Intertextual connections: structures of feminine identification in the works of Karin Struck.

The intertextual space is potentially a valuable resource for women authors writing self-consciously within a female literary heritage. For Karin Struck, the intertextual mode is a central feature, reflecting and supporting the thematic concern with making connections that runs through her texts. This article offers a survey of her work, analyzing her intertextual practice and assessing the value of an intertextual mode employed principally to set in place structures of identification with anterior texts. The author argues that the later text Ingeborg B. Duell mit dem Spiegelbild is both more ambitious in this respect and less sophisticated than the early texts in its handling of the inherent tensions of intertextual narratives. (MS)

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A central aspect of Karin Struck's writing is her use of intertextuality. She makes extensive use of quotation and allusion, drawing her sources from the Bible, from classical and established works from the canon, and from contemporary authors and critics. While her oeuvre is of very mixed quality, it is nevertheless my belief that Struck's intertextual practice is of interest, for two reasons. First, her writing enables us to assess the critical value of an intertextual mode that is employed above all to set in place structures of identification with anterior texts. Second, it contextualizes some issues arising in relation to an intertextual model conceived as a specifically female literary bond and functioning as a symbolic space outside the male preserve. The aims of this article are therefore twofold: to offer a survey of Struck's work, focusing particularly on the contribution made by the intertextual mode to the development of her feminist project; and to reflect more generally on the nature of the tensions inherent in intertextual narratives.

Struck's intertextual methodology can be understood as the structural corollary to a central thematic thread that runs through her works, the constant desire to establish connections. Her texts enact a recurring fear, the fear of the writer's isolation from the rest of the world, and their referentiality bespeaks an attempt to break free from an anxiety associated with pure, unmediated individuality. By setting up narratives that are driven by a technique of speaking across divides, by crossing and transgressing the boundaries between her own work and that of other authors, she wishes to contextualize herself, finding sustenance in the assurance that her words do not act as a barrier to others, as it sometimes seems.

In a reading of Die Mutter (The Mother, 1975), Inta Ezergailis suggests that the numerous references to other authors represent an attempt to overcome the sense of total isolation that the protagonist experiences, and to return to a "naive state where one was in harmony with the natural world and with other people.... [Struck's] particular route ... includes researches into childhood and exploration of dreams, but it never becomes solipsistic. A contact with others is essential" (25-26). Manfred Jurgensen, in reference to Lieben (Loving, 1977), draws attention to what he calls Struck's "citation mania," describing the work as a "many-layered citation" (89) and assessing it positively as "a living and connecting citation" (93).

As a whole, however, critics have been rather less convinced by Struck's use of intertext. Joanne Leal, discussing Klassenliebe (Class Love, 1973), questions Jurgensen's analysis of Struck's citational method as an all-important gesture of contact with others, arguing that the narrator is too fragile to withstand the rigors of social contact and is able only to exist within the closed world of the text. For Leal, the text represents a failure to resolve the dual impulses of "writing for me" and "writing as a cry for help," and so exemplifies the conflict between the private and the political that tends to be a characteristic of feminist thought and literature of this period (521-22). In Peter Handke's review of Die Mutter the citational method is dismissed as a "flight into thoughtlessness," and Gabrielle Wohmann's equally scathing account of Lieben accuses Struck of bad imitation. (1)

These assessments rightly point toward a certain insecurity that accompanies the intertextual voice and compromises the narrative in these early texts. In that thematic struggle to establish the female self in respect to others, they already strike a precarious balance between highly subjective self-expression and a sometimes rather strained identification of the literary voice with other texts and authors. In a broad sense, the existence of a feminine space self-consciously outside the tradition of male writing is, potentially, of great interest: women writers and theorists have effectively occupied it in various ways to bypass or disrupt the dominant discourses of the literary canon. The particular dynamics of the intertextual mode, moreover, would appear to be especially suited to an exploration of and meditation on a female literary inheritance. Insofar as the intertext challenges notions of singularity and pre-existing authority, it lends itself well to the search for creative alternatives to established literary discourses and might represent a textual complement to that position of non-belonging or nonconformity out of which the female literary tradition has been crafted. However, as a complexly functioning space in a narrative, the intertextual dimension of a text must be managed with dexterity. We are right to question whether the intertextual dimension of Struck's narratives really realizes what the intertextual mode promises in theory, namely a complex and dynamic interplay among writer, text, source, and reader.