3.1 Political Personae

THE CHARACTERS WHOM Hyperion encounters seem one-dimensional, fleshless; they lack the quality that brings alive even the minor characters of most of what is considered great fiction. Their appearance follows an episodic, schematic schedule, and they almost never interact with one another in such a way as to allow the autonomous development of their traits. Yet while they could appear to be personified abstractions— one may justly suspect that Hölderlin lacked even a mediocre talent for conventional fiction—they are not mere caricatures or narrative clichés. Only the most unsympathetic reader could see them as failed attempts at realistic and nuanced characterization by a writer who had not yet found suitable means of expression, a poet who had not yet found his poetic calling. Are they then mentors in a Bildungsroman, each imparting the education needed at a certain stage in Hyperion's development? Their entrances, to be sure, coincide with the stages of his early life, though indeed the first of these—childhood—is characterized by the absence of other human beings; Hyperion's father and mother seem not to exist at all. He is fundamentally a child of nature, whose own nature develops in peace according to its inner law. But subsequent stages are each marked by the appearance of others who draw Hyperion into their orbit, giving shape to his existence: Adamas—boyhood (early youth); Alabanda and the League of Nemesis—homosocial (and homosociopathic) young adulthood; and finally Diotima—the channeling of erotic energies toward a female object. The process of Bildung, to be sure, is catastrophically interrupted: if the point is to prepare Hyperion to exist in the world, realizing his potential by interacting with others, it has failed. When Hyperion begins recalling his past in his letters to Bellarmin at the start of the novel, he has already become a hermit. But he's no self-contented, godlike philosopher, who, enraptured in contemplation, can exist outside the city. He has not withdrawn from the world gladly but with a sense of despair and failure. Yet this still doesn't compel us to reject the Bildungsroman as interpretive paradigm: it just means that the process of education now requires not only the past experiences themselves but subsequent reflection on them.