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Undine geht and Lola rennt : Symbolic Female Flights in the Work of Ingeborg Bachmann and Tom Tykwer

2008; Routledge; Volume: 83; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.3200/gerr.83.2.107-138

1930-6962

Éva Révész,

Literature and Cultural Memory

Using the structural similarity of the titles Undine geht and Lola rennt as a point of departure, the author argues that Tykwer's film pays homage to Bachmann's quasi-feminist manifesto through his radical revision of the classic cinematic figure of the siren; his Lola is akin to Bachmann's subversive, modernist revision of Undine, the well-known romantic siren figure. "In flight" from a female identity "defined by the masculine," both protagonists not only defy and confound gender expectations, but their narratives also break radically with conventional narrative forms. The programmatic nature of their revolt elevates each character to an allegorical level: both serve as allegories of love as well as of art along Julia Kristeva's notion of the semiotic. Bachmann's Undine, at home though she may be in the borderlands of the semiotic/symbolic, nonetheless capitulates before the paternal symbolic in ways that Tykwer's Lola, whose postmodern sensibility allows her to break even more radically with essentialist notions of gender, does not.