The Beginning of Terror. David Kleinbard
discusses Rilke’s portrayal of Malte’s reactions to Paris from a sociological perspective, in relation to Walter Benjamin’s and Georg Simmel’s accounts of the big city’s effects on the individual and on modern literature (in Simmel’s essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life” and Benjamin’s, “Some Motifs in Baudelaire”). This part of Huyssen’s analysis indicates a direction in which interpretations of Rilke’s fiction should be developing. At the end of my review of recent Rilke criticism I shall say more about this approach, in my reflections on Brigitte Bradley’s study of The Notebooks.
A number of recent commentators on Rilke’s work continue to divorce the poetry from the poet’s life, as if any attempt to read the Duino Elegies, The Sonnets to Orpheus, and other great poems by Rilke with understanding enhanced by consideration of his life and by psychoanalytic insights demeans the poetry and deprives it of proper aesthetic appreciation. Some critics, Huyssen argues, see Rilke as representing “a modernism of disembodied subjectivity, metaphysical negativity, and textual closure, the classicism of the twentieth century.”2 Such criticism may develop perceptive readings of individual poems and passages, but it often suppresses much of the emotional and intellectual complexity, vitality, richness, and subtlety of Rilke’s work.
One of the strongest statements of antipathy to psychoanalytic and biographical criticism among Rilke scholars is to be found in the foreword to Jacob Steiner’s book Rilkes Duineser Elegien (1962 and 1969). Steiner goes to the extreme of insisting that the more boldly the biographical “I” of the poet stands out in the “i” of the work, so much the worse is the poetry (“Aber es lásst sich vermuten, dass das biographische Ich des Dichters umso starker durch das ich des Werks hervortritt, je schlechter die Dichtung ist”).3 Attacking Simenauer’s analysis, Steiner says he forgets that “the private person Rilke is not yet the poet in his productive hours and that ... from the productive poet to his product there is a distance to be overcome whose breadth, unfathomable depth, and complexity have not been measured up to the present time” (“Aber er vergisst dabei, dass die private Person Rilke noch nicht der Dichter in seinen producktiven Stunden ist und dass auch vom producktiven Dichter zu seinen Produkt ein Abstand zu überwinden ist, dessen Weite, Abgründigkeit und Komplexität bisher nicht ermessen worden sind”).4
This doctrine foreshadows more sophisticated and carefully argued attempts to define and justify the critical concept of “das lyrische Ich” (the lyric I) in each poem, such as Kate Hamburger’s in Die Logik der Dichtung (1968) and Anthony Stephens’s in Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Gedichte an die Nacht” (1972), which are reminiscent of earlier endeavors by the English and American New Critics to analyze the narrative persona in a poem or a work of fiction without reference to the life and personality of the poet or the novelist. Steiner’s desire to separate and distance “the productive poet” from the person and his purist Aestheticism in arguing that the reflection in the “I” of the poem of the “private person” in his nonproductive hours makes for a bad poem seem wildly defensive and curiously naive. In her very perceptive study Transcending Angels: Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies (1987), Kathleen Komar finds even Steiner guilty of digressing into the personal and the biographical, when he remarks that a passage in Elegy IV reflects Rilke’s relationship with his father (though he immediately qualifies this observation, saying that the relationship between father and son is so fully generalized in these lines of the Elegy that reference to a biography would make no further contribution to an understanding of the poem). Noting that, “as Steiner points out, the passage concerning the father may well have biographical overtones concerning his bureaucratic-military father’s questioning of Rilke’s poetic vocation,” Komar remarks, “the more general implications for the male and female factors of human life provide a more fruitful focus for our discussion of the Elegies.”5 The clumsy vagueness of this comment suggests an evasive, skittish response to the personal and psychological dimensions of Rilke’s poetry, a response which flaws and limits an otherwise excellent book.
Komar brackets off the poet’s life in a three page “Biographical Sketch” that appears as an appendix at the end of her study. Her decision to exclude the life from the rest of her book imposes substantiallimitations upon her valuable, detailed analyses of content and form. And the more’s the pity. For, her elucidations of verbal nuances, multiple meanings, and the connections among passages and poems which contribute to the integrity of each Elegy and to the coherence and development of the cycle are the work of an exceptionally gifted and knowledgeable interpreter.
Richard Exner and Ingrid Stipa argue that psychoanalytic interpretation is largely irrelevant in reading Rilke’s later poetry, in another valuable recent contribution to Rilke criticism: “Das Phanomen der Androgynie des Schaffenprozesses im spáten Rilke: Das Beispiel. ‘Solang du Selbstgeworfnes fángst ...,’” (The Phenomenon of the Androgyny of the Creative Process in Late Rilke: Example, “As long as you catch what you yourself have thrown ... “), published in Rainer Maria Rilke, as part of the “Wege der Forschung” series (1987). Referring to Simenauer’s contrast between the archaic, analyzable, comparatively unformed perceptions of Rilke’s earlier work and the form-giving harmonies of the later poetry, Exner and Stipa conclude that the creative processes responsible for the latter were grounded, to a large extent, in “bewussten Denkvorgange” (“conscious thought processes”), which these critics see as providing “logische Ausdrucksformen zur Kommunikation” (“logical forms of expression for communication”).6 One can find support in Rilke’s work for their hypothesis that poetry should not be read primarily as an expression of the complex and largely unknown psychic life of the poet, for example, in Sonnet to Orpheus 1.3, which tells us, “Gesang ist Dasein,” “Ein Hauch um nichts” (“Song is existence,” “A breath without purpose or object”). But their choice of a focal example, “As long as you catch what you yourself have thrown ...,” is unintentionally ironic. This poem suggests that the writing of great poetry is a profoundly mysterious process and experience, in which suddenly the poet becomes the one who catches the ball thrown to him, to his center, by an eternal female partner. In this experience all conscious courage and power, all conscious calculation, are gone, and the poem seems to come from him of its own accord, like a meteor leaving his hands and raging into its own spaces. This is only a partial paraphrase, but it suffices to show that the creative processes the poem envisions are very largely unconscious, unknown, mysterious.7
Exner and Stipa maintain that in “Solang du Selbstgeworfnes fángst ...” Rilke conceives of poetry as arising out of its own logic and language, as if it were largely or entirely disconnected from the poet’s unconscious thought processes. They use the word “poetologische” (“poetological”) to label this purely self-sufficient logic and process. Though their critical methods and concepts are very different from Jacob Steiner’s, their affirmation of rarefied aestheticism, like his, seems strangely naive and psychologically defensive. Like so many other Rilke scholars, they are defending the purity of poems which we all value as great treasures. But the poems do not become less extraordinary if we see them in relation to the poet’s life and with the help of psychoanalytic insights. Exner’s and Stipa’s method of defining the “poetological” processes and results is to identify “lexische Fáden” (“lexical strings” or “threads”), “lexische Gewebe” (“lexical webs” or “wefts” or “textures”), and “Wortfelder” (“word fields”) in a poem or a series of selected poems. This mode of operations enables them to trace the development of connected themes and closely related words and images through quite a number of poems written in different stages of Rilke’s creative life. And although at times their terminology seems a pseudoscientific jargon, their careful tracings of “lexical strings” or “threads” and “word fields” do accumulate a large, persuasive picture of the developing relationship between Rilke’s evolving sense of himself, his feelings and thoughts about androgyny, and his conception of the poet’s (especially his own) creative processes.8