“We are different.” Gender and race in Barbara Frischmuth’s novels Abstract

This work attempts to show the ethnologic-feminist discourse in Barbara Frischmuths novels and emphasizes the importance of the author in a multi-cultural dimension within the german-speaking contemporary literature (especially of the nineties). Within the theoretic part of this work different cultural and scientific approaches are being introduced which offer a fertile disciplinarian connection of different scientific questions and a new theoretic conceptualisation of cultural “identities” and “differences”. Using cultural and scientific theories like cultural anthropology (Geertz, Bachmann-Medick), postcolonialism (Said, Bhaba), feminist colonialism (Spivak), gender research (Butler) and psychoanalysis (Freud, Kristeva) a model can be recontructed which can be developed further for the analysis of the chosen literary texts from Barbara Frischmuth In chapter 3 an attempt is being made to include the early novels of Barbara Frischmuth into (the overall concept of) this thesis and to show that her works follow a similar logic: from the topic of women’s literature to the writing between cultures, further to the integration of (gender related and ethnic) differences – just like the feminist study of literature that evolved into gender studies, within which it proceeded to the gender and race problem. In three short text analyses I attempt to show how the author is trying to overcome female speechlessness. As the central theme she picks out this speechlessness, describes institutions and situations in which it’s becoming manifest (education, marriage, sexuality, love etc.), but also possibilities of overcoming them. First of all, Frischmuths direction from the early women’s novels, to the topic of strangeness, allow gender and race to be established, according to my thesis, with how the new themes, new cultural phenomena and cultural and scientific theories were developed further, which accompanied and reflected the works of the author from the seventies until today. Secondly, the question about difference was also raised due to Barbara Frischmuths own life experiences: her interest for the Turkish language, her plans for a dissertation about brother- and sisterhood within the bektaschi-derwishes, her tolerance and love for humanity, her pleading for the “door-to-door”-life inspired her novels and made her uniquely familiar with islamic culture and religion unlike any other German speaking author (chapter 4). The unknown diversity in Islam inspired several novels from Barbara Frischmuth. In her novel Das Verschwinden des Schattens in der Sonne (The Disappearance of the Shadow in the Sun) the author articulates a problem which will from then on play a major role in her work (chapter 5). Against the abstract beliefs about islamic culture and muslims Frischmuth tries to show in her work (against Said’s concept of Orientalism) what Islam means. This religion and culture are well known to the author due to her studies and much time spent in Turkey. The novel touches upon important topics, motives and themes within the orient-discourse. According to Said this form of “intensive schematisation” is necessary to be able to lead a discourse about the orient. In this sense a manner of “regulated writing” (Said 1981:231) is shown. Nevertheless the novel tries to break up the old image of the orient, this firm dichotomy between the orient and occident, and even though the transgression of these borders fails, the fictional text offers a deep insight into the “real” orient (orientalism). On the other side the first novel already shows that what is one’s own and what is strange must always be correlated to each other in a complicated manner and that the acceptance and the integration of what is strange cannot function in spite of all the historic understanding – or even because of the hermeneutics of what is strange. In chapter 6 I introduce the novel Die Schrift des Freundes (The Writing of a Friend) which I consider to be a concise example for the moment of Entortung, hybridity, and mimicry. Frischmuth’s work is setting a cultural knowledge around an internal difference, an eerie strangeness, not on the cultural rim but in the centre of a given symbolic order, by taking this knowledge and letting it become embodied through the developing history of an entorteten (dislocated) Austrian migrant. The novel should be read as a dialectic of a progressive creation of identities which tries to cross out already existing identities, but doesn’t completely cancel them out and also offers to the subalterne speechless woman a possible language. In the novel Die Entschlüsselung (Decoding) (chapter 7) Barbara Frischmuth introduces several themes in the subtext of the text. Not only known themes return like matriarchal mythologie, dream concepts, oriental elements and images of womanhood, but a form of critcism is formulated towards science and more precisely an academic study of literature, and different ways of reading. In the centre of the novel appears an eerie text, a writing, which was not only hidden in the belly of a badger, but also its contents are indecipherable even though it is a kind of writing. The “writing” - which I was trying to read with the help of Derridas theory – cannot be deciphered, only interpreted. In (Die Entschlüsselung (Decoding) everything is dissolved into literature, into ambiguity and riddles which actually confirms Derridas theory of Nachträglichkeit and of the Verschiebung of writing. It could mean the criticism of the author towards the “new passion for philology” or towards philological theories and academic institutions. But this subtext of the novel which can also not be decoded due to the huge amount of narrative material just like the other traces of the “arrangement”, can be read as a pleading for literature and dream and therefore a pleading for written and oral traditions of culture. In chapter 8 the latest novel of the author Der Sommer, in dem Anna verschwunden war (The Summer Anna disappeared) is being orientalised. In the discussion about the novel the quality and the status of the statements about cultural identity which were given in the text were analysed and implications regarding the construction of social gender were questioned. The aim is to judge how much the work can be designated as an ethnic text. The question posed in Decoding about wearing a veil is a starting point for the analysis that rests on various theories about the “veil” (Derrida, Höglinger) which is the “universal” sign for the Islamic woman in the so called western world – just like the veiled woman of the Islam. Barbara Frischmuth is dealing with different forms of Identity and Alterity. She reflects the difficulties to show them literarily. Her works are readable as a symptom of the impossibility or as allegories of (maybe intentionally) failing attempts, to bring the “other” coherent, distinctly and without contradiction into clear cut concepts and to represent accordingly. She discusses matters that are impossible to be grasped by schematic models and simple ideologies. Neither the research holiday in turkey nor the secret correspondence of the mythic Wendlgard, nor are the cultural outsiders being staged as coherent Others. The originally accepted Alterity is vanishing; strangeness is dissolving into one’s own.