Gender and Language

16      By means of parallel analogies, Gabriele Stötzer-Kachold first points out hierarchies, before she abolishes them. Diagrammatic iconicity enables her to question the splits in time, in space, and also in herself. Her biography makes these inner splits visible: in 1976, when she was still a student, she was exmatriculated, because along with other students she had sent a letter to education minister Margot Honecker, describing their "indefinable fear in an apparatus, which became narrower and narrower for us" (Stötzer 258). The following year she signed the petition of artists protesting against Biermann's expatriation. As a result, she was accused of "state defamation" and spent one year in the women's prison of Hoheneck. There she experienced a major inner conflict, which was to determine her writing career: she was torn between loyalty to her homeland (her origin, her socialisation) and her spirit of rebellion. Once released, she decided to remain in the GDR and to become a writer so that she could cope with her inner conflicts.

[Ich] habe [. . .] diesen sozialistischen Staat nicht verlassen, weil mir die sozialistische Idee sehr wahrscheinlich war, weil sie mir als Kind als einzige Zukunft dargeboten wurde. Ich wollte schon wissen: Ist das wahr, das System? [. . .] Ich bin nicht so ein Typ, der aus dem Knast gegangen ist und sich geschworen hat, die DDR, diesen Staat kaputt zu machen [. . .]. Ich wusste, ich habe alles verloren, jetzt kann ich auch schreiben. Das Schreiben war für mich ein Ort der letzten Freiheit geworden. Aber innerhalb dieser Grenzen. (Stötzer qtd. in Adamczyk 159)
([I] did not leave this socialist state because the socialist idea seemed very plausible to me, because it is the only future they offered to me when I was a child. I wanted to know: is the system real? [. . .] I am not the sort of person who leaves the clink and swears to break this state, the GDR [. . .]. I knew that I had lost everything, so now I can also write. Writing means to me a place of last freedom. But inside these borders.)

17      The third dimension of iconicity, the metaphoric one, is the most complex, demanding, and fruitful kind of iconicity. In the introduction to this paper, I presented an example quoted by Jappy (Chapter 3) to demonstrate how metaphors function. Jappy compares two utterances (1) and (2), which are identical in structure from a strictly syntactic point of view:

(1) This surgeon is a golfer. (2) This surgeon is a butcher.

(1) is an example of a simple diagram, while (2), on the other hand, is metaphorical, and establishes a parallel between a "base domain" in which the class of butchers figures, who, by definition, cut up meat and saw bones, and the target domain, the one the speaker wishes to characterize or pass judgement upon, in which we have an incompetent surgeon who treats his patients as though they were lumps of meat and bone.

This is the situation I have attempted to represent in Figure 10, in which the indices b and m represent the classes "butcher" and "meat" in the base domain, and s and p represent respectively the surgeon and patient in the target domain. But note that whereas the parallelism is evident in the object and the interpretant — assuming the judgement to have been correctly interpreted -, the sign, e.g. utterance (2), is underspecified with respect to the notions of "meat," "patient" and indeed "incompetence," etc., which have to be inferred from relatively impoverished data. (Jappy, Chapter 3)

18     How do female authors in the former GDR implement metaphoric iconicity? And what do they intend while creating metaphors? Elke Erb, for instance, uses metaphors to explore the labyrinth of speech: her metaphors blur the boundaries between literary genres and the linearity of writing. In her 1983 book Vexierbild (Picture Puzzle), she emphasizes the writing process itself rather than the achieved result: "The journey is the destination" ("Der Weg wird zum Ziel"). This artistic posture is also a political and ethical one. Erb uses the metaphor of the journey in order to switch from the field of literature to the field of politics and ethics. In a society governed by efficiency, she wants to abolish the dictates of the goal: She claims her right to write without purpose. Her metaphorical world is extremely rich and sometimes difficult to decode. Therefore I would like to come back to the above-mentioned explanation of a metaphor by Jappy. Let us consider the text "Alex in M. oder Der Weg zum Ziel" (Erb, Vexierbild 85), where the author collects short and heterogeneous speech material: loud interruptions, slightly modified idiomatic speech, quotations from other poets or from her own previous works.

19      Let us consider in particular the utterance marking the beginning of the excerpt above:

(A) Filler words like booster rockets

As Jappy would say: this utterance is metaphorical, and establishes a parallel between a "base domain" in which we find the class of "booster rockets," which convey precious freight, and the target domain, the one the speaker wishes to characterize or pass judgement upon, in which we have "filler words," i.e. words with little meaning by definition, which are as precious as "booster rockets." This is the situation I have attempted to represent in Figure 11, in which the indices b and p represent the classes "booster rockets" and "precious freight" in the base domain, and f and q represent respectively the "filler words" and their qualities (significant, subversive) in the target domain. Again, the sign, e.g. utterance (A) is underspecified with respect to the notions of "freight," "meaning" and other qualities, which have to be inferred from relatively impoverished data (freely adapted from Jappy, Chapter 3).

In Erb's eyes, "filler words" have the qualities of "booster rockets" (they are highly significant). "Filler words" are textual elements serving as links, as cement between other discourse's components. They stand for the "journey," and are more important than the "goal," the meaning of the whole sentence, of the whole text. The poet advocates for a small-scale utopia: "the journey as a goal." While emphasising it, she wants to open the text and the thought of her readers. In the piece "Widerstand," in Der Faden der Geduld (Erb, Faden 35) ("Resistance," in: The Thread of Patience), Erb stresses that "[w]ordplay liberates the oppressed system" ("Das Wortspiel befreit das unterdrückte System"). Christa Wolf says about Elke Erb (Erb, Faden 137): She sets "linguistic signs in place of structures of the real world — for instance instead of hierarchical structures" (Elke Erb setze "Sprache als Zeichen an die Stelle von Strukturen der wirklichen Welt — zum Beispiel für hierarchische Strukturen"). She uses iconicity to burst open the two-dimensional frame of the text. She adds a third dimension, a subjective and subversive one.

20      Let us now turn to another aspect of Erb's litany-like poetic prose. In the previous excerpt as well as in the following one, the text breaks with the binary tradition structuring thinking and speaking in Western societies: left-right, top-bottom, good-bad, true-false, black-white, etc. In "Alex in M. oder Der Weg zum Ziel" (Erb, Vexierbild 89-91), the author brings meaning and form together: The journey is the topic of this poetic prose, the words look like experimental paths on the page.

The structure of the text is in and of itself the metaphorical element here. In other terms: "the form is the meaning." The writer wants to reconcile form and meaning. Erb expresses her need for more readability in an essay entitled "Bericht über eine neue Darstellungsweise":

Ich half mir, ich half dem Lesen, indem ich mir zunächst Freiräume in den Zeilen schuf und als zweites die Hilfsmittel der Absätze und Einräumungen nutzte. (104)
(I helped myself, I helped my readers, by first creating free spaces in the lines and secondly by using paragraphs and concessive clauses as aids.)

"The form is the meaning": This poetic motto fulfils on one hand a pragmatic function (to achieve more readability), and, on the other, a programmatic one (to abolish the dictates of linearity). This dimension appears clearly when we analyse the metaphor using Jappy's graph (Fig. 12):