THE BOY APPEARING (AS) THE SISTER: GENDER AND SILENCE IN GEORG TRAKL*

Abstract

The present text is concerned with figures of unusual gender in two poetic texts by Georg Trakl, namely ‘Traum und Umnachtung’ and ‘Ruh und Schweigen’, each of which features the same violation of German grammar at a crucial point. The first text starts and ends with a scene of a boy recognising his sister's image in the mirror, which will be read as a specular identification that transgresses the norms of gender assignment. This transgression will be further illuminated by Lee Edelman's No Future, a text that analyses the need of the heterosexual family to reproduce itself unchanged, and Jacques Lacan's concept of the mirror stage which discusses specular identification as a prerequisite for the possibility of speech. In reading ‘Ruh und Schweigen’, the issue of silence, which is both thematised and performed by the poem, will come to the forefront. The bi-gender figure appearing in the last lines will be understood as being dependent on this silence to appear, contrasting the way the protagonist of ‘Traum und Umnachtung’ is silenced by his family. Both these figures will therefore be read as transgressing against related, though not identical, norms of gender in ways that can only be expressed in a poetical language.