Remnants of Song: Trauma and the Experience of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan (review)

Given the recent scholarly writing on trauma resulting from September 11, the publication of Remnants of Song. Trauma and the Experience of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan one year prior may help to put events in their proper historical perspective. In an “Editor’s Column” of the PMLA (October 2004), Marianne Hirsch discusses the implications of witnessing and mediating the destruction and carnage from September 11. Central to her discussion is Art Spiegelman’s comic book account of events entitled In the Shadow of No Towers, which she compares to its predecessor, Maus. In both performances of “an aesthetics of trauma,” according to Hirsch’s argument, the depiction is “fragmentary, composed of small boxes that cannot contain the material, which exceeds their frames and the structure of the page” (1213). In terms of Baudelaire, and Celan’s poetry, Ulrich Baer’s argument concerning the relationship between the two poets’ use of language to frame experience would appear analogous. Often what is left out is the most painful or traumatic of the experience.