German Studies Review

The critical editions and archival documents pertaining to the oeuvre of Paul Celan offer an anarchic range of texts that exceed the boundaries of once-authorized publications and indefinitely expand the range of what may be read as "poetry." But "how prepared are we," asks Thomas C. Connolly, "for the encounter with literary works that now seem more than ever 'dauntingly uncontained'?" (33). In posing this question, Connolly not only speaks to the ways in which the "genetic documents now available in print" resist various interpretive frameworks, including the very presuppositions that often underlie the organization of "genetic" critical editions, such as the teleological principle according to which "alternative or previous versions" should merely "enhance … a reading of the definitive text" (22). For Connolly also underscores the risks that the practice of reading runs upon each "encounter" with a text, once the notion of poetry "is not restricted to the unicity of the individual poem," but opened to "those parts of a poet's textual production most often considered preparatory, superfluous, or otherwise redundant" (24). It is upon this premise that Connolly goes on over the course of four chapters to venture readings of Celan's "Das Seil" (1966) from the "unfinished and critically neglected cycle of poems called Eingedunkelt" (3); his translation of Stéphane Mallarmé's rondel, "Si tu veux nous nous aimerons" (1958); his poetic responses to the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial from the mid-1960s; and his engagement with Rembrandt van Rijn and Ossip Mandelstamm in "EINKANTER" (1970). Yet what is at stake throughout Connolly's monograph is nothing less than an approach to poetics that takes seriously the possibility that "poetry is perhaps never more itself than in those moments when it is unfinished, unexpected, discarded, and overlooked" (24). [End Page 402]

Already with his title, Paul Celan's Unfinished Poetics: Readings in the SousOeuvre, Connolly announces an exploration of poetic writing that registers the tensions between the authority signaled by a proper name—here, "Paul Celan's"—and the unauthorized and indefinite scope of "the sous-oeuvre," whose elaboration throughout Connolly's book marks a most significant contribution to literary studies. In current parlance, "sous-oeuvre" more commonly designates the labor that is performed upon the foundations of a construction without demolishing the structure it supports, and it was in this sense that Paul Valéry would adopt it to describe his writing practice: "My taste for the clear, the complete, the sufficient, leads to a system of substitutions—which takes on language as if to underpin it—replaces it with a sort of algebra—and for images, attempts to substitute figures—reduced to their useful properties" (Valéry, Tel Quel [1943], 226, my translation). Yet far from systematically designing a new foundation to replace the often-supposed identification of poetic production with "completed … published text[s]" (22), Connolly radically reworks the term, extending the notion of a "sous-oeuvre" to include "all traces of scriptural activity, whether published or unpublished, visible or invisible, linguistic or super-linguistic" (2). This redefinition—and indefinition—of "sous-oeuvre" underscores its resistance to any vertical or straightforward orientation toward the object and objective of reading, and it undermines any clear-cut separation between unruly "traces of scriptural activity" (2) and the "oeuvre" to which the "sous-oeuvre" remains literally and graphically joined. Connolly's "readings in the sous-oeuvre" are not aimed at getting to the "bottom" of poetic writing, nor do they simply invert—and thereby reinforce—the hierarchical assumptions that have tended to privilege authorized publications. Rather, as Connolly points out, the "French 'sous,' under, comes from the Sanskrit root 'ubh' or 'umbh' meaning to gather or bring together, so that the sous-oeuvre might be said to bring together multiple contradictory dynamics, dimensions, and intensities that the conventional oeuvre cannot contain" (2). As such, the "sous-oeuvre" may not only be legible through the multiple drafts of a poem such as "Das...