Week #4: Celan, continued

[J. Scappettone]

Dear students,

I am sorry that a sequence of weather-related internet disruptions and weather-related travel disruptions has me posting this so late. 

For Tuesday, please read through Lightduress in the Celan, and the Derrida and Adorno essays. Your assignment is simply to choose one of the essays we've read in conjunction with Celan and post 1-2 pages about whether its terms are adequate to Celan's poetry. Reading the poems closely (choose one example!), are we obliged to qualify or transform the argument in any way?

Also, an announcement: next week's office hours will be held on Wednesday from 2:30-4:30 and by appointment.

Best,

Jennifer

[Michael Dango]

I'm interested in Adorno for Celan, and whether his argument about the paradox of the lyric subject applies equally beyond Adorno's prewar examples.  "The Syllable Pain" (91) has been helpful for me. On the one hand, its first stanza reads almost as a primer for Adorno: Celan's "I came to itself" and "It gave itself into Your hand," animating an unresolved triangulation of personal and object pronouns, rehearses Adorno's subjective/objective doubling of language and the transformation of objective conditions into subjective expressions, which are themselves objects. Then Celan's "everything" entering "empty forms" reads similarly to Adorno's "spontaneous" irruption of social content into a poem and the lyric subject's "embodiment" of the "whole".   Finally (to finish the stanza), Celan's "mixed / and unmixed / and mixed / again" describes the Moebius strip circuit of the particular and the collective and the "I" within a cosmos where it is both part of a whole and the receptacle of it.

In such a stanza, it is not that Adorno does not provide a way to read Celan: it's that Adorno provides too easy a way. The fit is such that criticism does not provide a way of illuminating, excavating,  &/or describing Celan; rather, it is mimetic, or poetry has absorbed the theory presented to explain it. There's no longer a historical gap, either, between the theorist and the poem, as there was for Adorno and Mörike or George, and the contemporary of Celan does not present itself as easily as object. This, too, would be a phenomenon continuous with Adorno's theory, the poem as absorption machine, but I think it also asks us to look a little differently, for something else.

In particular, I think Celan challenges the privileged role Adorno gives to paradox.  In my reading, Adorno sees poetry as one side of an opposition that takes the other side and opposition itself as its stuff, which reduces to a paradox of being both one thing and the other, both part and whole, both singular and collective, because one side is always expressing itself as internalized in the other.  On the surface, paradox, too, seems to be something Celan shares with Adorno in this poem, with the numbers "woven into the / uncountable," with the "forgotten  groped / the to-be-forgotten," but the second half of the poem, with its language of colonization and the "everything" no longer arriving at a place, but departing from one in order to explore, seeks a dispersing that forbids paradox; the project becomes taxonomic, mapping the world as disparate instead of converging difference into a singularity where it becomes contradiction.  Adorno, it seems to me, aligns subjectivity with language.  For Celan, I think, the point of pain born on syllables is that the subject is not coterminous with language; rather, they're sets governed by a surjective function.  In Celan, language can have paradox, but subjectivity does not: the apparent paradox of the subject can always be resolved by a strategy of placement, putting each otherwise contradictory part in its proper place.

What then to make of the "knot" of the final stanza, which anticipates the language of Lacan's notion of extimacy so much so as to be again continuous with Adorno's collective subjective project? The knot is something "spell-, spell-, spelled / out, out," a stumbling towards a language of contradiction that is not the "brood" but only their stumbling expression.  But the knot, too, is diversified off stage to be many possibilities "(and counter- and contra- and yet- and twin- and thousandknot)", that is, the genus of the knot is always trying to catch up with its species.  But it is these species, which are always collected by "and," that sustain a poetic project not of Adorno's collective subject but of Celan's taxonomic mapping. I'm not sure if I see Celan reading out for a common language of the brood, for communication among human beings as Adorno asks for.  I think it's rather the appreciation of barriers, the understanding of their proper placement, rather than their transcendence, that Celan foregrounds.

[Patrick Morrissey]

Hi Everyone,

I will have lots to say about Celan and our theorists in class on Tuesday, but in advance of that I want to send along a document that includes the original German versions of "Frankfurt, September" and "Tübingen, Jänner" alongside my own annotated translations of them.  I will talk at some length about the former poem, but since it so closely parallels the latter, I thought it might be productive for us to have both on hand during the conversation.

Looking forward,

Patrick

[David Finch]

I enjoyed reading Michael’s comments on Adorno and Celan, particularly Michael’s thought that Adorno’s criticism does not describe Celan’s poetry as much as the poetry has absorbed the theory presented to explain it. This might reflect, as Michael implies, a sort of reciprocal or dialectical mimetic process. I guess I see it more prosaically: a lyric poem exists in critical theory only as a simulacrum that the theory has chosen to embrace, i.e., as a mutation that lacks what Adorno, writing of Stefan George, describes as the “chimerical yearning for the impossible” that marks true poem’s art and essence ("On Lyric Poetry and Society," 53). The true poem thus remains hidden from theory, especially theory of the hegemonic sort, which invades its privacy and its solitude in the name of what Adorno describes as the “social substance” of the lyric’s universality. If theory tries to look back at the poem’s mysteries of the impossible, the poem will be lost: as Rilke said of Eurydice, ’“Sie war schon Wurzel” (“She was already root”).

This issue lurks in the question of translation as well. Celan’s “To a Brother in Asia.” In German (“Einem Bruder in Asien”), the poem reads: “Die selbstverklären / Geschüstze / fahren gen Himmel, // zehn / Bomber gähnen, // ein Schnellfeuer blüht, / so gewiß wie der Frieden, // eine Handvoll Reis / estirbt als dein Freund” (Poems of Paul Celan, trans. Michael Hamburger, 282). In Selections, Pierre Joris reads the poem in English this way: “The auto-transfigured / cannons / drive toward heaven, // ten / bombers yawn, // a running fire blooms, / as surely as peace, // a handful of rice / expires as your friend” (124-24). Here is Michael Hamburger’s take: “The self-transfigured / guns / ascend to heaven, // ten / bombers yawn, // a quick-firing flowers, / certain as peace, // a handful of rice / unto death remains your true friend” (282-83). These translations render different poems. Cannons that drive toward heaven are not the same as guns that ascend to heaven; a running fire that blooms is different than quick-firing flowers; and, above all, rice that expires as your friend is far, far from a handful of rice that remains your true friend until death. These differences are not merely a matter of how one might approach the problem of translation per se. Joris’s poem is almost polemical with judgment. Hamburger’s poem is more respectful of Celan’s silences, omissions, and ambivalence, particularly his ambivalence about sociality as a mediator of the experience of death. The true poem is Celan’s, and it keeps its mystery.

[Ingrid Becker]

Derrida captures at least two major concepts that I found helpful for reading Celan. Broadly, I mean the “non-place” or reaching beyond knowledge of the event of the poem, and the related emphasis on the shibboleth as taking its power not from “knowing” but from “doing.”

So, he begins by elaborating on the form of the anniversary date, which must depart from or efface itself (make itself unreadable or encrypted) in order to make possible an address to or encounter with its other, and therefore make possible the commemoration of this encounter, its blessing, that is the poem. Part of the difficulty of applying the date-form as an interpretive guide, I think, is that Derrida goes on to say that the poem’s dating does not have its source merely in the fact that it can be “coded according to the conventional grid of a calendar.” Actually, all words engage in the date’s partition and “partaking of revenance.” So, for the “poetic date…the difference between the empirical and the essential [we might also say something like particular and universal] no longer has any place” (44). In the “non-place” that is the event of the poem, the singularity of a date is the condition of its recurring and encountering itself, and it is the repeatability of this encounter that marks the division of the singular in the first place. Or: “the date that is mentioned, commemorated, blessed, sung, tends to merge with its recurrence in the mentioning, commemorating, blessing, and singing of it” (47).

The shibboleth also crosses or dismisses the border between the empirical and the essential; it doesn’t have “essence” that goes beyond its performance. For me, perhaps Derrida is most illuminating in his insistence that the shibboleth operates as a form—also the form of the date (33)—predicated not on knowing (this is part of the beauty of the risk taken) but on doing. As Derrida tells us, the shibboleth is a word that “cannot be pronounced by the one who does not partake of the covenant or alliance. The Ephraimite knows how one ought to but cannot pronounce it” (50). Similarly, the poem’s song “is addressed and destined beyond knowledge, inscribing dates and signatures that one may encounter, in order to bless them, without knowing everything of what they date or sign” (34). I understand Derrida to be saying that dating, a sort of witnessing that bears something forward, goes hand in hand with forgetting (knowledge doesn’t necessarily help us) and turning to the shibboleth’s active affirmation and communal blessing. The shibboleth doesn’t “signify” any one thing—Derrida tells us “How can one interpret this phrase of indication: “this = ‘shibboleth’? This deictic, here, now? Who knows?”—but it opens a space for the gathering of revenants. Here is a poem that we might see this production going on within:

WORDACCRETION, volcanic,

drowned out by searoar.

 

Above, the flooding mob

of the contra-creatures: it

flew a flag—portrait and replica

cruise vainly timeward.

 

Till you hurl forth the word-

moon, out of which

 

the wonder ebb occurs

and the heart-

shaped crater

testifies naked for the beginnings,

the kings-

births.

 

The spacialization of the “scene” of this poem—and I do think that Celan sets up fairly concrete scenes or stories of “non-place” all the time—is constructed through abstract terms of relationality and relative motion. Movement is not exactly directionless, but takes place along indeterminate vectors. Portrait and replica move “timeward,” the word-moon is “hurled forth” (to where? just forth), the ebb “occurs” “out of” this word-moon whose source and destination are unsaid, the tide recedes to expose the shape of the flooded crater. The ebbing reveals the nakedness of the crater, but we do not know where the flood and the mob end up. The exposing of the crater, itself a geographical mark and commemoration of the volcanic moment (or an encounter between the earth and interstellar matter) allows the mark to testify—“to speak!”—not "to" but "for" beginnings, births.

We might even read the circular form of the date or “meridian” as a narrative shaping the poem. It announces a gathering of language that is drowned out, effaced, by (maybe) its own explosive noise, noise that “floods” the originary mark of wordaccretion’s volcanic crater (also marked by a flagpole, as if the “mob / of the contra-creatures”—its others—is a conquering force). Together two iterations of an image, both of which are secondary in their mimetic function—“portrait and replica”—move through time but “vainly,” as if without meaning. Then the gravity of the thrown “moon-word” (I don't know whether the play of “ward” as vector and “word” is in the German, but it can be felt in this translation) reveals the crater, the mark, that had been flooded out by the earlier accretion-gathering, something is spoken, and a birth is witnessed in the speaking. The “moon-word” has a degree of nonsense, but takes its power from its exposing of the crater (remnant, shadow, specter); in this way it reminds us of the way the shibboleth works.

Okay, so, as Michael said of Adorno’s piece, is this too good a fit? What in the poem is not accounted for? What about the role of the “you,” which seems to come from outside—“Till” feels like an interruption—the pattern of words that gather, self-efface, and encounter eachother/themselves as revenants. We might wish for a better account of the role of the poet, the one who blesses, in this pattern. The same goes for the reader. Do I get into the poem by pronouncing a shibboleth, and can I even do it? Don't I need to know something first? This goes back to the problem that the “non-space” of the poem doesn’t distinguish between empirical and essential. Derrida purposefully avoids grounding his reading of Celan historically, and I don’t want to forget that context (or do I have to forget it in order to commemorate it???!). That type of confused thinking is one of the challenges I’m facing with applying Derrida. So I’ll have to end on a confused (not sappy) note this time.

 

On Saturday, April 20, 2013 6:22:26 AM UTC-5, jscappettone wrote:

[Mollie McFee]

Derrida undertakes an exploration of the significance of things that are irreducibly singular, yet submit to a potential a loss of their singularity through signification. I was particularly interested in the way that this gets played out in “Radix, Matrix,” though I will not be turning to Derrida’s brief reading of the poem. I’m particularly interested in the two terms of the title, which seem to be figures that illustrate Derrida’s overarching point in the article. Radix is of course that Latin word for root, from which we get words like radical. Mathematically it’s also a synonym for base, which connotes the fundamental unit of counting in a numeric system (ex. we count in a base 10 system). At first glance, this seems to map neatly onto Derrida’s idea of the date. A Radix implies repeatability, in the same way that dates in the calendar repeat after passing the end of a year, or that numbers begin to repeat every time one passes a multiple of ten while counting. The roots that Celan takes up in “Radix, Matrix” are more singular points of origin than they are repeating cycles, and seem to recede from vision both into the soil and the air. When Celan speaks to origins in the poem, they speak from an incomprehensible beyond, as opposed to a returning and familiar trope: “Like one speaks to the stone, like / you, / to me from the abyss, from / a homeland hereward”. The you speaks from a home, but the homeland is compared to an abyss, and speech is directed to the expressionless stone. Speech is hurled in a general direction without guarantee of reception. Much like Derrida’s description of the cipher, there is no certainty that speech will be received and understood. Yet, in my reading of the Derrida, he expressed certainty that the fact of address was legible, even if the meaning remains obscure: “A ciphered singularity, that gathers a multiplicity in eins, and through whose grid remains readable… The poem speaks, even if none of its references is intelligible, none apart from the Other… Even if it does not reach the Other, at least it calls to it. Address takes place” (33). All this is to say that I totally buy Derrida’s reading here as it pertains to the “Radix” part of the poem. A singular root brings together a multiplicity through address, even if the address is uncommunicative. What complicates Derrida’s reading is the coupling of “Radix” with “Matrix.” While a Radix implies a common set that is regularly repeated, a Matrix is a grid, and does not necessarily follow a logic of repetition or even correspondence of terms to one another. Given that the poem makes repeated reference to roots, a homeland, and lineage, I’ve really been struggling to understand the role of the Matrix in the title. In the Derrida quotation cited above, he speaks of the grid through which the poem remains readable to a lineage and its descendants who hold the cipher that translates a multiplicity of experience. I think something else is going on here. Perhaps in “that / lineage, the murdered one, the one / standing black into the sky” is not excised but destroyed, leaving nothing but a grid of singularities.

On Saturday, April 20, 2013 6:22:26 AM UTC-5, jscappettone wrote:

[Suzannah Spaar]

     While moments of directly addressed dates (“if a man was born, today” 79, “Back then” 81, “This year” 130--to name a few) are certainly used throughout Celan’s work--I do think that looking just for these dates doesn’t do justice to Celan’s technique of othering, and creating instances of “secret encounter.” In the poem “from The NOONESROSE” Celan actually specifies “they...passed their day away, their night.” He is immediately othering dates--making them personal to whoever these collective diggers are. At the end, the “O one” fades immediately to “O none”--the small insertion of letter functioning as Derrida says of the date to have “broken the silence of pure singularity (9).”  If one can also be none, then it can also be everyone.    
    
     Likewise, the “I” does make a presence, however, and is counted in--not with the almonds, but with the diggers: “I dig, you dig, and so too digs the worm, and the/singing there means: They dig.”  So the I is included with the “they”--the poet is just as othered as the you or as the reader, and this collective othering--this inability and failure to relate is exactly what relates us all.  “O nobody, you” Celan writes. What does this mean for poetry? How can the poems capture the singular (sole) and the infinite (soul)?  Derrida says that Celan is “capable of speaking to the other of the other (10).” This reinforces the notion of our collective otherness, that what “takes places in this experience of [a] date [is] experience itself (9).”  In the case of this particular Celan poem, and indeed many of the poems, this is the experience of failure.  Yet, the poems don’t fail.  In this regard, I am willing to apply Derrida’s essay onto Celan’s poetry--for the singular, complete poem successfully creates an aura of something that is both fixed and fluid, and accessibly inaccessible.

On Saturday, April 20, 2013 6:22:26 AM UTC-5, jscappettone wrote:

[Peter]

I found Michael's comments on Celan and Adorno helpful, and along with Suzzanah's comments on the troubling of the lyric I there might be a sense in which we could no longer call Celan's poems lyrical. However, I want to take these issues in a different direction to what I think is a singular poem in Celan's work, and one that seems to me to offer an application that also corresponds word for word to Adorno, but at the same time provides a radical reversal and reinterpretation of him. I hope this reading will also connect to the themes of absolute singularity and universality that we encountered in Derrida's reading, and thus provide something of a bridge for our discussion. The poem is "No Sandart Anymore", and specifically the second half: "Your question -- your answer. / Your chant, what does it know? // Deepinsow / Eepinno, / I-i-o." (100). For comparison, let me also give the original and an alternate translation of the last three lines: "Tiefimschnee, / Iefimnee, / I - i - e." "Deepinsnow, / Eepinnow / Ee-i-o" (Trans. Hamburger, 216-217). The poem seems to me to be singular in at least three senses. 

First, unlike any Celan poem I have encountered this seems to dramatize a work of both composition and decomposition, a process of poetic creation that reveals something like the structure of sound that underpins the rhythm of the line. In this regard the middle line is crucial to keep the sense of decomposition, loss, and violence, rather than leaving the vowel sounds to persist as a mere abstraction. Second, the poem is singular in that through this violence it reaches towards a universal language. With each layer, the poem speaks across a broader register, returning perhaps to infantile babel, a howl of pain, or the echo of a voice whose only content is precisely as voice. The third singularity will perhaps be the most contentious, but seems to me to be justified by this move towards a universal language - it is the singularity of translation that rediscovers the lyric I at the zero degree of language. Here the Germanic heritage of English is not unimportant, connecting the I in "I - i - e" through the Old English "ic" to the German Ich. At this point, the poet who argues that one should only write in a mother tongue discovers (perhaps by accident, but who could state this with certainty) rediscovers the subject in another language. What at first appeared as an absence of knowledge (ie. the implicit answer to what does your chant know: nothing) and the violence of becoming mute is transfigured into a universality that no longer even needs translation. 

It is here that Celan's poem seems to both correspond to Adorno and to entirely re-write him. Adorno writes that "the lyric work of art's withdrawal into itself, its self-absorption, its detachment from the social surface, is socially motivated behind the author's back. But the medium of this is language. The paradox specific to the lyric work, a subjectivity that turns into objectivity, is tied to the priority of linguistic form in the lyric...Through its configurations [language] assimilates itself completely into subjective impulses...[b]ut at the same time language remains the medium of concepts, remains that which establishes an inescapable relationship to the universal and to society. Hence the highest lyric works are those in which the subject, with no remaining trace of mere matter, sounds forth in language until language itself acquires a voice" (43). In all this, Adorno is assuming that the lyric's withdraws from the social in to a realm of subjective pleasure in language, and which produces pure language by erasing those non-sonorous elements and thus produces an objective image to oppose to concrete life. Celan obeys each of these dictates, but flips the values so that meaning is stripped from language in a process of violence. Nonetheless language remains the medium of concepts, so that even the nonsensical ends up inscribing a poetic subject in another language. It seems precisely in this reversal of value that another term is added to the dialectic of lyric poetry that Adorno describes: another term or the term of the other.

On Saturday, April 20, 2013 6:22:26 AM UTC-5, jscappettone wrote:

[David Gutherz]

Reading this selection of Celan’s poetry side by side with “Lyric Poetry and Society” there was one section that really stuck out to me:

“Poetic subjectivity is itself indebted to privilege: the pressures of the struggle for survival allow only a few human beings to grasp the universal through immersion in the self or to develop as autonomous subjects capable of freely expressing themselves. The others, however, those who not only stand alienated, as though they were objects, facing the disconcerted poetic subject but who have literally been degraded to objects of history, have the same right, or a greater right, to grope for the sounds in which sufferings and dreams are welded. This inalienable right has asserted itself again and again, in forms however impure, mutilated, fragmentary, and intermittent—the only forms possible for those who have to bear the burden.” 45

I would connect these lines with the section of Aesthetic Theory where Adorno writes that in Celan, “the experiential content of the hermetic was inverted…They imitate a language beneath the helpless language of human beings, indeed beneath all organic language: it is that of the dead speaking of stones and stars…Celan transposes into linguistic processes the increasing abstraction of landscape, progressively approximating it to the inorganic.” Here Adorno seems to be endorsing a reading of Celan that chimes very nicely with Peter's re-writing of Adorno, insofar as I understand it, as exposing the violent underside of language.

I'm interested in how, in these late poems, at least, Celan seems to be drawing closer and closer to “mutilated…intermittent forms.” It doesn’t seem right to say that he mimics these gropings; approximating is better…“exposing”—Celan’s word—probably serves best. He doesn’t abandon the search for purity in a form and language that have been deeply compromised, the goal rather, as Adorno’s other late, stormy literary love Sam Beckett put it, is “to find a form to accommodate the mess.”

This, at least, is how I make sense of the “flooding mob of…contra-creatures” that erupts throughout Breathturn, especially. “Harbor,” for example, is full of this semi-linguistic flotsam. The first stanza indicates that the whole poem could be read as a “crossdream” (what does that mean? An intra-dream encounter?) by “schnappsbottlenecks at the whore table.” The message, in this case, is quite literally in a bottle; the poem attempts to make sense of bottle-sounds (“I sang all the way up into your throat…like the astral-flute from beyond the worldridge”) and bottle-sights (“Seaheair heap up the wave, that carries me”, “neptunic sin throws its corn-schnapps-colored towrope between twelve-toned lovesoundbuouys”).  In the latter example, the “abstraction” Adorno refers to is accomplished by treating concepts whose power depends on their cultural specificity (“sin”, “twelve-tone” as a kind of verbal membra disjecta. These are the sort of “sense-greedy sentences” one might “dredge up” the Ister, a river rich in decomposing slogans from liquor bottles, Holderlin hymns, and Heidegger seminars.

On Saturday, April 20, 2013 6:22:26 AM UTC-5, jscappettone wrote:

[Dani Fox]

I really liked what Michael had to say about paradox, Adorno, and Celan.  I am sitting here and I can't quite get over the thought that the Adorno, if applicable to Celan might just be not enough although there are aspects that ring true.  I am thinking of the poem "Mandorla" now in conjunction with the idea from the Adorno that the lyric poem's language goes beyond just signification.  Intentionally obscure or not, I think Celan often plays with language (not so much experimentally as through it's repetition and insistence on returning to certain themes or visuals) as to eradicate meaning or perhaps only its significance.  

The melody of "Mandorla" ushered in through the seven or eight most important/repeated words invokes for me a rolling lump gaining speed and somehow being set back in rhythm though I can't be clear on why the poem insists so strongly upon itself.  In a sense these seven or eight key words emerge boldly from the whirling background of words that link them together.  Though parallel at times to the sense of "I" or humanity coming to the forefront out of a type of alienation or ideological cover, a poem such as "Mandorla" does not seem to have this as its goal.  It does not lie neatly within the bounds of Adorno's lecture but it fits then departs, adhering neatly into the theory and the bursting out.  

[Peter]

I think I did a poor job articulating what I was trying to get at in "The Syllable Pain" and wanted to make it up to everyone with a few short notes on the poem. Basically, I was trying to read it as prefiguring what seems to me to be a turn towards the non-human and particularly what Deleuze and Guattari name 'becoming-molecular' and define in opposition to what they call the molar: "the animal, flower, or stone one becomes are molecular collectivities, haecceities, not molar subjects, objects or form[s] that we know from the outside and recognize from experience, through science or by habit" (A Thousand Plateaus, 303). Lightduress in particular seems to hover on this boundary. What I was trying to highlight in the Syllable Pain is something like an excess of vegetative language and metaphors (which may be an artifact of the translation that I cannot follow); words such as "ripened," "germinating," "exfoliated," as well as the more obvious flower imagery. With regard to the coffins, urns, and canopic jars, I agree that the imagery is undeniably connected to the holocaust and a generation returning to the world of the living. However, there seems to me to be something strange in the children waking within these vessels (rather than say being born out of them) and also with the repetition of the three forms of death-container. The canopic jar especially seems to link to another realm of death and symbolism - which forms a link between Egypt and the "peoples, tribes and clans" that might connect our conversation today to the previous discussion of the language of the tribe. Awakening in these jars with a blind reaching towards a light that is under erasure seems to me to again speak of these vegetal subjects - not just a continuation of the flower imagery, but the production of these children in the kind of subjectivity of knotted and rhizomatic roots that Michael's post seems to also capture. Not sure I'm getting to where I wanted with this reading, but I hope my aim is a little clearer.

Peter

On Saturday, April 20, 2013 6:22:26 AM UTC-5, jscappettone wrote: