Gespräch, Gesang: Music, Dialogue, and the Human in Celan and Hölderlin

Abstract

Gespräch, Gesang: Music, Dialogue, and the Human in Celan and Hölderlin Hannah Vandegrift Eldridge (bio) Paul Celan’s interest in the work of Friedrich Hölderlin, both in its own right and as mediated through Martin Buber and Martin Heidegger, is well-documented. Indeed, fifty years ago, in his own fiftieth (and last) year, Celan marked a similar occasion to the one celebrated in this issue by reading his unpublished works in Stuttgart to commemorate Hölderlin’s 200th birthday: March 21st, 1970 (Böschenstein 68). On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Celan’s birth and the 250th anniversary of Hölderlin’s, I want to invert this direction of interpretation and draw on Celan to suggest a slight shift in understandings of Hölderlin. In particular, I use the contrast in Celan between music and conversation to sharpen our ears for a similar distinction in Hölderlin, one that reveals ambivalences in his ambitious poetics of song (Gesang) as uniting the divine, nature, and the human in doing so and hints at an enclave of particularly human speech, described perhaps most clearly as dialogue/conversation (Gespräch) but encompassing dialogue, speech (Reden) or speaking (sprechen). My argument proceeds in three stages: first, I explicate Celan’s dialogic poetics and their complex relation to art (Kunst) in the Meridian speech, linking the fraught term Kunst to Celan’s seemingly contradictory attitudes towards music. Next, I give an overview of the appearances of music and dialogue in Hölderlin and outline the relation of both to the topos of Gesang in his poems and essays. Finally, I turn to Hölderlin’s poems “Heimkunft” and “Andenken” to illuminate the tension between the [End Page 658] divine praising in song and more human, finite, and modest modes of speech.1 Celan: “oft ist es ein verzweifeltes Gespräch” Celan’s Meridian speech is an enormously complex interweaving of allusions, quotations, and intermediaries that, like the speeches of previous and subsequent prizewinners, engages extensively with the work of Georg Büchner. Celan establishes what appears to be a firm opposition between a negatively inflected art (Kunst) and a positively connoted poetry (Dichtung).2 The speech opens by introducing art (“die Kunst”) as “ein marionettenhaftes jambisch-fünffüßiges und— diese Eigenschaft ist auch, durch den Hinweis auf Pygmalion und sein Geschöpf, mythologisch belegt—kinderloses Wesen” (Celan III 187). Art appears as sterile, not-alive, and in its iambic five-footedness, unnatural or artificial; Celan adds, after a list of Büchner’s works that affiliates art with “Mechanismus” (III 188), that art is “ein Problem, und zwar, wie man sieht, ein verwandlungsfähiges, zäh- und langlebiges, will sagen ewiges” (III 188). Quoting Büchner’s Lenz, Celan notes that art is easy to discuss or to theorize about, and that in doing so Lenz forgets himself, a point that Celan extends to a general statement: “Kunst schafft Ich-Ferne.” (III 193). To the problem of art Celan opposes what he calls “das Gegenwort,” a word “das den ‘Draht’ zerreißt,” destroying the mechanisms and imprisonments of art in an “Akt der Freiheit” (III 189). This word or act (rather, word-as-act), which honors the “für die Gegenwart des Menschlichen zeugenden Majestät des Absurden,” Celan admits, has no permanent name, “aber ich glaube, es ist…die Dichtung” (III 190, suspension points in original). In contrast with Kunst, then, Dichtung speaks against the [End Page 659] mechanistic-artificial and testifies to the human in rendering homage to (“huldigen”) the majesty of the absurd. As the speech continues, however, Celan begins to inflect art and poetry into one another, first noting the “unheimlich” tendency of art to absorb or freeze the natural in its very effort to preserve it as such (“das Natürliche als Natürliche mittels der Kunst zu erfassen”), exemplified by a scene in Lenz (III 192). But he believes he finds, in Büchner as a poet (Dichter) of the creaturely, a calling into question of art that also affects poetry, “Eine In-Frage-Stellung, zu der alle heutige Dichtung zurück muß, wenn sie weiterfragen will” (Celan III...