Iconicity as a Doorway to a New Space: Lesser Known East German Women Writers in the Seventies and Eighties — Page 6:
26 "Slave speech" can also refer to a code used to communicate with readers. This code hides a message between the lines, as for instance in Maron's The Deserter (Die Überläuferin). Monika Maron quotes the last line from the poem "Der Asra" by Heine (Maron 198): "[. . .] and my tribe are these Asra, who die when loving" ("[. . .] und mein Stamm sind jene Asra, welche sterben, wenn sie lieben"). Rosalind, the heroine of Maron's novel thinks of this sentence when she dreams of leaving her friends behind her and going to the railway station. Readers familiar with the poem will recognise that the sentence was uttered by a slave. New fields of interpretations open up: Was Rosalind deprived of her freedom — that is to say enslaved — when she ran away from her home country?
27 In the case of Elke Erb, "slave speech" also hints at the lack of autonomy mentioned in Fig. 13. She wrote in 1980 a short poem called "Sklavensprache":
Die Hände, die gestreichelt haben, kann man ruhig abhacken. Das ändert nichts, denn sie würden das Streicheln nicht lassen, und es führt zu nichts Gutem. Man kann sie aber fesseln, und die Person, der sie gehören, folgt ihnen nach bis in die finsterste Zelle. (Erb, Vexierbild 57)
(Feel free to chop off the hands that have caressed. It does change anything since they would not stop caressing and nothing good will come out of it. But you can put them in chains and the person whom they belong to follows them up to the darkest cell.)
Two interpretations suggest themselves. The first, on an interpersonal level, could concern a couple. One partner offers unconditional tenderness, but this love remains unrequited. Human beings yearn for harmony, nothing can prevent them from giving up even their independence for this deep desire. The second interpretation is more political. The author may be describing the suffering of a whole nation longing for freedom or driven by a collective, masochist force.
28 We have now come to the end of this journey along texts reflecting a society which disappeared — at least formally — about 15 years ago. I have tried here to present some possibilities of interpretation from my point of view as a French scholar reading foreign literature. This underlines a principle that governs iconicity: non-arbitrariness. To quote Max Nänny:
Iconic functions of textual elements [. . .] are no more than latent possibilities. They will only appear if the meaning of the textual passage is compatible with them [. . .]. In consequence, iconicity exists only as it is perceived. (199)
29 Let us return to our original hypothesis: is there a relationship between political acceptance and the use of literary iconicity? In other words: Are iconic means in literature somehow subversive? Indeed, the equation iconicity = subversion is tempting, but is reducing and misleading. It would not account for the other creative powers of iconicity revealed by the texts analysed as examples in this paper. Firstly, iconicity enabled female authors in the former GDR to give up their "squinting gaze" for a while by reconciling Frauenbild and Frauenliteratur. According to Weigel (Blick 83), femininity is a male defined concept which cannot be satisfyingly fulfilled by any woman at all, since the "images of women" (Frauenbild) do not correspond to the world contained in "women's literature" (Frauenliteratur). Imagic, diagrammatic and metaphorical iconicity, however, allowed East German women writers — at least temporarily — to renew male aesthetic norms and reconcile the subjugated other (that is, women's traditional role in patriarchal society) with the subject they were writing about. Secondly, iconicity helped to create a tangible space of writing in a politically controlled atmosphere. There is a gap between what the authors feel (mostly loyalty to socialism) and what they experience (lack of personal freedom). Iconicity is a way, not to close these gaps, but rather to jump back and forth, from one shore to the other.