Hölderlin and the terra incognita of the novel: the eccentric belonging of Hyperion to the novel tradition in the 18th Century

Abstract

This essay proposes an investigation of the close connection between the dialectical conception of totality developed by Hölderlin in his novel Hyperion or The Hermit in Greece and its own expression in the form of the novel in the 18th century. By shifting the analysis mainly to a formal problem, the purpose is to show that the difficulty of the critical reception to fit this work of the German poet into the categories of the epistolary novel and of the Bildungsroman is a symptom of the complex time stratification that structures the book. However, rather than being a mere composition deficiency, it is possible to recognize in its eccentric outline, which is tangential both to the immediacy and to the retrospective distance, the expression of a notion of totality that links the particularity of the feeling to the universality of reflection from an experience of a conflictive and fragmented modernity, bringing forth from the failure of an harmonious unification a new possibility of breaking up the dissonances.