The Beginning of Terror. David Kleinbard
lets go of his cane indicates relief and liberation.” Sokel notes that an “elemental force” seems to take over this sick man. The imagery of the scene, according to his essay, suggests the destruction of the conforming bourgeois, the conventional personality, the constricting will, the little ego which Malte both wishes and fears to transcend.1
As Sokel’s detailed analysis makes clear, the language and imagery of this scene evoke an ambivalent response. But the emphasis at this point in The Notebooks is upon fearful devastation by illness. When Malte remembers that the St. Vitus dancer’s “gaze wobbled over sky, houses, and water, without grasping a thing,” the scene recalls the dying man in the crémerie. As the convulsive spasms overwhelm the victim of St. Vitus’ dance, he stretches “out his arms as if he were trying to fly.” But he does not succeed in flying. And if he does a “dance,” it is the “horrible dance” of a man dragged and bowed and flung like a puppet by his spasms. The end of the scene leaves one in little doubt about its meaning. The crowd swallows the sufferer, and Malte feels annihilated, as his own ego boundaries have almost evaporated and he has been sucked, half helplessly, half willingly, into mergence with this embodiment of devastation and dehumanization.
At the time he was writing The Notebooks Rilke believed that the little ego must be shattered by the exploding titanic forces of the unconscious in order that the aspiring poet may gain access to essential energies. But in the St. Vitus’ dance victim Rilke encountered an image of the annihilation that might come from courting and encouraging such a Dionysian shattering of the ego. He did not underestimate the dangers of mental illness. Suffering often in severe neurotic and borderline states of mind, he sometimes felt he was close to complete breakdown.
Malte fears that the world around him or objects in it will invade his body, drive out his insecurely established and feebly defended self, and replace it. In The Divided Self, the English analyst, R. D. Laing, describes a closely related fantasy of “implosion”: “This is the strongest word I can find for the extreme form of what Winnicott terms the impingement of reality. Impingement does not convey, however, the full terror of the experience of the world as liable at any moment to crash in and obliterate all identity.”2 In his fear of impingement or invasion Malte reconfirms the contours of his body, the physical boundaries between himself and the world. He draws the outline of his face, and the renewed sense of his differentiation reassures him that most of what is out there in the vast world cannot get into his very limited interior space. But he quickly realizes that he could be wrong. He imagines external reality flooding over the frail border barriers of body and mind, filling him up, through the last branching of his capillaries, pushing out breath, life, and self, increasing until it spatters his insides outside, and nothing is left of the conscious individual within (see 74). In this terrifying fantasy of invasion, the boundaries of body and self are easily breached, the “surface hardness and adaptability” on which he has relied to protect him are no more dependable than the Maginot Line.
Impairment of the ability to differentiate between self and other obviously goes along with a weak sense of identity. These defects may give rise to fantasies of engulfment in which something or someone else incorporates or swallows a person, takes over his will, smothers him with possessive, pressuring love, fixes him in formulas which he feels he cannot escape, blots out his sense of a separate self, draws him into an identification so complete that there is little or nothing left of him apart from this mergence with the other person. Rilke makes the threat of engulfment a focus of interest in the final section of The Notebooks, Malte’s reinterpretation of the Prodigal Son story as “the legend of a man who didn’t want to be loved” (251).
This version of the parable of the Prodigal Son is a vehicle for Rilke’s fear that intimacy opens one to the danger of being effaced and changed through and through into the person or nonperson other people need one to be:
Once you walked into [the] full smell [of the house], most matters were already decided ... on the whole you were ... the person they thought you were; the person for whom they had long ago fashioned a life, out of his small past and their own desires; the creature belonging to them all, who stood day and night under the influence of their love, between their hope and their mistrust, before their approval or their blame....
Can he stay and conform to this lying life of approximations which they have assigned to him, and come to resemble them all in every feature of his face? (253-54).
The final sections of the novel emphasize the fear of being loved. In the margin of The Notebooks manuscript Malte has written, “To be loved means to be consumed.... To be loved is to pass away” (250). He imagines that the Prodigal Son often thought of the troubadours as men who feared more than anything else that the woman they longed for might reciprocate their love (255). Malte seems to project onto them his fantasy that any woman who loved him would engulf him. His illness and isolation recall the fate of Dostoevsky’s narrator in Notes from Underground, who sends away the prostitute Liza when she comes to his apartment, in the fear that her love will suffocate him, and thus compulsively and helplessly seals himself in his hole, cut off from everyone but a servant, living on daydreams which turn to nothingness, as his precursor, the narrator of Dostoevsky’s earlier novella, White Nights, tells us.
The Notebooks closes on a curiously negative note of hope. In concluding his version of the story of the Prodigal Son, Malte comes up with a notion of how a prodigal returned might continue to live with his family while defending himself against the threat of engulfment. This defense might work just as well in any human community. The selfish, egocentric nature of the love surrounding the Prodigal Son, which at first seems so menacing, provides a defense against itself. Those who threaten to reshape his face so that it will resemble theirs tend to see him through the colored lenses of their egocentric love, their fears, their hopes, their mistrust, their needs and desires. In brief, they see what they want to see and are blind to what frightens or displeases them.
Their distorted perceptions and their lack of understanding protect him against them. Their denial of what they do not want to see and their tendency to see what they desire mask him. Behind the masks they unconsciously create for him, he will have the freedom to develop inwardly, secretly, in accord with his distinctive needs, desires, and gifts. This part of The Notebooks brings to mind Nietzsche’s argument in Beyond Good and Evil that false interpretations of everything a “profound spirit” does and says create a mask around him. Evading communication, he makes certain that “a mask of him roams in his place” in the minds of other people.3 J. R. von Salis reports in his book on Rilke’s years in Switzerland that the poet told him he had never read Nietzsche. But, as Erich Heller has shown in The Disinherited Mind, there are many affinities between the ideas of the two. At least it is likely that Rilke acquired some knowledge of Nietzsche’s thought through Lou Andreas-Salomé, whose brief relationship with the philosopher had a major impact on her thinking.4
Malte imagines the actress Eleonora Duse using the parts she played on the stage as masks which defended her inwardness against the threat of engulfment by the audience that was “gnawing on” her face. For Duse, he believes, acting became a camouflage so effective in hiding her from the psychological cannibals around her that she could let herself live with unrestrained emotional intensity and vitality behind the roles she performed (234-35). Rilke saw Duse in Ibsen’s Rosmersholm in Berlin during November 1906 before writing about her in The Notebooks. She was also the subject of his poem, “Bildnis” (Portrait). After talking with her for the first time in Venice at the beginning of July 1912, he declared that this meeting had been “almost my greatest wish” for years (Letters 2:64).
II
The Notebooks entry on Duse reflects Malte’s weak ego boundaries, his poor capacity for differentiation, and his insecure sense of self and identity. But the passage points beyond Malte’s illness to the idea that a thoughtful, creative person—philosopher, poet, or actress—feeling threatened by engulfment, might use masks to defend growing inward strength. Duse’s fear of having her face devoured by her audience