Chapter 4: Trauma and Lyric I. Introduction
VI. Trauma and the Pastoral
Although Eich’s speaker has avoided directly dealing with the trauma of the war, he is incapable of formulating a complete identity without including it. Eich has not addressed the Real explicitly; however, his non-mentioning of trauma has created a void, which betrays the Real’s existence. Through its absence in the poem, Eich has drawn attention to the presence of trauma.
only as a flower-strewn retreat but as a psycho-physiologico-psychical area of extended mental activity: concentration, contemplation,
meditation, view-formation, creativity. (McLoughlin 100)
In light of this view then, when the pastoral becomes conflicted and humanity is living in a state of Fussell’s “anti-pastoral,” the effects reverberate not only through the physical atmosphere, but also through man’s “psycho-physiologico-psychical area.” In other words, the disruption of man’s harmonious relationship with nature externally also affects man’s ability to reflect and meditate internally.
Many of Celan’s poems thematize man’s troubled relationship with nature.
“Notturno,” written in 1941, is one such example.
Notturno
Schlaf nicht. Sei auf der Hut.
Die Pappeln mit singendem Schritt ziehn mit dem Kriegsvolk mit.
Die Teiche sind alle dein Blut.
Drin grüne Gerippe tanzen.
Eins resist die Wolke fort, dreist:
verwittert, verstümmelt, vereist, blutet dein Traum von den Lanzen.
Die Welt is ein kreissendes Tier, das kahl in die Mondnacht schlich.
Gott ist sein Heulen. Ich fürchte mich und frier.
Nocturne
Sleep not. Be on your guard.
The poplars sing and stride with war troops by their side.
The ditch runs with your blood.
Green skeletons are dancing.
One tears the cloud away:
wind-beaten, battered, icy,
your dream bleeds from the lances.
The world’s a laboring7 beast creeps stark under night sky.
God is its howling. I fear for me and freeze.8
7 Laboring as in giving birth.
8 This translation attempts to retain the reflexive construction in the original. A more natural translation would read: “I / am afraid and freeze.”
The poem begins with a warning cry. The “you” the speaker addresses throughout the poem is related to his own identity in a way that is not contrasting, but rather
emphasizing it. In fact, throughout the poem it seems as though the “you” is nothing more than a foreshadowing of the future identity of the “I”. The “you” and “I” therefore form a group identity that is then contrasted with the identity of the negative force of the poem. The ominous personification of the poplars in the second line, not only continues the sentiment of the first line by warning the “you” what he should be on his guard against, but also introduces the conflict that resounds throughout the poem. Nature is equated with war, or at least a warring force. Nature, symbolized by the poplars, is not neutral in the war; it is not idealized. In fact, nature is on the offensive against the “you”
and the “I”. The final line of the first stanza shows that the “you” has fallen victim to the warring poplars; yet, interestingly, his blood now comprises the ponds (another symbol of nature). Through his death, the “you” has become one with the force of nature that has killed him.
The second stanza introduces a figure that further bridges the gap between the
“human” and “nature”. The figure of the dancing green skeletons is one that can neither be considered totally human, nor totally inhuman. Certainly they were once human, but now that they are dead, do they continue to be so? Or do they now become elements of the nature that is at war with humanity? The color green leads the reader to associate the skeleton with the forces of nature in the poem. One of the skeletons tears a piece of cloud away. “Your” dream, which in this reading is nearly synonymous with “my”
dream, is “wind-beaten, battered, icy” after having been pierced by the lances
(presumably thrown by the troops of poplars). The weather, clearly reinforcing the idea of nature as a powerful negative force, is shown as having also turned against the “you”.
The final stanza confirms what the reader has thought in the first two stanzas and explicates the speaker’s relationship to the world. The world is depicted as an animal. It is naked and creeps around in the night. Just when the reader thinks that there is no hope of salvation from this world but God, the speaker eliminates this possibility: there is no God. He is an ephemeral sound that originates from the very thing that we hope He will save us from, namely the natural world. The speaker, speaking about himself for the first time in the poem, says, “I / fear for myself and freeze.” The enjambment draws attention to identity of the speaker, as well as physically separating the “I” from its only action in the poem, which is being afraid. Here the speaker’s agency is limited to a subconscious emotion that is contrasted with nature’s very real power over the speaker’s temperature (“freezing”) and by extension, his life.
The “Other”, in this case nature or the world, is that which Celan’s lyrical “I” is identifying himself against. Clearly, this is an impossibility that cannot be resolved, which creates the tension in the poem. “Man and the world” are not two exclusive
opposites that exist in dichotomy with one another; rather, the relationship is complicated by the fact that the “I” must live within the world that he has been contrasted against, and in this case even fears. Another problem of the formulation of identity in this poem is that man is a part of nature. As we can see in the first stanza, nature has taken sides with a warring-folk that the speaker does not identify with. This presents the reader with the idea that some people can exist within nature, while others can only be defined against it.
Certainly, biographical information about Celan can tell us that the “warring-folk” are the
Germans and the “you” and “I” are Jews, but the speaker does not seem to want to limit his identity in this way. Rather, the speaker’s identity is completely defined by what he claims he is not: he is not a part of the world – rather, he fears the world and its violent, animalistic nature. However, the line between the speaker and the world is blurred. The
“you’s” blood, for example, becomes the pond. In “Notturno” we could say that the speaker, instead of acknowledging an internal human and animalistic identity, projects a difference between the nature he perceives, a world which is at war, and himself. This formulation leaves us wondering how the speaker reconciles his fear of his physical reality, which is paralleled with society, with the fact that he is necessarily a part of both.
The pastoral element of nature has vanished and Fussell’s “anti-pastoral,” which defines the state of war, is dominant.