Principles of Stratigraphy: Methodology
6. The Limits of Ethics and Aesthetics
As Schwyzer suggests, writers and scholars might be said to perform a kind of ‘necromancy’ when they attempt to speak with or on behalf of the dead. This conjuring effect is what Hill attempts with the mythological remains of Offa in Mercian Hymns and with Kenelm in The Triumph of Love. The aesthetic potency of invoking these genius loci as embodiments of local attachment is evident when the poet has a specific ‘name to conjure with’ (MH II), but what of the ethics of such conjuration when what is at stake are not the sacrificial archetypes of myth, but history’s numerous unnamed victims? This chapter began by contesting the assumption that Hill’s excavations are predicated on unearthing an archē which functions as an assurance of the poet’s mastery of language and selfhood, and his ability to invoke correspondences between a mythological past and contemporary events. The search for such an origin may be figured as the ‘primary’ rock in geology, or the buried shard in archaeology, but whatever its form, the archē always contains a remnant or trace of human existence. Conjuration relies on the archē as a kind of talisman that guarantees a connection between different temporalities, as the dead are invoked in order to prophesy the present or near future. Thus as I have suggested, genii loci such as Kenelm are unearthed for their ability to function as sacrificial types that prefigure later antitypes. The mythical past is thereby understood as a pattern or model for subsequent historical events. If the archē that guarantees the poet’s correspondence between past and present is a mythological ‘name’, a tutelary presence, then the risk is that the real lives eradicated by events of history are like Kenelm’s domain of Coventry, poetically rendered to ‘legendary dust’ (T VII my emphasis). The demand that Celan’s sedimentary poetics makes on Hill is to rupture the typology that would make history subject to myth, and renounce the poetic mastery that would conjure the ash, sand and dust, which represents the victims of twentieth century war and atrocity.
When Celan writes in ‘Psalm’, ‘No one moulds us again out of earth and clay, / no one conjures our dust. / No one. // Praised be your name no-one.’ (P 179/GW 1:225) one might hear such an imperative against the aesthetic conjuring of the dead. Yet the conjuring (‘bespricht’) of dust in ‘Psalm’ is like Rabbi Loew’s double-edged invocation of the golem, a blessing and a curse, which suggests that for post-Holocaust psalmists like Celan or Hill poetry is a
necessary form of intercession even if it offers no real consolation. Jean Boase- Beier’s observation that the competing meanings of ‘bespricht’ are lost in its various translations into English is helpful here. In German the word has at least four meanings including, to speak about, to call up, to cast out or ban, and to cure.143 Boase-Beier argues that the ambiguity of Celan’s use of ‘bespricht’ reflects the equally ambiguous ‘bystander’ (the ‘no-one’) in the poem. Now an established figure in Holocaust scholarship, the ‘bystander’ has broadened to encompass a range of positions, from those who could have spoken out but didn’t, victims who live with survivor guilt, and later generations who avert their gaze or simply neglect to actively remember. Celan addresses the absent Judaeo-Christian God as such a figure when he intones ‘Praised be your name no-one’, but as Boase-Beier points out ‘Psalm’ also requires the reader to occupy the position of bystander and thus to acknowledge the ethical ambivalence between speech and silence. She glosses:
[T]he differences between to speak about (if no-one speaks of our dust, we are forgotten), to call up (if no-one puts us together, like the golem was put together out of earth and clay, then we are physically no longer existent), to cast out (no- one is able to get rid of the aftermath, the dust that remains after our
extermination, and so we are here forever), and to cure (we are forever infected with what happened to us) […] and their coming together in the word
‘besprechen’ […] suggest an ambiguous state of mind: we are not spoken about, we are not reborn, we can never disappear or be healed.144
The term ‘bespricht’ thus expresses two sets of ostensibly incompatible meanings: ‘if no-one speaks of our dust, we are forgotten’, yet ‘dust’ remains regardless of the bystander’s remembrance or forgetting. Similarly if ‘no-one puts us together, […] then we are physically no longer existent’ but there is at the same time no act of remembrance that will resurrect the dead, nor is there any possibility of fully atoning for the ‘Guilts [that] were incurred’ (T II). Hill writes himself into this ambivalent position of the bystander in The Triumph of Love:
143 Jean Boase-Beier, ‘Bringing Together Science and Poetry: Translating the Bystander in
German Poetry After the Holocaust’, Comparative Critical Studies, 2.1 (2005), 93–105 (p. 100). In the original German the lines read: ‘Niemand knetet uns wieder aus Erde und Lehm / niemand bespricht unsern Staub. / Niemand. // Gelobt seist du, Niemand’. Neugroschel in SG translates ‘bespricht’ as ‘incants’ (p. 183), while Pierre Joris in Paul Celan: Selections (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), gives ‘evokes’ (p. 78).
too young to participate in the events of World War Two except as witness to ‘Coventry ablaze’ from the hills above Romsley, the poet must respond to the demands of Celan’s ‘besprechen’, remembering the dead with answerable speech but with due recognition that while ‘Penitence can be spoken of’ it ‘is itself beyond words’ (T XVII). For Hill, forms of remembrance require
judiciousness in speech and recognition of that which is ‘beyond words’; a discernment that ‘the lyric cry’ might be ‘Incantation or incontinence’ (T CXLV), close to ‘cant’ as the poet says elsewhere (CXXV), or a lack of self-restraint.
This is a different relation between speech and silence than Heidegger’s silence on the Holocaust that arguably provoked Celan’s poem ‘Schliere’.
Nevertheless speech and silence still pose an ethical dilemma for the bystander who has not known the ‘silence of the Shoah’, ‘of total obliteration’, as Hill avers in ‘Language, Suffering and Silence’.145 He says, ‘[i]f we weep it is to be in the right place; when we speak we are to speak advisedly; our taciturnity or silence, must be able to moderate itself. Weigh More’s ‘esteemed very light of your tonge’ against ‘it is a desperate state, to be speechlesse’. Both are true’.146 In a discussion of the ethics of this essay, David-Antoine Williams suggests that Hill’s writerly oblation does not usually take place on the ‘plane’ of ‘silence’. How can Hill, ‘at a remove’ from both the ‘silence’ of ‘final resistance’ and of ‘survival’, Williams asks, ‘acknowledge his debt to the dead without encroaching on them; how can he contain the unspeakable and the unsayable in poetry without
causing offence?’ The answer is that the poet is ‘deeply sceptical that he can’ even if he ‘holds out a hope, against hope, of the possibility of ethical language that meets its own demands for justice’.147 There is a tinge of overbearing querulousness in this demand which the poet recognises: ‘Obnoxious chthonic old fart’ he remonstrates with himself (T XXXIV), ‘Even now, I tell myself, there is a language / to which I might speak and which / would rightly hear me’, the language known ‘elsewhere as justice’ which ‘is met also in the form of silence’ (XXXV).
For Hill language ‘must’ in some sense be sufficient to ‘moderate itself’ whether in speech or silence. As the stratum that registers the injustices of its misuse as well as its ethical potential, the efficacy of language cannot depend
145 Hill, ‘Language, Suffering, Silence’, p. 399. 146 Hill, ‘Language, Suffering, Silence’, p. 395.
147 David-Antoine Williams, Defending Poetry: Art and Ethics in Joseph Brodsky, Seamus
on the mastery of the poet alone. In this Hill echoes Celan’s claim in his Bremen Prize speech for the agency of language to save itself (and by extension the poet) against all odds.
Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses:
language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss. But it had to go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence, through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech. It went through. […] Went through and could resurface, ‘enriched’ by it all. […] In this language I tried, during those years and the years after, to write poems: in order to speak, to orient myself, to find out where I was, where I was going, to chart my
reality.148
Celan insists that his native German, the language that went through a ‘thousand darknesses’ can remain ‘secure against loss’ and be made not only to confront atrocity, but also to function as a linguistic ground for the subjectivity of those it had cast out with anti-semitic speech. By deciding to write his post-war poetry in German rather than the other languages available to him (Romanian or French for example) Celan ‘refuses’ as Beth Hawkins observes, to give murderous speech ‘another victory by silencing the original voice of the dead’.149 Language goes ‘through’ this ‘terrifying silence’ and ‘resurface[s]’ secured for the poet who must then subject it to another form of pressure, a circumcision of the word, which is expressed in poetic devices such as caesura and neologism. Celan’s coining of words in German increases throughout his later work, the opacity and strangeness of many of these terms confront the concealing euphemisms of Nazi neologisms such as Endlösung (Final Solution) and judenrein (clean of Jews) that entered the German language during the 1930s and 40s.150
148 Celan, ‘Speech on Occasion of Receiving the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of
Bremen’, in Collected Prose, ed. and trans. by Rosemarie Waldrop (Manchester: Carcanet, 2003), pp. 33–36 (p. 34).
149 Beth Hawkins, Reluctant Theologians: Franz Kafka, Paul Celan, Edmond Jabes (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2002), p. 78.
150 See Felstiner, ‘Translating Paul Celan’s “Todesfuge”: Rhythm and Repetition as Metaphor’,
in Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the ‘Final Solution, ed. by Saul Friedländer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 240–258 (p. 242), for an anecdote about Celan’s response to a friend concerning his commitment to write poems in a ‘language that fashioned Endlösung and judenrein, slogans meant to obliterate such things in his poetry’; Also cited in Hawkins p. 77.
Hill agrees that ‘[l]anguage under the kind of extreme pressure which the making of poetry requires, can on occasion, push the maker beyond the barrier of his or her own limited intelligence’. This would be the basis of a ‘theology of language’ for Hill, if he were to propose one. It would require the capacity of language to move beyond the limitations of self and towards an other. This would be achieved when a ‘shock of semantic recognition’, such as those caused by the defamiliarising action of Celan’s compound or caesuraed words, brings with it a ‘shock of ethical recognition’.151 Examples of this unsettling of language (and along with it the reader) are everywhere in Hill, and in the work of poets that he emulates such as Celan or Hopkins – neologism, diacritical marks, rhetorical devices, attention to pitch and cadence comprise a few. ‘Atemwende’ (‘breathturn’) is a significant neologism of Celan’s that bears on speech and silence, and which Hill borrows and repeats in six of the seventy- two cantos of The Orchards of Syon; it is no coincidence either that Hill’s prominent interlocutor in this collection is Hopkins, that other practitioner of semantic shock.
In ‘The Meridian’ address, Celan deploys ‘Atemwende’ to describe the moment where poetic language falls unexpectedly silent, at the caesuraed word, or between units of sound.
[I]t is a terrifying falling silent, it takes away his – and our – breath and words. Poetry: that can mean an Atemwende, a breathturn. Who knows, perhaps poetry travels this route – also the route of art for the sake of such a breathturn? Perhaps it will succeed, as the strange […] for this single short moment?
Perhaps here, with the I – with the estranged I set free here and in this manner – perhaps here a further Other is set free?152
Recalling the ‘terrifying silence’ of ‘murderous speech’ in the poet’s
Bremen address, this ‘terrifying falling silent’ ‘takes away’ the ‘breath and words’ of the listener who must confront the horror of the Holocaust that resides in this pause. The ‘Atemwende’ instigates a turn towards the other out of this
‘moment’, and propels the poem on its ‘route’ through figural language towards the rupture of its own image as art. Celan’s suspicion of image and metaphor is significant here as further manuscript notes reveal, for it is ‘Not the motif, but
151 Hill, ‘Language, Suffering, Silence’, pp. 404–405. 152 Celan, ‘The Meridian’, p. 7.
pause and interval, but the mute breath-auras, but the cola [that] guarantee in the poem the truth of such an encounter’.153 The value of ‘Atemwende’ for Celan is not for its carefully wrought status as image or motif but as the silent ‘truth’ of an encounter between one human and another that is guaranteed by an exchange of breath – inspiration and exhalation. This is not to say that it is possible to avoid the metaphoricity of ‘breathturn’ as an image that registers the moment between speech and silence. Rather as Tobias suggests ‘the
metaphors that a poet chooses for language determine in turn the kinds of claims his texts can make about themselves’.154 As a neologism, ‘Atemwende’ suggests itself as something straining beyond extant figural language, its ‘origin’ is like the cola of scriptural poetics, not ‘aesthetic but respiratory’, and its
purpose is not mimesis but an encounter with the other.155
Celan refers to cola several times in his manuscripts notes as a paraphrase for ‘breathturn’. The term refers to a group of prosodic clauses (singular colon), which in Hebrew biblical poetry are separated by natural pauses in breathing rather than visual punctuation, due to the sung nature of the verse. Celan’s elaboration of ‘breathturn’ in ‘The Meridian’ speech, his poetry, and his manuscript notes echo Buber’s and Rosenzweig’s use of such breathing rhythms in their translation of the Hebrew Bible into German (1925– 1929).156 It is also strikingly similar to Buber’s formulation of breath as ‘the word’ that operates between ‘I and Thou’, a fact that is perhaps unsurprising given Celan’s veneration of the Jewish-German scholar.157 It is worth quoting an extract at length here to observe the influence on Celan’s thought.
153 Celan, MS C23, 3, in The Meridian, ed. by Bernhard Böschenstein and Heino Schmull, p.
128.
154 Tobias’ argument here is that the frequency of landscape images in Celan’s poetry
expresses the ‘idea that language is an infinitely extending space that can be configured in different ways’ (p. 3).
155 Ernst Simon, ‘Martin Buber and German Jewry’, in Year Book III of the Leo Baeck Institute of
Jews from Germany (London: East and West Press, 1958), pp. 3–39 (p. 37). Simon remarks on
the use of cola in the Buber-Rosenzweig Bible ‘as a special rhythm, the origin of which is not aesthetic but respiratory, that is, fitted to the division of the scripture into segments divided according to the tempo of reading aloud’ (p. 37); Also cited in Maurice Friedman, Martin Buber’s
Life and Work, 3 vols (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988), II, 61.
156 For further discussion of breath rhythms in the Buber-Rosensweig translation see Zachary
Braiterman, The Shape of Revelation: Aesthetics and Modern Jewish Thought (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), pp. 105–110.
157 Martin Buber, I and Thou (London: Continuum, [1923] 2004), p. 36. For discussions of the
influence of Buber’s I and Thou on Celan’s dialogic theory of language see James K. Lyon, ‘Paul Celan and Martin Buber: Poetry as Dialogue’, PMLA, 86.1 (1971), 110–120; and Friedman, ‘Paul Celan and Martin Buber: The Poetics of Dialogue and “The Eclipse of God”’,
Religion and Literature, 29.1 (1997), 43–62. Neither Lyon or Friedman note the similarities
Spirit in its human manifestation is a response of man to his Thou. Man speaks with many tongues, tongues of language, of art, of action; but the spirit is one, the response to the Thou which appears and addresses him out of the mystery. Spirit is the word. And just as talk in a language may well first take the form of words in the brain of the man, and then sound in his throat, and yet both are merely refractions of the true event, for in actuality speech does not abide in man, but man takes his stand in speech and talks from there; so with every word and every spirit. Spirit is not in the I, but between I and Thou. It is not like the blood that circulates in you, but like the air in which you breathe. Man lives in the spirit, if he is able to respond to his Thou. He is able to, if he enters into relation with his whole being […] Only silence before the Thou – silence of all tongues, silent patience in the undivided word that precedes the formed and vocal response – leaves the Thou free [….]158
Like Buber’s ‘true event’, Celan’s encounter between I and the Other can only take place in the turning of breath, the space between two clauses or sounds, or the air which simultaneously separates and joins two breathing bodies. Celan’s workbooks also contain annotations on his reading of Buber and the concept of breath. Here, however, the emphasis is on the gasp of ‘breath’ that takes place in the ‘dark, and the readying silence’ that occurs when the violence of ‘murderous speech’ is confronted.159 Celan departs from Buber’s analysis of the ‘undivided word’ insofar-as post-Holocaust language always requires a circumcision; the ‘strange’ and ‘estranged’ neologism or caesuraed word provides the kind of semantic shock that guarantees an ethical
recognition. It is not from Celan’s perspective ‘silent patience’ and trust in the efficacy of the divine or ‘undivided word’ that ultimately ‘leaves the Thou free’.
The caesuraed word that interrupts speech is the condition for ‘mute breath-auras’, the ‘terrifying silence’ that Celan was convinced should occur when ‘I’ stands in recognition of its responsibility before the ‘Other’. Atemwende as image, and in its other forms (Atemkristall – breath-crystal, Atemseil –
breath-rope) is not a metaphorical end in itself for Celan, its true end is in the encounter. This encounter, as the epigraph poem to this chapter recalls, takes
158 Buber, pp. 36–7.
159 Celan, MS Workbook II, 15, in The Meridian, ed. by Bernhard Böschenstein and Heino
Schmull, p. 129. Celan translates and glosses Buber (‘till there comes the great shudder, the holding of the breath in the dark, and the preparing silence’) from I and Thou, p. 89.
place ‘in the air’ that we breathe, and in which the ‘remains’ of the dead
circulate in traces of ash, sand and sediment, present in both ‘breath-and-clay’ (SPP 395/GW 1:290). This claim of encounter is that which Celan’s sedimentary poetics makes about itself, and the condition that he argued all poetry after the