fragilekeys

[The following was written in preparation for the “Literature Argues?” conference held at the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma, on October 2017. I offer here my very warm thanks to Karl Pollin, Victor Udwin, and Huiwen Zhang for the invitation to participate and for the great hospitality and friendship they showed me then. Taking up again my research from 2011 (see In Light of U-topia), this paper is an attempt to explicate in greater detail Paul Celan’s poetics, as he articulates them in his ‘Meridian speech’ and in the draft materials for that speech. The study is supplemented with a reading of his poem ‘Schliere’ and various meditations on the relation between literature and silence.]

Silent Consonants of the Named

A word of refusal, but also of absolute commitment, forging its bonds of silence in the unfathomable silence of the bond. —Edmund Jabès

To write poems so that they remain attuned, if not to our talking, then to our silence, to our keeping-silent-with-the-named; so that we only silence ourselves before a most-foreign You as consonants [Mitlaute]—and give it a chance. —Paul Celan

The following reflections will explore the idea that literature “argues” for or from silence. Or, to put it more modestly, that literature issues from silence and has the power to restore us to it: a silence to which the work responds, defending and transforming it. Let us offer a working hypothesis: literary works suspend normal modes of discourse, seeking a language uniquely their own. They construct their own imaginative context or discursive space “subtracted” from everyday speech, forming an exception to it. Although this subtraction can be undertaken in different ways, literary works—both at their point of origin and of reception and in order to accomplish their exceptionality—impose silence upon the general noise of the world. They induce us to draw back, to reappraise the world and our immersion in it. This withdrawal inevitably involves a silencing, albeit for the sake of contacting a power of language that is perhaps neither known nor practiced elsewhere.

Let us characterize the problem as follows: everyday speech and discourse is “noisy” because it occupies itself with representing and communicating what there is in the world, the hubbub of objects, whereas literary works seek to express that there is a world—whether it be real or possible, dream or future. In its deployment, if not in its content, the work does not busy itself with merely discussing what is “the case.” This is one aspect of its refusal: it is never satisfied with established significations, with known judgments about things, with the norms of the situation, calculations of immediate value, and so on. The labor and hope of the work is more profoundly to express the inexpressible that there is of a world, that we are, or to make this ontological affirmation possible. This is its absolute commitment: to say what cannot be spoken in the language of consensus, and to say it once each time, with a singular speech isolated from the world. And yet, this speech is capable of forging human bonds where formerly only the general noise prevailed—bonds of silence that are perhaps stronger than any bond that could be spoken (or represented politically, for example).

To paraphrase Wittgenstein, the presence of a world—that which in the present is irreducible to reality—is that about which one cannot speak, that whereof one must be silent. Literature does not betray this silence so much as it betrays this limitation. It refuses to ratify the category of the “unsayable” or to put its faith in the repetitions of the mystical. Rather, it makes of this silence an imperative for its own speech, for its fabulation of that whereof propositional logic must remain silent: objectless presence.[1] For propositional logic deals in objects, our knowledge of them and how we can string knowledges together to form arguments about objects. Seeing what poetry could conjure without this mediation, Plato deemed it just to expel the poets from the city. Why? Because by operating a complete “dis-objectification” and proffering a thought that goes “straight to presence,” the poem ruins dianoia, discursiveness, the foundation of reason and dialogue. As Alain Badiou writes, “The poem is the exemplary instance of a thought obtained in the retreat and subtraction from everything that sustains the faculty of knowledge.”[2] According to him, the poem either gives us nothing (subtraction: the lack of any object) or the excessive equivalence of objects (dissemination: the object dissolved in pure multiplicity). Poetry is thus most readily opposed to journalism, which naively believes it responsible to “get the story straight” and communicate the current state of things objectively. Poetry is instead a conversation with the power of language at the point where it is no longer an instrument for the babble about objects, nor the negotiator of meanings, but delivers a thought of the presence of a world, of a “we” that nothing discursive could guarantee. Badiou characterizes the operation of the poem thus:

Folded and reserved, the modern poem harbors a central silence. This pure silence interrupts the ambient cacophony. The poem injects silence into the texture of language. And, from there, it moves towards an unprecedented affirmation. This silence is an operation… The poem is a halting point. It makes language halt within itself. Against the obscenity of ‘all seeing’ and ‘all saying’ – of showing, sounding out and commenting everything – the poem is the guardian of the decency of speech.[3]

On this account, poetry, explicitly arguing “for” nothing (no being), implicitly makes of this very “nothing” (of Being) an argument—a nothing destined to foil what is. In this sense, Blanchot is right to say that, “silence and nothingness are the essence of literature.”[4] The same sentiment is registered by Borges when he avows, somewhat disconcertingly, “I do know that literature is an art that can foresee the time when it will be silenced, an art that can become inflamed with its own virtue, fall in love with its own decline, and court its own demise.”[5] Whoever has spent time with literature, especially with the difficult act of writing it, knows what silences are required for even the least line to flow, and the extent to which creative work takes place on the edge of the void (or, as Blanchot might say, on the edge of death). As Sylvie Germain tells us, “To write is to descend into the grave of the prompter to learn to listen to language respire there where it silences itself, between the words, around words, sometimes at the heart of words.”[6] That said, it would be abusive to talk about all of literature in this way. Were we to accept these characterizations, we should concede that there are varying degrees of “purity” here. Some works are more “talkative” than others, if talkative means being busy with what is the case, as opposed to the enigmatic that there is or that we are. If we uphold, on the one hand, that all literary works in one way or another issue from silence, or require silence for their composition, on the other hand, in the work itself the degree of subtraction from the general noise and its interests lies on a spectrum. (To be clear, this is less a matter of content than of inclination; Shakespeare’s works are more than occupied with worldly happenings, but it is how he conveys them toward the infinite power of language, by holding them close to their ironic or tragic point of collapse (“all the world’s a stage”), that makes them literature.)

To investigate and deepen all these remarks, I will turn now to the poetry of Paul Celan, who certainly lies far to one end of the spectrum. His work exerts an extreme suspension not only of language as a means of argument and communication, but also of language as a means of lyrical expression and historical narration. The main goal in what follows is to illustrate the reasons why, as he tells us in his Meridian speech, “the poem today… has a strong tendency to falling silent” [eine starke Neigung zum Verstummen].[7] But before embarking upon a reading of one of his poems, it is important to clarify specifically what we mean and do not mean by silence. Continue reading →

COINHERENCE

The Lord
will make of us all
overbearers,
never let us miss
the right exit.

This mysterious thing
forcing plans for the inevitable
abortion of all plans.

This ruinous thing
a total illusion
when taken in light of
the gift bestowed.

Relation scurries ahead of
relata, out-comparing them.
Corpses rise glorious,
fulfilling the times.

The one’s distinction
carries into other’s openness
where the unseen
cranes
an eye over
so that Lord is
in tread of our burial.

What else could we do?

We learned our lesson,
learned it on the other side
where mirrors echo,
our wretched gestures
rectified in the soft divine
radiant message
channeled in particulars
now duly magnified.

A grace inescapable
abides: that we glide
across that threshold
every day.

*

Exegesis:
In thinking through what it means to be a ‘person’, theology does not begin from what we commonly understand to be personhood, but from the persons of the Trinity, working backward to understand what human personality truly is. Unlike the individual, the person is not a division or a part divided off from a species. Rather, the person contains within it the fullness of the nature, without any loss or fragmentation. As one instance, it is absolute, and this does not contradict the existence of other absolute instances. From there it is a manner of conceiving the human person, not as an individual member of a species or a cultural group, but in its radical distinctiveness, uncategorizability, incomparability, etc. (From there, it is easy to see why the essence of the commandments is to love your neighbor as yourself: one absolute instance as another.) The ‘person’ is not equal to the body made of flesh, but signifies something more like a phenomenon of ‘between’, a between-being. This is not its ‘identity’ per se, but the uniqueness of its dance in and between all others, affecting all others in the web of humanity and, more broadly, of creation. As Sloterdijk summarizes, “Perichoresis means that the milieu of the persons is entirely the relationship itself.”

So, the person is not equal to the biological individual but, according to this dogma at least, a participant in the Spirit from and for eternity. Hard as it is to grasp, theology locates our ‘person’ not in the world but in the coinherent structure of the entire body of humanity, as a structure which is only made consistent through love and loving memory. By grace (and analogously, by the gift of memory and language), we are in the Spirit of love more than we appear to be as earthly, mortal, consigned to decay. We live on in each other, primarily by the bonds of love; we can be eternal presences for each other. This is the Lord who makes us ‘overbearers’ (or ‘translators’) of ourselves; the Lord who stands in for us, instead of our burial, and gives the body to rise “glorious” in and for the other; and whereby our errors and wretchedness are transformed, by forgiveness and time, into one soft divine message which, amazingly, magnifies us for just who we were/are — or rather, for who our “particular” person is in the common, transtemporal Spirit.

The claim is then that the person both includes and exceeds what it ‘is’, for it is always expanded or enlarged by crossing to the other’s side. And there is no end to such crossing, this bearing-over, which we do not accomplish ourselves (since the root metaphor is our living on in the other after our death, which is obviously not a biological capacity or tied to our powers of intention). Death may reach the physical body of the individual, but we qua personhood, we as participating ‘in the Spirit’ or we as made in the likeness of God — as self-giving love — are something ‘more’, something ‘uncreated’, endowed with an imperishable or eternal life — although, in a certain sense, we have no direct access to it and can only take it on faith.

Perhaps this makes the ‘exit’ – the ruinous thing death, an illusion in light of the gift of existence, restored in every instant – more legible, legible as ‘right’. The poem acknowledges the difficulty of believing this, confessing that it is only learned on the other side, in the other for whom we still ‘live’ and are still persons, still thinking and acting, sharing and loving, against all odds and against the evidence of transience. The grace of going across the threshold of death/the exit – into the heart of the other where we will never not be persons – that is what, it seems to me, human coinherence or perichoresis might teach us everyday, amidst all our numberless departures.

To continue writing poetry, one would have to believe in the universal human value of expressions of singularity. Not in ‘big’ singularities (poets supposedly), but in small ones that coincided with their expression (delimited, circumscribed, contoured in the poem). But expressions too of a generic potentiality for thinking―for speaking the truth―faced with the empty page. Along poetry’s route, this necessitates the sparing of language, which can be described in multiple registers.

Language is spared whenever it is not enchained and constrained to a sharp finality (e.g., the instrumental purposes of capital, but also the brandishing of identities, the definition of objects); whenever language is played with, to open a world, to expose the miracle of one, or in one way or another to exhibit its capacity for conceiving wholeness, totality, the indivisibly singular―the thatness of whatever is such, the it-is-ness that poetry deems refractable through images. Such language does not have a finality, except to refract a universe in its passages.

Language is spared when it is not lost to oblivion. Here the performative and vocative dimension of poetry imposes itself. Words on a page, no matter how poetic, are only potential phenomena (traces, ghostmatter). The poem spares language―and some might say it thereby spares being―from forgetting, yet only to the extent that it is “voiced” again; that the singularity it puts in play is put in play again. Such is why it impresses upon us, with the help of jolting images and caesuras between them―the one uttering something, the other on the verge of the unutterable―, the event of language, language as an instance of genesis.

The poem is an event of a world, a coming-into-being facilitated by the contact of the souls exscribed in its words and images. For we can easily see that, even in this instance of voicing, itself marking an event of language, we have been lifted off the page, suspended between reading and originating. This signifies that we are now in thought’s activity; it includes or fuses a repetition of past expression alongside or inside a new one, one which collapses the interval and allows two times to coincide or rest in each other. The archived text is thus “lifted,” torn or stolen from its context in order to approach its origin―not, of course, an origin in the past, but now, in its present pertinence for thought and expression in their evental singularity. In the poem, a soul’s being unfolds.

Language is then spared from being “merely” propositional, for now it implies something equal parts chemical and spiritual, a transformation of essence from corporeal to literal, the risk this entails and the burden. It is language come alive in a life―and with it history and the idea of language as an eternal utopia.

For the poem’s being-present-again is not explainable as a linguistic phenomena. More than conveying meaning, symbols, ideas, the poem is the transmission of the affections of a soul. It is even the sharing of a common soul, through the hope-orienting structure of the open phrase (transhistorical), of a singular expression of language qua generic thought, an epiphenomenon of the blank expanse which drives the fall-out of the “I” into the real. This is why, without ever becoming the voice of a people, the poem remains hospitable to all and so universally translatable, without ever sacrificing its singularity, the unique configuration that it is. To do justice to it is to be drawn toward our own singularity therefore. The event of langauge is always anarchic, lifted. Its horizon hearkens the transcendence of yours.

The poem calls from its nowhere to draw the here toward it. The here, to “voice” it, welcomes it like the nowhere of utopia: past and present contract or cancel into pivot-point, which poem manifests, diverting life from its formal-historical axis, the concept from its objects, and letting arise a sort of third space, measured and not merely diachronic. An emergent extra-temporal property of souls communes materially, through the poems, in their hopes―among others, the hope that our language (as shape, direction, voice) not be lost to the flattening effect of discourse, the neutral apparatus of chronological time, and the practical arrangement of reified, temporal, merely ‘external’ objects (since in that case, the image would undoubtedly lack totality and singularity).

We are struggling here to articulate a going-together of humans accomplished through their own efforts at “subtraction”―their own attempts to remember the soul in its action. A poem is just such an expression, sparing language from being submerged in facts and explanations about the given world. It spares language from too much understanding, and so gives it back to life. Perhaps this is why poetry could never place judgment and punishment at its center, except perhaps to raise an objection to those uses of language that punish it (and through its misuse abuse humans, animals, objects, the whole universe of being). Poetry’s subtraction from such uses (counting, reckoning, calculating, determining, etc.), preparing it for a future communion, implies a gesture of forgiveness. It opens a space for histories to be rewritten, against the fantasy of closed worlds and the retributive finalities that come with them. The poem makes, instead, for the open field, the light that refracts the invisible.

But the poem’s openness corresponds in turn to its strictures, to the exigencies of its singular expression, which is clearly never a pure free reign. The control of the poet, the art, is exerted on the excess of language in its servility, stupidity, and superfluity. A poet may write many things, but nothing ever minimizes the sparing use of language the poem must make if it is to avoid the insipid bellowing and blaring language is normally used for. Its “infinitely small vocabulary” turns it into a channel for exact expressions and thoughts, inimitable and inexchangeable. It is this restraint exerted upon language that allows the poem to bear a silence in itself, to be the pregnant pause of its own eventality, to sign its singularity and suchness with a seal that can’t be forged – nor forgotten.

And so the poem hovers forever between empty speechlessness and its voicing, bearing witness to a (im)potentiality to speak that is never exhausted in speaking, ever on the threshold of its own becoming-event. The poem knows that the latter requires special conditions, namely, that the parameters of the poem be “scanned.” But scansion is not limited to analyses of the poem’s composition (breaks, feet, rhymes, etc.). Scansion can only be thought as a dwelling-in, or as an exposure-to, the threshold that the poem itself is. The eyes run up and down the lines, revisiting turns endlessly, each time in preparation for the advancement of the encounter, each time listening in for what thought is granted. This act amounts to a gradual absorption of the poem’s unique chemical (vocalization is also an injestion) and spirit (contemplation implies concepts and so participates in the general movement of human thinking). But the complex molecule that is the poem does not only have to search the body for receptors; it also has to turn our soul into one. This becoming-receptor of the soul mirrors the dynamic at play in the poem’s own strictures, the counter-violence it must do to itself to uphold its silence, the strain exerted against its own discourse.

In the poem, then, delimitations are made for the sake of the unlimited, for it to shine or refract through. The conditions it sets for being voiced are to welcome the unconditional. It is thus a desperate conversation, for the imagination must go where no finite imagination can go: to the limit of totality, of singularly undivided and whole. The poem overcomes this gap only where it remains in thought or in action, in the voice that, resurrecting it, gives it breath. Yet to be worthy of being carried thus, the poem must leave something to spare: a reserve of life’s present which has not been spent or disappointed, or of hope’s universality as it inscribes itself in the monuments of souls and unifies its energy in so many total gifts of speech.

Poetry’s sparing language, then, is meant to leave language to spare: the insufficiency of an expression caught in its own glare, sighting itself out to be sought, in thought’s groaning prayer. A lack of finality duly noted: on the one side, the poem which is lifted into voice (genesis), on the other, we who are given and share voice, one whose vocation is only in lifting (force). We who read it are led by it to ascend. And so we respond to the call and assume our vocation in the parade of souls, being who we are, exhibiting our idea.

An escalation of human being into sparing language: this is a gift of presence, understood here as a sort of universal value of openness beyond finalities―like the poem in its cosmic state, or which the cosmos in a poem refracts. But poetry the art form is not the gift’s necessary condition, even if the poem dedicates all its resources to remembering it, for it is in presence that human potentiality in general gets its grip and world-trajectories are altered. This is a presence whose matter is personal―as personal as the reading of a poem. If poem and presence seem here to coincide, perhaps it is not accidental. For isn’t presence itself sparing? Is it not what spares itself, like an origin or an empty page, from the ravages of discourse?

Shall we then say: the poem preserves the presence of a soul? Or of a thought of presence as voiced/speechless, surrendered to the unknown of the universal? Perhaps along such roads, singular as they are absurd, we will continue to discern the value of poetry.