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Pendant: Büchner, Celan, and the Terrible Voice of the Meridian

2007; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 122; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mln.2007.0063

1080-6598

Michael G. Levine,

Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism

Pendant: Büchner, Celan, and the Terrible Voice of the Meridian Michael G. Levine Rutgers University "A posteriori—that's how everything begins." Büchner, Leonce and Lena (I.3) In his 1960 Meridian address delivered on the occasion of receiving the Büchner Prize for Literature, the poet Paul Celan pinpoints a central organizing moment in the work of the nineteenth-century writer and dramatist in whose name the award was given. While winners of the Büchner prize are generally expected to reflect in their acceptance speech on their relation to the writer, Celan's address goes well beyond the level of artistic reflection, turning repeatedly about a pivotal moment in Büchner's work, a moment with which it makes contact and on which it in many ways remains stuck. That moment, as the title of Celan's speech suggests, is associated with the time of day when the sun is directly overhead, standing majestically at the zenith of its movement across the heavens.1 It is a moment that recurs at critical points in Büchner's plays and prose work. Yet, its value is not always the same. Indeed, what is gathered together at this privileged point in time, what is brought to a head in the punctuality of this moment are at least three competing values, three mutually exclusive ways of understanding the significance of this moment. In Büchner's work the noontide meridian is at once [End Page 573] a moment of absolute sovereignty, a point of stasis and traumatic fixation, and the site of a possible opening toward what is yet to come. The focus of my reading will be twofold. I propose to approach Büchner through Celan, concentrating both on that overdetermined highpoint in his work to which the poet draws our attention, and on that moment in Celan's own speech where questions of sovereignty and temporality come together and ultimately usher in a very different notion of poetic majesty. I am referring to that moment in Celan's Meridian address where he discusses the famous last words of Büchner's 1835 play, Dantons Tod. To understand the effect of these last words, it is necessary to recall the specific context in which they are uttered. At this point in the play, Danton and many of his circle, including the pamphleteer and journalist Camille Desmoulin, have already been sent to their deaths at the Place de la Revolution by Robespierre. In the scene immediately following their execution, Desmoulin's bereaved widow, Lucille, appears alone on stage. Isolated in her grief, she is painfully cut off from the comprehension of her surroundings. Her world has effectively come to an end and yet, as she observes, "everything else is allowed to go on living." "Everything's astir; clocks tick, bells ring, folk pass, water flows, everything continues just as before, for ever and ever.—But no! It mustn't happen, no! I shall sit on the ground and scream, so everything stops, shocked into stillness, not a flicker of movement. [She sits down, covers her eyes, and screams. After a pause, she stands up.] It makes no difference. Things are just as they were. The houses, the street. The winds blow, the clouds drift.—Perhaps we just have to bear it [Wir müssen's wohl leiden]."2 Just as Lucille's words have no impact whatsoever on the world around her, so too is she herself now absorbed into the crowd of women joining her on stage. Yet, the speech act that so badly misfires in this scene—the cry that was to have shocked everything into stillness and brought time itself to a halt—will be performed again in the next scene. Whereas Lucille's first scream fails to stop anything, her last words, "Long live the King!" hurled in the direction of a patrol entering the Place de la Revolution lead to her immediate arrest. [End Page 574] These words, which will in...