Вольфганг Хильбиг: The Females

Whenever I’d felt within me the unforeseen power to examine myself, even to know myself, and consequently, perhaps, expunge the germs of my sickness, I found that the state snatched every tool from my hands, or hid all those tools from me, obscuring the means of ascertaining any kind of probability. The inevitable result was a serious disease, a pervasive disease of my ability to really and truly perceive the world, and a disease of my ability to truly make myself known to another person as a figure in reality. For me, reality had been stolen and annihilated, so by necessity I had to exist as a form of annihilated reality, as a mere delusion of reality , and by that same token had to annihilate the reality of the people around me.

What, for instance, could the labor court possibly care when I lamented my fear of impotence? What an incredibly sad, pathetic question. Was that why they hadn’t let me in? There being no injustice in this country, there could be no justice either… I sensed that this sort of mental short circuit was already part of my speech. And—now the scales fell from my eyes—what I should have demanded from the bureaucrats was some kind of archive collecting complaints about the psychological transgressions of the past against the present ; such a bureau, I now realized, was the only thing that could vindicate the existence of this country’s justice system. But there was no such bureau, or else that too had been kept secret from me. Desperately I wondered to whom I could turn. — There was no doubt in my mind that the person heading such an institution would have to be a woman, by no means a man; that, for me, was in the very nature of things… but when I tried to prove it, I was at a loss; once again I felt I would need almost visionary abilities to perceive the most natural, self-explanatory, and necessary things. I had to hallucinate in order to discover the world and the possibilities I had for living in it. But if I lacked the strength for that, even in a brief spell of faintness, those possibilities vanished, seemed to vanish forever, everything I could love vanished, justice vanished, right and wrong vanished, my hopes and reproaches vanished… everything I loved to touch vanished, happiness vanished, the women vanished. — Indeed, I probably vanished myself. I looked around in the station bar, and saw nothing but men, drunken, palavering, wildly gesticulating men who seemed to be talking away furiously at invisible opponents; I’d been noticed as little as if I’d never come in. And yet it soon seemed to me that accusations loomed from the stifling air, accusations about the isolation in which I sat, the isolation that was dissolving me. — I can’t be held responsible for the mistakes of this male society, I argued in my defense: not I alone. There are certain limitations I couldn’t possibly transcend. I’ve come too late, even on the occasions when those mistakes I’m referring to were made, Chairwoman. — You were dismissed too late, you mean. — For heaven’s sake, I cried, I’ve come to reverse my dismissal. — You’ll have to explain in full; you’ll have to pull yourself together and explain everything in full from the very beginning. Pull yourself together, remember what it means to you to get your job back. — Actually it means nothing, I replied, actually all it means, Madam Counsel, is that it was there, in that factory, that I was first able to recollect all the things that ultimately precipitated my dismissal. I think they go back to when I was about your daughters’ age, Madam Chairwoman, yes, maybe that’s when it began. At some point back then I underwent an amputation. Metaphorical, of course, not literal. No diseased limb was removed, but it was an amputation all the same, a mental amputation, a lobotomy. In the splendid springtime of my life, I suddenly caught a chill… since then the days have sped past. Believe me, now, compared to your daughters, my nature is that of someone twice as old. But recently I seemed to have been rejuvenated, evidently blossoming. No longer in my first youth, but still fairly healthy, I’m telling you, at least to a certain extent I imagined I was. Healthy, then, and with my life laid out before me; I had work, yes I did, I worked up until this summer. Of course I’d rather have been writing… you know I tried my hand at that, but I was working in a so-called women’s factory, day after day I went with the greatest of pleasure to work directly under the women. And as I did I recalled my youth; my youth was a kind of metastasis that grew out of me, not always to my advantage, but youth all the same… but now that factory has been amputated from me, just one more cruel intervention in my fate. And perhaps that completed my amputations. All at once I lost more cells, cells that steered me… perhaps they steered my breath, the crooks of my knees, my vocal cords, perhaps they steered the voice I put to paper, albeit unsuccessfully. Perhaps amputation is the wrong word, and I should speak of castration, castration that mutilated my interior world. I wasn’t operated on, it was all left attached to me, but the cells that steered it were dimmed; my cells, certain cells of mine, were sterilized and castrated. It was a castration of the brain, and fair femininity was the forceps they used.

It’s hard for me to describe the methods they employed, and it embarrasses me, Madam Magister . The whole affair… both my explanations and the conclusions I draw from them… is embarrassing, ludicrous, anything but manly , the way I ought to be. And death is near. Oh, I find these things obscene, but I must try to explain them. I must , I say. And my hope is that the method, if it was one, will seem less obscene to you than the tone of my explanation. In other words, the obscene thing is not what I’m explaining, the obscene thing is how I explain it… I’m telling you this, Madam Magister , in order to stay in your good graces… so in many ways the manner of my account is identical with its moral. Moral , admittedly, is a rather old-fashioned word, not very popular nowadays… at most one speaks of the morale of soldiers or workers… but the latest version of the word, the sense in which I’m using it, goes back to the period I’m starting in; even then the word was the flag under which I was castrated. I grew up within walls that resounded with the din of this word’s two vowels, within walls where, as in any ordinary madhouse, my prick was regarded as dangerous. As you know, the mission of psychopathology is to kill all natural urges. I grew up under the rule of psychopathologists who declared the sex drive to be abnormal… and sex to be capitalistic; the very word was practically banned for sounding too American. I’m not exaggerating, the documents are still available, and you know all this yourself anyway, you’re only a little bit younger than I am, you’re about as old as my mother, and no doubt you collaborated on those sorts of communiqués back then… in short, even then science was holding a shielding hand over me. They had a dim premonition of the calamity arising from the pricks of my generation; they didn’t have enough money back then to buy up the young people’s sexual interests; the state threatened to collapse if they couldn’t keep the pricks down. Perhaps they could have explained this to me in scientific terms, but even then, it seems, there was only limited access to the academic departments that kept the sexological ledgers. Though I belonged to the class for whom the products of Enlightenment thought were intended, they were not revealed to us in their pure form; instead, they were instantly translated into action. And so—it was a very enlightened method—they began to sever me from the consciousness of my prick, the Enlightenment took charge of that consciousness itself, for the cleanliness of my feelings had to be preserved. Oh, they compared me to a starfish, and lectured me in its reproductive methods. In fact, the word clean usually played the chief role in speaking of interpersonal relationships; the term seemed obligatory in that context. That gave me pause, for I knew that my prick pissed and dangled near my anus, Madam Magister . — It was smut —I’m inserting a little anecdote so you don’t get bored—it was filthy smut, I learned during my first police interrogation, which happened in sixth—I think, unless it was earlier—sixth grade, after they’d confiscated some female nudes from us in the schoolyard—where are the rest of the naked ladies, a police officer bellowed at me, frightening me out of my wits—nudes drawn in exercise books, drawn in a manner that did not obfuscate the existence of genitalia. Incidentally it wasn’t me, I have to say in my defense; I was arrested merely for sneering at the drawings’ poor quality, which probably raised suspicions that I dabbled in that kind of artwork myself. That wasn’t the case, but I have to admit that the little drawings had lodged so firmly in my mind that four or five years later I myself became a pornographer… and probably to this day I can’t see the females because there’s nothing to be found anywhere that compares with those pictures… I became a pornographer myself, albeit in prose, effusions that probably all landed in the trash, which is why it’s no blasphemy if the depths of a trash can remind me of a gaping pelvis. My home was duly searched, but nothing was found; he’s probably hid that smut where no one can find it, was the conclusion the officers conveyed to my teachers, who stood frozen in attitudes of revulsion. Thus nothing, not even my innocence, was proven, all that was proven was the necessity of making a note for the files branding me as a highly problematic prospect for any kind of higher education. Thus, Madam Magister , academia remained closed to me, and I became a worker; I desire to remain one, in a factory of my choice, and that is the reason for my speech.