Self-Regulation, Reception and Ridicule in Hölderlin’s Hyperion

Self-Regulation, Reception and Ridicule in Hölderlin’s Hyperion Kirk Wetters (bio) I. Hyperion’s Enigmatic Character “Ein Scherz des Weisen, und das Räthsel sollte fast nicht gelöst werden.” [A philosopher’s joke, and the enigma shall become almost insoluble.] (Friedrich Hölderlin, „Pindar-Fragment: Das Unendliche”) Hyperion’s characteristic” tone can be described: lyrical beauty combined with paradoxical and often contradictory general formulations, frequently “in the form of exclamations; the latter reveal an unmistakable pathos, which serves to personalize, relativize, and critically undermine often quasi-philosophical claims of the epistolary narrator and protagonist of Hyperion. These features can be joined to produce an altered perspective on both novel and protagonist: situations that Hyperion narrates with profound pathos may appear comical, or at least come close to it, depending on the reader’s willingness to read between the lines of what is told. This potential for comedy has often been overlooked by readings that seek to normalize the work within well-known (and rather earnest) paradigms like the Bildungsroman. Hyperion’s lyricism also has the potential to undercut the comic elements: it is easy to be taken in by his rhetorical talents, by the beauty and rhythm of the text, its obvious craft. The lyrical-philosophical side of the text makes a powerful claim for its own autonomy. And Hölderlin [End Page 534] himself is generally understood—not wrongly—as a profoundly, abyssally serious author. Thus, without refuting these understandings, the present essay hopes to demonstrate an equally abyssal comic dimension at work in Hölderlin’s only novel, which can be read as a comedy of the suffering idealist (in the tradition of Goethe’s Werther and Tasso). The attempt to talk about humor in Hyperion inevitably focuses on novelistic, narratival, and situational aspects. This does not mean that one must ignore the novel’s obtrusively high tone, but it requires a narrative contextualization of the lyrical tone. The representation of lyrical affects through an effusive and antisocial narrator does not allow these lyric expressions any purity or autonomy. Like Werther but even more extreme, Hyperion pushes the ambiguity concerning the status of the protagonist’s words to the limit without resolving the novel into anything like a unified perspective. This problem of the mixed status of Hyperion’s words forces the reader to regulate, to reconcile the dissonances between quasi-comical situations and the hyperbolical intensity of Hyperion’s linguistic self-assertion. The specific inversion at issue, which leaves the reader laughing at the protagonist, is constantly thematized in the novel itself: Hyperion’s enthusiasm often makes him an object of mockery and ridicule. Overemphasizing such reversals will make him look foolish and progressively undermine the credibility of the narrative (assuming credibility is the relevant category here). To read humor in Hyperion therefore means provisionally joining those who oppose and mock the novel’s hero. Uncertainty about how what is narrated is to be taken introduces the possibility that the novel’s humor is unintentional: the reader’s perverseness is to blame. Such a claim presupposes a fixed authorial intent in order to posit a proper and authentic reading. This general hermeneutic problem is a real dilemma in the case of Hyperion: even if the reader’s insensitivity alone makes the novel seem comical, the structural possibility of this kind of mis-reception must be admitted and then discounted from the author’s intention (as established elsewhere). In this case, the blame is placed with the author who has proven unable to unambiguously regulate the novel’s tone. Readers of the novel have therefore typically either identified with the socially ostracized protagonist (who is implicitly identified with the author), or have judged that the inadequate differentiation of author and hero, producing ambiguously comic effects, are the symptoms of a second-rate novel. [End Page 535] Hyperion’s preface (Vorrede) provides an important (if cryptic) insight into the novel’s intents. This extremely brief avis au lecteur makes no claims to the veracity, probability, or the didactic value of the text to follow. Instead, it denounces both learning (at least in the form of a moral, dogma, or “fabula docet”) and enjoyment (Lust) in a

Aesthetics · Art · Beauty · Character (mathematics) · Comedy · Comics · Elegance · Literature · Pathos · German Literature and Culture Studies · Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Hegel · Philosophy · Philosophy and Historical Thought