Poetica Obscura: Reexamining Hamann's Contribution to the Pindaric Tradition

"Ne nous reprochez pas le manque de clarté puisque nous en faisons profession."

Paul Celan citing Pascal

It appears that Johann Georg Hamann immediately sets out to intimidate the reader when he opens his Aesthetica in nuce (1762) with two biblical epigraphs, one from the Book of Judges and the other from the Book of Job, left in the original Hebrew with no appended translation.¹ Our suspicions deepen when we arrive at the third citation taken from Horace's Carmina 3.1, which, although printed in more accessible Latin, still communicates a decided distaste for the masses: "Odi profanum vulgus et arceo"—"I hate the uninitiate crowd and keep them off."² Barely passing through such paratextual deterrents, we are convinced of the author's intentions as we attempt to unravel the thoroughly oracular style of the essay itself. Presumably, the remaining lines from Horace reveal one of the motives why Hamann has chosen to couch his message in such darkness. Like pious custodians, Hamann's obscure words protect the inner sanctum of meaning, barring more readers than they admit. The profane are literally those who sit outside the temple; and only those selected shall gain access to its secrets. Hamann's "cabalistic prose," therefore, should be equated with Horace's new songs, aimed at preserving some mystery for the privileged few, for the maidens and youths (virginibus puerisque), who subsequently ought to keep a reverent silence (favete linguis).

Devoted to the subject of holy, if not mystic, literature, Hamann's essay requires such a conception of language—of a language that hides itself from the crowd. Indeed, the issue of elitism stretches across the entirety of the text, reappearing at the essay's conclusion, in a passage concerning "sacred" poetry and Klopstock. Klopstock, Hamann proclaims, is the "great restorer of lyric song " and has earned the right to be called "the German Pindar." The essay's final footnote further singles out this poet's achievement in free rhythms, which characterizes him as a "singer who does not want to be common" (gemein), (SW, 2:215 n. 61). It is wholly appropriate that Hamann would conceal this return to the odi profanum in the marginal space of a footnote, a textual site often shunned by the neglectful (and therefore, uninitiated, profane) reader. And it is no less surprising that Pindar, or an avatar of Pindar, is specifically named as the representative par excellence of the "heilige Poesie" Hamann so passionately wishes to renew—a poetry that, like Nietzsche's Zarathustra, may be so selective of its audience as to be for no one at all.

The firmness of the border separating the elect from the rest reasserts the fundamental, clear-cut juxtaposition that neatly organizes the eighteenth-century idea of genius, an idea that found its particular exemplum in the figure of Pindar with its attending metaphoric of exclusion, for instance in the second Olympian's image of the eagle, "the divine bird of Zeus" (, 88), that soars above the mundane.³ In a narrow sense, both Pindar's and Hamann's genial obscurity would seem to have no other function than to guarantee the inviolableness of this structure. A well-trained hermeneut, however, would confront such obscurity as an enticement to interpret, a call to clarify and elucidate. To be sure, Pindar's well-known statement from Olympian 2, understood in its conventional sense, is at once a warning and an invitation: "Under my arm are many swift arrows here in the quiver, speaking to those who understand; but the crowd needs interpreters ()" (vv. 83-6). Thomas Gray, who placed these lines (untranslated) at the head of his Progress of Poesy (1757), presumably intended to signal a resistance to easy comprehension, but not necessarily an impossibility, understanding the value of his verse to be in proportion to the difficulties it presented. Such deployment of obscurity can be derived from Augustine's discussion of scriptural impenetrability, which he reads as a corrective to human pride and disdain, for "those things which are easily discovered generally become worthless."⁴ On the secular plane...