AGAINST TIME: THE AMBIVALENT MODERNISM OF PAUL CELAN

Paul Celan was possibly the last of the great Modernists, poets of the twentieth century whose work impressed readers as a departure from tradition and an advance into new territory. Yet on closer acquaintance he reveals an ambivalence that gives his radical modernism almost the air of a deliberate reductio ad absurdum. In a late poem he speaks of striving "against time."

The ambivalence stems, I believe, from Celan’s dual role as literary innovator and witness for a vanished community. At the time of his childhood and adolescence, in the ‘20's and ‘30's, his home town of Czernowitz was still steeped in tradition, just opening up to the influence of Western culture. Most of Celan’s early attempts, like most poetry written in Czernowitz, were in traditional forms, though with imagery influenced by Surrealism. Gradually, after 1944, the rhymes fall away, the unrhymed lines (long at first, with a pronounced triple rhythm) become shorter, the incantatory use of anaphora is discarded. It is not until his third collection, Speech-Grille (1959), that a modern "free verse" establishes itself, together with the first signs of the "telegrammatic" late style in which words are forced into novel compounds, into juxtapositions increasingly grotesque, and the poem’s occasion becomes more and more difficult to make out. Thus, in Celan’s work, stylistic change is a function of the distance from home. He might well have left home in due course, as a young man, like Joyce, drawn to the artistic capitals, eager to make his mark on a global culture; but in the event the severance was effected from without, in a terrible manner, and he remained mistrustful of all its results: "Whichever word you speak/ you give thanks/ to perdition" (From Threshold to Threshold, 1955).

In 1958, answering a questionnaire, Celan gave his own rationale for the use of the modern style, a rationale that bears the marks of an uneasy accommodation:

German poetry is traveling, I think, a different route from the French. With darkest things in memory, most questionable things around it, it cannot, however much it invokes the tradition in which it stands, go on speaking the language which many a gentle ear still seems to expect from it. Its language has become soberer, more factual, it distrusts the "beautiful," it attempts to be true. Thus it is (if, keeping an eye on the polychrome nature of what is apparently current, I may seek a word for it in the visual realm) a "grayer" language, a language which among other things wants to see its "musicality" settled in a place where it no longer has anything to do with that "euphony" which, along with and beside the most terrible things, went on jingling more or less unconcernedly.

Thus, Celan interprets his use of the modern style as a reaction to trauma and an expression of mistrust. Adorno’s famous saying that to write a poem after the Holocaust is a barbaric act, is partially internalized as the poet sacrifices traditional poetic "musicality" and "beauty" in hopes of remaining "true." Similarly, in a letter Celan wrote: "I am not concerned with euphony, I am concerned with truth." ("Es geht mir nicht um Wohllaut, es geht mir um Wahrheit.")

At the same time, these statements illustrate Celan’s poetry continued reliance on sound and mistrust of the "polychrome," the visual -- attitudes harking back beyond modernism to cultures where the ear, not the eye, was the main channel of communication. The meaning of the last-quoted sentence is driven home by the contrast between the rounded vowels and double l of "Wohllaut" and the unrounded vowels and rough rh of "Wahrheit." Again in "Speech-Grille":

One has to have heard this in the voice recording, the inimitable bitterness with which that last word, "Bilder," is clipped off. And again, in "The Meridian":

Accordingly, Celan’s poetry alludes and invokes, but does not describe. Indeed it often seems set up to prevent the reader from visualizing anything -- the diametric opposite of the emphasis on visual "imagery" that seems to characterize the "postmodern" period.

Moreover, despite the impression which his poems make of being "experimental," Celan felt the need, in a 1961 letter, to disclaim the intention of verbal experiment for its own sake:

Deeper than the question of style, then, runs the question of what the poem is supposed to do, the question of its function in the community. For all the exquisite sophistication of his work, Celan tried repeatedly, especially in "The Meridian," to make it clear that he was not interested merely in creating "art." At times he reminds one of Plath in those moments when she takes the reader by the collar: "And there is a charge, a very large charge..." (Plath, "Lady Lazarus"). He wished to be subversive; to an early commentator, Dietlind Meinecke, he said that "bombs are ticking" in his long poem "Stretta"; but more than that, he was visited at times by hopes of a new beginning. At the apogee of his career, in The No-One’s-Rose and in the "Meridian" speech, he seems to be looking toward a culture of the future ("the heart-bright future") that would have both the warmth of home and the spaciousness of a global community. This dream was apparently short-lived; the last words of The No-One’s-Rose are "too late," and in Breathturn the reader has the sensation of walking over broken glass, the shards of Kristallnacht mingled with those of the poet’s attempts to establish viable connections in exile. And yet in Jerusalem, in 1969, he was to refer to the "Meridian" as his "credo." What was shattered is whole, what is gone remains, in the persistence of memory and vision. In the 1960's Celan, like Plath in the Ariel poems, seemed to have got into a spiral of escalating shock tactics. The juxtapositions become more grotesque, more brutal, in Breathturn (1967) and then again in Thread-Suns (1968). I for one, having begun reading Celan in 1967, well recall the successive shocks of these two collections; a perception that these were the increasingly tortured expressions of an increasingly tortured soul made it difficult for me to think of them as literary achievements. And yet of course these were literary achievements, not a simple cry for help to which one could simply respond. The harder the poet worked to supply the Western literary-academic intellectuals, who were now his main audience, with verbal novelties, the more unbridgeable grew the gulf between his humanity and that of the reader:

The pelt grows over

my thundery mouth,

you

do not come

to yourself. (Light-Force, 1970)

The aspiration negatively implied in these lines -- the aspiration of bringing others to themselves -- would have been better understood among his mother’s Hassidic ancestors.

In the spring of 1969 I read, for the first time, Celan’s earliest collection, Der Sand aus den Urnen, which he had withdrawn soon after its publication in 1969; one of the few extant copies was in the Germanistisches Seminar at the Freie Universitaet in Berlin. The librarian kindly suggested that I take the copy out into the garden. The trees in the garden were blossoming, and as I read those early poems, including one called "Black Snowflakes," which allude to the events undergone by the poet and his parents in old-fashioned singsong lines with folkloristic and literary circumlocutions, a few petals drifted down on the page. Like in a Japanese movie, I thought, but the effect was really quite heartrending. Sometimes in reading Celan’s poetry -- others have noted this -- there comes a spooky feeling as if he had the power to reach into the reader’s present reality and rearrange it so as to mirror his symbolism. Jungian synchronicity, I guess. Apparently this did not depend on the specific literary techniques used. I found myself thinking back on Thread-Suns and asking myself, with astonishment: why was that necessary?

In my one interview with Celan, in August 1969, I got the impression that -- despite the awe-inspiring consistency with which his work had moved in one stylistic direction -- in his mind the question of style was by no means closed. On the one hand he was unhappy with the critics of Thread-Suns who had faulted the poems’ "aesthetic construction," about which he did not give a damn ("ich schere mich zum Teufel um die aesthetische Konstruktion)." He had, he said, wanted to create something that could be "contraband." By this he meant, I’d guess, the above-mentioned escalating shock tactics. He spoke of having learned from the modernist poets whom he encountered in Paris in the 50's: "I said to myself, ‘You have to be able to do that too!’" Yet later in the conversation he mentioned that he might republish Der Sand aus den Urnen. And then later still (the conversation never stayed on any one topic for long) he said, "I don’t think anyone can use rhyme today, except for irony; what do you think?" Me he asked? I had already used it in at least one poem influenced by him, but hadn’t the courage to say so and therefore said, "I don’t know." "I don’t believe so," he said. He did not sound happy about it. At the end of the interview he said, in an apologetic tone, "Don’t pay too much attention to Thread-Suns. That is something that walks the edge (das ist etwas Randgaengerisches)."

Something similar is reported by Ilana Shmueli, a friend from Czernowitz days and the companion and confidante of his last months, in her book Say that Jerusalem Is. Speaking of Der Sand aus den Urnen, he said, "I wrote a lot of bad poems back then." Shmueli countered by reciting the first poem of that collection, which she knew by heart: "Erst jenseits der Kastanien ist die Welt (The world begins beyond those chestnut trees)." He agreed that, after all, that was not so bad.

It seems generally true that shock tactics do not work for long. My impression in the academic community (which I was to leave in the year after his death) was that people were getting used to the linguistic extremism of the later poems. It was, to them, just another way of writing, a style. In that year I came to believe that Celan committed suicide because he could not accept that acceptance. Of course, I realize now that that was simplistic. Human reality is a lot more complex than that and a lot deeper. As Wallace Stevens said, "It is not the reason/ That makes us happy or unhappy." But I still think there was something in it. Like a lot of the prophets of the ‘60's -- he was a prophet of the ‘60's, though a survivor of an earlier generation, of the literary and ideological and social flowering that had been cut down in Czernowitz in 1942 -- he wanted to shake people up, to stop the wheels of history, he was in his own way willing to lie down in front of the tanks. He marched with the students in ‘68 although the character of the student movements gave him misgivings; at a friend’s house in Jerusalem he hummed a few bars of the Varshovianka, still proud of his Communist past (which he also mentioned to me). In his mature years he evidently found nothing to engage with, perhaps was no longer capable of the trust this would have required, and so perished in isolation amid the ironic acclaim of poets seeking to enlarge their own stylistic repertory and of "hermeneutic" interpreters. But to me the central question of his work is that which surfaced in an unfinished, unfinishable poem of my own written a few months after the interview:

Do our words mean

when we do not mean

them?

The question of meaning, then, became for me the question of good faith, of the possibility of mutual understandings, of covenants, among writers and readers of poetry. At a still later moment, in reacting to all this, I reverted to sonnet form and archaic language, such as even the current "formalist" movement is not ready for.

At this point, and of course I can’t say this in the name of Celan but only as a witness to his tragedy among much else, I believe that the future of poetry if any does not lie in the adoption of any given set of stylistic devices but rather in the devising of new forms of commitment, forms of interaction -- in short, that we should think about Organizing. I think that intertextual structures exist -- Celan’s poetry makes one aware of them -- and that on the basis of them we could, at least theoretically, rebuild a center that might hold. If we could find the will for it.