'Glauben Sie mir das Wort Blume?' Productive Language Scepticism and Skilful Questioning in the Work of Peter Waterhouse

Abstract

'Glauben Sie mir das Wort Blume?5 Productive Language Scepticism and Skilful Questioning in the Work of PeterWaterhouse MAURIZIO PIRRO University of Bari I Despite being developed within a different gender context, the concept of ?criture f?minine that was generated in the theoretical approaches of H?l?ne Cixous and Julia Kristeva ismore appropriately applied to the lyric poetry of Peter Waterhouse than perhaps to any other contemporary poetry in German. He shifts the meaning of poetic utterance into a sonorous dimen sion inwhich the reader is invited and challenged to share the poet's plea sure in freemental and verbal associations. His work gradually approaches a level of direct, transparent signification that is paradoxically derived not from clarity but from the very diffuseness and indeterminacy of a language that does not straightforwardly express content but releases instead the semantic potential inherent in lyric language for making use of that chora where words exist in a kind of pre-verbal condition, shielded from the falsifications that every speaker riskswith every utterance.1 Furthermore, he reveals the semiotic structure of poetic communication, towhich the reader is drawn by the free-floating movement of a lyric discourse that is not the direcdy addressed utterance of a clearly defined self but rather takes unex pected directions and pursues every possibility of verbal communication within the polyphonic poetic act. These are the key elements of Peter Waterhouse's poetics, which he has expounded with meticulous precision not only in collections of poetry but also in a range of essays. It can perhaps best be described as a poetics ofmultiple voices, and has much in common with the Italian philosopher Adriana Cavarero's model of a non-logocentric, subjective, feminine mode of writing.2 1 The duplicity of lyric language in Waterhouse's work has been traced back to the Romantic concept of the arabesque. See Alexandra M. Kedves, '"Ich vern?hte den Himmel mit dem Stra?enst?ck vor dem Haus." Die Arabeske als thematische Form bei Peter Waterhouse', Text + Kritik, 137 (1998), 31-40. For chora (and its Platonic origins) see Julia Kristeva, La revolution du langage po?tique. Vavant-garde ?ia fin du ig. si?cle. Lautr?amont et Mallarm? (Paris, 1974). 2 See Adriana Cavarero, A pi? voci.Filosofia dell'espressione vocale (Milan, 2003). MAURIZIO PIRRO For Cavarero, the voice as the unmistakable sign of human individuality gains relevance from a process of mutual listening, which frees individuals from the hierarchically ordered sentence structure of everyday language and equips them for a purely human encounter with the Other. No loss of sub jectivityresultsfromtheabandonment of logic thatthispolyphonic layering entails. On the contrary, the identity of the individual is reinforced in the semiotic process, all themore because the stereoscopic structure of language necessitates the establishment within the speaking voice not only of the speaker but also of one spoken to. The speaker is no longer distinguishable from the listener in the all-encompassing flood of language, but gains instead deeper insight into a self that exists beyond the power-relations that inevita bly make themselves felt in normal discourse. The meaning of any verbal utterance is perceptible here only as an ill-defined luminescence, as the final echo of voices long since extinguished, and yet is an unmistakably perceptible appeal to another, comparable perhaps to the inarticulate but nonetheless meaningful babble of a mother playing with her child. In the same way, the poetics of voices developed by Peter Waterhouse aspires towards the fragmentation of the speaking selfwhich, via the critical destruction of the linguistic conventions that have been unreflectively inter nalized, will make possible the reconstruction of subjective integrity on a higher plane. This condition is equivalent to an intensified capacity for language itself, attainable only by the individual's commitment to that darker, shadowy aspect of linguistic communication that has been profiled in the theories of ?criture f?minine. In characterizing Waterhouse's work, ?criture f?minine is an appropriate term to use insofar as his Sprachskepsis [language scepticism], with its roots in the traditions of Austrian literature, is only rarely manifested in a negative gesture such as the renunciation of any form of verbalization, but instead usually takes the...