Diagrams
Much of my work focuses on understanding how poetry — in its minutest phonic sounds and scriptural marks — thinks. To this end, I make use of diagrams and animations to visualize poetic form as a dynamic process at work in the poem.
‘Absolute’ metaphors in modernist poetry
The following sonnet to Orpheus by Rilke (I.XXI) opens with a seemingly simple figurative comparison: the earth is like a child… That simile turns out, however, to function as the hinge for an extensive, elaborate metaphor that governs the whole poem. The metaphor is ‘absolute’ because one cannot decide what counts as the poem’s vehicle and what as its tenor. In other words, this class of metaphors does not allow one to distinguish between the literal and the figurative. Rilke’s brilliant sonnet instead ceaselessly oscillates between imagining nature in terms of culture, culture in terms of nature.
The final cubist painting perfectly depicts a similar figural oscillation: the undulating curves above the hole of the guitar could be taken as the material instrument’s upper half and contour or just as well as the guitarist’s plucking fingers and arm. What Wittgenstein called ‘aspect seeing’ thus extends beyond visual art to the art of poetic figuration.
Rhyme as the sonic shaping of time
The following animation attempts to understand August Wilhelm Schlegel’s temporalization of Dante’s rhyme scheme, terza rima:
“Admittedly, this first number, complete in itself, here appears under the bounds of finitude; for each tercet, by virtue of the isolated rhyme in its middle, demands a following one, just as in nature’s productivity, in every generation a strife of forces is brought to equilibrium, while at the same time the seed of a new strife is sown, and so on into the infinite. This, then, grounds the chaining of the tercets, the inherent pointing toward the future that makes this syllabic measure so apt for a prophetic significance. And as spirit [Geist], in the progress of finitudes, can gather the infinite into unity only by a free act, by an incomprehensible leap, so too can the chain of the tercets be closed only arbitrarily, by a superadded line.” (Lectures on Romantic Poetry, 1803/04)
Articulatory Gestures (Lautgebärden) in Celan’s poems
Poems obviously channel our senses of sight and sound, but how might they engage the other, less directly ‘verbal’ senses such as touch, taste, and smell? Lautgebärden designate the physical gestures that coordinate tongue, lips, teeth, and palate into an articulation that resounds from within the body to release a voice into the world. Poetic ‘touch’ most immediately happens in these gestures that enable reading aloud, whether alone to oneself (a doubled self) or to others. Such gestures isolate the articulating movement of the speech organs rather than the sound thereby articulated, whether codified phoneme or proto-lingual babble. Linguists and theorists from Wilhelm Wundt to Roland Barthes have been entranced by articulatory gestures, phantasizing through them an embodied origin of language. Paul Celan, whose library testifies to his study of the physiology of speech production as well as the linguistic theories of Jakobson, often ‘scripted’ articulatory gestures in his poetry, nowhere perhaps more explicitly than in the poem “Offene Glottis.” To the right of the poem is its transcription in IPA, with recurring phonemes accordingly highlighted so as to allow the gestural patterns between colors and beyond all linguistic codes and hierarchies of unit to become apparent.
Anachronic Narrative Time and Character Psychology in Goethe’s Novella
The Novella’s first sentence stages a Janus-faced present event poised between two adverbial modifiers: “still” and “already,” “noch” and “schon,” retrospection and anticipation, but also occlusion and visibility, night and day, emblematically furnishing a structural principle for the interpretation of narrative events in general in the text. When located at the level of discourse rather than story, such anachronic events take place at a site of coincidence between analepsis and prolepsis (flashback and flashforward). All narrative events, of course, refer backwards and forwards in time, for they are embedded in a given causal sequence, i.e., a plot. Anachronic events, however, point towards past and future in indirect fashion, not according to the chronologic of plot but according to a synchronic, paradigmatic resemblance. The operation of iteration, e.g. of seeing the ruins or a tiger multiple times, first through different media and images, then in real encounter, is constitutive of these anachronic narrative events. This is the case because, given the coincidence of retrospection and anticipation at the level of story, ana- and prolepsis at the level of discourse, it will not be clear whether a ‘new’ event is genuinely new; it will instead take on the appearance of a repetition.
The central problematic dramatized by Novelle at the level of story consists in the princess working through a pathology of the imagination, the latter’s susceptibility to fearful enthrallment before idées fixes. These fixed ideas or phobic imprints give rise to anachronic narrative events by precontextualizing the present occurrence in terms of a past event and priming the princess for a future event in terms of the present. Liberation from this pathology of the imagination will ultimately come with the emergence of poetry at the text’s conclusion. The child’s lyric poetry speaks his present situation into aesthetically accessible presence and thereby enables a shift from the past’s pre-contextualization of the present to the present’s re-contextualization of the past, thus breaking the pathological imagination’s repetitive cycle of anxious priming and sudden returns of the phobically impressed. Ending with neither a radically singular event nor a straightforward repetition, Goethe’s Novelle allows the final event’s singular urgency to come to appearance precisely through the iterability and recontextualizability of poetic language in recitation. The events that make up Goethe’s novella achieve narrative singularity, in other words, through poetic iterability.