Language and Negativity in European Modernism 1108475027, 9781108475020

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involves renewing our understanding of membership and participation within and beyond the nation-state. Allegiance can be used to define a singular national identity and common connection to a nation-state. In a global context, however, we need more dynamic conceptions to understand others outside borders. Understanding how allegiance and identity are being reconfigured today provides valuable insights into important contemporary debates around citizenship. “This book reveals how public and international law understand allegiance Weller.9781108475020. Jacket. C M Y K

and identity. Each involves viewing the nation-state as fundamental to concepts of allegiance and identity, but they also see the world slightly differently. With contributions from philosophers, political scientists and social psychologists, the result is a thorough appraisal of allegiance and identity in a range of socio-legal contexts.” James T. Smith, New York Literary Review

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Thomas Paine and the Idea of Human Rights

the importance of maintaining diversity and building allegiance with

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Interrogating the concepts of allegiance and identity in a globalised world

Language and Negativity in European Modernism Shane Weller

LA N G U A GE A N D NE G ATI VI T Y I N EU R OP E A N M OD E R N I S M

This book charts the history of a distinct strain of European literary modernism that emerged out of a radical reengagement with late nineteenth-century language skepticism. Focusing first on the literary and philosophical strands of this language-skeptical tradition, the book proceeds to trace the various forms of linguistic negativism deployed by European writers in the interwar and postwar years, including Franz Kafka, Georges Bataille, Samuel Beckett, Maurice Blanchot, Paul Celan, and W. G. Sebald. Through close analyses of these and other writers’ attempts to capture an “unspeakable” experience, Language and Negativity in European Modernism explores the remarkable literary attempt to deploy the negative potentialities of language to articulate an experience of what, shortly after World War II, Beckett described as a vision of “humanity in ruins.” shane weller is Professor of Comparative Literature and CoDirector of the Centre for Modern European Literature at the University of Kent. His publications include A Taste for the Negative: Beckett and Nihilism (2005), Beckett, Literature, and the Ethics of Alterity (2006), Literature, Philosophy, Nihilism: The Uncanniest of Guests (2008), and Modernism and Nihilism (2011). He is also the co-author (with Dirk Van Hulle) of two volumes in the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project series: The Making of Samuel Beckett’s ‘L’Innommable’/‘The Unnamable’ (2014) and The Making of Samuel Beckett’s ‘Fin de partie’/‘Endgame’ (2018).

LANGUAGE AND NEGATIVITY IN EUROPEAN MODERNISM Toward a Literature of the Unword

SHANE WELLER University of Kent

University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108475020 doi: 10.1017/9781108566001 © Shane Weller 2019 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2019 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. A cataloge record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data names: Weller, Shane, author. title: Language and negativity in European modernism / Shane Weller. description: Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, ny : Cambridge University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. identifiers: lccn 2018025046 | isbn 9781108475020 (hardback) subjects: lcsh: European literature – 20th century – History and criticism. | Modernism (Literature) – Europe. | Negativity (Philosophy) in literature. classification: lcc pn56.m54 w45 2018 | ddc 809/.9112–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018025046 isbn 978-1-108-47502-0 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

Acknowledgments

page vi

Introduction: A Literature of the Unword

1

1 The Language Crisis: From Mallarmé to Mauthner

15

2 Great Destructive Work: The Interwar Years

38

3 Performing the Negative: Franz Kafka

61

4 Humanity in Ruins: Samuel Beckett

90

5 Writing the Disaster: Maurice Blanchot

126

6 Through the Thousand Darknesses: Paul Celan

158

7 Unconditional Negativity: W. G. Sebald

187

8 Unwording, Terminal and Interminable

217 242

Conclusion: The Art of Failure

248 266

Bibliography Index

v

Acknowledgments

This book has been a long time in the making, and has benefited considerably from the feedback provided by those who have heard draft chapters delivered at conferences, those anonymous peer reviewers who have read journal articles in which some of the analyses included in the present book were first presented, and those colleagues at my home institution, the University of Kent, and at other institutions both in the United Kingdom and abroad with whom I have had the opportunity to discuss some of the principal ideas proposed herein. I would like to express my thanks to Ray Ryan and Sapphire Duveau at Cambridge University Press for all their help and support, and also to Sri Hari Kumar, Christine Dunn, and Jim Fuhr. The peer reviewers of the manuscript for Cambridge provided extremely helpful feedback on the initial submission, not least because that feedback was challenging in spirit. I am especially grateful to my colleague and friend Ben Hutchinson for his close reading of the complete manuscript. My greatest debt of gratitude is to Anna Katharina Schaffner, not only for her invaluable comments on the work at various stages in its evolution, but also for her unwavering faith in, and unremitting support for, the project. When others doubted – not least the author – she continued to believe, and that belief carried me through the darker moments. *** Parts of Chapters 3, 5, 6, and 7 have appeared in the following publications: “Performing the Negative: Kafka and the Origins of Late Modernism,” Modern Language Review 111 (2016): 775–94; “Voidance: Linguistic Negativism in Maurice Blanchot’s Fiction,” French Studies 69 (2015): 30–45; “From Gedicht to Genicht: Paul Celan and Language Scepticism,” German Life and Letters 69 (2016): 69–91; and “Unquiet Prose: W. G. Sebald and the Writing of the Negative,” in Jeannette Baxter, Valerie Henitiuk, and Ben Hutchinson (eds.), A Literature of Restitution: Critical Essays on W. G. Sebald (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), pp. 56–73. I would like to thank these publishers for permission to include revised versions of the relevant material in this volume. vi

introduction

A Literature of the Unword

“And more and more my own language appears to me like a veil which one has to tear apart in order to get to those things (or the nothingness) lying behind it.” So wrote Samuel Beckett in July 1937, shortly after his return from a six-month trip to Nazi Germany, where he had spent much of his time looking at paintings in both public and private collections. In part a response to the proposal that he undertake the translation of works by the German writer and painter Joachim Ringelnatz, Beckett’s letter to Axel Kaun (whose acquaintance he had made in Germany) also provided him with the opportunity to outline, in German, his own emerging conception of literature. That conception was grounded in the idea that, far from being an effective means of expression or a way of mapping the world, language obstructs access both to the outer and to the inner realms. Given this, the writer’s task becomes the rending of the language veil, or, varying the metaphor, the boring of holes in language, “until that which lurks behind it, be it something or nothing, starts seeping through.” In the literary work, the “terrifyingly arbitrary materiality” of language must, Beckett insists, be “dissolved.” He goes on to declare that he “cannot imagine a higher goal for today’s writer” than the practice of such linguistic undoing, for which the most suitable comparisons are to be found not in literature but in music. The result would be what he describes as a “literature of the unword” (Literatur des Unworts), diametrically opposed to James Joyce’s “apotheosis of the word” in the work that at the time was known only as “Work in Progress,” but that two years later, on the eve of World War II, would be published under the title Finnegans Wake.1

1

Samuel Beckett, letter to Axel Kaun, July 9, 1937, in The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume I: 1929–1940, ed. Martha Fehsenfeld and Lois Overbeck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 518–20 (English); pp. 513–15 (German). For an analysis of Beckett’s activities in Germany in 1936–7, see especially Mark Nixon, Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries, 1936–1937 (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011).

1

2

Language and Negativity in European Modernism

The profound language skepticism that prompts Beckett to make the case for such a literature of the unword has its roots in the second half of the nineteenth century and casts its long shadow across the twentieth-century European literary landscape. Two of its most eloquent early literary and philosophical articulations occur at the beginning of that century, with the almost simultaneous publication of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos Letter (1902) and Fritz Mauthner’s Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache (“Contributions to a Critique of Language,” 1901–2), the former only a few eloquent pages in length, the latter a hefty three volumes in which Mauthner tackles the entire history of Western philosophy from a language-skeptical vantage point. The forces behind that language skepticism – behind the sense that, far from being an effective means of communication, far from granting us access to the world, language is in fact a hindrance, something to be undone – are, however, neither purely literary nor purely philosophical in nature. Indeed, the language crisis with which Beckett and other major European writers both before and after him would find themselves obliged to struggle can only begin to be understood when one considers the sociopolitical context in which it arises. That context is a modernity increasingly seen in negative terms. As the twentieth century unfolded, the language crisis would only be exacerbated as modernity came to be considered by various European writers and thinkers as nothing short of catastrophic. That the two most important early articulations of this language crisis should have come from a German-language context is significant. For it was precisely in central Europe, with the waning of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the rise of nationalisms that championed national languages over any lingua franca, that German-language writers and philosophers increasingly found themselves obliged to question the power – at once literary, political, and philosophical – of any historical language. By articulating his own language skepticism in a letter written in German, and thereby echoing Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos, Beckett locates himself squarely within this tradition, as had Franz Kafka before him. The increasing political instabilities in central Europe in the latter half of the nineteenth century would in due course play a decisive role in triggering World War I, the consequences of which would in turn trigger the rise of totalitarianism in Russia and Germany, World War II, and the Holocaust. Among European writers and thinkers, this sequence of catastrophic historical events would prompt an ever more radical questioning not only of the idea of European culture, but also of the European

Introduction: A Literature of the Unword

3

Enlightenment conception of the human being as an essentially rational animal, and of human history as a progress toward ever greater levels of civilization and individual freedom. And it would also significantly exacerbate the sense that existing literary forms, modes of expression, and even language as such were wholly inadequate to articulate the experience of modernity. Beckett’s own profound skepticism regarding both language and the possibility of any genuine progress, be it social, political, or cultural, is but one, albeit particularly acute, manifestation of this pessimistic intellectual current. From the outset, this language crisis, and the negative conception of modernity underlying it, prompted a profound reaction in the literary sphere, the first major literary response to it coming with the emergence of the Symbolist movement, and most notably with the publication of Mallarmé’s late poem A Throw of the Dice (1897), published just over a year before his death. In the interwar years, that language crisis, significantly exacerbated by the catastrophe of world war, would lie behind the widespread attempts by the historical avant-garde and the more aesthetically (and often politically) radical modernists to achieve forms of linguistic renewal that were considered the prerequisite for any genuine cultural renewal. Those various, highly innovative attempts at linguistic renewal were trans-European in nature and lay at the heart of Expressionism, Dada, and Surrealism, while also shaping the work of writers as diverse as Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Djuna Barnes, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and Hermann Broch, reaching their most extreme incarnation in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939). Ten years before the publication of Joyce’s novel, Eugene Jolas characterized Joyce’s linguistic practice in what would prove to be his final work as a “revolution of language.”2 This was far from being the only linguistic revolution of the period, however, for in their distinctive ways the various interwar avant-garde movements, as well as modernist writers more generally, responded to the perceived breakdown in the relation between word and world, to the sense that existing linguistic forms were no longer adequate to articulate the extremity of the experience of modernity, by turning against those linguistic forms.3 2

3

See Eugene Jolas, “The Revolution of Language and James Joyce,” in Samuel Beckett et al., Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (New York: New Directions, 1962), pp. 77–92. Jolas’s essay was originally published in 1929. On the modernist language revolution, see, for example, Ben Hutchinson, Modernism and Style (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Marjorie Perloff, The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage, New Edition (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2000), which includes chapters on Stein, Pound, and Beckett; and Richard Sheppard, Modernism – Dada – Postmodernism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2000).

4

Language and Negativity in European Modernism

If the work of many of the European modernists of the interwar years was haunted by the sense that the language that had served the aims of a realist aesthetic in the nineteenth century had become wholly inadequate, this was not simply because “making it new” was considered to be a transhistorical aesthetic imperative, but rather because they found themselves having to face a modernity increasingly experienced as dehumanizing and alienating in ways that had resulted in a wholescale crisis of representation.4 This dehumanization was seen as being wrought not only by totalitarianism – there were some among the avant-garde and in modernism more generally who were far from critical of Stalinist Russia, Fascist Italy, or Nazi Germany – but also by the increasingly administrated nature of capitalist democratic societies. Hannah Arendt speaks for precisely this view of modernity when she asserts that “the essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs out of men, and thus to dehumanize them.”5 In their attempt to achieve a linguistic renewal that would enable literature to capture the nature of this new historical reality, and, no less importantly, to make possible, or at the very least lay the groundwork for, a wider cultural renewal, both the avant-garde and the more aesthetically radical among the interwar modernists committed themselves to linguistic innovations that would break dramatically with any sense of a consensual relation between writer and reader, and, in some cases, even of a shared language. Rather, these linguistic revolutions required the literary reeducation of the reader. Difficulty became the value of values, and the (generally bourgeois) reader’s struggle to understand the literary work the index of its power to achieve its aims. Within this broad, varied, and complex tradition of radical linguistic renewal in the early decades of the twentieth century, which embraced many forms of innovative linguistic practice, including the macaronic, extreme variations in register, a turn toward non-European languages, and even the invention of new languages (as in Dada “sound poems” or the incantations of Antonin Artaud), and which also extended across the political spectrum, from the far left to the far right, there emerged a distinctive strain of radical literary practice that, while profoundly modernist in spirit, responded to the language crisis, and to the modernity of which it was the sign, in a manner that placed the emphasis 4

5

For helpful overviews of the nature of this crisis in representation, see Pericles Lewis, The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 3–10; and Sheppard, Modernism, pp. 89–100. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann and the Holocaust (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 2005), p. 117.

Introduction: A Literature of the Unword

5

squarely upon the negative. This literary strain would recognize the full force of the language crisis but would react to it, not through any form of positive linguistic renewal, but rather through a practice of linguistic negativism in the forms of parataxis, fragmentation, intensive epanorthosis, and the repeated deployment of negative affixes, negative modifiers, and particles of negation. While linguistically innovative, this linguistic negativism would make of the literary work both an experience of the language crisis and the attempt to achieve the seemingly impossible, turning language back against itself not just to highlight its failings but also to make of this very negation the privileged form in which to articulate the experience of a dark modernity and to take a critical distance from it. This linguistic negativism thus served a threefold purpose: the enactment of language skepticism in the language of the literary work; the representation of experience by way of the negative, in accordance with the principle that any positive representation of the experience of modernity would be a deformation of that experience; and a critique, either explicit or implicit, of modernity because of what was seen as its dehumanizing and alienating effects. This practice of linguistic negativism would result in what, taking up Beckett’s term, may be described as a literature of the unword, which, in the interwar years, would find its most extreme incarnation in the later works of Franz Kafka, before undergoing a significant proliferation and intensification in the post–World War II period, in response to an ever darker picture of European modernity at the heart of which lay the scarcely imaginable horror of the Holocaust.6 While Kafka’s later work stands as the most fully realized instance of this literature of the unword in the interwar period, the practice of linguistic negativism that becomes ever more intensive in his writing is also to be found, in distinct forms, in the work of numerous other writers of the period, from Antonin Artaud to Georges Bataille, from T. S. Eliot to Hermann Broch. Often, however, this linguistic negativism serves a subordinate purpose. On the one hand, it is deployed to clear the ground for new linguistic forms. The radical linguistic negativism in Dada, for instance, opens the way for the production of “sound poems” characterized by their break with all historical languages. 6

This literature of the unword is distinct from Claude Mauriac’s idea of an “aliterature” that would find its first full modern articulation in Kafka, and whose later practitioners would include Antonin Artaud, Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris, Henri Michaux, and Samuel Beckett, for Mauriac’s conception of “aliterature” is one in which the avant-garde elements serve to overcome the pejorative sense that has accrued to the term literature, with the emphasis not being upon any form of linguistic negativism as such. See Claude Mauriac, L’Alittérature contemporaine (Paris: Albin Michel, 1958).

6

Language and Negativity in European Modernism

The most extreme form of such linguistic renewal emerging out of a skeptical attitude to existing languages is undoubtedly Finnegans Wake. On the other hand, this linguistic negativism can serve, as it does in Eliot’s postconversion poetry, to articulate a crucial distinction between two forms of language – the human and the divine. If Kafka’s later work, above all that of the years 1922 to 1924, stands out as the most fully realized form of this literature of the unword in the interwar years, in the post–World War II period its decisive instantiations include works by Samuel Beckett, Maurice Blanchot, Paul Celan, and W. G. Sebald. In their distinctive ways, each of these writers embraces the categorical imperative articulated by Kafka in one of his Zürau aphorisms, written in 1917–18, shortly after he had been diagnosed with tuberculosis and at a time when central Europe was feeling the full force of a disastrous war: “To perform the negative is what is still required of us, the positive is already ours.”7 In their work, as in Kafka’s, linguistic negativism is not subordinated either to a new language that would emerge out of it, or to a realizable “silence” that would transcend it. And just as the valorization of such a silence remains foreign to the literature of the unword, so too does Arthur Rimbaud’s withdrawal from the literary altogether.8 Rather, there is in this literature of the unword a tarrying with the linguistically negative as what is taken, for far more than merely aesthetic reasons, to be the only inhabitable literary space. For all its unremitting negativism, this literature of the unword is less a flight from than a critique of modernity, and the increasing horrors that make of that modernity what Sebald, in the final decade of the twentieth century, terms an historia calamitatum.9 For the intensive linguistic negativism that is characteristic of this literature of the unword serves as a means not only to depict a time and an experience seen as beggaring the word, but also to enact a form of resistance to it, albeit one that remains deeply suspicious of the apocalyptic utopianism that underlies the very negations that it enacts linguistically.10 Adorno’s notion of the negative image is helpful for an understanding of the critical function of the linguistic 7

8 9 10

Franz Kafka, The Collected Aphorisms, trans. Malcolm Pasley (London: Syrens, 1994), p. 8; Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente II, in der Fassung der Handschriften, ed. Jost Schillemeit (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1992), pp. 47, 119. This aphorism was composed in November 1917. On the idea of such a withdrawal into literary silence, see George Steiner, “The Retreat from the Word,” in Language and Silence (London: Faber & Faber, 1967), pp. 30–54. W. G. Sebald, Die Beschreibung des Unglücks. Zur österreichischen Literatur von Stifter bis Handke (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1994), p. 12. In this respect, Peter Fifield’s conception of “late modernism” offers insight into the nature of the literature of the unword. According to Fifield, late modernist literature, which he sees as emerging in

Introduction: A Literature of the Unword

7

negativism that is characteristic of this modern European literature of the unword. According to Adorno, what distinguishes Beckett’s work from that of many of his European modernist contemporaries is precisely its refusal to offer any utopian vision while never simply abandoning the utopian spirit of the European avant-garde. In postwar works such as The Unnamable (1953) and Endgame (1957), Adorno finds Beckett presenting Western civilization with the most clear-eyed vision of a modernity in which the bourgeois category of the self-determining individual has become mere semblance and in which the logic of instrumentalized reason is dominant. Rather than seeking to reinstate or even to preserve what remains of the Enlightenment concept of the rational, self-fashioning individual, however, Beckett’s works constitute an “anthropological sketch” that presents us with the dark reality of this dismantled subject. Taking up in dialectical fashion Baudelaire’s view that the essence of modernity lies in the ephemeral,11 Adorno identifies the individual as an “historical category, both the outcome of the capitalist process of alienation and a defiant protest against it, something transient.”12 Hollowed-out subjectivity is precisely what Beckett’s œuvre puts on display, according to Adorno, but in a manner that offers the reader or, in the case of the plays, the spectator a negative image of that utopia conceived by the apocalyptic imagination that shaped many of the avant-garde movements of the interwar years. As Adorno puts it in his 1961 essay on Endgame: “The Beckettian situations of which his drama is composed are the photographic negative of a reality referred to meaning.”13 In other words, meaning is signaled by meaninglessness, hope by despair. Adorno’s championing first of Kafka’s work and then of Beckett’s in the

11 12

13

the post–World War II era in Europe, responds to historical disaster of a very particular kind, and above all to the Holocaust; see Peter Fifield, Late Modernist Style in Samuel Beckett and Emmanuel Levinas (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Other influential theorizations of late modernism, each of which proposes a distinct late modernist canon and distinct historical parameters, include: Tyrus Miller, Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction and the Arts between the World Wars (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1999); Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso, 2002); Anthony Mellors, Late Modernist Poetics from Pound to Prynne (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005); Charles Bernstein, Against Voluptuous Bodies: Adorno’s Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006); and C. D. Blanton, Epic Negation: The Dialectical Poetics of Late Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). The very diversity of these various takes on late modernism suggests that the concept is very far having been sufficiently stabilized such that it might serve as a relatively unproblematic critical tool. See Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1995). Theodor W. Adorno, “Trying to Understand Endgame,” in Notes to Literature, Volume One, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicolsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), pp. 241–75 (p. 249). Ibid., p. 253.

8

Language and Negativity in European Modernism

1950s and 1960s is grounded in this idea that it is only by way of the negative that a modernity perceived as catastrophic can be seen for what it is, and thereby an alternative to what Adorno sees as the “radical evil” of modernity be glimpsed. So great are the similarities that Adorno finds between Kafka’s and Beckett’s work in this respect that he is led to use precisely the same image for the human experience articulated in those respective œuvres: that of a fly that has been squashed, but that is not yet quite dead. In the post–World War II period, the proliferating commitment to a literature of the unword, characterized by what Sebald describes as unconditional negativity,14 and enacted at the level of form and style as much as at that of content, is in no small measure the result of a perceived failure of various, more positive forms of linguistic renewal to achieve their ends in the interwar years. For the modern European literature of the unword emerges, and then proliferates and intensifies, in the face of an unfolding catastrophe that the European avant-garde and modernism more generally could not only do little to prevent, but, in some of their philosophico-political as well as literary forms, did much, if not to bring about, then at the very least to endorse. While there were many among the avant-garde and modernism more generally in the interwar years who were of a strongly left-wing persuasion, most notably among the Dadaists and Surrealists,15 there were also some among the most aesthetically radical who aligned themselves with a farright politics that would in due course prove to be catastrophic. Ezra Pound’s literary modernism is far from being at odds with his commitment to Italian Fascism. Wyndham Lewis’s appreciation of Hitler, in a work published in 1931, before the Nazis had come to power,16 Eliot’s early sympathies for the far-right movement Action Française, Blanchot’s revolutionary nationalism in the 1930s, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle’s espousal of Fascism and anti-Semitism in the 1930s and his subsequent collaboration with the German Occupation, and Céline’s virulent anti-Semitism, as expressed not in his novels but in his 14

15

16

See W. G. Sebald, “Against the Irreversible: On Jean Améry,” in On the Natural History of Destruction, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: The Modern Library, 2004), pp. 147–71 (p. 154; translation modified); “Mit den Augen des Nachtvogels. Über Jean Amery,” in Campo Santo, ed. Sven Meyer (Munich and Vienna: Carl Hanser, 2003), pp. 149–70 (pp. 157–58). On the relation between the avant-garde movements and socialism, see in particular Martin Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). See Wyndham Lewis, Hitler (London: Chatto & Windus, 1931). Lewis later changed his position on Hitler (whom in his 1931 book he describes with an astounding lack of foresight as a “man of peace”), this change being reflected in The Hitler Cult (London: J. M. Dent, 1939).

Introduction: A Literature of the Unword

9

pamphlets during the late 1930s and early 1940s – most notably, Trifles for a Massacre (1937), L’École des cadavres (“The School for Corpses,” 1938), and Les Nouveaux Draps (“The Fine Mess,” 1941) – are further instances, among many others, of fateful modernist ventures into the political.17 Indeed, Nazism may itself be seen as one of the principal forms of political modernism, not least in its invocation of myth as a means of shaping a new conception of the nation.18 Heidegger’s philosophical modernism, which entails a thoroughgoing revolution in philosophical language, cannot easily be kept apart from his active support for Nazism in the early 1930s.19 One need only think of his so-called Black Notebooks of the 1930s, which contain instances of unambiguous anti-Semitism, or Pound’s preoccupation with usury in the Cantos, to appreciate the extent to which certain strains of what Frank Kermode terms apocalyptic early modernism are profoundly implicated in the political revolutions that would lead to the murder of millions.20 The linguistic negativism that is the distinctive characteristic of the modern European literature of the unword as it develops and proliferates in the post–World War II era is shaped in no small part by the writers’ grasp of this relation between the kinds of apocalyptic mythical thinking to be found in some strains of literary modernism and sociopolitical monstrosity.21 In this respect, in the post–World War II period the 17

18

19

20 21

On the politics of these modernists, see in particular: Tim Redman, Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Leon Surette, Pound in Purgatory: From Economic Radicalism to Anti-Semitism (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003); Matthew Feldman, Ezra Pound’s Fascist Propaganda, 1935–1945 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Fredric Jameson, Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist, Illustrated Edition (London and New York: Verso, 2008); Christopher Ricks, T. S. Eliot and Prejudice (London: Faber & Faber, 1994); Anthony Julius, T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Jeffrey Mehlman, Legacies of Anti-Semitism in France (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983); Robert Soucy, Fascist Intellectual: Drieu La Rochelle (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1992); and Annick Durafour and Pierre-André Taguieff, Céline, la race, le juif. Légende littéraire et vérité historique (Paris: Fayard, 2017). See Andrew Hewitt, Fascist Modernism: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996); Mark Antliff, Avant-Garde Fascism: The Mobilization of Myth, Art, and Culture in France, 1909–1939 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); and Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). On the relation between Heidegger’s philosophical thinking and his politics, see, for instance, Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933–1935, trans. Michael B. Smith (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). On the relation between modernism and apocalyptic thinking, see Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968). Fredric Jameson considers this loss of faith in the power of art to remain autonomous from ideology to be a principal characteristic of late modernism. See Jameson, A Singular Modernity, pp. 198, 209.

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literature of the unword is increasingly shaped by a skepticism not only toward language as such, but also toward the idea of literature’s autonomy from ideology, and the power of the literary to enable sociopolitical change. Thus, in historical terms, while there are important instances of this literature of the unword in the interwar years, above all in Kafka’s later works, alongside a more widespread language skepticism in modernism more generally, the full flowering of this literary strain across western Europe occurs in the wake of Hitler’s coming to power, the breakdown of any coherent sense of European culture as shaped by Enlightenment ideals, a second world war, and the Holocaust. For many of the post–World War II practitioners of this literature of the unword, including (a politically transformed) Maurice Blanchot, Edmond Jabès, Nelly Sachs, Paul Celan, and W. G. Sebald, the Holocaust came in due course to represent the most extreme form of the unspeakable – in both senses of the word – and this event would profoundly shape their particular forms of unwording.22 For almost all of the major post–World War II writers who commit themselves to intensive forms of linguistic negativism, Kafka’s later work proves to be a – if not the – decisive influence. In its turning of its own means of expression back against those means, the literature of the unword is in a very particular sense necessarily a literature of belatedness.23 Epanorthosis, for instance, involves a stating, and then the revision or, in the most extreme cases – in works by Kafka, Beckett, Blanchot, and Celan – the unstating of that which has been stated. Similarly, negative affixes in German and in English can follow rather than precede that which they negate – as, for instance, in the words nameless and namenlos. In this respect, rather like Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, literary unwording faces backward as it moves into the future. That said, 22

23

In The Holocaust and the Postmodern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), Robert Eaglestone considers the significance of the Holocaust for what he terms the “postmodern,” within which he includes the philosophers Emmanuel Levinas as well as writers such as Anne Michaels and Jonathan Safran Foer. In The Broken Voice: Reading Post-Holocaust Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), Eaglestone turns to the analysis of literary works by writers such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Jonathan Littell, Imre Kértesz, and W. G. Sebald. Eaglestone’s focus is thus not on those writers in the post–World War II period whose response to historical catastrophe takes the form of a literature of the unword, and it would be problematic to identify those writers as “postmodern.” The concept of lateness as applied to literary movements, literary styles, and the careers of individual writers and artists has received increasing critical attention in recent years: see, in particular, Edward Said, On Late Style (London: Bloomsbury, 2006); Gordon McMullan and Sam Smiles (eds.), Late Style and Its Discontents: Essays in Art, Literature, and Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); and especially Ben Hutchinson, Lateness and Modern European Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

Introduction: A Literature of the Unword

11

the forms of linguistic negativism to be found in the modern European literature of the unword vary not only from writer to writer, but also from language to language. For instance, whereas in English and German, negative affixes can both precede and follow the modifier – the un- affix preceding and the -less or -los affixes following – in French, negative affixes precede the modifier, as in indicible (unsayable), and it is often necessary to rely upon a preceding preposition, as in sans nom (nameless). The linguistic negativism that is characteristic of the literature of the unword is nonetheless one that remains belated because, like any form of negation, it necessarily comes after that which is negated. This is the case even when the act of unwording syntactically precedes that which is being unworded. And this process of unwording is in principle interminable. For not only does the language that is undone through forms of epanorthosis, parataxis, fragmentation, and the intensive deployment of negative affixes necessarily precede the work of undoing, but that work of undoing necessarily relies upon language and thus remains a linguistic event. That which is unworded in the literary work is thus always spectrally present in the way that the unsaid is not. The literature of the unword is thus governed by the principles of impossibility, on the one hand, and necessity or obligation, on the other. The profound language skepticism out of which it emerges leads its practitioners to adopt the principle that the effective positive articulation of the experience of a catastrophic modernity is quite simply unachievable. The extremity of the experiences with which they concern themselves, and the ideological taint affecting existing languages, are such that these experiences beggar expression, and no amount of linguistic innovation will suffice to overcome the limitations of the language on which the writer has to rely. Hence, the writer’s obligation becomes to pursue a linguistic via negativa. However, the forms of linguistic negativism that are deployed cannot, even at their most intensive, undo language altogether because that would abolish the literary work as such. What Blanchot refers to as the “disappearance of literature” is, in the literature of the unword, a process that is necessarily at once “incessant” and “interminable.”24 In the attempt to achieve the impossible – either to find the words for a languagebeggaring experience, or to negate the word altogether – what emerges is the most accurate register of the negative experience of modernity. Thus,

24

Maurice Blanchot, The Book to Come, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), pp. 195, 213; Le Livre à venir (Paris: Gallimard Folio, 1986), pp. 265, 290.

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Language and Negativity in European Modernism

paradoxically, it is precisely in its failure to achieve it ends that the literature of the unword articulates the experience that evades the grasp of words. It is this appreciation of impossibility, of the inevitability of failure, that distinguishes the literature of the unword from what Ihab Hassan describes as a modern “anti-literature” that would include among its practitioners the Marquis de Sade, Mallarmé, Kafka, Beckett, and Genet. For Hassan, this tradition of antiliterature is shaped above all by its commitment to a particular kind of silence: “the negative echo of language, autodestructive, demonic, nihilist.”25 Just as the literature of the unword is shaped by a principle of impossibility, if there is a nihilism in that literature then it is one that cannot easily be assimilated into either Enlightenment or counterEnlightenment thinking.26 For it would be a nihilism grounded in the idea that the positive is not only given, in Kafka’s sense, but also precisely the bearer of an ideology that is itself nihilistic. The idea of failure, and of an impossibility to which it is deemed necessary to commit literature, lies at the very heart of the political and ethical nature of this modern European literature of the unword. For all their many differences, both the Enlightenment and the counterEnlightenment projects share a drive to mastery grounded in the idea of possibility; that is, the possibility of integrating or expelling various forms of alterity – political, cultural, ethnic, and religious. Both such an integration and such an expulsion are forms of negativity that fall within the realm of the possible, just as they fall under the aegis of universalism. While the attempted expulsion of alterity might at first glance seem to be antiuniversalist, it is ultimately no less universalist than an integrative approach to alterity because it takes that alterity not only to be all of a kind, but also to be at once identifiable and linguistically determinable. In the literature of the unword, the forms of otherness with which it must contend can be neither included nor excluded and resist all attempts at positive linguistic determination. Those forms of otherness are, rather, that which challenges the power of the word, that which calls for a radical linguistic negativism that is also a form of political nominalism, troubled as it is to its very core by its failure to find, and indeed by what it takes to be the impossibility of finding, the words to capture the experience of calamity with which it concerns itself. It is to the nature of that experience that 25 26

Ihab Hassan, The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 248. On the concept of counter-Enlightenment, see in particular Isaiah Berlin, “The CounterEnlightenment,” in The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays (London: Vintage, 2013), pp. 248–68.

Introduction: A Literature of the Unword

13

Beckett directs us when, at the end of his (unbroadcast) 1946 radio text “The Capital of the Ruins,” he refers to a vision of “humanity in ruins,” this vision being one that would lead neither to despair nor to utopianism, but rather to “an inkling of the terms in which our condition is to be thought again.”27 By this idea of humanity in ruins is to be understood a humanity that is no longer master of itself or its world, a humanity that can no longer rest secure in its possession of reason and its ability to be selfdetermining, a humanity that finds itself obliged to reflect on its barbarism and its unknowing as much as on its civilization and its knowledge, and on its works of destruction as much as on its works of creation.28 With its roots in late nineteenth-century language skepticism, intensified through the experience of historical catastrophe, the modern European literature of the unword thus becomes nothing less than an attempt to find the terms in which to begin to rethink our condition in dark times. To chart the emergence of this literature of the unword, and to grasp both the nature and the functions of its unwording practices, it is first necessary, then, to consider its roots in the language skepticism manifested in both literary and philosophical discourse at the very moment when the concepts of modernity and modernism were being forged in Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century. Furthermore, if one is to appreciate the distinctiveness of this literary strain, it is also necessary not only to take account of the various manifestations of language skepticism and linguistic negativism to be found in the works of the European avantgarde and modernist revolutions of the word in the interwar years, but also to consider the ways in which language skepticism lay behind the most innovative attempts to achieve linguistic renewal. With that literary, philosophical, and historical terrain having been charted, one can turn to the closer analysis of some of the most radical incarnations of the literature of the unword in twentieth-century European literature, from Kafka to Beckett to Sebald and beyond. That analysis requires an appreciation of the ways in which linguistic negativism can operate in different languages, and the extent to which it can survive translation. Throughout, the question of the relation between historical experience and its inscription into the very form and style of the literary work remains paramount. For the visions of “misfortune” (Kafka), “humanity in ruins” (Beckett), “disaster” 27 28

Samuel Beckett, “The Capital of the Ruins,” in The Complete Short Prose, 1929–1989, ed. S. E. Gontarski (New York: Grove Press, 1995), pp. 275–78 (p. 278). On the ethical dimension to Beckett’s conception of “humanity in ruins,” see Lee Oser, The Ethics of Modernism: Moral Ideas in Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, Woolf and Beckett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 102–19.

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(Blanchot), “that which happened” (Celan), and “calamity” (Sebald) that preoccupy the preeminent practitioners of this modern European literature of the unword, as it intensifies and proliferates in the course of the twentieth century, demand an uncompromising writing of the negative that opens onto nothing less than a negative universe where, for aesthetic, political, and ethical reasons, the word has unremittingly to be unworded.

chapter 1

The Language Crisis: From Mallarmé to Mauthner

The history of the West has been marked by a recurrent sense that, in the face of certain thoughts, feelings, objects, or experiences, words fail us. For Plato, the Ideas that constitute the real (of which human beings can capture only the shadows on the cave wall) may be described, but they remain in a more profound sense beyond the grasp of language, even the Greek language, considered by its possessors to be superior to all others, with non-Greek speakers falling into the category of the barbarian. Similarly, the long tradition of negative theology is shaped by a profound sense of the limited power of language, insisting, as it does, that God can be expressed linguistically only in terms of what he is not, any positive articulation of the divine essence being at best a reduction, if not an outright distortion, of that essence. The works of Meister Eckhart bear eloquent witness to this conviction that human language is beggared by the divine. This skepticism toward language becomes particularly acute, however, in the modern period, casting its long shadow over European literature and philosophy. Indeed, according to George Steiner, European modernity – which he sees as commencing in the 1870s, and thus following the humiliation of France in the Franco-Prussian War – is the time of the “after-Word,” an epoch defined principally by the breaking of the longstanding contract between language and reality upon which Western culture was established.1 Alongside the widely held belief that language shapes rather than simply reflects or represents our world, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Europe are also marked increasingly by the belief that the only hope of making contact with reality, be that reality objective or subjective, outer or inner, lies in a vigilant distrust of language, a distrust that can lead in two directions: either to a renewal or reinvigoration of language, or to its destruction. In the Symbolist 1

See George Steiner, Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say? (London: Faber & Faber, 1989); see also C. A. M. Noble, Sprachskepsis. Über Dichtung der Moderne (Munich: text und kritik, 1978).

15

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Language and Negativity in European Modernism

movement that arose in France in the late nineteenth century and then spread across western Europe, these two seemingly contradictory commitments are brought together: Linguistic renewal in response to a profound language skepticism is seen as requiring a labor of the negative directed at language. In his poem “The Tomb of Edgar Poe” (1876), Stéphane Mallarmé identifies the language that requires renewal as the “words of the tribe” (mots de la tribu).2 A decade later, in the prose text “Crisis of Verse” (1886), in a passage that alludes back to the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, with its emphasis on linguistic multiplicity as disempowering, Mallarmé declares that all languages are “imperfect insofar as they are many; the absolute one is lacking . . . ; the diversity, on earth, of idioms prevents anyone from proffering words that would otherwise be, when made uniquely, the material truth.”3 He goes on to anticipate Saussure’s notion of the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign – that is, the nonnatural, nonmimetic relation between signifier and signified – by asserting that the “discourse” on which we rely in everyday life “fails to express objects by touches corresponding to them in shading or bearing. . . . Beside ombre [shade], which is opaque, ténèbres [shadows] is not very dark; what a disappointment, in front of the perversity that makes jour [day] and nuit [night], contradictorily, sound dark in the former and light in the latter.”4 As Leo Bersani observes, Mallarmé considers language to be an “epistemological disaster,” and his reflections upon a new kind of poetry that would be “composed of silences, of the spaces between words, can in part be understood as a consequence of the secondary status given to words.”5 Alongside this new privileging of silence and empty space, there is also in Mallarmé’s poetics – and, indeed, in Symbolism more generally – a privileging of music that finds its philosophical credentials in Schopenhauer, for whom music was the “most powerful” of the arts, being the only one – in Schopenhauer’s binary conception of Will (Wille), on the one hand, and Idea or Representation (Vorstellung), on the other – with the power to express the Will directly, the other arts merely reproducing the superficial Vorstellung.6 2 3 4 5 6

Stéphane Mallarmé, Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Mary Ann Caws (New York: New Directions, 1982), p. 51. Stéphane Mallarmé, Divagations, trans. Barbara Johnson (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 205. Ibid. Leo Bersani, The Death of Stéphane Mallarmé (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 39. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne, 2 vols. (New York: Dover, 1966), vol. II, p. 448.

The Language Crisis: From Mallarmé to Mauthner

17

If Mallarmé follows Schopenhauer in this privileging of music, he does so in a manner that, far from simply rejecting the linguistic, only increases the power of poetry. For he sees poetry, reasonably enough, as a musicalization of everyday language. Combined with this musicalization is a purification of language such that poetry “makes up for language’s deficiencies.” Poetry thus conceived is, for Mallarmé, a form of language that is “essential,” in contrast to the “brute and immediate” language of everyday usage. It is essential rather than brute because it overcomes the arbitrariness of the relation between word and world, the result being that in poetry “the object named is bathed in a brand new atmosphere.”7 For Mallarmé, as subsequently for modernists as diverse as Rainer Maria Rilke, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Osip Mandelstam, the writer’s task is precisely, as Eliot puts it in Little Gidding (1942), recalling Mallarmé, to “purify the dialect of the tribe.”8 Three decades before Mallarmé’s claim that all languages other than the “essential” language of poetry are deficient, his compatriot Flaubert is also to be found questioning the power of the word, comparing it to its detriment to music. In Madame Bovary (1857), Emma Bovary’s lover, Rodolphe, compares “human language” (la parole humaine) to a “cracked kettledrum on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when what we long to do is make music that will move the stars to pity.”9 According to Roland Barthes, it is precisely with Flaubert that modern European literature’s entire concern becomes the “problematics of language,”10 and this is certainly reflected in Flaubert’s assertion in 1852 that his ultimate aim was to write “a book about nothing.”11 However, Mallarmé’s operations on language in his most adventurous poem, A Throw of the Dice (1897), as well as in late sonnets such as “Stilled by the crushing cloud” (“A la nue accablante”), are considerably more linguistically radical than anything 7

8 9 10 11

Mallarmé, Divagations, p. 211. Although Bersani claims that, for Mallarmé, poetic language “does not make up for the deficiencies of ordinary language” (The Death of Stéphane Mallarmé, p. 400), this is precisely what the poet sees it as being able to achieve. T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems, 1909–1962 (London: Faber & Faber, 1974), p. 218. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary: A Story of Provincial Life, trans. Geoffrey Wall (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 2004), p. 170. Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967), p. 9. In a letter of January 16, 1852 to Louise Colet, Flaubert writes: “What seems beautiful to me, what I should like to write, is a book about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external, which would be held together by the internal strength of its style, just as the earth, suspended in the void, depends on nothing external for its support; a book which would have almost no subject, or at least in which the subject would be almost invisible, if such a thing is possible” (The Letters of Gustave Flaubert, 1830–1857, ed. Francis Steegmuller [Cambridge, MA, and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1980], p. 157).

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Language and Negativity in European Modernism

achieved by Flaubert, even in later works such as Salammbô (1862) and Bouvard and Pécuchet (1881). In Mallarmé’s poems of the 1890s, any simple correspondence between word and world disappears; language operates in these works not so much referentially as musically, by way of evocation rather than description, suggestion rather than nomination, while making of the referential function an almost irresistible lure. Barthes tells only one side of the story, then, when he claims that Mallarmé’s aim is the “destruction of language, with Literature reduced, so to speak, to being its carcass.”12 For while Mallarmé declares in a letter written in May 1867 that “Destruction was my Beatrice,” and that his work has come into being “only by elimination,”13 it is possible to see the Symbolist aesthetic in terms of a negativity that is ultimately not only productive rather than destructive, but productive of something quite other than carcasses. That aesthetic may be related back to Kant’s conception of poetry in his Critique of Judgement (1790), where the German philosopher argues that poetry is the highest of the arts because it offers us forms that accord with concepts in a manner that “couples with the presentation of the concept a wealth of thought to which no verbal expression is completely adequate.”14 Poetry, for Kant, necessarily reminds us of the limits of language, but it does so in a manner that evokes that which remains unnameable. The limits of language would thus be at once the precondition for, and the justification of, poetry. What Malcolm Bowie rightly describes as the “risk of complete semantic breakdown” in Mallarmé’s later poetry, when “familiar meanings dissolve,” is thus the precondition for a “dizzying blur of potential meanings.”15 If the work is, as Barthes claims, a carcass, then it is one that pullulates. An initial semantic negation enables semantic enrichment, and poetry becomes the name for the form of language use in which such proliferating enrichment is achieved through the negative. Similarly, the negations enacted in the prose work Igitur (published posthumously in 1925) are orientated toward the experience of the “Infinite,” such that, at the end of a negative process, “Nothingness having departed, there remains the castle of purity.”16

12 13 14 15 16

Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, p. 11. Mallarmé, Selected Poetry and Prose, p. 88 (Mallarmé’s emphasis). Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1952), p. 190. Malcolm Bowie, Mallarmé and the Art of Being Difficult (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 5. Mallarmé, Selected Poetry and Prose, p. 101.

The Language Crisis: From Mallarmé to Mauthner

19

If Mallarmé’s A Throw of the Dice proves to be a key work in the emergence of a European literature of the unword, then this is not simply because of its insistence upon forms of linguistic negativism as a prerequisite for any genuine linguistic renewal, but also because, in contrast to Igitur, the negativism here leads not to the absolute (the “castle of purity”) but to a “constellation” in which order, form, and unity are considerably harder to establish. The force of the negative in Mallarmé’s most structurally innovative poem is almost immediately apparent in the positioning of the particle of negation “never” (jamais) after the opening line, “A throw of the dice.” As Malcolm Bowie observes, the full “titlemaxim” – “A throw of the dice will never abolish chance” – which extends in syntactically dismembered form across the poem, troubling the distinction between title and work, inside and outside, may be read as stating that “no act of knowing eliminates the unknowable; no would-be definitive thought may free itself from contingency; no action of whatever kind may perfectly transcend the conditions of its execution.”17 The experience of unknowing, the lack of power and control, in the face of ineradicable chance, is brought out through the image of “shipwreck” (naufrage) that lies at the heart of the poem, alongside those of the “Abyss” (Abîme), the “gaping depth” (béante profondeur), the “gulf” (gouffre), silence (silence), and “absence” (absence). Bowie is absolutely right to emphasize the fact that the poem’s language is “dominated by negatives, privatives and limiting parentheses,”18 these limiting parentheses being signaled by “even when” (quand bien même), “albeit” (SOIT que), and “except” (excepté). To this can be added the fact that the poem is punctuated by a series of violent verbal forms: “cutting” (coupant); “throw” (jeter); “separated” (écarté); “invades” (envahit); “bifurcated” (bifurquées); “disperse” (disperser); and “dissolves” (se dissout). The procedures here are predominantly negative in nature. Crucially for what would emerge as a literature of the unword in the twentieth century, the sense of a devastating negativity in A Throw of the Dice is realized not only lexically but also syntactically. The poem is striking for its complete absence of punctuation, and lines are ruptured by gaps such that the reader is not granted any clear syntactical path to follow. Indeed, the reader is repeatedly faced by a choice of directions (this being very much part of the experience of “chance”), and, with that choice, a semantic risk. The uneven spaces introduced into the poem constitute a materialization of those silences into which, as Bersani observes, language 17

Ibid., p. 27.

18

Ibid., p. 133.

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and meaning slip. This disintegrative spatialization recurs, in more or less radical form, in Dada, in Pound’s Cantos, in concrete poetry, and particularly in the work of the post–World War II French poets André du Bouchet, Jean Daive, and Anne-Marie Albiach. The threat posed by contingency, by a world that exceeds the power of both thought and language, is such that A Throw of the Dice might seem to present us with language on the point of complete disintegration, subject to the power of a negativity that leaves nothing but linguistic flotsam and jetsam in its wake. While it is certainly the case that this threat is articulated in the poem, Mallarmé also includes a counterforce, a shaping, controlling, ordering principle: “Number” (Le Nombre). In this, he follows, as in much else, in the wake of Baudelaire, for whom “All is number.”19 As Bowie puts it, for Mallarmé the numerical, mathematical here constitutes a “means of escape from the undifferentiated flood of phenomena; it is the tenuous foretaste of knowledge, the promise of a world simplified, organised and understood.”20 One finds a similar promise in French literature more than half a century later, in Jean Daive’s poem White Decimal (1967) and in Philippe Sollers’s novel Nombres (“Numbers,” 1968). On the one hand, this turn to the numerical is an abandonment of language, and thus of poetry, or at least a severe restriction of poetry’s power. In this respect, Mallarmé anticipates the sense shared by writers such as Samuel Beckett and Paul Celan in the post–World War II period that language is beggared by catastrophic experience. A more telling anticipation of those postwar writers in whose work, as we shall see, linguistic negativism is enacted with an extraordinary intensity, is, however, to be found in the posthumously published fragments of a projected long poem on the death of Mallarmé’s son, For Anatole’s Tomb.21 On the other hand, Mallarmé never loses faith in literature, or, indeed, in the possibility of achieving the summa of all literary works: “the Book” (le Livre). That this “Book” should have remained as unfinished as Nietzsche’s projected philosophical magnum opus, “The Will to Power,” no more than a collection of fragments, is highly significant, because it, too, points toward a future in which the experience of failure, loss, and fragmentation would come to prevail, and in which this experience would be reflected in 19 20 21

Charles Baudelaire, “Fusées,” in Fusées, Mon Cœur mis à nu, et autres fragments posthumes, ed. André Guyaux (Paris: Gallimard Folio, 2016), pp. 49–76 (p. 52; Baudelaire’s emphasis). Mallarmé, Selected Poetry and Prose, pp. 129–30. Mallarmé’s son, Anatole, died in 1879; more than 200 sheets of notes toward the poem were produced by Mallarmé, but the work remained unfinished at the time of his death in 1898. It was published posthumously in 1961.

The Language Crisis: From Mallarmé to Mauthner

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forms of linguistic negativism constituting a radical literature of the unword. While Mallarmé’s insistence upon the negative has as its aim the emergence of an “essential” language, rather than linguistic destruction and silence, the classic turn-of-the-century literary expression of the broken contract between word and world certainly appears to commit itself to the latter. Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos Letter (1902) is a fictional missive from Lord Chandos to the philosopher Francis Bacon, one of the founders of the empirical natural sciences in the early seventeenth century, recording the former’s sudden and devastating experience of the world having become resistant to conceptualization – and thus to adequate linguistic articulation: Everything fell into pieces in front of me, the pieces into more pieces, and nothing could be contained in a single concept any more. Individual words swam around me: they melted into eyes, which stared at me, and which I had to stare back at: they are like whirlpools, it gives me vertigo to look down at them, they turn without cease, and transport you into nothingness [ins Leere].22

For Lord Chandos, then, the referential function of language has suddenly been lost. Hofmannsthal’s metaphors for language here suggest both resistance to the would-be language user (eyes that return the gaze) and a threatening power (words as whirlpools) that open not onto the world in the manner of a window (a key realist metaphor for language) but rather onto a complete absence of world (nothingness). Not only is language seen as wholly inadequate to map the real, but it lures one away from that world, leaving the speaking/writing subject abandoned, not just adrift on a sea of signifiers but dragged down into vacant depths, the whirlpool image here echoing Mallarmé’s preoccupation with images of shipwreck and the abyss in A Throw of the Dice.23 The experience described in the Lord Chandos Letter is essentially that of radical nominalism. When the habitual, abstracting, universalizing mode of apprehending the world breaks down, there emerge radical singularities that cannot, without distortion, be grasped by conceptual thinking – and thus cannot be captured by language, given its necessarily generalizing nature. From such a nominalist perspective, to use the word tree is simply 22

23

Hugo von Hofmannsthal, The Lord Chandos Letter, trans. Michael Hofmann (London: Syrens, 1995), p. 11; “Ein Brief,” in Der Brief des Lord Chandos. Schriften zur Literatur, Kultur und Geschichte, ed. Mathias Mayer (Stuttgart, Germany: Reclam, 2000), pp. 46–59 (p. 52). On the Lord Chandos Letter and its place within European modernism, see Richard Sheppard, Modernism – Dada – Postmodernism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2000), ch. 4.

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a nonsense because this term captures nothing of trees in their diversity, complexity, and mutability. All words suffer the same fate. In the short story “Funes, the Memorious” (1942), Jorge Luis Borges’s narrator claims that “To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract.”24 The language crisis described by Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos originates in his realization that to use language is necessarily to suppress differences, and, in so doing, to fail to grasp a reality taken to consist of radical singularities that would require a language consisting of no less radical singularities to articulate them. In his account of language failure, Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos seeks to place the emphasis on the richness of the most seemingly mundane of experiences. That which manifests itself to the letter writer as “something that has never been named and that it is probably impossible to name” (etwas völlig Unbenanntes und auch wohl kaum Benennbares) is located not in the abstract, not in the extraordinary, but in the most concrete, the most everyday of realities: in a “watering-can, a harrow left abandoned in the sun, a dog in the sun, a poor churchyard, a cripple, a small farmhouse.”25 And yet, for all his insistence upon the richness of experience, upon the “overflowing torrent of higher life” that is suddenly to be found in the mundane, and upon his “nameless [unbenanntes] feeling of bliss,” Lord Chandos’s letter also reveals not just the initial trauma prompted by his language crisis, but the existential darkness and emptiness that it heralds. The watering can that initially offers the experience of that “higher life,” and that seems even to incarnate it, is all too soon the image of death: The water within the watering can is “dark from the shadow of the tree,” and the water boatman moving across that dark water is passing “from one gloomy bank to the other.” Lord Chandos confesses that he now leads “a life of almost unbelievable emptiness [Leere],” and that he finds it difficult to disguise “the deadness [Starre] that is inside me.” If there is a language to capture this new, highly ambiguous experience, then it is “neither Latin nor English nor Italian nor Spanish, but a language of which I do not know even one word, a language in which dumb things speak to me.”26 Far from promising some form of linguistic renewal that would enable the articulation of his new experience of the world, in which “bliss” and “emptiness” sit disconcertingly alongside one another, Lord Chandos’s letter leaves its reader with a vision of the language-deprived writer facing 24 25 26

Jorge Luis Borges, “Funes, the Memorious,” trans. Anthony Kerrigan, in Ficciones (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), pp. 83–91 (p. 90). Hofmannsthal, Lord Chandos Letter, pp. 12–13; “Ein Brief,” p. 53. Ibid., pp. 12, 15, 17–18, 20; pp. 53, 55–57, 59.

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an “unknown judge” (unbekannten Richter), lacking the very words that might justify his existence.27 In the letter, he finds it necessary to resort, time and again, to negative modifiers (formed principally through the use of the un- affix) to evoke the nature of that existence. The proximity of things is “awful” (unheimlich); his choice of mental object is “inexplicable” (unbegreiflich); his empathy for dying rats is “terrible” (ungeheuer); his joy is “nameless” (unbenannt); his thinking is directed by something that is “unnameable” (unnennbar); his condition is “inexplicable” (unerklärlich); and the judge before whom he imagines himself standing after death is “unknown” (unbekannt).28 It is unsurprising that Kafka should have been so impressed by this text, and that it should also have proven to be so important for many of the most influential practitioners of a literature of the unword in the second half of the twentieth century, including both Blanchot and Sebald. In the realm of philosophical discourse, an argument that is, in certain key respects, strikingly similar to the one underlying the Lord Chandos Letter, with its eloquent endorsement of silence, lies at the heart of a work published at the same time and coming from central Europe. The work in question is Fritz Mauthner’s three-volume Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache (“Contributions to a Critique of Language,” 1901–2). In this monumental work, one of the most neglected figures in the history of modern philosophy seeks to demonstrate that the entire history of Western philosophy since Plato has been afflicted by what he terms “word superstition” (Wortaberglaube) or “word fetishism” (Wortfetischismus); that is, the failure to recognize that language and thought are in fact not only intimately related but one and the same, and thus that, while we may believe that we are referring to concepts, ideas, truths, or reality when we philosophize or indeed when we think in the most everyday sense, we are in fact strictly confined within a purely linguistic realm, a prison house of language. As Mauthner puts it: “There is no thinking without speaking, that is, without words. More precisely, there is no thinking, there is only speaking.”29 Even when one is silent, thinking remains for Mauthner a purely linguistic phenomenon. This is, in effect, a radicalization of Humboldt’s argument that language is the “constituting organ of thought,” and that “intellectual activity and language are one and not 27 29

Ibid., p. 20; p. 59. 28 Ibid., pp. 11, 13, 15, 18–20; pp. 52–53, 55, 57–59. Fritz Mauthner, Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache, 3 vols. (Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1923), vol. I, p. 176. Cf. Gershon Weiler, Mauthner’s Critique of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 32.

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separable from each other.”30 Far from denying his debt to earlier thinkers, Mauthner is the first to acknowledge that others have recognized that thought is not possible without language, and even that language and thought are one. He cites, for instance, Hamann’s assertion in 1784 that “reason is language” (Vernunft ist Sprache), this formulation taking advantage of the polysemantic nature of the Greek term logos, meaning speech, language, reason, and science.31 Mauthner’s radicalization of this philosophical position leads, however, beyond both Humboldt and Hamann, to the claim that the philosopher’s task is a critique of language that has for its aim not only the rejection of all existing philosophical concepts, but also a seemingly impossible step beyond language. For Mauthner, as Gershon Weiler observes, “[M]ental events are not observable at all and therefore, a fortiori, they are not describable either.”32 In effect, it makes no sense to speak of the mind. In addition to the mind/body distinction that has played such a central role in Western philosophy since Plato, Mauthner also dismisses the idea of timeless truths, as well as all philosophical systems: “Every closed system is a self-delusion, thus philosophy as selfknowledge of the human spirit is always unfruitful and so philosophy, if one insists on retaining the old word, can aim to be nothing else but a critical attention to language.”33 In spirit, Mauthner’s conception of philosophy as language critique (Kritik der Sprache) is, like the Lord Chandos Letter, deeply nominalist, and he owes much both to the skeptical tradition, especially Hume, and to medieval nominalism and medieval mysticism, in particular Meister Eckhart. Following on from his claim that thought is nothing but language, with all ideas being purely metaphorical in nature, the delusion from which Mauthner seeks to deliver philosophy is the notion that there is an extralinguistic reality, or any extralinguistic truths, that could be accessed by way of language and articulated in language because all language use is in fact a form of misuse. Furthermore, he dismisses the idea that logic can help us to describe reality. While Western philosophy may have remained trapped within such delusional thinking, Mauthner nonetheless sees its history as the “long self-decomposition of the metaphorical,” which is to say a slow, halting progress toward the recognition that all concepts, not least those on which both theology and philosophy have depended most 30 32

Cited in Weiler, Mauthner’s Critique of Language, p. 23. 31 Mauthner, Beiträge, vol. I, p. 178. Weiler, Mauthner’s Critique of Language, p. 20. 33 Mauthner, Beiträge, vol. I, p. 705.

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heavily, are in fact empty metaphors.34 With a summative philosophical ambition that anticipates that of both Heidegger and Derrida in the twentieth century, Mauthner see the entire history of Western philosophy since Plato as a series of valiant attempts to achieve a philosophical critique of language. Medieval nominalism is, he argues, “the first attempt at the real self-decomposition of metaphorical thinking.” If this attempt failed, the reason was that the nominalists could not free themselves from theology, and thus from God as the “supreme metaphor.”35 Scholasticism, which Mauthner sees as extending as far as Kant and Schopenhauer, constitutes an “astonishingly clear-sighted attempt to overcome ‘word-realism,’” albeit ultimately one that failed.36 Locke’s critique of concrete concepts is also seen as a major step forward, although, according to Mauthner, he remains ensnared in “word superstition” in his analysis of complex ideas in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689). With Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40) and An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), the concept of cause is finally recognized as a metaphor. In his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant insists that we can have no knowledge of the “noumenal” realm, or things in themselves, and that we should therefore limit ourselves to the phenomenal in matters epistemological. This constitutes the next major step forward in the critique of language, according to Mauthner, even if Kant does not reflect upon the nature of language, revealing, as it does, that all thought is at once metaphorical and anthropocentric.37 Like the nominalists before him, however, Kant fails to carry his wholly justified “negative thinking” through to its necessary conclusion, instead settling upon a new supreme metaphor, replacing God with Pure Reason.38 For all his critical spirit, Kant thus remains on the threshold of the “gates of truth,” unable to step beyond the metaphors of thought and world. In Kant’s wake, a step backward is taken, proving that the selfdecomposition of the metaphorical is far from being a rectilinear process. For, with Hegel, the “old word superstition indulges in the wildest orgies,”39 the concept of Spirit (Geist) being, according to Mauthner, more seductively metaphorical than that of Pure Reason. From Plato’s 34

35 38

Ibid., vol. II, p. 473. The passage on the self-decomposition of the metaphorical is included in the notes taken by Beckett on Mauthner in the 1930s. As we shall see, linguistic self-decomposition lies at the heart of Beckett’s conception, and ultimately his practice, of a literature of the unword. Ibid., vol. II, p. 474. 36 Ibid., vol. II, p. 475. 37 Ibid., vol. II, p. 476. Ibid., vol. II, p. 477. 39 Ibid., vol. II, p. 478.

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Ideas, through the Christian God, to Kant’s Pure Reason, to Hegel’s Spirit – for Mauthner, these are all purely linguistic entities that have not hitherto been recognized for what they are. Driven by his profound intellectual animosity for Hegel, his great philosophical rival in the first half of the nineteenth century, and his qualified respect for Kant, Schopenhauer delivers what Mauthner sees as a major blow to the various forms of word fetishism that blight Western philosophy, drawing on Eastern thought as well as medieval mysticism (especially Meister Eckhart) in his attempt to think an ascesis that would liberate us from the entirely delusional world of representation (Vorstellung). In this, Schopenhauer “shakes often and strongly at the gates of language critique.” However, like so many of the major philosophers against whom he turns his critical eye, Schopenhauer cannot resist generating in his turn a supreme metaphor to explain the world. The metaphor in question – the Will – is one that would impact profoundly on the realm of the political, in a manner that Schopenhauer could scarcely have imagined. For, by way of Nietzsche’s Schopenhauer-inspired, if also Schopenhauercritical, notion of the Will to Power, Western philosophico-political thinking would arrive in due course at the Nazis’ racial concept of Will, and the need for its “triumph” over that of the many “inferior races.” There is perhaps no more compelling proof that metaphors are not only what we live by, but also what we die by, for they can most certainly prove murderous. As for Nietzsche, Mauthner is less appreciative of his critical spirit than he is of Kant’s, although his case against Nietzsche is based less upon the concept of the Will to Power than upon his particular forms of language use. For Nietzsche fails to contribute significantly to the critique of language because he remains too enamored by his own rhetoric. Mauthner’s having concentrated his critique of Nietzsche on the latter’s style rather than on the notion of the Will to Power, which would seem to fit well with the other “supreme metaphors” operative in Western philosophy that are the object of Mauthner’s critique, can be explained by the fact that the book – it is certainly not in any sense a “work” – that led to the Will to Power, and its struggle against nihilism, becoming the perceived core of Nietzsche’s mature work, was only published in 1901.40 In his dismissal of Nietzsche, Mauthner also makes no mention of the essay 40

Although this fact was obscured on its first publication, The Will to Power consists of extracts from Nietzsche’s notebooks and is not to be confused with the projected book of that title to which Nietzsche refers on more than one occasion in the late 1880s.

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“On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense,” in which Nietzsche anticipates Mauthner’s critique of metaphorical thinking by claiming that truth is nothing but a “mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms.”41 Here, too, there is a simple historical explanation for Mauthner’s omission. Although written in 1873, Nietzsche’s essay was only published posthumously, in 1903,42 and thus Mauthner would not have been familiar with it at the time of writing the Beiträge. Mauthner’s relentless critique of language is directed against what he terms “logocracy” – the rule of the word. As he puts it in the first section of the Beiträge, giving a radical spin to the opening of the Gospel According to St John: “‘In the beginning was the word.’ With the word humankind stands at the beginning of the knowledge of the world and it remains there for as long as it remains with the word. Whoever wants to go further, even the smallest step further . . . must free himself from the word and from word-superstition, he must seek to liberate his world from the tyranny of language.”43 As for what would lie beyond language, it is not only indescribable, but also inconceivable. Just as Schopenhauer claims that, were the Will to be entirely negated, through some form of radical ascesis, what lies beyond it can only be described as “nothingness,” so, for Mauthner, beyond language, beyond metaphorical thinking, there lies what can only – all too inadequately – be described as the “void” (Leere). This liberation from the tyranny of language can be achieved, according to Mauthner, only through an annihilation of language. There is no possibility of a critical metalanguage; that is, a purified “essential” language of the kind sought by Mallarmé that would not constitute just one more form of mis-saying. However, given that we have nothing but language in and through which to think, the critique of language can only be achieved in and through language. This means that language must be turned against itself; it must become self-undoing, self-negating. As Mauthner puts it, in unavoidably metaphorical fashion: “because thinking is language, this new philosophy is, out of the death-wish of thought, a suicide of language.”44 The philosopher’s task thus becomes the negation of language by way of language: “If I wish to ascend in the critique of language, which is the most 41

42

43

Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense,” in The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, ed. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs, trans. Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 139–53 (p. 146). The first publication of this 1873 essay was in volume 10 (1903) of the 15-volume Grossoktav-Ausgabe of Nietzsche’s Werke, ed. Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche et al. (Leipzig: Naumann/Kröner, 1894–1904). The first English translation appeared in 1911, in Oscar Levy’s 18-volume edition of The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche (Edinburgh and London: T. N. Foulis, 1909–13). Mauthner, Beiträge, vol. I, p. 1. 44 Ibid., vol. I, p. 713.

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important business of thinking mankind, then I must destroy language behind me, before me and in me from step to step, then I must destroy every rung of the ladder once I step upon it.”45 One technique employed by Mauthner in the Beiträge to undo the language on which he has to rely is the deployment of the modifier “so-called” (sogenannt) – as in “our socalled thinking” or “the so-called objective spirit of language.”46 Given his position on the all-pervasiveness of word fetishism, this modifier could of course be used of each and every concept to which he refers. This technique is, however, far from being sufficient to achieve a thoroughgoing critique of language. That critique of language is, then, the attempt to say the unsayable, and is thus, strictly speaking, impossible. As Gershon Weiler puts it: “[T]he critique must remain necessarily self-defeating; it will either increase the confusion implicit in language by using it, or else it will eliminate language and then there will remain nothing to criticize and the critique itself will become impossible.”47 In this conception of language critique as both necessary and impossible, Mauthner anticipates a core tenet of those writers who, in the twentieth century, would commit themselves to the task of producing a literature of the unword. For Mauthner, the step beyond word superstition – or the word realism that is diametrically opposed to the kind of nominalism that he champions – is signaled not by anything linguistic, but rather by laughter, as the nonlinguistic sign of our detachment from language, our recognition that words will never deliver on their promise to grant us access to the world. The “pure critique” of language is thus “a great, healthy laughter. A strong laughter, stronger than the laughter of Aristophanes and Lucian, of Rabelais and Balzac, of Lichtenberg and Heine.”48 Such “articulated laughter” is not, however, the ultimate stage in our liberation from word fetishism; for while this laughter signals a higher form of knowledge than that which could ever be achieved in language, the highest form of language critique lies in “heavenly-still, heavenly-cheerful resignation or renunciation [Entsagung].”49 As the German word Entsagung suggests, this highest form of language critique is an active unsaying, the privative affix 45

46 48

Ibid., vol. I, pp. 1–2. Mauthner’s image of the ladder recurs in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: “My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognises them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)” (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus, trans. C. K. Ogden (London: Routledge, 1998), proposition 6.54 (p. 189). Mauthner, Beiträge, vol. II, p. 532. 47 Weiler, Mauthner’s Critique of Language, p. 274. Mauthner, Beiträge, vol. III, pp. 632–33. 49 Ibid., vol. III, p. 634.

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ent- operating to take back or negate, proleptically, the act of saying as such. The only two available modes of language use, then, become missaying (which would include all philosophy prior to Mauthner) and unsaying, the aim of the latter being silence because silence alone avoids misleading us – as long, that is, as we do not name it, “silence” being no less of a metaphor than God, Reason, or Will.50 Mauthner’s critique of language may therefore be contrasted with that of his continental contemporary, Franz Brentano, among others, precisely on account of its radicality. While Brentano’s aim is to purge ordinary language of those elements that make it unreliable, and thus to achieve for philosophy what Mallarmé wishes to achieve for poetry, Mauthner insists that language as such is irredeemably unreliable, and that no form of linguistic purification can overcome this intrinsic unreliability. Mauthner’s Entsagung is a mode not of linguistic purification, but of linguistic negation. Mauthner was born in 1849 in Hořice, Bohemia, in what is now the Czech Republic, and the cultural context in which he developed his conception of language critique was also that in which another Germanspeaking Jewish writer, no less concerned with language issues, would grow up three decades later: Franz Kafka.51 This context was one in which linguistic differences were beginning to be mapped very directly onto national and ethnic differences, as the power of the Austro-Hungarian Empire waned. Like Kafka after him, Mauthner reflected upon this situation at length, and there are good reasons to see his insistence on linguistic failure, and his practice of linguistic negativism, as emerging in part out of a growing crisis of confidence in German as the central European lingua franca.52 Just as Mauthner summarily dismisses Nietzsche’s contribution to the critique of language in the Beiträge, so his work would, in its turn, be dismissed by another philosopher hailing from central Europe: Ludwig Wittgenstein, who, in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), endorses Mauthner’s view that philosophy should be a critique of language, only to qualify this with the negation: “but not at all in Mauthner’s sense.”53 While Wittgenstein does indeed take a different approach to the critique of 50 51 52

53

As Weiler observes, for Mauthner “only silence is not misleading” (Weiler, Mauthner’s Critique of Language, p. 295). Mauthner died in 1923, just one year before the much younger Kafka. On the context in which Mauthner’s language critique arose, see Christopher Ebner, Sprachskepsis und Sprachkrise. Fritz Mauthners Sprachphilosophie im Kontext der Moderne (Hamburg: Diplomatica Verlag, 2014). Wittgenstein, Tractatus, prop. 4.0031 (p. 63).

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language, he nonetheless shares rather more than he is willing to acknowledge with Mauthner, as evidenced by assertions both in his 1914–16 wartime notebooks and again in the Tractatus, where he famously argues that “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world,” and, following the mystical turn to be found in Mauthner, that “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”54 According to Wittgenstein, the only things that can be said without missaying are the “propositions of natural science. i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy.” Thus, unlike Mauthner, he retains, at least in the Tractatus, a faith in the power of a certain form of language to describe the world. As for that which lies beyond the power of propositional language – as what he terms the “inexpressible” (Unaussprechliches) – it is the “mystical,” and this is experienced in an extralinguistic manner as that which “shows itself.”55 Working with a strict fact/value distinction, Wittgenstein assigns facts to the realm of the expressible and ethics to that of the inexpressible. As he puts it in a conversation recorded by Friedrich Waismann: “Man feels the urge to run up against the limits of language. . . . This running up against the limits of language is ethics. . . . In ethics we are always making the attempt to say something that cannot be said.”56 As Iris Murdoch observes, for the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, “Value is essentially ineffable since significant discourse is tied to fact.”57 And yet, of course, there are values and ethics in every culture, and they might reasonably be seen as part of our world, which suggests that the limits of one’s language are not in fact the limits of one’s world. The explanation for the restriction lies in Wittgenstein’s definition of world in the Tractatus; that is, the “totality of facts,” or the totality of that which is expressible. So defined, the world does not constitute the total field of experience. Furthermore, while everything beyond the world as the totality of facts is inexpressible in verbal language, it can nonetheless be shown, this distinction between saying (sagen) and showing (zeigen) being fundamental to Wittgenstein’s early work, but absent from Mauthner’s critique of language. For all its radicality, then, Wittgenstein’s argument on the limits of language in the Tractatus is, in fact, considerably less radical than Mauthner’s in the Beiträge. In his own critique of language, Wittgenstein 54

55 56 57

Ibid., props. 5.6 and 7 (pp. 149, 189). Cf. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914–1916, ed. G. H. von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979), pp. 49 and 49e (May 23, 1915). Wittgenstein, Tractatus, prop. 6.522 (p. 187). Cited in Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Chatto & Windus, 1992), p. 29. Ibid., p. 36.

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retains a language/thought distinction that is rejected by Mauthner. In his wartime notes, he describes words as being “like the film on deep water.”58 In the Tractatus, he deploys a familiar metaphor to describe the relation – or, more precisely, the nonrelation – between the two: “Language disguises the thought; so that from the external form of the clothes one cannot infer the form of the thought they clothe, because the external form of the clothes is constructed with quite another object than to let the form of the body be recognized.”59 As we have seen, Mauthner dismisses the possibility that language can present a picture of reality. Rather, it deceives its user into imagining that reality is being described, when in fact all that is being presented is language. Furthermore, while Wittgenstein’s assertion in his Philosophical Remarks that “I cannot use language to get outside language” is ostensibly in line with Mauthner’s conception of language critique,60 it is not followed by a theorization of language critique that would take the form of a self-negating or self-undoing use of language, precisely because Wittgenstein’s aim is the correct use of language rather than its negation. Whereas Wittgenstein’s critique of language in the Tractatus entails a turn to the propositional form as an effective means of presenting the world of facts, which remains expressible in the form of an image or picture, Mauthner has no such faith in the propositional, and instead champions what he terms the “not-word” (Nichtwort) as the ultimate means by which to overcome the all-pervasive word fetishism that blocks access to any extralinguistic reality. It is solely by way of this “not-word” that, according to Mauthner, one can achieve a liberating “annihilation” (Vernichtung) of the linguistic.61 In proposing the “not-word” as the means to free thinking from word superstition, Mauthner’s language critique might seem to chime with that of Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos, who informs his addressee that he is to abandon writing altogether because linguistic expression will always miss the real. However, there is an important difference between their respective positions, and one that cuts to the heart of the literature of the unword’s approach to language. Lord Chandos is able to express his language crisis with considerable eloquence, and this eloquence is set in opposition to a complete withdrawal from language into pure silence. Eloquence and 58 59 60 61

Wittgenstein, Notebooks, pp. 52 and 52e (May 29, 1915). Wittgenstein, Tractatus, prop. 4.002 (p. 63). Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Remarks, ed. Rush Rhees, trans. Raymond Hargreaves and Roger White (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975), p. 54. “Zum höchsten Einssein der Vernichtung gelangt man durch das Nichtwort” (Mauthner, Beiträge, vol. I, p. 83).

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silence are presented in unproblematic opposition to one another, and as equally possible. In contrast, Mauthner’s Nichtwort remains a word, albeit a self-negating one. It is not to be mistaken for silence. The form of language critique envisaged by Mauthner, then, takes the form of a process, albeit an interminable one directed toward an impossible, even mystical end. There can be no immediate escape into silence of the kind anticipated by Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos and, as it happens, already enacted by Rimbaud. First language must be submitted to a radical labor of the negative. To imagine that there can be any such immediate escape into silence would be to fall for another metaphor. That Lord Chandos’s abandonment of the literary should be articulated with such rhetorical power is more than a mere paradox. It bespeaks a valorization of literature akin to both Kant’s and Mallarmé’s championing of poetry, as that form of language (“essential” rather than “brute and immediate”) which alone can chart, and even surpass, the limits of language. As it happens, Mauthner’s Beiträge contains a similar valorization of the literary, although in his case the literary promises not eloquence, but rather a means of enacting the negation of language. In a move that anticipates the literary practice of linguistic negativism in twentiethcentury Europe, Mauthner identifies a particular literary style as the most effective means of breaking the spell of word superstition, namely an ironic use of language, the most exemplary form of which he finds in Goethe’s Poetry and Truth (1808–31). In this major autobiographical work, Mauthner claims that Goethe “really appears, more than any other writer before or after him, to rise above all possible limits of language [alle möglichen Grenzen der Sprache], because he uses words to a certain extent ironically [ironisch], in an inimitable way, that is to say with the clearly betrayed complaint that he must simply follow linguistic usage.”62 In Poetry and Truth, Goethe achieves a “superior manner of using words as mere words [die Worte als bloße Worte zu gebrauchen],”63 and, in so doing, reminds the reader at every step of the unbridgeable gap between word and world. Goethe’s ironic approach to language is even more pervasive than its author realizes, finding its clearest expression in Faust, Part One, where Goethe famously has Faust dismiss the biblical “In the beginning was the Word” in favor of “In the beginning was the deed.”64 For Mauthner, the “deed” (Tat) in question is the radical self-negation of language by way of the Nichtwort. 62

Ibid., vol. II, p. 506.

63

Ibid., vol. II, p. 507.

64

Ibid., vol. I, p. 137.

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In addition to Goethe, Mauthner also sees the Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck as moving in the direction of an effective critique of language. Plays such as The Intruder (1891), The Blind (1891), and Interior (1895) reveal through their “reverence for silence” a sense of the “worthlessness of language” that had become increasingly prevalent in the course of the nineteenth century.65 Maeterlinck makes an important distinction between “active” and “passive” silence;66 only the former – like active as opposed to passive nihilism, according to Nietzsche – can achieve the desired objective: the negation of language. However, while Maeterlinck’s work clearly anticipates Beckett’s in its orientation toward silence, and thus has its place in an emerging European literature of the unword, Mauthner considers Maeterlinck to have failed to maintain the level of critical spirit achieved by Goethe because, he argues, the Belgian writer turns silence into a “divinity” (Gottheit), a “mystical Something,” and thus falls back into metaphorical thinking. In other words, he takes flight from the rarefied realm of the negative.67 The point that Mauthner makes here with respect to Maeterlinck’s approach to silence is crucial for an understanding of the literature of the unword that would emerge in twentieth-century Europe. For it highlights the difference between linguistic negativism in the form of Entsagung – that is, a process of linguistic undoing that is interminable, and indeed, strictly speaking, impossible – and a pure negation of the word that would give onto silence as a possible end. The increasing loss of faith in the power of the word in the second half of the nineteenth century that finds two of its most important articulations in Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos Letter and Mauthner’s Beiträge was owing, as Steiner argues, in part to the rise of the sciences and the shift to nonlinguistic ways of representing the world.68 As a result, a sense began to emerge that words are not in fact the most effective means by which to comprehend reality. Mallarmé’s emphasis upon “Number” in A Throw of the Dice reflects an early awareness in the literary realm of this shift away from language as the primary mode of articulating reality. No less importantly, Mauthner’s praise for Hamann is a sign of the impact of a growing interest in the origins and nature of language in the 65

66 68

Ibid., vol. I, pp. 117–18. For an analysis of Maeterlinck’s work and his impact on European theater, see Patrick McGuinness, Maurice Maeterlinck and the Making of Modern Theatre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Mauthner, Beiträge, vol. I, p. 118. 67 Ibid., vol. I, p. 120. See George Steiner, “The Retreat from the Word,” in Language and Silence (London: Faber & Faber, 1967), pp. 30–54.

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late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, particularly in France and the German-speaking countries, with two of the most notable works in this field being Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages (1781) and Wilhelm von Humboldt’s On Language (1836). A core element in the emerging science of language, especially in the German-speaking world, was an appreciation of linguistic differences, alongside the intimate relation between language and thought. As noted previously, Humboldt sees language as the “constituting organ of thought,” with thought and language being inseparable from one another. One of the obvious implications of this conception of the thought/language relation is a dramatic relativization of thought, which will necessarily take different forms in different languages. This in turn leads to a growing sense of the arbitrariness of language, or the nonnatural relation between word and object or word and thought. This sense of the arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign eventually finds its clearest, and, in due course, its most influential, articulation in Saussure’s 1916 course on structural linguistics. However, whereas Saussure seeks simply to gain acceptance for this arbitrariness as the principle of all languages, writers would, for obvious reasons, be profoundly troubled by it. This anxiety is, as we have seen, already very much present in Mallarmé’s reflections on language, shaping as it does his distinction between “essential” (poetic) and “brute” language, and it is also at the heart of Lord Chandos’s revelation into the relation between word and world, and his subsequent sense of emptiness (Leere). The rise of psychoanalysis also plays its part in the growth of language skepticism at the turn of the century, albeit a contradictory one. On the one hand, in his Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Freud proposes the extraordinary hermeneutic possibility of making sense of the apparently nonsensical. For all their seeming illogicality, dreams can be decoded through a reversal of the dream-work (Traumarbeit), and the unconscious revealed. On the other hand, psychoanalysis in its Freudian form emerges within, and contributes to, an increasing emphasis upon subjectivity that is considered to be radically split between conscious and unconscious, with the latter being dominant. The mind is not master in its own home, and its language is radically ambiguous. Freud seeks to demonstrate time and again that signs can be read in radically antithetical ways, the most homely (heimlich) being also the most unhomely (unheimlich). The significant impact of psychoanalysis on Surrealism would entail not only the adoption of the idea of a language of the unconscious, but also the literary enactment

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of the kinds of ambiguity that Freud sought to bring to light.69 Out of their close engagement with Surrealism, two of the most important practitioners of a literature of the unword in the second half of the twentieth century – Samuel Beckett and Paul Celan – would take up precisely this conception of linguistic ambiguity.70 Beckett’s encounters with Surrealism occurred in the 1930s and take the form of numerous translations of works by various French Surrealists, most notably Paul Éluard. In his translation of Éluard’s “L’Amoureuse” (“Lady Love”), for instance, from the 1926 volume Capital of Pain, Beckett captures very effectively the profound ambiguity articulated in the poem: She is standing on my lids And her hair is in my hair She has the colour of my eye She has the body of my hand In my shade she is engulfed As a stone against the sky She will never close her eyes And she does not let me sleep And her dreams in the bright day Make the suns evaporate And me laugh cry and laugh Speak when I have nothing to say71

In the first of the poem’s two stanzas, the female lover is shaped by the poem’s speaker, taking his form, mixing with him even to the point of losing her own identity – she is “engulfed” in his “shade” (Elle s’engloutit dans mon ombre) – such that she can be compared to an inanimate object (a stone). In the second stanza, however, she is presented as all-powerful: never succumbing to exhaustion, preventing the speaker from sleeping, she exudes a heat stronger than that of any sun, and can compel the speaker’s emotions. Most significantly of all, she has the power to make him speak when he has nothing to say. The reader is left to experience this flow of 69 70

71

On the impact of psychoanalysis on Surrealism, see, for instance, David Lomas, The Haunted Self: Surrealism, Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2000). On Celan’s engagement with Surrealism, see Charlotte Ryland, Paul Celan’s Encounters with Surrealism: Trauma, Translation and Shared Poetic Space (Oxford: Legenda, 2010); on Beckett’s engagement with Surrealism, see Daniel Albright, Beckett and Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 1–27. Paul Éluard, “Lady Love,” trans. Samuel Beckett, in Samuel Beckett, The Collected Poems, ed. Seán Lawlor and John Pilling (London: Faber & Faber, 2012), p. 72. For the original, see Paul Éluard, La Capitale de la douleur, suivi de L’Amour la poésie (Paris: Gallimard “Poésie,” 1966), p. 56.

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images, and to try to make sense of the two contradictory versions that they present of the female lover. The seeming ambiguity in the presentation of the female figure in the poem reflects Freud’s idea that the unconscious is untroubled by contradiction. The two visions of the female lover presented by Éluard here are perfectly compatible with one another at the level of the unconscious, and the language of the poem is, in that sense, the language of the unconscious. As we shall see, the poem anticipates Beckett’s own practice of a literature of the unword not only through the specific linguistic negativisms in the second stanza – “She will never close her eyes,” “she does not let me sleep,” “Speak when I have nothing to say” – but also through the second stanza countering the presentation of the woman in the first stanza. If the language crisis that arose in the second half of the nineteenth century was prompted in part by the increasing dominance of nonverbal ways of mapping reality, and in part by an increasing appreciation of linguistic difference, it was also directly related to a social crisis, as Jacques Rancière observes with regard to the Mallarméan “crisis of verse.”72 That modernity (modernité) of which Baudelaire writes in The Painter of Modern Life (1863) was increasingly shaped by mass culture, consumerism driven by fashion (Mallarmé having edited a fashion magazine, La Dernière Mode), and the growing hege mony of the language of the masses and of popular culture, compelling the advocates of high culture to recognize their evermore marginal status, and thus their diminishing power to shape cultural change. The increasing alienation of the bourgeois intelligentsia from its own class led to a weakening of the belief in the kind of shared language that underpinned the realist aesthetic. With the erosion of the sense of the bourgeoisie as a progressive class following the European revolutions of 1848, writer-intellectuals increasingly came to see themselves as standing in opposition to the very class to which so many of them belonged. Baudelaire was among the vanguard of those experiencing this self-alienation, making it the matter of their literary work. In the later nineteenth century, aesthetic culture in Europe took evergreater critical distance from mass culture. In Mallarmé’s idea of the “words of the tribe,” to which T. S. Eliot would allude in the last of the Four Quartets, it is certainly possible to detect a class element, a movement away from the progressive inclusiveness to be found in the work of Balzac or George Eliot. With the rise of mass culture, this sense of difference – and 72

Jacques Rancière, Mallarmé: The Politics of the Siren, trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2011), p. xvi.

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of artistic distinction – was only exacerbated. One need only look to the violently satirical reaction of the Austrian writer Karl Kraus in the early twentieth century to what he saw as the “lexical and grammatical decay of literary, journalistic, political, legal discourse.”73 Whereas, for Mauthner, the critique of language is a philosophical necessity, for Kraus it is a political one. Indeed, it is an early instance of ideology critique.74 The ever-increasing commodification to which Marx and his followers drew attention was seen as extending to language, the result being that writers (along with some philosophers, at both ends of the political spectrum) came to conceive of their urgent task as a thoroughgoing linguistic renewal, borne out of a labor of the negative on the existing language. The language crisis that is reflected so sharply in Mallarmé, Hofmannsthal, and Mauthner may be seen, then, as very much part of a more general waning of faith in the existing culture and its forms, codes, and norms. This process would be radically exacerbated by the catastrophe of World War I, and, in the literary sphere, would prompt nothing less than a language revolution in which forms of linguistic negativism would play an increasingly important role. 73 74

Steiner, Real Presences, p. 112. For an analysis of Kraus’s modes of critique, see Edward Timms, Karl Kraus: Apocalyptic Satirist: Culture and Catastrophe in Habsburg Vienna (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1986).

chapter 2

Great Destructive Work: The Interwar Years

Reflecting upon the significance of World War I for European culture, Paul Valéry identified a profound crisis in the European “spirit” (esprit) that would, he believed, if not checked, result in the death of European culture as such.1 Although Valéry does not address the matter directly, the crisis to which he refers undoubtedly includes a waning of faith in various forms of political, philosophical, literary, and even scientific discourse. Indeed, the language skepticism that had emerged in the late nineteenth century would become considerably more widespread within both literary and philosophical culture in Europe following the outbreak of a war that would result in the death of millions of Europeans, and that would undermine the European Enlightenment faith in the power of reason and in the possibility (and even the necessity) of cultural progress. In the European avant-garde and in European modernism more generally in the interwar years, the attempt to make sense of this cultural trauma, and to imagine ways in which it might be overcome, entailed a questioning of language no less thoroughgoing than that to be found in Mallarmé and Mauthner. That language crisis would be both thematized and countered through various attempts to achieve linguistic renewal by the avant-garde movements and in the work of the more aesthetically radical modernists during the interwar years. The attempt to achieve such a linguistic renewal would, in certain instances, entail a profound commitment to various forms of linguistic negativism. Nowhere was this linguistic labor of the negative more evident than in Dada. In response to what he describes as the “complete folly of a world left in the hands of bandits who have demolished and destroyed the centuries,” the Romanian-born Tristan Tzara declares in his Dada manifesto of 1918 that there is “great destructive, negative work to be done.”2 The objects of 1 2

See Paul Valéry, La Crise de l’esprit, suivi de Note (ou l’Européen) (Paris: Éditions Manucius, 2016). Tristan Tzara, “Dada Manifesto 1918,” in Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries, trans. Barbara Wright (London: Calder Publications, 1992), pp. 3–13 (p. 12).

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this negative work would include the family, sexual mores, logic, social hierarchies, memory, and all gods. Within the literary work, however, this negative work would be directed first and foremost at language. The Dadaists subject language to the most extreme violence to free it from what they see as its ideological shackles. Words are dissected, syllables recombined, the soiled language of Mallarmé’s “tribe” replaced by soundwords with no clearly identifiable shared meaning. Underlying all this linguistic violence is a commitment to cleansing language of its conventional meanings, and to enabling new signifying possibilities. What was taken to be the ideologically soiled nature of existing European languages required extreme linguistic action, and this is what the Dadaists sought to achieve: a complete renewal of language and, as a result, of experience as such.3 Hugo Ball’s 1916 sound poem “Dirge” is a particularly striking example of such linguistic renewal being achieved through the negation of all existing languages in favor of new and unique “words” that are highly suggestive semantically, but in a manner that is likely to differ from listener to listener, or from reader to reader, and that places the emphasis squarely upon the act of utterance: ombula taka bitdli solunkola taka tak babula m’balam tak tru – ü wo – um biba bimbel o kla o auwa . . .4

The linguistic negativism here is evident most obviously in the abandonment of all historical languages, as well as in the abandonment of all forms of punctuation, grammatical and lexical distinctions (it is not possible to distinguish parts of speech), irregular spacing, and line breaks that challenge any sense of syntactical coherence. As for the “words” used in the 3

4

For an analysis of this linguistic violence and its ideological justification, see Anna Katharina Schaffner, “How the Letters Learnt to Dance: On Language Dissection in Dadaist, Concrete and Digital Poetry,” in Dieter Scheunemann (ed.), Avant-Garde/Neo-Avant-Garde, AvantGarde Critical Studies (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2005), pp. 149–72; and Sprachzerlegung in historischer Avantgardelyrik und konkreter Poesie (Berlin: ECA, 2007), pp. 63–87. In Karl Riha (ed.), 113 dada Gedichte (Berlin: Klaus Wagenbach, 1982), p. 33.

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poem, while syllables such as “wo” and “um” might initially sound familiar to a German speaker, within the context of this poem there can be no guarantee that their meaning is the conventional one – “where” and “in order to,” respectively. It would make no sense at all to translate anything other than the German title of the poem – “Totenklage.” For the act of translation is rendered completely redundant by the linguistic uniqueness of “Dirge” and other sound poems written by Ball in 1916 – including the celebrated “Caravan,” which opens “jolifanto bambla ô falli bambla”; “Clouds”; “Cats and Peacocks”; and “Gadji beri bimba”5 – or Hausmann’s “kp’erioum,” which opens “kp’erioum lp’erioum.”6 While these poems certainly retain a signifying function, as well as a powerful affective charge, they do not communicate in the manner that a poem written in a shared conventional language would – even a poem as syntactically innovative as Mallarmé’s A Throw of the Dice, in which one finds no neologisms, no words that are not to be found in a French dictionary, and thus nothing that is simply untranslatable. There would be little point in seeking to establish the objective meaning of any of the words in these Dada sound poems. Indeed, to attempt to do so would be to go against their guiding principle. These poems are works – or, rather, linguistic events – the meaning of which will necessarily vary from reader to reader, and from moment to moment. They might even be seen as exploding the idea of meaning altogether, if by meaning is understood something that would exist apart from the language in which it is articulated or incarnated. As Tzara puts it in the 1918 manifesto: “DADA DOES NOT MEAN ANYTHING.”7 Collapsing the distinction between sign and meaning, the poems operate at an affective level that requires a conceptual frame (in the form of an accompanying manifesto) if they are to be grasped intellectually and constitute a dramatic commitment to the literary work as an absolute singularity, irreducible to established forms and semantic norms. In this respect, they are profoundly nominalist in spirit, and would prove not merely influential but also profoundly enabling for those writers who during the twentieth century would commit themselves to a literature of the unword. The “negative work” to which Tzara refers in the 1918 manifesto bears a clear affinity to the work of negation in the political sphere that the Russian nihilists in the late nineteenth century – depicted first by Turgenev 5 6 7

For these poems, see ibid., pp. 34–36. In Karl Riha (ed.), Dada Berlin. Texte, Manifeste, Aktionen (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun., 1977), p. 64. Tzara, “Dada Manifesto 1918,” p. 4.

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in Fathers and Sons (1862) and then, more damningly, by Dostoevsky in The Possessed (1871–72) – saw as the prerequisite for a new political dispensation.8 Unlike the Russian nihilists, however, the Dadaists were of the view that cultural transformation could only be achieved through a radical transformation not just of thought but also of the language in which that thought was incarnated. In this respect, their project forms very much part of the great linguistic turn in the twentieth century – the conviction that thought and language are inextricably related, that experience is to be understood in terms of linguistic structures, and that all ideological change, all social transformation, requires linguistic change. As Victor Klemperer demonstrates, the Nazis would also recognize the nature of this relation between language and ideology, as evidenced by their propagation of a barbarized German that enabled certain kinds of thinking while making others almost impossible.9 The idea of “Newspeak” in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) derives from the very same insight, albeit drawing on the Stalinist version of it. While the Stalinist and Nazi forms of linguistic revolution are enslaving rather than liberating, the underlying principle is in fact the same as the one to be found in Dada, namely that to change the way in which people think, one has first to change the nature of the language in which they do that thinking. As Philippe Sollers puts it: “One does not transform society unless one changes its language.”10 A politics of language is thus at the heart of the European avant-garde’s most radically nominalist literary manifestation, constituting the most extreme response to language skepticism. Rather than reacting to this loss of faith in existing languages by resorting to Lord Chandos’s silence, Dada proposes linguistic singularities that are designed, nominalistically, to overcome not only the conventionality of the sign but also its history, its accrued meanings, and its ideological form.11 The disintegration of existing language into its most basic constituents, and then the recombination of these constituents to generate new words in accordance with a principle of radical nominalism, freed from existing grammatical and syntactical forms, is thus a procedure in which an initial practice of linguistic negativism ultimately serves a positive purpose. 8 9 10

11

On the relation between Dada and nihilism, see my Modernism and Nihilism (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), ch. 3. See Victor Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich, trans. Martin Brady (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). Philippe Sollers, Portraits de femmes (Paris: Fayard, 2013), p. 56 (my translation). Sollers’s own novels of the 1960s and 1970s, especially Drame (1965), Nombres (1968), Lois (1972), and H (1973), testify to just such an attempt to transform society through a radical linguistic practice. On the politics of Dada, see especially Sheppard, Modernism, ch. 12.

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A no less radical skepticism toward existing historical languages, and above all toward modern European languages, lies behind the linguistic operations undertaken by a writer initially affiliated with Surrealism: Antonin Artaud. As Artaud’s earliest work testifies, he considered there to be an insuperable division between his thought and the language in which he sought to express that thought, the consequence being poems that may be found wanting when judged against any current aesthetic principle, but that, according to Artaud, are of value precisely because of this failure. In his correspondence of 1923–24 with the writer and editor Jacques Rivière, who had refused to publish his poems in the Nouvelle Revue Française, Artaud states: I suffer from a fearful mental disease. My thought abandons me at every stage. From the mere fact of thought itself to the external fact of its materialization in words. Words, the forms of phrases, inner directions of thought, the mind’s simplest reactions, I am in constant pursuit of my intellectual being.12

In one of his early works, Nerve Scales (1925), Artaud returns to this idea that his thoughts evade linguistic articulation: “At times I am only at a loss for one word, a simple unimportant little word, an exact word, a subtle word, a word thoroughly steeped in my bones, come out of me to stand at the furthest limits of my being, and which would be nothing to most men.”13 While it may be no more than a “little word” that is lacking, the consequences are profound, leading Artaud to conclude not only that all writing is “trash,” but that there should be “no works, no language, no words, no mind, nothing.”14 Far from his simply lapsing into silence, however, the following two decades of Artaud’s life, more than half of which would be spent in mental institutions, were devoted to finding both linguistic and nonlinguistic forms that would capture a mental life that defied articulation in existing linguistic forms. That attempt would entail very considerable violence against the French language, and at times an abandonment of that language altogether, as well as an appreciation of Oriental languages.15 In a letter written in September 1931, for instance, he asserts: 12 13 15

Antonin Artaud, “Correspondence with Jacques Rivière,” in Collected Works, Volume One, trans. Victor Corti (London: Calder and Boyars, 1968), p. 27. Antonin Artaud, “Nerve Scales,” in Collected Works, Volume One, p. 71. 14 Ibid., p. 75. On Artaud’s conception of the relation between thought and language, and the limits of representation, see especially: Jacques Derrida, “The Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 292–316; Évelyne Grossman, Défiguration. Artaud – Beckett – Michaux (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2004), ch. 1; Adrian Morfee, Antonin Artaud’s Writing Bodies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 49–70; and Ros Murray, Antonin Artaud: The Scum of the Soul, Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 10–35.

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[B]eside the culture of words there is also the culture of gestures. There are other languages in the world besides our Occidental language which has decided in favor of the despoiling and dessication of ideas, presenting them inert and unable to stir up in their course a whole system of natural analogies, as in Oriental languages.16

In the essays that make up the volume published in 1938 under the title The Theatre and Its Double, Artaud repeatedly challenges the privilege accorded to “speech” in the theater, asserting the importance of physical gestures and calling for a new linguistic form. It is necessary, he argues, to “turn against language and its basely utilitarian, one could say, alimentary, sources, against its trapped-beast origins; and finally, to consider language as the form of Incantation.”17 That Artaud’s skepticism toward existing languages, and above all European languages, remained acute is evidenced not least by the first words in his October 1946 notebook, written less than two years before his death: “I no longer believe in words” (Je ne crois plus aux mots).18 Increasingly in his notebooks, and especially in the works that he produced in the last two years of his life – including Suppôts et Suppliciations (“Henchmen and Torturings”) and To Have Done with the Judgement of God – Artaud’s response to this language skepticism is to juxtapose writing in French with incantatory passages that are closely akin to Dada sound poems, but that draw on Artaud’s interest in non-European languages. Like the Dada sound poems, these passages in Artaud’s works (as well as in his notebooks and letters of the same period) do not simply defy translation; they make it completely redundant. The following example is from the section in Suppôts et Suppliciations entitled “Interjections,” with only the lines in French having been translated: maloussi toumi tapapouts hermafrot. emajouts pamafrot toupi pissarot rapajouts erkampfti This is not the crushing of language but the risky pulverization of the body by ignoramuses who

16 17 18

Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958), p. 108. Ibid., p. 46. Antonin Artaud, Œuvres complètes XXIV. Cahiers du retour à Paris, octobre–novembre 1946 (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), p. 9.

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Language and Negativity in European Modernism lokalu durgarane lokarane alenin tapenim anempfti dur geluze re geluze re geluze tagure rigolure tsipi19

Alongside Dada, Artaud’s attempt to produce a new, incantatory language is among the most radical forms of linguistic renewal attempted by the European avant-garde, arising out of a negation, either partial or complete, of existing historical languages. In Artaud’s later writings, the French language is repeatedly juxtaposed with an alternative language in which the rules of grammar and syntax cannot be established, and in which, as in Dada sound poems, the parts of speech cannot be parsed. The distinction between nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, articles, and prepositions is all but lost, punctuation is minimal, and there is little if any indication as to where one syntactical unit ends and another begins, let alone any sign of a distinction between main and subordinate clauses. Crucially, however, in such passages, the linguistic negativism – the great destructive work – serves, as it does in the Dada sound poems, to enable the production of an entirely new language. As for the nature of that new language, in Artaud’s later writings the words that emerge out of this negativism are not necessarily absolute singularities, and thus not necessarily governed by a principle of radical nominalism. The word geluze, for instance, is repeated, and while its meaning may elude any form of objectification, the very fact that it is repeated bestows upon it a force distinct from that of the absolute singularity.20 This limitation of the nominalist impulse accords with Artaud’s commitment to a transcendence of the isolated individual self, and to a new communal experience in the face of what he describes as the “anguished, catastrophic period in which we live.”21 If Artaud’s linguistic negativism in the face of extreme experience ultimately leads him toward a new language of incantation, the linguistic negativism of another French writer who was also initially associated with 19 20 21

Antonin Artaud, Suppôts et Suppliciations, ed. Évelyne Grossman (Paris: Gallimard “Poésie,” 2006), p. 169 (my translation). On the nature of this new language, see especially Paule Thévenin, Antonin Artaud, ce Désespéré qui vous parle (Paris: Seuil, 1993). Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, p. 84.

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the Surrealists would prove to be considerably more anticipatory of post–World War II forms of such negativism. That writer is Georges Bataille, and his importance for the postwar practitioners of a literature of the unword is evidenced not least by the impact of his work upon that of Maurice Blanchot,22 his appreciation of Beckett’s postwar novels, and the fact that Sebald would cite him approvingly, alongside the Romanian-born philosopher E. M. Cioran, as a writer whose work was exemplary in its being “unconditionally negative” (bedingungslos negativ) in nature.23 Unlike Artaud, Bataille’s attempts to articulate the most extreme kinds of experience would lead him not to a rejection of existing languages, but rather to forms of linguistic negativism in French that would include a sustained deployment of negations at the level of syntax, lexis, and morphology, with affixes and prepositions playing a key role therein. Bataille’s linguistic negativism constitutes an act of violence directed back against the very language of the texts. In his fiction, the art of artistic composition becomes an art of de-composition, in line with his remark in the essay “Rotten Sun” (1930) that modern painting is distinguished by its “decomposition of forms” (décomposition des formes),24 and by his more general commitment to what he terms the “formless” (informe).25 Bataille’s first published novella, Story of the Eye (1928), which recounts the narrator’s initiation into perverse forms of sexual activity, culminating in the murder of a priest in a church, is striking for a linguistic negativism that is intensified in systematic fashion in the revised version of the text, which was first published in 1940, but only published posthumously under 22

23

24

25

Bataille expresses his appreciation of Blanchot’s second novel, Aminadab (1942), in a June 1943 letter to Michel Leiris; see Georges Bataille, Choix de lettres 1917–1962, ed. Michel Surya (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), pp. 193–94. On their shared literary-philosophical preoccupations, see in particular Leslie Hill, Bataille, Klossoski, Blanchot: Writing at the Limit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). See W. G. Sebald, “Against the Irreversible: On Jean Améry,” in On the Natural History of Destruction, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: The Modern Library, 2004), pp. 147–71 (p. 154); “Mit den Augen des Nachtvogels. Über Jean Amery,” in Campo Santo, ed. Sven Meyer (Munich and Vienna: Carl Hanser, 2003), pp. 149–70 (pp. 157–58). Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 58; Œuvres complètes, 12 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1970–88), vol. I, p. 232. On the relation between this decompositional procedure and the thematization of necrophilia in Bataille’s work, see my chapter “Decomposition: Georges Bataille and the Language of Necrophilia,” in Anna Katharina Schaffner and Shane Weller (eds.), Modernist Eroticisms: European Literature after Sexology, Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 169–94. See Bataille’s entry on the “formless” (informe) in the 1929 Critical Dictionary (Visions of Excess, p. 31; Œuvres complètes, vol. I, p. 217). Bataille’s concept of the formless has played an important role in recent theories of the aesthetic; see, for instance, Yves-Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone, 1997).

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Bataille’s name, in 1967.26 Of these forms of linguistic negativism, the most prevalent is the deployment of the negative preposition “without” (sans), particularly in the expressions “sans fin” and “sans finir” (“endlessly”). This preposition serves to articulate an experience of transgression in which the limit that is transgressed needs to be preserved – that is, named – in its very negation. This general (philosophical) point is not simply thematized by Bataille, however, but incarnated at a micrological level in the form of intensive linguistic negativism serving to unword all limits and borders. Regarding the deployment of the preposition “without” (sans), in the revised version of Story of the Eye its importance is evident in its being deployed considerably more often than in the original 1928 version. For instance, in the first version of the novella, the narrator’s lover, Simone, is associated with “everything that indefinitely destroys [détruit indéfiniment] human bliss and honesty”; in the revised version, this becomes: “everything that endlessly ruins [ruine sans fin] bliss and good conscience.”27 Later in the 1928 version, Simone is described as speaking “for a long time” (longuement); in the revised version, this becomes: “endlessly in a low voice” (sans finir à voix basse).28 Similarly, the modifier “unintelligibly” (confusément) in the 1928 version is revised to “endlessly” (sans finir).29 In the 1928 version, the narrator records that when another of his lovers, Marcelle, masturbates and then urinates in a wardrobe, the effect is to make their desires “unceasingly agonizing” (sans cesse déchirants); in the revised version, this agony occurs “endlessly” (sans fin).30 While seemingly insignificant, the replacement of “cesse” by “fin” here is part of the systematization of the negative at the linguistic level. In the 1928 version, the narrative breaks off with the narrator, Simone, and Sir Edmund disappearing “continuously” (continuellement) across Andalusia; in the revised version, this disappearance is described as being “endless” (sans fin). Moreover, the night into which these transgressive figures disappear, originally described as an “immense chamberpot” (immense vase de nuit), becomes an “infinite chamberpot” (infini vase de nuit), the negative modifier “infinite” capping the intensive unwording that serves throughout the text to negate the finite, the limited, and the formed.31 In each case, 26 27

28 30

The original 1928 edition of Story of the Eye was published under the pseudonym Lord Auch, the surname playing on the expression “aux chiottes” – “to the shithouse.” Bataille, Œuvres complètes, vol. I, p. 15; Histoire de l’œil (Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1985), p. 12. All translations from the two versions of Histoire de l’œil in this chapter are my own; the published English translation – Story of the Eye, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (London and Boston: Marion Boyars, 1979) – is based on the 1928 text. 29 Bataille, Œuvres complètes, vol. I, p. 60; Histoire de l’œil, p. 81. Ibid., p. 24; p. 26. 31 Ibid., p. 25; p. 29. Ibid., p. 69; p. 93.

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then, Bataille retains the negativity of the modifier in the later version of the text, but revises it to create a far more insistent, and indeed stylistically more systematic, sense of the experience recounted in the narrative as being under the sign of the limitless, that which is negated by the preposition “without” (sans) being recurrently identified as the “end” (fin). In Bataille’s conception of the “formless” (informe) as realized in his fiction, the idea of the decomposing corpse plays a central role.32 The profoundly ambiguous (repulsive/attractive) nature of the decomposing body in Bataille’s first novella, as well as in his later fiction, lies in its being a sign of the continuity of nature, a continuity that threatens any sense of the coherent, autonomous, individualized self.33 It is precisely this continuity of nature that is articulated in the revised version of Story of the Eye, above all through the repeated deployment of “sans fin”/“sans finir” constructions. This connection between the corpse and the “sans fin” is rendered explicit when the narrator remarks upon a fly returning “endlessly” (sans fin) to alight on the face of the murdered priest toward the end of the novella. The particular significance of the “sans fin” construction in Bataille’s work is that it is a doubly negative modifier because the idea of an “end” (fin) is, of course, itself a negation, this negation being proleptically negated by the preposition that precedes it. In Story of the Eye, this doubly negative modifier is generally associated with the narrator’s lover, Simone, thereby establishing a clear connection between the debauched woman and the corpse as figures of a double negation that is not Hegelian in nature because it does not result in anything positive.34 In a section originally entitled “Coincidences,” in which he makes a number of connections between the story and his own life, Bataille extends the figures of this double negation to include his relation to his own mother, substituting “endlessly” (sans fin) for the original “for a long time” (longuement) in the revised version of the text. After the disappearance of his mother, Bataille recalls that “we looked for her for a long time” (on la chercha longtemps); in the revised version, this statement is both personalized and rephrased in a linguistically negative form: “I had to look for her endlessly” (je dus la 32

33 34

Bataille’s engagement with the theme of necrophilia locates him within a tradition in French literature that extends back into the nineteenth century; on that tradition, see Lisa Downing, Desiring the Dead: Necrophilia and Nineteenth-Century French Literature (Oxford: Legenda, 2003). For an analysis of Bataille’s novella in relation to the idea of the “formless,” see Patrick ffrench, The Cut: Reading Bataille’s “Histoire de l’œil” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). On the non-Hegelian nature of the negative in Bataille’s work, see Jacques Derrida, “From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 317–50.

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chercher sans fin).35 This is yet further evidence of Bataille’s attention to particular forms of linguistic negativism. In addition to the extensive deployment of “without” (sans) in the revised version of Story of the Eye, the other key instances of linguistic negativism in the novella (in both its original and its revised incarnations) are negative modifiers formed through in- and im- affixes. The principal such unwords in the novella are “impossible” (impossible), “incredible” (inouï), “impure” (impur), “immodesty” (impudeur), “immoderate” (immodéré), “inhuman” (inhumain) – this unword replacing “superhuman” (surhumain) in the revised version, “squalid” (immonde), and “formless” (informe).36 Significantly, when the negative modifiers “inhuman” and “formless” are deployed in relation to Marcelle in the revised version of Story of the Eye, they refer to forms of expression. When she is in the wardrobe, for instance, Marcelle emits “inarticulate grunts” (grognements informes) and “a stream of inhuman cries” (une kyrielle de cries inhumains).37 Here, like Artaud, Bataille suggests that the nature of the experience in question is one that beggars all existing forms of linguistic expression, although, unlike Artaud, he articulates this point in the text not by seeking directly to reproduce “formless” or “inhuman” sounds, but rather through the deployment of negative modifiers. In Bataille’s next major work of fiction, the novel Blue of Noon (written in 1935, but first published more than two decades later, in 1957), there is a striking intensification of the forms of linguistic negativism to be found in Story of the Eye. Most notably, a new unword comes to the fore, in the adjectival and nominal forms of “vide” (“empty”; “emptiness” or “void”). Early in the novel, the narrator, Henri Troppmann, declares that he is quite simply “empty” (vide).38 Bataille then proceeds to connect this sense of emptiness with a desire for the annihilation of the individual self, through the resemblance between the words “vide” and “avide,” his narrator stating that “The blank head [tête vide] in which ‘I’ am has become so frightened and greedy [avide] that only my death could satisfy it.”39 In accordance with this desire for an annihilation of the self, the narrator’s 35 36

37 38 39

Bataille, Œuvres complètes, vol. I, p. 77; Histoire de l’œil, p. 102. See: “impossible” ibid., pp. 22, 33; pp. 23, 41); “inouï” (ibid., p. 22; p. 23; “impur” (ibid., p. 25; p. 29); “impudeur” (ibid., pp. 25, 27, 33; pp. 29, 32, 40); “immodéré” (ibid., p. 31; p. 38); “inhumain” (ibid., pp. 21, 32; pp. 23, 39); “immonde” (ibid., pp. 42, 62, 64; pp. 54, 82, 85); and “informe” (ibid., p. 21; p. 22). Bataille, Histoire de l’œil, pp. 22–23. Georges Bataille, Blue of Noon, trans. Harry Mathews (London: Marion Boyars, 1979), p. 20; Œuvres complètes, vol. III, p. 391. Ibid., p. 23; p. 395.

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sense of the “vide” becomes ever more intense in the course of the narrative. At various points, Bataille’s narrator records that he is “gazing through the blinding light into vacancy [le vide]”; that it is as though he were “tumbling through space [dans le vide]”; that he experiences an “obsession with emptiness” (obsession du vide); and that “Meaningless dust” (Une poussière vide) is billowing inside him.40 This preoccupation with the experience of the void is ultimately located within an apocalyptic political context in the final chapter of the novel, when the narrator sees a group of Hitler Youth in a vast, rainswept square.41 If this insistence upon the void distinguishes the unwording procedure in Blue of Noon from that in Story of the Eye, the earlier work’s preoccupation with states of exhaustion, paralysis, and inertia not only recurs, but is even more forcefully articulated. Animate beings, above all the narrator, are repeatedly rendered inanimate and “powerless” (impuissant).42 More insistently than in Story of the Eye, debauchery is related to the ideas of inertia and decomposition in Blue of Noon. As in the earlier work, so here, too, both inertia and decomposition constitute the negation of the borders between forms of life, and indeed between life and death, the individual and that against which it defines itself. The narrator records, for instance, that his life “was falling to pieces like rotten matter” (s’en allait en morceaux comme une matière pourrie).43 It is, however, his lover Dirty who is the most debauched, and thus it is she who most often comes to resemble a decomposing corpse. Significantly, the unword “inert” (inerte) is used in Blue of Noon not only of literal bodies, but also of the narrator’s own language. This makes it clear that decomposition has also to be understood as a linguistic phenomenon, and that language is beggared by the extremity of the experience that lies at the heart of Bataille’s work. As his narrator puts it: “No point talking [Inutile de parler]: words would already be dead and inert [Déjà les phrases sont mortes, inertes], the way they are in dreams.”44 This conception of language as corpse-like in its inertia or powerlessness anticipates a crucial development in Bataille’s later prose narratives, especially the short prose text Le Petit (“The Little One,” 1943). This text is fragmentary, ruptured, or decomposed in a way that Story of the Eye and Blue of Noon are not, opening not only in medias res in narrative terms, but in the middle of a sentence and then proceeding in a highly paratactical 40 41 44

Ibid., pp. 90, 93, 101 (translation modified), 114; pp. 442, 445, 450, 459. Ibid., pp. 150–51; p. 486. 42 See, for instance, ibid., p. 92; p. 444. 43 Ibid., p. 65; p. 426. Ibid., p. 84; p. 438.

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manner. Moreover, with regard to the unwording strategies employed in this short text, Le Petit is particularly significant for its use of two negative modifiers that relate directly to the act of enunciation, and, more precisely, to its impossibility: “unavowable” (inavouable) and “unnameable” (innommable).45 Together with the unword “impossible” (impossible), which is also prevalent in Le Petit,46 “unavowable” becomes one of the most important unwords in Bataille’s postwar narratives, including L’Abbé C (1950) and The Impossible (1962). As we shall see, this increasing emphasis upon a linguistic negativism that is directed back at the act of enunciation anticipates a central element in the linguistic negativism to be found in both Blanchot’s and Beckett’s fiction, as indeed do the negative modifiers “unavouable” and “unnamable,” along with (in Blanchot’s case) the negative modifier “inert.” The specter of language skepticism, and a commitment to forms of linguistic negativism in response to this skepticism, were far from being limited to the avant-garde in the interwar years, for it was also very much present in the more mainstream currents of literary modernism. In the modernist poetry that takes its inspiration from Rimbaud and Mallarmé, Roland Barthes detects the destruction of the “spontaneously functional nature of language.”47 Words become more like things, and as a result their instrumental (referential) function is impeded or even negated. Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (1914) is one influential example of just such a frustration of the referential function. Discourse is concretized, atomized, even reified.48 It is thus unsurprising that Beckett should have referred to Stein by name, contrasting her linguistic practice with that of Joyce, in the 1937 letter in which he proposes a literature of the unword.49 Ezra Pound occupies an important position between the avant-garde and literary modernism, especially in the Cantos (1917–69), where a dissatisfaction with existing forms of literary expression leads him to draw 45 46 47 48 49

Georges Bataille, Le Petit, in Œuvres complètes, vol. III, pp. 37, 41. See, for example, ibid., pp. 37, 41, 47. Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967), p. 52. For a genetic study of Stein’s linguistic innovations, see Ulla E. Dydo and William Rice, Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises, 1923–1934 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2009). Samuel Beckett, letter to Axel Kaun, July 9, 1937, in The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume I: 1929–1940, ed. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois Overbeck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 515 (German); p. 519 (English). In this letter, Beckett refers to Stein’s “Logographs”; the editors of his letters do not clarify to which works by Stein he was referring when using this term, and unfortunately neither Beckett’s other published letters nor his library casts any light on the matter. (On Beckett’s surviving library, and Stein’s importance to Beckett, see Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon, Samuel Beckett’s Library [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013], p. 145.)

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on numerous historical languages (not only Western), and to follow the avantgarde in their preference for typographical innovation and variability. Pound’s attempt to achieve linguistic renewal does entail a degree of linguistic negativism, although this negativism is neither extensive nor intensive. In the Cantos, fragmentation and parataxis tend to prevail, together with the juxtaposition of languages, as well as forms of textual spatialization, albeit ones that remain considerably less adventurous than Mallarmé’s in A Throw of the Dice. Like Artaud, Pound is drawn to non-European languages (in Pound’s case, Chinese), set alongside various western European languages, in his search for new signifying possibilities. Importantly, however, this macaronic approach maintains the distinction between historical languages in a way that the Dada sound poems and Artaud’s chants do not. In his earlier work, T. S. Eliot shares Pound’s preference for the juxtaposition of existing languages as a way of highlighting the limitations of any one language. This is nowhere more in evidence than in the final lines of The Waste Land (1922) – a poem in the composition of which Pound played a decisive role – where five languages (English, Italian, Latin, French, and Sanskrit) are set side by side, and where the fragmentary nature of the result is thematized: London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina Quando fiam uti chelidon – O swallow Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie These fragments I have shored against my ruins Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe. Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. Shantih shantih shantih50

This juxtaposition of existing languages echoes the practice established in the trilingual Dada “simultaneous” poem “The Admiral Is Looking for a House to Rent” (1916), created and first performed by Richard Huelsenbeck, Marcel Janco, and Tristan Tzara. In this poem, unlike in the Dada sound poems proper, however, for all the confusion, for all the syntactical disintegration, for all the other sounds in the poem (including whistling), the three languages in question (English, French, and German) retain their integrity, as evidenced by the opening three lines (spoken or sung by Huelsenbeck, Janco, and Tzara, respectively), in which spacing is as significant as the words: 50

Eliot, Collected Poems, p. 79.

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Language and Negativity in European Modernism Ahoi ahoi Des Admirals Where the honey Boum boum boum Il déshabilla51

While, in his early work, Eliot shares Pound’s predilection for such linguistic juxtapositioning, he places considerably greater emphasis than does Pound upon a language crisis, and upon the need for a linguistic violence and for a labor of linguistic negativism. As he puts it in his 1921 essay “The Metaphysical Poets,” the poet’s task is “to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.”52 Statements of language skepticism abound in Eliot’s work. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1917) is punctuated with the exclamation: “It is impossible to say just what I mean!”53 In Burnt Norton (1936), Eliot again highlights linguistic failure: “Words strain, / Crack and sometimes break, under the burden.”54 East Coker (1940) refers to “the intolerable wrestle / With words and meanings.”55 And, as noted previously, in Little Gidding (1942), Eliot evokes Mallarmé when he declares that “speech impelled us / To purify the dialect of the tribe.”56 More significantly for the literature of the unword in the post–World War II period, Eliot also comes to rely increasingly upon negative affixes, with the most intensive use of such affixes occurring in Part V of Ash Wednesday (1930), where they are deployed in direct relation to the question of language: If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent If the unheard, unspoken Word is unspoken, unheard; Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard, The Word without a word, the Word within The world and for the world; And the light shone in darkness and Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled About the centre of the silent Word.57

Here, the negative modifiers “unheard,” “unspoken,” and “unstilled” serve to capture an experience that resists all positive articulation; the linguistic negativism that is activated in this passage thus points unambiguously toward that which lies beyond the power of the word.58 For Eliot at this 51 52 53 57 58

This poem was first published in the review Cabaret Voltaire (May 1916). T. S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” in Selected Prose, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Faber & Faber, 1975), pp. 59–67 (p. 65). Eliot, Collected Poems, p. 16. 54 Ibid., p. 194. 55 Ibid., p. 198. 56 Ibid., p. 218. Ibid., p. 102. On Eliot’s place within a modern literary tradition shaped by a negative aesthetics, see Shira Wolosky, Language Mysticism: The Negative Way in Eliot, Beckett, and Celan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995).

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point in his career, following his conversion to Anglicanism in the mid-1920s, that to which such linguistic negativism gestures is precisely the “silent Word.” As he puts it in Burnt Norton: “Words, after speech, reach / Into the silence.”59 Crucially, that silence remains linguistic in nature, as the reference to the “silent Word” in Ash Wednesday makes clear. It is thus to be distinguished from any withdrawal from the literary, for it is precisely through the literary word that such a reaching toward, if not an attainment of, this “silent Word” can be achieved. There are striking similarities between the preceding passage from Ash Wednesday and the ending of Hermann Broch’s novel The Death of Virgil (1945). Broch’s work contains passages of intensive unwording, among which one of the most significant is the following from the second part of the novel, in which Broch evokes the idea of chance that is so central to Mallarmé’s poetics: the empty surface of unmastered [unbewältigten] existence was suddenly laid bare, and the night in the inaccessible inner and outer spheres [Unzulänglichkeit der inneren und äußeren Sphären], although unchanged [unverändert] and radiant in the full circle of its darkness, had dissolved into a nowhere [sich zu einem Nirgendwo aufgelöst] which was so delivered over to chance that all perception and knowledge had become superfluous, and being useless was allowed to vanish [in Nutzlosigkeit hinschwinden läßt]; . . . inescapable [unentrinnbar] this chance which held sway over the uncreated [Unschöpfung], enveloped by intoxication and the unremembered abandonment [Unerinnerung] of the pre-creation, threatened by its cold flames, by its amorphousness [Ungeborenheit] and pre-natal death, making itself known as naked chance which spelled utter and nameless loneliness [die namenloseste Einsamkeit]. . . . The nameless [namenlose] loneliness of chance, yes it was that which he saw before him as, ready for the fall and the already falling, he stood there at the window.60

Here, Broch deploys negative modifiers intensively and repetitively – “unmastered,” “inaccessible,” “unchanged,” “useless,” “inescapable,” “uncreated,” “unremembered” – evoking an experience that can only be approached by way of what it is not, and that is ultimately “nameless” (namenlos). The novel ends, however, with a passage of intensive linguistic negativism in which it is not an extralinguistic experience that defies the dying poet’s linguistic expression, but rather “the word” (das Wort) itself that resists articulation: the more he penetrated into the flooding sound and was penetrated by it, the more unattainable, the greater, the graver and more elusive became the 59 60

Ibid., p. 194. Hermann Broch, The Death of Virgil, trans. Jean Starr Untermeyer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 121; Der Tod des Vergil (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995), p. 139.

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Language and Negativity in European Modernism word [das Wort], a floating sea, a floating fire, sea-heavy, sea-light, notwithstanding it was still the word: he could not hold fast to it and he might not hold fast to it, incomprehensible and unutterable for him: it was the word beyond speech [unerfaßlich unaussprechbar war es für ihn, den es war jenseits der Sprache].61

The distinction here between a language at the disposition of the human being, and a word that is “unutterable” (unaussprechbar), echoes Eliot’s crucial distinction between the “word” and the “silent Word,” a distinction that is certainly not purely aesthetic in nature. As Maurice Blanchot observes, activating an idea that is central to Bataille’s literary-philosophical practice, Broch’s novel is shaped by the principle that “There can be no true communication, no song, if song cannot descend, below all form, toward the formless [l’informe] and toward that profundity where the voice outside of all language speaks.”62 Paradoxically, the form that promises to reach the formless is the circle, and in this, as in the four-part structuring of The Death of Virgil in accordance with the four elements (in the order water, earth, fire, air), Broch’s kinship with Eliot is again apparent, the latter’s Four Quartets (published between 1936 and 1942) also being structured in accordance with the four elements (in the order air, earth, water, fire) and both evoking and enacting a circular movement: East Coker opening “In my beginning is my end,” Little Gidding complementing this with: “And to make an end is to make a beginning,” before itself ending with the anticipation of a unifying future when “the fire and the rose are one.”63 The unity evoked by both Eliot and Broch extends well beyond the aesthetic to the cultural more generally, and its possibility lies in a movement beyond human speech to the “silent Word.”64 As we shall see, for all the apparent similarities in their deployment of negative modifiers, it is precisely this distinction between “word” and “Word” that is denied to those writers who commit themselves most fully to a literature of the unword.65

61 62

63 64

65

Ibid., p. 416; p. 454. Maurice Blanchot, “Broch,” in The Book to Come, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), pp. 111–25 (p. 123); Le Livre à venir (Paris: Gallimard Folio, 1986), pp. 152–72 (p. 169). Eliot, Collected Poems, pp. 196, 221, 223. The wider cultural impact of Eliot’s distinction between the “word” and the “silent Word” is evident in his Notes towards the Definition of Culture (1948), in which it is Europe’s Christian heritage that is evoked as the source of any possible renewal. I would like to thank the anonymous peer reviewer who very helpfully recommended a comparison of Eliot’s and Broch’s forms of linguistic negativism.

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Alongside Broch, works by other major European novelists of the interwar years also contain moments of profound linguistic doubt and articulations of language failure. In The Counterfeiters (1925), for instance, André Gide describes literature as the most disgusting of all “nauseating human emanations,” while also dismissing “those promissory notes which go by the name of words.”66 Gide’s passing attack on language does not result, however, in a radically new linguistic approach in his own work and does not prompt intensive forms of linguistic negativism. In contrast, another French writer of the interwar period, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, subjects language to radical syntactical decomposition. In his second novel, Death on Credit (1936), Céline adopts extreme parataxis, creating a prose of interruption and discontinuity, haunted by the perpetual threat of complete disintegration. This is apparent from the outset, the novel opening: “Here we are, alone again. It’s all so slow, so heavy, so sad . . . I’ll be old soon. Then at last it will be over. So many people have come into my room. They’ve gone away. They’ve grown old, wretched, sluggish, each in some corner of the world.”67 This form of parataxis, which anticipates Beckett’s in his postwar trilogy, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, is even more pronounced in Céline’s polemical Trifles for a Massacre (1937) and then in his own post–World War II trilogy, based on his experience of flight from France to Germany and then to Denmark after it became apparent that Germany would lose the war: From Castle to Castle (1957), North (1960), and the posthumously published Rigodoon (1969). According to Céline, in his Conversations with Professor Y (1955), this disjunctive mode is best understood as an “emotive style” (style émotif), designed to counter that rational style often seen to be prevalent in French literature, and a means of rendering the written language more akin to spoken language.68 The principal means by which Céline seeks to achieve such an emotive language is through the intensive use of ellipses, together with a reliance upon slang and stylistic traits that are generally found in spoken rather than written language. As Merlin Thomas observes, Céline’s ellipses break his language down into rhythmical rather than syntactical units.69 These units follow one another in a paratactical manner that is highly disjunctive and 66 67 68 69

André Gide, The Counterfeiters, trans. Dorothy Bussy (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1966), p. 291 (Gide’s emphasis). Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Death on Credit, trans. Ralph Manheim (London: John Calder, 1989), p. 15. Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Conversations with Professor Y, trans. Stanford Luce (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press/University of New England, 1986), pp. 76–77. See Merlin Thomas, Louis-Ferdinand Céline (London: Faber & Faber, 1979), p. 89.

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staccato. In addition to his ever more intensive use of ellipses, Céline’s linguistic negativism is also evident in his approach to negative constructions. In Death on Credit, for instance, the standard French negative construction “ne . . . pas” is repeatedly reduced down simply to “pas.” On the one hand, this again reflects spoken language, in which the “ne” is often elided; on the other hand, it tends to emphasize the negative precisely through its partial omission.70 Céline’s profoundly negative, even misanthropic, take on humanity, and in particular on modern European society,71 is thus reflected in forms of linguistic negativism that also testify in his later work in particular to a language crisis that goes well beyond a mere dissatisfaction with existing literary forms.72 Among the modernist novelists of the interwar years, it is James Joyce who ultimately commits himself to the most radical language-renewing response to the language crisis, borne out of a dissatisfaction with any one individual existing historical language. Just as the Dadaists and then Artaud engage in acts of reinvigorating violence against existing languages, breaking up words and creating entirely new ones – on the grounds that those existing languages have become so ideologically tainted that the most radical form of intervention is called for, even at the risk of destroying the notion of a shared language – so Joyce undertakes what the writer and editor Eugene Jolas was the first to describe as a thoroughgoing “revolution of language” in what would eventually become Finnegans Wake.73 According to Jolas, “Modern life with its changed mythos and transmuted concepts of beauty makes it imperative that words be given new 70 71

72

73

See ibid., p. 101. As Merlin Thomas put it: “Céline is essentially an attacking writer, one who protests with all the vigour and violence at his command against man’s inhumanity to man, against false and lying recipes for human happiness, against the grotesque futility of so much of human existence, against the ignorance and stupidity of our so-called ‘leaders’, against the soul-destroying influence of press, radio, cinema and publicity, and also against the sentimental and commercial exploitation of human sexuality in the arts. His whole work is in fact an indictment of our modern consumer society, and he was one of the first writers to speak out on this theme” (ibid., p. 111). For a fine analysis of misanthropy more generally, see Andrew Gibson, Misanthropy: The Critique of Humanity (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017). As Julia Kristeva observes of Céline’s work: “[L]iterature may also involve not an ultimate resistance to but an unveiling of the abject: an elaboration, a discharge, and a hollowing out of abjection through the Crisis of the Word” (Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez [New York: Columbia University Press, 1982], p. 208). Eugene Jolas, “The Revolution of Language and James Joyce,” in Samuel Beckett et al., Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (New York: New Directions, 1962), pp. 77–92; cf. F. R. Leavis, “Joyce and ‘The Revolution of the Word’,” in The Critic as Anti-Philosopher: Essays and Papers, ed. G. Singh (London: Chatto and Windus, 1982), and Colin MacCabe, James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word, 2nd ed. (London and Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 2003).

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compositions and relationships.”74 In his essay on Joyce in the collective volume Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (1929), Jolas identifies various attempts to achieve this revolution by the German Expressionists and the French Surrealists, as well as by Gertrude Stein, before turning to Joyce, in whose “Work in Progress” language is, he claims, “born anew before our eyes.” For Jolas, this rebirth is achieved through bestowing upon words “odors and sounds that conventional language does not know.”75 In short, language is rendered sensuous. Samuel Beckett makes a similar point in his essay on Joyce in the same volume, when he asserts: “Here is the savage economy of hieroglyphics. Here words are not the polite contortions of 20th century printer’s ink. They are alive.”76 It is striking, however, that one of Beckett’s examples of such liveliness is Joyce’s coinage “in twosome twiminds,” indicating the state of being in doubt. Beckett sees this coinage as capturing, and indeed as incarnating, far more effectively the experience of doubt than the English word “doubt,” which also falls short, according to Beckett, of the German word for “doubt” (Zweifel), the latter including the number “two” (zwei) within it.77 That Beckett should choose “doubt” as an example can, in retrospect, be seen as highly significant, given his own subsequent view on the appropriate literary response to language skepticism, in which Joyce’s work is presented as the antithesis of what is required by experience. Joyce’s commitment to a sensuous language that can enact or incarnate its meaning, and thereby overcome the shortcomings of everyday language, wedding signifier and signified, is, then, in line with the Mallarméan commitment to an “essential” language operating at a level below the semantic. As Kristeva argues, through the importance that it gives to rhythm and sound, or to echolalias, this modernist strand (the origins of which she traces back to Lautréamont and Mallarmé) prioritizes what she describes as the “semiotic” over the symbolic function of language.78 This commitment to the semiotic lies at the heart of Joyce’s attempt to achieve linguistic renewal in the face of a loss of faith in “everyday” or what Jolas terms “conventional” language, and stands as an heroic alternative to 74 76

77 78

Jolas, “The Revolution of Language,” p. 80. 75 Ibid., p. 89. Samuel Beckett, “Dante . . . Bruno . Vico .. Joyce,” in Samuel Beckett et al., Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (New York: New Directions, 1962), pp. 1–22 (pp. 15–16). Ibid., p. 15. See Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Louis S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). According to Kristeva, the semiotic is pre-Oedipal; it is “Indifferent to language, enigmatic and feminine”; it is “rhythmic, unfettered, irreducible to its intelligible verbal translation; it is musical, anterior to judgment, but restrained by a single guarantee: syntax” (p. 29).

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Rimbaud’s retreat into poetic silence or Valéry’s withdrawal from public utterance between 1895 and 1917. Driven by a profound sense that language required renewal – in the 1930s, while working on what would become Finnegans Wake, he took an interest in Mauthner’s work, asking Beckett to take notes on the Beiträge for him – Joyce sought to achieve the reinvigorating renewal of an existing historical language: English. In Ulysses (1922), this renewal entails the adoption of a wide range of styles and registers, each selected for its appropriateness to a particular scene and theme. In the “Oxen of the Sun” episode, for instance, Joyce maps the history of English literary styles onto the growth of a fetus. On the one hand, this suggests that language is natural, and that it develops in a manner akin to the organic. On the other hand – and here a language-skeptical note is sounded – there is also a parodic dimension to Joyce’s procedure, recalling that of Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet (1881). The shifts from one style to another inevitably suggest the arbitrary or nonnatural nature of all literary styles, and the absence of any stable linguistic hierarchy. There is, then, no assumption here that the writer should be seeking to achieve a “pure language” (reine Sprache) of the kind evoked by Walter Benjamin in his landmark essay on “The Task of the Translator” (1923), in which Hölderlin’s translations of Sophocles are cited as instances of just such a language on account of their prompting meaning to fall “from abyss to abyss.”79 Rather, in Ulysses, Joyce jettisons the idea of purity in favor of stylistic encyclopedism, reveling in a plurality of modes, voices, registers, and tones. No one of these styles can be identified as more authentic than any other. If Ulysses reminds the reader ever more forcefully of linguistic and stylistic diversity, in Finnegans Wake Joyce responds differently to the language crisis, seeking to generate a new language out of various historical languages, with the underlying (unifying) principle being paronomasia.80 Rather than a range of styles, set alongside one another, words in Finnegans Wake signify in multiple directions simultaneously. His principle of linguistic mergence here is quite distinct from Pound’s and Eliot’s forms of linguistic juxtaposition. The linguistic axis in Finnegans Wake is temporal rather than spatial. This novel’s difficulty derives in no small measure from 79 80

Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1973), pp. 70–82. Finn Fordham’s Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake: Unravelling Universals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) provides a particularly helpful analysis of the compositional development that resulted in this language.

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this synchronic multiplicity, which Joyce sought to intensify in his revisions. The sound of the “fall” of “a once wallstrait oldparr” that lies at the origin of the story “retaled” in Finnegans Wake can be articulated, but only in a word that appears in no dictionary, a 100-letter word unlike any other: bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!81

The similarity between this “sound word” and those to be found in Dada sound poems is striking. In both, a form of linguistic renewal originates in a radical skepticism toward existing European languages, and in both such renewal is seen not only as necessary but also as eminently possible. That said, Joyce’s approach to language renewal differs from Dada’s in its being orientated not toward freeing language from its ideological taint, but rather toward the generation of a language of languages that would incorporate others. In that sense, it is universalist rather than nominalist in nature. While familiarizing himself with Mauthner’s critique of language, then, Joyce rejected the philosopher’s nominalism and his nominalist-inspired call for the Nichtwort. Rather than the not- or unword, Joyce opts instead for the maximalist new word, or what Beckett, in his 1937 letter to Axel Kaun, terms the “apotheosis of the word.”82 As such an apotheosis, Joyce’s last novel stands as the ne plus ultra of the interwar attempts to achieve profound linguistic renewal in the face of a language crisis. The linguistic negativism that, as we have seen, is to be found – in more or less developed, more or less intensive, forms – in the work of various European writers in the interwar years is in fact precisely what Joyce rejects. While he certainly shares the general modernist sense of a language crisis in the face of the experience of modernity, his response to this crisis is distinctive precisely for its commitment to a language of affirmation, evoked so clearly at the end of Ulysses, the final word of which is “yes,” and enacted so magisterially in the accretive paronomasia of Finnegans Wake. It is in the work of another major writer of the interwar years, a writer who at the time was all but unknown and whose reception would be decidedly belated, that one finds forms of intensive linguistic negativism that render his work the first instance of a fully-fledged literature of the unword, in which the attempt to articulate the experience of modernity is 81 82

James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 2000), p. 3. Beckett, Letters, Volume I, p. 515 (German); p. 519 (English).

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pursued by way of an ever more stringent linguistic via negativa. The writer in question is Franz Kafka. The importance of his linguistic negativism lies in no small measure in its remarkable anticipation of, and, in almost all cases, its direct influence upon, the major European practitioners of a literature of the unword in the post–World War II period. If Joyce’s paronomastic language of affirmation led in one direction, Kafka’s ever more extreme linguistic negativism led in quite another.

chapter 3

Performing the Negative: Franz Kafka

Only a small proportion of Kafka’s writings were published in his lifetime, the vast bulk of his work, including his three, posthumously published novels – The Man Who Disappeared (written in 1912, published in 1927), The Trial (written in 1914–15, published in 1925), and The Castle (written in 1922, published in 1926) – remaining fragments. It is more than a mere imposition of the biographical onto the literary œuvre that the editors of the critical edition of Kafka’s unpublished shorter writings should have decided to present them in two volumes, with the caesura being the moment when, having been diagnosed with tuberculosis, Kafka spent eight months in the village of Zürau in west Bohemia.1 For the aphorisms that Kafka wrote in 1917–18, while in Zürau, and which were originally published posthumously (in 1931) by Max Brod in the collection The Great Wall of China, under the title “Reflections on Sin, Pain, Hope, and the True Way,” constitute a decisive moment in that œuvre. It is during that period that the negative imposes itself upon Kafka’s creative imagination in a new and considerably more forceful way. This is nowhere more evident than in aphorism 27, composed in November 1917, which reads as a directive for all the writing to come: “To perform the negative is what is still required of us, the positive is already ours.”2 While identifying the task very clearly as a performing of the negative, Kafka does not identify who or what imposes this obligation, or the precise purpose that it will serve. According to Adorno – who cites aphorism 27 in his groundbreaking 1953 essay on Kafka – the latter’s art is to be understood as revealing the appalling reality of modernity through the negative. The

1

2

Franz Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente I, in der Fassung der Handschriften, ed. Malcolm Pasley (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1993); and Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente II, in der Fassung der Handschriften, ed. Jost Schillemeit (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1992). Franz Kafka, The Collected Aphorisms, trans. Malcolm Pasley (London: Syrens, 1994), p. 8; Nachgelassene Schriften II, pp. 47, 119.

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shabbiness in Kafka’s world is, he argues, “the cryptogram of capitalism’s highly polished, glittering late phase, which he excludes in order to define it all the more precisely in its negative.”3 While it is certainly possible to take issue with Adorno’s interpretation, and to emphasize, for instance, the psychological or the religious dimension, and especially Kafka’s interest in Gnosticism, there is nonetheless considerable evidence in Kafka’s fiction, as well as in his diaries and letters, to suggest that his work does indeed bear witness to a psycho-socio-political reality by way of the negative, a reality from which the only imaginable escape would be death – and, as Kafka’s story of the hunter Gracchus reveals, even death is not necessarily the way out that it might once have been. For death, too, has a history. The obligation to undertake a labor of the negative upon which Kafka insists in aphorism 27 shapes both the content and the form of his later (post–World War I) works, with the radical nature of their linguistic negativism distinguishing them stylistically from his earlier writings, both published and unpublished. This negativism is apparent above all in the lexis, syntax, and morphology of the work produced in the last five years of Kafka’s life. It becomes ever more intensive, with the most extreme forms of linguistic negativism being found in the works written in the last year of his life (1923–24), fully justifying Harold Bloom’s claim that Kafka is a “literalist of the Negative,”4 to an extent matched by no other European writer in the interwar years. The roots of this linguistic negativism lie, however, much earlier in Kafka’s development. In mid-December 1910, for instance, in a letter to Max Brod, he describes an experience of radical language skepticism and consequent language loss: “My whole body warns me against every word; every word, before it lets me write it down, first looks around in all directions. The sentences literally crumble before me [die Sätze zerbrechen mir förmlich]; I see their insides and then have to stop quickly.”5 This passage bears a striking resemblance to the description of language loss experienced by Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos less than ten years earlier: “Everything fell into pieces in front of me, the pieces into more pieces, and nothing could be contained in a single concept any more. Individual words 3 4 5

Theodor Adorno, “Notes on Kafka,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1981), pp. 243–71 (p. 256). Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), p. 460. Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (London: John Calder, 1978), p. 70; Briefe 1900–1912, ed. Hans-Gerd Koch (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1999), p. 131.

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swam around me; they melted into eyes, which stared at me, and which I had to stare back at: they are like whirlpools, it gives me vertigo to look down at them, they turn without cease, and transport you into nothingness.”6 While, for Hofmannsthal’s nominalistic Lord Chandos, it is the individual words that become whirlpools threatening to drag him down into the abyss, for Kafka it is the breaking apart of sentences that opens onto a terrifying nothingness. The striking resemblance between these two experiences of language breakdown makes it clear that, while not discounting the individual, psychological aspect, Kafka’s language skepticism needs to be seen within a wider cultural context, one that is specific to central Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Kafka’s diaries testify to the abiding difficulties he experienced as a writer, and are saturated with reflections on nothingness, be it in a more or less loose philosophico-religious sense or in the most literal sense of nothing being produced by the creative imagination. For instance, a diary entry dated December 4, 1913 – that is, with two of his most important short stories, The Judgement and The Metamorphosis, already written – records the overwhelming sense of the nothing, and the paradoxes into which it leads him: To die would mean nothing else than to surrender a nothing to the nothing [ein Nichts dem Nichts hingeben], but that would be impossible to conceive, for how could a person, even only as a nothing, consciously surrender himself to the nothing, and not merely to an empty nothing but rather to a roaring nothing whose nothingness [Nichtigkeit] consists only in its incomprehensibility [Unfaßbarkeit].7

As it happens, Kafka had already deployed the word Nichtigkeit – translated as “nothingness” in the preceding passage – in a fragment of the unfinished and unpublished early work “Wedding Preparations in the Country” (written in 1906–7), in which the protagonist, Eduard Raban, reflecting anxiously on his forthcoming marriage, seeks to reassure himself: “I’ll send my clothed body. If it staggers out of the door of my room, the

6

7

Hugo von Hofmannsthal, The Lord Chandos Letter, trans. Michael Hofmann (London: Syrens, 1995), p. 11; “Ein Brief,” in Der Brief des Lord Chandos. Schriften zur Literatur, Kultur und Geschichte, ed. Mathias Mayer (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2000), pp. 46–59 (p. 52). Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1910–1923, ed. Max Brod, trans. Joseph Kresh (The Diaries of Franz Kafka 1910–13) and Martin Greenberg, with the cooperation of Hannah Arendt (The Diaries of Franz Kafka 1914–23) (London: Penguin, 1964), p. 243; Tagebücher, in der Fassung der Handschrift, ed. Hans-Gerd Koch, Michael Müller, and Malcolm Pasley (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1990), p. 604.

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staggering will indicate not fear but its nothingness [Nichtigkeit].”8 The same word would recur a decade later in Kafka’s last completed story, “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk” (1924), where it serves to name that to which music is reduced in Josephine’s singing: “any music there may be in it is reduced to the least possible trace [auf die möglichste Nichtigkeit reduziert].”9 The years 1914–15 are marked by recurrent laments over Kafka’s inability to write and the “nothing” that results from this inability, even though between August 1914 and January 1915 he managed to write The Trial. A diary entry for March 1914, for instance, reads: “I have written nothing [nichts geschrieben] for a year, nor shall I be able to write anything [nichts schreiben] in the future.”10 On April 8, 1914, this concern is reiterated: “Yesterday incapable [unfähig] of writing even one word. Today no better. Who will save me? And the turmoil in me, deep down, scarcely visible; I am like a lattice-work, a lattice that is solidly planted and would like to tumble down.”11 A year later, the refrain has not changed, the diary entry for May 3, 1915 including the lament: “The present is a phantom state for me; I don’t sit at the table but hover round it. Nothing, nothing. Emptiness, boredom, no, not boredom, merely emptiness, meaninglessness, weakness.”12 For all this emphasis upon the nothing, however, a striking transformation occurs in the last years of Kafka’s life. This transformation constitutes the intellectual context for the radical linguistic negativism that emerges in the works of 1923–24, especially in the stories “The Burrow,” “A Little Woman,” and “Josephine the Singer.” The wider context for this more radical linguistic negativism is the language skepticism that emerged for concrete sociopolitical reasons at the end of the nineteenth century and in the first decades of the twentieth century in central Europe. As Kafka’s biographer Reiner Stach observes, his œuvre is shaped by a “profound and fundamental scepticism about the efficacy of language.”13 While it is certainly possible to seek specific literaryphilosophical sources for this skepticism – most obviously in Mauthner’s Beiträge14 – Kafka’s sense of the radical inadequacy of language was also 8 9 10 13 14

Franz Kafka, Collected Stories, ed. Gabriel Josipovici (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), p. 302; Nachgelassene Schriften I, p. 17. Kafka, Collected Stories, p. 243; Franz Kafka, Drucke zu Lebzeiten, ed. Hans-Gerd Koch, Wolf Kittler, and Gerhard Neumann (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1994), p. 366. 12 Kafka, Diaries, p. 262; Tagebücher, p. 504. 11 Ibid., p. 267; p. 514. Ibid., p. 339; p. 742. Reiner Stach, Kafka: The Years of Insight, trans. Shelley Frisch (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), p. 14. Ritchie Robertson’s assessment of this question is that while “it is not clear whence Kafka derived his views of the inadequacy of language to express concepts . . . the closest contemporary analogue

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shaped by more general sociopolitical currents, of which Mauthner’s work was but one manifestation. That context was the waning of AustroHungarian power in a multilingual, multiethnic part of Europe; the increasing isolation of German-language writing in Prague, especially after World War I; and a range of experiences, not least the war, that seemed to challenge the power of the word. The position of German-Jewish writers in Prague in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was particularly complex. Just as Mauthner saw himself as possessing no “proper native language,” so, as Scott Spector observes, Kafka was “caught between languages, caught between nations.”15 For Deleuze and Guattari, it is precisely this situation that enables Kafka to produce a “minor” literature that will carry a radical political charge (the power of “deterritorialization”) that is denied to any “major” literature.16 The relation between language and territory was particularly significant for German-speaking Jews in Prague, prompting a sense of linguistic-territorial homelessness that is articulated by both Mauthner and Kafka. The profound ambiguity in the attitude of German-speaking Jews in Prague to Yiddish may be understood as rooted in this sense of homelessness, that attitude being what Spector describes as a “strange amalgam of romantic glorification, envy, and condescension.”17 It is, however, the distinctiveness of Kafka’s engagement with such language skepticism that makes him arguably the most important literary influence on the European literature of the unword in the post–World War II period, a distinctiveness that lies in his commitment not simply to the articulation of the limits of language at the thematic level, but to the enactment of forms of linguistic negativism that fully realize Beckett’s notion of a literature of the unword over a decade before it was formulated.18

15 16 17 18

would seem to be the extreme nominalism of the Prague philosopher Fritz Mauthner” (Kafka: Judaism, Politics, and Literature [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985], p. 206). Stanley Corngold sees Mauthner’s influence on Kafka as crucial to the latter’s understanding of metaphor, and, indeed, of language as metaphorical through and through: see Franz Kafka: The Necessity of Form (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 93. Scott Spector, Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka’s Fin de Siècle (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2000), pp. 79, 91. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). Spector, Prague Territories, p. 85. For analyses of language skepticism as it pertains to Kafka, see in particular Richard T. Gray, “Aphorism and Sprachkrise in Turn-of-the-Century Austria,” Orbis Litterarum 41:4 (1986): pp. 332– 54; and Clayton Koelb, Kafka’s Rhetoric: The Passion of Reading (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), especially pp. 104–9.

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In a remarkable letter to Max Brod written in June 1921, Kafka expresses a view of the “impossibility of writing” (Unmöglichkeit zu schreiben) that clearly anticipates those of both Blanchot and Beckett in the 1940s. Reflecting on the relation to the German language of Jewish writers in Prague, Kafka observes: They existed among three impossibilities, which I just happen to call linguistic impossibilities [sprachliche Unmöglichkeiten]. It is simplest to call them that. But they might also be called something entirely different. These are: The impossibility of not writing [Unmöglichkeit, nicht zu schreiben], the impossibility of writing German [Unmöglichkeit, deutsch zu schreiben], the impossibility of writing differently [Unmöglichkeit, anders zu schreiben]. One might also add a fourth impossibility: the impossibility of writing [Unmöglichkeit zu schreiben] (since the despair could not be assuaged by writing, was hostile to both life and writing; writing is only an expedient, as for someone who is writing his will shortly before he hangs himself – an expedient that may well last a whole life). Thus what resulted was a literature impossible in all respects [eine von allen Seiten unmögliche Literatur], a gypsy literature which had stolen the German child out of its cradle and in great haste put it through some kind of training, for someone has to dance on the tightrope. (But it wasn’t even a German child, it was nothing; people merely said that somebody was dancing.) [breaks off]19

Twenty years later – years that would see the rise of Fascism and then Nazism, world war, and the Holocaust, in which members of Kafka’s own family would perish – Blanchot, in the opening section of his first volume of literary essays, Faux Pas (1943), would echo Kafka’s conception of the impossibility of writing, complementing this impossibility with a no less absolute necessity: “The writer finds himself in the increasingly ludicrous condition of having nothing to write [rien à écrire], of having no means with which to write it, and of being constrained by the utter necessity of always writing it.”20 Six years later, in a dialog with Georges Duthuit on the French painter Pierre Tal Coat (1905–85), Beckett would insist on “The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, together with the obligation to express.”21 It is in direct relation to this sense of an “impossible literature” (unmögliche Literatur) that the linguistic negativism of Kafka’s later 19 20 21

Kafka, Letters, p. 289; Briefe 1902–1924, ed. Max Brod (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1975), pp. 337–38. Maurice Blanchot, Faux Pas, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 3; Faux Pas (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), p. 11. Samuel Beckett, Proust and Three Dialogues (London: John Calder, 1987), p. 103.

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works may in no small part be understood, the specificity of this impossibility lying in his particular relation to the German language within the sociopolitical context of early twentieth-century Prague. To the three impossibilities experienced by German-speaking Jewish writers of his generation in Prague, Kafka adds a fourth – the impossibility of literature as such. This impossibility results, however, not in silence, but in a form of what, following Beckett’s terminology, might best be described as unwording. If, as Spector argues, Kafka “begins to take apart the perilous construct of language,”22 the question becomes precisely how this unwording is achieved. The linguistic negativism that is ever more intensive in Kafka’s work is characterized primarily by the deployment of words (or, rather, unwords) bearing the affixes ab-, un-, and ver-, and through the use of the particle of negation nicht, particularly in the creation of double negatives. The key such unwords in Kafka’s lexicon of linguistic negativism prove to be Unglück (“misfortune” or “unhappiness”) Unruhe (“disquiet”), Ungeziefer (“vermin” or “pest”), Untier (“creature” or “beast”), Unschuld (“innocence”), Ungeduld (“impatience”), unruhig (“restless”), unsicher (“uncertain”), unmöglich (“impossible”), and unsauber (“unclean”). An analysis of the development of linguistic negativism across Kafka’s writing career reveals significant variations in the importance played by these unwords, as well as varying patterns of negation, culminating in the radical linguistic negativism in the works produced in the last year of Kafka’s life. There are, to be sure, passages of emphatic negation in Kafka’s earliest surviving texts. As noted previously, in the first and longest of the three fragments to which Max Brod gave the title “Wedding Preparations in the Country,” the protagonist Eduard Raban uses the term Nichtigkeit when reflecting on his planned journey to his fiancée. The linguistic context for this term is largely negative: And besides, can’t I do it [kann ich es nicht machen] in the way I always used to as a child in matters that were dangerous? I don’t even need [Ich brauche nicht einmal] to go to the country myself, it isn’t necessary [das ist nicht nöthig]. I’ll send my clothed body. If it staggers out of the door of my room, the staggering will indicate not fear but its nothingness [nicht Furcht sondern seine Nichtigkeit].23

However, while unwords such as unmöglich (“impossible”) and undeutlich (“blurred,” “unclear,” or “indistinguishable”), which will come to play a 22 23

Spector, Prague Territories, pp. 91–92. Kafka, Collected Stories, pp. 301–2; Nachgelassene Schriften I, p. 17.

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major role in Kafka’s writing between 1914 and 1924, are to be found in this early work,24 there are no clear patterns of linguistic negativism in the fragment. Furthermore, negative syntactical constructions, including the use of the particle of negation nicht, are rare. The keyword in “Wedding Preparations” is arguably the modifier müde (“weary” or “tired”), exhaustion being the condition that Raban presents himself as experiencing, this being interpretable as a cover for his resistance to the prospect of marriage. In the drafts of another early, more experimental work, “Description of a Struggle,” in which Kafka’s debt to Expressionism is particularly evident, what will prove to be one of Kafka’s most important unwords – Unglück (“misfortune” or “unhappiness”) – already plays an important role. This particular unword will lie at the heart of W. G. Sebald’s linguistic negativism at the end of the twentieth century, again signaling a clear lineage in the literature of the unword across the twentieth century. In the first draft of “Description of a Struggle,” in the account of a conversation between the “fat man” and the “supplicant,” the latter says that his “bad luck” (Unglück) is “precariously balanced and when touched it falls onto the questioner.”25 In the draft of the third part of the story, the man who has accompanied the narrator ever since he left the party at the beginning of the fragmentary narrative states that “misfortune” (Unglück) has not spared him.26 There is also a reliance upon a range of other negative modifiers in “Description of a Struggle.” In addition to unglücklich (“unfortunate” or “unhappy”), these include unruhig (“restless”), unbeweglich (“motionless”), ungewöhnlich (“unusual”), and unmöglich (“impossible”). The branches of a tree are “restless” (unruhig); a man is “monstrously” (ungeheuerlich) fat, and his facial expression “alarmed” (ganz unruhig); the river is “unruly” (unruhig); and, most strikingly of all, the principal narrator’s legs are “impossible” (unmöglich), suggesting his inability to make any progress.27 In this early story, too, however, there are no clear patterns of recurrence in the use of these negative modifiers, or any great intensity in their deployment. Rather, one finds an incipient use of such modifiers to create a sense of a world governed by incapacity, weakness, disquiet, and paralysis. Linguistic negativism is all but absent from Kafka’s first published book, the series of short prose texts Meditation (1912). It emerges, however, with dramatic suddenness in one of the very few texts with which Kafka ever expressed any degree of satisfaction, the work that he considered to be his 24 27

See ibid., pp. 313–14; pp. 35–36. 25 Ibid., p. 277; p. 88. Ibid., pp. 267, 270, 272, 292; pp. 75, 78, 82, 112.

26

Ibid., p. 293; p. 113.

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breakthrough achievement as a writer: The Judgement, written one night in September 1912 and published the following year. This story is punctuated by an explosion of linguistic negativism when the unnamed father of the protagonist, Georg Bendemann, suddenly transformed without any explanation from feeble invalid into violently overwhelming judge of his son, deploys the particle of negation nicht, emanating from an ironically “toothless mouth” (zahnlosen Mund), to reduce the son to nothing, first by denying that the son has a friend in St. Petersburg, with whom the son presents himself in the first part of the story as being in correspondence.28 The father’s linguistic negativism commences thus: it’s nothing, it’s worse than nothing [es ist nichts, es ist ärger als nichts], if you don’t tell me the whole truth. . . . I beg you, Georg, don’t deceive me [täusche mich nicht]. It’s a trivial affair, it’s hardly worth mentioning, so don’t deceive me [es ist nicht des Atems wert, also täusche mich nicht]. . . . You have no friend [Du hast keinen Freund] in St. Petersburg.29

When his son attempts to pacify his father, while also dismissing this extraordinary negation of his friendship, the latter explodes: “No!” (Nein!),30 and then condemns his son to death by drowning, a sentence that the son proceeds unquestioningly to carry out, driven by the overwhelming force of his father’s laconic act of linguistic negation. Commentators on The Judgement have remarked upon Kafka’s choice of the word traffic (Verkehr) in the story’s last line, after the son has carried out his father’s death sentence and thrown himself into the river: “At this moment an unending stream of traffic [unendlicher Verkehr] was just going over the bridge.”31 As has often been pointed out, the word Verkehr can also suggest sexual activity,32 and, with this double meaning in mind, the story can be read as enacting a damning judgment by the father/superego on the illicit sexual desires of the son. No less important, however, is the negative modifier unendlich (“unending”), in which the un- prefix functions as the morphological enactment of a negation. The story ends, in other words, with the radical juxtaposition of ending and unending – the end of Georg’s life and the end of the story, on the one hand; the continuation of life (in the form of both literal and metaphorical sexual traffic), on the other. This thematically decisive juxtaposition – which recurs in many of Kafka’s later 28 31 32

Ibid., p. 32; p. 51. 29 Ibid., pp. 32–33; pp. 52–53. 30 Ibid., p. 35; p. 56. Ibid., p. 39; p. 61. Zilcosky, for instance, identifies the term Verkehr as a “conceptual node” in Kafka’s œuvre “that, through the word’s double meaning, connects ‘traffic’ with ‘(sexual) intercourse’” (John Zilcosky, Kafka’s Travels: Exoticism, Colonialism, and the Traffic of Writing [New York: Palgrave, 2003], p. 34).

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works, including both The Metamorphosis and The Trial – is articulated through an act of linguistic negativism. The steadily increasing importance of linguistic negativism in Kafka’s work is evident in the opening sentence of another of his most important early works, The Metamorphosis (written in November–December 1912; published in 1915), in which the un- affix recurs three times: “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy [unruhigen] dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect [ungeheueren Ungeziefer].”33 The difficulties facing any translator of this opening sentence lie not least in the linguistic negativism that shapes Gregor Samsa’s experience of transformation. The un- affix here negates the calm (ruhig) and the familiar or safe (geheuer), before operating to intensify the negativity of the word Geziefer (“vermin” or “pest”). The expression “ungeheueres Ungeziefer” is not simply a “double negative”;34 it is a complex form of linguistic negativism in which a single negating affix (un-) performs two distinct tasks. The all-important difference between the unwords ungeheuer and Ungeziefer is that geheuer means the opposite of ungeheuer,35 whereas Ungeziefer has the same meaning as Geziefer. The unaffix in Ungeziefer serves, then, not only to intensify the negativity of that particular noun, but also to enforce the morphologically negative form of the sentence as a whole. The overwhelmingly negative nature of the creature into which Gregor has been transformed, and of his experience of being more generally, is reflected in the radically negative form of the sentence in which this transformation is recorded. This linguistic negativism continues with a series of incapacities being identified in contrast to past abilities through using “no longer” (nicht mehr) constructions, serving to create the (not necessarily objectively reliable) sense that Gregor’s transformation into a form of un-being has stripped him of powers that he once possessed, rather than revealing in the starkest manner, through the literalizing of a negating metaphor, the truth of his past powerlessness. At various points in the narrative, Gregor is described as being “stuck fast,” such that, without another’s help, he “could not have moved at all” (nicht mehr rühren können); as “no longer able to lift his head up” (den Kopf nicht mehr erheben konnte); as being so weary that

33 34 35

Kafka, Collected Stories, p. 75; Drucke zu Lebzeiten, p. 115. Carolin Duttlinger, The Cambridge Introduction to Franz Kafka (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 34. The word geheuer is, however, in modern German generally used in negative constructions; that is, in the form “nicht geheuer” (eerie, creepy, uncanny, troubling).

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“he had to give up listening [nicht mehr zuhören]”; and as realizing that he “was now unable to stir a limb [nicht mehr rühren konnte].”36 This recurrent negation of Gregor’s capacities forms part of a more general negation of his status as a human being. Identified from the outset not just as a Geziefer, but as an Ungeziefer, in the course of the narrative Gregor is shown failing to maintain his distinctively human traits – with regard to movement, what and how he eats, and how he expresses himself. Following on from his voice being perceived as an unintelligible squeaking rather than articulate speech, the ultimate negation of Gregor’s humanity is enacted through a brutal act of linguistic negativism when his sister, Greta, declares: “I won’t utter my brother’s name in the presence of this creature [Untier].”37 Here, the un- affix that is deployed to such striking effect in the story’s opening sentence returns, in a statement that insists, paradoxically, upon a refusal to name that is followed by the most damning act of un-naming. An Untier is more a beast or monster than a neutral creature (as it has often been translated)38 because it refers to something that does not even warrant the status of an animal (Tier), literally an un-animal, an entirely negatively defined being, the mirror image of the Ungeziefer. During the narrative, the pronoun that is used to refer to Gregor changes from “he” (er) to “it” (es), this pronominal shift reflecting the transformation of his status from human (Mensch) to animal (Tier) to unanimal (Untier). Crucially, it is Gregor’s sister (whose name, Greta, mirrors his own) who insists upon the pronominal redesignation, enforcing the status of Ungeziefer or Untier upon him.39 And just as the final sentence in The Judgement juxtaposes ending with unending – Georg’s suicide, on the one hand, and “unending traffic” (unendlicher Verkehr), on the other – so The Metamorphosis ends by juxtaposing Gregor’s death, which reduces him yet further, to the status of an inanimate “thing” (Zeug), with his sister’s emergence as an actively erotic being: Greta “sprang to her feet first and stretched her young body.”40 Here, however, the juxtaposing of life and death, activity and inactivity, capability and incapability, is not achieved with the economy afforded by a double negative of the kind deployed in 36 37 38 39 40

Kafka, Collected Stories, pp. 91, 94 (translation modified), 98, 124; Drucke zu Lebzeiten, pp. 142, 145, 153, 193. Ibid., p. 121; p. 189. See, for instance, the translations by Willa and Edwin Muir (Kafka, Collected Stories, p. 121), and J. A. Underwood (Franz Kafka, Stories 1904–1924 [London: Abacus, 1995], p. 138). “‘It must go [Weg muß es],’ cried Gregor’s sister” (Kafka, Collected Stories, p. 122 [translation modified]; Drucke zu Lebzeiten, pp. 190–91). Ibid., pp. 127–28; pp. 198, 200.

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The Judgement. It is only a decade later, in what would prove to be the final phase of his writing life, that Kafka manages to radicalize his linguistic negativism through the repeated use of double negatives to capture the paradoxical experience of endless ending, an experience that is alien to the Enlightenment conception of unlimited progress, at once social, scientific, and cultural, which underlies the powerful myth of modernity, and that lies at the heart of a conception of history that is captured perhaps most economically by Beckett’s use of the palindromic “on”/“no” in The Unnamable (1953) – “you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on” – and then, in even more paratactic form, in Worstward Ho (1983): “On. Say on. Be said on. Somehow on. Till nohow on. Said nohow on.”41 Turning from The Metamorphosis to The Trial, the novel on which Kafka commenced work in August 1914, and which he abandoned six months later, one encounters a further development in his reliance upon linguistic negativism. The novel is punctuated by the recurrent deployment of a range of negative modifiers to communicate uncertainty, insecurity, and discomfort, this effect now being enhanced by the repeated use of the verb to seem (scheinen). At the thematic heart of The Trial is the idea of innocence (Unschuld), on which Kafka’s hapless protagonist, Joseph K., insists throughout. In the unwords “innocence” (Unschuld) and “innocent” (schuldlos or unschuldig), a positive condition is stated through the negation of an originally negative condition: guilt (Schuld). On account of a linguistic constriction that reveals much about Western culture, Kafka’s K. can at best only be un-guilty. The other decisive unword in the novel is “impatience” (Ungeduld). In the Zürau aphorisms, Kafka rewrites a key moment in the Book of Genesis, identifying not the thirst for knowledge but impatience as humankind’s original sin: It was on account of their impatience that human beings were expelled from Paradise, and, Kafka declares, it is on account of their impatience that they are unable to return.42 The idea of impatience is increasingly prevalent in The Trial, with an early reference to K.’s “impatient eye” (ungeduldigem Blick)43 being followed by a radical intensification of this particular state of being toward the end of the novel. For instance, 41

42 43

Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable, ed. Steven Connor (London: Faber & Faber, 2010), p. 134; Worstward Ho, in Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho, Stirrings Still, ed. Dirk Van Hulle (London: Faber & Faber, 2009), pp. 79–103 (p. 81). Kafka, Collected Aphorisms, pp. 3–4; Nachgelassene Schriften II, p. 113. Franz Kafka, The Trial, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, rev. E. M. Butler (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), p. 70; Der Proceß, in der Fassung der Handschrift, ed. Malcolm Pasley (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1990), p. 95.

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K.’s hand twitches “impatiently” (ungeduldig), and, later, he seeks to suppress his “impatience” (Ungeduld). When visiting the painter Titorelli, K. agrees to look at a pile of canvases that the former has stored under his bed, despite the fact that he is “trembling with impatience to be out of the place.”44 When his lawyer tells K. that he knows he is feeling impatient, K. utters a hasty denial: “I’m not impatient” (Ich bin nicht ungeduldig). Thus, denial is delivered in a manner that is “a little irritated” such that K. is “less careful in his choice of words,” thereby confirming through the manner rather than the matter of the saying the lawyer’s assessment of his state. Although scarcely necessary, further proof of K.’s impatience soon follows, when shortly thereafter he grows “impatient” when listening to his own lawyer’s speech.45 These two thematically crucial unwords – “innocence” (Unschuld) and “impatience” (Ungeduld) – and the negative modifiers that derive from them, lie at the heart of a much wider pattern of linguistic negativism in The Trial, including a range of other negative modifiers as well as an extensive reliance upon “without” (ohne) constructions and double negatives to state positives, the negated repeatedly insinuating itself into the text in this way. In addition to the deployment of the terms Unschuld, unschuldig, Ungeduld, and ungeduldig, the principal forms of linguistic negativism in The Trial are negative modifiers that serve to highlight incapacities and failures of understanding, the most recurrent among these being “ungraspable” (unbegreiflich), “unknown” (unbekannt), “indefinite” (unbestimmt), “unclear” (undeutlich), “inexplicable” (unerklärlich), and “incomprehensible” (unverständlich). Early in the novel, Josef K. considers the possibility that his arrest is “a rude joke which his colleagues in the Bank had concocted for some unknown reason [aus unbekannten Gründen].”46 He then finds himself the object of “a long, apparently significant, yet incomprehensible [unverständlichen] look.”47 Later, he declares that he finds the Examining Magistrate to be someone whom he cannot understand (unbegreiflich).48 Similarly, in the courtroom, he finds the composure of the two men who are escorting him to be “incomprehensible” (unbegreiflich), and their words “unintelligible” (unverständlich).49 In his anger, K.’s uncle splutters in a manner that is “hardly intelligible” (ziemlich unverständlich).50 Furthermore, K. considers himself to have acted with “a certain inexplicable [unerklärlichen] complaisance” in informing others 44 47 50

Ibid., p. 178; p. 220. 45 Ibid., pp. 197, 204, 206; pp. 244, 253, 257. 46 Ibid., p. 4; p. 11. Ibid., p. 6; p. 13. 48 Ibid., p. 62; p. 85. 49 Ibid., pp. 78–79; p. 106. Ibid., p. 110; p. 133.

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of the trial, while also concluding that some have learned of it “in ways unknown to him” (auf unbekannte Weise).51 When visiting the painter Titorelli, he encounters a group of girls, one of whom mocks him and gives him a “little slap,” before running off to join the other girls, “whose shrieks were already dying away in the distance” (deren Geschrei schon undeutlich in der Höhe sich verlor).52 One of Titorelli’s portraits is described as having been sketched “indistinctly” (undeutlich).53 K. finds the heat in Titorelli’s studio to be “inexplicable” (unerklärlich).54 When the girls return, they jabber in a manner that K. finds “unintelligible” (unverständlich).55 K.’s assessment of his lawyer is that he has sought “to delude him with vague false hopes [unbestimmten Hoffnungen] or to torment him with equally vague menaces [unbestimmten Drohungen].”56 In the cathedral, the verger gestures to K. “in some vaguely indicated [unbestimmten] direction,” and the priest similarly lifts his hand “in a vague [unbestimmten] gesture.”57 As these examples indicate, in striking contrast to the trajectory of narrative (or plot) theorized by Aristotle and practiced for centuries, the experience of uncertainty, inexplicability, and incomprehensibility increases rather than decreases in The Trial. The intensifying deployment of the negative modifier “indefinite” or “vague” (unbestimmt) alone reveals an unwording procedure that challenges the basic form of Western narrative fiction. The use of the particle of negation “not” (nicht) is also considerably more widespread in The Trial than in Kafka’s earlier works. It serves in particular to mark failures of understanding on K.’s part. In the novel’s opening scene, when K. learns of his arrest, he hears laughter emanating from the next room, the sound leaving him “unsure whether [nicht sicher ob nicht] several people had joined in.”58 On returning home from work on the evening of his arrest, K. encounters a young man in the street doorway, the latter’s face being obscured because “one could not see very well [sah nicht viel] in the darkness of the entrance.”59 Of his neighbor Fräulein Bürstner, K. “could not even remember exactly [nicht einmal genau erinnern] how she looked.”60 And, in the novel’s penultimate chapter, in the cathedral, K. finds that, with evening falling, he is unable to “distinguish scarcely a single detail” (nicht mit Bestimmtheit sagen können) in his immediate surroundings.61 The nicht here functions, then, like the unaffix, to undo the positive wherever it appears, and indeed to do so even before it appears, articulating an experience of radical uncertainty. 51

Ibid., p. 137; p. 167. 52 Ibid., p. 155; p. 190. 53 Ibid., p. 159; p. 195. Ibid., p. 162; p. 199. 55 Ibid., p. 164 (translation modified); p. 201. 56 Ibid., p. 207; p. 257. 57 Ibid., pp. 226, 231; pp. 282, 288. 58 Ibid., p. 2; p. 8. 59 Ibid., p. 19; p. 31. 60 Ibid., p. 25; p. 38. 61 Ibid., p. 225; p. 280. 54

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Of particular significance among the novel’s various forms of linguistic negativism are “not” constructions in combination with the verb “to seem” (scheinen). In the novel’s opening scene, for instance, K., realizing that there are people laughing in the room next to his bedroom, declares that he wishes to know how his landlady, Frau Grubach, can possibly account for such behavior, only immediately to regret having expressed this thought aloud. This regret is then immediately followed by its dismissal – completing a series of self-revising, or epanorthotic, moves on K.’s part – with the thought that having spoken “did not seem important to him at the moment” (schien ihm jetzt nicht wichtig).62 If this particular conclusion is a reassuring one, it is only temporary. For, shortly thereafter, reflecting on his general tendency “to believe in the worst only when the worst happened,” K. is led to conclude: “But that struck him as not being the right policy here” (Hier schien ihm das aber nicht richtig).63 Not long thereafter, in conversation with Frau Grubach, K. refers to the extra work he believes he has generated for her through the visit he has received from the two men who have come to arrest him, only to judge her reaction to his remark as follows: “she seems to think it not quite right [sie scheint es nicht für richtig zu halten] that I should mention it.”64 These early instances of negative seeming establish a pattern for the rest of the novel. The first – and thematically most important – “without” (ohne) construction occurs in the novel’s opening sentence: “Without having done anything wrong [ohne daß er etwas Böses getan hätte] he was arrested one fine morning.”65 As soon as K. sees the clothing of the first man to enter his bedroom, he is struck by the “pleats, pockets, buckles, and buttons, as well as a belt,” making the suit seem “eminently practical, though one could not quite tell [ohne daß man sich darüber klar wurde] what actual purpose it served.”66 Reflecting on the possibility that the arrest is in fact a practical joke, K. recalls occasions when he had “behaved with deliberate recklessness,” only “to pay dearly for it.” This reflection on past misjudgments is significant simply because it takes place – this point being flagged to the reader by the parenthetical phrase “though it was not usual for him [ohne daß es sonst seine Gewohnheit gewesen wäre] to learn from experience.”67 In the presence of the two men who have come to arrest him, “Without wishing it [ohne es zu wollen] K. found himself decoyed into an exchange of speaking looks” with one of them.68 A little later, K. speaks “without noticing [ohne zu bemerken] how strange it must seem to speak” to adults 62 66

Ibid., p. 2; p. 8. Ibid., p. 1; p. 7.

63 67

Ibid., p. 4; p. 11. Ibid., p. 5; p. 12.

64 68

Ibid., p. 21; p. 33. 65 Ibid., p. 1; p. 7. Ibid., p. 6; pp. 13–14.

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in the way he has.69 The rapid variations – in effect, numerous instances of self-revision – that characterize K.’s thoughts, utterances, and behavior throughout the novel are often captured through such ohne constructions, making the novel a prolonged exercise in epanorthosis that anticipates Beckett’s practice in The Unnamable (1953). A typical example of this is K.’s behavior in the taxi in which he is driven to work on the day of his arrest: at that moment the taxi arrived, they took their seats and drove off. Then K. remembered that he had not noticed the Inspector and the warders leaving, the Inspector had usurped his attention so that he did not recognize the three clerks, and the clerks in turn had made him oblivious to the Inspector. That did not show much presence of mind, and K. resolved to be more careful in this respect. Yet in spite of himself he turned round and craned from the back of the car to see if he could perhaps catch sight of the Inspector and the warders. But he immediately turned away again and leaned back comfortably in the corner without even having attempted [ohne auch nur den Versuch gemacht zu haben] to distinguish one of them.70

The series of revisions in this passage is dizzying, reflecting a consciousness that cannot hold to any of its resolutions. The apparent comfortability of K.’s pose in the final sentence of the passage is challenged by the final ohne phrase, which clearly anticipates the revision, coming as it does after so many previous ones in the opening chapter of the novel. These destabilizing revisions are reflected, then, in the very syntax of the novel, which is to say in an emergent linguistic negativism. As for double negatives, these proliferate in The Trial in a manner unprecedented in Kafka’s earlier work. A woman whom K. encounters in the courtroom expresses her view that the long reports produced by the Examining Magistrate “surely can’t be quite unimportant [nicht ganz bedeutungslos].”71 K. considers the same woman’s offer to help him to be “probably not worthless” (vielleicht nicht wertlos).72 In the same chapter, K.’s desire to escape the attentions of a student lead to the latter’s response – that he can leave if he is too impatient to wait quietly – to be “not unwelcome” (nicht unwillkommen).73 Similarly, his lawyer’s illness is “not entirely unwelcome” (nicht ganz unwillkommen).74 Following his uncle’s intervention in the case, K. considers his own position to be “no longer quite independent” (nicht mehr vollständig unabhängig).75 When the painter Titorelli crawls under his bed in search of a pile of canvases that he wishes to show to K. in the hope of selling them to him, the latter does not 69 73

Ibid., p. 18; p. 28. Ibid., p. 62; p. 84.

70 74

Ibid., p. 18; p. 29. Ibid., p. 110; p. 132.

71

Ibid., p. 59; p. 81. 72 Ibid., p. 61; p. 83. Ibid., p. 137; p. 167.

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immediately decline because he “did not want to be discourteous” (wollte nicht unhöflich sein).76 K. considers his lawyer’s opinion to be “not entirely negligible” (nicht unwichtig).77 Block tells K. that waiting in the courtroom lobby is “not pointless” (nicht nutzlos).78 Toward the end of the novel, in the cathedral, K. is of the view that, were the priest to come down from his pulpit, “it was not impossible [nicht unmöglich] that they could come to some agreement,” and that “it was not impossible [nicht unmöglich] that K. could obtain decisive and acceptable counsel from him.”79 Through such double negatives, Kafka takes up an idiomatic aspect of central European vernacular German,80 and transforms it into a form of linguistic negativism that not only produces deeply troubling ambiguities for both his characters and his readers, but also creates a world in which the ostensibly positive is haunted by its own negation. Innocence, understanding, significance – each is stated only through its negation, and is thus contaminated by its antithesis. One of the most extreme examples of various forms of linguistic negativism being used together to produce a passage of intensive unwording that captures K.’s situation is to be found in the “Lawyer, Manufacturer, Painter” chapter, at the very heart of the novel: [H]is position was no longer quite independent [nicht mehr vollständig unabhängig] of the course the case took, he himself, with a certain inexplicable complaisance [unerklärlichen Genugtuung], had imprudently [unvorsichtiger Weise] mentioned it to some of his acquaintances, others had come to learn of it in ways unknown to him [auf unbekannte Weise], his relations with Fräulein Bürstner seemed to fluctuate [schien . . . zu schwanken] with the case itself – in short, he hardly had the choice now to accept the trial or reject it, he was in the middle of it and must look to himself. For him to be so tired was a bad look-out.81

This passage – located in the “middle” of the trial, as well as in the middle of the novel – constitutes a decisive step in the direction of the forms of radical unwording to be found in Kafka’s last works, combining, as it does, negative modifiers, particles of negation, parataxis, and an emphasis on seeming, exhaustion, instability, and fluctuation. It is, in short, a radical condensation of the entire novel as an exercise in unwording. 76 79 80

81

Ibid., p. 178; p. 220. 77 Ibid., p. 182; p. 225. 78 Ibid., p. 192; p. 238. Ibid., p. 233; p. 291. I would like to thank the anonymous peer reviewer of this book who remarked upon Kafka’s remarkable ability to “modulate this extremely common, quotidian language experience into a nightmare of indefiniteness.” Ibid., pp. 137–38; p. 167.

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After Kafka abandoned The Trial in early 1915 – despite the novel being, in terms of plot, essentially complete – he turned to the writing of shorter prose texts, many of which also remained unfinished and/or unpublished during his lifetime. There is relatively little evidence of linguistic negativism in these texts, which include “The Village Schoolmaster,” also known in English as “The Giant Mole” (written in December 1914–January 1915), and “Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor” (written in 1915). One of the few significant instances of linguistic negativism in these shorter works is the following description in the latter story of the bachelor’s state: “But he does not remain undisturbed [nicht ungestört]; as usual he sleeps without dreaming [traumlos], but very restlessly [sehr unruhig].”82 In the “Hunter Gracchus” fragments from January through April 1917, linguistic negativism plays a more important role, with a moment’s “absence of mind” (Unaufmerksamkeit) on the part of the pilot being identified as the cause of Gracchus’s exile from the realm of the dead,83 and his final declaration – “I am here, more than that I do not know, further than that I cannot go [mehr weiß ich nicht, mehr kann ich nicht tun]. My ship has no rudder, and is driven by the wind that blows in the undermost regions of death” – establishing the negative as his discursive home.84 At the heart of the story, then, is a failed negation, or rather the negation of a negation – that is, the negation of being that is death having been countered by the negation that is a moment of inattention (Unaufmerksamkeit). The result of this negation of a negation is nothing positive, but rather a form of wandering negativity. The Gracchus story of an experience of what might be termed un-death is one that, as we shall see, resonates strongly in the work of those European writers who commit themselves to a literature of the unword in the post–World War II period, especially Blanchot and Sebald. There is, then, a radical intensification of linguistic negativism in the works (both finished and unfinished, published and unpublished) written after World War I and the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, at a time when Kafka’s own health was deteriorating significantly and the sociopolitical world in which he had grown up was changing dramatically around him. Kafka’s own sense of unbelonging, both cultural and linguistic, only increased, and this is reflected in the intensification of linguistic negativism evident in his third and last unfinished novel, The Castle,

82 84

Kafka, Collected Stories, p. 350; Nachgelassene Schriften I, p. 241. Ibid., pp. 370–71; p. 311.

83

Ibid., p. 368; p. 309.

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which he began in February 1922 – just after the completion of the story “A Hunger Artist” – and abandoned in August of the same year. The linguistic negativism in The Castle is distinguished above all by a reliance upon negative modifiers that signal unclearness, unintelligibility, or uninterpretability. The most prevalent of these negative modifiers is “unclear” (undeutlich). The novel opens with the eponymous Castle being described as “hidden, veiled in mist and darkness,” and this lack of clarity soon extends beyond the perceptual to the psychological. K. asks a mother with “weary blue eyes” who she is, and when she replies “disdainfully” (wegwerfend) that she is a girl from the Castle, it is “unclear” (undeutlich) to K. whether her contempt is for him or for her response to his question.85 The text does not resolve this ambiguity. This unclear encounter is followed by one of the peasants at the inn in which K. is to stay speaking to him with an “enigmatic [undeutbaren] smile” that is reflected in the faces of others who are present.86 A little later, in the same location, and because of the darkness, Barnabas’s figure becomes “only vaguely discernible” (undeutlich) to K.87 After undeutlich, the other prevalent unwords in The Castle are the negative modifiers “ungraspable” (unbegreiflich), “unknown” (unbekannt), “unclear” (unklar), “insoluble” (unlösbar), “uncertain” (unsicher), and “unintelligible” (unverständlich), as well as the substantives “unknowing” or “ignorance” (Unkenntnis), “unintelligibility” (Unverständigkeit), and “uncertainty” (Unwissenheit). Together, this array of unwords serves to articulate an experience of radical uncertainty and uninterpretability that is established at the very outset of the novel, opening as it does with darkness and fog obscuring K.’s sight of the Castle, and with a sequence of negatives: “The Castle hill was hidden [Vom Schloßberg war nichts zu sehn], veiled in mist and darkness, nor was there even a glimmer of light to show that a castle was there [nicht der schwächste Lichtschein deutete das große Schloß an].”88 The extent of the problem is signaled when the innkeeper says to K.: “You misconstrue [mißdeuten] everything, even a person’s silence.”89 The unclarity, unknowing, and uninterpretability that are thematized so intensively in The Castle are, to be sure, characteristics of Kafka’s œuvre more generally. Both Walter Benjamin and, in his wake, Adorno see Kafka’s principal genre as the parable, but with the very significant qualification that his parables do not yield a single clear meaning. On the one 85

86

Franz Kafka, The Castle, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), p. 15; Das Schloß, in der Fassung der Handschrift, ed. Malcolm Pasley (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1982), p. 25. Ibid., p. 27; p. 44. 87 Ibid., p. 30; p. 48. 88 Ibid., p. 3; p. 7. 89 Ibid., p. 83; p. 129.

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hand, the unclear (undeutlich) nature of Kafka’s work lies at the heart of its power to engage such a culturally diverse readership because it can accommodate so many readings – psychological, political, philosophical, and religious. In this sense, its power, and its eventual status as an exemplary form of world literature, lies in its hermeneutic openness. On the other hand, according to Adorno, the radical Undeutlichkeit of Kafka’s art can be read in a stronger sense, namely that no interpretation is legitimate. In other words, far from being hermeneutically open, the work would be hermetically sealed. As Adorno puts it in his 1953 essay on Kafka: “Each sentence says ‘interpret me’ [deute mich], and none will permit it.”90 This uninterpretability can be seen as both a strength and a weakness. For Adorno, if there is a weakness in Kafka’s œuvre, then it is its monotony, the fact that the “presentation of the ambiguous, uncertain, inaccessible, is repeated endlessly.”91 This is certainly the case in The Castle, where the unwording procedures insist again and again on the uninterpretable and the uncertain. As for the ambiguity regarding interpretability – radical openness or radical closure to interpretation – this uncertainty testifies to the impact at a higher hermeneutical level of a literature of the unword: The negative affects not just specific interpretations but interpretation as such. In addition to the regular deployment of unwords highlighting the experience of radical unknowing and uninterpretability, The Castle repeats the emphasis upon misfortune (Unglück),92 impatience (Ungeduld), disquiet (Unruhe), and discomfort (Unbehagen) to be found in The Trial.93 The centrality of the idea of impatience, identified, as noted previously, as the original sin in the Zürau aphorisms, is related in The Castle to the notion of the “wrong time” or “untimeliness” (Unzeit),94 establishing a 90 92

93

94

Adorno, “Notes on Kafka,” p. 246. 91 Ibid., p. 254. See, for example, Kafka, The Castle, pp. 206 (where Unglück is translated both as “catastrophe” and as “ruin”), 207, 259, 283 (where it is translated as “disaster”), 289, 290, 292, 302–3, 306, 311; Das Schloß, pp. 324–26, 405, 441, 449–50, 452, 466, 468, 472, 479. Examples from The Castle include: “impatient”/“impatiently” (ungeduldig) (pp. 22, 40; pp. 36, 64); “impatience” (Ungeduld) (pp. 122, 124; pp. 189, 193); “uneasy” (unruhig) (p. 26; p. 43); “disquiet” (Unruhe) (pp. 121 (where it is translated as “wildness”), 123 (where it is translated as “exasperation”), 137 (where it is translated as “frenzy”), 243 (where it is translated as “noisy”), 279 (where it is translated as “unrest”), 282 (where it is translated as “uneasiness”), 306 (where it is translated at “restlessness”); pp. 188, 191, 213, 382, 435, 439, 473); “uncomfortable” (unbehaglich) (p. 60; p. 95); and “discomfort” (Unbehagen) (p. 107; p. 165). Ibid., p. 267; p. 417. The notion of Unzeit is central to Nietzsche’s second book, Untimely Meditations (Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen; 1873–76), a series of four essays, including what would later become a highly influential piece on forms of memory and historical methodology. The connection to Nietzsche here is strengthened by the fact that Kafka’s first book publication was entitled Meditation (Betrachtung).

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potentially causal link between impatience and misfortune. To this is added an emphasis on discourtesy, through using the unwords “impoliteness” (Unhöflichkeit) and “ungracious” (ungnädig), as well as on unfairness, reflected in the negative modifiers “unfavorable” (ungünstig) and, especially toward the end of the novel fragment, “injustice” (Unrecht).95 However, The Castle also includes numerous statements of unknowing, impossibility, and incapability. Early in the novel, K. accompanies Barnabas, although the former “did not know whither, he could discern nothing” (wußte nicht wohin, nichts konnte er erkennen).96 The destination proves to be the home of Barnabas’s parents. When the reason for this destination is given by Barnabas, and K. reacts with a series of questions, the former asks whether he was wrong to act as he did, a question to which K. “could not reply” (konnte nicht antworten), concluding silently that it had been “a misunderstanding, a common, vulgar misunderstanding.”97 When K. informs Frieda that he must speak with Klamm, she replies: “[Y]ou ask for the impossible [Unmögliches].”98 Again and again, K. comes up against the paralyzing power of unwords. The result of this unwording procedure is that the novel leaves open the question of the extent to which K. could behave in a manner other than the one in which he does – in other words, the experience of unclarity and undecidability extends beyond K.’s experience to that of the reader, who is left in no position to determine with any degree of confidence whether K.’s negative state of “misfortune” (Unglück) is of his own making. Responsibility for being in the negative here remains an open question, as unresolved as is the unfinished novel. The forms of linguistic negativism to be found in The Castle recur in another work from 1922, the posthumously published “Investigations of a Dog.” Here, too, the dominant unwords include “discomfort” (Unbehagen), “impatience” (Ungeduld), and “restless” (unruhig), together with “senseless” (unsinnig) and “senselessness” (Unsinnigkeit). It is, however, in three works written in the last five months of Kafka’s life – between November 1923 and March 1924 – that his practice of linguistic negativism achieves an unprecedented intensity. The three works in question are, in the order of their composition: “The Burrow” (written in November– December 1923), “A Little Woman” (written in December 1923–January 1924), and “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk” (written in March 95

96

See, for instance, Kafka, The Castle, pp. 4 (“discourtesy”), 5 (“ill grace”), 6 (“unpropitious”), 14 (“discourtesy”), 235 (“injustice”), 284 (“no right”), 314 (“injustice”); Das Schloß, pp. 10–12, 24, 369, 390, 396, 442, 484. Ibid., p. 30; p. 49. 97 Ibid., p. 32; p. 52. 98 Ibid., p. 49; p. 78.

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1924, and the last work to be completed by Kafka before his death on June 3, 1924).99 “The Burrow” presents a more radical experience of disquiet (Unruhe) than is to be found in any other work in Kafka’s œuvre. The narrator’s preoccupation with achieving a state of rest (Ruhe) is reflected in an extraordinary sequence of far-from-calm remarks upon that state. Roughly halfway through the unfinished narrative, he declares with a confidence that is undermined not least by his heavy reliance upon unwords, together with the use of the verb “to seem” (scheinen): “At last I can dare to rest [ruhen]. Everything is unchanged [unverändert], no great mishap [Unglück] seems to have occurred.”100 That this anticipated state of rest has not in fact been achieved is indicated soon thereafter, when the narrator declares: “I would be quite content if I could only still the conflict going on within me [wenn ich nur den inner Widerstreit beruhigte].”101 The conditional employed here is soon followed by another: “[I]t is almost as if I were already leaving the house to the whistler, content if I can only have a little peace [ein wenig Ruhe] up here.”102 Rest, peace, calm remain always either in an anticipated future “here,” or, if in the present, then always elsewhere: “Over there, there are no changes, there one is calm [ruhig].”103 Throughout the narrative, unwordings repeatedly negate this desired state of rest: “I am still trembling with agitation [die Unruhe zittert in mir noch] just as I was hours ago.”104 The narrator’s repeated attempts to achieve a sense of calm and security lead only to “false reassurance” (falsche Beruhigung),105 through a process of reversal whereby that which is designed to achieve rest or calm (Ruhe), and which initially seems to have done so – the emphasis on seeming (scheinen) being particularly strong in this story – achieves precisely the opposite effect: “[A]ll this transforms my fatigue into ardent zeal [Unruhe].”106 Such reversals are reflected in a disconcerting shuttling movement at the syntactical level, with the negating (epanorthotic) conjunction “but” (aber) serving to undo that which has been initially stated, time and again. These syntactical undoings, which anticipate those in Beckett’s The Unnamable, are in turn enacted by the narrating entity at the literal level of physical movement: “[T]his freedom to slip out and in at will, what does 99

100 102 105

Together with “First Sorrow” and “A Hunger Artist,” “A Little Woman” and “Josephine the Singer” were published a few months after Kafka’s death in the volume Ein Hungerkünstler. Vier Geschichten (Berlin: Verlag Die Schmiede, 1924). Kafka, Collected Stories, p. 485; Nachgelassene Schriften II, p. 604. 101 Ibid., p. 496; p. 621. Ibid., p. 496; p. 622. 103 Ibid., p. 501; p. 629. 104 Ibid., p. 492; p. 615. Ibid., p. 478; p. 593. 106 Ibid., p. 484; p. 603.

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it amount to? It is the mark of a restless nature [unruhigen Sinn], of inner uncertainty [unsichere Selbsteinschätzung], disreputable desires [unsaubere Gelüste], evil propensities.”107 This linguistic negativism reaches its most extreme form at the end of this (unfinished) narrative: The more I reflect upon it the more improbable [unwahrscheinlicher] does it seem to me that the beast has even heard me; it is possible, though I can’t imagine it [unvorstellbar], that it can have received news of me in some other way, but it has certainly never heard me [gehört hat es mich wohl nicht]. So long as I still knew nothing about it [nichts von ihm wußte], it simply cannot [überhaupt nicht] have heard me, for at that time I kept very quiet, nothing could be more quiet [es gibt nichts Stilleres] than my return to the burrow.108

While the linguistic negativism in “The Burrow” is extreme, it becomes even more intensive in “A Little Woman.” The use of the particle of negation nicht is unprecedentedly pervasive in this short story, often being deployed more than once in a given syntactical unit. Examples include the following remarks by the narrator: “I don’t say [will nicht sagen] that people wouldn’t believe me [nicht glauben würde]”;109 and “Now I cannot imagine [nicht vorstellen] that such a sharp-witted woman as she is does not understand as well as I do [nicht ebenso einsieht wie ich] both the hopelessness [Aussichtslosigkeit] of her own course of action and the helplessness [Unschuld] of mine, my inability [Unfähigkeit], with the best will in the world, to conform to her requirements.”110 In addition, the narrator’s discourse is marked by an intensive use of double negatives, including the expressions “not untidy” (nicht unordentlich); “not without trouble and care” (nicht ohne Mühe und Sorgfalt); “not profitless” (nicht ohne Nutzen); “I certainly won’t escape unharmed [nicht unbeschädigt]”; and “not unknown” (nicht unbekannt).111 This extensive use of the particle of negation, often in conjunction with a negative modifier, is reinforced by the repeated deployment of “nothing” (nichts). Regarding the central question of the woman’s perceived discontent (Unzufriedenheit) with the narrator, he declares that “nothing [nichts] can remove it, not even [nicht einmal] the removal of myself.”112 In other words, this Unzufriedenheit is absolute; even the complete negation of that against which this unword is directed (the narrator) would, he believes, fail to result in its negation. And yet, although he expects to be summoned for 107 109 111 112

Ibid., p. 482; p. 599. 108 Ibid., p. 503; pp. 631–32. Kafka, Collected Stories, p. 217; Drucke zu Lebzeiten, p. 326. 110 Ibid., p. 218; p. 328. Ibid., pp. 214, 217 (translation modified), 219, 220, 220; pp. 321, 327, 330, 332, 332. Ibid., p. 218; p. 328.

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judgment by the woman, the narrator must acknowledge that “there was no decisive moment [nichts von Entscheidung], no summons [nichts von Verantwortung], women faint easily, the world has no time [hat nicht Zeit] to notice all their doings.”113 For the narrator, then, the eponymous little woman embodies the power of the negative, above all in the form of her profound and unappeasable discontent with him. His assessment of her is that she is “very ill-pleased” (sehr unzufrieden) with him, and that her “discontent” (Unzufriedenheit) with him is “a fundamental one.”114 The narrator’s attempt to resist this ironically “little” incarnation of what is perceived to be a form of absolute negativity is itself articulated in the form of double negatives. In his defense, he asserts: “I am not so altogether useless a creature [kein so unnützer Mensch] as she thinks.”115 These double negatives locate the narrator’s resistance to the negative discursively within the very linguistic negativism against which it is directed, and, fatefully, unlike in mathematics, in Kafka’s work negations of the negative do not lead into the realm of the positive, but rather into deeper forms of the negative. In a manner that suggests a decidedly gendered dimension to Kafka’s unwording procedures, the linguistic negativism of “A Little Woman” is orientated, then, around the woman’s Unzufriedenheit and, for all his attempts to defend himself, what the narrator sees as his own incorrigibility (Unverbesserlichkeit) – these being the story’s twin poles of negation.116 Whereas his male figures tend to be beset by misfortune or calamity (Unglück), the female figure in “A Little Woman” is characterized by a discontent (Unzufriedenheit) directed toward a male figure; in other words, a form of nagging. The linguistic negativism in Kafka’s last work, the story “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk,” reflects a similar gendering, in that the core negativity here takes the form of the female singer’s own unmusicality (Unmusikalität); that is, a voice defined by its not being what it should be.117 That said, she becomes a figure of the artist as such, and this frustrates any simple gender mapping of the linguistic negativism in the story. In a manner that is even more extreme than in either “The Burrow” or “A Little Woman,” Kafka’s last work is characterized by the pervasive use of the particle of negation nicht. Of Josephine, the narrator declares that “Anyone who has not heard her [nicht gehört hat] does not know [kennt nicht] the power of song. There is no one but is carried away by her singing 113 116

Ibid., p. 219; pp. 330–31. 114 Ibid., pp. 214, 217–18; pp. 322, 328. Ibid., p. 216; p. 325. 117 Ibid., p. 234; p. 351.

115

Ibid., p. 216; p. 325.

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[den ihr Gesang nicht fortreißt], a tribute all the greater as we are not in general a music-loving race [als unser Geschlecht im ganzen Musik nicht liebt].”118 Of her singing, he asks: “Is it not perhaps [nicht vielleicht] just a piping?”119 He then answers his own rhetorical question: “[Y]ou will undoubtedly distinguish nothing [nichts anderes heraushören] but a quite ordinary piping tone.”120 Despite this, her singing proves to be a crowd pleaser, this too being articulated through a negation: “Josephine mostly needs to do nothing else [nichts anderes tun] than take up her stand.”121 While her singing may fail to achieve what it is supposed to achieve – namely, to save her “race” (Geschlecht) – “if it does not drive away the evil [Unglück], [it] at least gives us the strength to bear it.”122 The suggestion here regarding the limited power of Kafka’s own art of the negative is clear. The rhetorical negations of Josephine’s song as song – the repeated insistence that it is merely a form of piping or squeaking – are negated in a remarkable series of “not only” (nicht nur) constructions. These include the statements: “After all, it is [not] only a kind of piping [nicht nur Pfeifen] that she produces” and “if you sit down before her, it is not merely a piping [nicht nur ein Pfeifen].”123 Throughout the story, the narrator also relies on the extensive use of double negatives to state the ostensibly positive. Of Josephine’s art, for instance, he claims that it “does not go unnoticed [nicht unbeachtet],”124 and, of the Mouse Folk, that “people of such a kind cannot go in for unconditional devotion [kann immerhin nicht bedingungslos sich hingeben].”125 The linguistic negativity increases in intensity in the course of the narrative, and the use of nicht appropriately reaches its climax at the end of the story, with the total negation of the singer: “Josephine has vanished [verschwunden], she will not sing [sie will nicht singen]; she will not be cajoled into singing [nicht einmal darum gebeten werden], this time she has deserted us entirely.”126 In his posthumously published rewriting of the Greek myth of the sirens, “The Silence of the Sirens,” Kafka asserts that their fatally attractive power lies not in their song but in their silence, an idea by which Blanchot will in turn be struck.127 In “Josephine the Singer,” his narrator first questions whether the sound produced by Josephine is 118 121 123 125 127

Ibid., p. 233; p. 350. 119 Ibid., p. 234; p. 351. 120 Ibid., p. 234; p. 352. Ibid., p. 237; pp. 356–57. 122 Ibid., p. 239; p. 360. Ibid., p. 234 (translation modified), 234; p. 352. 124 Ibid., p. 240; p. 362. Ibid., p. 238; p. 358. 126 Ibid., p. 250; p. 376. See Kafka, Collected Stories, p. 398. Blanchot takes up “The Song of the Sirens” in the first part of The Book to Come, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), especially pp. 3–10; Le Livre à venir (Paris: Gallimard Folio, 1986), pp. 9–18.

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singing at all, and not merely a piping or squeaking (Pfeifen), and then, with her eventual refusal to sing, presents the reader with a complete retreat from the word. The description of that withdrawal entails a double negation because Josephine’s song is identified as a form of nothingness: “a mere nothing in voice, a mere nothing in execution [dieses Nichts an Stimme, dieses Nichts an Leistung].”128 It is with just such a nothing in voice, nothing in execution, that a number of European writers in the post–World War II world will engage so productively in their attempts to produce a literature of the unword. The relation between Josephine’s song and the narrative, and thus between Josephine and the implied author, is such that the force of the Nichts extends here to the entire work, which is placed under the sign of another key unword in the text: “senselessness” (Unsinnigkeit).129 The Mouse Folk’s “unexpended, ineradicable childishness” (unerstorbene unausrottbare Kindlichkeit) lies, ultimately, not simply in their being “unmusical” (unmusikalisch),130 but in the relation between this unmusicality and weariness or hopelessness, which manifests itself in Josephine’s singing of, and as, a Nichts: “We have no youth [keine Jugend], we are all at once grown-up, and then we stay grown-up too long, a certain weariness [Müdigkeit] and hopelessness [Hoffnungslosigkeit] spreading from that leaves a broad trail though our people’s nature, tough and strong in hope that it is in general. Our lack of musical gifts [Unmusikalität] has surely some connection with this.”131 In Kafka’s last story, then, the linguistic negativism is not simply a mode of expression, but also that which is expressed. The senselessness of singing the nothing is – precisely and paradoxically – the point. That reduction to “nothingness” (Nichtigkeit)132 which is enacted in the song through intensive linguistic negativism is, in its very senselessness, the reason for the song. Far more than a means, linguistic negativism is here an end in itself. If, in line with the obligation to perform the negative that is articulated in the Zürau aphorisms, Kafka commits himself to linguistic negativism to reach some form of affirmation, the double negatives that become increasingly prevalent in his work make it clear that there is no reassuringly dialectical movement through negation to affirmation. He begins and 128 130 131

132

Kafka, Collected Stories, p. 241; Drucke zu Lebzeiten, p. 362. 129 Ibid., p. 241; p. 362. Ibid., pp. 242, 233; pp. 264, 350–51. Ibid., p. 243; p. 365. For an analysis of the theme of exhaustion more generally in Western culture, see Anna Katharina Schaffner, Exhaustion: A History (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 2016). Kafka, Collected Stories, p. 243 (translation modified); Drucke zu Lebzeiten, p. 366.

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ends with Nichtigkeit, the difference between the two being that by the time of his final work Kafka not only performs the negative in the most intensive manner, but makes that performance of the negative the very matter, as well as the manner, of the work. The mere “nothing in voice” (Nichts an Stimme) becomes the song – the Nichts an Leistung. While Blanchot is right to argue that Kafka’s “entire work is in search of an affirmation that it wants to gain by negation [gagner par la négation],”133 that œuvre is shaped by an ever-greater commitment to linguistic negativism, to ever more intensive forms of unwording, which reach their most extreme form in the works written in the last year of his life, and climax not in affirmation but in the enacted silencing of song, the “nothing in voice” becoming the song. Kafka’s writings – and above all the texts written in the final year of his life, after World War I, the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the diagnosis of what would prove to be a fatal strain of tuberculosis – are thus the most fully realized instance of a literature of the unword in Europe in the period between World Wars I and II. His ever-greater commitment to linguistic negativism to communicate an experience of unknowing, insecurity, incapacity, and uninterpretability, and ultimately to turn unwording into the very matter of the work, makes him the major precursor for those writers in the post–World War II era who commit themselves to forms of linguistic negativism in response to a modernity perceived as catastrophic. Indeed, while, as we have seen, there are various manifestations of literary unwording in the interwar period, not least in Eliot and Broch, it is in Kafka’s late work that a literature of the unword first comes fully into being, and this, together with what, after World War II, was to seem such an astonishingly proleptic sense of the European catastrophe, and of the fate of the Jewish people in Europe, sets him apart from many of his contemporaries. It is no surprise that two of the most influential theorists of literature of the post–World War II period – Adorno and Blanchot – should have found in Kafka, and especially in the “Hunter Gracchus” fragments, a proleptic vision of the univers concentrationnaire.134 For both Adorno and Blanchot, writing after the 133 134

Maurice Blanchot, The Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 7; La Part du feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), pp. 14–15. On this concept, see David Rousset, L’Univers concentrationnaire (Paris: Éditions du Pavois, 1946). For a comparative analysis of Adorno’s and Blanchot’s negative aesthetics, see William S. Allen, Aesthetics of Negativity: Blanchot, Adorno, and Autonomy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016).

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revelation of the full horror of the Nazi death camps, the Gracchus experience of living death, or what might be termed not immortality but undeath, proleptically captures the destruction of the clear distinction between life and death, offering a terrifying vision of the living death to be experienced by so many in the Nazi concentration camps and, indeed, the Soviet gulags.135 In Kafka’s final works, then, one finds a literature of the unword in the service of a vision of humanity that challenges the fundamental distinctions between human and animal, animate and inanimate, the living and the dead. That which in Kafka’s work might well at the time have seemed to be fantastical, would all too soon become the most brutal of historical realities. With this in mind, there is one further unword that needs to be taken into account when considering Kafka’s linguistic negativism. The unword in question is “the indestructible” (das Unzerstörbare).136 Like the obligation to perform the negative, the concept of the indestructible is articulated in the Zürau aphorisms.137 In aphorism 70/71, Kafka asserts that this indestructible is “each individual human being and at the same time it is common to all, hence the unparalleled strength of the bonds that unite mankind [die spiellos untrennbare Verbindung der Menschen].”138 And yet the indestructible requires belief, and thus hope, and it is this very hope that is ultimately most troubling. If, as Kafka is reported as having remarked to Max Brod in 1922, he was of the view that human beings are merely “nihilistic thoughts that came into God’s head,” this does not rule out all hope, for, as Kafka goes on to clarify, human beings are not the sin committed by an evil demiurge (in accordance with Gnostic doctrine), but rather merely one of God’s “bad moods.” And thus, there is hope: “Plenty 135

136

137 138

According to Adorno, “In the concentration camps, the boundary between life and death was eradicated. A middleground was created, inhabited by living skeletons and putrefying bodies, victims unable to take their own lives. . . . Gracchus is the consummate refutation of the possibility banished from the world: to die after a long and full life” (“Notes on Kafka,” p. 260). According to Blanchot, the Gracchus story communicates the “impossibility of death” (impossibilité de la mort) (The Work of Fire, p. 7; La Part du feu, p. 8), which in turn becomes the principal theme of Blanchot’s own fiction (see Chapter 5). This experience is described with unparalleled power by Primo Levi in his remarks on the so-called Muslims (Muselmänner) in the Nazi extermination camps; see Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Summit Books, 1986). Following Ritchie Robertson’s lead, Harold Bloom emphasizes the centrality of the concept of the indestructible in Kafka’s work, seeing it as the “spiritual center” of his œuvre (Bloom, “Kafka,” p. 454). See Aphorisms 69, 70/71, and 74. Kafka, Collected Aphorisms, pp. 16–17; Nachgelassene Schriften II, pp. 128–29.

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of hope – for God – no end of hope – only not for us.”139 The commitment to the negative, then, cannot eradicate that hope, which lies beyond the world. The indestructible is at once there and not there, at once unreachable and ineradicable. It is for this reason that, as Blanchot observes, Kafka’s narratives “are among the darkest in literature, the most rooted in absolute disaster. And they are also the ones that torture hope the most tragically, not because hope is condemned but because it does not succeed in being condemned. However complete the catastrophe is, an infinitesimal margin survives; we do not know if it preserves hope or if, on the contrary, it dismisses it forever.”140 The proliferation and intensification of a literature of the unword in Europe in the post–World War II era owes so much to Kafka precisely because his is a literature of the dark times, in which beings (above all, human beings) can only be defined negatively, and in which, ironically, no amount of negativity can, for all its justification, reduce being to nothing, the animate to the inanimate, the properly living to the properly dead. What remains is a spectral, uncanny realm, the place in which the negative is the only form that hope can take. Kafka’s literature of the unword thus anticipates not only the historical catastrophe that was soon to befall European civilization, but also the manner in which several major European writers would respond in their work to that catastrophe. It is to the nature of that response that we may now turn, carrying with us the thought that, as Kafka puts it in his last story, while a literature of the unword may lack the power to drive away the “evil” (Unglück), it may just give one the strength to bear it.141 139 140 141

Kafka cited in Max Brod, The Biography of Franz Kafka, trans. G. Humphrey Roberts (London: Secker & Warburg, 1947), p. 61. Blanchot, The Work of Fire, p. 10; La Part du Feu, p. 18. Kafka, Collected Stories, p. 239; Drucke zu Lebzeiten, p. 360.

chapter 4

Humanity in Ruins: Samuel Beckett

The various avant-garde and modernist forms of linguistic renewal reached both their most demanding and their most sustained form in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, published only months before the outbreak of World War II. In this, Joyce’s final work, the interwar modernist response to the language crisis entails the creation of what is virtually a new language – a language of the night, according to Joyce. While having English as its base, this language draws on the verbal resources of a range of other European languages, and, through its underlying principle of paronomasia, generates a degree of semantic activity unprecedented in European literature. The compositional procedure behind this language entailed both accretion and condensation, and accorded with an encyclopedism that is reflected not only in the work’s inclusivity but also in a circularity that becomes apparent at the end, as the novel’s final sentence flows back into its opening sentence.1 Samuel Beckett was among the earliest and most enthusiastic advocates of Joyce’s linguistic strategies in Finnegans Wake. Indeed, Joyce represented both the principal model and the major obstacle for Beckett’s own literary aspirations in the early 1930s. Having been introduced to Joyce in 1928–29, during his time as a lecteur at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, and when Joyce was working on what was then known only as “Work in Progress,” Beckett contributed one of the most important early essays on Joyce’s new work to the volume Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, first published in 1929 by the Parisbased Shakespeare and Company. The remit of Beckett’s essay – entitled 1

As noted previously, Finn Fordham’s Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake: Unravelling Universals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) casts valuable light on the compositional procedures that resulted in this language. See also Luca Crispi and Sam Slote (eds.), How Joyce Wrote “Finnegans Wake”: A Chapter-by-Chapter Genetic Guide (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008); and Dirk Van Hulle, James Joyce’s “Work in Progress”: Pre-Book Publications of “Finnegans Wake” Fragments (Abingdon, UK, and New York: Routledge, 2016).

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“Dante . . . Bruno . Vico .. Joyce” – was to analyze the relation between Joyce’s work and Italian literature and thought. In so doing, Beckett not only celebrates Joyce’s method, but also makes clear his own profound commitment at that time to the latter’s project of linguistic renewal. In his essay on “Work in Progress,” Beckett emphasizes above all the intimate relation between form and content, language and world, that he sees being achieved by Joyce, a relation that is so close as to become an identity: Here form is content, content is form. You complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read – or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His [Joyce’s] writing is not about something; it is that something itself. . . . When the sense is sleep, the words go to sleep. (See the end of “Anna Livia”) When the sense is dancing, the words dance.2

The passage from what would in due course become Finnegans Wake to which Beckett is referring when he writes of the words going to sleep to reflect sleep at the level of content reads as follows in its 1930 version (published by Faber & Faber as Anna Livia Plurabelle): Can’t hear with the waters of. The chittering waters of. Flittering bats, fieldmice hawk talk. Ho! Are you not gone ahome? What Tom Malone? Can’t hear with bawk of bats, all the liffying waters of. Ho, talk save us! My foos won’t moos. I feel as old as yonder elm. A tale told of Shaun or Shem? All Livia’s daughtersons. Dark hawks hear us. Night! Night! My ho head halls. I feel as heavy as yonder stone. Tell me of John or Shaun? Who were Shem and Shaun the living sons or daughters of? Night now! Tell me, tell me, tell me, elm! Night night! Tellmetale of stem or stone. Beside the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of. Night!3

In this passage, which, as it happens, contains a reference to a figure whose name will feature in one of Beckett’s major postwar works – Malone Dies (1951) – the falling asleep of language is achieved most obviously through the interruptive, paratactic syntax, alliteration, assonance, and repetition. As for an example of a language that is “drunk,” and in which the “very words are tilted and effervescent,” Beckett supplies the following example:

2 3

Samuel Beckett, “Dante . . . Bruno . Vico .. Joyce,” in Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (New York: New Directions, 1962), pp. 1–22 (p. 14). James Joyce, Anna Livia Plurabelle (London: Faber & Faber, 1997), pp. 34–35. Anna Livia Plurabelle was published in 1928 by Crosby Gaige, and then by Faber & Faber in 1930. On this prebook publication, see Van Hulle, Joyce’s “Work in Progress,” ch. 4.

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Language and Negativity in European Modernism To stirr up love’s young fizz I tilt with this bridle’s cup champagne, dimming douce from her peepair of hideseeks tight squeezed on my snowybreasted and while my pearlies in their sparkling wisdom are nippling her bubblets I swear (and let you swear) by the bumper round of my poor old snaggletooth’s solidbowel I ne’er will prove I’m untrue to (theare!) you liking so long as my hole looks. Down.4

Here the intoxicating effects of alcohol are compounded with those of sexual desire not only at the level of the image – for instance, of champagne “bubblets” being “nippled” – but also in the flowing syntax, in stark contrast to the fragmenting parataxis of the passage from Anna Livia Plurabelle. While celebrating Joyce’s ability to bring form and content together in this way, and achieving a literature that is profoundly acoustic in nature,5 Beckett makes it clear that he does not consider this to be particular to modernist writing, but rather that it is the characteristic of the literary as such. Identifying both Shakespeare and Dickens as precursors of Joyce in this respect, Beckett argues that all three writers reject the idea of words as “‘polite symbols” – or, in Saussurean terms, as arbitrary signifiers. Instead, they seek to achieve an incarnation of meaning in the language that expresses it, thereby overcoming the arbitrariness of the sign: “‘Shakespeare uses fat, greasy words to express corruption. . . . We hear the ooze squelching all through Dickens’s description of the Thames in Great Expectations.”6 In this, Beckett echoes Mallarmé’s assertion that the “essential” language of literature is one that would “express objects by touches corresponding to them in shading or bearing.”7 Onomatopoeia becomes the dominant figure here. If Joyce differs from his modernist predecessors and peers, then it is in his achieving an identity between form and content that is so complete – Joyce’s writing “is not about something; it is that something itself ” – that the text becomes autotelic; its subject is the text, the reader being constantly reminded that the language is the work, its materiality the sole materiality. Nothing could be further from the idea of language as a mirror that reflects, or a window onto, the world. It is just such a language – the “savage economy of hieroglyphics,” as he puts it in his 1929 essay on Joyce – that Beckett seeks to achieve in his own 4 5

6 7

Beckett, “Dante . . . Bruno . Vico .. Joyce,” p. 14. On the acoustic in relation to European literature in the modern period, see Adam Piette, Remembering the Sound of Words: Mallarmé, Proust, Joyce, Beckett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Beckett, “Dante . . . Bruno . Vico .. Joyce,” p. 15. Stéphane Mallarmé, Divagations, trans. Barbara Johnson (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 205.

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earliest work, most extensively in his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women (written in 1931–32). In an unpunctuated passage from Dream that was published under the title “Text” in 1932, after Beckett had failed to find a publisher for the novel, the sexual nature of the content is incarnated in the language in a manner that clearly takes late Joyce as its model: Come come and cull me bonny bony doublebed cony swiftly my springal and my thin Kerry twingle-twangler comfort my days of roses days of beauty week of redness with mad shame to my lips of shame to my shamehill for the newest news the shemost of shenews is I’m lust-belepered and unwell oh I’d rather be a sparrow for my puckfisted coxcomb bird to bird and branch or a coalcave with goldy veins for my wicked doty’s potystick8

Even in Dream, however, Beckett can be seen beginning to take his distance from the aesthetic that underpins Joyce’s work, if only theoretically. For Dream’s protagonist, Belacqua (named after a figure in Dante’s Purgatorio who lacks the willpower to ascent Mount Purgatory and thereby achieve salvation) dreams less of “fair to middling women” than of producing a work that would be diametrically opposed to Joyce’s. The work in question would be shaped by an “aesthetic of inaudibilities,” a “dehiscent” art of the kind Belacqua believes to be have been achieved by Rimbaud and Beethoven, the “terms of whose statements serve merely to delimit the reality of insane areas of silence, whose audibilities are no more than punctuation in a statement of silences.”9 Bringing together literature and music – and, in this regard too, following Mallarmé, while also taking account of Schopenhauer’s privileging of music as the highest art form – Beckett adumbrates a new kind of literary work in which it is no longer the words but that which separates them – the gaps, the silences – that takes on the burden of signification: “The experience of my reader shall be between the phrases, in the silence, communicated by the intervals, not the terms, of the statement.”10 The contrast with Joyce could not be starker: Whereas Finnegans Wake operates above all through sound – paronomasia, alliteration, assonance – Beckett’s proposed work will operate through silence. The idea of what five years later, following his six-month period in Nazi Germany,11 Beckett will describe as a “literature of the unword” 8 9 10 11

Samuel Beckett, “Text,” in The Complete Short Prose, 1929–1989, ed. S. E. Gontarski (New York: Grove Press, 1995), p. 17 (p. 17). Samuel Beckett, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, ed. Eoin O’Brien and Édith Fournier (Dublin: The Black Cat Press, 1992), p. 102. Ibid., p. 137. For an analysis of Beckett’s activities and his engagement with German literature during his 1936–37 journey through Germany, see Mark Nixon, Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries, 1936–1937 (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011).

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(Literatur des Unworts) is already present, then, albeit as an idea rather than a practice, even in his most Joycean of works. Dream of Fair to Middling Women is far from being the realization of any such aesthetic of inaudibilities, and it is unsurprising that Beckett’s principal examples of artists who have achieved such an aesthetic are taken from the arts of painting (Rembrandt) and music (Beethoven) rather than from literature. However, in addition to Rimbaud, Beckett does also mention the poets Malherbe and Hölderlin in Dream, even though his familiarity with the German poet’s work, and indeed with the German language, was limited at the time of writing the novel. Significantly, that familiarity would be achieved during the 1930s, and Hölderlin’s late work would help to inform Beckett’s own literary practice from the 1940s onward, particularly in the ever more intensive parataxis to which Beckett resorts.12 The aesthetic that begins to emerge in Dream places the emphasis squarely upon disintegration rather than upon Joycean integration.13 In Rembrandt’s late portraits, for instance, Beckett’s protagonist discerns “a disaggregating, a disintegrating, an efflorescence, a breaking down and multiplication of tissue.”14 Similarly, in Beethoven’s early compositions there is a “punctuation of dehiscence,” while the composer’s later works are “eaten away with terrible silences.”15 This claim anticipates almost word for word the assessment of Beethoven that Beckett offers five years later, in his letter to Axel Kaun of July 9, 1937. If, in the identification of silence rather than sound, and of disintegration rather than integration, as the principles for a literary aesthetic, Beckett’s remarks in Dream signal a radical departure from the Joycean model for which he had been so full of praise only a few years earlier, they also include a proposed alternative to the Joycean model of a universal language that draws together the resources of a wide range of historical languages. That alternative is French – in other words, for Beckett, a foreign language: “Perhaps only the French language can give you the thing you want.”16 The “thing” wanted here can only be defined negatively – that is, to write “without style.” 12

13 14

On the Beckett–Hölderlin relation, see Nixon, Beckett’s German Diaries, ch. 4; and Dieter Henrich, Sein oder Nichts. Erkundungen um Samuel Beckett und Hölderlin (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2016). On parataxis in Hölderlin, see Theodor W. Adorno, “Parataxis: On Hölderlin’s Late Poetry,” in Notes to Literature, Volume Two, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicolsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), pp. 109–52. For an analysis of the various forms of disintegration in Beckett’s œuvre, see my “On the Principle of Disintegration in the Works of Samuel Beckett,” doctoral thesis, University of Oxford, 1999. Beckett, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, p. 138. 15 Ibid., pp. 138–39. 16 Ibid., p. 48.

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Why should French be the language for such a styleless writing? It may be the case that the French language is “poorer” than English in purely quantitative terms, but to suggest that Racine (one of Beckett’s models) writes without style is, of course, highly questionable. More persuasive is the idea that for Beckett/Belacqua to write in French – a foreign language – would be reduce not only his own word hoard but also the flair, the semantic richness, the allusiveness that would come more easily when writing in his mother tongue. It is precisely the idea of such a linguistic impoverishment that Beckett would in due course identify as his reason for turning to French immediately after World War II.17 The key point here is that, rather than creating a new, enriched, universal language of the kind Joyce seeks to produce in Finnegans Wake, Beckett indicates the possibility of a contrary move – toward an existing language that is, precisely, not his own, a language of which he is not fully the master and in which he will necessarily experience a certain impoverishment and distance.18 While Dream of Fair to Middling Women is, given its stylistic indebtedness to Joyce, anything but the work imagined by its protagonist, Beckett nonetheless continued throughout the 1930s to reflect upon the possibility of a literature that would be governed by the principles of disintegration (not least between word and world) and by language skepticism. When asked by Joyce in the course of the 1930s to read and take notes on Mauthner’s Beiträge,19 Beckett finally found the philosophical foundations to support his emergent aesthetic, which, as Dream reveals, was already being shaped by language skepticism in the early 1930s. Whereas the impact on Joyce of Mauthner’s critique of language would be minimal – 17 18

19

On this aesthetic of impoverishment, see Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). For a comparative analysis of Beckett’s and Joyce’s compositional procedures, see Dirk Van Hulle, Manuscript Genetics: Joyce’s Know-How, Beckett’s Nohow (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2009), and “‘Nichtsnichtsundnichts’: Beckett’s and Joyce’s Transtextual Undoings,” in Colleen Jaurretche, Beckett, Joyce and the Art of the Negative, European Joyce Studies 16 (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2011), pp. 52–61. The precise dating of Beckett’s reading of Mauthner’s Beiträge has yet to be established. However, there are grounds for dating it as occurring after his trip to Germany in 1936–37, and even after his having written the July 1937 letter to Axel Kaun, despite the remarkable similarities between some of the formulations in that letter and passages in Mauthner, including the reference to medieval nominalism and the use of the term Unwort, which is closely akin to Mauthner’s idea of the Nichtwort. For analyses of Beckett’s reading of Mauthner, and the dating thereof, see: Geert Lernout, “James Joyce and Fritz Mauthner and Samuel Beckett,” in Friedhelm Rathjen (ed.), In Principle, Beckett Is Joyce (Edinburgh: Split Pea Press, 1994), pp. 21–27; Dirk Van Hulle, “Beckett – Mauthner – Zimmer – Joyce,” in Thomas F. Staley (ed.), Joyce Studies Annual 10 (Summer 1999): 143–83; Matthew Feldman, Beckett’s Books: A Cultural History of Samuel Beckett’s “Interwar Notes” (London and New York: Continuum, 2006), pp. 137–46; and Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon, Samuel Beckett’s Library (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 158–63.

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because Joyce had already found his way toward a model of linguistic renewal that served as a powerful reaction to language skepticism, making the word itself the world, rather than seeking to abolish the word to break through to the world – the impact of that language critique in its championing of the “unword” or “not-word” (Nichtwort) on Beckett would be profound, confirming and strengthening his sense that a gulf divides word and world, and that it is the role of literature not to bridge that gulf, not to repair the damage, and not (as with Joyce) to replace world by word, but rather to make the work the experience and, indeed, the enactment of that gulf between word and world.20 This conception of literature as insisting upon, rather than overcoming, the breakdown between word and world, language and experience, is further developed in Beckett’s reflections on literature and art in the 1930s, in which he seeks precursors in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European literature. Having celebrated the work of one of the towering figures of modernism in his essay on Joyce’s “Work in Progress,” only to signal two years later in his first novel the need for a radical departure from the kind of linguistic renewal undertaken by Joyce, with a turn away from language to silence as that which takes on the signifying function, Beckett immediately turned to celebrate the work of another major figure on the European modernist landscape: Marcel Proust. In his short book on Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, published in 1931, only four years after the publication of Time Regained, Beckett argues that Proust’s aesthetic is in fact, for all the linguistic proliferation, for all the extended metaphors, shaped by a negative aesthetic: “The artist,” he asserts, “is active, but negatively, shrinking from the nullity of extracircumferential phenomena, drawn in to the core of the eddy.”21 Beckett also takes the opportunity in his book on Proust to articulate in the most unambiguous terms a radical language skepticism: “There is no communication because there are no vehicles of communication.”22 Beckett’s conception of Proust in the 1931 book is strongly under the influence of Schopenhauer – in his emphasis upon boredom and suffering, habit, the will, and the relation between music

20

21 22

In a letter to Hans Naumann dated February 17, 1954, Beckett states that he was “greatly impressed” (fortement impressionné) by Mauthner’s Beiträge when he read it in the 1930s (The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume II: 1941–1956, ed. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More Overbeck [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011], pp. 461, 465). Samuel Beckett, Proust and Three Dialogues (London: John Calder, 1987), pp. 65–66. Ibid., p. 64.

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and literature.23 No less striking is Beckett’s turning of Proust into a writer whose work is shaped by a labor of the negative, an argument that might have been more appropriately made of Kafka, with whose work Beckett was not yet familiar. After Proust and Dream of Fair to Middling Women, Beckett’s adumbration of an aesthetic of the negative continues in reviews and essays written in the mid-1930s, during his time in London. In his 1934 review of contemporary Irish poetry, for instance, he distinguishes between the “antiquarian” and the writer who recognizes the unbridgeable divide between subject and object. Rather than seeking to overcome that division through some form of linguistic renewal, the non-“antiquarian” or genuinely modern writer accepts the “rupture of the lines of communication” for what it is, and takes it as an aesthetic obligation to “state the space that intervenes between him and the world of objects.”24 Writers who, according to Beckett, have sought to state this rupture, and thus to abandon the attempt to find a language that would counter the language-skeptical insight, are principally French – Tristan Corbière, Arthur Rimbaud, Jules Laforgue, and the surrealists – this judgment in part reflecting Beckett’s greater familiarity with French over any other European literature at that time. However, T. S. Eliot, himself profoundly influenced by French poetry, especially Laforgue, is also named, Beckett’s appreciation of The Waste Land in particular being considerable.25 Another writer identified by Beckett as committing himself to this new response to the rupture between mind and world is the Irish playwright Sean O’Casey, whose work “communicates most fully this dramatic dehiscence, mind and world come asunder in irreparable dissociation.”26 While this compliment would not be reciprocated by O’Casey, it does indicate a path that Beckett would in due course follow, namely into drama, where the possibility of punctuating language with silence is far more easily realizable than it is in prose.27 23

24 25 26 27

Beckett was reading Schopenhauer shortly before writing the Proust monograph. For an analysis of Schopenhauer’s influence on Beckett’s reading of Proust, see Nicholas Zurbrugg, Beckett and Proust (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1988). Samuel Beckett, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (London: John Calder, 1983), p. 70. Beckett imitated Eliot’s practice in The Waste Land by supplying notes of a particularly playful kind to his first published poem, Whoroscope (1930). Beckett, Disjecta, p. 82. This is not to suggest that silence does not play a significant role in Beckett’s prose works: see, for instance, Elizabeth Marie Loevlie, Literary Silences in Pascal, Rousseau, and Beckett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), ch. 6 (“Literary Silence in Beckett’s Trilogy”); and Duncan McColl Chesney, Silence Nowhen: Late Modernism, Minimalism, and Silence in the Work of Samuel Beckett (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2013).

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Beckett’s emerging aesthetic of the negative, in which the writer’s aim becomes not to achieve a form of linguistic renewal that would overcome the perceived breakdown in the relation between word and world, but to enact a form of language critique, reaches its fullest articulation in his July 1937 letter to Axel Kaun, whose acquaintance he had made during his trip to Germany in 1936–37, a trip undertaken with the primary intention of viewing works of art in many of the country’s major museums.28 The Germany that Beckett encountered was, of course, very different from the one in which he had spent time with his extended family in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and Beckett’s experience of Nazi Germany was one that would bear significantly not only upon his political outlook, but also upon his conception of the role of art and literature. Returning in the 1937 letter to Kaun to ideas, and indeed examples, already present in Dream of Fair to Middling Women, Beckett states that, far from being a means of communication or a way of mapping the world, language is in fact a “veil” (Schleier) or “mask” (Larve) that obstructs any access to the world. Rather than a reinvigoration of language of the kind undertaken most radically by Joyce, Beckett insists that the solution can only lie in the destruction of language. He declares that he “cannot imagine a higher goal for today’s writer” than a form of linguistic destruction that would enable that which “lurks behind” language, “be it something or nothing,” to start “seeping through.”29 Whereas, in his 1929 essay on Joyce, he celebrates the materiality of language, he now sees that very materiality as “terrifyingly arbitrary,” something to be torn open, drilled through, or dissolved. As in Dream, so in this letter, Beckett resorts to a nonliterary art (music) for an example: In Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony the sound surface is, he asserts, punctured by “huge black pauses,” leaving only “a dizzying path of sounds connecting unfathomable chasms of silence.”30 It is hardly surprising that Beckett should turn to music again here, given

28

29

30

On Beckett’s negative aesthetics, see especially Jean-Michel Rabaté, “Beckett’s Negative Esthetics,” in Colleen Jaurretche, Beckett, Joyce and the Art of the Negative, European Joyce Studies 16 (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2011), pp. 181–96. See also Richard Ellmann, Samuel Beckett: Nayman of Noland (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1986); reprinted in Four Dubliners: Oscar Wilde, William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett (New York: George Braziller, 1988), pp. 79–104; and my A Taste for the Negative: Beckett and Nihilism (Oxford: Legenda, 2005). Samuel Beckett, The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume I: 1929–1940, ed. Martha Fehsenfeld and Lois Overbeck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 518 (English); pp. 513–14 (German). Ibid., pp. 518–19; p. 514.

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that the writer is, in principle, entirely dependent on the very language against which Beckett believes he must turn. The aesthetic position that Beckett articulates in the letter to Kaun is, then, in key respects antithetical to the one taken in his 1929 essay on Joyce. It is a position that evolves in the course of the 1930s, and for which Beckett seeks a number of literary precurors, including Racine, Hölderlin, Rimbaud, Corbière, Laforgue, and Eliot, while identifying Gertrude Stein as a contemporary writer whose works “come close” to what he has in mind.31 Beckett fully appreciates the aesthetic distance traveled since 1929, contrasting, as he does, what he terms a “literature of the unword” (Literatur des Unworts) with what he sees as Joyce’s “apotheosis of the word” (Apotheose des Wortes).32 While it is possible that he had not read Mauthner’s Beiträge at the time he articulated his conception of a literature of the unword, the linguistic procedure for which he calls is completely in accord with Mauthner’s.33 Beckett’s metaphor of boring holes in language is certainly one that can be reconciled with literary practice. Mallarmé’s spatializing of the text of A Throw of the Dice, Dada’s disruptive play with typographical fonts and its own spatializing techniques, the forms of spatialization adopted in the post–World War II era by the concrete poets, as well as the French poets André du Bouchet and Anne-Marie Albiach, might all be seen as offering models of such a practice. However, the dissolution of language advocated by Beckett in the letter to Kaun, as well as his championing, in another letter written in the same month, of what he terms a “Logoclasts’ League” that would practice a form of “ruptured writing,”34 suggests something of a distinct nature. It is hardly surprising, then, that, having cited Gertrude Stein as a possible exemplar, Beckett should conclude his letter by admitting that he finds himself currently unable to practice such a literature of the unword: “In the meantime I am doing nothing” (Inzwischen mache ich gar nichts).35

31 32 33

34

Beckett refers to what he terms Stein’s “Logographs” (Logographen) rather than to any specific work (see ibid., p. 519; p. 515). Ibid., pp. 520, 519; p. 515 (translation modified). In the letter to Hans Naumann in which he states that he was “greatly impressed” by Mauthner’s work, Beckett also highlights the fact that he sees his own literary path as being antithetical to Joyce’s: “I still think of him [Joyce] as one of the greatest literary geniuses of all time. But I believe I felt very early on that the thing that drew me and the means I could call on were virtually the opposite of his thing and his means [pratiquement à l’opposé de sa chose et de ses moyens à lui]” (Beckett, Letters, Volume II, pp. 461, 463). See Beckett, Letters, Volume I, p. 521. 35 Ibid., p. 520; p. 516.

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The “word-storming” (Wörterstürmerei) that Beckett advocates in the letter to Kaun is justified by a language skepticism so radical that it beggars any attempt to achieve a countering linguistic renewal of the kind that Beckett finds in Joyce.36 This is the moment, then, when the commitment to such renewal is dismissed because of its failure to recognize the radical nature of the problem. Beckett’s letter is as telling, however, for what it does not say as for what it does. For he gives no indication as to why language – or, more precisely, what he terms “my language” (meine Sprache)37 – should block rather than reveal the world, prevent rather than ensure the effective communication of experience. That indication comes only eight years later, at the end of World War II, when Beckett’s relatively brief experience of Nazi Germany had been complemented by his experience of war, occupation, life in the French Resistance, and the destruction wrought upon European civilization by the forces of political darkness that had arisen from the very heart of Europe. The letter to Kaun was written after Beckett had finished the first novel for which he managed to find a publisher: Murphy (completed in 1936; published in 1938). The language of Murphy already constitutes a move away from the Joyce-inspired prose of Dream of Fair to Middling Women and parts of the short-story collection born out of that failed novel, More Pricks Than Kicks (published in 1934). Indeed, the perfectly structured opening sentence of Murphy reveals Beckett beginning to commit himself to linguistic negativism: “The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.”38 However, the real impact of Beckett’s new conception of language as obstruction, and of the writer’s task in relation to that language, only becomes apparent following the outbreak of World War II, with the writing of the novel Watt between 1940 and 1945. In all likelihood, the sustained reading of Mauthner’s Beiträge, as well as of Hölderlin, whose works he read in 1938–39, helped Beckett to move slowly, but irreversibly, toward a practice of what would in due course become a literature of fullblown linguistic negativism no less radical than Kafka’s. In Beckett’s case, that linguistic negativism would be shaped by a necessity to negate the word alongside a recognition that, for the writer, any such negation is in principle impossible. It is in the face of this impossibility that the kind of language critique envisaged by Mauthner would prove decisive for Beckett. For Mauthner points to what he sees as Goethe’s ironic use of language in Poetry and Truth, with an implicit “so-called” (sogenannt) operative alongside 36 38

Ibid., p. 520; p. 515. 37 Ibid., p. 518; p. 513. Samuel Beckett, Murphy, ed. J. C. C. Mays (London: Faber & Faber, 2010), p. 3.

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every word. Just such a practice would be taken to an extreme in one of Beckett’s last works, Worstward Ho (1983), where Mauthner’s Goetheinspired idea of the “so-called” is evident from the outset: “On. Say on. Be said on.”39 That it might in fact be impossible to achieve a rending of the language veil, to reach, and thus to express, that which lies beyond it, is already suggested in the letter to Kaun, and then emphatically stated in Watt, in which one finds the following judgment on the matter: “[W]hat we know partakes in no small measure of the nature of what has so happily been called the unutterable or ineffable, so that any attempt to utter or eff it is doomed to fail, doomed, doomed to fail.”40 Ironically, this assertion is made – by a character named Arsene, who is Watt’s predecessor in the Knott household – at the end of a “statement” that is described before it is delivered as “short,” but that extends over more than twenty pages.41 The irony here is akin to that in Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos Letter, in which considerable eloquence serves the purpose of dismissing language. Beckett’s Watt experiences a severe language crisis when he enters the Knott household, in which all the habitual ways of making sense of the world and of communicating that sense break down: For Watt now found himself in the midst of things which, if they consented to be named, did so as it were with reluctance. . . . Looking at a pot, for example, or thinking of a pot, at one of Mr Knott’s pots, of one of Mr Knott’s, pots, it was in vain that Watt said, Pot, pot. Well, perhaps not quite in vain, but very nearly. For it was not a pot, the more he looked, the more he reflected, the more he felt sure of that, that it was not a pot at all. It resembled a pot, it was almost a pot, but it was not a pot of which one could say, Pot, pot, and be comforted.42

Here, in striking contrast to Beckett’s earlier work, linguistic failure is not simply stated, but also beginning to be enacted, principally through repetition and parataxis. Indeed, the effects of Beckett’s use of the comma in Watt include an extraordinary linguistic disaggregation that is profoundly nominalist in spirit. The sense that the negation of language is as impossible as it is necessary becomes increasingly prominent in Beckett’s critical writing in the late 1940s, particularly in his essays on the work of the contemporary Dutch 39 40 41

Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho, in Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho, Stirrings Still, ed. Dirk Van Hulle (London: Faber & Faber, 2009), pp. 79–103 (p. 81). Samuel Beckett, Watt, ed. C. J. Ackerley (London: Faber & Faber, 2009), pp. 52–53. Ibid., p. 31. 42 Ibid., p. 67.

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painters Geer and Bram van Velde. In “Peintres de l’empêchement” (“Painters of the Impediment,” 1948), his second substantial article on the van Velde brothers, Beckett argues that art must originate in the recognition that the “object of representation always resists representation,” and that the artist’s obligation is to recognize this resistance for what it is – absolute – rather than seeking to overcome it.43 Instead of succumbing to the “old naïvety” – that is, the belief that representation is possible, and that the gap between subject and object, word (or image) and world, can be overcome – the artist must seek to paint that resistance; in other words, to paint “that which prevents painting” (ce qui empêche de peindre).44 Thus the impossibility of representation becomes the subject of the work. Beckett does not, however, rest happy with this formulation for very long because it could be seen to sideline, if not negate, that sense of necessity that must accompany the sense of impossibility. Hence, one year later, in his dialog with Georges Duthuit on the work of the painter Pierre Tal Coat, Beckett reformulates his conception of the artist’s predicament as follows: “The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, together with the obligation to express.”45 As we have seen, this formulation bears a remarkable similarity to earlier formulations by Kafka (in 1921) and Blanchot (in 1943). Beckett would later reflect on more than one occasion on the relation between his work and Kafka’s in terms that suggest both a continuity and an exacerbation. In a letter written in 1954, for instance, he states that he “felt at home, perhaps too much so” when reading Kafka, before adding that he had been “disturbed” by what he felt to be the “imperturbable aspect” of Kafka’s work; Beckett was “wary of disasters that let themselves be recorded like a statement of accounts.”46 In his other recorded comments on Kafka, Beckett reiterates this claim that Kafka’s prose remains unaffected by, and thus at odds with, the “disasters” that it records. In 1956, for instance, he remarks that Kafka’s form is “classic,” in that “it goes on like a steamroller – almost serene. It seems to be threatened the whole time – but the consternation is in the form.” In contrast, in his own work “there is consternation behind the form, not in the form.”47 Not 43 45 46 47

44 Beckett, Disjecta, p. 135 (my translation). Ibid., p. 136. Beckett, Proust and Three Dialogues, p. 103. Samuel Beckett, letter to Hans Naumann, February 17, 1954, in The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume II, pp. 462, 464–65. Samuel Beckett, in Israel Shenker, “Moody Man of Letters: A Portrait of Samuel Beckett,” New York Times, May 5, 1956, Section II, 1, 3; reprinted in Lawrence Graver and

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only is this a questionable assessment of Kafka’s prose style, it also suggests a contradiction in Beckett’s appreciation of Kafka’s work: On the one hand, Kafka’s style is too “serene,” while on the other hand, there is “consternation” in the form. What is clear, however, is that Beckett was struck by just how close his own work was to Kafka’s, even to the point of his having to stop reading him.48 Furthermore, his remarks on Kafka make it clear that Beckett sought to find a literary form that would be profoundly affected by the “disasters” that it describes, and that his work had to be not a “statement of accounts” but an enactment of ruination, of figures who are “falling to bits.”49 The key difference between Beckett’s own two formulations of the artist’s predicament, in 1948 and then in 1949, is that in the latter there can be no sense of achievement, no sense that stating the impossibility of expression – or, for the writer, the failure of language – is sufficient. Rather, the task becomes an interminable labor of the negative, a process of unwording that cannot anticipate any satisfactory end, at which either the “impossibility of expression” or the “obligation to express” would have been overcome. The writer’s experience is thus shaped both by the impossibility of expression – that is, of language achieving effective expression – and by the obligation to keep trying to find a way to achieve that very expression. For Beckett, that such an undertaking might seem to be pure folly is far from being a reason not to pursue it. Beckett’s postwar linguistic negativism emerges out of the collision of this sense of necessity and impossibility. It is the attempt to achieve the impossible: to produce a literature of the unword that would enable that which lies beyond language to emerge and to escape from what Mauthner terms “word fetishism” in the interests of that which lies beyond language. It is, in short, the pursuit of what Mauthner terms the “not-word” (Nichtwort).50 Within the literary work, this pursuit becomes a performance of the negative, the undoing of language through language.

48

49

50

Raymond Federman (eds.), Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), pp. 146–49 (p. 148). The similarities between Kafka’s and Beckett’s work have attracted considerable critical attention, and the two writers are often seen as belonging together within a particular modern literary tradition, although not one characterized by similar forms of linguistic negativism. A recent attempt to draw out the connections between the two writers is Jeff Fort’s The Imperative to Write: Destitutions of the Sublime in Kafka, Blanchot, and Beckett (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014). Ibid. For a recent assessment of Beckett’s œuvre that takes account of his distinction between his own approach and Kafka’s, and that develops the idea of an artistic “mismaking,” see Leland de la Durantaye, Beckett’s Art of Mismaking (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). Mauthner, Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache, 3 vols. (Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1923), vol. I, p. 83.

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And, crucially, in the post–World War II period, this procedure is not simply undertaken in the interests of some theoretical or philosophical principle. Rather, it is informed at the very deepest level by what Beckett in 1946, following his experience of World War II and, especially, of the ruination resulting from that war, describes as a vision of “humanity in ruins.”51 While it is certainly the case that Beckett’s preoccupation with suffering, and consequently a deeply pessimistic vision of the human condition, predates his own personal experience of the European catastrophe, and was informed not least by his reading of Schopenhauer in 1930, as well as of Plümacher’s Der Pessimismus in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart (“Pessimism Past and Present,” 1888),52 his vision of the human in his post–World War II work is not only considerably darker, but one in which images of ruination are pervasive. While Beckett rarely makes explicit reference to that historical moment, his correspondence reveals his abiding recollection of it. In a letter written in May 1977, for instance, he refers, in relation to the novel Watt (written between 1940 and 1945), to “the horrors of that hateful time.”53 While Beckett may have seen the writing of Watt as an “escape operation” from those horrors,54 his later works are, as Adorno recognized, anything but attempts to evade a confrontation with the worst. It is hardly surprising that the first audiences of Endgame (1957) should have been led to conclude that the refuge in which the characters find themselves, and the desolate world beyond it (never seen by the audience), was conceived in the light of contemporary history. Likewise, the ruinous landscapes in prose works such as Afar a Bird (first published in French as Au loin un oiseau in 1976, but possibly written as early as the mid-1950s) and Lessness (1970; first published in French as Sans in 1969) recall Beckett’s earlier description of the town of Saint-Lô as the “capital of the ruins” in 1946. It is as though European history had simply confirmed Beckett’s deeply pessimistic conception of the human, and, in so doing, prompted ever darker visions, in which the humor becomes ever more minimal and the linguistic negativism ever more pervasive. Evidence that Beckett did indeed take account of historical specificities in his conception of “humanity in ruins” is to be found in the record of his 51 52 53 54

Beckett, “The Capital of the Ruins,” in The Complete Short Prose, p. 278. See Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon, Samuel Beckett’s Library (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume IV: 1966–1989, ed. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More Overbeck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), p. 460. Ibid.

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conversation with the journalist Israel Shenker in 1956. Returning to the antithesis that he sets up between his work and Joyce’s in his 1937 letter to Kaun, Beckett describes Joyce as “tending toward omniscience and omnipotence as an artist,” while Beckett sees himself as “working with impotence, ignorance.” He then proceeds to justify this privileging of impotence and ignorance on the grounds that “anyone nowadays who pays the slightest attention to his own experience finds it the experience of a nonknower, a non-can-er.”55 The “nowadays” to which he refers here separates him historically from Joyce, whose work was completed prior to the horrors that would be visited on Europe between 1939 and 1945, a time during which, as Beckett would later put it, the world had suddenly become “provisional.”56 Nothing could be more appropriate to Beckett’s vision of humanity in ruins than forms of linguistic negativism that insist, unceasingly, on the failure of the word to capture an experience that challenges the Enlightenment conception of human beings as rational entities with the capacity to shape a history that is essentially a progress toward ever greater freedom, knowledge, and civilization. Beckett’s vision is of a humanity stripped of just such illusions, a humanity that is brought face to face with its irrationality, its barbarity, its neediness, as well as its neglect of the needs of other beings – and not only human beings.57 Beckett’s vision is, then, not just of humanity in dark times; it is of the many darknesses that lie, irreducibly, within the human. The language of those darknesses is the language of Beckett’s literature of the unword. In Watt, Beckett clearly states linguistic failure, insisting on the resistance posed by the “ineffable.” This linguistic failure is reflected in the language of the novel – the last that Beckett was to write in English – in ways that are very much in line with Mauthner’s conception of ironic language use, as exemplified by Goethe in Poetry and Truth. The techniques employed by Beckett in Watt – a novel the writing of which took longer than that of any of his other novels, and that entailed very considerable revision (as evidenced by the differences between the original notebook versions and the published text) – include an extraordinarily high degree of repetition at the level of phrases, an intensive use of 55 56

57

Beckett, in Shenker, “Moody Man of Letters,” p. 148. For an analysis of Beckett’s prewar work, and of the transitional period between the Fall of France in 1940 and the end of the war, see John Pilling, Beckett before Godot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). On Beckett’s abiding interest in animals, and in the suffering inflicted upon them by human beings, see Mary Bryden (ed.), Beckett and Animals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

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the splice comma (producing an often ironically paratactical syntax), as well as lacunae in the text, signaled by references to the “MS” (manuscript).58 In the second part of the novel Molloy (written in 1947, published in 1951), which recounts in the first person the travails of a certain Jacques Moran as he seeks to locate Molloy, Beckett employs a different strategy. Moran’s narration opens with the seemingly unambiguous and reassuringly representational statement: “It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows.”59 Following the recounting of the failed attempt to locate Molloy and the rapid physical decline of Moran, however, the narrative ends with Moran declaring: “Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining.”60 The narrator thereby negates not just the opening of the narrative but, by extension, his entire account. The words on which the reader has relied are suddenly detached from any referent, the gulf between word and world opens, and the reader is left irretrievably suspended, in no position to determine what is representationally reliable and what is not. The language crisis is thus experienced directly by the reader. The novel that follows Molloy, and that takes up the name encountered by Beckett in Joyce – Malone Dies (also published in 1951) – relies on a technique already exploited in Watt, namely narrative interruption, a breakdown in language when the dying narrator’s drops his pencil or falls asleep. Beyond such interruptions, the novel ends with a syntactical disintegration designed to capture the dissolution of the narrator’s consciousness as he dies, as well as the homicidal violence being committed by the character of Lemuel, a figure who merges with that of Malone the narrator as well as the novel’s author: Lemuel is in charge, he raises his hatchet on which the blood will never dry, but not to hit anyone, he will not hit anyone, he will not hit anyone any more, he will not touch anyone any more, either with it or with it or with it or with or or with it or with his hammer or with his stick or with his fist or in thought in dream or with his pencil or with his stick or or light light I mean 58 59 60

See Beckett, Watt, pp. 25, 197. Samuel Beckett, Molloy, ed. Shane Weller (London: Faber & Faber, 2010), p. 95; Molloy (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1951), p. 153. Ibid., p. 184; p. 293.

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never there he will never never anything there any more61

Malone Dies ends, then, with the negation of the novel’s characters, of the diegetic levels, of the distinction between text and world, and ultimately of both being and language. The full impact of language skepticism – informed by the reading of Mauthner, and above all by the latter’s insistence that all language is metaphorical and that we never manage to get beyond these metaphors to the extralinguistic reality to which they are supposed, albeit indirectly, to refer – is only to be felt, however, in the novel with which Beckett concluded his series of three novels (in French) written between 1946 and 1950, after having completed the scripts for two plays: Eleutheria and Waiting for Godot. The work in question is entitled, appropriately enough, The Unnamable, and it was first published as L’Innommable in 1953, Beckett’s own English translation appearing in 1959. The manuscript of Beckett’s English translation reveals that before deciding on the final version of the title for the English version, he considered the possibility of it being “Beyond Words.”62 In The Unnamable, Beckett for the first time explores from the inside the impossible situation created by a decidedly Mauthnerian principle: a speaker seeking to describe where, when, and who or what he is, and yet, in rigorously Mauthnerian fashion, rejecting every linguistic selfidentification as no more than a metaphor that fails to capture reality. The novel’s narrator is thus trapped in words that are never the right ones to describe his experience. Seeking more appropriate words, and ultimately seeking to go beyond words altogether, to grasp the nature of where, when, and who or what he is, this narrator finds himself obliged to rely on the very language that repeatedly fails him. The paradox that remains latent in Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos Letter – with its decidedly eloquent condemnation of language – becomes in Beckett’s novel a cause for tortured linguistic negativism. Writing to undo language to reach that what lies beyond it – the “unnamable” for which not only no name, but also no

61 62

Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies, ed. Peter Boxall (London: Faber & Faber, 2010), p. 119; Malone meurt (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1951), p. 191. See Dirk Van Hulle and Shane Weller, The Making of Samuel Beckett’s “L’Innommable”/ “The Unnamable” (Antwerp and London: University Press Antwerp/Bloomsbury, 2014), p. 39.

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pronoun (least of all “I”),63 is the right one – Beckett makes of this impossibility, and of the necessity to keep struggling against it, the very matter of his text. The aporetic nature of the predicament explored in The Unnamable is manifest most clearly in the vacillation between the antithetical positions taken by the narrator regarding what constitutes him. On the one hand, he is led to conclude that he is nothing but words, a purely linguistic entity: I’m in words, made of words, others’ words [je suis en mots, je suis fait de mots, des mots des autres] . . . I’m all these words, all these strangers, this dust of words, with no ground for their settling, no sky for their dispersal, coming together to say, fleeing one another to say, that I am they, all of them, those that merge, those that part, those that never meet, and nothing else.

And yet, on the other hand, he is indeed “something else” (autre chose) – “something quite different, a quite different thing, a wordless thing [une chose muette] in an empty place.”64 The novel offers no resolution to this ambiguity, and ends with the narrator committing to the impossible search for the right words to describe himself: you must say words [il faut dire des mots], as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me. . . , perhaps it’s done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on [il faut continuer, je ne peux pas continuer, je vais continuer].65

The identifications proposed by Beckett’s narrator prove to be a series of failures, each identification being exposed sooner or later as a metaphor that does not capture the reality of who, when, and where he is. At the thematic level, The Unnamable focuses on linguistic failure and linguistic self-decomposition far more extensively than does any of Beckett’s earlier works. Indeed, the entire novel unfolds in Mauthnerian fashion as the positing and then the rejection of a series of metaphors. The narrator begins by rejecting past metaphors for himself – Murphy, Watt, MercierCamier, Molloy, Moran, and Malone – before positing a series of new metaphors, each of which will be rejected during the stream of words from 63 64 65

See Daniel Katz, Saying “I” No More: Subjectivity and Consciousness in the Prose of Samuel Beckett (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999). Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable, ed. Steven Connor (London: Faber & Faber, 2010), p. 104; L’Innommable (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1992), p. 166. Ibid., p. 134; p. 213.

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which he is unable to free himself. These metaphors include the figures of Basil, Mahood, Worm, a tympanum, an entirely linguistic entity, and an entirely alinguistic one – an abstract “wordless thing.” The Unnamable is, then, a novel in which, as Mauthner has it, the “gates of truth” lead “beyond the world and beyond thought into emptiness” (aus der Welt und dem Denken hinaus ins Leere). And yet, even the void threatens to serve as one last metaphor, hence Beckett’s insistence on aporia and the need to “go on” with the labor of self-identification in language even though that labor is seen as impossible and, as his narrator often declares, the real aim is not language at all, but silence. For his “unnamable” speaker, the beyond of language (or what he terms “real silence”) remains “unimaginable unthinkable,” precisely because any imagining or thinking of it would render it one more metaphor, one more instance of word fetishism – a mistaking of the word for the extralinguistic reality to which it is supposed to refer. If The Unnamable is an essentially Mauthnerian exercise in the destruction of word fetishism at the macrological level, Beckett also engages in forms of linguistic negativism at the micrological level – that is, in the syntax and lexis – and it is at this level that he achieves a linguistic negativism as radical as Kafka’s. The novel becomes a sustained exercise in epanorthosis, with statement after statement being proposed only to be revised. These statements are themselves characterized by intensive unwordings, both in the original French and, even more markedly, in Beckett’s English translation, which took him considerably longer to produce than did the original novel.66 At the micrological level, one of the most obvious ways in which linguistic self-decomposition is enacted in The Unnamable is using negative affixes to produce negative modifiers, in a manner that is strikingly similar to Kafka’s from The Trial onward. In Beckett’s English translation the principal negative affixes are un-, in-, and -less. The most frequently used unwords in The Unnamable are “unable,” “incapable,” “inability,” “unfortunate,” “unintelligible,” “unhappy,” “unceasing,” “incessant,” “unchanging,” and “indifferent.” The narrator’s insistence upon his incapacities or inabilities is intensified by the remarkably frequent recurrence of “cannot”/“can’t,” of which there are 114 instances in the published version. As for the use of the -less suffix, it is found most often in the forms: 66

For an analysis of the genesis of Beckett’s novel, see Van Hulle and Weller, The Making of Beckett’s “L’Innommable,” where the examples of unwording revisions in Beckett’s translation of L’Innommable are analyzed in more detail, alongside further examples. For an analysis of Beckett’s reliance upon forms of rhetoric more generally, see Bruno Clément, L’Œuvre sans qualités. Rhétorique de Samuel Beckett (Paris: Seuil, 1989).

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“hopeless,” “useless,” and “motionless.” Other ways in which Beckett’s unwording is achieved in The Unnamable include the recurrence of the expression “in vain” (20 times), “no matter” (47 times), “no more” (49 times), “never” (215 times), and “nothing” (283 times). Linguistic self-decomposition is apparent, however, not only in the published version of The Unnamable, but also in its genetic history, with there being a marked intensification of unwording in the process of translation. The unwriting procedures to be found in the genetic history of the translation include a more intensive use of negative affixes and negative constructions; lexical reduction and syntactical atomization (resulting in grammatically incomplete sentences and an intensification of the paratactical); and the use of stock phrases, in which words are used as what Mauthner terms “mere words” (bloße Worte) – that is, in a manner that exposes their status as no more than words. Among the many examples of Beckett introducing an un- prefix while also effecting lexical reduction and syntactical atomization is his translation, in the opening section of the novel, of the sentence “Sans me le demander” as “Unquestioning,” the manuscript revealing that he first considered translating the sentence as “Without asking.”67 This translation corresponds with the nearby translation of “Sans le penser” as “Unbelieving” rather than as “Without believing it.” Similarly, when translating the phrase “pour mettre de l’ordre dans mon affaire,” Beckett opts first for “to straighten out my affair,” then for “to untangle my affair,” then for “to unravel my affair,” until finally arriving at “to unravel my tangle.”68 When translating the expression “un petit filet de voix d’homme forcé,” he opts first for “the little murmur of a man against his will,” before considering “the little murmur of a man under duress,” until settling upon “the little murmur of unconsenting man,” again finding an unword that enables him to intensify the lexical reduction.69 When translating the phrase “c’est long, ce sera long,” he opts first for “it’s a long time, it will be a long time,” before revising this to “it’s long and tedious, it will be long and tedious,” and then “it’s interminable, it will be interminable,” before finally arriving at “it’s unending, it will be unending.”70 Again, the use of an unword enables a form of syntactical compaction. “Unquestioning,” “unravel,” “unconsenting,” “unending” – each of these unwords early in the novel is introduced through a process of self-revision in translation that mirrors the process of self-revision (epanorthosis) in the text. 67 69

See Van Hulle and Weller, The Making of “L‘Innommable,” pp. 195–96. See ibid., pp. 196–97. 70 See ibid., p. 197.

68

See ibid., p. 196.

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A similar pattern of revision is apparent in Beckett’s use of the -less suffix. In translating the expression “en très peu de temps on est dans l’impossibilité de plus jamais rien faire,” for instance, he opts first for “you soon find yourself precluded from ever doing anything again,” before opting for “you soon find yourself powerless ever to do anything again.”71 The phrase “Si cette voix pouvait s’arrêter, qui ne rime à rien” is translated first as “If it could only stop, this voice which means nothing,” before becoming “Ah if only this voice could stop, this meaningless voice.”72 Similarly, “sans bouger” is first rendered as “without stirring,” before becoming “motionless”; and “dans l’impossibilité d’articuler” is translated first as “inarticulate” and then as “speechless.”73 “Powerless,” “meaningless,” “motionless,” “speechless” – each of these negative modifiers, too, emerges out of a process of self-revision in translation that systematically intensifies and compacts the linguistic negativism of the original. In the light of these revisions, it is not surprising that the translation should have taken Beckett so much longer than the original to complete. Beckett’s translation also reveals an intensification of the already high number of negative constructions in the original French version of the novel. For instance, the sentence “Ceci dit, je continue, il le faut” is rendered first as “And now I continue, being obliged to,” then as “And now I continue, I have to,” until Beckett finally opts for the more concentrated negative form: “I resume, having no alternative,” this phrasing echoing the opening line of his first published novel, Murphy, itself an early instance of unwording in Beckett’s œuvre: “The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.”74 Beckett also opts on occasion for double negatives to translate an affirmative, revealing a preference that we have already seen in Kafka’s later work. For instance, the phrase “un autre moyen de me tirer d’affaire” is translated first as “another and more agreeable means of putting an end to my troubles,” then as “another and more pleasant method of putting an end to my troubles,” before becoming “another and less unpleasant method of putting an end to my troubles.”75 There is no equivalent in the French “un autre moyen” for the linguistic negativism of “less unpleasant method,” the phrase having been added precisely for the purpose of intensifying the unwording in the English version, as though the negativity to be directed against the English language – “my language” (meine Sprache), as Beckett describes it in the letter to Kaun – has to be more extreme on account of that very ownership. 71 75

74 See ibid., p. 198. 72 See ibid., p. 200. 73 See ibid. Beckett, Murphy, p. 3. See Van Hulle and Weller, The Making of “L‘Innommable,” pp. 203–4.

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A particularly striking instance of a negative construction being introduced to translate an affirmative in the original French is Beckett’s opting for the expression “No matter,” which, through its repetition, becomes an important atomistic phrase throughout The Unnamable. For instance, the phrase “Où qu’il en aille” is translated first as “Wherever he goes,” before becoming “No matter where he goes”; while “ça ne fait rien” is translated first as “that doesn’t matter” and then simply as “no matter.”76 Alongside “no matter,” “no more” is also deployed extensively in the English version (forty-nine times in total), being preferred to “no longer” in the translation of “ne . . . plus” constructions. These constructions enable Beckett to place a negative particle at the head of sentences, ensuring a proleptic negation of what is to follow. The preceding examples of an intensification of unwording in the translation of L’Innommable also reveal Beckett’s commitment to lexical reduction and syntactical atomization, both of which will be intensified in his later works, reaching their most extreme form in Worstward Ho. For instance, the sentence “Je suis tranquille, allez” is translated first as “Don’t mind me, I’m only joking,” before becoming the more atomized, more paratactic, and repetitively negative “No, no danger. Of that.”77 The sentence “Je ne me poserai plus de questions” is rendered first as “I shall ask myself no more questions,” before being reduced to “No more questions.”78 Again, in each case, the translation places a negation – “No” – at the head of an atomized, grammatically incomplete sentence, whereas the French original commences with a “Je” and is grammatically complete. In translation, then, there is a shift from an “I”-led syntax to a “No”-led syntax – that is, from first-person pronoun (subject) to subjectless particle of negation. Just as Kafka’s unwording procedures in The Trial and later works highlight uncertainty and ambiguity, so the forms of uncertainty already present in L’Innommable are significantly intensified in Beckett’s translation. For instance, the phrase “je compte bien” is translated first as “I’m confident” before becoming “I flatter myself.”79 The expression “A noter” is translated first as “It is notable” before becoming “It is perhaps worth noting,” the introduction of the “perhaps” here, which finds no equivalent in the original French, raising to 240 the number of occasions on which the word appears in the published version of the text.80

76 80

See ibid., p. 203. See ibid., p. 207.

77

See ibid., pp. 204–5.

78

See ibid., p. 205.

79

See ibid., pp. 206–7.

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The genetic history of Beckett’s translation also shows him eventually opting repeatedly for idiomatic expressions, stock phrases, or clichés that work in different ways to intensify the unwording nature of the text by reducing language to “mere words,” in line with Mauthner’s interpretation of Goethe. For instance, the question “S’ils m’affranchissaient, de guerre lasse?” is translated first as “If they gave it up as a bad job and set me free?” before becoming “Why don’t they wash their hands of me and set me free?,”81 the cliché here also introducing an allusion to Pilate’s act of selfexculpation when giving Jesus up to the rule of the mob. The sentence “Côté spectacle, ça semble maigre” is rendered first as “Nothing much then in the way of sights to see” before becoming the clichéd “Nothing much then in the way of sights for sore eyes.”82 Far from such clichéd expressions indicating thoughtlessness on Beckett’s part, they result from a process of revision that is driven by an impulse to commit acts of violence against the language of the text, and thus in the interests of achieving through various means a literature of the unword in prose rather than in drama, where the opportunity to use silences makes the challenge considerably less formidable. What becomes clear, then, is that the extensive use of pauses in Beckett’s plays is very far from being the only or even the principal means by which he seeks to achieve a literature of the unword. The Unnamable engages directly with Mauthner’s conviction that only through language can language be undone, and this principle leads to the aporetic experience that lies at the heart of Beckett’s novel. In The Unnamable, linguistic negativism, achieved in a wide range of forms, becomes for the first time in Beckett’s œuvre not only the matter, but also the very manner of the literary work. In conversation with the literary critic Lawrence Harvey in the 1960s, Beckett remarked that “If you really get down to the disaster, the slightest eloquence becomes unbearable.”83 While, for Beckett, this disaster was undoubtedly transhistorical in nature, there is also every reason to see the ever more radical enactment of linguistic negativism in his work following World War II as in no small part a reaction to what history seemed to have confirmed, namely that the so-called rational animal was capable of the most extreme barbarity, and that language was beggared by the experience. Far from time and the reconstruction of Europe alleviating the trauma, however, in the works that followed upon The Unnamable, particularly 81 83

See ibid., p. 215. 82 See ibid., pp. 215–16. Cited in James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), p. 492.

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works of prose fiction, Beckett intensifies the forms of linguistic negativism deployed in that novel. Such an intensification was far from being a straightforward matter, given the linguistic extremes already achieved in The Unnamable, and it is hardly surprising that Beckett should have found the writing of the thirteen Texts for Nothing after the completion of The Unnamable to be arduous. In these texts, he weakens the voice until it becomes no more than a “murmur,” and the last text ends with a particularly intensive passage of linguistic negativism that relies above all on epanorthosis, recalling that of The Unnamable: It’s not true, yes, it’s true, it’s true and it’s not true, there is silence and there is not silence, there is no one and there is something, nothing prevents anything. And were the voice to cease quite at last, the old ceasing voice, it would not be true, as it is not true that it speaks, it can’t speak, it can’t cease. And were there one day to be here, where there are no days, which is no place, born of the impossible voice the unmakable being, and a gleam of light, still all would be silent and empty and dark, as now, as soon now, when all will be ended, all said, it says, it murmurs.84

Here, assertion after assertion is made only to be unmade, phrase negating phrase. Silence is asserted, only to be negated, and then to be asserted again alongside its negation. Time is asserted, only to be negated. Space is asserted, only to be negated. A being is asserted, only to be proleptically negated by the negative modifier “unmakable.” The voice is asserted, only to be negated proleptically by the negative modifier “impossible,” and then to be asserted again, only to be subjected to the irony of an “it says,” followed by a reduction to the status of a murmur. For all the radical linguistic negativism at work here, however, stylistically there is no decisive step beyond the unwording procedures to be found in The Unnamable, and the modernist drive in Beckett for each work to constitute a stylistic innovation, in the manner of each of Joyce’s major works, is not achieved. This is doubtless the principal reason for Beckett’s remaining unsatisfied with the result. That next step in the production of the literature of the unword would only be achieved with the writing of How It Is, first published in French in 1961 and then in Beckett’s own English translation in 1964. In this novel, the abandonment of all punctuation and of the standard sentence structure 84

Samuel Beckett, Texts for Nothing and Other Shorter Prose, 1950–1976, ed. Mark Nixon (London: Faber & Faber, 2010), p. 53; Nouvelles et Textes pour rien (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1958), pp. 205–6.

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not only makes for a challenging reading experience, but also effects a further syntactical disintegration, one that is achieved through a considerable labor of compositional revision.85 The radical parataxis already evident in both The Unnamable and the Texts for Nothing becomes still more extreme in How It Is, and the absence of punctuation forces the reader to find the pauses that might ensure a degree of semantic intelligibility. Ironically, the absence of punctuation leads to a greater textual materiality because the phrases are as though panted, with the aurality of the text becoming paramount, this being emphasized by the refrain “I say it as I hear it.”86 Syntactical atomization, repetition, and an array of unwords are deployed with even greater intensity in two of Beckett’s later prose works, one written originally in French, and the other in English: Sans (1969), translated by Beckett as Lessness (1970), and Worstward Ho (1983), which he considered himself unable to translate.87 In Lessness, Beckett depicts a human being in a ruinstrewn landscape of gray sand in a manner that strips that being down to the most rudimentary of features: a small, ash-gray, upright body with a pair of blue eyes. In terms of composition, the text is distinct from all of Beckett’s other works in that he makes use of the cut-up technique famously exploited by William S. Burroughs. Having written sixty unpunctuated sentences, Beckett allowed chance to dictate the order in which they would appear in the two parts of the text, each sentence occurring twice, to make up a text of 120 sentences arranged into 24 paragraphs, in which the first half is repeated (albeit with the sentences in a different order) in the second part.88 As for the forms of linguistic negativism in Lessness, the titles of the French and English versions make direct reference to them. In the French version, expressions commencing “sans” (“without”) recur frequently, in 85

86 87

88

For an analysis of the genetic history of How It Is, see Édouard Magessa O’Reilly, Samuel Beckett’s “Comment c’est”/“How It Is” and “L’Image”: A Critical-Genetic Edition/Une Édition Critico-Génétique (London and New York: Routledge, 2016). Samuel Beckett, How It Is, ed. Édouard Magessa O’Reilly (London: Faber & Faber, 2009), p. 3; Comment c’est (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1961), p. 9. Beckett produced draft translations of parts of Worstward Ho, which he sent on to his French publisher, Jérôme Lindon. However, despite Lindon’s encouragement, Beckett abandoned the translation. A French translation of the work was published after Beckett’s death: Cap au pire, trans. Édith Fournier (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1991). On Beckett’s later prose in relation to unwording, see Carla Locatelli, Unwording the World: Samuel Beckett’s Prose after the Nobel Prize (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990). For an analysis of the structuring based on the manuscripts of Sans/Lessness, see Rosemary Pountney, Theatre of Shadows: Samuel Beckett’s Drama 1956–1976 (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1988), Appendix II, pp. 236–39. See also James Knowlson and John Pilling, Frescoes of the Skull: The Later Prose and Drama of Samuel Beckett (London: John Calder, 1979).

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a considerably more extreme form of the technique deployed by Kafka in The Trial, in which, as we have seen, “ohne” constructions play an important role. In Beckett’s English translation of Sans, these “sans” constructions are rendered either using the negative affix “-less” or through “no” constructions. There are nine forms of “sans” construction in Sans, none of which is translated using the privative conjunction “without.” These forms are “sans fin” (which occurs eight times, four times in each of the two parts, and is translated by Beckett as “endlessness”), this echoing its antithesis, “enfin” (translated as “long last”); “sans issue” (ten times; “issueless”); “sans trace” (twelve times; translated either as “all gone from mind” when set alongside “aucun souvenir,” or as “blank” when modifying “faces,” the latter word being translated as “planes”); “sans temps” (eight times; “timeless”); “sans bruit” (six times; “no sound”); “sans nuage” (two times; “no cloud”); “sans relief” (four times; “flatness” and “all side”’); and “sans prise” (four times; “no hold”).89 This makes a total of fifty-four instances of the negating conjunction “sans” in a text of less than 1,500 words. These “sans”/“-less” constructions are not, however, the only forms of linguistic negativism to be found in this short prose text. In the French version, Beckett also relies upon a number of repeated “aucun,” “jamais que,” “pas,” and “rien” constructions: “aucun souvenir”; “Jamais ne fut qu’air gris” (translated as “Never was but grey air”); “Jamais ne fut que cet inchangeant” (“Never but this changelessness”); “Jamais qu’en rêve” (“Never but in dream”); “Jamais que rêve” (“Never but dream”); “Jamais que silence” (“Never but silence”); “Jamais qu’imaginé le bleu” (“Never but imagined the blue”); “pas un bruit rien qui bouge” (“no sound no stir”): and “pas un souffle” (“not a breath”). The “jamais que” (“never but”) constructions might also have been translated as “only ever . . . ,” giving, for instance: “Only ever grey air,” “Only ever this changelessness,” and so forth. However, Beckett’s translation places the negative, as in the French, at the head of the sentence or phrase. This leading negative is complemented by the “no” constructions: “no sound,” “no stir,” “no hold.” If the French and English versions are both characterized by such proleptic negations, locating the negation in the place normally reserved for the subject (a technique that, as we have seen, Beckett also adopts in his translation of L’Innommable), the English version of Sans is distinguished from the French by the additional analeptic 89

Samuel Beckett, Sans, in Têtes-mortes (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1972), pp. 67–77; Lessness, in Texts for Nothing and Other Shorter Prose, pp. 127–32.

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negations achieved through the suffix “-less.” In addition to serving in the translation of three of the “sans” constructions – “sans fin” (translated as “endlessness”), “sans issue” (“issueless”), “sans temps” (“timeless”) – the “-less” suffix is also used in the translation of “infini” (translated as “endless”), “inchangeant” (“changelessness”), and “lointains” (“endlessness”). This means that the linguistic negativism in Lessness is even more intensive than it is in Sans, just as the linguistic negativism in The Unnamable is greater than in L’Innommable. Once again, Beckett’s first language is subjected to even greater negativity than his second, and translation becomes a mode of intensifying unwording. While it might seem scarcely possible to go beyond the linguistic negativism of a work such as Lessness, that is precisely what Beckett does in one of his last prose texts, Worstward Ho, in which he comes closer to achieving a literature of the unword – which is to be distinguished from a literature of silence – than in any other work. Thematically, a key unword in Worstward Ho is “naught,” this particular term having a long history in Beckett’s œuvre. The idea of nothingness lies at the heart of Beckett’s first published novel, Murphy, being identified as that which his eponymous protagonist seeks to experience, thereby escaping what are taken to be the many miseries of being. Shortly before his death, Murphy does indeed achieve such an experience of nothingness, which is described as follows: Murphy began to see nothing, that colourlessness which is such a rare postnatal treat, being the absence (to abuse a nice distinction) not of percipere but of percipi. His other senses also found themselves at peace, an unexpected pleasure. Not the numb peace of their own suspension, but the positive peace that comes when the somethings give way, or perhaps simply add up, to the Nothing, than which in the guffaw of the Abderite naught is more real.90

The reference to the “Abderite” – that is, to the pre-Socratic philosopher Democritus, associated with the city of Abdera – makes it clear that Beckett’s conception of “the Nothing” here is informed by his reading in the history of philosophy in the mid-1930s, and in particular by his interest in Democritan atomism, with its fundamental distinction between atoms and void. The identification of this nothingness as that than which “naught is more real” helps to locate the principal source for this passage: Archibald Alexander’s Short History of Philosophy, from which the following statement was noted down by Beckett: 90

Beckett, Murphy, p. 154.

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Almost half a century after taking notes on Democritus’s idea of nothingness, and then including a reference to it in Murphy, Beckett turns again to the word naught in his most extreme exercise in linguistic negativism. While the word void appears more frequently than naught in Worstward Ho – fifty-two times in the published version, and also having been used in decisive statements in The Unnamable and Ill Seen Ill Said (1981)92 – “naught” (which occurs eleven times in Worstward Ho) is no less decisive, not simply on account of the impossibility that it names (Beckett here echoing the Belgian Occasionalist philosopher Arnold Geulincx’s insistence upon the impossibility of a vacuum),93 but also on account of the word’s material quality, on which Beckett draws in the remarkable phrase “gnawing to be naught.”94 If “naught” plays a crucial role in the linguistic negativism in Worstward Ho, it does so not least on account of its function within an echo chamber – “naught,” “gnawing,” “brought,” and the other unwords with which it alliterates in the text: “no,” “nohow,” “none,” “nothing,” “never,” and “neither.”95 91

92

93

94 95

Archibald B. D. Alexander, A Short History of Philosophy, 3rd ed. (Glasgow: Maclehose, Jackson & Co., 1922), pp. 38–39. Beckett’s notes on Alexander are to be found in the manuscript MS 10967/75 (Trinity College Dublin). In addition to Alexander’s Short History of Philosophy, other principal philosophical sources for Beckett in the mid-1930s included John Burnet’s Greek Philosophy, Part I: Thales to Plato (1914) and Wilhelm Windelband’s History of Philosophy (1893). See Feldman, Beckett’s Books; and Matthijs Engelberts, Everett Frost, and Jane Maxwell, Notes Diverse Holo: Catalogues of Beckett’s Reading Notes and Other Manuscripts at Trinity College Dublin, with Supporting Essays (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006). In The Unnamable, the narrator declares at one point: “only I and this black void have ever been” (The Unnamable, p. 14). The final lines of Ill Seen Ill Said read: “Grace to breathe that void. Know happiness” (Samuel Beckett, Ill Said Ill Seen, in Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho, Stirrings Still, ed. Dirk Van Hulle [London: Faber & Faber, 2009], pp. 43–78 [p. 78]). For Beckett’s notes on Geulincx’s Ethics, taken in the mid-1930s, see Arnold Geulincx, Ethics, with Samuel Beckett’s Notes, ed. Han van Ruler, Anthony Uhlmann, and Martin Wilson, trans. Martin Wilson (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2012). Further analyses of Beckett’s engagement with Geulincx’s thought are provided in Feldman, Beckett’s Books, pp. 131–36; and David Tucker, Samuel Beckett and Arnold Geulincx: Tracing “a Literary Fantasia” (London: London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), passim. Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho, in Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho, Stirrings Still, pp. 79–103 (p. 103). The translation of “naught” as “néant” in the French version of Worstward Ho by Édith Fournier not only has to sacrifice the distinction between “nothingness” and “naught” that is the sign of Beckett’s precise source in the pre-Socratics, but also loses the aural connection that is established in Worstward Ho between “gnawing” and “naught”; that is, between the desire and its object.

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The preoccupation with achieving the state of “naught” in Worstward Ho is tied directly to the act of saying – or, more precisely, to the act of unsaying. The text charts a process of stating and unstating, the former bringing into virtual being three entities – a man, a woman, and a child, constituting a kind of family – in an abstracted time and place, this family then being unsaid. The entire process takes the form of a series of imperatives (neither first nor third person) in which, through unremitting epanorthosis, everything that is stated is then revised. This process is itself described in the text as a “worsening,” the aim being the achievement of an adequate saying of the world described, and with that the end of saying and the end to any kind of being. In other words, the principle underlying the text is: Were the saying/unsaying to achieve its aim, then the longed-for experience of “naught” would be achieved. However, this remains impossible, and the text thus leaves the process of unsaying incomplete. The entire work thus becomes an instance of language failure of a very particular kind: Language fails to unmake the world that it has also failed to make. Far from having the power of the divine fiat – the biblical “let there be” that brings beings into being through the creative, performative power of the word – the saying in Worstward Ho fails either fully to create or fully to negate. The process of “worsening” enacted in the text thus remains ongoing, and the text reflects this through its end returning the reader to its beginning: from the opening “On. Say on. Be said on. Somehow on. Till nohow on. Said nohow on” to the closing “Said nohow on.”96 As noted previously, the “said” here functions in the manner identified by Mauthner regarding Goethe, reminding the reader that there is nothing but language here. It undermines the authority of what has been said, by identifying it as no more than a saying. And, crucially, this subversion applies as much to the unsaying as it does to the saying. Thus, if the circular form of Worstward Ho recalls that of Finnegans Wake, it does so in a manner that reflects Beckett’s distinction between what he sees as an (impossible but necessary) literature of the unword and an apotheosis of the word. The radical linguistic negativism of Worstward Ho is achieved in various ways: through the intensive use of the negative affixes “un-” and “-less,” involving the creation of a new unwording lexicon; through parataxis, resulting in an atomization of syntax considerably more extreme than that in The Unnamable; and through forms of epanorthosis more intensive than in any other of Beckett’s work. The “un-” affix is used to negate knowledge (“unknow,” “unknown,” “unasking”), perception and nonperception 96

Beckett, Worstward Ho, pp. 81, 103.

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(“unseen,” “undimmed”), movement and stasis (“unchanged,” “unchanging,” “unreceding,” “unstillable”), being and nonbeing (“unmoreable,” “unnullable,” “unlessenable,” “unlessable,” “unworsenable,” “unworseable”), and utterance (“unsay,” “unutter,” “ununsaid”). The “un-” prefix also serves to negate process, action, and capability, in the various modifiers ending in “-able”: “unnullable,” “unstillable,” “unlessenable,” “unlessable,” “unworsenable,” and “unworseable.” This form of unwording reaches its most extreme form in the sentence “Unmoreable unlessable unworseable evermost almost void.”97 The sole instance of a double unword in Worstward Ho is, significantly, “ununsaid,” referring the reader to the central question of the power or powerless of language.98 Both saying and unsaying are taken to fail in this text, with the unsaying never achieving the complete reduction of the said to nothing. In addition to the previously mentioned unwords, Beckett also relies extensively on the “mis-” affix for “misseen,” “missaid,” and “missay,” and on the affix “-less” in forms that negate time, place, and movement: “beyondless,” “thenceless,” “thitherless,” “boundless,” “topless,” “baseless,” “pastless,” “onceless,” and “lidless.” The first three of these unwords are deployed together in a sequence of atomized sentences that constitute one of the most extreme forms of linguistic negativism in this most linguistically negativist of works: “Beyondless. Thenceless there. Thitherless there. Thenceless thitherless there.”99 In addition, the word less is also deployed repeatedly in the text, as in “Less. Less seen. Less seeing. Less seen and seeing when with words than when not.”100 If the “-less” affix effects a retrospective negation, the proleptic negations effected by the “un-” affix function alongside another form of proleptic negation, this one being syntactical: “no” is repeatedly placed at the head of a phrase, and “never” is also used in this way. Examples include “no knowing”; “no saying”; “No bones. No ground. No pain”; “No words for one whose words”; “No hands. No face”; “No once”; “No future in this”; “Never less. Never more. Never since first said never unsaid never worse said never not gnawing to be gone.”101 While this form of unwording is already to be found in The Unnamable and Lessness, it is considerably more pervasive in Worstward Ho. As in Lessness, the only form of punctuation used in Worstward Ho is the full stop, and not a single sentence in the entire text is syntactically complete. The result is a syntax of radical compaction, atomization, and parataxis. Furthermore, the text consists of ninety-six paragraphs, each of 97

Ibid., p. 101.

98

Ibid., p. 95.

99

Ibid., p. 83.

100

Ibid., p. 99.

101

Ibid., p. 100.

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which is separated by a line space. The meaning of these spaces is indicated in the text: “Blanks for when words gone. When nohow on.”102 The text is, then, an exercise in the most radical form of unwording, the aim of which is the “naught,” to be achieved through a process of pejoration (“worsening”) that would lead toward a saying of that which is to be said. The text makes it clear that this “worsening” unwording cannot achieve its aim of the worst, and Beckett’s notebooks reveal that he found an expression of the unwording principle underlying Worstward Ho in King Lear: “The worst is not/so long as one can say, This is the worst.”103 However intensive the linguistic negativism, it cannot in principle achieve a description of the very worst state: absolute disaster. That said, there is nonetheless an intensification of unwording in Worstward Ho. The majority of the neologistic unwords are to be found later in the text, and these unwords are also subjected to reduction: “unlessenable” becomes “unlessable,” while “unworsenable” becomes “unworseable.”104 The text makes it clear from the outset that all saying is a form of “missaying,” and that language cannot achieve the ends it sets itself: “Said is missaid. Whenever said said said missaid.”105 It cannot bring into full being that which it names, any more than it can reduce to nothing that which it unnames. And yet, it is also clear that this unavoidable “missaying,” rooted in the most profound language skepticism, results in a radically innovative language that reminds the reader throughout of its own failure. The unremitting epanorthosis in Worstward Ho (“The body again. Where none. The place again. Where none”; or “Say bones. No bones but say bones. Say ground. No ground but say ground”)106 and the deployment of the modifier “so-said” (as in “The so-said dim. The so-said shades. The so-said seat and germ of all”)107 go well beyond anything in Goethe’s Poetry and Truth to ensure that the reader remains acutely aware of the linguistic nature of what is posited, and thus of the dangers of what Mauthner terms “word fetishism.” If Worstward Ho enacts the idea of language as world-creating and world-negating, only to insist on the failure of both, Beckett’s final work, comment dire (1989; translated by Beckett shortly before his death as what is the word), enacts the failing attempt to name the extralinguistic: that beyond language of which Mauthner insists that nothing can be said that 102 103 104 107

Ibid., p. 99. The lines from King Lear are recorded in Beckett’s “Sottisier” Notebook, held at the Beckett International Foundation, University of Reading, MS 2901. Beckett, Worstward Ho, pp. 95, 101. 105 Ibid., p. 97. 106 Ibid., pp. 81–82. Ibid., p. 94.

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is not a missaying. In what is the word, the text stammers its way toward the articulation of “all this,” the failure to achieve this articulation being signaled by the refrain “what is the word,” which constitutes eight lines of this fifty-three-line work, including the last two. This attempt to name that which resists all naming is described as “folly” (folie), a word that is repeated twelve times, on each occasion at the head of a line, as in the longest line in the work: “folly for to need to seem to glimpse afaint afar away over there what –.”108 This “folly” arises as a result of the obligation to achieve what is again taken to be impossible; that is, the predicament already identified by Beckett in his 1949 dialog on Pierre Tal Coat. That Beckett’s œuvre should end – or, rather, break off – with the repetition of the unpunctuated phrase “what is the word” is only appropriate: The closest he comes to finding that word is in the unword, and yet even the most extreme forms of unwording, as in Worstward Ho, fail to overcome the impossibility of naming upon which Beckett insists. It might seem that a writer who seeks as persistently as Beckett does to turn language back against itself, and who concerns himself again and again with a failure to find the words to articulate “how it is,” is intent upon taking his distance from the political. Beckett certainly sought to avoid any kind of cultural nationalism and was deeply suspicious of attempts in Ireland to create a national literary culture. His approach to the political in art is clearly at odds with Brecht’s, and it is hardly surprising that the latter, appalled by Beckett’s failure to take advantage of the opportunity, should have thought it necessary to draft an adaptation of Waiting for Godot in which the relationships are explicitly rendered in terms of class antagonism, with Pozzo as the capitalist and Lucky as the proletarian in possession of nothing but his labor. Faced with Beckett’s apparent refusal to produce a politically engaged art, some commentators have located his work on the political right, as does Lukács.109 However, Adorno is surely right to argue that Beckett’s postwar work is political in a manner that locates it on the left, even if, for historico-aesthetic reasons, that work can offer no positive vision of utopia of the kind proposed both by those on the far right and by those on the far

108

109

Samuel Beckett, what is the word, in Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho, Stirrings Still, pp. 131–35 (p. 134). For a more extended analysis of the poem, see my “The Word Folly: Samuel Beckett’s ‘Comment dire’ (‘What is the Word’),” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 5:1 (2000), 165–80. See Georg Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, trans. John and Necke Mander (London: Merlin, 1963).

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left.110 Like Kafka’s before him, Beckett’s literature of the unword engages very explicitly with the themes of power, domination, torture, the freedom or otherwise of speech, the relation between the animal and the human, as well as various forms of “abnormality” in a way that, while for the most part resisting any simple decoding, and indeed any Enlightenment conception of the “political animal” as a “rational animal,” is undoubtedly political. On occasion, this political dimension can become overt, as is the case with the late play Catastrophe (1982), which Beckett dedicated to the imprisoned Czech dissident Václav Havel. This, Beckett’s penultimate play, is striking not least for the fact that the resistance to oppression presented in it takes the form of a silent gesture. The play depicts a theater director who, with the aid of his female assistant, seeks to manipulate an actor in a profoundly dehumanizing manner so that he represents, indeed symbolizes, “catastrophe.” At the end of the play, however, this actor, left alone on stage, raises his head and stares at the audience, rendering that audience complicit in the oppression to which he has been subjected. When a reviewer suggested that this final gesture was ambiguous, Beckett responded: “There’s no ambiguity there at all. He’s saying, you bastards, you haven’t finished me yet.”111 But, of course, Beckett’s protagonist is not in fact saying anything. At no point in the play does he utter a word; rather, it is the director and his assistant who speak. If, on this occasion, the resistance to oppression – and, ironically, an oppression that would make of him a symbol of a catastrophe that is Beckett’s own abiding theme – takes a nonlinguistic form, this is not to suggest that Beckett privileges silence over language as a political force. Rather, it is to highlight, first, that Beckett is acutely aware of the risks entailed in political art – Catastrophe might reasonably be interpreted as an act of self-critique on Beckett’s part – and, second, that, following Beckett’s own comments on nominalism in relation to a literature of the unword in his letter to Kaun, his work is characterized by a political nominalism that resists any comfortable 110

111

This idea of a “political Beckett” has been taken up by Terry Eagleton, for whom, as for Adorno before him, Beckett’s is an “art after Auschwitz,” a form of realism that serves “the cause of human emancipation more faithfully than the bright-eyed utopians” (Terry Eagleton, “Political Beckett?,” New Left Review 40 [July–August 2006]: 67–74 [74]). Important recent considerations of the politics of Beckett’s work include: Andrew Gibson, Samuel Beckett (London: Reaktion Books, 2009); Seán Kennedy (ed.), Beckett and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); David Weisberg, Chronicles of Disorder: Samuel Beckett and the Cultural Politics of the Modern Novel (Albany: State University of New York, 2010); Jean-Michel Rabaté, Think Pig! Beckett at the Limit of the Human (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), ch. 10; and Emilie Morin, Beckett’s Political Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Samuel Beckett, cited in Gibson, Beckett, p. 142. According to Gibson, in Catastrophe Beckett “addressed a Communist abuse of power obliquely, through an image of a Western one. In so doing, he also insisted on a principle of reversibility endemic to the Cold War itself” (ibid., p. 143).

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generalizations and that tends to seek out the particular “unspeakable” situation.112 The nominalist nature of the politics of his work is revealed precisely in Beckett’s resistance both to any easy political pigeonholing of his works, and to the deriving of universal political principles from them. Similarly, Beckett’s own political acts – including his work for the French resistance during World War II – were justified by him in terms of his support for individuals, not groups, be they political, religious, or ethnic. If Beckett’s art is, as he claims, one of impotence and ignorance, then, as we have seen, these manifest themselves above all in the failure of language not just to name, but also to unname. The political implications of this linguistic failure are considerable. Beckett’s linguistic negativism reaches its most extreme form in a work – Worstward Ho – that seeks to imagine a community of a kind – three figures constituting a residual family – and that, for all the negativity, arrives at a state beyond which any progress, any “on,” is said to be impossible, the three figures having been reduced to “pins” and the conceiving entity to a “pinhole.” The vision here, then, is of a radically disaggregated community, for which the word community seems scarcely appropriate. This undoing of the communal is enacted in a radical atomization of syntax: Enough. Sudden enough. Sudden all far. No move and sudden all far. All least. Three pins. One pinhole. In dimmost dim. Vasts apart. At bounds of boundless void. Whence no farther. Best worse no farther. Nohow less. Nohow worse. Nohow naught. Nohow on.113

In its nominalist skepticism toward notions of community that entail fusion, unity, communication, and identification, Beckett’s work bears qualified comparison with Blanchot’s reflections on community in a work published in the same year as Worstward Ho. Responding to an essay by the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy on the idea of a “inoperative community,” Blanchot’s The Unavowable Community (1983) takes its inspiration from Georges Bataille’s notion of a “negative community,” and insists upon the “unavowable” (inavouable) nature of any community that would avoid the fusional, unifying, totalizing forms of various historical models of community, including both communism and Nazism.114 112 113 114

In the letter to Kaun, Beckett advocates “some form of nominalistic irony” as a stage on the way toward a fully realized literature of the unword (Beckett, Letters, Volume I, p. 520; p. 515). Beckett, Worstward Ho, p. 103. See Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, trans. Pierre Joris (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1988). For Nancy’s response to Blanchot’s reflections on community, see Jean-Luc Nancy, The Disavowed Community, trans. Philip Armstrong (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016).

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In its insistence upon the negative, and above all upon failure – “Fail again. Fail better,” as he puts it in Worstward Ho115 – Beckett’s œuvre resists the idea of literature as a power, be it to enable cultural renewal, to contribute to the enhancement of human civilization, or, as Heidegger claims in The Origin of the Work of Art (1935–36), to enact the “settingitself-to-work of truth.”116 And yet, for all its linguistic negativism – or, rather, precisely on account of that negativism – Worstward Ho ends not with the words Nohow on, but rather with the words Said nohow on, just as the final words of The Unnamable are not I can’t go on, but rather I’ll go on. For the “nohow on” to be flagged as “said” at the end of the text is for it to be rendered irreducibly open. In other words, the thought of progress – “on” – albeit a progress conceived as a “worsening,” as directed to the reduction to “naught” of the spectral, is retained precisely by the Mauthnerian gesture of reminding the reader that what we have here is a linguistic phenomenon that is not – precisely not – to be confused with that which is “out there.” For Beckett, then, far from being a game, far from being pure play, far from being a means of collapsing the distinction between word and world, far from reducing everything to the linguistic, his literature of the unword insists on the difference between word and world, and on the obligation to continue to seek to overcome it, even though that is taken from the outset to be impossible. The key to the politics of Beckett’s literature of the unword lies in that inhabiting of the impossible, for in the possible he had witnessed catastrophe. The political nominalism of his work lies precisely in its critique of the ideas of community – national, religious, ethnic – founded on possible identities, on that for which there are words. To appreciate Beckett’s ever more intensive engagement with language skepticism in his literature of the unword, then, one must take account of the shadow cast by the mid-twentieth-century historical catastrophe. To grasp the distinction between what he sees as Joyce’s “apotheosis of the word” and Beckett’s own literature of the unword, it is necessary to take account of a loss of faith in the power of the word that is intimately bound up with a loss of faith in humanity as anything other than “in ruins”; that is to say, a loss of faith in the human that is never, for all the many darknesses, absolute. 115 116

Beckett, Worstward Ho, p. 81. Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art, in Off the Beaten Track [Holzwege], ed. and trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Hayes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 1–56 (p. 49).

chapter 5

Writing the Disaster: Maurice Blanchot

In December 1943, two years after the appearance of his first novel, Thomas the Obscure, and during the German occupation of France, Maurice Blanchot published his first collection of literary-critical essays under the title Faux Pas. The volume was divided into four parts, for the first of which – entitled “From Anguish to Language” – Blanchot supplied an untitled prefatory text in which he identified what he took to be the predicament of the literary writer. That predicament is shaped entirely by a relation to nothingness and appears to set the writer apart from any concrete political concerns. The writer, Blanchot asserts, “finds himself in the increasingly ludicrous condition of having nothing to write [de n’avoir rien à écrire], of having no means with which to write it, and of being constrained by the utter necessity of always writing it.” He goes on to clarify that having nothing to write is to be understood not as lacking material, but rather as having “nothingness” (le rien) as one’s material. This does not mean, however, that the writer’s task is to seek to represent nothingness or to describe scenes in which nothingness is experienced. To proceed in that way would, according to Blanchot, be to approach nothingness in the form of an “allusion.” Although Blanchot does not offer examples of such an approach, these would include two novels published five years earlier, shortly before the outbreak of World War II: Beckett’s Murphy and Sartre’s Nausea. Rather than seeking to describe the experience of nothingness, the writer must engage, according to Blanchot, with nothingness “in its own actual truth,” such that writing becomes an act of pure negation; that is, a performance of the negative in which there would be no negated content. For Blanchot, the writer’s task – as impossible as it is necessary – is to achieve a negation “that is not ‘No’ to this, ‘No’ to that, ‘No’ to everything, but ‘No’ pure and simple.”1 1

Maurice Blanchot, Faux Pas, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 3; Faux Pas (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), p. 11.

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Blanchot’s formulation of the writer’s task in terms of a “nothing to write” clearly anticipates Beckett’s formulation a few years later: “The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.”2 Furthermore, both Blanchot’s and Beckett’s conceptions of the artist’s predicament echo, in their insistence upon necessity and impossibility, Kafka’s remarks on the predicament of the Jewish German-language writer in post–World War I Prague.3 As we have seen, in Beckett’s case this predicament justifies a commitment to forms of linguistic negativism that bear a striking resemblance to those in Kafka’s later work. A no less thoroughgoing commitment to linguistic negativism is also to be found in Blanchot’s fiction, alongside, in his critical writings, a championing of both Kafka and Beckett, as well as the work of another major European writer who commits himself to a literature of the unword: Paul Celan.4 Just as Beckett comes to see linguistic negativism as the only means by which to articulate a vision of “humanity in ruins,” so the forms of linguistic negativism practiced by Blanchot serve to articulate what he will term the “calamity” (malheur) and, later, the “disaster” (désastre). As Françoise Collin, the author of the first book-length study of Blanchot’s œuvre, observes, the negative is his abiding theme.5 The specificity of this all-pervasive negativity lies in its distinction from that negativity which is the motor of the Hegelian dialectic. Unlike Beckett, who took little (if any) interest in Hegel’s philosophy, Blanchot’s work – both the fiction and the critical writings – is profoundly

2

3

4

5

Samuel Beckett, Proust and Three Dialogues (London: John Calder, 1987), p. 103. On the similarity between Blanchot’s and Beckett’s formulations of the artist’s predicament, see, for instance, Gerald L. Bruns, Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal of Philosophy (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 20. See Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (London: John Calder, 1978), p. 289; Briefe 1902–1924, ed. Max Brod (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1975), pp. 337–38. Blanchot’s essays on Kafka are collected in De Kafka à Kafka (Paris: Gallimard “Idées,” 1981). His influential review of Beckett’s Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable is included in The Book to Come, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003) pp. 210–17; Le Livre à venir (Paris: Gallimard Folio, 1986), pp. 286–91. His essay on Beckett’s How It Is is included in The Infinite Conversation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 326–31; L’Entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), pp. 478–86. For his appreciation of Celan, see The Last to Speak, in A Voice from Elsewhere, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), pp. 53–91; Le Dernier à parler (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1984). See Françoise Collin, Maurice Blanchot et la question de l’écriture (Paris: Gallimard “Tel,” 1986), p. 190.

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shaped by it, but precisely as a reaction against it.6 This engagement with Hegel is shared by a host of other major French writers and philosophers of Blanchot’s generation, including his close friend Georges Bataille. The key figure in this reception of Hegel in France in the 1930s was the Russianborn philosopher Alexander Kojève, whose lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) shaped a generation of intellectuals across a range of fields, from philosophy to literature to psychoanalysis.7 In the aftermath of World War II, it would be another German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, whose thinking of being, nothingness, technology, and the language of poetry (Dichtung) would prove similarly influential on a new generation of French intellectuals, for whom Blanchot would also be a decisive influence. Like Bataille, Blanchot seeks to think a negativity that not only differs from Hegel’s dialectical conception of the negative, but that cannot be recuperated by it. In the Hegelian dialectic, negativity operates through a process of sublation (Aufhebung) to ensure a progress toward the realization of the Absolute. If the ultimate form of negation is death, for Hegel the life of Spirit (Geist) is “not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it.” The power of Spirit is exercised “only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being.”8 For all its emphasis upon the negative, then, Hegel’s teleological conception of philosophy, and indeed of history, is one that remains essentially in line with Enlightenment thinking in its belief in the possibility, and in fact the inevitability, of progress toward the Absolute: the end of history, the mastery of nature, the triumph of being over nothingness, and the achievement of absolute knowledge in the form of science (Wissenschaft). For reasons that are no less political than they are philosophical, and in this respect revealing his counter-Enlightenment inclinations, Blanchot 6

7

8

Blanchot’s notion of a nondialectical negativity is explored, and indeed shapes, some of the principal critical engagements with his work. See, for instance, Jacques Derrida, Parages, ed. John P. Leavey, trans. Tom Conley, James Hulbert, John P. Leavey, and Avital Ronell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011); and Leslie Hill, Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary (London and New York: Routledge, 1997); “Death, Writing, Neutrality,” in Bataille, Klossowski, Blanchot: Writing at the Limits (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 181–255; and Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing: A Change of Epoch (New York and London: Continuum, 2012). For Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel’s Phenomenology, see his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on “The Phenomenology of Spirit,” ed. Allan Bloom (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980). G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 19.

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seeks from his first novel onward to focus on a negativity that would not function dialectically to achieve any such progress toward absolute mastery; rather, the negativity with which he concerns himself is one that fails to effect a sublation of the negated material. This errant, nondialectical negativity is represented thematically in Blanchot’s fiction as the idea of the impossibility of death, this impossibility resulting in an experience of endless dying that recalls the experience of Kafka’s Hunter Gracchus, whose death miscarries such that he is left weak, disempowered, a stranger to the world, condemned to interminable wandering. That failing death, or interminable dying, is thus the counterdeath to the suicide enacted in Mallarmé’s Igitur. In The Space of Literature (1955), Blanchot argues that Igitur is an “abandoned narrative” precisely because Mallarmé realized that the conception of death in that work was one that he found it necessary to abandon.9 The death in question is a Hegelian negation that would be governed by the principle of possibility and would result in the production of the absolute – named in Igitur as the “castle of purity.” In contrast, what interests Blanchot is an experience of death governed by the principle of impossibility, and it is this experience of impossible death that he finds in Kafka’s story of the Hunter Gracchus. In The Space of Literature, Blanchot also notes Kafka’s appreciation of Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos Letter, thereby highlighting the relation between language skepticism and the idea of a nondialectical negativity.10 In a letter to Pierre Madaule in February 1981, Blanchot makes it clear that this idea of an errant negativity, figured as impossible death, lies at the thematic heart of his work: “In a sense, and to express myself too simply, what led ‘me’ to write is the thought (the anguish) of the impossible death [la mort impossible].”11 In a letter to Georges Bataille probably written in 1960, he identifies the “calamity” (malheur) with which his work is concerned as precisely this experience of an existence that is “issueless” (sans issue), adding that this issuelessness can only be affirmed on the condition that one also affirms “the necessity of always seeking a way out” (la nécessité de toujours chercher une issue).12 Blanchot’s definition of this calamity or misfortune in the letter to Bataille is strikingly similar to Beckett’s 9 10 11

12

Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), pp. 43–44, n. 3; L’Espace littéraire (Paris: Gallimard Folio, 1988), pp. 45–46. “Max Brod reports that Kafka read Lord Chandos’s Letter as a kindred text” (ibid., p. 183; p. 242). Maurice Blanchot, letter to Pierre Madaule, February 1981, in Maurice Blanchot and Pierre Madaule, Correspondance 1953–2002, ed. Pierre Madaule (Paris: Gallimard, 2012), p. 29 (my translation). Maurice Blanchot, letter to Georges Bataille, August 8 (1960?), in Georges Bataille, Choix de lettres 1917–1962, ed. Michel Surya (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), pp. 591–92 (my translation).

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conception of “senseless, speechless, issueless misery” (non-sens cul et sans issue) in Molloy.13 Both writers explore the experience of an existence conceived in terms of a failing negativity, the escape from which is seen as being at once necessary and impossible – on account of the failure of the negative to achieve a negation that would be absolute, leaving no remainder, specter, trace, or murmur. In one of his last works, The Writing of the Disaster (1980), Blanchot makes it clear that the “disaster” in question – the one to be written, and the one that is writing as such – is the very same calamity to which he refers in the letter to Bataille, this disaster being defined as that which deprives human beings of the “refuge which is the thought of death, dissuading us from the catastrophic or the tragic.”14 As we shall see, in his later work Blanchot seeks to relate this seemingly abstract, philosophical disaster of an errant negativity not only to the act of writing, and thus to the nature of literature, but also to the most concrete and most monstrous of historical events: the Holocaust. Turning to Blanchot’s fiction, the fundamental distinction established in his first novel, Thomas the Obscure, is quite explicitly between the eponymous protagonist’s experience of such an “impossibility of death” (impossibilité de la mort),15 on the one hand, and the all-too-possible deaths of the young woman Anne and, significantly, of animals, on the other – that is, “beings that do not bear within themselves their double death.”16 For Thomas, death’s impossibility entails an experience not of full life, not of immortality, but of “dying endlessly” (mourir incessament).17 Almost half a century later, Blanchot ends his last literary work, The Instant of My Death (1994), with the very same experience of endless dying, in the form of death’s perpetual deferral. In this story, which occupies a troubling space between fiction and autobiography, the unnamed protagonist’s narrow escape from execution during the German occupation of France leads, many years later, not to a sense of life, but rather to “the feeling of lightness that is death itself or, to put it more precisely, the instant of my death henceforth always in abeyance [toujours en instance].”18 13 14 15 16 18

See Samuel Beckett, Molloy, ed. Shane Weller (London: Faber & Faber, 2010), p. 10; Molloy (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2009), p. 18. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), p. 3; L’Écriture du désastre (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), p. 10. Maurice Blanchot, Thomas l’obscur, première version, 1941 (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), p. 295. (All translations from the 1941 version of this novel in this chapter are my own.) Ibid., p. 296. 17 Ibid., p. 294. Maurice Blanchot, The Instant of My Death, in Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida, “The Instant of My Death” and “Demeure,” trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 1–11 (p. 11); L’Instant de ma mort (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), p. 18.

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Despite what is often seen as the formidable difficulty of Blanchot’s literary works, and regardless of what has been described as their resistance to allegorical decoding,19 Blanchot’s fiction is, then, in its unremitting insistence upon this experience of death’s impossibility, and the consequent endless dying to which his (male) protagonists are subjected, the articulation of a negativity that is at odds with Hegel’s concept of death as “the tremendous power of the negative.”20 Far from having purely philosophical implications, this errant negativity also lies at the heart of a counter-Enlightenment political vision that draws in particular on the work of the Marquis de Sade,21 and that leads Blanchot not only to conceive of a negatively defined community – that is, an “unavowable community” (communauté inavouable)22 – but also to seek to make sense of the Holocaust as an event that effects the negation of all meaning. If Blanchot’s abiding theme is this disastrous, nondialectical negativity, his attempt to articulate it leads him to deploy radical forms of linguistic negativism. Jacques Derrida’s essays on Blanchot are striking for their attention to Blanchot’s use of pas (both as an adverb of negation, “not,” and as a noun, “step”), as well as the negative conjunction “without” (sans).23 Blanchot’s radical linguistic negativism extends, however, far beyond the use of these two words; indeed, it is possible to chart shifting patterns of linguistic negativism across his literary œuvre, especially as regards his deployment of negative modifiers and conjunctions that become the very signature of his writing of the negative. This linguistic negativism serves a purpose – the realization of nothingness, or what might be termed a proper death – that is taken to be, in principle, at once necessary and impossible. Blanchot’s earliest works of fiction – the short narratives “The Last Word” and “The Idyll” (written in 1935 and 1936, respectively, and first published in 1951) – not only anticipate the politico-philosophical themes of his fiction in the 1940s and 1950s – including forms of institutional or state terror, the function of the law, and the nature and fate of the foreigner – but 19 20 21

22 23

See, for instance, Hill, Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary, p. 67. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 19. Blanchot’s most extensive engagement with Sade’s work is in the 1949 essay “Sade’s Reason,” in Lautréamont and Sade, trans. Stuart Kendall and Michelle Kendall (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004). See Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, trans. Pierre Joris (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1988); La Communauté inavouable (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1983). See Derrida, “Pace Not(s),” trans. John P. Leavey, in Parages, pp. 11–101. On Blanchot’s conception of the limits of language, see William S. Allen, Ellipsis: Of Poetry and the Experience of Language after Heidegger, Hölderlin, and Blanchot (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), ch. 3.

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also contain a number of what will prove to be the principal unwords of his later fiction. In these first two stories, those unwords include “decompose” (se décomposer), “irrational” (déraisonnable), “idleness” (désœuvrement), “indifferent” (indifferent), “inert” (inerte), “inhuman” (inhumain), “impregnable” (infranchissable), “ungraspable” (insaisissable), “endless” (interminable), “unwilling” (involontaire), and “calamity” (malheur). By some margin, however, the most frequent unword in these two early stories is the modifier “uneasy” (inquiét), together with the substantive form, “uneasiness” (inquiétude). “The Last Word” presents the reader with an apocalyptic scenario, signaled from the outset by two negative constructions: “there is no watchword anymore” (il n’y a plus de mot d’ordre) and “There’s no more library” (Il n’y a plus de bibliothèque).24 At one point, the story’s unnamed narrator (a judge) even suggests that the most common form of linguistic negation should be all that remains of language: One should “cross out all these words [effacer tous ces mots] and replace them with the word not [les mots ne pas].”25 This first short narrative thematizes disorder and the idea of an absolute negation that would put an end to that disorder. However, it is precisely such an absolute negation that proves to be impossible. When the narrator looks at the photograph of a child, it “immediately burst apart; it scorched my eyes and tore out a section of the wall. But this hole, opening on the emptiness again, didn’t show me anything [ce trou, ouvert à nouveau sur le vide, ne me découvrit rien]: it closed off my view, and the freer the horizon appeared to be, the more this freedom became a power to see nothing to which the emptiness itself gave itself up [une puissance de ne rien voir à laquelle cédait le vide lui-même].”26 The acquisition of this negative power, the power “to see nothing,” heralds the first experience in Blanchot’s fiction of a dying that fails to reach its term on account of a certain weakness or exhaustion; that is, a form of radical unpower: “What weakness! What weariness! I knew that I was already too weak to die, and I saw myself as I was – an unlucky man [avec toutes les disgrâces d’un homme] who has no life and yet who struggles to live.”27 When the catastrophe occurs, it is accompanied by an insistence upon the negation of language. With a sudden shift from first- to third-person narration, the text records: 24

25

Blanchot, “The Last Word,” in Vicious Circles: Two Fictions and “After the Fact,” trans. Paul Auster (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1985), pp. 37–55 (pp. 42–43); “Le Dernier Mot,” in Après Coup, précédé par Le Ressassement éternel (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1983), pp. 57–81 (pp. 62–63). 27 Ibid., p. 47; p. 69. 26 Ibid., p. 53; p. 78 (translation modified). Ibid., p. 54; p. 79.

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“[A]ll three of them fell without saying a word [sans dire un mot].”28 The story’s literal last word proves, then, to be “word” (mot), inscribed under the sign of the negative. Earlier in the story, however, the “last word” (dernier mot) is identified as “there is” (il y a),29 and, anticipating Levinas’s remarks on the “there is” in From Existence to Existents (1947), it may here be understood as a form of ontological affirmation that frustrates any absolute negation. The affirmation that there is nothing unavoidably leaves a remainder: the “there is” that is required for that nothing to be thought and said.30 In his remarks on “The Last Word” when it was republished by Les Éditions de Minuit in 1983, almost half a century after it was written, Blanchot emphasizes the apocalyptic nature of this first story – “the Apocalypse finally, the discovery of nothing other than universal ruin [rien d’autre que la ruine universelle]” – and associates the collapsing tower at the end of the story with the biblical Tower of Babel, while also connecting this linguistic ruination with the negative in Mallarmé’s poem A Throw of the Dice by describing it as “total shipwreck” (naufrage total).31 Nuancing his remarks on the writing of the nothing in Faux Pas, Blanchot insists in his 1983 essay that the saying of the nothing requires that last word – “there is” (il y a).32 The imbrication of utterance and negation is firmly established, then, in Blanchot’s first published work of fiction, and, to some extent, marks the style of the text. And if “there is” proves to be the last word, then the “total shipwreck,” the absolute disaster, will result in neither nothingness (the pure void) nor being, but rather in “universal ruin.” While their philosophical sources may differ, this idea of universal ruination is closely akin to Beckett’s. The second story written in the mid-1930s, “The Idyll,” recounts the experience of Alexander Akim, identified as a “stranger” (étranger), on his arrival in a town where he is immediately placed in a guarded hospice or asylum (hospice), in which he will soon die. In his remarks on this story 28

29 30

31 32

Ibid., p. 55; p. 81. This shift from first- to third-person narration at the end of Blanchot’s first work of fiction is reversed in his last work, The Instant of My Death, which ends with a shift from third to first person. Ibid., p. 45; p. 66. See Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001), pp. 51–52. This work was originally published in 1947. On the Blanchot–Levinas connection regarding the “il y a,” see, for instance, Simon Critchley, Very Little . . . Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 31–83; and Hill, Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary, pp. 62–63. Blanchot, “After the Fact,” in Vicious Circles, pp. 57–69 (p. 65; translation modified); “Après coup,” in Après coup, pp. 83–100 (p. 93). Ibid., p. 65; p. 94.

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when it was republished in 1983 together with “The Last Word,” Blanchot proceeds to name the “total shipwreck” that seems, as in Kafka’s The Trial, also to be anticipated in the story. “The Idyll” is, he observes, “a story from before Auschwitz, a story nevertheless of a wandering that does not end with death [une errance qui ne prend pas fin avec la mort].”33 This statement points very deliberately in two directions. On the one hand, Blanchot insists that “The Idyll” is not to be read as the story of “an already menacing future,” Nazi tyranny in Europe, the establishment of concentration camps, and the attempted destruction of the Jews along with all those considered to be racially other.34 On the other hand, Blanchot also asserts that “every story from now on will be from before Auschwitz,” in the sense that the historical catastrophe that is the Holocaust not only renders fiction about the Holocaust impossible – “there can be no fiction-story about Auschwitz” – but also constitutes a radical historical and philosophicopolitical caesura.35 Blanchot’s argument here recalls Adorno’s, and it is unsurprising not only that he should mention in his essay on his two stories from the mid-1930s Adorno’s claim that poetry after Auschwitz is impossible, but also that he should refer explicitly to Kafka, given that it is Adorno who, in his 1953 essay on Kafka, compares the experience of impossible death in “The Hunter Gracchus” with the experience of the Nazi concentration camps, in which, Adorno argues, death is no longer possible as a proper end to life.36 In “After the Fact,” Blanchot takes Kafka’s The Metamorphosis as his example of just such an impossible death: “Right after Gregor Samsa has died in agony and solitude, everything is reborn, and his sister, even though she was the most compassionate of all, gives herself up to the hope of renewal that her young body promises her.”37 The implication is, then, that Blanchot’s thinking of an impossible death as “total shipwreck,” absolute disaster, a kind of failed negativity, is already a thinking of the Holocaust as the instantiation of that disaster historically. This connection is also made explicitly in The Writing of the Disaster, where, having identified the Holocaust as “the absolute event of history” in which “the movement of Meaning was swallowed up,”38 Blanchot proceeds to assert that “He who has been the contemporary of the camps is forever a survivor: death will not

33 36 37 38

Ibid., p. 69; p. 99. 34 Ibid., p. 67; p. 96. 35 Ibid., pp. 68–69; pp. 98–99. See Theodor W. Adorno, “Notes on Kafka,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1967), pp. 243–71 (p. 260). Blanchot, “After the Fact,” p. 69; “Après coup,” p. 99. Blanchot, Writing of the Disaster, p. 47 (italics in original); Écriture du désastre, p. 80.

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make him die [la mort ne le fera pas mourir].”39 In other words, the experience of death’s impossibility – as a philosophical idea that counters the Hegelian conception of a dialectical negativity, and that is to be thematized in literature – becomes a way of understanding the Holocaust as an historical event, which in turn serves to confirm the philosophical thesis. The stakes here are particularly high, not least because at the time of writing “The Last Word” and “The Idyll,” as well as his first novel, Thomas the Obscure (the first version of which was drafted between 1932 and 1940, and published in 1941), Blanchot was aligned politically with the nationalist far right in France. While taking from 1933 onward a strong position against Nazi Germany, and anticipating another European war, Blanchot did so by calling for an antidemocratic revolutionary nationalism in France, castigating the Popular Front, and repeatedly lamenting what he saw as France’s cultural and political decline.40 Furthermore, while he was certainly not a collaborator during the Nazi occupation and the Vichy regime, neither was he, as were Beckett, René Char, and other writers on whom Blanchot would subsequently write appreciatively, an active member of the French Resistance. Most troubling of all, to make of his conception of a nondialectical negativity not only a way of understanding the literary (Kafka and Beckett both being identified by Blanchot as writers of such a negativity), but also a way of understanding the Holocaust, is to risk rendering that event no more than a particular manifestation of a philosophico-literary phenomenon, and even to suggest that the experience of “impossible death” realized in the Nazi extermination camps is in fact the only authentic experience of being. While both philosophy and literature clearly bear upon history, the manner in which Blanchot conceives of that relation in terms of a certain form of negativity is thus disturbing, to say the least. His political realignment from far right to far left after World War II in no way reduced his commitment to the idea of permanent revolution as his preferred political model. His appreciation of the writings of the Marquis de Sade, and of forms of radical negativity, reflect this political vision. If the unwording strategies deployed in Blanchot’s first two works of fiction are discreet, the linguistic negativism to be found in his first novel, Thomas the Obscure, is, in some respects, more extreme than that in any of 39 40

Ibid., p. 143; p. 217. For Blanchot’s political journalism in the 1930s, see Maurice Blanchot, Chroniques politiques des années trente, 1931–1940, ed. David Uhrig (Paris: Gallimard, 2017).

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his other works of fiction. In his 1983 essay on “The Last Word” and “The Idyll,” Blanchot remarks that the former was an attempt to “short circuit” Thomas the Obscure, “to overcome endlessness [surmonter l’interminable] and reach a final decision.”41 For better or worse, this attempt to short-circuit the novel, to have the last words be “without saying a word” (sans dire un mot), failed. The “search for annihilation” (recherche de l’anéantissement)42 that is then undertaken in Thomas the Obscure is prolonged in a manner that Blanchot came to see as unsatisfactory, and he published a radically shortened version of the novel (under the same title) in 1950; only after Blanchot’s own death in 2003 was the original, longer version reprinted. In terms of unwording procedures, the most striking characteristic of the original 1941 version of Thomas the Obscure is its extraordinarily heavy reliance upon negative modifiers. It hardly matters to which of the three main characters (Thomas, Anne, Irène) these modifiers are applied; they are quite simply all-pervasive. Several of these negative modifiers mark the limits of language, the linguistic negativism serving here to highlight that which resists linguistic expression. These modifiers include “inexpressible” (inexprimable), “unsayable” (indicible), “undefinable” (indéfinissable), “untransmittable” (intransmissible), and “ineffable” (ineffable). Blanchot’s repeated deployment of such modifiers in Thomas the Obscure places the novel within that tradition of language skepticism that finds one of its first, and most influential, modern formulations in Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos Letter, and that extends by way of Mauthner’s Beiträge to Beckett’s postwar concern with the “unnameable,” to which Blanchot would respond so enthusiastically in the 1950s. It is primarily by way of Mallarmé’s late work, however, that a literature engaging directly with this language-skeptical tradition reaches Blanchot. Mallarmé’s contention that language functions only in the absence of that to which it might be thought to refer – the word rose in some sense stating, and indeed being dependent upon, the “absence of any rose” (absence de toute rose) – becomes, in Blanchot’s work, an insistence upon language as a form of failing nihilation that is orientated toward that unseizable “nothing” to which he refers in Faux Pas. A second set of negative modifiers in Thomas the Obscure insists upon powerlessness, incapacity, and paralysis, with the modifier “motionless” (immobile) being particularly frequent. As we shall see, this modifier plays an increasingly important role in Blanchot’s fiction of the 1950s, being 41 42

Blanchot, “After the Fact,” p. 64 (translation modified); “Après coup,” p. 93. Ibid., p. 64; p. 92.

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central to his attempt to present a negativity at odds with Hegel’s dialectical form. The novel’s second sentence presents Thomas as “motionless” (immobile).43 This condition recurs throughout the work and is far from being restricted to the protagonist. Early on, Thomas is described as remaining “silent and motionless” (muet et immobile), and then as “motionless, fascinated and exposed” (immobile, fasciné et devoilé).44 In the presence of an innkeeper, he again remains “motionless” (immobile), while others also appear to be “motionless before him” (immobiles devant lui).45 Soon it is the figure of Anne who is distinguished by her “profound immobility” (profonde immobilité).46 This literal paralysis is matched by an inability that extends to the entire world of the novel, in which both perception and understanding repeatedly come up against that which is “inaccessible” (inaccessible), “incomprehensible” (incomprehensible), “inconceivable” (inconcevable), and “indecipherable” (indéchiffrable), these modifiers recurring with remarkable frequency. Blanchot’s reliance upon negative modifiers reaches its climax in the novel’s penultimate chapter, in which, following Anne’s death and a shift from third- to firstperson narration, Thomas describes himself as “invisible, inexpressible, non-existent” (invisible, inexprimable, inexistent).47 It is in this penultimate chapter, too, that Thomas distinguishes himself both from Anne and from animals in terms of his experience of the impossibility of death. The writing of the negative in Thomas the Obscure is associated initially with the role of the negative in Mallarmé. At the heart of the latter’s poem A Throw of the Dice, two instances of “as if” (comme si) frame a passage on the “gulf” (gouffre).48 As the mark of fiction, the “as if” insists both on similarity and difference, proximity and distance; it takes back what it asserts in the very act of assertion.49 Echoing Mallarmé, Blanchot frames Thomas the Obscure with just such an “as if.” The novel opens with Thomas on the beach, “motionless as if [comme si] he had come there to follow the movements of the other swimmers,” and it ends with him feeling “as if [comme si] the shame had begun for him.”50 While confirming the 43 47 48 49 50

Blanchot, Thomas l’obscur, p. 23. 44 Ibid., pp. 41, 45. 45 Ibid., pp. 49, 69. 46 Ibid., p. 81. Ibid., p. 305. Stéphane Mallarmé, A Throw of the Dice, trans. Brian Coffey, in Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Mary Ann Caws (New York: New Directions, 1982), pp. 103–27 (pp. 116–17). Cf. Hans Vaihinger’s The Philosophy of “As If,” trans. C. K. Ogden (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1924). The original German version of this work was first published in 1911. Blanchot, Thomas l’obscur, pp. 23 (emphasis added), 323. Notably, this ending is retained for the 1950 revised (radically reduced) version of the novel: see Maurice Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure, trans. Robert Lamberton (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1988), p. 117; Thomas l’obscur, nouvelle version (Paris: Gallimard, 1950), p. 137.

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importance of Mallarmé, this closing phrase also establishes a connection to Kafka’s writing of the negative: The Trial famously ends with the phrase “it was as if the shame of it must outlive him” (es war, als sollte die Scham ihn überleben), as Joseph K. lies dying.51 Beyond any question of direct influence, this superimposition of Kafka over Mallarmé at the end of Thomas the Obscure anticipates the thematics of Blanchot’s next novel, Aminadab (1942), which, as Sartre was the first to observe, bears some striking resemblances to The Castle, at the level of both content and style.52 In addition to various thematic, and even phrasal similarities, this resemblance even extends to Blanchot’s decision to identify the protagonist by the name “Thomas” (the same as for his previous novel), just as Kafka uses a reduced form of the name “Joseph K.” from The Trial for his next, and, as it turned out, last novel. The “as if” construction with which Thomas the Obscure both opens and closes, and which echoes first Mallarmé and then Kafka, recurs at the end of Aminadab, too. Thomas asks a young man whom he encounters in the house through which he has been wandering throughout the novel: “Who are you?,” in “a voice full of calm and conviction, and it was as if [comme si] this question would allow him to bring everything into the clear.”53 That the novel ends, or rather breaks off, with nothing having been brought into the clear is precisely the point, the “as if here functioning in much the same way as the “so-called” to which Mauthner refers in his Beiträge. At the stylistic level, one of the signal differences between Thomas the Obscure and Aminadab lies in the far less frequent reliance upon negative modifiers in the latter novel. That said, there are some notable similarities between the linguistic negativism in the two works. Whereas much of the unwording in Thomas the Obscure relates to language and its limits, the unwording in Aminadab primarily concerns movement. As in Thomas the 51 52

53

Franz Kafka, The Trial, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, rev. E. M. Butler (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), p. 251; Der Proceß, ed. Malcolm Pasley (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1990), p. 312. In his review of Aminadab, Sartre notes Blanchot’s insistence that he had not read Kafka at the time of writing Aminadab. Even if this is the case, it does not undermine Sartre’s argument, which concerns an “extraordinary similarity” (resemblance extraordinaire) between Aminadab and The Castle, rather than any direct and empirically verifiable influence of Kafka on Blanchot (see Jean-Paul Sartre, “Aminadab, ou du fantastique considéré comme un langage,” in Situations I. Essais critiques [Paris: Gallimard, 1947], pp. 122–42 [p. 123]). In his insistence upon the decisive importance of Mallarmé for Blanchot, Paul de Man arguably underestimates the importance of Kafka, not least for Blanchot’s writing of the negative (see Paul de Man, “Impersonality in the Criticism of Maurice Blanchot,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd ed. [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983], pp. 60–78). Maurice Blanchot, Aminadab, trans. Jeff Fort (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2002) p. 199; Aminadab (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), p. 227.

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Obscure, so in Aminadab, the negative modifier “motionless” (immobile) plays a particularly important role. Both Thomas the Obscure and Aminadab open with a Thomas who remains “motionless” (immobile).54 This immobility is reiterated a few pages later in Aminadab,55 before being extended to numerous other figures in the novel. Thomas is described at various points in the narrative as being “paralyzed and numb” (paralysé et engourdi), “as if inanimate” (comme inanimé), and as having “a paralyzed body” (le corps paralysé).56 He encounters two men who remain “motionless before him” (immobiles devant lui); his attempt to pass through a room in the house in which the novel is set is hampered by the “immobility” (immobilité) of the other people in it; and when an employee whom Thomas encounters in the house comes down from the high desk at which he has been sitting, he struggles to get his legs to move, on account of their having “grown numb from such a long period of motionlessness [une longue immobilité].”57 The action in Aminadab, such as it is, takes the form of Thomas’s passage through the house he enters in the opening chapter, in response to what he thinks is a sign made to him by a girl from one of the windows. The recurrent bouts of immobility from which he suffers not only threaten his progress but are also set alongside a challenging of the belief in any “true path” (vrai chemin) or in the fabled gatekeeper of the novel’s title. Just as in Kafka’s The Castle, so in Aminadab, the increasingly exhausted protagonist never arrives at his desired destination, while nonetheless remaining committed to reaching it. Through his insistence both on immobility and on the absence of any achievable end in Aminadab, Blanchot clearly signals his distance from the teleological nature of the Hegelian dialectic. That the fiction of Blanchot’s close friend Georges Bataille should also be strongly marked by inertia and immobility is significant here.58 In Blanchot’s fiction of the 1940s, it suggests both a break with the Enlightenment concept of progress (still very much present in Hegel’s thought) and also a skepticism regarding the possibility of revolutionary political action that would find its philosophical underpinnings in the Enlightenment and to which Blanchot was so attracted in the 1930s. 54 55 57 58

Blanchot, Thomas l’obscur, p. 23; Blanchot, Aminadab, p. 2; pp. 8–9. See Blanchot, Aminadab, p. 7; p. 14. 56 Ibid., pp. 11, 14, 20; pp. 18, 21, 28. Ibid., pp. 26, 47, 64; pp. 36, 59, 77. For an analysis of the negative modifiers “motionless” (immobile) and “inert” (inerte) in Bataille’s fiction, see my chapter “Decomposition: Georges Bataille and the Language of Necrophilia,” in Anna Katharina Schaffner and Shane Weller (eds.), Modernist Eroticisms: European Literature after Sexology, Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 169–94.

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The meaningfulness of Thomas’s entire experience in the house in Aminadab is placed under the sign of the negative when Lucie, one of the figures he encounters there, and whom he identifies as the person who had signaled to him to enter the house, declares: Contrary to what you have thought, I never made a sign, and I did not send any message [je ne t’ai jamais fait signe et je n’ai pas envoyé de message]. It is only thanks to the carelessness [incurie] that reigns in this house that you have been able to come this far; but no order called you here, and someone else was expected.59

In a manner that bears striking similarities to a form of negativism to be found in Kafka, while Thomas insists that he recognizes Lucie, and that she once lived next door to him, his assertions are systematically countered by her negations: “I am not the one you are looking for, and you are not the one who was supposed to come.”60 As for the “nothing,” it is located at the heart of the novel when, regarding the “secrets of the house,” Thomas is informed by a figure named Barbe that “everything we have learned is contained in the word nothing [le mot rien]; we have seen nothing, because there is nothing [il n’y a rien], and there is nothing because, between the four walls of each room, no furniture remains, no stove, no useful objects of any kind; likewise the doors have been removed, the paintings taken down, and the carpet carried away.”61 Although he is reassured that he will in due course come to understand the nature of the relations between the tenants and the domestic staff in the house, Thomas is told immediately thereafter: “The essential thing is precisely that there is nothing to say about it, nothing happens, there is nothing [il n’y a rien à en dire, il ne se passe rien, il n’y a rien].”62 It is this “nothing to say about it” (rien à en dire) that is said in the novel, leaving neither Thomas nor the reader any closer at the end of the work to an understanding of the true nature of things in the house. In this, Aminadab bears a close resemblance not only to Kafka’s The Castle, but also to Beckett’s Watt, which was written between 1940 and 1945 (and first published in 1953). Like Blanchot’s Thomas, Beckett’s Watt enters a house in which he experiences precisely the nothing; language is beggared by the experience. Overall, Blanchot’s writing of the negative is considerably subtler in Aminadab than it is in Thomas the Obscure, with far less dependence upon negative modifiers. This is not to say that such modifiers do not have an important function in the novel: In addition to “motionless” 59 62

Blanchot, Aminadab, p. 192; p. 220. Ibid., p. 75; p. 90.

60

Ibid., p. 193; p. 220.

61

Ibid., p. 149; p. 172.

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(immobile), both “unbearable” (insupportable) and “impatient” (impatient) recur frequently in Aminadab, as does “disorder” (désordre). It is this latter unword, already central to Blanchot’s earliest work of fiction, “The Last Word,” as well as to his political journalism in the 1930s, that becomes among the most important in his next novel, The Most High (1948). The disorder in The Most High is from the outset identified as political in nature, placing in question the possibility of any genuine community. Sociopolitical order is threatened in this novel by an epidemic as well as by counterinstitutional forces,63 while the state and the law are presented as irreducibly violent. So frequently do the negative modifiers “motionless” (immobile) and “inert” (inerte) appear in The Most High that the novel might be read as concerning itself primarily with the politics of inertia in the face of looming political disaster. The following examples indicate just how recurrent this unwording element is in the novel: The first-person narrator, Henri Sorge,64 a functionary of the state, refers early on to his “inertia” (inertie);65 his sister, Louise, is repeatedly described as “motionless” (immobile);66 and Sorge is later described by Pierre Bouxx (who presents himself as a medical student, but who is eventually revealed to be a political activist) as “sick, immobilized” (malade, immobilisé), before Bouxx in his turn is described as “motionless, inert” (immobile, inerte).67 This insistence upon immobility reaches a climax in the novel’s final chapter, which opens with Sorge declaring that “‘I knew that I had to act as I was acting, that I had to stay in my corner, motionless and feigning death” [immobile et faisant la mort].68 This is soon followed by his reporting: “I heard a slight noise. I completely stopped moving [Je me fis tout à fait immobile] and didn’t look anywhere; after a few moments, I started sweeping again. . . . So – I had to stay still, still, still [immobile, immobile, immobile].”69 The novel ends with Sorge’s nurse, Jeanne Galgat, turning a gun on him, the irony being that it is at this very moment that Sorge seems finally to have overcome his inertia, exclaiming: “Now, now I’m 63 64

65 66 68

In this respect, Blanchot’s novel bears comparison with Camus’s The Plague (1947). Blanchot’s choice of the name “Sorge” for the narrator of The Most High is tantalizing in its politicophilosophical suggestiveness, given that during World War II it was a Soviet spy named Richard Sorge (1895–1944) who informed Stalin, in September 1941, that the Japanese were not planning an imminent attack on the Soviet Union and that it was therefore safe to redeploy Soviet troops to the Western front to combat the German army during the battle for Moscow. Furthermore, the German word Sorge (meaning “care”) is central to Heidegger’s argument concerning Dasein’s relation to Being, in Being and Time (1927). Maurice Blanchot, The Most High, trans. Allan Stoekl (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), p. 51; Le Très-haut (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), p. 55. Ibid., pp. 53, 53, 58, 67; pp. 56–57, 61, 70. 67 Ibid., pp. 140–41; pp. 137–38. Ibid., p. 235; p. 225. 69 Ibid., pp. 142–43; p. 232.

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speaking.”70 It is with this assertion, and with Sorge’s imminent death, that the novel ends, just as Beckett’s The Unnamable, published five years later, ironically breaks off with the words “I’ll go on” (je vais continuer).71 As in Thomas the Obscure, so in The Most High, it is two female figures, Louise and Jeanne, who represent the threat of the pure nothing. In Sorge’s sister, Louise, it is the “nothing” (rien) that gazes back at him when she leads him down into a crypt, while in the nurse, Jeanne, it is a murderous intention combined with an identification of Sorge as the “Most High.” The gendering of the nothing that is already present in Thomas the Obscure is thus no less explicit in The Most High. This disturbing relation between gender and the negative is also explored (in inverted form) in the other work of fiction that Blanchot published in 1948: the novella Death Sentence. The relation between The Most High and Death Sentence is identified in a flyer (prière d’insérer) written at the time of their original publication, in which Blanchot states that they may be seen as “two irreconcilable and yet concordant versions of the same reality.”72 The events in both works have a clear political context; both works focus on illness and death; and both take the form of first-person narratives. In Death Sentence, however, not only is the political context decidedly more concrete historically – the 1938 Munich crisis in part one; the June 1940 bombing of Paris by the Luftwaffe in part two – but now it is the first-person male narrator, rather than the female characters he encounters, who threatens the nothing. Indeed, in part one of Death Sentence, this unnamed male narrator is described by the dying woman J. as the figure of death, after he has recalled her to life (in the manner of Jesus recalling Lazarus, or Orpheus Eurydice): “[S]he turned slightly towards the nurse and said in a tranquil tone, ‘Now then, take a good look at death,’ and pointed her finger at me.”73 This scene is an inversion of the one at the end of The Most High, where it is the woman, Jeanne, who wields the weapon: a gun in her case, a syringe in the case of the male narrator in Death Sentence. Regarding linguistic negativism, Death Sentence is striking not least for the reduction in the kind of unwording procedures to be found in the three novels that precede it. That said, three negative modifiers do stand out: 70 71 72

73

Ibid., p. 254; p. 243. Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable, ed. Steven Connor (London: Faber & Faber, 2010), p. 134; L’Innommable (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), p. 213. Quoted in Pierre Madaule, “Grammaire de L’Arrêt de mort,” in Christophe Bident and Pierre Vilar (eds.), Maurice Blanchot. Récits critiques (Tours: Éditions Farrago/Éditions Léo Scheer, 2003), pp. 523–45 (pp. 534–35; my translation). Maurice Blanchot, Death Sentence, trans. Lydia Davis (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1978), p. 28; L’Arrêt de mort (Paris: Gallimard “L’Imaginaire,” 1980), p. 48.

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“irremediable” (irremediable), “uneasy” (inquiet), and, as in both Aminadab and The Most High, “motionless” (immobile). The most sustained instance of unwording in part one of Death Sentence concerns the dying J.: “In her nightly terror, she wasn’t superstitious at all; she faced a very great danger, one that was nameless and formless [sans nom et sans figure], altogether indeterminate [tout à fait indéterminé], and when she was alone she faced it all alone, without recourse to any tricks or charms.”74 The phrase “nameless and formless, altogether indeterminate” is very much in line with Blanchot’s linguistic negativism in Thomas the Obscure, at the heart of which is another dying young woman, Anne, the centrality of this death to the narrative being even clearer in the revised (1950) version, which cuts out all reference to a second woman, Irène, who plays a significant role in the 1941 version. In Death Sentence, the dying J. is described as “propertyless” (sans bien) and “dispossessed” (déjà dépossedée).75 Like Kafka’s Gracchus, her death miscarries – although only on the first occasion. Ultimately, the experience of death’s impossibility, and of an errant negativity, proves to be that of the unnamed male narrator, rather than that of any of the female figures he encounters, and is explicitly related to the question of language, and, more precisely, to the failure of language to effect any absolute negation. The first part of Death Sentence ends with the narrator asserting that he is “no longer able to speak” of his experience of the “extraordinary” – in other words, language fails when it comes to the essential: the meaning of J.’s coming back from the dead at the narrator’s verbal bidding and then her death in his presence, if not at his hand.76 The reader is left without any explanation of the events recounted by this unnamed narrator.77 The second part of Death Sentence opens with a number of crucial remarks upon language and silence in which unwording becomes considerably more intensive. Silence, the narrator asserts, cannot be maintained unless that which needs to be spoken has indeed been spoken: “After a week of silence I have seen clearly that if I was expressing badly what I was trying to express, there would not only be no end, but I would be glad that there was no end.”78 The narrator describes his words as a “curtain behind which what happened will never stop happening.”79 He considers himself to have been deceived by “silence, immobility, and patience carried to the point of inertia” (le silence, l’immobilité, la patience poussée jusqu’à l’inertie) because 74 77 78

Ibid., p. 11; p. 22. 75 Ibid., p. 6; p. 14. 76 Ibid., p. 30; p. 53. This lack of any explanation is reinforced in the revised (1971) version of Death Sentence, which does not include a one-page section at the end of the 1948 version. Blanchot, Death Sentence, p. 31; Arrêt de mort, p. 54. 79 Ibid., p. 31; p. 54.

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that which the use of language was supposed to achieve has not been achieved.80 Speech fails, then, to put an end to that of which it speaks. The silence is not that “real silence” to which Beckett will refer in The Unnamable, a silence that can remain unbroken. The negating power of language is thus a failing one. The narrator has “lost silence,” and the regret he feels at this loss is “immeasurable” (sans mesure): “I cannot describe the pain [malheur] that invades a man once he has begun to speak. It is a motionless pain [malheur immobile], that is itself pledged to muteness; because of it, the unbreathable [l’irrespirable] is the element I breathe.”81 This preoccupation with speech (la parole) as the place in which a wandering, failing negativity is experienced will become ever more pronounced in Blanchot’s subsequent fiction. Toward the end of the second part of Death Sentence, Blanchot relies upon one of the principal forms of unwording in The Most High. The narrator describes himself as remaining “for a very long time without moving” (très longtemps immobile) in his hotel room in the rue d’O.82 A young woman, Nathalie, who has entered the room before him, is also caught in this pervasive inertia: “I put my arms around her, I was completely motionless and she was completely motionless [j’étais tout à fait immobile et elle tout à fait immobile].”83 The narrator notes once again the “dead and empty flame” (flamme morte et vide) in the woman’s eyes.84 That the idea of immobility lies at the thematic heart of Death Sentence becomes evident when Nathalie informs the narrator of her intention to have a cast made of her head and hands.85 When he tries to dissuade her, he encounters in her eyes “something so motionless and so cold” (quelque chose de si immobile et de si froid) that the question he has directed at her remains “suspended” (suspendue) between them.86 Once more, then, it is a woman who figures the dead, with the male narrator being the one with the power to say “Come,” recalling the dead to an existence that is “perhaps” one of “immeasurable unhappiness” (un malheur sans mesure).87 Language here is thus the means by which the negativity of death is derailed; it prevents the very end that it is supposed to deliver. The gendered nature of this scene in Death Sentence, in which death no longer constitutes either a simple reduction to nothing or a dialectical sublation in the Hegelian sense, is again apparent in the short narrative (récit) that Blanchot first published in 1949, in the journal Empedocle. 80 84 87

Ibid., p. 31; pp. 54–55. 81 Ibid., p. 33; p. 57. 82 Ibid., p. 68; p. 109. 83 Ibid., p. 69; p. 111. Ibid., p. 69, cf. p. 68; p. 111, cf. p. 109. 85 Ibid., p. 75; p. 119. 86 Ibid., p. 75; p. 120. Ibid., p. 80; p. 127.

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Originally entitled generically “A Story,”88 and many years later published in book form under the title The Madness of the Day (1973), this work opens with a form of unwording that marks a new phase in Blanchot’s writing of the negative. The form in question is the anaphoric “neither . . . nor” (ni . . . ni), countering the integrative, conjoining “both . . . and” logic of the Hegelian dialectic. The first instance of this particular form of linguistic negativism occurs in the opening sentence of The Madness of the Day, in which the unnamed first-person narrator declares: “I am neither learned nor ignorant” (Je ne suis ni savant ni ignorant).89 Later in the story, the narrator resorts again to this doubly negative construction when referring to his physical, perceptual, and intellectual inabilities: “I could neither walk, nor breathe, nor eat” (Je ne pouvais ni marcher, ni respirer, ni me nourrir); “I could neither look nor not look” (je ne pouvais ni regarder ni ne pas regarder); and “I could neither read nor write” (Je ne pouvais ni lire ni écrire).90 Inability here extends, then, beyond the immobilities and inertias of Blanchot’s earlier fiction, and is all the more apparent for the concentrated nature of the narrative, which tells of the narrator’s experience in a hospital after someone has put crushed glass in his eyes for a reason that is never stated. If the unwording in The Madness of the Day stands apart from that in Blanchot’s earlier fiction, this is because it is explicitly directed back against the entire work, and indeed against narrative as such. Responding to the bidding of the doctors who are treating him, the narrator begins to tell the very story that we are reading, which, as noted previously, opens with a double negation: “neither . . . nor” (ni . . . ni). This story having failed to satisfy his male listeners, and in response to the demand that he continue narrating, the narrator declares: “A story? No. No stories, never again [Non, pas de récit, plus jamais].”91 The end of The Madness of the Day announces, then, the end of all stories, just as Blanchot’s apocalyptic first story, “The Last Word,” announces the end of words, concluding as it does with the phrase “without saying a word” (sans dire un mot). And yet, in 1951, three years after the original publication of the text that would only much later be titled The Madness of the Day, Blanchot nonetheless published When the Time Comes, significantly identified generically as a “story” 88

89 90

As Derrida observes in his reading of The Madness of the Day, the original title varies between “A Story” (“Un récit”) and “A Story?” (“Un récit?”) in the journal (Empedocle) in which the work was first published. See Derrida, “Living On,” trans. James Hulbert, in Parages, pp. 103–91 (p. 114). Maurice Blanchot, The Madness of the Day, trans. Lydia Davis (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1981), p. 5 (translated modified); La Folie du jour (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), p. 9. Ibid., pp. 7, 11–12 (translations modified); pp. 12, 18–19. 91 Ibid., p. 18; p. 30.

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(récit) on the front cover of the French edition. The very fact of this publication serves to weaken the power of the negation with which The Madness of the Day ends. Or rather, it brings out the highly paradoxical nature of Blanchot’s linguistic negativism. On the one hand, the breaking of the contract between word and world means that language will inevitably fail to capture that to which it refers (in Blanchot’s case not things but the nothing), hence the need for a linguistic negativism that constitutes an act of violence against the language of affirmation. On the other hand, such unwording functions, like the Levinasian “there is” (il y a), to affirm that which it negates – through the very act of its negation. It is within this paradox that Blanchot’s linguistic negativism is ever more explicitly placed during the 1950s and early 1960s. When the Time Comes follows in the wake of The Madness of the Day not only chronologically, but also in its reliance upon unwording procedures that work through the taking back of the said; in other words, through a radical form of epanorthosis closely akin to that to be found in Beckett’s postwar novels. Indeed, it is this gesture of taking back the said that will, from this point on, prove to be the dominant form of linguistic negativism adopted by Blanchot in his fiction. In the opening paragraph of When the Time Comes, for instance, the unnamed narrator asserts as a “truth” he would rather have been able to avoid that “Time had passed, and yet it was not past” (Le temps avait passé, et pourtant il n’était pas passé).92 Later, he records: “what I have, I don’t have” (ce que j’ai, je ne l’ai pas).93 This form of epanorthosis generates a series of paradoxes, and When the Time Comes is notable for its heavy reliance upon paradox more generally, above all with regard to that by now most familiar of Blanchovian unwords: “immobility” (immobilité). Early in the text, the narrator reports: “[M]y steps were the steps of immobility [les pas de l’immobilité].”94 This radically paradoxical idea of mobile immobility comes to dominate the final pages of the story, where the narrator records his being tied to “the immobility that passes [cette immobilité qui passe] both through the night and through the day,” reflects on the “cold fantasy” of his “fixed ascension” (ascension immobile), refers to “a day that passes immobile [un jour qui passe immobile] through the day,” and then to “the absolutely dark moment of the plot,” when “human events, around a centre as unstable and immobile [instable et immobile] as myself, indefinitely construct their return.”95 Here, 92 93 95

Maurice Blanchot, When the Time Comes, trans. Lydia Davis (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1985), p. 1; Au moment voulu (Paris: Gallimard, 1982), p. 8. Ibid., p. 50 (translation modified); p. 113. 94 Ibid., p. 4; p. 15. Ibid., pp. 72–73; pp. 161–65.

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Blanchot brings together not only movement and immobility, but also end and recurrence, such that the negative (end) proves to be the condition for a kind of spectral return, initiating his sustained engagement with Nietzsche’s concept of eternal return (ewige Wiederkehr), an engagement that finds its fullest articulation two decades later, in The Step Not Beyond (1973), but is also signaled both in When the Time Comes and in the volume title chosen for the 1951 republication of the two early stories “The Last Word” and “The Idyll”: Le Ressassement éternel (“Eternal Recurrence”). In his next work of fiction, The One Who Was Standing Apart from Me (1953), Blanchot continues to rely heavily on the negative modifier “motionless” (immobile), once again insisting on its paradoxical nature, and thus on the experience of aporia rather than dialectic. For instance, his unnamed first-person narrator states early in the story that “I think I made a slight motion or tried to shift, but I ran up against my own immobility [immobilité].”96 The unword that plays the most decisive role in this text, however, is “emptiness”/“void” (vide). Both the substantive “emptiness”/ “void” and the modifier “empty” punctuate the narrative with great regularity. In the small room in which the narrator finds himself, he is “immobilized in a feeling of radiant emptiness [vide rayonnant].”97 The obscure task he sees himself as obliged to undertake is “one that can’t be grasped, a demand, but empty [vide], gloomy, and devastating.”98 A vase on the table is described as “empty” (vide).99 A face that appears in a window is “an empty, silent point” (un point vide, silencieux), glimpsed in “an empty moment” (un instant vide), while the narrator’s own gaze, which is itself “empty” (vide), encounters “only the emptiness [le vide], the closed circle of its own vision.”100 The event at the heart of The One Who Was Standing Apart from Me not only remains obscure, but is characterized above all by its “emptiness.”101 And what takes place, does so in “the emptiness of an airless and rootless time” (le vide d’un temps sans air et sans racine).102 A smile is “ineffably poised on emptiness” (posé ineffablement sur le vide), and in this smile “the emptiness [le vide] opens on a smiling allusion torn across by a slight derision.”103 Indeed, the narrator eventually considers the possibility that “everything is empty and lifeless” (tout est vide et inanimé), thereby bringing together in a single unwording formulation the two prevailing forms of the negative in the story.104 96 97 100 104

Maurice Blanchot, The One Who Was Standing Apart from Me, trans. Lydia Davis (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1993), p. 30; Celui qui ne m’accompagnait pas (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), p. 59. 98 99 Ibid., p. 26; pp. 52–53. Ibid., p. 29; p. 57. Ibid., p. 35; p. 69. Ibid., p. 38; p. 74. 101 Ibid., p. 47; p. 89. 102 Ibid., p. 55; p. 105. 103 Ibid., p. 91; p. 171. Ibid., p. 77; p. 146.

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The One Who Was Standing Apart from Me stands apart from Blanchot’s earlier fiction not only because of the degree of abstraction, and the lack of clearly identifiable events that would constitute a narrative, but also on account of the very considerable attention that it devotes to the question of language in the form of speech (la parole), which exceeds even that in Death Sentence and The Madness of the Day. The narrator is convinced that he has to write, and that what he writes are “profound words [paroles profondes] which I would like to belong to, but which would, themselves, also like to belong to me, words empty and without connection [paroles vides et sans lien].”105 He is compelled, however, to acknowledge that he is “without power” (sans pouvoir) over these words, and that “they have no relations with me.”106 These unmasterable, inappropriable words can be described only through an unremitting reliance upon linguistic negativism, as evidenced by the following passage: they do not speak, they are not interior, they are, on the contrary, without intimacy, being altogether outside, and what they designate engages me in this “outside” of all speech, apparently more secret and more interior than the speech of the innermost heart, but, here, the outside is empty, the secret is without depth, what is repeated is the emptiness of repetition, it doesn’t speak and yet it has always been said already.107

Blanchot’s narrator proceeds to connect this conception of an unmasterable language, a language “without intimacy,” with the experience of “infinite unhappiness” (malheur infini), the “greatest distress” that he has ever endured.108 And this distress is, once again, the experience of death’s impossibility, of wandering negativity: “Everything has an end [une terme], but distress [la détresse] does not, it does not know sleep, it does not know death.”109 The trajectory in Blanchot’s engagement with the negative in his fiction can thus be seen to pass from encounters with female figures (from Anne and Irène in Thomas the Obscure to J. and Nathalie in Death Sentence), to thought (la pensée, at the end of Death Sentence), to speech (la parole, in The One Who Was Standing Apart from Me). A final phase will entail a move from speech to writing (écriture), in the hybrid work The Writing of the Disaster, this being in no small measure in response to Derrida’s rethinking of writing as trace in his major works of the 1960s, Of Grammatology and Writing and Difference (both first published in 1967). Furthermore, while the political dimension that is so evident in 105 108

Ibid., p. 74; p. 139. Ibid., p. 72; p. 136.

106 109

Ibid., p. 75; p. 141. Ibid., p. 46; p. 144.

107

Ibid., p. 72; pp. 135–36.

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the two works of fiction published in 1948 – The Most High, where the political is thematized, and Death Sentence, where it constitutes the context (the 1938 Munich crisis; the German bombing of Paris in 1940) – becomes ever less apparent in the later fiction, it returns in the later hybrid work, above all in Blanchot’s reflections on the Holocaust. Blanchot continues to rely upon the negative modifier “motionless” (immobile) in his next work of fiction, The Last Man (1957), with the important difference being that the philosophico-political stakes of this immobility are signaled through the allusion to Nietzsche’s idea of the “last man” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Whereas Nietzsche presses for the overcoming of, or passage beyond, this “last man” in the interests of the “overman” (Übermensch), Blanchot insists upon a form of taking back or withdrawal that leaves spectral traces (the “pure no” remains, as ever, unachieved). The last man of the title is not only gravely ill, but also, and for that very reason, immobile: “For a long time now he has not left his bed, he doesn’t move [il est immobile], he doesn’t speak.”110 Unsurprisingly, this last man can only be described through a reliance on intensive linguistic negativism: His solitude, the solitude of someone who no longer has room to be wrong about himself. He can no longer do more than suffer himself, but this was a suffering he could not suffer. . . . He was there, entirely there, and yet someone who was less himself, who gave less certainty of being himself, somebody absolutely insufficient, without reliance on himself or on anything else [quelqu’un d’absolument insufficent, sans appui sur soi, ni sur rien d’autre].111

Such linguistic negativism is far from being restricted to the last man, however. As in his earlier writing of the negative, so here, too, Blanchot deploys his negative modifiers in the most general manner, weakening any firm distinction not only between individuals but also between body, language, and thought. In part one of The Last Man, the young woman’s face is described as “closed and motionless” (fermé et immobile); she, in turn, describes the narrator himself as “so motionless” (si immobile); and the narrator is also aware of “motionless words” (paroles immobiles).112 In part two, where the focus switches from the last man and the young woman to thought (la pensée), it is thought that is described as “motionless”

110 111

Maurice Blanchot, The Last Man, trans. Lydia Davis (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1987), p. 11; Le Dernier Homme, nouvelle version (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), p. 24. Ibid., pp. 29–30; p. 53. 112 Ibid., pp. 52, 18, 26; pp. 88, 34, 48.

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(immobile).113 Motionlessness and emptiness here serve to figure precisely that endless dying, that failing of the negative, that is Blanchot’s abiding theme and that traverses the distinction between beings. In philosophicopolitical terms, the disaster here remains that of the last man, forever blocking the arrival of Nietzsche’s overman. A linguistic negativism that operates through the increasingly systematic retraction of the said, a form of epanorthosis already evident in Blanchot’s previous two works of fiction, comes to dominate in The Last Man. The unnamed male narrator writes of “an anguish without anguish” (une angoisse sans angoisse), the “approach of what has no approach” (approche de ce qui est sans approche), and of the last man’s suffering as a “suffering he could not suffer” (souffrance qu’il ne pouvait pourtant pas souffrir).114 In addition to the intensification of this form of epanorthosis, what particularly distinguishes the unwording in The Last Man from that to be found in Blanchot’s earlier fiction is its deabsolutizing qualification of the negative through the repeated deployment of “almost” (presque). The impact of this weakener is felt in part two, particularly in relation to the idea of emptiness, which is now marked by a degree of uncertainty that is not apparent in part one, the narrator declaring that “It seems that the emptiness is never empty enough” (Il semble que le vide n’est jamais assez vide) and that the “very last face” is “the emptiness, perhaps” (le vide peut-être).115 Such hesitancy marks a new phase in Blanchot’s writing of the negative, suggesting one more affinity with Beckett, who in the 1950s identified the weakener “perhaps” as the “key word” in his plays.116 Despite this hesitancy in The Last Man, the idea of emptiness or the void nonetheless continues to play a central role in Blanchot’s next work, Awaiting Oblivion (1962), the dialogic form of which explores a relation between an unnamed man and an unnamed woman located in what is repeatedly described as a void. The level of abstraction, or more precisely of evacuation, is more extreme here than in any of Blanchot’s earlier works of fiction. In part one, the man’s relation to the woman is one in which “It was as if he had touched her across the void [à travers le vide],”117 while the distinguishing feature of the hotel room in which the dialog between 113 115 116

117

Ibid., pp. 66, 71; pp. 111, 119. 114 Ibid., pp. 20–30; pp. 52–53. Ibid., pp. 87–88; pp. 145–46. Samuel Beckett in Tom Driver, “Beckett by the Madeleine,” Columbia University Forum (Summer 1961): 21–25; reprinted in Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman (eds.), Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), pp. 217–23 (p. 220). Maurice Blanchot, Awaiting Oblivion, trans. John Gregg (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), p. 3; L’Attente l’oubli (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), p. 11.

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them takes place is “its emptiness” (son vide).118 Their voices “ring out in the immense emptiness [l’immense vide],” with “the emptiness of this empty place” (le vide de ce lieu vide) in which their dialog occurs being matched only by “the emptiness of the voices” (le vide des voix).119 This void may in part be understood as a negation of the personal, heralding Blanchot’s reflections on the “neutral” (le neutre) in the course of the 1960s and 1970s, as reflected in both The Step Not Beyond and The Writing of the Disaster. The emphasis in Awaiting Oblivion is placed primarily on the nature of language. Language here is cut adrift in a manner that clearly reflects the impact of language skepticism. The woman’s words are described as being “without history, without connection to the past of everyone else, even without relation to her own life or to anyone else’s” (sans histoire, sans lien avec le passé de tous, sans rapport même avec sa vie à elle, ni avec la vie de personne).120 Furthermore, it is only “something negative” (quelque chose de négatif ) that enables her to speak.121 The use of the word something (quelque chose) here is significant, signaling a challenge to identification and nomination that proves to be central to the work as a whole, and which is signaled by the repeated deployment of “some” (quelque) and “like” (comme). The man knows, for instance, that “somewhere” (quelque part) there is “a kind of void” (comme un vide), and that the woman is located in a place where an “indistinct assemblage” extends to infinity, “a crowd that was not a true crowd of people but something uncountable and indefinite [quelque chose d’innombrable et d’indéfini], a kind of abstract weakness, incapable of presenting itself in any other way then in the empty form [la forme vide] of a very large number.”122 Following on from the deployment of “perhaps” in The Last Man, Blanchot’s use of “some” (quelque) and “like” (comme) in Awaiting Oblivion constitutes a new means of highlighting a weak or failing language. The other distinguishing feature of Blanchot’s linguistic negativism in Awaiting Oblivion is his heavy reliance upon the conjunction “without” (sans) in “X without X” constructions, this being the most extreme form of epanorthosis, in which the said is immediately unsaid. Examples of this pervasive construction in Awaiting Oblivion include “waiting and without waiting” (attendant et sans attendre); “at a distance without distance” (à distance sans distance); “clarity without clarity” (clarté sans clarté); “Present without presence” (Présente sans presence); “Forgetting without 118 121

Ibid., p. 7; p. 17. Ibid., p. 16; p. 35.

119 122

Ibid., pp. 29–30; p. 53. 120 Ibid., p. 10 (translation modified); p. 24. Ibid., pp. 15, 18; pp. 32, 39–40.

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the possibility of forgetting” (Oubli sans possibilité d’oublier); “Forgettingforgotten without forgetting” (Oubliant-oublié sans oubli); “rest without rest” (repos sans repos); “even without evenness” (égal sans égalité); and “spaced without space” (espacée sans espace).123 This particular unwording strategy is no less insistent than is the use of negative affixes in the 1941 version of Thomas the Obscure. However, the epanorthosis in Awaiting Oblivion is a taking back of the said that nonetheless leaves in place what has been said, the negation coming, as it were, after the fact. In contrast, the extensive reliance upon negative prefixes in Thomas the Obscure places the negation before the negated. The difference between these two forms of linguistic negativism is crucial to an appreciation of the development of Blanchot’s linguistic negativism and its relation to his attempt to explore in his fiction the idea of endless dying or impossible death as an alternative to a Hegelian negativity that would serve the purpose of a dialectical progression toward the absolute. In Blanchot’s later work, the unwording is retrospective rather than prospective, and thus, in a sense, always too late, highlighting a failure of the negative. If no unsaying of the said can ever quite be accomplished, if there will always be some remnant, this is arguably more evident in retrospective negations. In other words, the predominant form of linguistic negativism in Blanchot’s later fiction – his late style, as it were – is one that insists upon, and operates through, belatedness.124 The various unwording procedures that characterize Awaiting Oblivion are important for an understanding of a European literature of the unword more generally, not least because, according to Blanchot, they were appreciated by Beckett. In a short text written shortly after Beckett’s death in December 1989, Blanchot asserts that the latter recognized a language closely akin to his own in a passage in Awaiting Oblivion concerning the nature of the young woman’s speech, a passage that is striking for its intensive linguistic negativism: This even speech, spaced without space [espacée sans espace], affirming beneath all affirmation, impossible to deny [impossible à nier], too weak to be silenced, too docile to be contained, not saying something [ne disant pas quelque chose], only speaking, speaking without life, without a voice [parlant 123 124

Ibid., pp. 20, 24, 37, 67, 78 (translation modified), 79 (translation modified), 82; pp. 43, 49, 73, 128, 147, 149, 151, 155. In this respect, Blanchot’s work takes its place within a modern European literature preoccupied with its lateness, this preoccupation being articulated not only thematically, but also stylistically. Cf. Ben Hutchinson, Lateness and Modern European Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

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sans vie, sans voix], in a voice lower than any other: living among the dead, dead among the living, calling to die, to come back to life in order to die, calling without appeal [sans appel].125

If Beckett did indeed, as Blanchot claims, recognize himself in this passage, it would be no less true to say that Blanchot’s writing of the negative in Awaiting Oblivion owes much to his reading of Beckett, especially The Unnamable and Texts for Nothing, perhaps above all the last lines of the last of the thirteen Texts for Nothing: It’s not true, yes, it’s true, it’s true and it’s not true, there is silence and there is not silence, there is no one and there is something, nothing prevents anything. And were the voice to cease quite at last, the old ceasing voice, it would not be true, as it is not true that it speaks, it can’t speak, it can’t cease. And were there one day to be here, where there are no days, which is no place, born of the impossible voice the unmakable being, and a gleam of light, still all would be silent and empty and dark, as now, as soon now, when all will be ended, all said, it says, it murmurs.126

As in The Unnamable and Texts for Nothing, so in Awaiting Oblivion, unwording places all affirmation under the sign of the negative. In Blanchot’s case, however, this is effected in a manner that preserves the adjectival force at the expense of the nominal. That is to say, Blanchot repeatedly deploys modifiers followed by a negation that is directed at the noun form: “even without evenness” (égale sans égalité) and “spaced without space” (espacée sans espace) are but two among many instances of this procedure in Awaiting Oblivion. The effect of this form of radical epanorthosis is to evacuate the modifier while letting it stand. In other words, the modifier is semantically voided, such that what remains is in each instance a void word – or even a word void. This stylistic voidance, the origins of which are to be found in Blanchot’s earliest fiction, reaches its most extreme form in Awaiting Oblivion, where it serves as a means of resistance to semantic hypostatization and reification, but at the risk of an evacuation of all sense. What could it possibly mean, for instance, for something to be “spaced without space” or at “rest without rest”? In this 125

126

Blanchot, Awaiting Oblivion, p. 82; pp. 155–56. On Beckett’s response to this passage, see Maurice Blanchot, “Oh All to End,” trans. Leslie Hill, in Michael Holland (ed.), The Blanchot Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), pp. 298–300 (p. 299); “Oh tout finir,” Critique, 519–20 (August–September 1990): 635–37 (636). Samuel Beckett, Texts for Nothing and Other Shorter Prose, 1950–1976, ed. Mark Nixon (London: Faber & Faber, 2010), p. 53; Nouvelles et Textes pour rien (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1958), pp. 205–6. On the Beckett/Blanchot relation, see, for instance, my chapter “Beckett/Blanchot: Debts, Legacies, Affinities,” in Matthew Feldman and Mark Nixon (eds.), Beckett’s Literary Legacies (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), pp. 22–39.

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respect, the epanorthosis in Awaiting Oblivion goes far beyond the voiding of the speaking subject that, for Foucault, is the essential feature of contemporary Western fiction, and most radically of Blanchot’s own.127 Indeed, it comes as close as it is possible to come to saying nothing. While never completely abandoning any of the procedures on which he relies in his writing of the negative, each of Blanchot’s works of fiction privileges a particular form of linguistic negativism. With the recognition of those differences, it becomes possible to detect a trajectory in which the literary milestones are first Mallarmé, then Kafka, and then Beckett. This is not to say that Blanchot’s writing of the negative is simply beholden to these writers, or that he fails to find a distinct manner of deploying the negative resources of the French language. Rather, it is to suggest that Blanchot’s linguistic negativism, shaped by language skepticism, belongs within a strain of modern European literature in which each of these writers marks a decisive moment. One can only really begin to appreciate the particularity of Blanchot’s linguistic negativism when one takes one’s critical distance from it, locating it within this broader literaryphilosophical context. When one does so, his fiction can be seen to take its place, in all its singularity, within a modern European literature of the unword that relies upon parataxis, repetition, fragmentation, epanorthosis, and negative affixes, as well as various other forms of linguistic negativism, to explore the relation of language to a world and to a conception of the human that demand to be rethought in the wake of a catastrophic history that beggars any attempt to think it in terms of a progress toward ever greater enlightenment and civilization, or even to think the relation between enlightenment and barbarism dialectically. The unwording tradition to which Blanchot belongs develops such forms of linguistic negativism as what it takes to be the only aesthetically and ethically justifiable response to a modernity increasingly perceived as both socially and politically catastrophic. Far from being driven by purely aesthetic concerns, Blanchot commits himself for philosophical-political reasons to particular forms of linguistic negativism – culminating in the high-risk strategy of semantic voidance – to try to speak of that which resists articulation, that which Blanchot names the “calamity” (malheur) and then the “disaster” (désastre). Unlike Beckett, whose political allegiances were on the left throughout his life, and who worked for the 127

See Michel Foucault, Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside, trans. Brian Massumi, in Michel Foucault and Maurice Blanchot, Foucault/Blanchot: Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside/Michel Foucault as I Imagine Him (New York: Zone Books, 1987), pp. 7–58 (p. 54).

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Resistance in France during World War II, Blanchot underwent a radical conversion from extreme right-wing nationalism in the 1930s to the far left in the postwar era, playing an active role in the resistance to the Algerian War in the late 1950s.128 Understandably, this history has led some commentators to question the politics of even his postwar work.129 Perhaps what remains most troubling in this respect is his identification, on the one hand, of the Holocaust as “the absolute event of history,” in which “the movement of Meaning was swallowed up,”130 and his claim, on the other hand, that “He who has been the contemporary of the camps is forever a survivor: death will not make him die [la mort ne le fera pas mourir].”131 If the idea of the impossibility of death is, for Blanchot, not tied to any specific event but is the more general way in which it is necessary to think history, the human, thought, and language, then his characterization of the Nazi death camps in terms of impossible death might be seen not only to make of the Holocaust a concrete historical confirmation of his core idea, but to make the experience of the death camps the most authentic experience of being (conceived in terms of an errant negativity). It is this thought that is arguably the most disturbing of all in Blanchot’s œuvre. Blanchot’s last book-length work, The Writing of the Disaster, is disturbing precisely because it relies upon the very forms of linguistic negativism that are to be found in his fiction, while suggesting that the “disaster” of which it speaks is at once the general disaster of the human that an Enlightenment thinking cannot begin to grasp, and the very specific disaster that is the Holocaust. Blanchot relies heavily on epanorthosis when characterizing the disaster that is both the subject of writing and the nature of writing. The disaster, he assets, is that which “ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact” and “When the disaster comes upon us, it does not come.”132 It is that which is “motionless” (immobile), and yet it “nevertheless approaches.”133 In his thinking of this disaster, Blanchot also relies heavily on a number of unwords, among the most important of which are “unmanifest” (non-manifeste); “un-power”

128

129

130 131

As noted previously, Blanchot’s prewar political journalism is collected in Blanchot, Chroniques; his postwar political writings are collected in Maurice Blanchot, Écrits politiques, 1953–1993 (Paris: Gallimard, 2008). See, for instance, Jeffrey Mehlman’s chapter on Blanchot in his Legacies of Anti-Semitism in France (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). For a consideration of his political trajectory, see the essays collected in the journal Lignes, 43 (March 2014), a special issue on “‘Les politiques de Maurice Blanchot, 1930–1993.” Blanchot, Writing of the Disaster, p. 47 (emphasis in original); Écriture du désastre, p. 80. Ibid., p. 143; p. 217. 132 Ibid., p. 1; p. 7. 133 Ibid., p. 10; p. 22.

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(non-pouvoir); and “un-knowledge” (non-savoir).134 The mode of thought championed by Blanchot in the face of the disaster is one that is “without purpose [sans but], without power [sans pouvoir], without unity [sans unité], and precisely, without ‘the way’ [sans ‘comme’].” Any comparison is thus to be negated – even that between thought and dying. Indeed, in accordance with the disaster, each assertion must be subjected to “annihilation” (anéantissement).135 Thought in relation to the disaster of “endless dying” or the “impossibility of death,” language becomes, as it does for Beckett in Worstward Ho, that in which one cannot place one’s trust and yet that in which one has no alternative but to place one’s trust. As Blanchot puts it in The Writing of the Disaster: “To write is to be absolutely distrustful of writing, while entrusting oneself to it entirely.”136 The core paradox of the unsayable is that the necessity to say it remains, together with the irony that the very attempt to say it is what makes it unsayable: “[W]hat escapes all that can be said is not only what must be said; it escapes only under the auspices of Saying.”137 In his attempt to think a language in which the negative would not operate dialectically, Blanchot turns to the idea of the neutral (le neutre), subsequently taken up by Roland Barthes in his 1977–78 seminar series at the Collège de France,138 and in Blanchot’s work emerging out his thinking of the impersonal. This neutral can only be described through a reliance on linguistic negativism: It is “cut off both from being and from nonbeing.”139 In The Writing of the Disaster, the neutral is aligned with the idea of passivity, which finds articulation in the “pas,” as “both negation and step – the trace or movement of an absence.”140 This passivity, too, can only be articulated through radical unwording: Passivity neither consents nor refuses [ne consente, ne refuse]: neither yes nor no [ni oui ni non], without preference [sans gré], it alone suits the limitlessness of the neutral [l’illimité du neutre], the unmastered patience [la patience immaîtrisée] which endures time without resisting [sans lui résister]. The passive condition is no condition [est une incondition]: it is an unconditional [inconditionnel] which no protection shelters [que nulle protection ne tient sous abri], which no destruction touches [que n’atteint nulle destruction], which is as remote from submission [hors soumission] as it is bereft of initiative [sans initiative]; with it, nothing begins [rien ne commence].141 134 136 138 139 141

Ibid., pp. 11, 63; pp. 24, 103. 135 Ibid., p. 39 (translation modified); p. 67. Ibid., p. 110; p. 170. 137 Ibid., p. 114; p. 176. See Roland Barthes, The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France (1977–1978), trans. Rosalind E. Krauss and Denis Hollier (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 2005). Blanchot, Writing of the Disaster, p. 20; Écriture du désastre, p. 38. 140 Ibid., p. 16; p. 33. Ibid., pp. 29–30; p. 52.

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Just as for Beckett, then, so for Blanchot, any attempt to articulate the disaster requires acts of radical linguistic negativism. Ultimately, the disaster is to be thought as both intrinsic to language and that which requires a certain form of language use. Alluding to Derrida on the question of the proper name, Blanchot asserts that the disaster is “the improperness of its name and the disappearance of the proper name”; the disaster “is neither noun nor verb, but a remainder which would bar with invisibility and illegibility all that shows and is said.”142 For all the similarities between Beckett’s and Blanchot’s forms of unwording, there are nonetheless important differences. Whereas, for Beckett, linguistic negativism becomes the only manner in which to approach a ruination of the human that might be seen as reaching its most extreme form in the Holocaust, Blanchot does not adopt the model of language, on the one hand, and reality, on the other. Rather, he tends to elide, without ever quite doing away with, the difference. This is nowhere more evident than in his presentation of the Holocaust both as the “absolute event” – which he, like Adorno, sees as the outcome of a certain (Enlightenment) ideology – and as an instantiation of a more general philosophical, suprahistorical condition: the impossibility of death, the inevitable failure of the negative, to which the writer can – and, indeed, must – bear witness through a language of unwording. The risk entailed by such an elision is that the most appalling forms of human brutality might seem to result from a philosophical condition that is inescapable – as Blanchot puts it of the “calamity” in his 1960 letter to Georges Bataille. This is the radical risk of a counter-Enlightenment thinking of Blanchot’s kind and reveals the complexity of a European literature of the unword that embraces, as it does, Blanchot alongside writers such as Beckett and Celan, to the latter of whom we may now turn. 142

Ibid., p. 40; p. 68.

chapter 6

Through the Thousand Darknesses: Paul Celan

The European literary engagement with language skepticism in the post– World War II era takes place in the context of an historical trauma that had brought home as never before the fact that what is to be described constitutes the greatest challenge to the power of the word. As we have seen, for Beckett the language of unwording is required to move toward the (impossible but nonetheless necessary) articulation of a vision of “humanity in ruins,” while for Blanchot it is the “disaster” that requires the turn toward forms of linguistic negativism. For the Romanian-born, German-language poet Paul Celan, that which requires such a reliance upon linguistic negativism is what he terms “the monstrosity of what happened” (das Ungeheuerliche des Geschehenen);1 that is, the Holocaust, to which Celan lost his own parents and which he very deliberately only ever names indirectly. For Celan, as for the other European writers in the tradition of literary unwording, it is never simply a matter of distrusting language as such in some purely ahistorical manner, even if that can sometimes appear to be the case. Rather, their engagement with the tradition of language skepticism derives from a sense that there are certain, historically specific experiences that defy the power of the word. Furthermore, there is for a German-language writer such as Celan also the acute awareness of the appalling uses to which the German language had been put between 1933 and 1945, and the need to inhabit, and to transform, a mother tongue that has served the darkest of purposes. If Mallarmé’s idea of purifying the words of the “tribe” might be seen in terms of the growing massification of culture, and anxieties about the place of the intellectual within that culture, what happens to the German language in Celan’s poetry may be seen as an attempt to wrest it back from its appropriation by the forces of barbarism. 1

Paul Celan, “Aphorismen, Gegenlichte und aphoristische Fragmente,” in “Mikrolithen sinds, Steinchen.” Die Prosa aus dem Nachlass, Kritische Ausgabe, ed. Barbara Wiedemann and Bertrand Badiou (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005), pp. 9–60 (p. 34).

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When one considers Celan’s own place within the emergence of a modern European literature of the unword, however, what is initially most striking is his very explicit statement of faith in language, and, indeed, in the German language in particular. In 1958, one year before the publication of his collection of poems Speech-Grille (Sprachgitter), the multivalent title of which evokes language as both a barrier and an opening, Celan declares (in his speech on the occasion of his being awarded the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen) that even through the dark time of the Nazi terror, there was one thing that remained “reachable, close and secure amid all losses” – language: Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss. But it had to go through its own lack of answers [Antwortlosigkeiten], through terrifying silence [furchtbares Verstummen], through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech [die tausend Finsternisse todbringender Rede]. It went through. It gave me no words for what was happening, but went through it. Went through and could resurface, “enriched” by it all. In this language I tried, during those years and the years after, to write poems: in order to speak, to orient myself, to find out where I was, where I was going, to chart my reality.2

While the quotation marks around “enriched” (angereichert) alert the reader to the particular care that needs to be taken when seeking to grasp precisely what is meant by this word in this particular context, the strong sense nonetheless remains that the language in which Celan sought to write poetry in the post–World War II years was one in which he maintained a faith that might seem, at first glance, to put him at odds with those European writers whose work is shaped by a profound language skepticism of the kind articulated by Beckett in his 1937 letter to Axel Kaun. In the same year as he delivered the preceding speech, however, Celan also outlined (in his reply to a questionnaire from the Flinker bookshop in Paris on the current state of German-language poetry) how that poetry differs from its French-language counterpart: German poetry is going in a very different direction from French poetry. No matter how alive its traditions, with most sinister events in its memory, most questionable developments around it, it can no longer speak the language which many willing ears seem to expect. Its language has become more 2

Paul Celan, Collected Prose, trans. Rosmarie Waldrop (Riverdale-on-Hudson, NY: The Sheep Meadow Press, 1986), p. 34; Gesammelte Werke in fünf Bänden, 5 vols., ed. Beda Allemann, Stefan Reichert, and Rudolf Bücher (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992), vol. 3, pp. 185–86. (Hereafter, this five-volume edition is abbreviated as GW, followed by volume and page numbers.)

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Language and Negativity in European Modernism sober, more factual. It distrusts “beauty.” It tries to be truthful. If I may search for a visual analogy while keeping in mind the polychrome of apparent actuality: it is a “greyer” language [eine “grauere” Sprache], a language which wants to locate even its “musicality” in such a way that it has nothing in common with the “euphony” which more or less blithely continued to sound alongside the greatest horrors.3

This suggests that, for very specific historical reasons, German-language poetry should be shaped by a particular attitude toward the word, one that breaks with the notion that, as Keats puts it, “truth is beauty.” But how is one to understand the idea of a “grayer” language, and what relation might this grayness bear to language skepticism? A helpful indicator is to be found in a remark on the language of current poetry made by Celan two years later, in his 1960 Büchner Prize speech, The Meridian: It is true, the poem, the poem today, shows – and this has only indirectly to do with the difficulties of vocabulary, the faster flow of syntax or a more awakened sense of ellipsis, none of which we should underrate – the poem clearly shows a strong tendency towards silence [eine starke Neigung zum Verstummen]. The poem holds its ground, if you will permit me yet another extreme formulation, the poem holds its ground on its own margin [am Rande seiner selbst]. In order to endure, it constantly calls and pulls itself back from an “already-no-more” into a “still-here” [unausgesetzt aus seinem Schon-nichtmehr in sein Immer-noch zurück].4

The paradoxical relation to language that is articulated here – that, subject to a tendency toward silence, poetry should nonetheless hold its ground “on its own margin” – locates Celan’s poetics firmly within the modern European literary engagement with language skepticism, an engagement that deploys language in such a way as constantly to mark the limits of its power. As William Franke puts it of both Celan and the francophone Egyptian writer Edmond Jabès, whose major work, the seven-volume Book of Questions (1963–73), is also characterized in parts by intensive linguistic negativism and an attempt to speak that which is unspeakable: “It is only by moving away from and withdrawing before what they intend to say that the unsayable burden of their poems registers at all.”5 It is significant that Celan, like Beckett before him, not only read Mauthner’s Beiträge, but also noted the philosophy of the “nihilist” preSocratic philosopher Gorgias, as summarized in Wilhelm Windelband’s 3 5

Celan, Collected Prose, pp. 15–16; GW iii, p. 167. 4 Ibid., pp. 48–49; p. 197. William Franke, “The Singular and the Other at the Limits of Language in the Apophatic Poetics of Edmond Jabès and Paul Celan,” New Literary History 36:4 (Autumn 2005): 621–38 (p. 624).

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widely read History of Philosophy (1893). Celan’s reading notes on Windelband summarize Gorgias’s philosophy as follows: 1. There is nothing. . . . 2. Were there anything, it would not be knowable. 3. Were there knowledge, it would not be communicable.6

As Georg-Michael Schulz demonstrates in considerable detail, both the “nothing” (Nichts) and silence function in intimate thematic relation to each other in Celan’s poetry.7 Celan’s own engagement with language skepticism – with the idea that the essential is, when it comes to certain extreme experiences and the losses and the lost at the heart of these experiences, “not communicable” (nicht mitteilbar) – is to be found not only at the thematic level, however, but also in the particular forms of linguistic negativism that characterize his poetry, especially in Speech-Grille and the five completed volumes that followed it: The No One’s Rose (1963), Breathturn (1967), Threadsuns (1968), and the posthumously published Lightduress (1970) and Snowpart (1971). Far from being an attempt simply to negate what Beckett sees as the language veil, Celan’s linguistic negativism is driven by an ethico-aesthetic imperative to memorialize – and thereby in a certain sense to save – the lost (“Abraham’s root,” as he puts it in the poem “Radix Matrix,” in The No One’s Rose), and to articulate experiences of scarcely imaginable extremity and calamity.8 6

7

8

Paul Celan, La Bibliothèque philosophique/Die philosophische Bibliothek, Catalogue raisonné des annotations établi par Alexandra Richter, Patrik Alac, and Bertrand Badiou (Paris: Éditions Rue d’Ulm, 2004), p. 643 (my translation). The volume from which this note was taken by Celan is Windelband’s Geschichte der abendländischen Philosophie im Altertum. On the importance of Gorgias for Beckett, see his letter to A. J. Leventhal and Ethna MacCarthy-Leventhal dated April 21, 1958, in which, linking the pre-Socratic’s thought to Petrarch, he sums it up as follows: “1. Nothing is / 2. If anything is, it cannot be known. / 3. If anything is, and can be known, it cannot be expressed in speech.” Beckett describes the third of Gorgias’s propositions as the “coup de grâce” (The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume III: 1957–1965, ed. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More Overbeck [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014], p. 136). On Beckett and Gorgias, see Matthew Feldman, Beckett’s Books: A Cultural History of Samuel Beckett’s “Interwar Notes” (London and New York: Continuum, 2006), pp. 76–77. See Georg-Michael Schulz, Negativität in der Dichtung Paul Celans, Studien zur deutschen Literatur, Band 54 (Berlin: Niemeyer, 1977), especially pp. 97–241. For an analysis of the nature and function of silence in Celan’s work, see also Leonard Olschner, “Poetic Mutations of Silence: At the Nexus of Paul Celan and Osip Mandelstam,” in Aris Fioretos (ed.), Word Traces: Readings of Paul Celan (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), pp. 369–85. On the manner in which Celan seeks to register the experience of historical trauma in his work, and the similarities between this and Baudelaire’s poetic engagement with the experience of shock that he sees as characterizing urban modernity, see, for instance, Ulrich Baer, Remnants of Song: Trauma and the Experience of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). Baer’s argument does not, however, focus on the various forms of linguistic negativism in Celan’s work that locate him within a modern European literature of the unword.

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Just as in the œuvres of Kafka, Beckett, and Blanchot, so in Celan’s, the forms of linguistic negativism vary considerably from work to work, reflecting distinct attempts to find a language in which to articulate that which resists positive articulation. In his first published volume, The Sand from the Urns (1948), which was revised to become the first part of Poppy and Memory (1952), linguistic negativism is minimal, especially in what remains Celan’s most anthologized poem, “Death Fugue.” Negative affixes such as un-, ver-, and -los are scarce, with one of the few exceptions being the opening line of the poem “Marianne,” in which a woman’s hair is described as “lilac-less” (fliederlos).9 The most frequent form of linguistic negativism in Poppy and Memory is the use of the particle of negation “not” (nicht), which is deployed in two ways. In the poem “Crystal,” for instance, it is used in a sequence of three anaphoric negations, with the particle of negation being placed at the head of each phrase: “Not on my lips [Nicht an meinen Lippen] look for your mouth, / not in front of the gate [nicht vorm Tor] for the stranger, / not in the eye [nicht im Aug] for the tear.”10 This anaphoric form of linguistic negativism will become a distinctive feature of Celan’s poetry of the later 1950s. The predominant use of the particle of negation in Poppy and Memory, however, is to state that which does not take place. In “Aspen Tree,” for instance, that which should be sayable – “My mother came home” – is precisely that which cannot be said, and it is this impossibility that is stated in the poem: “My yellow-haired mother did not come home [kam nicht heim]” and “My gentle mother cannot return [kann nicht kommen].”11 In “Your hand full of hours,” a woman’s hair is described negatively, as “not brown” (nicht braun).12 In “Chanson of a Lady in the Shade,” a figure is described in terms of what it does not do: “He does not walk to the window” (Der tritt nicht ans Fenster) and “He does not speak her name” (Der nennt ihren Namen nicht).13 And in “Stigma,” the speaker reports: “We slept no more” (Wir schiefen nicht mehr).14 Celan’s use of the particle of negation in Poppy and Memory serves primarily, then, the purpose of stating that which is not, and yet should be, the case. This form of unsaying thus marks within the language of the poems the traumatic losses to which those poems bear witness.

9 10 11 14

GW iii, p. 35. Paul Celan, Poems, trans. Michael Hamburger (London: Anvil Press Poetry, 1988), p. 67; GW i, p. 32. Ibid., p. 39; p. 19. 12 Ibid., p. 37; p. 16. 13 Ibid., p. 53 (translation modified); p. 29. GW i, p. 50.

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A reliance upon the particle of negation to state that which should have happened, but did not, or that which should be possible, but is not, is even more prevalent in Celan’s next volume, From Threshold to Threshold (1955). In the volume’s opening poem, “I Heard Tell,” for instance, the speaker reports that, having seen “my poplar go down to the water,” “I didn’t rush after it” (Ich eilt ihr nicht ab). The poem ends with the isolated line: “And saw my poplar no more” (Und sah meine Pappel nicht mehr).15 The poplar here stands for all that was lost, its fate precisely not being shared by the poet, who survived by going into hiding at the moment when others, including his own parents, were being rounded up for deportation. In “Together,” the negations are structured anaphorically: “the shadows will not / come singly” (werden die Schatten nicht / einzelnen kommen), and “the wings will not / rustle for you later than for me” (werden die Fittiche nicht / später dir rauschen als mir).16 In “The Heaviness,” the heaviness in question is one that “makes me unkind [nicht gewogen] to the stone that gapes.”17 The strand of hair in “Strand” is one “that I didn’t braid” (die ich nicht flocht).18 In “Out of the Sea,” the “foam of eternity” is that which “We have not spun” (Wir haben ihn nicht gesponnen), because “our hands were not free” (wir hatten die Hände nicht frei).19 In “The One Who Counted the Hours for Us,” a triple, anaphoric unsaying constitutes the second of the poem’s three stanzas, in the manner of an unwording core: “It doesn’t get cooler, / It’s not more nightlike, / It’s not any damper” (Nicht kühler wirds, / nicht nächtiger, / nicht feuchter).20 The “brightness” in the poem “Assisi” is one “that gives no comfort” (der nicht trösten will).21 In the poem “Here,” having spoken the curse and the blessing, the speaker “hasn’t spoken since” (sprach nicht wieder seither).22 And in “Pursed at Night,” there is a triple, anaphoric stating of precisely what will not happen: “they will not name the hour / nor count the flakes / nor follow the waters to the weir” (sie werden die Stunde nicht nennen, / die Flocken nicht zählen, / den Wassern nicht folgen ans Wehr).23 Again, these instances of linguistic negativism give voice to that which, for a very precise historical reason, cannot happen: What is unsaid here is an unlived future. Negative affixes (especially un- and ver-) are also more frequent in From Threshold to Threshold than in Poppy and Memory, anticipating Celan’s later practice. The negative affix un- is deployed in the poem “Still Life,” for instance, to describe an eye as “unpaired” (ungepaart) and as 15 16 20

Paul Celan, From Threshold to Threshold, trans. David Young (Grosse Pointe Farms, MI: Marick Press, 2010), p. 3; GW i, p. 85. Ibid., p. 9; p. 88. 17 Ibid., p. 13; p. 90. 18 Ibid., p. 17; p. 92. 19 Ibid., p. 19; p. 93. Ibid., p. 45; p. 107. 21 Ibid., p. 47; p. 108. 22 Ibid., p. 57; p. 113. 23 Ibid., p. 77; p. 125.

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“unforgotten” (unvergessen).24 And in “You Too Speak,” an unidentified “you” (du) is described as becoming “less perceptible” (unkenntlicher),25 while in “With Time-reddened Lips” a kiss is described as “unending” (unendlich).26 The affix ver-, which is distinct from un- in its generally constituting a necessary component of the word in which it occurs, and which often bears a negative charge, is used in the modifiers “petrified and stubbornly sunk” (versteint und verbissen) in “Still Life,”27 and “pupated” (verpuppt) in “I Know.”28 This intensification of Celan’s range of unwording procedures in From Threshold to Threshold is complemented by more frequent references to inarticulacy and to silence than are to be found in his earlier poetry. In “Assisi,” for instance, that which “climbed into life” is described, twice, as “dumb” (stumm).29 The snow in “With a Key That Keeps Changing” is that of “what’s never spoken” (des Verschwiegenen),30 while in the poem “Argumentum e silentio” it is “the silenced word” (das erschwiegene Wort) that is assigned to the night, this silenced word being the one “whose blood wouldn’t curdle when the poison fang / pierced its syllables.”31 One of the very few exceptions to this tendency is the replacing of “voiceless” (stimmlos) by “murmuring” (murmelnd) in the second draft of the poem “With Time-reddened Lips.”32 In From Threshold to Threshold, then, Celan places the question of language more clearly at the heart of his poetic practice, while intensifying a linguistic negativism that renders the poem less a representation of reality than a negative of it in the photographic sense. It is to precisely this kind of negative representation that Adorno alerts readers of Celan in his posthumously published remarks on the poet, thereby relating them to Beckett’s: Celan’s poems want to speak of the most extreme horror through silence. Their truth content itself becomes negative. They imitate a language beneath the helpless language of human beings, indeed beneath all organic language: It is that of the dead speaking of stones and stars. The last 24 25 26 28 29 31 32

Ibid., p. 59; p. 114. Ibid., p. 97; p. 135. Felstiner translates “unkenntlicher” as “less knowable” (Paul Celan, Selected Poems and Prose, ed. and trans. John Felstiner [New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2001], p. 77). Celan, From Threshold to Threshold, p. 101; GW i, p. 137. 27 Ibid., p. 59; p. 114. GW i, p. 119 (my translation). David Young translates “verpuppt” as “in your chrysalis” (Celan, From Threshold to Threshold, p. 69). Celan, From Threshold to Threshold, p. 47; GW i, p. 108. 30 Ibid., p. 55; p. 112. Ibid., p. 103; p. 138. See Paul Celan, Von Schwelle zu Schwelle. Vorstufen – Textgenese – Endfassung, ed. Heino Schmull, Christiane Braun, and Markus Heilmann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002), pp. 104–5.

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rudiments of the organic are liquidated; what Benjamin noted in Baudelaire, that his poetry is without aura, comes into its own in Celan’s work.33

Whether such a form of poetry is indeed without aura is a moot point, although Adorno is surely right to insist on Celan’s attempt to find a voice and a language for the lost, just as his fellow Germanlanguage poet Nelly Sachs seeks to do. In From Threshold to Threshold, however, a language of the unword is still very much nascent. During the fifteen years that separate its publication from Celan’s suicide in the spring of 1970, this linguistic negativism develops beyond anything that a reader of From Threshold to Threshold might reasonably have imagined, resulting in an unwording as radical, intensive, and original as that to be found in Kafka’s, Beckett’s, and Blanchot’s later works, and utilizing the resources of the German language to turn that language back against itself in an unprecedented manner. The increasing centrality of language – and, in particular, of speech – to Celan’s poetics is signaled by the title of his 1959 volume, Sprachgitter – translated variously as Speech-Grille, Language Mesh, and Language behind Bars – which presents language as dividing an inside from an outside, one world from another.34 Linguistic negativism is achieved in this volume primarily through a more frequent reliance upon the negative affixes un- and -los. The principal un- words in Speech-Grille include “endlessness” (Unendliches), “the unwept” (Ungeweintes), “the unwritten” (Ungeschriebenes), “invisible” (unsichtbar), “unbeen” (ungewesen), “unseen” (ungesehn), “unheard” (unbelauscht), “untouched” (unberührt), “unbidden” (ungebeten), “inaudible” (unhörbar), “unbranched” (unverzweigt), and “impassable” (unbefahrbar).35 Examples of 33

34

35

See Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. and trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: The Athlone Press, 1997), p. 322. Adorno planned to write essays on Beckett’s The Unnamable and on Celan’s Speech-Grille; however, only a series of notes were produced on the former: see Theodor W. Adorno, “Notes on Beckett’s The Unnamable,” in Dirk Van Hulle and Shane Weller, “Dossier: Adorno’s Notes on Beckett,” Journal of Beckett Studies 19:2 (2010): 157–78. On the importance of this title to Celan, see, for instance, his letter dated August 4, 1958 to his publisher Rudolf Hirsch at S. Fischer Verlag (Paul Celan and Rudolf Hirsch, Briefwechsel [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004], p. 47). For a critical overview of the ways in which the title poem of this volume has been read, and especially the idea of the “speech-grille” (Sprachgitter) in relation to the difficulties of communication, see Jean Bollack, “Paul Celan sur la langue. Le poème ‘Sprachgitter’ et ses interprétations,” in Martine Broda (ed.), Contre-jour. Études sur Paul Celan (Paris: Cerf, 1986), pp. 87–115. In the current chapter, this volume of poems is referred to as Speech-Grille, although the English translations of individual poems are taken from David Young’s translation of the volume, under the title Language behind Bars. On occasion, these translations have been slightly modified. Paul Celan, Language behind Bars, trans. David Young (Grosse Pointe Farms, MI: Marick Press, 2012), pp. 5, 13, 15, 19, 41, 53, 59, 73–75, 77, 83; GW i, pp. 148, 153, 154, 156, 169, 177, 180, 188, 190, 193.

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the less frequently used -los (“-less”/“-lessly”) ending include “endlessly” (endlos), “dreamless” (traumlos), and “noiseless” (geräuschlos).36 There is, of course, a temporal dimension to such linguistic negativism. According to George Steiner, “Because language is an expressive action in time, there can be no unsaying, only denial or contradiction, which are themselves forward motions.”37 While Steiner is no doubt right to insist that the unsaying of the said, or the unwriting of the written, inevitably leaves the trace of the said or the written, there are nonetheless different temporalities to consider here. With these temporalities in mind, it is possible to identify distinct forms of unwording.38 Whereas the un- prefix proleptically places what follows under the sign of negation, the -los suffix negates after the fact, taking back what has been asserted, such that, for instance, the sound is, as it were, unsounded in the negative modifier “noiseless” (geräuschlos) in the poem “Overhead, noiseless.”39 Whereas the un- and -los affixes are appended to words that could in principle stand alone, the distinctiveness of Celan’s increasing reliance on the ver- affix – most notably in the lines “What was banished and what was lost [Verbannt und Verloren] / were at home” in the poem “Cologne, at the Hof”40 – is that it is generally more integral lexically. However, Speech-Grille marks the increasing use of the ver- affix in more lexically inventive ways: for instance, “scar over” (vernarben) in the volume’s opening poem, “Voices,”41 as well as the description of the sea as “drunk empty, dreamed away” (vertrunken, verträumt), and of an hour as “soul-eclipsed” (seelenverfinstert), in the poem “All Souls.”42 Signaling a nascent intensification in Celan’s commitment to language negativism, in the autograph manuscript of “All Souls” dated November 2, 1957, the ver- affix is introduced as a revision of the standard ge- affix for both “drunk empty” and “dreamed away,” getrunken becoming vertrunken, and geträumt becoming verträumt.43 On one occasion in Speech-Grille, in the poem “The World,” Celan brings the un- and ver- affixes together to produce a doubly negative locution: “Two / tree trunks, black, / not branching [unverzweigt], without / knots.”44 Such compounding of negative affixes will become the signature of Celan’s most 36 37 38 39 41 43 44

Ibid., pp. 19, 37, 73; pp. 156, 167, 188. George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 130. Cf. Chapter 4 on the temporality of unsaying in Blanchot’s later fiction. 40 Celan, Language behind Bars, p. 73; GW i, p. 188. Ibid., p. 53; p. 177. 42 Ibid., p. 9; p. 149. Ibid., p. 65; p. 183. See Paul Celan, Sprachgitter. Vorstufen – Textgenese – Endfassung, ed. Heino Schmull and Michael Schwarzkopf (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996), p. 66. Celan, Language behind Bars, p. 77; GW i, p. 190.

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radical linguistic negativism in the mid-1960s, following the traumas of the “Goll Affair” (when Celan was accused of plagiarism by the French-German poet Yvan Goll’s widow, Claire),45 and his own internment in a psychiatric hospital after acts of violence against both himself and his wife, the artist Gisèle Lestrange. At one level, this accusation of plagiarism can be seen as having driven Celan to ever more radical forms of linguistic negativism, forms that would distinguish him all the more clearly from any other Germanlanguage writer of the period, including his friend and contemporary Nelly Sachs. The increasing reliance upon unwording procedures in Speech-Grille is complemented at the thematic level by an emphasis upon the failure or impossibility of speech. While the opening poem, “Voices,” might seem to place the emphasis on successful articulation, each section of the poem opening with the word Voices (or, in one instance, “Jacob’s voice”), the final section insists on the loss or absence of voice, opening “No / voice.”46 This italicized phrase was added by Celan on November 2, 1958, almost a year after the completion of the first two drafts of the final stanza (dated November 26 and 27, 1957, respectively). That such a revision should have come so long after the original drafting of the poem testifies to a very significant moment in Celan’s poetic development toward new forms of linguistic negativism.47 The movement from multiple voices to no voice in the opening poem sets the tone for what follows in Speech-Grille, with its recurrent insistence on dumbness and silence. In the poem “Trust,” for instance, the eye to come is described as being “silent [stumm] / under a stony lid.”48 In “Homecoming,” Celan refers to an “I” that has “slipped away into muteness” (ins Stumme entglittenes).49 In “Streak,” the streak in the eye that is the sign of a “strange time” is “tuned to be a silently / vibrating consonant [stumm / vibrierender Mitlaut].”50 The title poem, “Speech-Grille,” ends with “two / mouthfuls of silence” (zwei / Mundvoll Schweigen),51 thereby doubling the single “mouthful of silence” in the first draft of the poem.52 In the poem “Into the Distance,” “muteness” (Stummheit) is identified as the “house” in which “you shall live.”53 The poem “At Mouth Level” ends with 45 46 47 48 50 53

On the accusation of plagiarism and its consequences, see Barbara Wiedemann (ed.), Paul Celan – die Goll-Affäre. Dokumente zu einer “Infamie” (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000). Celan, Language behind Bars, p. 7; GW i, p. 149. See Celan, Sprachgitter. Vorstufen, pp. 6–7. Celan, Language behind Bars, p. 13; GW i, p. 153. 49 Ibid., p. 19; p. 156. Ibid., p. 25; p. 159. 51 Ibid., p. 37; p. 167. 52 See Celan, Sprachgitter. Vorstufen, p. 40. Celan, Language behind Bars, p. 55; GW i, p. 178.

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the assertion that the lip has knowledge, but is “silent about it, to the end” (schweigt es zu Ende).54 In “A Hand,” at the table made from “hour-wood,” “There is / silence” (Es wird / geschwiegen).55 And the poem “Low-lying water” ends with “a small / impassable silence” (ein kleines / unbefahrbares Schweigen).56 Furthermore, Speech-Grille is punctuated, like Celan’s earlier volumes, by statements of that which cannot be said – or, more precisely, that which can no longer be said, for the impact of historical events on the language of poetry is decisive here. Important examples of this form of unwording include: “The no-longer-nameable [Das nicht mehr zu Nennende], hot, / audible in the mouth,” in “An Eye, Open”;57 and, in the final poem in the sequence, “Stretto”: The place, where they lay, it has a name – it has none. They didn’t lie there.58

“Stretto” was written in part as a reaction to what Celan came to see as the overly explicit, too easily appropriable nature of what remains his bestknown poem, “Death Fugue,” and in the later poem one encounters an early instance of what would become Celan’s distinctive use of epanorthosis: the taking back, or unsaying, of the said: “The place where they lay. . . . They didn’t lie there.” This thematization of the unsayable, and the correlative enactment of unsaying, in Speech-Grille coincides with a thematization of nothingness that owes much to Celan’s reading of Heidegger,59 alongside an emphasis upon the evacuated or negated subject: “no one” (niemand). Celan’s first reference to nothingness (das Nichts) occurs in the first stanza of the poem “Matière de Bretagne,” in the lines “the Nothingness / rolls its seas toward worship,” and then, later in the same poem, in the radically paratactical line: “hands, the Nothingness, its seas.”60 In the final stanza of the poem “But,” the flight of the swans in Geneva is figured as that of a boomerang whirring “out of nothingness” (vom Nichts her), this something coming out of nothingness anticipating an idea that will be central to the work of W. G. Sebald.61 The radically paradoxical nature of the Celanian 54 58 59

60

Ibid., p. 59; p. 180. 55 Ibid., p. 61; p. 181. 56 Ibid., p. 83; p. 193. 57 Ibid., p. 71; p. 187. Ibid., p. 89; p. 198. For an in-depth analysis of Celan’s reading of Heidegger, see James K. Lyon, Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger: An Unresolved Conversation, 1951–1970 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). Celan, Language behind Bars, p. 45; GW i, p. 171. 61 Ibid., p. 63; p. 182.

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nothingness is captured perhaps most economically in “Stretto,” in the phrase “Nothing, / nothing is lost” (Nichts, / nichts ist verloren).62 Just as the nothing is, in a sense, substantialized here, so the “no one” or “nobody” (niemand) becomes, as it were, a new kind of speaking (or, more precisely, un-speaking) subject in Celan’s poetry. An early reference to the “no one,” which comes to play such a crucial role in the poem “Psalm” (in Celan’s next volume, The No One’s Rose), is to be found in Speech-Grille in the poem “One Day and Then Another,” in the line “I dumped / everything into nobody’s hand [in niemandes Hand].”63 In “An Eye, Open,” the “No / Voice” of the opening poem in the collection becomes “Nobody’s voice [Niemandes Stimme], once again,”64 this phrase being an addition in the second typescript of the poem (dated May 28, 1958).65 A further important use of “no one” occurs in the final line of the opening stanza of the poem in the poem “Low-lying water”: “Nobody cut the word [Niemand schnitt uns das Wort] from our heart walls.”66 As with “nothingness,” so with “no one,” the negation results in something other than a pure nothing, while the subject is sayable only as something other than itself. In Speech-Grille, Celan deploys forms of linguistic negativism that become increasingly prevalent and, indeed, considerably more extreme, in the collections that follow upon it. The centrality of negation in his next volume, The No One’s Rose (1963), is established from the outset, in the poem “There was earth inside them,” where the stating of what was not, of what did not happen, prevails: “they did not praise God” (sie lobten nicht Gott); “They dug and heard nothing more [und hörten nichts mehr]; / they did not grow wise [sie wurden nicht weise], invented no song [erfanden kein Lied], / thought up for themselves no language [erdachten sich keinerlei Sprache].”67 This poem also recapitulates Celan’s movement through a sequence of negations toward that lost (negated) subject – “you” (du – the familiar, more personal form of the second person pronoun) – to whom his poems will increasingly be addressed: “O one, o none, o no one, o you: / Where did the way lead when it led nowhere?” (O einer, o keiner, o niemand, o du: / Wohin gings, da’s nirgendhin ging?).68 The centrality of the negated subject is clearly established in the title of the volume, The No One’s Rose (Die Niemandsrose), which replaced the earlier title, “Stations” (“Stationen”), in the second autograph manuscript of the title page, dated 62 65 66 68

Ibid., p. 101; p. 204. 63 Ibid., p. 57; p. 179. 64 Ibid., p. 71; p. 187. See Celan, Sprachgitter. Vorstufen, p. 72. Celan, Language behind Bars, p. 83; GW i, p. 193. 67 Celan, Poems, p. 153; GW i, p. 211. Ibid., p. 153; p. 211.

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January 31, 1961.69 And, in the poem “Psalm,” the relation between nothingness (Nichts) and no one (niemand), both of which are already present in Speech-Grille, becomes Celan’s primary concern, the “you” here expanding into an embracing “we” (wir): A nothing we were, are, shall remain, flowering: the nothing-, the no one’s rose.70

While this concentration on the “nothing” and the “no one” in The No One’s Rose is most evident in “Psalm,” it is also present in other important poems in the volume, from “Abraham’s root. Jesse’s root. No one’s / root – O / ours” in “Radix Matrix,”71 to “the living / Nothing” (das lebende / Nichts) in the poem “To one who stood before the door,”72 to the recurrent “nothing” in the poem “Mandorla”: “What dwells in the almond is Nothing [das Nichts]” and “Your eye, on Nothing it dwells [dem Nichts stehts entgegen].”73 If the recurrent deployment of the substantive “nothing” is a form of linguistic negativism that distinguishes The No One’s Rose from his earlier work, Celan also continues to make very regular use of the particle of negation, “not” (nicht). This particle serves the same epanorthotic purpose as in the earlier volumes, often retracting or unsaying the said. Examples of this form of unsaying include: “we knew, / we did not know, we / were there, after all, and not there” (wir wußten, / wir wußten nicht, wir / waren ja da und nicht dort) in the poem “So many constellations”;74 “I swam for us both. I did not swim” (Ich schwamm für uns beide. Ich schwamm nicht) in “Glimmer Tree”;75 “He does not come, does not lay us down dry” (Er kommt nicht, er legt uns nicht trocken) in “Two-housed, eternal one”;76 and “They will / not go down, will not drop, / will not hit” (Sie wollen / nicht niedergehen, nicht stürzen, / nicht treffen) in “The bright stones.”77 Here, the temporality of the negation in the instances of epanorthosis entails an unsaying that leaves the trace of the said on the page, to be read and re-read. This procedure has a spectralizing effect, dematerializing that which is 69 70 71 73 75 77

See Paul Celan, Die Niemandsrose. Vorstufen – Textgenese – Endfassung, ed. Heino Schmull and Michael Schwarzkopf (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996), p. 2. Celan, Poems, p. 175; GW i, p. 225. The original German reads: “Ein Nichts / waren wir, sind wir, werden / wir bleiben, blühend: / die Nichts-, die / Niemandsrose.” Ibid., p. 187; p. 239. 72 Celan, Selected Poems, p. 171; GW i, p. 242. Celan, Poems, p. 189; GW i, p. 244. 74 Ibid., p. 159; p. 217. 76 GW i, p. 233 (my translation). Celan, Poems, p. 193; GW i, p. 247. Ibid., p. 197; p. 255.

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asserted without ever obliterating it. The ethico-aesthetic imperative here is that saying is permissible only if followed by unsaying, only if it is never forgotten that the “what” or the “who” that is being said is there no more and cannot testify for him- or herself. A catastrophic history is thus written into the poem precisely through such unsaying. The emphasis upon silence, the unnameable, and the loss of names is also considerably greater in The No One’s Rose than it is in Celan’s earlier volumes. The many references to silence and to language loss in this volume include “With the mouth, with its silence [Schweigen]” in “Threesome, foursome”;78 “To a mouth / . . . I lost – / I lost a word [verlor ich ein Wort] / that had remained with me: /sister” and “To / the worship of many gods / I lost a word [verlor ich ein Wort] that was looking for me: / Kaddish” in “The Lock Gate”;79 “All the names, all those / names / burnt with the rest” in “Alchemical”;80 and “Like you, it has no name” in the poem “It is no longer.”81 Far from time healing, far from poetry enabling an overcoming of trauma, a trajectory of exacerbation becomes visible in the intensification of the linguistic negativism. This attention to the limits of language when faced with experiences of traumatic loss and destruction reaches its most sustained and explicit poetic formulation in the poem “Tübingen, January,” through an allusion to the language of the German poet Hölderlin’s madness: Should, should a man, should a man come into the world, today, with the shining beard of the patriarchs: he could, if he spoke of this time, he could only babble and babble over, over againagain (“Pallaksh. Pallaksh.”)82

In a letter to Gisela Dischner dated May 15, 1968, Celan cites from an 1846 report by Christoph Theodor Schwab on Hölderlin’s use of the word Pallaksh (Pallaksch) during his years of madness. The word could be taken to mean “yes” or “no,” although for the most part Hölderlin used it when he was either too impatient or too exhausted to reflect on whether he 78 80

79 GW i, p. 216 (my translation). Celan, Poems, p. 169; GW i, p. 222. 81 Ibid., p. 179; p. 227. Ibid., p. 185; p. 238. 82 Ibid., p. 177; p. 226.

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wished to affirm or negate something said.83 The word Pallaksh may be understood, then, as a way of speaking without speaking, marking as it does the limits of the sayable. The post-typescript revision that resulted in “man” (Mensch) replacing “child” (Kind) in “Tübingen, January” only intensifies the sense that there is no language with the power to express the reality of our time – “today” (heute); “this time” (diese Zeit).84 No less importantly, the poem in which the nonword Pallaksh is cited, and in which speech is reduced to slurred inarticulacy – captured in the repetition of the verb lallen, translated by Michael Hamburger as “babble” – is marked by the kinds of parataxis, stammering repetition, and word divisions that are signature features of Celan’s later style, in which linguistic negativism reaches extremes matched only by those to be found in Beckett’s late work. Indeed, Celan was the first to recognize this affinity, saying of Beckett in early 1970, following a missed opportunity for them to meet in person, that Beckett was ‘“probably the only person with whom I might have got along [mit dem ich mich verstanden hätte]”; that is, the only living person whose conception of literature, and what was required of the writer in the darkest of times, was akin to his own.85 It was not long after this missed opportunity to meet Beckett that Celan would take his own life, leaving on his desk the copy of the biography of Hölderlin that he was reading at the time. The later poems in The No One’s Rose are characterized by a more intensive use of the un- affix. Important unwords in this volume include “uninhabitable” (unbewohnbar),86 “the unnavigated” (das Unbefahrene);87 “unland” (Unland), this unword replacing “land” (Land) in an autograph manuscript revision;88 “the unsubsided” (Unverklungen),89 “untimeliness” (Unzeit),90 and “shoals” or “shallows” (Untiefen).91 Through his more radical use of the un- affix in The No One’s Rose, Celan creates a new, negative world characterized by un-space and un-time, the world of the lost to whom his poetry would stand as a memorial, but one that testifies to its

83

84 85 86 88 89 91

See Paul Celan and Gisela Dischner, “Wie aus weiter Ferne zu Dir.” Briefwechsel (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2012), p. 93. Cf. Bernhard Böschenstein, “Tübingen, Jänner,” in Dietlind Meinecke (ed.), Über Paul Celan (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), pp. 101–5. See Celan, Die Niemandsrose. Vorstufen, p. 37. Paul Celan and Franz Wurm, Briefwechsel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. 1995), p. 250. Celan, Poems, p. 193; GW i, p. 247. 87 Ibid., p. 199; p. 256. Celan, Selected Poems, p. 181 (translation modified); GW i, p. 259. For the negating replacement of “Land” by “Unland,” see Celan, Die Niemandsrose. Vorstufen, p. 88. Celan, Poems, p. 205; GW i, p. 269. 90 GW i, p. 287 (my translation). Celan, Selected Poems, p. 213; GW i, p. 291.

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own inevitable failure to restore to full being by way of the word that which no longer is, those who no longer are, not least Celan’s own parents. This use of often-invented words with the un- prefix is part of a more general radicalization of affixes in The No One’s Rose, together with a rupturing of words across lines, as, most notably, in the use of the prefix ver- in the poem “A boomerang”: “out- / weighed, out-stripped, out- / done, / played out and thrown out” (ver- / zwergt, verwinzigt, ver- / nichtet, / verbracht und verworfen).92 The stammering of “spelled-, spelled-, spelled- / out, out” (buch-, buch-, buch- / stabierte, stabierte) at the end of the poem “The Syllable Pain” fractures the very act of spelling out a word in a manner that effects a retardation of sense.93 Another important form of linguistic negativism on which Celan relies increasingly from The No One’s Rose onward is the juxtaposing of counteraffixes, as in the lines “mixed / and unmixed / and again / mixed” (gemischt / und entmischt / und wieder / gemischt) in “The Syllable Pain,”94 or “carted up and down” (herauf- und herabkarrt) in “La Contrescarpe.”95 As in Blanchot, this use of affixes enacts a to-and-fro movement that hinders any progression of the kind taken to be achievable in Hegel’s dialectical conception of the negative. Celan’s linguistic negativism here is, then, one that enacts oscillation, interruption, blockage, rather than progress. This dialectic at a standstill may be read in at least two ways: On the one hand, it constitutes a failure to move toward any desired end, including the end of achieved expression; on the other hand, in the light of Adorno and Horkheimer’s conception of the dialectic of enlightenment, it constitutes a form of resistance to a modernity the unfolding of which would entail a movement from light to dark, from reason to rationalization, from liberation to enslavement, from the scientific mastery of nature to mass murder. Taken as a whole, The No One’s Rose constitutes a crucial moment in Celan’s development as a poet for whom linguistic negativism is an ethicoaesthetic imperative. The poem cannot simply state unsayability; rather, it has to enact it in the full awareness of the paradox entailed by any such enactment. Through his reliance upon a range of increasingly radical unwording procedures, Celan renders the poem the place in which language un-says itself, with the aim of reaching beyond the word to that for which it stands as both memorial and message – in Celan’s sense, taken up from Osip Mandelstam, of the poem as a “message in a bottle” 92 93 94

Ibid., p. 179; p. 258. GW i, p. 281 (my translation). Felstiner translates the last two lines of “The Syllable Pain” as “book-, book-, book- / stalling and stalling” (Celan, Selected Poems, p. 203). Celan, Selected Poems, p. 201; GW i, p. 280. 95 GW i, p. 282 (my translation).

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(Flaschenpost).96 Just as for Kafka, Beckett, and Blanchot, so for Celan, expression is at once a necessity and an impossibility. Neither is privileged over the other in the forms of linguistic negativism on which these writers rely to enact the experience of necessary, impossible saying. The poems collected in Celan’s next volume, Breathturn (1967), continue the more radical forms of linguistic negativism to be found in The No One’s Rose, with the thematizing of language becoming even more emphatic. Indeed, in poem after poem in Breathturn, Celan refers explicitly to names and, above all, to the word. Examples include “word spoor” (Wortspur), “word accretion” (Wortaufschütterung), “word moon” (Wortmond), “name-wandering” (Namen-Durchwandern), “cleft words” (Spaltworte), “animal-bloodsoming words” (Tierblütige Worte), “lostsoured / language” (verloren-vergällter / Sprache), the line “The namegiving [Das Namengeben] has an end” in the poem “Black,” “there was / no name left for / what urged us on” in the poem “In Prague,” “word wall” (Wortwand), “liquefied names” (verflüssigten Namen), “man-of-war word” (Orlog-Wort), and the “count- / less to-be- / named un- / pronounceable names” (unzahligen zu / nennenden un- / aussprechlichen / Namen) in the poem “Solve.”97 Breathturn stands out from all of Celan’s other volumes for the frequency with which it explicitly identifies the word and the name as poetry’s concern, and in that respect it constitutes a thematizing prelude to the radical enactment of linguistic negativism in the volume of poetry that would be published one year later: Threadsuns. Time and again in Breathturn, Celan combines a materialization of the word – it becomes a wall, a skin, liquid – with a linguistic negativism that breaks the word into parts governed by a negative affix (un-, ver-, ent-). The unwording phrases created in this manner, many of which are the result of revisions at various stages in the compositional process, include: “By the undreamt etched” (Von Ungeträumten geätzt) in the poem “By the undreamt,” the un- affix resulting from a revision of the modifier “dream-etched” (Traumgeätzt) at typescript stage; “Standing-for-no-one-and-nothing. / Unrecognized” (Für-niemand-und-nichts-Stehn. / Unerkannt) in the poem “To stand,” the negative modifier “Unrecognized” (Unerkannt) being an addition in the autograph manuscript; “Disenfranchised lip” (Entmündigte Lippe) in “Singable remnant,” the negative modifier “Disenfranchised” 96 97

Celan, Collected Prose, p. 186 (translation modified); GW iii, p. 186. Paul Celan, Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry, trans. Pierre Joris (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2014), pp. 13, 16, 21, 31–33, 33, 35, 45, 55, 59, 67, 71, 77; GW ii, pp. 24, 29, 35, 44, 45, 46, 47, 57, 64, 66, 69, 75, 77, 82. In this chapter, translations from Celan’s Collected Later Poetry have on occasion been slightly modified.

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replacing “split, / blood-empty” (gespaltene, / blutleere) in the second typescript; “the / letters of the / tower cranes write / an unnamed [einen Unnamen]” in “Harbour”; “a piece / of unburied poetry [unvergrabner Poesie]” in “Landscape,” the negative modifier “unburied” being an autograph revision of “buried” (vergraben) in the first typescript; “the hour and the reprieve” (Unfrist und Frist) in “When you lie”; “inexplicables” (Undeutbares) in “Cello-entry,” this unword being an autograph revision of another, “wordlessness” (Wortlosigkeit), in the typescript; “The un- / buried, uncounted” (Die Un- / bestatteten, ungezählt) in “Answered”; and “the unbarred” (Unvergitterte), “un- / losable” (Un- / verlierbare), and “magnificent-inexplicable / flood” (herrlich-undeutbare / Flut) in “From beholding the blackbirds,” with “the unbarred” being an addition in the second autograph manuscript, and “un- / losable” appearing for the first time in the third autograph manuscript.98 This procedure entails the production of an increasing number of new words. As Celan’s friend, and one of the finest commentators on his work, Peter Szondi remarks: “The use Celan makes of German’s capacity to create endless new compound words is one of the most significant characteristics of his language.”99 The creation of new words through a negative affix, such as “De-easterned” (Entosteter) in the poem “Solve,”100 coincides with a no less radical breaking apart of words, especially using negative affixes. This form of linguistic negativism reaches its most radical moment in Breathturn in the poem “Once,” in the lines “One and unending, / annihilated, / I’ed” (Eins und Unendlich, / vernichtet, / ichten),101 where it is precisely the negation in the final line of the (usually) negative affix verthat results in the unword ichten, in part the negated subject (ich), in part a verbal procedure, in part a remnant, which is to say that which remains of language (and what it represents) beyond the terrible annihilation (Vernichtung) that haunts Celan’s entire postwar œuvre. It is also in Breathturn, in the opening stanza of the poem “Eroded,” that Celan finally puts a name to what remains of the poem (Gedicht) as a result 98

99 100

Ibid., pp. 3, 5, 11, 23, 43, 47, 51, 67, 85, 95; p. 12 (for the unwording revision at typescript stage, see Paul Celan, Atemwende. Vorstufen – Textgenese – Endfassung, ed. Heino Schmull and Christiane Wittkop (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), pp. 8–9), pp. 15, 23 (for the revision, see Celan, Atemwende. Vorstufen, p. 30), 36 (for the revision, see Celan, Atemwende. Vorstufen, pp. 52–53), 52, 59 (for the revision, see Celan, Atemwende. Vorstufen, p. 92), 61, 76 (for the revision, see Celan, Atemwende. Vorstufen, p. 125), 87, 94 (for the revisions, see Celan, Atemwende. Vorstufen, pp. 162–63). Peter Szondi, Celan Studies, trans. Susan Bernofsky with Harvey Mendelsohn (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 66. Celan, Collected Later Poetry, p. 77; GW ii, p. 82. 101 Ibid., p. 107; p. 107.

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of the forms of linguistic negativism required by the language skepticism that increasingly shapes his poetic practice: Eroded by the beamwind of your speech the gaudy chatter of the pseudoexperienced – the hundredtongued perjurypoem, the noem [Genicht].102

While it is certainly possible to interpret the Genicht here as a synonym for the “perjury-poem” (Meingedicht), or the negation of poetry by the very forces against which Celan is struggling as a poet – namely, “the gaudy chatter” (das bunte Gerede) at a time when history calls for what Celan had a decade earlier described as a “grayer” language103 – it is also possible, reading against the grain, to see the Genicht as the poem (Gedicht) under the ethically and aesthetically necessary sign of the negative. The justification for such a reading can be found not least in the remarkable commitment to even more extreme forms of linguistic negativism in his next volume, Threadsuns (1968), the last to be published during Celan’s lifetime. As Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe observes, in Celan’s later work prosody and syntax “do violence to language; they chop, dislocate, truncate or cut it.” There are clear affinities here with the poetry written by Hölderlin shortly before his mental collapse. This is poetry characterized above all by “condensation and juxtaposition, a strangling of language.” LacoueLabarthe rightly considers Adorno’s analysis of the paratactical in Hölderlin’s late poetry as applicable to Celan’s.104 As we have seen, this violence takes the form of a linguistic negativism required by an ethicoaesthetic imperative rooted in a relation to language that Celan shares, above all, with Beckett. It is nowhere more in evidence than in Threadsuns, where Celan uses the very same word employed by Beckett in the latter’s 1937 letter to Axel Kaun: “unword” (Unwort), so closely akin to Mauthner’s “not-word” (Nichtwort). It is in the poem “Who rules?,” in Threadsuns, that Celan writes of “The hard-won umlaut in the unword” (Der erkämpfte Umlaut im Unwort),105 and throughout the volume as a whole Celan explores in the most radical way the possibilities of a poetry of 102 103 104 105

Ibid., p. 19; p. 31. The modifier “gaudy” (bunte) is introduced as a revision in the autograph manuscript (see Celan, Atemwende. Vorstufen, p. 46). Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Poetry as Experience, trans. Andrea Tarnowski (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 12. Celan, Collected Later Poetry, p. 115; GW ii, p. 116.

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the unword; that is, a poetry that bears witness to the unspeakable and, crucially for Celan, to that which might remain saveable beyond it. The unwording procedures in Threadsuns include intensive (often multiple) deployments of the negative affixes un-, ver-, and ent-, often with more than one affix modifying a word. Examples of words modified by the un- affix in this volume include “impatience” (Ungeduld), “invisible” (unsichbar), “inaudible” (unhörbar), “unconquerable” (unbezwingbar), “uncanny” (ungeheuer), “unawakened” (unerweckt), “unwavering” (unbeirrbar), “unpicked” (ungepflückt), “myriad” (Unzahl), “uninscribed” (unbeschrieben), “unbidden” (ungebeten), “irresistibly” (unwiderstehlich), “eternity-hither” (unendlichkeitsher), “unerringly-secret” (unbeirrbar-geheim), “unkept” (unverwahrt), “unconditional” (unbedingt), “unconstricted” (unumschnürt),106 “the inanimate” (das Unbelebte), “bare one” (Unbedeckte), “unredressable one” (Unumkleidbare), “indecent” (unzüchtig), “the unburiable” (Unbestattbare),107 and “inextinguishable” (unauslöschlisch).108 As for Celan’s reliance on the ver- affix in Threadsuns, the poem “Orphaned,” the title of which may be seen as alluding to Celan’s own loss of his parents in the Holocaust, gives a clear sense of its importance, each stanza of this four-stanza, eight-line poem opening with a negative modifier: “Orphaned” (Verwaist); “shadowed” (verschattet); “moored” (vermurt); and “fermented” (vergoren).109 What distinguishes this unwording practice from its employment in earlier volumes is above all its frequency. These negative affixes are generally already present in the first drafts of the poems included in Threadsuns, whereas in Breathturn they are often the result of revisions at autograph manuscript or typescript stage, signaling a key moment of development in Celan’s poetics in the mid-1960s. Furthermore, in addition to the extensive use of the un- affix, Celan relies upon the ent- affix far more often in the poems included in Threadsuns than in any of his earlier volumes. This heavy use of the ent- affix is among the most distinctive features of this moment in the unfolding of Celan’s linguistic negativism, 106

107

108

109

This negative modifier is a supralinear revision in the autograph manuscript of the poem “Near, in the aortic arch” (see Paul Celan, Fadensonnen. Vorstufen – Textgenese – Endfassung, ed. Heino Schmull, Markus Heilmann, and Christiane Wittkop (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), p. 173). This unword is a supralinear autograph revision in the typescript of the poem “Imagine.” The final line of the poem in the published version – “from what cannot be buried” (vom Unbestattbaren her) – replaces “from what transforms everything” (vom Allverwandelnden her) (see Celan, Fadensonnen. Vorstufen, p. 221). Celan, Collected Later Poetry, pp. 125, 128, 131, 133, 139, 145, 149, 153, 155, 163, 165, 167, 175, 177, 201, 211, 213, 221; GW ii, pp. 124, 129, 130, 131, 139, 143, 144, 148, 151, 152, 158, 163, 164, 175, 176, 202, 203, 218, 220, 227. Ibid., p. 207; p. 212.

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often resulting in unwords not to be found in any dictionary. Examples of this form of unword in Threadsuns include “the destarred” (das Entsternte); “the relinquished dream-relics” (die entäußerten Traumrelikte);110 “unveils” (entschleiert); “the not-to-be-deciphered [nicht zu enträtselnde] / jubilee”; “disnighted” (entnachtet); “acclimatized-disclimatized” (eingewohntentwohnt) and “adisclimatized” (einentwohnt);111 “dedeviled instant” (entteufelter Nu); “discolors” (entfärbt); “deslagged” (entschlackt); “the disrhymed” (der Entreimte); “untwinned” (entzwillingt); “de-scarred” (entnarbt); and “de-realized” (entwirklicht).112 The distinctiveness of the ent- affix is that it signals the removal or stripping away of that which once was, rather than being a proleptic negation of the kind effected by the unaffix, this latter being Celan’s predominant mode of negation in his earlier works. The intensity of the linguistic negativism in Threadsuns is nowhere more evident than in the poem “Your eyes in the arm,” where Celan creates a rhythmic to-and-fro movement between ver- and ent- prefixes in the radically paratactical line: “Mismeasure, unmeasure, misplaced, unworded” (Vermessen, entmessen, verortet, entwortet), this affixal rhythm being achieved through a revision at post-typescript stage, with verortet replacing the manuscript version: “unplaced” (entortet).113 In addition to the sheer frequency of negative affixes, what is most distinctive about the unwording procedures in Threadsuns is Celan’s use of multiple, compounded negative affixes, where the double negative affix produces what may be described as an un-negation or an un-unsaying. Examples of this form of double negation include “undebecome” (unentworden), “undarkened” (unverdunkelt), “de-eternalized” (verunewigt), and “unexpiated” (unentsühnt).114 These unwordings show Celan at his most linguistically inventive at the very moment when his linguistic negativism is at its most intensive. The linguistic landscape of Threadsuns is characterized more generally by the prevalence of what in the poem “Over mulled and toiled wine” is 110 111

112 113 114

The negative modifier “relinquished” (entäußert) is a supralinear addition in the autograph manuscript of the poem “Truth” (see Celan, Fadensonnen. Vostufen, p. 53). The autograph manuscript of the poem “Acclimatized-disclimatized” reveals Celan adding the modifier “acclimatized-disclimatized” (Eingewohnt-entwohnt) to complement “adisclimatized” (einentwohnt), the latter, doubly negative modifier becoming a compaction of the former, creating one more instance of the rhythmic movement of affixes (see Celan, Fadensonnen. Vorstufen, p. 86). Celan, Collected Later Poetry, pp. 121, 139, 147, 153, 155, 159, 165, 169, 183, 187, 201; GW ii, pp. 121, 138, 146, 151, 153, 156, 163, 169, 182, 183, 190, 213. Ibid., p. 123; p. 123. For the revision, see Celan, Fadensonnen. Vorstufen, p. 25. Celan, Collected Later Poetry, pp. 111, 117, 121, 213; GW ii, pp. 113, 119, 122, 220.

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termed the “necronymic” (nekronym).115 It is a landscape where there is “No name that would name” (Kein Name, der nennt).116 And it is precisely to confront this radical limitation on the naming power of the word that Celan resorts not only to a reduction in proper names, but, in a manner more extreme than in any of his earlier – and, indeed, any of his later – work, to the previously mentioned forms of linguistic negativism. Words are broken across lines, often such that affixes of negation stand out even more clearly (either at the beginning or at the end of a line), and, time and again, double affixes of negation are employed, above all unent-, through which a subtractive negation (ent-) is negated (by the un- that modifies it proleptically). In this way, Celan’s linguistic negativism serves not only to achieve what Adorno describes as a negative image of a terrible reality, but also, and no less importantly, as an attempt to rescue through a double negation a life and a world from the very clutches of all that is most destructive. Only works such as Kafka’s late text “The Burrow,” or Beckett’s Lessness and Worstward Ho, bear comparison with the radical linguistic negativism of Threadsuns. For each of these writers, if there is hope, then it would lie only in what Kafka describes as a performing of the negative.117 For Celan, who in the early 1950s considered writing a doctoral thesis on Kafka, and who often alludes to his work, it is precisely the positive that is to be resisted, constituting as it does the triumph of the worst. In the un-unsaying of Threadsuns, Celan enacts the negative in a manner that comes closest to making the “noem” (Genicht) a poem (Gedicht) in the truest sense. Threadsuns stands out, then, as the culminating work of radically inventive linguistic negativism in Celan’s œuvre. In the other poetry written at around the same time or subsequently he does not take any decisive steps beyond what he achieves in this 1968 volume. In Tenebrae’d,118 for instance, which was also published in 1968 – as part of a series of “abandoned works” – and the poems written at the same time as those in Threadsuns, but not selected by Celan for inclusion in that volume, he again relies heavily upon the negative affixes un- and ent-. Important examples of words modified by the un- affix in Tenebrae’d include “unrepentant” (unbußfertig), “insubordinate” (unbotmäßig), “untamed” 115 117

118

Ibid., p. 173; p. 172. 116 Ibid., p. 219; p. 226. See Franz Kafka, The Collected Aphorisms, trans. Malcolm Pasley (London: Syrens, 1994), p. 8; Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente II, in der Fassung der Handschriften, ed. Jost Schillemeit (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1992), p. 47. The German title of this volume, Eingedunkelt, has also been translated as Benighted. See Paul Celan, Fathomsuns and Benighted, trans. Ian Fairley (Manchester: Carcanet, 2001).

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(unbezwungen), and “the undifferentiated” (das Ungeschiedene).119 In the other poems related to that volume one finds “the insubordinate” (der Unbotmäßige), “the unlosable” (das Unverlierbare), and “the unearthly” (das Unirdische).120 As for the use of the ent- affix, key instances akin to those in Threadsuns are “de-hawked” (enthökert)121 and “de-heavened one” (Enthimmeltes).122 In Lightduress, which was with the publisher at the time of Celan’s death in April 1970, and published later that year, there is a linguistic negativism akin to, but less pervasive than, that in Threadsuns, and also less radical in its compounding of negative affixes of the unent- form. Examples in the poems included in Lichtzwang of the un- affix, which is less radical lexically than ent-, include “incomprehensibly” (unbegreiflich); “unleveled” (uneingeebnet); “unopened” (unaufgeschlagen); “untransformed” (unverwandelt), this negative modifier being a supralinear addition in the autograph manuscript;123 “unwritten” (unbeschrieben), this negative modifier also being a supralinear addition in the autograph manuscript;124 “undamaged” (unversehrt); “unrepentant” (unbußfertig); and “unendingly” (unendlich).125 As for the use of the ent- affix, important instances in Lichtzwang include “the disbreathed” (das Entatmete), this unword replacing “the breathed away” (das Veratmete), which in turn replaces “the breathed” (das Geatmete), in the autograph manuscript;126 “unveiled” (entschleiert); and “the diselevated one” (das Enthöhte).127 Celan’s manuscripts thus reveal not only an intensification in unwording during the composition of the poems in Lightduress, as in Breathturn and Threadsuns, but also an unwording of his own work. The revision of “breathed” to “disbreathed,” for instance, indicates a compositional process that is in fact decompositional. To be able to appreciate the full force of Celan’s linguistic negativism in his later poetry it is thus necessary not only to consider the unwording in the published versions, but to take account of a (de)compositional process

119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127

Celan, Collected Later Poetry, pp. 227, 229, 233; GW iii, pp. 144, 146, 150. Paul Celan, Die Gedichte aus dem Nachlass, ed. Bertrand Badiou, Jean-Claude Rambach, and Barbara Wiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), pp. 116, 118, 120. Celan, Fathomsuns and Benighted, p. 267 (translation modified); GW iii, p. 147. Celan, Die Gedichte aus dem Nachlass, p. 127 (my translation). See Paul Celan, Lichtzwang. Vorstufen – Textgenese – Endfassung, ed. Heino Schmull, Markus Heilmann, and Christiane Wittkop (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001), p. 64. See ibid., p. 78. Celan, Collected Later Poetry, pp. 241, 257, 261, 263, 267, 277, 295, 303; GW ii, pp. 236, 255, 262, 263, 272, 286, 305, 315. See Celan, Lichtzwang. Vorstufen, p. 115. Celan, Collected Later Poetry, pp. 283, 297, 314; GW ii, pp. 292, 310, 326.

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that makes of the original drafts the object of the negative. In this respect, too, the Gedicht becomes a Genicht. In Lightduress, then, Celan continues to employ the forms of negativism that reach their fullest realization in Threadsuns but does not carry them any further. That said, the linguistic negativism of Lightduress may nonetheless be distinguished from the forms of linguistic negativism in the earlier volume by one particular unwording procedure, namely a multiplication of unwords within a sequence. The poem “Mussel-heap” is a striking example of the kind of sequential multiplication of the negative to be found in Lightduress more generally: No Later. No bowl urn, no pierced necklace, no starfootfibula. Unappeased, unconnected, artless, the all-transforming slowly scraping climbed after me.128

Here, the multiplication of the negative is achieved firstly by the anaphoric recurrence of “no” (kein), followed by that of the un- affix in the words “Unappeased” (Ungestillt) and “unconnected” (unverknüpft). Other important examples of such a multiplication of unwords in Lightduress include “no flower” (keine Blume), “no ore” (kein Erz), and “no / angel” (kein / Engel) in the poem “Well-like”; “you sail, smolder, and die down [verglimmst und verglost]” in “With dream-propulsion”; “not a word, not a thing” (kein Wort, kein Ding) in “Wan-voiced”; and “Unanalyzed, un- / archived, un- / cared for?” (Unasyliert, un- / archiviert, un- / umfürsorgt?) in “Leap centuries.”129 Importantly, this sequential – as distinct from compounding (unent-) – multiplication of the negative does not result in the negation of a subtractive negation. Rather, it suggests an unredemptive negativity, and thus, to use Celan’s own image, the language of Lightduress is of a considerably darker shade of gray. It is only, then, a seeming paradox that Threadsuns, the most radically linguistically negative volume in Celan’s œuvre, is also, and for that very 128

Ibid., p. 239; p. 236.

129

Ibid., pp. 289, 293, 295, 313; pp. 302, 303, 307, 324.

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reason, the one in which linguistic negativism carries the greatest redemptive charge. If Lightduress offers the reader what, in the poem “Leap centuries,” are described as “reading stations in the late-word” (Lesestationen im Spätwort),130 then that late word does not really belong within the lexicon of a literature of the unword for which linguistic negativism offers the only hope of both capturing a catastrophic reality, while offering a glimpse (if only a negative one, as Adorno argues) of “reconciliation” (Versöhnung). That is certainly not to say that Lightduress constitutes a poetic failure, or even that it marks Celan’s loss of faith in the ethico-aesthetic imperative that led him, step by step, toward the radically innovative linguistic negativism of Threadsuns. Rather, it is to suggest that Lightduress marks, paradoxically, a movement toward a kind of serial negativism that is ultimately a darker, less potentially redemptive, inflection of the negative. In the poem “Notepaper-pain,” Celan identifies “the newborn / nothing” (das neugeborene / Nichts) that “cradled him,”131 and it is this newborn nothingness that prevails in Lightduress, most forcefully in the imperative articulated in the last poem in the volume, “Do not work ahead”: Do not work ahead, do not send out, stand inward: transgrounded by the nothing, free of all prayer, fine-fugued, according to Writ’s pre-Script, not overtakable, I take you in, instead of any rest.132

The call upon the unnamed addressee in this poem to be “transgrounded by the void” (durchgründet vom Nichts) can be read in at least two ways. It might be taken as a call to commit either to the compounding negativity so characteristic of Threadsuns, or to the kind of serial negativity that tends to prevail in Lightduress. The idea of the poem as “noem” (Genicht) houses both these possibilities. 130 131

Ibid., p. 313; p. 324. “Late-word” (Spätwort) enters the poem as a revision of “Late- / November” (Spät- / november) in the autograph manuscript (see Celan, Lichtzwang. Vorstufen, p. 171). Celan, Collected Later Poetry, p. 309; GW ii, p. 321. 132 Ibid., p. 317; p. 328.

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Snowpart, the volume that Celan had all but prepared for publication by the time of his death, and which appeared in 1971, effects from the outset an intensification of the serial linguistic negativism of Lightduress. The opening line of the first poem in the volume makes this clear, reading: “Unwashed, unpainted” (Ungewaschen, unbemalt). Other examples of Celan’s deployment of serial un- words in Snowpart include “un- / sung, un- / vanquished, un- / entwined” (Un- / besungener, Un- / bezwungener, Un- / umwundener) in the poem “To night-order”; and “uncountable you [Unzählbarer du]: / you are one un- / sign [Un- / zeichen] / ahead of them” in the poem “The half-gnawed.”133 The other important use of this negative affix is to create the core features of a negative world, with examples including “Unreadability [Unlesbarkeit] of this / world”; “the uncreated” (das Ungeschöpfte); “unsleep” (Unschlaf); “the sans-image” (das Ohnebild); “unwindowed” (Unverfenstertes);134 and the identification as “unoccupiable” or “uncathectable” (unbesetzbar) of both the capital city in the poem “One reading branch,” and consciousness in the poem “Open glottis,”135 this negative modifier being a revision in this latter poem of “unfurnishable” (unmöblierbar) in the first typescript.136 This insistence upon definition by negation is also achieved in the poem “Rapidfireperihelion,” when both the “I” and the “you” are identified as the “acosmic” (Akosmische).137 The volume of poems on which Celan was working at the time of his death, Timestead (published posthumously in 1976), shares with Snowpart and, to some extent with Lightduress, a considerably less radical and less innovative practice of linguistic negativism than is achieved in Threadsuns. There is, as in the earlier volumes, a recurrent use of the un- affix, although these unwords tend now to be isolated; that is, neither serial nor compounded. Examples of the use of the un- affix in Timestead include “unmonitored” (unbelauscht), “unrealizable” (unverwirkbar), “irrefutable” (unwiderlegbar), “unflinching” (unbeirrbar), “unthorned” (unverdornt), “unkissed” (ungeküßt), “immovable” (unverrückbar), “insurmountable” (unübersteigbar), “the undifferentiated” (das Ungeschiedne), “believingunbelieving” (gläubig-ungläubig), and “the invisible one” (der Unsichbare).138 In contrast to this pervasive use of the un- affix, both the 133 134 136 137 138

Ibid., pp. 321, 343, 367–69; p. 333, 357, 384. Ibid., pp. 327, 347, 365, 373; pp. 338, 364, 378, 389. 135 Ibid., pp. 388, 373; pp. 403, 388. See Paul Celan, Schneepart. Vorstufen – Textgenese – Reinschrift, ed. Heino Schmull and Markus Heilmann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002), p. 103. Celan, Collected Later Poetry, p. 395; GW ii, p. 410. Ibid., pp. 409, 423, 425, 431, 433, 437, 439, 445, 447; pp. 74, 87, 89, 95, 98, 104, 105, 110, 111, 123.

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ver- and ent- affixes, which play such a crucial role in Threadsuns, are rare in Timestead, with “de-eternalizing you” (Entimmernde du) in the poem “As I” standing out precisely on account of its isolation in the volume,139 this form of linguistic negativism harking back only in passing to the radicalism of Threadsuns. One of the most striking features of Timestead is its return to that preoccupation with the nothing (Nichts) that is to be found in SpeechGrille and The No One’s Rose. In the poem “Spiteful moons,” for instance, the moons “sprawl and slobber / behind Nothingness [hinter dem Nichts]”; the poem “From the sinking whale forehead” ends with “the copulating Nothingness” (das balzende Nichts); in the poem “In the remotest,” the speaker states that “the Übernothing [das Übernichts] has / joined up with me”; and in the poem “Nothingness,” the nothingness seals “for the sake / of our names.”140 This preoccupation with the nothing is echoed by the introduction of a number of complementary substantives such as “Nowhere” (Nirgends), “unground” (Ungrund), “abyss” (Abgrund), and “Empty-text” (Leertext).141 Overall, then, one finds in the two posthumously published volumes Snowpart and Timestead something of a retreat from the radical linguistic negativism of Threadsuns, a retreat that is already detectable in Lightduress. In the latter volume, the serial multiplication of unwording affixes certainly constitutes an enactment of the negative that is no less powerful poetologically than that to be found in Threadsuns, although it does tend to reduce the redemptive charge of the un-unsaying achieved by the unent- form so characteristic of Threadsuns.142 Charting the development of Celan’s linguistic negativism as a response to language skepticism in the face of a catastrophic European history reveals, then, that from Speech-Grille to Threadsuns Celan significantly increases the frequency of unwords – principally those that are formed through the negative affixes un-, ver-, ent-, and -los – and develops both a serial and a compounding form of unwording, the latter reaching its greatest intensity in Threadsuns, where it becomes a remarkable form of un-unsaying, comparable to that in Beckett’s Worstward Ho. Alongside these forms of unwording, one also encounters an increasing preoccupation with nothingness (das Nichts), which wanes precisely at the moment 139 141 142

Ibid., p. 447; p. 112. 140 Ibid., pp. 403, 407, 413, 445; pp. 70, 72, 77, 110. Ibid., pp. 409, 415, 423, 437, 439; pp. 74, 78, 86, 101, 104. Schulz’s claim that there is no “pure negativity” in Celan’s work tends to obscure this retreat; what Schulz rightly describes as the “ambivalence of the negative” in Celan is more fully achieved in Threadsuns than it is in the final works (Schulz, Negativität, pp. 269 and 271; my translation).

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when unwording through affixes reaches its most extreme, and then increases again when such unwording is reduced (in the volumes from Lightduress to Timestead). This return to a concern with nothingness coincides with a new attention to related ideas such as “abyss,” “unground,” and “empty-text.” The negativity that is introduced into Celan’s poetry in these ways can serve both to articulate and to resist the forces of darkness against which his poetic œuvre would stand, above all against what he describes as “the monstrosity of what happened” (das Ungeheuerliche des Geschehenen). Thus, for instance, the un- affix can serve an essentially positive function in the modifier “unlost” (unverloren), as can the -los affix, particularly in “timeless” (zeitlos), which Celan connects with the plant meadow saffron (Zeitlose). As Celan puts it in a posthumously published prose text: “‘Timeless’ poem: the ever untimely present one. . . . Timeless = temporally open” (“Zeitloses” Gedicht: das immer zur Unzeit Gegenwärtige. . . . Zeitlos = zeitoffen).143 This temporal openness is very much at one with Celan’s concern that his poems should reach an addressee – named, if at all, as “you” (du) – hence his strong objection to the characterization of his poetry as hermetic or sealed, as well as the distance he explicitly takes from Mallarmé and the idea of the absolute. For Celan, the value of a poem lies in no small measure precisely in its remaining “temporally open” (zeitoffen). If the writing of poetry after Auschwitz is, as Celan believed, necessary (pace Adorno’s initial judgment on the matter), and, indeed, if poetry can stand as the very antithesis of the barbaric (in the etymological sense of a language that is less than a language), its ethico-aesthetic imperative must be to do justice both to history and to its own time, while remaining open to the future. Celan’s œuvre unfolds in accordance with the principle that to achieve this, the poet must enact a linguistic negativism that constitutes a “haven of hope” (Zuflucht der Hoffnung), to use the expression adopted by Adorno to describe what he sees as the difference between nothingness and coming to rest in Beckett’s work.144 As Celan puts it: “The poem stands and hopes upon its own ruins” (Auf den eigenen Trümmern steht und hofft das Gedicht).145 If there is such a haven of hope, then it is to be found, above all, in the forms of linguistic negativism that double the negative, as in the unent- affix that is so distinctly Celanian. Faced with “the 143 144 145

Celan, “Aphorismen, Gegenlichte und aphoristische Fragmente,” p. 35. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), p. 381. Celan, “Aphorismen, Gegenlichte und aphoristische Fragmente,” p. 29.

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monstrosity of what happened,” and, as Celan saw it, the appalling failure to learn from that history in postwar Europe, the poet may well, as Celan puts it, be left “word-poor and perhaps already irrevocably condemned to silence” (wortarm und vielleicht schon unwiderruflich zum Schweigen verurteilt).146 And yet, for Celan, as for Beckett, such a language-skeptical predicament is precisely the one in which the ethico-aesthetic imperative is to find, if not the words, then the unwords, in which to speak – not to the self, not to some abstract other, but to you. 146

Celan, “Erzählende Prosa,” in Prosa, pp. 63–84 (p. 74).

chapter 7

Unconditional Negativity: W. G. Sebald

The vision of a ruined humanity that one finds in the work of those postwar European writers who commit themselves to a literature of the unword is a vision of what remains after the disintegration of the Enlightenment conception of the human being as a rational being that has the power and the basic inclination to shape a civilization grounded in the values of individual freedom, tolerance, and scientific knowledge. The catastrophic history with which these writers of the unword found themselves confronted, the barbarities that culminated in the Holocaust, left them facing the obligation to reflect upon, and to find a language for, that which beggared both understanding and articulation. The shadow cast by that European disaster is a long one, extending to the early twenty-first century, with the work of the German-language writer W. G. Sebald being one of the most significant recent manifestations of a European literature of the unword shaped by an ethico-aesthetic commitment to forms of linguistic negativism in the face of that disaster. For all its indisputable originality, Sebald’s œuvre is haunted by the works of other modern European writers, including Hofmannsthal, Kafka, Beckett, Jean Améry, and Thomas Bernhard, the latter’s intensive reliance upon the modifier “so-called” (sogenannt) serving to effect something closely akin to what Mauthner finds in Goethe’s ironic approach to language in Poetry and Truth, exposing the words used as anything but the expression of the true nature of what is being described. Sebald’s work is not only profoundly intertextual, but also one in which the distinctly European nature of the unwording tradition to which he belongs becomes clear. The tradition within which Sebald locates himself, primarily through allusion, citation, and stylistic imitation, as well as through his choice of subject matter in his critical writings, is one characterized above all by its engagement with the negative and, more precisely, by its practice of linguistic negativism. For Sebald, this literary tradition is one that is shaped not just in its content but also in its language by its sense that modernity is 187

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the darkest of times, the nature of which is captured in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947). For the two Frankfurt School thinkers, far from constituting a step beyond barbarism, the European Enlightenment project leads, in strictly dialectical fashion, to ever-greater barbarism, epitomized by the Nazi terror and the Holocaust. Where one finds reason, one will also necessarily find unreason because Enlightenment reason is itself a form of unreason. Where one finds Kant, one will also necessarily find the Marquis de Sade because the categorical imperative can serve to generalize torture and the death drive just as much as it can generalize respect and the life drive. Horkheimer and Adorno’s argument exerts a considerable influence on Sebald’s conception of modern European history.1 For Sebald, as for the other European practitioners of a literature of the unword, history testifies in the most powerful terms against the Enlightenment conviction (still very much present in the Hegelian dialectic) that, through the exercise of reason, progress toward an ever-greater degree of civilization is possible, and even inevitable. Sebald’s œuvre stands as a profoundly skeptical reflection on this idea, exploring what it takes to be the monstrosity, the ruination, and the disaster of modernity, in what he terms a “natural history of destruction.” Just as for Kafka, Beckett, Blanchot, and Celan, so for Sebald, the attempt to capture the nature of that dark time in the literary work requires nothing positive, but rather a tarrying within the negative that accords with Adorno’s conception of a “radically darkened art.”2 As we have seen, in his 1953 essay on Kafka, Adorno cites the latter’s “Zürau” aphorism that the positive is already given, and that the task, in the face of this positivity (which is seen as monstrous), is to “perform the negative.”3 For Adorno, like Kafka before him, in a world that is “caught in its own toils” the positive only increases the “entanglement.”4 As for the precise nature of such a performing of the negative, Adorno finds the answer first in Kafka’s own work, and then in Beckett’s, in what he sees 1

2 3

4

On the importance of these Frankfurt School thinkers for Sebald, and their impact on his own work, see especially Ben Hutchinson, “The Shadow of Resistance: W. G. Sebald and the Frankfurt School,” Journal of European Studies 41 (2011): 267–84; and W. G. Sebald. Die dialektische Imagination (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2009). Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: The Athlone Press, 1997), p. 19. Franz Kafka, The Collected Aphorisms, trans. Malcolm Pasley (London: Syrens, 1994), p. 8. Cited in Theodor W. Adorno, “Notes on Kafka,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1981), pp. 243–71 (p. 271). Adorno, “Notes on Kafka,” p. 271.

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as their ambiguous alliance with death. On the one hand, Kafka articulates the dream of an end to “the half-uselessness of a life which does not live.” On the other hand, the very failure of the attempt to reach this end, as embodied in Kafka’s Hunter Gracchus, a failure of the negative or even a nondialectical negation of the negative, is the sole source of hope: “[T]he fact that the mutilated creature cannot die any more is the sole promise of immortality which the rationalist Kafka permits to survive the ban on images.”5 In other words, there is a profound ambiguity at the heart of the attempt to perform the negative. That ambiguity is reflected in the work of both Beckett and Blanchot through the idea of the impossibility of death or ending. In Beckett, this experience of endlessness is directly related to the failure to achieve a naming of that which is to be named, that which it is at once impossible and yet necessary to name. That Sebald’s work emerges out of this tradition, in which the writer’s ethico-aesthetic obligation is to perform the negative to capture the nature of a modernity over which monstrosity casts its long shadow, and, crucially, to offer some resistance to it, is nowhere more evident than in his 1988 essay on the Austrian-born novelist and essayist Jean Améry. The latter’s principal works include the essay collection At the Mind’s Limits (1966), in which Améry considers the impact of torture and the experience of Auschwitz on the human mind, as well as the sense of profound homelessness to which European Jews were condemned by Nazi anti-Semitism.6 Améry’s other major works include the novel Lefeu or the Demolition (1974) and the two studies On Ageing (1968) and On Suicide (1976), the latter published only two years before Améry took his own life. In his essay on Améry, Sebald argues that the former’s works are distinguished above all by their refusal to make any “compromise with history,” their denunciation of “the obscenity of a psychologically and socially deformed society,” and their commitment to a writing that, like that of Georges Bataille and the Romanian-born philosopher E. M. Cioran in France, is “unconditionally negative” (bedingungslos negativ) in nature.7 If Sebald commits himself to just such an unconditional negativity, he does so most obviously at the level of content. In the four major prose 5 6 7

Ibid., pp. 270–1. At the Mind’s Limits is the translation of the work originally published in German under the title Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne (“Beyond Guilt and Atonement”). W. G. Sebald, “Against the Irreversible: On Jean Améry,” in On the Natural History of Destruction, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: The Modern Library, 2004), pp. 147–71 (p. 154; translation modified); “Mit den Augen des Nachtvogels. Über Jean Amery,” in Campo Santo, ed. Sven Meyer (Munich and Vienna: Carl Hanser, 2003), pp. 149–70 (pp. 157–8).

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works that he completed before his death in 2001 at the age of 57 – Vertigo (1990), The Emigrants (1993), The Rings of Saturn (1995), and Austerlitz (2001) – Sebald presents a vision of a radically darkening world of ruins, loss, trauma, and isolation, refracted in a melancholic prism that, at times, is so exaggerated as to produce comic effects. Sebald’s is a world in which modern European history, dating back to the expansionist dreams of Napoleon, is characterized not by increasing civilization but rather by increasing barbarism, epitomized above all by the Holocaust, but also including the Napoleonic wars, the World Wars I and II, and European imperialism, especially in Africa.8 If there is hope, then it lies for Sebald not in grand political schemes, but in the small, the fragile, the ephemeral, and, above all, in art of a very particular kind. And like that of Kafka and Beckett before him, Sebald’s writing of the negative, his thematization of disaster, ruination, and inhumanity, is always also reflected, and indeed enacted, in his language – in his deployment of particular words and phrases, his syntax, and the rhythm of his prose, which together serve the ends of a linguistic negativism that, while never avant-garde in the manner of Beckett’s or Celan’s later works, is nonetheless intensive in its nature and shares the ethico-aesthetic purpose of those other postwar European writers who commit themselves to a literature of the unword. Foremost, Sebald aims to achieve a form of linguistic negativism through his deployment of several recurring unwords. The most important of these is Unglück, the meaning of which can extend from “misfortune” to “mishap” to “unhappiness” to “disaster” or “catastrophe,” but for which, on the one occasion on which he offers an English version of the term, Sebald opts for “calamity.”9 For Sebald, modern European history is nothing short of an historia calamitatum,10 an overwhelming experience of recurrent Unglück. In addition to Unglück, the other principal unwords 8

9

10

For a wide-ranging analysis of Sebald’s engagement with modernity, see Anne Fuchs and Jonathan Long (eds.), W. G. Sebald and the Writing of History (Würzburg: Königshausen & Naumann, 2007). In English editions of Sebald’s work, Unglück has most often been translated as “misfortune,” with other translations including “unhappiness,” “mishap,” “disaster,” and “tragedy.” While the word undoubtedly has a range of meanings, Sebald matches the word unglücklich with “calamitous” in the German and English versions of his 1976 essay on Kafka: see W. G. Sebald, “The Law of Ignominy; Authority, Messianism, and Exile in Kafka’s The Castle,” in Frank Kuna (ed.), On Kafka: SemiCentenary Perspectives (London: Paul Elek, 1976), pp. 42–58 (p. 52); “Das Gesetz der Schande. Macht, Messianismus und Exil in Kafkas Schloß,” in Unheimatliche Heimat. Essays zur österreichischen Literatur (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1995), pp. 87–103 (p. 98). W. G. Sebald, Die Beschreibung des Unglücks. Zur österreichischen Literatur von Stifter bis Handke (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1994), p. 12. All translations from this volume in the present chapter are my own.

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deployed by Sebald include “uncanny” (unheimlich), “monstrous” (ungeheuer), “uneasy” (unruhig), “uncertain” (unsicher), “unforeseen” (unversehens), “unwholesome” (ungut), “impossible” (unmöglich), “incapable” (unfähig), “incomprehensible” (unbegreiflich), and “misshapen” (unförmig). Together, these unwords reveal the profound importance of Kafka’s œuvre to Sebald, many of them playing, as we have seen, a central role in Kafka’s own linguistic negativism.11 Sebald also regularly deploys words with the negative prefixes aus-, ver-, and zer-, and the suffix -los. As for phrases, among the most important is “out of nowhere” or “out of nothing” (aus dem Nichts), which marks the moment when the negative appears to give way to the positive, but that is in fact profoundly ambiguous in nature. At the rhythmic level, Sebald relies principally on anaphora, with “no . . . no . . .” (kein . . . kein . . .), “not . . . not” (nicht . . . nicht . . .), and “nowhere . . . nowhere” (nirgends . . . nirgends . . .) being the most recurrent forms, these echoing those used by Celan. Sebald also makes considerable – and increasingly frequent – use of the construction “the more . . . the less” (je mehr . . . desto weniger), which, as Ben Hutchinson argues, enacts at the syntactical level a critique of progress (Fortschrittskritik) akin to the one articulated by Horkheimer and Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment.12 In short, for every step forward (toward a greater degree of civilization), there will inevitably be a step back (toward greater barbarism). Each of Sebald’s four completed prose works also contains extended passages exhibiting a more general syntactical negativity, these passages helping to establish the overall rhythm of each work. As soon as one begins to pay attention to this enactment of the negative in Sebald’s œuvre, it becomes apparent that particular words, phrases, and syntactical forms play a key role in a given work. For instance, the word uncanny (unheimlich) tends to predominate in Vertigo, where the experience of “vertigo” (Schwindel) is directly related to that of the uncanny, which reaches its most extreme when the narrator returns to his childhood home in southern Germany in the fourth and final part, “Il ritorno in patria.” In contrast, the phrase “out of nowhere” (aus dem Nichts) comes to the fore in Austerlitz, where it is the return of Jacques Austerlitz’s hitherto occluded memories of life before he was sent alone from his home in Prague on a Kindertransport to London in 1939, at the age of five, that lies 11

12

For an overview of Kafka’s importance for Sebald more generally, see Richard T. Gray’s contribution to Claudia Öhlschläger and Michael Niehaus (eds.), W. G. Sebald Handbuch. Leben – Werk – Wirkung (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2017), pp. 268–73. See Hutchinson, Sebald, p. 120.

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at the heart of the work. Focusing on the specific ways in which the negative is written in Sebald’s prose works, and its relation to forms of recollection, both personal and collective, can thus help to clarify the differences between them, and to counter any easy homogenization of his œuvre. It can also help to reveal the way the language of Sebald’s primary narrators comes to resemble that of his protagonists, through a stylistic contagion that marks these narrators’ ethico-aesthetic identifications. That this stylistic contagion is particularly evident in Austerlitz suggests that, in what proved to be Sebald’s last work, a new, Giorgio Bassani-influenced conception of the narrator as his protagonist’s “guardian angel” is adopted.13 It also suggests, however, that the space of any potential irony is reduced, the implications of this impacting directly upon the function of the negative. While taking different forms in each of his four major prose works, Sebald’s linguistic negativism is shaped by the principal aim that he sets for postwar German-language literature and, indeed, for European literature more generally: namely, to resist, as does Jean Améry, any compromise with a history that he sees as obscene. Unconditional negativity is thus an aesthetic obligation rooted in the historical experience of calamity, and in the sense that literature’s purpose is to do what it can to capture the nature of that calamity, chart its impact upon the individual, and do what can be done to prevent its repetition. Given this commitment to unconditional negativity, the principal challenge for Sebald becomes how to avoid, on the one hand, the nihilism that he criticizes in his 1983 essay on Günter Grass and Wolfgang Hildesheimer14 and, on the other hand, any movement out of the negative of the kind condemned by Adorno in Negative Dialectics (1966), where it is argued that acts of “overcoming” (Überwindung), not least attempts to overcome nihilism, including Nietzsche’s, are “always worse than what they overcome.”15 Ultimately, the space that Sebald seeks to inhabit as a writer is the one identified in his 2001 essay “An Attempt at Restitution,” in which he identifies what he sees as the restitutive power of literature. That power lies, for Sebald, precisely in the negative, in forms of

13 14

15

See Ben Hutchinson, “‘Der Erzähler als Schutzengel’? W. G. Sebald’s Reading of Giorgio Bassani,” Gegenwartsliteratur 6 (2007): 69–91. W. G. Sebald, “Constructs of Mourning: Günter Grass and Wolfgang Hildesheimer,” in Campo Santo, pp. 102–29 (p. 127); “Kunstruktionen der Trauer. Günter Grass und Wolfgang Hildesheimer,” in Campo Santo, pp. 101–27 (p. 125). Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), p. 380.

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radical linguistic negativism that produce a unique form of that literature of the unword for which Beckett calls in 1937. Not only does the unword Unglück recur throughout Sebald’s critical writings, but it also plays a very significant role in each of his prose works. Its importance is evident as early as 1969, in the foreword to his monograph on the German expressionist writer Carl Sternheim (1878–1942), which ends with a quotation from Kafka’s diaries on the Jewish actor Jizchak Löwy: “And we are supposed, even if we are not gripped, to acknowledge that he is gripped and to explain to him how the misfortune which has been described was possible [und ihm die Möglichkeit des beschriebenen Unglücks zu erklären].”16 It is from this aesthetic imperative that Sebald derives the title for his 1985 collection of essays on Austrian literature, Die Beschreibung des Unglücks (“The Description of Calamity”). In the foreword to that volume, which includes essays on Adalbert Stifter, Arthur Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal, Kafka, Elias Canetti, Thomas Bernhard, Peter Handke, Ernst Herbeck, and Gerhard Roth, Sebald states that a central concern of the essays will be “the calamity of the writing subject” (das Unglück des schreibenden Subjekts).17 Austrian literature’s preoccupation with Unglück is, he argues, so pronounced that one may characterize that literature as driven by a “quasi-natural negative inclination” (quasi naturgemäß negative Inklination).18 Sebald considers this negative inclination to be not a weakness, but rather a “form of resistance,” its function being “anything but reactive or reactionary.”19 In this, Sebald aligns himself closely with Adorno. In his foreword to Die Beschreibung des Unglücks, then, Sebald sets out in the clearest possible terms his conviction that a writing of the negative, the production of works impelled and shaped by a “negative inclination,” is both politically radical and ethically grounded. No less crucially, he slips from a conception of literature as a form of “resistance” (Widerstand) to a thinking of it in terms of “overcoming,” declaring that the description of Unglück in the literary work “includes the possibility of its overcoming [Überwindung].”20 With this claim, Sebald might seem to depart from Adorno’s conception of “radically darkened art,” as embodied by Kafka 16

17

Quoted in W. G. Sebald, Carl Sternheim. Kritiker und Opfer der Wilhelminischen Ära (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer Verlag, 1969), p. 11. Cf. Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1910–1923, ed. Max Brod, trans. Joseph Kresh (The Diaries of Franz Kafka 1910–13) and Martin Greenberg, with the cooperation of Hannah Arendt (The Diaries of Franz Kafka 1914–23) (London: Penguin, 1964), p. 172; Franz Kafka, Tagebücher, in der Fassung der Handschrift, ed. Hans-Gerd Koch, Michael Müller, and Malcolm Pasley (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1990), p. 359. 20 Sebald, Die Beschreibung des Unglücks, p. 11. 18 Ibid., p. 12. 19 Ibid. Ibid.

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and Beckett, and its unremitting resistance of all positivity and any form of overcoming. As we shall see, however, Sebald’s own writing of the negative accords with a conception of the literary as a form of resistance that is to be achieved by a tarrying with the negative rather than by any actual overcoming. It is only appropriate that what proved to be Sebald’s last work should end not with sunrise but with darkness beginning to fall.21 Understood as calamity, Unglück inhabits a liminal space, pointing in two directions simultaneously, challenging the reader to resist any simple answer to the question of why modernity should be an historia calamitatum. Sebald’s Unglück is at once “personal” – as he observes of Friedrich Hölderlin’s22 – and collective; it is at once natural and historical; and it has, above all, to be understood in relation to Glück, as suggested by Sebald’s marking of the following sentence in his own copy of Dialectic of Enlightenment: “Every birth is paid for with death, every fortune with misfortune [jedes Glück durch Unglück].”23 This view, which challenges any possibility of unqualified progress, enlightenment, or civilization, and which accords with Walter Benjamin’s idea that “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism,”24 is articulated in Sebald’s essay on Robert Walser, in the essay collection A Place in the Country (1998): “I have slowly learned to grasp how everything is connected across time, . . . happiness with misfortune [das Glück mit dem Unglück], natural history with the history of our industries, that of Heimat with that of exile.”25 It is for this reason that, for Sebald, any escape from the dialectic of enlightenment, which is to say the nonprogressive dialectic of Glück and Unglück, would take the form not of happiness or good fortune (Glück), but rather of “consolation” (Trost).26 Sebald’s use of this word in Die Beschreibung des Unglücks suggests that he sees art, like Kafka and Beckett, in essentially Schopenhauerian rather than Nietzschean 21 22 23

24 25

26

W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz, trans. Anthea Bell (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002), p. 415; Austerlitz (Munich and Vienna: Carl Hanser, 2001), p. 417. W. G. Sebald, “An Attempt at Restitution,” in Campo Santo, pp. 206–15 (p. 212); “Ein Versuch der Restitution,” in Campo Santo, pp. 240–8 (p. 245). Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York and London: Continuum, 1997), p. 16. Sebald’s copy of Proust’s work is held at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1973), pp. 255–66 (p. 258). W. G. Sebald, “Le promenaire solitaire: A Remembrance of Robert Walser,” in A Place in the Country, trans. Jo Catling (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2013), pp. 117–54 (p. 149); “Le promenaire solitaire. Zur Erinnerung an Robert Walser,” in Logis in einem Landhaus. Über Gottfried Keller, Johann Peter Hebel, Robert Walser und andere (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2000), pp. 129–68 (p. 163). Sebald, Die Beschreibung des Unglücks, p. 13.

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terms. Art would have the power to console, but not to effect the radical transformation of a culture.27 To grasp what it might mean to think Unglück in terms of a dialectic that is entrapping rather than liberating, one has only to turn to Sebald’s own poetry and prose, where a clear trajectory in this unword’s deployment becomes apparent. In the long poem After Nature (1988), Sebald twice addresses the question of art’s relation to Unglück, first in the work of the German painter Matthias Grünewald and then in that of Brueghel the Elder.28 This relation between art and Unglück is again addressed explicitly in the second part of Vertigo, “All’estero,” when the narrator, traveling in Italy, sees the Giotto frescoes in Padua.29 It is, however, in the third part of Vertigo, entitled “Dr K. Takes the Waters at Riva” and based on Kafka’s trip to the Italian resort of Riva in 1913, as recorded in his diaries, that the word comes to dominate Sebald’s writing for the first time. This is hardly surprising, given that Unglück is arguably thought first and foremost by Sebald in relation to Kafka. The remarks by Sebald’s narrator on Kafka’s “Hunter Gracchus” fragment, which is set in Riva, conclude with the statement: “The question of who is to blame for this undoubtedly great misfortune [Unglück] remains unresolved [ungeklärt], as indeed does the matter of what his guilt, the cause of his misfortune, consists in.”30 Together with K. in The Castle, Gracchus is the principal textual paradigm for Sebald’s travelers, inhabiting as he does the endless space of Unglück, following a death that has gone awry, the reason for this Unglück remaining “unresolved” (ungeklärt). That Unglück is beyond the power of any enlightenment thinking precisely because the responsibility for it lies, for Sebald, in no small part in the Enlightenment project itself. No Aufklärung can ever explain this Unglück, because that Aufklärung is largely responsible for it. In the final part of Vertigo, “Il ritorno in patria,” the narrator is marked by this Unglück when he dreams of another Gracchus-like figure out of Kafka: an old tailor’s dummy, dressed in the uniform of an Austrian chasseur. At the narrator’s touch, this dummy crumbles into dust, and the narrator goes on to record that he now dreams repeatedly of the figure 27 28 29 30

See Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne, 2 vols. (New York: Dover, 1966), vol. I, p. 267. W. G. Sebald, After Nature, trans. Michael Hamburger (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2002), pp. 7–8, 104; Nach der Natur. Ein Elementargedicht (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1995), pp. 9, 91. W. G. Sebald, Vertigo, trans. Michael Hulse (London: Vintage, 2002), p. 84; Schwindel. Gefühle (Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn, 2001), p. 96. Ibid., p. 165; p. 180.

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holding out its hand to him: “And every time, I then see before me the fingers of my right hand, dusty and even blackened from that one touch, like the token of some great woe that nothing in the world will ever put right [ein durch nichts auf der Welt mehr auszugleichendes Unglück].”31 Wherein lies the narrator’s guilt here? While it might seem to relate to some failure on his part to protect the other, it arguably remains as unresolved – that is, as under the sign of the unword – as that of Kafka’s Joseph K. or Hunter Gracchus. Unglück plays, then, a decisive role in the final two parts of Vertigo, taking up Kafka’s concern with this unword and relating it to the uncanny experience of a failure of the negative (Blanchot’s core idea of the “impossibility of death”) and of homecoming to a place that is at once profoundly familiar and profoundly alien. In Sebald’s next prose work, The Emigrants, this unword is used more sparingly, but nonetheless decisively, in each of the four narratives of emigration that constitute the work. The dialectic of Glück and Unglück emerges in the second narrative, “Paul Bereyter,” for instance, when the narrator describes his former schoolteacher as someone who was expelled “from happiness into misfortune” (aus dem Glück ins Unglück).32 Paul Bereyter is identified as “German to the marrow, profoundly attached to his native land in the foothills of the Alps,”33 someone who returns to Germany in 1939 and who is called up to fight in the Wehrmacht during World War II, but who comes to hate himself for what he represents. His experience of exile from his own homeland, from its history, and thus from himself is one that leads him into a form of living death, from which he eventually seeks to escape through suicide. The Unglück into which Paul is “expelled” (verstoßen) is never simply personal, as becomes clear when the narrator states that he sees Paul’s Märklin model railway as “the very image and symbol of Paul’s German tragedy [deutschem Unglück].”34 The modifier “German” here makes it clear that the calamity of this individual’s life is that of an entire people, and indeed a calamity that will extend across Europe as the Nazi terror spreads. If Paul Bereyter chooses to commit suicide on a railway track – railways always having “meant a great deal to him” – then, the narrator speculates, this is perhaps because “he felt they were headed for death.”35 The point here is, of course, that European railways were indeed 31 32 33 34

Ibid., pp. 228–9; pp. 249–50. Ibid., p. 49 (translation modified); p. 73. Hulse translates the word verstoßen as “plunged.” W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants, trans. Michael Hulse (London: Vintage, 2002), p. 57; Die Ausgewanderten. Vier lange Erzählungen (Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn, 2001), p. 84. Ibid., p. 61; pp. 90–1. 35 Ibid., p. 61; p. 90.

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heading for death, for all those deported to extermination camps during the Nazi terror, while railways also symbolize not just technological progress but modernity. There is no more apt, if deeply troubling, symbol of that dialectic of enlightenment, in which rationality and barbarism belong together, with which Sebald concerns himself in his exploration of European Unglück. In the third of the four narratives that make up The Emigrants, “Ambros Adelwarth,” the movement is again toward a terminal Unglück, the institutional frame for this being the sanatorium in Ithaca, New York, where Ambros, the narrator’s great-uncle and a former butler, dies. In Adornian fashion, the only hope for any redemption from this Unglück appears to lie in another negation: the literal disintegration of the sanatorium through the activities of the mice and various beetles, the intertextual link to Kafka’s “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk” being clear in Sebald’s choice of the term “mouse folk” (Mäusevolk).36 In the fourth narrative, “Max Ferber” (entitled “Max Aurach” in the original German edition),37 the word Unglück appears less frequently. This may be owing to the very nature of the autobiographical text, which recounts a life from before the catastrophe that was to befall Europe and, above all, the European Jews. That said, it occurs three times in Luisa Lanzberg’s manuscript autobiography, which thereby takes on a proleptic quality akin to that in Kafka’s work.38 In The Rings of Saturn, Sebald deploys the unword in ways that extend from the personal to the historical, again bringing the two into intimate relation with one another. In chapter 5, Joseph Korzeniowski (later, Joseph Conrad) is described as his father’s “troubled son” (von so viel Unglück bedrückten Sohnes).39 Conrad’s account in Heart of Darkness (1899) of the barbaric treatment of the native people in the Congo by the Belgian imperialists is central to Sebald’s own vision of modern European history. In chapter 9 of The Rings of Saturn, the French writer Chateaubriand describes his affair with Charlotte Ives as “our unhappy story” (unsere

36 37

38

39

Ibid., pp. 110, 112; pp. 161, 165. Cf. Hutchinson, Sebald, pp. 83–4. The surname was changed from “Aurach” to “Ferber” because of the former being seen as making too clear a connection to the German-Jewish painter Frank Auerbach (b. 1931), who was sent to London by his parents in 1939 so that he could escape the Nazi deportation of Jews to concentration camps. Both of Auerbach’s parents would die in the Holocaust. Sebald, The Emigrants, pp. 191, 198, 215; Die Ausgewanderten, pp. 285, 297, 322. In the English translation by Michael Hulse, the word Unglück is translated first as “tragedy,” then as “misery,” and then again as “tragedy.” W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, trans. Michael Hulse (London: Vintage, 2002), p. 107; Die Ringe des Saturn. Eine englische Wallfahrt (Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn, 2001), p. 136.

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unglückliche Geschichte).40 The word Geschichte can signify both “story” and “history,” and other uses of the unword Unglück in The Rings of Saturn place the emphasis squarely upon the latter: The photographic history of World War I is a “chronicle of disasters” (Unglückschronik);41 the Dowager Empress of China comes to the conclusion that “history consists of nothing but misfortune [Unglück]”;42 and, reflecting on Chateaubriand’s Memoirs from Beyond the Tomb (1848), the narrator concludes that, ironically, but in complete accordance with a darkened view of modern European history, the Vicomte’s “colourful accounts of military spectacles and large-scale operations form what might be called the highlights of history which staggers blindly from one disaster [Unglück] to the next.”43 This imbrication of personal and historical Unglück is developed furthest in Sebald’s last prose work, Austerlitz. This is anticipated in striking fashion in a passage from his abandoned “Corsica Project.” In a short text first published in 1996 under the title “A Little Excursion to Ajaccio,” Sebald’s narrator recounts his visit to the Musée Fesch in Ajaccio, where he comes upon a double portrait by the seventeenth-century Italian painter Pietro Paolini. In the September 12, 1995 diary entry, which is the earliest surviving draft of this passage, the narrator’s reaction to this painting is not recorded.44 In the published version, however, the following sentence is added: “I stood in front of this double portrait for a long time, seeing in it, as I thought at that time, an annulment of all the unfathomable misfortune of life [das ganze unergründliche Unglück des Lebens aufgehoben].”45 Here, the narrator reveals what he takes to be the essential capacity of art in its relation to Unglück – the latter is aufgehoben. For Hegel, the dialectical process, working exclusively by way of the negative, is one that takes the form of a series of Aufhebungen; this concept, usually translated as “sublation,” signifying not only annulment but also preservation. History is, for Hegel, shaped by such a series of Aufhebungen, which will always entail death and destruction, although, as in the Christian myth, this violence is ultimately seen as redemptive, and thus meaningful and even necessary. In Sebald’s text, however, the sense of art’s power is radically modified by the phrase “as I thought at that time” (wie ich damals glaubte). 40 44

45

Ibid., p. 254; p. 316. 41 Ibid., p. 95; p. 122. 42 Ibid., p. 153; p. 193. 43 Ibid., p. 256; p. 319. See W. G. Sebald, “Aufzeichnungen aus Korsika. Zur Natur- und Menschenkunde,” ed. Ulrich von Bülow, in Ulrich von Bülow, Heike Gfrereis, and Ellen Strittmatter (eds.), Wandernde Schatten. W. G. Sebalds Unterwelt (Marbach am Neckar: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 2008), pp. 128–209 (p. 151). W. G. Sebald, “A Little Excursion to Ajaccio,” in Campo Santo, pp. 3–15 (p. 5); “Kleine Exkursion nach Ajaccio,” in Campo Santo, pp. 7–18 (p. 9).

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The question thus becomes whether the narrator’s view has changed on this crucial question, and in search of an answer one must turn to Sebald’s final prose work. Early in Austerlitz, the word Unglück is again used in relation to painting, on this occasion in Austerlitz’s reflections on a work by Lucas van Valckenborch depicting the frozen river Schelde with the city of Antwerp in the background.46 The element in this painting that particularly attracts Austerlitz’s gaze is located, appropriately, on the margins: “In the foreground, close to the right-hand edge of the picture, a woman has fallen.”47 Just as the Unglück of Icarus in Brueghel’s painting is not even noticed by the other figures depicted therein, so here, too, the woman’s fall goes unnoticed – except, of course, by the artist and then by Austerlitz, and in turn by Sebald’s reader. For Austerlitz, it is “as if the little accident [Unglück], which no doubt goes unnoticed by most viewers, were always happening over and over again, and nothing and no one could ever remedy it [als höre es nie mehr auf und als sei es durch nichts und von niemandem mehr gutzumachen].”48 Everything in Austerlitz will depend upon the space that is opened here by the anaphoric “as if” (als). Can art be the exception to the rule that nothing can remedy the calamity, at once personal and historical? Can art be the exception to the belief that there are certain forms of Unglück for which no restitution can be made? The words Unglück and unglücklich occur considerably more often in Austerlitz than in any of Sebald’s earlier works, supporting Richard Sheppard’s claim that there is a distinct trajectory in Sebald’s œuvre.49 For instance, Austerlitz considers the railway stations of Paris to be “places marked by both blissful happiness and profound misfortune” (Glücks- und Unglücksorte zugleich).50 Just as in the earlier prose works, so here the emphasis falls upon the entrapping rather than progressive dialectical relation between Glück and Unglück, articulated by the word both (zugleich) and, as in “Paul Bereyter,” precisely through that apparent symbol of Enlightenment progress: the railway. The troubling thought is, again, that civilization and barbarism may not be mutually exclusive, but belong inextricably together. 46

47 49 50

Sebald, Austerlitz, p. 15; Austerlitz, p. 19. Cf. Anne Fuchs, Die Schmerzensspuren der Geschichte. Zur Poetik der Erinnerung in W. G. Sebalds Prosa (Weimar, Vienna, and Cologne: Böhlau, 2004), pp. 181–2. Sebald, Austerlitz, p. 15; p. 20. 48 Ibid., p. 16; p. 20. See Richard Sheppard, “Dexter–Sinister: Some Observations on Decrypting the Mors Code in the Work of W. G. Sebald,” Journal of European Studies 35:4 (2005): 419–63 (441). Sebald, Austerlitz, p. 45; p. 49.

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On the Nazis’ coming to power in Germany, Austerlitz’s father is reported by his former neighbor Věra Ryšanová as not believing that the German people were “driven into their misfortune [Unglück].”51 Recounting his reaction on examining with a magnifying glass the February 1929 photograph of himself, Austerlitz remarks upon “the misfortune [Unglück] lying ahead of him.”52 During his visit to Terezín, site of one of the concentration camps to which Jews were sent before being deported to Auschwitz, he comes upon a porcelain statuette representing a figure on horseback saving a girl from a “cruel fate” (grauenvollen Unglück).53 If Austerlitz asks himself what the significance of this statuette might be, without proposing an answer, his description connects it for the reader with the motif of art’s power to counter, even to lift one out of, Unglück, if only briefly. Alongside Unglück, the Freudian and Kafkan unwords “uncanny” (unheimlich) and “monstrous” (ungeheuer) also play important roles in Sebald’s prose. In the various forms of homecoming that Sebald explores in his work, the experience is repeatedly presented as being “uncanny,” at once familiar and absolutely alien, this being the experience of figures who, because of the European calamity, can neither identify with nor escape from their homeland and the impact that it has upon their identity. For these figures, there is no longer any proper, homely (heimlich) home, hence the absolute centrality of Kafka’s Hunter Gracchus to Sebald’s imagination, no less than to Blanchot’s. In addition to “uncanny” and “monstrous,” several other unwords also play a decisive role in Sebald’s linguistic negativism. Among these, one of the most significant is the series “disquiet” (Unruhe), “restless” (unruhig), and “disturb” (beunruhigen). The experience of Unruhe is a frequent one in Sebald’s prose works, and often accompanies the act of recollection. Indeed, it is around the theme of recollection, both historical and personal, that the unwords Unglück, unheimlich, and Unruhe come together, the past in Sebald’s work being at once familiar and alien, and always traumatic and disturbing. One of these forms of recollection is intertextual in nature, the word Unruhe having, as we have seen, like ungeheuer, a particularly important function in Kafka’s linguistic negativism. The opening sentence of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, for instance, describes Gregor Samsa as awakening from “uneasy dreams” (unruhigen Träumen),54 while the experience of 51 54

Ibid., p. 236; p. 240. 52 Ibid., p. 260; p. 264. 53 Ibid., p. 276; p. 281. Franz Kafka, Drucke zu Lebzeiten, ed. Hans-Gerd Koch, Wolf Kittler, and Gerhard Neumann (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1994), p. 115.

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Unruhe is at the very heart of one of Kafka’s last, unfinished stories, “The Burrow.”55 That Sebald thinks the unword unruhig in relation to Kafka is suggested not least by its appearance in the opening paragraph of “Dr K. Takes the Waters at Riva,” in Vertigo. Sebald’s narrator reports Dr K. coming upon a statement in a newspaper concerning the treatment of “everyday accidents” (Unglücksfälle) and adds that this statement “disturbs” (beunruhigt) its reader.56 Sebald returns to the experience of Unruhe at the end of part three of Vertigo, when reflecting on Kafka’s story of the Hunter Gracchus, the figure who, for both Sebald and Blanchot, stands as the epitome of the experience of exile and of erring negativity. The symmetry is clear because Gracchus’s failed death is an “accident” (Unglücksfall) of the most severe kind. As Sebald’s narrator puts it, in unwording terms that are taken directly from Kafka: Following a “moment of inattention [Unaufmerksamkeit] on the part of the helmsman,” Gracchus has been “without respite” (ruhelos).57 As so often, a negative experience associated with Kafka’s work goes on to become the experience of the narrator. In part four of Vertigo, in the account of his return to his home village in the Allgäu in southern Germany after many years in England, the narrator reports that for him there is “something most unsettling” (etwas äußerst Beunruhigendes) about the paintings that he comes upon there by the local German artist Joseph Hengge (1890–1970).58 Although the precise reason for their disquieting effect upon him is not made explicit, it is doubtless their depiction of heroic worker-types of the kind to be found in Nazi art. Experiences described as “disquieting” (beunruhigend) are generally associated with the foreboding either of death or of that no man’s land between life and death inhabited by Kafka’s Gracchus. Such moments also punctuate both The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn. At the end of “Paul Bereyter,” in The Emigrants, Mme Landau says that her failure to grasp the “innocent meaning” of Paul’s uncle’s expression “end up on the railways” caused her “disquiet” (Beunruhigung).59 The narrative “Ambros Adelwarth” contains numerous instances of 55 57

58 59

See Chapter 3. 56 Sebald, Vertigo, p. 141 (translation modified); Schwindel, p. 157. Ibid., p. 165; p. 180. Cf. Franz Kafka, Collected Stories, ed. Gabriel Josipovici (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), p. 368; Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente I, in der Fassung der Handschriften, ed. Malcolm Pasley (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1993), p. 309. See also Carolin Duttlinger, “‘A Wrong Turn of the Wheel’: Sebald’s Journeys of (In)attention,” in Markus Zisselsberger (ed.), The Undiscover’d Country: W. G. Sebald and the Poetics of Travel (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010), pp. 92–120. Sebald, Vertigo, p. 206; Schwindel, p. 225. Sebald, The Emigrants, p. 63; Die Ausgewanderten, p. 92.

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disquiet (Unruhe). The wealthy son of the Jewish family for whom Ambros works, Cosmo Solomon, has a second nervous breakdown after he has seen a German film – unnamed in the text, but evidently Fritz Lang’s Dr Mabuse the Gambler (1922): “He was particularly disturbed [beunruhigt] by an episode towards the end of the film in which a one-armed showman and hypnotist by the name of Sandor Weltmann induced a sort of collective hallucination in his audience.”60 The analogy with the collective hallucination experienced by the German people during the Nazi years is clear, if unstated. In The Rings of Saturn, the narrator points out that in Jorge Luis Borges’s story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (1940) a mirror produces “a somewhat disquieting effect” (eine Art Beunruhigung) in the story’s narrator.61 And in the “Corsica Project” material, the September 12, 1995 entry in which the narrator records his visit to the Musée Fesch includes the remark: “Whenever I visit a museum I am full of disquiet [bin ich voller Unruhe].”62 These examples all suggest that in Sebald’s work Unruhe is prompted by the encounter with a traumatic past, one that is at once personal and collective, and in which the question of responsibility is pressing. While the experience of Unruhe punctuates Sebald’s first three prose works, it is in Austerlitz that it comes to play its most decisive role, and to be associated not only with deathly motifs (including fire and doubles), but also explicitly with the feelings of responsibility and guilt. Early on, the narrator experiences “an uneasy, anxious feeling” (etwas Beunruhigendes) when he sees newspaper photographs of the 1971 Lucerne Station fire, and this feeling is transformed into the idea that he is in fact responsible for the destruction.63 And, in December 1996, the narrator finds himself “in some anxiety” (in einiger Unruhe) when he discovers that he has suddenly lost the sight in his right eye.64 Photographs, eyesight – the continuity here is reinforced when Jacques Austerlitz in his turn says that he must have been “disturbed” (beunruhigt) throughout his childhood by the fact that the house in the town of Bala, North Wales, in which he grew up had a window on the outside for which there was no corresponding window on the inside.65 Of the faces that he would see in train stations, Austerlitz remarks: “[T]hey would haunt and disturb me” (sie verfolgten und beunruhigten mich).66 Following the discovery that his entire identity is 60 61 62 64

Ibid., p. 97; p. 141. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, p. 70; Die Ringe des Saturn, p. 92. Cf. Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” trans. Alastair Reid, in Ficciones (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), pp. 5–21 (p. 5). Sebald, “Aufzeichnungen aus Korsika,” p. 150. 63 Sebald, Austerlitz, pp. 11–12; p. 16. Ibid., p. 47; p. 50. 65 Ibid., p. 63; p. 67. 66 Ibid., p. 179; p. 183.

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a fabrication, beneath which lies his early life in Prague before he was placed on a Kindertransport to England in 1939 at the age of five, Austerlitz returns to Prague, where he meets Věra, a woman who used to look after him as a child and who knew his parents. She recalls his asking as a child a “troubling question” (beunruhigende Frage), namely, how squirrels find their buried nuts once the snow has covered the ground.67 The disturbing nature of this question clearly lies in its being proleptic: Austerlitz’s own life will be shaped first by disturbances prompted by an uncanny sense that he is not who he thinks he is, and then by disturbances experienced through the difficulty of recovering his buried past. Importantly, Unruhe is prompted in Austerlitz not only by memory, but also by others’ forgetting, with the political implications of this forgetting being only too clear. The architecture of Nuremberg, for instance, provokes Unruhe in him precisely because it marks the erasure of the past, namely any “crooked line” in the façades of the buildings in the city in which the Nazis held their rallies.68 While Nuremberg is striking for being so highly populated, both Terezín and the Gare d’Austerlitz in Paris are completely unpopulated, signaling the disappearance of all those who were murdered by the Nazis, including Austerlitz’s own parents. This absence, too, produces Unruhe in him.69 These experiences of topological Unruhe then recur in the narrator, who recounts of his return to the town of Breendonk – site of a fortress in which the Nazis tortured their prisoners, including Jean Améry: “I spent a disturbed night [eine unruhige Nacht] in a hotel on the Astridsplein.”70 Here, too, the allusion to Kafka’s distinctive linguistic negativism is evident, that negativism now serving, in the postwar context, a very clear historico-political purpose. Like the relation between Unglück and Glück, that between Unruhe and Ruhe is presented by Sebald in dialectical terms, albeit a dialectic that is distinctly non-Hegelian in that it leads not to any form of sublation or progress, but rather to an oscillation of the kind that is so prevalent in the work of both Beckett and Blanchot. This is suggested through the recurrent association of both Ruhe and Unruhe with death. In the first of his two essays on Kafka’s The Castle, Sebald argues that Kafka’s world is one in which the only “peace” (Ruhe) lies in death, and that it is toward this death that K.’s longing is directed, in accordance with the death drive as defined by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920).71 Sebald is fully aware of 67 70 71

Ibid., p. 287; p. 291. 68 Ibid., p. 314; p. 318. 69 Ibid., p. 406; p. 408. Ibid., p. 410; p. 412. W. G. Sebald, “The Undiscover’d Country: The Death Motif in Kafka’s Castle,” Journal of European Studies 2 (1972): 22–34 (p. 34); “Das unentdeckte Land. Zur Motivstruktur in Kafkas Schloß,” in Die

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Adorno’s verdict on the possibility of any such enduring rest. As the latter puts it in his 1953 essay on Kafka: “In the concentration camps, the boundary between life and death was eradicated. . . . Gracchus is the consummate refutation of the possibility banished from the world: to die after a long and full life.”72 Like K. and other figures in Kafka’s work, and in accordance with Freud’s conception of the death drive, Sebald’s travelers seek that “undiscovered country” (unentdecktes Land) in which enduring rest might at last be found. As Sebald puts it on the dustjacket of his copy of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, however: “In the fullness of time the moment of calm cannot endure; it goes on.”73 With biting irony, the narrator in Austerlitz remarks that what the Nazis did at Theresienstadt to reassure the Red Cross visitors in 1944 that none of the prisoners was suffering there, let alone dying, was “a most reassuring spectacle [beruhigendes Schauspiel].”74 For Sebald, in such a world there can be hope only where there is Unruhe, the Adornian inflection here being evident: Hope lies only in the unconditionally negative. While Sebald’s debt to Kafka’s linguistic negativism is at once profound and pervasive, there are other important intertextual relations in his practice of unwording. These include Sebald’s sustained but less obvious engagement with Beckett’s work. Like Adorno, Sebald often mentions Beckett and Kafka together, as, for instance, when including as an epigraph to his 1972 essay on Kafka a passage from Beckett’s novel Molloy (1951), or, when commenting on the style of “exemplary modern authors” such as Kafka and Beckett in his 1980 monograph on the “myth of destruction” (Mythus der Zerstörung) in the work of the German novelist Alfred Döblin.75 It is in his book on Döblin that Sebald undertakes his most extensive analysis of Beckett’s work, commenting on what he terms Beckett’s “ironic” style. Quoting from the English translation of Molloy, Sebald argues that Beckett explodes the “myth of death” – that is, death conceived as “rest” (Ruhe) – by imagining that, as Molloy puts it, there might be “a state of being even worse than life.”76 The “critical meaning” (kritischer Sinn) of Beckett’s œuvre lies, according to Sebald, in its showing that regression offers no genuine refuge; rather, it is simply the dialectical

72 73 74 75 76

Beschreibung des Unglücks, pp. 78–92 (p. 92); “Thanatos. Zur Motivstruktur in Kafkas Schloß,” Literatur und Kritik 8 (1972): 399–411 (p. 411). Adorno, “Notes on Kafka,” p. 273. Sebald’s copy of Proust’s novel is held in the Sebald archive at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv (German Literature Archive), Marbach. My translation. Sebald, Austerlitz, p. 345; p. 341. Sebald, Der Mythus der Zerstörung im Werk Döblins (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1980), p. 136. Cited in ibid., p. 116.

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counterpart of progression – just as Glück is the dialectical counterpart of Unglück, and Ruhe of Unruhe. It is doubtless for this reason that when Sebald refers to Beckett, he generally does so in relation to mobility and immobility. In his 1972 essay on Kafka, for instance, Sebald compares the treatment of the “stiff and helpless bodies” of Amalia’s parents in The Castle to the treatment of Nagg and Nell in Beckett’s Endgame (1957).77 This theme haunts Sebald’s prose, as it does Blanchot’s, as evidenced by the frequent recurrence of the unwords “motionless” (bewegungslos), “incapable” (unfähig), and “impossible” (unmöglich), out of which Sebald’s acts of narration emerge. The Rings of Saturn, for instance, opens with its narrator recording that, following a walking tour of Suffolk, he is taken to hospital “in a state of almost total immobility [Unbeweglichkeit].”78 The similarity to the predicament of Molloy at the time he commences the narration of his attempt to reach his mother is striking. The impact of Beckett’s linguistic negativism on Sebald’s own unwording practice is also to be detected in the relation between the passage from Molloy cited as the epigraph to the 1972 essay on Kafka and various moments in Sebald’s prose works. The passage in question concerns a traveling figure whom, in the English version, Molloy names “C.”79 Shortly before the lines cited by Sebald, Molloy says of this traveler that “he went with uncertain step.”80 In part three of Vertigo, the departure of the Italian girl with whom Dr K. has fallen in love is described in the following terms: “[S]he mounted the little gangplank to board the ship, with an unsteady step [mit unsicheren Schritten].”81 Similarly, at the beginning of Austerlitz, recalling a visit to Antwerp, Sebald’s narrator remarks: “I still remember the uncertainty of my footsteps [unsicheren Schritten] as I walked all round the inner city.”82 Later in the same work, when Austerlitz begins to count in Czech, he describes himself as feeling “like someone taking uncertain steps [unsicheren Schritten] out on to the ice.”83 For all the obvious stylistic differences between the two writers – not least Beckett’s Mauthner-influenced pursuit of a minimalist literary language that would be the most radical form of language critique – Sebald’s linguistic negativism shares with Beckett’s an insistence that these 77 78 79 80 81 83

Sebald, “The Undiscover’d Country,” p. 27. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, p. 3; Die Ringe des Saturn, p. 10. In the original French version of Molloy, this figure is identified as “B.” Samuel Beckett, Molloy, ed. Shane Weller (London: Faber & Faber, 2009), p. 5. Sebald, Vertigo, p. 159; Schwindel, p. 174. 82 Sebald, Austerlitz, p. 1; p. 5. Ibid., p. 226; p. 230.

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“uncertain steps” are those of figures for whom there is no possibility of genuine Ruhe and for whom, as Sebald writes (in decidedly Beckettian fashion) on the dustjacket of his copy of In Search of Lost Time: “[I]t goes on” (es geht weiter). Thus, Unruhe is at once the condition to which his figures, like Beckett’s, are condemned, while being the only possible form of resistance to what is seen as a monstrous world of positivities, in which any genuine rest is denied. The irresolvable ambiguity here is the sign of the historical predicament in which those postwar European writers who commit themselves to a literature of the unword find themselves. In addition to the unwords already considered, Sebald also deploys several other unwords in his prose works, most of which can also be found playing an important role in the linguistic negativism of many other major European writers. These include “unwholesome” (ungut) – rightly described by J. J. Long as a “typically Sebaldian epithet”84 – “unexpected” (unversehens), “unfortunate” or “disastrous” (unselig), “incomprehensible” (unbegreiflich), “undiscovered” (unentdeckt), and “endless” (unendlich). Some of these negative modifiers play a particularly important role in a specific work and often form part of longer unwording sequences. In some cases, too, a particular unword can function in two, diametrically opposed ways. This is the case with “unexpected” (unversehens), which occurs repeatedly in both Vertigo and Austerlitz, where it concerns the disconcerting nature of memory. In Vertigo, the narrator recalls that, on a trip to Klosterneuburg in Lower Austria to see her grandmother, Clara/ Olga visits the school she attended as a child “and neither on the way there nor that entire evening did she regain her composure [konnte sie sich nicht beruhigen] following this unexpected return [unversehene Wiederkunft] of the past.”85 In Austerlitz, after numerous occurrences of this particular unword, Austerlitz tells of how, wandering in the 13th arrondissement in Paris, he is “always thinking, against all reason, that I might suddenly see my father appear out of nowhere [unversehens].”86 These two instances indicate that memory in Sebald has to be thought in terms of negation – and doubly so. The negation of memory is to be understood grammatically as both a subjective and an objective genitive. Memories are seemingly destroyed, but their return is also by way of the negative: The past returns in a manner 84 85 86

J. J. Long, “W. G. Sebald: The Anti-Tourist,” in Zisselsberger (ed.), The Undiscover’d Country, pp. 63–91 (p. 73). Sebald, Vertigo, p. 45 (translation modified); Schwindel, p. 52. Sebald, Austerlitz, p. 358; p. 360.

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that is at once “unexpected” (unversehens) and “disturbing” (unberuhigend).87 This eruption of the past is even more clearly marked by one of the most important expressions in Sebald’s linguistic negativism: “out of nowhere” or “out of nothing” (aus dem Nichts). Sebald’s use of this expression is striking not least for the fact that it comes to play a particularly important role in his later work and, like the other key unwords in his œuvre, is profoundly ambiguous in its significance. The expression (or a slight variant thereof) appears in The Emigrants, in the description of Paul Bereyter’s ability to teach: He is described as someone who was “born to teach children – a veritable Melammed, who could start from nothing [aus einem Nichts heraus] and hold the most inspiring of lessons.”88 In chapter 4 of The Rings of Saturn, however, there occurs a negative version of just such an appearance of something as if out of nothing. Sebald’s narrator recalls an occasion in The Hague when an American limousine driven by a pimp appears “as if it had come out of nowhere [aus dem Nichts].”89 Juxtaposed with this negative version of the “out of nowhere” is the remark in chapter 6 of The Rings of Saturn that the English poet Algernon Charles Swinburne has been seen by his biographers as “an epigenetic phenomenon sprung from the void [aus dem Nichts], as it were.”90 It is after the completion of The Rings of Saturn, however, that the expression comes to play a major – and irreducibly double – role in Sebald’s prose. In the second draft of the “Corsica Project,” the expression “out of nowhere” is used in the context of flight. The figure of Gerald Ashman recalls a recurrent dream concerning his cousin, Hamish Arbathnot, who went missing during a World War II bombing mission, Gerald saying that the German fighter planes “appeared like sharks out of nowhere” (wie Haie auftauchten aus dem Nichts).91 And, of one of the flights on which he accompanies “Douglas X,” the narrator recalls that the Thames estuary appears “as though out of nowhere” (wie aus dem Nichts),92 this latter passage finding its way in only slightly revised form into Austerlitz.93 In the majority of cases, “out of nowhere” (aus dem Nichts) marks the manner of something’s emergence into the visual field, and it is in this sense, too, that 87

88 89 91 93

The nature and function of memory in Sebald’s work has understandably attracted considerable critical attention. See, for instance, Scott Denham and Mark McCulloh (eds.), W. G. Sebald: History – Memory – Trauma (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2006); and Alan Itkin, Underworlds of Memory: W. G. Sebald’s Epic Journeys through the Past (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017). Sebald, The Emigrants, p. 56; Die Ausgewanderten, p. 83. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, p. 82; Die Ringe des Saturn, p. 105. 90 Ibid., p. 162; p. 203. 92 Sebald, “Aufzeichnungen aus Korsika,” pp. 165–6. Ibid., p. 168. Sebald, Austerlitz, p. 162; p. 166.

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the expression is used in Sebald’s essay on the German artist Jan Peter Tripp in A Place in the Country.94 In Austerlitz, this sense of the “out of nowhere” is associated with the art of photography and the experience of memory. Austerlitz is struck by the moment when one sees “the shadows of reality, so to speak, emerge out of nothing [sozusagen aus dem Nichts hervorkommen] on the exposed paper, as memories do.”95 Just as the expression “out of nowhere” establishes the connection between photographic developing and memory, so it also binds these two processes to the motif of the moth that is so central to Austerlitz, and that establishes a connection with the motif of flying taken up from the “Corsica Project.” Austerlitz recalls his school friend Gerald Fitzpatrick’s great-uncle Alphonso placing a lamp outside their home one night, and the moths then appearing “as if from nowhere” (wie aus dem Nichts).96 That which seems to come “out of nowhere” is certainly not always positive in Austerlitz. Věra, for instance, recalls the arrival of German troops in Prague during a snowstorm, “which seemed to make them appear out of nowhere [aus dem Nichts].”97 However, the emphasis generally falls upon the seemingly miraculous nature of such appearances, and, significantly, this is seen as characteristic of art. In addition to Austerlitz’s remark upon the photographic image apparently coming “out of nowhere,” he also experiences a mysterious “out of nowhere” effect when he sees the circus performers playing in their tent beyond the Gare d’Austerlitz, from which his name is taken and which in turn relates (through the motif of the railway) to the Holocaust, as well as to Napoleon’s victory over a Russian and Austrian army at the Battle of Austerlitz in 1805 and thus to his dream, anticipating Hitler’s, of a trans-European empire. On seeing the circus performers, Austerlitz recalls: “I still do not understand . . . what was happening within me as I listened to this extraordinarily foreign nocturnal music conjured out of nowhere [aus dem Nichts], so to speak.”98 It is significant that, on each occasion that he uses the expression “out of nowhere” (aus dem Nichts) in his final prose work, Sebald qualifies it with an “as though” (wie), a “so to speak” (sozusagen), or an “as it were” (gewissermaßen). While it is idiomatic in German to use the expression “as though out of nowhere” (wie aus dem Nichts), Sebald revitalizes this idiom, suggesting not only that there is something seemingly miraculous 94

95 98

See W. G. Sebald, “As Day and Night . . . : On the Paintings of Jan Peter Tripp,” in A Place in the Country, pp. 155–73 (p. 162); “Wie Tag und Nacht – Über die Bilder Jan Peter Tripps,” in Logis in einem Landhaus, pp. 169–88 (p. 177). Sebald, Austerlitz, p. 109; p. 113. 96 Ibid., p. 128; pp. 131–2. 97 Ibid., p. 242; p. 246. Ibid., p. 383 (translation modified); p. 385.

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about art, but also that it is only apparently out of nothing that phenomena emerge, be they psychological or historical. For instance, while it might seem to Věra that the German troops entering Prague appear “as it were out of nowhere” (gewissermaßen aus dem Nichts),99 on account of a heavy snowstorm, they are, of course, there as a result of specific historical forces and specific political decisions that, for Sebald, following Adorno, must be understood within the context of the dialectic of Enlightenment. Within this context, the snowstorm might therefore be seen to suggest an historical forgetting against which Sebald’s own work would hope to stand. Furthermore, the phrase “out of nowhere” is profoundly ambiguous in its articulating a form of the negative in which both preservation and destruction are possible. The expression “out of nowhere” incorporates a negativity that can be generative (in art), destructive (in history), and both generative and destructive (in memory). In addition to the use of particular words and phrases, each of Sebald’s major prose works is also marked in distinctive ways by extended passages of intensive linguistic negativism. Such passages are crucial within the overall architecture of each work. In Vertigo, the first instance of such extended linguistic negativism occurs in “Dr K. Takes the Waters at Riva.” As noted previously, on his way to Vienna, Dr K. reads about “everyday accidents” (Unglücksfälle), and what he reads “disturbs” (beunruhigt) him. On arrival, he takes a room in the Matschakerhof Hotel “out of sympathy” for the nineteenth-century Austrian writer Franz Grillparzer, but this gesture proves to be “ineffective” (unwirksam) because while there he is “extremely unwell [unwohl]” and the spectral figure of Grillparzer “indulges in all sorts of tomfoolery” (macht ungute Faxen).100 The following night, Dr K. “tosses and turns in bed to no avail [nutzlos],” and the next day he notes anaphorically that “It is impossible [unmöglich] . . . to lead the only possible life, to live together with a woman, . . . and even more impossible [unmöglich] to take the only possible step beyond a friendship with men.”101 He feels an aversion to his companion Otto Pick on account of the latter’s having an “unpleasant hole” (unangenehme Lücke) in his nature.102 On his way to the Prater, the company of Pick and Albert Ehrenstein proves to be “unnerving,” a form of monstrosity (Ungeheuerlichkeit).103 Aside from the relief granted by the company of Lise Kaznelson, he suffers “constantly” (unaufhörlich) from 99 100 101

Ibid., p. 242 (translation modified); p. 246. Sebald, Vertigo, p. 142 (translation modified); Schwindel, pp. 157–8. Ibid., pp. 142–3; p. 158. 102 Ibid., p. 143; p. 159. 103 Ibid.

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headaches.104 This burst of intensive unwording is interrupted, however, by a moment of simulated flight, when the group have their photograph taken as passengers in an imaginary airplane. This is an example of that experience of levitation that marks an escape – albeit a temporary one (einstweilens), as Schopenhauer claims of the consolation provided by art – from the negative condition enacted in Sebald’s linguistic negativism.105 And yet, of course, that flight is a form of negation, leading not out of the negative into the realm of the positive, but rather into a negativity seen as saving rather than destroying. Traveling on to Trieste, Dr K. imagines another kind of flight – the appearance of an angel accompanying him – despite his own “lack of faith” (Unglauben) in such beings. However, this vision of flight is short-lived, Dr K. realizing that what he has taken for an angel is no more than a “garishly painted” ship’s figurehead.106 Arriving in Venice, Dr K.’s entrapment, his inability to go outside, let alone fly, becomes all the more extreme: “If, as he believed, it was impossible [unmöglich] to be here at all, how much more was it impossible [unmöglich] for him, on the brink of disintegration [Auflösung], to venture out beneath this watery sky under which the very stones dissolved [zerflossen].”107 Part three of Vertigo ends with Sebald’s narrator reflecting on the fate of Kafka’s Hunter Gracchus, and here, as we have seen in Sebald’s deployment of the unword Unglück, the linguistic negativism reaches its climax, at the very moment when the question of responsibility and guilt in relation to the calamity of a miscarried death is raised: “The question of who is to blame for this undoubtedly great misfortune [zweifellos großen Unglück] remains unresolved [ungeklärt], as indeed does the matter of what his guilt [Schuld], the cause of his misfortune [Unglücks], consists in.”108 Matching this linguistic negativism are the final pages of Vertigo, where the narrator’s vision of an all-consuming fire culminates in a description that works largely through an anaphoric negation that privileges the negating word syntactically: “Not a tree was there to be seen, not a bush, not even a stunted shrub or a tussock of grass” (Nirgends war ein Baum zu sehen, kein Strauch, kein Krüppelholz, kein Büschelchen Gras).109 All that remains is a “breathless void” (atemlose Leere), and it is in this void that language returns to Sebald’s narrator, words that recall another great calamity: the Great Fire of London 104 106 107 109

Ibid., p. 144; p. 161. 105 See Hutchinson, Sebald, pp. 145–65. Sebald, Vertigo, p. 146 (translation modified; Hulse translates the word Unglauben as “little faith”); Schwindel, p. 161. Ibid., p. 147; p. 162. 108 Ibid., p. 165; p. 180. Ibid., p. 262 (translation modified); p. 286.

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in September 1666, as recorded by the diarist Samuel Pepys.110 Vertigo opens with Napoleon crossing the Alps, as experienced and recorded by Stendhal, and ends with “a silent rain of ashes” falling over London and the surrounding countryside. The great historical calamities to have befallen Europe in the modern period are captured therein, and, for Sebald, the only appropriate words, in the dark light of such a history, are unwords. As we have seen, Sebald’s linguistic negativism is almost always disquieted by intertextual ghosts, and this is nowhere more clearly the case than in the most sustained passage of unwording in his last work. The passage in question is the account in Austerlitz of its protagonist’s breakdown in 1992, which closely resembles that of Lord Chandos in Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos Letter, a touchstone work for the European literature of the unword. Jacques Austerlitz’s experience of language loss, and thus of language skepticism, repeats at the end of a calamitous century the experience of a figure writing at the very moment when the empirical sciences were establishing themselves, and with them the age of modern technology, rationality, and the mastery of nature. This figure is imagined by Hofmannsthal from the standpoint of the beginning of the century that would include two world wars, totalitarianism on the right and on the left, the attempted annihilation of an entire people at the heart of Europe, and the unprecedented destruction of populations, cities, and nature. Jacques Austerlitz stands here as the very embodiment of that European sensibility that finds expression in a linguistic negativism considered to be the only means through which to articulate the loss of self, the loss of language, and the loss of world: I already felt in my head the dreadful torpor that heralds disintegration of the personality [Persönlichkeitssverfall], I sensed that in truth I had neither memory nor the power of thought, nor even any existence, that all my life had been a constant process of obliteration, a turning away from myself and the world. . . . The entire structure of language, the syntactical arrangement of parts of speech, punctuation, conjunctions, and finally even the nouns denoting ordinary objects were all enveloped in impenetrable fog. . . . I could see no connections any more, the sentences resolved themselves into a series of separate words, the words into random sets of letters, the letters into disjointed signs, and those signs into a blue-grey trail gleaming silver here and there, excreted and left behind by some crawling creature, and the sight of it increasingly filled me with feelings of horror and shame.111

110

Ibid., pp. 262–3; p. 287.

111

Sebald, Austerlitz, p. 174–6; pp. 178–80.

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Austerlitz’s language crisis, his feeling of revulsion toward words, is captured in three unwords: He is struck by the “falsity” (Unwahrheit) of his linguistic constructions, the “inadequacy” (Unangemessenheit) of the words he uses, and the “inconsistencies” (Ungereimtheiten) of what he writes.112 In the face of the historical calamities in the darkest of centuries, calamities that are always also personal, human language is beggared: It is found to be false and inadequate. In addition to “annihilate” (vernichten) and “extinguish” (auslöschen), it is the word “hollow” (ausgehöhlt) that captures the nature of the negativity at work here, rendering language worthless: “There was not an expression [keine Wendung] in the sentence but it proved to be a miserable crutch, not a word [kein Wort] but it sounded false and hollow [kein Wort, das nicht ausgehöhlt klang und verlogen].”113 The “hollowing out” (aushöhlen) to which Sebald refers here is enacted through a form of linguistic negativism in the anaphoric double negative construction “no . . . but” (kein . . . das nicht).114 The recurrent use of “no longer” (nicht mehr) in Austerlitz’s description of his breakdown emphasizes that the negation taking place here is of the very constructions – both psychological and linguistic – that were founded on the negation of his early childhood in Prague. However, the implications of this negation go beyond that personal dimension to include language as such. In the face of the historical monstrosities – the Ungeheuerlichkeiten – to which Sebald’s work bears witness, the only appropriate linguistic response is seen to be, not silence, because that might be taken as a form of condonement, but an unconditional language of the unword. The linguistic negativism in the passage describing Austerlitz’s psychological breakdown and his language loss is profoundly ambiguous, in that it articulates a process in which, on the one hand, negation threatens Austerlitz’s very identity and existence, while, on the other hand, it renders possible the emergence of memories that will enable him to reconstruct an identity that was itself subjected to a negation both historical and psychological in nature. As Sebald puts it in his 1981 essay on the German poet Ernst Herbeck (1920–91), who, at the age of 20, was committed to a mental asylum in Austria, where he spent much of the rest of his life, the “disintegrated nature” (Disintegriertheit) of language contains within itself the possibility of renewal: “Not only from an aesthetic, but also from 112 114

Ibid., p. 172; p. 176. 113 Ibid., p. 173; p. 177. For an analysis of the idea of “hollowing out” in Sebald’s work, see Hutchinson, Sebald, pp. 83–4, 109, 170.

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a psychological point of view, linguistic disorder [sprachliche Unordnung] functions as a reservoir of regenerative energies.”115 Austerlitz’s own linguistic disorder is at once devastating and enabling, making possible the reconstruction of his identity based upon his experiences on his return to Prague and the extraordinary reawakening of his mother tongue in him. As with Kafka, Beckett, Blanchot, and Celan, so here in Sebald, the literature of the unword is never simply and unambiguously orientated toward silence. In his 2001 essay “An Attempt at Restitution,” which would prove to be his last public articulation of his conception of the literary, Sebald privileges literature above critical discourses, including history, for being the only form of writing in which there can be “an attempt at restitution over and above the mere recital of facts and over and above scholarship.”116 For Sebald, that attempted restitution, as a response to historical catastrophe and the uncountable losses of life, culture, and civilization that result from it, must take the form of a literature in which it is linguistic negativism that at once captures the nature of the calamity and offers some refuge from it. In the essay, Sebald proceeds to deploy several unwords that establish a connection between his own linguistic negativism and that of two other Germanlanguage writers, Friedrich Hölderlin and Paul Celan. Unlike the game “Cities Quartet,” which Sebald recalls playing as a child, and in which Germany is pictured as “not only undivided but intact” (nicht nur ungeteilt . . . sondern auch unzerstört),117 postwar literary writing as Sebald conceives it must insist upon division and destruction, not least to chart – in the manner of the “meridian” in Paul Celan’s 1960 speech on the occasion of his being awarded the Georg Büchner Prize – “the invisible connections [unsichtbare Beziehungen] that determine our lives.”118 One of the lives that Sebald has in mind here is Hölderlin’s, shaped as it was by “misfortune” (Unglück) and by a sense of the “impossibility” (Unmöglichkeit) of love.119 It is Hölderlin who, in the elegy “Bread and Wine” (1802), asks the question that would so preoccupy Heidegger during World War II, following his failed attempt in the mid-1930s to lead a Nazi revolution in higher education in his capacity as rector of Freiburg University: “[W]hat are poets for in a destitute time?” (wozu Dichter in dürftiger Zeit?).120 This 115 116 117 120

W. G. Sebald, “Eine kleine Traverse. Das poetische Werke Ernst Herbecks,” in Die Beschreibung des Unglücks, pp. 131–48 (pp. 132–3; my translation). Sebald, “An Attempt at Restitution,” p. 215; “Ein Versuch der Restitution,” p. 248. Ibid., p. 207; p. 241. 118 Ibid., p. 210; p. 244. 119 Ibid., pp. 212, 213; pp. 245, 246. Friedrich Hölderlin, Poems and Fragments, trans. Michael Hamburger, 3rd ed. (London: Anvil Press Poetry, 1994), p. 271 (translation modified).

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question is asked once again, this time in French, by Sebald in his 2001 essay: “A quoi bon la littérature?”121 By translating Hölderlin’s epochal question into French, Sebald not only reminds us of Hölderlin’s time in Bordeaux, from which the poet returned to Germany in mental disarray, but also marks his own distance from a Heideggerian conception of poetry (Dichtung) and from Heidegger’s insistence on Hölderlin not only as the “poet’s poet” but also as a German poet, indeed the poet of the German Heimat. Whereas Heidegger’s answer to Hölderlin’s question is that Dichtung recalls Sein (Being), Sebald’s response is that literature’s power as a form of restitution lies in its helping us to remember and in its teaching us that there are “strange connections” that cannot be explained by “causal logic” – connections between, for instance, German industry and the murder of a French town’s entire male population by an SS division.122 For Sebald, the kind of restituting recollection that literature can achieve requires, as we have seen, an unconditional abiding with the negative – this negativity always being double: It is the negativity both of an historia calamitatum and of a resistance to any false overcoming of the kind against which Adorno warns readers of Negative Dialectics. That Sebald thinks the negativity of literature in these terms is suggested not least by his claim in his 1983 essay on Günter Grass and Wolfgang Hildesheimer that the latter’s novel Tynset (1965) has “nothing in common with nihilism in the usual sense of the word [im landläufigen Sinne].”123 This claim suggests that there might just be another form of nihilism to consider in relation to the literary, and it is precisely to this other form of nihilism that Adorno directs us in his remarks on Beckett at the end of the section on nihilism in Negative Dialectics (1966): “Thought honours itself by defending what is damned as nihilism.”124 In his essay on Hildesheimer, in which he quotes from Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (1970), Sebald declares that the “ideal of absolute lightlessness [Lichtlosigkeit]” in art remains “a hopeless undertaking” (ein aussichtsloses Unterfangen).125 If Sebald is successful in his own forms of linguistic negativism, then it is to the extent that he resists not only what he takes to be the calamitous negativity of modernity, but also the negativity of any overcoming of that modernity, and tarries instead within the negativity of precisely this “hopeless 121 122 123 124 125

Sebald, “An Attempt at Restitution,” p. 213; “Ein Versuch der Restitution,” p. 247. Ibid., pp. 213–14; p. 247. Sebald, “Constructs of Mourning,” p. 127 (translation modified); “Konstruktionen der Trauer,” p. 125. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 381. Sebald, “Constructs of Mourning,” p. 127; “Konstruktionen der Trauer,” p. 125.

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undertaking” in the face of an ambiguous light and a profoundly ambiguous Enlightenment. Like those European writers who haunt his work, not least Kafka and Beckett, it is, for Sebald, precisely the necessity, the obligation, to commit oneself to the impossible that underlies the only form of literature that can begin to do justice to the experience of historical calamity. Thus, if the moments of levitation in Sebald’s prose interrupt the dialectic of modernity as forms of consolation (Trost), the recurrent falling back into what Sebald terms the “dialectic of melancholy” is necessary if those moments of levitation are not to be reified into one more modern form of myth.126 Just as for Adorno in Aesthetic Theory, so for Sebald, only from the perspective of a writing that is “unconditionally negative” can any form of restitution be achieved and the possibility of redemption from an “obscene” history be glimpsed. Sebald’s commitment to a literature of the unword, which takes the form of a sustained engagement with a literary tradition that extends back through Beckett and Kafka to Hölderlin, insists, then, upon the irreducible doubleness of that negativity. If his writing of the negative reaches its most extreme enactment in Austerlitz, that work, in its very openness (with Austerlitz disappearing from the narrator’s purview as he continues the search for information about his father), is also arguably the most hopeful, the most committed to the power of literature. The work ends, after all, with the narrator recording what he has read in another’s text – Dan Jacobson’s memoir Heshel’s Kingdom (1998) – regarding those victims of the Nazis who left a written trace, the last of these traces being a name, a place, and a date: “Max Stern, Paris, 18.5.44.”127 The date is W. G. (“Max”) Sebald’s own date of birth, no less the date of another’s death. As for “Stern,” it stands as a symbol (the star) of the Jewish people and may be seen in relation to an unword that appears only once in all Sebald’s prose works, and that is in Austerlitz. The unword in question is Unstern, translated by Anthea Bell as “unlucky star.”128 Austerlitz charts the movement from this “unlucky star” to the “star” (Stern) that is both the proper name of a unique individual and the symbol for an entire people, a people whose attempted destruction stands as the darkest moment in a dark century. This movement from Unstern to Stern in Austerlitz is the negation of a negation, the unwording of an unword. As we have seen, just such ununwordings are to be found in the work of both Beckett and Celan. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that such a negation of 126

Ibid., p. 126; p. 123.

127

Sebald, Austerlitz, p. 415; p. 417.

128

Ibid., p. 85; p. 89.

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a negation leads into the realm of those positivities that Adorno sees as the very embodiment of radical evil. For Sebald insists, like Adorno before him, that hope lies, if anywhere, only in an art this remains resolutely “hopeless” (aussichtslos). This is revealed nowhere more tellingly than in the final sentence of Austerlitz, in which the narrator reports having read to the end of the fifteenth chapter of Heshel’s Kingdom while sitting by the moat of the fortress at Breendonk, in Belgium, that fortress having been the Nazi prison in which the “unconditionally negative” Jean Améry was tortured, together with so many others. The narrator then sets off for the town of Mechelen, reaching it “as evening was beginning to fall.”129 On the one hand, darkness falls here on the memory of historical calamity and unimaginable personal suffering. This is the Unstern. On the other hand, Sebald mentions, alongside Breendonk, Dan Jacobson’s autobiographical account of his journey to Lithuania, the country his grandmother had left following the death of her husband, the rabbi Heshel Melamed, in 1919. This account, at once a personal one and an attempt to restitute the lost past of others, is, as it were, the Stern, associated as that word is by Sebald with his own person and his own writing. Like Hegel’s owl of Minerva, that Stern, that star, can only cast its light when darkness falls. The ambiguity here is not just that the light requires the darkness, but that the late may also be the too late. Like that of his European literary predecessors, Sebald’s own literature of the unword inhabits precisely that crepuscular ambiguity. 129

Ibid., p. 415; p. 417.

chapter 8

Unwording, Terminal and Interminable

An obvious question arises in the face of a literature that commits itself to radical linguistic negativism. Would not such a literature abolish itself through the very act of achieving its ends? Put slightly differently, would not the ultimate work of literary unwording be either a blank page or a work of art in another medium, such as music, mime, dance, or painting? The œuvres of the majority of the writers who commit themselves to a literature of the unword certainly seem to follow a trajectory characterized by reduction, if not to nothing then to states of what Beckett terms “lessness.” Not one of Kafka’s three novels was brought to satisfactory completion, and many of his shorter texts remain fragments. In the years following the completion of The Unnamable, Beckett produced two Acts without Words, while his later works (following the publication in 1961 of what would prove to be his last novel, How It Is) are ever more pared down in nature and include the wordless television play Quad (1981), first broadcast on German television as Quadrat I & II, the second part constituting a reduction of the first through the use of black and white rather than color and a much slower tempo. Beckett’s final literary utterance, what is the word (1989), his own translation of comment dire, is, in its English version, a 176-word, unpunctuated poem in which repetition plays such a significant role that, of those 176 words, only 24 are different.1 Of these, the unaccompanied demonstrative article “this” is repeated 20 times, the interrogative “what” 17 times, “folly” 11 times, “glimpse” 8 times, “seem” 7 times, “there” 7 times, “away” 5 times, “afar” 5 times, “afaint” 4 times, and the phrase “what is the word” 8 times. Ending with the repetition of this latter phrase, the poem insists upon the fundamental 1

Samuel Beckett, what is the word, in Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho, Stirrings Still, ed. Dirk Van Hulle (London: Faber & Faber, 2009), pp. 131–5. For an analysis of the textual genesis of what is the word, see Dirk Van Hulle, The Making of Samuel Beckett’s Stirrings Still/Soubresauts and comment dire/what is the word (Antwerp: University Press Antwerp, 2011).

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literary challenge: how to find the words for that which is taken to resist all possible expression. Like Beckett, Blanchot also abandoned the novel as a genre, in favor of more concentrated forms, with an ever-greater predilection for the fragmentary.2 Indeed, Blanchot’s trajectory of abandonment is, in at least one respect, even more extreme than Beckett’s, for while the latter’s last novel was published roughly mid-way through his writing life, Blanchot’s last novel, The Most High (1948), was published only seven years after his first, Thomas the Obscure (1941), and almost half a century before his last work, The Instant of My Death (1994). As for Blanchot’s final literary work, it, too, is only a few hundred words long, ending with an insistence upon Blanchot’s abiding theme: the experience of death’s impossibility, negativity in the wilderness. The trajectory of Celan’s œuvre is also characterized by extreme reduction, his final four volumes of poetry – from Threadsuns (1968) to the posthumously published Timestead (1976) – consisting for the most part of short, untitled poems characterized by radical syntactical compaction. Stylistically, Celan’s later poetry is highly paratactic, and dominated by forms of linguistic negativism that break words apart, the lines becoming not only shorter but often ending with a negative affix. Moreover, Celan’s correspondence in the late 1960s, in the years immediately prior to his suicide in April 1970, bears witness to increasing anxieties regarding his ability to continue to produce poetry, the threat of silence being felt as ever more pressing. There is, then, a clear trajectory in the œuvres of some of the major European practitioners of a literature of the unword: a movement toward ever-more extreme reduction, condensation, and linguistic negativism, with the logical endpoint of their commitment to unwording seeming to be complete negation, or silence.3 This trajectory appears to be all the more evident when one compares the work of these authors with that of less wellknown European writers who bear significant ethico-aesthetic affinities with them, such as Edmond Jabès, Nelly Sachs, Roger Laporte, and Charles Juliet. 2 3

On Blanchot’s turn toward the fragment, see especially Leslie Hill, Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing: A Change of Epoch (New York and London: Continuum, 2012). Sebald’s work might seem to be the obvious exception here and, in some respects, it is. However, it is worth bearing in mind that, following the completion of The Rings of Saturn, he embarked upon a new project – now known as the “Corsica Project,” and, as the title suggests, a work that would engage with a modern European history that originates with Napoleon – that was abandoned, leaving only fragments.

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In his seven-volume Book of Questions (1963–73), the Jewish Egyptianborn French-language writer Edmond Jabès (1912–91), himself an exile in France from 1956 until his death, responds to the impact of the Holocaust, and the experience of exile and estrangement for those who survived the Nazi persecution of the Jews in Europe. The two central figures in the first volume of The Book of Questions, the lovers Yukel and Sarah, are in fact belated victims of the Holocaust, their fate anticipating that of several writers who also survived, including Paul Celan and Primo Levi. Sarah’s experience of life in a Nazi concentration camp drives her mad, and Yukel, her lover, commits suicide when he realizes that he has lost her to this madness. Jabès’s profound sense of affinity with the work of other practitioners of a literature of the unword is evident in his text on Celan’s poetry, La Mémoire des mots (“The Memory of Words,” 1990), his remarks upon the importance of Blanchot’s writing for him,4 and his explicit agreement with Beckett’s conviction that “to be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail.”5 An important early influence on Jabès was the work of the French poet Max Jacob, who was associated with both Dada and Surrealism without ever fully belonging to either movement.6 Reflecting on Jacob’s importance to him, Jabès notes that he was “much more concerned with a questioning of language than the others in his circle.”7 In his own work, in the dark light of the Holocaust, Jabès takes this questioning of language considerably further than does Jacob. Jabès’s texts are characterized above all by their concern with the nature of writing and the book in a post-Holocaust world, and with an experience of nothingness that seems to beggar linguistic articulation. If The Book of Questions begins with the tragedy of the Holocaust survivors Sarah and Yukel, it proceeds to reflect on what becomes of the idea of God in such a world. In an interview with Marcel Cohen, Jabès explains that, for him, God is simply a metaphor for “emptiness,” while the Jew is a metaphor for the “torment” of this emptiness.8 In another interview, he adds that in his work God is “an abyss, a void, something against which we are powerless.”9 Any attempt to find a language in which to 4

5 6 7 9

In an interview with Marcel Cohen, Jabès states that Blanchot’s works “go with me and have often sustained me” (Edmond Jabès, From the Desert to the Book: Dialogues with Marcel Cohen, trans. Pierre Joris [Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1990], p. 38). Edmond Jabès in Paul Auster, “Book of the Dead,” in Ground Work: Selected Poems and Essays, 1970–1979 (London: Faber & Faber, 1990), pp. 183–210 (p. 210). On Jabès’s engagement with surrealism, and his subsequent detachment from any literary movement, see Stephen Jaron, Edmond Jabès: The Hazard of Exile (Oxford: Legenda, 2003). Ibid., p. 191. 8 Jabès, From the Desert to the Book, p. 57. Jabès in Auster, “Book of the Dead,” p. 203.

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express this emptiness, and the tormenting experience of it, necessarily entails a form of linguistic negativism. As Jabès puts it: “There is a constant effacement, a constant peeling away of layers, a stripping away of the name until this name becomes an unpronounceable name.”10 In accordance with this principle of negation, the trajectory of The Book of Questions is one that leads, in the final volume, not to a name, not even to a word, but to a point: the title of volume seven of The Book of Questions (1973) being: ● followed by the subtitle: El, or the Last Book. The close affinity between Jabès’s commitment to linguistic negativism and that to be found in the work of Kafka, Beckett, Blanchot, and Celan is indicated not least by his inclusion of Kafka’s aphorism on the necessity of performing the negative as an epigraph in the final volume of The Book of Questions.11 In this work, God (“El” in Hebrew) manifests itself as a nonverbal sign (a point), this being all that remains once the linguistic negativism has reached its limit. The act of writing becomes one that has the impossible as its object, namely a wordless book. As Jabès puts it: “[W]e should be able to write and speak without words.”12 The only way in which to move in the direction of this impossible wordless book is through the linguistic negativism of words that are in some sense self-undoing. The aim is to produce a book “whose words we need to cancel to let it return to its white plurality.”13 It is through such unwording that the writer eventually arrives at the point, the meaning of which is radically ambiguous: It is, for Jabès, at once a birth and a death.14 At the heart of Jabès’s work, then, is the paradoxical need for the book to destroy itself to survive. This destruction is effected through the intensive deployment of unwords such as “unsayable” (indicible), “impossible” (impossible), “unbearable” (insupportable), “cut” (découpé), “emptiness” (vide), “nothingness” (néant), and “without” (sans), as well as through textual fragmentation. As Jabès remarks: “All my books are about cutting, about disjunction. From one end to the other the book is fragmented, cut up constantly.”15 Each of his works consists of brief fragments, originating from multiple voices, set alongside one another without being bound together by any continuous narrative or argument. Each book’s structure 10 11

12 14 15

Ibid., p. 204. See Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions: ● El, or the Last Book, trans. Rosmarie Waldrop (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1984), p. 6; ● El, ou le dernier livre (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), p. 10. 13 Jabès, El, p. 20; p. 25. Ibid., p. 19; p. 24. “Birth and death: one and the same indelible point” (ibid., p. 22; p. 27). Jabès in Auster, “The Book of the Dead,” p. 208.

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resembles that of a ruin, this textual ruin being all that remains of the sacred text following the catastrophe to have befallen the European Jews in the years of the Nazi terror. While there are obvious differences between Jabès’s concern with what becomes of the idea of God in a post-Holocaust world and Beckett’s concern with the disintegration of the human subject and the impossibility of finding the right words to capture that disintegration, the two writers share an abiding preoccupation with finding a way in which to articulate a nothingness that resists the power of the imagination and that remains, strictly speaking, unnameable.16 Just as Beckett seeks to achieve a linguistic negativism that would capture the experience of humanity in ruins, so Jabès practises forms of unwording to articulate the experience of the Hebrew God in ruins. For both writers, the task is from the outset seen to be as necessary as it is impossible. Notwithstanding the many similarities between his own work and that of those European writers with whom he declares his affinity, Jabès nonetheless takes his distance from them in his conception of the ultimately productive nature of the negative. While he endorses Kafka’s imperative to perform the negative in El, or the Last Book – which, as it happens, was far from being his last book – the negativity in Jabès’s work ultimately proves to be generative. The destruction of the book is the means by which to ensure its survival, in the form of “another book that will prolong it.”17 The negative thus promises renewal, and this is reflected in the fact that, while The Book of Questions moves toward a point rather than any word in its attempt to articulate the emptiness that is its subject, Jabès’s œuvre as a whole does not follow the trajectory that characterizes the œuvres of Beckett, Blanchot, or Celan. The two cycles that follow The Book of Questions – the three-volume Book of Resemblances (1976–80) and the fourvolume Book of Limits (1982–7) – do not take the linguistic negativism of the final volume of The Book of Questions any further and suggest, if anything, a step back from the radical negativism of the final volume in that first cycle. Furthermore, in El, or the Last Book, the productive nature of the negative is apparent in various forms of word play that recall those of Michel Leiris in works such as Glossaire, j’y serre mes gloses (1939). For instance, “Grow roots” (Cent racines) – literally “A hundred roots” – is given as a homophone of “No roots” (Sans racines); “born in . . .” (né en . . .) 16 17

As Jabès puts it in El: “Like God, emptiness [le vide] has no name” (Jabès, El, p. 37; p. 43). “The book that would have a chance to survive, I think, is the book that destroys itself” (Jabès in Auster, “Book of the Dead,” p. 206).

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as a homophone of “nothingness” (néant); and “Life of the eyes” (Vie d’yeux) as a homophone of “Emptiness” (Vide).18 In each case, the homophone serves as a means of generating a positive out of the negative: roots out of rootlessness, birth out of nothingness, life out of emptiness. The postwar European poet with the greatest affinity to Paul Celan is arguably the German-Jewish writer Nelly Sachs (1891–1970), who escaped from Nazi Germany to Sweden in 1940, and lived there for the rest of her life. Their poetological closeness, as well as a friendship borne out of a shared experience of scarcely imaginable loss, is reflected in Celan’s own work, most notably in the poem “Zürich, at the Stork.” Written on May 3, 1960 in commemoration of their meeting in the Swiss city, and included in Celan’s 1963 volume The No One’s Rose, this poem is dedicated to Sachs, and recalls their conversation concerning a God that Celan identifies in the poem as “your God.” Celan’s poem makes it clear that his attitude to the God of the Jews is profoundly different from hers: “Our talk was of your God, I spoke / against him, I let the heart / I had / hope: / for / his highest, death-rattled, his / wrangling word—.” In contrast to the speaker’s railing against a God who could have permitted the Holocaust, the figure of Sachs in Celan’s poem remains calm, her words leaving open the question of understanding, and thereby resisting any final judgment: “We / really don’t know, you know, / we / really don’t know / what / counts.”19 In her principal volumes of poetry, from In the Habitations of Death (1947), through Eclipse of the Stars (1949), Flight and Metamorphosis (1959), Out Beyond the Realms of Dust (1961), and Death Still Celebrates Life (1961), to the long, four-part poem Glowing Enigmas (1962–6), all of which were written in exile, Sachs shares with Celan not only a preoccupation with the Holocaust, and with the concomitant experiences of suffering, death, and mourning, but also a poetics in which the principal images include ash, sand, night, stars, crystal, and eyes. Furthermore, Sachs also shares Celan’s concern with the challenge posed to poetry, and indeed to language as such, by the Holocaust.20 Hers is a poetry preoccupied, like Celan’s, not simply with the remembrance of the dead – the threat of forgetting (Vergessenheit) being absolutely central to Sachs’s poetry – but with the impossible task of finding words for them, and thereby enabling them to speak from beyond their untimely deaths. 18 19 20

Jabès, El, pp. 7, 29, 72; pp. 11, 35, 84. Paul Celan, Poems, trans. Michael Hamburger (London: Anvil Press Poetry, 1988), p. 157. On Sachs’s poetics, and the idea of the unsayable or unrepresentable, see Elaine Martin, Nelly Sachs: The Poetics of Silence and the Limits of Representation (Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2011).

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However, just as Celan marks the difference between the two poets’ approaches to the question of God in the poem “Zürich, at the Stork,” so a comparison of their respective forms of linguistic negativism reveals significant differences beyond the apparent similarities. First and foremost, the linguistic negativism in Sachs’s œuvre is considerably less intensive than in Celan’s. While there is an intensification of unwording forms in her later poetry, commencing with Flight and Metamorphosis, these forms are already present in the earlier poetry, and are not the result of any radical linguistic inventiveness of the kind to be found in Celan’s later poems, especially Threadsuns (1968). The use of the particle of negation “not” (nicht) is limited in Sachs’s poetry, and there is almost no use of epanorthosis, which, as we have seen, is such a pervasive form of linguistic negativism in Celan’s work, as it is in Beckett’s and Blanchot’s. The particle of negation tends rather to be used to communicate limitation and powerlessness: The poem “The candle that I have lit for you,” for instance, from In the Habitations of Death, ends: “I can do nothing but weep” (ich kann nichts tun als weinen).21 Furthermore, there is almost nothing akin to Celan’s extraordinarily inventive use of negative affixes and his creation of neologisms with a negative charge. The two most frequently used substantives formed through the use of the un- affix in Sachs’s œuvre are “unease”/“disquiet” (Unruhe) – which, as we have seen, plays a major role in Kafka’s later work, and in turn in Sebald’s – and “the invisible” (das Unsichtbare).22 The other negative substantive that plays an important role in her poetry is “the unborn” (die Ungeborene), this unword evoking the generations that would never be, on account of their would-be parents having been murdered before their conception.23 Negative modifiers formed using the un- affix are rare in Sachs’s poetry, with “invisible” (unsichtbar) being, by some margin, the most frequently used.24 This contrasts starkly with Celan’s intensive use of such negative modifiers, as does Sachs’s infrequent use of the negative substantive “nothingness” (Nichts).25 21

22 23 24 25

Nelly Sachs, Fahrt ins Staublose. Gedichte (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988), p. 23. All translation in this chapter from the volumes collected in this edition are my own. For translations of the poems in the volumes In the Habitations of Death and Eclipse of the Stars, see Nelly Sachs, Collected Poems 1944–1949, trans. Michael Hamburger, Ruth and Matthew Mead, and Michael Roloff (Copenhagen and Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2011). See, for instance, Sachs, Fahrt, pp. 176, 258, 271, 277, 289, 318, 357, 361 (for the use of Unruhe); and pp. 130, 136, 181, 351 (for das Unsichtbare). See, for instance, ibid., pp. 67, 138, 245. See, for instance, ibid., pp. 25, 146, 147, 209, 215, 267, 335, 372. The few uses of “nothingness” (Nichts) tend to occur in Sachs’s later volumes: see, for instance, ibid. pp. 243, 257, 314.

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While negative modifiers formed with the un- affix are rare, those formed with the -los affix are more frequent, with “nameless” (namenlos), “wordless” (wortlos), and “speechless” (sprachlos) playing a particularly important role, repeatedly serving to highlight the challenge faced by a poet seeking not simply to memorialize but also to give voice to the victims of the Holocaust.26 In addition to these explicitly languageorientated negative modifiers, Sachs also deploys several other negative modifiers formed with the -los ending, the most frequent of these being “helpless” (hilflos), referring both to the victims for whom her poetry seeks to find a voice and the poet herself, faced as she is with an impossible task.27 Other negative modifiers formed in this way include “homeless” (heimatlos), “motherless” (mutterlos), “skinless” (hautlos), “eyeless” (augenlos), “sightless” (blicklos), “speechless” (sprachlos), “soundless” (lautlos), and “propertyless” (eigenschaftlos).28 Unlike Celan, Sachs makes very little use of the ent- affix, one of the few exceptions being the description of the cry of the seagulls as “dehumanized” (entmenscht) in the poem “O the homeless colours,” in Eclipse of the Stars.29 Instead, the most pervasive form of linguistic negativism in Sachs’s work is achieved through her use of words bearing the affix ver-, in both substantives and modifiers. By far the most recurrent ver- substantive is “oblivion” (Vergessenheit), this being the condition against which her entire œuvre seeks to stand.30 Other recurrent ver- substantives include “despair” (Verzweiflung), “eclipse” (Verdunkelung), and “metamorphosis” (Verwandlung), the latter not only evoking Kafka, but also being profoundly ambiguous, suggesting both loss and the possibility of restoration through the poetic word.31 Much more prevalent than these substantives, however, are the negative modifiers formed with the ver- affix, these constituting the most distinctive form of unwording in Sachs’s œuvre. The most recurrent negative modifier of the ver- affix form is “lost” (verloren), this unword evoking the experience that lies at the very heart of Sachs’s poetry.32 The other two, closely related negative modifiers that recur most frequently in her poetry are versteckt and

26 27 28 30 31 32

For uses of these three language-focused modifiers, see, for instance, ibid., pp. 81, 107, 144, 169, 244, 358, 367. For the use of “helpless” (hilflos), see, for instance, ibid., pp. 39, 123, 132, 271, 298, 377. See, for instance, ibid., pp. 81, 109, 121, 174, 220, 283, 306, 334, 367. 29 See ibid., p. 117. For uses of this unword, see ibid., pp. 90, 99, 123, 135, 141, 191, 244, 245, 267, 316, For the use of these unwords, see, for instance, ibid., pp. 57, 73, 74, 96, 104, 117, 135. For the use of the negative modifier “lost” (verloren), see, for instance, ibid., pp. 25, 27, 111, 140, 151, 158, 205, 231, 261, 282, 374.

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verborgen, both meaning “hidden.”33 Other important negative modifiers of the ver- affix form include “burned” (verbrannt), “mutilated” (verstümmelt), “shrouded” (verhüllt), “expired” (verfallen), “withered” (verwelkt), “scattered” (verstreut), “abandoned” (verlassen), “condemned” (verurteilt), “buried” (vergraben), “dislocated” (verrenkt), “bewitched” (verhext), “charred” (verkohlt), “petrified” (versteinert), “extinguished” (verlöscht), “vanished” (verschwunden), and “eclipsed” (verdunkelt).34 These negative modifiers are complemented by the recurrent use of the verbs “to vanish” (vergehen), “to wither” (verwelken), “to sink” (versinken), “to bury” (vergraben), “to burn” (verbrennen), and “to fall silent” (verstummen).35 Sachs’s increasing reliance upon linguistic negativism is reflected in a poem such as “Unconquerable” (“Uneinnehmbar”), in the volume Flight and Metamorphosis, published in 1959, the same year as Celan’s Speech-Grille. The second stanza of this poem reads: Not with my mouth which lets the words earth sun springtime silence grow on its tongue do I know how to ignite your vanished alphabet36

The poem clearly thematizes the poet’s own impossible task: to find a language through which the dead might speak. Indeed, this stanza captures the essence of Sachs’s poetics, highlighting as it does the fact that with her own voice and her own language she cannot hope to transform the lost speech of the dead into a living language. And yet, the poem also points toward that which in Sachs’s poetry does not fall under the sign of the negative. The words in the poet’s mouth are precisely not the words of the dead. In this respect, the significance of Sachs’s own form of linguistic negativism, with its predominant reliance upon words bearing the ver- affix, becomes clearer. For, unlike the affixes un- and -los, the veraffix is not unambiguously privative and is often nonseparable. For all its 33 34 35

See, for instance, ibid., pp. 56, 79, 129, 139, 167, 245, 245, 286, 333, 381. See, for instance, ibid. pp. 16, 50, 84, 93, 107, 111, 112, 118, 158, 162, 163, 215, 234, 239, 244, 247, 249, 261, 279. See, for instance, ibid., pp. 21, 54, 57, 81, 104, 120, 139, 335, 341. 36 Ibid., p. 272.

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many darknesses, then, Sachs’s poetry is striking for forms of lament in which the negative remains ambiguous. This ambiguity is reflected not least in the title of her last major work, the four-part poem Glowing Enigmas. The unwording procedures to be found in Sachs’s poetry of the 1940s and 1950s are also present in this volume, in which the principal negative modifiers are “nameless” (namenlos), “speechless” (sprachlos), and “homeless” (heimatlos), and in which there is a recurrent preoccupation with death, nothingness, and the abyss.37 Furthermore, Sachs places considerable emphasis upon suffering, madness, the “evil time,” the “language of dust,” the “great terror,” and silence as the place “where the victims dwell.”38 However, at the heart of Glowing Enigmas is the idea of a positive metamorphosis (Verwandlung), captured in the recurring image of the butterfly, in striking contrast to Kafka’s image of transformation: vermin (Ungeziefer).39 In Glowing Enigmas, the darkness becomes the place where the light may be glimpsed: “Effulgence of lights enters into the dark verse.”40 Similarly, that which exceeds or beggars language has the power to save: “[T]hat which is wordless [das Wortlose] heals the ailing star.”41 While the shadows cast by the “great terror” remain long and all-but-impenetrable, and while the linguistic negativism in Glowing Enigmas reflects a profound skepticism as to the power of poetic language either to capture the nature of the “evil time” or to offer any resistance to it, the enigmas do indeed glow in Sachs’s final major work, and the possibility not only of memorializing the dead, but also of finding a voice for them and thereby effecting some form of transformation or resurrection, has a force equal to, if not greater than, that of the impossible. If Sachs’s deepest poetic affinities are with Celan, those of the French writer and literary critic Roger Laporte (1925–2001) are undoubtedly with Blanchot, as evidenced not least by a number of essays on Blanchot’s work, alongside essays on other European writers who commit themselves to a literature of the unword, most notably Celan.42 Laporte’s major work is, however, not to be found among his critical essays but is rather the work published in eight parts between 1963 and 1983, and brought together into 37

38 39 40 42

For these negative modifiers, see Nelly Sachs, Glowing Enigmas, trans. Michael Hamburger (Portland, OR: Tavern Books, 2013), pp. 59, 61, 95; Glühende Rätsel, in Späte Gedichte (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981), pp. 147–229 (pp. 193, 195, 221). Ibid., pp. 12, 45, 54, 76; pp. 150, 179, 188, 206. For the image of the butterfly in Glowing Enigmas, see ibid., pp. 31, 47, 52; pp. 169, 181, 186. Ibid., p. 15; p. 153. 41 Ibid., p. 30; p. 168. For Laporte’s essays on Blanchot, see Roger Laporte and Bernard Noël, Deux lectures de Maurice Blanchot (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1973) and Études (Paris: P.O.L, 1991).

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a single volume in 1986 under the title Une vie (“A Life”).43 Laporte identifies this massive undertaking as a “biography,” although its abiding concern is his own experience of seeking to write the work in question, any other “life” events being completely excluded from it. Rather than having his own life at its subject, the work is about – or, more precisely, enacts – the attempt to write a work that would produce rather than represent the life of the author. Across more than 600 pages (in the 1986 volume), Laporte engages unremittingly with what he sees not just as the difficulties, but as the impossibility, of the project to which he has committed himself. In the first volume of what would become Une vie, entitled La Veille (“The Vigil,” 1963), Laporte asks himself what the precise nature of his work is, only to exclaim in response: “I am unable to say!,” before proceeding to identify this indescribable project as “unrealizable” (inexécutable).44 Like Beckett and Blanchot before him, then, Laporte devotes himself to a task that he sees as impossible from the outset. It is this very impossibility, however, that becomes the material of the work, with the mode of engagement being increasingly intensive linguistic negativism. In La Veille, Laporte presents the act of writing as being entirely dependent upon an italicized “he” (il) that can only be defined negatively: “He does not see me, and I do not see him; I shall never embrace him, and he will remain at a distance, for he is the one whom you never encounter; he does not speak and does not hear me; in short, no sensory organ can detect him.”45 This unnamed third person is described variously as “anonymous,” “neutral,” and “the Stranger” (l’Étranger), and while Laporte insists that to describe him as “the Unsayable” (l’Indicible) would be to describe him only in a manner that is external, any saying of him proves to be a form of missaying that requires immediate questioning or correction.46 The title of the second volume, Une voix de fin silence (“A Voice of Sheer Silence,” 1966), alludes to God’s aural manifestation in the Bible (see 1 Kings 19:12b), and the work opens with the assertion that the author simply lacks the language to describe the experience that prompted in him the desire to produce the work in question. In a formulation that recalls Mallarmé’s distinction between everyday and essential language, but that 43

44 45

The critical reception of Laporte’s work in the English-speaking world has been minimal, and his work has yet to be translated into English. For a book-length study of Laporte’s œuvre that charts its development in relation to the work of Heidegger, Blanchot, Levinas, and Derrida, see Ian Maclachlan, Roger Laporte: The Orphic Text (Oxford: Legenda, 2000). Roger Laporte, Une vie. Biographie (Paris: P.O.L, 1986), p. 14. All translations from this volume in the present chapter are my own. Ibid., p. 15. 46 Ibid., pp. 25, 29, 48, 60.

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insists that the essential language is not at his disposal, Laporte states that the event of which he wishes to speak is so different from what one experiences in “everyday life” that he would have been “unable to name it” (incapable de le nommer) even if he were a painter or a musician with the power to invent a completely new language.47 This second volume concerns itself above all with what Laporte identifies abstractly as the “nameless calamity” (malheur sans nom). The entire volume thus becomes the attempt to say that which cannot be said: “I would now like to speak of this calamity, but the words slip away [les mots se dérobent], I cannot speak of anything [je ne peux parler de rien], even of this new distress, a distress that redoubles itself indefinitely.”48 In a manner that recalls Kafka, Beckett, and Blanchot, the impossibility with which Laporte finds himself confronted here is double in nature: “I can neither write nor give up writing” (Je ne peux ni écrire, ni renoncer à écrire).49 The result is a form of writing that relies ever-more heavily on linguistic negativism. The principal stylistic features of Laporte’s entire “biographical” project become abstraction, paradox, repetition, epanorthosis, self-questioning, and an intensive reliance upon negative modifiers, among which the most recurrent are “unable” and “impossible.” In Une voix de fin silence, for instance, sentences repeatedly commence: “I cannot . . .” (Je ne peux pas . . .). When writing does become possible, it is because the writer has managed through a process of negation to become nothing but a “listening room” (chambre d’écoute), in which resonates the event that lies at the origin of the work – that is, the “nameless calamity.”50 No concrete details are supplied in the attempt to describe this event. Rather, Laporte commits himself to a form of epanorthosis reminiscent of Beckett’s in The Unnamable. Having reduced himself to a listening room, Laporte writes: “I await the unexpected [l’inattendu], or rather, I don’t even await it. I wait.”51 Repeatedly, statements have to be radically modified or even taken back altogether, sometimes even in advance of their being made. This negativism is justified by the conviction that there is no appropriate literary language in which to describe the calamity in question: “There does not exist, at least in literature, an appropriate vocabulary to designate that specific world of which I would like to speak.”52 That for which the writer listens, that for which he waits, can therefore be described only negatively, as the “unexpected” (inattendu) or the “unknown” (inconnu).

47 52

Ibid., p. 69. Ibid., p. 156.

48

Ibid., p. 75.

49

Ibid.

50

Ibid., p. 109.

51

Ibid., p. 113.

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To enable this negatively defined source to be articulated, Laporte privileges either silence or a language characterized by its “simplicity,” its “poverty,” and its “sobriety.”53 However, aside from its abstraction, what distinguishes that language most clearly from any other is its intensive negativism. More important than what is said is the manner in which it is said, and that manner is insistently negative.54 While he stresses that the experience of which he wishes to speak “can be the object neither of an affirmation nor of a negation,”55 the very formulation of this judgment in the neither/nor form – so characteristic of Blanchot’s The Madness of the Day (1948) – demonstrates how dependent Laporte will have to be on linguistic negativism if he is to approach the state of pure listening and to produce the requisite “language of sheer silence” to communicate what he hears in that state. As he puts it at the end of Une voix de fin silence, in a manner that bears a striking similarity to Beckett’s in his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, if there is a “pure speech” (parole pure) that would capture the event of which he wishes to speak, then it takes place “between the words.”56 The event will, he continues to emphasize, “always remain at a distance from even the most appropriate language” (restera toujours à distance du langage même le plus juste).57 This insistence upon the impossibility of finding the right words is, however, set against what Laporte sees as the absolute necessity of so doing, hence the interminable nature of the task: “I am engaged in an endless movement [un mouvement sans terme], which includes neither a verifiable beginning nor a verifiable end.”58 The seeming interminability of the biographer’s task is reflected in Une voix de fin silence being followed one year later by a sequel: Pourquoi? Une voix de fin silence II (“Why? A Voice of Sheer Silence II,” 1967). As indicated by its title, this third volume in the sequence is characterized by an increasing reliance upon interrogatives, and these intensify during the remaining five volumes. The final paragraph of the first part of Pourquoi?, for instance, begins: “How to speak? How to speak of that place, the aim and the point of departure of all language, forever above and set apart from all definition?” Laporte then asks himself, in a manner 53 56

57

Ibid., pp. 129, 132. 54 Ibid., p. 134. 55 Ibid., p. 158. Ibid., p. 160. In Dream of Fair to Middling Women, Beckett’s protagonist, Belacqua, dreams of writing a work the reading experience of which would lie “between the phrases, in the silence, communicated by the intervals, not the terms, of the statement” (Samuel Beckett, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, ed. Eoin O’Brien and Édith Fournier [Dublin: The Black Cat Press, 1992], p. 137). Ibid., p. 160. 58 Ibid., p. 161.

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reminiscent of both Beckett and Blanchot, whether it would be possible for him to find a language that “speaks without saying anything and without being silent.”59 This question remains an open one, propelling him on in his quest for that essential language in which the origin of language would become manifest. In this third part of this seemingly most lifeless of biographies, Laporte reflects on the possibility that this essential language might take the form of a “toneless voice” (voix blanche) or a “blank speech” (parole blanche). What soon becomes clear is that such a speech would necessarily be characterized by intensive linguistic negativism, directed toward an event “that is not one and that is yet not nothing” (qui n’en est pas un et qui pourtant n’est pas rien).60 Indeed, Laporte insists that this “toneless voice” is without any “positivity” at all.61 The reliance upon linguistic negativism is thus unsurprising, given that Laporte’s aim is to “hear the voice of that which does not speak – but is that speaking? – other than through the silence of listening.”62 The fourth volume in the sequence, Fugue (1970), is dedicated to Jacques and Marguerite Derrida. The former’s distinct conception of “writing” (écriture) and of “text” in terms of différance (differingdeferring), as articulated in Of Grammatology and Writing and Difference (both first published in 1967), clearly informs Laporte’s attempt to pursue his movement toward the articulation of the “nameless calamity” at the heart of his work. Divided into nine numbered sections, Fugue is preoccupied with the idea of a biographical writing that, rather than reflecting or representing a preexistent life (bios), would in fact produce it, the writing in some sense preceding the living: “To call a work ‘Biography’ although it relates nothing of my life as a man as such, is to affirm that a certain life is neither anterior nor exterior to writing, that one could not therefore know that life other than in writing.”63 To go beyond the concept of representation is far from easy, however, and it leads Laporte to introduce the idea of a “counter-writing” (contre-écriture). As soon becomes clear, the definition of this counter-writing is only possible by way of linguistic negativism: “Counter-writing does not exist, or rather it is nothing other than that void which sooner or later effaces all work or even takes away from me in advance the page on which I prepare to write.”64 Furthermore, the very distinction between writing and counter-writing proves impossible to maintain in so far as it is “impossible to say” (impossible à dire) where one ends and the other begins.65 59 64

Ibid., p. 197. Ibid., p. 297.

60 65

Ibid., p. 205. Ibid., p. 281.

61

Ibid., p. 234.

62

Ibid., p. 205.

63

Ibid., p. 371.

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Fugue is a significant moment in the sequence, not least because it is in this volume that Laporte introduces the principle of re-reading – that is, the need to return to the earlier volumes in the series, citing and revising them as he proceeds. Writing, he declares, becomes “possible again from the moment that I read completely otherwise the texts that I had brought together.”66 In accordance with this principle, the next two volumes in the sequence – Fugue. Supplément (1973) and Fugue 3 (1976) – reflect upon statements made in Fugue, citing them, commenting on them, revising them, and thereby making progress toward the articulation of the “nameless calamity,” one that entails a form of trans-textual epanorthotic regress. In a manner akin to Walter Benjamin’s “Angel of History,” although at a level of almost complete abstraction, Laporte’s biographer increasingly has his back turned to the future. This self-revising, backward-facing movement is reiterated in the penultimate volume in the series, Suite (“Sequel,” 1979). The question with which Suite opens is why Laporte should continue – or, more precisely, “pursue” (poursuivre) – the biographical venture at all, given his inability to find the words in which to articulate the “nameless calamity.” One answer is that, but for the act of writing, there would quite simply be no life – or at most a form of what in Fugue 3 is described as “wretched sub-existence” (misérable sous-existence). What becomes clear in Suite is that Laporte’s “biographical” project is distinguished from any other work in that genre not only through its taking the bios in question to be explicitly the product or effect of the act of writing, but also through the life-producing act of writing operating in accordance with a principle of unremitting reduction. Laporte describes the form of his project as a “descending spiral,” compelling him to inhabit an “ever more restricted space.”67 This assessment of the writer’s experience is closely akin to Beckett’s claim in his 1931 monograph on Proust that the artist is “active, but negatively, shrinking from the nullity of extracircumferential phenomena, drawn in to the core of the eddy.”68 The similarities between Laporte’s work and that of other European writers committed to a literature of the unword thus grow only more pronounced as his biographical project takes its tortuous course. While the image of the descending spiral might seem to suggest an achievable endpoint – a reduction to nothing – the emphasis in Suite falls not only upon the necessity of pursuing the biographical project, but also

66 68

Ibid., p. 301. 67 Ibid., p. 511. Samuel Beckett, Proust and Three Dialogues (London: John Calder, 1987), pp. 65–6.

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upon its interminability on account of the right words always eluding the writer: I will never be able to say anything of this interminable burial that excludes any witness: I will have to be content with speaking of an incomprehensible passion, a cold suffering, the cruel simulacrum of a torture; but to go against language, to have always already lost the right word [le mot juste] that would have saved [delivré] me, and yet to have to allow myself to be caught again, endlessly [sans fin], the formulation that I never possessed, the password that would enable me to enter the kingdom of the dead – is there a worse torment?69

The biographical writer’s predicament is described in Suite not simply as “endless” (interminable), but as a “motionless oscillation” (oscillation immobile),70 an oxymoronic formulation that recalls those by Blanchot, in whose work, as we have seen, the negative modifier “motionless” (immobile) is among the most recurrent – as it is, but to different effect, in that of Georges Bataille. Once again, the experience enacted is that of a stalled dialectic. Suite ends with a linguistic negativism that is as intensive as any to be found in the work of Beckett or Blanchot, and that echoes both. It is a negativism at the core of which lies that which resists all nomination, but from the attempted nomination of which the writer cannot free himself. All that can be done in such a predicament is to rely upon unwords. Suite concludes with its author reflecting on the possibility that the “ordeal” to which he finds himself subjected is an “incessant calamity” (malheur incessant), a “nameless ‘thing’” (“chose” sans nom) – even that most abstract of words, “thing,” being considered inappropriate, hence the inverted commas – from which he would turn away in horror were the thought of leaving that calamity to a “merciless solitude” (solitude sans merci) not “intolerable” (intolérable).71 In short, while it cannot be described, the calamity out of which Laporte’s work emerges is one that he cannot simply abandon to wordlessness: The compulsion to keep seeking the words, despite what is seen as the impossibility of the task, is nothing short of ethical in nature. If the experience to which Laporte is subjected as a writer of his own biography (as a writing being) is repeatedly described as “endless” or “interminable,” it nonetheless ends, or rather breaks off, with the volume entitled Moriendo (1983). The notion of death is already present – or, rather, in Derridean terms, always already there, deferring any possible 69

Laporte, Une vie, p. 537.

70

Ibid., p. 551.

71

Ibid., p. 563.

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presence – in Fugue. Supplément, in which Laporte considers renaming his biography a “thanatography,” a form of death- rather than life-writing.72 This idea is in due course reflected in the title of the last volume in the series, which, like Fugue and Suite before it, is derived from the language of music. Crucially, however, the Latin gerund “moriendo” suggests not death as an achieved state, but rather dying as a process. The process in question is precisely one in which linguistic negativism effects a form of pursuance, as evidenced by the following epanorthosis at the beginning of Moriendo: “Having written the ninth sequence of Suite – by then I was exhausted, almost exhausted [à bout de forces, presqu’à bout de forces] – I decided to pause for a long time.”73 The modifier “almost” (presque) makes all the difference here, as it does in Blanchot’s The Last Man (1957), and as does the word “nearly” at the beginning of Beckett’s Endgame: “Finished, it’s finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished.”74 In Laporte’s text, this qualifier opens up a tiny breach in the idea of the impossibility of continuing. That said, to continue writing once such a stage of near exhaustion has been reached is, Laporte observes, an “unending agony” (agonie interminable).75 In Moriendo, the questions come as thick and fast as the negative modifiers. The insistence on failure is intensive, and the biographical has become the thanatographical, but with no more hope of success – that is, with no expectation that the act of writing can bring about the death toward which it is directed, any more than it could bring about the life of the writer. The impossible challenge remains essentially the same as at the beginning of Laporte’s decades-long task: “If a mute ‘thing’ lies in a lower region that never knew the light, where clear language cannot penetrate, how could I say its misery, a nameless misery [malheur sans nom]!”76 Ultimately, all that can be done is to attempt, failingly, to name the namelessless, to say the unsayability, of the calamity, misery, or misfortune (malheur) that lies at the origin and end of Laporte’s work. As Moriendo emphasizes one last time, that attempted saying can only take the form of an unwording that becomes increasingly intensive and, indeed, increasingly similar to the forms of unwording to be found in the work of both Beckett and Blanchot. Given its unremitting concern with a “nameless 72 74

75

Ibid., p. 339. 73 Ibid., p. 573. Samuel Beckett, Endgame (London: Faber & Faber, 2009), p. 6. There is no clear equivalent for the repeated “nearly” in the original French version of Beckett’s play, the line in Fin de partie reading: “Fini, c’est fini, ça va finir, ça va peut-être finir.” Nonetheless, the “peut-être” (“perhaps”) serves a similar function, opening the judgment up to the possibility of things continuing. Laporte, Une vie, p. 575. 76 Ibid., p. 608.

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calamity” for which the writer must seek, by way of linguistic negativism, to find the “right word” (mot juste), Laporte’s Une vie takes its place alongside the works of those other modern European writers who commit themselves to a literature of the unword. For all the similarities between Laporte’s unwording procedures and those of Beckett and Blanchot, however, there is also one important difference, namely the extent to which the “nameless calamity” around which the whole of Une vie circulates is never related to anything beyond the act of writing. In other words, Laporte brackets not only that “ordinary life” to which he refers in the first volume of Une vie but also almost any historical context. When proper names do appear in the text, they are not of historical places or events, but almost always of fictional or mythological figures: Don Quixote, the Maenads, Eros, Dionysus, Actaeon, Sisyphus, and Chronos, with Freud and Champollion (both of whom are mentioned in Fugue) being among the very few exceptions to this rule. That said, Laporte’s dedication in Pourquoi? gestures toward an historical context that he would share with the major postwar practitioners of a literature of the unword, casting an entirely new light on his apparently abstract form of linguistic negativism. While the dedications in the other volumes of Une vie point toward his (largely French) intellectual influences – from Emmanuel Levinas, to Blanchot, to Derrida, to Philippe LacoueLabarthe, the dedication in Pourquoi? reads: “To all my Jewish friends.”77 With this dedication, the volume’s title question – “Why?” – takes on a new resonance, as does the work’s insistence upon finding a language in which to enable the “sheer silence” to speak. The dedication establishes a clear connection between Laporte’s work, and the intensive linguistic negativism that characterizes it, and the poetry of Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs, driven as the latter is by the need not simply to recall and to mourn, but also to find a voice for those who have been deprived by political terror of all voice. Moriendo, and thus Une vie, ends with the writer hoping that he may, for all his insistence upon difficulty, suffering, and failure, have “satisfied the call of the distant.” And yet, having expressed this hope, he immediately asks himself: “But what then is that gentleness, that terrible gentleness?”78 It is with this last of so many (abstract) questions that Laporte’s “biography” ends. To say that this question remains unanswered would not be entirely accurate, however. By being asked in the way that it is, working negatively through a “But what then . . .” (Mais quelle est donc . . .) 77

Ibid., p. 165.

78

Ibid., p. 614.

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construction upon that which precedes it, this last question suggests that the writer’s hope that he has done what was required, and that he has indeed managed to satisfy the “call of the distant,” may well be a false one. In other words, the final act of unwording, coming in the form of a question at the very end of Moriendo, folds back like a dark wave of negation upon the entire textual enterprise. Laporte’s suggestion that, for all the words – or rather, for all the unwords – that go to make up Une vie, he may well have failed, sets him apart from the more limiting or even terminal conceptions of the negative to be found in the work of both Jabès and Sachs. It also sets his work apart from that of another French writer, Charles Juliet (b. 1934), whose major works were first published by the publisher of Laporte’s Une vie: Paul Otckakovsky-Laurens. Juliet’s accounts of his conversations with Beckett and with the painter Bram van Velde, first published in 1986 and 1978, respectively, convey his profound respect for the aesthetic that shapes the work of those European writers who seek to achieve a literature of the unword. His early diaries, covering the years 1957–68, reveal the extent to which he shares the belief that words will inevitably fail to capture the nature of reality, and that the writer is caught within the double bind of the necessity for and the impossibility of expression. In a diary entry dated April 15, 1965, Juliet records the “violent shock” caused by his discovery of Beckett’s œuvre.79 This shock is so great precisely because Juliet finds in Beckett’s work the articulation of that insight into language at which he had arrived independently: namely the sense of words’ inadequacy, and thus of expression’s impossibility, together with a valuing of literature as that which can, and indeed that which must, engage with this very impossibility as its subject. Before his discovery of Beckett’s work, Juliet is already of the view that words “render systematically pointless any attempt to express oneself or to communicate.”80 Words, he asserts, enable us to “establish a little order and clarity in the chaos,” and for this very reason inevitably “falsify,” “denature,” and “destroy” reality in the very act of expressing it.81 Given this, the writer’s obligation must be not only “to distrust words,” but “to fight against them.”82 In Juliet’s early work, and above all in his early poetry, that struggle against words takes the form of unwording.

79 80

Charles Juliet, Journal II. 1965–1968 (Paris: Hachette, 1991), p. 49. All translations from this volume in the present chapter are my own. Ibid., p. 11. Diary entry dated January 10, 1965. 81 Ibid., p. 59. 82 Ibid., p. 76.

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For Juliet, what he terms the “language crisis” (crise du langage) is neither transhistorical nor universal in nature, but historically and culturally specific. It is owing, he argues, not just to the conventional nature of linguistic signs, or to what Saussure terms their arbitrariness, but also, and above all, to the tendency in almost all domains – advertising, politics, journalism, business – to use language to “mislead, misinform, deceive” (tromper, égarer, mystifier).83 This unethical use of language in the contemporary Western world leads Juliet to feel disgust and even hatred for the word. “Our era,” he asserts in a May 1966 diary entry, “is drowned in words, slogans, lies, confusion deliberately produced by the systematic turning of words away from their meaning. It seems to me that every true writer must bear within himself this hatred of words, must nourish a desire to be able one day to write without words, using only a certain quality of silence.”84 In this respect, Juliet’s aims are clearly akin to Laporte’s and in particular to the latter’s privileging of a “voice of sheer silence.” In his early diaries, from the late 1950s to the late 1960s, Juliet’s judgment of modernity is profoundly negative, and it is out of this negative vision of modernity that his conception of language and of the writer’s task emerges. As he puts it in an entry dated May 31, 1966: “God is dead, humanism is bankrupt, all values have been destroyed, human beings are ever more debased by the materialist, technological, and bureaucratic society in which they live. It is incumbent upon the artist to work to accelerate the process, to hasten the liquidation.”85 In his commitment to a “destruction of the old” to enable the emergence of the “new,” Juliet shares something essential with the historical avant-garde, above all Dada. However, in his early diaries, he tends to place the emphasis not on what would come after the much-needed destruction, but rather on what is required of the artist regarding language, namely a labor of the negative. In the face of what he sees as the pervasive misuse of language in the contemporary Western world, Juliet insists that the only way in which the writer can hope to capture the nature of reality is through “a negative approach” (une approche négative).86 As for literature in the light of this insight into language and how to combat its being used to hide rather than to disclose reality, a poem or a painting “seeks to say that which words cannot express.”87 This task is, he insists, as impossible as it is necessary – herein lies his profound aesthetic kinship with those other European writers who seek to achieve a literature of the unword. The writer’s 83

Ibid., p. 97.

84

Ibid., p. 136.

85

Ibid., p. 140.

86

Ibid., p. 97.

87

Ibid., pp. 20–1.

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impossible obligation is, he asserts, to “grasp the ungraspable, express the unsayable” (saisir l’insaisissable, formuler l’indicible).88 The unsayable here is the “nothing” (rien), and that is why, strictly speaking, the writer has precisely “nothing to say” (rien à dire).89 It is the saying of this unsayable that is the writer’s sole, impossible task and, to seek to achieve it, the writer must “violate” and “torture” language.90 In this, Juliet echoes both Tristan Tzara and T. S. Eliot. This conception of language, and of the writer’s task regarding it, underlies Juliet’s own early poetry, which is characterized by radical linguistic negativism and which thematizes the language crisis to which he refers so explicitly in his diaries. The first poem in the volume Fouilles (“Excavations”), which brings together Juliet’s earliest surviving poems, dating from the years 1960–5, opens with the lines: “being / eludes me / denies itself.”91 In another (untitled) poem in the same volume, he relies upon the anaphoric form of negation that is so characteristic of the poetry of Paul Celan and, to a lesser extent, Nelly Sachs: “not an act that is appropriate // not a path that does not go astray // not a word that accords” (pas un acte qui convienne // pas un chemin qui ne s’égare // pas un mot qui soit conforme).92 The predominant themes in Fouilles are distinctly Beckettian in nature: weakness, exhaustion, linguistic failure. Like Beckett, Juliet concerns himself with the torturous predicament of the writing self as it attempts to find the words to capture its own nature, this predicament being characterized by impossibility and necessity – “that which I am compelled to do,” he writes, “has become impossible”93 – and by the nothingness of that which is to be rendered in language. For all the emphasis upon impossibility, however, in Fouilles, and then across Juliet’s œuvre more generally, progress is nonetheless made toward a revelation of the self in the language of poetry. In other words, he moves away from any rigorous adherence to impossibility, and either to a stalled dialectic or to a dialectic of enlightenment of the kind identified by Horkheimer and Adorno that proved so influential for Sebald’s writing of the negative. This is indicated as early as the final poem in the first part of Fouilles, in which Juliet writes: “forces weak / exhausted / but step by step / day 88 89

90 91 92

Ibid., p. 114. Ibid., pp. 114, 138. On the first occasion on which he refers to this “nothing to say,” Juliet places the expression in quotation marks (ibid., p. 114), suggesting that, in all likelihood, he has taken it up from Beckett. Ibid., p. 117. Charles Juliet, Fouilles, suivi de L’œil se scrute, Approches, Une lointaine lueur (Paris: P.O.L, 1998), p. 15. All translations from this volume in the present chapter are my own. Ibid., p. 17. 93 Ibid., p. 20.

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by day / I make progress / draw nearer / to that point / which moves / back / and beneath so much / ruin / rubble / disgust / the secret / to be unearthed / shines.”94 While that which is to be captured in language may retreat before it, there is nonetheless a drawing nearer to the ungraspable and a clearer perception of it. Furthermore, far from moving toward ever-more radical forms of unwording, Juliet heads in precisely the opposite direction, without ever abandoning his commitment to the ethics of weakness or nonmastery, the understanding and thereby a certain negation of the self remaining an abiding principle of his art. This movement away from the experience of the impossibility of expression, and the linguistic negativism required in the face of that impossibility, is reflected in one of Juliet’s most important works, the autobiographical narrative Lambeaux (“Shreds,” 1995), which is written in the second person and takes as its subject the tragic life and death of his mother, his own early years, and his slow and painful emergence as a writer. The suffering that is described in this autobiographical work is extreme and includes not only the attempted suicide of his mother and his own permanent separation from her when he was just one month old, but also her death in the mental hospital in which she was incarcerated following her suicide attempt. His mother’s death is the result of a deliberate policy under the Vichy regime to starve those considered to be “subhuman.” And yet, without ever avoiding these many darknesses, Lambeaux nonetheless gestures toward the coming into being of a writer with the linguistic power to record that suffering, and who can do so in a manner that involves the overcoming of the experience of linguistic failure and a concomitant step beyond linguistic negativism.95 Juliet’s diaries are also significant for any consideration of the ends of literary unwording in Europe because they record his visits to various European art galleries and his meetings with the Dutch painter Bram van Velde (1895–1981). Painting is of particular importance to Juliet because it seems to offer a way out of the language crisis. Following a visit to the Netherlands in 1967, where he had seen works by Van Gogh and Mondrian, Juliet notes that he feels a much greater affinity for painters than he does for writers because the former can express themselves without words and without the intervention of the intellect. The language of painting is, he asserts, unlike the language of literature, “essentially the 94 95

Ibid., p. 32. I would like to take this opportunity to express my thanks to Charles Juliet for his kindness in agreeing to meet with me in Paris on December 27, 2016 to discuss his life and work, including the experiences described in Lambeaux.

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language of the sacred”; it is more “mysterious” than the language of literature and, thus, “much less unsuited to grasp the ineffable.”96 For Juliet, the painter who stands out above all others in his commitment to finding a means to express the ineffable is Bram van Velde. This is a judgment shared by Beckett, as evidenced by the latter’s critical essays on van Velde in the late 1940s.97 In van Velde’s art, Beckett sees a process of “endless unveiling” (dévoilement sans fin) directed toward “the ununveilable, the nothing, the thing anew” (l’indévoilable, le rien, la chose à nouveau).98 Such an art is, Beckett argues, fully committed to achieving the impossible. Juliet’s recollections of his meetings with van Velde between 1964 and 1977 support Beckett’s assessment, revealing an artist who sees himself as unremittingly committed to achieving the impossible.99 Van Velde’s experience as an artist is characterized by weakness, inability, impossibility, destitution, failure – and perseverance. According to van Velde, the artist’s task is to “seek the face of that which has no face.” He strives to paint the “impossibility of painting.” For him, to paint is to “approach the nothing, the void”; it is to direct oneself toward the “unknown” (inconnu).100 Any other objective is without value for the artist, in van Velde’s view, and results in something other than genuine artistic expression. To paint the impossibility of painting, or to express the inexpressible, it is necessary, according to van Velde, to pursue an aesthetic via negativa. The artist must be stripped of all resource, must be “without knowledge, without power, without will” (sans savoir, sans pouvoir, sans vouloir).101 The painting must be an “annihilation” (anéantissement), a “destruction” of everything that stands in the way of seeing.102 This claim accords perfectly with Beckett’s assessment of van Velde’s procedure as one of endless unveiling. It also establishes a clear link with Alberto Giacometti’s post–World War II work, in which figures emerge out of a process of subtraction and effacement – as Giacometti puts it, “I make only by 96 97

98 99 100 101

Juliet, Journal II, p. 209. Roger Laporte, too, devotes one of his only essays on the visual arts to the work of Bram van Velde. See Roger Laporte, “Cette petite chose qui fascine,” in Études, pp. 319–33. First published in 1980, Laporte’s essay on van Velde is dedicated to Charles Juliet. Samuel Beckett, “Peintres de l’empêchement,” in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (London: John Calder, 1983), pp. 133–7 (p. 136). Juliet’s recollections of his meetings with Bram van Velde between 1964 and 1977 were brought together in the volume Rencontres avec Bram van Velde, first published by Fata Morgana in 1978. Bram van Velde in Charles Juliet, Rencontres avec Bram van Velde (Paris: P.O.L, 2016), pp. 21, 30, 33. Van Velde in ibid., p. 54. 102 Van Velde in ibid., pp. 56, 66.

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unmaking” (Je ne fais qu’en défaisant)103 – this process of unmaking resulting neither in pure emptiness nor in works that could be described as either finished or perfected.104 For the artist to glimpse the essential – the unsayable, the invisible, the unknown – and to capture it in the work of art, requires, then, an unremitting labor of the negative, not a making but an unmaking. Van Velde’s mature paintings certainly seem to challenge the idea of art as representational, while never being categorizable simply as abstract. That said, the artist’s use of vibrant colors is significantly at odds with any Beckett-inspired art of shadows. While the painter may be someone who “‘cannot make use of words,”105 this does not mean that literature simply becomes irrelevant. Like Juliet, van Velde expresses his great admiration for Baudelaire and, above all, for Beckett. Indeed, van Velde considers Beckett’s The Unnamable to offer an image of the contemporary human being that is “more faithful” and “more impressive” than that granted by any other contemporary work of art, including any work of visual art.106 And just as Beckett situates his own commitment to a literature of the unword in opposition to Joyce’s “apotheosis of the word,” so van Velde places his conception of art in opposition to what he sees as Picasso’s art of mastery, productivity, and affirmation.107 For all his appreciation of Beckett’s œuvre, however, van Velde nonetheless considers words to be a “power” (puissance), and, given his commitment to powerlessness and destitution as the only means by which to approach the essential, he paints to “kill the word” (tuer le mot).108 That words have a power is the central problem for literature, for power is at odds with the experience of destitution, of radical negation, that is required if the work of art is to disclose the “unsayable” (indicible). Words suited to the “unknown” (inconnu) will always be hard to find because of the conventional nature of language. According to van Velde, painting and music are, for this reason, better able to express the unknown than is literature. This suggests that the impossibility faced by the painter may in fact be less great than the one faced by the writer, and even that the impossible may become possible for the painter. Indeed, van Velde states 103 104

105 107

Alberto Giacometti, cited in Charles Juliet, Giacometti (Paris: Hazan, 1985), p. 82 (my translation). Giacometti insists that his postwar works cannot ever be either finished or perfected, that they are forms of questioning, attempts “to understand a little better what I see,” without any possibility of reaching a satisfactory end (Alberto Giacometti, “La Voiture démythifiée,” Arts–Lettres–Spectacles 639 [October 9–15, 1957], 1, 4; my translation). Van Velde in Juliet, Rencontres, p. 23. 106 Van Velde in ibid., p. 47. See Juliet, Rencontres, pp. 68–9. 108 Van Velde in Juliet, Rencontres, pp. 61, 98.

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that his life as an artist is the “story of the impossible becoming possible.”109 For all his admiration of Beckett’s work, then, the implication is that the painter can reasonably hope to achieve what the writer cannot, given the nature of their respective mediums. Ultimately, for all his affinities with Beckett, and despite his having provided an illustration for the first book publication of Blanchot’s The Madness of the Day in 1973,110 van Velde’s idea that progress can be made toward achieving the impossible, and that the impossible can even become possible, given the right form of negative approach, sets him apart from the aesthetic of the modern European literature of the word in its most extreme forms. That said, the difference between van Velde’s position on impossibility and that taken by Beckett helps to clarify why the idea that linguistic negativism leads ultimately either to silence or to another art form (including mime, as in Beckett’s œuvre) is more questionable than might at first seem to be the case. For the nature of the modern European literature of the unword is precisely its remaining unremittingly subject to the twin principles of necessity (or obligation) and impossibility. As soon as the impossible becomes possible, as soon as silence replaces the word, that literature of the unword disappears, not in the sense that it has achieved its ends, but rather in the sense that those ends have been abandoned. For the literature of the unword is a process, and one that is, strictly speaking, interminable. While it can be interrupted or abandoned, it can never be ended in the form of a consummation. 109 110

Van Velde in ibid., p. 90. Maurice Blanchot, La Folie du jour (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1973).

conclusion

The Art of Failure

The intensive linguistic negativism that characterizes the modern European literature of the unword enacts a negation of that which necessarily remains present, albeit in its negated form. The works that emerge from this procedure are ones in which it is not an absence of words but rather a process of unwording that is left to be read. The negations of this literature of the unword can never be absolute, either in the sense of a pure negation without remainder or in the Hegelian sense of a sublation (Aufhebung). What one might, taking up Beckett’s last word on the matter, describe as the folly of a literature of the unword lies precisely in this commitment to the impossible, an impossible that can never afford to resolve itself into the possible, and that necessarily renders the literary work a failure, but a failure that may just be “better” – to use Beckett’s own word from Worstward Ho – than any success. The linguistic negativity that is so characteristic of this modern European literature of the unword is errant, then, in its being without achievable end (telos). Therein lies both its power and its powerlessness. If the politics of such a literature is no less nominalist than its aesthetic, then that politics is subject to a similar principle. The political charge that attaches to the performance of the negative in this literature of the unword, in its direct engagement with the politics of language, and the challenge of finding the words for that which, in its monstrosity, appears to exceed the sayable is one that can never afford to resolve itself into a positive political program. Therein lies both the power and the powerlessness of that politics. The modern European literature of the unword is political, and sometimes very explicitly, if also ambiguously, so. As we have seen, Beckett’s penultimate play, Catastrophe (1982), written in support of the imprisoned Czech writer and politician Václav Havel, is a case in point. In response to a letter from Havel thanking Beckett for this work, Beckett makes it very clear how important this particular work was to him: “To have helped you, 242

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however little,” he writes to Havel in May 1983, “and saluted you and all you stand for, was a moment in my writing life that I cherish.”1 No less political was Beckett’s unremitting refusal to permit his plays to be performed before segregated audiences in apartheid South Africa. Similarly, many of Celan’s poems explicitly address key moments in modern political history, from the murder of the German Spartacists Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht to the war in Vietnam, while Sebald’s entire œuvre stands as a critique of Nazism, while only rarely referring directly to it. This political dimension is arguably at its most ambiguous in the work of Blanchot because while his postwar political allegiances are with the far left, and while he was a leading figure in the opposition to the Algerian War, both his fictional and his critical works tend, as we have seen, to disturb any clear distinction between the negativity upon which they insist, in the form of “endless dying,” and the negativity that he sees as characteristic of the experience of the Nazi death camps. This political dimension to the literature of the unword remains, however, for the most part within the negative, and when it manifests itself in the positive, it does so in a manner that tends to be politically nominalist, related to a very particular moment and resisting the extrapolation of any political program. Whether such a literature of the unword – characterized as it is by a principle of necessary failure, by impossibility rather than possibility, by interminability rather than consummation, and by a form of negativity that leads to no positivity – can constitute a form of resistance to the many darknesses that it sees in modernity thus remains the most challenging of questions. One is returned here to the disturbing thought in Kafka’s last story, “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk”: Her singing is supposed to save her “race,” but, Kafka writes, “if it does not drive away the evil, [it] at least gives us the strength to bear it.”2 If the modern European literature of the unword abides in the negative, and if it engages in forms of linguistic negativism that cannot, in principle, ever achieve their ends, then is it not ultimately a form of capitulation to those dark times against which it turns its critical light, giving its writers and some of its readers the strength to bear the darkness, but lacking the power to counter it? Beckett’s abiding

1 2

The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume IV: 1966–1989, ed. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More Overbeck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), p. 614. Kafka, Collected Stories, p. 239; Franz Kafka, Drucke zu Lebzeiten, ed. Hans-Gerd Koch, Wolf Kittler, and Gerhard Neumann (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1994), p. 360.

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conviction that “to be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail,”3 a conviction to which both Edmond Jabès and Bram van Velde explicitly subscribe, can undoubtedly be seen as a rejection of the idea, shared by many in both the historical avant-garde and modernism more generally, that literature has the power to enable cultural transformation through forms of linguistic renewal. It might seem easy to dismiss this modern European literature of the unword as a form of defeatism, nihilism, or even political cowardice. Georg Lukács’s well-known attack on modernism is in many respects an attack on precisely this literature of the unword, although his lumping together of Kafka, Joyce, and Beckett tends to obscure the precise target because it misses the crucial distinction made by Beckett in his 1937 letter between an art of power, mastery, and the possible, and an art of powerlessness, loss of mastery, and the impossible; between an art of linguistic renewal that attempts the overcoming of language skepticism and an art of linguistic negativism that holds to the idea that any such overcoming is impossible, and that only by way of unwording can the experience of a dark modernity begin to be articulated.4 That missed distinction notwithstanding, Lukács’s critique cannot simply be dismissed as wrong-headed if applied to the literature of the unword. The insistence upon impossibility, and upon the need to remain within the negative, committed unremittingly to a literature of the unword the politics of which can only ever be nominalist is certainly not something that can be unambiguously celebrated as a form of resistance to, or as an overcoming of, the modernity against which it turns its critical light. That said, were we able to learn anything from history, then among the things that might have been learned would be that the greatest transformations, be they for the better or for the worse, often have their origins in the most unexpected, the more marginal of places. In Sebald’s work, for instance, one finds the idea, deriving in part from Walter Benjamin, that the small, the marginal, the fragile, the seemingly insignificant can hold the promise of a better world. Benjamin’s thinking of history remains revolutionary to the end – the messianic interruption of mundane history to which he refers in the 1940 “Theses on the Philosophy of History” being 3

4

In his dialog with Georges Duthuit on the work of Bram van Velde, first published in 1949, Beckett declares that “to be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail,” that “failure is his world and to shrink from it, desertion, art and craft, good housekeeping, living” (Beckett, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn [London: John Calder, 1983], p. 145). For Lukács’s attack on modernism, see Georg Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, trans. John and Necke Mander (London: Merlin, 1963).

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nothing less than the most extreme form of revolutionary action, albeit one that seems to dismiss any form of concerted communal action to make that revolution possible. In this respect, Benjamin is at one with the kind of apocalyptic mythical thinking that Frank Kermode considers to be one of the principal characteristics of early modernism, as distinct from the late modernism that he finds in Beckett’s post–World War II works.5 Adorno’s conception of “radically darkened art” offers a potentially less bloody prospect in the wake of a century of particularly bloody political revolutions on both the Left and the Right. For Adorno – or, more accurately, for the Adorno who has read Kafka, Beckett, and Celan in the postwar, post-Holocaust years – the work of art can, at the very most, stand as a “haven of hope” (Zuflucht der Hoffnung) in dark times, but only on the condition that, in line with Kafka’s Zürau aphorism, it performs the negative, avoiding any form of positivity, including any form of direct political engagement of the kind most obviously championed by Brecht and the many European writers who followed his lead in the postwar years. For Adorno, only by abiding in the negative can the work of art avoid becoming pure ideology. As he puts it of Hegel, there is a moment when, “despite having made the principle of determinate negation its vital nerve,” his philosophy “passes over into affirmation and therefore into ideology.”6 The implications of Adorno’s argument are, of course, that the haven of hope that is the wholly negative work of art can never result in the realization of that better world the image of which it is – albeit negatively. The nature of modernity’s darkness is such that any attempt to counter it with a vision of light will, for Adorno, only intensify the darkness. As Adorno puts it in his 1965 lectures on metaphysics, it is impossible “to insist after Auschwitz on the presence of a positive meaning or purpose in being.”7 As Stephen Bronner observes in his short history of the Frankfurt School, significant political consequences follow from Adorno’s conclusion regarding all forms of positivity. The original concern with “organized resistance and institutional politics” gives way to an “aesthetic-philosophical form of critique.”8 Furthermore, Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of the Enlightenment, which tends to reduce 5 6 7 8

See Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 115. Theoder W. Adorno, Metaphysics: Concept and Problems, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), p. 144. Ibid., p. 101. Stephen Bronner, Critical Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 7, 110.

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reason to rationalization, fails to consider its own roots in the European Counter-Enlightenment. Crucially, Nazism draws from this CounterEnlightenment as much as it does from the Enlightenment; and, pace Horkheimer and Adorno, the former is not simply the dialectical image of the latter. While it is arguably not the case, as Bronner insists, that the idea of the dialectic of enlightenment is no more than a “fiction,”9 unless one first rethinks the idea of fiction, it is certainly possible to challenge the idea that Nazism and other forms of totalitarianism are either purely Enlightenment or purely Counter-Enlightenment in their origins. The conviction that any form of positivity is to be avoided can indeed be found to underlie the work of the major European practitioners of a literature of the unword, for whom linguistic negativism is the only possible refuge, undoing the done, unmaking the made, unsaying the said, abiding with the impossible, because all doing, all making, all saying, all possibility seems to have proven to be so disastrous. Thus, if Adorno’s conception of radically darkened art is subject to critique, then so, too, is the aesthetic underpinning this unwording practice. The difference, of course, is that while a philosophical position may come to be adjudged as wrong, a work of art, or even something resembling a literary movement, cannot be judged in quite the same way, the truth value of art being necessarily distinct from the truth value of philosophy. The literature of the unword that emerges in the wake of historical catastrophes the nature of which challenged all faith not only in God, but also in reason and the Enlightenment project founded upon the idea of the human as the rational animal, may – and, indeed, should – be seen within that historical context. To contextualize the modern European literature of the unword in this way is not, however, to collapse the aesthetic distance that would prevent this literature from being anything more than an all-too-predictable historical phenomenon. Rather, it is to attempt to appreciate the critical spirit of that literature, and thus to appreciate it for what it is. The commitment to performing the negative that lies at the heart of the literature of the unword entails, then, a commitment to the impossible. It is justified by the writers’ sense that failure is all there is for them, but that, crucially, there is more than one kind of failure. The art of failure to which they devote themselves is one that, like Gracchus’s failure to die, bears witness to a dark time that it would be the height of naïvety to believe the literary work could ever effectively counter. That several European writers 9

Ibid., p. 111.

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should, in the remarkable form of a literature of the unword, have sought to bear witness to a vision of ruination, disaster, calamity, the monstrosity of what happened, and what continues to happen, and that they should have committed themselves to the folly of seeking to achieve the impossible, to find the unwords for that which resists the word – might this not be as much as, and perhaps even far more than, one could ever reasonably ask of them?

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Index

Titles beginning with definite and indefinite articles, in English and in foreign languages, are sorted on the following word in both main and subheadings. L’Abbé C (Bataille), 50 “Acclimatized-disclimatized” (Celan), 178n111 Action Française, 8 Acts without Words (Beckett), 217–18 “The Admiral Iis Looking for a House to Rent” (Tzara, Janco and Huelsenbeck), 51–2 Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory, 214 on art’s performance of the negative, 245 on Beckett, 6–8, 104, 122, 123n110, 185, 188–9, 245 Blanchot and, 87n134, 134, 157 Bronner on, 245 on Celan, 164–5, 182, 245 death as impossible in, 87–8, 88n135 Dialectic of Enlightenment, 173–4, 188, 194 vs. false overcoming of nihilism, 192, 214 Hegel and, 245 on Hölderlin, 176 on hopeless forms of art, 214, 245 on “The Hunter Gracchus,” 87–8, 88n135, 134 Hutchinson on, 188n1, 191 on the individual as historical category, 7 on Kafka, 61–2, 79, 188–9, 245 linguistic negativism and, 6–7 on literature after Auschwitz, 134, 245 on modernity’s barbarism, 7–8, 187–8 on Nazi death camps, 87–8, 88n135, 134 negative aesthetics and, 7–8, 87n134 Negative Dialectics, 192, 214 on nihilism, 192, 214 on the performance of the negative, 245 vs. political literary engagement, 245 positivity critiqued by, 245 on radically darkened art, 188, 193–4, 246 Sebald and, 193–4 on totalitarianism, 246 univers concentrationnaire and, 87n134, 87–8

Aesthetic Theory (Adorno), 214 Afar a Bird (Beckett), 104 After Nature (Sebald), 195 “After the Fact” (Blanchot), 134–5 Albiach, Anne-Marie, 19–20, 99 “Alchemical” (Celan), 171 Alexander, Archibald, 117–18, 118n91 aliterature, 5n6 “All Souls” (Celan), 166–7 “All’estero” narrative (Sebald), 195 “Ambros Adelwarth” (Sebald), 197, 201–2 Améry, Jean, 189n6, 192, 216 Aminadab (Blanchot), 138n52, 141, 142–3 “Answered” (Celan), 175 anti-literature, 12 anti-Semitism, 8, 9n17, 189 aporia, 108, 109, 147 Arendt, Hannah, 4 Artaud, Antonin aliterature and, 5n6 vis-à-vis extreme experience, 44–5 incantational writing by, 43–4 language skepticism of, 42–5 linguistic negativism of, 5–6, 35–6, 42–3 mental illness of, 42 negative affixes and terminologies in, 48 Nerve Scales, 42 nominalism of, 44 non-European languages embraced by, 42–3, 51 poetry of, 43–4 silence and, 42 sound poems and, 4, 43–4 Suppôts et suppliciations, 43–4 The Theatre and Its Double, 43 thought/language relationships in, 42–3n15, 42 To Have Done with the Judgement of God, 43 “As I” (Celan), 184

266

Index Ash Wednesday (Eliot), 52–3 “Aspen Tree” (Celan), 162 “Assisi” (Celan), 164 “At Mouth Level” (Celan), 167–8 At the Mind’s Limits (Améry), 189n6 “An Attempt at Restitution” (Sebald), 192–3, 213–14 Auerbach, Frank, 197n37 Auschwitz, 123n110, 134, 185. See also Holocaust Austerlitz (Sebald), 189–90, 191–2, 198–200, 202–4, 205, 206–8, 211–13, 215–16 Awaiting Oblivion (Blanchot), 153n125, 154 Bacon, Francis, 21 Ball, Hugo, 39–40 Balzac, Honoré de, 28, 36 Barnes, Djuna, 3 Barthes, Roland, 17–18, 50, 156 Bassani, Giorgio, 192 Bataille, Georges L’Abbé C, 50 aliterature and, 5n6 Beckett and, 45, 50 Blanchot and, 45n21, 50, 139 Blue of Noon, 48–50 Cioran and, 45 corpses in, 47, 49 decomposition in, 45n23 enactment of linguistic negativism in, 232 vis-à-vis extreme experience, 44–5, 49 formlessness and, 45n24, 47n32, 47, 48, 54 Hegel and, 128 The Impossible, 50 language skepticism of, 45–50 Laporte and, 232 Leiris and, 45n21 linguistic negativism of, 5–6, 45–50 necrophilia in, 45n23, 47n31 negative affixes and terminologies in, 47–50 negative community and, 124 negativities doubled in, 47 negativity as unconditional in, 189 non-Hegelian features in, 47n33 Le Petit, 49–50 “Rotten Sun,” 45 Sebald and, 45 Story of the Eye, 45–9, 46n25 the void/emptiness (le vide) in, 48–9 Baudelaire, Charles, 7, 20, 36–7, 161n8, 164–5, 240 Beckett, Samuel. See also Kaun, Axel; The Unnamable; Worstward Ho Acts without Words, 217–18 Adorno on, 6–8, 104, 122, 123n110, 185, 188–9 Afar a Bird, 104

267 aliterature and, 5n6 anti-literature and, 12 aporia in, 108, 109 on the arts of power vs. powerlessness, 244 Bataille and, 45, 50 Blanchot and, 102, 126–7, 129–30, 135, 140, 150, 152, 153n125,126, 154, 157, 218 “The Capital of the Ruins,” 12–13 Catastrophe, 123n111, 124, 242–3 Celan and, 127, 162, 164, 165n33, 172, 173–4, 176–7, 179, 187 Céline and, 55 clichés in, 112–13 comment dire, 217–18 Company, 122n108 “Dante . . . Bruno . Vico .. Joyce,” 91 Democritus and, 117–18 on destruction of language, 98–9 disintegration/decomposition in, 25n34, 94n13, 95, 106–7, 108–10, 221 Dream of Fair to Middling Women, 93, 94–6, 97, 98–9, 229n56 Eleutheria, 107 T. S. Eliot and, 97n25, 97, 99 enacting catastrophe through literature, 190 Endgame, 7–8, 104, 205, 233 Enlightenment concepts and, 7, 72 epanorthosis in, 10, 76, 109, 110, 114, 146, 223 on failure as inevitable for artists, 242, 243–4, 244n3 Finnegans Wake and, 90–2 French as literary language of, 94–5 in the French Resistance, 100, 124, 135 German literature and, 93n11, 94n12 in Germany, 1n1, 1–2, 3, 93–4, 98, 100 Geulincx and, 118n93, 118 Gorgias and, 161n6 Havel and, 242–3 Hölderlin and, 94n12, 99, 100–1 How It Is, 115n85, 127n4, 217–18 on humanity in ruins, 13n28, 14, 104, 105, 127, 158, 221 Ill Seen Ill Said, 118n92, 122n108 impossibility/necessity of writing and, 66, 100–2, 103–4, 107–8, 119, 126–7, 127n2, 158, 173–4, 215, 227 Jabès and, 221, 243–4 vs. Joyce, 1–2, 90–2, 96, 98, 99n33, 100–1, 105, 240 on Joyce, 50, 57, 59, 96, 98 Joyce and, 95n18, 106, 114, 125 Juliet and, 235, 237n89

268

Index

Beckett, Samuel (cont.) Kafka and, 65–6, 67, 72, 76, 82–3, 96–7, 100, 102–3, 103n48,49, 109, 111, 112, 115–16, 123, 127 Kermode on, 245 “Lady Love” translated by, 35–6 language crisis and, 1–2, 101, 106 language skepticism of, 1–2, 57, 95–6, 97–8, 100–1, 104, 107, 121, 125, 186 language veil in, 1, 98, 101, 161 Laporte and, 227, 228, 231, 233–4 Lessness, 104, 115n88, 117, 120, 179 linguistic impoverishment in, 95n17 linguistic negativism (enacted by), 65–6, 82–3, 95–6, 101, 103, 109, 113–14, 119, 121, 124 linguistic negativism of (general), 50, 100–1, 103–4, 105, 106–14, 115–17, 125, 127, 157, 162, 190, 205–6 vs. linguistic renewal, 98, 100–1, 114 literary precursors of, 96, 97, 99 literature of the unword and, 5, 6, 50, 93–4, 99, 113, 119, 123–4, 158, 242 Lord Chandos Letter and, 2, 107–8 Lukács vs., 244 Malone Dies, 55, 91, 106–7 Mauthner and, 25n34, 58, 95n19, 96n20, 99, 100–1, 105–6, 107, 108–10, 113, 160–1, 205 vis-à-vis modern historical catastrophe, 13–14, 20, 100, 104, 105n56, 125, 188 Molloy, 55, 106, 129–30, 205 Murphy, 100, 111, 117–18, 126 musical influences on, 93, 94, 98–9 negative aesthetics and, 96, 98n28,29 negative affixes and terminologies in, 109–12, 115, 118n92,95 negativities doubled in, 215, 228 nominalism in, 101, 123–5, 124n112 nothingness in, 102, 109–10, 117–18 the novel genre abandoned by, 218 the obligation to continue in, 72, 108, 125, 142 vs. overcoming, 193–4 “Painters of the Impediment,” 101–2 painters/painting and, 1, 66, 94, 101–2, 239 parataxis in, 55, 91, 94, 101, 105–6, 110, 112, 115, 119–20, 176 “perhaps” as keyword, 112–13, 150, 233n74 philosophical sources for, 118n91 political content in, 122–5, 123n110, 242–3 on Proust, 231 Proust and Three Dialogues, 96–7 Quad, 217–18 Quadrat I & II, 217–18 Racine and, 95 reduction increasing in writings of, 217–18, 231 on representational impossibility, 101–2

Rimbaud and, 97, 99 Schopenhauer and, 93, 96, 97n23, 104 Sebald and, 190, 192–5, 203, 204–6 silence and, 93–4, 97n27, 109, 114, 153, 213, 229n56 Stein and, 35–6, 50n48, 99n31 Stirrings Still, 122n108 styleless writing and, 94–5 Surrealism and, 35n70, 36, 97 “Text,” 93 Texts for Nothing, 114, 115, 153 unword, concept of, 1–2 unwording in, 67, 103, 109n66, 111–13, 114, 117, 153, 165, 233–4 unwords in, 109–10, 115, 117–19, 120, 121, 176–7 utopia as viewed by, 6–7 van Velde and, 101–2, 235, 238–41 the void (le vide) in, 109, 117, 118n92, 120, 124 Waiting for Godot, 107, 122–3 Watt, 100–1, 104, 105–6, 140 what is the word, 121, 122n108, 217n1, 218 wordlessness in, 108–9 on “Work in Progress,” 57 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 93, 94, 98–9 Die Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache (Contributions to a Critique of Language). See Mauthner, Fritz Bell, Anthea, 215 Benjamin, Walter, 10, 58, 79, 164–5, 194, 244–5 Bernhard, Thomas, 187 Bersani, Leo, 10–11, 16, 17n7 Die Beschreibung des Unglücks (Sebald), 193–4 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud), 203 “Black Notebooks” (Heidegger), 9 Blanchot, Maurice Adorno on, 87n134, 134, 157 “After the Fact,” 134–5 Aminadab, 138n52, 141, 142–3 on Auschwitz, 134 Awaiting Oblivion, 153n125, 154 Bataille and, 45n21, 50, 139 Beckett and, 102, 126–7, 129–30, 135, 140, 150, 152, 153n125,126, 154, 157, 218 on Broch, 54 calamity/disaster (malheur/désastre) in, 13–14, 127, 129–30, 132, 133–5, 150, 154–6, 157, 158 Celan and, 127, 157, 165, 173–4 death as impossible in, 78, 87–8, 88n135, 129, 130–1, 132, 134–5, 137, 143, 152, 155, 156, 189, 218, 243 death of, 136 Death Sentence, 142–4, 143n77, 148–9 Derrida on, 131 on the disappearance of literature, 11–12 emptiness (le vide) in, 132, 133, 147–8, 150–1

Index ending as endless in, 189 vs. the Enlightenment, 128–9, 131, 146–7, 157 epanorthosis in, 10, 146–7, 150, 152, 153–4, 223 “Eternal Recurrence,” 147 failing/errant negativity in, 129–31 Faux Pas, 66, 126, 136 fragmentary writings of, 218n2 “From Anguish to Language,” 126 vs. Hegel, 127–9, 131, 146–7, 152, 173–4 Heidegger and, 128 Holocaust and, 130, 135 “The Hunter Gracchus” and, 200 “The Idyll,” 131, 135–6 immobility/inertia in, 136–7, 138–9, 139n58, 140–4, 145, 146–7, 149–50, 155, 232 impossibility/necessity of writing and, 66, 126–7, 127n2, 129–30, 156, 173–4 The Instant of My Death, 130, 133n28, 218 Jabès and, 219n4, 221 Kafka and, 65–6, 89, 127n4, 129, 133–4, 135, 138n52, 139–40, 154 language neutrality sought by, 156 language’s limitations and, 131n22 Laporte and, 226n42, 229, 232, 233–4 The Last Man, 149–50, 151, 233 “The Last Word,” 131–4, 133n28, 135–6 Levinas and, 133n30, 146 linguistic negativism of, 50, 127, 131, 135–6, 138, 142–3, 145, 146, 148, 149–50, 151–3, 154–7 literature of the unword and, 6, 10 Lord Chandos Letter and, 22–3 The Madness of the Day (“A Story”), 145n88, 146, 148, 229, 241 Mallarmé and, 136, 138, 154 Mauthner and, 136, 138 vis-à-vis modern historical catastrophe, 188 The Most High, 141n64, 142–3, 144, 148–9, 218 nationalism of, 8 negative aesthetics and, 87n134 negative affixes and terminologies in, 131–2, 136–9, 140–1, 145, 154, 155–6 negativities doubled in, 78, 228 Nietzsche and, 147, 149–50 non-dialectical negativity in, 128n6, 129, 135 nothingness in, 126 the novel genre abandoned by, 218 The One Who Was Standing Apart from Me, 147–8 parataxis in, 154 political content in, 243 political shifts of, 135n40, 154–5, 155n128,129 Sade and, 131n21, 135 silence and, 137, 143–4, 147, 213 “The Silence of the Sirens” and, 85n127 The Space of Literature, 129

269

speech in, 144, 148, 152–3 The Step Not Beyond, 151 Thomas the Obscure, 126, 130, 135–40, 137n50, 148, 152, 218 A Throw of the Dice and, 133, 137–8 The Trial and, 133–4 The Unavowable Community, 124n114, 131 univers concentrationnaire and, 87n134, 87–8 The Unnamable and, 142 unwording in, 135–6, 141, 142–4, 146, 150, 152–3, 154, 156–7, 165, 233–4 unwords in, 131–2, 140–1, 146, 147–8, 155–6 van Velde and, 241 When the Time Comes, 145–7 The Writing of the Disaster, 130, 134–5, 148, 151, 155–6 The Blind (Maeterlinck), 33 Bloom, Harold, 62 Blue of Noon (Bataille), 48–50 “Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor” (Kafka), 78 Book of Questions (Jabès), 160, 219–20, 221 Borges, Jorge Luis, 21–2, 202 Bouchet, André du, 19–20, 99 Bouvard and Pécuchet (Flaubert), 17–18, 58 Bowie, Malcolm, 18, 19, 20 “Bread and Wine” (Hölderlin), 213–14 Breathturn (Celan), 161, 174–6, 177, 180–1 Brecht, Berthold, 122–3, 245 Brentano, Franz, 29 “The Bright Stones” (Celan), 170–1 Broch, Hermann, 3, 5–6, 53–4, 87 Brod, Max, 61, 62, 66, 67 Bronner, Stephen, 245, 246 Brueghel, Peter, the Elder, 195, 199 Burnt Norton (Eliot), 52–3 Burroughs, William S., 115 “The Burrow” (Kafka), 64, 82–3, 84, 200–1 “By the undreamt” (Celan), 174–5 Cantos (Pound), 9, 19–20, 50–1 Capital of Pain (Éluard), 35 “The Capital of the Ruins” (Beckett), 12–13 capitalism, 4, 7, 122 “Caravan” (Ball sound poem), 40 The Castle (Kafka), 61, 78–9, 80–1n95, 138n52, 139, 140, 195 catastrophe. See historical calamity/catastrophe/ disaster Catastrophe (Beckett), 123n111, 124, 242–3 “Cats and Peacocks” (Ball sound poem), 40 Celan, Paul abandoned works by, 179–80 “Acclimatized-disclimatized,” 178n111 Adorno on, 164–5, 182, 245 “Alchemical,” 171

270

Index

Celan, Paul (cont.) “All Souls,” 166–7 “Answered,” 175 art as haven of hope, 185 “As I,” 184 “Aspen Tree,” 162 “Assisi,” 164 “At Mouth Level,” 167–8 Beckett and, 127, 162, 164, 165n33, 172, 173–4, 176–7, 179, 187 Blanchot and, 127, 157, 165, 173–4 Breathturn, 161, 174–6, 177, 180–1 “The Bright Stones,” 170–1 “Chanson of a Lady in the Shade,” 162 “La Contrescarpe,” 173 “Crystal,” 162 Death Fugue, 162, 168 dialectic of enlightenment and, 173–4 “Into the Distance,” 167–8 “Do not work ahead,” 182 enactment of linguistic negativism in, 168, 173–4, 179, 184, 185 epanorthosis in, 10, 168, 170, 223 “Eroded,” 173, 176n103 ethico-aesthetic imperative of, 161, 171, 173, 176, 182, 185–6 “An Eye, Open,” 168–9 faith in language retained by, 159, 185–6 “From beholding the blackbirds,” 175 “From the sinking whale forehead,” 184 From Threshold to Threshold, 163, 164–5 on German poetry, post-war, 159–60 “Glimmer Tree,” 170–1 Goll Affair and, 166–7 Gorgias and, 160–1 “The half-gnawed,” 183 “A Hand,” 167–8 “Harbour,” 174–5 “The Heaviness,” 163 Heidegger and, 168n59 “Here,” 163 historical catastrophe and language in, 20, 170–1 Hölderlin and, 172, 176 Holocaust and, 158, 177 “Homecoming,” 167–8 “I Heard Tell,” 163 “I Know,” 163–4 “Imagine,” 177n107 impossibility/necessity of writing and, 173–4 “In the remotest,” 184 “It is no longer,” 171 Jabès and, 219, 221 Kafka and, 127, 162, 165, 173–4, 179, 187 “Landscape,” 174–5

language skepticism of, 158–9, 160, 161, 175–6, 184, 186 Laporte and, 226, 234 “Late- / November,” 182n130 late-word in, 182n130 “Leap centuries,” 181, 182n130 Lightduress, 161, 180–5 linguistic ambiguity in, 35 linguistic negativism of, 127, 158, 161n8, 162, 163–7, 169–77, 190, 218, 223 literature of the unword and, 6, 10 “The Lock Gate,” 171 “Low-lying water,” 167–9 Mandelstam and, 173–4 “Mandorla,” 170 “Marianne,” 162 “Matière de Bretagne,” 168–9 Mauthner and, 160 vis-à-vis modern historical catastrophe, 13–14, 161n8, 168, 176, 179, 184–6, 188 vs. modernity, 173–4 “Mussel-heap,” 181 “Near, in the aortic arch,” 177n106 negative affixes and terminologies in, 10, 162–4, 165–7, 170–1, 172–3, 176, 177n106, 178, 179–85, 218, 223–4 negativities doubled in, 185 negativity in, 181, 182–3, 184n142 The No One’s Rose, 161, 169–71, 172–4, 184, 222 the noem (Genicht) in, 175–6, 179, 182–3 “Notepaper-pain,” 182 “Nothingness,” 184 nothingness in, 168–70, 184–5 “Once,” 175 “One Day and Then Another,” 168–9 “One reading branch,” 183 “The One Who Counted the Hours for Us,” 163 “Open glottis,” 183 “Orphaned,” 177 “Out of the Sea,” 163 “Over mulled and toiled wine,” 178–9 parataxis in, 172, 176, 218 on poetry, 159–60, 185–6 political content in, 243 Poppy and Memory, 162 “Psalm,” 168–9, 170n70 “Pursed at Night,” 163 “Radix Matrix,” 161, 170 “Rapidfire-perihelion,” 183 redemption in, 184 reduction increasing in writings of, 218 Sachs and, 165, 166–7, 222–3 The Sand from the Urns, 162 Sebald and, 213

Index silence and, 159, 160, 161n7, 164, 185–6, 213, 218, 234 “Singable remnant,” 174–5 Snowpart, 161, 183, 184 “Solve,” 175 speech in, 159, 167, 172, 175–6 Speech-Grille, 159, 161, 165n34, 170, 225 “Spiteful moons,” 184 “Stations,” 169 “Stigma,” 162 “Still Life,” 163–4 “Strand,” 163 “Streak,” 167–8 “Stretto,” 168–9 suicide of, 165, 172, 218 Surrealism and, 35n70 “The Syllable Pain,” 173n93 temporal openness in, 185 Tenebrae’d, 179–80 Threadsuns, 161, 174, 176–85, 218 “Threesome Foursome,” 171 “Timeless,” 185 Timestead, 183–4, 218 “To night-order,” 183 “To one who stood before the door,” 170 “To stand,” 174–5 “Together,” 163 “Trust,” 167–8 “Truth,” 178n110 “Tübingen, January,” 171–2 “Two-housed, eternal one,” 170–1 “By the undreamt,” 174–5 “Unwashed, unpainted,” 183 unwording in, 158–9, 164–5, 167–8 unwords in, 165–6, 172–3, 177n107, 180–5 “Voices,” 166–7 “When you lie,” 175 “Who rules?,” 176–7 Windelband and, 160, 161n6 “With a Key That Keeps Changing,” 164 “With Time-reddened Lips,” 164 wordlessness in, 223–4 “The World,” 166–7 “You Too Speak,” 163–4 “Your hand full of hours,” 162 “Zürich, at the Stork,” 222, 223 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand the abject in, 56n71 anti-Semitism of, 8, 9n17 Beckett and, 55 Conversations with Professor Y, 55 Death on Credit, 55, 56 L’École des cadavres, 8–9 ellipses in, 55–6 emotive style of, 55

271

From Castle to Castle, 55 language crisis in, 56 linguistic negativism of, 55–6 linguistic renewal by, 3 misanthropy of, 56n70 negative affixes and terminologies in, 56 North, 55 Les Nouveaux Draps, 8–9 parataxis in, 55 Rigodoon, 55 Trifles for a Massacre, 8–9, 55 “Chanson of a Lady in the Shade” (Celan), 162 Char, René, 135 Chateaubriand, François-René de, 197–8 Cioran, E. M., 45, 189 “Clouds” (Ball sound poem), 40 Coat, Tal, 66, 102 Cohen, Marcel, 219n4 Collin, Françoise, 127n5, 127 comment dire (Beckett), 217–18 communism, 123n111, 124 Company (Beckett), 122n108 concrete poetry, 19–20, 99 Conrad, Joseph, 197–8 consumerism, 36, 56n70 “La Contrescarpe” (Celan), 173 “Contributions to a Critique of Language” (Mauthner). See Mauthner, Fritz Conversations with Professor Y (Céline), 55 Corbière, Tristan, 97, 99 Corngold, Stanley, 64–5n14 “Corsica Project” (abandoned Sebald texts), 198, 202, 207–8 The Counterfeiters (Gide), 55 “Crisis of Verse” (Mallarmé), 16 Critique of Judgement (Kant), 18–19 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant), 25–6 “Crystal” (Celan), 162 Dada in the interwar years, 38–44 Jacob and, 219 language diversity in, 51–2 linguistic negativism in, 5–6, 39n3, 40–1 linguistic renewal in, 3, 236 manifesto of, 38, 40–1 nihilism and, 41n8 nominalism of, 40–1 politics of, 8, 41n11 politics of language as central to, 41 Russian nihilism and, 40–1 simultaneous poems in, 51–2 sound poems of, 4, 5–6, 39–40, 43–4, 59 spaces between words in, 19–20, 51–2, 99 typographical irregularities in, 99

272

Index

Daive, Jean, 20 “Dante . . . Bruno . Vico .. Joyce” (Beckett), 91 Dante Alighieri, 93 de Man, Paul, 138n52 Death Fugue (Celan), 162, 168 The Death of Virgil (Broch), 53–4 Death on Credit (Céline), 55, 56 Death Sentence (Blanchot), 142–4, 143n77, 148–9 Death Still Celebrates Life (Sachs), 222 Deleuze, Gilles, 65 Democritus (pre-Socratic philosopher), 117–18 Derrida, Jacques, 24–5, 131, 145n88, 148, 157, 230, 234 Derrida, Marguerite, 230 “Description of a Struggle” (Kafka), 68 destruction of language, 15, 18, 20–1, 185 dialectic of enlightenment, 173–4, 187–8, 194–7, 199, 209, 246 Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno and Horkheimer), 173–4, 188, 194 Dickens, Charles, 92 “Dirge” (Ball sound poem), 39–40 “Do not work ahead” (Celan), 182 Döblin, Alfred, 204–5 Dostoevsky Fyodor, 40–1 “Dr K. Takes the Waters at Riva” (Sebald), 195, 200–1, 205, 209–10 Dream of Fair to Middling Women (Beckett), 93, 94–6, 97, 98–9, 229n56 Drieu La Rochelle, Pierre, 8, 9n17 Duthuit, Georges, 66, 102 Eagleton, Terry, 123n110 East Coker (Eliot), 52, 54 Eclipse of the Stars (Sachs), 222 L’ École des cadavres (Céline), 8–9 El, or the Last Book (Jabès), 220, 221n16,17, 222 Eleutheria (Beckett), 107 Eliot, George, 36 Eliot, T. S. Action Française and, 8 anti-Semitism of, 9n17 Ash Wednesday, 52–3 Beckett and, 97n25, 97, 99 Broch and, 53, 54 Burnt Norton, 52–3 conversion to Anglicanism, 52–3 “dialect of the tribe” and, 36, 52 East Coker, 52, 54 Four Quartets, 36, 54 language crisis in, 52–3 language diversity in, 51–2 language skepticism of, 52 linguistic negativism of, 5–6, 52–3 linguistic renewal by, 3

Little Gidding, 17, 52, 54 “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” 52 Mallarmé and, 52 negative aesthetics of, 52n57 negative affixes and terminologies in, 52–3 on the purification of language, 17 saying the unsayable in, 236–7 silence and, 52–3 silence vs. literary abandonment in, 52–3 unwording in, 87 The Waste Land, 51, 97n25, 97 on the word vs. the silent/unspoken Word, 52–3, 54n63, 54 Éluard, Paul, 35–6 The Emigrants (Sebald), 189–90, 196, 197n38, 201–2, 207 Endgame (Beckett), 7–8, 104, 205, 233 Enlightenment concepts and ideals. See also dialectic of enlightenment ambiguities of, 215 Beckett and, 7, 123 Blanchot vs., 128–9, 131, 146–7, 157 breakdown of, 10, 38, 72 civilization’s advancements and, 2–3 Counter-Enlightenment vs., 12n26, 246 Hegel and, 128 Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of, 246 Kafka and, 10, 72 literature of the unword vs., 12 modernity vs., 187–8 nihilism and, 12 An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Hume), 24–5 epanorthosis (defined), 10. See also Beckett, Samuel; Blanchot, Maurice; Celan, Paul; Kafka, Franz; Laporte, Roger; The Unnamable; unwording “Eroded” (Celan), 173, 176n103 Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Locke), 24–5 Essay on the Origin of Languages (Rousseau), 33–4 “Eternal Recurrence” (Blanchot), 147 Expressionism, 3, 57, 68 “An Eye, Open” (Celan), 168–9 Fascism, 1–2, 4, 8, 9n17,18, 66. See also Nazism Fathers and Sons (Turgenev), 40–1 Faust, Part One (Goethe), 32 Faux Pas (Blanchot), 66, 126, 136 Fifield, Peter, 6–7n10 Finnegans Wake (Joyce) acoustic nature of, 92n5 Anna Livia Plurabelle section of, 91n3, 92 apotheosis of the word and, 1–2 Beckett and, 90–2

Index form/content fusion in, 91–2 language crisis and, 58, 59, 90 languages created in, 58n79, 59, 90n1, 90, 95 as linguistic renewal, 3, 5–6, 56–60, 90 parataxis in, 91 paronomasia in, 58–60, 90, 93–4 as “Work in Progress,” 1–2, 56–7 Worstward Ho and, 119 First World War. See World War I Flaubert, Gustave, 17n11, 18, 58 Flight and Metamorphosis (Sachs), 222, 223, 225–6 Foer, Jonathan Safran, 10n22 For Anatole’s Tomb (Mallarmé), 20–1 Fordham, Finn, 58n79, 90n1 Fouilles (Juliet), 237–8 Four Quartets (T. S. Eliot), 36, 54 fragmentation (literary), 11, 20–1, 49–50, 51, 68, 92, 154, 218, 220–1 Franke, William, 160 Freud, Sigmund, 34–5, 36, 200, 203–4, 234 “From Anguish to Language” (Blanchot), 126 “From beholding the blackbirds” (Celan), 175 From Castle to Castle (Céline), 55 From Existence to Existents (Levinas), 133 “From the sinking whale forehead” (Celan), 184 From Threshold to Threshold (Celan), 163, 164–5 Fugue (Laporte), 230–1 Fugue 3 (Laporte), 231 Fugue. Supplément (Laporte), 231 “Funes, the Memorious” (Borges), 21–2 “Gadji beri bimba” (Ball sound poem), 40 Genet, Jean, 12 Germany. See Beckett, Samuel; Nazi Germany; totalitarianism Geulincx, Arnold, 118n93, 118 Giacometti, Alberto, 239, 240n104 “The Giant Mole” (“The Village Schoolmaster”) (Kafka), 78 Gide, André, 54, 55 Giotto de Bondone, 195 “Glimmer Tree” (Celan), 170–1 Glowing Enigmas (Sachs), 222, 225–6 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 32–3, 100–1, 105–6, 119, 121, 187 Goll, Yvan and Claire, 166–7 Gorgias, 160, 161n6 Grass, Günter, 192, 214 The Great Wall of China (Kafka short story and collection), 61 Grillparzer, Franz, 209 Grünewald, Matthias, 195 Guattari, Felix, 65

273

“The half-gnawed” (Celan), 183 Hamann, Johann Georg, 24, 33–4 Hamburger, Michael, 172 “A Hand” (Celan), 167–8 “Harbour” (Celan), 174–5 Harvey, Lawrence, 113–14 Hassan, Ihab, 12 Hausmann, Raoul, 40 Havel, Václav, 242–3 Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 197–8 “The Heaviness” (Celan), 163 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Adorno on, 245 Bataille and, 128 Blanchot vs., 127–9, 131, 146–7, 152, 173–4 on death, 128, 129, 144–5 the Enlightenment and, 128, 188 historical dialectic of, 198 Kojève and, 128n7, 128 Mauthner and, 25–6 negativity in dialectics of, 128 Phenomenology of Spirit, 128n7, 128 Heidegger, Martin “Black Notebooks” of, 9 Blanchot and, 128 Celan and, 168n59 on Hölderlin, 214 Mauthner and, 24–5 Nazism and, 9, 213–14 The Origin of the Work of Art, 125 Hengge, Joseph, 201 Herbeck, Ernst, 212–13 “Here” (Celan), 163 Heshel’s Kingdom (Jacobson), 215–16 Hildesheimer, Wolfgang, 192, 214 historical calamity/catastrophe/disaster. See also Beckett, Samuel; Blanchot, Maurice; Celan, Paul; Jabès, Edmond; Kafka, Franz; Laporte, Roger; Sebald, W. G. as historia calamitatum, 6, 190, 194, 214 language crisis resulting from, 187 language’s inability to articulate, 11, 20, 113–14, 154, 212 linguistic negativism and, 12 literary form and, 13–14 literature of the unword and, 6, 13 History of Philosophy (Windelband), 160–1 Hitler, Adolf, 8n16, 9n17, 10 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 22, 37, 187, 193, 211. See also Lord Chandos Letter Hölderlin, Friedrich Beckett and, 94n12, 99, 100–1, 172 “Bread and Wine,” 213–14 Celan and, 172, 176 Heidegger on, 214

274

Index

Hölderlin, Friedrich (cont.) historical calamities and, 194, 213–14 negativities doubled in, 215 parataxis in, 94n12, 176 Sebald on, 194, 213–14 Holocaust Blanchot and, 130, 135, 155 Celan and, 158, 177 humanity in ruins and, 157 Jabès and, 10, 219, 220–1 Kafka and, 66 language crisis resulting from, 187 language’s inability to articulate, 187, 219 late modernist literature and, 6–7n10 literature of the unword and, 10 modernity and, 5–6, 187–8 origins of, 3 Sachs and, 10, 222–3, 224 “Homecoming” (Celan), 167–8 Horkheimer, Max, 173–4, 187, 188n1, 191, 246 How It Is (Beckett), 115n85, 127n4, 217–18 Huelsenbeck, Richard, 51–2 humanity in ruins Beckett on, 13n28, 14, 104, 105, 127 vs. Enlightenment rationality, 105, 187 the Holocaust as, 157 linguistic negativism and, 105 unwording required for articulation of, 158 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 23–4, 33–4 Hume, David, 24 “The Hunter Gracchus” (Kafka) Blanchot and, 143 death and undeath in, 62, 78, 87–8, 88n135, 129, 134, 189, 201, 203–4, 246 Sebald and, 78, 195–6, 200, 201, 203–4, 209–10 Hutchinson, Ben, 188n1, 191, 212n114 “I Heard Tell” (Celan), 163 “I Know” (Celan), 163–4 “The Idyll” (Blanchot), 131, 135–6 Igitur (Mallarmé), 18–19, 129 Ill Seen Ill Said (Beckett), 118n92, 122n108 “Imagine” (Celan), 177n107 The Impossible (Bataille), 50 In Search of Lost Time (Proust), 96–7, 205–6 In the Habitations of Death (Sachs), 222, 223 “In the remotest” (Celan), 184 The Instant of My Death (Blanchot), 130, 133n28, 218 Interior (Maeterlinck), 33 Interpretation of Dreams (Freud), 34–5 interwar years. See also Artaud, Antonin; Bataille, Georges; Beckett, Samuel; Broch, Hermann; Céline, Louis-Ferdinand; Dada;

Eliot, T. S.; Gide, André; Joyce, James; Kafka, Franz; Pound, Ezra; Surrealism language crisis in, 3–4, 38 language skepticism in, 13, 38–43, 50–1 linguistic innovation in, 13 linguistic negativism in, 5 Nazism in, 41 negative utopia theme arising in, 7 political spectrum in, 8–9 “Into the Distance” (Celan), 167–8 The Intruder (Maeterlinck), 33 “Investigations of a Dog” (Kafka), 81 “It is no longer” (Celan), 171 Jabès, Edmond Beckett and, 221, 243–4 Blanchot and, 219n4, 221 Book of Questions, 160, 219–20, 221 Celan and, 219, 221 El, or the Last Book, 220, 221n16, 222 emptiness (le vide) in, 219, 220, 221n16,17, 222 and the ethico-aesthetic imperative, 218 on failure as inevitable for artists, 243–4 fragmentary writings of, 220–1 on God, 219–20, 221n16 the Holocaust and, 10 Jacob and, 219 Kafka and, 221 Laporte and, 235 linguistic negativism of, 160, 219–20 La Mémoire des mots, 219 negative affixes and terminologies in, 220, 221–2 on the negative as generative, 221–2 reduction increasing in writings of, 218 Surrealism and, 219n6 unwording in, 220 unwords in, 220 word play in, 221–2 Jacob, Max, 219 Jacobson, Dan, 215, 216 Jameson, Fredric, 9n21 Janco, Marcel, 51–2 Jolas, Eugene, 3, 57 “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk” (Kafka), 63–4, 81–2, 84–6, 86n131, 197, 243 Joyce, James. See also Finnegans Wake apotheosis of the word and, 1–2, 99, 125, 240 Beckett and, 95n18, 106, 114, 125 Beckett on, 50, 57, 59, 96, 98 Beckett vs., 1–2, 90–2, 98, 99n33, 100–1, 105, 240 Dada sound poems and, 59 Flaubert and, 58 language crisis and, 59

Index language of affirmation in, 59 linguistic negativism and, 58–60 linguistic renewal by, 56–60, 90, 98–9, 100–1 literary precursors of, 92 Lukács vs., 244 Mallarmé and, 57 Mauthner and, 58, 59, 95–6 paronomasia in, 58–60 semiotic vs. symbolic language in, 57–8 stylistic diversity in, 58, 90 Ulysses, 58 vs. the unword, 59 “Work in Progress” (Finnegans Wake), 1–2, 56–7, 90–1, 96 The Judgement (Kafka), 63, 68–9, 71 Juliet, Charles Beckett and, 235, 237n89 diaries of, 238 and the ethico-aesthetic imperative, 218 Fouilles, 237–8 impossibility/necessity of writing and, 235, 237–8 Lambeaux, 238 language crisis and, 236, 237 Laporte and, 235, 239n97,99 linguistic failure overcome by, 238 linguistic negativism of, 237, 238 on modernity as catastrophic, 236 his mother’s sufferings and, 238 negativities doubled in, 235 on negativity as linguistic corrective, 236–7 painters/painting and, 238–41 progress vs. impossibility in, 237–8 reduction increasing in writings of, 218 on saying as missaying, 236 on saying the unsayable, 236–7 self-revelation in, 237–8 silence in, 236 themes of, 237 on the unethical use of language, 236 unwording in, 235, 238 van Velde and, 238–41, 239n99 Vichy regime and, 238 Weller’s discussions with, 238n95 on wordless art, 238 Kafka, Franz. See also “The Hunter Gracchus” Adorno on, 7–8, 61–2, 79, 188–9 anti-literature and, 12 aphorism 27, 61–2 Beckett and, 65–6, 72, 76, 82–3, 96–7, 100, 102–3, 109, 111, 112, 115–16, 123, 127 Blanchot and, 65–6, 89, 127n4, 129, 133–4, 135, 138n52, 139–40, 154 “Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor,” 78

275 “The Burrow,” 64, 82–3, 84, 200–1 The Castle, 61, 78–9, 80–1n95, 138n52, 139, 140, 195 Celan and, 127, 162, 165, 173–4, 179, 187 death as undeath in, 78, 129 death of, 81–2 “Description of a Struggle,” 68 enacting catastrophe through literature, 190 enactment of linguistic negativism in, 69–70, 71, 86, 87, 109 ending as endless in, 69–70, 71–2 Enlightenment concepts undermined in, 72 epanorthosis in, 10, 82 Expressionism’s influence on, 68 “The Giant Mole” (“The Village Schoolmaster”), 78 The Great Wall of China, 61 the Holocaust and, 66 hope in, 89 impatience as theme in, 72–3 impossibility/necessity of writing and, 66, 173–4, 215, 227 in the interwar years, 61–2, 87 incomplete writings of, 217 the indestructible in, 88n136, 88–9 innocence in, 67, 72–3, 77 “Investigations of a Dog,” 81 Jabès and, 221 “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk,” 63–4, 81–2, 84–6, 86n131, 197, 243 The Judgement, 63, 68–9, 71 language of affirmation in, 59–60 language skepticism of, 62–3, 64, 65n18 linguistic negativism of, 6, 62–3, 64–74, 75, 77–82, 83–7, 100–1, 127 as literalist of the negative, 62 literature of the unword and, 5–6, 10, 59–60, 89, 123 “A Little Woman,” 64, 81–2, 83–4 Lord Chandos Letter and, 22–3, 62–3 Lukács vs., 244 The Man Who Disappeared, 61 Mauthner and, 29, 64–5n14 Meditation, 68 The Metamorphosis, 63, 70n35, 70–2, 71n38, 200–1 vis-à-vis modern historical catastrophe, 13–14, 188 negative aesthetics and, 89, 96–7 negative affixes and terminologies in, 67–78, 70n35, 80–1n95, 83–6, 115–16 negativities doubled in, 86, 215, 228 nihilism and, 12, 88 nothingness (Nichtigkeit) in, 63–4, 67, 86–7 vs. overcoming, 193–4

276

Index

Kafka, Franz (cont.) paronomasia in, 59–60 performing the negative, 61–2, 86–8, 179, 188–9, 221 posthumous publications of, 61 Sachs and, 224 Sebald and, 187, 188–9, 190, 191n11, 193, 195–6, 200–1, 209–10, 215 silence and, 6n8, 213 “The Silence of the Sirens,” 85n127 socio-political contexts for linguistic negativism of, 64–7 The Trial, 61, 69–70, 72–8, 77n80, 115–16, 133–4 tuberculosis, diagnosis of, 6, 61, 87 unbelonging and, 65–7, 78–9, 127 understanding/misunderstanding in, 77, 81 Unglück (misfortune) in, 193 Unruhe (disquiet) in, 67, 80n93, 82 unwording in, 67, 74, 77, 80, 81–2, 84, 87, 112, 165 unwords in, 48–50, 67–8, 70, 72–3, 79–82, 83–4, 86, 88–9, 191 “The Village Schoolmaster” (“The Giant Mole”), 78 “Wedding Preparations in the Country” (titled by Brod), 63–4, 67 “without” (ohne) terminologies in, 75–6 World War I and, 62–3, 64–5, 87, 127 Zürau aphorisms of, 6n8, 61, 72, 86–7, 88, 188–9, 245 Kant, Immanuel, 18–19, 24–6, 32, 188 Kaun, Axel, Beckett’s correspondence with, 1n1, 1, 59, 94, 95n19, 98–9, 100–1, 105, 111, 123, 124n112, 159, 176–7 Kermode, Frank, 9, 245 Klemperer, Victor, 41 Kojève, Alexander, 128n7, 128 “kp’erioum” (Hausmann sound poem), 40 Kraus, Karl, 37n74 Kristeva, Julia, 57n77, 58 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 176, 234 “Lady Love” (Éluard), 35–6 Laforgue, Jules, 97, 99 Lambeaux (Juliet), 238 “Landscape” (Celan), 174–5 language crisis. See also Beckett, Samuel; Blanchot, Maurice; Celan, Paul; Eliot, T. S.; Hofmannsthal, Hugo von; Joyce, James; Juliet, Charles; Kafka, Franz; Lord Chandos Letter; Mallarmé, Stéphane; Mauthner, Fritz; skepticism (language/ linguistic skepticism); Watt arising from historical catastrophe, 187

German-language origins of, 2 in the interwar years, 3, 38 linguistic negativism and, 4–5 linguistic renewal vs., 38 non-verbal representation and, 36 political instabilities generating, 3 language skepticism. See skepticism (language/ linguistic skepticism) Laporte, Roger Bataille and, 232 Beckett and, 227, 228, 231, 233–4 biography in, 227, 230, 232–3, 234–5 Blanchot and, 226n42, 229, 232, 233–4 calamity (nameless) in, 228, 230, 231, 232, 233–4 Celan and, 226, 234 counter-writing in, 230 death in, 232–3 enactment of linguistic negativism in, 232 English-speaking world’s reception of, 227n43 epanorthosis in, 228, 231, 233 and the ethico-aesthetic imperative, 218 Fugue, 230–1 Fugue 3, 231 Fugue. Supplément, 231 historical contexts of, 234 impossibility/necessity of writing and, 227, 228–9, 231–2 Jabès and, 235 Juliet and, 235, 239n97,99 La Veille, 227 language’s inability to articulate calamity in, 228 linguistic negativism of, 227, 228, 232, 234–5 Mallarmé and, 227–8 Moriendo, 232–5 negative affixes and terminologies in, 228, 232 negativities doubled in, 228 Pourquoi? Une voix de fin silence II, 227–8, 229–30 reduction increasing in writings of, 218, 231–2 Sachs and, 234, 235 silence in, 229–30, 234 Suite (Laporte), 231–2 Une vie, 226–7, 233–5 Une voix de fin silence, 227–8, 229–30 unwording in, 235 unwords in, 232 van Velde and, 239n97 wordlessness in, 232 The Last Man (Blanchot), 149–50, 151, 233 “The Last Word” (Blanchot), 131–4, 133n28, 135–6 “Late- / November” (Celan), 182n130 lateness/belatedness theme, 10n23, 152n124, 182n130, 216

Index Lautréamont, Comte de (Isidore-Lucien Ducasse), 57 “Leap centuries” (Celan), 181, 182n130 Lefeu or the Demolition (Améry), 189 Leiris, Michel, 5n6, 45n21, 221–2 Lessness (Beckett), 104, 115n88, 117, 120, 179 Lestrange, Gisèle, 166–7 Levi, Primo, 219 Levinas, Emmanuel, 10n22, 133n30, 146, 234 Lewis, Wyndham, 8n16 Liebknecht, Karl, 243 Lightduress (Celan), 161, 180–5 linguistic negativism. See also Artaud, Antonin; Beckett, Samuel; Blanchot, Maurice; Céline, Louis-Ferdinand; Dada; Eliot, T. S.; Kafka, Franz; linguistic renewal/revolution/ innovation; literature of the unword; Lord Chandos Letter; Mallarmé, Stéphane; Mauthner, Fritz; negative affixes and terminologies; Pound, Ezra; Surrealism; Symbolism/Symbolist movement; A Throw of the Dice; World War II (years following) backward-facing while moving forward, 10–11 impossibilities/possibilities of, 33 in different languages, 13 language’s referential function negated in, 50 limitations of, 11 nominalism and, 12 positive purposes in, 41–2 as productive, 18–19 purposes of, 5 vs. silence, 241 linguistic renewal/revolution/innovation. See also Beckett, Samuel; Joyce, James by Céline, 3 destruction of language vs., 15 by T. S. Eliot, 3 failures of, 8 Finnegans Wake as, 5–6, 58, 59 in modernism, 3 in right-wing modernism, 37 in sound poems, 4–5 in the interwar years, 13 language skepticism overcome by, 244 left-wing modernism, 37 limitations of, 11 linguistic negativism arising in, 4, 37, 38 as literary reaction, 2 Lord Chandos Letter vs., 22–3 as modernist imperative, 37 by Pound, 50–1 by Sollers, 41n10 Symbolism and, 2 writer/reader relationships in, 4

277

linguistic skepticism. See skepticism (language/ linguistic skepticism) literature of the unword. See also Beckett, Samuel; Blanchot, Maurice; Celan, Paul; historical calamity/catastrophe/disaster; Kafka, Franz; Mallarmé, Stéphane; Mauthner, Fritz; modernity; Sebald, W. G.; unwording; World War II (years following) vs. aliterature, 5n6 arts’s position in, 246 as capitulation to modern catastrophe, 243 as commitment to the impossible, 242 defeatism in, 244 disappearance of literature and, 11 European writers striving for, 235, 236–7, 246–7 failure as essential to, 12 impossibility vs. necessity in, 11–12, 28, 241, 243 late modernism and, 6–7n10 linguistic negativism as characteristic of, 8, 9–11, 218, 242, 246 linguistic skepticism arising in, 13 Lukács vs., 244n4 vis-à-vis modern historical catastrophe, 6, 13, 246–7 modernism and, 9–10 nihilism and, 244 nominalism of, 242–3, 244 performing the negative, 246 politics of, 242–3, 244 powerlessness of, 242, 243 as process, 241, 242 as resistance to modernity, 243 as self-validating, 246–7 A Throw of the Dice and, 19 as unconditionally negative, 8 weaknesses of, 244 the word and the Word vs., 54 “A Little Excursion to Ajaccio” (Sebald), 198 Little Gidding (Eliot), 17, 52, 54 “A Little Woman” (Kafka), 64, 81–2, 83–4 Livi, Primo, 88n135 “The Lock Gate” (Celan), 171 Locke, John, 24–5 logocracy, 27 Long, J. J., 206 Lord Chandos Letter (Hofmannsthal) abandonment of literature in, 31–2 Beckett and, 2, 107–8 Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache and, 23 Blanchot and, 22–3 emptiness in, 34 Kafka and, 22–3, 62–3 language crisis in, 21–3, 31–2 language dismissed in, 101

278

Index

Lord Chandos Letter (Hofmannsthal) (cont.) vs. linguistic renewal, 22–3 Mauthner and, 24, 31–2 modernism in, 21n23 negative modifiers in, 22–3 nominalism and, 21–2, 24, 63 non-linguistic representation and, 33 Sebald and, 22–3, 211 silence in, 23, 31–2, 41 Thomas the Obscure and, 136 A Throw of the Dice and, 20–1 “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (Eliot), 52 “Low-lying water” (Celan), 167–9 Löwy, Jizchak, 193 Lukács, Georg, 122, 244 Luxemburg, Rosa, 243 Madame Bovary (Flaubert), 17 Madaule, Pierre, 129 The Madness of the Day (“A Story”) (Blanchot), 145n88, 146, 148, 229, 241 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 33n65 Malherbe, François de, 94 Mallarmé, Stéphane. See also A Throw of the Dice anti-literature and, 12 on the arbitrariness of language, 16 Blanchot and, 136, 138, 154 Brentano and, 29 Broch and, 53 chance in, 19, 53 “Crisis of Verse,” 16, 36 destruction of language and, 18, 20–1 the “dialect of the tribe” and, 17, 36, 39, 52, 158–9 on the diversity of languages, 16 as editor, 36 enactment of negation in, 18–19, 20, 129 on the epistemological disaster of language, 16 on essential/poetic vs. brute/immediate language, 17n7, 27, 29, 32, 34, 57–8, 92, 227–8 For Anatole’s Tomb, 20n21, 21 Flaubert and, 17–18 Igitur, 18–19, 129 language crisis in, 37, 38 on language purified in music, 17 Laporte and, 227–8 linguistic negativism in, 19–21 literary radicalism of, 17–18 as modernist precursor, 50 music privileged by, 16–17, 93 negative affixes and terminologies in, 19 the number as ordering principle for, 20 Schopenhauer and, 16–17 semantic breakdown in, 18

silence and, 19–20 sound poems and, 40 spaces between words as silences in, 16, 19–20 “Stilled by the crushing cloud,” 17–18 “The Tomb of Edgar Poe,” 16 Malone Dies (Beckett), 91, 106–7 The Man Who Disappeared (Kafka), 61 Mandelstam, Osip, 17, 173–4 “Mandorla” (Celan), 170 “Marianne” (Celan), 162 Marx, Karl, 37 “Matière de Bretagne” (Celan), 168–9 Mauriac, Claude, 5n6 Mauthner, Fritz Beckett and, 25n34, 58, 95n19, 96n20, 99, 100–1, 105–6, 107, 108–10, 113, 160–1, 205 Blanchot and, 136, 138 vs. Brentano, 29 Celan and, 160 enactment of language negation in, 32 ethics/facts distinctions in, 29 on Goethe’s ironic use of language, 32, 100–1, 105–6, 119, 187 Hamann and, 24, 33–4 Hegel and, 25–6 Heidegger and, 24–5 on history, 24, 25n34 Humboldt and, 23–4 Hume and, 24 Joyce and, 58, 59, 95–6 Kafka and, 29, 64–5n14 ladder image of, 27, 28n45 on language as misuse, 24 on language as thought, 23–4, 31 language crisis in, 37, 38 language critique as process in, 28–9, 31–2 on laughter vs. language, 28 linguistic negativism of, 29, 32, 33 literature of the unword anticipated by, 28 vs. logocracy, 27 Lord Chandos Letter and, 24, 31–2 Maeterlinck and, 33 Meister Eckhart and, 24 on the negation of language, 27–8 vs. Nietzsche, 26–7, 29 nominalism of, 24, 28, 59, 64–5n14, 95n19 not-word (Nichtwort) concept of, 32–3, 59, 95n19, 96, 103–4, 176 philosophical systems negated by, 24–7, 28–9 on philosophy as language critique, 24–5, 29n52, 37 on resignation/renunciation vs. language, 28–9 on saying as missaying, 121–2 silence and language in, 28, 29n50, 31–2 Thomas the Obscure and, 136

Index The Unnamable and, 107, 108–10 the void (le vide) in, 27, 109 Wittgenstein and, 29–31 vs. word fetishism, 23, 26, 28, 31, 103–4, 109 “Max Ferber” (Sebald), 197n37 Meditation (Kafka), 68 Meister Eckhart (Eckhart von Hochheim), 15, 24, 26 La Mémoire des mots (Jabès), 219 Memoirs from Beyond the Tomb (Chateaubriand), 197–8 The Metamorphosis (Kafka), 63, 70n35, 70–2, 71n38, 134, 200–1 Michaels, Anne, 10n22 Michaux, Henri, 5n6 modernism apocalyptic thinking in, 6, 7, 9n20 art vs. ideology in, 9n21 enactment of linguistic negativism in, 242 Fascism in, 8, 9n17,18 vis-à-vis historical catastrophe, 8 Hitler’s rise and, 10 the Holocaust and, 6–7n10 in the interwar years, 38, 50–1 language problematics as central to, 17–18 language skepticism in, 13 language’s referential function negated in, 50 late modernism, 6–7n10, 9n21 left-wing modernism, 8n15, 37 linguistic revolution in, 3n3 literary negativism and, 10 literature of the unword and, 9–10 Lord Chandos Letter in, 21n23 Lukács vs., 244n4 Mallarmé’s influence on, 50 Pound’s position in, 50–1 purification of the “dialect of the tribe” in, 17, 52 right-wing modernism, 9n17 Rimbaud’s influence on, 50 semiotic vs. symbolic language in, 57n77, 58 words as objects in, 50 modernity alienation of bourgeois intelligentsia in, 36–7 as catastrophic, 1–2, 7–8, 11, 87–8, 187–8, 189, 214–15, 236 as crisis in representation, 4n4 Enlightenment concepts in, 72 the Holocaust and, 5–6, 187–8 Horkheimer on, 187–8 language crisis in, 59 language skepticism in, 13, 15 linguistic negativism vs., 5 literature of the unword and, 6, 243 Sebald on, 6, 187–8

279

Steiner on, 15 Molloy (Beckett), 106, 129–30, 205 Mondrian, Piet, 23 Moriendo (Laporte), 232–5 The Most High (Blanchot), 141n64, 142–3, 144, 148–9, 218 Murdoch, Iris, 29 Murphy (Beckett), 100, 111, 117–18, 126 music, 16–17, 93, 233, 240 “Mussel-heap” (Celan), 181 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 124n114 Naumann, Hans, 96n20, 99n33 Nausea (Sartre), 126 Nazi Germany Beckett in, 1–2, 93–4, 98, 100 Blanchot vs., 135 death camps of, 87–8, 155 Heidegger and, 9, 213–14 in Améry, 189 in Jabès, 219 in Sebald, 196–7, 200, 201, 208, 215 language transformation in, 158–9 modernity and, 188 Vichy regime and, 238 Nazism. See also Fascism Blanchot and, 134 Celan’s critique of, 243 Enlightenment/Counter-Enlightenment sources for, 246 Heidegger and, 9n19 Kafka and, 66 language and ideology in, 41 as modernist, 8–9 the negative community vs., 124 “Near, in the aortic arch” (Celan), 177n106 negative affixes and terminologies. See Artaud, Antonin; Bataille, Georges; Beckett, Samuel; Blanchot, Maurice; Celan, Paul; Céline, Louis-Ferdinand; Eliot, T. S.; Laporte, Roger; Mallarmé, Stéphane; Sachs, Nelly; Sebald, W. G. negative community, 124 Negative Dialectics (Adorno), 192, 214 Nietzsche, Friedrich on art, 194–5 Blanchot and, 147, 149–50 and the eternal return, 147 the last man, concept of, 149 Mauthner vs., 26–7, 29 nihilism and, 26, 33, 192 Sebald and, 194–5 Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 20–1, 149 “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense,” 26

280

Index

Nietzsche, Friedrich (cont.) the Übermensch in, 149, 150 “The Will to Power,” 20–1, 26n40 nihilism Adorno on, 192, 214 Dada and, 41n8 in literature, 12 Kafka and, 12, 88 Nietzsche and, 26, 33, 192 Russian nihilism, 40–1 Sebald on, 214 Nineteen Eighty-Four (Orwell), 41 The No One’s Rose (Celan), 161, 169–71, 172–4, 184, 222 Nombres (Sollers), 20 nominalism of Artaud, 44 of Dada, 40–1 in Beckett, 123–5, 124n112 in Lord Chandos Letter, 21–2, 24, 63 of Mauthner, 24, 28, 59, 64–5n14, 95n19 medieval nominalism, 24–5 political nominalism, 12, 242–3 non-linguistic/nonverbal representation, 36 North (Céline), 55 “Notepaper-pain” (Celan), 182 “Nothingness” (Celan), 184 Les Nouveaux Draps (Céline), 8–9 numbers vs. language, 20 O’Casey, Sean, 97 Of Grammatology (Derrida), 148 On Ageing (Améry), 189 On Language (Humboldt), 33–4 On Suicide (Améry), 189 “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense” (Nietzsche), 26 “Once” (Celan), 175 “One Day and Then Another” (Celan), 168–9 “One reading branch” (Celan), 183 “The One Who Counted the Hours for Us” (Celan), 163 The One Who Was Standing Apart from Me (Blanchot), 147–8 “Open glottis” (Celan), 183 The Origin of the Work of Art (Heidegger), 125 “Orphaned” (Celan), 177 Orwell, George, 41 Otckakovsky-Laurens, Paul, 235 Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (Jolas, ed.), 56–7, 90–1 Out Beyond the Realms of Dust (Sachs), 222 “Out of the Sea” (Celan), 163 “Over mulled and toiled wine” (Celan), 178–9

The Painter of Modern Life (Baudelaire), 36 “Painters of the Impediment” (Beckett), 101–2 Paolini, Pietro, 198 parataxis. See Beckett, Samuel; Blanchot, Maurice; Celan, Paul; Finnegans Wake; Hölderlin, Friedrich; unwording paronomasia, 58–60, 90, 93–4 “Paul Bereyter” (Sebald), 196–7, 199, 207 Pessimism Past and Present (Plümacher), 104 Le Petit (Bataille), 49–50 Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel), 128n7, 128 Picasso, Pablo, 240 A Place in the Country (Sebald), 194, 207–8 Plato, 15, 23, 24–6 Plümacher, Olga, 104 Poetry and Truth (Goethe), 32, 100–1, 105–6, 121, 187 Poppy and Memory (Celan), 162 Popular Front, 135 The Possessed (Dostoevsky), 40–1 postmodernism, 10n22 Pound, Ezra anti-Semitism of, 9 Cantos, 9, 19–20, 50–1 Italian Fascism and, 8, 9n17 language crisis and, 51 language diversity in, 51 linguistic negativism of, 50–1 linguistic renewal by, 3 literary avant-garde and, 50–1 modernism and, 50–1 non-European languages embraced by, 51 on the purification of the “dialect of the tribe,” 17 spaces between words in, 19–20 A Throw of the Dice and, 51 The Waste Land and, 51 Pourquoi? Une voix de fin silence II (Laporte), 229–30, 234 Proust, Marcel, 96–7, 205–6, 231 Proust and Dialogues (Beckett), 96–7 “Psalm” (Celan), 168–9, 170n70 psychoanalysis, 34, 35n69 “Pursued at Night” (Celan), 163 Quad (Beckett), 217–18 Quadrat I & II (Beckett), 217–18 Racine, Jean, 95, 99 “Radix Matrix” (Celan), 161, 170 Rancière, Jacques, 36 “Rapidfire-perihelion” (Celan), 183 realism, 4, 123n110

Index “Reflections on Sin, Pain, Hope, and the True Way” (Kafka aphorism collection; Brod, ed.), 61 Rembrandt van Rijn, 94 Rigodoon (Céline), 55 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 17 Rimbaud, Arthur, 6, 31–2, 50, 93, 94, 97, 99 Ringelnatz, Joachim, 1 The Rings of Saturn (Sebald), 189–90, 197–8, 201–2, 205, 207, 218n3 Rivière, Jacques, 42 Robertson, Ritchie, 64–5n14 “Rotten Sun” (Bataille), 45 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 33–4 Russia, 4, 40–1, 87–8 Sachs, Nelly Celan and, 165, 166–7, 222–3 Death Still Celebrates Life, 222 Eclipse of the Stars, 222 and the ethico-aesthetic imperative, 218 Flight and Metamorphosis, 222, 223, 225–6 forgetting as a threat in, 222 Glowing Enigmas, 222, 225–6 the Holocaust and, 10, 222–3, 224 In the Habitations of Death, 222, 223 Kafka and, 224 Laporte and, 234, 235 linguistic negativism of, 224, 225–6 negative affixes and terminologies in, 223, 224n32, 226n37 the negative as ambiguous in, 225–6 nothingness in, 223n25, 224 Out Beyond the Realms of Dust, 222 poetics of, 222n20 reduction increasing in writings of, 218 silence in, 234 “Unconquerable,” 225–6 Unruhe (disquiet) in, 223 the unsayable/unrepresentable and, 222n20 unwording in, 223, 224, 226 unwords in, 224n30 wordlessness in, 226 words for the Holocaust dead sought by, 222, 225–6 Sade, Marquis de, 12, 131n21, 135, 188 Salammbô (Flaubert), 17–18 The Sand from the Urns (Celan), 162 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 126, 138n52 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 16, 34, 92, 236 scholasticism, 25 Schopenhauer, Arthur on art, 194–5, 210 Beckett and, 93, 96, 97n23, 104

281

on consolation, 210 on music, 16–17, 93 on nothingness, 27 scholasticism and, 25 Sebald and, 194–5 on the Will, 16–17, 26, 27 Schulz, Georg-Michael, 161 Sebald, W. G. Adorno and, 193 After Nature, 195 “All’estero,” 195 “Ambros Adelwarth,” 197, 201–2 Améry and, 187, 189 on art as consolation, 194–5 on art as redemption, 198–9 on art as resistance, 193–4, 200 on art as restitution, 192–3, 213–14, 215 “An Attempt at Restitution,” 192–3, 213–14 Austerlitz, 189–90, 191–2, 198–200, 202–4, 205, 206–8, 211–13, 215–16 authors critiqued by, 193 Bataille and, 45 Beckett and, 190, 192–5, 203, 204–6 Belgian imperialism and, 197–8 Bernhard and, 187 Die Beschreibung des Unglücks, 193–4 Borges and, 202 on the calamity of the writing subject, 193 Celan and, 213 “Corsica Project,” 198, 202, 207–8 death as impossible in, 78 vs. the dialectic of enlightenment, 194–7, 209 Dialectic of Enlightenment and, 187–8 dialectic of melancholy vs. modernity in, 215 on Döblin, 204–5 “Dr K. Takes the Waters at Riva,” 195, 200–1, 205, 209–10 The Emigrants, 189–90, 196, 197n38, 201–2, 207 enacting catastrophe through literature, 190 enactment of catastrophe through literature by, 6, 8, 190, 191 enactment of linguistic negativism in, 210, 212 ethico-aesthetic imperative of, 187, 189, 190, 192, 193, 215 flight in, 207, 210 fragmentary writings of, 218n3 on Grass, 192 Grillparzer in, 209 on Herbeck, 212–13 on Hildesheimer, 192, 214 on historical calamity vis-à-vis literature, 192–5 on Hölderlin, 194, 213–14 the Holocaust and, 10n22

282

Index

Sebald, W. G. (cont.) “The Hunter Gracchus” and, 78, 195–6, 200, 201, 203–4, 209–10 Hutchinson on, 191, 212n114 impossibility/necessity of writing and, 215 intertextuality of, 187 ironic language in, 187 on Jacobson, 215, 216 “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk” and, 197 Kafka and, 187, 188–9, 190, 191n11, 193, 195–6, 200–1, 209–10, 215 on language and renewal, 212–13 language crisis and, 212 language skepticism in, 211–12 linguistic negativism of, 187–8, 190–1, 192–3, 200, 203–6, 207, 209–15 literature of the unword and, 6, 10 “A Little Excursion to Ajaccio,” 198 Lord Chandos Letter and, 22–3, 211 “Max Ferber,” 197n37 memory and photography in, 208 memory negated in, 206, 207n87 vis-à-vis modern historical catastrophe, 6, 13–14, 188, 189, 190n8, 210–11, 214–15 Molloy and, 205 negative affixes and terminologies in, 68, 190–2, 210–11, 212 negativities doubled in, 215 negativity as unconditional in, 189–90, 192–3, 215 Nietzsche and, 194–5 on nihilism, 214 nothingness in, 168 “out of nowhere” terminologies in, 207–9 painters/painting and, 195, 197–8, 199, 201, 207–8 “Paul Bereyter,” 196–7, 207 A Place in the Country, 194, 207–8 on poetry in catastrophic times, 213–14 Proust and, 205–6 The Rings of Saturn, 189–90, 197–8, 201–2, 205, 207, 218n3 Schopenhauer and, 194–5 silence and, 213 on Tripp, 207–8 Unglück (calamity/misfortune) in, 68, 190n9, 193–201, 197n38, 203, 204–5, 209–10, 213 Unruhe (disquiet) in, 201–3, 204–6, 223 unwording in, 187, 201, 204, 205–6, 210, 211, 215 unwords in, 190–2, 193, 195, 196, 197–8, 200–1, 215 Vertigo, 189–90, 191, 195–6, 201, 205, 206–7, 209–11

World War I and, 197–8 Second World War. See World War II Shakespeare, William, 92, 121n103 Shenker, Israel, 105 Sheppard, Richard, 199 Short History of Philosophy (Alexander), 117–18, 118n91 silence (literary/linguistic silence) Artaud and, 42 T. S. Eliot and, 52–3 in Genet, 12 in anti-literature, 12 in Beckett, 229n56 in Blanchot, 137, 143–4, 147 in Celan, 159, 160, 161n7, 164, 185–6, 213, 218, 234 in Juliet, 236 in Kafka, 6n8 in Laporte, 229–30 in Lord Chandos Letter, 23, 31–2, 41 in poetry, 16 in Sebald, 213 linguistic negativism vs., 241 vs. literary negation, 6 Maeterlinck and, 33 Mallarmé and, 16, 20–1 Mauthner and, 29n50 “The Silence of the Sirens” (Kafka), 85n127 “Singable remnant” (Celan), 174–5 skepticism (language/linguistic skepticism). See also Artaud, Antonin; Bataille, Georges; Beckett, Samuel; Celan, Paul; Kafka, Franz; language crisis; Sebald, W. G.; World War II (years following) among modern French poets, 97 in literature of the unword, 13 in modernism, 13, 50–1 in the interwar years, 38–43, 50–1 modernity and, 15 spread of, 38 Snowpart (Celan), 161, 183, 184 Sollers, Philippe, 20, 41n10 “Solve” (Celan), 175 Sorge, Richard, 141n64 sound poems, 4, 5–6, 39–40, 43–4, 59 The Space of Literature (Blanchot), 129 Spector, Scott, 65, 67 Speech-Grille (Celan), 159, 161, 165n34, 170, 225 “Spiteful moons” (Celan), 184 Stach, Reiner, 65 Stein, Gertrude, 3, 50n47,48, 99n31 Steiner, George, 15, 33, 166 The Step Not Beyond (Blanchot), 151 Sternheim, Carl, 193

Index “Stigma” (Celan), 162 “Still Life” (Celan), 163–4 “Stilled by the crushing cloud” (Mallarmé), 17–18 Stirrings Still (Beckett), 122n108 Story of the Eye (Bataille), 45–9, 46n25 “Strand” (Celan), 163 “Streak” (Celan), 167–8 “Stretto” (Celan), 168–9 Suite (Laporte), 231–2 Suppôts et suppliciations (Artaud), 43–4 Surrealism. See also Artaud, Antonin Beckett and, 35n70, 36, 97 Jabès and, 219n6 Jacob and, 219 linguistic negativism of, 44–5 linguistic renewal in, 3 linguistic revolution sought by, 57 politics of, 8 psychoanalysis and, 34–6, 35n69 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 207 “The Syllable Pain” (Celan), 173n93 Symbolism/Symbolist movement, 2, 3, 15–17, 18 Szondi, Peter, 175 Tal Coat, Pierre, 66, 102, 122 “The Task of the Translator” (Benjamin), 58 Tender Buttons (Stein), 50 Tenebrae’d (Celan), 179–80 “Text” (Beckett), 93 Texts for Nothing (Beckett), 114, 115, 153 The Theatre and Its Double (Artaud), 43 “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (Benjamin), 244–5 Thomas, Merlin, 55, 56n70 Thomas the Obscure (Blanchot), 126, 130, 135–40, 137n50, 148, 152, 218 Threadsuns (Celan), 161, 174, 176–85, 218 “Threesome foursome” (Celan), 171 A Throw of the Dice (Mallarmé) the abyss in, 19, 21 Blanchot and, 133, 137–8 language disintegration on, 99 literary radicalism of, 17–18 literature of the unword and, 19–20 Lord Chandos Letter and, 20–1 negative affixes and terminologies in, 19 negativity in, 19–20 number as ordering principle in, 20, 33 Pound and, 51 spaces between words in, 19–20, 99 Symbolist movement and, 3 Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche), 149 Time Regained (Proust), 96–7

283

“Timeless” (Celan), 185 Timestead (Celan), 183, 218 “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (Borges), 202 To Have Done with the Judgement of God (Artaud), 43 “To night-order” (Celan), 183 “To one who stood before the door” (Celan), 170 “To stand” (Celan), 174–5 “Together” (Celan), 163 “The Tomb of Edgar Poe” (Mallarmé), 16 totalitarianism, 2–3, 4, 211, 246 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein), 29–31 A Treatise of Human Nature (Hume), 24–5 The Trial (Kafka), 61, 69–70, 72–8, 77n80, 115–16, 133–4, 138 Trifles for a Massacre (Céline), 8–9, 55 Tripp, Jan Peter, 207–8 “Trust” (Celan), 167–8 “Truth” (Celan), 178n110 “Tübingen, January” (Celan), 171–2 Turgenev, Ivan, 40–1 “Two-housed, eternal one” (Celan), 170–1 Tynset (Hildesheimer), 214 Tzara, Tristan, 38, 40–1, 51–2, 236–7 The Unavowable Community (Blanchot), 124n114, 131 “Unconquerable” (Sachs), 225–6 the unconscious, 34–5, 36 Une vie (Laporte), 226–7, 233–5 Une voix de fin silence (Laporte), 227–8, 229–30 The Unnamable (Beckett) aporia in, 108, 109 “Beyond Words” as alternate title for, 107 Blanchot and, 142 disintegration/decomposition in, 108–10 ending as endless in, 72 epanorthosis in, 76, 109, 110, 114, 228 genesis of, 109n66 impossibility/necessity of writing and, 107–8 individualism in, 7 language skepticism in, 107 linguistic negativism in, 107–13 Lord Chandos Letter and, 107–8 Mauthner and, 107, 108–10 narrator as linguistic entity in, 108 narrator’s character identification in, 108–9 negative affixes and terminologies in, 82–3 negativities doubled in, 72 parataxis in, 55 silence in, 142 unwording in, 114, 153

284

Index

The Unnamable (Beckett) (cont.) van Velde on, 240 the void in, 118n92 word/Word distinction and, 125 “Unwashed, unpainted” (Celan), 183 unwording. See also Beckett, Samuel; Blanchot, Maurice; Celan, Paul; Eliot, T. S.; Kafka, Franz; Laporte, Roger; linguistic negativism; Sachs, Nelly; Sebald, W. G.; The Unnamable overview, 217–41 catastrophic modernity’s articulation in, 244 epanorthosis in, 11 in Bataille, 49 in Broch, 53 necessity of, 13–14 parataxis in, 11 reductive nature of, 217–18 resisting expression, 217–18 silence as end-point of, 217–18 Valckenborch, Lucas van, 199 Valéry, Paul, 38 Van Gogh, Vincent, 238 van Velde, Bram on achieving the impossible, 239, 241 on Baudelaire, 240 Beckett and, 101–2, 235, 238–41 Blanchot and, 241 on failure as inevitable for artists, 243–4, 244n3 Juliet and, 238–41, 239n99 Laporte and, 239n97 on painting and music vs. literature, 239n97 vs. Picasso, 240 on wordless art, 240 La Veille (Laporte), 227 Vertigo (Sebald), 189–90, 191, 195–6, 201, 205, 206–7, 209–11 “The Village Schoolmaster” (“The Giant Mole”) (Kafka), 78 “Voices” (Celan), 166–7 Waismann, Friedrich, 29 Waiting for Godot (Beckett), 107, 122–3 Walser, Robert, 194 The Waste Land (Eliot), 51, 97n25, 97 Watt (Beckett), 100–1, 104, 105–6, 140 “Wedding Preparations in the Country” (Kafka, titled by Brod), 63–4, 67 Weiler, Gershon, 24, 29n50 Weller, Shane, 238n95 what is the word (Beckett), 121, 122n108, 217n1, 218 When the Time Comes (Blanchot), 145–7

“When you lie” (Celan), 175 White Decimal (Sollers), 20 “Who rules?” (Celan), 176–7 “The Will to Power” (Nietzsche), 20–1, 26n40 Windelband, Wilhelm, 160, 161n6 “With Time-reddened Lips” (Celan), 164 Wittgenstein, Ludwig fact/value distinctions in, 29 faith in language retained by, 30, 31 language/thought distinction in, 30–1 vs. Mauthner, 29–31 Philosophical Remarks, 31 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 29–31 wordlessness in literary works, 108–9, 175, 223–4, 226, 232, 238. See also music; van Velde, Bram words as objects, 50 word/Word distinction, 52–3, 54, 125 “Work in Progress” (Finnegans Wake) (Joyce), 1–2, 56–7, 90–1, 96 “The World” (Celan), 166–7 World War I conditions leading to, 2–3 cultural crises arising from, 38 Kafka and, 62–3, 64–5, 87, 127 linguistic negativism arising from, 37 Sebald and, 189–90, 198 World War II (years following) Beckett’s views of obstructive language developing in, 100 Blanchot’s political shifts in, 135 Céline in, 55 Eliot’s vision of the Word developed in, 52–3 Heidegger’s influence in, 128 historical catastrophe substantiated in, 6–7n10, 9–10, 113–14, 158 as humanity in ruins, 104 Kafka and, 65–6, 78, 87, 89 linguistic negativism in, 9–10, 59–60 literature of the unword arising in, 10 literature of the unword proliferating in, 5–6, 8, 89 nothingness as theme in, 86 Sebald and, 189–90 writers performing the negative in, 6 Worstward Ho (Beckett) artists and failure in, 242 Beckett’s translation of, 115n87 Celan and, 179, 184–5 enactment of linguistic negativism in, 119, 121, 124 epanorthosis in, 119 Finnegans Wake and, 119

Index language skepticism in, 156 linguistic negativism in, 124–5 negation of language in, 100–1 negative affixes and terminologies in, 117–18 parataxis in, 72, 112 unwording in, 117–22 unwords in, 115 Writing and Difference (Derrida), 148, 230 The Writing of the Disaster (Blanchot), 130, 134–5, 148, 151, 155–6

285

“With a Key That Keeps Changing” (Celan), 164 “You Too Speak” (Celan), 163–4 “Your hand full of hours” (Celan), 162 Zilcosky, John, 69n32 Zürau aphorisms (Kafka), 6, 61, 72, 86–7, 88, 188–9, 245 “Zürich, at the Stork” (Celan), 222, 223