The Threshold and the Ledger

Since her untimely death in 1973, Ingeborg Bachmann has come to be regarded as one of the twentieth century’s most important writers. Unpacking a single Bachmann poem, novelist Tom McCarthy latches onto two of its central terms — the eponymous threshold and ledger — and takes off on a line of flight: through the work of Franz Kafka, David Lynch, Anne Carson, Sappho and Shakespeare. Can writing be understood as an experience of the threshold, a limit- or boundary- state? A condition of ecstasy or ec-stasis, standing outside of oneself? If so, then how might such experience be archived, jotted down, notated? And when the boundaries of the self are ruptured, who then might be said to be this ledger’s author? Appearing on the eve of Bachmann’s centenary year, McCarthy’s book not only celebrates her brilliance, but also argues for the centrality of her vision to the very act of literature itself, whatever epoch it may be composed in.