Flowers, only flowers, too many flowers…
–Jacques Derrida, Glas
Je dis: une fleur!
–Stephane Mallarmé, Divagations
Book Botany
Jan Mieszkowski
In his preparatory notes for a dictionary of botanical terms, Jean-Jacques Rousseau expresses some concern about the word flower: “If I should let my imagination surrender to the sweet sensations which this word seems to evoke, I would be able to write an article pleasing perhaps to shepherds, but most unacceptable to botanists. So for a moment let us forget bright colors, sweet scents, elegant shapes, to discover first how to know really well the organism which embraces all these properties.”[1] To understand the workings of the plant kingdom, we must begin by putting aside the aesthetic experiences facilitated by its denizens, but precisely how we will do this is far from obvious. As Georges Canguilhem comments: “It is easier to renounce the fashion for the pastoral style than to silence the shepherd in one’s soul. Before becoming the subject matter of theory, trees, flowers, fruits, and grains are symbols, spurs to the imagination. Plant symbolism continued to haunt the desperate attempts of eighteenth-century botanists to depict the plant as a mechanism, an economy, or an organism.”[2] On this account, the emergence of botany as a scientific field becomes a struggle with an aesthetic and literary tradition in which the flower is among the most complex and venerable of motifs, not least in its capacity as a metaphor for figuration itself.[3]
On a rhetorical level, the noun “flower” is challenging because it can refer either to the seed-bearing part of a plant or to the entire organism, meaning that the mere invocation of the word sets in motion a dynamic of semantic and physical dissection that sees various anatomical parts and meanings uncertainly cut and grafted onto one another. Like generations of poets before them, modern botanists thus find themselves forever trying to write with and against the language of flowers.[4] The following essay considers several attempts to unsettle the authority of this language. I begin by looking at an article by Elaine Scarry, then test its idiosyncratic claims in readings of Rousseau, Kant, and Celan.
Mindful of Canguilhem’s warning that plant symbolism haunts the most sober empirical and material projects, Scarry tries to limit the signifying hegemony of the flower by offering a non-linguistic explanation for why colorful buds and blossoms have so often been identified by philosophers and poets as the representative objects of the imagination. Her deceptively simple thesis is that flowers are just the right size and shape, that is, they constitute a localized phenomenon that aligns neatly with the perceptual and cognitive powers of human beings: “The ease [with which we can imagine flowers] is in turn attributable to their size and the size of our heads, their shape and the shape of our eyes, their intense localization and the radius of our compositional powers, their rarity that lets them rise and enter our brains.”[5] Accordingly, “when a poet describes a flower, even when a poet merely names a flower, it is always being offered up as something that after a brief stop in front of [our] face can immediately pass through the resisting bone and lodge itself and light up the inside” of our heads.[6] Going further, Scarry suggests that when a poet makes reference to a flower, its petals in effect become surfaces on which less easily envisioned images can take shape, one imagined object facilitating the mental composition of others.
As she discusses the aesthetic significance of flowers, Scarry produces her own version of a flowery language. As Anne-Lise François has observed, Scarry’s central claims are invariably accompanied by a qualifying “almost” that threatens to undermine what is being said, as if simply talking about flowers were enough to force one to begin speaking vaguely, or at least metaphorically.[7] In this way, Scarry characterizes the imagination as “the almost percipient, the not yet percipient.”[8] Flowers kick the imagination into high gear, but they also reveal that it is defined by a potentially permanent delay between perception and understanding, as if the comprehension promised by the imagination’s products were always just out of reach. Suspending the mind between determinations of possibility and actuality, flowers simulate the prospect of insights that they may never deliver and as such are exercises in virtuality, a term Scarry does not use.
At a number of points, Scarry observes that her argument draws on the aesthetic tradition Rousseau and Kant helped found. When we examine their texts, however, a rather different relationship between flowers and the imagination emerges. In his Reveries of the Solitary Walker, Rousseau offers a detailed account of the botanizing he pursued during his brief stay on the Isle de St. Pierre in Western Switzerland. At the outset, Rousseau celebrates his activities as “precious far niente [doing nothing],” but he makes doing nothing sound quite arduous when he announces his ambition “to describe every single plant on the island in enough detail to keep me busy for the rest of my days.”[9] With the fecundity and diversity of plant life threatening to consume the remainder of his own life, Rousseau takes things a step further: “They say a German once wrote a book about a lemon-skin; I could have written one about every grass in the meadows, every moss in the woods, every lichen covering the rocks—and I did not want to leave even one blade of grass or atom of vegetation without a full and detailed description.”[10] This hyperbole may border on the preposterous, but Rousseau is addressing a central concern of eighteenth-century natural science, the fear that a single site—estuary, glade, meadow—could contain more elements and demand more classificatory schemas than is humanly manageable. In this case, Rousseau’s claim that he could have written a book about each blade of grass fuels a reversal by which the almost unlimited scope of the project becomes something positive, namely a guarantee that there will never be a lack of “nothing” to do: “Until such time as I can collect all the plants of the seashore and the Alps, and the flowers of all the trees of the Indies, I am making a modest beginning with chickweed, chervil, borage, and groundsel. I botanize learnedly at my birdcage, and every new blade of grass that I spot makes me say to myself with satisfaction: ‘There’s one more plant anyhow.’”[11] Governed by this n + 1 logic, Rousseau moves with disturbing ease from being content to catalogue what is at hand to identifying the same everyday items over and over again (one more blade of grass, one more blade of grass). It is not obvious why he would find these rote operations so satisfying, as if botany, far from an adventure into the uncharted splendors of the natural world, had been reduced to the repeated act of putting an ordinary label on an ordinary organism.
Turning to the last book of Rousseau’s Confessions, we find an even more eccentric account of this same sojourn on the Isle de St. Pierre. Once again eager to affirm his ambition to spend his time doing nothing, Rousseau sings the praises of true idleness (l’oisiveté), which he likens to the activities of a child “who is always in motion and always doing nothing [ne rien faire],” or to the activities of the driveller (radoteur), “who rambles on endlessly while never stirring from his seat.”[12] To embrace such idleness is to give in fully to “the caprice of the moment,” but not so that the imagination can run wild.[13] To the contrary, such idleness is desirable precisely because it keeps the imagination in check, and here plants play a key role:
Botany, as I have always considered it and in the form in which I was beginning to conceive a passion for it, was just such an idle study, one that filled the void of my leisure-time without leaving room for the fevered workings of the imagination or the boredom of total inactivity. Wandering carelessly through the woods and the fields, gathering mechanically, here and there, now a flower, now a branch; browsing almost at random in my hayfield, examining again and again a thousand times the same things, and always with the same interest, because I had always forgotten them, these things were enough to last me an eternity without my being bored for a moment.[14]
The botanical praxis Rousseau describes is not a straightforward embrace of natural beauty, and it has little to do with clichés about the imperialist classificatory ambitions of Enlightenment systems of knowledge. In his relationship to the plant world, Rousseau is scarcely more directed than a malfunctioning robot, his browsing just this side of random. No activity relates to the next, since a specimen is forgotten the moment it is identified. As objects of reflection, plants are distinctive not because they are ideally suited to the mind’s compositional powers, but because they arrest the eye only long enough to be registered before any memory of them fades away. Far from a scientific inquiry or even a parody of one, this seems more like an investigative nightmare based in a model of consciousness that is virtually indistinguishable from madness. Whereas in the Reveries Rousseau describes his ambition to write a book about a single blade of grass, here he lauds the blades of grass because there is nothing to say about them, and if he were to start a sentence about one, he would presumably forget what he was doing before he was done.
If identifying plants turns Rousseau into an automaton, this appears to be an acceptable price to pay for sparing himself both the exhaustion that comes with exercising his imagination and the boredom that stems from inactively rather than actively doing nothing. This uniquely impractical practice of energetic idleness sound more like something out of Samuel Beckett than a proto-romantic impulse, and it has not made it into the standard picture of Rousseau the botany aficionado. For our purposes, the crucial point is that for Rousseau flowers do the opposite of what Scarry says they should do, that is, rather than facilitating the presentational powers of the imagination, flowers keep the mind from having to think about, much less create, anything.
Rousseau’s discussion offers a novel perspective on twenty-first-century reflections about impending ecological catastrophes, in which the power of the imagination—individual or collective—is often invoked as a crucial resource in combatting the destruction of the world’s ecosystems.[15] If the suggestion is that it is only by engineering the correct balance of creativity and receptivity that humans will have any hope of righting the wrongs they have done to the planet, Rousseau is adamant that a passion for the natural order is as likely to paralyze as to stimulate the imagination. We might also ask whether the ease with which the human species has laid waste to its environment is evidence of a lack of imagination or an indication that people find it all too easy to give the inherently destructive drives of their creative faculties free rein.
By the mid-eighteenth century, botany was well established as a central enterprise of the European colonial project, and most of the botanical research conducted took place within an ever-expanding imperial network in which ecosystems at home and abroad were being refashioned for commercial purposes. In this vein, the entry on botany in Diderot and d’Alembert’s 1751 Encyclopédie openly exhorts us not to waste time classifying plants, but rather to devote our energies to figuring out how to profit from them. From this perspective, we might conclude that Rousseau’s writings on botany are a-political or worse, since he seems to overlook the imperialist tenor of his musings about the acquisition of knowledge (“Until such time as I can collect all the plants of the seashore and the Alps, and the flowers of all the trees of the Indies…”). Alternatively, one might argue that Rousseau’s resolute insistence on studying the form of plants rather than their commercial uses throws a wrench into the bio-colonial machine, perhaps even articulating a non-imperialist relationship to nature. If nothing else, this would give us a new way of understanding why the Rousseau of the Reveries repeatedly rehearses and debunks the fantasy of terra nullius, the experience of believing oneself to be on a spot of land never before seen by human eyes only immediately to realize that, to take the most famous example, there is a stocking factory just around the corner.
Rousseau’s approach to contemplating flora without reference to their utility as food or medicine is sometimes identified as an influence on Kant’s conception of the disinterested judgment of taste, another point of reference for Scarry, who maintains that her argument about flowers and the imagination has important affinities with the third Critique.[16] As we know, Kant argues that when we judge something to be beautiful, our imagination and understanding harmonize in such a way that we engage with our very capacity to apprehend the form of an object.[17] In other words, it feels good to make a judgment of taste because it offers us a brush with the conditions of possibility of judgment as such.
Given the resolutely subjective (borderline solipsistic) character of this dynamic, Kantian aesthetics is notoriously vague about whether it should be possible to enumerate the defining attributes of beautiful objects. Kant does feel compelled to provide some examples of beauty, and among the first phenomena he mentions are flowers. If we have a genuinely aesthetic encounter with a plant specimen in the wild, we will deem it beautiful because it appears purposive even as it is equally apparent that it in fact has no end or purpose. Precisely what, however, does such purposiveness without a purpose look like, that is, how does one see the active absence of purpose? In his discussion of judgments of taste, one of the first things Kant tries to do is to distinguish between the sense of pleasure we get from a disinterested judgment of something beautiful and the way in which our senses can be pleased by the process of sensation itself, in which case we are expressing an interest in the agreeable (angenehm). This potentially shaky opposition considerably complicates the task of offering examples of beauty, since to identify any particular trait of an object—its color, taste, or smell— as crucial to the experience raises the suspicion that we may be moving from a disinterested to an interested evaluation of it.
The first flower Kant mentions is a rose: “By means of a judgment of taste, I declare the rose that I am gazing at to be beautiful.”[18] Recalling Canguilhem’s warnings about the irrepressible ghosts of plant symbolism, a rose is a strange choice to illustrate a “free natural beauty,” since it is among the most overdeterminately cultural of phenomena, possessing manifold layers of emblematic significance and nearly unlimited associative possibilities. Kant’s response would presumably be that in his text the word “rose” is a sort of placeholder, an idea that is reinforced a few dozen pages later when he repeats exactly the same remarks he made earlier, except now the rose has become a tulip. Commentators have found the invocation of this second genus equally curious, since Kant seems to be borrowing the image of a wild tulip from a book by Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, a Swiss geologist and Alpine explorer whom Kant often cites. In the specific passage in question, Saussure is describing the powerful experience of coming upon a wild tulip in the mountains, but of course, tulips do not grow wild in the Alps (they are neither wildflowers nor indigenous to Europe), so it is not just that Kant gets his example of a free natural beauty from a book; he gets it from a fiction—or at least he unwittingly relies on someone else’s mistake.
We might conclude that for Kant flowers only grow in books, which would mean that despite his best efforts his philosophy does remain under the yoke of conventional plant symbolism. There is, however, a moment in the argument at which this traditional symbolic edifice is seriously undermined. Distinguishing between judgments of the beautiful and the good, Kant writes: “In order to find something good, I must always know what sort of thing the object is supposed to be, i.e., I must have a concept of it. I do not need that in order to find beauty in something. Flowers, free designs, [and] lines aimlessly intertwined in each other under the name of foliage; they signify nothing, do not depend on any determinate concept, and yet please [Blumen, freie Zeichnungen, ohne Absicht in einander geschlungene Züge, unter dem Namen des Laubwerks, bedeuten nichts, hängen von keinem bestimmten Begriffe ab, und gefallen doch].”[19] With surprising ease, Kant passes from objects in a garden to entirely abstract productions to decorative frills.[20] Far from privileging the colorful denizens of the natural realm, he includes flowers here only as one example of visual phenomena that are free precisely because they are not part of a representational logic that exceeds them. The aimless marks with which he finishes his list are not signifiers, but Kant insists that they do not mimetically represent anything, either: “Thus designs à la grecque, foliage for borders or on wallpaper, etc., signify [bedeuten] nothing by themselves: they do not represent anything [sie stellen nichts vor], no object under a determinate concept, and are free beauties.”[21] According to Kant, to encounter the beauty of flowers or designs is not so much to muse on what they look like as to register the absence of any concept of what they should be. In judging flowers to be beautiful, then, what one sees is their freedom from any plan or design, that is, one sees what is not there to be seen at all, which is why even images of roses and tulips are just this side of something completely haphazard and therefore not fundamentally different from idle marks on a page. Perched on the border between representational and non-representational art, these squiggles and whirls are the visual equivalent of the language of Rousseau’s idle driveller. To talk about flowers—even if this merely means identifying a rose as a rose or a tulip as a tulip—is to flirt with a discourse whose spontaneity ensures that it will be almost indistinguishable from babble.
Kant and Rousseau offer glimpses of what it would mean to unsettle the power of the flower as a semantic edifice or a spark for the imagination. Something similar happens in the poetry of Paul Celan, where the flower is more a threat than an ally to signification. Consider in this regard a short text from the 1952 Mohn und Gedächtnis (Poppy and Memory), which opens: “Der Tauben weißeste flog auf: ich darf dich lieben!” (“The whitest dove flies off: I can love you!”).[22] The speaker’s expression of love initially takes place as a celebration of the fact that his feelings have a right to exist, a permission authorized by an event that is overdeterminately symbolic—only in a lyric can “the whitest” dove fly off. If we are outside, we are not on an ornithology expedition so much as adrift in Charles Baudelaire’s “forêts de symboles,” and the dove’s departure is a linguistic event that occurs with the opening of the text, not an empirical event being described in verse. The ensuing interaction between the lovers heightens the sense that in this poem connections are predicated on determinations that may have no analog in the natural world:
Aus meiner Hand nimmst du die große Blume: From my hand, you take the great flower: sie ist nicht weiß, nicht rot, nicht blau – doch nimmst du sie. it is not white, not red, not blue – yet you take it.
Wo sie nie war, da wird sie immer bleiben. Where it never was, it will always remain. Wir waren nie, so bleiben wir bei ihr.[23] We never were, so we remain with it.[24]
This introduction to indeterminate negation is an exercise in negative theological botany. In principle, the enumeration of the traits that “the great flower” does not have should be open-ended, even endless—by definition, a flower is not every imaginable color save one. The bond of love between “us” therefore has to be articulated by a leap of faith, or rather a leap of dash as the punctuation mark and the word “doch” team up to interrupt the unbounded string of not-this-color, not-this-color, etc. The integrity of the individual formulations is thereby pitted against a more abstract interplay of identity and difference. Logically the line should continue ad nauseum, but grammatically, metrically, and/or rhetorically, it must be interrupted. “The great flower” is nothing but not x, not y, and not z—“yet, you take it,” and you take it precisely in all its Nicht-heit; you take the flower and everything it is not, certain only that it is not not a flower, even if it is unquestionably a flower of nots. Far from a robust symbol or metaphor of love, the plant in this poem represents the retreat of representability, the fact that whatever such a “notting” flower is, a mere reference to it can never “light up the inside of the brain” with an image as Scarry would have it.[25]
In an earlier version of this poem, the penultimate line read: “Wo sie nie war, da trug sie einen Namen” (“Where it never was, there it bore a name”).[26] In Celan, “flower” is an impossibly burdensome appellation that threatens to undo the identity of both what it names and the one who would wield it as a name.[27] This sense of denominative dissonance is the central concern of Celan’s poem “Psalm,” published in Die Niemandsrose (The No-One’s-Rose, 1963). It opens by ambiguously restaging and yet not restaging the creation story at the start of Genesis: “No one [Niemand] kneads us again out of earth and clay / no one enchants our dust. / No one.”[28] Confronted with a nobody (ein Niemand) that may just be nobody (keiner), we are potentially like the cyclops confronting the intruding Odysseus in that we are unable to hear the difference between “No Man” and “no man.” In short order, the existential status of this figure appears to be at least provisionally resolved, for we are said to praise this “No one” the way we would praise God, the One:
Gelobt seist du, Niemand.
Praise be to you, No One.
Dir zulieb wollen
For your sake
wir blühn.
we bloom.
Dir
Towards [Against]
entgegen.
you.
Ein Nichts
A Nothing
waren wir, sind wir, werden
were we, are we, will
wir bleiben, blühend:
we remain, flowering:
die Nichts-, die
the Nothing-, the
Niemandsrose.[29]
No-One’s-Rose.[30]
Some plants are hydrotropic and others are heliotropic, but we claim to be No One–tropic as we bloom toward or against our addressee, and in doing so, we designate ourselves “a Nothing,” “the Nothing-Rose,” and “the No-One’s-Rose.” In the earlier poem, we were told: “Where it never was, it will always remain. / We never were, so we remain with it.” In “Psalm,” this is rewritten as: “A Nothing / were we, are we, will / we remain, flowering.” On this basis, “Psalm” arguably stabilizes the vertiginous not-identity of the earlier text insofar as it appears more confident about our status as a nothing, as something positive that can be presented in language, whereas in the first poem we are defined by a not that has to be conceived of as prior to any proposition that it might help affirm or negate, a not that leaves us suspended between non-determinations of the rose that is not one: the rose of no one, of no one, and of no one. Ultimately, however, “Psalm,” a discourse of turns from not to not and from nothing to nothing, has to turn against the turns of language. Rejecting the claim of metaphor to produce meaning by giving one thing the name of another, the poem substitutes the no-name of one no-thing for the no-name of another no-thing.[31]
In taking us through a floral review of what was, is, and will be, both poems suggest that flower time is a kind of no-time, or better, a time of lingering with not. This uncertain temporality is further explored in another poem in Celan’s Niemandsrose, “Die Silbe Schmerz” (“The Syllable Pain”), in which, as the title hints, the very integrity of words begins erode under the burden of botanical labels. In one crucial section of the text, Celan puts colonialism at the forefront of his discussion of flowers:
Kolumbus, Columbus,
die Zeit- autumn
lose im Aug, die Mutter- crocus in his sight, the mother-
Blume, flower,
mordete Masten und Segel. Alles fuhr aus, murdered masts and sails. Everything left port,
frei, free,
entdeckerisch, adventurous,
blühte die Windrose ab, blätterte the wind rose flowered and faded, ex-
ab. . .[32] foliated. . . [33]
Celan’s Columbus is seeking out a very special plant, the Colchicum autumnalea—in French, “le colchique,” in English the “autumn crocus” or “meadow saffron,” in German “die Herbst-Zeitlose.” In hunting this particular—highly poisonous—specimen, our explorer is following in some hallowed adventurers’ footsteps. Celan explained that this poem was occasioned by a letter from a friend who was going to spend his holidays in the Georgian town of Colchis on the Black Sea.[34] Colchis is famous as the home of Medea, hence the destination of the Argonauts, where they hoped to find the Golden Fleece; “Les Colchiques” is also the title of a poem by Apollinaire translated by Celan as “Die Herbstzeitlosen.”[35]
In a letter to his wife, Celan relates that a few days after having written “Die Silbe Schmerz,” he went out on a walk and “suddenly a flower appeared: un colchique!”[36] If Rousseau savored his strolls in the meadows because they helped deaden his imagination, here Celan’s imaginative text has seemingly refashioned the world in its image, although notably he does not spontaneously declare the flower he sees to be beautiful, as Kant might have had him do. For Scarry, part of the power of flowers lies in the fact that we can easily see them even when they are not there—say the word “tulip,” and we all immediately picture a tulip without any further ado. What happens, however, if one thinks one sees a tulip, but it is actually something else? As if to underscore the potential gap between name and image, “Die Silbe Schmerz” presents the reader with an exercise in true book botany by offering up flowers that definitely do not look like anything Celan, Rousseau, or anyone else has ever seen on a walk, because the plants’ names are broken up by hyphens and line breaks: “die Zeit- / lose”; “die Mutter- / Blume.” With the appearance of “wind rose” a few lines later, we finally have a flower word that is not typographically fractured, but in this line of verse, “rose” appears only secondarily in its capacity as a flower, since in a nautical context, the term “wind rose” refers to the graphic on a map that shows wind speed and direction.[37] At one moment, the typography of the poem underscores its power to disarticulate words and with them any simple correspondence between grapheme and imago; in the next moment, we are reminded of the ways in which names can unite the verbal and visual orders.
Complicating things further, the verbs that immediately follow the noun “wind rose” treat it as if it were a plant. Having faded (abblühen) like a flower, it then flakes away or exfoliates itself (sie blätterte ab), with the prefix ab (ex-) appearing alone on the next line. Die Sprache blättert ab—the syllables flake away. At the same time, this scattering of linguistic units does not become a stable representation of the dissemination of petals or seeds. A wind rose should help orient sailors, yet here it marks the breakdown of the language of flowers, since nothing tells us how to coordinate die Windrose with its brethren, die Zeitlose and die Mutterblume. “We never were, so we remain with [the flower]”—in this poem, the uncertain interplay of never and forever sees the timeless, die Zeit-lose, broken up by the timely yet irregular spacing of verbal elements, one following semi-haphazardly after another. Susan Sontag said of Walter Benjamin that his “major essays seem to end just in time, before they self-destruct.”[38] In contrast, Celan’s poems begin just in time, which is to say right after they have begun flaking out into a time out or an out-time that is never entirely timeless.
In the poem “Psalm,” floral self-determination, identifying ourselves as “the No-One’s-Rose,” becomes an act of anti-self-appellation whereby no-thing is given the no-name of another no-thing. At first glance, something very different appears to take place in “Flower,” a poem Celan published four years earlier in his 1959 Sprachgitter (Speech-Grille or Language Mesh). Far from revealing the language of flowers to be constitutively disruptive of any effort to ground one’s self-identity, this text boldly puts the word “flower” at the center of the process by which one comes into one’s own as a linguistic being, because the composition of the poem was purportedly prompted by the momentous event of Celan’s twenty-month-old son Eric speaking his first word, the French noun “fleur.”[39] In its final version, the text comprises four short stanzas:
Blume Flower
Der Stein. The stone.
Der Stein in der Luft, dem ich folgte. The stone in the air, which I followed.
Dein Aug, so blind wie der Stein. Your eye, as blind as the stone.
Wir waren We were
Hände, hands,
wir schöpften die Finsternis leer, wir fanden we baled the darkness empty, we found
das Wort, das den Sommer heraufkam: the word that ascended summer:
Blume. flower.
Blume – ein Blindenwort. Flower – a blind man’s word.
Dein Aug und mein Aug: Your eye and mine:
sie sorgen they see
für Wasser. to water.
Wachstum. Growth.
Herzwand um Herzwand Heart wall upon heart wall
blättert hinzu. Adds petals to it.
Ein Wort noch, wie dies, und die Hämmer One more word like this, and the hammers
schwingen im Freien.[40] will swing over open ground.[41]
A host of drafts of this poem exist, and in the first two, the body of the text is written in German while the title is in French (“Fleur”), whereas in the subsequent drafts as well as the final copy, the title is also in German (“Blume”).[42] Although Blume, fleur, and flower all derive from the same Indo-European root, bhel- (“to thrive, to bloom”), the multilingual staging of the title unsettles the casual attribution of any given word to a given tongue, as if every time one says “Blume,” “flower,” or “fleur,” one cannot be entirely sure what language one is speaking.
In his remarks about the poem “Flower,” Hans-Georg Gadamer argues that one should not make the mistake of trying to reduce Celan’s text to a personal narrative about the author’s son, not least given Celan’s own oft-referenced notion that true poetry is anti-biographical.[43] Gadamer is confident that “Flower” traces a tale of origination and development irrespective of the information about Celan’s life that the reader has at her disposal. At the very least, one can read and interpret the text without knowing that it is specifically a father and son who are tending to the word “flower” and watching it grow. At the same time, once one has heard that the poem was supposedly inspired by Celan’s son’s first word, one cannot exactly unhear it. To be sure, the story sounds fanciful. Whose first word was “flower”? Skepticism on this point is compounded by the fact that any child’s “first” word is almost certainly the product of an eager parent’s imagination, a mother or father straining to discern some trace of the articulate in the midst of infantile babble.[44]
As it happens, the poem’s early drafts are quite explicit that the word “flower” is emerging from babble: “Ein Mund … lallt /Blume”; “Lippen … lallend: / Blume” (“a mouth … gurgles / flower”; “lips … gurgling: / flower”).[45] The insistent repetition of the letter L hints that the text’s own language may not be entirely free of infantile gurgling, and this is hardly the only evidence that the phonic may hold sway in this discourse. In his notes on the poem, Peter Szondi emphasizes the repetition of the two-letter consonant blend bl (blind, Blume, Blinden, blättert), and he calls attention to the string of words that begin with W: Wort, Wasser, Wachstum, and Wand, as well as wir and wie.[46] Regardless of whether the poem “Flower” ever confirms itself to be babble-free, we should not underestimate the potential violence inherent in the notion of a child’s first utterance. As a radically proto-linguistic act, such an exclamation may well have no pretension to signify or refer, yet whoever overhears the putative utterance will necessarily strive to bring it into the verbal fold, typically by understanding what the child has quote/unquote “said” as a reference to someone present: “He called me a flower!”[47]
If the poem “Flower” appears to dwell on a primal speech act (“In the beginning was the word, and the word was flower”), the word “Finsternis” in its second stanza ups the theological ante by taking us back to the beginning of Genesis and God’s first act of denomination: “Da schied Gott das Licht von der Finsternis und nannte das Licht Tag und die Finsternis Nacht” (“And God divided the light from the darkness, and God called the light day and the darkness he called night”).[48] Viewed in this light, or darkness, virtually every phrase in the poem acquires a potentially ultra-paradigmatic quality as a foundational utterance on the basis of which all subsequent verbal acts must be measured. Crucially, the result is not a hymn to the hegemony of the word “flower.” To the contrary, there is no indication that this poem called “Blume” is at a loss for non-floral vocabulary, not least because it opens in an eminently lapidary fashion with: “Der Stein” (“The stone”). Like many of the other short words in this text, including “eye,” “blind,” “heart,” and the word “word” itself, the noun “stone” recurs throughout the Sprachgitter collection, while instances of “flower” are much less common. In fact, an intimate relationship between stones and language insists throughout Celan’s oeuvre. Scholars often observe, for example, that the letters of the Hebrew alphabet are traditionally said to be put together to form words in the same way that stones are put together to form houses. Yet the opening of “Flower” is far removed from any sense of construction—there is no indication that “der Stein” will become some sort of cornerstone or building block. Nor is the word “stone” being apostrophized, as if the language of the poem could win power by interpolating the geological, something that does happen in other Celan texts. If anything, the first line of “Flower” appears to be content with its own verbal minimalism, betraying no anxiety about the absence of a verb or any other part of speech that would give it some pretension to being at least proto-propositional, and in this respect, the verse may well recall a child’s first stabs at speech—after all, maybe young Eric’s first word was not “fleur” but “pierre” (French for “stone”).
Read in the context of the poem’s title, the word “stone” stands out because whatever it is, it is not “flower.” Recalling “Psalm,” the first line could even be read as “the not-flower.” The second line of the poem begins as if it were repeating the first line but quickly adds a prepositional phrase and a relative clause, and with these additions comes the alignment of a first-person pronoun with a finite verb: “Der Stein in der Luft, dem ich folgte” (“The stone in the air, which I followed”). With this relatively complex sentence, we ostensibly move beyond any rendition of a child’s first word, although one could read the poem’s opening lines as a series of increasingly intricate verbal forms, hence a simulation of language acquisition over time. In any case, if we were tempted to gloss the first appearance of the word “stone” as “not-flower,” we will want to read the “stone” of the second line as “not-star,” because the more common expression in both English and German would be “to follow a star,” “dem Stern folgen,” and in an earlier draft of the poem, this is exactly what Celan wrote: “So blind wie der Stern in der Luft, dem ich folgte” (“As blind as the star in the sky, which I followed”).[49]
Following the stone across the lines of the poem as we might follow a bouncing ball, we find its trajectory to be rather brief insofar as the last overt appearance of the word is in the third line of the first stanza, which seems to differ from the first line in that a verb, while not written out, is implicit: “Your eye [is] as a blind as the stone.” Equally important is the minimal introduction of rhetoric: Is “your eye” literally as blind as “the stone”? As rhetorical figures go, this is nothing ornate, but it is significant that the grammatical and lexical parameters of the text no longer fully control the relationships between its words. In this vein, if the word “as” ostensibly clarifies the relationship between “your eye” and “the stone,” it does not clarify the relationship between lines two and three. “I track the stone in the air,” but it is not what “I” do with the stone but rather something about the stone itself that becomes the basis for the comparison with “your eye,” and possibly for an implicit contrast between your eye and my eye.
As with most Celan texts, we need only dip our toe in the first stanza to start feeling uncertain about precisely what we should be taking note of from line to line. What kinds of repetition must be identified; what sorts of patterns or developments need to be delineated ? Should we primarily be reading at the level of the clause, the word, or the letter, or should we be focusing on the tensions between these different registers? These questions are hardly just rhetorical—in a certain sense, any commentary on a Celan poem is nothing more or less than a sustained attempt to answer them. For his part, Szondi tries to show that the patterns of letters and words in “Flower” are not at odds with one another. Having identified the insistent repetition of bl and W, he notes that the arc of the poem sees these two sound chains come together in a single term in the middle, “Blindenwort,” which is the complement to the word whose discovery stands at the very center of the text, “das Wort, das den Sommer heraufkam: / Blume” (“the word that ascended summer: / flower”). The event of this word’s advent almost feels as if it could be the end of the poem, since we have managed to look around or through the stones and follow the travels of the word “flower” all the way from the title to the last line of the second stanza. Far from bringing the text to a close, however, the discovery of this wondrous noun is presented as the beginning of a lifetime of existence as a linguistic being, or at least its halting first step. Articulated with some fanfare, the word “flower” is immediately repeated, which might be taken as evidence that it is the only word one knows, except that this happens in order that “flower” may, in a very adult gesture, be outed as a particular kind of word, “a blind man’s word.”
Of course, to maintain that the poem identifies the word “Blume” as a “Blindenwort” may be to assume too much, because the two nouns are united/divided not by a comma, but by a dash: “Blume – ein Blindenwort.” First and foremost, the punctuation mark functions to highlight a word or symbol that is not there, whether this is the copula is, an equals sign, or the preposition or conjunction as. In this fashion, the poem asserts a relationship between these two Bl-nouns through a lack of clarification. The dash may also bring a broader asymmetry into relief, highlighting the imbalance of a latent chiasmus, with “Wort” and “Blume” on one side, “Blume” and “Blinden-Wort” on the other.
This sense that the dash is a hinge connecting the two halves of the text is heightened by the fact that immediately following it the poem shifts from the preterit to the present tense. Having learned that the power of the word “Blume” does not rest in what can be seen, we are not surprised to see our eyes watering the word, and evidently with some success, as growth subsequently takes place. An eye may be as blind as a stone, but apparently we can squeeze water from such an eye-stone, even if this just means shedding tears in an odd exchange of an eye for an eye, if not an instance of the blind leading the blind. In case our word “flower” does not already feel well cared for, it now receives further assistance in the form of additional petals: “Herzwand um Herzwand / blättert hinzu” (“Heart wall upon heart wall / Adds petals to it”). In an earlier version of the poem, Celan wrote “Herzblatt um Herzblatt / tauchen [dive] hinzu.”[50] “Herzblatt” is a term for a heart-shaped leaf, and this shift from one Herz-word to another would appear to be a perfect example of the way in which Scarry claims flowers facilitate the creative imagination, since the leaves or the petals of the poetically crafted flower are a surface onto which other images or words can be fashioned, i.e., the “Herz-Blatt” (literally “a heart-shaped leaf,” figuratively “a heart-shaped sheet of paper”) becomes the place on which the poet can write the word “Herzwand.”[51]
The problem with this line of analysis is that these petals or sheets of paper are not so much facilitators of signification or representation as sites of disarticulation. In another poem in the same collection entitled “Niedrigwasser” (“Low Tide”), Celan writes: “Niemand schnitt uns das Wort von der Herzwand” (“No one cuts us the word from the heart wall”).[52] This line confronts us with a heart of words rather than a heart of stone, or at least a heart wall on which words grow; and somewhere in the background, one might hear the expression, “Mir fällt ein Stein vom Herzen” (“It’s a load off my mind”—literally: “a stone falls from my heart”), or perhaps “Mir fällt ein Wort vom Herzen” (“A word falls from my heart”—one assumes that this word would be “flower”). A couple of lines later in “Niedrigwasser,” Celan offers an odd parenthetical insertion, in italics, an intervention into the poem that somehow is and is not a part of it: “(niemand /schnitt uns das Wort von der – –)” [“(no one / cuts us the word from the – –)”].[53] If previously we were told that no one cuts the word “von der Herzwand,” the word “Herzwand” is here cut out of the poem, presumably by “No One”; and this occurs in a gesture that the text associates with closed eyes that can still follow things, like stones in the sky. “Herzwand,” the word from which no one would cut “the word,” is itself cut out just as one, or no one, might slice up a piece of paper or a leaf (“ein Herzblatt”). That this can only happen in a section of text whose status as a part of the poem is somehow in doubt suggests that the first step in writing a word is to cut up some other words, in the process challenging the very integrity of one’s text such that it becomes unclear which verbal elements do or do not belong to it and whether it is someone or no one who is driving all of these incisions and excisions. In this context, one necessarily thinks of the role played by the figure of circumcision in Celan’s poetry, yet precisely what the verbal operations in this poem are unsettling is the coherence of any stable textual body from which one could tidily detach a discrete piece.[54] For Scarry, every verbal flower is a field on which the imagination may create something new. For Celan, every verbal flower is a word that may have been chopped up to the point of unrecognizability, meaning that we cannot know whether it is a whole or a part, be that a part of something or a part of nothing, a part of someone’s text or a part of No One’s text.
In order for the word “Herzwand” to appear in the poem “Blume,” the word “Herzblatt” has to be cut out of or away from the Blatt. Scarry maintains that when “a poet merely names a flower, it is always being offered up as something that can . . . light up the inside of the brain.”[55] In Celan, when a poet names a flower, it a sign that the language of their poem has already started to carve up its own words, be those words “flower,” “stone,” or “eye,” and this happens because each word is nothing more or less than an incision that divides as much as it unites, withdrawing as much as supporting the integrity of any presentational gambit.
Turning to the last sentence of Celan’s “Blume,” we read: “Ein Wort noch, wie dies.” If the formulation recalls the comparison of the text’s third line (“so blind wie der Stein”), this particular alignment—“one more word like this one”—seems to posit something impossible, since no word can ever truly be like the first word, the primal word, which of course in this text, if not in all texts, is “Blume.” Looking at the manuscript drafts, it would appear that it was no easy matter for Celan to find the right word for what would ultimately prove to be the word “word.” In the place of “Ein Wort noch,” earlier versions included “ein Regen noch” (“one more downpour”), “ein Blatt noch,” (“one more leaf/sheet of paper”), and “Ein Kelchblatt noch” (“one more sepal”—a sepal is one of the individual leaves or parts of the calyx of a flower).[56] When the word for this “one more thing” finally becomes the word “word,” we cannot be sure whether this is cause for celebration or consternation, for what assurance do we have that there is any word that is like this “Blindenwort”? Etymologically, blinding has both the sense of radical illumination and darkness or confusion, for instance, the darkness or confusion that follows an explosion of light—an antonymic quality that is nicely preserved by the presence of S-t-e-r-n in Finsternis. “Ein Blindenwort,” one—or no one—might say, drowns all other words in light, making it impossible to see any of them clearly. Following Scarry, this blinding word does light up something inside the brain, but the result is not a perfect image of a beautiful blossom, but a chaos of characters that may or may not spell “star,” “stone,” or “flower.” This is why we can never be sure that what we are seeing on the page when we read the poem “Blume” is an orderly string of codified lexical elements rather a confusing mess of syllables, and this is why we can never be sure whether embracing the language of flowers means generating strings of elegant formulations or confounding our interlocutors with scribbles and babble.
[1] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Botany: A Study of Pure Curiosity (London: Michael Joseph, 1979), 134. Rousseau is one of the best-known plant enthusiasts of the eighteenth century. During the last fifteen years of his life, he regularly wrote about the natural specimens he collected, and he carried on an extensive correspondence with other aspiring naturalists that was part pep talk, part tutorial. In the decades after his death, Rousseau’s claim to fame arguably rested as much on his promotion of botany as on his literary or political writings.
[2] Georges Canguilhem, “Forward” to François Delaporte, Nature’s Second Kingdom, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1982), xii.
[3] Long before “the flowers of rhetoric” would become a stock phrase, words and flowers were linked by the Attic Greek verb legein, which in its earliest instantiations meant “to pick” or “to select”—one of its later derivatives would be logos, as if the act of choosing one’s words was originally modelled on the act of choosing pretty blossoms. This connection is legible in the Greek anthologia (anthos “flower” + logia “collection”), a selection of favored poems or epigrams (the “flowers” of verse). By the time Cicero and Quintilian were describing specific instances of language as being overly or insufficiently “flowery” (antheron or floridum), they were relying on a trope that was already more than 500 years old.
[4] When it comes refashioning the language of plants, the unrivaled champion was the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus, creator of the binomial nomenclature still used by botanists today. Linnaeus was idolized by Rousseau, who claimed to know “no greater man on earth,” and by J. W. von Goethe, who famously designated poetry as the source of science and said of Linnaeus: “With the exception of Shakespeare and Spinoza, I know no one among the no longer living who has influenced me more strongly.” Cited in Frank Birkin and Thomas Polesie, Intrinsic Sustainable Development: Epistemes, Science, Business and Sustainability (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing, 2011), 95.
[5] Elaine Scarry, “Imagining Flowers: Perceptual Mimesis (Particularly Delphinium),” Representations 57 (1997): 105 (emphasis in original).
[6] Scarry, “Imagining Flowers,” 94.
[7] See Anne-Lise François, “Flower Fisting,” Postmodern Culture 22, no. 1 (September 2011), n. p.
[8] Scarry, “Imagining Flowers,” 106 (emphasis added).
[9] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, trans. Peter France (New York: Penguin Books, 1979), 83/84.
[10] Rousseau, Reveries, 84.
[11] Rousseau, Reveries, 106.
[12] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, trans. Angela Scholar (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 627.
[13] Rousseau, The Confessions, 627.
[14] Rousseau, The Confessions, 627–628.
[15] See, for example, Lawrence Buell, “Can Environmental Imagination Save the World?” A Global History of Literature and the Environment, ed. John Parham and Louise Westling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 407–422.
[16] Paul A. Cantor has argued that in his efforts to treat each plant in its own terms, without any effort to contextualize it, Rousseau is a forerunner of the New Critics. See Paul A. Cantor, “The Metaphysics of Botany: Rousseau and the New Criticism of Plants,” Southwest Review 70.3 (summer 1985): 362–380.
[17] Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 160.
[18] Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 110.
[19] Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 93; Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, Werkausgabe, Band X, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), 120.
[20] Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 114.
[21] Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 114.
[22] Paul Celan, Werke, Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, I. Abteilung: Lyrik und Prosa, Vol. 2/3.1, Mohn und Gedächtnis, ed. Andreas Lohr (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003), 121; the English translation is cited in Werner Hamacher, “The Second of Inversion: Movements of a Figure Through Celan’s Poetry,” Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan, trans. Peter Fenves (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 346.
[23] Celan, Werke, Vol. 2/3.1, 121.
[24] Cited in Hamacher, Premises, 346.
[25] In this poem, love is nothing other than an unconditioned embrace of not. The logical consequences of this insight are drawn in the next two lines of the stanza through a twisted inversion of Yahweh’s “I will be who I will be,” which here becomes, “we will remain where [the flower] never was because we never were.” In his well-known essay on inversion in Celan, Werner Hamacher writes about these lines: “In the language of this flower, which is indeed not metaphorical in the traditional sense but meta-metaphorical, laying bare the carrying-over mechanism of imagistic language at its extreme, thus trope, turn, and reversal par excellence—: in the language of this flower, separated things have been brought together and what never was has turned into ever-remaining existence, for this very language came from a nothing and became something that remains” (Premises, 347).
[26] Celan, Werke, Vol. 2/3.2, 237 (my translation).
[27] This is why there is arguably no end to the exegetical glosses one can make on the flowers that appear in Celan’s texts, although in seeming to name everything, they may name precisely nothing. On the numerous associations that Celan’s flowers have inspired in his interpreters, see Winfried Menninghaus, Paul Celan: Magie der Form (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980), 126.
[28] Paul Celan, Poems of Paul Celan, trans. Michael Hamburger (New York: Persea Books, 1988), 175 (translation modified). For a fascinating study of unnamable no ones, see Daniel Heller-Roazen, No One’s Ways: An Essay on Infinite Naming (New York: Zone Books, 2017).
[29] Paul Celan, Werke, Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, I. Abteilung: Lyrik und Prosa, Vol. 6.1, Die Niemandsrose, ed. Axel Gellhaus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001), 27.
[30] Celan, Poems of Paul Celan, 175.
[31] In the final stanza of “Psalm,” “we” move to put a new spin on the flowers of rhetoric, parodying classical taxonomies of tropes and figures with a detailed review of the sexual organs of the rose:
Mit
With
dem Griffel seelenhell,
our pistil soul-bright,
dem Staubfaden himmelswüst,
our filament heaven-ravaged,
der Krone rot
our corolla red
vom Purpurwort, das wir sangen
with the crimson word we sang
über, o über
over, O over
dem Dorn. (Werke 6.1, 27)
the thorn. (Poems of Paul Celan, 175)
[32] Celan, Werke, Vol. 6.1, 82–83.
[33] Paul Celan, Selections, ed. Pierre Joris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 92 (translation modified). For a superb book-length study of “Die Silbe Schmerz,” see Michael Levine, Atomzertrümmerung: Zu einem Gedicht von Paul Celan (Wien: Verlag Turia + Kant, 2018).
[34] See Levine, Atomzertrümmerung, 83.
[35] See Paul Celan, Übertragungen I, Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), 792-793. On the semantic and symbolic complexity of the word “Colchis,” see Katja Garloff, Words from Abroad: Trauma and Displacement in Postwar German Jewish Writers (Detroit: Wayne St. University Press, 2005), 154–155.
[36] Paul Celan and Gisèle Celan-Lestrange, Briefwechsel, Vol. 1, Die Briefe, ed. Bertrand Badiou (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001), 126 (my translation).
[37] Composed of a circle of pointed parts, the wind rose graphic presumably got its name because it resembles a flower. It was the predecessor to the compass rose ( “Kompassrose”), which displays the orientation of the cardinal directions and their intermediate points. Visually, the two graphics can be virtually indistinguishable, and their names are sometimes used interchangeably.
[38] Susan Sontag, A Susan Sontag Reader (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982), 398.
[39] On these biographical details, see John Felstiner, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 105ff.
[40] Paul Celan, Werke, Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, I. Abteilung: Lyrik und Prosa, Vol. 5.1, Sprachgitter, ed. Holger Gehle (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002), 29.
[41] Celan, Poems of Paul Celan, 115.
[42] Celan, Werke, Vol. 5.2, 157–159.
[43] See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Gadamer on Celan: “Who Am I and Who Are You?” and Other Essays, trans. Richard Heinemann and Bruce Krajewski (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997), 133–135.
[44] This tale about Celan’s son may suggest that Scarry is right about the primacy of flowers where the imagination is concerned, but for the wrong reason. Rather than the image of the flower forming the basis for envisioning anything and everything, the word flower here becomes the basis for imagining an entire language that one has yet to acquire.
[45] Celan, Werke, Vol. 5.2, 158, 162. Lallen means “to gurgle” (as of a baby) or “to babble.”
[46] Peter Szondi, Celan Studies, trans. Susan Bernofsky (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 109–113. Following Szondi’s stress on the insistence of bl, Fritz Breithaupt has noted that “blättert hinzu” in the final stanza can be read “B lettert hinzu” (Fritz Breithaupt, Echo. Zur neueren Celan-Philologie, MLN 110, no. 3 [April 1995]: 639).
[47] In Allegories of Reading, Paul de Man offers a detailed interpretation of a passage in Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages in which “a primitive man” (“un homme sauvage”) meets another man for the first time and in fear exclaims: “Giant!” Following Celan, one wonders how this primal scene might have been different if the man had instead yelled: “Flower!” See Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 149–155.
[48] Die Bibel, trans. Martin Luther (1522)/ The King James Bible (1611), Genesis 1:4–5.
[49] Celan, Werke, Vol. 5.2, 159. The word Stern still lurks in the poem’s final version, appearing in the third line of the second stanza in the middle of the word Finsternis. If the letters s-t-e-r-n happen to flake away, all that is left is f-i-n-i-s, finis, the first-person indicative of the French finir, to finish. This point has been made by Aris Fioretos, “Finsternis,” trans. Arnd Wedemeyer, Lesarten. Beiträge zum Werk Paul Celans, ed. Axel Gellhaus and Andreas Lohr (Köln: Böhlau, 1996) 164; and Breithaupt, 639. Fioretos also observes that the Latin word for light, “lumen,” can be read in “Blumen” (175).
[50] Celan, Werke, Vol. 5.2, 157.
[51] “Herzblatt” is also a term for grass of Parnassus, a genus of wildflower.
[52] Celan, Werke, Vol. 5.1, 57.
[53] Celan, Werke, Vol. 5.1, 57.
[54] On circumcision in Celan, see Jacques Derrida, “Shibboleth: For Paul Celan,” Sovereignties in Question: the Poetics of Paul Celan, ed. Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 1–64.
[55] Scarry, “Imagining Flowers,” 94.
[56] Celan, Werke, Vol. 5.2, 159, 163. On this series of substitutions, see Kim Su Rasmussen, “The Inconclusive text: On Paul Celan’s ‘Blume,’” seminar 51, no. 3 (September 2015): 220–221.