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  • Die Garne der Fischer der Irrsee: Zur Lyrik von Paul Celan by Peter Horn
  • Joshua Dittrich
Peter Horn . Die Garne der Fischer der Irrsee: Zur Lyrik von Paul Celan. Oberhausen: Athena, 2011. 272 pp. € 29.50 (Paperback). ISBN 978-3-89896-420-3.

Peter Horn's recent study of Paul Celan approaches the latter's formidable lyric work from the perspective of the poet's mental illness. Celan struggled for years against a crippling manic depression, and Horn's introductory chapter recounts how, at moments of deep crisis, this depression would erupt into a destructive psychosis that resulted in attempts on his wife's life as well as his own, several hospitalizations (some forced), and finally the poet's suicide in 1970. The causes of this illness (though Horn acknowledges the difficulty in recent psychiatric literature of speaking unambiguously of such "causes") must surely be the dual traumas of Celan's suffering during the Holocaust and the prolonged torment of the plagiarism charges raised against him throughout his career. Yet Horn poses the question of Celan's mental illness and its relation to these personal traumas in a subtle, provocative way: How can one read the illness in Celan's poetry without clinicizing it (that is, subjecting it to a reductive psychobiographical interpretation)? And, at the same time, how can one read the specificity of Celan's poetry without assimilating it to what Horn calls "Sprachmagie," an ethereal discourse of abstract, "schizophrenic" poetic language characterized by a lack of logic; an excess of contradictory, obscure images; and a renunciation of referential meaning in favour of "pure" poetic and linguistic play?

Horn's answer, which he develops in a series of richly detailed, critically informed readings of Celan's poetic output from "Todesfuge" to his posthumously published poems, is to insist on the interrelation of Celan's madness and poetic expression. Horn reads Celan's madness both as constitutive of a certain poetic style and relation to language and also as the physical trace of a certain kind of suffering on a mind and body. Celan is thus not reduced to a case study, a psychopathography, nor to a mystical or hermetic nihilist, but rather to an artist who sought, again and again, to give expression to unthinkable thoughts and inhuman experiences in an explicitly paradoxical, self-defeating, and ultimately self-destructive language that was nevertheless profoundly human and dialogical.

In the opening chapter, Horn sets himself the task of transforming "madness" from a romanticized myth of creative suffering into a textual problem: "Man kann eine Psychose wie die Bipolare Erkrankung als Krankeit und als Textstruktur verstehen. [. . .] Wie erfährt ein Patient diese Krankheit, wie schildert er sein subjektives Erleben, welche Folgen hat das für seine Dichtung?" (35). He works with recent psychiatric and literary studies of the links between madness and writing to describe a style characterized by "Paradox und Oxymoron, aber auch [End Page 344] schwer verständliche, abwegige, unlogische und kontradiktorische Aussagen, paralogische Kombinationen, Sprachzerfall, Sprachskepsis, Sprachverweigerung und Sprachunfähigkeit" (37) in which the clinical symptoms of psychosis and Celan's poetic style coalesce into the methodological framework for the study.

The subsequent chapters interweave readings of Celan's poems with biographical discussions of the tolls taken by his illness on his personal and professional life, including bouts of depression, violence, and institutionalization. Horn offers extensive and engaging readings of canonical poems like "Todesfuge," "Psalm," and "Engführung," but also an impressive and original discussion of the rarely read "Huhediblu" and many of Celan's late short poems. Horn also discusses the so-called Goll-Affäre in detail, documenting the devastating long-term impact of spurious plagiarism charges on Celan's writing and mental state, as well as what it reflected about Celan's occasionally fraught relationship with the literary establishment. A related theme for Horn is the Adornian question of "poetry after Auschwitz" and the extent to which Celan has been read either as an aesthetic exploiter of his Holocaust experiences or - what was just as painful to Celan - a poet who dissolved the problem of writing about the Holocaust into a hermetic, non-referential language. Horn shows how these questions were only...

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