Gravity without Grace: The Prologue to Lars von Trier’s 'Antichrist'

Gravity without Grace:  The Prologue to Lars von Trier’s Antichrist

“None of it is any use.”[i]

Prologue

  As a cinematic experience, Lars von Trier’s Antichrist (2009) opens with a short prologue which is texturally different from the rest of the film and is referenced in a brief flashback near the film’s end. Shot in black-and-white and in slow-motion, the sequence of scenes which make up this Prologue are themselves soundless, while an aria from Handel’s ‘Rinaldo’ is the foregrounded musical accompaniment to the unfolding narrative. In this brief reflection I will look closely at the Prologue, identifying some important image sequences and their significance. Beyond this, I want to argue that the Prologue, more than just setting the film off on its specific narrative arc, identifies a central philosophical problem whose unrealized (and unrealizable) resolution is the crucial matrix of the rest of the film’s characteristically violent narratives of attempted existential integration. By using and developing some concepts drawn from the work of Jacques Lacan I will argue that Antichrist keeps alive the issue of the extent to which the Western psyche was, and remains, Christianized:  the film confronts us with the West’s Christian unconscious, the obscene underside of the anima naturaliter christiana: the corpus naturaliter paganum. For von Trier, that confrontation reveals the cost of the Western world’s religious solution to the mystery of contingency.

1.

 With the turning on of a shower faucet by a male hand, the Prologue to Antichrist opens onto a world where the human and the non-human are subject to the same pitiless mechanical forces. “He” (Willem Dafoe) and “She” (Charlotte Gainsbourg) are having sex in the shower and for a few brief moments it is easy to see this as a conventional film trope of an idealized romantic, sexually fulfilling relationship. Very quickly, though, the film cuts to a close-up, quasi-pornographic image of penetration, before cutting back to a more visually coy image of the couple in the throes of intercourse.
 The image of penetration framed by less explicit shots stands out as an unsettling instance of the kind of visual excess which has been considered widely in film studies on the basis of various versions of Lacan’s theory of the gaze, especially that of Slavoj Žižek in his analysis of pornography. The Lacanian gaze, as elaborated in Seminar XI, is, in Žižek’s formulation, “on the side of the object, it stands for the blind spot in the field of the visible from which the picture itself photographs the spectator”.[ii] So, what the spectator at first  thinks of as a safe position from which to view the object is transformed into the uncanny position that is the constitutive condition of the human subject: a fissured subject that is both the site of looking and an object looked-at from a point he cannot see. As a consequence, the gaze stages the real of desire in the subject, the desire to be gazed at: just as the gaze emanates from outside of the subject, so does the object of desire; the gaze is actually the object a, the object-cause of desire in the field of the visual.
 Žižek points out that the antimony between the eye and the gaze is abolished in pornography because in pornography there is no blind spot from which the gaze can emanate. Pornography is “the genre supposed to ‘show everything,’ to hide nothing, to register ‘all’ with an objective camera and offer it to our view.”  Or as Todd McGowan puts it: “ pornography assumes that the objet petit a (in the form of the gaze) is an actual object that one can see rather than a distortion in the fabric of the social reality that one must see in the process of distortion itself. Thus, this direct rendering of the objet petit a fails because there is no actual object that one might pin down and display. In fact, the oft-noted tedium of the porn film stems from its obfuscation of the objet petit a in the effort to expose it. Pornography fails because the gaze, the objet petit a in the field of the visible, is irreducible to the field of the visible itself.”[iii]
 By contrast, sex scenes in a non-pornographic film hold back from “showing it all” precisely in order to elicit the gaze, to depict as far as possible the real of desire which is not located in any object. “The films that actually enable us to recognize the gaze do so by making it visible as a distortion in this field.” [iv] For the pornographic film, by not cutting away and by showing everything, "[t]he sexual act...function[s] as an intrusion of the real undermining the consistency of th[e film’s diegetic] reality."[v] (Žižek 2000: 527)
 In the Prologue to Antichrist the brief pornographic moment of “showing everything” is the first of a series of images where the viewer is confronted by the intrusion of the real in the midst of images where we also recognize the complex dynamics of the gaze. The viewer’s introduction to He and She are separate head shots where each looks out directly from the screen, implicating us almost immediately in the film’s diegetic reality in a way that is both voyeuristically compelling and deeply unsettling: we gaze at them, and though we can certainly read their gazes as being directed at each other, they are also gazing at us; we too are the objects of unknowable desires, perceptions and judgements in the same way that they are for us.
 The pornographic intrusion at this point proves to be doubly unsettling. First, it undoes any claim the film might make to enact the logic of desire in any kind of satisfying way or with any kind of provisional closure—the boundary has already been overstepped, and any subsequent intimations of the gaze as object a will remain haunted by this. Additionally, though, by shaking the consistency of the film’s reality so early in the narrative, it hints at a self-critique of a major part of Cinema’s implied cultural functioning (including  this film’s pre-release playing up of its Horror genre) as providing some degree of fantasmatic satisfaction.
 I will return to and elaborate on this in a moment, but right now I want to continue by first examining a cluster of images whose conjunction, I think, is crucial to this film’s philosophical stance,  and next, identify those places in the Prologue where von Trier’s cinematic renderings of the gaze operate to assert the gaze’s own philosophical implications, implications which are deeply congruent with that stance.

 Even in those initial moments when He and then She gaze out at us, they share the screen with the falling water-drops of the shower which are emphatically present in the image due to the lighting of the scenes and the slow-motion technique. Before He and She are shown as having sex, the film cuts to the bathroom’s ventilation fan sucking in the steam from the shower, and then cuts again to the livingroom window blown open by a gust of wind, beyond which we see the snow falling thickly. In all these cases the slow-motion allows the camera to linger on the physical movement, the mechanical falling of water and snow, the centrifugal spin of the fan, the opening of the window and the blowing about of the curtains. When the image of sexual penetration makes its brief appearance, it too takes on the character of a pneumatic back and forth. In fact, from now on in the Prologue virtually every scene in this elaborate montage will contain an image which emphasises motion and the physics of motion, the ineluctable operation of gravity: a tumbler with a toothbrush get knocked over in the shower by He and She; She’s foot kicks around the bathroom scale (a real measure of gravity with an actual cold numerical value); as they move from room to room in the throes of passion, He and She knock over their child’s (Nick) wooden picture-puzzle; in the laundry room their copulation is a counterpoint to the turning of the washing machine; our first view of the child’s bedroom shows us a cartoonish mobile of the moon and stars rotating over his cot, and ragdoll bear tied to a helium balloon  floating in the foreground; pages on a table by the window are scattered by the wind; back in their own bedroom, She’s foot kicks over a bottle and spills its contents as she makes love with He. This is the way the physical universe operates—impersonal forces set objects in motion with inevitable physical results.

 Spliced into this exemplary litany of Newtonian motion, however, are some scenes which begin to evoke the traumatic dimension of the accidental. Undoubtedly, kicking over and spilling a bottle of water might be an “accident”, but it is a qualitatively different kind of accident than some of the others presented: the child-gate “accidentally” left unlatched and the, perhaps, inadvertant muting of the electronic child-monitor. On the pure physical level these accidents of omission set the same kind of wheels in motion as the former, but their consequences happen to be radically different. In this case they lead up to Nick falling out the window to his death. They lead to the traumatic irruption of the real into reality.
 Lacan, in Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, discusses accident/chance in terms of a distinction drawn from Aristotle between chance for subjects, tuché, and chance for objects, automaton. His point here is to give a thoroughly psychoanalytic account of the concept of causality and to distinguish cause from law (both scientific laws and moral laws).  In cause, he says,
“there is always something anti-conceptual, something indefinite. The phases of the moon are the cause of tides - we know this from experience, we know that the word cause is correctly used here. Or again, miasmas are the cause of fever - that doesn’t mean anything either, there is a hole, and something that oscillates in the interval. In short, there is only cause in something that doesn’t work”.[vi] Fundamentally, automaton refers to the “automatic, lawlike, regulated stringing together of the subject’s signifiers in the unconscious”[vii], and so it concerns the process of repetition as well as the law of that process whose precondition is the evasion of cause: as though the signifying chain had been set in motion like a line of dominos falling. What automaton evades is the lack that sets the whole process going; it evades, in a word, the real.
 By contrast Tuché, according to Malcolm Bowie, “is in one sense very simple: it is a tile falling on to the head of a passer-by, a person from Porlock bringing a creative trance prematurely to its end, or, to take one of Lacan’s own examples, a knock on the door that interrupts a dream" [viii]. These examples demonstrate the countless ways that the real can manifest itself in reality, the chance encounters, interruptions and accidents which foreground “something that doesn’t work”, traumas that function as the cause of a sequence, intimations of a structural lack in the symbolic order that we call reality. As Stephen Ross puts it:
 “...the real, though never directly encountered (except perhaps in death), is everywhere felt in the radical contingency of daily life...[I]t  forms the lie-giving truth that underwrites both of the remaining orders, the imaginary and the symbolic. In their basis upon and opposition to the real, then, these two latter orders have it built into their very fabric (if only by the vehemence of its exclusion), and we are compelled to read any disruption in either order as potentially an irruption of the real (even if it is masked in some way)”.[ix]
 In the Prologue, the automatic operation of the laws of gravity turn into the Lacanian tuché when the little boy, Nick, entranced by the swirling snow, climbs up to the sill of the blown-open window, loses his balance and falls to his death. In the sheer physics of falling, the child’s body plunging to the ground is no different from the falling of his toy bear along with him. But for He and She it is a traumatic undoing of the structure of their world, an irruption of the radically unsymbolizable order of the real, the cause of all that follows in their lives. Von Trier neatly evokes the inability of the symbolic, the order of language, to encompass the encounter with the real by having Nic as he climbs on the table by the window swipe away the three emblematic ornamental figurines embossed with the names Grief, Pain, and Despair.

These are the only instances of language in the Prologue’s diegetic reality, with the book behind them being metonymic for all written culture. (They subsequently become the chapter titles for the next three parts of the film, and are obliquely connected with a constellation named ‘The Three Beggars’ later on. Their dismissal at the literal hand of Nick, who is the locus of trauma and the irruption of the real, prefigures what I will later contend is the film’s radical skepticism about the capacity of narrative and metanarrative to provide existential succour.)
 And so, the snow comes down, the washing machine comes to the end of its cycle, the great sex exhausts itself, the child falls to his death. There are laws of motion, there is the inescapable irruption of the real; there is a cause but there is no “why”, no answer. Just the truth of contingency.

2.

 Beyond what I am essentially claiming above is the Prologue’s main theme, it is important to return for a moment to the issue of how the gaze, in its specific cinematic manifestations in this part of the film, structurally upholds that theme. In fact, from a strictly philosophical viewpoint, I want to contend that the Prologue as such enacts the epistemology of the Lacanian gaze rather than just exemplifying it.
 In the Prologue’s montage there is a remarkable number of different camera angles and shot positions. As viewers, these implicate us in different ways in the narrative, of course, as they structurally position us in relation to seeing and being seen; and the rapidity in shifts of position (underlined by the slow-motion) create a kind of anxiety as the camera cuts from mid-shots to close-ups, and eye-level views to high angle views to bird’s eye views in quick succession.
 I have already mentioned the ways in which the gazes of He and She, and the early pornographic cut-in function to unsettle us as viewers and problematize our narrative pleasure. One other gaze adds significantly to this unease: there is Nick’s turning away from the primal scene of his parents having sex to look at and move to the open window where the snow is falling, but, as he turns, intersecting the viewer with his gaze and smile. As viewers we have already intimated the danger of the open window and the child’s turn towards us casts us into a position of helplessness in the face of an unfolding disaster. We will watch his death take place in the filmic reality, but his gaze, engaging us, alerts us to the constant presence of the real in our reality, behind the back of the symbolic, as it were.
 But quite brilliantly von Trier chooses almost this precise moment in the film to use as a flashback late in Chapter 3, ‘Despair’. In the Prologue as Nick turns away from his parents the camera focus shifts from them to him; in the flashback, black-and-white and in slow-motion like the Prologue, the camera, in silence, cuts to a close-up of She’s face as she actually sees her son climbing on the table by the window just before he falls; her gaze of supressed horror meets our’s directly and contrasts radically with the Prologue’s last shot of her face, one of post-orgasmic satisfaction. (The two scenes together function like a portrayal of Freudian Nachträglichkeit where the only way She can try to integrate the trauma of the past event of death into the symbolic is to construct it, or “remember” it, as her failure, to see herself as blameworthy for being engaged in sex rather than confront the real in the tuché. And thus, in a terrible parody of the sex scene in the Prologue She masturbates using her unconscious, castrated husband’s hand, and then punishes herself by cutting off her own clitoris.)

 Taken together, the original scene and the flashback are remarkably congruent with the epistemological implications of the Lacanian concept of the gaze as such. We might call the Prologue’s production of anxiety and affective excess the production of an extreme “epistemological wobble” in that it works to constantly undermine any possible subject position that might fantasize itself as immune to the real of the gaze. For Lacan, of course, the human subject is split by its symbolic constitution into the imaginary ego and the subject of the unconscious;  and the discourse of the symbolic has the character of a signifying chain, so that the subject in the symbolic is also reduced to the signifier. Consequently, the meaning of the subject of the signifier does not encompass the subject of the unconscious, so the subject is alienated from its (own) subject of the unconscious. The splitting that occurs within the subject by its subjection to the signifying constitution of the Other has consequences for the subject’s perception as well. In the act of perception too the subject is split, since objects are perceived by the ego, the subject of the signifier, and desired by the subject of the unconscious. According to Lacan since the subject is an effect of the signifier, and thus constitutionally split, the subject has to constantly reconstruct and reassure itself through its discourses.
 In theory derived from Lacan the term suture is used to describe the process of the construction and incorporation of the subject in discourse, the means by which the subject recognizes the discourse as its own, and attempts to secure a degree of coherence within the discourse. Stephen Heath elaborates it as follows:
“[T]he "I" is a division but joins all the same. The stand-in is the lack in the structure but nevertheless, simultaneously, the possibility of a coherence, of the filling in. At the end of the suturing function is the ego, the "me": "it's me!", the little linguistic scenario of the ego - that I am the only one who can say. Can say insofar as I am one. The ego is not to be confused with the subject: it is the fixed point of imaginary projection and identification, where the subject as such is always on the side of the symbolic, the latter the order of its very constitution: but then, precisely, there is no ego without a subject, terrain of its necessity and its hold: function of the symbolic, suture is towards the imaginary, the moment of junction - standing in, a taking place, a something, a some one there.”[x]
 In strict Lacanian terms suture thus refers to the stitching of the imaginary, symbolic and real registers, with the seam separating the real from reality, closing off the unconscious from conscious discourse. Suture thus prevents the subject from losing its status as a subject, prevents it from falling into the void of the real, which would be falling into psychosis. But suture also has a narrower epistemological dimension in that it names a kind of closure, a sewing up of the subject’s fictional place within ideology and providing the subject with a false impression of plenitude and coherence.
 In film studies suture has been elaborated in terms of how formal, technical operations in the construction of the film narrative relate to the production of meanings and the creation of subject-positions for the viewer. Kaja Silverman writes that
“... cinematic coherence and plentitude emerge through multiple cuts and negations. Each image is defined through its differences from those that surround it syntagmatically and those it paradigmatically implies ("this but not that"), as well as through its denial of any discourse but its own. Each positive cinematic assertion represents an imaginary conversion of a whole series of negative ones. This castrating coherence, this definition of a discursive position for the viewing subject which necessitates not only its loss of being but the repudiation of alternative discourses, is one of the chief aims of the system of suture...Most classic cinematic texts go to great lengths to cover over these "cuts."” [xi]
 In the case of the Prologue to ‘Antichrist’, von Trier goes to great lengths to not cover over these cuts. While the Prologue has coherence at the level of plot, that coherence stands in an ironic relationship to the film’s foregrounding of its own suturing process, its own fictional construction.
 In addition to the cuts between images I talked about earlier, the Prologue also emphasizes its manipulation of the viewer’s subject position by a constant shifting of camera angles; remarkably, though, some of these camera angles are also the means by which the viewer is forced to question her own habitual subject position in her own habitual discourse as the subject of ideology. They work to make the gaze of the real inescapable, to unhinge the comforts of the viewer’s own suturing discourse.
These are the camera angles that place the viewer in an “impossible” subject position, and the most disturbing of them occur around the scenes of the child’s fall.
 When Nick first steps out onto the window ledge we view him from above, from a position which encompasses his viewpoint but is not identical with it, and is physically impossible within the diegetic reality of the film.

 The film then cuts to a medium close-up of the child just as he loses his balance and begins to fall; this shot is from an equally impossible angle—eye-level, outside the window. Very quickly the film cuts to a high-angle close-up of She’s face in the throes of sexual pleasure before cutting back to the falling child, shot from the same angle as before. Variations on this outside/inside shot sequence with similar camera angles occur over the next two minutes, all in all adding up to thirteen cuts which the slow-motion seems to achingly prolong.

I want to think about this for a moment using one of Žižek’s formulations of “the elementary logic of suture” as he writes about it in The Fright of Real Tears.[xii]  "Firstly”, he says, “the spectator is confronted with a shot, finds pleasure in it in an immediate, imaginary way, and is absorbed by it". Here we can think of some of the shots of She and He having sex. “Then, this full immersion is undermined by the awareness of the frame as such: what I see is only a part, and I do not master what I see. I am in a passive position, the show is run by the Absent One (or, rather, Other) who manipulates images behind my back”. On one level the many cuts, the black-and-white, and the soundtrack work this way. “What then follows is a complementary shot which renders the place from which the Absent One is looking, allocating this place to its fictional owner, one of the protagonists”. This, however, is where von Trier adds a significant complication. This “place from which the Absent One is looking” cannot be the place of one of the protagonists. It is a profoundly empty place rendered in the impossible camera angles and positions. It is the God’s-eye view of Nick falling and of his fall. It is a place the viewer occupies briefly with radical unease, realizing  the impossibility of that occupation by any subject. And then realizing it as the last trick of suture—it is a position occupied by God. Except that it’s empty. And then we see the gaze of the real: the amorphous stain of Nick’s physical death in the snow before which we are helpless.

3.

 Two aspects of the Prologue which I have only mentioned in passing now need some further comment— its being filmed in black-and-white and slow-motion, and the music which constitutes the soundtrack.
 One one level both the technique and the music foreground the artificiality of the filmic construct, and thus can be seen as part of the process by which the actuality and function of the suture is revealed. Beyond this, however, I think, once again, that these formal decisions have a specific philosophical import, intimating a philosophical anthropology which arguably the rest of the film exemplifies and displays. I will turn once more to Žižek to articulate what’s involved here.
 Obviously any black-and-white film with a musical soundtrack but without speakers will reference the early years of cinema and evoke a certain formalistic nostalgia, successfully commodified, for example, in Hazanavicius’s The Artist (2011).  However von Trier’s cinematic stance here is far more ironic given the content and the highly sophisticated set of filmic techniques. In Enjoy Your Symptom[xiii], Žižek comments on how historically the introduction of voice into cinema “changes the whole economy of desire, the innocent vulgar vitality of the silent movie is lost, we enter the realm of double sense, hidden meaning, repressed desire—the very presence of the voice changes the visual surface into something delusive, into a lure[.]” And quoting Pascal Bonitzer (“Film was joyous, innocent and dirty. It will become obsessive, fetishistic, and ice-cold”), he concludes that “film was Chaplinesque, it will become Hitchcockian”. I don’t think it’s too much to say that von Trier’s Prologue is a Hitchcockian film in a Chaplinesque mask. Chaplin’s world, to quote Bonitzer again, is a “world of pure gesticularity...the protagonists are generally immortal...violence is universal and without consequences, there is no guilt”. In the Prologue it is as if von Trier negates this statement and tarries with the negation: gesticularity contracts into grimace, violent death is central, and everyone is guilty.
 It must be noted too that the absence of voice in the diegesis is only an apparent absence. For the soundtrack’s dominating sonic presence is not simply music but song which synchronizes with the narrative and declares in full Baroque gorgeousness:

Lascia ch'io pianga
Let me weep
Mia cruda sorte,
for my cruel fate
E che sospiri
And sigh
La libertà.
after freedom

Il duolo infranga
May sorrow break
Queste ritorte,
these ropes
De' miei martiri
of my sufferings
Sol per pietà.
out of pity

 It is easy to see how the words of this aria from Act II, Scene 2 of Handel’s Rinaldo serve as a lament by the parents for tragic death of their son, perhaps especially on the part of She. Better, perhaps, is to see them as a lament for the human condition in general, the inevitable traumatic encounter with the real which is the fate and lot of everyone.
 There is also, however, the specific context of the opera from which it’s taken: set during the First Crusade, and based on Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, it narrates the tale of Christian forces led by their general, Goffredo, and the heroic knight Rinaldo, as they lay siege to Jerusalem to conquer its Muslim king, Argante. King Argante is allied with and enamored of Armida, the queen of Damascus, who is a sorceress. Goffredo has promised Rinaldo the hand of his daughter Almirena once Jerusalem falls. Through her magical powers Armida knows that the Christian armies will be defeated if they are without Rinaldo, and so while Rinaldo and Almirena are rejoicing in their love in a beautiful garden, Armida magically appears and takes Almirena from Rinaldo's arms, summoning up monsters to subdue him when he tries to resist. In Rinaldo’s search for Almirena he is brought by a mermaid to Armida’s enchanted castle. There King Argante, having seen Almirena, falls madly in love with her, and, as she sings the above aria lamenting her fate, he promises to free her. Meanwhile, Rinaldo confronts Armida and demands the return of Almirena, but the sorceress is struck with love for him and offers herself to him. When he rejects her, she transforms herself into the likeness of Almirena. He is temporarily bewitched, but comes to his senses and spurns her. He escapes and she is torn between love for him and the desire for revenge. Argante happens upon her while she is disguised as Almirena and promises again to liberate her. She reproaches him for his faithlessness and he defies her, only to be overcome by her superior magical powers.
 It is remarkable how this part of the tortuous opera plot (there is much more, including the eventual conversion of Armida to Christianity after her defeat through “good” magic) will eventually map onto the main narrative of the film in a darkly parodistic way—like Rinaldo, the main plot of Antichrist will employ elements of love, desire, revenge, the monstrous, the supernatural, a quasi-magical place set apart, and the figure of the sorceress. But the melodrama of Rinaldo’s plot and the sumptuosness of its music are twisted into affective excess, graphic violence, and the unmusic of Nature, the cries of animals and acorns clattering on a roof.
 I am arguing that the clash of the two narratives, prepared for here in the Prologue, exposes the universalizing thrust of western Christian culture as endless grandiose suturing, a melodramatic metanarrative of redemption through sanctioned violence against any Other. And yet it is always and forever accompanied by its obscene opposite and complement. There is Christ and there is Antichrist, the one encompassing  the Logos, the masculine, the Lacanian “subject supposed to know”, scientific rationality, consciousness, Culture; the other encompassing the female, unreason, the unconscious, prejudice, emotion, Nature.  But furthermore, I want to suggest that the entire constitution of the Prologue will not allow a simple and simplistic overturning of this set of binaries, privileging one over the other; rather, by allowing the appearance of the gaze of the real, by exposing sutural strategies, and undoing our pleasure in a product of high culture, the Prologue espouses a deep skepticism towards any fundamental coherence, closure or plenitude. At best, it is an “adoration of the question”[xiv]; at worst “None of it is any use”, and “Chaos reigns”[xv]. There is gravity, but there is no grace to redeem it.

4.
All whom the flood did, and fire shall o'erthrow,
All whom war, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies,
Despair, law, chance hath slain...(John Donne)

 All the foregoing is really but a prolegomena to engaging with the rest of Antichrist. And if anything, this reading of the Prologue should head off any sense that this is a misogynistic film: the binaries mentioned above and which thread throughout the film’s narrative are highlighted as gendered, not because one element or the other is in-itself gendered but because in the discourses of western Culture, in the Christian “answer” (and its Platonic precursor) they are structured that way. Luce Irigaray has argued that the Western philosophical tradition has privileged the concept of “presence” which then underwrites the concepts of Being, Truth, and God, among others, which are then themselves privileged over other elements of the metaphysical system.[xvi] These become the positive terms in a set of binaries where the second term is negative, such as Presence/Absence, Being/Nothing, Truth/Error, Identity/Difference, and Masculine/Feminine. If Antichrist presents, for example, madness as feminine, it is only because it is acknowledging that the world has still not managed to integrate the deconstruction of such a binary into its notions of either madness or the feminine. The old hierarchy reigns and enforces its structural valorization of the masculine and rationality as it represses its anxiety at female jouissance. In Antichrist He, the therapist, enlightened “subject supposed to know”, can’t even hear She’s effort to undo such a binary and its valorization (no matter which term is the positive); their dialogue proceeds as follows:
 She: I discovered something else in my material than I expected. If human nature is evil, then that goes as well...for the nature of...
He: Of the women? Female nature?
She: The nature of all the sisters. Women do not control their own bodies -Nature does. I have it in writing in my books.
He: The literature that you used in your research was about evil things committed against women. But you read it as proof of the evil of women? You were supposed to be critical of those texts, that was your thesis. Instead you're embracing it. Do you know what you're saying
She: Forget it.

 “Women do not control their own bodies—Nature does”: the corollary to that, of course, is that neither do men control their own bodies; Nature, neither masculine nor feminine, does. But that is unhearable by He.

  Žižek once wrote that
 All ‘culture’ is in a way a reaction-formation, an attempt to limit, canalize--

to cultivate th[e] imbalance, th[e] traumatic kernel, th[e] radical antagonism

through which man cuts his umbilical cord with nature, with animal

homeostasis. It is not only that the aim is no longer to abolish this drive

antagonism, but the aspiration to abolish it is precisely the source of

totalitarian temptation: the greatest mass murders and holocausts have

always been perpetrated in the name of man as harmonious being, of a

New Man without antagonistic tension.[xvii]

 In Antichrist, in the last scene, He, having killed and burned She, walks away from Eden and meets, coming up the hill towards him crowds of women, and because their faces are blurred, he is no longer the object of the female gaze; they pass him by and he passes among them unconcerned, eating berries in a Nature open for his needs, bright, and unthreatening. This New Man is still the Old, the one who burned witches, the one who sacrifices “Truth for the sake of knowledge.”[xviii]

---

[i] Last words of Antichrist

[ii] Žižek, Slavoj. “Looking Awry” In Stam and Miller (eds) Film and Theory an Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. 524-538

[iii] McGowan, Todd, The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan. SUNY Press, 2008, p.28

[iv] McGowan, ibid.

[v] Žižek, ibid.

[vi]Lacan, Jacques, Seminar XI, W.W. Norton, 1998, p. 21

[vii] Fink, Bruce, ‘The Real Cause of Repetition’ in Reading  Seminar XI, ed. Feldstein, Fink, Jaanus, SUNY Press, 1995, p.225

[viii] Bowie, Malcolm, Lacan, Harvard Univ. Press, 1993, p.103

[ix] Ross, Stephen, ‘AVery Brief Introduction to Lacan’, online article, http://web.uvic.ca/~saross/lacan.html

[x] http://www.lacan.com/symptom8_articles/heath8.html

[xi] Silverman, Kaja, The Subject of Semiotics , New York: Oxford University Press, I983, p. 204

[xii] Žižek, Slavoj,  The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieślowski Between Theory and Post-Theory, London: BFI Publishing, 2001, p.32

[xiii] Žižek, Slavoj, Enjoy Your Symptom, Routledge, 2008, p. 2

[xiv] Hegel

[xv]Dialogue from Antichrist  available at http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/a/antichrist-script-transcript-chaos-reigns.html

[xvi] Irigiray, Luce, Speculum of the Other Woman, Cornell University Press, 1995.

[xvii] Žižek, Slavoj, The Sublime Object of Ideology, Verso, 2008, p. xxviii

[xviii] This meditation originates in various conversations I had with my friend and colleague David Denny whose own paper ‘A Postmodern Family Romance: Lars von Trier’s Antichrist’ is a brilliant reading of the film as a whole.

All film stills are ©IFC Films and are used for scholarly illustrative purposes only.

©Ger Killeen 2014

The Monkey, the Automaton, the Medusa’s Head: Home Thoughts From the Uncanny [On Paul Celan]

The Monkey, the Automaton, the Medusa’s Head: Home Thoughts From the Uncanny

by Ger Killeen

1.

 I once had a long conversation with an elderly woman who in 1944 at the age of 21, on a lovely, sunny day in May, had been shipped off from her small town in what is now Romania to Auschwitz. Her survival there was largely a matter of chance, her suffering and losses almost unspeakable. While we drank coffee and talked she told me about her husband, Hugo,another Auschwitz survivor. Unlike her, he came from an urban, German-speaking background, and as a talented musician he was part of an orchestra which included Jews and Gentiles, a group bound together by the love of music and performance. On the day that he was put on a train to the death camp he saw one of his fellow musicians, a non-Jew with whom he was very friendly, at the teeming station. The other man was upset at seeing him. They spoke. The other man helped him onto the train. His last words to Hugo were “Ah, if only all Jews were like you.”

2.

 In May 1960, living in Paris, Paul Celan (born Paul Antschel in 1920 in Czernowitz, Romania) was informed by the German Academy of Language and Literature that he had won Germany’s most prestigious literary award, the Georg Büchner Prize. Only sixteen years separated him from the day in 1944 when he somehow managed to get out of a Nazi labor camp in Romania; about nineteen years and a dark eternity separated him from the deaths of his parents in aTransnistrian camp, his father by typhus, his mother by a bullet to the head.
 There was a certain improbability in Celan receiving the Büchner Prize. He was not German as far as nationality goes, nor was German in any simple way his mother tongue, though it was, profoundly, his mother tongue. In his German poetry the language is characterized by dense compounds, neologisms, syntactic breakage, sometimes a word order influenced by Hebrew and Yiddish, ellipses, diction drawn from specialized and obscure sources, vocabulary drawn from Middle High German, foreign words...This was a language and a kind of poetry which irritated part of the German literary establishment. As Amir Eshel tells us
 only a few months before Celan received notice of the Büchner Prize, the distinguished critic Günter Blöcker reviewed ‘Language Mesh’ (Sprachgitter, 1959) and observed that Celan's "freedom" vis-à-vis the German language "may lie in his ancestry" - another way to say that the poet is not a native speaker, is not from here, is other, is a Jew.[i]
 Celan was deeply disturbed by this and other examples of a barely concealed and sometimes overt anti-Semitism,  and in preparing his acceptance speech for the prize he went through what was, he wrote to a friend, “a dark summer”.
 Who were these people who were now bestowing honors on him? Eshel describes Celan’s audience as follows:
 He knew that many of the attending dignitaries had participated knowingly or involuntarily in the Nazi endeavor and that most belonged to the conservative cultural elite of Adenauer's Germany. He knew, furthermore, that many of them rejected everything his poetry stood for...[ii]
 How was he to address them? Could he even address them? What could he possibly say that would reach across to them from out of the experience of what he sometimes simply called “das was geschah”, “that which happened”? Was it even decent for a Jew to speak of poetry on soil where high culture had accompanied unspeakable barbarity?
 Over the dark summer Celan accumulated more than 300 pages of notes for what was to become ‘The Meridian’, a 16 page speech which is one of the most important documents of poetics ever written, a speech he delivered on October 22^nd, 1960 in Darmstadt,  a speech where he talks of art, of poetry, of language, of silence, of the other; of places and dates and journeys and routes; where he speaks of a kind of homecoming.  

3.

 ‘The Meridian’[iii] is hardly a text to be justly summarized; rather it is a text that one approaches and sees exfoliate as it engages a large number of other texts, both cited and uncited. To read the text of the delivered speech in conjunction with the preparatory notes is to get a sense of how concentrated it is in language and reference, and to realize that even with the notes to hand one’s process of unpacking all of its ramifications has just begun.
 Celan begins by talking about the notion of art in its broadest possible sense, using the work of Georg Büchner himself to frame his ideas. Art he asserts is “a puppet-like, iambically five-footed and...a childless being”, a fundamentally sterile activity. There is also in the world a great deal of conversation about art. He refers to such a conversation happening within Büchner’s ‘The Death of Danton’ and  goes on to remark that this kind of conversation “could be pursued endlessly”. Something, however, interferes with it.
 Celan waits to tell us what that interference is, and in the meantime “art returns”. It returns in Büchner’s ‘Woyzeck’  “presented by a carnival barker”, “in the shape of a monkey” wearing “a coat and trousers”.  And in Büchner’s ‘Leonce and Lena’ art comes back to where “time and lighting have become unrecognizable. For here we are ‘in flight toward paradise,’ ‘all watches and calendars’ shall soon ‘be shattered,’  even ‘forbidden’...”.  And in the presence of “ ‘two world famous automatons’”  and a man who says he may be “‘the strangest of them all’”  the spectacle before us is “‘Nothing but art and mechanics, nothing but cardboard and watchsprings!’”. Arguably it is naturalistic art and propagandistic art that are being engaged in these quasi-parables. All told, in a few paragraphs, Celan has launched a stealth attack on some of the main currents of the Western artistic tradition, especially in its German form. But where is all this going?
 Art still remains “an eternal problem”, Celan says, but “[i]t is easy to talk about art”. However, whenever art is talked about there is inevitably someone who doesn’t know what’s being talked about.

Someone who, nevertheless, “hears the speaker, who ‘sees him speak’, who perceives language and shape, and...breath, that is, direction and destiny.” For Celan, this is the situation of the character of Lucile in Büchner’s play ‘The Death of Danton’ as she watches Danton and Camille go to the scaffold during the Terror after the French Revolution. As they go joyfully to execution they are bathed in their own rhetoric—“many artful words”, “much talk”—while the onlookers think the whole performance is “old hat and boring”. Lucile, however, is “blind to art” and when “all around Camille pathos and sententiousness confirm the triumph of ‘puppet’ and ‘string’” (rhetoric, knotted to real political action and consequences) “...Lucile for whom language is something person-like and tangible”  comes out suddenly with ‘Long live the king’”.  And this, Celan says, “is the counterword, it is the word that cuts the ‘string’, the word that no longer bows down before ‘the bystanders and old war-horses of history’”. It is the interference he spoke of earlier. “Homage”, he says, “is being paid”, not to some historical monarchist ideal but “to the majesty of the absurd as witness for the presence of the human.”  And then,  “...I believe that this is...poetry”.
 At this point in the speech Celan admits to being “stuck”. He is stuck on an exclamation of Camille in ‘The Death of Danton’: “ ‘—oh, art!’” In order to move forward Celan says he has to put what he calls “the acute [accent] of today” rather than “the grave [accent] of history” or “the circumflex...of the eternal” on ‘—oh, art!’  It takes a while for Celan to amplify the meaning of this but when he does we become aware that it is the present itself that requires a “truly radical calling-into-question of art”. Furthermore, Celan makes a distinction between art (Kunst) and poetry (Dichtung) and asks how they might be related in the present day. And so he turns to and turns over another work of Büchner,  the novella ‘Lenz’.
 In the passage from ‘Lenz’ that Celan deals with, the title character, an 18^th century visionary poet who went mad, walks into the mountains on the 20^th of January. In the novella, Lenz describes his desire to capture a scene he witnessed while walking: the vision of two peasant girls sitting on a rock moved him so much that  “ ‘[at] times one wishes one were a Medusa’s head in order to turn a group like this into stone, and call everybody over to have a look.’”  This is an art which desires to efface its difference from nature; it is an attempt to “grasp the natural as the natural with the help of art!”, as Celan puts it. It is expansive, if not totalitarian, in its aspirations.
 “This is”, Celan continues, “a stepping beyond what is human, a stepping into an uncanny (unheimlich) realm turned toward the human—the realm where the monkey, the automatons and with them...oh, art too, seem to be at home”.  It is an art which causes estrangement and self-forgetting; human beings forget themselves in the forms which art represents, forms which mimic the human but which are fundamentally unhuman, and even, perhaps inhuman, especially when placed under the acute accent of the present.
 But poetry. Present poetry. Poetry is an art isn’t it? How might it differ from the art about which Celan has been speaking? 

Celan sets against  the Unheimliche, the self-estrangement of human beings in art, a concept of poetry which he will place under the signs of event, individuality and singularity.  Rather than an art which enlarges, poetry, which remains uncanny,  asks you, the unique individual you, to “go with art into your innermost narrows. And set yourself free.”  Poetry shelters the human,  not some capital H Human generality but this singular individual here and now. The poem is “one person’s language-become-shape”.

Poetry, then, becomes the art of an individual “who does not forget that he speaks under the angle of inclination of his Being, the angle of inclination of his creatureliness.” This unique “angle” can be thought of as all those circumstances that have led the poet to be who she is right now, personal inheritance and history shaped and warped by History. The language  of the poem runs into difficulties here because such an individuality can hardly make itself heard in the words we have at hand. That is why Celan stresses the poem as an event, as being “en route”.  The poem is obscure because it is traveling from what has no likeness, and “perhaps it is exactly here that the Medusa’s head shrinks, perhaps it is exactly here that the automatons break down—for this single, short moment”. Art is countered by an Atemwende, a breathturn, where our breath and words are taken away. The poem suspends language and the poem is a singular event occuring in the pure suspension of speech. The poem dangles over an abyss. Under the acute accent of the present (and the Shoah is present) the poem knows a “terrifying silence” into which it is always in danger of falling.
 Where do we go from here?  Where, precisely, is the poem traveling to?
 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe puts it this way:

In the place (without place) of the elsewhere, an "other" occurs, that is, a singular existent in whose name... the poem maintains the hope of speaking. Estrangement yields ground to the encounter.[iv]

  The encounter;  a mystery is how Celan describes this encounter.  “The poem is lonely. It is lonely and en route. Its author remains added to it.”  The author too is lonely and en route, moving towards an encounter with another human being and the creatures of the world in all their mysterious otherness. And so the poem is a kind of dialogue where the poet travels through the uncanny to encounter an other, and in the journey discovers also her-self, him-self; the poem is fastidious in its attentiveness to the specificity of its own angle of inclination and that of the other.  “It becomes a conversation—often a desperate conversation”, Celan says. And as authentic conversation is doesn’t impose, it exposes.  As an attentive reader of such a poem one is always a unique addressee, exposed too in one’s singularity.
 Journeys, journeys, journeys.  They are everywhere in the ‘Meridian’, marking the poet and the poem:

Does one take, when thinking of poems, does one take such routes with the poems? Are these routes only re-routings, detours from you to you? But they are also at the same time, among many other routes, routes on which language becomes voice, they are encounters, routes of a voice to a perceiving you, creaturely routes, blueprints for being perhaps, a sending onself ahead toward oneself, in search of oneself...A kind of homecoming.

4.

 We have come to the word “homecoming”. There could scarcely be a more burdened word for Celan. Under the Nazis Celan had lost his physical home, his parents, his native land, his history. His home had been literally wiped off the map. On the 26^th January, 1958, Celan, accepting a literary award in Bremen said following:

The landscape from which I—by what detours! but are there such things: detours?—the landscape from which I come to you might be unfamiliar to most of you. It is the landscape that was home to a not inconsiderable portion of those Hasidic tales that Martin Buber has retold for us all in German. It was, if I may add to this topographic sketch something that appears before my eyes now from very far away—it was a region in which human beings and books used to live. There in this former province of the Hapsburg monarchy, now fallen into historylessness...[v]

 There is no going home to this; it exists as a landscape but much of its human history has gone up in smoke. After such loss all that was left to him, Celan says, is language, the German language common to “us all” (as he addresses his German listeners with what must surely be horrifying irony):

It, the language, remained, not lost, yes in spite of everything. But it had to pass through its own answerlessness, pass through frightful muting, pass through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech. It passed through and gave back no words for that which happened; yet it passed through this happening. Passed through and could come to light again, “enriched” by all this.[vi]

    Is his language, then, Celan’s only home? If it is, it is a most uncanny home, for  the journey creates both the “I” who is on the way home and the home itself,  an “I” who is as familar and strange as the language of the poem-conversation, perhaps an “I” who is always coming home, always on the way, never quite at home.
 There are two poems from ‘Sprachgitter’ , “Heimkehr” (“Homecoming”) and “Unten” (“Underneath”) which walk right beside each other and talk back and forth about home and language.

Heimkehr 

Schneefall, dichter und dichter,

taubenfarben, wie gestern,

Schneefall, als schliefst du auch jetzt noch.

Weithin, gelagertes Weiß.

Drüberhin, endlos,

die Schlittenspur des Verlornen.

Darunter, geborgen,

stülpt sich empor,

was den Augen so weh tut,

Hügel um Hügel,

unsichtbar.

Auf jedem,

heimgeholt in sein Heute,

ein ins Stumme entglittenes Ich:

hölzern, ein Pflock.

Dort: ein Gefühl,

vom Eiswind herübergeweht,

das sein tauben-, sein schnee-

farbenes Fahnentuch festmacht.[vii]

                Homecoming

Snowfall, denser and denser,

dove-coloured as yesterday,

snowfall, as if even now you were sleeping.

White, stacked into distance.

Above it, endless,

the sleigh track of the lost.

Below, hidden,

presses up

what so hurts the eyes,

hill upon hill,

invisible.

On each,

fetched home into its today,

an I slipped away into dumbness:

wooden, a post.

There: a feeling,

blown across by the ice wind

attaching its dove- its snow-

coloured cloth as a flag.[viii]

            Unten

Heimgeführt ins Vergessen

das Gast-Gespräch unsrer

langsamen Augen.

Heimgeführt Silbe um Silbe, verteilt

auf die tagblinden Würfel, nach denen

die spielende Hand greift, groß,

im Erwachen.

Und das Zuviel meiner Rede:

angelagert dem kleinen

Kristall in der Tracht deines Schweigens.[ix]

                Underneath

Led home into forgetting,
the guest-conversation of our
slow eyes.

Led home, syllable by syllable, divided

among day-blind dice, which

the playing hand grips, large,

in the awakening.

And the too much of my speaking:

heaped up around the small

crystal in the garb of your silence.[x]

 In the first poem the whole notion of a homecoming is complicated from the opening stanza by our uncertainty (typical of Celan) of who the “you” addresses. Perhaps it is you and me and all of us in our own time, but if so, it is also a “you” who is of Celan’s own time, a  you whose sleeping, whose unawareness of his complicity in all that has happened, necessitates a denser and denser accumulation of language (dichter, denser, puns on Dichter, poet) so that there’s some medium, however impermanent, in which the merest trace of the lost can be inscribed for now.
 Perhaps it is only by repressing the reality of “what happened” that you can be at home here—for anyone else attempting to come home the present is pressed upon painfully by the absence of the murdered; dead bodies and possessions that were mounded up for all to see are now invisible. Is the “I” who slips away into dumbness perhaps every individual silenced by murder, silenced by the murder of authenticity through the Nazification of language, as well as those whose condition of being at home is to stay dumb?
 And the poem ends in ambiguity—“a feeling”, a word of such Romantic provenance, but detatched from any human person, a generic feeling, not articulated through any human breath but stirred by the coldest wind, dominates the “There”, the place of repression and invisibility. Is the raising of the flag an act of possession, of repossession, of communication, or surrender? Dove-colored, it might be the sign that re-establishes a covenant; snow-colored, it might be a sign of defeat.
 Around and within this poem swirl Celan’s intricate relationships with home and homecoming as the Western, and especially German, literary and philosophical traditions have thought about them. Martin Heidegger, a thinker of huge and fraught importance for Celan, had engaged with the concepts of home and homeless throughout his career. In Being and Time, Heidegger's existential understanding of Dasein, the human Being, reveals that Dasein is uncanny, unheimlich,  "not-at-home" as Being-in-the-world, the awareness of which is the source of Angst, anxiety in the face of our finitude. But it is especially in his writings on Hölderlin that Heidegger teases out the connections between home, dwelling and a special understanding of poetry itself.
  “Poetically man dwells”, Heidegger claims in an essay of that name, quoting Hölderlin’s poem ‘In Lovely Blue’. Over against the crisis of modernity, of modernity’s instrumentalization of everything, including and perhaps especially language, Heidegger sets human beings in a relationship with nature that is non-manipulative, non-dominating; it is a relationship of authentic dwelling on this earth, and humans beings can be summoned to it by an equally authentic poetry which lets us hear the echos of a lost sacred engagement with the earth hidden by other human modes of being, such as the technological orientation towards the world. Poetic language is an invitation to dwell on earth as safekeepers of “the coming to presence of truth”, not as producers, consumers, and “human resources”.
 And yet, for Celan, there is something deeply problematic about Heidegger’s notion of dwelling. In ‘Poetically Man Dwells’ the philosopher says that the “dwelling” he has in mind has nothing to do with the “dwelling conditions” we experience as human beings in society. He speaks, rather, of an abstract, ontological condition; what poetry gives us access to is “a homelessness in which not only human beings but the essence of the human being stumbles aimlessly about”, as he puts it in his ‘Letter On Humanism’. He continues

 Homelessness so understood consists in the abandonment of beings by being. Homelessness is the symptom of oblivion of being. Because of it the truth of being remains unthought. The oblivion of being makes itself known indirectly through the fact that the human being always observes and handles only beings.[xi]
 

 Absent from this is the actual homelessness and uprootedness of millions of people after World War II. The terrible pathways back home, if they even exist, are dissolved into a kind of poetic transcendence. And Celan, as Eshel writes, “alluded...to the fact that for the philosopher, despite the experience of two world wars, the pathway remained comforting and ‘at home’ [heimisch] in its ‘inexhaustible power of the simple,’ a path always leading back to one's own language, to the solitude and supremacy of the self.”[xii] For Celan, the uncanny homelessness of the present stems from an historical catastrophe, not some rupture in Being.

 Turning to the other poem, ‘Underneath’, here Celan goes down into the “below, hidden” of ‘Homecoming’. To be led home presupposes an inability to go home under one’s own power or an inability to find the way home by oneself, perhaps because of blindness. But it is an unreliable leading (it is easy to hear Führer in –geführt “led”) that leads to forgetfulness when home should surely entail remembering. It is not being at home in what was or is home, and here the phrase “guest-conversation” condenses several ambiguous orientations: it suggests the polite sociability of being in someone else’s home, it suggests being a stranger whose temporary belonging is predicated on a forgetting of differences, it suggests a language whose bare functionality supercedes its meaningfulness.
 In the second stanza being led home is (or ought to be) a syllable by syllable path to awakening, to consciousness, to the linguistic fullness of speech. And yet every syllable is spoken under the powers of contingency and chance, and words do not have a straightforward correspondance with a reality that is scarcely graspable.
 That is why, to those who would forget, the language of the poem, a Celan poem, is “too much”. Syllable after syllable the poem leads down beneath the superficilaities of an unproblematic sense of home, the poem’s words a denser and denser snow around the cold, clear understanding of “what happened”, not concealing the “crystal” so much as indicating its existence; what really conceals it is “der Tracht”, the traditional Bavarian costume whose folksy homeliness is a cover for the history that many Germans would rather forget.
 Homecoming? The word itself was appropriated by the Nazis in a propaganda film commissioned by Goebbels: Heimkehr, directed by Gustav Ucicky, was released in 1941 and showed the tribulations of ethnic Germans living in what was then a part of Poland, their imprisonment, their waiting for execution, their rescue by the German army, and finally their “homecoming” to the Reich.

 Syllable by syllable Celan, over many poems, under many different guises, takes that kind of homecoming apart.

5.

 What kind of homecoming is a poem? In Celan’s sense the emphasis must surely be on home-coming, on the journey that is undertaken in the hope of, but not the confidence in, an arrival. Already in his Bremen speech Celan had said that

 A poem, being an instance of language, hence essentially dialogue, may be a letter in bottle thrown out into the sea with the - surely not strong - hope that it may somehow wash up somewhere, perhaps on a shoreline of the heart. In this way, too, poems are en route: they are headed towards.[xiii]

In ‘The Meridian’ he goes further into the notion of dialogue, the poem which counters and encounters, the poem as conversation, “often a desperate conversation”. It’s important to realize that the conversation Celan has in mind here as a figure for the poem has little to do with a simple linguistic exchange; it is nothing like the “guest-conversation” where horror can be concealed under politeness and custom. In the first place there is something strange about the modern poem; as he tells his audience in ‘The Meridian’ “...it is common today to reproach poetry for its ‘obscurity’.” But, he goes on, “This is, I believe, if not the congenital darkness, then however the darkness attributed to poetry for the sake of an encounter from a –perhaps self-created—distance or strangeness.” Remarkably, the poem’s strangeness exists not just for the sake of the reader, this other whom it asks to approach with deep attentiveness and the distancing of self that enables a genuine conversation, an encounter, to occur. It exists for the writer too. “[P]erhaps there are two strangenesses”, says Celan, “—close together, and in one and the same direction.” The other strangeness belongs to the poet, for the poem sets out from the poet’s own date and place, gathers a “you” around “the I addressing and naming it”. The poem acquires meaning on the way to the other and the accretion of meaning is also a manifestation of the other. Simultaneously the poem is mindful of  its "dates,"  (January 20^th , when Lenz walks into the mountains, January 20^th, date of the Wansee Conference codifying the systematic destruction of European Jews), markers of  the poem’s historical time, but also mindful of the multiplicity of readers’ dates from each of which the poem may be experienced anew.

 To describe poems then, as Celan does, as “routes on which language becomes voice...encounters...routes of a voice to a perceiving you, creaturely routes, blueprints for being perhaps, a sending oneself ahead toward oneself, in search of oneself...” is to burden poet and reader together with the same demand to “go into your innermost narrows” where you are strangest to yourself. As a reader, you are exposed in all your self-distancing otherness, just as the poem, lonely and on the way, accompanied by its poet, is. In the chance encounter of meeting you might come home together, an I and a you on the same path, in conversation.

6.

 Beyond Celan’s own poetry is there a message in a bottle thrown towards our post-modern now in the form of ‘The Meridian’?  

 Our contemporary images of the uncanny as un-heimlich, as not-being-at-home, are no longer the monkey in human clothes, the automaton, the dopplegänger, the head of Medusa; rather they are the genetically modified organism, the clone, the cyborg, the zombie. These images point to our anxiety in the face of technologies that blur the distinction between what is natural and human on the one hand and what, on the other hand, present themselves as seemingly natural and human but are not, a topsy-turvy world where corporations are legally people and strawberries contain genes from fish. They point to a global cultural anxiety that everything is spinning out of control—governments, corporations, cybernetics, climate.
 We have words that are descriptive enough for all of this—genocide, global warming, terrorism, ecocide—and yet these things continue apace. People are still being helped, politely or otherwise, onto death trains. If as poets and readers of poetry we were to think through to the end the challenges given by Celan, what would be required of us in the face of our catastrophes, both looming and underway, our loss of home, whether through climate change, ecosystem destruction, or the uprootedness of millions by these and by war after war after war? Can we honestly say that a January 20^th stands above the poems we write and our reading? Are we ever brave enough to make that turn to the stranger without and within ourselves, to open the authentic conversation with the unknown other who is moving towards us? What kind of poem would we, now, have to write to make this possible?
 There is a very late poem of Celan from the posthumously published book Schneepart (‘Snowpart’) which we might take as our talisman:

Steinschlag hinter den Käfern.

Da sah ich einen, der log nicht,

heimstehn in seine Verzweiflung.

Wie deinem Einsamkeitsstrum

glückt ihm die weit

ausschreitende Stille.[xiv]

Rockfall, at the beetles’ back.

I saw one there, who didn’t lie,

stand the ground of his brokenness.

Happy—like your storm

of solitude—his far

carrying calm.[xv]

The ground of our brokenness may not be the same as Celan’s. We cannot be at home there, but surely it is the only place from which we can write our way homewards.[xvi]

 

---

[i] Eshel, Amir, “Paul Celan's Other: History, Poetics, and Ethics”, New German Critique, No. 91 (2004), p.59

[ii] Eshel, Amir, ibid. p.59

[iii] All references to ‘The Meridian’ are from ‘The Meridian: final version, drafts, materials’ ed. by Bernhard Böschenstein and Heino Schmull, translated by Pierre Joris, Stanford University Press, 2011.

[iv] Lacoue-Labarthe, Phillipe, Poetry As Experience, translated by Andrea Tarnowski, p59, Stanford University Press, 1999.

[v] Felstiner, John, Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, p. 395, W.W. Norton, 2001.

[vi] ibid. p. 395

[vii] Celan, Paul, Gesammelte Werke, Erster Band, p. 156, Suhrkamp, 2000.

[viii] Translated by Michael Hamburger in Poems of Paul Celan, p.111, Persea Books, 1989.

[ix] Celan, Paul, Gesammelte Werke, Erster Band, p. 157, Suhrkamp, 2000.

[x] Translated by Shira Wolosky in Language Mysticism: The Negative Way of Language in Eliot, Beckett, and Celan, p. 172, Stanford University Press, 1995.

[xi] Heidegger, Martin, ‘Letter On Humanism’, in Pathmarks, ed. by William McNeill, p. 258,  Cambridge University Press, 1998.

[xii] Eshel, Amir, ibid. p. 70

[xiii] Felstiner, John, ibid. p. 395

[xiv] Celan, Paul, Gesammelte Werke, Zweiter Band, p. 400, Suhrkamp, 2000.

[xv] Translated by Ian Fairley in Snowpart, p. 125, The Sheep Meadow Press, 2007.

[xvi] This essay is dedicated to my late friend and colleague, Aliza Mizrachi Keddem 1930 – 2012.