The Paraclete and Fürsprache in Hölderlin's Homecoming

Abstract

The Paraclete and Fürsprache in Hölderlin's Homecoming Rüdiger Campe (bio) Characterizing the poet's task through invoking comparative roles has been common practice throughout Renaissance and Humanist poetry. Early modern poetics revels in historical speculation on mythical heroes and singers, on kings and prophets as the precursors to the poet, and by doing so it reaches back to antiquity and, with intensified significance, to early Christianity. Hölderlin's poems mention the prophet and the rhapsode, the bard or the one who sings on behalf of the congregation and, more often than not, they revolve around the constitutive pair of the epic hero's fame and the poem which is its echo and vessel. Not for the first time, to be sure, but with new importance and urgency, in outlining such comparative roles, Hölderlin's poems define the situation of their own foundation. Rather than portraying the one who speaks, they determine their own procedures of addressing others with or without authority, legitimation and success. Invoking comparative roles in Hölderlin is less about portraying or staging the poet than invoking the place and the situation of the modern poem, which is—in the view of Max Kommerell's 1943 Thoughts on Poems (Gedanken über Gedichte)—the written poem. Arguably none of the comparative roles of the poet in Hölderlin is so precisely suited and crafted to delineating the poem's situation as the figure of the paraclete. It may help that in the biblical reference text, the Gospel of John (John 14–15 and 1 John 2), the paraclete hardly is a figure we can point at. In line with the Greek word's meaning—parakalein, in Latin advocare—the paraclete is, first, the one who is called at the side of defendants in order to speak on behalf of them [End Page 542] in front of a judge or a body of judges. This figure came onto the European stage with Apollo who, in the court scene of Aeschylus's Eumenides, lingers in the background and then emerges suddenly at Orest's side in the moment when the matricide no longer knows how to respond to the pressing questions of the Erinyes who act as prosecutors. Jesus Christ, the son, becomes humanity's advocate at the Father's house when he has disappeared from the disciples' sight and presence. Intimately linked to the absent Christ is, however, secondly, the other paraclete—a non-figure and a person who exists only in symbolic ways—who is identified as the Holy Spirit, and who maintains the lines of communication with the humans on earth throughout the time of Christ's absence. In this function, whether still Christ himself or the Holy Spirit, the paraclete is not an advocate who speaks to the Father on behalf of humankind but he is what Luther translates as Tröster and the King James Bible as the Comforter (John 14:16f.).1 The concept of the paraclete bridges the internal differences between advocate and comforter and takes on the persons of the Son as well as the Spirit. The paraclete, we might say, is too much at the same time to coalesce in a single picture or any picture at all. Zie* (which I use here as a substitute for he/she/it) is the process of personification rather than a distinct person (a person with or without a face). Zie* performs acts of disappearance and reappearance, rather than having any fixed form of appearance. Faceless or endowed with more than one face, the paraclete defines the situation of privileged access to the sphere of truth and judgment while maintaining the lines of communication with those who lack such access. The paracletic situation, it might be added, is the communicative pattern which is at the basis of all poetical figuration in the Western tradition. This is so at least as far as poetics, in its turn, has had a rhetorical substructure since Hellenistic and Roman times. The situation of the one speaking for others to the Other, the situation in court and, in derivative ways, at the forum, is the internal condition for all practice and theory of...