Today is the 100th year anniversary of Paul Celan’s birth. Celan was very fond of memory and its meaning. He was obsessed with dates. He understood how we all live through these dates and relive them in language. The Holocaust is a date that lives on and through his poetry. Language, he says, in the Meridian Speech, lived through it and lives on. In a sense, language has a schlemiel-like aspect to it in that it, much like Samuel Beckett’s characters or IB Singer’s Gimpel, doesn’t stop moving, even after they have been lied to and mocked. The schlemiel lives on and in small things. As in “Conversation in the Mountains,” Gross and Klein (the main character) are wandering in search of a refuge.
The schlemiel is rootless, like Abraham in the Torah/Bible, ordered to leave his home in search of another place. Abraham isn’t promised immortality, he is promised a place and future through future generations. He lives on through them and they likewise wander through exiles and Holocausts. Their world and destination is physical, not spiritual. It is relational.
Reading the schlemiel through Celan’s poem, “Die Teuflischen” and IB Singer’s “Gimpel the Fool,” in the worlds eyes, the schlemiel is the subject of “devilish toungjokes of night” but those jokes break the way open through the physical world. The schlemiel may be “lord of dreams”(Arendt / Heine) but Celan shows him – just like IB Singer shows him – to be bound to the earth. The world barks us at “us” – at the reader and the character of this poem and of many poems; we are the schlemiels. Just like Klein and Gross in “Conversation in the Mountains,” we are klein (small) and gross (big). We are an odd couple that, with the voice of poem, must move on.
Let’s listen in to our conversation:
THE DEVILISH
tonguejokes of night
lignify in your ear,
what the glances
beamed back,
jumps forward,
the wasted
bridgetolls, harped,
chisel through
the chalkravine
before us,
the sea-ish lightswamp
barks up at us –
at you,
earthly-invisible
sanctuary.
(Die Teuflischen, p104,
Fadensonnen, trans Pierre Joris)
Schlemiel Theory has taken a special interest in his work because the characters and voices in prose pieces like, “Conversation in the Mountains” and in many of his poems that address smallness are those of the schlemiel.
One of the great tasks of Schlemiel Theory is to examine and discuss not only the literary or filmic schlemiel, but, even more importantly, the poetic schlemiel. The schlemiel in poetry or the schlemiel as poetry. After all, all poems are “klein” and “gross.”
Here are some of the essays that Menachem Feuer, the author of Schlemiel Theory has written. These have been gathered together in a book chapter of a forthcoming book on the Schlemiel and Jewish Philosophy:
Conversations in the Mountains between Franz Kafka and Paul Celan – Part I
Conversations in the Mountains between Franz Kafka and Paul Celan – Part II
A Note on Paul Celan’s Minor Language in “Conversation in the Mountains”
“Ladies and Gentlemen!” A Preface to Paul Celan’s “Conversation in the Mountains”
‘I Am Here, I’ve Come’: An Interpretation of Paul Celan’s “Conversation in the Mountains” – (Take 1)
‘I Am Here, I’ve Come’: An Interpretation of Paul Celan’s “Conversation in the Mountains” – (Take 2)
Schlemiel Theory 