13 - Travel’s Utopian Potential in Andrea Grill’s s Liebesmaschine N.Y.C.

Summary

THOUGH A FIXTURE in Austrian literary circles, Andrea Grill has yet to receive serious critical attention from scholars. A nominee for the Bachmann Prize (2007) and the winner of the Bremen Literature Prize Advancement Award for up-and-coming authors (2011), she is clearly establishing herself as an author of some importance in Austria and beyond. To date, she has published four novels, two collections of poems, and two collections of travel narratives, among other things. In addition to her literary accomplishments, she holds a PhD in biology, has published numerous articles in that field, and is “interested in change” and “biodiversity.” Indeed what we typically consider scientific methods of observation carry over into stylistic, generic, and content choices in her fiction, particularly in Liebesmaschine N.Y.C. (2012; Love Machine N.Y.C.), creating fertile ground for contributions to the genre(s) of travel writing. This is not to say that she claims scientific objectivity in her literary work—a concept she calls into question throughout the collection Liebesmaschine N.Y.C.—but that her stories of travel can be read as the study of a certain habitat, its biodiversity, and the labors of new arrival. Like Peter Handke in Der kurze Brief zum langen Abschied (1972; Short Letter, Long Farewell), she interweaves philosophical musings on identity with matter-of-fact descriptions of often unspectacular aspects of life in the United States, foregrounding that the objects of her observations and study in Liebesmaschine are not just the places to which she travels but she herself and, most significantly, the dynamic interaction between the two, both intellectually and physically. Here we emphasize how she explores not only her literal travel and movement in the external world but also how it precipitates internal movement: psychic and intellectual reactions to the rhythms around her. Her stream-of-conscousness-like narratives reconceive travel as a model for understanding the self and others. Embracing ambivalence and ambiguity as textual principles that mimic movement, Grill implicitly proposes a model for a utopian epistemology. The collection as a whole can be understood as a process of demonstrating rather than explaining. In Liebesmaschine, travel writing becomes a series of disparate meditations on identity (national and personal), the forces that shape specific environments, and the interplay between them.