Power, desire, performance - Narrative exchanges in Wolfgang Hildesheimer's 'Masante'

Wolfgang Hildesheimer's "Masante" represents a challenge to traditional narrative theory because it does not lend itself to interpretation in terms of the dominant story-discourse dichotomy. Recent theoretical work, however, has stressed the transactional nature of narrative, according to which performativity rather than truth-content becomes the privileged criterion of narrative value. Further, as the work of Ross Chambers suggests, narrative exchanges within a text can allegorize the process of the text's own construction and reading. This article analyses the narrative "duels" between the narrator and his female interlocutors in "Masante" in order to show the extent to which they can be seen as models or anti-models of narrative practice. Neither set of narrative exchanges can be regarded as a model: the stories told by the narrator to Niki Almesin are too "successful" in their aim of seduction, and play themselves out hastily in a surrender to entropy. Conversely, Maxine sacrifices narrative coherence in order to maintain her storytelling authority, with the result that her stories - and with them her identity - eventually collapse. It emerges that the text of "Masante" is both written and demands to be read in a way that mediates between these two "anti-models".