Hölderlin’s Heraclitean Canon

Abstract

This essay argues that Hölderlin develops a new understanding of canonicity by way of related concepts such as law, measure, and harmony. The final version of his novel Hyperion “bends” the straight rule of the canon—the metaphor underlying the notion of a literary canon—against itself, transforming it into a Heraclitean bow: a dynamic play of conflicting tones or voices. Diotima, the novel’s female protagonist, has an especially important role in this transformation: not simply through her diffuse physical beauty, which flows out into her surroundings rather than being concentrated into a plastic form, but through her voice and above all her words, which correct Hyperion’s own Platonizing interpretation of the Heraclitean doctrine—an interpretation that tries to conceive of the discordant unity as visual rather than radically acoustic and musical. This counter-Platonic reading of Heraclitus contributes to the political radicalness of Hölderlin’s novel, which regards the agonistic polis, ultimately extended to include the relationship between human beings and nature, as itself representing the highest unity.