Coda “Holy Madness”?

Coda “Holy Madness”? If Hölderlin’s retrieval of the Dionysiac chronotope and Dionysiac language fall prey to nationalism, Christianity and hyperabstraction, the final executioner of earth and community is alas the madness to which the poet succumbs. But is this not something we should have expected? Because the hyperabstract concepts that Hölderlin cultivates combine that which nationalism and Christianity already invoke, that is, the unhinging of the human life from history—, we can anticipate that such a gesture issues forth from a psychic disturbance that can devour a bal- anced experience of space, time and language. To be sure, we cannot fault Hölderlin for his isolation, an echo of which we hear in Hyperion’s longing for a kindred “spirit”—one that, because it is accom- panied by the melancholy reference to “the rays” of “light” that gather together in a “mirror”,1 evokes the isolated Dionysus’ who stumbles across a looking glass and gazes (fatefully) into his reflection (2.1). Schiller’s neglect, Hölderlin’s lack of stable employment, and the failure of his journal Iduna—also a victim of Schiller’s tyrannical spirit—all suggest a normal, if tragic, series of events(that tragically be- fall the talented poet). But symptoms of a psychic caesura reveal themselves. Alienation from others degenerates into wild self-hatred. “So I came to the Germans,” the German poet says, and proceeds to describe his own as, [b]arbarians from time immemorial, they [modern Germans] have become more barbaric through industry and science and even through religion, profoundly incapable of any divine emotion […] dull and lacking harmony, like fragments of a tossed out vessel. (5.1) “It is a hard word, but I say it nonetheless, for it is the truth,” Hölderlin continues, “I can think of no people more torn apart than the Germans. You see craftsmen, but no humans, thinkers, but no humans, priests, but no humans” (7.1). As we have seen, this passage concludes with the metaphor of the German people “like shards of a thrown out vessel” (7.1): “is this not like a battlefield”, Hölderlin asks, “where 1 Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, Bd. 2, Hyperion, Empedokles, Aufsätze, Übersetzungen, Schmidt 71. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015 221 L. Murrey, Hölderlin’s Dionysiac Poetry, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-10205-4 222 Coda “Holy Madness”? dismembered hands and arms and all body-parts lie cast about while their life-blood drains into the sand?” (7.1) As we have seen, the “immature attitude” of Germans who are “tyrannical to- wards nature” (7.1) which they greedily “tear apart” (7.2) is rooted in their “evil tongues” (10.1). Hölderlin describes the German language that estranges nature and humanity as the “idle chatter” of “clever ones” who are no match for the real language of “the springs of earth and morning dew [that] refresh the grove” (10.1). Here he leaves no doubt that it is his inauthentic mother tongue against which he is battling. “[W]hen they [the Germans] speak, woe to him! who understands them […]” (10.1) Given this unusual concentration of love and hatred for his German language, in particular the murder of the self that is implicit in Hölderlin’s contempt, it is not surprising that he perversely heroises individual death. This is clear in his essay Be- coming in Perishing (7.1, 12.1). As we have noted, Hölderlin writes this essay, also titled The Dying Fatherland, while translating a fragment from Oedipus at Kolonus where the tragic hero wilfully embraces his mortal finitude (12.1). Eerie also is Hölderlin’s need to identify with tragic heroes. We have witnessed how when he criticises “the Germans” he compares himself to “the homeless, blind Oedipus at the gates of Athens […]” (7.1) Although this gives Hölderlin some dis- tance from the reality of the inauthentic Germans and the inauthentic German language from which he struggles to free himself, this tendency to accept fantasy as if it is real turns into a dangerous illusion not simply of secret, authentic Germans and a secret, authentic German language—to which Hölderlin gestures when Hyperion declares, “I spoke in your name also, I spoke for everyone from this land and who has suffer as I suffered there” (10.1)—, but also into the illusion of a pure, ancient race from India and Greece from which authentic Germans and their authentic language secretly descend: the phantasm in Hyperion of an ancient “Volk of rare excel- lence hidden” secretly “in the depths of Asia” (12.4). Connected to these symptoms of psychic turbulence is the German identity cri- sis. Although the heightened linguistic feel of the alliteration of Hölderlin’s render- ing of the first verse of Pindar’s second Olympian ode, Ihr Herrscher auf Harfen, ihr Hymnen! (V 1; 10.2), echoes the socio-political potential of the language of mystery-cult to establish a more democratic language in tune with nature (10.2), it is also followed by an echo of Germany’s lack of a leader and, in contrast to France with its tradition of kingship and revolution, absence of sacred heroism: Which god, which hero Which man will we celebrate with song?2 (V 2–3) As we have implied, Hölderlin does not simply translate Pindar, but instead seeks “to penetrate”, as Böschenstein points out, “the linguistic spirit of the original”3 Greek songs (10.2). This suggests, alongside Hölderlin’s rigorous mimicry of 2 Ibid. 695. 3 Böschenstein, “Übersetzungen”, in Hölderlin-Handbuch. Leben, Werk, Wirkung, hg. J. Kreuzer 275. Coda “Holy Madness”? 223 Euripides’ trimeters in his translation of Bacchae,4 that the search for a hero and heroic language threatens to annihilate the mother—if often inauthentic—tongue. This means the destruction of the sacred place from which the identity of the poet issues forth. Hölderlin’s need to identify with the Greeks suggests finally psychosis, that is, a mental illness that conceals itself within the object of affection with which or with whom it actually has nothing to do. This is clear in how easily he transfers his dream of ancient Greece to modern Germany: “the mountains of German/Land are the mountains of the Muses” (V 35–36; 8). This psychotic gesture lays the foundation for the ambivalence that colours the poet’s culminating mental dismemberment. Let us briefly return to the heroism of ancient Greece that is transferred to modern Germany. The dream of Dionysian “fire” (V 28) that “gleams in the eye […] of the man/When he designs the great”5 (V 28–29) and “the wine-god’s holy priests” (V 123; 8) in search of “the open” (V 41) that secretly belongs to them6 (V 42) in- vokes the phantasm of a German hero. We have witnessed the birth “of the demigod” (V 31; 8) The Rhine, a godlike German spirit whose sheer strength and emotional disassociation is celebrated beyond all others: “He does not, like other children,/ Whine in swaddling clothes; […]”7 We have witnessed also the epiphany of “the day’s angel” (V 5), the German “master”8 (V 7) in The Poet’s Vocation (8, 10.3). Critical is that Hölderlin suffers the absence of the German deity he calls forth. “Creating one, o when, Genius of our Volk,” (V 25) he asks despairingly in To the Germans: “When will you make your complete epiphany, soul of the Vaterland”?9 (V 26) We have seen similar suffering before the absence of the divine German “stranger?” (V 149) at the centre of The Rhine, as well as the anguish that accompanies the absence of this deity at the end of The Poet’s Vocation (8). Given the borderline psychosis that accompanies Hölderlin’s picture of Greece and Germany, it is not surprising that such desolation easily regresses into—and thus continues— the poet’s self-hatred. The failure of the German god to appear is haunted by the “poverty of action”10 (V 4) that plagues the poet’s inauthentic Vaterland. But what is most telling—and that which most exacerbates the symptoms of Hölderlin’s impending psychosis—is the protracted absence of an authentic language. Given its absorption into a romantic image of silence—one thinks of Hölder- lin’s often cited Half of Life and its haunting reference to “[t]he walls [that] stand/ Speechless and cold” (V 12–13) in “winter”11 (V 8)—this tragic event tends to be overlooked. Nevertheless, tragic silence remains the terminal point of Hölderlin’s poetic experiments. Instead of transitioning into a Dionysiac language, in his first 4 Ibid. 274. 5 Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, Bd. 1, Gedichte, Schmidt 239. 6 Ibid. 287. 7 Ibid. 329. 8 Ibid. 305. 9 Ibid. 236. 10 Ibid. 235. 11 Ibid. 320. 224 Coda “Holy Madness”? Pindaric hymn As when on a holiday…, for instance, the poet, following his turn to the hyperabstract concept of the sublime, suffers a startling self-negation: But alas, if from Alas! And though I say I approached to see the heavenly ones, They themselves cast me down deep under the living The false priest, into the dark, so that I sing the warning song to those who can learn. There.12 Although most editions leave spaces about the final words of Hölderlin’s hymn, the original manuscript page shows that he crossed out many verses and words.13 Instead of founding a language that resists reckless eyes that lead to death (as with Semele)—and this means the visualised spirit of tyranny to which his blind Oedipus at Kolonus gestures (7.1), Hölderlin’s song culminates in an unsettling silence—and one that reverberates in the poem’s title.

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