Deed in the Beginning

Abstract

The text begins by preparing the horizon of expectation for the Biblical narrative of creation, by remarking that it is a sublime narrative of a sublime event. This is God’s speech be-re’shit, “in the beginning”, and it calls for a unique narrative position, a mystical communion with God, from which the narrative as testimony ensues. God’s speech in the Biblical narrative-testimony is paradigmatically represented by the sequence of creation, in which God’s call is followed by the coming of things into being (e.g. in Gen 1:3). From a grammatical point of view, this call is made of an imperative (“Be”) and a noun, or rather a name (“light”), but here they combine into the great performative, a word-deed, which not only does, but also makes what it says – the thing it calls to – come into being. Through the word of creation a thing comes into being from nothing; only when it is called upon, in its own name, is it suddenly in being and time. But this is not the case with man in the second Biblical report of his creation. In this report, man is the only being that was not called into being by the word of creation; according to an old translative interpretation in Targum Onkelos, when he was given life through God’s Spirit, he was also given the language element. It is from here that the idea of two different namings comes from, God’s and man’s, whereby man’s naming is not a pure translation of God’s naming, but rather a translation from God’s names to the extent of man's own knowledge; it is the translation of the language of things, its voicing in the language of man. – The text goes on to discuss the particular conjecture (which, at the end of a long Judeo-Christian tradition, was spread so insightfully by Benjamin) that things created according to the word of creation have in essence a linguistic structure, a structure of logos, in short, their own language. The tradition has carried the image of the two books, the Book of Revelation and the book of the world or nature, from late antiquity into the new age, and was given a new twist with the emergence of modern science, which fought to obtain the right to read the language of the book of the world, that is, the language of things, without the authority of the Book of Revelation, and to put it into human concepts. However, ever since Aristotle, to whom a concept was always something said in human language, European thought has been infused with one basic contradiction: are concepts as “fundamental words” being said from the things themselves, or from the reason, and without bringing out their own structure in the language? Be it as it may, the craving of science for a concept to be a meaningful structure of thing said in human language grows from a conjecture about the language of things brought about by the very Biblical narrative of creation. – It was the same narrative, which gave an impulse to European reflections on poetry. According to Plato, every art is poietic or poetic in that it brings things into being; on the other hand, poetry in the narrower sense is the bringing of words from one form of being into another, from regular speech into poetic speech, i.e. the production of verse. This understanding of poetry was prevalent in antiquity and was only changed in Renaissance with the intense encounter of Renaissance scholars with Greek and Judeo-Christian traditions. This gave rise to an analogy between the Maker and the poet as a “second Maker”, who brings into being after the first one; in the same way that God creates things, the poet creates human things, deeds, says Scaliger in his poetics, following Aristotle’s Poetics, according to which poetry is “a representation of an action”. For Aristotle, however, it is, as a poietic representation, only a making of an action into a cognizable action based on the human character and not yet a making of character itself, let alone the creation of man. But ever since the Renaissance poetry has often become the very creation or “counter-creation” (Steiner) of man, and reached its first pinnacle in Goethe imaging the poet as counter-creator in the character of Prometheus. The poet’s battle with God for the precedence of creation sharpens in different modernist counter-poetics and, apart from man, also includes the world and language. In many ways these are based in Mallarmé’s proto-modernist poetics, because in his poetry Mallarmé announces the renouncement to the world, that is, to the being of things in the language, and alongside this renouncement he also wants to find a word for the as yet “non-existent thing”. In modernist counter-poetics then the liberation of the word itself happens to take place, and not only from metric speech, but also from syntax and its own field of meaning, leading, in the extremes of avant-garde movements, to the ultimate destruction of the word. This spells the end of poetry, but – and this question concludes the text – does not the word-deed, despite the destruction, remain in the beginning?