Twenty-second International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Why write? This is the question that opens the English edition of “Requiem for Fanny Goldmann”, an unfinished novel by Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973). By the end of the 70-page fragment, the narrator can do little more than acknowledge the futility of trying to discover the “truth” of Fanny’s “long and dark and untellable story”, a tale that is, as the narrator observes, as “untellable as all stories”. In a final attempt to draw some kind of balance from the exercise, the narrator concludes that a writer “can only hold onto what is tangible […] and write down the sentences that are spoken, so that something is said by which one can begin to glimpse what really happened”. This is to say the truth of the lies that constitute the facts of Fanny’s ultimately unknowable and, of course, fictional life. This paper takes as its point of departure a close reading of Bachmann’s reflection on the power and limits of writing in “Requiem for Fanny Goldmann”, to argue with Jonathan Kramnick (Criticism and Truth) and Rita Felski (The Limits of Critique) that literary studies, by making rhyme and reason of humanity’s vast archive of written verse and lyrical prose, is able to make truth claims about this very material aspect of reality, to the extent that the discipline employs formalist analysis of language and aesthetic judgment in the practice of close reading as a form of writing about and with texts.