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Achterberg's “Ballade van de gasfitter”: The Mystery of I and You

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

John M. Coetzee
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Abstract

The pronouns I and you, together with several other “shifters,” do not have a referential function in language. Many of the questions we ask (and fail to answer) about lyric poetry arise out of inadmissable translations of I and you into referential forms. Buber’s myth of a primal I-Thou relation gives us a guide to a reading of I and you in Achterberg’s “Ballade” in such a preferential way, I seeking to recover the lost relation by calling You into being through poetic-magical activity. Here the quest of I, however, culminates in confrontation with “the hole,” the void from which comes the Logos. While the nominal theme of the poem is the failure of the poetic-creative self to bring back the Logos, its secret theme is that poesis-as-activity can cause the continual coming-into-being of the Logos and the lost You. (The essay includes a translation of Achterberg’s poem.)

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 92 , Issue 2 , March 1977 , pp. 285 - 296
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1977

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References

Notes

1 “Ballade van de gasfitter,” in Verzamelde gedichten (Amsterdam: Querido, 1967), pp. 833–47. First published in 1953, the “Ballade” reiterates a theme that dominates. Achterberg's poetry from the 1930's to the early 1950's: the death of the beloved and her recall through the power of the poetic word. After “Spel van de wilde jacht” (1957), the “Ballade” is the most ambitious work of a poet who otherwise specialized in short, tightly constructed poems collected in successive volumes of Cryptogramen [Cryptograms]. Achterberg (1906–62) is generally recognized as the most influential poet of his generation in Holland.

2 See particularly Anthonie Donker, “Het experiment van de gasfitter,” Critisch Bulletin, 21 (1954), 160–67; Andries Middeldorp, “De tragédie van de gas-fitter,” in Nieuw commentaar op Achterberg, ed. Bert Bakker and Andries Middeldorp (The Hague: Bakker, 1963), pp. 175–88; Kees Fens, “De onoverwinnelijke gasfitter,” Raster, 2 (1968), 157–70 and Raster, 3 (1969), 197–208; K. Meeuwesse, “Bij Achterbergs ballade van de gasfittter,” Ons Erfdeel, 13 (1970), 19–23; Stanley M. Wiersma, “Gerrit Achterberg, Gasfitter,” Christian Scholar's Review, 1 (1971), 306–17 (including a translation). There is a detailed exegesis of the “Ballad” in A. F. Ruitenberg-de Wit, Formule in den morgenstond (Amsterdam: Querido, 1968), pp. 113–35. Sharing no common ground with this reading, I have made no use of it, nor have I consistently tried to carry across in my translation that polysemy which, read systematically, opens the poem to a Jungian interpretation.

3 Jakobson, Shifters, Verbal Categories, and the Rus–sian Verb, Russian Language Project (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ., 1957), p. 2; Benveniste, “La Nature des pronoms,” in Problèmes de linguistique générale (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), pp. 254, 256.

4 “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction,” in Collected Poems (New York: Knopf, 1955), pp. 395–96.

5 I and Thou, 2nd éd., trans. R. G. Smith (Edinburgh: Clark, 1959), pp. 3, 24, 21, 16, 34; Between Man and Man, trans. R. G. Smith (London: Fontana, 1961), p. 246. I call Buber's l-Thou a myth advisedly, though Buber does not use the term. It is an “in the beginning” myth, both ontogenetic and phylogenetic, a myth of the fall into the quotidian from an original state of relation, as pp. 18–22 and 24–28 of / and Thou make clear.

6 These characteristics of the You emerge from linguistic analysis of the twelve occurrences of the pronoun “you” (Achterberg's gif/u, properly “thou,” here translated as “You”) in the poem. These twelve occurrences include two where “you” is part of “we.”

  1. (a)

    (a) “You must have made your entries from the rear.” (Sonnet 1, 1. 1)

    The verb is marked for inferential modality. (The Dutch says literally, “You have reached the houses from behind,” but this is an a posteriori inference from the appearance of You in each window frame.)

  2. (b)

    (b) “You appear and reappear” (Sonnet 1, 1. 4), “You vanish.” (Sonnet 2, 1. 5)

    The relation between the sentence pairs

    1. 1.

      1. You appear [to me]

    2. 2.

      2. I see you

  3. and

    1. 1.

      1. You vanish [to me]

    2. 2.

      2. I do not see you

      is ergative: The second is in each case a causally transformed version of the first. The You is the object of the gaze of the I.

  4. (c)

    (c) “As if You could escape me.” (Sonnet 2, 1. 8) I.e., “You cannot escape me.”

  5. (d)

    (d) “The apple-hawker lures You.” (Sonnet 1, 1. 2) The modality of the sentence is hypothetical, and being lured is by definition involuntary.

  6. (e)

    (e) “Indoors with You.” (Sonnet 2, 1. 1) The I and the You are in a relation of locativity.

  7. (f)

    (f) “I … see You standing.” (Sonnet 2, 11. 2–3) The pseudoactivity (in fact the mere locativity) of the You is attested only by the gaze of the I. (This emphasis is even stronger in the original, literally “my eyes ... see you stand.”)

  8. (g)

    (g) “We grow murky.” (Sonnet 2, 1. 5) The relation between the sentences

    We grow murky [to each other]

    We see each other murkily (i.e., We do not see each other clearly)

    is again ergative. There is reciprocity, but it is a reciprocity of incapacity.

  9. (h)

    (h) “You and I can keep our incognito.” (Sonnet 2, 1. 9)

    “Keep” ( = continue) is a dummy verb (i.e., a verb absent from the deep structure) carrying a progressive aspect marker. The underlying sentence is “We do not know each other.”

  10. (i)

    (i) “You are gone.” (Sonnet 4, 1. 7)

    The You is absent. In the original, 11. 6–7 read, literally: “I turn with an explanatory gesture toward You, but You are no longer there.” The (absent) You marks the direction of orientation of the I.

  11. (j)

    (j) “The higher I ascend, the wider space / yawns between You and me.” (Sonnet 9, 11. 1–2) The spatial relation between I and You is defined by the activity of the I.

7 Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1966), p. 59. See also p. xxxviii of the translator's introduction. Imagery of the leak in being occurs elsewhere in Achterberg's oeuvre. “Gehenna” (1953) begins: “I am the weak spot in the universe [,] / the hidden leak ...” (Verzamelde gedichten, p. 789). The gasfitter's crisis is literally an experience of nothing, “a vacuum” (Sonnet 11, 1. 5).

8 The following seven parallels are notable: (a) The blessing of Jesus by God (Matt, iii.17); the blessing of the gasfitter by his supervisor (Sonnet 5). (b) The inner torment of Jesus, followed by resignation to the will of God, in Gethsamene, and sleep of the disciples (Matt, xxvi.38–46); evasiveness of the gasfitter before his supervisor's commands, followed by flirtation with escape, and sleep of the concierge (Sonnets 5–7). (c) The mocking of Jesus and the ascent of Calvary; the mocking of the gasfitter by the maid and his ascent in the elevator (Sonnet 8). (d) Jesus' moment of doubt on the cross (Matt, xxvii.46); the gasfitter's admission of failure (Sonnet 9). (e) Acclamation of the Lamb by a host “of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues” (Rev. vii.9–10); scorning of the gasfitter by a host “of every nation, race, and tongue” (Sonnet 10). (f) The descent from the cross and the burial of Jesus (Matt, xxvii.58–60) ; the descent of the gasfitter in the elevator and his journey “underground” (Sonnet 10). (g) The ascent of Jesus to the right hand of God (Mark xvi.19); the return of the gasfitter to his supervisor and his dismissal (Sonnet 11).

9 Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1944), p. 187; Training in Christianity, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1944), pp. 127, 131.

10 “What Does It Mean to Speak of God?” in Faith and Understanding, I, trans. Louise P. Smith (London: SCM Press, 1966), p. 53.

11 “I and Thou,” in The Philosophy of Martin Buber, ed. Paul A. Schilpp and Maurice Friedman (1967; rpt. London: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1967), p. 44. Buber's reply to Marcel—that there is a distinction between the Thou that I “mean” and the word that I say—misses Marcel's point, which is that language does not preserve the stress of intention. See Buber, “Replies to My Critics,” pp. 705–06.

12 Quoted by George Steiner, After Babel (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975), p. 185.

13 “The women say … the language you [women] speak is made up of signs that rightly speaking designate what men have appropriated. Whatever they have not laid hands on … does not appear in the language you speak. This is apparent precisely in the intervals that your masters have not been able to fill with their words of proprietors and possessors, this can be found in the gaps, in all that which is not a continuation of their discourse, in the zero, the 0, the perfect circle that you invent to imprison them and to overthrow them.” Monique Wittig, The Guérillères, trans. D. Le Vay (London: Pan, 1972), p. 123. The 0, the circle, the hole are symbols of that which male authoritarian language cannot appropriate.

14 See Fens, Pt. i, 162–65, and Pt. ii, 198–99.

15 In Chapter iii of Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, Alice and the fawn walk lovingly together through “the wood where things have no names.” At the edge of the wood the two beings recover their lost names “fawn” and “human child.” “A sudden look of alarm came into [the fawn's] beautiful brown eyes, and in another moment it had darted away at full speed.”

16 “The cords of all link back,” wrote Joyce, back along all the genealogies of names to Adam, who issues out of the black hole of the void with God's maieutic help. Ulysses (New York: Random, 1961), p. 38.

17 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, Ch. xxxvi.

18 The puzzling question of why this sonnet alone, of the sequence 1–12, is dominated by the past tense, is debated in the essays cited in n. 2 above. I find none of the explanations I have read convincing, but have none of my own to offer.

19 Correspondence (Paris: Conard, 1929), II, 345.

20 Proust/Three Dialogues (London: Calder, 1965), p. 103.

21 S. Dresden, “Horizontale poëzie,” in Bakker and Middeldorp, p. 21.

22 The original reads:

Hoe hoger of ik stijg hoe groter wordt
de ruimte tussen u en mij. Het leven
voelt zich door nikkel en door staal omgeven.
Het bouwsel komt geen klinknagel te kort.

Hier zit geen gas. God is het gat en stort
zijn diepten op mij uit om te beleven
aan een verwaten fitter hoe verheven
hijzelf bij iedere étage wordt.

Verdieping na verdieping valt omlaag.
Ik weet niet waar of wat ik moet beginnen.
Misschien schiet me een laatste woord te binnen
als ik hem naar de eerste oorzaak vraag.
Een schok gaat door mij heen. Ik moet er uit
en geef het over aan zijn raadsbesluit.

(Reprinted by kind permission of J. C. Achterberg-van Baak.)