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

SUNY series, Intersections: Philosophy and Critical Theory

Rodolphe Gasch, editor

Redeeming Words

Language and the Promise of Happiness
in the Stories of Dblin and Sebald

DAVID KLEINBERG-LEVIN

Cover image: Figure on Road 19871988 by Josef Herman The Estate of Josef Herman, courtesy Flowers Gallery, London

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany

2013 State University of New York

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kleinberg-Levin, David Michael, 1939

Redeeming words : language and the promise of happiness in the stories of Dblin and Sebald / David Kleinberg-Levin.

pages cm. (SUNY series, Intersections: Philosophy and Critical Theory)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4384-4781-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Dblin, Alfred, 1878-1957Criticism and interpretation. 2. Sebald, Winfried Georg, 19442001Criticism and interpretation. 3. Language and languages in literature. I. Title.

PT2607.O35Z7174 2013

833'.912dc23

2012045688

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

An Michael:

trotz ihrer Vergnglichkeit, unvergessbar die Zeiten

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the Estate of Josef Herman and the Flowers Gallery of London and New York for kind permission to use an image of Herman's Figure on Road, a painting the allegorical sense of which seems singularly fitting for the cover of this book.

Many are the friends who, in one way or another, in the course of a number of years, have contributed to the thinking and writing of this book. But, hoping that my increasingly weak powers of memory have not made me forget the contributions of a friend, I would like to name at least those to whom I consider myself most indebted. I would like to recall, with my thanks, Giorgio Agamben, Jay Bernstein, Daniel Brandes, Gerald Bruns, Edward Casey, Mauro Carbone, Peter Fenves, Doris Gahler, Jrgen Habermas, Samir Haddad, Gregg Horowitz, Glen Mazis, Eduardo Mendieta, Guiseppina Moneta, Dennis Schmidt, Davide Stimilli, Carlos Thiebaut, Bernard Waldenfels, and Samuel Weber. I am immensely grateful to Charles Curtis, Thomas McCarthy, Michael McGillen, and David C. Wood; their comments and suggestions on various parts and stages of this work have been helpful beyond measure. And finally, I wish to acknowledge and thank Peter Fritzsche and Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei for suggestions regarding the penultimate draft of the work in its entirety. Of course, I alone am responsible for the words that have been published here.

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

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

Art is the ever broken promise of happiness.

Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory

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.

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 Worldto the shores of America. These people left England to escape political persecution, political oppression; they journeyed with a collective utopian dream of freedomabove 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 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 landand 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 becomeand 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 possibilitiesthe 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