Delayed Origins, Initial Inhibitions: The Beginnings of Fatherlandish Song and the Task of Answering the Mother in Hölderlin’s Am Quell der Donau

Abstract

The present essay represents an attempt to elucidate certain aspects of Friedrich H € olderlin ’ s early ‘ fatherlandish songs ’ , centred around the frag-mentary hymn Am Quell der Donau from 1801, in the perspective of psycho-analytic theory. I am referring to the theory of a ‘ motherly unconscious ’ , prolonging the psychic life of the mother in the speaking subject, in the version of the Franco-Hungarian psychoanalyst Nicolas Abraham. Establishing a fundamental relation between the process of language acquisition and the psychic relation between mother and child, this theory can be read as a conceptual elaboration of the vernacular term ‘ mother tongue ’ . As I shall argue below, a similar problematic can be found to underlie the conception and elaboration of the texts intended by H € olderlin to launch the cycle of poems named ‘ fatherlandish songs ’ ( Vaterl € andische Ges € ange ). I suggest a psychoanalytic reading of these texts centring around the mythologico-genealogical figures of the divine Father celebrated in the title of the projected cycle on the one hand, Mother Earth or Mother Asia as the addressee of its initial texts on the other. While attention to these figures and their relation is quite established in H € olderlin research, my focus shall be more specifically on the problematic of the speaking subject ’ s claim to an original, initial, foundational speech in relation to the inevitable anteriority of the parental instances evoked within the mythologic content of this speech. 1 The question guiding the reflections of this essay, devoted in the first part to a discussion of Abraham ’ s theory and in the second to a reading of the H € olderlin texts in question, can therefore be put as follows: what is the relation between the poetic task of beginning to sing an original song and the related task of addressing and answering the Mother?