Comparative Literature DANIEL FELDMAN Writing Nothing: Negation and Subjectivity in the Holocaust Poetry of Paul Celan and Dan Pagis And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. — Wallace Stevens, “The Snow Man” “H OW CAN ONE WRITE NOTHING?” asks Derrida in “Shibboleth for Paul Celan” (67), his meditation on the poet’s esoteric style and the “allconsuming” (50) unnamed historical event he sees circumscribing Celan’s “circumcised” words (61–68 passim). Yet nothing, it often seems, is all that remains to be written about Paul Celan’s elliptical poems or, more broadly, about literary representation of the unnamed event (the Holocaust) on which so much of his work is based. The voluminous body of extant criticism on the poetics of ineffability enveloping the Shoah, a poetics epitomized by Celan, apparently leaves nothing more to be said about the subject. The result is a self-conscious scholarly literature in which some lament, like the speaker of Ecclesiastes, that there is nothing new under the desiccative sun of Holocaust literary criticism. Perhaps, however, it is the search for something, rather than nothing, new that is vain. Derrida, for instance, guides us to an unappreciated and unorthodox insight by linking “the question of Nothing and the meaning of being in Celan” (67). His reading suggests that it is precisely the writing of nothing — the paradoxical inscription of nothing in a text — that continues to be revelatory about Celan and his gnostic form of evoking the Shoah.1 By transcribing nothing, Celan inverts the poles of conventional affirmation and negation. Furthermore, his assertion of a negative subjectivity challenges prevailing ontologies, especially Heidegger’s reified Dasein. This essay unpacks and interrogates Celan’s writing of nothing by putting the poet in conversation with Heidegger, who disputes Celan’s inscription of a substantive nothing, and with the Israeli author Dan Pagis, who affirms it. My analysis 1 I use the terms Holocaust and Shoah interchangeably throughout this essay to refer to the German genocide of European Jewry. I consider likewise all its casualties to be victims, regardless of whether they survived or not, and use that word accordingly. Comparative Literature 66:4 DOI 10.1215/00104124-2823874 © 2014 by University of Oregon Published by Duke University Press Comparative Literature THE HOLOCAUST POETRY OF PAUL CELAN & DAN PAGIS / 439 first ties nullification in speech to cancellation of self in Celan and aims to understand his articulation of a form of subjectivity reconfigured by the Holocaust as negative presence. This apophatic subjectivity, expressed in Celan as “nothing I am,” insists both on its negativity and existence. Celan’s depictions of negative subjectivity, I argue, vitally inform his attempt to create a negative poetics. I then elucidate Celan’s conception of negation by identifying an important distinction between Celan’s and Heidegger’s ontologies of nothing. For Heidegger, nothing is nothing more than negation; for Celan, however, nothing may itself be negated to attest, paradoxically, to that negation’s substantive reality. Finally, I show that this dispute is not merely a local debate between two German-language thinkers but an indication of a deeper fault line in poetic representation of the Holocaust. By tracing the same structure of negated subjectivity in the Hebrew poet Dan Pagis, a survivor-author with a heritage and personal history similar to Celan’s, I demonstrate the importance of converting negation into articulated presence in survivors’ literary responses to the Holocaust, an unspeakable atrocity about which it may have been more expedient, if impossible, simply to say nothing at all. Ultimately, this essay posits that, by emphatically stating nothing, Celan and Pagis instantiate what Derrida calls the shibboleth-like “insignificant difference as the condition of meaning” (31). Fine distinctions of no apparent consequence make all the difference in Celan’s and Pagis’s verse: nothing is more important in their language than voicing nothing. Their texts also evince what it entails for a survivor to cohere as an existential subject after genocide. Accordingly, Derrida’s question is still germane: What does it mean to write nothing and to equate nothing with being? Celan’s and Pagis’s verses — articulating nothing, testifying for no one, and emerging from nowhere — underscore the sibylline significance of Shoah writing not only for the subject of representing trauma, but also for the way in which the Holocaust reformulates subjectivity altogether by making subjects reduced to nothing continue to exist as coherent, vibrant beings. In this reading of Celan and Pagis, nothing is new. That is to say, it is precisely the equivocal nothing at the heart of their writing that is astonishingly new. Celan: Noting Nothing Derrida’s unanswered question about the possibility of writing nothing comes in response to Celan’s exhortation to “schreib das lebendige / Nichts ins Gemüt” (Gesammelte 1: 242; “write the living / Nothing in the heart,” Derrida 65). In accentuating this line from Celan’s “To one who stood before the door” (“Einem, der vor der Tür stand”), Derrida asks whether an inscription of nothing leaves a mark. Critics have long been inclined to read Celan’s recurring allusions to a rhetorical void at the heart (or scribed on the heart) of his work as a metaphorical absence. Typical is Lacoue-Labarthe’s Heideggerian interpretation of “the experience of nothingness” in Celan as “the Riß, or tear, of being” (translation qtd. in Anderson 12). Adorno similarly glosses Celan’s negative aesthetic as an existential, soundless encryption of ineffable trauma: “Celan’s poems articulate unspeakable horror by being silent, thus turning their truth content into a negative quality” (Aesthetic 400). To be sure, Celan sheathes his verses with frequent references to a linguistic vacuum: “Wir / taten ein Schweigen darüber,” he writes (Selected 124; “We / decked Published by Duke University Press Comparative Literature COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 440 it in silence,” 125). But that mute skin is usually read as an incommunicable trope. Aris Fioretos, whose edifying Derrida-influenced essay on Celan is suggestively titled “Nothing: History and Materiality in Celan,” claims that nothingness is actually inscribed but never articulated in Celan’s poetry (329). For Fioretos, Derrida’s essay on Celan “points to a way of approaching nothingness” (321) through a bifurcation of language into its constituent elements of speech and text. The everlaconic Celan, according to Fioretos, privileges the written over the oral strand in language’s double helix. Because the gratuitous punctuation and nonverbal typographical signs incised into Celan’s poems can be read but never interpreted or spoken, these symbolic written traces function, in Fioretos’s view, “as the material inscription of [Celan’s] unspeakability, bereft of the semantic dignity which always goes along with speech” (329). Like other prominent theoretically oriented interpreters of Celan (see also Szondi, Ziarek, and Janz), Fioretos thus assumes a textual priority in Celan’s work: “Nothingness is irreducibly linked to writing in a way which has little to do with the free sonorous sway of language magic” (321). The recondite Celan, he says, is irreducibly written. Fioretos is certainly right that for Celan “nothing is paradoxically transcribed in the text,” but he (as do others who consider the blank voids in Celan’s poetry purely figural) goes too far in claiming that “nothing resists articulation” (332). As Celan writes, and this article hopes to make clear, his poetry transcribes a “lebendiges Nicht s,” a living absence that is in fact a frequent lexical presence in his texts. Rather than resisting articulation, negative keywords such as “nothing,” “no one,” “never,” and “nowhere” echo sonorously throughout Celan’s poems as enunciated lyrics — perhaps, pace Derrida, as shibboleths, keywords whose difference is literally null. Nothing is paradoxically written, read, and heard everywhere in Celan’s oeuvre. Contrary to metaphorical readings of absence in Celan, Celan in fact articulates nothing in his poetry, and he does so frequently. Celan’s general penchant for negation, possibly the most commonly noted leitmotif of his writing, is not only a conceptual trope but also a linguistic device that he idiosyncratically uses in opposition to itself. In Celan, negation negates itself; the nullified apophatic expression that results forms the foundation for a new post-Holocaust subjectivity accessed through the survivor’s obscure shibboleths of being, the incongruous and nearly incommunicable sensation of having lived through one’s own death. Celan’s negative poetics give voice to the survivor’s vertiginous experience of the impossible becoming possible, of non-being mingling with being, of nothing in fact existing. To convey that paradoxical form of personal ontology, Celan does not necessarily disdain the spoken in favor of the written. Instead, he doubles the paradox of writing nothing with the riddle of saying nothing. Although Fioretos claims that Celan’s reticent poetry is “neither audible nor transcribable” (329), Celan talks volubly about “Mouthfuls of silence” (“Mundvoll Schweigen”; Selected 106–07) and other intrinsically dialogic phenomena — gates of speech (Sprachgitter), turns of breath (Atemwende), and shadow-speech (Schatten spricht) — that both signify and obstruct meaning. Furthermore, among Celan’s most frequently sounded words is “nichts,” “nothing.” Celan’s poems are as preoccupied with the hazards of spoken address as they are with the efficacy of written exchange. Both modalities, however, are threatened by a poetics of absence and silence that voices nothing and writes without visible trace. Celan transcribes what is “Ungeschriebenes, zu / Sprache verhärtet” (“Unwritten, hardened / into speech”); language so condensed, Published by Duke University Press Comparative Literature THE HOLOCAUST POETRY OF PAUL CELAN & DAN PAGIS / 441 he continues, “legt / einen Himmel frei” (Gesammelte 1: 251; sets / a heaven free).2 By hardening into emancipatory speech the insoluble contradictions that drive his thought, Celan expresses the terrible dilemma of a survivor living and writing after the Shoah, a something-as-nothing and nothing-as-something duality that underwrites his poetry. Throughout it all, Derrida’s question stands: What does it mean to write nothing? A similar question arrests interpreters of this work: What does it mean to read silences as audible or blanks as legible? My claim here is that negation and nothing must be read as literal rather than as solely figural in Celan’s (and Pagis’s) poetry. Indeed, Celan indicates that apprehending the presence of a lack is crucial to his work. Celan’s outlook, he says, is “durchgründet vom Nichts,” “deep-grounded by Nothingness” (Selected 324–25), in both logic and lyric. “Nothingness,” he writes in a poem aptly titled “The Nothingness” (“Das Nichts”), “gathers us in — / sets a seal” (371). That vacant seal serves as an emblem on all his work. It dices and plays (“Nichts erwürfelt”; Gesammelte 2: 39), making all of existence contingent on chancy communication (Wolosky, “Lyric” 656–59). Yet that negative imprint has, in general, been overlooked in the copious commentary on Celan. Anne Carson is one of the few Anglophone critics to have noticed that “words for ‘no,’ ‘not,’ ‘never,’ ‘nowhere,’ ‘nobody,’ ‘nothing’ dominate” Celan’s poems (9). Shira Wolosky has also written with keen insight about this motif.3 In German criticism, Margrit Schärer discussed Celan’s negations in her doctoral thesis, and Peter Paul Schwarz wrote incisively about the technique, which he called Celan’s “Revolte des Nichts” (55) — both in the 1960s. But there is no work of literary criticism that focuses specifically on Celan’s apophasis as an affirmation of subjectivity radically altered by the Holocaust.4 By consistently writing and saying nothing, Celan concomitantly asserts and negates himself. For to say or write nothing is simultaneously to convey and withhold meaning. It is to state a denial and to deny any statement. Composing a poetics of nothing, then, allows Celan both to speak and remain mute; it frees him to engage in the “dialectic of absence and presence that is implicit in negation” (Carson 114), a dialectic that exquisitely accommodates the personal immanence and referential opacity of his poetry. Paul Celan evanescently emerges and just as quickly disappears in his work as an invisible “I” or oblique subject 2 My translation. All unacknowledged translations are my own. Celan again refers to an essence encoded in what remains unwritten in “With Letter and Clock” (“Mit Brief und Uhr”): “Wachs, / Ungeschriebenes zu siegeln, / das deinen Namen / erriet, / das deinen Namen / verschlüsselt” (Selected 96; “Wax / to seal what’s unwritten / that guessed / your name, / that riddles / your name,” 97). Roland Barthes’ distinction between the “readable” (“lisible”) and “writable” (“scritible”) may help untangle Celan’s “unwritten, hardened into speech” and its opposed zones of interpretive scrutability and writerly elusiveness: “About writable texts there may be nothing to say,” Barthes observes (10–12). 3 Carson also notes that the archetypal “poet of nothingness” is Mallarmé, whom Celan frequently evoked early in his career (6). The label, she observes, is Sartre’s. Geoffrey Hartman also argues that Celan adopts “a Mallarmean and totally nonconfessional language of witness” (164). By contrast, Wolosky, while taking note of Celan’s affinity for Mallarmé, associates Celan’s via negativa with the work of Beckett, the author of Texts for Nothing. 4 More common is the diametrically opposed approach influenced by Continental thought and exemplified by critics such as Szondi, Janz, Menninghaus, Hamacher, and Ziarek, the last of whom cites Hamacher and, employing a double negative, writes, “Celan’s language not only does not invert nothingness into being but rather converts ‘its literary being, compositionally and semantically, into nothing’” (142). Published by Duke University Press Comparative Literature COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 442 addressing a more apparent and numinous “you” or other. For Celan, writing nothing in nobody’s voice is the ideal poetic mode. It reduces subjectivity to a cryptic password and speech to a form of spare silence. Through this act of linguistic subtraction the economical Celan excises all dross from his texts, even as he doubles the lack. “Nichts, / nichts ist verloren,” “Nothing, / nothing is lost,” he writes in “Engführung,” or “Stretto” (Gesammelte 1: 197–204, Selected 118–31). The uncharacteristic redundancy involves a double reduction. If “nothing, nothing is lost,” is anything missing? The insistence on negation negating itself suggests a poetic idiom approaching the fringe of language’s communicability and finally transcending that limit. The poem points “to what lies beyond language” by gesturing “toward both the nothing which is not (the silencing of language) and the nothing out of which language can come forth” (Wolosky, Language 7, 262). “Nothing lost,” in other words, might compute as something gained. Thus, Fioretos reads the double void as canceling itself out: “The first solitary Nichts posits the lack which the second nichts assures us is not lost” (332). Felstiner similarly sees the double negative as producing a positive. “Possibly ‘Nothing’ itself, our lack of traces and signs, is now gone, thanks to this poem,” he says (124). Indeed, it appears that nothing is lost on these perspicacious critics. But Celan’s “nothing is lost” is no mere hermeneutic riddle; rather, the doubled negative is a clue to a lost syntactical thread that Celan traces throughout his labyrinthine oeuvre outlining how to read his verse. For “nothing, nothing is lost” typifies Celan’s unconventional use of pronominal negatives as substantive entities. For instance, thrice in “Engführung” Celan repeats, “Nirgends / fragt es nach dir — / . . . / Nirgends / fragt es nach dir — / . . . / Nirgends / fragt — ” (“Nowhere / asked after you — / . . . / Nowhere / asked after you — / . . . / Nowhere / asked — ”). If nowhere’s insistent asking appears practically everywhere, subjects are not entities but absences: “Keines / erwachte” (“Not one awoke”), “keine / Rauchseele steigt” (“No chimney soul rises”). Nowhere asks, no one rises, but the negative concord (which is precluded in normative German) is never resolved in this deracinated view from nowhere: “The place . . . it has / a name / it has none.” The rep eated negation in the tightening spatial void of “Eng führung” — “nowhere . . . nowhere” — evokes the recurring contradiction of “Nobody’s voice, again,” (“Niemandes Stimme, wieder”) in “An Eye, Open” (“Ein Auge, Offen”; Selec ted 116–17) or the s yntactical antinomy of “the not hing,” “das Nichts,” strangely denominated successively with a (the?) definite article in “Mandorla”: In der Mandel — was steht in der Mandel? Das Nichts. Es steht das Nichts in der Mandel. Das steht es und steht. Im Nichts — wer steht da? In the almond — what stands in the almond? The Nothing. In the almond stands the Nothing. There it stands and stands. In the Nothing — who stands there? (172–73)5 5 Original German excerpts from “Mandorla,” “Engführung,” and “Psalm” are from Paul Celan, Gesammelte Werke, 1983. With permission of S. Fischer Verlag. Excerpted translations of “Mandorla,” “Stretto,” and “Psalm” are from Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, translated by John Felstiner. Copyright © 2001 by John Felstiner. With permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. Published by Duke University Press Comparative Literature THE HOLOCAUST POETRY OF PAUL CELAN & DAN PAGIS / 443 Felstiner flags the anomalous article appended to nothing: “What ‘stands’ in the almond is not nichts (‘nothing’) but das Nichts, ‘Nothingness’ or ‘the Nothing’” (180).6 The definite article makes nothing paradoxically concrete. Moreover, one may ask whether this named nothing, “das Nichts,” refers to a specific and consistent subject that endures over the course of Celan’s work. Is “the Nothing” in “Mandorla” identical with “the living Nothing” in “To one who stood before the door”? Is it the same Nothing that appears in the poem “The Nothingness” or that surfs the tide in “Matière de Bretagne” (“das Nichts / rollt seine Meere . . . das Nichts, seine Meere,” Gesammelte 1: 171; “the Nothing / rolls its seas . . . the Nothing, its seas,” Carson 4–5)? “Nothing” and related negative terms in innumerable other Celan poems blot out the positive pronouns that typically orient dialogic utterances. But such is the logic of the Shoah, the concentration camp context of “Engführung,” inside “the terrain with / with the unmistakable trace” (Selected 119). Negation canceling individual agency proliferates in this negative poetic space while pronouns investing subjects with personal autonomy run scarce. Thus, when the third of the repeated “nowheres” in “Engführung” briefly gives way to an efflorescence of “I” and “you,” the change is astonishing: Nirgends fragt es — Ich bins, ich, ich lag zwischen euch, ich war offen, war hörbar, ich tickte euch zu, euer Atem gehorchte, ich bin es noch immer, ihr schlaft ja. (Gesammelte 1: 198) Nowhere asked — I’m the one, I, I lay between you, I was open, was audible, I ticked toward you, your breath obeyed, I am still the one, and you’re sleeping. (Selected 121) Suddenly “out of nowhere” (Felstiner 121), here, at the heart of the poem, an “I” manically asserts its presence to a somnolent and heedless “you.” The effect, however, is short-lived. The pronominal resurgence is quickly covered up by a return not only to negative poetics but also to something even darker, the ghastly residue of individuals fatally caught in the conflagration of the camp: Deckte es zu — wer? Kam, kam. Kam ein Wort, kam, kam durch die Nacht, wollt leuchten, wollt leuchten. Asche. Asche, Asche. (Gesammelte 1: 199) 6 Felstiner further observes that Celan likely gleaned the unusual formulation from Heidegger. In 1952 Celan underlined “How stands it with the Nothing?” (“Wie steht es um das Nichts?”) in his copy of Heidegger’s “Was ist Metaphysik?” (181), a connection discussed below. Published by Duke University Press Comparative Literature COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 444 Covered it up who? Came, came. Came a word, came, came through the night, would glisten, would glisten. Ashes. Ashes, ashes. (Selected 123) What ultimately comes through the straits in “Stretto” is no statement at all — “no ‘I,’ ‘you,’ ‘they,’ or ‘we,’ but a single word: Ashes” (Felstiner 122). Less than nothing survives the cataclysm; “I,” “you,” “nothing lost” — all is burned to a cinder, leaving only “Ashes / Ashes, ashes.” Celan’s prolific use of negative pronouns in lieu of positive pronominal terms makes rhetorical apophasis take the place of cataphatic speech. That is, negation in Celan plays the discursive role usually reserved for affirmation of the subject as the poet inverts (or suspends) the regular polarity of language. In Celan’s “grammatical suspension,” Derrida observes, nothing and no one “are neither positive nor negative” (43–44). Moreover, the rhetorical inversion carries theological resonance, for Celan writes on behalf of “Für-niemand-und-Nichts-Stehn,” “Stand-forno-one-and-Nothing” (Selected 236–37), transforming adamant negations into enigmatic assertions anchoring a bizarre new reality. Nothing and no one emerge as the uncanny protagonists in this new order. For instance, a renowned line from “Aschenglorie” (“Ashglory”) in Celan’s landmark 1967 Atemwende (Breathturn) collection states: “Niemand / zeugt für den / Zeugen” (Gesammelte 2: 72; No one / witnesses for the / witness). In this breathtaking turn of language, “no one” is elevated to a central position in the poet’s testimonial pantheon. But is testimony delivered by “no one” transmitted or jammed? The question is akin to Celan’s general dilemma: does saying “nothing” make a sound? “Assertion and negation, personification and blind force” (Wolosky, “Lyrik” 661) strike a fragile equipoise in this verse tenuously set on the ambiguous fulcrum of “no one” bearing witness for the anonymous witness. “No one” may be either the repudiation or affirmation of the possibility of witness. Furthermore, according to Wolosky, negation here is endowed with a creative force or, at least, the force of a creator (see Language 236–63). The poem heretically insinuates negative theology by apophatically invoking an apathetic “No-one-and-Nothing” divinity who silently testifies to His people’s destruction. Indeed, a negatively defined (or grotesquely divined) godhead could be Celan’s incorporeal subject, but the text may adumbrate something bolder still by suggesting, as Hartman writes, that “the invisible may be Celan himself, who aspires to the most reticent self-presence” by vanishing into his text (164). If “niemand” (nobody) is a proper name for the poetic subject and not God, then rather than resorting to an iconoclastic via negativa, the poet might be proposing a revolutionary vita negativa, a life lived as no one. “A self-effacing Celan could be saying: ‘I am Nobody, yet must validate the idea of witness by my poems,’” Hartman argues (172). In this case, the invisible nobody reappears as the central somebody of the text. A blasphemous appeal to both no one and nothing also distinguishes one of Celan’s best-known poems, “Psalm,” which appeared in 1961, the same year as “Mandorla.” The poem exponentially raises the theme of obliteration by tragic history to the power of sacrilegious new heights: Published by Duke University Press Comparative Literature THE HOLOCAUST POETRY OF PAUL CELAN & DAN PAGIS / 445 Niemand knetet uns wieder aus Erde und Lehm, niemand bespricht unsern Staub. Niemand. Gelobt seist du, Niemand. (Gesammelte 1: 225) No one molds us again out of earth and clay, no one incants our dust. No one. Blessed art thou, No One. (Selected 157) Who is praised in this unholy psalm? No one. “Sie lobten nicht Gott” (“They did not praise God”), Celan writes in another poem (“Es war Erde in ihnen,” Gesammelte 1: 211; “There Was Earth Inside Them,” Selected 134). Instead, “sie gruben und hörten nichts mehr” (“they dug and heard nothing more”). Nullified prayer gives way to a listened-to silence. In “Psalm,” by contrast, No one is accorded an acrid benediction, but a hypostatized nothing follows close behind. Early in the poem, “Niemand” (“No one”) appears in multiple forms, including the enigmatic and resonant “Niemandsrose” (“No-One’s Rose”). The text then pivots from irreverent negative theology to assertion of inscrutable subjectivity: Ein Nichts waren wir, sind wir, werden wir bleiben, blühend: die Nichts-, die Niemandsrose. A Nothing we were, are, and ever shall be, blooming: the Nothing-, the No-One’s-Rose. First the nebulous negation — “A Nothing” — and then the equally baffling assertion: “We were, are, and ever shall be” (one hears overtones of the biblical statement of divine ontology, “eheye asher eheye,” “I will be what I will be”), meaning, we do exist! But we exist solely as “Ein Nichts,” as non-being or nothing. There is no syntactical coherence to the crucial phrase “A Nothing we were, are, shall be.” The gulf between “we were” and “we were nothing” is slight, seemingly trivial, but that insignificant difference situates meaning in the text. As Derrida postulates, nothing makes all the difference (Derrida 31, Fioretos 333). A silent turn of breath, or Atemwende, radically transforms this verse from a despondent admission of absence to an ecstatic profession of paradoxical survival: we exist, but as nothing. By eliding this ephemeral breathturn and reading across the caesura, one produces a couplet whose constituent parts contradict. Such enjambment born of neg at ion is Celan’s revolutionary new parad igm.7 “Atemwende, this turning of breath, is a breath-turning, breath-taking reversal of the poetic paradigm,” says Ziarek with reference to the entirety of Celan’s corpus (195). More specifically, the breathless joining of “Ein Nichts” and “waren wir” innovates a new poetic idiom by forcing the reader to integrate two antithetical claims into an unconventional affirmative whole that bursts all bounds of linguistic logic. 7 In “The Meridian” Celan suggests that poetry itself can be a kind of breathturn: “Dichtung: das kann eine Atemwende bedeuten. Wer weiß, vielleicht legt die Dichtung den Weg — auch den Weg der Kunst — um einer solchen Atemwende willen zurück” (Gesammelte 3: 198; Poetry: that can mean a breathturn. Who knows, perhaps poetry travels this route — also the route of art — for the sake of such a breathturn?). Published by Duke University Press Comparative Literature COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 446 In t urn, the compound paradox “A none we were” represents an a-non(e)ymous genocidal experience that violates the limits of rational comprehension. How, logically, can one speak of having been none? No one can utter this impossible phrase. But according to Celan, that is precisely the point: “No one” can voice these absurd words devoid of normative meaning. The survivor-poet speaks on behalf of himself and fellow victimized subjects, no ones (or “No-one-roses”) who, in the same ethereal line-broken breath, proclaim, “I am” and “I am not.” “We are none” is the victims’ strange shibboleth, a paradoxical and multivalent claim that encodes the dense, contradictory ramifications of what it means to pass over the abyss of constative meaning into the domain of the victim, particularly one who survives the calamity and outlives his or her own death. For the survivor, “I am” is an absurd, impossible claim. Personal integration belongs to no one who endured the Shoah. Mass atrocity leaves “no one,” no “I” in its wake, because genocidal terror, especially in its Nazi form, assaults “the very idea of selfhood” and baffles the lyricist’s “investment in voicing subjectivity” (Gubar 444).8 As Arendt argues, perhaps the Nazis’ most diabolical offense was the creation of a totalitarian reality in which “the killing of man’s individuality” was so effective as to prove that “henceforth nothing belonged to him and he belonged to no one. His death merely set a seal on the fact that he had never existed” (452, 454). A genocidal world in which nothing belongs to the victim and he belongs to no one — to niemand and nichts — so thoroughly contradicts personal identity that to reckon with it the survivor-poet is compelled to invent a new grammar not only replete with neologisms, but also rooted in nonsensical subjectivity. “Nothing we were” coheres in this postlapsarian idiolect as an identifier for the victims who were, are, and ever shall be contradictions, no ones who existed, non-subjects or negated subjects who regard themselves as “nothing that is,” suspended between existence and annihilation. Heidegger: Nothing Nihilates Conceptually balanced astride being and nothingness, Celan’s idiosyncratic poetic style and unique model of subjectivity challenge the preeminent ontological theories of his era. In particular, his verse betokening a perspective that we may term Being-after-death controverts Heidegger’s concept of Being-toward-death (Sein-zum-Tode). Instead of linking the ultimate value of Being to knowledge of one’s own inevitable death, as Heidegger does, Celan ties his complicated notion of existence to the recognition of having tenuously survived his own death. “Wir waren tot und konnten atmen” (Gesammelte 1: 28; we were dead and could breathe), he writes in an early postwar poem (“Erinnerung an Frankreich,” “Memory of France,” from 1948), succinctly framing the survivors’ stupefaction at being both alive after, and seemingly annihilated in, the cataclysm. While Heidegger claims that Being-toward-death demonstrates “the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein” (Being 251) and solidifies the exclusive Jemeinigkeit relationship between existence and one’s “ownmost potentiality-of-being” (Being 251), Being-after-death in Celan irrevocably sunders the poet’s faith in the possibility of cohering as a sub8 Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub poignantly describe the Shoah as an “event without a witness” (80ff). Following Arendt, Lang, Gubar, and others, I expand that characterization to argue that genocide is an event without a subject. Published by Duke University Press Comparative Literature THE HOLOCAUST POETRY OF PAUL CELAN & DAN PAGIS / 447 ject after atrocity. For Celan, as opposed to Heidegger, the certainty of eventual death does not produce meaning; astonishment at inexplicable survival does. Consequently, much of Celan’s work is an articulation of the self after its own nearextirpation, an elucidation of the survivor’s sense of Being-after-death. For example, his pseudo-prayer poems denying ecclesiastic adulation establish his speakers on the far side of a mortal divide by paraphrasing Psalms 115:17, “The dead will not praise the Lord” (Fesltiner 151). His entire purpose, he famously says in his 1958 Bremen address, is to square survival with the “thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech,” specifically German speech, by going “with his very being [Dasein] into language” (Gesammelte 3: 186; Selected 396). Writing against the shadow of a historical menace that showed “the individual [to be] fungible and replaceable under the liquidator’s boots” (Adorno, Negative 362), Celan recasts personal existence as an open question. While Heidegger argues that the human subject becomes intelligible through a triumphant affirmation of its own selfhood in declarative language — “Who then is man? He who must affirm what he is. To affirm means to declare . . . Man is he who he is, precisely in the affirmation of his own existence” (“Hölderlin” 297) — Celan throws the subject’s very existence in the wake of disaster into doubt: “Es ist, / ich weiß es, nicht wahr, / daß wir lebten” (Gesammelte 1: 217; it is, / I know, not true / that we lived), he writes in “Soviel Gestirne” (“So Many Constellations”). Celan writes not attestations of existence but tergiversations of absence. He pens “das hundert- / züngige Mein- / gedicht, das Genicht,” (Gesammelte 2: 31; “the hundred- / tongued lie- / poem, the noem,” Carson 112). Celan’s “das Genicht” blends “Gedicht” (poem) with “nicht” in a neologism that translators have rendered as “noem” (Hamburger, Joris, Carson, and Felstiner) to indicate Celan’s aesthetic, an equivocal poetry of nothing. Where Heidegger argues that the ineluctable individuality of one’s own death, the Jemeinigkeit of inevitable death, makes Dasein ever more “non-relational” and “essentially disclosed to itself” (Being 40 and 251), Celan discerns an inexorable sense of murky alienation from oneself and one’s fate.9 The ambiguity of whether he in fact survived undermines any definitive statement about being. The relevant question to pose, Adorno suggests in an oft-cited statement that partially retracts his dictum about poetry after Auschwitz (itself possibly prompted by Celan’s verse), is not whether art is possible after the Holocaust, but whether subjectivity is: It may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems. But it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question of whether after Auschwitz you can go on living — especially whether one who accidentally escaped, one who by rights ought to have been murdered, may go on living. (Negative 362–63, amended) 9 Perhaps the sharpest rebuttal of Heidegger’s theory of death’s Jemeinigkeit comes from Adorno and Arendt. While Heidegger maintains that the individuality of death demonstrates that the subjective uniqueness of “I am” cannot be expropriated, Adorno argues that the Nazis accomplished just that: The administrative murder of millions made of death a thing one had never yet to fear in just this fashion. There is no longer a possibility for death to come into the individual’s empirical life as somehow conformable with the course of that life. The last, the poorest possession left to the individual is expropriated. That in the concentration camps it was no longer an individual who died, but a specimen — this is a fact bound to affect the dying of those who escaped the administrative measure. (Negative 362) Arendt echoes this: “The concentration camps robbed death of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life. In a sense they took away the individual’s own death” (452). In dispossessing the victims of their own death, the Nazis destroyed the Jemeinigkeit of dying. Published by Duke University Press Comparative Literature COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 448 Celan evokes precisely this quandary of simultaneous survival and oblivion not merely to offer the dead poetic prosopopoeia — his verse does not merely ventriloquize the murdered millions — but rather to express another subject, a foreign self, or “befremdetes Ich,” within (Gesammelte 3: 195). Throughout his literary corpus, Celan says in “The Meridian,” he attempts to locate “the place where the strangeness was, the place where a person was able to set himself free as an — estranged — I” (Selected 407). The subject’s liberation, in Celan’s view, lies in its capacity to endure through an other — or in nothing. Contra Sartre, whose own existentialist treatment of Heidegger’s ontology led him to conclude in Being and Nothingness (L’Être et le néant) that nothingness describes an absurd void enclosing existence, Celan reconciles existence and nothingness. In Celan, being and nothingness do not contradict each other. On the contrary, nothingness is a mode of being, perhaps the sole mode available to one who has veritably experienced his own death. “Ein Nichts waren wir,” Celan affirms, forsaking logic and grammar. But as Beckett says, “Being is not syntactical” (Cohn 129). The apparently sophistic question of whether someone or something can be nothing, as in “A nothing we were,” or nothing can be something sharply divides Celan and Heidegger. Following Stevens, do we speak of the nothing that is not there or the nothing that is? Heidegger intimates the former, Celan the latter. The distinction suggests a sophomoric game of casuistic metaphysics, but elucidat ing that negative nicety is precisely what Heidegger plays out in “Was ist Metaphysik?” (“What Is Metaphysics?”), his inaugural lecture at the University of Freiburg from 1929: Wie steht es um das Nichts? . . . Was ist das Nichts? Schon der erste Anlauf zu dieser Frage zeigt etwas Ungewöhnliches. In diesem Fragen setzen wir im vorhinein das Nichts als etwas an, das so und so “ist” — als ein Seiendes. Davon ist es aber doch gerade schlechthin unterschieden. Das Fragen nach dem Nichts — was und wie es, das Nichts, sei — verkehrt das Begragte in sein Gegenteil. Die Frage beraubt sich selbst ihres eigenes Gegenstandes. Dementsprechend ist auch jede Antwort auf diese Frage von Hause aus unmöglich. Denn sie bewegt sich notwendig in der Form: das Nichts “ist” das und das. Frage und Antwort sind im Hinblick auf das Nichts gleicherweise in sich widersinnig. (Gesamtausgabe 108–09) How is it with the nothing? . . . What is the nothing? Our very first approach to this question has something unusual about it. In our asking we posit the nothing in advance as something that “is” such and such; we posit it as a being. But that is exactly what it is distinguished from. Interrogating the nothing — asking what and how it, the nothing, is — turns what is interrogated into it s opposite. The quest ion deprives itself of its own object. Accordingly, every answer to this question is also impossible from the start. For it necessarily assumes the form: the nothing “is” this or that. With regard to the nothing, question and answer alike are inherently absurd. (Pathmarks 84–85) Nothingness cannot be investigated because it cannot be, Heidegger states. Little (or nothing) can intelligently be said of what nothing is, because “nothingness is the complete negation of the totality of beings” (Pathmarks 86). “Das Nichts selber nichtet” (Gesamtausgabe 114; “the nothing itself nihilates,” Pathmarks 90). Heidegger’s analysis of nothing as lack induces him to ask what he calls “die Grundfrage der Metaphysik (“the fundamental question of phenomenology”): “Warum ist überhaupt Seiendes und nicht vielmehr Nichts?” (Gesamtausgabe 122; “Why are there beings at all, and why not rather nothing?” Pathmarks 96). Celan responds in “So Many Constellations.” The poem’s closing lines vacillate between multiple modalities of knowing and conjugations of wissen before locating the insuperable gap of existence: Published by Duke University Press Comparative Literature THE HOLOCAUST POETRY OF PAUL CELAN & DAN PAGIS / 449 ich weiß, ich weiß und du weißt, wir wußten, wir wußten nicht, wir waren ja da und nicht dort, und zuweilen, wenn nur das Nichts zwischen uns stand, fanden wir ganz zueinander. (Gesammelte 1: 217) I know, I know and you know, we knew, we did not know, we were there and not there, and at times when only the Nothing stood between us, we found our way to each other. The speaker stumbles for an epistemic foothold — “I know, / I know and you know, we knew / we did not know” — and settles on “Nothing stood between us.” Subjectivity is rendered uncertain; only nothing, “nur das Nichts,” exists between us. For Heidegger, this constitutes a logical impossibility. But nothing stands between him and Celan. That is to say, nothing as a substantive entity radically sets them apart. Derrida’s maxim again obtains: seemingly invisible distinctions produce significant difference. Al t hough scholarly consensus typically aligns Celan with Heidegger (see Lacoue-Labarthe, Szondi, Hamacher, and Ziarek for the orthodox reading), any encounter Celan’s work stages with Heideggerian metaphysics occurs under the sign of an event that the philosopher could never bring himself to name: Heidegger said nothing about the Shoah or his support for the Nazi regime. Although Celan, like others, held out hope for a heartfelt “word to come in the heart” from the venerated thinker about his political past (“von einer Hoffnung, heute, / auf eines Denkenden / kommendes / Wort / im Herzen”; Selected 315, Gesammelte 2: 255), like others, Celan hoped in vain; Heidegger was virtually silent on the issue, yet his reticence, unlike Celan’s, makes no sound. Nothing comes of Heidegger’s obdurate nothing, but Celan used the occasion of his confrontation with Heidegger and his failed attempt to elicit a word of contrition or justification to produce in 1967 a poem (“Todtnauberg”) proposing an alt ernate version of “there-being,” “Da-sein,” Heidegger’s signature concept. Named after a place and set “in the hut” (“in der / Hütte”) of the austere philosopher, “Todtnauberg” responds to Heidegger’s silence by locating the poet’s own subjectivity not in a dwelling place but in writing: “Into the book / — whose name did it take in / before mine?” (cf. Menninghaus 9). The dissemination of identity into material text considers what it means for one to be there, inhering “in the scribed lines” (“geschriebene Zeile”) of a guest book. If language is, as Heidegger says, “the house of being,” then Celan unsettles the thinker in both his philosophical and physical home by leaving him speechless. Celan trespasses the borders of Heidegger’s metaphysical redoubt by instigating “a most clumsy intrusion in the famous ‘language that speaks,’ the famous ‘die Sprache spricht’: entrance of the beggar into ‘the house of being’” (Levinas 40). Dwelling in normative German language, Heidegger is rooted in an originary home; Celan, by contrast, tunnels with his fractured neologisms to a “Wortlandschaft,” a no-place exile located nowhere (Presner). He sings, “O einer, o keiner, o niemand, o du: / Wohin gings, da’s nirgendhin ging?” (Gesammelte 1: 211; “O one, O none, O no one, O you: / Where Published by Duke University Press Comparative Literature COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 450 did it go, then, making for nowhere?” Selected 135). He asks, “Im Nichts — wer steht da?” (“In the Nothing — who stands there?”). For Celan, nowhere is a destination, nothing a place. If in Heidegger’s view nothing nihilates and language is the dwelling house of being, then that home has no room for Celan. The German philosopher’s language is a capacious house for coherent and logical subjectivity, but it offers no sanctuary for Celan and his notion of nothing that is. Pagis: Mistaking Nothing Celan is not the only writer excluded from Heidegger’s logocentric house of being. Dan Pagis, who is both a Hebrew author and a Holocaust survivor, is doubly barred. Linguistically, Hebrew affords Pagis no means of clearly asserting personal ontology: he cannot write “I am,” since Hebrew, like other Semitic languages, offers no copula. In Hebrew, there simply is no “is.”10 But Pagis is also philosophically predisposed to challenge Heidegger’s notion of ontological presence and to affirm Celan’s model of substantive absence, for he, like Celan, is skeptical about his coherence as a subject overshadowed by atrocity. In his poetry on the Shoah, Pagis exploits the absent copula as well as other linguistic instabilities to open up existential aporia reflecting a sense of self shaped by negation. Pagis locates personal existence in absence and subjectivity in nothing. His verse also depends upon inscribed erasures. Missing words, letters, and selves haunt Pagis’s writing. As such, Pagis’s poetry confirms that the patterns of negation and apophatic subjectivity innovated by Celan are not limited to Celan’s own work or exclusively offered in opposition to Heidegger, but are instead indicative of patterns and ideas informing poetry about the Holocaust more generally, especially verse written by survivors. Like Celan, Pagis grew up in a German-speaking assimilated Jewish home in Bukovina, a densely Jewish and exceptionally literary enclave of prewar Romania. Raised to revere the culture of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, Pagis and Celan were also briefly exposed to new trends in Hebrew and Zionist thought. When war engulfed Romania, each survived internment while witnessing the death of most of his fellow deportees. The two survivors further resemble each other in seeking to reconstitute their conceptions of self by deploying in verse new idioms in adopted lands: Pagis from Israel through the ironies and associations of modern Hebrew; Celan from France through a reclamation and radical revision of German (see, also, Felstiner 6–24, 42–45, 267; and Ezrahi 157–78). Unlike Celan, however, Pagis takes nothing for granted, for Pagis doubts his words will be received successfully and believes that mistakes will confound his speech. His attempt to reach a sympathetic reader thus becomes a bold attempt to cross the abyss of voicing nothing. In his best-known text, “Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway Car,” Pagis stages this desperate hope to reach a reader, even as he erases any substantive statement. The poem poses as found poetry, perhaps the breathless dying words of a victim etching her last testament in a rail car. It begins with reference to a place that is in fact no-place, a transport en route to hell: 10 Glowacka’s words, “The elision of the copula (of the verb ‘to be’) in the Hebrew language indicates a displacement of Hebrew from ‘the house of Being’” (136). Heidegger explains his complex investment in the significance of copular verbs in chapter 4 of The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (177ff). For Adorno’s opposing view, see Negative Dialectics 101. Published by Duke University Press Comparative Literature THE HOLOCAUST POETRY OF PAUL CELAN & DAN PAGIS / 451 ‫כאן במשלוח הזה‬ ‫אני חוה‬ ‫עם הבל בני‬ ‫אם תראו את בני הגדול‬ ‫קין בן אדם‬ ‫תגידו לו שאני‬ here in this transport I am Eve with my son Abel if you see my other son Cain son of Adam tell him that I (Kol 135)11 Only Eve’s instructions endure intact. Of her message to her son Cain, the sole word that survives is “I,” the Hebrew attestation of self. The “I” statements at the start and end of this brief poem enunciate an imperiled self that makes an address but does not rely on its receipt to constitute subjectivity amidst self-negating circumstances. Moreover, an implicit circularity in the poem loops the truncated final “I” back to the opening “here,” creating a cyclical text whose end leads Ouroboroslike back to its beginning in an endless appeal that compensates for the zero copula by placing the elided verb in the middle: “ . . . if you see Cain tell him that I / [am] here in this transport” (Zierler 325, Ezrahi 84, and Gubar 448). Completing the circuit uncovers what Eve might have hoped to impart, but her terse statement as constituted already offers a powerful ethical resonance through “ani” (“I”) and “kan” (“here”). An unspoken nothing joins the terms: the loop reads, “I [am] here.” Gubar argues that the missing copular link signifies the “abrogation of humanism’s faith in autonomous subjectivity” (448). But by marking her presence in a text, the speaker audaciously claims subjectivity, albeit one vitiated by impending doom and recorded in the “soon-to-fade ephemeral erasability” (Gubar) of “iparon” (pencil), which derives etymologically from “afar” (dust). The disparity between the evanescence of Eve’s writing and the finality of her fate in the sealed freight car is already insinuated in the liturgical overtones of the poem’s title, which draws on a central refrain of the High Holiday service: “On New Year’s Day the decree is written; on the Day of Atonement it is sealed.” If the speaker’s desperate promulgation of self occurs under the threat of the erasure of both body and text, her claim to be “here” must be understood as an attempt to inhere both in an elusive traveling deathtrap and in writing that is impermanent and predominantly left unsaid. The poem thus constitutes a special case of what Amir Eshel calls “the perspective of poetic presence” (143), since the impression of immanence in this text is intimated in words unwritten, in a missing message, in readers reading nothing. “Roll Call” (“Hamisdar”) likewise emerges from the abysm of an untraceable “here”: ,‫ רוקע מעט במגפיו‬,‫הוא עומד‬ .‫ קר לו ברוח הבוקר‬:‫משפשף את ידיו‬ .‫מלאך חרוץ שעמל ועלה בדרגה‬ .‫ כולו עיניים‬:‫פתאום נדמה לו ששגה‬ ‫הוא חוזר ומונה בפנקס הפתוח‬ ,‫את הגופים המחכים לו בריבוע‬ ‫ רק אני‬:‫מחנה בלב מחנה‬ ,‫ אני טעות‬,‫ אינני‬,‫אינני‬ ,‫ מוחק את צלי‬,‫מכבה מהר את עיניי‬ ‫ החשבון יעלה‬.‫ אנא‬,‫לא אחסר‬ .‫ כאן לעולם‬:‫בלעדי‬ He stands, stomps a bit in his boots, rubs his hand: there is a chill in the morning air. A diligent angel, he worked hard to rise in rank. Suddenly he thinks he sees a mistake: all eyes. He counts again in the open notebook, all the bodies in the square waiting on him, a camp in the heart of a camp: only I am not, I am not there, I am a mistake, shut off my eyes, quickly, erase my shadow. I shall not want. The sum will add up without me: here forever. (Kol 136) 11 Hebrew excerpts from Dan Pagis’s poems are from Kol Hashirim, 1991. With permission of the publisher, Hakibbutz Hameuchad. Published by Duke University Press Comparative Literature COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 452 The poem’s scenario is motivated by the possibility that the concentration camp roll call has been tabulated in error, that a mistake has entered into the counting of the condemned. The arch juxtaposition of the vernacular “ani taut” (“I am a mistake”) against the biblical undercurrent of “lo echsar” (“I shall not want”), from the opening of pathos-laden Psalm 23 (“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want”), underscores the profound and tragic absurdity of the victims’ fate. As the demonic roll call master counts and re-counts his prisoners, the speaker protests, “I am a mistake, / turn off my eyes, quickly, erase my shadow.” “I” should not be here, eyed by a sadistic officer, the speaker contends. Closer scrutiny, however, reveals that he is hardly there at all. If the roll call is designed to surveil the presence of dehumanized prisoners, the speaker subverts the procedure by absenting himself from the objectifying scene. In preserving the felicitous play between specular “eyes” and the many “I’s” in the text, the translation suggests how the Hebrew puns on “eyni” (my eye), “ani” (I), and “eyneni” (I am not) rub out the “I” addressing the reader. (Felstiner argues that Celan embeds the same Hebrew pun in “Mandorla” with its opposed “Aug” [eye] and “Nichts” [nothing], which in Hebrew unite in the homonym “ayin” [181].) This poem about seeing oneself transformed first into an object of oppression and then into nothing repeatedly asserts “I.” But in this ocular exchange, the demonic master’s cold gaze destroys the speaker’s subjectivity and turns the camp prisoners into counted objects (numbers replace names) rather than named subjects. Countering the officer’s nullifying notebook with a startling admission of self-negation, the speaker absents himself from the poetic frame — “I / am not, I am not there” — before locating himself anew, confident that the sum will tally “without me: here forever.” Like the dizzying “wir / waren ja da und nicht dort” (“we were there and not-there”) in Celan’s “Soviel Gestirne” (“So Many Constellations”), “Roll Call” defies any fixed deictic orientation. Both “not there” and “here forever,” the speaker simultaneously inhabits the camp’s terrestrial space and some amorphous cosmic beyond; he inheres in the poetic presence of a textual “kan” (here), but also aspires to be deleted from the lethal Nazi ledger and thus permanently blotted out. Writing is arbitrary, erasure permanent, yet this poem speaking from nowhere aims to have it both ways: “I am” and “I am not.” As with Celan’s “Psalm,” a perfunctory reading of “Roll Call” elides the poem’s crucial caesura between “I am” and “not” and hence misses the tension of “I am” sliding into its opposite: “I / am not.” The fourfold repetition of “I am,” “I am,” “I am,” “I shall” gives way with nearly imperceptible subtlety to the plaintive abnegation of “I am not,” “I am not,” “I am a mistake,” “I shall not,” challenging the reader to pause in the fleeting stutter between subjectivity and its erasure. Furthermore, the subversion of subjectivity and dissolving of deixis are integrally related. By untethering the speaker from an embodied subject position, the text renders it impossible to locate the final “here.” Deixis depends on proprioception (the sensation of physically inhabiting space) (Silverman 14), but the collapse of the speaker’s capacity for material integration reduces presence in this text to either ethereal writing or intangible remnant of the dystopian inferno. Pagis follows “Roll Call” with other works in which speakers aver that they are nothing by attesting to existential or semantic error. “Footprints” (“Akevot”), for instance, states, “It’s true, I was a mistake, forgotten in the sealed car . . . But I didn’t know I was alive” (Variable 36, 39). “Autobiography” (“Autobiographia”) Published by Duke University Press Comparative Literature THE HOLOCAUST POETRY OF PAUL CELAN & DAN PAGIS / 453 obliterates the speaker in an endless cycle of archaic serial fratricide: “I died with the first blow and was buried among the rocks of the field . . . My brother invented mu rder, my parents invented grief, I invented silence” (5). Perhaps the most emphatic act of self-eradication comes in “An Opening for Satan” (“Pe L’Satan”), a text that introduces an apparently flawed new phrase: “I was guillotined.” ‫כשעמד לפני הגיליוטינה‬ ‫אמר דנטון “הפועל לגלייט‬ (‫)הפועל החדש הזה‬ .‫ בזמן וגוף‬,‫מוגבל בנטייה‬ :‫כי לא אספיק לומר בזמן עבר‬ ”.‫גולַטתי‬ .‫ אבל תמים‬,‫משפט חריף וחד‬ )‫הנה אני (ובאמת אינני מיוחד‬ ‫נערפתי‬ ‫נתליתי‬ ‫נשרפתי‬ ‫נוריתי‬ ‫נטבחתי‬ .‫נשכחתי‬ When he stood before the guillotine Danton said: “The verb ‘to guillotine’ (our new verb) is limited in tense and person, for I cannot say in past tense, ‘I was guillotined.’” A sharp statement, but naive. For in truth I (I’m no one), I am nobody special, I’ve been beheaded hanged burned shot slaughtered forgotten. (Kol 269) The innovative phrase “I was guillotined” (a single word in Hebrew, “gulyatiti”) carries no syntactical sense, for who can claim to have been guillotined? Pagis presents the same hermeneutic of logical inversion that we saw in Celan: it is precisely “no one” who can say “I was guillotined.” “I am nobody,” the speaker claims, echoing the paradoxical figure of “I” (pause) “am not” in “Roll Call.” That is, “no one” makes these statements. The survivor is an antinomy, a no one who survived by mistake, a subject transformed by genocide into material absence. But what, finally, is the character of this “no one”? Pagis’s “Testimony” (“Edut”) delivers its own affidavit: ‫ הם בהחלט‬:‫לא לא‬ .‫ מגפים‬,‫ מדים‬:‫היו בני אדם‬ .‫ הם נבראו בצלם‬.‫איך להסביר‬ .‫אני הייתי צל‬ .‫לי היה בורא אחר‬ .‫ווהא בחסדו לא השאיר בי מה שימות‬ ,‫ כחול‬,‫ עליתי קליל‬,‫וברחתי אליו‬ ,‫ מתנצל‬:‫ הייתי אומר‬,‫מפויס‬ ‫עשן אל עשן כל יכול‬ .‫שאין לו גוף ודמות‬ No, no: they were definitely Human beings: uniforms, boots. How can I explain? They were created in the image. I was a shade. A different creator made me. And he, in his grace, left nothing from me to perish. I flew to him, rose weightless, blue, appeased, I might even say: apologizing — smoke to omnipotent smoke with neither body nor image. (Kol 137) “Testimony” tells nothing of the poet’s personal history; rather, it speaks through an inversion of a traditional Jewish prayer. Instead of ascribing incorporeal existence to God — “eyn lo d’mut haguf v’eyno guf,” “He has neither bodily image or body,” reads “Yigdal,” a canonical hymn enumerating the principles of Jewish faith specified by Maimonides — Pagis appropriates the divine attributes and assigns them to his murdered Holocaust victim narrator, here shockingly effaced and turned into abominable, inhuman smoke. The speaker exists in a heretical realm of alternate demiurges and permeable mortality: “ani hayiti tzel,” “I was a shade,” and yet I remain to relate the horror. Ex isting in a tenebrous realm of shadowy specters, the wraithlike speaker abjures his own physical form even as he attests to the essential human image of Published by Duke University Press Comparative Literature COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 454 his oppressors. In Hebrew these terms disclose a troubling semantic affinity that the speaker denies sharing with his persecutors: the words “tzel,” ‫ צל‬shade, and “tzelem,” ‫ צלם‬human image, are nearly carbon copies of each other, save for the physical substance and additional letter, “mem,” that distinguish the corporeal “tzelem” from the crepuscular “tzel.” Later in the poem the same combination of phonemes and letters recurs scrambled as “mitnatzel,” ‫ מתנצל‬apologizing. The apologetic note sounds discordant, yet here the compensatory “mem” salvages the word from becoming what the speaker insists he is not: “nitzal,” ‫ ניצל‬rescued or saved (Yacobi 237). A “nitzol” ‫ ניצול‬is a survivor. In Pagis, the contrite word “mitnatzel” is finally offered, although only by the dissonant letter “mem” overwriting “nitzal” and canceling the possibility of a survivor as subject. Early in the poem the invisible writing of a missing “mem” dims the inviolate human form of “tzelem” into the ghostly shadow of “tzel,” while excessive writing later turns rescue, “nitzal,” into remorse, “mitnatzel.” First, invisible letters efface the human image; then, superfluous characters transform a potential survivor into a rueful, invisible nothing. The other added letter in “mitnatzel,” “tav,” combines with “mem” to spell “met,” or “dead.” “Met-nitzal” means “the survivor has died.” Writing, seen and unseen, conspires to kill subjectivity and transfigure the human form into shadowy smoke that disappears without a trace. Rescue, as it so often does, arrives unseen in Pagis and Celan, written as if by an invisible hand. A return to Celan through his work “Einmal” (“Once”) illumines the dark subject matter of Shoah poetry by saving subjectivity from invisibly dissolving into nothing: Einmal da hörte ich ihn, da wusch er die Welt, ungesehn, nachtlang, wirklich. Eins und Unendlich, vernichtet, ichten. Licht war. Rettung. (Gesammelte 2: 107)12 Once I heard him here, here he washed the world, unseen, nightlong, real. One and Infinite annihilated I-ing. Light was. Rescue. Worlds collide in this brief poem. Revelation and annihilation, the audible and the unseen, the personal and the cosmic clash and envelop each other in the compact space of a single text. The poem juxtaposes “Einmal” (“Once”), a single isolated moment, against eternity, “Unendlich” (“Infinite”), and the rustlings of theophany, “I heard him,” against an invisible, dark reality (“ungesehn, nachtlang / wirklich”). Moreover, the rhetoric offers an aural analogue to this disparity through the staccato monosyllabic “Eins,” extended by the long trisyllabic “Unendlich.” Der12 The German text of “Einmal” is from Paul Celan, Gesammelte Werke, 1983. With permission of the publisher, Suhrkamp Verlag. Published by Duke University Press Comparative Literature THE HOLOCAUST POETRY OF PAUL CELAN & DAN PAGIS / 455 rida, furthermore, notes that the morpheme “ich” (I) surfaces in the text only once, although it repeatedly hides in the reverberations of “Unendlich,” “wirklich,” “vernichtet,” “ichten,” and “Licht” (44). Celan brings these antitheses to a pitched climax in a direct contrast between the ethical extremes of genocide: “vernichtet” (exterminated) is placed in tension with “ichten,” a neologism meaning “to I.”13 Stripped of its negative prefix, “vernichtet” (annihilate) gives way across the line break to “ichten,” to I-ilate. Pausing in the caesura of this final poem of Breathturn, the reader transforms the ultimate genocidal negation — the object of the Nazi “Vernichtungskrieg” — into the basis for the production of the inalienable “I.” By negating violent negation to reconstitute essential human subjectivity, unconventional language achieves what rational logic could not. New words and worlds can yet come to be as Celan sheds light on the dark recesses of language with his own demiurgic formula, “Licht war” (“Light was”). While mourning the many unsaved victims, including his own mother, Celan’s neologisms nonetheless rescue the self from the nihilistic reign of nothing by extracting the subject, “ich,” from the bleak annihilation of “vernichtet.” A similar “heliotropic” reading (Hartman 164) detects how the black dawn of despair already incorporates white milk in Celan’s most acclaimed text (Ezrahi 145). In “Once,” however, obliteration of all being morphs into the construction of a subject, as the poet rewrites nothing, “nichtet,” as having I-ed, “ichten.” Celan’s poem charges readers of Holocaust poetry with a moral calling. If the result of extreme historic trauma such as the Shoah is to destroy the individual subject, then it is the work of genocide literature to “I,” to “ichten.” The reader’s responsibility is to oppose vernichten and to engage in a process of ichten whereby we restore subjectivity to the victims. To do so one must learn to read between lines, letters, and sounds in order to hear silent and concealed words. The task, Pagis makes clear in his late prose poem “For a Literary Survey” (“L’Mishal Sifruti”), is nothing less than to read nothing with care: ‫ זוהי דיו סתרים‬.‫ טובל את העט במיץ וכותב‬,‫ אבל שיישאר בינינו! אני נוטל בצל בשֵ ל סוחט אותו‬.‫אתם שואלים כיצד אני כותב‬ ‫ הדף שוב נראה טהור‬.‫ ואחרי שהוא מתייבש אינו מותיר שום סימן‬,)‫ מיץ הבצל חסר צבע (בדומה לדמעות שמעלה הבצל‬:‫מצוינת‬ ‫ כל משפט‬,‫ ולבסוף כדין‬,‫ אות פה אות שם‬,‫ תחילה בהיסוס‬,‫ יתגלה הכתוב‬,‫ רק אם יקרבו אותו אל האש וילהטו אותו‬.‫כשהיה‬ (Kol 308) ?‫ שכתוב בו משהו‬,‫ בדף הטהור‬,‫ ומי יחשוד בו‬,‫ אלא מה? את סוד האש אין איש יודע‬.‫ומשפט‬ You ask how I write. Let’s just keep it between us! I take a ripe onion, squeeze it, dip my pen in the juice, and write. It makes excellent invisible ink: onion juice is colorless (just like the tears an onion elicits), and leaves no trace after it dries. The page appears as pristine as before. Only if you draw it close to the fire and set it ablaze will the writing reveal itself, first hesitantly, a letter here and a letter there, and then, finally, every sentence. Naturally! No one knows the secret of the fire, and who would suspect the pure page of having anything written on it? This posthumously published text gives playful expression to the evanescence of Holocaust writing and the charred trace it leaves behind. Although light in tone, the poem, like the fiery script it conceals, smolders with hidden fury. The implied question it answers—how, indeed, can one write after an experience like the Shoah? — remains a burning question for literary criticism, but to the untrained eye, the poet replies, he writes nothing. Underneath its invisible onion ink, however, the text reveals its secret words to anyone who cares to place the seemingly pristine page in the fiery context of conflagration from which it came. 13 Contra Ziarek, who reads “to I” as a proximate form of “to annihilate” by subsuming the appropriated other in the ego of the poetic subject (166), I interpret “Vernichten” and “Ichten” as polar opposites. Published by Duke University Press Comparative Literature COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 456 Pagis, a scholar of classical Hebrew poetry in addition to a poet, was surely fa miliar with a prominent Jewish Midrash that characterizes the Torah as a script of superimposed flames: “eish shachor al gabei eish lavan” (“black fire upon white fire”). Black script on white parchment reveals only the textual veneer, but, because the blank void surrounding the words may encode as much as the inscribed text, by reading the unwritten white nothing around the black script we can begin to set these words ablaze. Why, for instance, does the poet in Pagis’s “Literary Survey” use an onion? Its translucent juice is not particularly combustible, and although its layered skins reveal additional strata brought to light through the act of peeling, the onion still seems a risible rosin for invisible ink. The Hebrew word for onion, “batzal,” however, suggests a deeper resonance. “Batzal” includes “tzel” (shade), thus repeating another key term from “Testimony” and “Roll Call.” But this onion veils still darker shades within. For if one learns to read both the black ink and the unvoiced white absence, the text reveals the invisible last letter of “batzal.” By adding the letter “mem” to “batzal” it completes “b’tzelem” (in the image), as in creation’s original human form. Literature written “b’tzelem” (in the human image) leaves no obvious mark, but it burns with a scorching passion. Conclusion: Hear Nothing More Pagis and Celan explicitly instruct their readers in how to read their poems bearing witness to the ineffable. “Shackle your voice / enfold your hands, and listen / to the voice / of the blank page,” advises Pagis (Kol 228). “They dug and heard nothing more,” writes Celan, establishing a paradigm for his interpreters. Those who dig deeply enough into these texts learn to hear the written nothing they voice. This two-toned injunction to read the “blank page” and hear “nothing more” is also a guide for how to read atrocity literature more generally. Despite persistent clichés about unrepresentable trauma, Celan and Pagis demonstrate that what is ineffable may already be written and what is unwritten may somehow be said. “La poésie ne s’impose plus, elle s’expose” (Gesammelte 3: 181; poetry no longer imposes, it exposes itself), Celan contends, and the conscientious reader must read both what is written and what is not. If this task seems impossible, then that assessment may have comforted Celan, who recognized that his art was following an improbable path. “I find something that comforts me at having taken, in your presence, this impossible path, this path of the impossible” (“diesen unmöglichen Weg, diesen Weg des Unmöglichen”), he says in “The Meridian” (Gesammelte 3: 202; Selected 413). Levinas doubles the difficulty: Celan’s poetry, he says, travels “along the impossible path of the Impossible” (46). But by writing nothing, Celan and Pagis run the gauntlet of the impossible. “Sie versucht, den Bereich des Gegebenen und des Möglichen auszumessen” (“[They] measure the area of the given and the possible”), Celan writes in his own response to a literary survey, “Reply to a Questionnaire from the Flinker Bookstore, Paris, 1958” (Gesammelte 3: 167; Collected 16). Such writing, again in the words of “The Meridian,” “stays mindful [both] of the limits drawn by language, [and] the possibilities [Möglichkeiten] opened by language” (Gesammelte 3: 197; Selected 409). Published by Duke University Press Comparative Literature THE HOLOCAUST POETRY OF PAUL CELAN & DAN PAGIS / 457 Celan’s last poems, published posthumously, continue to exhort an idealized other to read nothing: “Du liest / es fordert / der Unsichtbaren den Wind” (“You read, / the Invisible / summons the wind”), states “Rebleute” (“Vinegrowers”) (Gesammelte 3: 123; Selected 377). That invisible summons to the articulation of nothing demands a sensitivity so acute that it threatens to disappear entirely. But Celan resolutely clings to the hope that his texts will find their way to the intended other and “wash up . . . on heartland” (Gesammelte 3: 186), completing the journey from “I” to “you”: “Ich hier, ich hier, ich; ich, der ich dir all das sagen kann, sagen hätt können” (Gesammelte 3: 173; “I here, I here, I; I, who can say, could have said, all that to you,” Selected 400). By transcribing the stammer of nobody and nothing, Celan situates his poetry in the ghostly “fissure between speech on the page, seemingly so absolute, and an invisible writing that may not be retrievable” (Hartman 164). But retrieve it we can, if we learn to read with sensitivity and care sufficient to raise subjectivity from the voids of Celan’s work: “Hier livitiert / der Schwerste. / Hier bin ich” (“Here the heaviest Levi- / tates. / Here am I”), he writes in his last poem, “Gedichtzu, gedichtauf” (“Poem-closed, Poem-open”) (Selected 390–91). “Hier bin ich” (“Here am I”) enclosed in words, announces an I whose being is, as Derrida says, “almost nothing” (44). This inscription of self in the writing of nothing is the same fragile articulation of fleeting subjectivity voiced by the negated speakers of Celan’s “Psalm,” “Stretto,” and “Todtnauberg” and Pagis’s “Written in Pencil,” “Roll Call,” and “Testimony.” Selfhood, for a survivor and poet such as Celan or Pagis, becomes a cryptic shibboleth, a byword that is almost nothing, but which makes all the difference: “I am, I am only cipher commemorating that which will have been consigned to oblivion, destined to become name, for a finite time, the time of a rose, name of nothing, voices of no one” (Derrida 44). Cosigned as nobody and written under the sign of nothing, Celan’s last poem finally signals the author’s presence and signs his name: “Here am I.” Bar-Ilan University Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Trans. Christopher Lenhart. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984. Print. ———. Negative Dialectics. Trans. E.B. Ashton. New York: Seabury Press, 1973. Print. 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