On the Possibility of Poetic Embodiment: Articulatory Gesture in Paul Celan’s “Offene Glottis”

Abstract

The metaphor of proximity underwriting the notion of ‘close’ reading presumes a sublated distance, as if one were moving ‘up close’ to the text in order to scrutinize optically its every minutiae. Reading aloud, on the other hand, can often seem close reading’s less illustrious sibling, with a reputation for being sound pedagogic practice, a way to make the text one’s ‘own’ by revoicing – and sensually enjoying – it in the body rather than taking it interpretively apart in the mind. As simplistic as these dichotomies are, they have a way of surreptitiously infiltrating hermeneutic practice. In order to think through how close reading and reading aloud productively intertwine, the following argument reconstructs the disciplinary history of the concept of phonic or articulatory gesture (Lautgebärde), tracking its origin in early twentieth-century ‘ethnopsychology’ and its afterlife in linguistics and literary theory. The argument then makes the case that articulatory gestures in poetry pose a significant challenge to literary hermeneutics. This section draws on contemporary work in the phenomenology of embodiment as well as Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic account of poetic language in order to probe novel modes of para-hermeneutic reading. The argument’s third and final step focuses on how articulatory gesture, as a general poetic phenomenon, gains historically specific contour and singular poetic function in the poem “Offene Glottis” by Paul Celan, shedding light on Celan’s pneumatic poetics in the process.