This article reads Ingeborg Bachmann's short story Ein Schritt nach Gomorrha' (1961), about the encounter between two women, in the light of recent theory concerning temporality, futurity, and failure, especially the work of Lee Edelman and Judith Halberstam. Such a queer reading supplements and extends existing readings of the story as documenting a failed attempt to break free of patriarchal power relations. Seeing the text as either positive' or negative' in its depiction of lesbian desire and in its assessment of the possibilities of escape or transformation means overlooking the significance of the failure itself, and the ways in which such failure might be instructively perverse. The very failure of the text to lend itself to easy or unproblematic readings is also noteworthy. This analysis suggests that the text is not only literary' but itself theoretical'. Bachmann's story charts the ambivalences and oscillations inherent in a female subject's negotiation with the Symbolic Order, and bears comparison with Bracha L. Ettinger's theorisation of the matrixial'. In particular, the text highlights the failure of the matrixial to emerge, combining a queer challenge to ideals of success and normality with a materialist-feminist emphasis on the female body.
