Redeeming Words: Language and the Promise of Happiness in the Stories of Döblin and Sebald

Prologue

Prologue I am tempted to say that the right expression in language for the miracle of the existence of the world, though it is not any proposition in language , is the very existence of language itself. —Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Lecture on Ethics”1 The imperfect is our paradise. / Note that, in this bitterness, delight, / Since the imperfect is so hot in us, / Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds. —Wallace Stevens, “The Poems of Our Climate”2 Art is the ever broken promise of happiness. —Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory3 In Parages, Jacques Derrida explains why he likes the figure of a distant shore to signify the wholly, absolutely other: “Because,” he says, “the shore, that is the other [la rive, entendons l’autre], appears [only] by disappearing from view.”4 “Voyage of the Mayflower,” one of the essays that William Carlos Williams wrote for In the American Grain, is about the historical fate of such a shore. In this essay, the poet laments the smallness, the weakness, of the imagination that the Puritans brought with them to the “New World”— to the shores of America. These people left England to escape political persecution, political oppression; they journeyed with a collective utopian dream of freedom—above all else, the freedom to live in the keeping of their religion. And yet, when they landed on this continent, imagined from across the Atlantic Ocean as a virtual paradise, they were frightened by its xiii xiv / PROLOGUE immeasurable dimensions: not only the challenges in its mountains, forests, and marshes but also its questions for the spirit. There was then, after all, a certain metaphorical truth in the ancient cartography, which showed this continent inhabited by monstrous dragons and other frightening creatures. Would their spirit measure up to the greatness of the land—and the greatness it demanded? The place where they landed caused them great hardship; but even its hospitality, its generosity, its openness, proved to be deeply troubling: what they found here shocked their senses and overwhelmed their comprehension. They shrank in abject fear before the possibilities that this “New World” offered. Their powers of imagination, weakened by repression, recoiled from the actuality of the sublime. Was there ever even a brief moment of romanticism, a moment when they suddenly glimpsed what they could create and become—and found themselves tempted? The institutions that they quickly founded denied the providential promise in this “promised land.” Terrified of the new, the different, everything that for them must count as other, they betrayed the utopian promise for the sake of the same. They settled for the old jurisdiction and a compromised promise of happiness. They used words to indict words in a futile attempt to repress the promise of happiness that their language itself, in its very being, nevertheless persisted in representing. And they bequeathed memories darkly stained by imaginary guilt. So many missed opportunities, so many lost possibilities—the very essence, it seems, of history, chronicle of the ruins of hope. A shore that appears only by, only in, disappearing! Is that not the aporetic phenomenology of utopia as a promised land? The figure of an earthly paradise of universal happiness appears again and again in world history. But if what “happiness” signifies, namely, the bringing of humanity to itself, repeatedly withdraws from our approach, how can we avoid skepticism or cynicism, concluding that it is nothing but a transcendental illusion, a haunting phantasm, the impossible possibility of the poetic imagination? Briefly, early in his life, it seems that Jacques Derrida, an Algerian French philosopher coming to the shores of America, and approaching, no doubt, with Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America vividly in mind, entertained the speculative thought that “America” might be a worthy name for the utopian promise. He would call it the promise of a new Enlightenment, a new democracy, still to come.5 However, as his familiarity, discernment, and understanding increased, he gave up that name for his faith, his hope; for in the reality that “America” named, he observed how powerfully and effectively what that promise called for had been systemically suppressed and betrayed. Neither America, nor the elusive promise PROLOGUE / xv that name once seemed, somehow, to vouchsafe, could rescue, or redeem, the moral promise that Europe in the twentieth century had so singularly failed to realize. What now remains, if anything, of that promise? Where now might its summons be found? • In this book...