Malina reading notes no. 3

The Third Man, performance & animus

I finished Malina two days ago, in a feverish long read on a flight from Paris to New York. Quite a vibe, let me tell you. I realize now that most of my reading was in fact done in long, obsessive chunks: I read a few pages here and there throughout the month, but the bulk of my reading occurred in three bursts, two of which were at times my body ought to have been sleeping. That seems about right.

These notes pertain to the second section of the book; I’ll write up my thoughts on the last section, and maybe some overall thoughts (although the idea is daunting), in my next batch.

The Third Man, directed by Carol Reed (1949)

Der dritte Mann

The title of the second section made me wonder if “the third man” has its origin in the Carol Reed noir, which is what I first  associate it with (and which I misremembered as being directed by Orson Welles because he stars in it). Basically, yes. The film (1949) is set in post-war Vienna (the same setting as Malina, may I remind you), with a screenplay by Graham Greene and cinematography by Robert Krasker. The “third man” of the title refers to the catalyzing incident of the film: the American author Holly Martins (Joseph Cotton) arrives in Vienna, seeking his old friend Harry Lime (Welles) but is told that Lime has been killed by a car. Martins learns that the dead body was moved by two known men, and, according to the porter of Lime’s apartment,  that “there was a third man.” But that’s not the only third man of the story. Martins is working on a new novel by that name. The film historian Charles Drazin theorizes that the third man is a reference to a British double-agent exposed after two others post World War II. “The third man” as a phrase, and The Third Man as a film are thick with connotations of espionage and double lives. It turns out that Lime was allegedly involved in the black market. Vienna in the movie is a hotbed of Western and Soviet allegiances.

“The third man” is also a reference to Christ who appears to two disciples in a passage of the Gospels. This has a thematic importance in Welles’ movie and Bachmann’s book. T. S. Elliott references this in The Waste Land (1922):

Who is the third who walks always beside you?

When I count, there are only you and I together

But when I look ahead up the white road

There is always another one walking beside you

Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded

I do not know whether a man or a woman

—But who is that on the other side of you?

Because I know almost nothing of the Gospels I never read Christ into that passage. Instead, I read a ghost or the specter of war past (in this case, World War I) and of destruction/fascism fermenting. I read trauma, or to get more religious about it all again, the Devil.¹

So who is the third man in Malina? The narrator’s father, of course: the specter of her past, the interloper of her dreams and fairy tales, the weight she carries. It’s Malina: the third man in the dynamic we’ve spent the first half of the novel exploring between the narrator and Ivan, the third man/analyst in this dive into the narrator’s psyche and her relation to her father. 

In fact, we see a lot of groupings of three in the book. There’s the weird relationship triangle between the narrator, Ivan and Malina. There’s the tripartite structure of the book itself. There’s the allusion to Pierrot Lunaire, which is itself in three parts. The past, present and future. And lists of objects and authors often occur in trios (Kafka, Rimbaud and Blake; Locke, Leibnitz and Hume…).

But there’s simultaneously an interplay between duos and trios. Duple structures — a connection between two people, a line between two points, parallels, pairings, dualities such as animus/anima, conscious/subconscious, reality/invention — quickly turn into a triangle, and then collapse again into two. I feel there’s a constant play with the space of connection between two and three in the book, which although tripartite is nonetheless very symmetrical along the halfway point. For that matter, depending on the perspective, three and two also collapse into the one, centralized narrator “ich” and on that impossible today. This slippiness is constant, like a geometric puzzle that Bachmann writes herself and her reader in and out of:

If you can’t read my handwriting: a single point conceals an ability to form a line to a duality/pair; a double conceals an ability to form a triangle to a third point, to any number of third points, in a shift of perspective and reality

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Performance

Malina: Du hast dir immer zuviel vorgestellt.

Ich: Aber damals konnte ich mir gar nichts vorstellen. Oder wir sprechen von Vorstellen und von Vorstellungen und meinen nicht das gleiche.

Malina: Your imagination always did overperform.

Me: But back then my mind couldn’t perform at all. Or else we’re talking about perform and performance and not meaning the same thing.

I’m interested in the word “perform” in this translation, because there’s performance throughout the book — again, let’s not forget about Pierrot Lunaire — and all the more so in Part Two.

“In my father’s grand opera I am supposed to take over the lead role, supposedly it’s the wish of the artistic director, who has just announced… I say to the journalists: I don’t know anything at all, please ask my father, I don’t know anything, it’s not a role for me, it’s only designed to get the audience to come in droves! But the journalists write down something completely different, and I don’t have any more time to scream and tear up their notes, for it’s the last minute before curtain, and I run through the entire opera house, screaming in despair. There isn’t a libretto to be found anywhere, and I hardly even know two entrances, it’s not my role. I’m very familiar with the music, oh, do I know it, this music, but I don’t know the words, I can’t play this role.”

It’s not my role. She’s not actually suited for the elements of herself or of her life imposed upon her by her father. She knows the theme — she inherited it — but it’s not hers properly.

Let’s return to vorstellen and Vorstellung. Vorstellen (verb), within different contexts and with different verbal additions, can be translated as: to perform, yes, but also to portray, to put forward, to move forward, to introduce, to imagine, to visualize. Vorstellung (noun, fem.): performance (as in theatre, a movie), imagination, idea… all of these suiting the phantasm of Part Two splendidly. The narrator is trying to imagine and to visualize her dreamscape, and to portray and represent it for her audience of Malina. She performs — as in incarnates different roles — within the fever dream and in the retelling in an attempt to move on from her formative trauma around her father.

Her father is also a performance and a performer, wearing several different masks (the crocodile, the face of her mother) and constantly dissembling. In her narrative, he has a role to play, or several. Malina asks, “Whom have you made into your idol?”

Finally, there are the connotations of subjectivity, action, and laboring in the idea of “performance,” with “overperforming” in English able to mean in this context and throughout the book “overworking.” We see the narrator’s mind overworking constantly, in her obsessive attachments to people, in her ravenous reading, in her letters and linguistic dissections (I’ll talk about these in my next batch of notes). Her mind is consuming itself in its overperformance. 

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Animus 

In this section, a theme is solidifying that this consumption is in the form of animus. Jung described animus as the unconscious masculine side of a woman, and anima as the unconscious feminine side of a man. Anima is also an individual psyche, while animus transcends to a more collective unconscious, aligning with principles of logos, idea, intellect, abstraction and rational ability. And Animus is, of course, the name the narrator chooses for the child she has as a result of her incestuous, coercive relationship with her father in the prolonged fantasy of Part Two. 

As we spend more time with Malina in this section, his function as the narrator’s animus also begins to emerge clearly in the form of his interrogation/shepherding through the unconscious tangle of her narrative. For George Reinhardt, “‘Malina’ is an anagram for ‘animal,’ not as instinct or erotic potency but as insuperably devastating animus.”² So in the ongoing mystery “Who is Malina?”/“Does Malina even really exist?”: I mean, sort of…? This only gets more questionable in the last section of the book. In addition to pure animus, Malina seems like a personification of logical positivism, slashing through the knots and imperfections of how actual lived experience settles in the body and distorts within the limitations of language. In the interview with — of the previous section, the narrator said: “I will tell you a terrible secret: language is punishment. Language must encompass all things and in it all things must again transpire according to guilt and the degree of guilt.” (Hello, Wittgenstein!) We’re seeing over and over again the punishment caused by language and done to language.

Survival

And related to narrative and the tangles of experience, Malina tells the narrator: “Once one has survived something then survival itself interferes with understanding, and you don’t even know which lives came before and which is your life of today, you even mix up your own lives.”

1. An interesting piece on The Third Man to which I owe some of my facts and thoughts.

2. Reinhardt, George W. "Form as Consolation: Thematic Development in Ingeborg Bachmann's Malina." Symposium 33, no. 1 (Spring 1979): 41-64.