The Collapse of Language and the Trace of History in Ingeborg Bachmann's "Simultan".

In Ingeborg Bachmann's story "Simultan" ("Word for Word"), history--specifically the history of fascism in Austria and Italy--and language have collapsed as structures and subsided into symbolic rubble, ruled by metonymy and slippage, exceeding any stable meanings. Fascist violence is always present through its very absence, in lacunae and silences. Bachmann's protagonist, both privileged and cursed by her awareness of this language of echo and displacement, chooses to become blind and deaf to the trace of fascism; ultimately, she is "cured" of its discomfiting effects by submitting to the "murder" of her unique subjectivity. (SSC)

In Ingeborg Bachmann's "Simultan" ("Word for Word"), first published in 1972,(1) history, subjectivity, and language become fluid categories. Bachmann takes as her focus language itself: language becomes metaphoric "rubble," in which past and present intermingle, and history, subjectivity, gender, and the unconscious are structures that are all scattered and tumbled together across a field of epistemological and linguistic ruin. In my reading of "Simultan," I will argue that history, specifically both Austrian and Italian fascism, is structured like language, with the same interplay of absences and presences.(2) Like words in the chain of displacements that is language, the democratic present is defined by the absence of the Nazi past, which is paradoxically always there as a trace, the unspoken and unacknowledged ground of all knowledge about "today." In "Simultan," therefore, Bachmann creates a condition of epistemological crisis; in presenting the reader with a landscape of symbolic rubble she undermines familiar regimes of knowledge. There are no epistemological certainties left, only provisional configurations that are threatening to collapse once more into the debris. Bachmann explores the trace and echo of "history" and the rupture of temporal stability. History and language are both ruled by metonymy and slippage, always exceeding any stable framework. This self-referentially fractured narrative presents us with a universe in which everything is in flux. If "history" is "broken" by definition, so too are subjectivity, gender, and desire: rupture and splitting are their constitutive elements.

Language is the key arena in which the epistemological crisis at the center of "Simultan" is enacted. Bachmann provides us with a protagonist and sometimes narrator--typically for Bachmann, the narrative point of view is also fluid and unstable--with a unique relationship to language. Nadja, a Viennese expatriate living in Rome, works as a simultaneous translator for the United Nations. Her profession requires her to move constantly back and forth among many different languages, never coming to rest in any of them. Nadja experiences language as an endless series of substitions and displacements, in which meaning is never fixed, but always unstable, slipping into an infinite chain of relationships among words and among different languages. Anything that can be said carries with it a limitless train of unsaid words, of displaced meanings. Because of the constitutive "iterability" of language--to use a Derridian term--it always exceeds any particular context, speaker, or referent. Language is indeed excessive in "Simultan," acting out a complicated movement between absence and presence that is never completely one or the other. If every word that is spoken carries with it a trace--the echoes of all the words that are not spoken, but through differentiation from which the uttered word gains its meaning--then every word that is not uttered is also in a sense "present." The chain of displacements between absence and presence is infinite: they are dispersed and scattered positions along the progression of connected signifiers, and are never "pure" or mutually exclusive.

The restlessness and slippage that, for Nadja, define language, knowledge, history, and subjectivity itself are evident from the first paragraph of "Simultan," which is scattered with untranslated fragments of different languages. The story begins: "Boze moj! were her feet cold." Nadja is struggling to remember a word (the name of a hotel near Paestum in southern Italy): "I can't understand how the name could have slipped my [sic], it'll occur to me in a second, it's on the tip of my tongue, but she couldn't remember it...." She goes on to give directions in fragmented Italian to her German-speaking companion:

 
   credimi, te lo giuro, dico a destra. Ah, there it was, yes, the Nettuno. As 
   he slowed down at the intersection and turned on the headlights she spotted 
   the sign immediately, illuminated in the darkness among a dozen hotel signs 
   and arrows (1). 

The appearance in the opening paragraph of these directional signs, helpfully if ironically illuminated in the darkness, serves as an introduction to one of the main questions on which the exploration of language in "Simultan" centers. We are given an ironically literal illustration of one of its vital epistemological concerns: an interrogation of the nature of the sign, in the broadest sense. Throughout the story, Bachmann explores the tension between desire, on the one hand, for the iconic power of the sign--a longing for a coherent, stable system of meanings--and, on the other, a fascination with the inherent instability of language, its resistance to fixed meaning. Bachmann brings this fundamental tension into play on many levels, using it as the basis for investigating history, gender, and subjectivity. In beginning the story with these "signs," the ironically literal embodiment of the longed for, but always elusive, possibility that language might, in fact, provide clarity, transparency, and certainty, Bachmann is invoking the reader's own ambivalence, allowing us to recognize in ourselves the temptations of certainty, while ultimately undercutting that possibility.

Later in "Simultan" we see again how Nadja's work as a simultaneous translator gives her a position that is privileged or, perhaps, cursed: she truly lives "between," in the spaces in which language exceeds fixed meaning: