Aster, Disaster: The Nature of Names

_____I raise these questions not to dispute that there is a difference between stars and flowers or celestial and terrestrial asters.  Physics and botany have made too many advances with respect to these phenomena to deny that they are different or independent of each other. But their similarity, if not identity, in name and appearance poses a dilemma for us, who would like to believe that there is something in a name that tells us something about the nature of phenomena. We would like to believe that the nature of names is to reveal the nature of things, such that hearing a name amounts to seeing an object in its most essential qualities. The term “aster” challenges this basic assumption by referring to two things at once or, rather, by making two things into one and the same thing, even if they appear in different places at different times (i.e., in the morning in the fields or at night in the sky). While it is tempting to say that the common name points to a common identity, I suspect the reverse is the case.  Different though the aster flower and astral bodies may be, they are alike in appearance.  This likeness is what the name captures.

_____Classical rhetoric has traditionally defined metaphor as the description of one thing by means of another. A metaphor is a likeness for something that has no proper name and hence cannot be expressed literally. Yet if all names are shared, as the term “aster” suggests, then any description is bound to be nothing more (or less) than a metaphor that figures something that cannot be expressed except through an image (say, the “rosy fingers” invoked by Homer for the morning light of the sun). The two poets I will discuss in this brief essay would seem to stand at the opposite ends of the aesthetic spectrum.  The turn-of-the-century German poet Stefan George is most famous for his defense of art for art’s sake and his elevation of poetry to a religion. Gottfried Benn, by contrast, is a Weimar era poet identified principally with Expressionism, whose work consistently underscores that the material world can never be transcended.  Yet for all their seeming opposition and their radically different views of what constitutes poetry, the two share a belief that the natural world for human beings is always something named, which is to say a metaphor, a likeness, an appearance.

_____Gottfried Benn’s poem “Little Aster” was the opening work in the poetic cycle “Morgue,” which was also part of the title for the entire collection, Morgue and Other Poems, published in 1912. “Little Aster” is arguably one of Benn’s most striking works in its apparent brutality and at the same time carefully crafted conceit:

_____Kleine Aster

_____Ein ersoffener Bierfahrer wurde auf den Tisch gestemmt.

_____Irgendeiner hatte ihm eine dunkelhellila Aster

_____zwischen die Zähne geklemmt.

_____Als ich von der Brust aus

_____unter der Haut

_____mit einem langen Messer

_____Zungen und Gaumen herausschnitt,

_____muß ich sie angestoßen haben, denn sie glitt

_____in das nebenliegende Gehirn.

_____Ich packte sie ihm in die Brusthöhle

_____zwischen die Holzwolle,

_____als man zunähte.

_____Ruhe sanft,

_____kleine Aster!  2

_____[Little Aster

_____A drowned driver of a beer truck was dumped onto the table.

_____Someone had stuck a dark-pale lilac-colored aster

_____between his teeth.

_____As I cut out the tongue and gums

_____with a long knife,

_____working outward from the chest

_____underneath the skin,

_____I must have touched it, because it slid

_____into the brain right next to it.

_____between the wood shavings,

_____as it was being stitched up.

_____Drink up in your vase!

_____Rest sweetly,

_____Little Aster!]  3

_____Benn was not the first poet to do so.  Baudelaire arguably inaugurated this tradition with his depiction of a cadaver as an aesthetic and erotic object in “Une charogne” (A Carcass), which boasts such lines as,

Les jambs en l’air, comme une femme lubrique,

__Brûlante et suant les poisons,

Ouvrait d’une façon nonchalante et cynique

__Son ventre plein d’exhalaisons.

[Her legs were spread out like a lecherous whore,

__Sweating out poisonous fumes,

Who opened in slick invitational style

Unlike Baudelaire, however, Benn does not attempt to impute to the corpse laid on the autopsy table an afterlife—specifically, the afterlife of its decay which was the theme of Baudelaire’s text.  Rather he makes the body into a vessel for another life in an apparent exchange, in which the body becomes the vehicle for something at once earthly and unearthly or physical and linguistic. This is reflected in the symmetrical structure of the text. Just as the driver of a beer truck drowns while presumably drunk from beer, so too the “little aster” is exhorted to drink its full in the driver’s now embalmed body. (The possibility that the driver was drunk is clearer in the original than in the English translation. The adjective “ersoffen” [drowned] immediately calls to mind the adjective “besoffen” [drunk], as the strange locution “auf den Tisch gestemmt” [propped on the table] calls to mind a Stammtisch, a regulars’ table at a pub.)  The analogy between the driver and the aster, however, does not extend beyond this point.  The aster drinks neither beer nor spirits. Instead it feeds off death as a metaphor for the poem as a whole, a poem that draws its life from the dead letter.

_____The text introduces this self-reflexive dimension from its outset in choosing the figure of a drowned and possibly drunk driver as its ostensible subject.  A poet as well versed in the classical tradition as Benn would no doubt have been aware that the driver of a beer truck is someone who transports spirits in much the same manner as a metaphor transports an ethereal content.  (Metaphor literally means to transport or carry over in Greek.) Why the poem would begin with such a loaded figure has much to do with its efforts to take what is contingent, random, and incoherent and turn it into something necessary and predetermined. Hence the poem emphasizes from the beginning the role of chance, starting with the truck driver’s accidental death and then proceeding to the improbable sight of an aster stuck between his teeth.

_____These circumstances contrast sharply with the speaker’s deliberate gestures which, I would argue, have little, if anything, to do with the autopsy he is supposed to be performing. It is worth noting that the speaker appears on the scene as a replacement for the anonymous individual who originally stuck the aster between the driver’s teeth. What was perhaps an inadvertent act becomes a conscious deed as the speaker packs the flower into the dead man’s chest cavity. More importantly, the speaker gains a voice and becomes a discrete figure in the text at precisely the moment that he cuts out the speech organs of the truck driver and reduces him to raw material, i.e., matter that cannot speak for itself. What makes these circumstances significant is that they challenge the pretext of the text: the pretext that there is a dead body with an aster stuck between the teeth. Once the speaker takes up the knife and by extension the pen, the dead body and the flower prove to be nothing more than an occasion for him to demonstrate his craft by converting an accident into a necessity. For Benn and his fellow Expressionists, only the poet could accomplish this task since the world, as far as they were concerned, was not governed by a transcendental force that insured that everything was as it ought to be.  In other words, they no longer conceived the world as a physical vehicle for a metaphysical tenor, a figure animated by something ineffable.  In the absence of such an animating force, poetry had to take its place, if only to announce that beyond the death there is only death and beyond the letter only the letter.  This is the function of the aster in the text.  It is a figure for the poem written in dead letters which can only speak to remind us that its voice is nothing but an after-effect of its inscription. Per aspera ad astra: through adversity to stars that shine only insofar as they are embedded in a written word or buried in a literary corpus.

_____Such a bleak vision could not seem further from the elegiac tone of Stefan George’s “Come into the park they say is dead and look,” which is among the most elegant lyrics in modern German poetry:

Der schimmer ferner lächelnder gestade ·

Der reinen wolken unverhofftes blau

Erhellt die weiher und die bunten pfade.

Dort nimm das tiefe gelb, das weiche grau

Von birken und von buchs · der wind ist lau ·

Die späten rosen welkten noch nicht ganz ·

Erlese küsse sie und flicht den kranz ·

Vergiss auch diese letzten astern nicht ·

Den purpur um die ranken wilder reben

Und auch was übrig blieb von grünem leben

Verwinde leicht im herbstlichen gesicht. 7

The gleam of distant smiling shores,

The unhoped-for blue of the pure clouds

Shed a light on the ponds and the variegated paths.

Gather the deep yellow, the soft gray

Of birches and of box—the breeze is mild—

The late roses have not yet quite withered;

Choose them, kiss them, and wind the garland,

And do not forget these last asters either;

Twine in the purple round the tendrils of the wild vine,

And whatever there is left of the green life

Weave gently into the autumn sight.] 8

“Come” was the first poem in George’s 1897 collection The Year of the Soul which is organized around the motif of the seasons, beginning with the fall and then proceeding to winter before culminating in the summer. (Curiously spring is left out of the sequence.)  Owing to the seasonal frame, the poem begins with a reminder that some “say” the park “is dead,” although the remainder of the poem is devoted to refuting this assertion. “Come” can deny this claim, however, only by saying or announcing something else, and this fact draws renewed attention to the key term “totgesagt” in the first line that can be interpreted in a variety of ways. Idiomatically it means that the park is rumored to be dead, but literally it means the park is pronounced dead or, more forcefully, that the act of saying renders it dead.  This idea is hardly unique to the poem. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel argued that to name a thing is to negate it on the grounds that a thing, when named, is lifted from its crude and transient existence and restored to its proper definition, which is intellectual rather than empirical. Yet such an idea is curious in a poem that struggles to retain “whatever” is “left of the green life” through the one means it has available to it: the printed word, the letter written in black on white.

_____Indeed, the crude existence of the poem as a collection of black marks and white spaces stands in stark contrast with the autumn colors mentioned in almost every verse (i.e., unhoped-for blue, deep yellow, soft grey, purple, etc.). This raises the question of what we are supposed to look at, when we follow the speaker’s request.  The simple answer is that we are asked to look at an imaginary park which the poet paints for us in ever greater detail with each successive stanza. But this is also the most unsatisfying answer as it ignores what the text has to say about itself as well as its own medium. Notice, for instance, the number of times the reader is asked to wind a garland or twine a wreath, which could be interpreted as the poet’s tribute to himself; at the conclusion of the poem he finally gets his laurel wreath.  But the wreath is also one he shares with the reader who knits and weaves the fabric of the text and gives the work its texture.  I will not rehearse the arguments made in the 1970s and 80s about the textuality of writing and its relation to weaving. Suffice it to say that the motif can be traced back to Penelope in The Odyssey and is preserved in such expressions as “to spin a yarn” for storytelling. More interesting is the way George’s poem defines reading as an act in which the reader participates in the creative process and “makes” something, to recall the original meaning of poeisis as making, doing, manufacturing. Each time the reader looks, plucks, and gathers flowers and braids vines, she contributes to “das herbstliche Gesicht,” the autumn sight, which is a metonym for the poem as a whole: the poem as a still life.

_____Like Benn’s “Little Aster,” George’s “Come” is a text that wrestles with its basis in writing. Both poems seek to surmount the dead letter in which they are written by making us see what is nowhere visible and hear what is nowhere audible.  While this strategy would appear to have little to do with an ecopoetics, it is perhaps at the heart of any interaction with nature.  Any exploration of the metaphors of nature will always have to account for the nature of metaphors that name what is unnameable.

Rochelle Tobias is Assistant Professor of German at John Hopkins University and author of The Discourse of Nature in the Poetry of Paul Celan: The Unnatural World (Parallax: Re-visions of Culture and Society). this essay was originally delivered as one part of a panel on Ecopoetics at the AWP annual conference, 2008, in New YOrk City.