Paul Celan is an indispensable twentieth century poet not least because, as a Jewish poet writing in German, his work is emblematic of the possibility and necessity of writing poetry after the horrors of the Holocaust. By virtue of his unique position, Celan's poetry stands at the curious and difficult juncture between "the need to witness" and "the desire [...] to create in and through [...] poems a new, viable world that would overcome the past—without abolishing or dismissing it" (Joris, 25)—that is, between acknowledging and bearing witness to atrocity and death, and by creating anew bearing witness to life again. In the interview/commentary on Celan's work "Language Is Never Owned", Jacques Derrida gave voice to these possibilities by expressing the idea that the act of writing a poem—and the task, the responsibility of the poet himself—is to observe as nearly as possible the death of language and then bear witness to (and bring about) its resurrection.
This is accomplished with varying degrees of success in Celan's poems, and in various ways; in particular we will examine the poems "Death Fugue" and "You Were" for their near-opposite approaches to that problem and its resulting tension and questions, and the different conclusions that they reach. "Death Fugue" itself witnesses a traversing to the boundaries of living language—in a number of ways which will be elucidated presently—but returns to the living comparatively empty-handed if we hold it up next to "You Were", which is very much representative of Celan's later, mature poetry. Insofar as Derrida's thoughts on the matter apply to both poems, the former leaves little room for effecting the resurrection of language (bearing witness as it does to its death), whereas the latter—in all its straightforward simplicity and concision—is demonstrative of precisely what Derrida is getting at.
"Death Fugue" was written early in Celan's career, before he became a poet of renown and before he found the voice that characterised his later work; it is starkly, profoundly different from poems written later in his career. Accordingly, his relationship with the poem was anxious and diffident—after its original publication, Celan made a decision to bar the poem from being further anthologised and refused to read it (or have it read) in public (Joris, 24). Both of these reactions bespeak a desire to avoid being associated with or identified by that particular poem, even after having written it—and that incongruity is precisely what makes it so fascinating to examine in relation to Celan's mature work, and against the backdrop of Derrida's commentary on the poet's task and what Celan was trying to accomplish.
As its title suggests, "Death Fugue" (more or less) takes the form of a fugue, or a polyphonic form of musical composition that involves a single theme (or scant handful of themes) repeated over and over again in various configurations—moved up or down one or more octaves, transposed to a different key, played inverted or backward as the piece progresses, or simply repeated with a different starting time (not unlike folk songs sung in the round). The polyphonic aspect is the counterpoint that is developed when various transformed versions of the original theme are layered over top of each other, each making a distinct 'voice' that works in harmony with the rest; the end of the piece may (or may not) resolve back into the original unaltered theme. This counterpoint is subtly musically different from harmony, even though they overlap&mdashamong other things, it requires that each voice be able to stand on its own, as well as alongside the voice or voices with which it is harmonising. Compositional method aside, the true genius of any given fugue—its heart and its soul—is in the conception of a single theme that can be altered in so many ways as to turn it into something else entirely, and which can in turn be played back upon the original theme in a way that is harmonious, not dissonant.
"Death Fugue", too, has repeating themes arranged and then rearranged as the poem progresses. (For the purposes of this essay, the themes will be separated out and numbered in the order in which they first appear; the poem's title implies that it is not out of line to consider each theme separately as one would for a musical fugue before examining their convergence.) The first such theme begins the poem with a subject, or speaker, from whose point of view the rest of the poem is to be read; in altered form, is also begins about half the poem's stanzas:
Black milk of morning we drink you at dusktime
we drink you at noontime and dawntime we drink you at night
we drink and drink
we scoop out a grave in the sky where it's roomy to lie
The second theme, which begins in the second stanza, introduces the poem's narrative thread:
There's a man in this house who cultivates snakes and who writes
who writes when it's nightfall nach Deutschland your golden hair Margareta
he writes it and walks from the house and the stars all start flashing he whistles his dogs to draw near
whistles his Jews to appear starts us scooping a grave out of sand
he commands us play up for the dance
This puts the subject "we" into context: the poem's speaker is speaking with and for the Jews, who are being ordered to dig graves and to play accompanying music by someone who is writing nach Deutschland—a gang-boss in a concentration camp. Margareta is one of the main characters in the Faust story, which was perhaps most notably revisited in German by Goethe—she was the woman with whom Faust fell in love, and whom he seduced with the help of Mephistopheles.
There's a man in this house who cultivates snakes and who writes
who writes when its nightfall nach Deutschland your golden hair Margareta
your ashen hair Shulamite we scoop out a grave in the sky where it's roomy to lie
This second theme, when it is repeated, is not only intertwined with the first theme, but built upon: Shulamite is the (Jewish) princess in the Song of Solomon, and perhaps is a twisted analogical equivalent to Margareta from the German story. Margareta's hair is golden, like the Aryan blonde-haired ideal; Shulamite's hair is ashen, in contrast, perhaps washed out by the grief of an entire people, or as though it had been burnt in a crematorium. The juxtaposition is curious because in the Faust myth, Margareta dies imprisoned, tormented, and fallen from her original state of grace and beauty and idealised femininity; in the Song of Solomon, Shulamite endures no such fate and in fact could be considered a more lasting—eternal—representation of femininity. Curious though it is, the juxtaposition brings home the state of affairs from which the poem is being uttered by its speaker; golden-haired Margareta represents the zenith of German culture (heedless of a potential future decline), and ashen-haired Shulamite represents the very nadir of Jewishness.
The actual convergence of the themes if we separate them in this way—the general subject-oriented voice that begins the poem, and the specific narrative that follows—is gradual, not occurring until roughly two-thirds through the poem. But in spite of, because of this difference, they are implicitly and inextricably bound together for the entire poem even when they are not explicitly intertwined—the narrative constantly references and indeed is indebted to the 'we' that precedes it. And even in its generality, the first theme is specific—its 'we' is "a 'survivor' who adopts the persona of a 'wir', who speaks in the name of a 'wir', the 'we', of the murdered Jews" (Joris, 25-6). This specificity is one element that makes "Death Fugue" so radically different from Celan's other work, and it is a possible reason for his reluctance to associate himself with the poem:
Celan was loath to be made a mouthpiece for what came to be called Holocaust poetry and refused to narrativize his experiences from that period—though what has been called the "ontological shame" of the survivor must also have an important role to play in this context. (Joris, 24)
In that case, a poem that has a specific voice, a survivor's voice, flies in the face of what Celan saw as his prerogative; and in "Death Fugue" we cannot help but view the poet as a witness to what he is writing about, just as we cannot help but see the poem's speaker as a witness to the narrative that he ('we') describes. (This sort of witnessing is also immediately problematic for the survivor-witness who is able to tell the story of what happened to others who were not so lucky as to be able to tell it for themselves, as it can seem comparatively inauthentic—the witness didn't actually undergo the same experiences as those for whom he bears witness; and "[n]obody witnesses for the witness" (Celan quoted in Joris, 31).) It is this characteristic that defines "Death Fugue" and makes it first of all far more readable than much of Celan's mature poetry, and second of all so profoundly different from it; because of the relationship the speaker bears to the narrative, "the relationship between word and world, signifier and signified, is not put into question" (Joris, 25). And because we do not have to question that relationship—between the narrative and the voice that narrates it—the poem feels grounded and secure despite the tenuousness of the position described within it; "[i]t is a poem that still, somehow, maybe desperately, believes, or wants to believe, or acts as if it did believe, in the fullness of utterance, in the possibility of representation" (Joris, 26). In terms of the tension in Celan's work between the need to bear witness to the past and the need to overcome it without denying or forgetting it, "Death Fugue" clearly falls into the former category. Even by its very structure it is a poem of bearing witness to the past; the narrative it delivers is no metaphor. But it witnesses more than just physical, literal death. To examine it from this standpoint it will be illuminating to bring in Derrida's commentary on the poet's responsibility, and what it means to witness 'the death of language' to begin with.
Firstly, Derrida says that the death of language can come about in a number of different ways, all of which Celan would have found himself both observing and living through:
[Celan] must have lived [the death of language] everywhere he felt the German language had been killed in a certain way, for instance, by subjects of the German language who put it to a certain use; it is murdered, it is killed, it is put to death by what one makes it say in this or that way.... There is another death in the mere banalization, the trivialization of language, for instance, the German language, no matter where, no matter when. And then there is another death, the death that comes over language because of what language is: repetition, lethargy, mechanization, and so forth. (Derrida, 106)
The first of these deaths is more or less tailored specifically to Celan's position as a Jewish poet writing in German leading up to and during the Holocaust. Not only were people killed when orders were given for it to be done, but the language itself was also killed even as it became a murder weapon—this is especially true in the case of German-speaking Jews, whose own language was turned against them and used to oppress them, to categorise them as subhuman, and to ensure their death sentences. (This is where in a sense language is observed to bring about its own death.) In "Death Fugue" this particular death of language appears in the "we" (on whose behalf the speaker is speaking, those for whom the speaker is bearing witness) being forced into digging their own graves. Derrida's other two senses of 'the death of language' are intertwined—words lose their gravity when they are endlessly repeated; for instance an aphorism becomes trivialised if we repeat it often enough without stopping to consider what it means. (In "Death Fugue" it is the scale of death that becomes essentially meaningless—we do not know for how many the speaker is speaking, it is just "we", repeated over and over.) This goes hand in hand with the nature of language—its possibility is contingent upon its iterability. (In other words, language is nothing without meaning—and meaning is nothing if not use.) And once again we are left with language engineering its own demise. "Death Fugue" exemplifies this, too, again by its very structure. Like any language, fugal composition is also contingent upon repetition, and upon the iteration and reiteration of its themes; the poem's repetition seals this similarity, and through repetition condemns itself to death, again and again always.
But if all language involves its own death even as it is spoken or written, regardless of its subject, then how can there be any hope whatsoever for a poem to create a new future for itself and its readers? Derrida says that it is by the very act of witnessing language's death that it can be brought back, and made creative and productive again:
The poetic act therefore constitutes a sort of resurrection: the poet is not someone permanently engaged with a dying language that he resuscitates, not by giving back to it a triumphant line, but by sometimes bringing it back, like a revenant or a phantom. He wakes up language, and in order to experience the awakening, the return to life of language, truly in the quick, the living flesh, he must be very close to its corpse. (Derrida, 106)
"Death Fugue" is certainly an example of the poet's being perilously close to the 'corpse' of language—this we have already seen, through the various ways in which, structurally, it mirrors and embodies the aspects of language that bring about its death: in its application, repetition, trivialisation, mechanisation. But with this poem, does Celan succeed in returning from the place where language has died to the world of the living, where it can be re-used to create something new and viable? Bearing witness in the way that this poem does is a way to recall the past and its importance—to ensure that we do not forget—but can it bring anything productive to the future? (Is the dead language 'woken up' and brought back, or in "Death Fugue" are we just watching it as it lays dead before us?)
To answer these questions it might prove elucidating to examine some characteristics of Celan's later poems and his thoughts on the matter of what a poem is good for, bearing in mind that the poem already examined "can be read as an exception in his work and not as paradigmatic for his mature poetics" (Joris, 24). For instance, the very short poem "You Were" can be held up against "Death Fugue" to clarify some of the points that cause the latter to be problematic:
You were my death:
you I could hold,
when all fell from me.
By Derrida's view, we can take it as given that despite its length, this poem simply by virtue of being a poem involves observing language in its death throes—that it has been written is proof enough. With that caveat and similarity aside, "You Were" is immediately less 'traditional' in its approach than "Death Fugue" is, because its subject and object, its signifier and signified, do not bear the same sort of explicit relationship as they did in the other poem. It has a subject 'I' (and 'me') and an object 'you', but no specific narrative frame of reference to back them up'—instead of telling a story the poem conveys a sentiment, that of holding on to the other when one's own world falls away. In this poem the subject is identical with the speaker, speaking on his own behalf: it is not a poem of bearing witness on behalf of some other, like "Death Fugue", but rather a poem of bearing witness for oneself, first and foremost. It does not have to believe in the possibility of such representation as characterises "Death Fugue", because it speaks for itself, and not for anyone or anything else. (As we will see, this makes all the difference in the world.)
In a speech delivered in 1960—a decade and a half after "Death Fugue" was written, when Celan was at the height of his maturity as a poet—Celan himself expressed what he thought a poem ought to speak to:
[T]he poem speaks.... True, it speaks only on its own, its very own behalf.
But I think—and this will hardly surprise you—that the poem has always hoped, for this very reason, to speak also on behalf of the strange—no, I can no longer use this word here—on behalf of the other, who knows, perhaps, of an altogether other. (Meridian, 163)
In other words, the poem speaks for itself first and can only ever hope to speak on behalf of someone or something else—it can seek out an other on whose behalf to speak, but it cannot presuppose that it already has an other. In that same vein, Celan adds, the imperative "Elargissez l'art!"—"Enlarge art!"—which demands among other things to expand the diameter of the poems we compose so that they encompass even more things, even more others, is an imperative that ought not to be followed. In fact its opposite is more appropriate: "Enlarge art? No. On the contrary, take art with you into your innermost narrowness. And set yourself free" (Meridian, 166).
By this view—Celan's own (later) view—"Death Fugue" cannot possibly achieve a resolution to the tension that characterised all of his work, that between the necessity of witnessing for the past and the desire for creating a new and (ontologically) positive world that overcomes the past without forgetting it. This impossibility stems from the standpoint from which the poem begins, where the subject is 'we' and the speaker is speaking on behalf of the 'we' (the first fugal theme). In beginning here it presupposes that the poem can speak on behalf of the other—for it is, fundamentally, a poem of witnessing, as made manifest by its narrative structure and its subject. This is a dangerous presupposition because of the problems posed by witnessing itself—and it hearkens back to the witness's problem of having no-one to witness for him as he witnesses for others. (For clearly bearing witness to another's action or suffering is itself an action suffered through that itself deserves to have witness borne for the person engaged in that task—and so we quickly enter into an infinite regress from which there is no escape.) So clearly attempting to use a poem to bear witness to some specific occurrence, in narrative form, defeats itself, if we have taken it to be the poem's primary aim.
A possible alternate path to consider for the poem's purpose, what its aim ought to be if it cannot be to bear witness for others, is an inward one: as Celan said, we can try to take art into our "innermost narrowness" and find freedom and purpose there, if we cannot find it externally.
Is it on such paths that poems take us when we think of them? And are these paths only detours, detours from you to you? But they are, among how many others, the paths on which language becomes voice. They are encounters, paths from a voice to a listening You, natural paths, outlines for existence perhaps, for projecting ourselves into the search for ourselves... A kind of homecoming. (Meridian, 168)
This is not at all to say that it is not possible to bear witness through poetry—it is possible, and it is necessary in Celan's poetry that we keep that possibility alive; what is impossible, is making bearing witness the starting point and sine qua non of a poem. Instead we must approach bearing witness—or whatever the poem's aim is going to be—from another, internal angle; we cannot presuppose the external. Celan and Derrida arrive at this point from different directions, but they converge nonetheless: Derrida is operating from inside the text, with the poet's task as solitarily witnessing the death of language and being the cause of its resurrection; and Celan is operating from within the poet himself, with the poet's task as starting from 'a search for himself'. Under neither set of criteria is "Death Fugue" successful at what it intends to do—for all its poignancy and affectivity, it remains at its heart a problem without any possible solution, for having begun from an external vantage point—that of the witness—instead of from within the witness himself. Only by so doing can a poem—especially a poem written by someone like Celan—overcome the tension between the equal necessities of bearing witness, and overcoming what was witnessed without letting it fall by the wayside, unheeded and forgotten.
Celan, Paul. "Death Fugue", trans. Jerome Rothenberg. Celan, 46-7.
----------. "You Were", trans. Pierre Joris. Celan, 117.
----------. "Meridian", trans. Rosmarie Waldrop. Celan, 154-69.
Joris, Pierre. "Polysemy without Mask". Celan, 3-35.
Celan, Paul. Paul Celan: Selections, ed. Pierre Joris. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
Derrida, Jacques. "Language Is Never Owned: An Interview". Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, ed. Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005.