Paul Celan and Ernst Bloch on Clarity

In last week’s newsletter, I wrote about Aaron Zeitlin’s kabbalistic poetic manifesto, “The Cult of Nothing and Art as it Must Be.” A few days later, at our night-themed discussion of Yiddish poetry, I had the wonderful opportunity to hear other Yiddishists and individuals interested in poetry share their reactions to poems by Zeitlin and others. One lingering takeaway from this discussion for me arose not from any individual comment, but rather the nature of our very conversation: how much should a poem make itself clear?

Zeitlin’s answer to this question should be clear from his manifesto: the artwork does not have any obligation to be clear for us. Rather, the expectation that a work be clear arises from the marketplace, as manifested in the character of the terse, economical banker who deals in literary works, which Zeitlin ventriloquizes and critiques in his manifesto. 

I have also been thinking about clarity in the work of another Jewish poet, Paul Celan. Celan is perhaps the most famous and influential German-language poet of the 20th century. A Holocaust survivor from Czernowitz, Celan’s most famous work is a poem called “Death Fugue,” or “Todesfuge” in German. This poem is much more transparently about the Holocaust than most of Celan’s work. For example, a poem we read at Der Nister last Sunday:

The one self-
starred
night.

threaded through by ashes,
hour-hither hour-yonder,
by the lidshadows of shut-
down eyes,

ground down
to arrowthin
souls,
silenced in conversation
with airalgae-bearded
crawling quivers.

A fulfilled 
lightconch drives
through a conscience.

A few different readings of this poem arose from our discussion. One person suggested that we read the poem between the first and last stanza, omitting the middle two: the one self-starred night is a fulfilled lightconch driving through a conscience. Another person suggested we read it backwards. Someone else said that the “lightconch,” whatever that means, is the same image as the “shut-down eyes.” The multiplicity of possible renderings, the many ways of imagining this poem and the general impossibility of imagining it at all, belies the lack of clarity at the center of Celan’s poetics. I believe this is an intentional aspect of his work. Celan uses languages to construct worlds where we cannot see anything. While the sentence is grammatically intact, it does not show us anything. Clarity could not be further away from the poem.

It is fascinating to me how Celan’s lack of clarity leads readers to assume that he is talking about the Holocaust indirectly. How can this be the case, that lack of clarity leads us to an obvious explanation? Knowing his biography, we are tempted to assume that anything undated, any tragedy that does not have a specified event it corresponds to (and his work almost never gives any specifics,) must surely be about his experience during the Holocaust. This makes sense insofar as anyone who experiences a tragedy like Celan did–losing both of his parents overnight, losing the Jewish civilization he was a part of—will surely be haunted by the aftermath of that event for years to come. The past never really goes away, in that sense. Zeitlin, like Celan, lost all of his family members to the Holocaust. We might assume likewise that his work about creation and redemption, retelling stories of the Zohar, and intimating mystical secrets through poetry, is also a reflection of the traumatic event that changed his life forever.

I would like to propose another way of reading: Celan, Zeitlin, and everyone else we refer to as “Holocaust poets” are certainly capable of speaking about other matters than the Holocaust. Indeed, insofar as the Holocaust was a traumatic event that permanently changed their worldview, these writers have the ability to read all of society differently from those of us who never experienced that catastrophe, and they can tell us about how many seemingly mundane things in our existence are in fact harbingers of catastrophe. Zeitlin can read Kabbalistic text and myth with his deep, personal understanding of the separation between the human world and God, an experience made clear to him in his lifetime.

I recently read Ernst Bloch’s introduction to the text The Principle of Hope. In this work, Bloch advocates a unique form of Marxism, oriented towards the future insofar as it is deeply connected to the present and the past. Marxists, in general, are interested in history; their characteristic method is called “historical materialism,” and this is a way of understanding the past in Marxist terms relating to value and the modes of production. Bloch boldly argues that we must interweave our historical materialist reading of the past with a willingness to stake claims about the future; we should be able to imagine the future with clarity, to place it in a symbolic scheme that connects it to our experience in the present. This is a utopian, or at least a hopeful project: Bloch wants us to imagine our desired future with clarity, so that we can bring it to pass.

Celan and Zeitlin, to my reading, present something to an opposite view to Ernst Bloch. First of all, neither of these poets are even remotely interested in clarity. Zeitlin rails against clarity in his manifesto, for the reasons described above, claiming that “clarity is the mask of an unknown face.” Celan’s poems totally do not offer any clarity whatsoever; this includes his earlier surrealist work as well as the writing from his later decades, which is so bold and adventurous in its use of language that it even exceeds the limits of surrealism.

Bloch insists that clarity is necessary, Celan and Zeitlin both defy it; Bloch is oriented towards the future, encouraging us to imagine a communist utopia, while Celan and Zeitlin are seemingly fixated on the past. At least, in our reading of these poets, we are focused on their supposed orientation towards their own past trauma. The future is hardly invoked, other than an endless repetition of the past.

I am trying not to take a side here, but since Celan and Zeitlin are two of my favorite poets, it’s hard not to. I have said this in the newsletter before many times in different ways, but it is not fair to expect a mystical text to make sense to us. I am continuously fascinated by what is possible, in language, in poetry, and in philosophy, when we let go of the requirement of clarity. So much more can be revealed when we let go of that hope that the future–or the past—should be clear to us, or even that anything real is visible at all.