Writing the Apocalypse
Voicing Silence Through Time
by Rainer J. Hanshe
Tadeusz Rózewicz
new poems
Translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston
Archipelago Books, 2007
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Published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, June 2007. Copyright © 2007 Rainer J. Hanshe and The Nietzsche Circle. All essays, interviews, and reviews are shared copyright between author(s) and The Nietzsche Circle. All rights reserved. Please contact editors for any concerns or for usage rights.
Page I
. . . let us abolish the images, let us save immediate Desire (desire without mediation).
—Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida
We seek the poem of pure reality, untouched
By trope or deviation, straight to the word,
Straight to the transfixing object, to the object
At the exactest point at which it is itself,
Transfixing by being purely what it is,
A view of New Haven, say, through a certain eye,
The eye made clear of uncertainty, with the sight
Of simple seeing, without reflection. We seek
Nothing beyond reality.
—Wallace Stevens, “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven”
How can we write or think about disaster when by its very nature it defies speech and compels silence—when, moreover, it consumes thought and rips books apart? We cannot: but writing is the patient response of this helplessness.
—Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster
Tadeusz Rózewicz is recognized by critics and writers in Poland as one of the most exemplary Polish poets of the 20th century and some claim in the world. He is said to be in the same league as Czeslaw Milosz, Zbigniew Herbert, and Wislawa Szymborska. His first volume of poetry, Niepokój [Anxiety] (a seemingly farsighted title, prefiguring the character of his future work), was published in 1947 and ten years later, Poezje zebrine, an edition of his collected poems was published in Krakow. In 1966 Poland awarded Rózewicz the State Prize for Literature, Class I, bestowing upon him its highest distinction, while most recently, in 2000, he received the NIKE, the most eminent Polish literary award, for Matka Odchodzi [Mother Departs]. Szymborska confessed that she could not imagine what post-war Polish poetry would resemble without Rózewicz’ work and, revealing the true enormity of his influence, that everyone owes “something to him, though not all of us are able to admit it.” Clearly, Rózewicz has made a considerable impact upon Polish literature.
On the Polish Culture website Rózewicz is portrayed as “a disturbing writer who resists definition, a poet of silence who rejects poetic trappings,” searching instead for modes of expression alert to the perils of writing in the twentieth and now twenty-first century. The first English translation of his work was made by Milosz and published in his 1965 volume, Postwar Poetry, and Faces of Anxiety (London, Rapp & Whiting, 1969), translated by Adam Czerniawski, was the first edition in English of Rózewicz’ poems, but it was not widely available in America. Two other poetry books would follow in 1976, with Czerniawski translating a third in 1982, Conversation with the Prince and Other Poems. Lamentably though, all of these books are out of print and Rózewicz, who is also a novelist as well as a playwright some critics consider equal to Beckett in his revolution of dramatic form, is not as well known in America as Milosz and Szymborska. In new poems, a collection published by Archipelago Books that combines the last three volumes of Rózewicz’ poetry, the professor’s knife, gray zone, and exit (each not previously translated into English) as well as five “recent poems,” Rózewicz’ disturbance is keyed to an exceedingly high degree, but that condition is inevitable, an indication of one who is acutely sensitive to the traumas of history. Yet, the most tragic figures are also truly comedic, and Rózewicz is not incapable of Aristophanic exultations, though they are often tinged with woe.
To be disturbed is to be agitated, to be in a state of turmoil; it is a sign of sensitivity, proof that one feels, that one’s nerves are receptive, for they shudder when overcome by horror, and that is to know the sublime. There is nothing altogether exceptional in this, it is natural one might protest, but man is no longer natural, far from it, and sensitivity of Rózewicz’ order is rare in an era in which most humans have become anesthetized and are insensate to horror, if, at all, they are even cognizant of it. To be remotely aware of the horrors of the world is one matter, but to live with or be disturbed by them is yet another. What most of humanity prefers is the serenity and harmony of the beautiful. Few live with history as Rózewicz does and even fewer tremble before it continuously. From new poems, it is apparent that history is a regular presence in his life, one which, like a specter, haunts his memory and prods him into thought, and this is the poetry of one engaged in rigorous thought. When writing of the traumas of history though, they are not merely ‘past events,’ but living currents experienced again and again, evidence of ‘history’ as an ever present presence in consciousness. Time’s borders, as is well known, are amorphous.
In one of the numerous untitled poems in the book, Rózewicz declares that “we have to relive everything/from the beginning” (68) and concludes the poem questioning whether or not the past will ever end, the lack of an answer presupposing that it will not. The refusal to close the poem, even in the most marginal sense, such as with a period after its concluding word (in fact, not one of the poems in the book has any closing punctuation), indicates the persistent force of a past that will not and cannot end, not even through the event of death:
Like Giacometti’s fragile, wraithlike but essentially courageous Walking Man (the drawing which adorns the cover of new poems), Rózewicz clearly wonders what it is we are walking towards and how we have been and are walking there, whatever that there is. The poet continues walking, but weighted by a climacteric thought: how does one live in/with a ceaselessly unfolding apocalypse? How does one write the apocalypse?
Living in and with silence, Rózewicz is concerned with what it means to speak and to write during such an epoch. “The work of Rózewicz and many other European poets of his generation” noted eminent Hölderlin translator Michael Hamburger in The Truth of Poetry, “is the answer of those who agree with [Adorno’s statement that] after Auschwitz poems can no longer be written.” Rózewicz, says Hamburger, has “made himself at home in the silence” that Adorno’s statement prescribes. Like some of his contemporaries, his “anti-poetry does not contradict it” but is an altogether different kind of poetry—it is not that poems cannot be written, only certain kinds of poems. To be silent is not necessarily to refuse to write; as Lacoue-Labarthe noted, “poetry occurs where . . . language gives way.” To be silent is to refuse to write barbarically, which, interpreting Adorno’s statement, meant to Rózewicz metaphorically and mythically.
After Auschwitz, traditional language had been rendered inoperable. One mode of silence was to refute traditional language, which was no longer meaningful, and create if possible new poetic discourses. For Adorno, as he elucidated some years later in another essay, that was still not permissible: “The so-called artistic rendering of the naked physical pain of those who were beaten down with rifle butts contains, however distantly, the possibility that pleasure can be squeezed from it. Through aesthetic principles or stylization . . . the unimaginable ordeal still appears as if it had some ulterior purpose. It is transfigured and stripped of its horror, and with this, injustice is already done to the victims.” The disquiet Adorno felt seemed to be not only with the possibility of experiencing aesthetic pleasure from such art, thereby committing an ignoble act and potentially reducing its horror; it was also with shaping it into something that might be considered beautiful, thus giving rise to serenity and harmony instead of strife.
Uneasiness before the potential artistic rendering of the Holocaust was a grave concern for others such as philosophy professor Michael Wyschogrod. In a book on Elie Wiesel, echoing Adorno but speaking of art in its entirety, Wyschogrod proclaimed that since “art takes the sting out of suffering” to make fiction of the Holocaust must be forbidden—fiction pertaining to any aesthetic rendering whatsoever. But as an event forever beyond meaning and outside comprehension, no art could ever justify the Holocaust through imposing order and bestowing some potential meaning upon it. The apocalyptic event would always render such work absurd. Out of our helplessness though, we can patiently respond to it, knowing all the while that our response would always be forever limited, partial, fragmented. And it is only perhaps through the fragmentary that any work on the Holocaust could be made, only through the sublime, wherein there is a confrontation with that which surpasses our imagination and is beyond our control.
What Adorno and Wyschogrod were fearful of, and with grave necessity, was stripping an apocalyptic event of its horrific character through its transformation into the beautiful. Yet, despite the many modes of art, they either chose not to or refused to consider those, or that other mode—the ugly. With Adorno, this is especially peculiar, for in his Aesthetic Theory, the ugly is of crucial importance; in fact, it functions as a subversive force which can disrupt the tyranny of the classical mode. At the turn of the century, or perhaps even earlier with Van Gogh (whose paintings aren’t necessarily works of beauty), art’s concern was no longer with the rendering beautiful of things. Art shattered its bond to beauty, thus liberating itself from that mortifying constriction. (1) Instead of transfiguring a horrifying event into something beautiful, the artist could transfigure it into something ugly, or sublime, which would not at all be pleasing, but cruel. Such work would not be entertaining; it would retain its sting, if not sting and prick even more. In it, there would be no reconciliation, no serenity, no harmony. There would be stress, anxiety, and discord. When defining sublimity in The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche appeared to be closely aligned with the Aristotelian conception of catharsis, or what he considered it to be. The sublime was the “taming of the horrible” via artistic means, which results in tragedy, and the comic was the “artistic discharge of the nausea of absurdity.” Yet, while Aristotle noted that tragedy brings about catharsis, Nietzsche seemed to imply that the taming happens before it even enters the poem. In this, there is a transformation of the overwhelming suffering or of the horror of the world—it is tamed and, in the renowned formulation, existence is justified through art. Despite the ceaseless reiteration of this assertion, Nietzsche would abandon the position quite early—existence no longer needed justification. It was justified in and of itself—that was tragic wisdom. From Human, All Too Human onward, the impulse to tame was criticized and in Twilight of the Idols, the Dionysian figure is portrayed as one capable of displaying courage before the “horror and terror of existence,” able to “affirm life even in its strangest and sternest problems.” The Aristotelian conception of catharsis as Nietzsche understood it was surpassed, or overcome, and thus the need for serenity and redemption—horror was no longer to be tamed, but revealed in all its intensity. Strife would rule, not harmony. Tragic wisdom discloses that redemption is not only out of reach but undesirable. It is difficult wisdom to bear, but the sublime is as searing as lava and as hard and as lacerating as a diamond.
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