1 Hleb i Vino Imenovanje

The Problem of Poetic Naming in Hlderlin's Elegy "Brod und Wein"Author(s): John Jay BakerReviewed work(s):Source: MLN, Vol. 101, No. 3, German Issue (Apr., 1986), pp. 465-492Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2905604 .Accessed: 16/03/2013 10:01

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The Problem of Poetic Naming in HOlderlin's Elegy "Brod und Wein"

John Jay Baker

The objective of this essay is to consider the ways in which H6lder- lin's elegy "Brod und Wein" (henceforth BW) exemplifies in its mode of statement the problematic identity of the proper name in poetic discourse. In doing so, the essay will show the elegy to be less a sentimental recourse to mythological identities and much rather H6lderlin's thorough archeology of the name.' This could seem an unusual interpretive perspective to the reader who is ac- customed to think of H6lderlin's discourse as one which appeals freely to the gods' names of Greek and Christian religion as well as to the place names of the regions and cities where those religions flourished. Yet these names, and appositions for them, are themselves cases in point of the problem the elegy presents. Essentially, the problem is: how does one name presences without loading them with the weight of referential positivity?

In the eighth and ninth strophes alone the following names are introduced: "ein stiller Genius," "donnernde(n) Gott," "Fakel- schwinger des Hbchsten / Sohn, der Syrier."2 Taken in context, the

1 For an interpretation of the archeological practice of H6lderlin's translations, see Jeremy Adler, "Philosophical Archaeology: H6lderlin's 'Pindar Fragments'. A translation with an interpretation," in Comparative Criticism 6 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984) 23-46. I am grateful to the editor of Com- parative Criticism, Elinor Shaffer, for having made a galley proof of this essay available to me prior to its going to press.

2 The names referred to occur in vv. 129, 138, and 155-6, respectively, of BW. I have referred to two editions of Holderlin's works: the Stuttgarter Hliderlin-Ausgabe, ed. Friedrich Beissner (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1946ff.) [referred to in the text as


466 JOHN JAY BAKER

first, "ein stiller Genius," refers, in its Pietistic resonance, rather unambiguously to Christ. And comparison with Hdlderlin's Christ image in the later hymns "Patmos" and "Der Einzige," where the image of Christ as the last god is developed, would seem to con- firm this. The latter two names, however, are thoroughly ambig- uous. One may point with equal degrees of plausibility to Christ and Dionysus as the referents of these names. But it emphatically does not follow from this that the problem consists in the difficulty we have in finding sufficient reasons (philological) for referring the "donnernde Gott" or the "Syrier" to Christ, to Dionysus, or to yet some other god or synthesis of gods. The problem consists rather in the fact that every such identification overdetermines the figures' meaning in the elegy.3 This is not to say that the reader should therefore be content to let Holderlin's epithets resonate in the ambiguity of their reference. For these epithets do have an intentional referent: their provisional function as names is to point to the movement, or rhythm, of events as that which cannot be positively named. As a meditation on an imagined historical movement from East to West, from antiquity to the present, BW projects but also discretely declines to name a future, or coming, horizon of events. In this sense, if an ambiguity of reference besets the elegy's names, it is an ambiguity at the level of lexis and not one at the level of discourse or statement.4 If Holderlin resorts to

"StA"] and the Frankfurter Hilderlin-Ausgabe, ed. D. E. Sattler (Frankfurt: Verlag Roter Stern, 1976ff.) [referred to in the text as "FHA"]. To avoid cluttering the text I shall refer to BW simply by verse number. All other citations will be from the StA or the FHA. In each case the acronym will be followed by three sets of Arabic numerals which refer to volume number, page number, and, where apropriate, line number, respectively.

This paper is principally based on a reading of the first completed version of BW as printed by Beissner (StA 2,1.90-95) and Sattler (FHA 6, 248-52). Sattler offers the reader a "reconstituted text" of the entire elegy based on Holderlin's later emendations (FHA 6, 258-62).

3 Holderlin had in fact written "Der Weingott" at the head of an early draft of the elegy. A seminal contribution to the problem of designative readings of figures and names in H6lderlin's poetry, with especial reference to "Friedensfeier," is Peter Szondi's "Er selbst, der Furst des Fests. Die Hymne 'Friedensfeier'," in Hilderlin- Studien, now reprinted in Schriften I, ed. Jean Bollack (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1978) 315-42. On BW itself see Jochen Schmidt's comprehensive Hliderlins Elegie "Brod und Wein" (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1968), a work particularly important for its attention to H6lderlin's classical and contemporary sources, parallels elsewhere in the poet's work, and large thematic structures in the elegy.

4 This is to say that the nature of the ambiguity of the name is only settled at the level of larger discursive units, sentences and series of sentences. This doesnot make the name irrelevant. To the contrary, as Paul Ricoeur says, "the word remains


M L N 467

locutions which tread uncertainly between referents in the worlds of Greek and Christian religion, understanding of those locutions cannot be reached through a philological deciphering (as if it were a hermetic code which binds H6lderlin's work),5 but only through an articulation of their function in the elegy's sequence of statement, or discursive economy.6 Articulation of the sequences of statement in BW will show that while the elegy exhibits the problematic of poetic naming, its own mode of naming is a way of overcoming that problematic. Hdlderlin does not name the Olympian gods. As such, the appearance of the gods in BW is already seen in a demythologizing perspective as an historical ("geschichtlich") appearance envisioned (inevitably) in terms other than the Greek. In invoking the world of Greek cult and religion, the Greek "Gdt- tertag," the elegy proposes to render the events of that world of the sediment of previous naming which has gathered around them. It is this which constitutes the poem's demythologizing act and which accounts for the referential ambiguity of the epithets which function as names in BW. "Der kommende Gott" of the end of the third strophe (v. 54) is neither Christ nor Dionysus nor some syncresis of the two, but a future event to which the elegy's heuristic use of historical memory and mythpoints.

I.

The economy of the poem is on the one hand eminently percep- tible, on the other hand obscure. Its tripartite division represents a movement from a local depiction of the fall of night which ex- pands into a hymn to the night in the second strophe before is- suing in an imaginative journey to the daylight world of Greece in

the 'focus' even while it requires the 'frame' of the sentence." The word remains the locus of effect of metaphorical meaning even-or rather, above all-when the metaphorical process is dispersed over the sequence of statement, as it is in Hol- derlin. Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, tr. Robert Czerny (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977; originally La Metaphore Vive, Paris, 1975) 66.

DThe attempt to read the difficulties of Holderlin's text as a code, this time as a Jacobin code, has been revived in Pierre Bertaux's eccentric Friedrich Hblderlin (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1978).

6 In this respect Walter Benjamin's concept of "Reihen," according to which the elements of a poem are only graspable as a "Gefuge der Beziehungen," is an early and quite apt articulation of discursive economy. W. Benjamin, "Zwei Gedichte von Friedrich Holderlin," in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. R. Tiedemann and H. Schwep- penhauser (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977, 1980) 11,1.:112.


468 JOHN JAY BAKER

the third strophe. The middle three strophes of the elegy then imaginatively reenact the experience of the Greek "Gdttertag," following which the elegy redescends in the final three strophes to the night of the present. This tripartite division is repeated in the individual strophes.7 The third strophe, for example, begins with a continuation of the same nocturnal inspiration which animates the second strophe. Now, however, it commutes into an inspiration which drives "bei Tag und bei Nacht, / Aufzubrechen" (vv. 40-1) and finally issues, in contrast with the orphic night of the preceding strophe, into the openness of the world: "So komm! daB wir das Offene schauen, / DaB ein Eigenes wir suchen, so weit es auch ist." (vv. 41-2) Characteristically, however, this strophe, like the entire elegy, does not take a straight path to its goal. The middle three distichs interrupt the "Aufbruch" of the previous three to clarify that the search for what is "one's own" is not random, but is conducted under a certain measure which obtains through day and night alike: "Fest bleibt Eins; es sei um Mittag oder es gehe / Bis in die Mitternacht, immer bestehet ein Maas." (vv. 43-44) Hence the completion of the transition from night to day is delayed by a recourse to the eccentric rule of the night:

Drum! und spotten des Spotts mag gern frohlokkender Wahnsinn, Wenn er in heiliger Nacht plotzlich die Sanger ergreift.

(vv. 47-8)

The particle "Drum!" has a significant directive, or deictic, function in the third strophe. Its repetition in the following verses deci- sively connects the night image of the inspired Orphic poet with the diurnal image of a sea journey to Greece, so that the moment of transition to the solar region of Greek life preserves an affilia- tion with the (Hesperian) night which is the elegy's point of origin:

Drum an den Isthmos komm! dorthin, wo das offene Meer rauscht Am ParnaB und der Schnee delphische Felsen umglanzt,

(vv. 49-50)

The gradualness of the movement from the nocturnal landscape of the first two strophes to the daylight world of the third inheres in the long rhythms, the simultaneity of recourse and transition, which defines the plastic shape of the elegy. As always in Holderlin, this shape serves an historico-philosophical ("geschichtsphilo-

7On this aspect of the poem in detail, see Schmidt (1968).


M L N 469

sophisch") end: the imaginary movement from night to day and back, the evocation of the gods and then the tracing of their disap- pearance, these are the lyrical inflection of an old narrative about Greece and the West in which H6lderlin is preparing to change the names.8 The final distichs of the third strophe present the best opportunity to observe this change:

Dort ins Land des Olymps, dort auf die Hohe Citharons, Unter die Fichten dort, unter die Trauben, von wo

Thebe drunten und Ismenos rauscht im Lande des Kadmos, Dorther kommt und zuriuk deutet der kommende Gott.

(vv. 5 1-4)

In these lines what I have called the simultaneity of recourse and transition is established for the remainder of the elegy. If the place names and symbols ("ParnaB" and "Olymp," "Trauben" and "Fichten") point unambiguously to ancient Greece and the god Dionysus and so represent a species of recourse, the last verse of the strophe capitalizes on the legend of Dionysus as the god who arrived from the distant East to colonize Greece and so represents a movement of transition and change, of awakening from one element into another, from one age into another. (In the ode "Dich- terberuf," Dionysus is invoked under the name of Bacchus as the god who came from India to awaken the peoples from sleep.) In the broad contours of Hblderlin's historico-philosophic view these lines can be read both to honor and historicize the historical and aesthetic precedence of Greece.9 Because Dionysus "comes from" and "points back" to Greece, Greek culture is set up as a model or paradigm. At the same time, the god celebrated in these lines is not positively identified except as "der kommende Gott." Silence on the positive identity of the god is not simply for the effect of a rhetorical elision. Instead, elision of Dionysus into the figure of the coming god is an instance of the demythologizing act which, as

8 This is not to say that the character of Holderlin's "geschichtsphilosophische" project is a constant one. In fact, it takes several turns from the years prior to 1798 through the years of residence in Homburg and Jena to the time of the hymns and then the time of the Sophocles translations and hymn fragments. Through these periods one can trace H6lderlin's perfection and then his gradual abandonment of the triadic scheme of writing and historical vision.

9 In the end the status of Greece in H6lderlin's work is equivocal. It is both antique homeland and the foreign ("das Fremde"), both monument and ruin. See the discussion of "Dionysus" in section four below.


470 JOHN JAY BAKER

mentioned, is constitutive of the elegy's discourse.10 For the demythologizing mind the myth has no positive, inherent significance as a form of narration: it is only of interest as a text which occasions, or solicits, new interpretation, that is, as a text in need of trans-lation. The exemplarity of Greece, then, would consist in its being an historical realization of certain existential possibilities, a realization discernible in the narratives we have received of Greece. Contrarily, the aesthetical view of Greece, according to which Greece is a timeless or ahistorical model for the union of nature and art, is the point of view which must be demystified. The exemplarity of Greece is not that of a timeless model, rather that of an historical, or one time, realization of determinate possibilities. This means that what happened in Greece is not only a non-repeatable occurrence, it is also a fragmentary, hence non- ideal, realization of possibilities which for that reason remain outstanding. Greece is thus as exemplary in its fragmentariness as in its completeness, in its decline as in its rise.

It should be clear why Holderlin recurred to the Dionysus myth as the text, or precedent, through which to erect his image of ancient Greece. Dionysus was not only the wine god, but also, and among other things, the wandering founder of cities, of civiliza- tions. As such, Dionysus is an adoptive genius, the name for an act of appropriation rather than the name for an indigenous or au- tochthonous spirit. H6lderlin's suppression of the name Dionysus in favor of referring to the Greek myth through a constellation of signs which point toward without identifying the god performs the function of reiterating the growth of the myth, but in such a way as to revive it rather than merely reproduce it. This poetic function is informed by an intellectual structure, namely, an intention not only to commemorate elegiacally the past, but, more basically, to narrate the transition from past to present. It is in light of this that the

10 The concept and practice of "demythologization" as a mode of interpretation gained currency chiefly through the works of the New Testament scholar and exe- gete Rudolf Bultmann. The practice originated though in the works of the young Hegel and young Schleiermacher. Holderlin knew Hegel personally, of course, but he also is known to have read Schleiermacher's Uber Religion. Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verdchtern. Schelling's thought is also relevant in this regard, although the period of his extensive look into mythology and theology postdates Holderlin's activity as poet and thinker. Yet the fragment now considered to be the common work of Schelling, Holderlin and Hegel, "Das alteste Systemprogramm des deut- schen Idealismus," a document which calls for a "Mythologie der Vernunft," is also relevant (StA 4,1.297-99).


M L N 471

movement from the first to the third strophe is so instructive for the narrative structure of the elegy as a whole. The sequence from the night of the present into the world of day and thence into the Greek landscape looks like an imaginary trip through history. But the Greece in which the third strophe issues is neither the Greece of the historical present nor the Greece of the historical past. The Greece toward which the god of the third strophe points is finally neither more nor less than a construction of the poet's own historical memory. In this special historical view "Greece" names for H6lderlin the place colonized by the god whose identity consists in being the god of the future, or the god of arrival: "der kommende Gott." In this way H6lderlin thoroughly works out the demythologizing moment: the import of a text, in this case the text of a myth, is not to be found in a recoverable original meaning but rather in the way that it solicits a projection of new meaning.

Doubtless this still suggests a highly literary, not to say aesthetic, representation of the phenomenon of historical change and of the place of ancient Greece in such change. And in fact one cannot remove Hdlderlin from the inveterately aestheticizing tendencies of the milieu and age in which he lived. Accordingly, one approach to H6lderlin's text is to treat its historical dimension as a rhetorical overlay: Greece in H61derlin's elegy is not the Greece of history but instead the history and product of a trope, i.e., "Greece" as the inauguration of the aesthetic character by which the West has known itself."I Yet insofar as this approach is concerned solely with the figurative, or tropic, dimensions of the text as its constitutive elements, it is not the one to be pursued here. I shall be concerned instead with H6lderlin's heuristic use of myth to construct imaginatively a narrative of the vicissitudes of history. It is by this means that the implicitly fundamental problematic of the elegy will be confronted: how to name a changing succession of historical presences so that it is the rhythm of change and alteration which is summoned and an hypostatization of that movement of change which is avoided?'2

11 For a rhetorical, or purely "tropical," approach to Holderlin's concern with Greece, see Andrzej Warminski, "Holderlin in France," in Studies in Romanticism, vol. 22, No. 2 (Summer 1983): 173-97.

12 This avoidance is linked with the strenuous avoidance of positivity and positive assertion in early idealism. See for example the critique of positivity in Hegel's Jugendschriften (translated into English as Early Theological Writings (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1946).


472 JOHN JAY BAKER

II.

In comparison with the movements of Sturm and Drang and Weimar Classicism, which had, respectively, either reacted to or espoused the exemplarity of classical works of art, Hdlderlin broke open a path whose newness was its emphasis on the way in which classical works had come to be rather than on the the supposed perfection perceived in those works. This insight not only contests the image of Greece cultivated by Winckelmann and Goethe, but pushes beyond Schiller to the kind of speculative historical thought at work in Friedrich Schlegel.'3 The historical "accuracy" of H6lderlin's view of Greek literature is of less significance for us than his insight that it originated in a specific situation, different from "our own" (momentarily assuming Hdlderlin's point of view) in its historical determination and not in kind. That Holderlin did not categorically think the difference between the Greeks and "ourselves" as a function of history need not deter us from thinking his distinction in those terms. For what Hdlderlin had intuited is that the Greeks had not lived, as Winckelmann and Schiller himself had still thought, under a different dispensation. They did not breathe a different air; they felt as well the pressure of time and circumstance. Perhaps H6lderlin's most valuable intu- ition about the situation of the Greeks is that they were not free of the attritive effects of temporality.14

H6lderlin began to develop his ideas on poetics and the relation of poetic genres to the Greeks in his fragmentary essays from the time of his residence in Homburg and his work on the drama, Empedokles. At the end of 1801, in the now very famous letter to Casimir Bdhlendorff (StA 6. 425-28), H6lderlin's thinking on the

13 On this cf. Peter Szondi, Einfiihrung in die literarische Hermeneutik (Studienausgabe der Vorlesungen Band 5), ed. Jean Bollack (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1975) 224-5: "Holderlins Geschichtsdenken hat mit dem der Fruhromantik, zumal mit dem Friedrich Schlegels, gemeinsam, dal3 es im Gegensatz zur Klassik Winckelmanns und Goethes die griechische Antike nicht zur zeitlosen Natur erhebt, sondern als ein Vergangenes, als ein Verlorenes betrachtet, dessen Bedeutung fur die Gegen- wart darum aber nicht geringer, sondern eher noch grofBer wird, indem es zugleich eingeht in die Erwartung, in die Eschatologie, indem es zum Vorbild wird fur das dereinst wieder sich Erffillende."

14 This is scarcely to say that there is no authentic experience of freedom in Hol- derlin's world. What kind of freedom that is, however, needs to be further dis- cussed. Pertinent literature here would be Karlheinz Stierle's "Die Indentitat des Gedichts. Holderlin als Paradigma," in Poetik und Hermeneutik VIII: Identitdt, ed. Otto Marquard (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1979) and Rainer Nagele, Literature und Utopie. Versuche zu Holderlin (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Verlag, 1978).


M L N 473

relation of the Greeks to ourselves took the bolder turn which cul- minated in the implicit program of interpretation contained in the Sophocles translations and in the poet's notes ("Anmerkungen") to the translations. BW was drafted and probably completed in its original form by the middle of 1801, so that it stands squarely in the middle of H6lderlin's project for an historico-philosophic poe- tology whose solution to the problem of a standardizing concept of classicism would be an overcoming of classicism which nevertheless was not its rejection.15

The distinction between a classicism which recommends imitation of the antique and the antique as such rests for H6lderlin in the ability to discern a dimension of the Greek literary work not immediately apparent in its "Kunstkarakter."'6 H6lderlin's detec- tion of a difference, or rift, in the uniform surface of Greek art suggests a struggle for the achievement of aesthetic definition and clarity where neo-Classicism had either supposed no struggle or had underestimated the cost of the struggle. To this extent Hdlder- lin had already touched on the soft core of Schiller's essay "Uber naive und sentimentalische Dichtung": namely, that the idea of the naivety of Greek art, i.e., that Greek art somehow possessed the necessity of nature while it was also a human artifact, is funda- mentally sentimental, that is, an idea, like all ideas, without coun- terpart in the world. Nature can only be described as naive in contrast with and exclusively from the point of view of art.17 That H61derlin had seen into this is clear from his choice to speak of literary works in terms of the mediation of "Grundstimmung" and "Kunstkarakter," "Schein" and "Bedeutung," terms which express the necessity for mediation, though they spring from the basic "Bildungstrieb" we do have in common with the Greeks. As H6lder- lin makes explicit in a fragment where he introduces the term, "Der Gesichtspunct aus dem wir das Altertum anzusehen haben" (StA 4,1. 221-22), the "Bildungstrieb" does not function as freely

1D This fact was well appreciated by Szondi in the essay "Gattungspoetik und Geschichtsphilosophie," in Schriften I, p. 372: ". . . das Problem, dessen theoretische Losung die Lehre vom Wechsel der Tone und die-etwas spatere-Konzeption eines hesperischen Stils ist, der den Klassizismus uiberwindet, ohne der Antike den Rucken zu kehren."

16 For the "Grundstimmung"-"Kunstkarakter" distinction, see "Uber den Un- terschied der Dichtarten," StA 4,1.262-67.

17 See Peter Szondi, "Das Naive ist das Sentimentalische. Zur Begriffsdialektik in Schillers Abhandlung," in Schriften II, ed. Jean Bollack (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1978) 59-105.


474 JOHN JAY BAKER

or as originally as we may like to imagine. Rather, it can only function effectively with a consciousness of its provenance and destina- tion: "mit BewuBtsein ... woraus er hervorgieng und wohin er strebt ... ," (ibid). The difference between the Greeks and ourselves, then, does not consist in their having been happily ignorant of the need to master a "Bildungstrieb," but simply in their having established that mastery under different circumstances, namely in an as yet young and comparatively unschooled ("ungelehrt") world:

Und was allgemeiner Grund vom Untergang aller Volker war, nemlich, daB ihre Originalitat, ihre eigene lebendige Natur erlag unter den posi- tiven Formen, unter dem Luxus, den ihre Vater hervorgebracht hatten, das scheint auch unser Schiksaal zu seyn, nur in gr6Berem MaBe, indem fast eine granzenlose Vorwelt, die wir entweder durch Unterricht, oder durch Erfahrung innewerden, auf uns wirkt und drukt. StA 4,1. 221.

Significantly, it is the positivity of fixed or conventional forms which is singled out here as the menace to a culture's "eigene lebendige Natur." (The reader may be reminded here of the lines in the third strophe of BW: "So komm! daB wir das Offene schauen, / DaB ein Eigenes wir suchen, so weit es auch ist," a passage in which the poet later substituted "Lebendiges" for "Eigenes." FHA 6. 224-25.) In fact, Holderlin had anticipated, albeit in a much more personal tenor, the themes of this fragmentary essay in a letter to Schiller of 20 June 1797. Now, though, the issue is not a "milde Rache gegen die Knechtschaft, womit wir uns verhalten haben gegen das Altertum" (StA 4,1.22 1), but one of anxiety ("Angstig- keit") before the contemporary master, Schiller himself:

Denn ich bin gewiB, daB gerade diese Angstigkeit und Befangenheit der Tod der Kunst ist, und begreife deswegen sehr gut, warum es schwerer ist, die Natur zur rechten AuBerung zu bringen, in einer Pe- riode, wo schon Meisterwerke nah um einen liegen, als in einer anderen, wo der Kunstler fast allein ist mit der lebendigen Welt. Von dieser unterscheidet er sich zu wenig, mit dieser ist er zu vertraut, als daB er sich stemmen muBte gegen ihre Autoritat, oder sich ihr gefangen geben. Aber diese schlimme Alternative ist fast unvermeidlich, wo gewaltiger und verstandlicher, als die Natur, aber ebendeswegen auch unterjo- chender und positiver der reife Genius der Meister auf den jungen Kunstler wirkt. StA 6. 241.

If H6lderlin concedes here that the situation of the artist who finds himself alone with the living world is one of temptatiorn to lose oneself in that world by distinguishing oneself too little from


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it, nevertheless this represents a less inhibiting danger than does the positive authority of existing masterworks. By 1799, when he was working on the "Gesichtspunct" fragment, H6lderlin had ad- vanced well beyond this to see the positive forms which the "Bil- dungstrieb" has assumed as an "aesthetic education" in how the "Bildungstrieb" proceeds, in how it errs and fails as well as suc- ceeds. In making this advance, Holderlin was taking the initial steps toward the nonantithetical dialectic of nature and art which would eventually inform his own hymnic work, the translations of Sophocles, and the historico-philosophic view of the important ode "Natur und Kunst oder Saturn und Jupiter."'8 Thus, in the "Gesichtspunct" fragment he could follow his observation on the menance of positive forms to a people's "eigene lebendige Natur" with a new qualification: "Von der andern Seite scheint nichts gun- stiger zu seyn als gerade diese Umstande in denen wir uns be- finden" (StA 4,1. 221). The present situation need not suffer under a burden of anxiety, but can be turned instead to historical advantage. Rather than press the opposition between positive form and living nature, Holderlin turns to the concept of the "Bil- dungstrieb" as the mediating and shaping force which is neither the same as the general ground of being whence it proceeds nor to be equated with the positive forms which it creates. The present situation is an advantageous one because it is a "Gesichtspunct" from which the historical effects of the "Bildungstrieb" can be sur- veyed as a succession of failure and success.

For H6lderlin, as for Schiller, the "Bildungstrieb" does not work independently of a reflexive consciousness, or it does not ideally.'9 Hdlderlin's remark, "Es ist nemlich ein Unterschied ob jener Bil- dungstrieb blind wirkt, oder mit Bewuf3tseyn, ob er weif3, woraus er hervorgieng und wohin er strebt," (ibid) puts a premium on the reflexive act of narratively conceiving "Bildungstrieb" as a drive which brings with it a historical index to the previous directions it has taken ("die vorhergegangenen reinen und unreinen Rich-

18 By non-antithetical opposition I mean that the two are, in H6lderlin's phrase, "dem Schein nach" opposed, where "Schein" does not mean false appearance but appearance which is dialectically capable of masking without either contradicting or betraying another quality. Cf. "Uber den Unterschied der Dichtarten," as in n. 16 above.

19 Cf. the following passage from the ninth letter of Uber die dsthetische Erziehung des Menschen in context: "Viel zu ungestum, um durch dieses Mittel zu wandern," etc., Schillers Werke (Nationalausgabe), ed. Benno von Wiese (Weimar: Hermann Bohlaus Nachfolger, 1962), vol. 20: 334-5. Other references to Schiller will be identified as "NA," followed by volume and page number.


476 JOHN JAY BAKER

tungen") and implicitly recommends the breaking of another path. Already in the "Gesichtspunct" fragment Holderlin advocates the cultivation of a maximally reflective historical self-consciousness which will avoid the errancy of the "Bildungstrieb" in the past because it will have reiterated the path of the "Bildungstrieb" from the Greeks ("das Altertum") to its present. At the end of the fragment the task of articulating a "Bildungstrieb" is defined as: ... unsere eigene Richtung uns vorsezen, die bestimt wird, durch die vorhergegangenen reinen und unreinen Richtungen, die wir aus Einsicht nicht wiederhohlen" (ibid, p. 222). To determine one's own "Bildungstrieb" is also to participate in the history of other determinations through acquaintance with their effects. The thought arises that H6lderlin's sense of history is one in which con- tinuity, or discontinuity, is established by acts of self-distancing from origin and tradition; or, in H6lderlin's later words, by appropriation of the "Fremde," the "Kolonie" as one's own. The "Bil- dungstrieb" is thus at once recourse to and departure from a tradition, a fact suggested in the remarks with which the "Gesichts- punct" fragment trails off: "so daB wir im Urgrunde aller Werke und Thaten der Menschen uns gleich und einig fuhlen mit allen, sie seien so grof3 oder so klein, aber in der besondern Richtung die wir nehmen" (ibid; emphasis mine). Moreover, H6lderlin's marginalia reenforce the point made here that what is at stake in the "Bil- dungstrieb's" contemporary direction is no imitation or "positive" revival of the past. The script reads: "unsere besondere Richtung Handeln. Reaction gegen positives Beleben des Todten durch reelle Wechselvereinigung desselben" (ibid).

H6lderlin's terminology in the "Gesichtspunct" fragment still superficially resembles that of Schiller. The difference in tenor of thought is apparent, however, if we consider a passage from the ninth letter of Uber die dsthetische Erziehung des Menschen:

Aber nicht jedem, dem dieses Ideal in der Seele gliuht, wurde die sch6pferische Ruhe und der grosse geduldige Sinn verliehen, es in den verschwiegenen Stein einzudriucken oder in das nuchterne Wort auszu- giessen und den treuen Handen der Zeit zu vertrauen. Viel zu un- gestuim, um durch dieses ruhige Mittel zu wandern, sturzt sich der gottliche Bildungstrieb oft unmittelbar auf die Gegenwart und auf das han- delnde Leben und unternimmt, den formlosen Stoff der moralischen Welt umzubilden. (Letter 9, ? 6)20

20 NA 20: 334-5. Cf. also the fourteenth and twenty-sixth letters on the "Spiel- trieb," NA 20: 352-55 and 398-404.


M L N 477

Schiller's emphasis on the stillness, or calm ("Ruhe"), achieved in the silence of stone and in the sobriety of the word contrasts immediately with Holderlin's emphasis, though not, to be sure, because Hdlderlin could be said to represent the object of Schiller's criticism. H6lderlin's "Handeln" should not be taken for the drive which would transform "the formless matter of the moral world," nor for a "gltihende Verlangen [, das] strebt in kraftvollen Seelen ungeduldig zur Tat" (Schiller, ibid). The difference between the two is sooner to be found in the kind of perfection attributed to art by each. For Schiller, art is symbolic perfection. In its beautiful aspect ("sch6ner Schein"), or appearance, it gives shape and perfection to the moral world in a way action never can. The beautiful represents ("vorstellen") the ideal. But does the aesthetic represent such for Hdlderlin? The "Gesichtspunct" fragment will not pro- vide the answer to this, nor will other prose writings of Hdlderlin. Yet this much is clear: art does not represent in H6lderlin's thought the serene release from the vicissitudes of the moral world which it did for Schiller. To the contrary, it is rather the pattern of those vicissitudes, as a species of historical change, from which the aesthetic (hence also the "Bildungstrieb") takes its determination. For this reason, the Greece of BW could never become the supra- mundane model of perfection it was in Weimar Classicism.2'

III.

Though the elegy is built on a triadic model, it should be re- membered that this division is schematic. The vigilance and expec- tation of the first three strophes-"Heilig GeddchtiniB . . ., wa- chend zu bleiben bei Nacht" (v. 36)-typifies and defines the tone of the entire elegy. Remembrance is both the mood which serves as the poem's plastic principle (i.e., which summons gods, scenes, events as recollected things) and the mode of knowledge the poem seeks to enact. The former is apparent in the texture of imagery in

21 See the late hymn draft ". . . meinest du es solle gehen . . .": Meinest du

Es solle gehen, Wie damals? Nemlich sie wollten stiften Ein Reich der Kunst. Dabei ward aber Das Vaterlandische von ihnen Versaumet und erbarmlich gieng Das Griechenland, das schonste, zu Grunde. (StA2,1.228:1-7)


478 JOHN JAY BAKER

the poem, the latter in the ways in which the periodicities of the poem, night and day, recollected past and anticipated future, in- terpenetrate each other. The experience of time and memory in the elegy make for a movement through simultaneities, events being presented as if they were contemporary happenings.22 Si- multaneities which make recollected past and envisioned future resemble each other give a clue to the nature of narrative memory in Holderlin. It is not a memory in which the minutiae of the past are meditated and presented as if they were once again present. That is Proustian memory. But Hdlderlin's "Gedachtnif3" has neither the specificity nor the affective immediacy of Proust's memory. It is instead the memory of an immemorial past, which, in any positive sense can never be narrated historically.23 Because the object of memory in H6lderlin is recollected as an immemorial past, it also acquires a future dimension as the yet to come. Hence its shape as myth. Understanding of this is necessary in order to grasp that the temporal structures of BW are at least as funda- mentally simultaneities as they are progressions, or periodicities. Put in another way, this is to say that the narrative and lyric structures of the poem run across each other. To use Schiller's terms, the poem is at once elegiac and idyllic: now presenting its object as one of loss and mourning, now as one of an imminently renewed presence and joy (NA 20, pp. 448-9). The structural simultaneity of no longer and not yet in BW defines the special sense in which it is an elegy: the lament for a past which has not yet come to be.

These remarks on the structure of memory in the elegy elicit a question of critical procedure and method. It is the question of whether the sequence of statement in the poem replicates its sequence of thought. I am clearly suggesting that it does not. The cast of temporal experience which informs the narrative memory

22 This is also noted by Manfred Frank with reference to Hegel's poem "Eleusis" (dedicated to Holderlin) in Der kommende Gott. Vorlesungen uiber die neue Mythologie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982) 265: "Das ist freilich sonderbar: Denn jetzt, gegens Jahr 1800, ist ja offenbar weder die Stunde des Untergangs der Antike noch die Geburtsstunde des gdttlichen Kindes. Und doch behandeln Hegel und Holderlin dies Ereignis, als sei's ein zeitgen6ssisches." See also p. 270.

23 The non-narratable dimension of the past which is built into the structure of the elegy as a horizon of meaning gives the poem its emergently mythical shape. It is Hblderlin's shaping of the elegy as a myth which I find missing in Timothy Bahti's detailed exposition of the way in which BW repeatedly runs up against the non-narratability of events the poem itself proleptically projects. Timothy Bahti, "Dialectic and Negativity: Readings in the Rhetoric of Romanticism," diss., Yale University, 1980.


M L N 479

of BW cannot be broken down into a syntactic sequence on the order of "now, then and later." Instead, critical discourse must de- vise working concepts which account for the move of poetic discourse away from the language of ostensive reference (the language with which we identify "aspects of reality which can be shown or pointed to") to the language of non-ostensive reference, the language which discloses the world of the work.24 The chal- lenge to the reader is to grasp the rigorous tri-partite construction of the elegy as a facilitation of poetic statement, as a literary heuristic, without reifying it into an epochal structure. The alternative to reading the poem in the naive manner, as if its sequence of statement paralleled its sequence of thought, is to identify passages in the text which suggest a variety of possible contexts, hence a variety of interpretive perspectives.25

This point about reading sequence can initially be made in a simple manner with reference to the fifth strophe. The strophe begins:

Unempfunden kommen sie erst, es streben entgegen Ihnen die Kinder, zu hell kommet, zu blendend das Gluk,

Und es scheut sie der Mensch, kaum weiB zu sagen ein Halbgott Wer mit Nahmen sie sind, die mit den Gaaben ihm nahn.

(vv. 73-6) "Unempfunden" has been interpreted by Jochen Schmidt to

refer to a want of readiness and receptivity on the part of man (Schmidt, 1968, pp. 89-90). There is much to support this interpretation, and Schmidt by no means underestimates the complica- tions of the strophe. Still, the question arises whether the contrast in the strophe between the opening lines and those which begin "dann aber in Wahrheit . . ." is sheerly a function of the subjective impression of man (ibid). The lines which seem to form a contrast are the following:

... dann aber in Wahrheit Kommen sie selbst und gewohnt werden die Menschen des Gliks

Und des Tags und zu schaun die Offenbaren, das Antliz

24 On metaphorical language as "non-ostensive reference," see Paul Ricoeur, "Metaphor and the Problem of Hermeneutics," in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. and tr. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) 177.

25 On the "multiplicity of simultaneous contexts" in Hdlderlin's poetry, see Karl- heinz Stierle (1979) 517 and passim.


480 JOHN JAY BAKER

Derer, welche, schon langst Eines und Alles genannt, Tief die verschwiegene Brust mit freier Geniige gefullet,

Und zuerst und allein alles Verlangen begluikt; So ist der Mensch; wenn da ist das Gut, und es sorget mit Gaaben

Selber ein Gott fur ihn, kennet und sieht er es nicht. (vv. 81-8)

The "aber" which opens these lines as an adversative does not state antithesis so much as difference: the two ways in which the "heavenly" appear to man are not the same. This difference may be seen as a function of all too human subjectivity, but it is more precisely the embeddedness of subjectivity in time which grounds the difference. For what is described in each passage is the experience of letting or having something escape, either because it is too startling or too much a matter of habit; not, however, because the thing is identical in each case, but then in the one neglected and in the other properly received. So the essential point here may not be one at all of the proper or negligent reception of the heavenly. The point may rather be that what is essential in the experience is never experienced by man as such but is only construed to be the essential retrospectively, or a posteriori, by an act of reflection. Reflection, though, comes subsequent to the temporality of events and can only bridge the discontinuous moments of experience and retrospective recognition of their import through a discourse which recognizes the difference between the order of its own statement and the order of events. Only a highly differentiated discourse manages this. One remarks in the poet of BW a genuine hesitancy to stop or stay long in any single perspective.

That hesitancy underpins the poem's characteristic movement of repetition with variations. This, and not two discrete types of experience and event, should be read in the difference between "Unempfunden kommen sie erst" and "dann aber in Wahrheit."26 A similar sequence is observable in the seventh strophe which begins with a lament for the belatedness of the present, seems to contrive an ironical justification of the poverty of the present, and

26 Whereas Jochen Schmidt does precisely this in naming the movement from "Unempfunden kommen sie erst" to "dann aber in Wahrheit" a progress from an "unbewuBte Urzustand" to a "Stadium des Bewul3twerdens." Schmidt is right, of course, to aver that the sequence of statement in the strophe gives cause to read it as he does, yet the "progress" that he observes, from unconsciousness to consciousness, from darkness to light, recurs so often in the poem and in so many different shapes that one is led to think (as I am arguing) that a circularity rather than progres- sion of vision and statement shapes the text. Jochen Schmidt (1968) 89-91.


M L N 481

ends with a prophetic justification of the same present. The following distichs are from the beginning and end of the strophe:

Aber Freund! wir kommen zu spat. Zwar leben die Gbtter, Aber tiber dem Haupt droben in anderer Welt.

Endlos wirken sie da und scheinens wenig zu achten, Ob wir leben, so sehr schonen die Himmlischen uns.

Denn nicht immer vermag ein schwaches GefaB sie zu fassen, Nur zu Zeiten ertragt gottliche Fulle der Mensch.

... Indessen duinket mir ofters Besser zu schlafen, wie so ohne Genossen zu seyn,

So zu harren und was zu thun indefi und zu sagen, WeiB ich nicht und wozu Dichter in diirftiger Zeit?

Aber sie sind, sagst du, wie des Weingotts heilige Priester, Welche von Lande zu Land zogen in heiliger Nacht.

(vv. 109-14; 119-24) However ironical the voice of the distich on the "schwaches GefalB" is, that irony is better seen as an irony of time than it is as one directed at the human subject. In considering the seventh strophe one may well ask whether it is not in the character of the human subject as subject to feel itself a supplemental, or belated, presence on the scene of events. That thought is explicit in a sort of paren- thetical reflection which starts out at the reader from the middle of the strophe: "Traum von ihnen ist drauf das Leben" (v. 115). From the perspective of this brief but revealing aside-in Holder- lin's pre-hymnic verse it is an exceptionally laconic statement-the subject of the poem's discourse is precisely the condensed relation of dream text to dream narrative: the dream text meagerly covers a much larger story which extends far back in personal and historical time. And for this reason there are two orders of statement in the poem. One says in a plain fashion that there is a "before," a "later" and a "now" which one can distinguish. In the seventh strophe these supposed epochs are marked off by strategic adverbs or adverbial conjunctions: "zu spat," "biB daB," and "indessen" (vv. 109, 117, 119). On the other hand, the more general structures of statement in the poem, the movement through syntactic units, suggest that the problematic feeling of belatedness inheres in discourse and makes inevitable the privative relation of text to event encountered in BW. A persistent motif of the elegy is that a surfeit of joy, of happenings, of events, leaves an abundance of untold significance in human memory. This motif is represented in two places among others. One is in the eighth strophe:


482 JOHN JAY BAKER

Denn zur Freude, mit Geist, wurde das GroBre zu groB Unter den Menschen und noch, noch fehlen die Starken zu hochsten

Freuden, aber es lebt stille noch einiger Dank. (vv. 134-6)

These lines assert the need for a more adequate receptivity in the human subject. At the same time though they suggest that man lives principally in the mode of thanks and reflection, as a being defined by its steady occupation with a "has been." Thus, in the penultimate distich of the eighth strophe one reads: "Darum denken wir auch dabei der Himmlischen, die sonst / Da gewesen und die kehren in richtiger Zeit." If this is the characteristic attitude of man in this age, then the reading of "zu spat" at the beginning of the seventh strophe is revised to mean that significance, meaningful presence, is always only retrospectively construed. "Zu spat," then, does not say one could, under other conditions, be more punctual, only that these conditions, the historical conditions in which and for which the poem speaks, are "late."

The attitude of retrospection is not, however, a mere sinking into the past. As seen, the memory of the elegy is of something missed, or lost, which is also projected as the returning or arriving (as in vv. 139-40, quoted above). Retrospection and prolepsis or, to use Schiller's terms again, elegy and idyll repeatedly shade into each other through the sequences "zu spat ... biB daB . . indessen." Hblderlin's retrospection thus converts into the projection of a future. This can be seen in another example of the belatedness motif:

Was der Alten Gesang von Kindern Gottes geweissagt, Siehe! wir sind es, wir; Frucht von Hesperien ists!

Wunderbar und genau ists als an Menschen erfUllet, Glaube, wer es geprilft! aber so vieles geschieht,

Keines wirket, denn wir sind herzlos, Schatten, bis unser Vater Aether erkannt jeden und allen geh6rt.

Aber indessen kommt als Fakelschwinger des Hochsten Sohn, der Syrier, unter die Schatten herab.

(vv. 149-56)

These lines exhibit the same sequence as those noted in the seventh strophe. They begin with a claim of fulfilled prophecy, but then move into the familiar alteration from "aber" to "bis" to "indessen." Again, the contrast is between the abundance of expecta- tion and the seeming meagerness of return: "so vieles geschieht /


M L N 483

Keines wirket" parallels "Nur zu Zeiten ertragt gottliche FUlle der Mensch / Traum von ihnen ist drauf das Leben." Yet this despair, or "Herzlosigkeit," modulates into the vision of a coming god, am- biguously figured as the "Fakelschwinger," "der Syrier." To ask who the figure is though is to destroy by overdetermining the fu- tural, projective dimension of the poem's discourse. Like the image of the wandering priests at the end of the seventh strophe (vv. 123-4), it draws on the mythological narratives surrounding both Christ and Dionysus without committing itself to either. The discourse of H6lderlin's elegy does not syncretize the paradigms of Greek and Christian myth, it disperses them, fragmenting rather than solidifying them so that they retain their heuristic value for the imaginative narration of past and future. Hence the poem's mode of statement implicitly says there would never be a time in which the need to reimagine and renarrate the past would be su- perseded. In a very precise sense the discourse of BW is mythological: like every myth and rite, its work is fragmentary and therefore endless.27 The interrupted character of the discourse of BW as it moves among temporal perspectives is the clue to this infer- ence.

The special handling of myth in BW creates a circularity of reference. The projective is also the retrospective, the myths to which the poem appeals positive forms which it would break open to disclose another and new angle of refraction. Yet in doing this the elegy singularly lacks specificity: it does not create a new myth, it does not house or reveal a new historical reality. This is no weak- ness, but a sign of the text's discretion. This point can be made with reference to the fourth strophe. In the first five distichs of the strophe the subject is the decline of Greece, a decline lamented in a series of "ubi sunt" questions. The latter half of the strophe, however, modulates into an increasingly presentational evocation of the Greek "G6ttertag":

Vater Aether! so riefs und flog von Zunge zu Zunge Tausendfach, es ertrug keiner das Leben allein;

Ausgetheilt erfreut solch Gut und getauschet, mit Fremden, Wirds ein Jubel, es wachst schlafend des Wortes Gewalt:

Vater! heiter! und hallt, so weit es gehet, das uralt

27 On this aspect of myth, see Levi-Strauss's Le cru et le cuit (English: The Raw and the Cooked). For the connection of this with myth in Holderlin I am indebted to Manfred Frank (1982) 297.


484 JOHN JAY BAKER

Zeichen, von Eltern geerbt, treffend und schaffend hinab. Denn so kehren die Himmlischen ein, tiefschtitternd gelangt so

Aus den Schatten herab unter die Menschen ihr Tag. (vv. 65-72)

The order of statement here is telling for the way in which the elegiac lament of the first half of the strophe commutes into a vision of the return of a vanished divine presence. Significantly, that return is figured as the rapid transmission of a sign: "so riefs und flog von Zunge zu Zunge / . .. und hallt, so weit es gehet, das uralt / Zeichen ...." Taking recourse to the mythic event of an original, archaic revelation ("das uralt / Zeichen"), the elegy projects a repetition of the original revelation of the sign as "Vater Aether ... Vater! heiter!," the second H6lderlin's Germanicization and ho- mophonic doubling of the Greek "aither." But in a movement characterisic of the entire elegy we are brought up to the brink of that revelation and then denied it. The elegy both simulates the event of revelation and denies the adequacy of its language to de- liver such.28 This denial is no failure, but a gesture of discretion. From the point of view of the elegy's non-positive and circular manner of statement, it is thoroughly consistent. Rather than lift into an epiphanic mode-a genre of poetic discourse BW notably eschews, and in whose eschewal it is distinct from a text like Keats's "Ode to Psyche"-the elegy then converts into the post-epiphanic mode of the fifth strophe.29 "Post-epiphanic," because although superficially the fifth strophe presents divine appearance, or epiphany, in fact it narrates the divine's sufferings of the vicissitudes of temporality. Again, as in the seventh strophe, the ground

28 Running alongside this is another theme I have not highlighted and which would require extensive separate treatment. The notation on the fourth strophe, "es ertrug keiner das Leben allein," marks the mythical time of divine presence as one of full human community as well. As such, it implicitly judges the present to be an empty, alienated time and anticipates v. 120: "wie so ohne Genossen zu seyn." But this isolation should not be absolutized, as it, too, belongs in the temporal sequence of the elegy: it is both asserted as the present state and anticipatively over- come in the projection of a renewed human community: "bis unser / Vater Aether erkanntjeden und allen gehort" (vv. 153-4). On this, see also M. Frank, 1982.

29 Here I am dissenting from the reading of BW by Lawrence Kramer in "The Return of the Gods: Keats to Rikel," in Studies in Romanticism, vol. 17, No. 4: 483-500. I cannot accept Kramer's intention to fit BW into his argument for a "theophanic genre" (p. 484), principally because the elegy includes neither any pe- tition to the god nor any imaginative attempt to induce the god's (re-)appearance, traits which he finds characteristic of this "genre." On the other hand, Kramer's remarks on Keat's "Ode to Psyche" as a theophanic poem are strikingly apposite.


M L N 485

note of the strophe is encapsulated in a laconic aside: "M6glichst dulden die Himmlischen diB" (v. 81).

With this we have returned to the portion of the fifth strophe with which this section began. There it was argued that the contrast between "Unempfunden kommen sie erst" and "dann aber in Wahrheit / Kommen sie selbst" is not a substantial one, as in Jo- chen Schmidt's view, but rather an irony of existence in time which the poem's discourse traces. Whether this irony extends to the gods is another question. The statement quoted above, "Mdglischst dulden die Himmlischen diB," can be interpreted either as tragic irony, insofar as the irony is directed at the incapacities of the human subject outlined in the strophe, or as the irony of "indifference": what the gods offer ("es sorget mit Gaben / Selber ein Gott fur ihn," vv. 89-90) is offered blindly, one might almost say negli- gently, because offered out of an abundance or surplus of being. This should not be taken to mean the degree of indifference is absolute. In H6lderlin's universe the heavenly "need" man and the memory of man in order that their appearance have the definition of an image, or shape, be given a name.30 If the temporality of experience is problematic, it is nonetheless not beyond that temporality but within it that the heavenly can receive or assume appearance. For this reason, past forms become exemplary, though, to be sure, more through the mere fact of their having come to be than through what they can still positively represent.

IV. In the first existing draft BW was entitled "Der Weingott." The

subsequent drafts of the poem do not alter that fact so much as they probe more intricately and closely the discursive possibilities

30 But if the heavenly need man, it is also true that man may not identify with the heavenly. Again, against Schmidt this is the meaning of "zu hell kommet, zu blendend das Gluck" (v. 74): it is not that man is an inadequate vessel of reception for the heavenly, but that he belongs to another element in which he must abide. Hence, silence is also no refuge, much rather a threat. The hymn "Friedensfeier" provides a gloss here:

Eimal mag aber ein Gott auch Tagewerk erwahlen, Gleich Sterblichen und teilen alles Schicksal. Schicksalgesetz ist dies, daB Alle sich erfahren, DaB, wenn die Stille kehrt, auch eine Sprache sei.

As "Friedensfeier" was not discovered until 1954, it did not appear in StA 2,2 but was appended to StA 3. I am citing it from KStA 3, 429-30.


486 JOHN JAY BAKER

of the motifs linked with the figure Dionysus: wandering, exile and return, founding and overturning of cultures. Lines written toward yet a further revision of the elegy (probably in 1803) em- phasize the im-propriety which the god Dionysus instances:

Glaube, wer es gepruft! nemlich zu Hause ist der Geist Nicht im Anfang, nicht an der Quell. Ihn zehret die Heimath.

Kolonie liebt, und tapfer Vergessen der Geist. (FHA 6, 262: 155-7)

That Dionysus is not at home in the origin is the correlate of his identity as the god of arrival: he is the god of changing aspects. When he appears in the third strophe as the "kommende," the "zu-kiinftige" god, he points to Greece as an historical occurrence, not, however, to Greece as the land in which the god would appear again under the name "Dionysus." In BW historical Greece is a monument, a silent ruin. (In this respect, note especially the fourth and sixth strophes.) Interpretations which stress the nostalgia and the Grecian shape, or image, of the poem have habitually underestimated the extent to which the presence, or image, of Greece in the poem is a symbolic one with a symbolic function and not an object of mourning with which the poem's subject identifies itself. Instead, the elegy's language looks forward to a time in which the "laughing" god can again emerge. In the meantime the Greek landscape is the one against which the poet experiences both the extinction of the Greek world ("Thebe welkt und Athen . v. 100) and the riddle of his own identity: "So zu harren und was zu thun indeB und zu sagen, / WeiB ich nicht und wozu Dichter in durftiger Zeit?" (vv. 121-2). Undeniably, the poet's attention is stuck on "Greece" as a paradigm for his own experience. Yet this fixation would only be of critical importance to interpretation if the text referred itself universally to a "Greek experience" as the source of its own categories. As the discussion in the second section above served to show, however, by the time of BW Holderlin had behind him a well established dialogue with the Greeks in which the differences in their respective historical points of departure and the need for the present to establish its own direction ("unsere besondere Richtung") were thematic.

Rhetorically, one might well point out that "Greece" in BW does not designate an historical place or presence, but instead a literary topos. What the text does is participate in and further the textual fiction "Greece." However little may or should be denied (and r do


M L N 487

not wish to deny it), it is also no substitute for a simultaneous approach to the text as an interpretative effort to grasp preceding history and its texts as projections of a future which, precisely as a dimension of historical being, will always solicit interpretation as the outstanding. This solicitation presupposes a circularity, though not a vicious circularity. The circularity of reference in BW whereby a future is anticipated by recourse to a past, issues in manner of citing the past so that it points potentially yet non-teleo- logically to as yet unrealized possibilities.3' The circularity of reference in BW is, to borrow Nietzsche's terms from the essay in Un- zeitgemdJfe Betrachtungen, at once monumental, antiquarian and critical. As such, its circularity does not devolve into the vicious circularity of textual self-referentiality, in which BW would only be repeating and perpetrating tropes. Instead, it discovers in such repetition the means to treat the fragments of Greece (which in- clude the texts which accrued to and sedimented around "Greece") as the "membra disiecta" of history from which other historical worlds may be re-membered, imagined.32

31 On the potentially positive character of circularity of reference, see Hei- degger's famous dictum on the "hermeneutic circle" in Sein und Zeit 32. M. Hei- degger, Gesamtausgabe Band 2, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977) 197-204, esp. 203-4 (in earlier editions pp. 148-53). The reader will note that the parallels I am suggesting between Heidegger's hermeneutic procedures in Sein und Zeit and the sequence of statement in BW do not lead in any necessary way to Heidegger's own Holderlin interpretations [Erlduter- ungen zu H6lderlins Dichtung (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1971/81)]. In fact, the discrepancy between the principles of interpretation in Sein und Zeit and the procedures of the "Erlkuterungen" has often been noted, as by Paul de Man in Blindness and Insight (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971; reprinted Minne- apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983) 30/1. Ultimately, this is not only a question of H6lderlin interpretation, but one about Heidegger's use of art in his attempt to rethink ontology. Ironically, from H6lderlin's point of view, Heidegger probably overtaxes the work of art in his insistence on its capacity to instantiate dimensions of being "metaphysical-technological" language obscures and forgets. This last remark, though, is strictly preliminary. A new work, beyond Beda Allemann's H6l- derlin und Heidegger (Zurich: Atlantis Verlag, 1954) is needed.

32 On the "unity" of Nietzsche's threefold distinction of historiography as "monumental, antiquarian and critical," see the pointed remark by Heidegger in Sein und Zeit, p. 523 (earlier editions, p. 396): "Er [Nietzsche] unterscheidet drei Arten von Historie: die monumentalische, antiquarische und kritische, ohne die Notwendig- keit dieser Dreiheit und den Grund ihrer Einheit ausdrficklich aufzuweisen. Die Dreifachheit der Historie ist in der Geschichtlichkeit des Daseins vorgezeichnet. Diese laBt zugleich verstehen, inwiefern eigentliche Historie die faktisch konkrete Einheit dieser drei Moglichkeiten sein muB. Nietzsches Einteilung ist nicht zufallig. Der Anfang seiner Betrachtung ladt vermuten, dal3 er mehr verstand als er kundgab."


488 JOHN JAY BAKER

From this perspective it ought to be clear why the shape of Greece and, in particular, of the gods in BW is a general and non- specific one. They function primarily as heuristics-pointers to that which they cannot possibly disclose. And in this perspective the nature of the emphasis on Dionysus also becomes clear: "Dionysus" stands for the mobility of the mythic name, its capacity to act in a purely functional (i.e., non-identical) way, so that new meanings devolve onto it. It is of strategic importance for understanding H6lderlin's text to note that although the text is occupied by myth, it contains relatively few proper names, mythic or other- wise. Significantly, when names do occur, they occur as isolated integers in the discourse, which, instead of bringing a meaning with themselves, acquire one through their function. The name does not en-title for Holderlin something or someone already established and present. The name functions as a call or appeal for meaning which transpires within the text. That this perpetual, text-immanent transference of meaning is a Dionysian trait is even more strongly suggested by Holderlin's later emendation of the final line of the third strophe:

Dorther kommt und da lachet verpflanzet, der Gott. (FHA 6, 259:54)33

No name for Holderlin is absolute, not, to be sure, that of Dionysus himself. To the contrary, the mythical name is there to be bent, to be reshaped. In an extremely pointed phrase in his

33 That meaning in a text is something constituted by a movement of transference and substitution in the text and not something derived from a center in which the text is grounded is a point well made by Jacques Derrida in LWcriture et la difference (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1967) 411: "Le substitut ne se substitue a rien qui lui ait en quelque sorte pr~exist6. Des lors on a dui sans doute commencer 'a penser qu'il n'y avait pas de centre, que le centre ne pouvait etre pense dans la forme d'un etant-present, que le centre n'avait pas un lieu fixe mais une fonction, une sorte de non-lieu dans lequel sejouaient a linfini des substitutions de signes. C'est alors le moment oii le langage envahit le champ problematique universel; c'est alors le moment oui, en labsence de centre ou d'origine, tout devient discours . . . c'est-a-dire systeme dans lequel le signifie central, originaire ou transcendental, n'est jamais absolument present hors d'un systeme de differences." Yet if signification is a movement of substitutions within the discourse, we nevertheless want to be able to characterize that movement. Or, if there is no center but only something in the function of a center, that is still something, even if no "thing" in Derrida's sense of "etant." With respect to BW, we may say "Greece" is in fact "no place" and "Dionysus," "the coming god" and "the god who laughs" successive substitutions for something unidentifiable and non-identical, in short, a play of differences. That movement within difference, however, names something that is not simply the ab- sence of a transcendental signified. Holderlin's highly differentiated text gets at a question Derrida slides by.


M L N 489

essay "Parataxis," Adorno refers to Holderlin's "Brechung der Namen":

Die Differenz zwischen den Namen und dem Absoluten, die er nicht verdeckt und die als allegorische Brechung sein Werk durchfurcht, ist das Medium der Kritik an dem falschen Leben, wo die Seele ihr gottlich Recht nicht ward. Durch solche Distanz der Dichtung, ihr gesteigert idealisches Pathos, entragt Holderlin dem idealistischen Bannkreis.

...) die Holderlinschen Abstrakta sind so wenig wie Leitworte Evoka- tionen von Sein unmittelbar. Ihr Gebrauch wird determiniert von der Brechung der Namen. In diesen bleibt stets ein UberschuI3 dessen, was sie wollen und nicht erreichen.34

The pathos Adorno detects in Holderlin's allegory of the name may be connected with later lines of the poet written toward a revision of "Patmos":

... Begreiffen mtissen DiB wir zuvor. Wie Morgenluft sind nemlich die Nahmen Seit Christus. Werden Traume. Fallen, wie Irrtum, Auf das Herz und todtend, wenn nicht einer

Erwaget, was sie sind, und begreift. (StA 2,1. 182:162-66)

Taken together with Adorno's remarks, these fragmentary verses attest trenchantly to the double aspect of allegory in Holderlin, namely both the fragility and the weightiness which devolve on the name when it is isolated and reduced to itself, as it is already in BW and then increasingly in the hymns. The names are fragile inas- much as they are overburdened with a significance to which they can only obliquely point. But precisely on account of this attribution they can be made to assume that significance and so effect mortal error, illusion, deception. For to invest the attested significance in the name itself is to invert the direction of the allegorical relation and so to hypostatize the name. But this is exactly the kind of positive attribution, or positive determination, of meaning that Holderlin (along with the young Hegel, Schleiermacher, and Schelling as well) wanted to avoid. Names are essential to Holder- lin's discourse; but they are essential as factors of discourse, not as conjurers of meaning in themselves. Their real relation is quite the reverse of this. Names in Holderlin have, as moments of discourse,

34Theodor W. Adorno, Noten zur Literature, in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tie- demann (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974), vol. 11: 463.


490 JOHN JAY BAKER

a belated and provisional relation to what they attest. Rather than create meaning, they serve to articulate one that is indubitably, even excessively present (Adorno: "ein UberschuB dessen", etc.,). As seen, this relation of surplus of meaning and the belatedness of the receptive poet-subject is eminently articulate in the seventh strophe of BW: "Nur zu Zeiten ertragt gdttliche Fulle der Mensch. / Traum von ihnen ist drauf das Leben" (vv. 114-5). If the life of the dream names the time in which the poet lives, then names and the discourse to which they belong have the status of dream-work: they are, as it were, the run-off of a dream dreamt in memory of a grounding but inaccessible, hence nameless, event. Holderlin knew that language cannot tell or narrate this event except in the shape of a myth. (Though, to be sure, a myth whose form the discourse of the poem has reinvented.) Just here, however, where myth must be most fluid and productive, discourse must be at its most precise and crystalline. In the "Brechung der Namen" the poem works at a level of abstraction from events and perceptions which enables its discourse to function as if it were simply the re- porting of an absolute content with a minimum of comment and interpretation.

If this last remark seems to conflict with my view that BW is an interpretative archeology of the name, that is only because these apparently colliding theses hit upon an irreducible duality at the heart of H6lderlin's poetry and poetics: that a mode of statement which has reached such a high degree of reduction, or condensa- tion, intends to be fully unambiguous at the same time that it opens itself up to a multiplicity of interpretations. And indeed this is one of the ways in which Holderlin's text is most valuable to us. It displays tenaciously the difference between the generality of reference in poetic language and the precision in its order of statement. While this duality drives the reader into a perennially circular contemplation of the origin of meaning in the text, it also demands that the reader's interpretation be measured against the task which the poem sets itself. In BW that task is to display in its own order of statement the conditions of poetic naming.35

In the world of BW the problem of poetic naming is articulated in view of a programmatic opposition between the labor of language and the ease of divine revelation. The two describe not only

35 That every text implicitly has a task against which it asks to be measured is a critical thematic developed to some degree by Benjamin in the opening pages Qf his essay "Zwei Gedichte von Friedrich Holderlin," Benjamin, ibid, 105-08.


M L N 491

two different conditions but two differing temporalities, better seen as simultaneously existing dimensions of historical time than as historical versus supra-historical time. These two realms are never the same, as the dream is never the same as the dream-work, as the unconscious can never be pulled up into the conscious without losing its character as the unconscious. For this reason, the wish that words "arise" with the ease of nature or divine revelation is a belated wish, one that will always be made nostalgically, elegiacally. In the "mean-time" the labor of making language and the idea of a language which would name the "dearest" with the ease of natural origination are inseparable in thought if widely divided in deed:

Tragen muB er, zuvor; nun aber nennt er sein Liebstes, Nun, nun mussen dafur Worte, wie Blumen, entstehn.

(vv. 89_9O)36

That this wished for condition will never obtain is finally of less consequence for the sequence of statement in the poem than the fact that it stands heuristically as a horizon of meaning for the poem's activity: not to furnish names with new meanings but to give the new meanings which emerge in the discourse of the poem the function of names.37 By completely transferring the text's au-

36 In an influential essay entitled "Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image," now reprinted in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984) 1-17, Paul de Man isolates this distich from the rest of the poem and discusses it as an example of the, presumably, generic romantic image, i.e. as an image "grounded in the intrinsic ontological primacy of the natural object" (p. 7). In this view the poetic image is symptomatic of a nostalgia for the originary character of the natural object, "nostalgia [which] can only exist when the transcendental presence is forgotten" (p. 6). As the present paper has argued, though, the difference between word and object, transcendental presence and the temporality of existence is never forgotten in the elegy, is instead made thematic by Holderlin in the com- plex structure of statement. De Man's interpretation is only possible because it takes the distich out of the sequence of statement in the text and treats it as an individual trope. There is certainly much romantic discourse where this would be valid, but H6lderlin's is not it. The Holderlin text is built on gradations, or modulations, of voice and statement. These modulations are sometimes gradual, as in the long rhythms of BW, or steep and violent, as in the later hymns. In either case they supply the rule within which Holderlin must be treated. De Man implicitly recognizes this in his remark, made "in passing," that his handling of the distich from BW far from exhausts "HW1derlin's own conception of the poetic image" (p. 7).

37 On the commutation of function of name and meaning, see Wolfgang Binder's brief but extremely instructive remark in "H6lderlins Namenssymbolik": "Mit dem Ende der 'Empedokles'-Dichtung ist auch die Grenze der Hdlderlinschen Namens- symbolik erreicht, oder doch nahezu erreicht ... Dann beginnt die Epoche, die nicht mehr Namen mit Bedeutung versieht, sondern Bedeutungen Namensfunk-


492 JOHN JAY BAKER

thority to name to its order, or mode, of statement, Holderlin's elegy performs the task of stating with a precision which perpetu- ally allows for the interpretatively new. In BW the provisional name for emergent meaning is "the coming god," "the god who laughs."

If these concluding remarks are a long way in tone and tenor from H6lderlin's essay on our outlook on the Greeks, they nonetheless belong to a cognate network of concerns. Holderlin's dem- onstration of the problem of poetic naming in the text of BW is an instantiation of the principle of change in literature briefly enunci- ated in the "Gesichtspunct" fragment. To understand a path to the present so that one is alive in that understanding ("lebendig": one of Holderlin's favorite words) and not simply reviving the dead, does not mean to reiterate that path but rather through insight ("aus Einsicht") to change direction. But the difference between the prose text and the discourse of BW is that whereas the former remains a theoretical prescription the latter is charged with founding in its own mode of statement a time in which the rhyth- mical process of change and transition can be celebrated.

University of Tulsa

tion gibt; davon war die Rede." W. Binder, Hblderlin-Aufsdtze (Frankfurt: Insel Verlag, 1970) 258. This remark was, in a certain sense, the origin of the present essay. Insofar as Binder suggests the function of names in H6lderlin's poetry from c. 1800 can only be articulated in terms of structure and function, it is a more commensurate perspective in H6lderlin's work than that tentatively offered by de Man above or that offered by Kramer, as in n. 29 above.


Article Contentsp. [465]p. 466p. 467p. 468p. 469p. 470p. 471p. 472p. 473p. 474p. 475p. 476p. 477p. 478p. 479p. 480p. 481p. 482p. 483p. 484p. 485p. 486p. 487p. 488p. 489p. 490p. 491p. 492

Issue Table of ContentsMLN, Vol. 101, No. 3, German Issue (Apr., 1986), pp. 461-738Front Matter [pp. ]One Hundred Years of German Studies in MLN [pp. 461-464]The Problem of Poetic Naming in Hlderlin's Elegy "Brod und Wein"[pp. 465-492]The Stage-Struck Wilhelm Meister and 18th-Century Psychiatric Medicine [pp. 493-515]Die Friedens-Utopie im europischen Humanismus: Versuch einer geschichtlichen Rekonstruktion[pp. 516-552]"Links und rechts umlauert": Zu einem symbolischen Schema in Fontanes "Effi Briest" [pp. 553-591]Three Unpublished August Wilhelm Schlegel Letters in the Kurrelmeyer Collection [pp. 592-608]Heine as Weltbrger? A Skeptical Inquiry[pp. 609-628]Christine Busta and Das Kinderlied: An Exploration [pp. 629-658]Mephistopheles as an Aristophanic Devil [pp. 659-669]Vergesellschaftung in Mren Transmission: Peter Schmieher's "Der Student von Prag"[pp. 670-694]NotesZu Heines "Wo?" [pp. 695-696]Anatol Ludwig Stiller alias James Larkin White: Ein Beitrag zur Arbeitsweise Max Frischs [pp. 697-704]

ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 705-706]Review: untitled [pp. 706-708]Review: untitled [pp. 708]Review: untitled [pp. 709-710]Review: untitled [pp. 710-713]Review: untitled [pp. 713-715]Review: untitled [pp. 715-721]Review: untitled [pp. 721-722]Review: untitled [pp. 722-724]Review: untitled [pp. 725-726]Review: untitled [pp. 727-729]Review: untitled [pp. 729-731]Review: untitled [pp. 731-732]Review: untitled [pp. 732]Review: untitled [pp. 733]Review: untitled [pp. 733]Review: untitled [pp. 733-734]Review: untitled [pp. 734]Review: untitled [pp. 734-735]Review: untitled [pp. 735]Review: untitled [pp. 735-736]Review: untitled [pp. 736]Review: untitled [pp. 736]Review: untitled [pp. 737]Review: untitled [pp. 737]Review: untitled [pp. 737-738]Review: untitled [pp. 738]

List of Books Received [pp. ]Back Matter [pp. ]

1 Hleb i Vino Imenovanje

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