Abstract
Representations of metatextual space in J. H. Prynne’s ‘The Glacial Question, Unsolved’ are read alongside those in Paul Celan’s ‘Engführung’ [‘The Straightening’] as expressions of ‘Sprachskepsis’ or language skepticism. The creation of anti-metaphorical subterranean geological and archaeological spaces is shown to be a means by which language might be redeemed and the possibility of meaning restored in an altered form. What emerges is an understanding of Prynne and Celan’s non-metaphorical, meta-textual spaces as ‘maps’ to their own meaning, which are an attempt to engage with, and a gesture towards resolving in quite distinct ways, the aporia of language crisis.
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Notes
- 1.
On the distinction between landscape and terrain, see the work of Ulrich Baer (Baer 2000, 227).
- 2.
Celan, ‘The Straightening’ (Celan 2007, 159). All translations from ‘Engführung’ are by Michael Hamburger.
- 3.
‘Es gibt nicht als die Atome und den leeren Raum; alles andere ist Meinung’, according to Celan; in fact, the quotation, which Celan highlighted in a text from his personal library, is of uncertain origin: what Democritus appears to have actually said is commonly translated as ‘by convention sweet and by convention bitter, by convention hot, by convention cold, by convention color; but in reality atoms and void’ (Celan 2003, 668; Berryman 2010).
- 4.
For a fuller discussion of fragmentation in Celan, see the work of Leonard Olschner (Olschner 2007).
- 5.
This vocabulary and description draws on reference book in Celan’s library on the identification of crystals and stones, which contains descriptions of individual minerals which use a very similar vocabulary: ‘körnig, fasering, stengelig, stätig, dichte, erdige Agregate, Versteinerungsmineral’. See Chap. 2, above, and Börner (1955). See also Wiedemann (in Celan 2003, 669).
- 6.
He wrote that, after the Shoah, poetic language has become ‘nüchterner, faktischer […] “grauere” […] sie nennt und setzt, sie versucht, den Bereich des Gegebenen und des Möglichen auszumessen’ [‘more sober, more factual […] “greyer” […] it names and posits, it attempts to measure the realms of what is given and what is possible’] (Celan 2000).
- 7.
The title of the poem refers to the unresolved debate about the extent of glaciation in Britain during the last Ice Age: scholars remain uncertain how far to the south the glacial ice penetrated. The formulation ‘Glacial Question’ is Prynne’s own, and, as Roebuck and Sperling point out, deliberately invokes the vocabulary of nineteenth century positivist science (Roebuck and Sperling 2010, 40).
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Thomas, N. (2018). Excavation, Expansion and Enclosure: Paul Celan’s ‘Engführung’ (1959) and J. H. Prynne’s ‘The Glacial Question, Unsolved’ (1969). In: Space, Place and Poetry in English and German, 1960–1975. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90212-8_3
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