Why I Love the Poetry of Paul Celan

In his essay 'The Hollow Miracle' (1959), George Steiner argues that the Nazis killed the German language. Or, at any rate, they murdered the poetry of the language. Post-war German, says Steiner, still makes a sound and it still allows for communication, but it creates no sense of communion.

This is a terrible indictment - and, clearly, it's meant to be. But is it strictly fair, or even accurate? For without wishing to dispute that something immensely damaging was done to German during the Nazi period, it might be argued that a process that had been underway for some time was simply taken to its fatal conclusion.

In fact, Steiner concedes that the death of the German language has a long and complicated history. Thus, even during the Second Reich, for example, there were worrying signs that German was in a bad shape, including an over-reliance on fixed metaphors, stock similes, and ready-made slogans. And as words and sentences started growing clumsy and bloated, it became ever more difficult to express new thoughts or feelings in a concise and cheerful manner (even Nietzsche struggles at times).  

It was the Prussians, therefore, not the Nazis, who replaced the genius of the language with cliché, vulgarity, and a fatal taste for sickly romantic pathos beneath which to conceal their own ressentiment; and it was the Prussians who showed a peculiar liking for the loud voice barking threats and commands, rather than that which spoke softly and with good humour.

Thus it was that the voices of Heine, Rilke, Kafka, and others were all drowned out by the those who knew how to turn the German tongue into a weapon of mass destruction and rob human speech of its integrity and tenderness. Steiner writes:

"Let us keep one fact clearly in mind: the German language was not innocent of the horrors of Nazism. It is not merely that a Hitler, a Goebbels, and a Himmler happened to speak German. Nazism found in the language precisely what it needed to give voice to its savagery. Hitler heard inside his native tongue the latent hysteria, the confusion, the quality of hypnotic trance."

- 'The Hollow Miracle', essay in Language and Silence, (Penguin Books, 1969), p.140.

Of course, all languages contain toxic reservoirs of hatred, but only in German did they bubble so closely to the surface of legitimate and everyday speech. Thus it was that German supplied evil with a tongue. And if under Bismarck it became the language of the modern state, under Hitler it became the language with which to administer Hell. 

Steiner concludes his essay on a pessimistic note, arguing that when a language has been used to conceive, organize, and justify genocide, then it has been fatally compromised; that something of the malevolence and malignancy sinks into the language and prevents it from ever being able to renew itself. Is there then no hope for German? Was Adorno right to assert there could be no poetry after Auschwitz? 

For me, Paul Celan provides this hope and proves Adorno wrong. Celan knew exactly what was needed of poetry after the Holocaust: first, it had to articulate the silence without breaking it; secondly, it had to find a way to 'bear witness from the inside of death'. Those critics who accused him of aestheticizing genocide were profoundly stupid and shamefully mistaken. Celan is the greatest post-War poet writing in German and those who love the language have him to thank for reinvesting it with Geist and freeing it from its congealment in blood and soil.

Say No to Female Genital Mutilation

 
Although some aspects of Mary Daly's work are problematic, I think she's fully justified in identifying female genital mutilation (along with other practices which serve to inscribe patriarchal values upon the body) as a re-enactment of goddess murder, or a symbolic form of gynocide.

This deeply depressing form of religious and cultural cruelty is still inflicted on large numbers of girls and young women throughout the world and, whilst it can take several forms, it's essentially a violent attempt to construct a model of passive female sexuality founded upon the deadening or destruction of the clitoris.

Why? Because the clitoris is understood to be an impure organ that not only lacks any reproductive function, but doesn't serve male purposes either. In fact, the clitoris exists exclusively as an organ of female pleasure and empowerment and so might be regarded as a challenge to the authority of the phallus. And clearly, that can't be allowed. 

Daly quotes from an African tribal leader explaining to a Western anthropologist why clitoridectomy is a good thing for young women about to be married: when it has been removed, he says, they no longer feel the childish desire to masturbate and they discover that true happiness comes from vaginal penetration by a husband. Daly describes this piece of tribal wisdom as brutish and one-dimensional. 

But before we congratulate ourselves in the West for our more sophisticated thinking on the subject, we should remember that psychoanalysis also views female sexuality as infantile and polymorphously perverse; i.e., as something that refuses to circulate within designated coordinates and so remains disconcerting, if not actually threatening. Freud too - like the witch doctor - wanted to centre everything in the vagina, regarded as an absence awaiting to be filled by any available prick.    

And we might also mention the contemporary phenomenon of plastic surgery, which offers labia trimming, vaginal reshaping, and even hymen reconstruction. The clinics carrying out such procedures may speak about improving the look, feel, and function of female genitalia and pretend that such procedures are all about boosting a woman's confidence and self-esteem, but everyone knows that this manifestation of pornographic idealism is all about enhancing male pleasure, making money, and making women feel ashamed of their own bodies.

Ultimately, whether it's done with a rusty razor blade, or the latest laser technology, female genital mutilation is a form of sex abuse. 

I Love Everything That Flows

 Sarah Maple: Menstruate With Pride (2010-11)

Vaginal lubrication and menstrual blood; saliva, semen, and tears ... these bodily fluids all belong to love, even though such secretions are often subject to severe prohibition and taboo. It is feared that they possess magical properties which threaten to dissolve the solidity and rigidity upon which Man prides himself and bases his integrity. 

For the bone-dry moralists of patriarchal society, that which is soft, formless, and liquid is intrinsically evil: to be male is to be hard and firm of body and misogynists everywhere repeat after Heraclitus that, above all things, a dry soul is best. 

But for those of us fascinated by decadence and the corruption of the flesh, the moist cunt that waits like a carnivorous plant in the boggy marsh where insects and philosophers lose their way, is both a site of strange truths and the dissolution of all Truth with a phallic-capital T.

Feminism begins when one decides to reject the petrified and well-organized bodies produced by molecular fascism (bodies that daren't leak, or sweat, or even cry) and when one finds the courage to declare like Henry Miller: 'Yes, I too love everything that flows.'

Towards a Queer Democracy

Thomas Eakins: The Swimming Hole (1884-85)

If the great American poet Walt Whitman set out to chronicle one subject above all others, it was the flowering of democracy within the United States. But his vision of democracy passes far beyond conventional models of liberalism and is curiously eroticized.

The inherent queerness within Whitman's political thinking is now generally accepted by critics. But many still choose to quickly pass over this with a mixture of embarrassment and homophobic distaste. They tell us, for example, that Eros is to function as the glue within Whitman's democracy to come, but fail to specify the particular nature of this adhesive love. Whether they like it or not, however, physical tenderness between men remained crucial for Whitman and his thinking was not based on a purely abstract ideal of comradeship and solidarity. 

This flooding of the political sphere with manly love is something that Lawrence finds irresistible, although he is troubled by the exclusion of women from such a world. Thus, in his own model of democracy, Lawrence is keen to include both sexes and reinstate the male-female relationship as primary. That said, he continues to insist that vaginal intercourse isn't the great be-all and end-all that many people believe it to be:

"The vagina, as we know, is the orifice of the hypogastric plexus ... It is the advent to the great source of being ... But beyond all this is the cocygeal centre. ... Here, at the root of the spine, is the last clue to the lower body and being ... Here is the dark node which relates us to the centre of the earth, the plumb-centre of substantial being. Here is our last and extremest reality." 

- D. H. Lawrence, 'Whitman' (Intermediate Version, 1919), Studies in Classic American Literature, (CUP, 2003), 365-66.

Thus it is that anal sex assumes vital importance within Lawrence's philosophy and throughout his fiction. If this is invariably heterosexual in character, the opportunity to discuss Whitman's work allows Lawrence to concede that homosexual coition is an equally valid form of interchange and establishes "the same perfection in fulfilled consciousness and being" [ibid., 366], as an act of heterosexual intercourse.

To conclude, then, both Whitman and Lawrence encourage us on an open road towards a queer model of democracy founded upon many forms of touch, including sodomy and the interpenetration of passionate love. That is to say, a democracy born from a new economy of bodies and their pleasures and not merely the inhuman flow of capital.

Better a Spectacular Failure ...

Malcolm was very fond of saying: Better to be a spectacular failure, than a benign success.

I always agreed with him on this, because, what it means in effect, is that it is as right to rebel, take risks, and show courage as it is admirable to resist doxa, stereotype, and convention. In Nietzschean terms, it means: love fate and live dangerously.

For what is success, ultimately, if not the reward for conformity: a form of patronage? There's nothing noble in it, nor creative. And nothing particularly inspiring about being a winner, despite what our athletes like to think. Just as it is the small imperfections of a face that make it beautiful, so too it is the losers who really capture our imagination and our hearts.

The British have always understood this, even if the Americans never will. But today, sadly, within a culture largely determined by Simon Cowell, the fear of failure has never been greater and, in a wonderful phrase, Laurie Penny speaks of the 'desperate tyranny of aspiration' that results from the bullying and humiliation of the less able, less talented, and less successful which is now the key component of both Saturday Night television and government policy.

When an entire nation can only dream of having the X-factor or winning the lottery - and despises anyone who refuses to share this final hope - then you know things have got pretty grim.    

Better Penny Red than Dead

Let me say from the outset: I like Laurie Penny.

Anyone who can cheerfully provoke such astonishing levels of vitriol from left, right, and centre deserves not just begrudging respect and admiration, but genuine affection. Thus, although this post was originally intended as a critical commentary upon her Notes from the New Age of Dissent, it might in fact be better read as a passionate appreciation of both book and author.

Ultimately, it doesn't really matter if Ms Penny is right or wrong, or whether her work makes good sense or no sense. If, sometimes, she's spectacularly mistaken and naive in her assessment of what's unfolding within contemporary culture, I prefer her wrongness to all the orthodox banality and cowardice that usually passes for rightness in this world. The point, surely, of Penny Red is to accept the challenge that is being thrown down and engage - not nit-pick.

For a work concerned with politics and feminism, however, the nature of this challenge is rather unusual. Lacking as it does any kind of theoretical framework or point of reference, it's not so much a challenge to think, as to care - which, for those of us who philosophically affirm insouciance and irony (terms that will make Ms Penny splutter on her cup of tea) is quite a big ask.

However, such is the quality of the writing and the personality of the author, that one feels almost charmed into dropping the simulated apathy and indifference of my generation, for a while at least, in order to share her anger and enthusiasm. Even, at a push, I might also concede the importance of retaining a little hope.

That said, I'm certainly not about to scrabble around amongst the ruins looking for old values and ideals and something to believe in once more - not even for Ms Penny! Revolution should never be a question of faith: or, if it is, then you can be sure a time of terror and inquisition will follow.

Besides, as Nietzsche pointed out: No one is free to be a crab. Which means you can't just reterritorialize on models of self or society which you imagine as more authentic or more real. (Ms Penny does tend to fetishize these notions and there's a powerful sense of nostalgia throughout her writings which she might do well to interrogate at some stage, as it undermines her radicalism.)  

Anyway, I'll stop here, for fear of starting to sound like one of those pompous and patronising middle-aged men who always talk over women at dinner parties; or, worse, one of those academic dinosaurs who rudely like to jab fingers in the face of the young.

You Are Like a Beautiful Black Hole to Me My Love

Illustration by Emma Charleston

Sometimes, the longing arises to obscenely scrutinize the naked body of one's lover; to peer and probe like a technician of desire into their cunt or anus, as if hoping to locate the hidden truth of their being.

But clinical fascination soon gives way to impatience and frustration, as one realises that for all the mystery surrounding these secret places, there is nothing to see or discover; that the only truth revealed is the nihilistic truth of the void in which all values come crashing back down to nought. 

Of course, rather than despair or grow angry at this, we might choose to celebrate the body as a site of sheer loss in which to joyfully abandon all hope, as well as deposit semen. As so often, it's simply a question of interpretation. For whilst bodily organs and orifices can serve all kinds of functions, they are revered or despised entirely depending on the disposition of the subject performing the erotic autopsy. 

 

More than Just a Son and Lover

Today is the 100th anniversary of the publication of D. H. Lawrence's third and some would say greatest novel, Sons and Lovers. 

It was certainly highly acclaimed at the time and has long since remained popular with those readers who like to think of Lawrence first and foremost as a working-class collier's lad growing up amongst the haystacks and the Nottinghamshire coalfields and a bit smutty in every sense of the word: 'Our Bert' writing his semi-autobiographical fiction in a late nineteenth-century realist tradition, but with twentieth-century knobs on.

It's never been my favourite work (despite some fantastic scenes and passages of writing) and this is a characterization of Lawrence that I find particularly loathsome and depressing; an attempt to possess and limit and keep in place on behalf of the Bestwood mafia who continue to wield a powerful influence over Lawrence's reception. Oh, how they love to forever remind us of Lawrence's remark about the East Midlands being the country of his heart. But let them recall also how he wrote: 

"It always depresses me to come to my native district. Now I am turned forty, and have been more or less a wanderer for nearly twenty years, I feel more alien, perhaps, in my home place than anywhere else in the world. I can feel at ease in ... Rome or Paris or Munich or even London. But in Nottingham Road, Bestwood, I feel at once a devouring nostalgia and an infinite repulsion."

- [Return to Bestwood], Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (CUP, 2004), p. 15. 

This is the Lawrence I admire: nomadic, cosmopolitan, and refusing to belong to any class or people; refusing to be anyone's son or lover. A singular individual who is no longer their Bert - and probably never was.

Suicide by Tiger (The Case of Sarah McClay)

Tipu's Tiger (Victoria and Albert Museum)

In the news at the moment is the case of zookeeper Sarah McClay, who was killed by one of the big cats in her care. 

Although the police have ruled it out, the suggestion was made (much to the anger of her family) that the young woman could have entered the animals' enclosure with the intention of ending her own life: suicide by tiger, as it has been described.

I have to say, this idea is one that greatly appeals to me: not so much in a fetishistic manner - though, for the record, I've nothing against those vorarephiles who are aroused by the thought of being eaten alive by wild animals - but simply as a method of taking one's leave from this world.

Better, surely, to die in the jaws of a magnificent beast, than beneath the steel wheels of a tube train. One might imagine that one is passing directly back into life (quite literally becoming-animal) and derive a real element of joy from that.   

On Myth

Henri Matisse: Icarus (1947)

I recently heard someone point out that the wax holding Icarus's wings together would not have melted if he flew too high, because, as a matter of fact, it gets colder at altitude not hotter.

I know this is spectacularly besides the point, because, being a myth about hubris and a young man's folly, it is not meant to be read as a scientific account of early experiments in human aviation. Having said that, I understand how the temptation to prick the bubble of myth by simply speaking the truth and pointing to amusing inaccuracies and unverifiable bits of nonsense can sometimes be difficult to resist.

And, personally, I have no time for those critics who regard the 'disenchantment' of the world by the Enlightenment as a regrettable error and call for a radical re-mythologization.

When I see the new mythologists standing before the world of virtual reality and information technology articulating arguments that fundamentally still rely upon the language of Romanticism, I am reminded of those agrarian idealists who at the beginning of the industrial era sought to revive values associated with the rapidly disappearing feudal past and encourage people to take up handicrafts once more.

Postmodernity enables us to do many things - including the decoupling of thought from its dead relationship to old forms of thinking - but it does not allow us to simply reterritorialize upon a model of ancient culture and society, rediscovering their narratives as our own. Ultimately, life today no longer corresponds to a mythological framework and myth has simply lost its power to shape plausible identities (unless you happen to be a religious fundamentalist of some variety or other).

Ultimately, I agree with Baudrillard here: having passed beyond both the physical and metaphysical worlds we enter into a pataphysical era - but not a new mythological age. Things today no longer have an origin, an aim, or any end; they develop neither logically nor symbolically, but chaotically and randomly.

And I agree also with Voltaire, that grand seigneur of the spirit as Nietzsche calls him, who was of the opinion that the study of myth is an occupation for blockheads.