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Paul Celan: a Rhetoric of Silence Andreas James Ado Michael Ph. D

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Paul Celan: a Rhetoric of Silence Andreas James Ado Michael Ph. D Paul Celan: A Rhetoric of Silence Andreas James Ado Michael Ph. D. Queen Mary College University of London i HL l i 4_J: 'ß_ ý. ) . \ -2- ABSTRACT The thesis focusses on the suspension of Celan's poetry between speech and silence, in particular on the way in which this suspension functions and on the interrelations between its thematic, formal, meta- phorical, tonal and structural manifestations. As is emphasized in a fusion like "das erschwiegene Wort" in the early programmatic poem "Argumentum e silentio, " silence in Celan is not opposed to, but is inherent in, poetic speech. The fundamental mediality of his poetry engenders numerous devices of suspension, which, according to the rhetorical modes in which they silence reference, may be divided into three distinct but not mutually exclusive categories: unfinality, dis- junction and displacement. The first category is defined by the avoidance of closure. What- ever the technique employed, be it the elision of a final full stop or an explicit self-revocation, this type of poem not only negates its own finality, but consists of this very invalidation. The speech of the poem is the silencing of speech. This primal suspension infuses Celan's work with a host of correlative disjunctions. Metaphors are often radi- cally suspended between mutually exclusive extremes of connotation, mutu- ally exclusive denotations sometimes starkly juxtaposed. The opposing terms at once define and negate each other: the essence lies in the interstice they delimit. The third category investigated is that of displacement, which, exemplified by the use of irony and anagrams, involves suspension by a deviation from, rather than a negation of, literal meaning: an element of deflection and play is to the fore. All three categories share the basic mechanism of exploiting an interstice between reference and rhetoric. And, the thesis ventures finally to suggest, it is this interstice, reflected thematically in many metaphors of mediality and constituted by a fusion, a synchron- ization, of multiple grids of signification, that structures the poem; it is silence that speaks. TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFATORY REMARKS 5 ......................................... ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 12 ......................................... Part One: Introduction SUSPENSION I. Speech Silence 14 and .................................... II. The Silent Word 17 ...................................... III. The Concept Suspension 30 of ........................... IV. A Precursor in Silence 39 ............................... Part Two: Interpretation 2 UNFINALITY I. Self-revocation 46 ....................................... II. Formal Unfinality 55 .................................... III. Dissimulating Circularity 63 ........................... 3 DISJUNCTION I. Literal Disjunction 74 ................................... II. Mediated Disjunction 86 ................................. III. Figural Disjunction 97 ................................. 4 DISPLACEMENT I. The Grotesque 108 ........................................ II. Irony 120 ............................................... III. Play 131 ............................................... Part Three: Conclusion 5 SYNCHRONICITY I. Silence Der Meridian 139 and ............................. II. Interstice Doubling 150 and ............................. III. Synchronicity the Silent Letter 156 and ................ IV. Provisional Conclusions 164 ............................. BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS CITED 171 ............................. Wir wissen ja nicht, weisst du, wir wissen ja nicht, was 1 gilt. 1 Paul Celan, Gesammelte Werke in fünf Bänden, ed. Beda Alle- mann et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983), I, 214-215. All further references to Celan's works are to this edition, and appear, stating volume and page numbers, in the text. PREFATORY REMARKS 1 "Das simple Faktum, dass man etwas ausspricht, ist indezent. " Hugo von Hofmannsthal's play Der Schwierige, whose protagonist Hans Karl Bühl utters these words in accordance with the most urgent dic- tates of an anguished existence, received its premiere in 1921 - when Paul Celan was not yet one year old. Nevertheless, the reader of Celan's recalcitrant art may well be forgiven for feeling that Bühl's assertion was conceived with only his own, the reader's, predicament in mind: too often does silence seem the only answer to the diffi- culties encountered in reading Celan. Most obviously perhaps, the critic is painfully aware of what he does not know. The ideal reader of Celan possesses, apart from a basic sensitivity to poetry, an adequate command of the German language; an awareness of the history recent and remote of that language, in other words, of its National Socialist past as well as of Old and Middle High German; a firm grasp of the German literary tradition, particularly perhaps of the works of Novalis, Hölderlin, Rilke and Kafka; a knowledge of French, Russian and Hebrew; of Modern French and Russian poetry; of the writings of Martin Heidegger, Walter Ben- jamin, Martin Buber, Emmanuel Levinas and Gerschom Scholem; of Jewish religious history and Jewish mysticism, particularly the Hasidic strain; of prehistory; of geology, particularly mineralogy; of medi- cine, particularly anatomy - the ideal reader of Celan is an elusive creature indeed. But perhaps such knowledge is beside the point. Perhaps it con- tributes little to an understanding of what is central in Celan; per- 1 Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Der Schwierige, in his Lustspiele II, ed. Herbert Steiner (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1977), p. 312. -6- haps the critic may contrive to make of his ignorance a virtue, an article of faith almost. That, however, is by no means the end of his tribulations. On the contrary, what he does know may prove as prohibitive of discussing Celan as what he does not. Thus the critic may be reluctant to present whatever insight he might have gained into the inner workings of this poetry in the often laboured and dense language enforced upon him in the process. This problem does not, of course, arise if one is content to discuss only line 9 of this poem, line 17 of that, and line 5 of another, collecting, for instance, mentions of "Luft" and "Rauch" from the work of the post- war Jewish poet Celan and neatly categorizing them under the heading of "the Auschwitz-theme. " But if one follows in interpretation a kind of principle of responsibility, if one aims ideally to account for every element in, without reducing the complexity of, a text, Celan's poems will frequently be found to coalesce only on a level of inter- pretative abstraction to which the English language is perhaps natively hostile. This is not to imply that the problem is local, merely a matter, say, of regrettable "continental" abstruseness easily remedied by an injection of solid common sense; rather, the problem originates in the process of interpretation itself. If inter- pretation is the supersessive projection of (lexical, formal, histor- ical, biographical, psychological, philosophical, formalist, struct- uralist, deconstructive etc. ) frames of reference around textual phenomena of signification, what constitutes such phenomena is, in turn, determined by the frame of reference employed. And in reading Celan, the spiralling reciprocity of text and conceptual enframing needs to be left unchecked uncomfortably long before it comes close even to indicating, let alone somehow circumscribing, the multiplicity of potential meanings projected. For instance, the following poem from the volume Fadensonnen (II, 166), DU WARST mein Tod: dich konnte ich halten, während mir alles entfiel. has, and not without good reason, been designated a work "of utter -7- 2 simplicity" by Corbet Stewart. Yet even so simple an example of Celan's art is fraught with questions, for the poem plays off the certainty of death against the indeterminate identity of the "du. " Is "du" death? That is to say: is death personified because, as 3 Stewart writes, it is "the only certain companion"? Or is someone "allegorized" as death; is the speaker addressing an enemy, or a lover, in the sense of "you will be the death of me"? Is death, then, literal, or figural? The final curtain, or merely an affectation of speech? The poem itself is this question: death is both, and neither wholly. The point is not that Stewart is wrong or misleading in calling this poem simple; the point is that he is right. Compared to most of this poet's work, and especially to poems like those with which it is contrasted by Stewart, namely the poems surrounding it in the volume Fadensonnen, "DU WARST" is simple indeed. For complexity in Celan tends on the whole to be such that some attempts to come to terms with it can, whether legitimately or not, seem excessively speculative or wayward even to those acquainted with the difficulties involved. This poem from the volume Lichtzwang (II, 307) has given rise to a particularly instructive example: FAHLSTIMMIG, aus der Tiefe geschunden: kein Wort, kein Ding, und beider einziger Name, 5 fallgerecht in dir, fluggerecht in dir, wunder Gewinn einer Welt. Wulf H. Ahibrecht includes among his suggested readings the following: 2 Corbet Stewart, "Some Problems in Reading Celan, " in London German Studies II, ed. Joseph P. Stern, Publications of the Institute of Germanic Studies, 32 (London: Institute of Germanic Studies, 1983), p. 138. 3 Stewart, "Some Problems, " p. 138. -8- Auch erotisch, als Lust- und Liebesakt, drastisch intensive Kopulation liesse sogar als ... sich mit dem Text spielen. Was da aus der Tiefe
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