8 - Of Unhomed Subjects and Unsettled Voices: Alois Hotschnig’s Die Kinder Beruhigte Das Nicht

Summary

THE AUSTRIAN AUTHOR Alois Hotschnig (born in 1959 in rural Carinthia) has been considered an insider's tip in the Germanspeaking literary world ever since his first appearance on the scene in the early 1990s. His work has been given recognition in the form of multiple awards, among them the “Preis des Landes Karnten” in 1992 (the “Carinthia Prize,” the highest local accolade at the Ingeborg Bachmann Competition) for his distinct style of reducing a plot's focus to variations of perspective and narrative voices until the narrator almost completely disappears from the story.

In terms of style and its treatment of the concept of subjectivity, Hotschnig's work can be placed at the fault line between late modernism and postmodernism. He employs a sober, almost disengaged language, devoid of semantic frills, and it is striking how style and content complement each other in the subdued, solemn rhythm of his descriptions of the various incidents of psychological unravelling around which his stories revolve. These incidents crop up as uncanny rifts in the narrative when, for instance, protagonists are confronted with aspects of their own persona in the form of doubles, past versions of themselves, dolls, or their own subconscious in the form of an active figure. Overarching themes in Hotschnig's hauntingly dark texts are death and vanishing into nothingness, pathological forms of amnesia, and the phantom-like presence of lost family members, all presented in a curiously laconic and level-headed way. It is as if the narrator lacked empathy with the protagonists and was comfortably numb in the face of human pain and disorientation. I will show how this offers a poetic strategy to invite the reader to explore the human condition around the turn of the twenty-first century in all its fragility.

Hotschnig's oeuvre to date includes two acclaimed, individually published tales, Aus (Over, 1989) and Eine Art Glück (A Kind of Luck, 1990), two novels, Leonardos Hände (1992; Leonardo's Hands, 1999) and Ludwigs Zimmer (2000; Ludwig's Room, 2014), as well as a number of plays, including Absolution (Absolution, 1994).