Herta Müller: Traveling on One Leg

I suppose it's certainly possible that I'm guilty of a certain type of confirmation bias.  Having only recently finished Elfriede Jelinek's The Piano Teacher, perhaps my thoughts are still with her, and I'm seeing parallels that don't exist.  Perhaps this book of Müller's is not representative of her overall work, and I was simply drawn by the title into an outlying sample.

But the question arises nonetheless, what is it about Germany that draws this sort of book out of women, and what is it about those works that attracts the attention of the Nobel Committee? The style, subject, and structure of these books all seem to be in dialogue with each other, though Jelinek could obviously claim to be the first speaker.  If Müller was at all influenced by Jelinek, it is clear that she chose to take her style even further into obscurity.  Where Jelinek blurred lines between reader, character, and narrator, Müller nearly eliminates them altogether.

Which could give the mistaken impression that Müller has a narrative to be narrated at all.  What she creates is not a story, but rather a textual collage.  She could easily be referring to the work as a whole when she writes of Irene's photos that "The connections were opposites.  They made one single strange collage out of all the pictures.  The collage was so strange that it could relate to everything.  It was constantly moving" (38).  It might even be said that both in style and content, she is entirely unconcerned with connections, and far more interested in the spaces between things, the very tips of fingers and leaves, where one thing ceases to be itself, but before it becomes another.  The moment in one's stride when they are "traveling on one leg, lost before they change to the other" (80).

These moments, the tips and termini of things, are all that matter to Irene.  For her, "the detail has been bigger than the whole" (145).  The silence at the tips of things is both obsession and terror for her.  She "lived not in the things, but in their consequences," a habit that renders her stagnant, unable to act, which is where her similarity to Jelinek's Erika unravels (124).  Where the latter's desire is that of insatiable teeth, Irene's has no object.  It is sterile, a subject-in-itself, observing the world without becoming a part of it, and ultimately, unable even to say goodbye.