Hölderlin and Celan: A Fragmented Poetics of Remembrance

Abstract

Hölderlin and Celan: A Fragmented Poetics of Remembrance Charles Bambach Purity, Homecoming, and the Poetics of Citation One of the defining moments in Celan’s signature poem “Tübingen, Jänner” is its focus on the Hölderlinian trope of “origin.” Drawing upon Hölderlin’s hymn,“Der Rhein”, and the opening line of stanza four—“A riddle is what is purely originated” (v. 16)—Celan undermines and compromises the very conceit of an origin as an Ursprung, an arche, or a pure beginning. For Celan, origin itself functions as a metonymy for the sense of something lost; it is nothing other than a fiction. Within Hölderlin’s poem, the source or Quelle of the Rhine offers the poet an occasion on which to reflect on the enigmatic origin of all that springs forth purely form nature. But even as this vision unfolds, the poet is, at the same time, confronted by the river as demi-god, a curious blend and opposition of both human and godly elements—hence, not “pure” in any simplistic sense. In “Tübingen, Jänner,” Celan will seek to dismantle the power of this arche by shifting its field of signifiers and placing them under a form of poetic erasure that, paradoxically, involves citing them again but in a parodic and distantiated way. Such a movement reenacts the experience of violence that this arche-discourse itself brings forth. Here the very act of citation occurs as a tearing out from one context and placing it, almost imperiously, in a new one that is often strange, foreign, and other. [End Page 635] Almost by definition, citation requires a double kind of tear/rip—of an excising from a longer piece that needs to be truncated and of a repositioning of this old text into a new configuration. What emerges from this process is a variation of the original that, in its repetition, challenges the originarity of the origin. In Celan’s staging of this Hölderlin citation from “The Rhine,” we are forced outside the frame of the poem itself. It is as if Celan wants to declare that the poem is never self-sufficient or in any way organically whole or pure; it comes to us as life itself, in fragments that are separated from each other, estranged parts dispersed by the rivenness of time and history. In the homophonic play of rein and Rhein, Celan crafts a poetics of dispersion that attends to the doubling implications of citation, repetition, and rehearsal. If the Hölderlin myth was built upon the riddle, enigma, and mystery of the pure origin, then Celan’s Widerruf of Hölderlin will draw attention to the split between origin and rehearsal, between primary utterance and secondary recitation, through which the origin becomes but another iterative repetition. But repetition, thought of in its German sense as Wiederholung, also invariably brings with it a sense of retrieval. Citation is one such form of retrieval that reiterates and repeats what was once expressed; yet it does so now in a wholly different and foreign context so that such an activity does not merely “fetch back” (wieder-holen) what was once written, since in the new iteration one moves away from the former site of expression. In Celan’s hands, then, citation—especially when underscored and attended by the repeated insertion of quotation marks, hyphens, parentheses, colons, enjambments, and other poetic devices—will function as a way to pluralize the purported singularity of the origin and to burst asunder the deadly metaphysical-political implications of the arche as source, inception, provenance, home (in its various forms as nation, race, state, Volk). For Celan, citation as repetition serves to destabilize the security and singularity of the origin by tearing it from its home, placing it into a kind of poetic exile and rendering the possibility of a homecoming as Heimkehr, Rückkehr, and Wiederkehr ever more problematic and uncertain. Given his deep interest in geological processes of decomposition, erosion, and the abrasive effect of wind and water on stone, soil, and sand, we can see how attuned Celan was to processes of change, transformation, and metamorphosis. Much as chemical particles get unsettled by...