Silencing the Provincial Other: Focalisation, Identification and Power in Franz Innerhofer's Schöne Tage

Franz Innerhofer’s first novel, Schöne Tage, is often held up as an archetype of the Austrian anti-Heimat novel, whose critical revision of the provincial idyll is believed to have contributed to the linguistic and social emancipation of Austria’s rural underclass. Employing a comparative narratological approach, which combines insights from literary and film studies, this article addresses the issue of narrative perspective in Innerhofer’s novel. The view ‘von unten’, celebrated as a sign of rural literature’s liberation from patriarchal power, is exposed as a problematic peg on which to hang provincial equality. Whilst narrative perspectives may have changed, the language in which they find expression remains firmly in the service of existing power structures, subjugating rather than enfranchising the rural subject. This article examines the connection between perspectival, narrative and identificatory structures and questions the basis of the reader’s identification with the text’s protagonists in the face of an unidentified, omniscient narrator wielding ultimate narrative power. In locating the basis of the reader’s identifications in problematic linguistic power structures, this article demands a re-evaluation of the impulse in literary history to accord a positive performative function to anti-Heimat literature.