Rethinking Language with Ghérasim Luca

chapter 6 No Man’s Langue: Rethinking Language with Ghérasim Luca

Laura Erber

From no language to written language – without belonging or affiliation henri michaux

Perhaps it’s when death – or something that resembles it – is at stake that words are more lively? Or is it just the opposite, when words play until they become disjointed and the reader plunges into an abyss that is to some degree mortal? michel leiris

Ghérasim Luca is the signature of a poet whose place in the written poetry of the French language is quite unique. Born Zolman Locker from jewish parents in Bucharest in nineteen thirteen his nom de plume cannot be dissociated from a strong accent and is also the history of an abandonment that begins “dismiss- ing origins” and develops into a poetics of the voice – a rediscovery of the humors of the spoken word. During the pre-Communist period he founded the Romanian surrealist movement together with Gellu Naum, Paul Păun, Virgil Teodorescu and Dolfi Trost. With a short stay in Israel he escaped to France in nineteen fifty one. He commited suicide in nineteen ninety four when he, as Paul Celan many years earlier, died jumping into the Seine river. Ghérasim invented and put into practice a way of using the very imbalance of language as a support that reveals the sonorous virtualities of each word. Hard to trans- late, because in addition to a strong physical adhesion, the translator needs ears that are attentive to all the sonorous slipping and sliding that a language can produce. Disconcerting too, because while exploring the negative charac- ter of language, the poet conquers a rhythm that does not admit any of the whims of melancholy drama, and the reader might sense the ecstasy that Ghérasim feels in the act of writing. And all the more disconcerting because of the abyss-plunging into a language that allows no illusions of capture and laughs at fantasies of identification. We are far removed from the modern suf- fering that springs from awareness of the precarious nature of language. However drastic the literary experimentations throughout the Twentieth century, very few avant-garde authors involved in the struggle with linguistic

No Man’s Langue 99 conventionalisms questioned the deep relation between language and national identity. That is to say, even in the radical modern disfigurations of language the notion of language (langue) remains generally intact, especially with regard to its gregarious characteristic of installing and maintaining a national community. The poetics of Romanian born poet and artist Ghérasim Luca is singularly inserted in this blind spot, engaged in producing a new relation between the poet and his language, in the sense of acting on language in a way that makes it unstable, solitary and no longer equipped to guarantee the user’s belonging to a national cultural community. In this way, Luca’s poetry, and above all his work at vocalizing the poem, should be understood as a critique of the historical and cultural notion of language being comprised of an accu- mulation of sediments. Luca proposes a stuttering language that gropes around the meaning instead of transmitting it, a poetic language brought to life by the silences that strip the performance of its own violent irruption. This essay approaches the ideia of a NO MAN’LANGUE proposed by Luca (nineteen thirteen–ninety ninety four), and based on Luca’s experiments with vocal performance I explore the notion of statelessness in its traditional under- standing as laid out by Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism and discuss its differences vis-à-vis other related notions such as exile. Although the expression “stateless poetry” was never used by Luca himself, inspired by Dominique’s Carlat important study on Luca’s poetic trajectory I argue that it constitutes a fertile notion to consider his poetic-existential gesture. While writing my Master’s thesis, I struggled continuously with these questions, also trying to understand how Luca’s vocal experiments demonstrate a deep awareness of the subject’s linguistic over-determination while at the same time refusing to understand language as a mere instrument of community or cultural identity. The question that guides this investigation can be thus formu- lated: how to understand his formulation of a No Man’s Langue? How to free poetic language from national identity? And how to do so without aspiring to a universal language like Esperanto, but at the same time avoiding “secret” lan- guages? How to write poetry in a language which is at the same time singular and belongs to no-one? In brief, how to keep a relationship of constant insta- bility with the adopted foreign language? Perhaps Hitlerism is the most explicit, but also the least subtle, example of political appropriation of language. In their obsession with ethnic purification, the National-Socialists created a strictly racist linguistic policy that was pro- moted and assured by laws that ruled on linguistic behavior, censuring and punishing any deviant forms that threatened the integrity of the German language. Even admitting that no living language is entirely pure, the task is as impossible as it is absurd. But it didn’t take long for the aberration of the project