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In recent years, the work of Kathrin Röggla has been the object of considerable attention. This interest has focused largely on a theme that can be identified in many of her literary essays, as well as in her lectures and texts on poetics: impending disaster—which is to say, a sudden interruption of normality.1 At the same time, reference has also been made to Röggla’s original narrative procedures, which foreground the theme of the “state of exception” (Ausnahmezustand) by giving rise to aporetic speaker positions, thus structurally suspending the “normal case” of narration.2 A central role is played here by the grammatical mood of the German subjunctive (Konjunktiv), which Röggla configures as narrative mood in the publications wir schlafen nicht (2004), die alarmbereiten (2010), and Nachtsendung: Unheimliche Geschichten (2016).3 This “subjunctive narration” is in need of clarification, and should not be prematurely identified as “indirect speech.”4 Röggla’s narrative deployment of the subjunctive is not fully covered by contemporary descriptive grammars. Poetic practice makes such an original use possible, and is also able to establish the validity of new forms. Nevertheless, Röggla’s deployment of the subjunctive differs substantially from the way it is commonly used, and thus constitutes an anomaly, one that first needs to be described, as well as to be analyzed in relation to its usefulness for narration: not only as an anomaly of speech but also as a “speaking anomaly.” In what follows, anomaly will therefore stand for a manifest deviation from grammatical norm and narrative convention, a double irregularity that disturbs the production of meaning without entirely destroying it. In Röggla’s writing, anomaly orients meaning in the direction of something unsaid, or even unsayable. While Röggla’s anomaly of grammatical and narrative form may well never establish a new collective norm, it is convincing as a form sui generis—at least within the space of literature.
This essay takes two works by Röggla, “die ansprechbare” (from die alarmbereiten) and “Der Wiedereintritt in die Geschichte I” (from Nachtsendung), as its case studies. The primary focus is on Röggla’s grammatical-narrative strategy, which I summarize with the notions of “escalating subjunctive” (for “die ansprechbare”) and “unloosened ends” (for “Wiedereintritt in die Geschichte I” and Nachtsendung in general).