Poets, Belief and Calamitous Times . in calamitous times When old certainties lose their outlines, Virtues are negated, and faith fades.1 Gwynith Young Submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy June 2006 Department of English University of Melbourne 1 Primo Levi, ‘Huayna Capac’, Collected Poems, (London: Faber & Faber, 1988), 35. ii iii Abstract My research in this thesis covers the religious discourse of six contemporary poets who write belief from a position of calamity. Yehuda Amichai writes from the constant wars fought since the founding of the state of Israel; Anne Sexton from psychiatric illness; Seamus Heaney from the sectarian violence of Ireland; Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs from the twentieth century's greatest calamity, the Holocaust; and Yves Bonnefoy, from the language theories of post-modernism, which are calamitous for a poet. My hypothesis is that under the pressures of calamity, in their resulting fragile subjectivity, poets will write an over-cohesive statement of belief, in which ambiguity and contradiction are suppressed, but that these qualities may be discernable through both traces and gaps in the discourse. In all except one of the poets, I have found this to be the case. Only Nelly Sachs avoids this pattern, and integrates evil and belief. Yehuda Amichai's over-cohesive statement of belief asserts the absence of God and calls God to account. Breaking through this overt discourse however, and dominant by Amichai's final book, is evidence of a nurturing spiritual belief. Anne Sexton repudiates her writing of Christ as Divine mother, companion, liberator and nourisher and reinscribes a patriarchal metanarrative in her 'Rowing' poems. She nevertheless unconsciously subverts this Divine figure. Seamus Heaney's primary discourse of belief is of silenced Catholicism. Alternative discourses appear as traces and rise to dominance—a pagan sexuality, a Jungian discourse of water, the use of emblems and a discourse of silent Presence. iv Paul Celan's overt religious statements are primarily an angry repudiation. He inscribes an absent God, and a bitter Jewish-Christian dialectic. Nevertheless, Celan finally writes a luminous, simple poetry in which an immanent spirituality wells through. Nelly Sachs, alone among these poets, writes a religious discourse which integrates the existence of evil with belief and includes no over-cohesive statement. Sachs draws on the mystical writings of the Kabbalah, Jacob Boehme, and Christian mystics. Her beliefs include resurrection, rebirth, and the possibility of the containment and transformation of evil within the Divine. Yves Bonnefoy writes religious Presence in a liquid and elusive language which hovers between form and formlessness, and in a discourse of the simple real. In his poetry the incompatibility between his two irreconcilable theories of language is suppressed. Unlike the other four poets who suppress ambiguity within their religious discourse, Bonnefoy's suppression occurs within his discourse of calamity. * v Declaration This is to certify that (i) the thesis comprises only my original work towards the PhD, (ii) due acknowledgement has been made in the text to all other material used, (iii) the thesis is less than 100,000 words in length, exclusive of tables, maps, bibliographies and appendices. vi vii Acknowledgments My thanks go to my principal supervisor, Professor Peter Steele SJ, whose brilliance and depth of knowledge have been an invaluable scholarly resource for me during the writing of this thesis, whose reputation as an outstanding academic has opened doors for me, and whose gentle wisdom and support have enabled me to work with delight and satisfaction within the scholarly enterprise. During our academic time together he has shared his own homilies and papers with me and has even written a sonnet about Cormac my cat; his enrichment of my life has gone far beyond a supervisor's duty. I thank, too, Professor Bernard Muir who supervised me during Professor Steele's sabbatical leave. I wish to thank my lifetime friend and husband, Geoff Young. Over eleven years he has given me maximum support and assistance to pursue a student's and scholar's path which he does not share himself, and I thank him for his generosity. Third, I thank Jan Rasche, who, by e-mail and over cups of coffee, has been willing to share my chapters step by step, Thelma Percy who has helped me financially and read my chapter drafts sympathetically, and those other friends and family members who have been prepared to ask "How's it going?" and then to fit their friendship around the demands of my research. Thankyou, everybody. * viii ix Table of Contents Title page i Abstract iii Declaration v Acknowledgments vii Table of Contents ix Introduction xi Relevant Literature xxiii Chapter 1. Yehuda Amichai: The Calamity of War 1 Chapter 2. Anne Sexton: The Calamity of Psychiatric Illness 43 Chapter 3. Seamus Heaney: The Sectarian Violence of The Troubles 89 Poets of the Holocaust 131 Poets of the Holocaust: An Introduction to the Issues 133 Poets of the Holocaust: The Adorno Statement 137 Chapter 4. Paul Celan: Writing the Holocaust through a Fractured Discourse of Absence 145 Chapter 5. Nelly Sachs: The Holocaust, the Wounded Survivor and the Transformation of Evil 201 Chapter 6. Yves Bonnefoy: The Post-modern Crisis of Language and of Loss 255 Conclusion 303 Works Cited 309 Bibliography 323 * x xi Introduction "The angel of the Lord appeared to him and said to him, 'The Lord is with you . .' Gideon answered him, 'But, sir, if the Lord is with us, why then has all this happened to us? And where are all his wonderful deeds that our ancestors recounted to us?' " (Judges 6:12–13). The title of my thesis, Poets, Belief and Calamitous Times is drawn from the poetry of Primo Levi, in which he speaks of . calamitous times When old certainties lose their outlines, Virtues are negated, and faith fades.2 Reflecting on Levi's concepts, I have chosen to research contemporary poets in whom religious belief is mapped against the discourses of calamity. I have sought to trace in the work of each poet the influence of the drastic on her or his religious beliefs, to contrast and compare the poets with each other, and to identify the factors in the calamity which are significant in religious response. I agree with Ben Belitt that, under conditions of calamity, poets will tend to discern an "apparent contradiction between a calamitous turn of events —tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, the sword—and the absence of an intervening God, [as] all evidence points to the removal of God from the riotous world of his creation."3 It is my hypothesis that under such conditions, poets will display a flight to metanarrative and religious closure and will tend to write over- coherent poetic worlds of belief, because the religious ambiguities which 2 Primo Levi, Collected Poems, trans. Ruth Feldman & Brian Swann (London: Faber & Faber, 1988) 35. xii are tolerable under less stressful situations will be suppressed. I have addressed these poets in order to test this theory. Critical writings in this broad territory determine the range of my field. Self/Same/Other,4 the collected papers from the 1996 Oxford conference on literature and theology, has proved invaluable for the formulation of my question. I am particularly indebted to Heather Walton, whose introductory essay "Re-visioning the Subject in Literature and Theology" extended my understanding of the possibilities of the suppression of alterity where subjectivity is fragile. My selected poets are Yehuda Amichai, Seamus Heaney, Anne Sexton, Yves Bonnefoy, Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs, all of whom are major poets of calamity whose statements of religious belief are significant in their work. Although I am conscious that even superficially similar poets who are writing from the same situation of calamity experience it through different filters of language and ideology, and from differing past experiences and concepts of meaning, in choosing these poets I have sought diversity both in personal stance and in concepts of calamity; I have not wished to limit my thinking to war and its atrocities. I have chosen three believers from a Christian background and three Jewish believers, two women and four men, two post-modern thinkers (Bonnefoy and Celan), three whose thinking is primarily modernist (Heaney, Sexton and Sachs), and one (Amichai) who combines elements of the two. On a continuum between high and popular culture, Celan occupies one pole and Amichai the other. The poets' calamities include 3 Ben Belitt, Literature and Belief: Three "Spiritual Exercises" (New York: Bennington College, 1985) 7. xiii constant warfare, sectarian violence, psychiatric illness, crises of language, meaning and mortality, and the Holocaust. Several texts provide the basis for my thought. Alan Mintz's Hurban: Responses to Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature,5 David Roskies' Against the Apocalypse6 and Robert Alter's Defenses of the Imagination7 all explore paradigmatic religious responses to Jewish disaster; Allen Feldman's Formations of Violence8 is set against Northern Ireland's sectarianism. Alan Mintz's Hurban: Responses to Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature9 reads the Holocaust literature of the Israeli interpretative community against the background of Jewish literary traditions in order to investigate the interplay of traditional responses as expressed in prophecy, liturgy, exegesis and poetry. Mintz's emphasis is on creative survival; he concludes that in the Jewish tradition "it is the story of the transcendence of catastrophe rather than of the catastrophe itself which is compelling."10 He defines the catastrophic element in events as that which has "the power to shatter the existing paradigms of meaning, especially as regards the bonds between God and the people of Israel" and finds that the literary imagination is paramount in the reconstruction of these paradigms.11 Mintz stresses the Hebrew scriptures' book of Lamentations 4 Heather Walton and Andrew W.