Urs Allemann - Babyfucker

Urs Allemann

Babyfucker

e-book edition

translated by
Peter Smith

LES FIGUES PRESS
Los Angeles

First published under the title Babyficker, Deuticke, Vienna, 1992.

Billingual edition published under the title Babyfucker, Les Figues Press, 2010.

Copyright 1992 Urs Allemann

Introduction 2009 Peter Smith

Afterword 2009 Vanessa Place

Babyfucker

E-book edition, 2011

Design: Teresa Carmody, Les Figues Press

ISBN 10: 1-934254-29-0
ISBN 13: 978-1-934254-29-5

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-934254-29-5

Library of Congress Control Number: 2009933958

This project is supported, in part, by Pro Helvetia, Swiss Arts Council.

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Introduction

Urs Allemanns Babyfucker took second place in the 1991 Ingeborg Bachmann Competition and quickly became the center of one of the biggest literary controversies of the postwar era in German-speaking Europe: Der Spiegel magazine includes the Allemann affair as one of only three cultural events on its list of the top forty-five scandals between 1949 and 1999. The reaction to the award was swift, as Austrian politicians, including Jrg Haider, demanded that the prize be rescinded because of the texts subject matter.

Although there was a great deal of attention paid to Allemanns 1991 prize (over three hundred articles, letters to the editor, and television features in the German media), Babyfucker the text remains overshadowed by Babyfucker the scandal. The critic Wolfram Groddeck has called the treatment of Babyfucker de facto censorship, and it would be difficult to think of another German-language literary text that has been so effectively silenced.

Babyfucker seems to have anticipated this muzzling, because its narrator never quite emerges from silence into rational speech. His ramblings are repetitive, stuttering, and monstrous: as monstrous as the penultimate paragraphs neologism elbophantone (or Ellefanton in German), which is a combination of at least four words (elephant, elbow, phantom, and tone). In this word montage made up of ghosts, body parts, and sound, we should be able to detect the word jolifanto from one of the foundational texts of the avant-garde: Hugo Balls multilingual, paralingual Dada poem Karawane. Allemanns few critics have compared him to Beckett, but Dada (that other Swiss phenomenon) might be an even better starting point for understanding his writing. The Dadaists turned the artwork into a missile. It jolts the viewer, taking on a tactile quality, Benjamin writes. We are jolted by Babyfuckers vocabulary, but also by its constant interruptions and its refusal to explain itself, its refusal to say this is a dream or this is a repressed fantasy or this is bad. Allemann has suggested that the narrator has lost the certainty that he exists and attempts to catapult himself back into existence with an extreme sentence. The narrator tries to compensate for a desperate powerlessness by repeating a desperately extreme sentenceI fuck babiesabout violence committed against the weak. This violence, like the powerlessness that triggers it, remains shockingly inexplicable, unexcused.

Dada writers use shock to overcome the distinction between art and life, that split that paralyzes literature and dooms it to irrelevance. Shock emerges not only from the occasional obscene Dada line, but also from the foregrounding of the materiality of language in texts such as Karawane that barely mean anythingand that might offer new possibilities for thinking about literature and the speaking subject. Allemann, like Dada, offers neither the kernel of an absolute, singular expressive identity (as in primitivism), nor the originary source of libidinal energy (the id of psychoanalytic biologism),but the Othera divided logos, or in Balls terminology, anlogos (T.J. Demos).

The critical and political reactions to Babyfucker reveal the force behind the prescription of codes for talking about babyfuckingand the force behind the prescription of codes for thinking about literature. We think, often despite ourselves, that literature is about things or people or events.

It is about these things, but never only about these things. Babyfucker is about babyfucking, but it is also about literatures ability to affect readers. Babyfucker is unsatisfied with the impotent status accorded to literature. It struggles, and fails, to be more than yet another text separated from everyday life. Even in its failure, though, it serves as a powerful and disturbing reminder that literature might be more than what it often aims to be now.

About Urs Allemann

Urs Allemann was born in 1948 near Zurich and grew up in Germany, where he studied sociology and German and English literature. From 1986 to 2004, he edited the literary section of a Basel newspaper, the Basler Zeitung. He is the author of four collections of poetry: Fuzzhase (1988), Holder die Polder (2001), schoen! schoen! (2003), and im kinde schwirren die ahnen (2008). Besides Babyficker (1992), he has published two books of prose: a collection of stories, z & Kco. Sieben fernmndliche Delirien (1990) and the prose text, Der alte Mann und die Bank (1993). He lives near Basel, Switzerland.

Babyfucker

Nothing is ever excluded.
Everything is always included.

JO

THE GLUTTONER

I will eat my way
out of this world.

I fuck babies. Around my bed there are creels. Theyre swarming with babies. Theyre all here. Always have been. Always will be. Like me. Im here too. For others it would probably be different. Others would leave. Would have come. Would go somewhere. Have come from somewhere. Not us. Were here. The babies in their creels. Me in my bed. With closed eyes. Reach into the swarm. Fish one out. Fuck it. Throw it back to the others. All of them naked. All of them here. No names. At night everyone sleeps. Me. The babies. Linda. All is calm. During the day the babies get fucked. Always been that way. By me. Before going to sleep. After waking up. The babies here. Me here. Linda not here. All the lightless day long.

Sometimes I catch a male. Sometimes a female. O it doesnt matter. Ring finger and pinkie span the flesh notch. The flap of skin can be hidden between my thumb and pointer. Its all very chaste in my garret. Scraping. Rubbing. I want to write a chaste story. Middle finger. Bumhole. Fontanels. Their toothless salivating mouths. Where do I penetrate. Where do I slide right in. Their pores flung open to me. My chaste ambition. With closed eyes. Feeling my way. Conquering. Every baby pore a hole for life. I want to write a story about holes for life.

The babies sleep. Not only at night. During the day too. When I fuck them. They used to always scream. Now theyre always sleeping. Some other time. It just doesnt work without any time. I mix a little morphine into their milk. Males. Im a man. The babies get the bottle from me. Females. It just doesnt work without any difference. The babies would be breastfed by a woman. From one of two breasts. From both. From neither. O I take that back. But how would the woman mix the morphine into the milk. Maybe it would be injected into her swollen breasts. Into both of them. Into neither. Into one. O I take that back. But where do I get the milk. There appears to be a milk spigot in my garret. It just doesnt work without any cause without any reason. My head. I could hold my head under the milk spigot. Until. But where do I get the morphine. There appears to be a vat of morphine in my garret. A barrel of morphine. With morphine powder. With morphine brew. My torso. I could roll around in the morphine powder. I could dip my morphine-tossed body in the morphine brew. Until the day. Instead I soak babies. Drug them. Fuck them. Sleeping babies. Havent been screaming babies for a long time.