The Beginning of Terror. David Kleinbard
more skillful and knowledgeable. But, if you postulate, as Exner and Stipa do, that the earlier work is shaped by Rilke’s unconscious, as Simenauer and Lou Andreas-Salomé describe it, you will have a hard time making the case that the later work somehow floats completely free of the poet’s psychic depths, as if it had no connection with its antecedents. And if, at times, as in the line from Sonnet I.3, quoted above (“Gesang ist Dasein” [“Song is existence”]), Rilke seems to resemble other purists of modernist Aestheticism, such as Mallarmé, much of his prose and poetry, including the Duino Elegies, shows affinities with works of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature, philosophy, and psychology which weigh heavily against such a position. Among the writers and thinkers most important to Rilke were Kleist, Jens Jacobsen, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Freud, and Lou Andreas-Salomé.
I have mentioned Anthony Stephens’s study, Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Gedichte an die Nacht” (1972), a nonpsychoanalytic commentary which shows an intelligent openness to a variety of approaches to Rilke’s extraordinarily complex, problematic, and elusive writings. Stephens finds that the “intellectual structures” of the “Gedichte an die Nacht” [Poems to the Night], written in 1913-14, “have their roots determined largely by emotion.” Quoting Rilke’s early definition of his aim in writing poetry—“Bilder zu finden für meine Verwandlungen” (“to find images for my transformations”)—Stephens proposes that “in his later work intellectual structures [of human experience] may function precisely as images.” (Among the structures which seem most important to him in Rilke’s poems is “Gegenstándlichkeit,” the radically alien quality and opacity of external objects for the person who feels unrelated to them and feels that he is not at all at home in a world in which he is like a tenant constantly in danger of eviction. Opposed to “Gegenstándlichkeit” in Rilke’s thinking and writing is “Weltinnenraum,” a term which Stephens and other critics read as a means of conceptualizing “a feeling of participation and emotional identification with the objects of experience.” In other words, “The concept of ‘Weltinnenraum’ is based on a feeling of the homogeneity of inner and outer worlds and on the absence of any barriers to emotional identification.”9 The argument that such concepts function in Rilke’s poetry as images rather than as rational abstractions in logical relationship to one another leads Stephens to the following conclusion: “What determined the succession of Rilke’s ‘Verwandlungen’ (“transformations”) is a psychological question and hence unanswerable within the framework of this book.”10 That is to say, one should not study the transformations of “Gegenstándlichkeit” into “Weltinnenraum” in exclusively logical, metaphysical, or epistemological terms if one wants to give a clear and full analysis of the works which represent and realize them. Such transformations in Rilke’s poetry involve complexities of feeling and thought which need help from psychological insights if we are to understand them.
But I do not want to give the impression that Stephens is an avid supporter of psychoanalytic criticism. He faults both Ulrich Fülleborn and the “Freudian” critics for approaches to Rilke which try to fit poetry to “a priori” assumptions, absolute preconceptions; if “these conditions do not appear to pertain, then the ‘Synthesis a priori’ supplies them in terms of what ought to be there if the presuppositions are correct.” Stephens shows that this is the case with Fülleborn, but does not mention any “Freudian” critics specifically, as examples of this failing.11
My interpretations of Rilke’s work in The Beginning of Terror resemble Stephens’s questioning approach to the work, his emphasis on the problematic nature of the poetry, his sense of its great complexity, subtlety, and richness, as well as its difficulty and elusiveness, and his belief that, possessed of these qualities, it invites a variety of critical perspectives. The Beginning of Terror shuns the kind of prescriptive “a priori” narrowness found in some primitive, reductive psychoanalytic criticism. For the most perceptive literary critics and psychoanalysts share a sense of the fertile overdetermination of meaning in the metaphors, images, and formal patterns of great poems and other works of art.
In his concluding chapter, “An Approach to Rilke,” Stephens discusses “two opposing tendencies, or attitudes, or techniques” in Rilke’s work, focusing on “the poem as a closed system and the poem as a reaching out beyond the limits of given experience.”12 Stephens is interested in the interaction between these two tendencies and opposing views of poetry in Rilke’s work, and in the poet’s oscillating emphases, now on the one, now on the other. The former view may be associated with the poet’s inclination, in his studies of Rodin and his letters about Rodin’s sculpture, to magnify art into something that has an absolute value, something, like a god, unapproachable, magical, untouchable, and in its essence incomprehensible. As Stephens points out, Rilke inherited this idealization of the work of art and the artist from the Romantics. In The Beginning of Terror I explore this tendency in Rilke’s thought and work at length, especially in my discussion of the poet’s relationship with Rodin (see chapter 8). Describing the opposing tendency, Stephens focuses on Rilke’s lecture, Moderne Lyrik (1898), where the poet says that the “specifically modern impulse is ... to penetrate to the furthest regions of the self and express the result in poetry.” An excerpt from that lecture makes the same point in the poet’s words:
Sehen Sie: seit den ersten Versuchen des Einzelnen, unter der Flut flüchtiger Ereignisse sich selbst zu finden, seit dem ersten Bestreben, mitten im Gelärm des Tages hineinzuhorchen bis in die tiefsten Einsamkeiten des eigenen Wesens,—giebt es eine Moderne Lyrik.13
Look: since the first attempts of the individual, amid the flood of fleeting events, to find himself since the first endeavors, amid the noise of the day, to listen within down to the deepest solitudes of his own being—there [has been] a Modern Poetry.
Stephens argues persuasively that this early association of modern poetry with “an exploration of the self and its relation to the world” is an enduring and central concern of Rilke’s writings. In my chapters on The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge and my studies of Rilke’s later poems, including the Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus, with questions and suggestions arising from the insights of a number of analysts and from Rilke’s own writings, I examine this aspect of his work.
Chapters 2, 3, and 4 of this book are largely concerned with The Notebooks. One of the most valuable recent studies of the novel, Brigitte L. Bradley’s “Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge: Thematisierte Krise des literarischen Selbstvertándnisses” (The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge: Thematicized Crisis of Literary Self-Understanding) (1980), reveals close affinities with Andreas Huyssen’s attempt to integrate psychological and sociological perspectives on Rilke’s work. Bradley argues that Malte’s responses to Paris reflect the conflict in Rilke between his early interest in the oppressiveness of the modern urban, technological, industrialized environment, with its crowded living conditions, and his belief that a writer corrupts and degrades his work if he allows it to be shaped by an ideology or by political, sociological, and economic ends.
Bradley argues that a number of passages in The Notebooks reflect Rilke’s sense of the ways in which the old ideal of individuality, according to which a person could hope to become master of his or her circumstances, rather than be mastered by them, had been undermined by modern methods of mass production and the pervasion of human existence by technology, commercialization, and huge bureaucracies. Bradley points out that in a number of episodes, such as the ones in which Malte encounters the blind seller of cauliflowers and the blind newspaper vendor, Rilke focuses on human figures who may be seen as examples of social problems, “as representative of alienation conditioned by the economic system of production in relation to the sphere of work”