Speaking shadows: human and divine possibility in the poetry of Paul Celan

Catherine Lejtenyi Religious Studies McGill University, Montreal OctQber 2004

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Paul Celan (1920-1970), the Jewish poet of German descent, lived through the greatest catastrophe of European Jewry of the modem age. He survive d, as his parents and innumerable others did not, and dedicated his writing, his voice, to the reality he had witnessed. It would be a mistake, however, to think of him solely as a "Jewish" poet, a term he considered anti-Semitic (see Christina Ivanovic's '''AlI poets are Jews:' Paul

Celan's Reading of Marina Tsvetaeva"). Celan wrote of the world as such; a world that was able to reorganize itself towards the annihilation of countless human beings. In its midst, he questioned how one could live, how brotherhood could still be possible, and how a God could possibly appear in such a place. This thesis follows his questioning and pursues, along with him, the course of poetry and poetic language through the appearance of atrocity.

Paul Celan (1920-1970), le poète juif d'origine allemande, a vécu pendant la catastrophe la plus terrifiante du peuple juif de l'àge moderne. Il a survécu comme ses parents et d'innumérables d'autres ne l'ont pas, et a dédicacé son écriture, sa voix, à la réalité qu'il a témoigné. Nous nous tromperons, par contre, de lui penser simplement un poète Juif, une terme il considerait anti-Sérnitique (voir Christina Ivanovic: '''AlI poets are Jews:' Paul Celan's Reading of Marina Tsvetaeva"). Celan écrivait de la réalité telle quelle, d'un monde qui pouvait se réorganiser pour l'extermination d'un peuple entier.

Dans le sein de ce monde, il questionna comment on puisse vivre, comment la fraternité puisse être toujours possible, et comment un Dieu pourrait apparaître dans un tel monde.

Ce mémoir pose ces questions avec Celan, en poursuivant les étapes de la poésie et de la langue poétique contre l'apparence de l'atrocité. Acknowledgements

1 would like to thank my good friend Paul, whose support and poetic insight surely run through the course of this thesis as steadily as the ink on its pages. 1 would like to thank my family for never disowning me for rolling my eyes when they asked me about my work; Leon and Laura, of course, just because; Maureen, who always managed to have calming and sensible advice when it was frantically needed; Melissa for her inexhaustible sensitivity. Finally, special thanks go to my advisor, Barry Levy, without whom 1 would not be in the program; and to my dear Barbara Galli, who first lit my love of beauty in thinking, and has never ceased fanning its flames. SPEAKING SHADOWS: HUMAN AND DIVINE REALITY IN THE POETRY OF PAUL CELAN

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: Paul Celan, Poetry in Dark Times ... 1

Chapter 1: A Breathturn in the Absurd ... 5 Introduction . .. 5 Philosophical Groundwork . .. 6 "The Meridian:" Paul Celan and George Büchner ... 16 Meridians of Poetry ... 24

Chapter 2: The Voice of Language ... 33 Introduction ". 3 3 The Unspeakability of Language ... 34 The Remainders of Language ". 3 8 Whose Voice? Who Hears? ". 45

Chapter 3: Presence and Absence of the Numinous in the Poetry of Paul Celan ... 56 Introduction ... 56 The Divine in Poetry ... 58 No One and Nothing ... 69

Conclusion ... 87

Bibliography ... 90 INTRODUCTION

This thesis for the Faculty of Religious Studies (McGill University) focuses on the poetry of Paul Celan (1920-1970). In the past three decades, there have been many voices, to which I would like to add my own, arguing that Celan is the most important poet of the post-W ar perioQ, either in German or in any language. His work is not confined to the realm or interest of literature and aesthetics; rather, his work is the reflection and locus of the state of our world, our language, our religiosity. His poetry is the articulation, ev en in its stuttering and hiccoughing, of an era that must exist under the shadow of what Celan would only caU "that which happened" ("Bremen Address," 395). If ours is a time in which we must "think through pain," as philosophers like Martin Heidegger would have us do, thinking through Celan's language is an initial and defining step in this venture. The language which passes through his vision could be the univers al language through which to understand our times and find a way to redeem ourselves from the human capacity for monstrosity.

In this thesis, then, we wi!l concentrate on the relationship between language and reality, both human and divine. Implicit to the argument is the belief that poetic language, above aIl other manifestations of language, can express the condition of reality in its truth.

The poet in this sense takes the place of the prophet in a world that is without God. That is, his is the "voice in the wildemess" in a world that finds its limit in the finitude of human existence. Nevertheless, this voice goes to the edge of finitude, and questions both in anger and sincerity what is beyond it. It is the voice of the poet which can lead us there, and provide the site where an encounter with the "wholly Other" can become possible once

1 agam.

The fist chapter is a consideration of what we will caU Celan' s aesthetic manifesto,

"The Meridian," the speech he delivered upon receiving the Büchner award in 1960. In this speech, Celan accounts for the mystery of the encounter which is at the heart of the poem. The poem is the place where true encounter - where the 1 meets a Thou - remains possible against the dehumanization of a technocratic age. Indeed, the poem only exists if this encounter is possible; the poem is defined by the encounter, a true encounter is necessarily poetic. As it resists dehumanization, it also reaches for something beyond the human. Celan speaks of a "near" other, a neighbour whom one encounters, but he also speaks, with a question mark, of the "whoUy other" that is perhaps found in the poem. The speech encompasses many themes that pervade his entire work, and thus its consideration in the first chapter will provide us with the orientation to understand his poetry itself.

The second chapter leaps from his aesthetic mode to an analysis of a single, yet long, poem, "Voices," from the 1959 collection Sprachgitter, in English, Speech-grille. The poem becomes here an artifact, simultaneously of language itself and of the deepest meanings regarding human existence in light of our times. In this way, it demonstrates the mercurial power of poetry, to reach through history and language, through historical fact and the multiple meanings of words which only poetry can in their entirety convey, in order to uncover a true expression of our existence.

ln the third, final chapter, we will look at two poems which address the existence of

God in history, "Tenebrae" from Speech-grille and "Psalm" from Die Niemandrose or The

No-One 's-Rose collection of 1963. In the se works, God in his glory and in his being has been radically negated. In this way, through his poems, we come to understand not only

2 the nature of the divine vis-à-vis the historical world, but how human beings can or can no longer relate to him; in other words, how the atrocity of history has finally been able to ineradicably impinge upon the bond between humanity and God.

Celan's poetry bears within it a difficult and often heart-breaking negativity. It must, given not only what he lived through, but what the world revealed itself to be. In his

Aesthetic Theory, Theodor Adorno writes of the ugly, which is often but certainly not exclusively present in Celan's work:

Art must take up the cause ofwhat is proscribed as ugly, though no longer in order to integrate or mitigate it or to reconcile it with its own existence through humor that is more offensive than anything repulsive. Rather, in the ugly, art must denounce the world that creates and reproduces the ugly in its own image, even if in this too the possibility persists that sympathy with the degraded will reverse into concurrence with the degradation (48-49).

Celan's work must bear the ugly and the negative because it was the reality through which he lived, a reality in which the beautiful, insofar as it is the good, has been shoved brutally

"beyond humankind" ("Threadsuns"). Yet his poetry, even in its raw condition, points toward, without deluding itself to reach, that point beyond.

Paul Celan was born Paul Antschel in the city of Czernowitz, once the capital of

Bukovina, a province of the Austro-Hungarian empire, annexed to Romania during the war, and later integrated into the borders of the Ukraine. When the Gestapo came for him and his parents in 1942, Paul was hi ding, either at a friend's house or in a clothing factory

(stories vary; for a full account of these years, see Israel Chalfen's Paul Celan: A

Biography of his Youth). His parents were deported to Mikhailovka in the Ukraine, where his father died of typhus, and his mother, several months later, was shot. Celan himself was in a Romanian work camp, where he shoveled dirt into sand-bags during working

3 hours, and wrote poetry during the night.

After the War, Celan lived for a time at his home in Czernowitz, then moved to

Bucharest where he worked as translator and continued to write poetry in German, his mother-tongue. Dissatisfied and restless, he emigrated clandestinely first to Vienna then, a few months later, to Paris. It was there, in 1970, unable to endure the impossible wound inflicted on him by his experiences, that he committed suicide by drowning in the Seine

River. Primo Levi called aU of Celan's work, in its refusaI of easy comprehension, a "pre- suicide" (Ezrahi, 263-4). This is a grave misunderstanding of his poetry. Rather, in

Celan's work, there is a desperate (despair is a word he occasionally used in his prose writing) attempt to live, and to be recognized as a living human being. It remains with us as the expression ofthis need for recognition, of the univers al need to caU another "Thou."

Over the past thirty years, several poets, scholars and translators have taken their hands to Celan's work. Michael Hamburger is perhaps.. one of the earliest (he was acquainted with Celan personally, although, as he tells us in his "Afterword," their friendship suffered a rupture when Celan suspected him of having published an article in which he called his poetry overly "hermetic"), followed by Pierre Joris, Nikolai Popov and

Heather McHugh, to name a few. John Felstiner's 2001 tran,slation is, in my opinion, the strongest, conveying the simultaneity of darkness and brilliance inherent to Celan's work.

Unless otherwise specified, 1 have used his translations throughout the thesis.

4 CHAPTER 1: A Breathturn in the Absurd: The Aesthetic of Paul Celan

Introduction

Since the Second World War and the unspeakable horrors that occurred in that period, the act of representation has become an urgent philosophical as weIl as artistic problem. How can the "incredible" and "unthinkable" atrocities that took place during the

Shoah be represented, either in language, in reason, or in art? Adorno's famous and often misunderstood dictum, "After Auschwitz, to write poetry is barbarie" sounds with a resonance of moral truth. Yet what Adorno's statement signifies is not that poetry and art must bow to silence; rather, they must break with tradition (which for him had, in any case, become irreversibly instrumentalized and commodified) and incorporate that silencing into their works. For silence now does not mean denial; on the contrary, it signifies aIl too acutely the recognition of that which cannot be otherwise represented. As Peter Szondi put it, in a reformulation Adorno himself might have proffered, "After Auschwitz, one can no longer write poetry, except in relation to Auschwitz" (2003, 74).

Paul Celan, in his poetry, took up the burden of silence, of the gap in language and breath, the syncope signifying the limits of expression. Yet as a poet - specifically, as a

German-speaking poet - he remained forever intimately welded to language. That he was a poet in German adds meaning upon meaning to his works; for we must consider them not only in terms of the message they express, but also in terms of the language in which they are written. That is to say, Celan's works are not only expressed in German, they are expressed to the German language: it is not least among his poetry's many addressees.

5 That being said, it is with regret that 1 find myself and this paper limited to his work in translation. Since that is the case, we cannot here embark on a thorough investigation of his use of German. Yet the realization that he wrote in the language of the Nazis, that is, of his and his people's torturers, will nevertheless guide our understanding of his writing and help illuminate sorne of its darknesses. What we will be able to look to for this task are his prose pieces, "The Meridian" and "The Bremen Address", his man~festos on poetry and language, which provide the basis upon which we can decypher his work.

Philosophical Groundwork

Celan's poetry is so difficult that one needs, at least initially, outside references to understand it. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's critical collection of essays on Celan, Poetry as

Experience is a very use fuI work for this cause. Yet what might become apparent, after one returns to Celan's writing, is that Lacoue-Labarthe is not proffering a strict literary analysis of Celan's poetry, as Peter Szondi does; rather, he is using Celan's poetry as a base for his own philosophical meditations. While this is a legitimate use of Celan's work (or any poet's), we must nonetheless be careful to differentiate Lacoue-Labarthe's meaning from Celan's - for 1 will argue that there is indeed a difference. Thus the door that Lacoue­

Labarthe opens is perhaps better used to let in a fresh CUITent of air or a ray of Iight onto a study of Celan, but it need not be considered the definitive interpretation of the poet's meaning or aesthetic.

1 cannot here attempt a reconstruction of Lacoue-Labarthe's first two essays, "Two

Poems by Paul Celan" and "Catastrophe" - partly because space does not allow for it, partly because it is not absolutely germane to this work and partly because my own thought

6 will take a very different direction than his. What 1 can here (re)construct are the parts that so clearly informed the central thrust of this paper.

"Tübingen, Janner", the poem Lacoue-Labarthe first deals with, is worth quoting in full because it is from it that he constructs his argument of Celan's poetics.

"Tübingen, Janner"

Eyes talked into blindness. Their - "an enigma is the purely originated" -, their memoryof Holderlin towers afloat, circled by whirring gulls.

Visits of drowned joiners to these submerging words:

Should, should a man, should a man come into the world, today, with the shining beard of the patriarchs: he could, if he spoke of this time, he could only babble and babble, over,over again, again.

("Pallaksch. Pallaksch.")

Lacoue-Labarthe's principal thesis in this essay is that poetry (or perhaps, the obscurity of poetry, the poetic in poetry) is, first and foremost, the experience of dizziness, the experience of nothing. What Lacoue-Labarthe writes specifically about "Tübingen,

Janner" can be applied to poetry in general.

1 say "experience" because what the poem "springs forth" from here - the

7 memory of bedazzlement, which is also the pure dizziness of memory - is precisely that which did not take place, did not happen or occur during the singular event that the poem relates without relating... A visit in memory of that experience, which is also in the non-form of pure non-event (18).

Dizziness can come upon one; it does not simply occur. Or rather, in it, nothing occurs. It is the pure suspension of occurrence: a caesura or syncope. [... ] What is suspended, arrested, tipping suddenly into strangeness is the presence of the present. And what then occurs without occurring (for it is by definition what cannot occur) is - without being - nothingness, the nothingness of being (ne-ens). Dizziness is an experience of nothingness" (19).

The experience (or lack of same) to which Lacoue-Labarthe refers is Celan's visit to the

Holderlin tower on the Neckar river: it is understood, in this work, as the source of poetry.

That the only thing which can be related of that experience is its dizziness - dizziness at the source of poetry - indicates that its source is dizziness, the dizziness of nothingness. The question of poetry then becomes whether language can take up the linguistic burden of its expression, and if so, how - how can one express something purportedly beyond speech

(the experience ofnothingness) without betraying its very essence?

"Tübingen, Janner" is particularly apt for this question, both in regards to the ontological and the historical character of poetry. The first two stanzas are obscure, it is as if the last part is a translation of the first (18). The former is the expression of that experience of dizziness, the images, and their senselessness, are themselves dizzying. The very obscurity of this part of the poem reflects the obscurity of the experience that generates it. "A poem has nothing to recount," Lacoue-Labarthe writes, "nothing to say; what it recounts and says is that from which it wrenches away as a poem" (20). It is the memory of that experience of dizziness and nothingness; it speaks the dizziness of existence.

It says it inasmuch as it says itself as a poem, inasmuch as it says what arose from, or remains of, the non-occurred in the singular event it commemorates.

8 "In-occurrence" is what wrenches the event from its singularity, so that at the height of singularity, singularity itself vanishes and saying suddenly appears - the poem is possible. Singbarer Rest: a singable remainder, as Celan says elsewhere (21).

The poem, says Lacoue-Labarthe, to be itself, must participate both in the non-occurrence of the singular experience of nothingness, and in the "in-occurrence" of the experience of language. But inasmuch as it participates in language, it does so only as an echo of the singular experience of dizziness, the singable remainder that is shed as the moment passes.

Thus for Lacoue-Labarthe, there is no su ch thing as a "poetic experience", an experience that is in and of itself represented in the poem; the poem is not the experience to which it refers (this is thematically polar opposite to Szondi's understanding of Celan, as seen in his essay, "The Poetry of Constancy: Paul Celan's Translation of Shakespeare's

Sonnet, 105"). What there can be, Lacoue-Labarthe argues, is poetic existence, a mode of existence which "rips holes" into the life of the anecdotal (20). Poetic existence is perhaps what we need to tear holes into what is "lived" (the anecdotal, the prosaic which passes in an unthinking strain or narrative constituted of mimesis and representations), to allow the experience of nothingness, which yields the poem, to occur.

So far, we have dealt with the "ontological" condition of the poem; and Heidegger and Holderlin were as present in this (at least, in Lacoue-Labarthe's work) as Celan was.

Yet, in assessing the second part of the poem, Lacoue-Labarthe explores a condition unique to Celan's generation and which found its apogee in Celan's work: his historical time after the now "thinkable unthinkable", and in it, the poem's historical plight. Lacoue-Labarthe opens his essay with this historical consideration - not only on the natl?"e of poetry in our time, but, even more fundamentally, on the nature of thought. For him, now, in our time, we in the West have come to the end or completion of knowledge, of techne; and the only

9 hope for our future is to recover what in our tradition had been previously neglected.

What has not been deployed, what has been forgotten or rejected in the midst of this completion - and no doubt from the very beginning - must now clear itself a path to a possible future. Such thought must re-inaugurate history, reopen the possibility of a world, and pave a way for the improbable advent of a god. Only this might "save" us. For this task, art (again, techne), and in art, poetry, are perhaps able to provide sorne signs. At least, that is the hope, fragile, tenuous and meager as it is (7).

A new entrance thought, or a new mode of thinking becomes most urgent in art and in poetry. Lacoue-Labarthe wants a work of art, of poetry, to be a vehicIe for such newness; in it, he wants to see a tuming-away from the mode of subjectivity - "[b]ecause it is first the question of whoever today (heute) might speak a language other than the subject's, and attest or respond to the unprecedented ignominy that the 'age of the subject' rendered itself - and remains - guilty of' (13-14) (as Lacoue-Labarthe's essay is on Celan, it is also on Nazism; and therefore, as he says elsewhere, the "subject" is not limited to the individual ego, its ignominy can also be applied to a society's subjectivity, such as - but not limited to - Nazi Germany's). For Lacoue-Labarthe, the solution to the problem of subjectivity is not objectivity; rather, it is in the experience and recognition of singularity, in an experience of language and of poetry which is singular. However, although no one who knows anything of Celan's life can doubt the assertion that Celan experienced his singularity in a solitude "to what we must justly call the utmost degree" (15), 1 am not convinced that we can call the singular experience of dizziness or nothingness the essence ofhis work or his vision. Perhaps his prose pieces can help us through this problem.

The Bremen Address: Poetry in the Shadow

The Bremen Speech is properly entitled, "On the Occasion of Receiving the

10 Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen" and Celan here uses the opportunity to draw a parallei between history and language. Bremen was known to him in

Czernowitz, the city of his youth, for its publication press; and so it became associated for

Celan with the authors it published, its writers and poets. Celan writes that as it had always been too distant for him to reach, the goal had been instead Vienna; since the war, however, aIl German speaking cities had become unreachable to him. Yet in spite of that, in spite of the atrocity that had become history (in Germany, in German), the German language remained to him.

Reachable, near and not lost, there remained in the midst of the losses this one thing: language. It, the language, remained, not lost, yes in spite of everything. But it had to pass through its own answerlessness, pass through frightful muting, pass through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech. It passed through and gave back no words for that which happened; yet it passed through this happening. Passed through and could come to light again, "enriched" by all this (395).

Language remained, to him and to us, but it was irrevocably and essentially changed. Thus the poem,

A leaf, treeless, for Bertoit Brecht:

What kind of times are these, when a conversation is weil nigh a crime, because it includes so much that is said?

Conversation, language, bears with it - in it - the mark of the crime it had carried. Any word that the Nazis had used for the purposes of their propaganda, be it towards the glorification of Aryans and the Third Reich, or the dehumanization of Jews and other undesirables, bore with it now, without any possibility of erasure, the taint of its criminal currency. Every word returns with the echo ofits past. Yet these words were, too, those of

11 Celan's mother tongue, and thus incredibly the - only possible - language ofhis poetry.

For Celan, to be bound to the German language could not be much different than having the crime inscribed upon his body. Inasmuch as poetic language is the pure st manifestation of language, its manifestation in Celan brought with it (as well as in and through him) the words in which mass murder had been ordered and executed. And yet, for the German language (and ail language, at least in the West) to have a poet such as

Celan marks the tentative beginning of its possible redemption - or at least, of its retum from the brink of (shaH we name it?) evil. As Dennis Schmidt note d, "But what Celan struggled mightily with [ ... ] is that German is polluted because it had only ever been the language of the torturers, never the tortured. [... ] [I]t had still not found the word for the victim" (33-4). It became his task to reconfigure this language. He set to his task by going into language, and thus into reality ("stricken by and seeking reality", he would write,

[Felstiner, 396]), whose essence had so drastically changed and darkened. He would write from that place, from that consciousness. Because language moves in history as history moves within it, one cannot write truthfully unless one acknowledges the nature into which language has evolved. To speak now is also to "speak shadow" :

"Speak You Too"

Speak you too, speak as the last, say out your say.

Speak - But don't split off No from Yeso Give your say this meaning too: give it the shadow.

Give it shadow enough, give it as much as you see spread round you between

12 midnight and midday and midnight.

Look around: see how things aH come alive - By death! Alive! Speaks true who speaks shadow.

But now the place shrinks, where you stand: Where now, shadow-stripped, where? Climb. Grope upwards. Finer: a thread the star wants to descend on: so as to swim down below, down here where it sees itself shimmer: in the swell ofwandering words.

Reality now al ways cornes with its shadow, shadow is inscribed upon it. "Whichever word you speak -1 you owe toi destruction" ("Whichever Stone Y ou Lift"). With varying emphasis, Celan's poetry will always communicate the darkness at the poem's origin - it must, for it must communicate the darknesses in and of its language.

ln order not to betray reality and history and the truth that is required inpoetry, language must bear the atrocity of "that which happened". It cannot escape it, it cannot deny it or neglect it; it can neither pretend it did not happen nor that it did not print its indelible mark into language. Yet with aH this darkness, Celan was not (yes, in spite of his suicide) whoHy without hope. For he, as one who had lived through what he had and as one who knew such things must not be, he wrote poems. "In this language 1 have sought, during those years and the years since then, to write poems: so as to speak, to orient myself, to find out where 1 was and where 1 was meant to go, to sketch out reality for myself' (396). Poetry, as he says or implies repeatedly throughout his work, is language, is breath. It is (only) from within his poetic existence that he is able to find sorne kind of root, sorne kind of ground, to find a reality free from the "age-old load of false and

13 distorted sincerity" ("Edgar Jene and the Dream about Dreams", Waldrop, 6). "Now 1 am a person who likes simple words," he writes. "It is true, 1 had realized long before this joumey that there was much evil and injustice in the worId 1 had now left, but 1 had believed 1 could shake the foundations if 1 called things by their proper names" (Waldrop,

4). Recalling Heidegger's essay, "What Are Poets For?" and Walter Benjamin's "On

Language as Such and on the Language of Man", poetic (true) language is the "place" where truth is freed. But it must first go through its terrible joumey - as he says, "through time [as through "the thousand darkness of deathbringing speech"] , not above and beyond it" (Felstiner, 396). To "call things by their proper names" also entails to "never leave the depths and keep holding dialogue with the dark wellsprings" (Felstiner, 1995, 52). In

Benjamin's terms, to complete God's creation through naming means to caB the creature not only with its name, but also with its shadow. The poem may mark the singular event, but it is a singular event that contains its history within it.

Celan attests that after "that which happened", poems could still be written. We will see, in our reading of "The Meridian" to what depths this brings us, for in that text,

Celan proposes that the poem is perhaps the last surviving place where not only truth, but true community and communion remain possible. In Celan, community is the medium without which truth could not appear. In the Bremen Address he states is thus:

For a poem is not timeless. Certainly it lays claim to infinity, it seeks to reach through time - through it, not above and beyond it. A poem, as a manifestation of language and thus essentially dialogue, can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the - not al ways greatly hopeful - belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps. Poems in this sense too are underway: they are making towards something (396).

It is not, perhaps, very strong (Rosemarie Waldrop's translation reads, " ... a bottle thrown out to sea with the - surely not al ways strong - hope ... " [35]), but the hope is present - for

14 he continued to write poems. In a letter to Hans Bender he wrote, "Craft means handiwork, a matter of hands. And these hands must belong to one person, i.e. a unique, mortal soul searching for its way with its voice and its dumbness. Only truthful hands write true poems. 1 cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem" (Waldrop, 26).

It is not - and we will see this again with "The Meridian" - that poems are addressed to their readers; but they need to be received by them, they need a place where they can exist once they have been set free by their author. Inasmuch as poems are manifestations not only of language but of "a unique, mortal soul", that dwelling place must be on "heartland"

- it must be received, as it is given, by one who can discem through the poem the figure of the one who uttered it, one who "sees the speaker as he speaks" ("The Meridian," emphasis added), one who realizes that the "manifestation of language" contained in the poem is nothing less than a manifestation of a human life, not of a mechanism or a mechanic. As sign of his perhaps meager or despairing hope, Paul Celan continued to write poems.

Yet - and we must, in reading and discussing Celan, keep "yet" always at the forefront of our understanding, swinging from one hand to the other, between hope and hopelessness, between Yes and No - we cannot dismiss that how slight it was. He conc1udes his letter to Hans Bender with this: "We live under dark skies and - there are few human beings. Hence, 1 assume, so few poems. The hopes 1 have left are small. 1 try to hold on to what remains" (26). "Remains" is a theme that recurs throughout his works, the remains of hope, the remains of God, the remains of humanity (the remains of human beings). Remains, small hopes. Celan's world is bleak. And yet, the smallness ofhis hope lends a grandeur to his poems; for such small hope gave birth to so great a body of work:

15 so much could be built on so little. Celan's hope was perhaps nameless (or unnamed) and blind, but, if his poems were written as a "message in a bottle" seeking "heartland", their number attests to its persistence.

"Reachable, near and not lost, there remained in the midst of the losses this one thing: language." In the war, Celan lost very close to everything he had: his home, his family (his parents had been deported to Mikhailovka, where his father died of typhus and his mother was shot), his native land (the province of Bukovina, once part of the Austro­

Hungarian empire, was sovietized and tumed over to Roumania). Language - but what language - remained. Through it, he tried to cling to what was left of hope, and on the basis of this, he searched for a possible reality. This reality would be neither abstract nor solitary: it would be the reality of human community. If language defines reality, the only language left to establish a true "pure" reality was poetry; and poetry is the mark of communion, of, as he would write in "The Meridian", "the encounter".

The Meridian: Paul Celan and George Buchner

"The Meridian" was written as a "Speech on the Occasion of the A ward of the

Georg Buchner Prize". Here, Celan takes up again the theme of being in poetry. Since it was written in reception of the Buchner prize, it was written also as a response to Buchner's works, particularly to Lenz and Danton's Death; and more particularly, to the characters, the (human) figures in these works, Lenz and Lucile. It is therefore worthwhile for us also to engage, ifbriefly, with these works along with Celan.

The complexity and richness of Danton's Death have to be left unexplored in this paper: Buchner's works de serve (and have been reflected in several German) monographs,

16 and this play about revolution and being cannot be dealt with adequately here. What we will bring into the discussion now are the parts that Celan quoted or aIluded to in his speech about poetry and art. These parts are Buchner's own meditations on art and that which stands against - or over and above - it. Celan would calI it breath, the "Breathturn," or "Atemwende, " the counter-word.

In the tense moments leading up to the Dantonists' arrest, Camille Desmoulins and

Danton have a conversation about art (in a room, Celan points out, not in the

Conciergerie). Camille argues that art offers a re-creation of life that may dazzle its audience and provoke its admiration for its "artistry" (artifice seems to be the meaning intended), but this same audience will avert its eyes with disdain when confronted with the life of flesh and blood.

CAMILLE: 1 tell you, if they don't get everything in wooden reproductions, in their theaters, concerts, art exhibitions, they won't even listen. But if they get a ridiculous marionette and they can see the strings moving it up and down and they can see its legs creaking along in iambic pentameters, they say, "What truth! What understanding of hum an nature, how profound!" ... But turn them out of the theater into the street and, oh dear, reality is just too sordid. They forget God himself, they prefer his bad imitators. Creation is being newly born every minute, within them and aIl around them, glowing, a storm glittering with lightning: but they hear nothing. They go to the theater, read poems and novels and praise the caricatures. To creation itself they say "How ugly, how boring" (Act 2, Sc. 3, 32).

Danton replies, equally caustic, equaIly insightful. And yet a short ex change immediately afterwards qualifies their eloquent speeches. It is between Camille and Lucile.

CAMILLE: What do you say, Lucile? LUCILE: 1 just love to watch you talk. CAMILLE: But do you hear what 1 say? LUCILE: Of course. CAMILLE: But am 1 right? Did you reaIly hear what 1 said? LUCILE: WeIl, no. Not reaIly.

The blurbs and introductions to Buchner's works (there is no critical literature on Buchner

17 in English available on hand except in this form) point out that Buchner's work prefigures modem German drama and the dramaturgy of its great modem playwright, BertoIt Brecht.

We can in a way see Brecht reflected in CamiIle's diatribe against the disjuncture between art and life. For Brecht, the theater was the place where one should be fired to encounter life, not to ignore it or its "sordid reality". Buchner's and Brecht's aesthetics were perhaps different (as we shaIl see particularly with Lenz), but their spirits in this sense were kindred.

"CAMILLE: ... Did you reaIly hear what I said?/ LUCILE: WeIl, no. Not really."

Lucile's reaction to Camille does not indicate a "feminine" lack of intellectual ability or acumen. Rather, it is, as Celan perceives, the "counter-word" to the false idealism of art and to the falseness which we now kno~ is possible in aIl speech. Lucile was not listening because she was watching: she was watching the figures speak. This act of perception,

Celan tells us, involves much more than a passive taking-in:

But when the talk concems art, there's always sorne one who is present and ... not really listening. More precisely: someone who hears and listens and looks ... and then doesn't know what the talk was about. But who he ars the speaker, "sees him speak", perceives language and form and, at the same time - who could doubt it, here in the realm of this work - at the same time perceives Breath as weIl, that IS, direction and destiny (Felstiner, 402).

To perceive "Breath as weIl, that is, direction and destiny" involves a different aesthetic attitude or deportment than the one Camille denounces, or that he himself, in his own way, participates in. That is, it is to perceive the figure, it is to perceive that the work of art cornes from "human hands". As Celan puts it in his letter to Hans Bender, "the se hands must belong to one person, i.e. a unique, mortal soul searching for its way with its voice and its dumbness." It is to perceive that there is much more possible of language than

18 imitation (mimesis), and bad imitation at that. It is ,to perceive that the language uttered by human figures indicates "direction and destiny": it can contain the truth of one's reality and the direction in which this reality, depending on the way one speaks ("with its voice and its dumbness"), may proceed.

Lucile's statement, in its "simplicity" is not un-aesthetic. For as much as Buchner ma~ have railed against the insipidity of the theater, he nonetheless did so in a play, in einem Theaterstuck. Lucile's counter-word and criticism, that are in effect more devastating than Camille's, especially as Celan understands them, are themselves an aesthetic credo. It is a criticism of art made in art; and thus it necessarily indicates a viable solution. To put it another way: it is both an aesthetic objection and an artistic manifestation of that objection - that is, it is a counter-word; the solution Buchner would see is already, if only for a few moments, perhaps, put into practice. Celan caUs Buchner

"the poet of the creature" (Felstiner, 405), and what the latter seems to demand, as we will see clearly in Lenz, is art that is a reflection - or perception - of the reality of creation, of the created, a transparency (even if it may be obscure) * between the work and the reality it addresses.

It is thus appropriate that the final scenes, the play's final say, should belong to

Lucile. Celan writes of CamiIle's death and Lucile's fate,

... as Camille theatricaIly, one might almost say iambicaIly, dies a death that, two scenes later, we only then discem as his own [that is, in Lucile's lament], through a word that's strange to him yet so close; as aIl around Camille, pathos and proverbialism confirm the triumph of the "puppet" and the "wire", here cornes Lucile, blind to art, the same Lucile for whom language is something personal and perceptible, once again with her sudden "Long live the King!" (Felstiner,

*How can transparency be obscure? In "The Meridian" Celan writes of obscurity: "allow me to cite a phrase ofPascal's ... 'Ne nous reprochez pas le manque de clarte puisque nous en faisons profession!' ['Let us not reproach the lack of clarity since we make a profession of it!']. Once we understand the reality of Celan's world, we see that his poetry is a transparent reflection it.

19 402).

This statement, as Celan points out, is not "an homage to the ancien regime" (407). It is the "counter-word" - not a reversaI of her husband's politics, but a reversaI of the present moment. To hail the King sincerely would be to champion everything that Camille fought against. Instead, Lucile is using that very motto to honour him.

P~rhaps Peter Szondi can help clarify the meaning, for he understood the nature of contradiction which had become so native to Celan. In his essay on the poem

"Du liegst", entitled "Eden" (named after the luxury apartments built on the site of Rosa

Luxemberg's and Karl Liebk.necht's assassination), Szondi writes,

For Celan, these contradictions were not contradictory. He was weIl acquainted with the experience of discovering that milk is black and blackness milk, that the moral world is neither divided into good and evil nor consists of fluctuations between the two, but rather that good is also evil and that evil, in one way or another, has sorne element of good (90).

In this light, Lucile's "Long live the King!" carries a meaning full of contradictions - one in which "Yes" is not split off from "No" - that is, that al! its possible meanings are present.

To repeat, in Celan, this is not an homage to the ancien regime, but an homage to the

"Majesty of the Absurd", and indeed, what can be more absurd than swearing allegiance to your beloved through the very language he had fought to bring down? It is a word that is both "strange to him yet so close" (and this, as we shall see, is the nature of poetry itself): in its alienation - or alienatedness - from Camille and from the reality of their present it manages nonetheless to express what is most close to him and to Lucile. If we consider whom, at that moment, Lucile would wish most to see alive, we must read in her "Long live the King", that traditional motto of monarchy, not a proclamation of monarchy, but a new definition of Kingship. Camille, the Republican martyr, is her King. This word,

20 loaded with the injustices of history, will now carry another (indeed, almost Biblical) meaning. Just as in Celan's poetry, words must bear their shadow, so now must shadow words give off a radiance.

By the end of the play, Lucile, like so many of Buchner's characters, has go ne mad. But as with his other "touched" figures, this does not alienate her from reality or life, but rather brings her c1os~r to them. We this most acutely in Lenz. Anticipating Celan, the subject's reality here is not every-day, parochial or prosaic. It is the reality of one who need not leave the world in order to "go into your self-most straits"(Felstiner, 410), for in this case, the self-most straits - which we can agree, perhaps, are the most real - are already in his exterior reality. For Lenz, there does not seem to be any salient distinction between the movements of his inner being and the movements of the world.

Lenz's two extremes of mood are a terrible madness or "dizziness" (to use

Lacoue-Labarthe's term): " ... as far as the eye could reach ... everything [was] so still, so gray, lost, in twilight. He was seized with a nameless terror in this nothingness: he was in the void! It seemed as though something were foIlowing him ... as though madness on horseback were chasing him" (38), and a calm that reflected the pastoral harmony of nature around him (although this nature was certainly not exc1usively calm): "Not a movement in the air other than a soft breeze or the faint rustle of a bird shaking snow from its tail. AIl so still and far above, the trees with swaying white feathers in the deep-blue air... a familiar feeling as of Christmas came upon him ... the created world was speaking to him" (42).

Many other feelings and moods and thoughts in Buchner's Lenz played between the se extremes, and in relation to them. Not least ofthem was his considered aesthetic stance.

Buchner has Lenz, like his other heroes, speak out against German idealism. As

21 Celan notes, he wrote in a time radically different from our own (401); that is, before the caesura of the twentieth century, and thus our problems with representation could not be

Buchner's. On the contrary, Buchner called for an art that was as close to nature as possible. Yet even this demand, in the way in which it is demanded, is not wholly different from the transparency of Celan's poetry. Buchner wrote in a time when one's conscience could permit a representation of the natural world; this representation, however, like

Celan's, is more perception than reproduction. Although Buchner stuck to the logical natural world as Celan would take flight from it, he did so because he could still discem pure life and pure language in it.

ln all things 1 demand - life, the possibility of existence, and that's aIl; nor is it our business to ask whether it's beautiful, whether it's ugly. The feeling that there's life in the thing created is much more important than considerations of beauty and ugliness; it's the sole criterion in matters of art.... One must love human nature in order to penetrate into the peculiar character of any individual; nobody, however insignificant, should be despised; only then can one understand humankind as a whole... and one can allow one's characters to emerge from one's own mind without... adding details in which one feels no life, no muscles, no pulsation beating in response to one's own (45-47).

Buchner, although at ease with the natural world the way today's true artists are not, nevertheless worked in the same motion as Celan: for in his time, to look at nature, at the ugly as weIl as the beautiful, was to look past the given. Lenz ("that is, Buchner") spumed the reigning classical and neo-classical school of art that produce "an Apollo Belvedere or a Madonna by Raphael" (47). He rejected it on the grounds that it was false, that it hid the truth of life behind its formalism. To get to truth, he rejected falsity as Celan would; their difference lay in what had to be abandoned to achieve it.

Although Buchner talks about art in general as a category in which aIl its media are included, Celan dislodges a particular medium from the rest - poetry - and posits both a

22 distinction and a relationship between the two. For in Lucile's counter-word to idealist art

and the talk about art, Celan sees an homage to the Majesty of the Absurd. "And that,

ladies and gentlemen," he says, "has no fixed name once and for aIl time, yet it is, 1

believe ... poetry" (403). Of aIl the modes or "accents" with which he could discuss art and

poetry, Celan chooses the acute, the accent of the contemporary. And so his discussion

will center on poetry in light of art in this time, in our time.

Celan picks out of Buchner's oeuvre relatively few words and phrases, specifically

ones which relate to art and poetry. From Leonce and Lena he gives us the terms "robots

and mechanism", from Woyzeck "monkey", from Danton's Death, "wooden puppets", from

Lenz, the "Medusa's head". AIl these words and images are used to signify art, and the

. uncanny in art. If we are to detect a pattern emerging with these tropes, surely it is that art

is "uncanny" - yet, in relation to Buchner, that is, in relation to what Buchner would

demand from art, this uncanniness is "turned to what's human - the same realm where the

monkey, the robots and thereby ... alas, art too seems to be at home" (404-5). The question

of where art dwells is the one with which Celan went to Buchner (405). He went to him

with it because it is of historical moment, it addresses just what art is and means after

Auschwitz (Celan never thus named his time). "Probably these [the monkey, they robots,

the Medusa's head] are - Buchner's voice forces me to this conjecture - among the oldest

forms of the uncanny. That 1 dwell on them so stubbornly today has likely to do with the

air - the air we have to breathe" (405). "The air we breathe" is a reference, of course, to

the death camps, and to what floated through the air then. "Your ashen hair Shulamith we

shovel a grave in the air/ where you won't lie to cramped" ("Todesfugue"). The uncanny

of art has always been present, constitutive. Now, however, the uncanniness is (re)defined

23 by what has become of air. As we know of Celan, nothing that "happened" remained historically isolated: the Shoah did not occur in a temporal vacuum, but continues, ev en now, to constitute the essence of our reality. And so "the air we breathe", which determines the uncanny, remains full of the ashes of the murdered. It is in this light that we must look at art - with the acute accent of the contemporary. As Szondi put it, "After

Auschwitz, one can no longer write poetry, except in relation to Auschwitz" (74).

Art and history, then, share the same uncanniness, they breathe the same air. If the uncanniness of art is now marked by the "graves in the air", Lucile's perception of

"Breath", which is also the perception of "language and form" , "direction and destiny" is also marked: she too in her poetry, that is, in her speech, is breathing this ashen air. Hope, as a turning away, cornes in the form of Lenz - that is, in the form of Lenz's falling silent.

"Lenz - that is, Buchner - has gone one step further than Lucile. His 'Long live the King!' is no longer words, it is a frightful falling silent, it takes away his - also our - breath and word. / Poetry: that can signify an Atemwende, a Breathtum. Who knows, perhaps poetry follows its path - also the path of art - for the sake of such a breathtum?" (Felstiner, 407-8).

It is not, as we shall see, that poetry falls silent (although it nearly does), rather a kind of silencing is required in order to mark the tuming around of Breath.

The Meridians of Poetry

In his Aesthetic Theory, Adorno notes that the artist does not "love" art - he can't, for he both lives in art (and thus to "love" it would be like loving air) and forgets himself in art, that is, he goes out of his self in art (13). Celan states it thus, "Whoever keeps art before his eyes and in his mind - here l'm thinking of Lenz - has forgotten himself. Art

24 creates I-distantness. Art in a certain direction demands a certain distance, a certain path"

(406). And yet, this distance is not a lostness, rather it is the place where the self-forgotten

1 can set itself free. "Perhaps - l'm only asking - perhaps poetry, like art, is going with a self-forgotten 1 toward the uncanny and the strange, and is again - but where? but in what place? but with what? - setting itself free?" (406).

Despite this uncanny estrangement, poetry also partakes in an encounter - with an other, with a figure. Ta seek and find another being is a matter of poetry's survival. "1 seek

Lenz himself, seek him - as a pers on, 1 seek his form: for the sake of poetry's place, for the setting free, for the step" (407). And so, if poetry is where the self-forgotten 1 is freed, and is also where - in order for poetry to continue to exist - the other figure must be sought and found, perhaps the encounter with this other figure is in itself how the self-forgotten 1 can set itself free. In "Catastrophe", Lacoue-Labarthe writes, "The self - or the singular 1 - reaches itself within itself only 'outside'. Reapplying one of Heidegger's formulas, we can say that the 'outside self is the selfs origin" (59). The encounter with a being outside the self is thus as necessary to the self as it is to poetry.

As noted earlier, Celan clung to the "remains" of hope - "the hopes 1 have left are small" he wrote "1 try ta hold on to what remains". Here, in "The Meridian" it resurfaces again, again in its smallness.

Certainly the poem, the poem today shows - and this 1 think has only indirectly to do with not-to-be underestimated difficulties of word choice, with the sharper faH of syntax or heightened sense of ellipsis - the poem unmistakably shows a strong bent toward falling silent. It holds on - after so many extreme formulations, allow me this one too - the poem ho Ids on at the edge of itself; so as to exist, it ceaselessly calls and hauls itselffrom its Now-no-more back into its Ever-yet (409). j

The brink of poetry's Now-no-more is both Auschwitz itself, and the uncanniness that art

25 has acquired because of it. Celan notes a line from the opening page of Lenz: "' ... only it sometimes bothered him that he could not walk on his head.' Whoever walks on his head, ladies and gentlemen, whoever walks on his head has heaven as an abyss beneath him"

(407). The abyss now is the uncanny, it is "strangeness" (and walking on one's head the act of writing poetry). For Celan, there are both two strangenesses and, as we shall see, onlyone. "Perhaps, since strangeness - the abyss and the Medusa's head, the abyss and the robots - seem to lie in a single direction, perhaps poetry here succeeds in telling strange- ness from strangeness, per!Iaps right here the Medusa's head shrinks, perhaps here, with the

I - the estranged I set free here and in such wise - here perhaps sorne Other becomes free?"

(408). Not only does the I become free in its estrangement, and in its encounter with another being, but so does the Other itself.

In the encounter, the Other acquires its name. And through acquiring its name, it becomes a Thou - that is, it becomes real.

What is addressed takes shape only in the space of this conversation, gathers around the I addressing and naming it. But what's addressed and is now become a Thou through naming, as it were, also brings along its othemess into this present. Even in a poem's here and now - a poem itself really has only this one, unique, momentary present - even in this immediacy and neamess it lets the Other's ownmost quality speak: its time (410).

This passage recalls Walter Benjamin's essay, "On Language as Such and on the Language of Man". In this essay (briefly), Benjamin uses the Genesis story of creation as a model through which we can understand the mystical origin of language, and the name as the quintessence of language. He writes that "in man, God had set language, which had served

Him as a medium of creation free. God rested when he had left his creative power to itself in man. This creativity, relieved of its divine actuality, became knowledge" (323). By

"free" Benjamin means that God had given man the priviledge of naming His creatures,

26 and only by naming them, by calling them by their right names, could their creation be completed. A creature acquires its reality through its name, through the recognition of its name (it is tirst known in God). To be real, according to Martin Buber, whom Celan revered (Felstiner, 1995, 161), is to be a "thou". The poem gives the Other a name; it caUs it "Thou" (the theme of naming will be taken up again in chapter 3 of my thesis). To give something or someone a name is to address it simultaneously as a thou. By calling one by its name, by calling it thou, we usher it into the present, its present, its time.

The poem "stands", exists in, the encounter. As such, to be mindful of the

"mystery" of the encounter, it must be obscure, and the names the poet gives must be new, until-now unrecognized names ("Love blots out is name: itl signs on with you" ["Twelve

Years"]) "That obscurity is, l believe, if not congenital, then the obscurity associated with poetry for the sake of an encounter, by a self-devised distance or strangeness" (407).

Poetry must be obscure in order to be mindful of the encounter; to safeguard the encounter in its mystery (that is, in its truth) and against any false speech that might be imputed to it if it were immediately clear. As reality is no longer immediately comprehensible, its representation cannot be either. For aIl its obscurity, however, the poem still seeks to reach beyond itself. "Yet the poem does speak! It remains mindful of its dates, yet - it speaks. lndeed it speaks only in its very selfmost cause" (408). The encounter of which Celan speaks is not between poet and reader. The poem is the "Singbarer Rest" of the encounter.

To reformulate Lacoue-Labarthe, the poem is the singable remainder of the dizzying experience of the encounter. The poem "speaks only in its very selfmost cause". It seeks the reader, but not to fultill the poem's requirement of meeting an other - that it has already done - it seeks the reader as heartland for the poem which is the witness of the encounter.

27 "For the poem making toward an Other, each thing, each human being is a form of this Other" (409). The poem is taking its path " - also the path of art -" to be itself "for the sake of a breathturn" (408). It encounters, along its path of the uncanny and the strange, not only an other thing or person, it encounters also the "wholly Other". "But 1 think - and now this thought can hardly surprise you - 1 think a hope of poems has al ways been to speak in just this way in the cause of the strange - no, 1 can't use this word anymore - in just this way to speak in the cause of an Other - who knows, perhaps in the cause of a wholly Other" (408). In his biography of Celan, Felstiner tells us that shortly before writing "The Meridian", Celan had read Rudolf Otto's Das Heilige (165), and surely there can be no mistaking Celan's "wholly Other" - especially in view of the un canny - for anything but Otto's understanding of the numinous. If we can conflate the the wholly

Other with Celan's understanding of the strange and the uncanny, then we must understand that the numinous, as the uncanny, is qualified too by "the air we breathe". Not only language, not only art, but the numinous (God) itself, in our time, is determined and qualified by Auschwitz. And so, especially in light of sorne of his poems, Buchner's line in

Lenz, "the AlI was full of wounds" must have resonated with particular force for Celan.

The numinous - that which is wholly other, beyond all things known and unknown (and which, let us not forget, can also reduce the one who experiences it to "dust and ashes") - it too is constituted of the wounds of Auschwitz.

TENEBRAE

Near are we, Lord, near and graspable.

Grasped already, Lord, clawed into each other, as if each of our bodies were your body, Lord.

28 Pray, Lord, pray to us, we are near.

Wind-skewed we went there, went there to bend over pit and crater.

Went to the water-trough, Lord.

lt was blood, it was what you shed, Lord.

It shined.

It cast your image into our eyes, Lord. Eyes and mouth stand so open and void, Lord. We have drunk, Lord. The blood and the image that was in the blood, Lord.

Pray, Lord. We are near.

In a sense, the wholly other and the human have been leveled. Both now are wandering through this realm ofthe uncanny, both breathing a particular air. Several years after writing "The Meridian", Celan wrote:

CI know you, you're the one bent over low, and l, the one pierced through, am in your need. Where flames a word to witness for us both? You -- wholly real. 1 -- wholly mad.)

This poem, Felstiner tells us (1995, 231), was written for his wife, Gisele. Yet by the same token, it may also evoke the "wholly Other", the "Lord" found so wounded in "Tenebrae".

In 1967, Celan, who had known Gershom Scholem and his works for sorne ten years,

"scoured this book [On the Mystical Shape of the Godheadj over a ten-day period. Many things in Jewish mysticallore engaged him ... above aIl the Shechinah - God's emanation as mother, sister, and bride ... " (Felstiner, 1995, 235). Although written several years after

29 "The Meridian", this poem and the understanding of the passage from Scholem can throw a

light, as of hindsight, upon it. The "other" that Celan seeks, as we have seen, is not only

"wholly Other", but also a near one, one who is at hand. "Perhaps, 1 must tell myself now -

perhaps even a meeting between this 'wholly Other' - l'm using a familiar term here - and a

not aIl that distant, a quite near 'other' becomes thinkable - again and again" (408). His

encounter with his bride might also be an encounter with the numinous, or at least, with an

"emanation" of the numinous - as bent over low now and as pierced through as human

beings are.

The meeting of which Celan speaks stands in the encounter which is the poem.

The poem "speaks in its very selfmost cause", and in the cause of the wholly Other. The

wholly Other not only meets with a near other, it can also emanate from that other. "For

the poem making toward an Other, each thing, each human being is a form of this Other' ,

(409). The true encounter with the Other, in which the poem is born, and so is also the

poem itself, can exist in the experience of the numinous.

The poem is not only the locus where we encounter the wholly Other or the near

other - it is aiso the place where the estranged 1 encounters itself. Referring to a poem with

the quatrain, "'Voices from the nettle path:1 Come on your hands ta us.! Whoever is alone

with the lampl has only his hands to read from'" (412) and his short story'''Conversation in

the Mountains" ("a failed encounter in the Engadin" he caUs it, referring to not-meeting

Adorno), he says that "[i]n both instances l'd begun writing from 'a 20th of January', from

my 20th of January. lit was ... myselfl encountered" (412). While Buchner's Lenz begins,

"On the twentieth of January Lenz went across the mountains", many critics have also

'noted that it was on the 20th of January that the Final Solution was devised at the Wannsee

30 conference. And thus Celan reminds us of the eeriness of our time: that to encounter oneself, that is, in a sense, to find one's origin, can occur on the same date as one's annihilation has been decided. Even here, even now, Celan keeps his Yes and No unsplit: his existence and his void are simultaneous.

And yet, we cannot forget what else has been encountered in poetry: the other and the wholly Other. Is it not possible, then, that the encounter with the other, with the wholly

Other and the self aIl occur in one moment? That if the Other is set free in the poem, can't the Other set the self free, in the same moment, in the same poem? That is perhaps exactly what the poem and what the encounter entai!. "But with art go into your very selfmost straits. And set yourself free" (411). Art for Celan is not, in the end, an uncanniness distinct from the Other, the "perhaps ... wholly Other". For the wholly Other, as we have seen, has acquired the same uncanniness as art has. "Art, thus also the Medusa's head, the mechanism, the robots, the uncanny strangeness so hard to tell apart, in the end perhaps really only one strangeness - art lives on" (411). It lives on in its uncanniness, but perhaps now we can apprehend that uncanniness as the same as the one that exists in the Other - one that is not only mechanized but one that is also "art-less, art-free" (408) - that is, creaturely.

Then does one, in thinking of poems, does one walk such paths with poems? Are these paths only by-paths, by-paths from thou to thou? Yet at the same time, among how many other paths, they're also paths on which language gets a voice, they are encounters, paths of a voice to a perceiving Thou, creaturely paths, sketches of existence perhaps, a sen ding one self ahead toward oneself, in search of oneself... A kind ofhomecoming (412).

Celan is positing here, perhaps, that now, in our time, home is the uncanny, it is the

Unheimliche; and poetry is its language.

31 This paper was intended as an overview of Celan's aesthetic, and initially it was conceived in terms of his style, that is, his technique. It seems that on that score, l have said very little. For better or for worse, this paper has followed - to take a formulation from Celan - a different path. Perhaps, though, we can take our cue from Celan himself:

"True, there are exercises - in the spiritual sense... And then there are, at every lyrical street-corner, experiments that muck around with the so-called word-material. Poems are also gifts - gifts to the attentive. Gifts bearing destinies." (Waldrop, 26). For Celan, there was no distinction between the spirit of a poem and its expression. To understand his poetry (at aH) and not only his style but the reason he chose it, we must understand where he came from - his "Whence and Whither" (Felstiner, 408) - his "direction and destiny."

Although we have not dissected specimens of his poetry, holding each word, neologiSin or image under a critical light, we have, l hope, come to understand where he posited poetry within our historically-bound existence, and what he hoped from it.

32 CHAPTER2:

The Voice ofLanguage: A Study of Celan's Poem "Voices"

Introduction

This chapter looks at the presence of voice in Celan's work as one of the fundamental and determining facets of language. As such, we will see how this basic medium of human expression functions as the locus of being and community. As such, it will pro vide us the springboard from which we can examine in the subsequent chapters how human beings may or may not form a community with the divine and with other human beings in the very heart of language.

"Word," "name," "voice," and "breath" are terms that recur so frequently in

Celan's poetry we might say that they constitute the essence of his poetic expression, that they are the shafts around which the house of his work is built. This suggests to us that the fundamental meaning of his work is expression, utterance itself. If that is the case, his poems do not come to us simply as autonomous literary artifacts; rather they are recorded moments of a being seeking to find a way out of the darkness of solitude into the brilliance of community. Celan's poems are vehicles for the expression of his being, yet at the same time they are also - and, perhaps, necessarily - vehicles for language itself. For Celan took on, as we know from the Bremen Address, the burden of language which must pass

"through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech" (395). In its way, Celan's poetry takes into itself the trauma that the Shoah inflicted into our historical reality which is borne by language, and remains there, "stand[ing] in the shadow of a scar in the air".

The language which Celan utters and which bears his being in the world does not

33 try to evade or sublimate the suffering that has entered it and that constitutes its nature.

Celan is, indeed, relentless in uttering, through metaphor and grammar, the pain that seeped into reality and which is for him definitive of that reality. Nowhere in his work does he attempt a reconciliation between language and terror; yet he continued to write, and it might be that his writing and our attempts at understanding are both labours toward redemption. For although he incorporated the world's darkness into his poetry, it was not in complicity with this darkness but as prote st against it. This prote st is aU the more powerful for being able to trace the figure of the dark itself. While there are moments of brightness - of hope, of love recoUected - in Celan's poems, they are nevertheless shaped, like pieces in a puzzle, to the contours of suffering. If we foUow the trace of darkness along with him, we may be able to find a way to build upon the scattered brightness that remams.

Our labour, then, is through language: with Celan, we must work through the

"thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech," we must attend to language as it appears in his haunting lyricism. In understanding the darknesses as they manifest in a myriad details, we may then begin to construct a response appropriate to the caU, or the "message in a bottle" (396) of his work. Language, as has already been suggested, is the setting as weIl as the object of our labour. Whereas in the foUowing chapters we wiU take a close look at a philosophy of language which touches on - but at the same time withholds - the divine, in this chapter we will look at a poem which takes as its theme or "metatrope" the essential organ of language: voice.

34 The Unspeakabality ofLanguage

A year after his death, In 1836, Wilhelm von Humboldt's (1767-1835)

Introduction to the Kawi Language was published. In this text, Humboldt outlines the development of language and places at its center, as its seed, the spoken word, the phoneme, as the bearer of aIl qualities and meanings of the thing it designates. And yet, if we understand, as Benjamin did, that even when we communicate other beings, we, are principally communicating ourselves (thus establishing the necessary interdependence between human beings and the creatures around us), we can grasp Humboldt's even more primary notion that above or before aIl else, the hum an voice is the true transmitter of one soul to another. He writes, '

Inasmuch as thought in its most typically hum an relationships is a longing to escape from darkness into light, from limitation into infinity, sound streams from the depths of the breast to the external ambient... [I]ntellectual striving... is especially promoted by the sound of the human voice. For, as living sound, it proceeds, as does respiration itself, from the breast; it accompanies - ev en without speech - pain and joy, aversion and avidity, breathing life from which it streams forth into the mind which receives it. In this respect, it resembles language (1 DO- 101).

Perhaps more than any other hermeneutic philosopher, Humboldt esteemed speech as the highest activity of language; it 'is speech, dialogue, and therefore the community they establish which designate for him the "humanity of man" (101).

Aris Fioretos begins his commentary on Celan's poetry with a quote from Katka's short story (his last) "Josephine the Singer": '''This mere nothing of voice asserts itself and finds its way to us; it is weIl to think of that'" (295). For Fioretos, there is something in

Celan's poems which imitates the patterns of speech - the dash marking breath or breathturn, for example - but there is also something which necessarily resists vocalization.

35 "His poems, then, contain not only the representative traits of vocalization, but also something which resists oral expression - a materiality of writing, which cannot be translated into the spoken language of voice without an unaccountable remainder" (295-6).

For Fioretos, the "illocutionary" quality of Celan's poetry leads us back to the texts themselves; the moments in which speakability is arrested are the cIues to understanding a poem whose significance lies above el se in the materiality of the written text.

Yet the incorporation of speech and unspeakability in Celan's poetry which

Fioretos identifies is in and for itself revealing, and not simply in reference to the written text. The most striking instance of a poem inhabited by the pattern of (broken) speech is the already-cited "Tübingen January". The final lines embody the concept of what the stanza is expressing: the inability to communicate coherently: whoever would speak our age, Celan writes, "could/only babble and babble,l ever- ever-/moremore./I ('Pallaksch.

Pallaksch')" (159). This time, the utterance of the poem is at once the message of the poem: the poem's structure forces us, the readers, to stutter along with it. Stuttering and babbling are primarily qualities of locution, not literature, and so it is as if Celan is urging us out of the text (reminding us ofthe lines from "Stretto", "Read no more - 100k!1L00k no more - go!"), into at least the recollection of speech. The Biblical prophet (of whom the poem's "man... with the patriarch's light beard" is reminiscent), speaks or cries out long before his words are written down, and traditionally his message is more important than, although not dissociated from, its oral execution. Now, however, if we consider the centrality of the fact of language itself, babbling is the message. Humboldt argued that

"even without words" the human voice as the locus of communicability could convey much by its sound; what does it convey then in its babbling, its stuttering? The inability to

36 speak, and the impossibility to recite Celan's poetry without stumbling over its syncopes and breaks are themselves signaIs for the loss of communicability. If we apply

Humboldt's logic to this proposition, the interiority of the human being, which seeks escape from its solitude in speech, is arrested at its root. Or in another light, all that can escape, today, from the individual is nonsense, or a kind of madness. AlI that can be established between two, people is the failure of communication. The "external ambient" which is designated by air, "the air we breathe" writes Celan in "The Meridian" speech, signaling the smoke and ash which it contains is imbued now only with babbling, with break-down.

"Voices" - The Remainders ofLanguage

Part of the reason that voice is a problematic element in Celan's poetry - both as a mode and as a theme - is that it bears so many connotations. Like almost every facet of language for Celan, voice can evoke the howl of the Nazis or the songs of his mother.

Thus his dark and beautiful and haunting poem, "Voices:"

Voices, nicked into the smooth water's green. When he kingfisher dives, the instant buzzes:

What stood by you on each of the banks steps mown into another image.

* Voices from the nettle path:

Come on your hands to us. Whoever is alone with the lamp has only his hands to read from.

37 * Voices veined with the night, ropes you hang the beU on.

Grow vaulted, world: When the deadmen's conch swims up, there'U be bells pealing here. * Voices from which your heart shrinks back into your mother's heart. Voices from the gaUow tree, where latewood and springwood change and ex change their rings.

*

Voices, guttural, in the rubble where endlessness shovels away, (heart-) slimy streamiet.

Chi Id, Iaunch the boats here that 1 manned:

When a squall sets up amidships, the clamps will snap shut. *

Jacob's voice:

The tears. The tears in the brother's eye. One stayed clinging, grew. We dweU inside. Breathe, that it come loose.

* Voices in the bowels ofthe ark:

38 It is only the mouths are saved. You sinking ones, hear us too. *

No voice - a late-noise, alien to hours, a gift for your thoughts, here at last wakened: a . carpel, eyesize, deeply nicked; it resins, will not scar over.

The structure of this poem resembles a fan, folding back onto itself, but also diverging one part from another, revealing a hidden slat that one may not have anticipated. This poem appears in Celan's 1959 collection Sprachgitter, translateci by John Felstiner as Speech-

Grille. Jerry Glenn has cornmented on the collection's title, proffering four possible readings of the term "speech-grille."

(1) the original, literaI [meaning], namely the window through which cloistered nuns were allowed to speak to outsiders; (2) the metaphorical use of the term made by Jean Paul (1763-1825), "The old man ... spoke behind the Sprachgitter of sleep with dead persons"; (3) language itself may be a "Gitter" through which ideas are simultaneously realized (through expression) and limited (by the form of expression); (4) going back to its etymological root, "Gitter" may imply a union or a binding together (91-92).

"Voices" contains all these elements, which is 1 think fitting, since it is the first poem to open the collection.

The first section of the piece irnmediately reminds us that we are dealing with a poet of the modem age for whom empirical reality and therefore the metaphors that encode it are necessarily at a remove, alienated and abstract. It begins with the image of a water's

39 surface "nicked" by voices, meaning that voices disturb the calm and integrity of the water, or rather "water's green" ("[das] Grün! der Wasserflache"). Green signifies youth, spring, freshness; it can also indicate a fresh wound which has not healed. In this case, it bears a highly personal resonance for Celan, for "das Grün" appears in his "Epitaph for François", the poem he wrote for his first son who died soon after his birth (Felstiner, 1995, 72). The last line reads, "and [we] bear this Green into your Ever." Green, then, indicates a youthfulness which is already gone - gone even before it had an opportunity to be, and yet at the same time restituted to etemity. It also connotes the freshness of the wound this loss inflicted whose incurability is equally etemal.

If the occurrence of "Green" in "Voices" echoes the "Green" dedicated to Celan's child, the connotation is therefore not only general and metaphorical, it is not a mere trope intended to communicate the cuts in the tender freshness of an abstracted springtime, rather it bears with it the extremely personal and painful resonance of the new-bom youth stolen from him by death. Although the death of his child came naturally as his parents' did not, this reaping placed his son in the company of the dead, whose memory and murder Celan could not forget. Felstiner points out that "Epitaph for François" became the focal piece of a section of poems structured around it, in which the death of his progeny as well as his progenitors are accounted for by the same metaphor (1995, 72-3).

Green, then, resonates with both the green of life and the green of a wound that will not heal. It is into this "water's green" that "the kingfisher dives." A glance at the

German original is especially helpful here, for "kingfisher" is a translation of "Eisvogel", literally, "ice-bird." We know from Jerry Glenn and John Felstiner that winter imagery signifies not only the murder of the Jews (and more specifically and personally, of Celan's

40 parents) but the psychic reality of the world since that "event." The kingfisher or ice-bird can be a symbol for the poet; indeed, he would later write a poem in which the jackdaw -

"Dohle" in German, "kavka" in Czech - stands in for the German-Jewish prose-poet Franz

Kafka (Felstiner, 229). This bird from "Voices," constituted of the ice of a murderous reality, must dive into the water - ofthe subconscious, ofhistory, of language - which bears the green both of an etemal spring and an etemal woun~ in order to fish out, with its beak, the organ of its song, the images of its poem. The trace of the voices' indentations in the water - could these form a "grille" upon it? The water, if we refer back to Glenn's meanings, then becomes one side of reality from which language emerges into hearing.

When the kingfisher dives into this water, "the instant buzzes:" and this is not an inchoate buzzing, rather the colon implies that the following stanza is what the buzzing communicates. "What stood by you! on each of the banks/ steps/ mown into another image." If the flight of the kingfisher or ice-bird is the process of creating a poem, this stanza is, in its cyphered way, a description of what that process entails. If the poet is standing at the banks of the Green, then he is 100king both into the waters of his child's infant death and the most unnatural death of his parents, and what accompanies him there is the suffering of loss, beyond words and image. Yet these companions of memory and pain are "mown" (other possible translations are "ground" or "crushed") "into another image." The act here is one of violence, as if to put something into a form, into an image is to destroy it. The unspeakable, unimaginable pain is thus betrayed by being spoken and imagined, or "be-imaged" as Michael Hamburger would translate in another poem (see

Lacoue-Labarthe,). No image now can contain the enormity of the suffering that might be forced - or ground - into it. The creation of a poem, then, has this double quality, on one

41 hand it is an engagement with the green waters of love and pain, and on the other, it also marks the inadequacy of verbalizing this suffering, this reality.

The second section of the poem begins with: "Voices from the nettle path:".

Before the war, Celan had lived a year Tours studying medicine, but the foundation of his scientific curiosity lay closest in botany (Chalfen, 88). The nettle is a weed-like plant which grows between two to four feet high with jagged, oval shaped leaves. Out of the se leaves grow minute hairs, which sting on contact as terribly as bees. The poem continues:

"Come on your hands to us." The voices are calling the poet (and the reader) to crawl on a path of nettles, puncturing the palms and leaving a mass of welts. "Whoever is alone with the lamp/ has only his hands to read from." Whoever is alone with his suffering, whoever's suffering is unmitigated and cannot diverge from its way, has only that to interpret. His suffering self is the only reality left him, or it is the only prism through which he can interpret reality. And there are voices commanding him to traverse this path. If the addressee obeys, the voice itself becomes the path. Language itself forces or demands this crawl: to come to the point of vocalization necessitates the crossing of this path: the generation ofutterance, now, is in pain.

Although nettles cause a painful stinging, for centuries across the world they have been known to have curative properties. Celan, with his vast botanical knowledge must have been aware of them. Not only are nettles healing plants, they address, among other things, specifically male and female reproductive problems: for the male prostate difficulties, for the female menstrual, menopausal and child-bearing difficulties. The reproductive functions of plants and human beings figure prominently throughout Celan's work, not least at the end of this very poem. The "nettle paths", then, are paths both of

42 pain and of healing, reaching to the procreative and progenitive aspects ("Radix, Matrix," latin for root and womb, is the title of a poem from the 1963 Die Niemandrose collection) of humans and plants, but because as medicine they require being boiled, soaked or infused in water, their curative quality can only come about through a transformation. In terms of the poem and the poet, the path of suffering can only begin to indicate the path toward healing if it has been adopted and interpreted, if it first "passes through" - or perhaps remains in - its darkness. If the voices of the first section seem to say that whoever would tum their suffering into poetry must crush the original feeling into an image, the voices of the second stanza, in continuing this commentary of the poeticization of pain, are saying that the route toward the poem is a repetition of pain, and it is from these renewed wounds that the poet reads and decyphers the only meaning left to him. Only in this as yet undisclosed way can language, steeped in memory and pain, be transformed.

Thus, just as a poem may be the locus of pain (in an uncollected poem entitled

"Wolfsbean," Celan writes to his mother: "Yesterday/ one ofthem came and! killed youl a second time/ in my poem" [381-2]), it is also the locus of hope and thus the possibility of healing. Celan quotes this verse in "The Meridian", and the ideas which frame it indicate a coincidence of opposites: of an irreconcilable pain and a tentative sketch of hope. He had been speaking of the Atemwende, the breathtum which is, in the breath beyond the ash- laden air of a concentration-camp world, the possibility of poetry. Seeming exasperated with talking about poetry, he says, "Poetry, ladies and gentlemen -: this speaking endlessly of mere mortality and uselessness!" and tums to speaking poetry itself.

Ladies and gentlemen, several years ago I wrote a little quatrain - this is it: "Voices from the nettle path: / Come on your hands to us [Celan's italics]. / Whoever is alone with the lamp / has only his hand to read from."

43 And a year ago, in memory of a failed encounter in the Engadin, l set down a little story in which l had a man "like Lenz" walk through the mountains. In both instances l'd begun writing from a "20th of January," from my "20th of January." It was ... myselfI encountered (412).

This encounter, as l argued in the first chapter, is the moment of the poem's genesis. That it requires walking on nettles with one's hands bespeaks the pain that such an encounter bears, as does the poem that is borne with it. About the path towards an encounter C~lan continues:

Then does one, in thinking of poems, does one walk such paths with poems? Are these paths only by-paths, bypaths from thou to thou? Yet at the same time, among how many other paths, they're also paths on which language gets a voice, they are encounters, paths of a voice to a perceiving Thou, creaturely paths, sketches of existence perhaps, a sending oneself ahead toward oneself, in search of oneself... A kind of homecoming (412).

This passage almost forms a list of what occurs on the nettle path of poetry, but we must not think that they form a sequence of occurences, rather aIl these things are part of the same moment. If it is an encounter, it is also the moment in which "language gets a voice", in which a perceiving you - and here we must remember Lucile, who "sees the speaker as he speaks" - might be found; this painful path is the path of the creature, whose integrity is essentially inalienable; this path forms the blueprint of existence. It is, finaIly, a homecoming.

Homecoming, like so many notions in Celan's writing, has a double meaning, for on one hand, we are forced to recognized that "home" now is found through pain. And yet, as much as home will now have to incorporate the meaning of pain, pain must also here be suspended or transfigured in favour of home. "Home" or "Heimat" has so many meanings of comfort and belonging, that they cannot aIl be obliterated by the induction of pain. This homecoming must bear its pain, but, paradoxically, it is also its peace. Or, to put it another

44 way, home for Celan and for anyone who has lived through genocide has been so ravaged that any path toward it is defined by its destination. Since the destination is both home and the pain of its ravaging, the path there is equally painful.

Yet, as mentioned above, nettles, if treated appropriately, have healing properties.

The transformation from something which wounds into something which heals cornes about through an immersion in water. In the cosmos of this poem, could this be the water of the previous verse (or the "streamlet" of the fifth)? In the first verse, the process of image-making occurs at the moment the kingfisher dives into the water and something, standing on the banks, steps into the water and thus is "mown/ into another image." As violent as that act is, it nevertheless produces the articulation of the poem. For Celan, so much depends on the poem; it is for him, among other things, a token of hope. If the immersion of pain in water transforms it into the poem, which is an encounter and the hope of an encounter, the immersion of the wounding nettles into this water transforms the path of pain into a path of healing. However, it would be weil to remember that the labour of hope is ours, more than it was Celan's. Celan's act of hope was in writing poetry, even at its darkest, it awaits reception in an enlightened heart. That it bears within it such darkness qualifies the hopefulness we could ever ascribe to it. He himself doubted of a proper reception, as Michael Hamburger mentions in the Afterword to his translation. The hope

Celan held in reserve and which his poetry bears is like Kafka's, about which he latter famously said, "Hope exists, but not for us."

Whose Voice? Who Hears?

We are slowly coming to an understanding of who these vaices might be, or to

45 whom they may belong. However, we can only posit their identity once we have grasped the meanings which they utter. The beginning of the next stanza has another eerie juxtaposition of dark and light motifs, the darkness of night and the clarity of beUs:

"Vaices veined with the night, ropes/ you hang the beU on." The veins, these dark lines that bear the blood of the voices back through the body of voice into the heart of meaning are determined by the night of genocide(s) from which we have not emerged. The world, we read in the next line, must "grow vaulted" - in order to delimit itself, to bec orne conscious of its limits and not to deceive itself of its openness. Vaultings also provide for better acoustics, thus making it better to hear the pealing of the beUs which receive their momentum from the puUing on the veins of the night.

This interpretation is supported by the middle line of the stanza which reads,

"When the deadmens' conch swims up." Again, it might be useful here to refer to the

German original, which reads, ''''Wenn die Totenmuschel heranschwimmt." "Muschel" can be translated as either mussel, sheUfish, shell, conch or earpiece. Borrowing from the

English meaning, "conch," as well as being a seashell, is a word for the domed roof of a church's apse - that is, it too is a kind of vaulting. As earpiece, the meaning of the verse acquires greater clarity: when we find the mechanical or ersatz ear of the dead, the bells which hang on the ropes of their murdered and murderous reality will sound for them.

That the world is supposed to share in the same vaulting implies on one hand that the world shares in this deadness, and on the other that the whole world should become an ear for the peal or the toll of its darkly-held bells.

Bell can aiso refer to the corolla of a flower whosepetais shape into that form. As if anticipating Die Niemandrase, this flower bell thus can be a symbol of the Jewish

46 people, whose peal must be heard equally by those who sound it as the rest of the world which must now receive it. The world in its vaults must be receptive to the cry of the

Jewish dead; yet at the same time, the Jewish dead (as weIl as those who survive to give them a voice) must hear the sound they set out into the air. Just as Humboldt argued that air is the best, most suitable and well-suited medium to carry the human voice, so did he argue that it is only when words or sounds have left the individual and become part of that medium that he can fully understand what he himself has uttered. The simultaneity of speech and hearing is a repeated motif in Celan - in another poem he writes, "Hear deep in with your mouth," conflating the two senses. Thus the poem urges the dead and world alike to hear their voice and recognize their truth. It is at the moment in which they are able to hear - "[w]hen the deadmen's conch swims up" that their voices will ring out.

If the sound of the voices of the de ad are the peals of the bells which resonate from the ropes of the night, then these ropes become the nooses hanging from the "gallows tree" of the next stanza. In the German original, Celan has made a compound of gallows and tree, "Galgenbaum." The compound makes the two one entity and thereby naturalizes the gallows, while at the same time poisoning the image and trope of the tree. Hence

"latewood and springwood/ change and exchange their rings," as we can no longer distinguish one from the other, or untangle the time when the two were not combined.

Under these conditions, with these terrible voices, "your heart/ shrinks back into your mother's heart." 1 am tempted here to read the voices as belonging to someone or something ominous that would cause the heart to "shrink back" into the comfort of its mother's heart. However, although the action is indeed a withdrawal - something similar, perhaps, to withdrawing the hand from nettles - the place into which it retreats is not

47 wholly peaceful, for in shrinking back into his mother's heart, he is shrinking back into the dead. In a poem from the 1952 collection, Pappies and Memary, Celan writes, "My mother's heart was hurt by lead" ("Aspen Tree," 21). Although we can read the voices from the gallows as those of the executioners, it is still possible that these voices, veined as they are with the night, in speaking of a deathly reality, belong principally to that reality, to the "20th of January" which is as much the date of the Wannsee conference as it is the date upon which Lenz set out on his joumey through the mountains. The voices of the killed may be, in fact, as horrifying as those of the killers.

If, with my limited German, 1 have understood correctly, in Wart und Name bei

Paul Celan Dietlind Meinecke asks whether the path into the mother's heart is not the

"(heart-)I slimy streamlet" of the following section. Here, the voices recall Celan's time in a labour camp, in which for a year and a half he shoveled dirt into sand-bags. In the poem he formulates it as, "Vaices, guttural, in the rubble/ where endlessness shovels away," as if it is time itself - his time - which now endlessly shovels, as if the shoveling he was forced to perform " ... atl beck and command" ("1 Have Cut Bamboo," 185) is carried on in the present as well, without end, even beyond the camps. Time itself becomes constituted by imprisonment and forced labour. Because his mother was shot in a brutal work-camp in

Transnistria, this insufferable slavery is what leads Celan back into her heart; digging is not only the gesture of his intemment, it is also at one and the same time the gesture which connects him to his mother and makes her present - in a presence conditioned by pain.

This path, this stream let which leads to his mother is a variation of the nettle path which leads to homecoming.

In the next stanza Celan writes, "Child, launch the boats here/ that 1 manned".

48 The child might have any or aIl of three identities: in light of his mother's presence and absence, it could be Celan himself; or it could be Francois, his dead infant son who resides in the same heartspace of memory as Celan's mother does; or it could be a caU to his living son Eric, in a contiguity of parent and child. In the poem's ability to sustain an encounter with more than one other being, there is no reason not to understand the child's identity as this triad. It speaks of the continuity of suffering, through the generations, that is made forever present in every one.

The boats are a more difficult trope to decode, until, in accepting the child's identity at least in part as Celan himself, we recall his reference in "The Bremen Address" to Mandelstam's conception of a poem as a "message in a bottle" (396). The boats are thus poems, "manned" by Celan himself - that is, bearing his being at sea or streamlet. The squall, the violent eruption of wind and sleet over sea, is the disruption of understanding and reception, making the "reception on heartland" ("Bremen Address," 396) impossible.

This reception was essential for Celan, and it was often confounded by critics who almost deliberately misconstrued Celan's meaning and aesthetic. Many saw his work as too hermetic, others too "Jewish," as if the reality of the Jews itself was hermetic, sealed, unrelated to the "outside" world (see Christine Ivanovic's "'AlI Poets are Jews' - Paul

Celan's Reading of Marina Tsetayeva"). Not least, and most relentlessly painful were the libelous accusations of plagiarism launched by Claire Goll throughout Celan's career, and even beyond his death.

When this happens - misunderstanding at best, defamation at worst - "the clamps will snap shut." It is again helpful here to look at the German original which reads, "Wenn mitschiffs die BQ sich ins Recht setzt,/ treten die Klammem zusammen." "Klammem"

49 along with clamps also means brackets, parentheses. In the previous stanza, the "heart" is in brackets. When or if the squall of misunderstanding erupts amid the boat-poems manned with Celan's being, the heart will close in upon itself,destroyed by the brackets who gave it a tentative presence in the first place. The streamlet will be but slimy, the heart will disappear from it, and the endlessness of shoveling will hold sway.

The pain Celan communicates is not only personal. It is also the pain of the

Jewish people. The next section begins, "Jacob's voice:" for once giving the voice a definite identity. This section speaks the idea of community so important to Celan, although this community is formed through sorrow. "The tears./ The te ars in the brother's eye./ One stayed clinging, grew./ We dwell inside." Just as shoveling dwells in time, tears

. had become the dwelling-place of Israel. The tear is in the brother's eye conveys the preeminence of alterity in Celan's thought. In a poem in the same collection entitled

"Confidence," he writes, "as if, thanks to stone, there still were brothers" (95). He and

Nelly Sachs addressed each other as siblings, and "sister" appears frequently throughout his work, in reference sometimes to his mother whose age at her death he surpassed, or his wife or his lover. Here, "we" dwell in another's pain as much as in our own. "Breathe, thatl it come loose." The hope is present that this tear, symbol of sorrow, might loosen, and find a way to exist in the world.

The following section is an of inversion of the second. Whereas in the second section the figures made present were the dead with their conch or earpieces, here it is the mouths of the survivors. "Voices in the bowels of the ark:// It is only the mouths/ are saved. Youl sinking ones, hear/ us too." "It is only the mouths/ are saved" on this ark, plays on a recurrent motif in Celan's work, the cleavage in the integrity of the human body.

50 Often it is an eye or an ear, here it is the mouth, as if only those left to testify what has happened are saved, the saved ones can speak. The cleavage in the human body parallels the cleavage in language: neither of them is whole. And yet it is possible that the part contains the who le; it is possible that that which speaks must hear itself as weIl. In this way, Celan is extending the possibility of reception by the one who speaks. It is also clear, however, that the ones going under are the dead - as in the second section, they must hear as well. In and through Celan's poetry, the dead are able to speak and to hear.

Throughout the analysis of this poem we have been picking up clues as to the identity of the voices. From the second section, when we realize that the path of and to community, the path, Celan writes in "The Meridian" "in which language gets a voice" the voices align themselves with that path. "The Meridian" gives us the further clue, with that line, inserted unobtrusively among others, that the nettle-path is one along which, as just quoted, "language gets a voice." Are the se voices from the poem, then, those of language itself? With each verse, is it language itself which speaks? If so, then their ambiguity complements the ambiguity which Celan has identified in language since "that which happened" ("Bremen Address," 396). The dark and light aspects of the voices (including

Jacob's) are in keeping with a language which now must never abandon its "dark well­ springs." Healing is possible, it is present, but only if one takes and takes on the nettle path. Redemption is possible only if one recognizes its source in and as pain.

If the voices are language and if we agree with Martin Heidegger that poetic language is its highest manifestation ("Language" in Poetry, Language, Thought, 241) thus rendering the work's "voices" as poetry itself, then the last verse which begins "Nol voice -

" is troubling in its suspension ofvoice, oflanguage, ofpoetry. Perhaps it is intended to be

51 so. Perhaps Celan is here acknowledging a limitation to language, that something remains which can not be voiced, spoken or written. Yet what is given us is not complete silence.

Instead there cornes "a! late-noise," independent ofhuman (or animal) vocalization. It is so independent that it is "alien to hours," as if it does not fit within time. In this instance, time can be paralleled with air; just as, to regain purity or wholeness, breathing requires a

"breath-tum" beyond the ash-Iaden air, so a moment (and we cannot forget how intimate sound and time are), in order to grasp at its portion of purity, must reach beyond hours, beyond time in which "endlessness shovels away."

The "late-word" plays on time other than by transcending it, for it also implicates the past, as something beyond the present that had not yet arrived or that has come later than it should. The noise is either set to a past moment which it did not meet and thus cornes late, or it is from lateness, the lateness of day or of night, again, this time beyond time. Whatever its origin, it is making itself present, and as such it is "a! gift for your thoughts." That this noise, which is "[n]o voice," which is beyond the bonds of language, is a gift to thought suggests that if language is here impossible, hearing is not. Hearing remains, to the living as weIl as the dead. This verse presages the later "Threadsuns" (from the 1967 collection Breathturn): "Threadsuns/ over the grayblack wasteness.l A tree-/ high thought/ strikes the light-tone: there are/ still song to sing beyond/ humankind". In this short poem, song, which is the quintessence of human existence according to Heidegger, is possible only beyond human presence. In "Voices" sound abides, without voice, that most distinctive human feature according to Humboldt, late to the present, beyond time, beyond speech, "beyond humankind." It nevertheless remains a gift to our thoughts.

This late-noise, this gift is "here at last/ wakened: a! carpel, eyesize, deeply/

52 nicked ... " The noise bears with it a metaphor (the carpel); it is not speech, but encoded image. This is a recurrent tum in Celan's writing, the combining of senses and disparate organs, as it is a noise now which bears an image. The image is of a carpel, the female reproductive system of a flower. In his biography of Celan, Israel Chalfin tells us how close Celan (then Antschel) and his mother were, and many of his earlier poems refer to or

~ddress her directly. The occurrence of the female reproductive unit is at once an encoded reference to his mother, but it is also, in its encodedness as procreation itself, a universalizing reference: by presencing his mother in metaphor, pe presences motherhood itself.

The "late-noise," then, which is "al gift for your thoughts" is the presencing cypher for his mother. It is perhaps to her that he is referring when in the first verse he writes, "What stood by you! on each of the banks/ steps/ mown into another image." Given the darkness into which language has now fallen, to evoke his mother in language he must

"mow" her memory into an image. And yet, it is perhaps the universalizing cypher which saves the memory from being overly and destructively reified through image and word, for it forces us to proffer a labour of aesthetic and hermeneutic interpretation which can accommodate aIl the layers, contradictions and paradoxes which dwell in the image's source.

The thought-gift is "wakened," as if after the dreadful trauma it is emerging from a coma, into the wakefulness of its wounds. This, along with the carpel's "eyesize" hearkens back to the sixth verse, as weIl as to other poems throughout Celan's work which express the necessity and inescapability of weeping, as primaI as the necessity of breathing.

Indeed, with the last two Hnes of the sixth verse, "Breathe, that/ it [the tear] may come

53 100se" we see that for Celan, weeping and breathing are one act.

The carpel, like the water of the tirst verse, is "deeplyl nicked." A wound has been inflicted to the very womb of the Jewish people, to its source, the hou se which would keep its youngest and most helpless seed. The poem concludes, "it! resins, will not! scar over." Here we are reminded of the "green" of the tirst verse, with its possible meanings as youthfulne~s and the birth of spring, or of a fresh wound which does not he al. That the carpel is "eyesize" transforms the resin in imagination into tear, and therefore, as the wound is etemal so are the tears which follow.

The poem "Voices" begins with a deeply coded statement on writing poetry, which is in tum a code for the nature language itself. Within the tropes of the tirst two verses, we have found images and ideas which, within the statement on creating a poem, are charged with Celan's troubled personal experiences and the perception of reality they unveiled. These two verses set the tone for the rest of the poem, determining the mixture of personal (the pain of losing his parents and his child, of living in a world which endures evil) and the universal (the condition of language, of speech, of the dead, of an evil­ enduring world). For Celan and for us interpreting him, the personal is the key to understanding the uni verse of his work. As the poem escalates to the ultimate verse, and our labour of interpretation with it, each word, initially understood as a metaphor for a larger historical reality, becomes charged with personal meanings, and only then is it fully decypherable. As mentioned in the previous chapter, for Celan, a poem is a handshake, it is a message in a bottle, it is a tigure of a human being awaiting reception and recognition.

The wonder of his poetry is that we are called to seek these two conditions, the personal

54 and the universal.

Celan vehemently denied that his poetry was hermetic (Hamburger, 352) and, as painfully difficult as his writing is, this assertion remains incontrovertible on two interrelated counts. On one hand, that its difficulty resides principally in its linguistic fusing of contradictions expresses the nature of reality which is contradictory, which is obscure, unc1ear and ~onfusing. On the other hand, its obscurity reminds us that human beings to one another are obscure, and to understand someone in him- or herself is an infinite task. Dekovah Ezrahi noted that in Nazism we find "the end of the moral struggle, in that the subject - or the subject's right to 'phrase' - and reciprocity has been preempted, allow[ing] Shulamith and Margerete to survive in the imagination as reminders of a mutual recognition that has become an annihilation of one by the other" (266). Our labour with

Celan's poetry is therefore to restitute reciprocity; it is the urgent and urgently needed work of recognizing the speaking source of these poems. Our labour of interpretation is to become part of a chorus of voices which can find a way to say "you" to the figure who utters these words.

55 CHAPTER 3: PRESENCE AND ABSENCE OF THE DIVINE IN THE POETRY OF PAUL CELAN

Introduction

In the past two chapters we have looked at the condition of despair which, in

Celan's poetry, is the condition of our times, of our world "after Auschwitz.'" In the following chapter, we will again take up this theme in relation to the relationship between humanity and the divine in our dark times. It should be understood, however, that this labour is not undertaken in either resignation or concurrence with despair. Rather, taking our cue from Heidegger's "What Are Poets For," we will attempt to look into the midst of despair in order to discover how hope may yet be possible. To make such a claim, that there is nupe for us, through an analysis of Celan's work, we must approach the darkness of his work as it is. That is, if hope is possible and legitimate, it can only be found, construed and reconstructed out of the abyss of a history which has accommodated extermination. Therefore, following Heidegger, we will understand the advent of hope as • requiring a conversion in the heart of the abyss, or, to put it another way, a conversion of the abyss of the world's heart. If conversion is what is needed, then we must understand the condition that must be tumed. Celan's poetry provides us with this double perception.

For as it "traces the abyss" (to paraphrase Heidegger) it is also, in that very movement, the hand, or the voice, which would make things other than they are.

Hope for a better world, for utopia, for redemption is often if not exclusively

1 At least, it should be. The amount of grinning insipidity that invades our consciousness from the dominant and dominating mass culture would indicate that we have largely come to ignore the reality which demands at least the beginning of despair. But perhaps this insipidity is, in the end, yet another symptom ofit.

56 linked with divine reality. It is, indeed, what underpins much of metaphysics, and is its end; the fulfillment of hope is the teleology of religious thought. Often, the divine has been the last repository ofhope, as many of the Biblical psalms suggest. In Celan's poetry, God is often the final repository of despair. Yet from this finality, perhaps, something new emerges; a conception of the divine clear of the old notions of the godhead which failed to become manifest when they were most needed. If in Celan's poetry we find a voice that cornes closest to uttering the truth of our times, we might find there aiso a way to conceive of the divine that is commensurate with that perception.

This chapter, then, deals with the appearance and absence of the divine in

Celan's poetry. It assumes that Celan's visions of reality and its distortions are accurate, and that they in turn reflect the condition of the human-divine relationship; and that only through deciphering Celan's vision of the universe can we begin to conceive the identity of

God, or rather, as such a feat is impossible, to conceive how God relates to human beings, and how human beings can relate to God. Although Heidegger was mentioned above, it will perhaps be more fruitful for us to study this theme by retuming to Phillippe Lacoue­

Labarthe's work on Celan, Poetry as Experience. Even as Lacoue-Labarthe criticizes

Heidegger umeservedly for his Nazi affiliations and, more pointedly, for his subsequent silence, his own thought is heavily informed by Heidegger's. This tension is especially pertinent to a study of Celan, for he read and (for a time at least) admired Heidegger's work, even as he would later despair over the philosopher's silence. Thus taking a scholar who bases his thought on Heidegger while simuitaneously criticizing or ev en condemning rus Nazi affiliations provides us with a dynamic foothold from which to engage with

Celan's vision.

57 The Divine in Poetry

Lacoue-Labarthe opens his short essay, "Sky," by hesitating, on the grounds of both ignorance and propriety, to write about Judaism and the Jewish God. He therefore approaches the question of the divine in Celan's writing by looking instead to the

(Germanie) poetic tradition of which Celan was a part, and to which we could say he

"belonged," as much as he "belonged" to Judaism. In terms of the numinous, the extra- religious and terrifying experience of the "wholly other," Lacoue-Labarthe recognizes

Celan as the inheritor of HOlderlin, as the poet who struggles with the presence of the divine and makes his poetry the site and expression of the encounter with this presence. In this essay, to underpin his consideration of Holderlin and Celan, Lacoue-Labarthe refers to

Heidegger's lecture "Poetically Man Dwells," and his interpretation of divine presence in

HOlderlin's poetry. Here are the verses from "In Lovely Blueness" ("In Lieblicher Blaue") which Heidegger considers:

May, when life is all trouble, maya man Look upwards and say: 1 Aiso would like to be thus? Yes. As long As kindness, which is pure, lasts in his heart, Man not unhappily can measure himself With the divine. Is God unknown? Is He visible as the sky? This 1 rather believe. It's the measure ofmen. Full of merit but poetically man Lives on this earth. But the shadow Ofnight with the stars is not purer, if 1 could put it like that, than Man, who is called the image of God. Is there a measure on earth? There is None.

There are many themes in these lines that are well worth interpreting, both in and of themselves and in relation to Celan's work. We will limit ourselves, like Heidegger and

58 Lacoue-Labarthe, to a few.

The sky is both something we see and do not see. What we do see - its lovely blueness - is not properly itself. There is but a part of it which we see, through which we know that the sky is "there," but we know the blue dome, or the blue colour, is not the sky proper, but only that part which presents itself to visibility; the blue vault does not tell us what the sky is in itself. Like the sky, then, God is unknown; he is as unknown as the sky: we might know that the divine exists, but we can never grasp it. For Heidegger, man lives in the "Dimension" between earth and sky; this dimension is the measure of man. At one end of the Dimension there is the earth, the ground, the seen, felt knowable and known plane of limitation; on the other there is the sky, infinite, invisible and unknown. Lacoue­

Labarthe writes, "But for poetry, taking the measure is always 'relating to something celestial' and measuring oneself with it" (115). The measure of man is thus the unknown, it is the divine. "The Divine, or rather God, is the measure in that he is the unknown"

(115). Man himself is measured by the unknown, in Hegel's terms, the "standard" for man's existence, that against which man is known and knowable. For Heidegger, the

"Unknown One" is the measure of the poet. The poet writes and lives in the dimension determined (Lacoue-Labarthe mlght write, as he did in the essay "Prayer:" "de-termined," signifying the extent, the limitless limit of this dimension) by the infinite sky, by the divine.

The divine for Heidegger is not a being whom we address: this "facelessness"

(see Emmanuel Levinas' book, with a chapter dedicated to Celan, Proper Names) perhaps marks the "default of the gods" and the abyss of our era more than anything else. We do not address it because it is al ways concealed, it is always departing, even in its appearance.

59 This is the only way we can know (of) the divine. Lacoue-Labarthe quotes Heidegger:

"The measure consists in the way in which the god who remains unknown, is revealed as such by the sky. God's appearance through the sky consists in a disclosing that lets us see what conceals itself, but lets us see it not by seeking to wrest what is concealed out of its concealedness, but only by guarding the concealed in its self-concealment. Thus the unknown god appears as the unknown by way of the sky's manifestness. This appearance is the measure against which man measures himself' (116).

Man thus measures himself against a double unknown: that which appears is unknown, but it is also unknown (unseen) in its appearance. The appearance as such is unknowable, even if it were unconcealed, it still could not be known; but in its appearance, the divine is concealed, it appears necessarily as that which is concealed, impenetrable. In this way, the divine maintains, in the Holderlinian sense, its integrity; for if it were known in this mortal world, it would be subject to its order; at a remove, it can maintain its holy purity. It is this unreachable distance, God can still exist for us.

Lacoue-Labarthe ends his essay on God' s distance with the poem,

"Tenebrae," offering us little interpretation of the poem, as if to allow the poem to speak for itself. The brief comment he divulges retums to God's distant neamess, and reorganizes the nature of the "Dimension", determined by God, in which man receives his nature: "The distance between them is the measure here ... (changing the direction of prayer in the name of camaI proximity between the God and man, in order to signify that

God's image is man's blood shed: God present, which is to say withdrawn, not in 'the figure of death,' but in the face of the dead - the exterminated)" (119). The poem, in its details, will serve us as a beginning for an understanding of God's presence in the world and the human relationship to him.

60 TENEBRAE

Near are we, Lord, near and graspable.

Grasped already, Lord, c1awed into each other, as if each of our bodies were your body, Lord.

Pray, Lord, pray to us, we are near.

Wind-skewed we went there, went there to bend over pit and crater.

Went to the water-trough, Lord.

It was blood, it was, what you shed, Lord.

It shined.

It cast your image into our eyes, Lord. Eyes and mouth stand so empty and void, Lord. We have drunk, Lord. The blood and the image that was in the blood, Lord.

Pray, Lord. We are near.

God in this poem is neither Holderlin's nor Heidegger's God. It is, first of aIl, an addressable and an addressed God. One who is in the distance, certainly (for as Heidegger tells us in his essay "The Thing," only distance allows for the approach of neamess; and so his terrible distance now, even as a degraded subject, allows for the "camaI proximity" of those whom he abandoned), but one who exists within the range of human existence, and who must answer to it. In her book Le livre de Job et le destin du peuple Juif (1946),

61 which Celan read and, in a sense, imbibed as the clearest appreciation of the meaning of

Judaism after the Shoah, Margarete Susman writes that what Job sought from God was not consolation from his agony, but a restitution of justice. God's castigation of Job was not prima faci just, for Job had never sinned. If he had done, he could have understood his terrifying punishment within a scheme of justice. That the punishment was incomprehensible meant that God's justice is incomprehensible, that between the mind of

God and the mind of man, between divine justice and human justice there is a gulf, an alienation, that can never be broached.

In the book of Job, God answers Job's accusations by a tremendous revelation ofhis being, before which Job is both humbled and reconciled to God's existing greatness. In

Celan, God never reveals himself, and so reconciliation with him and his justice never occurs. Instead, as we shall see throughout this chapter, God is understood as impuissant, and as "one among the least/ of the Just" ("1 drink wine from two glasses"). Our relationship to him, then, remains one of accusation, and as long as he does not act to contravene this judgment, his impuissance (or indifference?) is legitimated. This is what the lines of "Tenebrae" tell us.

"Tenebrae" speaks of the degradation of both the human and the divine, and as both have been degraded, their positions to one another have evened. No longer is God the great Being before whom all deference and sacrifice must be made. As we will see in

Lacoue-Labarthe's essay "Prayer," the annihilation has deposed God from his inaccessible heights. Rather, its opening stanza tells the Lord of our neamess; through this poeticization of the proximity of God and man, we leam of the nature of both.

In the poem, the community, the "we" could be grasped, but what is the form here to

62 be held? Something "c1awed into" - and now, the bodies are "c1awed into each other, as if/ each of our bodies were/ your body, Lord." Clawing is a desperate and violent ge sture , reminding us of the conditions under which the Jewish people lived, and the degradation of their bodies. At the same time it evokes the desperation of c1awing - c1awing for food, for life. There is an equal degradation suggested on the part of those c1awing, not only on those who are being c1awed into, for it is an animal act, the c1aw replaces the hand. We must recall how important hands are to Celan: they are the receptors and site of pain, as well as being the creators of poems. As such they are the poet's humanity. Reduced to something animal-like with c1aws, they deaden the possibility of feeling pain and obviate the possibility of creating poems. The shadow of the Jews' as weU as the poet's dehumanization thus becomes present in the poem.

The speakers of the poem are c1awing into each other "as if/ each of our bodies were/ your body, Lord," as if the god who would have been their last refuge must be substituted by their neighbours, their fellow sufferers. The need they are imposing on each other must now bear all the need they would once have asked an answer to from God. Yet even while recognizing that human beings must now take up this responsibility toward one another, what can one offer another when they are aU "c1awed into", when those in whom solace is sought are as degraded as those who are seeking it?

Between the tirst and the "descriptive" or "be-imaged" stanzas, Celan demands prayer from God. "Pray, Lord,! pray to us,/ we are near." This demand is posed in light of the stanzas which surround it. That is, given that the subjects of the poem are "c1awed into each other, as if/ each of our bodies were/ your body, Lord," that these tom bodies are seeking sorne kind of comfort or answer from their feUows instead of from God, these

63 desperate and broken bodies become the figures to whom God himself must offer prayer.

Celan is here establishing the victims as the standard of justice against which God is held.

The Jewish prisoners must already seek answers from each other "as if' from God. Since they in their torture must take the place of God for one another, it is only fitting then that

God must take the place of the supplicants.

"Pray, Lord,! pray to us,! we are near" also implies God's absence, that the people are approaching him through their suffering. However, unlike traditional religious concepts of suffering, which conceive of suffering as the precondition to true devotion (wasn't Job's faith ultimately deepened by his misery, inflicted upon him by Satan, the instrument of

God?), this suffering, including degradation of body and spirit, brings them so close to God that they surpass Him. This is a metaphysical position: that there is a suffering which will cause the creature to give up the creator; there is a desolation so great and pervasive that, existing within the human being and without, it makes itself greater than God.

The next stanza contains abyssal images: "Wind-skewed we went there,! went there to bend/ over pit and crater." These are not abstract images, rather, in an economy of language, Celan is presenting to us, in a necessary resistance to specification, the conditions under which prisoners lived. "Wind-skewed" recalls the shoddy apparel they were given, even while they laboured through snow and ice. Skewed by the wind, the "we" of "Tenebrae" have gone "to bend/ over pit and crater." The pit and crater - the latter image evoking the craters of the ice-cold and barren moon, perhaps - are not idealized images, rather they indicate the pits and craters of mass graves, so common throughout

Nazi Europe.

The pit and crater become, in the next image, "the water-trough" and in it is blood.

64 "It was blood, it was,! what you shed, Lord.!/ It shined." It is weIl here to remember that

"Tenebrae," Latin for darkness or shadows, is the teI1l) for Holy Week, the last week of

Lent before Easter, anticipating the commemoration of Christ's crucifixion. Although this is not a Christian poem, the allusion to Christ is clear in these stanzas which refer to blood, in this case, the blood which poured from Jesus' wounds. Jesus here becomes an emblem for a god; more strongly, perhaps, but still correspondingly, he is a figurehead for Jewish suffering. For Celan, representing Jesus in a poem has more to do with recognizing the torture of Jews at the hands of Gentiles than with any kind of pluralism. John Felstiner writes,

To bind the Crucifixion into Jewish agony was no interfaith gesture for Celan - or for Marc Chagall, whose Russian-Jewish scenes he admired. In Chagall's crucifixions, the martyr is an East European Jew in a tallit, amid burning scrolls and synagogues, and there is no salvation, suffering goes on. To imagine their death throes "as if/ each of our bodies were/ your body, Lord," reclaims the Jewish Jesus' suffering from an ecclesiastic ideology that used it against Jews (1995, 104).

The betrayal and the blood Jesus shed correspond to the betrayal and bloodshed of twentieth century (or twenty centuries of) Jews in Europe. Yet Celan was nevertheless living in a Christian world, and he may have used this dual identity of Jesus Christ - as suffering Jew and Son of God - to underscore the metaphysical meaning - or bitter commentary on metaphysical assertions - of this work. Above we considered that the desolation of the Jewish people in a Nazi uni verse could usurp the place of God in such a cosmos. "Pray, Lord,/ pray to us,! we are near." The suffering human beings take the place of God, and God, in the face ofthis suffering, must become the supplicant. In "Tenebrae,"

Jesus Christ, one part God in the Christian Trinity and therefore, theologically, God

Himself, once again becomes the suffering Jew - not God, but as an emblem and member

65 ofJewish suffering he takes the place of God. In the uni verse of this poem, the suffering

Jew becomes aIl there is, or can be said, of God.

The blood shone or, as Felstiner translated it, "shined." This choice of neologism on the translator's part was, he writes in his biography of Celan, probably in keeping with the two recordings he had of Celan reciting the poem. In each, Celan utters the line which reads "Es gHinzte" in the present rather than in the past, "Es glanze" "making the past present" (104), refusing to allow this moment in history to fall into the forgetfulness and limitation of the past. The shining allows for a continuity of the breakdown of the image of

God found in the next stanza. The blood in the water-trough "cast your image into our eyes, Lord.! Eyes and mouth stand so open and void, Lord.! We have drunk, Lord.! The blood and the image that was in the blood." The blood, which should naturally course through the in si de of the organism and not without, giving it life, serves now as the surface which contains the image of God. As Lacoue-Labarthe writes, "God's image is man's blood shed: God present, which is to say withdrawn, not in the 'figure of death,' but in the face of the dead - the exterminated" (119). The blood which acts as mirror compounds the violence associated with image-making that we saw in "Voices": "What stood by you! on each of the banks/ steps/ ground into another image" (trans. modified). It is the symbol of their torture, the blood, which contains the image of the Lord. Again, Celan is pointing to the correspondence of suffering and the godhead, that it is suffering which permits the image to be cast, that suffering is the image reflected.

"Eyes and mouth stand so open and void, Lord" the verse continues, suggesting that even the image in the blood is in fact empty; whatever image could have been in the blood, it could not respond to those who have need of God. "We have drunk, Lord.! The blood

66 and the image that was in the blood, Lord." They have "drunk," taken their fiU, of their suffering and God's image, and neither could provide any nourishment. We must remember that none of these is a voluntary act. The blood is in the water-trough which is itself a substitute or synonym for the "pit and crater" of the mass graves to which the Jews were forced. Thus the blood retums from the symbolic realm to the concrete, referring to the blood of the dead lying in their graves. The image of God lies with the dead, as if it needed their blood to be reflected. Or, as if the blood which the Lord had shed was the blood of the Jewish people and that given the reversaI of Creator an~ creature, it is, again, the blood of the dead and the dead themselves who take the place of God, while he is absent yet, in death, approached (cf. Glenn, 99).

The poem ends with Celan's former command, "Pray, Lord.! We are near." While the first appearance of this injunction gives us the clue to the reversaI of order that is central to the poem, this last one seals it. It follows the poetic expression of the plight of the Jews, the chosen people of God, and after such a description, the reversaI is irrefutable. The faU of the Lord, in his inability or unwillingness to intervene (as we shall see further in the poem, "There was earth inside them") has distanced him from his people, but while formerly this distance was vertical, placing him On High and human beings below, now it is a lateral distance. Overthrown from his position by his inactivity, the Lord has been cast onto the plane of the suffering people. He is approached now not through an ascent of his people, which is now impossible, but by the simultaneity of suffering and wreckage.

The lateral distance between suffering humanity and God - a distance marked, perhaps, not so much by the empty space between earth and sky, but by the endless pits lying in the ground - no longer has "celestial" quality of former times. If we follow

67 Lacoue-Labarthe's analysis and apply it to the poem with which he completed his essay, we have to consider this Heideggerian Dimension in terms not of an appearing concealed

God, Almighty etc., but as a ravaged God, ravaged because his people are ravaged, ravaged insofar as his people are ravaged (because he allowed this ravaging). It is this conception of God, ultimately as inconceivable as the celestial God, which now determines the nature of humanity. Because God does not reveal himself as he did to Job, and because we have made this world an impossible place for such a revelation (see especially Heidegger's

"What Are Poets For"), we have no choice but to fathom God in relation to such terms as are left to us. That is, as a brutalized God, who, in the figures of those who were exterminated, suffered for Nothing. This is the theme that underpins Lacoue-Labarthe's other essay on the presence of the divine in Celan "Prayer," which in turn, underpins our analysis of poems from the No-One 's-Rose collection.

No One and Nothing

The central poem which anchors Lacoue-Labarthe's essay, and which glves the collection its title, is "Psalm" and is worth quoting immediately.

PSALM

No one kneads us again out of earth and clay, no one incants our dust. No one.

Blessed art thou, No One. In thy sight would we bloom. In thy spite.

68 A Nothing we were, are now, and ever shall be, blooming: the Nothing-, the No-One's-Rose.

With our pistil soul-bright, our stamen heaven-waste, our corona red from the purpleword we sang over, 0 over the thorn.

Lacoue-Labarthe identifies "Psalm" as not only being in the form of prayer, but as a prayer itself. He writes, "The prayer seems to nullify itself as an address because it nullifies its addressee by presenting or naming him as No One. But 'No One' only ever means the absence or non-existence of the addressee, not that there is no addressee" (72-3). The non- existence of the addressee - No One rather than Someone, rather than a named God - does not make the statement one of atheism; for, as Lacoue-Labarthe notes, a declaration of atheism would need to assert that God has never existed. The word in the first line, "again" states in its complexity (as we shall see) that there was once a God who existed for us.

"This clearly me ans that someone did so in the past; someone, a god, the god of creation, molded us out of earth and clay and conjured our dust. Or at least, we hum ans believed so; we believed that we were creatures and that someone, the god of this creation, comforted us even in death" (74). What Celan is arguing through this poem, according to Lacoue-

Labarthe, is that this God has become a no one, he has disappeared for us, he has lost his name. "To substitute No One for God is to reveal in a dazzling way that 'God' is not, or was not, a name. This poem has an apocalyptic quality" (73). The apocalypse here, the revelation, is that God is revealed as absence, as not being present; finally, as not being.

69 Thus the first premise upon which Lacoue-Labarthe builds his argument is that

"God" is not a name.

To say that "God" was not a name amounts to saying that "God," long thought the name of aIl names, the name of the name, designated no one to whom to direct an address; it was a word or a concept signifying that which was "whoIly other" than man, but neither more nor less a name than "man" is... As Heidegger says, in substance, before such a (concept of) God, one can neither kneel, nor offer sacrifices, nor pray. And if people believed they could address God, calI him by the "name" God, this was no less paradoxical than invoking No one (the divine, on the other hand, is always named and renamed: Apollo, Jesus, the oblique "Christ." The biblical god is known by several names, or an unpronounceable, written one) (73).

To "calI" God "No One" then is not a great leap from calling him "God." The criticism here is obvious: the abstract conceptualization of God is useless to human beings; human beings do not need a god simply to exist, we need a god whom we can address. Celan's poem does address the god, but insofar as he radically has no name, this address is itself compromised; indeed, it compromises the possibility and integrity of address. For if the

One who should be the "name of aIl names" has no name to be called, then what of aIl the other names, which gain their existence from this source? That is, if at the source of aIl names which ought to be "the name of aIl names" there is no longer any name, what happens to aIl other names? Furthermore, what happens to our ability to address them? Do humans, creatures, lose the power of their names if their source (the name of God) is rendered anonymous, defunct?

This problem finds expression in the penultimate stanza of "Psalm:" "A Nothing/ we were, are now, and ever/ shaIl be, blooming:/ the Nothing-, the/ No-One's-Rose." These lines suggest to us that we have become as empty and anonymous as God. Like God, we are a Nothing, a No One; and thus if we are addressed (by God or by another human

70 being), it will be, in the condition of our times, only through our non-appearance; what is addressed (which, in our name, is our humanity, our creatureliness) will be what is absent.

In the context of this poem our absence, like God's, will be defined and determined by the exterminated. Insofar as God's ravaged presence and absence are to be sought and explicated in the bloodshed of the dead ("Tenebrae"), so is humanity's. To put it more simply: the forces of history have rendered God anonymous ("God' s becoming anonymous ... is historicity; that is, the dislocation of the religious" [76]); if God is the source of our names, his namelessness empties our names of our creatureliness, of our humanity. Therefore, even in our names, we have become anonymous. The mass graves and the "ash in the air" testify to the disappearance of the recognition of our names, creatureliness and humanity. This is our historical condition.

In this condition, which could best be called, above an other qualities, anonymous,

Celan retains the possibility of prayer. "Celan's extraordinary, 'exorbitant' effort consists in keeping open the question 'Who?' [as opposed to 'What?'] even with respect to God and even if, as Heidegger says, the question ('Who is God?') is 'perhaps ... too difficult for man, and asked too early" (75). Beyond the No One found first in the pit and crater, there remains the possibility of another god, a "god to come." Lacoue-Labarthe retums to

Holderlin, and chooses, in the context of the disappearance of God in Celan's poetry,

Holderlin's conception ofretreat over Nietzsche's "God is dead."

"Retreat" is not death; it is, on the contrary, what preserves the god and separates the human being from the divine, what retraces the limit of finitude, for "the immediate, rigorously considered, is impossible for mortals and immortals alike." Which means at least that the immediacy of the god, his pure and simple epiphany, is - as tragedy attests - man's death, or plunge into turmoil. It is the monstrous (ungeheuer) coupling in which the god, too, is lost in man's excess, his enthusiasm. Retreat is thus necessary to preserve the god's "holiness," in the same way that the

71 law commands man to endure the god's "flaw" - because only the flaw helps or saves. For the man retumed to earth (catastrophized), such "lmfaithfulness" is the height of piety. This supposes that epiphany always be conceived as the initial moment of retreat, or the initial test of finitude: man's finite being is his being a­ the os. But it also supposes that the divine be subject to the very history its epiphany - or retreat - sets into motion: the gods have tumed away from the world; perhaps a god is to come (77).

It is only God's retreat which permits man to live; elsewhere Lacoue-Labarthe writes "Re- cited by Celan, the prayer is addressed to God for him to stop the pain, the pure pain that he is in us and between us. Or even, to stop the agony that he is, the agony of death" (85).

God has become pure agon; were he present "in us and between us" we could not bear him.

For aIl that God is absent in this poem, tortured and torturous, he nonetheless exists in the consciousness of the human being, he can still in this poem be addressed, just as in another poem ("There was earth inside them"), a movement is possible from one to none to no one to you; that is, even as no one, God is still addressable as "you" (80). As such,

Celan leaves open the possibility of prayer. Lacoue-Labarthe cites again "The Meridian," and the already cited passage in Celan says that the poem speaks on behalf of the other, on behalf of "who knows," perhaps the wholly other. This wholly other, Lacoue-Labarthe writes, is not to be understood as or reduced to Heidegger's Being, it is not within the parameters of onto-theology, but of the divine proper (hence the remaining possibility of prayer) which has suffered its own degradation, its own becoming-anonymous, and yet survives at the edge of human consciousness.

The movement from nothingness to you indissociably links the movement of the 'encounter' and the movement of God's becoming anonymous. But one must also understand that it is the God, and he alone, who makes possible the address or appeal. A God without a name is needed in order to name, in order to say 'you,' to invoke, and perhaps thus to save names (80).

72 Lacoue-Labarthe's essays are all founded on history, he interprets Celan's words by referring to their point of origin which is the extermination. God' s becoming anonymous, his departure, his "default," to borrow Heidegger's term, is necessary in order to maintain his integrity: if he were in the world, he would be answerable to the world, and how could he answer for "that which happened." His becoming anonymous is as necessary as it is historical, factual.

Yet God's anonymity allows for the encounter. It is in being anonymous that the encounter is authentic; if he were not, the encounter would be fake. That there should be

"something rather than nothing" is possible now only in or from nothingness. "A God without a name" is the reverse side of a "language which has had to pass through the thousand darknesses of death-bringing speech." God's anonymity is akin to language's insurmountable silence. As silence gives a new timber and meaning to language, God's namelessness gives a new meaning to names. And as silence is not a renunciation of language, divine anonymity is not a renunciation of God. It simply imposes a new dictate on the way we are to conceive of and make a place for such a God.

God's becoming anonymous: "0 einer, 0 keiner, 0 niemand, 0 du," ("0 one, 0 none, 0 no one, 0 you" ["There was earth inside them"]) forces the supplicant away from the

(divine) name toward "you." As such, explicitly without falling back on Heidegger's

Being, humans must nevertheless fall back on each other, as in the poem "Tenebrae." With this in mind, let us recall that in "The Meridian," Celan quotes Malebranche's

"attentiveness is the natural prayer of the soul" (Lacoue-Labarthe, 79). Attentiveness is the characteristic of the encounter. In the encounter, one says "you" to another; in saying

"you" and in being called "you" 1 am given back to myself. In relation to the argument

73 being built, if "saying-you" is a form of prayer, and prayer now is given to No One, which is wholly other and to whom we can at best only refer as "you," attentiveness, the . encounter, "saying-you" also invokes the wholly other.

But to address someone else, to love him, is necessarily to address in him the wholly other, in the very recognition of alterity and always"UIlder the threat that the alterity might take refuge in its ab-soluteness ... Calling the Vou Not-You [a reference to the poem "Zurich, at the Stork," dedicated to the encounter with Nelly Sachs] says: if l call you, it is the other in you that l caU in calling you "you"; you whom l caU and can call... From nothingness, calling the wholly other, even if he is "no one" is the very possibility of address, of "speaking to," of "sayirig you"... And it is in this sense that every poem is a prayer (83-4).

In this way, accepting that a named, definite God, has departed from the world, the encounter now bears and must bear what there is left of the divine. To modify the quote on the previous page, it is saying you which keeps al ive the possibility of God, as well as the correlative possibility of names. It is in the encounter, of which the poem is the most exquisite expression, that prayer is still possible.

And yet, although Lacoue-Labarthe will never assert an atheism present in

Celan, he identifies in his later poetry a movement to be "clear" of God. He quotes verses from the poem "Hour of the Barge""

... cast from the throne, he tumed inwards, speaks among brows on the shore:

clear of death, clear of God.

Lacoue-Labarthe understands "clear of death" as referring to the extermination, in which humanity has paid its debt to death. Since we owe nothing to death, are thus "clear" of it, as we have seen too much of it or in it, we are no longer determined by it. If we are no

74 longer determined by death, if we are not "mortal" in the sense of being defined by that which is immortal, we are no longer "creatures," we exist exactly in no relation to God whatsoever; we owe nothing to God in the same degree and for the same reasons that we owe nothing to death.

The formulation III the verses above are a re-working of the mystic Meister

Eckhart's words, who prayed to be delivered from God, in order to be free of a concept of

God which would inhibit a grasp of his conceptlessness, and the freedom from death refers to the Christian doctrine of resurrection. According to Lacoue-Labarthe, Celan' s desire for freedom is, ifnot atheist, absolute. Lacoue-Labarthe writes,

Celan's introduction of "clear of death" cannot mean the "death of death" which is really the Hegelian notion of God's death (the resurrection... Rather, Celan's formulation means: Given that we no longer owe anything to death, that we have no debt to,is or have already paid it everything (the allusion is clear), we are in effect - and without as king God, "who... wanted aIl that / who... knew aIl that" - clear of God. The citation arrives in the prayer's stead and in its place; the poem as it is henceforth uttered by the "deposed" or "fallen," the desublimed (der Enthohte, who no longer inhabits the heights), revealing precisely through this that "there is no longer a God," rather than that "there is no God." Celan's poetry would then perhaps also be the place where the essence of poetry ceases to be prayer. Or more accurately, where it renounces prayer (86).

It is thus this movement from the despair of nothingness in poetry which is also prayer, to the despair of the renunciation of prayer in poetry that we must bear witness to and think through, no longer philosophically, but within the words of Celan's poetry themselves.

We have seen, through Lacoue-Labarthe's analysis, that the metaphysical God has been rendered a No One through the historical occurrence of innumerable deaths and unthinkable monstrosity. This No One is both the absence (departure) of the divine, and the becoming-anonymous of the deity. The poem that surrounds this metaphysical

75 statement refers to God's necessary counterpart: humanity, or more precisely, the human being, for as Margarete Susman notes in relation to the Book of Job, it is the individual who matters to God. In this poem, then, God's counterpart is the human being, the community of human beings.

1 would posit that there are two ways of understanding the first person plural of this poem. On one hand, in its present and subjunctive tenses, the community speaking here is always the present one; these words belong in the mouth of every reader and every community of readers. It refers to humanity now. On the other hand, Celan, despairing of being a "witness for the witness," that is, for those who "witnessed" the gas or the bullet, etc., nevertheless spoke for the dead, he gave himself, impossibly (he recognized although did not concede to this impossibility), to their cause. Let us consider this poem in these two modes.

The first line, which sparked Lacoue-Labarthe's essay, reads, "No one kneads us again out of earth and clay," and should for our purposes be understood hand in hand with the next, "no one incants our dust." The earth and clay of course refer to the biblical myth of creation, that God formed Adam from a lump of clay and breathed life into him. In the first line, Celan marks the termination of the myth and thus of myth itself. Lacoue­

Labarthe writes, "[Celan] knows with overwhelming certainty where the nostalgia for muthos, and the frenzied attempt at remythologization (which Holderlin escaped, but with which Heidegger compromised himself weIl beyond 1933 's proclamations) led Germany

(Europe)" (77-78). With this initial line, Celan is clearing himself and us of the mythological aspects of our existence; there is no longer any pre-history to which we can bind ourselves or with which we can identify. Our condition, which is in need of being

76 "kneaded again" into existence, is without this possibility. This is confirmed by the following line: "no one incants our dust." Dust in Celan's lexicon is a synonym for ash, and ash is the representation of those whose bodies were destroyed in the mass crematoria of the death-camps. These dead are beyond the revivifying powers of God; God cannot bring the ash back to life; in the face of, because of, this death, there is no God to incant this dust. 2

This interpretation by itself, however, in light of Lacoue-Labarthe's, is inadequate; it is too simple, too one-sided. For Lacoue-Labarthe, "No One" is substantive; it is the non-name of the anonymous God. As such, he exists in a realm apart from humanity. He exists not only in absence, in the spatial sense, but also apart from the present in the temporal sense. This is a paradox, as that which is not (i.e. does not exist in the present) is not (i.e. does not exist [see esp. St Augustine's tracts on time in his Confessions]). In light, however, of the "thinkable unthinkable" which occurred in history, the paradox will stand.

"No One," then, is a being, existing wholly outside of history; but history, time, as

Celan tells us in "The Meridian" is the domain of the world, of our world which has been radically demythologized and as such, has taken on time as the limit of the essence of human being. T 0 say that God exists outside of time is not to retum to familiar conceptions of an etemal God; rather it is to state that God exists apart from human existence, which is delimited by time, by the present, by the "accent of the contemporary," as Celan says in "The Meridian."

2 Although 1 am as hesitant as Lacoue-Labarthe to address tenets of Judaism, it is nevertheless worth noting that in traditional (that is, non-Reform) Judaism, the human body should be buried rather than cremated, in order to respect and reverence the material presence of the human being (creature) which served him and enabled his spiritual actions or being in the world. Thus the mass cremation of the Jewish people was a fmal and almost absolute obviation oftheir being; and the impossibility of "incant[ing]. .. dilst" marks the cessation, or at least suspension, of the spiritual presence in human beings. In its representation in Celan's work, it is a further de-mythologization, a further repudiation of spiritual assertions made of our existence.

77 Nevertheless, we must retum to the paradox: inasmuch as human being is delimited by the present, the beyond-present exists; it remains as the "place" of absence. A poem from the collection Atemwende, in English, Breathturn, speaks of it.

Threadsuns, over the grayblack wasteness. A tree- high thought strikes the light-tone: there are still songs to sing beyond humankind.

This is not a poem which touches on the divine, yet it says that "beyond humankind," that which is most definitive of humanity, song, can still be sung, thus asserting a "place" (a utopia, perhaps, or as Lacoue-Labarthe writes, "u-topia," a place that is not yet place) beyond terriporally-defined human existence. As much as it is beyond humankind now, it is where humanity can be given back that which is most essential to it, where it could rec1aim itself. In "Threadsuns" only humankind is included in this place. In "Psalm" God, who is still at this stage No One exists with it.

In the second stanza, Celan profers a common prayer to "No One:" "Blessèd art thou, No One." This blessing is as genuine as it is ironic. Following Laocue-Labarthe's understanding of the poem as prayer, the blessing can be understood as directed sincerely to the God become No One. No One is blessèd insofar as it exists in non-existence. It is directed to God only because he is absent. That God has become No One due to "that which happened," renders this a very bitter line; the God that is blessèd, as Lacoue-

Labarthe notes, "knew of aIl this ... wanted aIl this" (''There was earth inside them").

Calling him here and throughout the poem "No One" is bitter, it is accusatory and not

78 without cynicism. The Jewish god is implied behind the non-name of No One. Implicit in this blessing is the query whether God can be blessed as anything other than No One.

"In thy sight would/ we bloom" (the literaI translation of "zulieb" in the German original is "for your sake") marks the paradoxical relationship that still might remain between humanity and God, yet the following line, which in German reads "Dir/ entgegen," translated by John Felstiner as "In thy/ spite," also implies that the speakers would bloom "against" God, echoing Celan's lines from the poem "Zurich, at the Stork:"

Our talk was of your God, 1 spoke against him, 1 let the heart Ihad hope: for his highest, death-rattled, his wrangling word -

In both cases, God exists precisely as that object which must be rejected. God is allowed a kind of existence, but he is not entitled reverence. His existence is given him in order to be able to blaspheme and to reject.

Blooming occurs in both the second and the third stanzas. It is an indication of life, of continuity, of regeneration. In the context of this poem, however, that which blooms does not have an immediate relation to growth and existence. Rather, that which blooms is the Nothing.

A Nothing we were, are now, and ever shaH be, blooming: the Nothing-, the No-One' s-Rose.

79 In this stanza, Celan is clearly and incontrovertibly establishing the relationship between humanity and No One. These lines are heavy with the "fate" of the Jewish people, for the various tenses can apply to the various eras in time and the conditions in which the Jewish people lived. "A Nothing/ we were, are now, and ever/ shaU be ... " These words, taken from (or given to) the silenced mouths of those who perished, can refer specificaUy to

Auschwitz. Those who peri shed there into dust, into nothing, were nothing at that moment, have so remained and will so remain, since they have neither bodies nor names with which to be resurrected. Yet this condition of the Jews is not original to the Shoah, for their historical condition in a Christian uni verse had always been one of negation. The Jew had always been a pariah, a nothing, excluded from the world by virtue of his Jewishness (see

Margarete Susman's Le livre de Job et le destin du peuple Juif). Celan, who continued to live under anti-Semitic attacks, could hardly have hoped for a quick restitution of such injustices.3

This stanza also bears its metaphysical meaning. Above we saw how the nameless

God became No One; a God who loses his grasp on his creatures thus loses his name, his identity. For the creature, who can neither caU a nameless God, nor kneel nor sacrifice to him, God ceases to exist. He exists as the lack of God, as absence. He (the divine) is recognized as that which is not there. If the dust of the first stanza belongs to the community speaking throughout the poem, if it is the community, then they are truly a

Nothing. Both the divine and the human become defined in this work by Auschwitz: God has become No One, human beings have become Nothing. It is a further metaphysical

3 For a thought-provoking consideration of the "role" of the Jew in European consciousness, see Christina Ivanovici's article, '''Ail poets are Jews:' Paul Celan's Reading of Marina Tsvetaeva," in which she looks at Celan's poem "Das Buch aus Tarussa" as weil as Yevtushenko's "Babii Yar" and considers the role of suffering in poetic language, and thus the role of the poet in a monstrous world, making the Jew and the poet kin.

80 statement, if God is No One, if he is absence, his creature must be Nothing: absence can only engender a void.

As God-become-No One is now, through his absence, given to exist outside of time, the human being-become-Nothing on the contrary exists in time, through and throughout time. And yet, just as the radically absent God can be addressed, so are the annihilated capable of an existential act: they can bloom. They are coming into flower both in and of themselves, in the broken compound of the Nothing-rose; but they are also coming into existence in relation to the absent and obviated God: die Niemandrase, the No-One's-Rose.

This Nothing is as such insofar as it "belongs" to or is a part of No One. If the community of speakers, the Nothing, is kindred to the absent God, No One, then they exist in the same sphere of radical absence. They are the temporal counterpart to God's extra-temporality:

God exists outside of time; they exist as Nothing in time. This Nothing is what remains of

God's creativity; if God is known by his creation ii(see, for a Christian example, St

Bonaventura's The Mind's Raad ta Gad), the only manifestation we can know is Nothing.

To rework Lacoue-Labarthe's thought on "Tenebrae," what there is of God is to be found only in the disappeared ashes of the dead.

In the final stanza, Celan rescues the community from total annihilation, for he gives them a being in the form of the rose .. Each existential quality of the annihilated, which we will look at in detail in a moment, is given a corresponding part of a "real" rose.

Let us read again what Celan writes.

With our pistil soul-bright, our stamen heaven-waste, our corona red from the purpleword we sang

81 over, Oover thethom.

The rose is a metaphor for the Jewish people, and its existence here in language as metaphor compounds again the absence of an actual existence in language or in the world.

A metaphor for a thing is communicative - death in Shakespeare, for example, is "the undiscovered country from whose boume no traveler retums," but it is not the thing itself.

It relies on the power of association, and in this way proves the interdependence aU thing on others for their expression.4 But here, because the metaphor is not the thing, there is a lack of presence in actuality. Death is not a country, it has no place. The metaphor represents the Jewish people, but because it is not the people, the people are not actuaUy present in the creation (or, in Heidegger's terms, in the appearance) of the metaphor. The

Jewish dead are given a kind of presence, in an emblem of ultimate beauty no less, but they are not given back their actuality. Thus, they are given an existence, but, like the No One and Nothing, it is not in actual time or place. Their existence must exist along with the departed and absent divinity.

Yet although the rose exists primarily symbolicaUy, Celan's careful naming of each part gives it substance, preventing us from dismissing the image; rather in the parts of the rose, the Jewish dead are given a means to stand, through their absence, in the present.

With our pistil soul-bright, our stamen heaven-waste, our corona red from the purpleword we sang over, Oover

4 1 am tempted here to posit that language, at least the human language we are given, is inherently dialectical - but that would be the subject of another thesis. For the relationship between the creative God, things and human expression, see Walter Benjamin's essay, "On Language as Su ch and on the Language of Man."

82 the thorn.

The pistil is the female reproductive organ of the flower, and that it should he, in this poem, "soul-bright" suggests the memory of the poet's mother, so often recalled in his earlier poetry. She figures here, brightly, as soul; not as physical presence. It also suggests that while the presence or existence of God is dubious, the presence and existence of the

Jewish people, contained in the Mother, is not; its soul, irrespective of its connection to the godhead, remains, brilliant.

The stamen is the male reproductive organ of the flower, and that it is here

"heaven-waste" expresses the seed of the Jewish people which exists now as waste in the skies. This association is given more clarity in another poem, "Radix Matrix" in the middle of which Celan writes,

Who, who was it, that stock, that murdered one, that one standing black into heaven: rod and testis - ?

(Root. Root of Abraham. Root of Jesse. No One's root - 0 ours.)

By evoking the skies and the wasted seed therein, Celan is evoking the smoke that rose into them from the death-camps. The stamen, "rod and testis" abides there, burnt and wasted.

While the image refers to the Jewish seed, to its past (root) and future (seed) and thus aligns the possibility of life with the ineffaceability of annihilation, it also refers, perhaps, to God the Father, God too becomes waste in the heavens.

According to Jerry Glenn, the red corona of the next line is a reference to Christ's corona, but not as a conciliatory inclusion of Christian themes into Celan's poetry; rather

83 the reference borrows the image and applies the suffering of the crown of thorns to the

Jewish people. What distinguishes this suffering from that of Jesus of Nazareth is that this suffering was - for nothing and no one. The corona, in botanical terminology, is also the inner circle of petaIs in the head of the flower, therefore if the rose is a symbol for the

Jewish people, might not the corona be its inner, most vulnerable condition? Corona also means the petaI collective; therefore here it can symbolize the bond of the Jewish people, the "we" which appears throughout the stanza, both through the beauty of the rose and in the reddening ofblood that is upon it. The corona is made red by the "purpleword," itself a difficult image to unpack. Purple, a colour for blood, is also a royal colour, so the corona is reddened "from" the blood of Israel's monarch - that is, the people themselves. Yet purple here is also associated with "word," the corona has a language, it speaks, both of the blood it has shed and of its royalty; it speaks in the colour of its royalty and blood, the blood of its people.

From the locus of the purpleword, symbol of Israel and blood and language itself,

"we sang! over, 0 over/ the thorn." Celan is locating "us" in the language of the kingly dead; it sings over the thorn, over that which continues to inflict pain, making both the pain and the ability to sing over it present. Or perhaps not present but concomitant, as the singing which occurs is conjugated in the past: "the purpleword we sang! over 0 over/ the thorn" as if even singing belongs to the past. It is a reminiscence of song, of what was possible before the War. It is also the sound of the lament over the pain inflicted by the thorn, and what this thorn must represent. This last is rather difficult, as the thorn, which one might quickly conclude to be the pain of the camps, is part of the rose, as if ta say that the suffering has become (or has always been?) a part of its being. The act of singing in the

84 poem takes place in the past, indicating this being's existence outside oftime, that singing is not more. What remains now is silence, or, as Lacoue-Labarthe quoted, the "singable remainder" of song.

The "singable remainder" appeared in the first chapter of this thesis in relation to the condition of language after Auschwitz. Song in this chapter has taken on another shade of meaning. It refers not solely to language as such, but to the existential condition of human beings, both in terms of this historic world, and to the realm which exists only in absence, as that which may yet appear, but remains "beyond humankind." We have found that song is primarily an expression of pain, and that this pain has become as essential to being as the thorn is to the rose. In the context of this poem, pain might be an essential element to God, since the rose representing the Jewish people is the No-One's-Rose, the anonymous God's rose. In this case, every element of the flower, the soul-bright pistil, the heaven-waste stamen, refers back to God's wasted creativity. Pain for Celan has become an essential element in the site where God and humanity meet.

l cannot tell whether there is hope in Celan for a restitution of religion, for a

"religion to come." The only thing which could inaugurate such a thing is a proper ethical response to the Shoah, in thought and in the world, as Adorno meant when he wrote, '''The only philosophy which can be responsibly practiced in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate aIl things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption ... Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light'" (quoted in Ezrahi, 262). It seems we are a long way from such a response on any kind of global scale, for as the late Jacques Derrida writes in "Shibboleth for Paul

85 Celan," "there is a Holocaust for every date." Lacoue-Labarthe gives us a clue in the penultimate essay of his book on Celan. Here, moving away from Heidegger's interpretation, he gives us an understanding of Holderlin's "In Lovely Blueness:"

This also is the measure for Holderlin: kindness, Freundlichkeit, as the imitation of divine goodness - virtue and pleasure; it shows itself as the sky, that is, as light's modesty - in its very nudity - and as the jubilation of reserving the visible in the self. What is lacking is the "source": grace - as kindness is reserve. God is not (absent). He goes away. He lets man die, lets him be human, leaves him kindness in the capacity to die. Something like love, then; what God gives in withdrawing from mortals' desire (will), which is always to be immortal (119). ln the next, final and brief essay, Lacoue-Labarthe condemns Heidegger's silence, and quoting two poets, one from the dawn of Western culture and one who lived certainly through its darkest night, encourage us to "think through pain." ln Agammemnon,

Aeschylus writes, "To leam to know through pain ... " and in Requiem, her book on the

Stalinist terror, Anna Akhmatova writes, "No, it is not l, it is someone else who suffers.! l,

1 could not have suffered thus." From mythology to concrete history, the poets caU upon us, upon our kindness to think through pain. It would require this terrifying venture through suffering to find again the presence of the divine.

86 Conclusion·

The poet Paul Celan, originally Paul Antschel, was born in Czernowitz, once the capital of the Austro-Hungarian province of Bukovina. Although the city, annexed during the War to Romania, still exists today within the borders of the troubled Ukraine, Bukovina itself, like the Austro-Hungarian Empire, does not, and the fate of his native city, which he evokes in the Bremen Address, parallels the fate of Celan himself. As the city lost the province to which it belonged, so Celan lost his parents and his home; as Czernowitz found itself in a foreign country, Celan after the War lived out his self-imposed exile from

Eastern Europe in France. It was there, in Paris, that he tried - perhaps impossibly - to start his life anew, and it was there that he ended it, in suicide, in the Seine river.

Celan's aesthetic, his verbal style, is extremely difficult, deliberately and necessarily so. Indeed, without understanding the linguistic cosmos in which he wrote and lived, much of his work is aIl but impossible to understand. And yet, there is a hypnotic pull to his poems, a force which leaves the reader dumb-founded, or transfixed. If moved, hopefully, by his haunting words, the reader will be impelled to leam more about the personal as weIl as historical cosmos from which Celan drew the substance of his poetry.

If he or she is willing to undergo this labour, Celan's struggle will in part have been successful, for his work necessitates the full recognition ofreality. This reality is two-fold.

On one hand, it is of the world we live in, with aIl its horrors, disjunctures, hypocrisies and contradictions. On the other hand, it is the reality of the poet, the man, the figure himself.

For Celan and his fellow survivors especially, and for us as weIl, the ground of reality is constituted now primarily by destruction. In his essay, "Two Poems by Paul Celan,"

87 Phillippe Lacoue-Labarthe writes,

The extermination gave rise, in its impossible possibility, in its immense and intolerable banality, to the post-Auschwitz era (in Adomo's sense). Celan said: "Death is master from Deutschland" [trans. modified]. It is the impossible possibility the immense and intolerable banality of our this time (dieser Zeit). It is always easy to mock "distress," but we are its contemporaries; we are at the endpoint of what Nous, ratio and Logos, still today (heute) the framework for what we are, cannot have failed to show: that murder is the first thing to count on, and elimination the surest means of identification (8).

Celan's poetry reaches into the depth of this framework and sketches out the terrain for us.

In this way, in his works, if we perceive our reality along with Celan, we may begin to fathom a way to redeem it.

We also, in his work, through a labour of interpretation, come to perceive the human being Paul Celan himself. If the framework of the world-order is based on elimination and murder, the intensive labour to decipher Celan's poems is a labour at reaching him as a human being. Indeed, understanding that it is a human being who wrote these poems should be the standard with which we approach our study of them: in seeking the figure as he speaks (as he expounded in "The Meridian"), we reverse the annihilating motion of Auschwitz. Poetry is often considered a limb of Art; it were better if it were recognized as the extended hand of a human being.

Celan's poetry focuses first and foremost on the condition of being - of being human - in the world. His perception of reality is identical with his perception of the social and existential condition of those living and dying in it. The divine, like light, figures in his work only to be succumbed again by shadow. This, it seems to me, is also the condition of human beings in the world. In this very concrete abyss of the social-historical world, we must find a way to conceive of the holy - if wé are to consider it at aIl - which is

88 compatible with it. Although the old notions of the godhead will continue to help us and guide us in this matter, if we are to conceive of God at all (and the question is not entirely resolved that we should), it must be in light of this event which has legitimately cast an inexorable shadow of doubt and disbelief on such a proposition.

The issues here at work are part of a body of scholarly work, begun at the end of

Celan's career and ongoing today. Of the earliest works on Celan, we have Dietlind

Meinecke's Wort und Name hei Paul Celan, Jerry Glenn's extensive study, the tirst in

English, Paul Celan (1970), and Peter Szondi's seminal work, Celan Studies (originally published in German in 1972, translated into English in 2003). Work continues to be undertaken today by Jacques Derrida, in Béliers: Le dialogue ininterrompu: entre deux infinis, le poème (2003), Julia Kristeva in "Paul Celan: Celanie, la douleur du corps nomade," published in the July-August 2001 issue of Magazine littéraire, and Jean Bollack in L'écrit: Une politique dans l'oeuvre de Paul Celan (2003). From the many angles that constitute today's philosophical and literary scene, Celan's work continues to form, today, the brilliant prism with which to decipher - or recipher - an incomprehensible world.

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