Roberto Calasso: Literature and the Gods

Towering as Poussin’s Orion, yet suspended over an empty sea, just as the dawn spreads its first light, absorbed and unconcerned: such is the god. He barely touches the heroes, whom he could easily trample underfoot. Instead it is the earth and the sea that quake. What can these men do? They listen to the words of Orpheus: “Take courage, and let us call this island sacred to the Apollo of the Dawn, for he appeared to us all, while walking in the dawn.” Then he invites his companions to offer a sacrifice to the gods. What could be more straightforward? Everybody has the same vision, all feel the same dismay, all help build the same altar. But what happens if there are no Argonauts, all sharing the same experience? What if no one knows how to build an altar? What if no one dares make an offering? This was Hölderlin’s secret thought. And concealed within it was another, more secret still: not only has our way of welcoming the god changed, but the form in which the god himself appears is different: “we cannot have something the same” as the Greeks had, Hölderlin confides to Böhlendorff. If only because — he adds a few lines later and with sudden harshness—“we leave the realm of the living tight-lipped, mute, shut up in some box or other.” It is not for us “consumed in the flames to expiate the flame that we could not subdue.” And this is “the tragic for us”: this meanness in our deaths.

Hölderlin knows the gods can’t reappear in a circle of statues over which the heavy curtain of history will suddenly rise. That was the neoclassical vision, which Hölderlin was the first to distance himself from. No, like figures on a carousel gods and men follow the back-and-forth of a secret movement that takes them now closer together, now further apart. Everything lies in grasping the law that governs that movement. Hölderlin calls it “turning back to nativeness” ( vaterländische Umkehr ). His most strenuous and obscure speculations, which still remain to be fathomed two hundred years on, are dedicated to that movement. Of these, I wish to mention one trait in particular: Hölderlin doesn’t speak of a situation where gods and men start to meet each other once again. Quite the contrary: in a scenario that he compares to that of the Thebes of Oedipus, “in the plague and in the confusion of the senses, and the general quickening of the spirit of divination,” in an age, what’s more, that Hölderlin then surprisingly describes as müssig , which is to say at once “vain” and “idle,” god and man, “in order that the world’s flow might not be interrupted and the memory of the divinities not be extinguished, communicate through the form, oblivious to everything, of infidelity , since divine infidelity is what is most easily retained.” Far from renewing an old relationship, gods and men immediately set about deceiving each other. “In such a moment man forgets himself and the god and turns around [ kehrt … um ], but in a sacred way, like a traitor.” So this new epiphany of the gods proves to be extremely ambiguous, a sort of salvation to be won only through deceit. The place we live in is thus the no-man’s-land where a double betrayal, a double infidelity, is going on: the gods’ betrayal of men and men’s betrayal of the gods. And it is in this place that the poetic word must now take form. There’s no question, then, of developing new mythologies, as if a mythology were a kind of fancy dress that made life more exciting. The very idea that mythology is something one invents suggests an unpardonable arrogance, as if myth were at our beck and call. Rather, it is we, the will of each and every one of us, that are at the beck and call of myth.

“We dream of originality and autonomy, we believe we are saying only what is new, and all this is no more than a reaction, a sort of mild vendetta against the state of servitude in which we find ourselves with regard to the ancient world.” Straightforward as they are drastic, the words are to be found in one of Hölderlin’s prose fragments. And a few lines further on he explains how in our relationship with the past a powerful spell is at work, a spell that still has us in its thrall, so that the whole of the past appears to us as “an almost limitless prehistory which we become conscious of either through education or experience and which acts upon us and oppresses us.” It is not only enthusiasm and the “fire in the sky” we need to recover now. Hölderlin had already tried that — and said only this of the experience: “we almost lost the power of speech in a foreign land,” words over which looms the shadow of Apollo who overwhelmed him in France. No, now it’s a question of recovering “Western sobriety,” that “clarity of representation” that the Greeks, born of oriental ardor, discovered as a, for them, exotic splendor in the verse of Homer — but which for us Hesperians, the modern Westerners, dry and blinkered as we are, is our native land, a place we must set out to rediscover, betraying the gods. But “in a sacred way for sure.”

What is this “Junonic Western sobriety” that is our natural heritage — and as such the most difficult of characteristics to identify, since “what is natural to us must be learned no less than what is foreign”? Hölderlin doesn’t say. He offers neither illustrations nor examples. Yet we sense that, though rarely found unalloyed, it is a constant if undeclared feature of literature in the West — something that we find in every age and in every register. When it asserts itself, it has the authority of a pulse beat. And then we are astonished by its sheer obviousness. It is what happens when we turn to Henry Vaughan and read:

I saw Eternity the other night Like a great Ring of pure and endless light, All calm, as it was bright.

Many have seen eternity, but only Vaughan, and he only in this poem, saw it “the other night,” as if it were an old acquaintance, or some traveler freshly arrived from abroad. Crucial here is the complete absence of preliminaries, the lightning suddenness with which the vision is introduced — and at the same time the sobriety in recording the event, as if one were to say: “There was a brawl the other night at the corner of X and Y.” And even more than “Eternity” the crucial word is “night,” for it determines the three rhymes. Might one speculate that what Hölderlin meant by the expression “Western sobriety” was something that calls to us from beyond enthusiasm, beyond that impulse that draws us to mingle with the gods, but which can disappoint, since it cannot “preserve God through purity and by making distinctions”? But even this is still only a definition by negatives. Otherwise we can merely observe that immediately after the elliptical formulations of the “turning back to nativeness,” Hölderlin’s style becomes ever more rugged, abrupt, broken. Until finally it eases out into the pensive, boundless uniformity of the last lyrics, where Scardanelli takes on the ceremonial role of him who stamps on the seal.

Towards the end Hölderlin abandons theory. If he has to pass judgment, he writes that something is prächtig , “splendid”: “life” itself, or even “the sky.” He now asks no more than to observe and name nature in its most common manifestations, though sometimes too in its most rare. Like the comets: “Would I like to be a comet? I think so. For they have the speed of the birds; they flower into fire, and in their purity they are like children. To wish for anything greater is not within man’s reach.”

Of the ideas that were to fashion the twentieth century in ways for the most part disastrous, one that stands out above the others, so far-reaching and indeed immense were its consequences, is the idea of the good community, where relationships between individuals are strong and a powerful solidarity is founded on common feeling. Nazi Germany was the most drastic manifestation of this idea, Soviet Russia the most long-lived and territorially vast. And the world is still full of those who will champion this idea. Why is the phenomenon so tenacious? On what does it depend? First and most crucially, as is ever the way, on a desire: many still feel that a community, any community, in the sense of a group — be it the merest criminal association — where much is held in common and where ties between individuals are meaningful, is the ideal place to live. So intense is their desire to live in such a community that the reasons for and nature of those ties hardly seem important. What matters is that they be strong and close-knit. And this when all the evidence before us should at least prompt us to inquire: might there not be something pernicious in the very idea of community, at least when it manifests itself, as has frequently been the case, in a world where technology has extended its grip over the whole planet? This is the crux of the matter: are community and technology somehow incompatible? Not in the sense that a community cannot be established in a technology-driven world — we know all too well that it can — but in the sense that once established, such a community can only lead to results that are radically different from those originally intended.