Writing Aphasia: Intermedial Observation of Disrupted Language in Wolfgang Herrndorf’s Arbeit und Struktur

“I am reading my own dialogues and realizing that I consider misunderstanding to be the essence of communication,”1 notes German writer Wolfgang Herrndorf in his blog Arbeit und Struktur.2 Herrndorf began this autobiographical and autopathographical blog in 2010, after being diagnosed with an incurable brain tumor, and continued it until his death in August 2013. The blog follows his life with a diagnosis of incurable cancer and psychosis due to initial surgery and an increasing number of malfunctions in language, coordination, and orientation caused by epileptic seizures. It also contains reflections on the process of writing the last two novels published during the author’s lifetime. In Arbeit und Struktur, physical disruption both produces the writing and becomes its subjectmatter. Disruptions, disorders of speech, mental disorders, fragmentary language, misunderstandings, going mute, aphasia: by treating all these phenomena as objects of discourse, Herrndorf joins a modern tradition of writing about mental disorders and evokes the narrative of the creative aspects of disruption, which assumes that every rupture has a reflective and innovative potential (Habscheid and Koch 2014). The blog touches on the discourse of writing on madness, and is simultaneously disrupted by a secondary level that deals with the narrator’s own medical condition experimentally and autobiographically in the medium of writing. For in the mode of autobiographical experience, Arbeit und Struktur renders visible the fact that, in Herrndorf ’s case, instead of creative potential, there is simply nothing to be found behind the epistemic category of disruption. Therefore, the narrative of the re-normalizing power of de-normalization is dismantled, and the regularity of disruption itself gets disrupted.