Low Tide, Black Shoals: Toward Offshore Formations in Celan Studies

AbstractWhile Paul Celan’s lyrical commemoration of the Holocaust has been recognized for its multidirectionality, commentators have not acknowledged his engagement with other colonial and imperial histories contemporaneous with his writing. Celan’s advocacy for reading words “with the acute accent of the present” calls for a reading of his poetry that is attentive to its evocations of, and silence around, multiple histories of racial violence. Recognizing how the longue durée of transatlantic slavery is mediated through oceanic archives and the element of water, this article reads the fraught nearshore landscapes in Sprachgitter for their commemoration of the unresolved unfolding of Auschwitz and, if inadvertently, the unresolved unfolding of the Middle Passage. The reading focuses on “Niedrigwasser,” a poem ostensibly about a coastal landscape that is also about the formation and deformation of that landscape through ecological processes that used materials transported by genocidal violence. The multiple temporalities of the poem move between human time and geologic time in order to grasp the legacy of Auschwitz. In unsettling attempts to contain the spatial and temporal scale of genocide, this and other poems evidence their receptivity to and implicatedness in distant, but not entirely unrelated, histories of violence.Keywords: AnthropoceneCelanHolocaustmemoryMiddle Passage Notes1 Rachel Zolf, No One’s Witness: A Monstrous Poetics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021), 5.2 Zolf, No One’s Witness, 5.3 Paul Celan, Gesammelte Werke in fünf Bänden, ed. Beda Alleman and Stefan Reichert with Rudolf Bücher, vol. 3 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983), 190. All following citations from this edition will be abbreviated GW followed by volume and page number. Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 14.4 Sharpe, In the Wake, 109.5 Ibid., 19.6 Astrida Neimanis, “The Weather Underwater: Blackness, White Feminism, and the Breathless Sea,” Australian Feminist Studies 34, no. 102 (2019): 490–508.7 Tiffany Lethabo King, The Black Shoals (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 19.8 Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 20.9 Ibid., 23.10 See Charlotte Ryland, Paul Celan’s Encounters with Surrealism: Trauma, Translation and Shared Poetic Space (London: Legenda, 2012), 71–91.11 Zolf, No One’s Witness, 5.12 Paul Celan, Die Gedichte, ed. Barbara Wiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2020), 766.13 GW, 1:187.14 Marlies Janz, Vom Engagement absoluter Poesie. Zur Lyrik und Ästhetik Paul Celans (Frankfurt am Main: Syndikat, 1976), 75, 223.15 Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 2009, xiii. Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin, The Human Planet (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 18.16 Heather Davis and Zoe Todd, “On the Importance of a Date, or, Decolonizing the Anthropocene,” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 16, no.4 (2017): 761–80, 761.17 Ibid., 774.18 Ibid., 772.19 Ibid.20 On the unthinkability of the Anthropocene, see Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 36–37, and Heather Anne Swanson, “The Banality of the Anthropocene,” Fieldsights, February 22, 2017. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/the-banality-of-the-anthropocene21 King, The Black Shoals, 2.22 Ibid., x.23 Ibid., 11.24 Ibid., 1–2.25 Ibid., 70.26 Ibid., 35.27 GW, 1: 193.28 GW, 1: 227.29 “Immer wieder gibt Celans geologischer Kosmos diskrete Hinweise auf die Dimension des Schreckens, die CACO3 in seiner Welt einnimmt. Wie ein unterirdisches Beziehungsgeflecht zieht sich die Welt von Kreide und Kalk mit der Celan eigenen Präzision durch diese Dichtung.” Uta Werner, Textgräber: Paul Celans Geologische Lyrik (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1998), 93. The word lists are reprinted in: Paul Celan, Sprachgitter. Vorstufen – Textgenese – Endfassung, ed. Heino Schmull (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2020), 109–22. The note “precipitation of CaCO3” (“Ausfällung von CaCO3”) can be found on page 110 of that edition, drawn from Franz Lotze’s textbook Geologie, while many of the terms in “Low Tide” appear in the word list on page 121, drawn from Roland Brinkmann’s Abriss der Geologie.30 “Spits [Nehrungen] arise as a result of the drift of sediment masses by currents running parallel to the coast at receding coastal areas where the ocean currents continue to run in the old direction due to their inertia. The spur-shaped hooks [Haken] that appear where the currents bend are embryonic forms of the spit [Nehrung] (e.g. Hela peninsula / Baltic Sea).” Hans Murawski, Geologisches Wörterbuch (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke Verlag, 1983), 152.31 Werner, Textgräber, 141.32 Stacy Alaimo, Exposed: Environmental Politics And Pleasures in Posthuman Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 168.33 Michael Rothberg, The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020), 74.34 Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), 13–14. Cited in Rothberg, The Implicated Subject, 73.35 Rothberg, The Implicated Subject, 1.36 Sharpe, In the Wake, 41, 40.37 Ibid., 19.38 Alexis Pauline Gumbs, M Archive: After the End of the World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 11.39 Ibid.40 GW, 1: 193.41 Gumbs, M Archive, 11.42 Shoshana Felman, “Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching,” American Imago 48, no. 1 (1991): 13–73, 27.43 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996), 24. See also Stef Craps, Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).44 King, The Black Shoals, x.45 “die Gespräche, taggrau, / der Grundwasserspuren.” (GW 1: 117).46 Sharpe, In the Wake, 14.47 Elizabeth Deloughrey, “Submarine Futures of the Anthropocene,” Comparative Literature 69, no. 1 (2017): 32–44, 35.48 Joshua Bennett, “‘Beyond the Vomiting Dark’: Toward a Black Hydropoetics” in Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field, ed. Angela Hume and Gillian Osborne (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018), 105.49 Joseph Roth, The Wandering Jews, translated by Michael Hofmann (New York: WW Norton & Company, 2001), 98–99. “Können nicht auch auf einem Schiff Pogrome ausbrechen? Wohin dann? Wenn einen Passagier auf dem Schiff der Tod überrascht, wo begräbt man den Toten? “Man versenkt die Leiche ins Wasser […] Werden aber auch die Toten erwachen, die ins Wasser versenkt worden sind? Gibt es Land unter dem Wasser? Welch seltsame Geschöpfe wohnen dort unten? […] Fressen die Haifische nicht die Wasserleichen?” Joseph Roth, Juden auf Wanderschaft in: Joseph Roth, Werke, vol. 2, ed. Klaus Westermann (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1989), 902–3.50 Sharpe, In the Wake, 30.51 Paul Celan, Sprachgitter, 120.52 “Kriechfährten beim Wandern am Meeresboden.” Ibid.Additional informationNotes on contributorsJason GrovesJason Groves is associate professor of German Studies at the University of Washington. He is the author of The Geological Unconscious: German Literature and the Mineral Imaginary (Fordham University Press, 2020) and translator of Sonja Neef’s The Babylonian Planet: Culture and Encounter under Globalization (Bloomsbury, 2021). He is coeditor of the new series Ecocriticism Unbound with De Gruyter.