Chapter One: Mandelshtamâs Meridian: On Paul Celanâs Aesthetic-Historical Materialism
Ultimately philosophical research must decide to ask what kind of being in general language has. Is it an innerworldly pragmatic tool, or does language have the mode of being of Dasein, or neither of the two? What sort of being is that of language, that it can be âdeadâ?
âMartin Heidegger1
Every sign by itself seems dead. What gives it life?âIn use it is alive. Is life breathed into it there?âOr is the use its life?
âLudwig Wittgenstein2
Important artworks reveal ever new layers, age, grow cold, die.
âTheodor W. Adorno3
The poetry of Paul Celan has played a salient role in the ongoing debate surrounding linguistic meaning and interpretation, even when the stakes of that debate extend beyond the experience or interpretation of artworks altogether. Thus both Jacques Derrida and Hans-Georg Gadamer have written book-length commentaries on selected poems of Celan, and although at odds in their fundamental philosophical commitments, both thinkers find support for and instantiation of their respective views on meaning and understanding in general in their readings of Celanâs poetry in particular.
While the debate of âdeconstruction vs. hermeneuticsâ has received much attention in literary theory and philosophy,4 far less attention has been paid to the exact nature of aesthetic experience in its relationship to nonaesthetic discourses that these philosophical positions presuppose. We can fruitfully situate this question within Adornoâs dialectic of aesthetic semblance, understood as the tension and movement between the poles of aesthetic autonomy on the one hand and heteronomy with the nonaesthetic on the other that characterizes genuine artworks for Adorno. In the specific context of Holocaust art, that dialectic might be best described as moving between the poles of monument (constructing a âfittingâ aesthetic artifact while adhering to aesthetic considerations such as coherence, genre, sense, even harmony and beauty) and document (foregoing such aesthetic considerations altogether in favor of factual documentation: names, dates, places, events). In the first extreme (aesthetic autonomy) aesthetic semblance in the sense of âillusionâ or âmythâ can usurp any reference to nonaesthetic reality, tantamount to dismissing any relevance of historical chronicle to the tasks of representation or commemoration; in the second extreme (referential autonomy) aesthetic semblance is abandoned altogether in favor of factual reconstruction, tantamount to dismissing any relevance of aesthetic construction to the tasks of representation or commemoration. The normative minimalist framework advocated in this study claims that a successful Holocaust artwork will maintain the tension between both poles of the dialectic of aesthetic semblance within aesthetic experience.
Two apparently opposed conceptualizations of aesthetic experienceâIdealist and deconstructive aesthetic theoriesâsurprisingly converge in maintaining aesthetic semblance. Traditional Idealist aesthetics holds that the successful artwork is to take up realityâs contingencies and contradictions and harmoniously reconcile them in aesthetic semblance, conventionally centered on the trope of the symbol. It is then merely one step to see the aesthetic reconciliation as a proleptic promise of the utopian possibility of actually reconciling societyâs and natureâs antagonisms in what Schiller called the âaesthetic state.â5 Conversely, deconstructive readings of literature by Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida draw on the untotalizability and undecidability of reference in aesthetic semblance to reveal the irreconcilable differences and deferrals of language and linguistic understanding in general. In the first case, artâs specificum is its sublation of difference; in the second case, artâs specificum is its revelation of semiotic diffĂ©rance. In both cases artâs specificity renders it autonomous vis-Ă -vis everyday, nonaesthetic experience, and in that sense aesthetic semblance remains intact. It is from this sense of aesthetic semblance that Celan will take a significant step back, and toward, as I shall show, a unique form of aesthetic-historical materialism, which in turn fulfills the dual desiderata of the minimalist framework for Holocaust art.
Celanâs retreat from aesthetic semblance, I shall argue, lies in his lyrical dialogism, in which nonaesthetic reference operates within and against aesthetic semblance. Historical and philosophical interests alternate in my exploration of Celanâs lyrical dialogism, the origins of which likely lie in concepts developed by Mikhail Bakhtin in his study of novelistic prose, while de Manâs critique of Bakhtinâs concept of dialogicity from the standpoint of aesthetic semblance initially defines the guiding problems of reference and linguistic understanding which underlie Celanâs ambitions (§1). Celan found a specifically lyrical form of dialogism and address in the essays of his poetic alter ego Osip Mandelstam (§§2â3), concepts that Celan developed in his two most important poetological essays (§§5â6). Against Derridaâs quasi-transcendental construal of linguistic understanding, I draw on work by Wittgenstein and Gareth Evans in arguing for an intersubjective conception of meaning reference having both naturalistic and normative dimensions (§4), and I claim that this theory best elucidates the kind of aesthetic-historical materialism at work in Celanâs poetry (§7), which Gadamerâs implicit Idealism can only dismiss as âoccasionalâ and inessential (§8). I conclude by offering close readings of two Celan poems according to this theory, in which nonaesthetic reference and linguistic understanding operate both within and against aesthetic semblance in order to enact the natural history or âmortalityâ of the proper-name references (§9).
1. Bakhtin and the Literary Device of Dialogue
In âDiscourse and the Novel,â Bakhtin offers an essential criterion for distinguishing the novel from lyric poetry as, one could say, Weberian ideal-types. In terms of speech genres, âthe poet is a poet insofar as he accepts the idea of a unitary and singular language and a unitary monologically sealed-off utterance. These ideas are immanent in the poetic genres with which he works.â6 The novel, by contrast, is characterized by âheteroglossiaâ and âthe double-voiced wordâ such that any monological speech, any singular speaking voice, is relativized and introduced into a dialogue, which, by virtue of its âdialogicity,â cannot be subsumed under a final utterance. The âdouble-voiced wordâ is Bakhtinâs term for describing the characteristic discourse of the novel that assumes two speakers involved in an unfinalizable dialogue. By contrast he claims that the poetic trope âcannot presuppose any fundamental relationship to anotherâs word, to anotherâs voice. The polysemy of the poetic symbol presupposes the unity of a voice with which it is identical, and it presupposes that such a voice is completely alone with its own discourse.â7 In their lucid summary of Bakhtinâs position, Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson identify the distinctive characteristic of poetic tropeâas opposed to nonfinalizable dialogicityâas its referential-representational relationship to an object: âWhether that interrelationship [of meanings in a poetic trope] is understood logically, ontologically, emotively, evaluatively, or in any other way, one is still speaking of the relation of words to their objects. One can discuss its complexity through the theoretical discourse of âsignifiedâ and âsignifier.ââ8
However, in his critical review de Man argues that âdialogicityâ itself becomes a trope for Bakhtin. After establishing that Bakhtinâs understanding of trope as âan intentional structure directed toward an objectâ is epistemological, that is, concerned with the referential link between a trope and its meaning or referent,9 de Man counters that âthe opposition between trope as object-directed and dialogism as social-oriented discourse sets up a binary opposition between object and society that is itself tropological in the worst possible sense, namely as reification.â10 If I understand de Man correctly, he is observing that Bakhtin equivocates between two meanings of âdialogism.â In the first case, âdialogismâ would designate sociality in the sense of what Bakhtin calls âexotopy,â which, if it is not âobject-directedâ (that is, involving a relationship of reference or representation), does not provide the means for distinguishing anything (and therefore falls into what de Man calls âthe categories of precritical phenomenalismâ). In the second case âdialogismâ would indicate individual voices to the extent that they can be individuated within novelistic discourse, yet in this case those voices would be tropes, object-oriented intentional structures for which Bakhtin provides a rich descriptive poetics. And in this case the problem of aesthetic semblanceâthe possible suspension of a referential relationship to the nonaestheticâreturns: âIt is possible to think of dialogism as a still formal method by which to conquer or to sublate formalism itself. Dialogism is here still a descriptive and metalinguistic term that says something about language rather than about the world.â11
Although Mathew Roberts, whom Morson and Emerson cite affirmatively, maintains that âthe âconfrontationâ of these two theorists cannot occur around a problematic or conceptual opposition immanent to eitherâ because of their âfundamentally different attitudes of the dialogic and hermeneutic epistemologies,â12 perhaps the confrontation can be reformulated as follows. Bakhtin seems to elide the epistemological intricacies of aesthetic semblance by trying to incorporate citation, sidelong-glances, the double-voiced word as events of social reality. De Man claims that within the literary text these devices are just thatâliterary devices that may represent a many-voiced sociality but which, as representation (mimesis), do not circumvent aesthetic semblance; therefore the analysis of such devices is not...