Kika Bomer
 

THE LABRYRINTH AS AMBIGUOUS FORM

The idea of the labyrinth in European cultures has many different meanings; it forms the structure of heaven, of the human soul, of the brain, it may hide the satanic or the structure of the Divine, it can be a maze of immoral ways or an image of burden, it can be the search for knowledge, wisdom, and holiness, it can be the devouring mother or the kind womb of sleep, it can be a prison or a reflection of divinely inspired creation. The Knossos labyrinth of Crete has been a history of mystery, a labyrinthal combination of myth and fact where the boundary of one gets lost in the other. Its function, whether it served as a palace, necropolis, or temple, is still debated among scholars. In its center the Minotaur was imprisoned, half bull and half man. The Egyptian labyrinth contained the mummified bodies of twelve dead kings at its center, treasures, along with the tombs of sacred crocodiles. King Henry 11, in 12th century England, designed a complicated maze in which he hid his lover Rosamond. She was eventually murdered by his jealous wife, who found the center and forced Rosamond to drink poison. In the Middle Ages, the Christian church designed church robes with labyrinths that represented the complicated folds of sin enveloping human beings. Only through the aid of Providence, divine intervention, could one be extricated from this unholy path (Lockridge 29-35).

There are two kinds of labyrinths: the unicursal and the multicursal models. The unicursal is most common in visual arts and has a circuitous pathway to the center without the series of bivia that lead one to dead ends. The wanderer is passive and does not know the end of how to reach it, but with patient endurance of the unpredictable twists of the path, he/she reaches its center. The maze is the guide, and the only choice is whether to enter the maze in the first place. The multicursal model, on the other hand, is one by which the wanderer learns not by precept but dialectic. It is often a symbol of moral or intellectual difficulty. The route to the center is more direct (not as circuitous) but there are many pathways that mislead one and the individual, not the structure itself, must be his/her own guide (Doob 46-53). In medieval literature, the multicursal mazes were considered evil and the unicursal a pattern of God's infinity (75).

The labyrinth has a double character because it presumes a double perspective. From the perspective within the maze, one suffers confusion. Vision is severely limited, pathways are narrow and winding. The viewer of the labyrinth from above, however, can see the pattern whole and understand its complex artistry. In The Idea of the Labyrinth , Penelope Reed Doob writes about the inherent ambiguity in its design:
 

What you see depends on where you stand, and thus, at one and the same time labyrinths are single (there is one physical structure) and double: they simultaneously incorporate order and disorder, clarity and confusion, unity and multiplicity, artistry and chaos. They may be perceived as path (a linear but circuitous passage to a goal) or as a pattern (a complete symmetrical design). They are dynamic from a mazewalker's perspective and static from a privileged onlooker's point of view. Their paths are linear...their pattern may be circular, cyclical...they may be inextricable (if no one can find the center). Our perception of labyrinths is thus intrinsically unstable...(1-2).

The winding passageways and the ambiguity in experience link the unicursal and multicursal models. Another important similarity, however, is the center. Doob writes "Most mazes are designed on behalf of, and in subordination to, their centers. Labyrinths are teleological..." (54). The center may hide a Minotaur or a treasure; in either case it is something that is so dangerous or valuable it warrants protection. The center makes the structure very different than the interweaving pattern, or interlace, which also suggests a complexity that is similar. The center also differentiates the structure from a fluid form, in which all boundaries begin to overlap. The structure is complex but solid and built according to a plan. Like the medieval mosaics, the fragments are pieces to a greater whole. In this case, individual experience is the fragment.

And it is this experience of the part, the individual, that undermines classical experience. Rodney Castledon, when writing about the Knossos labyrinth, writes about the richly decorated inner walls and double doors, some of which can be only partly opened, and the light-wells and windows, all of which combine to create a complicated pattern of tone, texture, and light. Some of the corridors have formal and grandiose beginnings, only to lead to tiny rooms or another passageway, undermining our idea of thresholds. At the foot of the Grand Staircase, one is led into a cellar that seems to have no purpose: "there is no obvious direction to follow, and we find our way almost by accident into the Double-Axe Sanctuary" (Castledon 179). The trickery of the design and deliberate irregularity, he writes, may be seen as a naive architecture:
 

Alternatively, the Labyrinth may be seen as part of an aesthetic that has little to do with classical tradition, one that seeks significantly different effects. The Minoan architect may not have been interested in creating a plastically unified composition, but was instead tryingg to create a pictorial or narrative experience for the visitor that was unsettling, full of incident, drama, and surprise. The Labyrinth depends for its effect less on overall structure than on accidentals, modulations, syncopations, and sudden changes of tempo and texture (179).

Meaning is always a phenomenon of culture, a product of culture; now, in our society, this phenomenon of culture is constantly naturalized...We believe we are in a practical world of uses, of functions, of total domestication of the object, and in reality we are also, by objects, in a world of meanings, of reasons, of alibis: function gives birth to the sign, but this sign is reconverted into the spectacle of a function. I believe it is precisely this conversion of culture into a pseudo-nature which can define the ideology of our society (Barthes 190).

The architecture of the labyrinth defies functionalism. It is significant that the function of the Knossos structure itself is still debated today. Not only the structure of the whole, but also each corridor deviates from our teleological perspective of order and rationality, despite its center. The center of the Knossos labyrinth is presumed to be for the sport of bull-leaping, but is ultimately unknown.

In Christianity, especially during the Medieval era, the labyrinth reflected the senses, the earthly realm, the pagan realm. Church labyrinths were everywhere throughout middle Europe and it is believed they served as a setting for penetential pilgrimages. The Crusades were ideologically associated with the labyrinth, a penetential journey. With the decline of the Crusades, some writers claim, penitents had to traverse pavement labyrinths on their knees, symbolizing the path from the house of Pilate to Calvary. Black and white labyrinthian figures were drawn on cathedral floors, symbolizing pilgrimages to the Holy Land. Ross Lockridge describes the process:
 

Two thousand steps had to be taken to reach the center after the right path had been chosen; but the pilgrim was first allured by devious and winding ways which led him in wrong directions. In the center, to which the path eventually led him, figures of bishops and saints were placed, ranging around a central cross. This signified that they rested in the bosom of the Church (36).

The labyrinth was also a place of play and pleasure. Maze-walking was an aristocratic diversion in France, for example. In England, the idea of the labyrinth was taken by the invading Roman army in the form of turf and stone mazes. For the English medieval peasants, they were places of aesthetic delight. Although very little information is known about them, they are associated with festivities. They are also associated with Troy and with cities, something the historians find baffling (Doob 113-114). The link between the labyrinth and the city makes sense, however. Both are structures of complex wholes composed of confusing parts. Because in England they are associated with pleasure, I suggest that these labyrinths are structured more in terms of the pagan traditions, in which the center is associated with animality (the Minotaur), a crossing of boundaries, instead of patriarchal transcendence.

In Roland Barthes' essay "Semiology and Urbanism," he writes about the conflict between functionalism and the semantic content of a city, between signification and reason. The experience of a city and the reality of objective geography are in opposition. He writes:
 

Investigations made by psycho-sociologists have shown that, for example, two neighborhoods are contiguous if we rely on the map, i.e., on "reality," on objectivity, whereas, from the moment they receive two different significations, they are radically split in the image of the city: signification is experienced in complete opposition to objective data (Barthes 195).

The signifieds are then like mythical beings on the verge of signifying something else. In our age there are also empty centers, for example the imperial palace in the center of Tokyo which used to be experienced as a center of signification, reflecting a social hierarchy, and is now empty of that semantic content (197). The place of the Law is empty, and every particular can form its own center. Hence, we find ourselves confronted with an infinite chain of metaphors "whose signified is always recessive or itself becoming signifier" (199). This dimension makes the city a place of pleasure, of eroticism, in which one encounters the other. The center is not a seat of legislation as much as the experience of sociality, a gathering point, a place of heterogeneity and play, and the periphery is the place of family, residence, and identity (200).

The labyrinth as symbol and structure is related to the feminine. It is a place of the senses: the earthly, the body, the belly of the whale, the devouring mother where the hero must endure full possession of the mother-destroyer and abandon the ogre aspect of the father in which the dragon thought to be God is the Superego and the monster of sin the repressed id. In Iragaray's discussion of the myth of the cave, she looks at Plato's depiction of reality and relates the space to the hystera, the womb. In his depiction, people are chained to the walls and damned to an interiority. They cannot represent this original matrix, however, the unrepresentable origin of all forms. Their heads face the walls. Fire is lighted by a man and there is no recourse to the sun, Father, Idea, Ideal, which lies outside of the cave. The inner space is only a reflection:
 

All is organized into cavities, spheres, sockets, chambers, enclosures, simply because the speculum is pt in the way. The operation is abortive--naturally--since only reflection is safe and spawns misbegotten freaks...This cave intercepts the games of copula in a miming of reproduction and in each figuration of the inner space the image of the Sun engenders sham offspring (Irigaray 255).

The breaking out of the labyrinth, then, would be an identification with the maternal body. Kristeva, in writing about poetic language, mentions the idea of the chora, space which is non-space, an anteriority of language which she sees as being represented, or rather expressed, through rhythm. It is the instinctive drive that brings heterogeneity in language and breaks up symbolic representation. The body of the mother is identified with and at the same time resists identification, creating an experience of a shattering of the body that invites multiple identifications. The result is either suicide or revolution. The repression that serves as the foundation of the symbolic results in suicide if the creation comes to a transcendental end. If not, revolution occurs, in which the symbolic is once more broken down by a shattering of the body. In language, this moment occurs through rhythm, the point where a text ceases to function as language and approaches...something else (Kristeva 206).

This exploding, or shattering, is related to Western conceptions of bliss. Sergei Eisenstein, when analyzing a sketch of the "Canceri Oscura" by Piranesi, uses a method in which he brings the work to a state of ecstasy by exploding the balanced form. The "madness" he creates consists of the grouping of objects into a system where arches extend out of themselves, arches ejecting new arches, staircases exploding into newstaircases, vaults that continue their leaps off the frame of representation (Tafuri 75). He writes:
 

Nowhere in the Carceri do we find an uninterrupted perspective view into the depths.
But everywhere the initial movement of deepening perspective is interrupted by a bridge, a column, an arch, a passage.
Each time behind such a column or semicircle of an arch the perspective movement is caught up again.
However, it is not in the same perspective mode but in a new one--usually in a much more reduced scale of representation than you would expect or might suggest (86).

The Spanish writer Jorge Luis Borges was interested in the idea of the labyrinth as a structure representing a gnostic metaphysics that worked well with his metafiction. Like the Carceri sketches, the perspective is continually interrupted by recession rather than explosion. The gnostic image of the world is a receding perspective, an infinite or cyclical series of creators and creations, images of images. Our world, according to the gnostics, was created by the ruler of the last heaven of 365 realms, Jehova, and his creation comes about as a development of celestial conflicts and wars. Human beings are imperfect creations and exist to imprison the fallen sparks of divine essence. The nontemporal god sends a redeemer who takes on an illusory human form while attempting to save the divine spark in humanity, but his illusory form dies on the cross with the secret knowledge or genius, the secret teaching of Christ to humanity.

Borges, in his essay "The Biathanatos," writes about how since Christ's death was voluntary, the Universe was created to provide a stage for this divine act of suicide. History is the agony of those fragments. The world as prison, illusion, deception, is the gnostic image. Since each divinity is a degradation of the previous one, each doctrine can provide a copy or critique of the former. The metafictional possibilities are apparent (Jaen 85-88). Salvation is the complete rejection of the world. Didier T. Jaen, in Borges' Esoteric Library , writes:
 

A consequence of this doctrine is the idea that the world is thus utterly divorced from the truly divine. It is, in fact, a prison or a deception, and the way to salvation is complete rejection of everything created. The world is not a bridge to the divine but an almost impenetrable obstacle. Rejection is the cardinal virtue, and suicide becomes a symbolic act of rejection. Metafiction, too, with its exposition of the tricks of the trade, becomes a symbolic act of literary suicide: a symbolic death of the author, the character, the reader (88).

2. The Labyrinth's Center

What lies in the center of a labyrinth? There are two possible centers I would like to discuss, both not entirely separate, but merely passageways into each other. The first one is Nothingness. The second one is the monster.

When an infant, in the stage of abjection, that moment when infantile pre-narcissism is verging on the mirror stage, looks at his mother, he/she asks what is it that she wants? Kristeva writes that the child, at the moment in which the Ego attempts to come into being and separation occurs from pre-Oedipal consciousness, is the moment when a child sees in his/her mother that she wants something beyond him/her:
 

Mother is not complete but that she wants...Who? What? The question has no answer other than the one that uncovers narcissistic emptiness; At any rate, not I (256).

The center of the labyrinth contains the non-I, the other. In the heart of the woman is the negative that religion or transcendence banishes as its blind boundaries. In this movement, the Not-I can become the imaginary father. And the real fathers look at the woman who gives birth to the arbitrary and create her as a projection of their desire. She defies a patriarchal structure of morality and ethics, the legislative power to unify a tribe. The experience of emptiness, of Not-I, becomes structured or excluded into a shadow-world in which the other is evil, the enemy, the object to be controlled.

In the center of the labyrinth is monstrosity when desire becomes a function that is socially mediated, which according to Girard is all desire. Arbitrary violence occurs when a sacrificial contract has been broken, as in the myth of King Minos whose white bull became violent when he did not provide the correct sacrifice to Poseidon. Violence also occurs when second-hand desire creates a monster out of the model. King Minos' wife, Pasiphae, crossed the boundary between species, broke a taboo by making love with a bull. The result was the Minotaur, a monster, a freak. The labyrinth was created to hide the Minotaur and the failed sacrifice created the need for more sacrifices, as King Minos fed it every nine years with seven youths and maidens from Athens. Girard writes:
 

The individual and collective history of secondhand desire always moves toward nothingness and death. A faithful description would elucidate a dynamic structure in the form of a descending spiral (Girard 4).

In combining these two centers, one sees a dynamic in which the Not-I, the nothingness of desire, becomes monstrous, through rivalry, returns to a nothingness that is death.

3. Distorted Perspective

But it is not at the center that I will begin to explore a certain labyrinth. This one is a textual labyrinth.

The text as labyrinth would be one in which the individual is led through passages, immersed in the parts, and is unable to see the center or the whole until it is revealed to him/her. Thus the labyrinth as hermeneutic experience. The multiplicity of interpretive options requires that the reader labor. A synthesis of linearity and circularity would also be a significant feature. The text, like the labyrinth, is an artificial construction. Doob writes, "...artistic ordering inherently, if not explicity, resembles the labyrinth, paramount emblem of artificial order" (207). This statement is very generalized; however, I do not believe every text can be compared to a labyrinth. Barbara Neuwirth, a contemporary Viennese writer who writes science fiction/fantasy Kafkaesque prose in Der Dunkler Fluss Des Lebens , is a postmodern Daedalus of the labyrinth.
 
 

The book is a collection of short stories that, however, works as a whole work. The first story is called the "Prologue" and the last the "Epilogue," pointing out Neuwirth's intention to see the work as a whole. But each story is separate and although themes repeat themselves, no character or story is continued in the next. The doubleness of this structure makes it labyrinthal. The two stories that lie at the work's center deal with the concept of the monstrous. The prologue I will explore as an entrance and the epilogue as an exit after looking at general characteristics that make the text labyrinthal.

In every story, there is a sense of blurred or blocked vision. The limited perspective of each character comes from the world in which they live, which is narrow and full of barriers to perspective. In "Die Stille Stadt" [The Silent City], the first sentence is "Das Gebirgsmassiv beherrschte unseren Horizont" (Neuwirth 117). [The mountain blocked our horizon.] Later, in describing the landscape, there is a sense of eternal passageways and blockages of varying depths, a vision of vertigo similar to Eisenstein's description of the Carceri:
 

Ich blickte die Eisenbahnscienen entlang den Hang empor. Die Wucht des Gebirgsmassivs wurde mir erst wieder bewüsst, als der Blick kein Ende fand auf disem Weg, immer höher schraubte er sich dem Himmel zu, bald auf terrassenähnliche Vorsprünge stossend, bald einem Kamin gleich verschlossen (133).

[I saw the railroad tracks along the cliff. The weight of the mountain was first noticable as I couldn't find an end to the path. It turned always higher into the sky, sometimes on cliffs like terraces, sometimes closed into a chimney]

Reflection is another device that limits perspective. There is often glass or water reflecting and/or distorting an image. In "Vertumnus," the protagonist writes, "Die Stadt glich meiner Erinnerung an das Gesicht eines Mädchens, das einst ich gewesen war..." (53). [The city was the same as my memory of the face of the child, who I once was...] The narcissism and displacement of time limits the perspective. Later, she describes the space of the post-apocalyptic city she moves through:
 

Ein Aufblenden, Kahle Mauern unter dem Dach, dessen Ziegel auf ungehobelten Sparren auflagen. Dicke Staubschichten bedeckten die Holzplanken des Bodens, und, aufgewirbelt durch meine Schritte, wirbelten Schlieren zur nackten Gluehbirne empor, drehten einige Pirouetten und sanken schlaff hernieder. (54)

[A deception. Bare walls under the ceiling, the tiles on unjoined rafters. Thick layers of dust covered the planks of wood on the ground and swirled to the shards of glass bulbs under my feet, turned pirouettes and sunk heavily down.]

Even her body is described as a piece of glass: "meine Haut feucht wurde wie eine Glasscheibe, deren eine Seite in der Wärme ruht, die andere aber im Frost" (53). [...my skin became moist like a piece of glass that was in warmth on one side, the other n frost.] Glass, which is a kind of transparency flickering into obscurity, is a repeating image in all stories and will be discussed more thoroughly later. The recurrent reflection and transparency makes for a labyrinthal experience of uncertainty for both the protagonists and the reader.

The spaces within each story are also often labyrinthal, described in detail, with many passageways and tunnels. Many of the stories take place either in a city, sometimes specifically Vienna, or in an unknown wilderness in the Third World. The landscapes of the cities are often post-apocalyptic. There has been a breakdown of a former order, symbolic of a kind of degradation of the Western Empire, the Enlightenment. For example, Columbina, in a story of the same name, lives in a broken-down city where trash is merely thrown out on the streets and where the children play games of war. When returning home, she "benützte Durchgänge und Tunnels, die sie auf ihren Streifzügen entdeckt hatte, die nur wenige kannten" (50). [used passageways and tunnels that she discovered during her wanderings and that few knew about.] In "Das Schwarze Gold," [The Black Gold] the structure where Tauschinsky lives, a rich owner of a drug company, is gigantic with many floors. The story follows a series of rooms until at the end we reach the basement, the center where his monstrosity is revealed in the blood-stained coat of a man he murdered. In "Das Rad des Geographen," [The Geographer's Wheel] the entire story is a journey through a labyrinth, beginning through a door in the library which leads to tunnels, passageways, glass corridors and a realm that spans between heaven and hell, full of witches and angels. An example can be seen in this short passage:
 

Da stiess ich einen Torflügel auf und trat in eine kleine Halle, aus der drei weitere Tore hinausführten. Die Halle war leer. Hinter mir schlug die Tür ins Schloss. Ich drehte mich um. Ich befand mich in einem quadratischen, leeren Raum, wo in der Mitte jeder Wand eine geschlossene Tür weiter lockte. Alle Seiten sahen gleich aus (30).

[I pushed the gateway open and walked in a small hall with three more gates. The hall was empty. The door slammed in the castle behind me. I turned. I found myself in an empty, square room with a closed door on every wall. All sides looked the same.]

Each passage requires choice. It is a multicursal labyrinth for the protagonist and a unicursal one for the reader, who is led by the structure of the work itself.

The reader, as well as the characters in each work, is limited and forced into a tunnel vision in each text. Like a mystery novel, the teleological project of the characters involved, or the reason for a certain behavior, is not explained until the end of the narratives. The reader is led by the author through narrow passageways, unable to see the end or the sense of the present.

Time, too, is labyrinthal in structure. Some of the stories take place in the future, but one is uncertain how far into the future. There is a mythical quality to many of the stories which give one a sense of the past. Sometimes time is confused within the stories themselves. In the prologue, "Das Traurige Essen," [The Meal of Mourning], the main character does not age, although her lover does. In "Nimm diese Rosen, Schöne" [Take these Roses, Beautiful], she is a mythical character who comes from the river and seems to have lived many lifetimes. Time is uncertain and more cyclical than linear. The linearity in the narratives that leads to a certain revelation or unveiling at the same time, through the dimension of time, creates spirals and circles. The present is a surfacing that does not disclude the past or the future that spiral into the whole of the structure.

4. Entrance: Woman's Desire

Because a labyrinth is essentially ambiguous, the borderline between fantasy and reality would become nebulous. A passageway can be built as a threshold into one kind of room and be a dead-end, or a passageway into something entirely different. The expectations and categorizations that we impose onto reality create a metaphysics of the referent which I dealt with when discussing realism. The entrance into a labyrinth is an entrance into another world, however, and "Das Traurige Essen" serves as an entrance into the labyrinth by validating imagination as the fulcrum by which reality is transformed.

In the story, a young woman is brought with a group of other tourists to an island where they feast before leaving. The protagonist, we find out later, has been chosen to be sacrificed by the patriarch of the island who believes that without the sacrifice, the island will be submerged in the sea and not bloom again. The town on the island is described in such a way that it erases the "objectness" of the reality, creating nebulous boundaries, also associated with a breakdown of language:
 

Was eben noch klar zu schen war, verliert beim Daraufschauen immer mehr an Deutlichkeit, die Konturen beginnen zu verschwimmen, und je wichtiger es Susanne erscheint, den Namen für die Objekte zu funden, die eben noch erkennbar schienen, desto unsicherer wird es, ob überhaupt Objeckte vorhanden sind, dort unten, in dieser Stadt (13).

[What was clear to see, once looked at, lost its clarity. The contours began to blur together and the more important it seemed to Susanne to find the names for the objects that still seemed recognizable, the less certain it became whether objects were even down there in this city.]

The imagination and continual "seeming" of reality leads to a questioning of the foundation of objective realitiy itself. Before the murder actually takes place, a young man from the island decides to save her. In the end, she takes on a mythical and magical dimension. It is through her desire for the son that she imagines the island in bloom and transforms it:
 

Sie nimmt, was sie wünscht, und gibt, was ihren Trämen bekannt ist...Ihre Gedanken treiben weg zu Fischerdörfern mit bunten Booten am Strand, wo Menschen lachend ihr Tagwerk tun, und dann deckt der Anblick der wunderschönen toten Stadt diese Lebendigkeit zu, verhüllt sie mit Schweigen und dem Wellenschlagen zm Stein (18).

[She takes what she wants and gives that which is familiar to her dreams...her thoughts move to fishing villages with colorful boats on the beach, where people work laughing, and then her vision covers the beautiful dead city with this liveliness and hides her in silence and the waves breaking on stone.]
 

5. The Vicious Cycle

In the next story, "Das Rad des Geographen" [The Geographer's Wheel] the protagonist, a young girl, idealizes the geographer. He is a man who draws maps, who imitates reality without moral or ethical considerations, holds a mirror to the world by which one can orient oneself through space. In many ways he is the ideal of objectivity, the view of the labyrinth from the heavens. It is through his perspective or vision of her that she loses vision and the ability to express herself. However, at the same time she is completely transformed:
 

Durch den Blickkontakt mit dem Geographen schien sich mein Leben auf einen Schlag verändert zu haben...so hatte ich durch den Blick in diese Augen die Konturen seines Gesichtes verloren, ich wusste nicht mehr, wie ich ihn jemandem, der ihn noch nicht gesehen hätte, beschreiben könnte...(23)

[Through looking into the geographer's eyes, it seemed like my whole life changed all at once...I lost the contours of his face by looking into those eyes and I didn't know anymore how I would be able to describe him to someone who had never seen him...]
 

After leaving the room in the library where her father and Secundus are discussing the primitive society or tribe, the protagonist moves into a glass tunnel which links her father's realm with moors outside. The glass tunnel is a transparency on which the ideals of the Enlightenment are based. Anthony Vidler writes:
 

Modernity has been haunted, as we know very well, by a myth of transparency: transparency of the self to nature, of the self to the other, of all selves to society, and all this represented, if not constructed...by a universal transparency of building materials, spatial penetration, and the ubiquitous flow of air, light, and physical movement (217).

The glass passageway, in which she can experience everything sensually, including smell, but is detached from it, signifies the ideal unity that then moves into a space of violence and sacrifice. For the girl in the story it is a naivité, where she is protected from the environment and at the same time unified with it. However, because she is separated by a transparent wall, she is unable to act and therefore moves into her head and the realm of abstraction--"...weil ich auch hier von der Aussenwelt abgeschnitten war wie immer in meinem Leben, es mir aber in seiner Transparenz so deutlich sichtbar war, beschäftigten mich diese Fragen..." (31). [Because I was separated from the outside as I have always been but the outside was so transparent, questions came to mind...] Leaving the glass tunnel is leaving the realm of innocence: "Nach dem Schritt aus dem Glastunnel war die Rückkehr in meine Unschuld nicht mehr offen" (35). [The return to innocence was no longer possible after the step out of the glass tunnel.] The unity of self and the world of the Enlightenment is an illusion that brings one into a world of abstractions. It is also a naivité, the narcissistic realm of the child who is on the verge of losing his/her innocence.

The glass tunnel leads into central chambers where sacrifice takes place. In the design of the Cretan labyrinth, Theseus is in the center, killing the Minotaur. But in the myth, King Minos fed the Minotaur with Athenian youths sent as tribute in atonement for the death of Androgeos. Later Theseus sacrificed the Minotaur with the help of Ariadne's thread and lastly, Daedalus himself was imprisoned in his own creation (Doob 12). In this story, the inner chambers contain three angels who are experimenting with humankind. One of the angels wants to break off the project because it has led to too much murder, but the other angel explains that the violence is merely a stage:
 

Diese archaischen Rituale sind ganz offensichtlich grundlegende Stadien in der Entwicklung des Menschen vom simplen Homo sapiens zum Homo culturatus. Das ist ahnlich der analen. Phase beim Kind...(36).

[These archaic rituals are obviously important stages in the development of humans from simply Homo sapiens to Homo culturatus. It is similar to the anal phase of a child...]
 

Werden sie Frieden bringen? Wissen sie überhaupt, wie das ist, dieser Friede? Ich, will Frieden, und doch weiss ich nicht, wie das gehen soll. Denn ich will auch den Tod. Den Tod des Büchermannes. (42)

[Will they bring peace? Do they even know what that is, this peace? I want peace, although I don't know how that can be. Because I also want death. The death of the librarian...]

Every character becomes imprisoned in the creation of culture based on the social contract of law and sacrifice.

This makes for a vicious cycle based on veneration or idealization that then leads to violence. The brothers are rivals for her father's power, the angels imitate and sacrifice human beings, she looks up to the geographer and in telling the story, is also trying to create orientation for the reader. But then she wants the person who organizes the books to be killed. Reneé Girard writes:
 

Veneration and rejection, mimesis and difference, are therefore experienced together in tension. The disclosure of rivalry then transforms the image of the model into that of one's "monstrous double." It is this problem that is the motivator and frustrator of human interaction (9).

Und ich sah vor meinen inneren Augen eine Aufgabe für mich erstehen, nämlich den Tod des Alten, und ein Rad begann zu rollen an jenem Tag, das niemand mehr stoppen könnte, weil das Blut es schmierte und schmierte und schmierte (41).

[And I saw before my eyes a duty, the death of the old, and a wheel began to roll on this day that no one could stop because the blood smeared it and smeared it and smeared it.]

In the end, she approaches her brothers, who are actually the angels, and says she wants to learn the Law. She has the librarian killed by calling him a "murderer." The title of the work is about the geographer's wheel. Orientation and judgment are conflated. A multiplication of violence happens as boundaries become multiplied, and ironically it is due to the totalizing narratives that aspire to unity that the violence escalates. Unlike Daedalus, who was able to escape his creation by building wings, giving him an objective view of his creation, in this world the ideal of objectivity itself is a problem.

The controlling father was sacrificed, then the mapper of reality. Lastly, she decides to sacrifice the one who orders books, the keeper of knowledge. Knowledge and the totalizing narratives it contains bring about violence but to sacrifice knowledge would be violent. Hence the vicious cycle, the bloody wheel.

6. The Eternal as Artifice

Daedalus is the imitator of the divine. Ovid presents him as a trickster who outwits himself and has the power to alter nature through art. The labyrinth is essentially artificial. This relates to Borges' labyrinths and the gnostic conception of the world. In Jerzy Jarzebski's discussion of Stanislaw Lem's "Memoirs Found in a Bathtub," he describes the "Building," a kind of perfect leviathan state:
 

...the "Building" degenerates into a totally closed institution, whose activities exhaust themselves in ceaseless inner reorganisations, which consist of nothing more than an exchange of personal roles within the system, whereas there are no changes in the underlying structure of the "Building," the basic system of masks or functions (Garnett 79).

The world becomes a structure that remains immutable as a system of processes and roles. The spies are both traitorous and patriotic and the difference between them is merely statistical. No authentic space can be found in the "Building" and it is impossible to live authentically because every act is already contained in it and one cannot strive for anything save the exit "which is the same as death (but even death is at the end of the novel subject to the suspicion of falsification and make-believe)" (85).

In Neuwirth's work, the artificial is an important concept in all the stories. In "Columbina," Columbina collects puppets for a scientist. Tschauskinsky, in "Das Schwarze Gold" [Black Gold], is an art collector and has a basement full of art work. In "Die Töchter der Künstlerin" [The Artist's Daughter], the main character is a writer who is in the middle of a fictional piece. The artifice, associated with art, is the building of a labyrinth with no exit. Death itself does not exist in this realm. Death is the moving of a persona from one spatiality to another. For example, in the story, the artist's fictional daughter is a future that never happened and she witnesses her death. In the next story, a young girl the same age appears. The boundary of death becomes another passageway into another story or character.

In "Ünter dem Equator" [Under the Equator], the protagonist steals a medallion from her lover which will give her eternal life. The medallion, a round structure with a third eye on it, represents synthesis, the mandala, unity and wholeness. In Klaus Theweleit's essay, "Circles, Lines, and Bits," he looks at the image of the circle in the body, art, and the technical: "...harmony, the 'universal,' divine, like the human technical, comes about in circles, puts the circle form to use, is reconstructed in circular series-connections..." (Crary and Sanford Kwinter 259). But the circle, in this story, is a symbol and therefore artificial. The protagonist had been searching for the fountain of youth, the water of life:
 

Verblendet hatte ich nach etwas gestücht, das ich den Kindermärchen kannte: den Lebensbrunnen. Dass das ewige Leben nichts Natürliches war, hatte ich dabei vergessen. Das Medaillon war künstlich, und es war alt (114).

[I was deluded in seeking out something that I knew from fairy tales: the fountain of youth. I had forgotten that eternal life was nothing natural. The medallion was artificial, and it was old.]

The passageways are circuitous and death itself is not an "exit" from Neuwirth's labyrinth. In many ways, this eternal "roundness" is the lap of the mythical mother who, like the Virgin Mary, has the ability to move from one spatiality to another without death. It can also be related to cyberspace, where one can generate an alternate reality that undermines the "spatial accountability" referred to the physical body in the deployment of the fiduciary subject where geographical coordinates fix the subject, mentioned by Allucquere Stone in her essay "Virtual Systems" (614-619). The personal body dies but the avator within a virtual system decouples.

As much as the stories point to the artificiality of human creations, the actual boundary between what is considered "natural" and "artificial" is blurred, as well as the metaphysical. They all exist within the labyrinth and the "natural" hierarchy between the three that one takes for granted is undermined. In "Vertumnus," René, the protagonist, wanders through a post-apocalyptic Vienna and is pursued by the authorities, though we don't know why. At one point, she observes a picture:
 

Zusammengesetzt aus herrlichen Früchten und Blüten war da das Porträt eines Königs. Auf braunem Grund sah ich Äpfel als Wangen, schwarze Kirschen, Birnen und Erbsen...uber der Brust hing eine Girlande aus Lilien, Ringelblumen, Ipomeen, Rosen, Nelken...Auf seiner Brust krauselte sich, wie weiches Haar, Weisskraut. Ganz Gott der Vegetation und Verwandlung lächelte er mir sanft entgegen: der Vertumnus des Arcimboldo. Das Abbild Rudolfs (61).

[Put together with beautiful fruit and blossoms was the portrait of a king. With a brown background I saw apples as cheeks, black cherries, pears and peas...over his breast hung a garland out of lilies, marigold, roses, carnations...On his breast white cabbage curled like thin hair. He smile softly at me, completely the god of vegetation and transformation: Vertumnus of Arcimboldo. The image of Rudolf.]
 

"Eines Tages werden wir Menschenwesen hervorbringen, die die pflanzliche Photosynthese beherrschen. Das löst alle Nahrungsprobleme der Welt. Schau nicht so angeekelt, es ist zum Besten der Menscheit." Mein gruenes Auge vor seinem Brombeerauge: "Experimentierst due mit pflanzlichen und tierischen Zellen?" Sein Brombeerauge vor meinem grünen: "Menshliche Zellen sind viel interessanter." Sein roter Kirschenmund öffnet sich, und heraus fallen tausend rote Perlen voll weisser Samen...(72).

[One day human beings will have control over photosynthesis. That would solve the problems of world hunger. Don't look so disgusted, it is for the best of humankind." My green eyes in front of his blackberry eyes. "Are you experimenting with plant and animal cells?" His blackberry eyes in front of my green eyes. "Human cells are much more interesting." His red cherry mouth opens, and a thousand red pearls full of white semen fall out...]
 

Rudolf is the creator of the monstrous. He is distrusted by the state and is a nomad in the realm of science. He combines parts that do not normally fit together, crossing species' lines like King Minos' wife Pasiphae with the white bull. This world of the cyborg is questioned by Neuwirth, who does not trust technology as long as it is in the hands of a dominating patriarchal myth. The father who reconciles the law and the body has coopted nature for his own uses, and as long as the relationship of subject/object does not change, the woman's desire will always be subservient to the man's.

7. Monstrous Center as Cyborg or Scream

In the central two stories, the monstrous is not aborted, but lives. In "Die Stille Stadt" [The Silent City], the monster is an ancient city in the Himalayas and is a primal scream and a ripping of the earth. In "Sieh mich an mit deinen gelben Augen" [Look at me with your yellow Eyes], the first story I will discuss, the monster is a mutated creature in a world that has been altered through nuclear war.

Donna Haraway, in "A Manifesto for Cyborgs," writes about the cyborg, a being that combines the technical, animal, and human. It is an apocalyptic creature with no origin story, no innocence, a self untied from all dependency. She looks at monsters/cyborgs in women's science fiction and their liberating qualities, their playing with boundaries, how they have more to do with regeneration than reproduction. She writes,
 

Monsters have always defined the limits of community in Western imaginations. The centaurs and Amazons of ancient Greece established the limits of the centered polis of the the Greek male human by their disruption of marriage and boundary pollutions of the warrior with animality and woman (Nicholson 222).

The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential (193).

In "Sieh mich an mit deinem gelben Augen," a malformed child is found screaming on the bus by a young woman, the protagonist, who decides to take in the abandoned child. When she takes the blanket off from its face, she sees that its head is too large, its forehead and chin jut out, it has yellow cat-eyes. She lives in a state that has developed gene technology to the point where healthy DNA can be verified through tests and there are laws against mutants being born through enforced sterilization or abortion. The laws do not just avoid the birth of severe mutations, however. There is an established norm regarding even the proportions of the body. The classical ideal of proportion and controlling space within limited boundaries, abolishing difference for the supposed "health" and "goodness" of humankind, is the basis of the state. It is not a state that sends people out to war. The oppression is internal and is supported by the propaganda that distinguishes it from the horror of the past war:
 

So unterscheidet sich unsere zivilisierte Welt von jener der Vergangenheit, als die Menschen in Kriege geschickt worden sind, deren Sinn ihnen unklar blieb. Endlich lebt die Menschheit im Frieden, und niemand wird mehr in einen Krieg geschickt. Wir leben endlich im Frieden, und jetzt können wir die Menschheit retten. (159)

[Our civilized world is different than the past where people were sent to war, unclear as to the reason. At last humankind lives in peace and no one will be sent to war. We live in peace at last, and now we can save humankind.]

The state is a product of the Enlightenment, one based on reason and the teleological project of "saving" humankind.

As she spends time with the child, she wants to save it, though she is trapped in a position where she would be accused of being its mother and would be sterilized. She moves further and further into the wilderness with it. The child smells like clove. She wants it to experience its first smile. Moving further into the space of nature, she realizes that they could not survive without civilization. But it is in this space of wilderness that she identifies with the monster, the cyborg:
 

Ich gehöre nicht zu den gesunden Menschen. Ich sitze da mit einem Monster an der Brust und weine, das ist doch nicht das Verhalten eines gesunden Menschen. Wahrscheinlich bin ich selbst defekt...Schau mich an, Kind...Du müsst leben. Du müsst leben, damit ich leben darf...(168)

[I don't belong to the healthy humans. I sit here with a monster on my breast and cry. That's not the behavior or a healthy person. I'm probably a defect...Look at me, child...You must live. You must live so that I can live..]

But at the moment of identification, the monster dies. Her plea is to be seen by the monster. It is a plea for another vision of the world. But the monster is sacrificed in the narrative to a state based on reason and proportion, to a narrative that has at its center this struggle between monster, man, and a woman who is herself a cyborg, always moving through the multiple boundaries of the closed labyrinth to the next story, the next passageway.

The next central story sequentially actually comes first. But in my labyrinthal wanderings, I have found a gap of silence in "Der Stille Stadt" [The Silent City] to which I must now return.

The protagonist is an architect who journeys with other scientists to an abandoned city deep in the Himalayas. A child tells her before going that she shouldn't go, that the air is bad due to the ozone hole and that anyone who enters, dies. The expedition endures many hardships on the way, "aber alles für Wissenschaft" (136) [but all for science] says one man. The architect describes the city from a distance, but the description is more of an indication of uncertainty than knowledge, despite the fact that she starts out with measurements:
 

Der sichtbare Teil der Stadt könnte eine Lange von etwa einem Kilometer haben, die niedrigere Höhe der Mauer schätze ich auf ca achtzehn Meter...Es handelt sich um einen herrschaftlichen Bau, ob saekularer oder sakraler Art, vermag ich nicht zu sagen...das Baumaterial könnte weisser Marmor sein, aber ich weiss nicht...(136)

[The visible part of the city could be a kilometer long, the height of the wall I guess to be eighteen meters...It's a wonderful structure, whether secular or sacred I couldn't say...the material could be white marble, but I don't know...]
 

As they approach the city, two people die through falling. One of the men is convinced the city is inhabited. He says they are not "menschlichen Wesen" (138) [human beings] and the protagonist asks whether he means that they are extraterrestrial. He says, "Es gibt mehr zwischen Himmel und Hölle als nur Menschen" (139). [There is more between heaven and hell than only human beings.] When they enter the city, there are very few openings, the air is warm and there is no snow, the hair feels electric, a metal sound hums in the air, a glass house collapses and behind her a hum becomes a scream.

The silence to scream parallels the solid earth that becomes a split. It swallows the other scientists. It is at this point that the architect comes to the realization that the city is being invaded by them, by their instruments of knowledge:
 

...wir, die zivilisierten Menschen, hatten die geringen Verlüste von ach doch nur! Menschenleben hingenommen, um ein Rätsel zu lösen: diese Lösung war uns so wichtig gewesen, dass wir dafür über Leichen gegangen waren. Weil wir so waren, hatte sie uns in ihre Mauern locken können, diese Stille Stadt, die jetzt ihren Mund öffnete, um den schrecklichen Gesang ihrer Sehnsucht anzustimmen und uns dann in ihrem Schlund zu verschlingen. (147)

[We, the civilized people, only! lost two people, to solve a puzzle: This answer was so important that we were willing to walk over corpses. Because we were like this, this silent city was able to lure us into its walls, this city that now opens its mouth in order to sing its song of longing and thereby swallow us in its abyss.]

The monstrous city is compared to a spider web that lures people into its domain. But it can only lure the people who are willing to control it. Like a phallic mother, its "evil" is a creation of the relationship between the patriarch who tries to control and measure it and the object of his desire who reacts. Like the geographer's wheel, orientation itself and not just judgment is part of the wheel of violence.

Because if a subject exists in terms of its relationship to the outside and not "in itself," then measuring it is creating an object out of it, one that must rebel. The protagonist is the only one to survive and significantly is the only woman on the expedition. It is in her recognition of the city's complete otherness that she is able to survive. Julia Kristeva, when describing images of Madonna in medieval art, writes:
 

...these luminously fleshed Madonnas, holding their male infants with often ambiguous caresses, remain enigmatic because of an immeasurable distance separating them from their sons--a distance especially manifest in their averted gazes, close to fainting, disgust, or nothingness...Illuminated by absence, nothingness; and nonetheless persistent, obstinate--like Not-I (157).

Not-I, which then can be and is in or mythology transformed into an imaginary father, remains the non-I, the gap, the place of silence. It is in traversing this gap that the character survives and is able to find her way out of the labyrinth.
 

Neben meinen Füssen spaltete sich die Erde, als flankiere sie meinen Weg durch das Chaos, als leite mich der Riss wie Ariadnes Faden aus einem Labyrinth zurück, dessen Schrecken jene des Minotaurus gierig übertrafen...(148).

[The earth split next to my feet as if it made a way out of the chaos, as if the rip led me like Ariadne's thread out of the labyrinth, whose fear was beyond that of the Minotaur's...]
 

7. Sacrifice of Paternal Function

Maurice Blanchot, when discussing Kafka, writes that art is the expression of the profundity of what is outside self. It is the consciousness of losing oneself and therefore losing the world in the same movement. Art belongs to exile and yet does not affirm another world because it does not have its origin in another world, but in "the other of all worlds" (75). He writes:
 

The work requires of the writer that he lose everything he might construe as his own "nature," that he lose all character and that, ceasing to be linked to others and to himself by the decision which makes him an "I," he becomes the empty place where the impersonal affirmation emerges...It does not oblige anyone to do anything; it is only the air one has to breathe, the void on which one has to get a footing, daylight worn thin where the faces one loves best become invisible...(55-56).

In "Nimm diese Rosen, Schöne" [Take these Roses, Beautiful] the nothingnesss is transformed into an imaginary father who, when intersectng with the world, is the creator of myth and symbol. The protagonist is the water spirit, Undine, taken by a romantic myth by Fouqué. She is a woman with many identities. She has three names. She is the other who the man recognizes as essence, as woman, as love: "...meine Namen waren drei, und der erste war: die Fremde, aber mein Wesen war: Frau, und das Wort, mit dem er mich erkannte, war: Liebe." [...my names were three and the first was recognized me was: Love.] Her father is the river, the "Nichts" [Nothingness], who gives her roses, her step into the world of desire and love, and moved her out of the water onto the land. The roses are symbols and the word "love" an abstraction that means nothing to her. It is when she leaves the wilderness and goes to the city with her lover that she begins to understand what the word means. But her lover is obsessed with knowing her origin and constantly asks her to tell him where she had come from. She answers "aus dem Nichts" [Out of Nothingness]. Because he cannot possess her, he leaves her for another woman. At the opening, where the river runs into the sea, she eventually returns to her father:
 

...ich wurde schwerelos, als wäre mein Körper nur noch der Gedanke eines Körpers, ach, Vater, das Ungeheuer ist kein Tier, sondern ein Mensch und treulos dem, was ich nur bin, was bin ich denn? ...beschämt höre ich das Wort, Liebe, mich fast zum Menschen gemacht hatte, ach Vater, warum hast du mich nicht gelehrt, wie Menschen sind, warum mir nicht beigebracht, dass den Menschen auf einer kurzen Reise die Bedeutung der Wörter so beliebig sein kann, warum hast du mir nicht die Rosen verweigert? (182)

[...I became weightless, as if my body was only the thought of a body, oh father, the monster is no animal, but a human who is unfaithful to what I am, what am I then?. ..ashamed I hear the word love, that almost made me human, oh father, why didn't you teach me how humans are, why didn't you teach me that words can be so arbitrary for people on a short journey, why didn't you refuse me the roses? ]

The father, who is the progenitor of a symbol, is the ideal father who is a part of nature. But it is the space where nature ceases to be natural, where the very essence of water becomes nothing and only on the threshold between the semiotic space and the outside world does the nothingness translate into meaning, a state where the eternal is given a name and is made transitory, pulling with it the essence of its origin--water. The eternal defeats itself. The eternal lives in the river, the living labyrinth, in the semiotic space of dissolution, of tears and sweat. As soon as it reaches the sea it turns back. The is no transcendental signified on earth, not even in the sea, and the divine does not exist within our creations except in our desire. In the end, Undine leaves her body floating behind her and returns to the space where language itself disappears:
 

...ich höre ein Wort, Liebe, Liebe, Liebe heisst es, aber ich verstehe nicht, was es bedeuten soll, und ich liege im Wasser mit offenen Augen und weiss nicht mehr, was Wörter sind, und dann bin ich schon weiter weg von diesem Körper und sehe ihn wie eine entwürzelte Wasserpflanze...(183).

[...I hear one word, Love, Love, Love it's called, but I don't understand what it is supposed to mean and I lie in the water with open eyes and don't know anymore, what words are, and then I'm far away from my body and see it like an uprooted water plant...]
 

He is style in the story "Die Töchter der Künstlerin" [The Artist's Daughter] and is called "Rokokkoman" [rococo-man]. In this passageway of the labyrinth, a child is killed by him, the child who was the writer's unrealized possibility, in one of her stories. She has visions of the man until finally she sees him run into a child, the child she never had. He is nothing in content. He is ornament and style. "Ein fremdes Gesicht. Eines, das sie an nichts aus ihrem Leben zu erinnen vermöchte. Er war ein Nichts in ihrem Leben. Er war nur der Mörder einer Töchter" (192). [A foreign face. One that didn't remind her of anything in her life. He was Nothingness in her life. He was only the murderer of a daughter.]

Language as sacrificial function extends beyond the symbolic. The very displacement of the body within the space of the imagination, on a continuum with the world of the body as absence. Style is the emperor's robes, but Neuwirth makes us aware of its thin covering by making the border between reality and fantasy convoluted. Through a style laden with symbols, she uses language like a rhetorician in the sense that she "does not invent a language; fascinated by the symbolic function of parental discourse, [s]he seduces it in the Latin sense of the verb--[s]he leads it astray" (Kristeva 182).

Through being led astray, the exit out of the labyrinth is found. To leave the labyrinth, there is no complete plan. The one who journeys through a labyrinth has no map, no objective viewpoint, and the creatures within the maze are monstrous, the fathers barely shadows emerging out of nothing. In the last story, "Das wertvolle Geschenk" [The Gift of Worth], the semanti content reaches its utmost complexity in the emergence of a young girl who immediately reminds one of the daughter who died in the preceeding story. The complex interweaving of the framework is the turning back in a multicursal maze where one enters another room to meet the character that one saw in a former passageway. Death becomes a passageway itself. In the labyrinth, death does not exist.

The girl is taken to see her dead father by a woman who represents the phallic mother. The woman wants to possess the power given to the girl by her father. She takes her to the temple where her father is buried. The girl observes:
 

Die Hexe hatte reht gehabt. Das war eine harte Prüfung. Vater war tot, und ich wollte ihn nicht zurückhaben. Ich wollte ihn nicht als eine der zerbrichenen, bandagierten Gestalten schen, die mich nun immer näher zu dem Schacht drägten, ich wollte nicht auf diese ominöse Kraft verzichten, die er mir zurückgelassen hatte (218).

[The witch was right. That was a hard test. Father was dead and I didn't want him back. I didn't want him to be this broken, bandaged figure that pushed me always closer to the gulley, I didn't want to deny this ominous power he left me...]

Neuwirth does not deny the paternal function of language. She is on the edge of a cliff, threatened by his ghost. She is a woman who has absorbed his power. Her stories are full of myth, history, and symbol. But the paternal exist in the realm of the labyrinth, the prison reflecting the fear of woman's desire, the warped speculum of a male metaphysics, the womb where the woman must enter herself to lose herself. The labyrinth is the dream and the dream is not subordinate to "reality." It is indistinguishable from it.

The girl wakes up from the dream of the monstrous dead fathers to affirm that her father is dead, and she is alive. The father is sacrificed. Paternal function has played out its code to carry on the ominous power of thetic meaning. But the little girl is alive. The trickster. The adventurer. And yet the father and the daughter do not exist as binary oppositions. Together they are monstrous. Together they are nothing.

8 The Dance

Only in not possessing the space of the labyrinth can one escape from it. Theseus escaped with a thin thread. Daedalus was able to thread a tightly spiraled shell by drilling a tiny hole on one end and inserting an ant with a thread attached to its body. He induced it to enter by smearing honey on the shell's mouth and thereby traced the windings of the shell. As a result of this contest, King Minos was killed by the Sicilians, who would not give up their artist and inventor (Doob 13). King Minos became the judge of the dead.

I have traversed this text with a thin thread. There are many passageways I have not entered.

Neuwirth's labyrinth is alive, however. It is a living and twisting text, a dancing maze. Her labyrinth is her body as well as the symbolic structure of an oppressive state. In the glass tunnel of the Enlightenment she meets a witch who chants her history of being burned and consumed. This chant resounds throughout her stories, as well as the semiotic space that dissolves its rationality and separation of inside/outside. Neuwirth is not chained to the walls. She enters the labyrinth because she is the labyrinth. The labyrinth is the inside that is wholly outside. It is neither one nor the other. It is the womb that nourishes monsters.

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