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Self-Possession in the Poetry of Paul Celan, Ts Eliot

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THE LANGUAGE OF REAL LIFE: SELF-POSSESSION IN THE POETRY OF PAUL CELAN, T. S. ELIOT, RAINER MARIA RILKE, AND PAUL VALÉRY by Scott Marentette A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Ph. D. Graduate Department of The Centre for Comparative Literature University of Toronto © Copyright by Scott James Marentette 2010 The Language of Real Life: Self-Possession in the Poetry of Paul Celan, T. S. Eliot, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Paul Valéry Scott Marentette Ph. D. 2010 Centre for Comparative Literature University of Toronto In his “Letter on Humanism,” Martin Heidegger conveys the importance he attributes to poetry when he states: “Language is the house of being” (“Letter” 239). In response to his early Jesuit education, he developed a secular alternative to theology with his existential phenomenology. Theology, poetry, and phenomenology share the basic concern of explaining the foundations of being. For Heidegger, ownership characterizes being in a fundamental way; in Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning) , he establishes the “Ereignis” (“event of appropriation”) as the foundation of being. Ownership lies at the core of being in his thinking following Being and Time . Yet his philosophy ignores the material circumstances of ownership. By way of a materialist critique of Heidegger’s Idealist phenomenology, I expose how property-relations are encoded in the modern poetry and philosophy of dwelling with the question: who owns the house of being? The answer lies in “self-possession,” which represents historical subjectivity as the struggle for the means of production. Paul Celan, T. S. Eliot, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Paul Valéry are all poets who address the relationship between being and ownership in expressing what Marx and Engels call the “language of real life” in The German Ideology (26). In 1927, Eliot converted to Anglicanism and found solace in the realm of faith; by opting for the theology of ii dispossession, he surrendered his historical subjectivity. Rilke thought that he could find refuge from the marketplace in aesthetic beauty and pure philosophy but eventually disabused himself of his illusion. Similarly, Valéry sought refuge in the space of thought; basing reality in the mind, he forsook the social realm as the site of contestation for gaining ownership over being. As a poet who distinguished himself from the Idealism of his predecessors, Celan developed a structure of dialogue based upon shared exchange on common ground. A materialist approach to the poetry and philosophy of dwelling exposes property-relations as the foundation of the house of being. iii Acknowledgements A number of individuals deserve thanks for helping me stay the course with my dissertation. The chief professional support has been my supervisor, Ted Chamberlin, who gave me enough leeway to get lost and trusted me to find my way back. I will continue to learn from him the art of translating stories into the language of real life. The other members of my committee, Pascal Michelucci, John Zilcosky, and Peter Nesselroth, have all been helpful with their expertise, attentiveness, and benevolence. I am grateful for their commitment to my project. The Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto has provided me with a wonderful environment for expanding my awareness of the world’s languages and literatures. I would like to thank the former director of the program, Roland Le Huenen, for his support in finding funding for the conferences at which I presented material relating to my dissertation. I would also like to thank the new director, Neil ten Kortenaar, for his intellectual and moral support. Two other people at the Centre without whom so much of my work would not have been possible are the administrative assistants, Aphrodite Gardner and Bao Nguyen: thank you for your patience, diligence, and efficiency. Fellow comparatist and friend Pablo Pemeja has provided constant support with his many hours of discussing, reading, and writing over what seem like oceans of coffee. In the course of working on my dissertation, I was given two very special opportunities to travel to Europe thanks to grants from the School of Graduate Studies in the form of the Edward W. Nuffield Graduate Travel Fellowship for each trip. My first trip took me to Germany in 2004 where I was able to conduct research at the Marbach Literaturarchiv and work at various libraries, institutions, and publishing houses by the iv graces of true friends Jenny Flügge and her father K. D. Wolff in Frankfurt. In 2006, my second trip took me back to Germany and to Paris for the first time, where I worked at l’Unité de recherche Paul Celan at l’École Normale Supérieure. One of the directors of the research group, Bertrand Badiou, was particularly generous with his time, energy, and resources. I would also like to thank him and co-director Jean-Pierre Lefebvre for inviting me to participate in their weekly seminars devoted to discussing Celan’s poetry. A number of other individuals outside academia have contributed support of a different order by helping me keep my own self-possession. My parents, Helen and Stan held out a lifeline with numerous words of support over many long-distance phone calls. Someone who righted my sails when I was headed for certain shipwreck is my dear friend, Samira Goetschel. Another friend, Paul Geelen, whose friendship goes way back, has always kept my spirits buoyant. Lastly, I would like to thank my partner Laura Hatcher for bringing me home. v Table of Contents Dissertation Abstract ii Acknowledgements iv Introduction 1 Chapter One: “You must go by the way of dispossession” 31 Chapter Two: “Pour atteindre et saisir ce Soi” 70 (“To reach and grasp this Self”) Chapter Three: “Einklänge ins Allgemeine” 100 (“To be in harmony with the prevailing voice”) Chapter Four: “Als gäb es, weil Stein ist, noch Brüder” 152 (“As if, thanks to stone, there were still brothers”) Conclusion 221 Bibliography 233 vi 1 Introduction High upon a mountain terrace in the Upper Rhône Valley, the Château de Muzot sits snugly in the surrounding trees girding the property with their roots. Built in the thirteenth century, the château still housed furnishings from the seventeenth century when Rainer Maria Rilke moved into it in 1921. In July of that year, he discovered the château in the town of Sierre while trekking across the Swiss region of Valais in search of a suitable dwelling in which to undertake his next creative venture. He moved into the château in November in order to begin the most ambitious creative phase of his life. Having gradually loosened the ties of family, friends, and finances, Rilke sought in the remote château the calm and solitude that he needed in order to mobilize all of his energies towards writing. By January 1922, Rilke would quickly become inspired to write the culminating works of his career, the Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus . By going to the château, Rilke performed the decisive task of setting apart his own space for creating. Much like the studio of visual artists such as his mentor, sculptor Auguste Rodin, Rilke’s retreat functioned as a specially designated space in which he could fully devote himself to his art. The trajectory of Rilke’s career is precisely the task of seeking out the space for living the way of the artist. Just as the artist needs a space in which to work, the artist also opens a space with the work of art. Earlier in his career, Rilke had written a poem entitled “Eingang” (“Entrance”) in which he invites the reader to step out of a room in a house, cross the threshold to the outside, and imagine planting a tree in the air. WER du auch seist: am Abend tritt hinaus aus deiner Stube, drin du alles weißt…. Mit deinen Augen, welche müde kaum von der verbrauchten Schwelle sich befrein, hebst du ganz langsam einen schwarzen Baum und stellst ihn vor den Himmel: schlank, allein. 2 Und hast die Welt gemacht. Whoever you are: in the evening step out of your room, where you know everything…. With your eyes, which in their weariness barely free themselves from the worn-out threshold, you very slowly lift one black tree and place it against the sky: slender, alone. And you have made the world. (my ellipsis; Sämtliche 371; Images 5) 1 The poem is fittingly placed at the beginning of his collection Das Buch der Bilder (The Book of Images ), which invites the reader to enter the space of poetry. As he grafts branches from Charles Baudelaire’s “forêts de symboles” (“forests of symbols”), Rilke establishes for poetry a privileged space apart from the cares of the quotidian (Baudelaire 11) 2. Yet what constitutes the world of verse? Is the tree that Rilke asks the reader to imagine merely growing in the imagination or does it correspond to concrete reality? Likening the tree to “ein Wort, das noch im Schweigen reift” (“a word which grows ripe in silence”), Rilke’s invitation is a call to enter the realm of poetry – the space that seems to exist apart from the material world. (Sämtliche 371; Images 5). As Rilke’s retreat to Muzot indicates, entering the space of poetry requires an appropriate place for dwelling in it. Muzot was the refuge where he could foster his creativity in an unfettered state of self- possession. Defined commonly as “equanimity” or “self-composure,” self-possession is the optimal condition for inhabiting the space of creativity. In other words, Rilke’s retreat 1 Rainer Maria Rilke, Sämtliche Werke , ed. Ruth Sieber-Rilke, vol. 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1957) 371. All original German citations from Rilke’s poetry refer to this edition.
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