Norman Manea - The Fifth Impossibility - Essays on Exile and Language

The need for addressing —so visible even in the most codified of Paul Celan’s poems and that in Conversation in the Mountains has become the refrain of the association that does not associate itself — does not direct itself only toward the living, but, as Geoffrey Hartman underlines in his essential pages on ‘the longest shadow and its aesthetic,’ 8it directs itself “even toward the slain.” Perhaps especially toward them …

To quote Celan, “He speaks truly who speaks shadows”—a phrase that might be alternatively translated, “He utters the truth who gives voice to the shadow.” 9The precariousness of any attempt at dialogue after the catastrophe solicits, I would say imposes , the necessity for authenticity and depth. At stake is the silencing of language not only “corrupt” of the real, as Adorno says, but directly burned in the darkness of the real. The silenced souls of those incinerated haunt the morbid void the poet traverses.

“Celan’s archeology is more exemplary for us than Schliemann’s,” Hartman writes. 10This funereal and fecund “depth” creates, in the end, that long-awaited Thou, that semblable that can no longer be, after the Holocaust, anything other than … phantomatic. Essential as it is, the cry to the other party, the evocation of the other party, who is even to be found “on the other side,” is itself the legitimization of the other. The phantomatic Celan speaks to the phantom Fondane who is beside him, alive, in the proximity of the halting place in the mountains beyond the mountains. He knows that he can speak only to him, even if the murmurs seem dizzy, stammered, mumbled, wounding the alpine silence of the earth, itself phantomatic yet so alive. Staff and stone speak too; the lily of the wood tempts whomsoever may be tempted. Our speakers are fractured interlocutors, and in the end they are dumbstruck in the stillness from which each has come.

Celan and Fondane are each the other’s addressee. If the apocalyptic combustion ruined the chance of a language that explains the modern crematorium, precisely because language lost the innocence of voice that belonged to former times, as Blanchot believes, and “the will to speak” itself is endangered, the obligation to speak persists, as even so taciturn a being as Samuel Beckett affirmed immediately after the war. In this stuttered and confused mourning of the “aftermath,” revelation is “betrayed through an unknowable” (Hartman) and, I would say, unhearable monologue. “Hearest thou me, thou hearest, thou really, thou, the one to whom it appears that thou hearest me?” As Hartman says, the logos no longer produces an event. Old children of the Logos, Celan and Fondane know it. Ample and heavy, crammed with unborn words, silence makes them brothers, like no one else.

Born into a family of bookish people and attracted early to Romanian, Yiddish, and French literature, prolific and insatiable, Fundoianu took his pseudonym from the Fundoaia estate (in Dorohoi), where his grandfather on his father’s side was a tenant. He made his literary debut and imposed himself rapidly on the literature of his country, which he would leave in 1923, at just 25 years of age, oppressed not only by the provincialism of a colony of French culture, as he would maintain, but also by not infrequent encounters with local anti-Semitism, either in its primary, hooligan form or in forms that were both codified and elitist.

Right after his expatriation, his superb volume Priveli sti / Landscapes (1930) appeared. It marked him as one of the major poets of his generation,

In Fundoianu’s case, landscape does not heal but rather exacerbates suffering sensibility, as does as the earth-shaking premonition that follows. The volume marks “an advanced stage in a process of demystifying nature, which Romanian poetry hadn’t known till then,” observes the exegete Mircea Martin. It is an “experience of becoming alone, not of communion … the rhetoric is descendant, not ascendant … the withdrawing of the poetic from landscape constitutes the fundamental aesthetic initiative, while the anti-pastel is its specific way of realizing that goal.” Emblematic here is the lyric memory of that Moldavian shtetl (“In the market it smells of rain, of autumn and cut hay”) in the much-anthologized poem Her ta , to which the name of the poet is inseparably attached.

Compared to the cry that will later mark the ever more accelerated and acute writing of the exiled Fondane, what is significant here is the sedentary silence of drowsy nature in the poet’s birthplace. Mircea Martin remarks on the poet’s “opacity” and contrasts it with “his internal ferment.” The mountain and the wood are mute, human beings are deaf, the same as beasts of burden, in women, “the cry of deaf children,” silence is “long and grey,” the poet perceives it as “made of glass;” he sees its spout and waits for it “to cover him with snow on a bench” in the waste over which the orgy of crime will soon rush.

Like so many of his confreres in Romania and in his adopted country, Fundoianu had naturally flirted with the iconoclastic temptations of the avant-garde; he had consumed his passions and devotions in a frenetic expansion of the I, but, like few of his close associates, he quickly understood, too, the traps of Red Revolution and the dangers of the Hooked Cross prepared by the then modern codes of “rationalism.” The acute and hopeless premonition of the Holocaust, visible in the poem “Exodus” (and in other poems as well) submits the verse to a planetary extension, dilates the call to uprising and resistance to the whole body of apathetic and complicit humanity, and thereby intensifies the millennial lament of the oppressed people. Poetry, which has now become the “cry” in the wilderness, is the solitude that does not wish to be conquered.

Verses like this from L’Exode / Exodus —

— have a resonance surprisingly similar to the motto Primo Levi affixed to his memories of Auschwitz (“You who live in the safety / of warm houses / You who find, on coming home, / at dusk / warm food and the faces of friendship” 11). Those at home are summoned to ask themselves if the one sacrificed isn’t “still a human being.” The poets’ attempts to escape the names Wechsler and Antschel, uttered with disgust and spat upon, manifests the same mise-en-question and mise-en-abîme (putting so many values into question in a way that creates a story within a story as well as the sensation of infinite depth one has in the presence of one mirror reflecting another) for the generic (Jewish) human being considered as inhuman.

Fondane’s Parisian exile in the existentialism and frenzy of the convulsive moment before the Nazi storm had deepened the poet’s dramatic recovery and restitution of his Jewishness. The “Jewish Ulysses” (as the poet called himself) had finalized his old Chestovian Athens — Jerusalem obsession, as well as his moving fraternization with the wanderers and the refused of the world: “An unseen hand rips out my lids / I cannot close an eye / And I must raise my ceaseless cry / Until the end of the world.”

Fondane’s death may be considered a suicide, as well, if we keep in view his decision to refuse the salvation he had been offered so as to assume his sister Lina and the other martyrs’ fate. Among these would have to be counted the death of his confrere, Celan, who committed suicide in the Seine two decades later.