(Email, University of Virginia)
The Sounds of Silence: Ingeborg Bachmann’s “Sprachskepsis”
Ingeborg Bachmann’s engagement with philosophy of language, and in particular, philosophy as language analysis, began early in her literary career. My paper focuses on two aspects of Bachmann’s “Sprachkritik” and attempts to understand how they inform her poetic production. Bachmann’s rational critique of language has its roots in the Tractatus logico-philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein, in which logical statements are deemed “purely tautological” and unfit for saying anything about reality. Wittgenstein asserts that while language can never represent “das Unsagbare”, philosophy’s methodical “Klarwerden von Sätzen” points to or signifies that which cannot be said. Bachmann interprets one of Wittgenstein’s main ideas – “Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt” – not as an impenetrable barricade erected between the metaphysical subject and the world, but as a border that may be opened up with the help of literature.
Bachmann’s ethical critique of language can be read in her Frankfurt poetological lectures of 1960, in which writers are given the duty of taking language beyond its boundaries. In her view, human beings must consciously make the morally “bad language” obsolete, because it results in the failure of language as a means of communication and in all forms of conflict. Literature does its part to solve the problem of “schlechte Sprache” in that it is chosen to silence and destroy these morally suspect elements. The remainder of my paper will feature a reading of a late poem of Bachmann’s, “Keine Delikatessen”, whose primary topos is a critique of poetry, a polemic in favor of silence; alternately, the paper may provide a brief reading of the short story, “Alles”, from Das dreißigste Jahr, in which parents attempt to exert influence upon their child’s acquisition of language.
