The Metaphysics of Language in Emily Dickinson
(As Translated by Paul Celan)
Shira Wolosky
I. Theo-Linguistics
Let down the Bars, Oh Death -The tired Flocks come in
Whose bleating ceases to repeat
Whose wandering is done -Thine is the stillest night
Thine the securest Fold
Too near Thou art for seeking Thee
Too tender, to be told. (Poem 1065)
Fort mit der Schranke, Tod!
Die Herde kommt, es kommt,
wer blo"kte und nun nimmer blo"kt,
wer nicht mehr wandert, kommt.
Dein ist die stillste Nacht,
der sichre Pferch ist dein.
Zu nah bist du, um noch gesucht,
zu sanft, genannt zu sein.
This poem by Emily Dickinson clearly falls within the traditions of mystical
discourse. Its eschatological focus, its transcendent yearning, its vision of arrival after
long wandering, of union after separation, are all distinctively mystical. Within the
context of the translation of the poem by Paul Celan, the mystical discourse of the text
emerges even more forcefully, and does so especially in terms of the linguistic
assertion and implications deeply inscribed within mystical tradition: something Celan's
work persistently probes.1 Thus, the "stillest night" (stillste Nacht) evokes both silence
and immobility: that is, atemporality, as cessation of all sound and temporal motion.
"Too near" (zu nah) invokes that absolute inwardness invariably inscribed in western
mystical experience as a crucial marker. And "Too tender, to be told" (zu sanft,
genannt zu sein) announces that inexpressibility which has through centuries served as
ultimate signifier for transcendence. In a persistent mystical paradox, negating
language serves as ultimate assertion. Language at this point is more than another
trope for surpassing temporal reality; rather, transcendence fundamentally is conceived
as the transcendence of language as such.
The potential ambiguity in such negation also emerges forcefully here. For the
poem is addressed, not to divine fullness, but to Death: in the dialogical form so
characteristic of Celan. It is therefore unclear whether the stillness the poem seeks is a
final fulfillment, or a final annihilation. The poem may either assert, or defeat, its
mystical promise, in a borderline with blasphemy that mystical discourse, especially in
its modern manifestations, seems often to risk. In terms of mystical language-imagery,
the unnaming of the end (strengthened in Celan's version) hovers in unstable fashion
between a silence that transcends the limits of language, or utter linguistic collapse and
denial.
What were Emily Dickinson's contacts with a tradition of mystical language, to
substantiate the claim that a text such as "Let down the bars oh Death" is embedded
within it? Celan's situation as a twentieth-century poet places him within a period of
heightened linguistic self-consciousness and interest; while his sources within mystical
tradition, first cited by himself, are specifically rooted in linguistic concerns. 2 Celan's
translations of Dickinson, however, suggest these as shared terrains with her: mystical
discourse, as it is specifically concerned with the status of language; and language,
conversely, as itself metaphysically structured and commanding a central metaphysical
function or role. All of the Dickinson texts chosen by Celan for translation center in
Wolosky, 3
metaphysical concerns: death; teleology; theodicy; redemption. 3 These metaphysical
subjects, however, are not treated as inseparable from linguistic interests, but rather are
presented by Celan as exactly as inscribed, enacted, and addressed through them.
The treatment of Dickinson's poetics as separate from the religious dimension of her
work is thus contested by Celan.4 Celan's translations instead implicitly present his own
interpretive understanding of Dickinson: as a poet within a tradition of metaphysical
discourse, for whom questions of language are inextricable from theological concerns
and profoundly shaped by them.
When thus viewed through the prism of Celan, Dickinson's acute linguistic selfreflection becomes visible, as is the case in this poem. And, as here, reflections on
language takes place in modes that are overtly theological, even if these may then
seem variously to point towards linguistic or poetic issues. In fact, in Dickinson's
historical context, just such a convergence between theological and linguistic issues is
prominent, characteristic, and pervasive. Nineteenth-century America develops a
tradition of theo-linguistic thought, which serves as a matrix out of which not only
Dickinson's poetry emerges, but which also points forward to the twentieth-century's
linguistically interested poetics.
Work on Dickinson's theological contexts has remained on the whole
impressionistic, and has been largely conducted through the prior assumption that
Dickinson's work subsumes religion into art. But while Dickinson's exact exposure to
systematic theology may be unrecoverable, the persistent claims, repeated from
commentator to commentator, that Dickinson's exposure to, for example, Jonathan
Edwards was minimal, are mystifying. Thus Albert Gelpi states that "there is no
indication that Emily Dickinson was acquainted with the writings of Jonathan Edwards." 5
Richard Sewell, in his two volume biography, mentions Jonathan Edwards once in
Wolosky, 4
passing as a background figure to recurrent revivals in the Connecticut Valley, where
both Edwards and Dickinson lived.6 Jack Capps asserts "There is no evidence of her
having been exposed to the writings of such authors as Nathaniel Ward, Cotton Mather,
or Jonathan Edwards."7 Even Karl Keller, who devotes a chapter to "Emily Dickinson
and Jonathan Edwards," does so in general reference to "the Puritanism he came to
represent in rural Massachusetts," and reiterates that "Edwards himself she never knew
very well."8 Yet full weight should be given to a quotation Keller brings from Millicent
Todd Bingham in her memoir, Emily Dickinson's Home:
The long shadow of Jonathan Edwards, distant from 1850 in years but not
in influence, still lay dark over Amherst. His ministry had begun in
Northampton only seven miles away, and from that town his frightening
message, instilling in many a sinner the fear of an angry God, had
inspired the Great Awakening of the 1730's. . . A century later the
orthodox New Englander was still weighed down by his awareness of evil.
. .In his inaugural address President Heman Humphrey of Anherst College
summed it up in these words: "Without the fear of God nothing can be
secure for one moment."9
The continued, live influence of Jonathan Edwards not only, but certainly also, in
Amherst has been reaffirmed by recent scholarship. The New Divinity and New
England Theology movements, whose clergy were settled over churches in Connecticut
and the Connecticut River Valley, specifically identified with Edwards and based
themselves in his writings.10 Edwards's presence was especially felt within popular
culture, affecting common thought and experience through sermons and discussion. 11
His works were frequently republished, circulated, and discussed up through the last
quarter of the nineteenth-century -- a publishing effort spearheaded by Edwards Amasa
Park of Andover, a committed Edwardsian whose preaching Emily Dickinson
particularly commends, at least regarding style ("I never heard anything like it, and don't
Wolosky, 5
expect to again, till we stand at the great white throne, and "he reads from the book, the
Lamb's book" L 142 I 272).12 Sereno Dwight, Edwards's grandson, brought out in 1829
a ten volume Works which included many previously unpublished manuscript writings
as well as a long biographical memoir. Not least, Mary Lyon, headmistress of Mount
Holyoke College which Emily Dickinson attended, was a devoted Edwardsian who often
preached and taught Edwards's texts in the college, notably "Sinners in the Hands of an
Angry God" and Edwards's History of Redemption.13 The Amherst College Library did
have (does have) the edition of The Works of President Edwards with a Memoir of his
Life edited by Sereno E. Dwight, acquired during the year of its publication by G. & C. &
H. Carvill. Edwards was taught as well in the Amherst College Curriculum of the
1840's.14
Dickinson herself refers to Edwards a number of times in letters and poems (as
well as mentioning visits to the Edwards Church in Northamption, L 46 I 121). She
includes a poem on the religion of bees -- "Of Industry and Morals / And every righteous
thing/ For the divine Perdition / Of Idleness and Spring" (Poem 1522) -- in a letter that
then adds: "All Liars shall have their part" -- Jonathan Edwards --" (L 712 III 701). This
text appears once again in Poem 1598 -- "All" Rogues "Shall have their part in" what -- /
The Phosphorous of God." A poem such as "A Pit -- but Heaven over it --" (Poem
1712) almost inevitably echoes Edwards's most famous sermon on "Sinners," which
Susan Gilbert Dickinson, Dickinson's sister-in-law and dearest friend, for example, also
cites.15 Other traces may be surmised -- Dickinson's use of the word "consent," for
example, in her important poem on the incarnation of language, where she compares
"A Word made flesh" to "this consent of Language, This loved Philology" (Poem 1651).
"Consent" is a central term in Edwards's theology and specifically in his aesthetic
statement on "The Beauty of the World" published in the 1829 Dwight Works:
Wolosky, 6
The beauty of the world consists wholly of sweet mutual consents, either
within itself or with the supreme being. As to the corporeal world, though
there are many other sorts of consents, yet the sweetest and most
charming beauty of it is its resemblance of spiritual beauties. The reason
is that spiritual beauties are infinitely the greatest, and bodies being but
the shadows of beings, they must be so much the more charming as they
shadow forth spiritual beauties.16
At issue, however, is more than specific traces of Edwards in Dickinson's work;
even as Edwards's interest for Dickinson studies does not reside in the revivalist
impulse (which Dickinson resisted), or doctrines of sin and the will for which Edwards is
most known. Edwards participates in an enduring Christian discourse on metaphysics
and language, which also marks other texts read by Dickinson, and which had become
of special and central importance in the religious discussion taking place during
Dickinson's life. The passage from "The Beauty of the World" assumes and presents a
structure in which corporeal things are "shadows" or, as he also calls it, images of
spiritual ones. In his treatise on "The Mind," also published in Dwight's 1829 edition,
Edwards develops his terms:
The reason why the names of spiritual things are all, or most of them,
derived from the names of sensible or corporeal ones -- as imagination,
conception, apprehend, etc. -- is because there was no other way of
making others readily understand men's meaning, when they first signified
these things by sound, than by giving them the names of things sensible,
to which they had an analogy. They could thus point out with the finger
and so explain themselves, as in sensible things (section 23).17
In the schema of modern linguistics, Edwards's "spiritual" idea as the "meaning" is what
he also calls the "signified;" while the "names" that are "derived from sensible or
corporeal" things are signifiers, conveyed through "sound." 18 The signifier is sensible
both in its own body, as sound, and as derived in the material world, which can
nonetheless act as an "analogy" and thus represent immaterial, spiritual signifieds.
However, this representation of the signified in the signifier remains partial or faulty or
Wolosky, 7
risky. In another note for "The Mind," Edwards considers:
Words. We are sued to apply the same words a hundred different ways;
and ideas being so much tied and associated with the words, they lead us
into a thousand real mistakes. For where we find that the words may be
connected, the ideas being by custom tied with them, we think that the
ideas may be connected likewise, and applied everywhere and in every
way as words (section 18).
Edwards's meditations on language are closely tied to his response to Lockean
epistemology, its complex negotiations of simple and mixed ideas (see "The Mind,"
sections 41 and 42, e.g.), and its implications for language. Locke's work on his theory
of sensations led him to argue that language is conventional, such that there is no
"natural connexion" between a particular sound and a specific thing and no essential
likeness between "the names that stand for them [and] our ideas." In this way he
"stumbled," as Perry Miller comments, "upon the discovery that the problem of
language is one with the problem of knowledge." Edwards pursues this, focussing on
the need, as he put it, to "extricate all questions from least confusion or ambiguity of
words, so that the ideas shall be left naked." For the "idea" must be distinguished from
its signifiers, which as "sounds and letters are external things." 19 Edwards's own turn to
experiential religion, with its emphasis on the affections, reflected his attitudes towards
language, albeit in complex ways. Edwards asserted the need to experience the ideas
themselves, rather than mere words, which remain inadequate substitutes. 20 But he
also recognized, and masterfully exploited, the role of words as rhetorical tools in
arousing the affections. His notes on "The Mind" include as topics to be considered
"How the affections will suggest words and expressions and thoughts, and make
eloquent" (section 35), and "How words came to have such a mighty influence on
thought and judgment, by virtue of the association of ideas, or from ideas being
habitually tied to words" (section 54).21
Wolosky, 8
These two inconsistent, if not conflicting, attitudes towards language can be felt
in a work such as the highly influential sermon "A Divine and Supernatural Light."
There, Edwards insists that true conversion occurs only when the divine spirit "unites
himself with the mind of the saint," and distinguishes this true spiritual union from both
sensation and imagination:
This spiritual and divine light does not consist in any impression made
upon the imagination. It is no impression upon the mind, as though one
saw any thing with the bodily eyes; it is no imagination or idea of an
outward light or glory or any beauty of form or countenance, or a visible
lustre or brightness of any object. The imagination may be strongly
impressed by such things; but this is not spiritual light. Indeed, when the
mind has a lively discovery of spiritual things, and is greatly affected by
the power of divine light, it may and probably very commonly doth, much
affect the imagination; so that impressions of an outward beauty or
brightness may accompany those spiritual discoveries. But spiritual light
is not that impression upon the imagination, but an exceeding different
thing from it. Natural men may have lively impressions on their
imagination; and we cannot determine but the devil, who transforms
himself into an angel of light, may cause imaginations of an outward
beauty, or visible glory, and of sounds and speeches, and other such
things; but these are things of vastly inferior nature to spiritual light.22
There's the rub. Mere "outward beauty," "visible glory," "sounds and speeches" may be
the work of the devil, not least perhaps in the attention they attract away from the
"spiritual light" to which they are "vastly inferior." And yet, while spiritual light
must be distinguished from the "impression upon the mind" made through "bodily eyes;"
yet, the power of divine light "probably very commonly doth, much affect the
imagination; so that impressions of an outward beauty or brightness may accompany
those spiritual discoveries." The sermon itself, in fact, in its rhetorical "sounds and
speeches" and vivid words, is an inextricable part of that movement of the affections
which Edwards would enlist in his preaching, and which is requisite to true spiritual
union.
Wolosky, 9
Edwards seems to stand both for and against an affective language and its
imaginative power; for and against the priority of the signified, as against the power of
the signifier intimately and inextricably connected with it. Edwards still assumes a
traditional theo-linguistic scheme, inherited from the Church Fathers through the
Christian ages, whereby spiritual experience as signified precedes and exceeds its
material embodiment, with language itself considered such an embodiment as a
signifier in sound or writing. And yet, Edwards also begins to assign a positive role to
imagination and to rhetoric, which he, as was also traditional, associates with material
impressions, "as though one saw any thing with the bodily eyes," and with the material
world generally.23
This dual linguistic legacy takes its place within a general duality in Puritan
commitments, which shifted emphasis in an attempt to embrace this-wordly historical
community no less than other-worldly transcendence. Edwards's double direction, not
least in language, leaves its strong mark on followers in the Second Great Awakening
and on nineteenth-century American literary culture. The Puritan imagination is
generally cited as background to the extraordinary developments of symbolism in
nineteenth-century American letters, with Edwards often seen as the godfather of
Emerson's "symbolic consciousness" in his refusal, for example, to confine types to
Scripture, making "nature as well as the Bible radically figurative." 24 Edwards, of
course, carefully hedged any such claims with doctrinal limits on human nature and
power.25 In Emerson, however, remains consistently unclear about whether nature,
language, or mind has priority; or what guarantees their correspondence; or whether
the priest is a poet or the poet a priest.26 And Emerson is only one case. Discussions
of language were widespread in nineteenth-century New England, and were often
caught, in ways more or less unstable, between an older privileging of intellectual or
Wolosky, 10
spiritual 'signified' experience and a newer emphasis on material 'signifiers' in nature
and language. In Amherst proper, for example, William Tyler preached and soon after
published a funeral sermon for Edward Hitchcock, a staunch Edwardsian and President
of Amherst College (which Dickinson's grandfather founded, and where her father and
brother served as treasurers).
Figurative language is not a mere play of the imagination. It is not by some
accidental discovery or human invention that all words in all languages
originally and properly signify objects, actions, and events in the outward
world. The material world was made for this purpose. It is a universal
langauge. The elements of nature are a universal alphabet. . . There is a
language of flowers. There is also a language of plants and animals, and
it is the language of God.27
Such discussions of language gained wide currency through Horace Bushnell's
Dissertation on The Nature of Language as Related to Thought and Spirit. This work
on the one hand insists on the importance of "objects and acts in the sensible world. . .
as signs of thought:"
It is only as there is a Logos in the outward world, answering to the logos
or internal reason of the parties, that they can come into a mutual
understanding in regard to any thought or spiritual state whatever. To use
a more familiar expression, there is a vast analogy in things, which
prepares them as forms, to be signs or figures of thoughts, and thus,
bases or types of words. Our bodily mechanism and the sensible world
we live in are, in fact, made up of words, to represent our thoughts and
internal states. They only want naming, and then, passing into sound, to
be re-produced or have their images called up by sounds, they drop out,
so to speak, their gross material quality and become words of spirit.28
The signifier as sensible world and words serves a positive function, as types or "words
to represent our thoughts and internal states." And yet, even this positive function is
secondary. It still only subserves the "thought or spiritual state" as "signs or figures of
thoughts," i.e. signifiers serving a prior and superior signified. What is more, this
Wolosky, 11
service is at best temporary. The role of the signifier is to erase itself, to "drop out, so
to speak, [its] gross material quality" in order to release pure signified "words of spirit."
At the worst, the material body of the signifying words compromises, if it does not
indeed block, the signified spirit it is meant to deliver:
Words of thought or spirit are not only inexact in their significance, never
measuring the truth or giving its precise equivalent, but they always affirm
something which is false, or contrary to the truth intended. They impute
form to that which really is out of form. . . . In one view they are all false;
for there are not shapes in the truths they represent, and therefore we are
to separate continually. . . between the husks of the forms and the pure
truths of thought presented in them.29
Language as signifying means competes with, or impedes, the signified idea it is
supposed to convey. Words as signifiers never fully convey the truth. Indeed, they are
"not only inexact," they are "false" and "contrary to the truth intended," in the very fact
that they are material forms or shapes, which truth must essentially exceed. Bushnell
finally arrives at that transcendence of time, of body, and of language which is deeply
inscribed within Christian tradition as its mystical core. To truly approach the truth of
spirit it is best "to clear ourselves of time and the law it weaves into words and
predicates. . . To see God all formulas, inferences, degrees, [are] out of the question. . .
Language under the laws of logic or speculation does not seem to be adequate to any
such use or purpose."30
Just how traditional Bushnell remains, and how close the contexts for his theolinguistic thought would be to Dickinson's, is attested by his citations to Sir Thomas
Browne's Religio Medici and to John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. These are texts
which Dickinson, which everyone, knew familiarly, and which she owned in her personal
library. In support of his own language claims, Bushnell quotes Sir Thomas Browne's
appeal to the Hermetic and Platonic traditions, to "the philosophy of Hermes, that this
Wolosky, 12
visible world is but a picture of the invisible, wherein, as in a portrait, things are seen,
not truly, but in equivocal shapes, and as they couterfeit some more real substance in
that invisible fabric."31 When Bushnell asserts that words "are related to truth, only as
form to spirit -- earthen vessels in which the truth is borne, yet always offering their
mere pottery as being the truth itself," he goes on to quote Bunyan's "Apology for his
Book" : "My dark and cloudy words, they do but hold,/ The truth, as cabinets inclose the
gold."32 (It is worth noting that, in the Pilgrim's Progress narrative, Bunyan makes
"Talkative" one of his foulest villains). Dickinson's library contains as well Thomas a
Kempis's classic of mystical writing, The Imitation of Christ. Language is there only a
tangential topic, but the structure which makes words an inferior vessel for a spiritual
truth that exceeds it is assumed, and is radicalized into mystical yearning for a silence
that transcends language altogether: "Happy the man who is instructed by Truth itself,
not by signs and passing words, but as It is in itself. . . Therefore let all teachers keep
silence, and let all creation be still before You." 33
II. From Dickinson to Celan
Dickinson's theo-linguistic background, with all its ambiguities and ambivalences,
strongly informs her poetry and her attitudes towards language. As poet, she is deeply
committed to language. But the conservative Christianity of the Connecticut River
Valley where she grew up (with Amherst College an orthodox stronghold against
Unitarian Harvard) continues in many ways to frame her attitudes and her efforts. And
the ambivalence towards language that characterized the Edwardsian tradition further
complicates Dickinson's position, at once forming part of her inheritance and yet
challenging its established metaphysical orders. Her texts, and especially her many
poems on poetry or language, often serve as scenes of struggle towards and against
Wolosky, 13
linguistic utterance within an overarching metaphysical frame of heaven and earth, time
and eternity, soul and body. But this very metaphysical structure is in itself problematic.
For it carries with it a suspicion against linguistic signifiers, while it elevates the
signified as a transcendence ultimately conceived as silence. For a poet, a hierarchy
which places silence over language is severely compromising.
This predicament is re-enacted by Dickinson in text after text. Dickinson's
grounding in a traditional metaphysics of language is attested in many poems.
Persistently she aligns interiority against exteriority, as spirit against flesh, eternity
against time, and silence against language. "To tell the Beauty would decrease," she
writes, "To state the Spell demean;" and she goes on to prefer to these signifiers in
language a signified "syllable-less Sea, Of which it is the sign." The poem itself
becomes at once a failed "endeavor[] for its word" and a "Rapture" (Poem 1700). "To
own the Art within the Soul" locates the art of language inward, where, however, it
merges with "Silence" (Poem 855). In Poem 1681, if "Speech is one symptom of
Affection / and Silence one--," the poem endorses the one "within:" "The perfectest
communication/ Is heard of none." And it helpfully cites I Peter 1:8 as its authority:
"Behold, said the Apostle,/ Yet had not seen." (Poem 1681). In Poem 976, "The Spirit
and the Dust" have a "Dialogue" in Death, in which the dust dissolves but the spirit
merely lays off its "Overcoat of Clay." Poem 664 reiterates, tracing the dissolution of
"Sense from Spirit," when "this brief Drama in the flesh -- is shifted" and the "Atom" is
released from "lists of Clay." This is also a linguistic movement: "Figures" dissolve as
well.
These poems in many ways reproduce -- even intend to
reproduce -- the structure of a metaphysics of language. But if Dickinson pursues this
metaphysics, she also complicates it. Her poems characteristically equivocate as to
Wolosky, 14
just which functions of language she is committed to; in terms of sign-theory, whether it
is the signified, or the signifier, and in just what relationship, that she holds dear. Poem
1651 may evoke the transcendent Word as Signified that was "Made Flesh and dwelt
among us," but it concludes with a moving tribute to her own "loved philology." When
she bids the poet in Poem 1129 to "Tell all the Truth but tell it slant," her allegiance is
given not only to the Truth in its abstract light but also to its figural representations:
"Success in Circuit lies." These cross-currents are especially severe in Poem 451,
which pursues a traditional hierarchy and model of signification, but does so with strong
counter-intentions:
The Outer -- from the Inner
Derives its Magnitude -'Tis Duke, or Dwarf, according
As is the Central Mood -The fine -- unvarying Axis
That regulates the Wheel -Though Spokes -- spin -- more conspicuous
And fling a Dust -- the while.
The Inner -- paints the Outer -The Brush without the Hand -Its Picture publishes -- precise -As is the inner Brand -On fine -- Arterial Canvas -A Cheek -- perchance a Brow -The Star's whole Secret -- in the Lake -Eyes were not meant to know. (Poem 451)
In this poem, as in the norms of western metaphysical tradition,
inner determines outer, while the outer serves and points back to the inner. In terms of
sign-theory, the outer as signifier subserves the inner as signified, while the signified
determines the signifier's "Magnitude" and meaning, Duke or Dwarf. Dickinson in this
Wolosky, 15
poem follows a whole series of traditional allocations. The signified is "Inner," "Central,"
and "unvarying Axis" -- interior, unchanging, singular; while the signifier is
"Outer," a "Wheel" spinning in the "Dust." The association of dust with body, recurrent
through Dickinson's work, is picked up in the final stanza's imagery of the "Cheek" as a
"Canvas" on which is painted the "inner Brand." Throughout this figural series, the ideal
role of the signifier is not only to be secondary, but ultimately to disappear. The ideal
signifier should become transparent as it refers to the signified, a reference which it is
the true function of the signifier, through self-erasure, to convey.
And yet, in this poem, the priorities between Outer and Inner are not quite
absolutely established. The only way of seeing the "inner Brand" is, after all, through
the published "Picture," which achieves in the poem something like parity with its
interior, bodiless ("without the Hand") origin: "precise -- As is the inner Brand." The
poem's ending is equivocal as well. What is reflected in the "Lake" -- an image of this
world as a copy of the supernal one as old as Plato -- is the "Star's whole Secret." This
conclusion verges into a mystical language of occult revelation and penetration, even
transgression. Eyes achieve a knowledge beyond knowledge they "were not meant to
know." Within the image-structures of the poem, the reflection of the "Inner" and the
"Star" in language and world seems almost a betrayal of transcendent secrets into
material body, language, and time. Yet it is also there that knowledge, realization, and
the poem are achieved.
Paul Celan did not select one of Dickinson's explicitly articulated theo-linguistic
texts for translation. His choices, while implicitly linguistic, remain more overtly
metaphysical. One additional translation, however -- the last he undertook (published in
1963) -- projects, at a very high level of complexity (not to say obscurity) linguisticmetaphysical issues: especially when read through Celan's own poetics.
Wolosky, 16
At Half past Three, a single Bird
Unto a silent Sky
Propounded but a single term
Of cautious melody.
At Half past Four, Experiment
Had subjugated test,
And lo, Her silver Principle
Supplanted all the rest.
At Half past Seven, Element
Nor Implement, be seen -And Place was where the Presence was
Circumference between. (Poem 1084)
Ein Vogel, einer, um halb vier:
dem Himmel, der da schwieg,
den einen Laut trug er ihm an
sparsamster Melodie.
Das war die Probe. Um halb fu"nf
gingsu" ber sie hinaus,
und sieh: ihr silbernes Zuerst
stach alles andre aus.
Halb sieben: weder Element
noch Werkzeug weit und breit.
Ein Ort hier, dort die Gegenwart,
mit einem Zwischenkreis.
This poem traces the course of song across markers in clock-time, from a tenuous
initiation, through an aesthetic fullness, to a final and abrupt disappearance. 34
Dickinson's language of almost formal philosophical or scientific investigation is
retained by Celan: Propounded (trug an); Experiment, test (die Probe); (first) Principle
(Zuerst); Element, Implement (Element, Werkzeug). Celan's syntax is, however, rather
more discontinuous even than Dickinson's, chopping up the text into more truncated
Wolosky, 17
sentences and phrases. For the final "Circumference," a persistently crucial word in
Dickinson's lexicon, Celan resorts to neologism: "Zwischenkreis."
From a Celanian point of view, this is a text of erasure. What it radicalizes is the
temporality of signifiers, through the terms of the bird's song tenuously proposed,
achieved, and then vanishing. The clock-time unmistakably and dramatically sets
temporality as this poem's frame. The focus remains on the course of its signs or
signifiers exactly as they etch themselves through time in a chain or sequence that is
transient -- a transiency that is enacted in both the bird's song, whose course is
pursued, and the language of the poem which pursues it. The poem in fact moves
emphasis or attention away from a supposed 'signified' that would be defined as stable
in some supra-temporal realm, and to which the signifiers would refer or which they
would represent; to the temporal signifiers through which the poem's experience takes
shape. Instead of a supra-temporal signified, the poem asserts or assumes blank
space: "a silent Sky" (der Himmel, der da schwieg) at the outset, an empty "Place"
where "the Presence was" (Ein Ort hier, dort die Gegenwart) at the end. What
traditionally is represented as signified here appears as silence, displacement,
absence.
Absence here is not an ontological signified reference, even paradoxically. It is
not a mystical nothing as metaphysical realm, in negative transcendence of the physical
world. Rather, it is a stage, or frame, upon which the signifier traces its course, and
makes its claims. The poem does not found the claims of the signifier by trying to
invest them with eternal presence, or by making them refer to eternal signifieds. The
signifier -- the bird's "term," a choice of words that reinforces the trope of song as
linguistic, and which Celan translates as "Laut," sound, suggesting as well the language
sound of the poem's own words -- is specifically mutable and in motion. The poem
Wolosky, 18
insists on driven temporal force, from a single term to a supplanting principle, to final
disappearance. But in this poem, the shape of this chain of signifiers in time is exactly
the shape of meaning: not as representing, in more or less inferior terms, a fixed
signified existing fully outside of the process of signifying, but as a course through time
thus given a significant order. And yet, the poem retains a metaphysical dimension and
relationship as the stage for its venture into meaning. A "Place" continues to stand as
scene or arena for the poem's linguistic course (and Celan certainly knew, as Dickinson
may also have done, that "Place" (Ort) translates the Hebrew "Makom," a standard
name for the divine). Its venture into sound takes shape within a space of absence
which here serves to intensify the significance of its utterance. The final image,
"Circumference," in Dickinson consistently intends an overarching connection between
realms of experience, especially as these verge into transcendence. 35 Celan's
"Zwischenkreis" -- literally between-circle or interval-circle -- makes this sense of
connection explicit. The world of time, of sound, of language, remains the space of
significant activity; but it does so within, and in continuing relation to a metaphysical
frame that precedes, exceeds, and endures after it. And it is the course of song which,
in this poem, specifically forges or enacts that connection -- a linguistic sense of
"circumference" which Celan further realizes in this text by the introduction of a
dialogical moment: "und sieh," a direct address to see. Dialogue itself emerges as a
linguistic tie bringing separate experiences into meaningful relationship, recalling
Celan's own peculiar term for linguistic order, "Meridian," as "something -- like language
-- immaterial yet earthly, terrestrial, something circular, crossing the two poles back into
itself and thus -- cheerfully -- even crossing over the tropics/tropes."36
But absence can have a more threatening sense, a more unstable meaning. It
may serve as a stage for temporal, linguistic signification; or it may indicate a genuine
Wolosky, 19
erasure into meaninglessness. The poem then would emphasize tenuousness and
cancellation. Absence, that is, may serve here as a metaphysical frame in which
events meaningfully occur, where the metaphysical is not constituted as a separate
ontological realm in which signified meanings reside outside or beyond temporal
experience. But absence may instead signal metaphysical
collapse. This would leave nothing more than a pure temporality "without," as
Dickinson put it in the poem "Four Trees," "Design" or "Order" or "Plan."
What "At Half past Three" registers in either case is a different status for
temporality or historicity, of history itself as the realm of significance. Instead of
measuring or determining the value of temporal experience, the metaphysical
dimension comes to be measured by it. There is a sense of the
incursion of time into the realm and processes of meaning, which is no longer
conceived as constituted before or outside temporal
experience. Meaning, rather than being defined as an eternal, immutable, suprahistorical order, instead takes place as ordered signifiers within the world and language.
"At Half past Three" may be said in this sense to point towards the revision of
metaphysics, with its implications for language, which has emerged since Dickinson's
writing, and which so marks Celan's own poetic.
In Celan's case, the incursion of historicity, of history, into any metaphysical
claim for order is inevitable and imperative. Celan's status as a German speaking
Rumanian-Jewish poet who lived through the Holocaust, but who continued to write in
German, at once opens his texts towards questions of historical meaning that at once
implicate divine intention, power, and/or goodness. In the context of World War II, the
silences of God lose their merely mystical meanings and emerge, frighteningly, as the
collapse of metaphysics altogether. This penetration of metaphysics by history, with its
Wolosky, 20
implications for mystical discourse itself, is suggested in another Celan translaqtion of
Dickinson:
My life closed twice before its close-It yet remains to see
If Immortality unveil
A third event to me
So huge, so hopeless to conceive
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven
And all we need of hell (Poem 1732)
Mein Leben, zweimal fiels in Schloss
eh's zufa"llt; nun ich will
jetzt sehn, ob die Unsterblichkeit
ein Drittes mir enthu"llt,
so ohne Hoffnung und so gross.
Abschied, das ist, was uns,
du Himmel, an dir wissbar ist, -und Ho"lle ists genug.
It is impossible to know what biographical events Emily Dickinson intended in this
poem.37 But whatever Dickinson had in mind, the poem's terms explode when
translated into Celan's German. The double closure of the poem opens for Celan
towards the genocide of a people and the destruction of culture (although the historicity
of Celan's translation suddenly brings into strong light the fact that Dickinson, as the
dates plainly show, wrote the bulk of her verse in the context of her own culture's
cataclysmic Civil War38). The metaphysical split that ruptures this poem takes shape
within historical trauma. The only certain knowledge is parting, death, absence: which,
if it asserts a metaphysical power, does so in ways that only indict it.
"My life closed twice" insists on the place of historicity within metaphysical
structure, as implicating -- indeed penetrating -- supposedly supra-historical realms. No
Wolosky, 21
longer do immutable realms stand beyond events as their measure. History is the test
of God. As characteristically occurs in both Dickinson and Celan, an accusation against
the divine comes to border on blasphemy. This, however, does not entail a secularist
rejection of the metaphysical. To rebuke God is not to dismiss him. It is rather to
attempt a strong, perhaps a violent reaching. Celan's dialogical recasting of the poem - "du Himmel, an dir wissbar ist" (you heaven, what is known of you) directs his anger,
and his anguish, towards the divine, in a linguistic effort to structure some possible,
positive relationship framing meaning within human experience.
The effort towards meaning in this remains within language, even if -- or exactly
as -- taking place in terms of a realm beyond language, an absence which would
denote the metaphysical as ground for temporal, earthly meaning: or, as Dickinson calls
it in what could be her translation of Celan, a Nothing:
By homely gift and hindered Words
The human heart is told
Of Nothing -"Nothing" is the force
That renovates the World -- (Poem 1563)
Redemptive power, the possibility of renewal, is in this poem at once asserted and
denied. The "Nothing," perhaps the most radical, as also the most ancient terms for
mystical devotion, here may be positive or negative. The poem thus balances at an
edge peculiar to negative mystical language, at once claiming and disclaiming a
metaphysical dimension as directing experience in the world. Yet the metaphysical is
not abandoned -- or rather, the consequences of metaphysical abandonment remain
dire. And the poem in its way performs what is its own acutest hope. It realizes its
metaphysical yearning (as also its metaphysical despair) within the familiar realm of the
temporal and the linguistic. Renovation, if it will come, will come within the immanence
of "homely gift" in our immediate, ordinary world; and through "hindered Words," the
Wolosky, 22
imperfection which Wallace Stevens calls paradise, where delight "lies in flawed words
and stubborn sounds." The metaphysical is experienced, if at all, within the mutable,
through an endless and ongoing effort to frame value in language, as the articulation of
meaning.
Wolosky, 23
Notes
1. This text, along with the other Celan translations of Dickinson (there are ten in all) have
been reprinted in Paul Celan (1983), Paul Celan Gesammelte Werke in fu"nf Banden Vol.
5, Beda Allemann, (ed.), Frankfurt Am Main; Suhrkamp Verlag, pp. 382-401. "Let down
the bars, o death;" first appeared in Neue Rundschau 72 (1961), pp. 36-39. The
publication history of this, along with other Dickinson poems, appear on p. 631. Evidence
internal to the translations show that Celan relied on the edition of Dickinson poems
compiled in (1955) The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Thomas Johnson (ed.), 3 vols.,
Cambridge, Mass.; Harvard University Press. This paper takes all Dickinson texts from
this Johnosn edition, and follows its numbering. For Celan's relationsip to mystical
discourses, see footnote 2 below.
2. The linguistic orientation of Jewish mysticism is most thoroughly defined in Gershom
Scholem (1972), "The Name of God and the Linguistic Theory of the Kabbalah,"
Diogenes, nos. 79/80, pp. 59-80, 164-194. I have explored their importance for Celan in
(1995) Language Mysticism: The Negative Way of Language in Eliot, Beckett, and Celan
Stanford: Stanford University Press.
3. The other poems translated by Celan are: "Der Tod," (Because I could not stop for
Death) in Almanach S. Fischer 73 (1959), p. 59; "My life closed twice," "To my quick
ears;" "One blessing had I;" "Father, I bring thee;" "I never saw a moor;" "I reason, earth is
short;" "Four Trees" (and "Let down the bars, o death") in Neue Rundschau 72 (1961),
pp. 36-39; and "Um halb vier" in Insel-Almanach 1963, p. 65.
4. Such aestheticist readings are characteristic in Dickinson Studies. See, for one
example, Margaret Dickie, (1991) Lyric Contingencies, Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press.
5. Albert Gelpi (1971) Emily Dickinson: The Mind of the Poet, New York: Norton, p. 90.
Gelpi later recognize a loose and general association, and affirms Dickinson's place
within a New England "literary tradition" of typological readings of nature, which also
includes Edwards (pp. 107, 154).
6. Richard Sewell (1974) The Life of Emily Dickinson, 2 vols., New York: Farrar, Straus,
and Giroux, p. 24.
7. Jack L. Capps (1966), Emily Dickinson's Reading, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
Wolosky, 24
University Press, p. 102.
8. Karl Keller (1979), The Only Kangaroo Among the Beauty, Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, pp. 67-8. Keller does concede she "may have read about
Edwards in local history books," such as her friend Josiah Holland's History of Western
Massachusetts (1855).
9. Quoted in Keller, The Only Kangaroo, footnote 5, p. 69.
10. Sydney Ahlstrom (1972), A Religious History of the American People, New Haven:
Yale University Press, p. 404.
11. Jonathan Edwards (1989), A History of the Work of Redemption in Works of
Jonathan Edwards 9 vols., John F. Wilson (ed.) vol. 9, New Haven: Yale University Press,
p. 88
12. Joseph A. Conforti (1995) Jonathan Edwards, Religious Tradition, and American
Culture (Chapel Hill; University of North Carolina Press, p. 55. Conforti retraces these
Edwardsian influences through nineteenth century culture, devoting a chapter to Park -as well as to Mary Lyon. The Letters of Emily Dickinson ed. Thomas Johnson
(Cambridge, Mass; Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1958). Hereafter cited by
Letter number (L), volume and page reference. Park taught at Amherst 1836-1837, and
was invited to be President of Amherst College in 1844, but declined in order to stay on at
Andover. Barton Levi St. Armand (1984), Emily Dickinson and her Culture, New York:
Cambridge University Press, p. 121, identifies the Park sermon as one Dickinson refers to
again twenty years later as "the loveliest sermon I ever heard" (L 385 II 502). Jay Leyda
(1960) in The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson, 2 vols, New Haven: Yale University
Press records a letter that gives some sense of the intimate ties between Andover and
Amherst (Vol. II, p. 26).
13. Fidlia Fisk, a teacher at the college, recalls how Mary Lyon preached "with Edwards's
History of Redemption in her hand" and regularly read it aloud to her students "between
the morning and afternoon service of the Sabbath Recollections of Mary Lyon (Boston;
American Tract Society, 1866) pp. 103-4; see Conforti Jonathan Edwards, p. 95, and
Wilson, (ed.), Works Vol. 9, p. 88.
14. This information was kindly provided to me by Avihu Zakai, who has been most
generous in providing me with information and materials concerning Jonathan Edwards;
and John Lancaster, Curator of Special Collections, Amherst College Library.
15. Susan Gilbert Dickinson describes a Bible class as one in which the Deacon "weighed
down our youthful spirits every Sunday morning with his pictures of ourselves as
Wolosky, 25
rebellious sinners in the hands of an avenging God," quoted in St. Armand, Emily
Dickinson, p. 84.
16. Papers on "Natural Philosophy" in Works of Jonathan Edwards (1980), Vol. 6,
Wallace Anderson (ed.), New Haven; Yale University Press, pp. 305-306. See Sang
Hyun Lee (1988), The Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards, Princeton: Princeton
University Press, for a discussion of Edwards's use of the term "consent."
17. Edwards (1980) Works, Anderson, (ed.) vol. 6, p. 349.
18. Just how traditional these modern linguistic terms are, is underscored in a book such
as Kenneth Burke (1970), The Rhetoric of Religion, Berkeley: University of California
Press, where Burke's discussion of signified and signifier is expressly Augustinian. My
own discussion is based in the critique of this traditional sign-theory initiated by Jacques
Derrida in, for example, (1974) Of Grammatology, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press. See my own essay (1982), "Derrida, Jabez, Levinas: Sign-Theory as
Ethical Discourse," Prooftexts 2, pp. 283-302.
19. Perry Miller (1949), Jonathan Edwards, New York: William Sloane Associates, pp.
149, 156-158, where he quotes from Edwards's early resolutions.
20. See Perry Miller (1956). Errand into the Wilderness, Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, p. 178.
21. Edwards (1980), Works, Anderson (ed.), vol. 6, 1980, pp. 391, 393.
22. Jonathan Edwards, "A Divine and Supernatural Light," in Jonathan Edwards:
Representative Selections, Clarence Faust and Thomas Johnson, (eds.), New York; Hill
and Wang, 1962, pp. 104 - 105. Note: This sermon was first published in 1734, after
being delivered at Northampton.
23. Sang Hyun Lee, Philosophical Theology, discusses this association in Edwards
between imagination and the passions, noting Edwards departure from the traditional
Christian view of imagination and passion as "negative elements disturbing clear ideas,"
pp. 115-117. Stephen Daniel, in The Philosophy of Jonathan Edwards, Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1994, argues that Edwards's work represents a shift from
traditional "predicative" metaphysics to a "model of discourse of communicative
exchange," p. 2, but this seems to me too thoroughly to resolve what remains for
Edwards a conflict.
24. Charles Feidelson (1953), Symbolism and American Literature, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, pp 99-101.
Wolosky, 26
25. Miller, Errand, pp. 195, 202-3.
26. Obviously, it is impossible to develop this immense topic here. But to cite only the
"Language" section of Emerson's essay on "Nature," a text Dickinson knew, when
Emerson says: "The use of the outer creation [is] to give us language for the beings and
changes of the inward creation," he seems to place priority on
inward activity, with nature a symbolic language for ideas. This seems also the case
when he speaks of man's "power over nature as an interpreter." Yet when he soon also
calls "man an analogist" who "studies relation in all objects," he seems to claim the
relation is already there, external to man, which he then reads
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1960), Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, Stephen E.
Whicher (ed.), Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, pp. 31-33.
27. Quoted Sewell, Life, vol. II, p. 355.
28. Horace Bushnell (1967), Preliminary Dissertation on The Nature of Language as
Related to Thought and Spirit in Theology in America, Sydney Ahlstrom (ed.), New York:
Bobbs-Merill Company, Inc., p. 324. Ahlstrom calls the "Dissertation on Language" "a
milestone in American thought," p. 318. For discussions on Bushnell and language, see
for example Michael Kramer (1992), Imagining Language in America, Princeton:
Princeton University Press, p. 156.
29. Bushnell, Dissertation, pp. 332-333. Cf. "Words are legitimately used as the signs of
thoughts to be expressed. [Yet] they do not literally convey, or pass over a thought out of
one mind into another.. . They are only hints or images," p. 330.
30. Bushnell, Dissertation, pp. 340-1; 350. Cf. "All seeming contradictions are in fact only
successive presentations of single sides of a truth, which, by their union, manifest
completely to us its existence," p. 342.
31. Bushnell quotes Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici Part I, Section 12, in Ahlstrom,
Dissertation, p. 350.
32. Bushnell, Dissertation, p. 333.
33. Thomas A Kempis (1952), The Imitation of Christ, Middlesex, England: Penguin
Books, p. 30.
34. The "plot" of the poem is clarified through an earlier version of it, P 783.
35. "Circumference" recurs throughout Dickinson's work as a term of mediation between
different realms, such as heaven and earth, time and eternity. See for example P 378,
Wolosky, 27
where the poet, somehow caught between heaven and earth goes "out upon
Circumference." The term is a staple of Dickinson criticism, and almost every
commentator discusses it.
36. Celan concludes his speech accepting the Georg Bu"chner Prize in literature with this
image of Meridan, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 3, p. 202.
37. Suppositions have ranged from unhappy love affairs to nervous breakdowns. But, as
Thomas Johnson observes, "any speculation about its autobiographical import is vain."
38. See Shira Wolosky (1984), Emily Dickinson: A Voice of War, New Haven: Yale
University Press.