The Beginning of Terror. David Kleinbard
of creativity have made me wary of the old myth that has “great wits ... to madness near allied” and poets “mad as the mist and snow.”4 Artists often reveal exceptionally strong capacities for organization and control which are absent or weak in insanity. But psychological analyses of the creative process also suggest that there are significant affinities between certain kinds of mental illness and talent or genius in art and science. In subsequent chapters I refer to a number of these findings, for example, Anton Ehrenzweig’s argument in The Hidden Order of Art concerning the striking similarities and essential differences between Picasso’s painting and Joyce’s writing and schizophrenic art and language. His comparative analysis applies, as well, to The Notebooks, with its fragmentary form, its dreamlike scenes and images, and its portrayal of a breakdown in mental integration and in the ability to differentiate self from world and fantasy from reality.5
Writing to Lou in the summer of 1903, Rilke expressed the fear that he “would belong irretrievably to the lost if some passer-by merely looked at me and half unconsciously counted me with them” (Letters 1:111). He felt that a stranger’s unspoken judgment could change him into an outcast, a dehumanized, broken thing, empty of mind and feeling, living on dust. Imagining that he was in danger of becoming one of “those who no longer hear their wills going in the noise” of the city, he thought he understood the fear that seemed to have “grown” “over” Parisians who were “beginning to read things differently from the way they were meant” (Letters 1:110-11). As his sense of self, distinctive identity, and autonomy became painfully uncertain and the “noise” of the city threatened to engulf him, he began to doubt his ability to distinguish fantasy from objective reality.
Writing the novel for which these experiences provided raw material helped the poet to master them and thus to defend himself against the illness that was threatening to destroy his sanity. In retrospect he believed the book was “something like an underpinning” for all the work that followed. It had opened up “a whole octave” of poetry in him. As a result of his writing The Notebooks, “everything reaches farther up” and “almost all songs are possible” (Letters 1:361).
Having received a commission to write a monograph on Auguste Rodin, Rilke came to Paris late in August 1902 to meet the sculptor. His two essays on the Frenchman (published in 1903 and 1907 as parts 1 and 2 of a book entitled Rodin) study Rodin’s decompositions and reconstructions of the physical world and illuminate his fascination with Rodin’s art at the time he was having the fantasies of disintegration described in the letters and in The Notebooks. In this sculpture he discovered that the “artist has the right to make one thing out of many and a world out of the smallest part of a thing.”6 This model licensed, inspired, and shaped his fictional evocations of the fantasies which had been so frightening to him. Thus, a sculptor became his “master” during the years in which his writing matured and established his place among leading modern writers with the completion of the New Poems (1907 and 1908) and The Notebooks (1910), though Rodin’s personal hold on Rilke began to decline after a temporary rupture in the relationship in May 1906. This part of the story is told in chapter 8.
Rodin’s example may have helped Rilke to discover, or at least to accept, the fragmentary form of his novel, the fractured personality of his central character, and the apparent incoherence of a life presented “as if one found disordered papers in a drawer” (Letters 1:362). A similar influence on The Notebooks was Paul Cézanne, whose painting also provided inspiration and guidance for some of the New Poems. In 1924 Rilke wrote that “from 1906 on” Cézanne’s painting was his “most forceful model” (Letters 2:334). The precise nature of this influence is delineated in a number of letters, including the eloquent ones written to the poet’s wife, Clara, in October 1907 when Rilke saw the Cézannes on exhibition in the Salon d’Automne. Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in 1907, and Braque was doing cubist landscapes in 1908. But I have not seen any evidence that Rilke was aware of their work that early. He may have known about some of the new ideas in science and psychology which were inspiring a revolution in painting and sculpture as they radically changed conceptions of nature and the mind—relativity theory, quantum physics, non-Euclidean geometry, and the psychology of the unconscious. All made it necessary to “learn to see” (Malte’s phrase) the world and self as they had never been seen or dreamt of in earlier times. These new ideas dismembered nature, converted solid matter into volatile, moving energy, demolished the old Newtonian assumption that the behavior of individual entities was as predictable as clockwork, formulated new relationships between space and time and between the spectator and what he or she sees, and proposed that a large part of the mind was a mass of seemingly chaotic unconscious energies, emotions, and ideas, shaping conscious thought and precariously restrained by fragile defenses from engulfing it. A number of passages in The Notebooks raise the possibility that Rilke had a vague awareness of some of the new theories in physics, mathematics, and psychology when he wrote his novel. But I know of no compelling evidence from his letters, from biographies, or from recollections of friends and acquaintances which shows that at this time he had any precise knowledge of the revolutionary ideas in these disciplines.7
It would be absurd to classify Rilke as a schizophrenic, but the anxieties and fantasies we find in his writings about his first year in Paris closely resemble some of those characteristic of this disease. According to Harold Searles, a widely respected authority on this form of mental illness, the schizophrenic “feels that his body is not his.” 8 Parts of it separate themselves and act autonomously. Alien personalities and objects invade him and are experienced as “foreign bodies within his personality,” which threaten to devour or to annihilate him.9 He may be sucked in, enveloped, or obliterated by the personality, mind, or will of another person, or by some animated part of his environment. (In a similar experience, as a boy, looking at himself in a mirror, Malte feels engulfed by a suffocating, inescapable mask and costume.) Relationships with other people threaten to obliterate all traces of his own face and to replace it with one responsive to their needs, closely resembling theirs. In this fantasy the face is felt to be synonymous with the sense of self. In The Nonhuman Environment, Searles analyzes the motives for the desire to turn oneself into a dehumanized object and the inclination to turn other people into such objects, tendencies which appear frequently in The Notebooks.
Studies of closely related forms of narcissistic and borderline illness by Heinz Kohut, R. D. Laing, and D. W. Winnicott have enlarged my understanding of what Rilke was going through when he first came to Paris. Like the poet at this time, like Malte, their patients felt so illdefined and uncertain of their differentiation from the world and from other people that mere contact with others often threatened to transform them into helpless responses or imitations. Sustained relationships could be engulfing. The contours of the body, the basis gradually discovered in infancy for one’s sense of one’s separate self, failed to hold against an impinging, invading, or “imploding” world. One defense against engulfment or invasion is “schizoid,” splitting into a “true” inner core of the self and a false, compliant, imitative outer self or selves, which shield the inner self against the dangers of alteration or annihilation by others or by an impinging environment.
In Rilke such defenses were crippling, but they also became creative. In subsequent chapters I discuss the self-protective, self-concealing personas which Rilke developed and consider their origins in his childhood. In this part of my commentary I refer to Winnicott’s and Laing’s concepts of the false self in schizoid illness and Winnicott’s argument that this has a healthy counterpart, the socially compliant facades which protect the inner core of the self in the experience of most mentally healthy people. Rilke’s conceptions of face and mask seem to have evolved out of intervals of illness. But Rilke, like Nietzsche, was convinced that masking protects the gifted artist’s cultivation and nurturing of his or her depth, power, and art from intrusion, distraction, and adulteration. The poet’s