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Reading Barbara Köhler's Niemands Frau As a Radical Poetic

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Reading Barbara Köhler's Niemands Frau As a Radical Poetic Reading Barbara Köhler’s Niemands Frau as a Radical Poetic Response to Homer’s Odyssey German Department University College London Rebecca May Johnson August 2016 Supervisor Dr Judith Beniston Second Supervisor Dr Mererid Puw Davies Dissertation submitted to University College London in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of PhD 1 Abstract This thesis presents the first sustained analysis of Niemands Frau (2007), Barbara Köhler’s radical poetic engagement with Homer’s Odyssey. Köhler weaves together a vast web of intertextual references including Ovid’s Metamorphoses, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and a biography of Alan Turing, and subjects including quantum mechanics, computers and cloning. To provide a coherent structure and facilitate navigation of the potentially overwhelming network of references, I anchor analysis to Köhler’s engagement with classical tradition and the major Odyssean figures that feature in the cantos. Key to my methodology is close reading, essential to gain access to complex and often syntactically irregular cantos. As Niemands Frau resists the total application of a single theoretical or philosophical approach, I draw selectively on the work of thinkers including Deleuze, Barthes, Freud, Cavarero, and Adorno and Horkheimer, in order to elucidate specific aspects. While the introduction provides a review of secondary literature and discussion of the physical construction of Niemands Frau, the first chapter examines Köhler’s text as a feminist critical and creative response to the German tradition of Odyssey translation and reception, as a radical, ‘minor’ translation. Subsequent chapters analyse the literary traditions surrounding Penelope, Helen of Troy, Tiresias and Odysseus to show how Köhler has used elements for her own poetic purposes. I argue that Niemands Frau calls for a close engagement with the literary canon to rehabilitate its ‘other’: the women, monsters and queer figures repressed by (patriarchal) cultural reception. Köhler’s poetic reworking of marginalised figures is political in making marginalised voices heard and, furthermore, derives an ethics from them. She criticises the political, scientific, philosophical and cultural traditions that she perceives as – currently and historically – repressive, and strives for an embodied and differentiated appreciation of life. 2 Contents Formatting……………………………………………………………………………...4 List of Figures…………………………………………………………………………..4 Notice of pre-publication……………………………………………………………….5 Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………..6 Chapter 1 Introduction……………………………………………………………………………7 Chapter 2 Niemands Frau as a ‘minor’ translation of the Odyssey from ‘er’ to ‘sie’………………….38 Chapter 3 Penelope’s Web or, ‘the voice[s] of the shuttle’………………………………………..65 Chapter 4 Helen of Troy: The Image, Power and the Impoverishment of Life…………………...97 Chapter 5 The Possibility of Recognising and Loving ‘Niemand’………………………………..138 Chapter 6 Tiresias, Turing and Dystopian Transformations in Köhler’s Waste Land…………….170 Chapter 7 The Genealogy and Operation of Patriarchal Power in Niemands Frau………………..214 Chapter 8 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………...242 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………...248 3 Formatting Where quotations from Niemands Frau are indented they will be laid out as closely as possible in accordance with the original edition of Niemands Frau (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2007). In such instances I will use Courier New font, as Köhler’s use of this font plays a role in how the text is interpreted. When shorter quotations are embedded within the body of the text they will follow the font style of the body text, that is, Garamond. When referencing line breaks in Niemands Frau within the body of the text, I will place the forward slash symbol within square brackets like this [/] to indicate that the slash was not in Köhler’s text. I am doing this because Köhler uses the forward slash relatively frequently in Niemands Frau as part of the text’s semantic content. List of Figures 1. Vertical loom, in Luanne Brown and Sidna Rachid, Egyptian Carpets. A Practical Guide (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 1986), p. 14. 2. “I want you for U.S. Army : nearest recruiting station”, c. 1917, poster by James Montgomery Flagg. Library of Congress. Retrieved from: <http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/96507165/> [accessed: 11th June 2016] 3. ‘Ehrentribüne mit Kanzel des Führers auf der Zeppelinwiese’, 1942, photograph by Karl Gasser. Das Bundesarchiv. Retrieved from <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_146-2008- 0028,_N%C3%BCrnberg,_Parteitagsgel%C3%A4nde,_Ehrentrib%C3%BCne.jpg> [accessed: 1 June 2016] 4. ‘La Città ideale’, c. 1470, by central Italian artist, Ministry of Heritage and Culture, Italy. Retrieved from < http://www.altritaliani.net/spip.php?article1033 > [accessed: 1 June 2016] 4 Pre-Publication note: An earlier version of Chapter 2 was published in a volume of German Monitor: Rebecca May Johnson, ‘Niemands Frau as a ‘Minor Translation’ of the Odyssey from ‘er’ to ‘sie’’ in, An Odyssey for Our Time. Barbara Köhler’s Niemands Frau, ed. Georgina Paul (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013), pp. 71-88. 5 Acknowledgements I would like to thank the following organisations and people: The Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding my research during the years 2010-2013. Dr Stephanie Bird for her insight and support as my supervisor from 2010- 2012, and for inspiring me as an undergraduate. Dr Georgina Paul at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford, for her enthusiasm, friendship and support, for introducing me to Barbara Köhler’s writing, for the opportunity to contribute to the first volume of scholarship on Niemands Frau, and for organising stimulating symposia and events with Barbara Köhler. My secondary supervisor Dr Mererid Puw Davies, for her enthusiasm, helpful suggestions and invaluable insights into my work. Zoe Jewell, Dr Christopher Douse and Lily Gorlin for being there at critical moments. Marion Hume for spurring me on. Michael Amherst for many essential lunches discussing work and life in the British Library. Jen Calleja for opportunities to share my work with a wider audience. My friends for their manifold expressions of support. The wonderful staff at all of the libraries I have used during my study. My parents for their unconditional love, support and faith in me. My brothers Guy and Henry for their support and occasional rescue. Sam Barton- Schlee for his love, enthusiasm and the numerous stimulating discussions we have had about my project. My primary supervisor since 2013, Dr Judith Beniston, without whom I would never have completed this work, and for whose continual kindness, enthusiasm, patience, encouragement, generosity, thoughtful criticism and insight I am more grateful than I am able to express in words. 6 Chapter 1 Introduction The title of Homer’s second epic narrative, the Odyssey (c. 800 BC), has long since entered the common lexicon in Western culture as a term for a challenging journey, real or metaphorical. Thanks to its afterlife in canonical texts such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses (c. 8 AD), Dante’s Inferno (c. 1300), and in modernist texts such as James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), as well as in popular culture and education, figures and stories from the text are ingrained in everyday language. The word ‘siren’ is now a clichéd way to describe a threatening but alluring woman and ‘stuck between Scylla and Charybdis’ is easily understood as a difficult situation in between two dangers. A journey that uses trickster wit and intelligence as the primary means of overcoming danger has appealed to many writers and philosophers as an allegory for the emergence of the rational subject. The Odyssey’s status as a homecoming narrative too, where a man returns home to a woman after military victory (the Trojan wars), has attracted nationalist, romantic and political interpretations. However, the fact that Odysseus is gendered male and that most of his foes are gendered female, and that the modern, rational subject, for which he has been an archetype, committed barbaric acts of mass murder in the twentieth century has also made the text fertile ground for cultural criticism and philosophical reflection. As Edith Hall comments in her extensive investigation into reception, ‘it can be difficult even to identify “spin-offs” from the Odyssey, so deeply has it shaped our imagination and cultural values’. As a work whose stories have been translated, plumbed, reworked and debated by writers, philosophers and artists over the course of almost three thousand years, the Odyssey is a foundational text of Western culture.1 1 Edith Hall, The Return of Ulysses (London: I.B. Tauris, 2008), p. 3; other substantial surveys of reception include the following: Georg Finser, Homer in der Neuzeit von Dante bis Goethe. Italien, Frankreich, England, Deutschland (Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1912; repr. New York: Hildesheim, 1973); W.B. Stanford, The Ulysses Theme. A Study in the Adaptability of a Traditional Hero (Oxford: Blackwell, 1973); Harold Bloom, Odysseus/Ulysses (New York: Chelsea House, 1991); Piero Boitani, The Shadow of Ulysses, trans. Anita Weston (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). 7 In 2007 German poet Barbara Köhler published Niemands Frau, a radical poetic response to Homer’s Odyssey.2 As signalled by her title, where Homer’s text focuses on the journey of one man, Köhler’s cycle of cantos gives voice to female figures whom she considers to have been marginalised by the male-dominated reception of
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