It has been said of both Swift and Gogol that they did everything they could to go mad, and in the end they succeeded. Hölderlin did not seek madness, he had to accept it; but, as Bertaux notes, his conception of madness had nothing to do with our notions of mental illness. It was, rather, something that could or should be inhabited. That is why, when he translates Sophocles’ Ajax, he renders the phrase theiai maniai xynaulos, literally ‘dwelling with divine madness’, as sein Haus ist göttliche Wahnsinn, ‘his house is divine madness’.
his versions appear to aim, as has been aptly observed, at achieving a sort of ‘mimesis’, if not downright ‘mimicry’, of the original’s form.10 Following an approach even Cicero considered misguided, Hölderlin not only translates verbum pro verbo, ‘word for word’, but forces the syntax of his German to adhere to the Greek. His pursuit of a ‘literal’ translation is so obsessive that he freely coins neologisms structured to correspond to the original (the Greek siderocharmes, which dictionaries typically translate as ‘bellicose’, is etymologically rendered eisenerfreuten, ‘iron-happy’)
Philosophy is born when certain individuals realize that they can no longer feel part of a people, that a people like the one poets believed they were addressing does not exist, or that it has become something foreign or hostile. Philosophy is, above all, this exile of a human being among other human beings, the predicament of being a stranger in the city in which the philosopher lives and in which he nevertheless continues to dwell, obstinately addressing an absent people. Socrates epitomized this paradox of the philosophical condition: he became such a stranger to his people that they sentenced him to death; but then, by accepting his sentence, he joins the people once again—as the one whom they have irrevocably expelled.
From a certain moment onwards, at the threshold of modernity, even poets become aware they can no longer address their own people—even the poet understands he is speaking to a people that no longer exists or, if it does, it cannot and does not want to listen to him. Hölderlin himself is the point at which these contradictions explode, and the poet is forced to recognize himself as a philosopher or—as he put it in a letter to Christian Ludwig Neuffer—take refuge in the hospital of philosophy. He realizes that what he lacks, or rather his weak point, is a sense of community with his people—what he referred to as the ‘national’— without which he will never be able to excel poetically. Hence the rupture, the break with earlier poetic forms, the paratactic shattering of the hymn, the stereotypical repetitions of his final quatrains; hence Hölderlin’s unconditional acceptance of the diagnosis—madness— his people ascribed to him. And, nevertheless, he continues writing until the very end, stubbornly seeking out a ‘German song’ in the darkness of night.
Hölderlin’s apparent silence regarding comedy is still more difficult to explain. It is as if, despite having understood that tragedy had become impossible, he simply could not see any way beyond tragedy except through madness—but then madness had to assume the character and manner of a comedy, of ‘sublime mockery’. Hence the exaggerated courtesy with which he simultaneously welcomes visitors and keeps them at a distance, deploying titles like ‘Your Majesty’, ‘Your Holiness’, ‘Your Highness’ and ‘Mister Baron, Sir—oui monsieur . . . ’; hence the nonsensical words he enjoys surprising them with: ‘Pallaksh, pallaksh’, ‘Wari wari’; hence the sublime irony with which he tells those who ask him for a poem, ‘Shall I write about Greece, about spring, or about the spirit of the age?’; or the way he abruptly points out to a visitor, ‘You see gracious sir, a comma!’ while reading a page from his own Hyperion.
Precisely as in Schelling’s account, Hölderlin’s apparently extravagant behaviours are referred to as ‘assumed’ mannerisms, not madness.
He is deemed half mad but perhaps sane, furiously mad and yet visionary: assessments of Hölderlin’s condition continue to oscillate between two radically opposite poles.
And yet commentators do not seem to realize that here, with a sort of theological nihilism which perhaps not even Nietzsche could have managed, the death or absence of God is in no way tragic, nor is it a matter of waiting for another divine figure, as Heidegger suggested in his later work. With a profound and paradoxical intuition—whereby the poet, ‘like ancient Tantalus’, is allowed to see more than he can bear—Hölderlin situates humans’ leave-taking from the gods in the poetic and existential form of an idyll or comedy.
True comedy aims to give a ‘a true but poetically grasped and artistically presented copy of so-called ordinary, habitual life’ (des sogennantes gewöhnlichen . . . Lebens). This in turn is immediately defined as that ‘life that stands in a weaker and more distant relation to the whole and for that very reason will be infinitely significant when it is comprehended poetically, but to a high degree insignificant in itself’.
What happens in comedy is that what is most common and insignificant—ordinary, habitual life— becomes ‘infinitely significant’ (unendlich bedeutend) and, although isolated from its vital context, shows itself as a truth of nature. But isn’t this precisely what, in the thirty-six years he spent holed up in his tower, Hölderlin’s life and poetry stubbornly, exemplarily and comically sought to do? And isn’t ‘habitual’ life the self-same inhabiting, ‘dwelling’ life (wohnend, that is, living according to habits) that appears so distant and done in the last idyll written from that tower? Wenn in die Ferne geht der Menschen wohnend Leben . . . ‘When one’s life of dwelling goes off into the distance . . . ’. In any case, if Hegel defines idylls as ‘poems that are half descriptive and half lyrical, having nature and the seasons as their main subject’, then the poems from the tower—that extreme, incomparable poetic legacy of the West—are, technically, idylls.
Agamben, Hoeldelin's Madness