Lyric Orientations: Hölderlin, Rilke, and the Poetics of Community by Hannah Vandegrift Eldridge (review)

The aim of Hannah Eldridge's monograph is to use Stanley Cavell's account of subjectivity and language in order to help "explain the extraordinarily ambitious claims Hölderlin and Rilke make for poetry: that it can create political communities, recast human relationships to death, or unite the sensual and intellectual components of human subjectivity" (2). In her introduction and "Epilogue," Eldridge extends these explanations to the poetry of Paul Celan to demonstrate the continuation of Hölderlin's and Rilke's poetic ambitions after the Second World War.

While unifying the senses and intellect and coping with death are important themes in Eldridge's exploration of the three poets, she does not examine the specific "political community" they may envision, since her interest is, more generally, in how they respond to "modern alienation" through lyric representations, or "performances," of "unification," "wholeness," "conversation," or "poetic community." These terms, which take up the poets' own formulations, make their work as well as Eldridge's study sound rather Romantic. The author's intent, however, is the opposite: to distance poetry, in particular Hölderlin's, from specifically Jena/Early Romanticism. While she finds that "[l]ike Hölderlin, the Jena romantics see the absolute as unreachable"; she believes that, unlike Hölderlin, the Romantics only "imagine" the absolute, resigning themselves to regard and enjoy language as "uncontrolled and self-referential play, leading to the interrelated themes of the fragment and irony or Witz (wit)" (49). Thus, Hölderlin's fragmentary texts are, in Eldridge's view, results of failing to "reach the absolute," whereas the Romantics created fragments, deliberately.

The many texts that Hölderlin left incomplete, appear, in fact, to be fragmentary not by design, in contrast to the Athenaeum-Fragments, for example. However, against the long-standing criticism of Early Romanticism, embraced by Eldridge, one can argue that the young Friedrich Schlegel conceived of the "absolute" (or "totality" or "universality") not as "unreachable," but as immanent in the present, finite world. He realized this contradictory and paradoxical project through the similarly contradictory and paradoxical concepts of the fragment as simultaneously complete and incomplete (A206), of irony as a series of endless contradictions (A 51), and of wit as "fragmentary ingenuity" (L 9) or "chemical spirit" (A 366). Novalis' "Monolog," in turn, which Eldridge finds "most clearly" expresses the "Jena romantic relation between language and subjectivity," describes language not just as self-referential, but also as a "mirror" of the world, and as gifted with a "musical spirit." By getting attuned to this spirit, the poet becomes a "prophet" who is "inspired," rather than "fooled" by language, suggesting that he gains, if not "control" over language, at least the capacity to use it adequately (cf. 49).

The second, contemporary opponent of Eldridge's study is poststructuralism, and more specifically, Derrida's and de Man's deconstruction, which she believes understands communication and language, similar to Romanticism, as "hopeless," "unreliable," and failing "to engage the world" (1). Eldridge shares with poststructuralism an interest in literary reflections on what she calls "human finitude": "the particularly human condition of uncertainty and mortality" (1). Yet, she believes that a poststructuralist notion of language "absolutely prohibits an understanding of lyric poetry as performing the kinds of orientation for which I argue" (38).

This common, uncharitable opinion of poststructuralism mischaracterizes at least Derrida's work, which critically analyzes both the power of language to "engage the world," and the limits of this power. In fact, Derrida's interpretation of Celan's poetics as expressions of individuality and encounter, which Eldridge leaves unmentioned, bear striking similarities to her own. Her claim that "the basis of communication is the impossibility of its certainty" (197) is also reminiscent of Derrida's cherished paradoxical formulation, that the "impossibility" of something is its very "possibility." Moreover, she calls her interpretations "readings" and "experiences," similar to Derrida. Finally, Eldridge interprets several texts by Hölderlin and Rilke as "undermining" their own claims...