The Beginning of Terror. David Kleinbard
detach himself from it, his long involvement with Malte had exhausted and gutted him. And he wondered if, having written The Notebooks and created Malte, he was sinking into irremediable, unchanging “aridity” (Letters 2:33).
Rilke’s frightening experiences in Paris and the fantasies which he embodied in Malte, the young Dane’s fears of death and mental disintegration and his belief that he must go through something like death and disintegration in order to arrive at the degree of originality in seeing and saying which permits work of genius, bring to mind Anton Ehrenzweig’s theory in The Hidden Order of Art that the first stage of the creative process may involve an artist in unconscious projections which are experienced as fragmented, accidental, and alien, and often as persecutory. The artist must be psychologically strong enough to get through this schizoid stage of fragmentation without being overwhelmed by the anxieties arising from it. Reading Ehrenzweig’s description of schizophrenic self-destructiveness, one can see how close Malte is to this illness and Rilke too during those early days in Paris: “The schizophrenic.... attacks his own ego functions almost physically, and projects the splintered parts of his fragmented self into the outside world, which in turn be comes fragmented and persecutory.”10 This shredding and projection of the self accompanies the schizophrenic’s attack on “his own language function and capacity for image making.” In this respect artists and writers, especially the “modernists” and “post-modernists,” may resemble the schizophrenic as he “twists and contorts words in the same weird way in which he draws and paints images.” One may think of Picasso as a model of physical and mental health and toughness. But Ehrenzweig points out that his savage attacks on his imagery, his dismemberment of it, his scattering of the bits and pieces in the picture, have obvious affinities with the schizophrenic’s ripping up of his own ego and the world. The essential difference between Picasso’s cubist painting and schizophrenic painting lies “in the coherence of [the master’s] tough pictorial space.” Unconsciously the shredded and scattered images have been integrated. The violently shattered world of a cubist masterpiece is held together and “animated by a dynamic pulse. It draws the fragments together into a loose yet tough cocoon that draws the spectator into itself.” The “linkages” which do this ordinarily remain unconscious in painter and spectator, author and reader.
In Joyce, according to Ehrenzweig, under the surface of the “language splinters,” “dreamlike phantasies ... link the word clusters into an unending hypnotic stream.”11 Despite the irritating vagueness of this explanation, if I think of Picasso’s cubism, Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, and Rilke’s fragmentary Notebooks in their apparent disconnectedness and underlying coherence, I can see the pertinence of Ehrenzweig’s attempt to define the similarities and differences between schizophrenic art and the works of such modern masters.
Ehrenzweig suggests that the motif of the dying god in literature and other arts reflects the artist’s sense of his own “heroic self-surrender” in the process of creation. The artist has to face death without anticipating rebirth. When the schizophrenic loses his grasp on reality, his images of world and self break up into “chaos,” and he feels that he is undergoing “final destruction.”12 The dying god motif in some works of art hints at the fact that the artist has endured a similar experience of the void opening when world and self are torn to pieces, but with a different outcome. An artist with a sufficiently strong ego can confront the frightening “void” within himself and live with his fear. Even when “loss of ego control” brings the feeling that mind and self are disintegrating, he can “absorb” this experience “into the rhythm of creativity” before emerging from it newly integrated and coherent, possibly with an enriched mental and emotional life and a strengthened sense of self.13
Rilke does not introduce the dying-god motif into The Notebooks, but Malte’s response to the dying man in the crémerie prepares him for a new understanding of the artist’s development. And this sequence of experience and realization in the novel does bring to mind the implicit sense of the creative process which Ehrenzweig finds in typical versions of the motif. Twenty pages after his account of the death in the crémerie Malte once more takes stock of his sense of his separation from others and of the radical changes in his perception of the world. Now the developments in his recent life, which have made dying or mental disintegration seem to resemble his own condition all too closely, have become, on the contrary, reasons for hoping that he is developing imaginative, creative intelligence and perception: “I have had certain experiences that separate me from other people.... A different world. A new world filled with new meanings. For the moment I am finding it a bit difficult, because everything is too new” (72).
On the same page Malte thinks of “Une Charogne,” Baudelaire’s “incredible poem,” as an example of radically new and different perception, which seems unmistakably valid. This is genius, not madness. Malte now welcomes the painful and often frightening emergence of a strange world. He has gladly given up the fulfillment of all his earlier expectations in the belief that what he has discovered is “real, even when that is awful” (73).
CHAPTER 3 A Mask of Him Roams in His Place
Differentiation between Self and Others in The Notebooks and Rilke’s Letters
I
During his first year in Paris, 1902-3, Rilke’s ability to differentiate himself from other people was often impaired. A letter to Salomé describes an experience in which the sense of mental and bodily separateness from others which underlies most adult relationships and contacts gave way to a frightening fantasy of being pulled into close identification, involving a partial merging of bodies and minds. This was his encounter with a man suffering from St. Vitus’ dance: “I was close behind him, will-less, drawn along by his fear, that was no longer distinguishable from mine.” Imagining that this stranger’s “fear had been nourished out of me, and had exhausted me,” he felt “used up” (Letters 1:115). As they became increasingly connected and the stranger seemed to feed on him, he felt that “everything” within him was being consumed. This experience was the source of an entry in The Notebooks.
Malte is drawn to an “emaciated” figure who becomes the focus of attention on the block, an object of laughter. Following the man despite an urge to cross the street to get away from him, he notices that he hops on one leg. When this hopping travels from his legs to his neck and hands, Malte feels “bound to him” (68). As the spasms increase, his anxiety grows with the stranger’s. With pounding heart he gathers his “little strength together” and begs the struggling St. Vitus dancer to take it. When the fellow finally loses control and the nervous spasms take over his body, exploding into “a horrible dance,” Malte is left feeling like “a blank piece of paper” (65-71).
What does the encounter mean to him? Why is he drawn into such close identification with this stranger?
The spectacle of St. Vitus’ dance speaks to his fear of going insane, of losing himself to uncontrollable forces which often seem on the verge of overwhelming him. The scene around the St. Vitus dancer awakens in Malte a dread of becoming an object of derision and revulsion. His desire to help the stranger is motivated by compassion, but also by his sense of affinity. If this fellow can overcome the convulsive compulsion of his nerves, his victory might answer Brigge’s need to believe that strength of will can win the struggle against his own fears and tensions. But Malte is also curious to see what happens if and when the fellow gives in, because he anticipates that he may soon go through a mental disintegration not unlike the cataclysm against which the other man is struggling. At the end of the episode the victim of St. Vitus’ dance is invisible, engulfed by his involuntary spasms and by the crowd that surrounds him.
In a highly illuminating essay, “The Devolution of the Self in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge,” Walter H. Sokel argues that when the St. Vitus dancer “gives in and his will collapses, something incomparably mightier, and truer leaps forth from him.” Professor Sokel supports his interpretation