The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Steppe by Ilma RakusaBrooke Horvath
Ilma Rakusa. Steppe. Trans. Solveig Emerson. Burning Deck, 1997. 77 pp. Paper: $10.00.
In Novelistic Love in the Platonic Tradition Jennie Wang argues that “lover’s discourse” is a “socially privileged language” postmodernists must disrupt. Why? Because, in Wang’s paraphrase of Noam Chomsky, “what enters the mainstream will support the needs of established power.” Consequently, love in postmodern fiction is often a means of making political points while evading condemnation or willful neglect.
Something like the above may explain the twelve stories of Steppe, the third book of fiction (published originally in German in 1990) by Ilma Rakusa, a Swiss writer also known for her poetry and translations. Yet if these seductive stories make eyes at the reader, they also manage to stay teasingly just out of reach, as this typical passage perhaps suggests: “And then I fell into this state of mind which does without the justification of cause, context, in short, reason. Do you like that, my dear? Not: why do you like that, my dear? Your bass voice is beautiful, and you are called Kasimir and Otto, nobody claims that is tautology, nobody claims the ideal is at hand.”
Love—what one narrator calls “a word from a dead language”—functions in Rakusa’s postmodern world as focal point for a reappraisal of sexual politics and metaphor for established power of whatever sort: “He who swings the whip may not despair”; “At least behave as though the status quo were the most peaceful of all possibilities”; “made to feel small, smaller, smallest, as gnomes we are controllable.”
“The novelist,” Wang contends, “sells ideology,” and “novelistic love” works as that ideology’s “advertisement.” I suggest this is what Rakusa may be up to here. But I am also prepared to do what she politely requests: to “please don’t trap me in the narrow limits of your imagination.” [Brooke Horvath]