Thanks to contributor Dirk Van Nouhuys for this stimulating and persuasive view of Celan, of meaning, and of language.
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| Paul Celan |
One of the things Noam Chomsky did to revolutionize
linguistics was to point out that you could make sentences that were grammatically
correct but did not make sense. His observation freed linguists to devote their
attention to grammar without worrying about meaning, as they had tended to
do. An example he used is this sentence:
“Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.”
It seems to me that when Chomsky asserts
this he is using ‘make’ in a narrow sense. The phrase “make sense” for him
means something like ‘to harmonize rationally with the speaker’s notion of the
world.’ But ‘make’ can also mean create, and ‘make sense’ can mean create
meaning.
I once had a teacher, Yosel Rogat, who suggested
that any metaphor, as opposed to a simile, behind the scenes evokes a universe
in which the metaphor is literally true. If you say, “life is like a
nightmare,” you point to certain resemblances that you might be able to list. “If
you say, “life is a nightmare”, you evoke a universe of darkness and suffering
where sordid details struggle for realization.
So it is with Chomsky’s sentence. If you
speak it from the narrow, Chomskian perspective, then you say nothing about
ideas or about sleep or about fury. But if you take ‘make’ in the sense of
create, you have a resonant image of ideas, some reified (because they might
have color), but without color and at once somnambulant and raging. And it does
seem relevant to me that Chomsky is himself a furious wielder of abstract ideas
intended to rouse others from complacency time after time.
And so it is with Paul Celan. His poems
for the most part do not make sense in the narrow Chomskian definition. But
they make a great deal of sense by creating meaning. Of course I’m reading in
translation, but I doubt knowing German would make any difference. In fact I
think the German inclination to create new words by joining old ones freely
lends it self to this sort of sense making. You can put two words together in a
way that does not harmonize rationally with the world, as you know it, but does
create a new sense, a new batch of meaning.
This generation of meaning is one thing that
makes Celan so exhilarating to read, and, in his context so moving. You re constantly
involved in making sense. Reading this book is a long struggle in which you
time after time are forced to make (create) sense based on the chimeric materials
Celan provides you. Nourishing your mind in the background as you work is
Celan’s tortured history, his upbringing as a German-speaking Jew in what had
been part of Austria, was then Romania and is now the Ukraine; the death of his
mother in a concentration camp; his tormented attempts to recreate his nationality
and his identity; his deep involvement with the German language though he was a
Jew suffering horrors enacted by Germans; his career in France, his eventual suicide. It is the history
of a chimeric identity, and the poems are chimeric. That the evocation is mostly
of tragedy and suffering does not make it less wonderful because it shows the capacity
of the human mind to work with such dark material and come out richer in
meaning.
