Hyperion
Page 17
Unlike the earlier work, however, in which the letter-writing protagonist reports his experiences from day to day, in Hyperion the letters written by the eponymous Greek recluse to his German friend Bellarmin portray his life in retrospect. Thus the novel begins after Hyperion has already returned to his native Greece from a deeply dispiriting sojourn in Germany that is not fully described until toward the end. He has withdrawn from the sorrows and disillusionments of the world into his hermitage and begun to reflect mournfully on his past joys, longings and strivings. Situated in time after Hyperion’s entire life-story has already unfolded, the opening letter is a lament that casts its shadow over all the recollected events that follow. This interplay between past and present is in keeping with the “elegiac character” that Hölderlin ascribes to his protagonist in the novel’s preface. Seemingly only a slight variation on the traditional epistolary form, it imparts to the novel a constant tonal fluctuation that enhances the work’s aesthetic power and emotional poignancy.
In the preface, Hölderlin articulates the novel’s central theme as “the resolution of dissonances in a certain character.” The tale of Hyperion’s striving for harmonious unity recounts his aesthetic, political, philosophical, spiritual and amorous education. The story highlights the pivotal phases of his life, from his discovery of the vanished glory of antiquity, through his encounter with his beloved Diotima, who personifies the intimacy with nature and the divine peace with the world for which he yearns, to his participation in a Greek uprising against Ottoman Turkish tyranny.
For his descriptions of the Greek setting, Hölderlin borrowed extensively from travel books. Like many prominent German philhellenes, including Winckelmann and Goethe, he never actually set foot in Greece. And yet his encounters with Hellenic culture through his translations of Sophocles and Pindar were perhaps more intimate than many a traveler’s impressions – though ridiculed by his contemporaries for their extreme literalness and foreignness, these renderings later became recognized as some of the most authentic translations of Greek ever attained. As Hölderlin remarks in the preface to Hyperion, making his protagonist a Greek of the eighteenth century was crucial to the novel’s thematic framework. Hyperion grieves over the lost splendor of ancient times. He idealizes his native country’s illustrious past as an age of fulfillment in contrast to the destitution of the present. For Hyperion, ancient Greece represents a mode of life in serene, joyful accord with nature and the divine, suffused with love of beauty and the spirit of freedom. Only in fleeting moments of enthusiasm has Hyperion experienced a sense of oneness with the universe. Cast down from this spiritual summit, he has been oppressed by the vapidity, disharmony and injustice of his century. In the hope of restoring the greatness of the ancient Athenian republic in a future liberated state, he takes part in the Greek revolution against the Ottomans. Because this renewal would remedy an age of decline, in Hyperion’s view it would augur a future even greater than the Greek past: “Is not convalescing life worth more to the heart than the pure life that does not yet know sickness? Not until youth is gone do we love it, and then not until lost youth returns does it delight all the depths of the soul.”
Hyperion’s decision to join the battle for liberation dramatizes Hölderlin’s own revolutionary impulses. The tension in Hyperion’s character between the visionary enthusiast and the freedom fighter reflects the author’s inner conflicts about the role of the artist in political change. Echoing Schiller’s conviction that the poet’s task is to transform the consciousness of the people – to promote, as he phrased it, the “aesthetic education of mankind” – Diotima urges Hyperion to be an Erzieher, or “educator,” of his people. But Hyperion feels drawn to political action beyond what can be accomplished with words and ideas. “I have become too idle,” he complains. He chides himself for attempting “to make do with words, and conjure the world with magic formulas.” His words, he states, “are like snowflakes, useless, and only make the air murkier.” Though Hyperion may easily be seen as conveying Hölderlin’s own self-reproach in this passage, the novel does not ultimately bear out his ennobling of deeds over words. Hyperion’s career as a man of action ends in failure and despair. If he had heeded Diotima’s advice, he might not have been any more effectual as an agent of revolutionary change, but his beloved might at least still be alive, and he might not have been driven into seclusion by his unassuageable grief and disappointment.
Throughout the novel, Hyperion seeks to be at one with the world, at home in it. Yet he is pulled in so many different directions. How can the “dissonances” of his character be resolved? The novel ends with the motif of unity within discord – encapsulated for Hyperion in Heraclitus’s notion of the “one differentiated in itself” – now encompassing the world rather than just a single individual: “The dissonances of the world are like lovers’ strife. In the midst of the quarrel is reconciliation, and all that is separated comes together again. The arteries part and return in the heart, and all is one eternal, glowing life.” Stylistically, the text of Hyperion illustrates this drawing together of what is divided through a plethora of similes. The word wie, meaning “like” or “as,” recurs probably more than any other word in the novel, thus arousing the reader’s awareness of the correspondences, affinities and interrelationships among all things, whether mortal, godly or natural. At the same time, the novel’s final words, “More soon,” suggest that Hölderlin hardly wished to deny the open-endedness and endlessness of conflict. In a letter to Neuffer in 1798, he affirmed the juxtaposition of contrasting “tones” as his primary form of expression:
Because I am more destructible than many others, I must seek all the more to derive an advantage from the things that have a destructive effect on me … I must take them into myself, so as to set them … as shadows to my light, to reproduce them as subordinate tones among which the tone of my soul springs forth all the more vitally.
Hölderlin viewed his artistic technique of varying fundamental and subordinate tones as an outgrowth of his own nature. The character of Hyperion shares many of the author’s most recognizable psychological traits: his propensity to melancholy, his hypersensitivity, his ambivalent apprenticeships to father figures and, most conspicuously, his extremely mutable temperament. Far from simply engaging in self-portrayal, however, Hölderlin transposes the variability of his own disposition into a structural and thematic principle of the novel. The protagonist’s vacillations between elated and despondent moods provide the rhythm of a life’s “rising and sinking, its bliss and its mourning” that lies at the heart of the narrative. There may well be intimations of the author’s own impending mental disturbance in these precipitous emotional shifts, but there is also stunning artistry and a moving vision of life and the world. Through the incessant alternation of tones, Hyperion reveals the interdependence of joy and pain, life and death. This theme is crystallized in the line “the bliss that does not suffer is sleep, and without death there is no life.”
Like his poetry, Hölderlin’s prose sounds endless modulations of emotion and experience. His sentences are distinguished by their musicality, the power of their cadences and tones to express a constant oscillation between heights of pleasure and abysses of grief. Nietzsche paid tribute to the musical character of the novel’s language: “In the euphonious movement of its prose, in the sublimity and beauty of the figures that appear in it, it makes an impression upon me similar to the beat of the waves of the troubled sea. Indeed, this prose is music, soft melting sounds interrupted by painful dissonances, finally expiring in dark, uncanny dirges.”
The novel abounds with musical references, similes and metaphors, and many of Hyperion’s perceptions are described in terms of sound and music. At one point, gazing out upon the undulating sea, he meditates on his life, and his past resounds to him “like a lyre on which the master plays through all tones and blends discord and harmony with hidden order.” The movement between blissful and sorrowful tones is the novel’s principle of composition and th
e source of the elemental force of its language. To hear and reproduce Hölderlin’s singular music is the essential challenge that I have sought to meet in my translation.
R.B.
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