Sticks and Stones

Considering the final lines of Ingeborg Bachmann’s 1961 story “The Thirtieth Year,” we read: “I say unto thee: Rise up and walk! None of your bones is broken.” They conclude the narration of the last episode of the thirtieth year in the life of the unnamed protagonist, who is involved in a traumatic car accident while hitchhiking back from Italy to Vienna. “They sped a few yards forward and into a wall,” Bachmann writes, the plural pronoun encompassing both the protagonist and the Italian driver who would not survive the crash. The 29-year-old passenger, however, survives. The final pages of the text accompany his recovery, bound up with the emergence of an odd kind of hope, a hitherto unfamiliar will-to-life with which he awaits the advent of his thirtieth birthday:One immediately notices that the final lines display a grammatical shift, from the third to the first and second persons. While the narrative voice refers to the protagonist as “er” throughout this final episode, the last line performs a direct address, albeit one that does without quotation marks. The line combines an imperative (“rise up and walk!”) with a performative (“I say unto thee”) and a constative utterance (“none of your bones are broken”). The perspectival switch, however, makes it difficult for us to determine both the addressee of these phrases and their subject. Who here says “I”? Is this still the narrator speaking? And how are we to imagine the situation that allows the narrative voice to turn its object into a “you” and refer directly to it? If one pursues this hypothesis further, one immediately faces a contradiction, for two pages prior the narrator unequivocally states, “This year has broken his bones” (“Dieses Jahr hat ihm die Knochen zerbrochen”). Which of the two statements is the reader to believe? And if they both can be considered true, what kind of bone can appear simultaneously broken and unbroken?