The Beginning of Terror. David Kleinbard
childhood.
The terrifying experience of engulfment is triggered by the boy’s feeling that he is trapped in a mask and costume. Fearing that he will be caught inside the close-fitting mask, with his hearing muffled and his vision obstructed, feeling that he is being strangled by the strings of the cloak and that the turban and the mask are pressing down on him, he rushes to the mirror. His hands, moving frantically, seem disconnected from the invisible boy and the mask in the mirror. In this disturbed state of mind he imagines that the mirror has come to life, that it is stronger than he is, that it has the power to invade, obliterate, and completely replace him. It forces upon him
an image, no, a reality, a strange, incomprehensible, monstrous reality that permeated me against my will. ... I lost all sense of myself, I simply ceased to exist. For one second, I felt an indescribable, piercing, futile longing for myself, then only he remained: there was nothing except him. (107)
III
The fantasy of “the Big Thing” expresses, among other feelings, the fear of death. It is connected with an earlier passage in which Malte wonders if the “almost nourishing smile” on the faces of pregnant women doesn’t come from their sense of having “two fruits” growing in them, “a child and a death” (16). In this passage Rilke has converted the fantasy of death developing within one like another organism, not subject to one’s will or control, from a source of fear into an idea which gives comfort and even pleasure and is, for this reason, an aid against the dread of death which is the central and most pervasive fear in the novel. The fantasy of the Big Thing and the notion that death is like a fetus within us reflect the same kind of anxiety, the same sense of separate lives or even autonomous beings, within us that are part of us and yet independent of us. They are both rooted in an experience of body and psyche which can develop into paranoid schizophrenia.1 But the conception of death as fetus and fruit growing within also reflects the strengths of ego and imagination that enabled Rilke to defend himself against the threat of mental disintegration by transforming the worst of all internal dangers, the developing potential sources and causes of death in body and mind, into images which suggest natural, healthy growth and creativity.
The idea that a person’s death grows in him like a fruit, evolving out of his genetic inheritance and his experience, conscious and unconscious, gives meaningful coherence to Malte’s account of the end of his paternal grandfather, Christoph Detlev Brigge. In this narrative, which Rilke considered Malte’s most fully achieved piece of writing, the chamberlain is transformed into the regal, frightening personality and thunderous voice of the death which has been developing within him throughout his lifetime: “This voice didn’t belong to Christoph Detlev, but to Christoph Detlev’s death. Christoph Detlev’s death was alive now, had already been living at Ulsgaard for many, many days, talked with everyone, made demands.... Demanded and screamed” (13). Malte imagines that this swollen, shouting figure was nurtured by every “excess of pride, will, and authority that [Christoph Detlev] had not been able to use up during his peaceful days” (15). One can see how this notebook entry might come from the mind that produced the delusion of the Big Thing. Here the fantasy of an autonomous, latent inner being which emerges from within and engulfs the self, giving rise to terrifying delirious behavior, becomes creative, shaping the conception of death which unfolds in this compelling narrative. With this entry, Rilke thought, Malte achieved the “inexorability” of “objective expression” which he (the poet) had discovered in Baudelaire’s “Une Charogne” and Cezanne’s paintings (Letters 1:314).
Here dying brings disintegration of the ego, with all its structure and defenses. Malte’s recollection that the chamberlain was no longer there, that he could no longer see what was going on around him, that his face was unrecognizable, that the shouting voice seemed to belong to someone or something else—these remembered details call to mind the delirium which often overwhelms the dying. Defenses are down; control is gone. Much of what the dying have not expressed in life, much that was repressed, comes out.
The Notebooks reveals Rilke’s unusual access to large areas of experience ordinarily denied and repressed. This access was often involuntary, and it made life perilous and sanity precarious. Rilke was willing to endure frightening experiences of partial disintegration because he felt that they were the price he had to pay for sustaining his contact with the sources of feeling, fantasy, and insight which were the reservoirs of the extraordinary wholeness essential to his genius.
IV
Concerning the “monsters” and “dragons” which he had discovered in the “horrible dungeons” of his own psyche, Rilke wrote in 1904, “We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them.”1 A letter to “Merline” (Baladine Klossowska), written sixteen years later, develops and clarifies this point, arguing that “the monsters” within us “hold the surplus strength” which makes it possible for men and women of genius to transcend their ordinary human frailties and limitations.2
The third Duino Elegy, begun in January 1912 and completed late in the fall of 1913, reflects these ideas in language and imagery which suggest Rilke’s growing interest in psychoanalysis at the time. Lou AndreasSalomé introduced the poet to Freud late in the summer of 1913. The following year, recalling this meeting with Freud and the Swedish analyst Poul Bjerre, he wrote, “These men were important and significant for me, their whole orientation and method certainly represents one of the most essential movements of medical science.”3 In the Third Elegy the poet imagines himself as a child going down into a beloved inner wilderness, a primeval forest within him. As he descends with love into the gorges of his own interior, into more ancient blood, what he encounters is fearful, still satiated with devoured fathers. Every terrible thing he meets recognizes him, winking with mutual understanding. What is hideous and shocking smiles. The poet wonders how the child, going down into his own depths, can help loving these monstrosities which are parts of himself and smile at him with narcissistic tenderness seldom equaled even by maternal love.
... Liebend
stieg er hinab in das altere Blut, in die Schluchten,
wo das Furchtbare lag, noch satt von den Vatern. Und jedes
Schreckliche kannte ihn, blinzelte, war wie verständigt.
Ja, das Entsetzliche láchelte ... Selten
hast du so zärtlich gelächelt, Mutter. Wie sollte
er es nicht lieben, da es ihm lächelte....
(WDB 1:451)
If, as the first Duino Elegy tells us, the realization of beauty depends upon our capacity for enduring terror, how does an artist come to trust, take possession of, and even love the objects of his fear and the fear itself? Psychoanalysis can sometimes help patients to achieve mastery over their anxieties or, at least, make it possible to feel more at ease with them. Rilke, who had been “on the verge of undergoing analysis,” decided not to because he thought that it would tame the lions and monsters in him and thus kill the energy he needed to surpass himself. Exposing his “most secret powers,” it would undermine “an existence that owed its strongest impulses precisely to the fact that it did not know itself” (R&B:IC, 109).
One alternative to undergoing psychoanalytic therapy was to find guidance for mastering his fears and using them creatively and models with whom he could identify in some of the artists whom he most admired, especially several in his father’s generation—Tolstoy, Cézanne, and Van Gogh.
Death was among the most fearful monsters living in the psychic depths. It was also among the greatest potential sources of creative energy. In 1915, reacting to the slaughter going on around him, Rilke wrote a letter in which he conceived of God and death as parts, “never before broached, of the human mind” (Letters 2:148). (His ideas on this subject have obvious affinities with the theory of a death “drive” which Freud formulated in Beyond the Pleasure Principle[1920].