What then is madness, in its most general but most concrete form, for anyone who immediately challenges any hold that knowledge might have upon it? In all probability, nothing other than the absence of work [“l’absence de l’œuvre”].
—MICHEL FOUCAULT, HISTORY OF MADNESS
IN 1989 the Stadtmuseum of Nürtingen published a handsome catalog to mark the opening of a new standing exhibit honoring one of the city’s most famous sons, Friedrich Hölderlin. The volume features twelve letters selected from the museum’s archive, written between 1828 and 1832 by Hölderlin’s warden, the master carpenter Ernst Zimmer. Reproduced on color plates, Zimmer’s reports promised a privileged glimpse of the poet who since 1807, upon being judged insane by family, friends, and local authorities, was consigned to the tower room above the carpenter’s house in Tübingen. The correspondence, however, graciously transcribed by the editors, Thomas Scheuffelen and Angela Wagner-Gnan, in fact contributes nothing new to Hölderlin’s fateful biography (Friedrich Beißner had already included a transcription of them in his critical edition). The scanty testimony, moreover, hardly offers a vivid portrait of the man. Still, something is communicated, or rather related, namely, the fact—perfectly obvious and terribly simple—that this unique, nonrepeatable life had existed. The faded sepia lines, together with the official governmental stamps, enhance the documentary quality of the pages. The life of the poet, now gone, is thereby displayed, suspended in epistolary formaldehyde, disinfected and preserved for posterity. This concrete evidence, although barely illuminating the author’s life and even less his work, points nonetheless to the poet’s singularity, to the person extrinsic to and therefore in excess of the work.
What is most striking, above all, is the collection’s title. Quoted from one of Zimmer’s last letters, it is as directive as it is descriptive and charged with especial significance:
« … die Winter Tage
bringt Er meistens am Forte Piano zu … »
(“… he usually spends the winter days at the pianoforte …”)
The words, doubly protected by quotation marks and ellipsis points, provocatively conjure the image of the mad musician. The citation-cum-title comes across as an invitation to consider the solitary life that followed a poetic career emphatically as musical. The figure of the neurotically tempered pianist begs the passerby to listen for the music that accompanied the sad downfall. Introduced into the silence of the nox mentis are the sounds of improvisations, the precise nature of which one can only guess: Some incomprehensible, shapeless melody? A phrase recalled from childhood? The aimless modulation of triads? Or perhaps an uncanny threnody vainly reaching out for an absent god? Whatever it may have been, the sound was lost upon emission. Hölderlin’s moments musicaux bear no opus number.
Among the many issues that make this anecdote pertinent is the dogged tenacity—as late as 1989—of the wholly romantic coupling of music and madness. The portrait of Hölderlin presented here could be conflated with a host of figures, historical and fictional, who share a similar fate. One is reminded, for example, of that other tragic hero of the nineteenth century, Friedrich Nietzsche, who, according to his many hagiographers, spent his last days in Turin alone at the piano, lost in frenzied meandering. We are thus asked to consider Hölderlin’s derangement overall (“meistens”) as a fall—or an ascent, which here amounts to the same—to music. The case of Nietzsche—der Fall Nietzsche—reinforces the implication, namely, that after the word has been exhausted—be it the logos of philosophical inquiry or the verse of lyric poetry—there is only madness and music. The image of Hölderlin at the piano, speechlessly looking out at the frozen waters of the Neckar, suggests that language had run its course. As if words no longer worked. As if writing had become impossible.
When Hölderlin does write—and, according to Zimmer and other witnesses, the occasions across these three decades are decidedly few—he writes in fragments, in a language that is broken into pieces, disarticulated, and obscure. Now and then, however, he pens brief, relatively coherent poems devoted to the seasons. Reminiscent of children’s songs, the lines appear to reintroduce music to language.
Wenn aus der Tiefe kommt der Frühling in das Leben,
Es wundert sich der Mensch, und neue Worte streben
Aus Geistigkeit, die Freude kehret wieder
Und festlich machen sich Gesang und Lieder.
Das Leben findet sich aus Harmonie der Zeiten,
Daß immerdar den Sinn Natur und Geist geleiten,
Und die Vollkommenheit ist Eines in dem Geiste,
So findet vieles sich, und aus Natur das meiste.
d. 24 Mai 1758
Mit Unterthänigkeit Scardanelli
(When from the depth spring comes into life
Mankind marvels, and new words strive
Out of intellect, joy turns round
And festively there appear song and sound.
Life is to be found in the harmony of the seasons,
So that evermore nature and spirit escort sense,
And perfection is one in the spirit,
Thus much is to be found, and from nature the most.
24 May 1758
Your humble servant, Scardanelli)
The evocation of vitality and wonder, novelty and song, expresses an experience of breakthrough, starkly opposed to the madly musical winter of Hölderlin’s discontent. The poem, with its gently musical end rhymes—one thinks of a lullaby—literally “strives” for “new words,” which would wrest themselves free of intellection (“aus Geistigkeit”) and break into a music (“Lieder und Gesang”), redeeming life from a language turned cold. Indeed, the lines seem to realize the beloved Rousseau’s dream of returning to the (Mediterranean) origin of language, where word and song reveled in unison, where an authentic accent underscored the speaking subject’s immediate presence.
What contradicts this optimism, however, is the date and signature that Hölderlin appends to the poem. Rather than accurately designating the poem’s source, both the date—1758, some fourteen years before Hölderlin’s birth—and the hauntingly Italianate, quasi-musical name of Scardanelli bring about a referential disorientation or derangement. If writing is still possible, it is so only as something anachronistic and pseudonymous. To be sure, music (“Lieder und Gesang”) is figured as authentic, yet precisely as a figure, it bespeaks expropriation. The subject of inscription has been radically displaced. The signature disrupts. Theories of expression, representation, and intention—of the mimetic figuration of words—underlie a working of language whereby something is lost.
Personal subjectivity as a fixed entity, capable of grounding discourse, becomes something suspect. The Hölderlinian subject of writing, who marks the text as out-of-date and authored by another, reveals the alienating function of this work. (Rousseau of course is no stranger to this.) Hölderlin’s attested incapacity or unwillingness to enter into verbal communication with visitors and old friends may be further symptoms of this fear of self-betrayal. Writing and speaking appear to equal self-loss, as though the referential mechanism of words—and especially the word “I”—fails to coincide with a feeling of selfhood. The pseudonymity and anachronism of Hölderlin’s mad signature—Scardanelli, 1758—redefine the gesture of authorial signing itself as an abandonment to language, literally as subordinating oneself (“mit Unterthänigkeit”) to programs of convention. Rather than legitimizing the work as a mark from the outside, the signature here operates from within. It becomes yet another signifier among others, a subject that is subject to play, a possible victim of misinterpretation or abuse. The author’s name, which should stand as the transcendental origin of the poem, is thereby implicated and indicted. That which should be situated at a validating position outside the text loses its own validity. The subject of writing—this parergon, both “beside” and “contrary to” (para-) the “work” (ergon)—can only remain outside the œuvre by virtue of being within it. The signature, which should promote the writer to the status of authority and authorship (auctoritas), here signals instead that the writer, by writing, has auctioned himself off.
And so Hölderlin “usually spends the winter days at the pianoforte.” The man who once worked out a poetics of alternating tones and discussed representation in terms of rhythm has now himself become a poem: a magnum opus of solitude and silence, of madness and music. Still, as Heidegger would note, something may be disclosed in this withdrawal, a truth that would be all the truer insofar as it could not be made to fit into the production of sense—a truth, radically singular and frighteningly evanescent, that would resist subscription to any concept. Would this something, then, not be better understood as a nothing, that which has being purely by being lost?
The following study does not primarily take into account poets who become poems. Instead, it deals with writers who attempt to appropriate the unworking effects of music and madness as a technique for retrieving—Orphically, one could say—that which is already gone. Through metaphors of music and madness, they attempt to bring to the light of day this Eurydicean point of selfhood that, according to the very law of metaphor, must return to the dark. The point, timeless and spaceless, can neither be held nor be beheld. Likewise, the subject of writing persists only in the work that marks its absence. That said, this nothing may only be taken as not something provided one stays in a working system that divides being from nonbeing. Outside this work, the nothing may indeed be not nothing. The hopelessness of the law is the condition of possibility for hope. If Hölderlin and his piano are conjured in this hors d’œuvre, it is only because, at the very least, his insane rhapsodies serve as a resonating figure of what Blanchot has called, in direct reference to the Orpheus myth, désœuvrement. Whether there was method in it or not, Hölderlin’s musical benightedness motivates thinking about the unworking of language. Given the ambiguity of the genitive (subjective and objective), the unworking of language begins to point to the way music and madness may disarticulate representational discourse as well as the means by which language can always disable the devices designed to evade it. The texts below, which all turn to the theme of music and madness, reverberate with Hölderlin’s concerts for no one: evanescent soundings that are “in all probability” nothing. In the end, it may be “nothing other than the absence of the work,” which is to say—perhaps after the end (or before the beginning)—everything.
I owe an immense debt of gratitude to the staff and colleagues at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin where, as a resident fellow in 2005–2006, I was able to complete the majority of my manuscript. Many thanks also to Lydia Goehr for her kind encouragement and support throughout. I would also like to express my fondest appreciation to all those who read portions of the work in various drafts and offered indispensable comments: Daniel Albright, Marshall Brown, Thomas Christensen, Peter Fenves, Judit Frigyesi, Eileen Gillooly, Christopher Hasty, Jennifer Hui Bon Hoa, Irad Kimhi, Reinhart Meyer-Kalkus, Eyal Peretz, Alexander Rehding, Timothy Reiss, Thomas Schestag, Marc Shell, William Todd, and Hans Zender. Thanks also to Glenn Most and to my dear friends in the Leibnizkreis, which continues to provide an exceptional forum for presenting my work in progress: Manuel Baumbach, Barbara Borg, Bettina Full, Dag-Nikolaus Haase, Martin Holtermann, Helga Köhler, Martin Korenjak, Stefan Rebenich, Adrian Stähli, Martin Vöhler, and Antje Wessels. Earlier versions of some chapters were first presented as talks at Johns Hopkins University, the University of Chicago, New York University, the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, the University of Bristol, the Zentrum für Literaturforschung Berlin, and the Freie Universität Berlin. It was an extraordinary pleasure and honor to discuss much of this material with Alexander Kluge for his televised series. Many thanks as well to my colleagues and students at Harvard University and to my copy editor, Sarah St. Onge. Above all, I am grateful to my wife, Donna, and my children, Jasper and Henry, for all their support, patience, and love.