Of Stones and Flowers

Abstract

Despite not being literary critics in the traditional sense of the term, Gadamer, Derrida and Blanchot are fundamentally concerned with responding to literature. However, their legacy is not a formulaic or easily replicable method of reading but an attention to the paradoxically-always-singular-demand that literature has on us. Trying to read their work with the aim of finding an approach or a method, which can then be applied to any text, would not only lead to frustration but also go against the grain of their thinking. The programmability of method and what Gadamer calls the ‘cult of the expert’ (GE 170) are key assumptions in certain practices of reading literature — belonging to what Derrida provocatively describes as the ‘library of poetics’ (CC 295) — that they problematise. In view of this, rather than attempting to provide a method to be validated elsewhere, the strategy of this chapter is to respond, almost exclusively, to the eventhood of style in one of Celan’s lyrics, ‘Flower’ (‘Blume’). Such exclusivity, however, will always have to remain tentative. For the purpose of comparison, the close-reading of Celan’s lyric is here preceded by several counter-textual (with and against) readings of style. We begin with Jameson’s analysis of Joseph Conrad’s style and an application of this method to an excerpt from Charles Dickens’s Bleak House.