The Beginning of Terror. David Kleinbard
But, reading further, you can see that this is not what Malte means when he turns from people whose personalities are fairly consistent throughout much of their lives to those who “change faces incredibly fast,” until at an early age, maybe forty, “their last one is worn through ... has holes in it, is in many places thin as paper.” Through the widening holes, “little by little,” we begin to see “the nonface” (“das Nichtgesicht”), “and they walk around with that on” (6-7). Is he thinking about people who burn themselves out too quickly? Certainly not just that. The notion of a person going through a rapid succession of personalities suggests instability, an absence of psychic continuity and integrity, an inability to develop a strong, lasting sense of identity. The image of a face “thin as paper” suggests that the sense of self is tenuous and fragile.
But what is the “Nichtgesicht,” the “nonface”? Does this refer to someone who continues to function without any strong sense of self or inner coherence, a person whose existence is unthinking, uncomprehending, guided by momentary impulses and feelings, external pressures and influences? That might be a description of many people lost in the confusion of modern urban life. A number of Rilke’s poems about faces warn us not to settle for this simple conclusion. In Rilke, Valéry and Yeats: The Domain of the Self Priscilla Shaw connects the “nonface” in The Notebooks with a poem about faces which Rilke wrote in December 1906.3 Here “das Nicht-Gesicht” does not refer to the facelessness of those who have lost self and soul in the chaos of the great cities. The poet asks if we do not implore whoever or whatever allots us our portion “for the non-face/which belongs to our darkness”:
flehen wir zu dem Bescheidenden
nächtens nicht um das Nicht-Gesicht,
das zu unserem Dunkel gehórt?4
He asks his face how it can be the face for such an inner life, in which continually the beginning of something is rolled together with its dissolving:
Gesicht, mein Gesicht:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Wie kannst du Gesicht sein für so ein Innen,
drin sich immerfort das Beginnen
mit dem Zerfliessen zu etwas balk.
The poet thinks of forest, mountain, sky, and sea, heaving themselves out of their depths. They have no face like ours. Those great masses provide him with images of the serene perfection and harmony of something completely at one with itself, utterly lacking in self-consciousness and any sense of the division between world and self. Rilke reflects that even animals sometimes find their faces too heavy and ask that they be taken from them. These lines recall the dogs in The Notebooks that wear their masters’ faces. The thought that animals have faces which they find oppressive implies that they do not lack self-consciousness and a sense of the separation and opposition of self and world, self and other, however vague such awareness may be in them.
The poet’s longing for the “non-face” “which belongs to our darkness” seems to be a desire to lapse without fear into the internal flux, which is chaotic, unfathomable, and incomprehensible. This would involve a complete release from the strain of self-consciousness, which awareness of one’s own face intensifies. Rilke imagines the inner darkness as a vortex and as depths (“Wirbel” and “Tiefen”), as a wilderness (“Wildnis”) in which paths are lost in the dread of the abyss (“sich verlieren ins Abgrundsgraun”) almost as soon as one is lucky enough to find them (WDB 2:11).
What the poet seeks in his longing for the “non-face” which belongs to his darkness, what he thinks he may find by waiting patiently in unfathomable inner flux, is the radiant unity and intensity of being which he hears in a bird’s call. Its call makes its tiny heart “so large” and “at one/with the heart of the air, with the heart of the grove”:
wenn ein Vogellaut, vieltausendmal,
geschrien und wieder geschrien,
ein winziges Herz so weit macht und eins
mit dem Herzen der Luft, mit dem Herzen des Hains....
(WDB 2:13)
This passage brings to mind the prose fragment “An Experience” (1913), Rilke’s description of his sense of fusion with the cosmos, concentrated in his feeling that a bird’s call was vibrating just as intensely within him as in outer space, that he and the universe were completely absorbed into that single resonant sound. This experience in a garden on Capri made the space within and around him “one region of the purest, deepest consciousness.” With eyes shut so that he might forget his body’s separateness from the environment, he felt “the gentle presence of the stars” within him.5
In the poem quoted above the bird’s luminous cry is heard by someone who, time and again, as often as it dawns, soars like “steepest stone,” implicitly like a mountain or a colossus. This seems to be the god invoked at the beginning of the poem, “in whom I alone ascend and fall and lose my way” (“in dem ich allein/steige und falle und irre” [WDB 2:11]). The poet discovers this god in himself in the whirling, unfathomable darkness, when suddenly, without warning, he becomes capable of song which has the luminous unity and intensity of the bird’s cry, expressing his affinity with air, sky, forest, mountain, sea, and grove. The poem implies that the poet must give up his face or faces, allow the non-face to come through, and wait in the unfathomable inner darkness, if he is to find and to become that deeper unity, power, and radiance of being which is his genius, the god who towers above his ordinary self (WDB 2:13).
Malte’s reflections upon faces and the “non-face” culminate in a passage which differs in substance and mood from this poem, as he recalls a frightening experience of radically original perception when he startled a woman holding her face in her hands on a Paris street corner:
The woman sat up, frightened, she pulled out of herself, too quickly, too violently, so that her face was left in her two hands. I could see it lying there: its hollow form. It cost me an indescribable effort to stay with those two hands, not to look at what had been torn out of them. I shuddered to see a face from the inside, but I was much more afraid of that bare flayed head waiting there, faceless. (7)
A face comes off. A head is flayed. Perhaps no other image of mutilation is so threatening, not even the cutting off of breasts or genitals. Nothing can be more horrifying than the photo of a face blasted away in war, or eaten away by fire, acid, or animals. Obviously, this is because we associate or identify the face with the person.
Underlying the passage quoted above is a fantasy of psychic disintegration. The language seems to imply that the woman is unselfed, left without self or soul. Like so many other figures in the novel, she is an image of what Malte fears may happen to him. Implicit also is fear of sudden exposure of the selfless, amorphous, helpless mass of psychic plasma underlying the coherent, self-aware person and public personality.
The imagery of faces thin as paper, wearing through, riddled with holes, expresses the fear that one’s private thoughts and feelings will show, despite one’s efforts to hide them. And there is the related fear, implied in the description of the woman, that we shall be seen as selfless, amorphous, and dehumanized, like the dead, the living dead whom Malte describes as husks, and the insane.
Malte sees the woman’s face lying in her hands. Does this suggest that in the moment of violent fear the woman’s hands have become as expressive as a face? Rodin taught Rilke that hands could express the inner life as well as faces do. But it is the hollow form of the face which Malte sees in the woman’s hands. I take this to mean that the sight of the woman’s hands gives him the idea that her face has come off. He has seen her fall forward into her hands and then pull herself up out of them “too quickly, too violently.” The sight of them, emptied, frightened, open, thin as they are, flashes upon his mind, by way of association, the image of the face peeled away, and then the image of her naked, helpless facelessness in this moment of shock and fear.
I have said that, in this Notebooks