Without Lifting A Finger

I've moved on but here's one more fantastic "clip" on Holderlin. * This distinction between text and variant came to prove so contentious among Hölderlin scholars that in 1975 a rival and yet to be completed edition, the so-called Frankfurt Edition, was inaugurated on the principle that there can be no core Hölderlinian text, that we must learn to read the manuscripts as palimpsests of versions overlaying and underlying other versions. For the foreseeable future the notion of a definitive text of Hölderlin is thus in suspension. One reason for this contest of editions is that, in the ninety-two-page notebook that lies at the heart of the problem, Hölderlin went back and forth between new and old manuscript poems, using different pens and inks in an unsystematic way, dating nothing, allowing what one might at firs t glance call different versions of the same poem to stand side by side. A deeper reason is that in his last productive years Hölderlin seems to have...

Interrupting Flaubert & Sand and entertaining Coetzee. A friend sent me a sample: Beckett, the White Whale (White Wall), Kafka. How could I refuse? Anyway, these "clips" are from an essay on Holderlin, which may prompt (imminently) yet another rereading. * There is no doubting Hölderlin’s revolutionary sympathies – ‘Pray for the French, the champions of human rights,’ he instructed his younger sister – but his poems say nothing direct about politics. To a degree this was because he had no models for political poetry; but it was also because of a strong tradition among Germany’s intellectual class of not involving itself in politics. The writer with the strongest following among young idealists was Schiller, and Schiller’s political line after 1793 was that the consciousness of the people needed to evolve before true political change could take effect. In his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind of 1794–5 Schiller argued that the human spirit could best be ...