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Integration and Distintegration in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge and Other Writings Illness and Creativity

I

Rilke came to Paris late in August 1902 to talk with Auguste Rodin and to study his sculpture in order to write a monograph on him. This monograph had been commissioned by Richard Muther, professor of art history at Breslau. The poet was twenty-six. He had published several volumes of poetry and short stories, mainly juvenilia, among them Leben und Lieder (Life and Songs) (1894), Larenopfer (Offerings to the Lares) (1896), Traumgekrónt (Dream-Crowned) (1897), Advent (1898), Zwei Prager Geschichten (Two Prague Stories) (1899), Mir zur Feier (In Celebration of Myself) (1899), Die weisse Fürstin (The White Princess) (1899), and Die Letzten (The Last Ones) (1901). Vom lieben Gott und Anderes (Of the Dear God And Other Things) (1900), a book of tales, and Das Buch der Bilder (The Book of Images) (1902), a volume of poems, show that his extraordinary gifts and skills were beginning to mature; these works foreshadow the distinctive qualities of those, soon to come, which would establish him as a major poet and novelist. He had already written early versions of “The Book of the Monastic Life” and “The Book of Pilgrimage,” two sections of Das Stunden-Buch (The Book of Hours), which many readers have considered his first work of enduring genius, although these poems do not move decisively beyond the excessive subjectivity, facile rhymes, and callow thinking of his early volumes.

Rilke’s move to Paris definitively ended his attempt, for little more than a year, to live as husband and father with his wife and daughter in their small house at Westerwede, near Bremen. In Paris he looked forward to long periods of solitude and the opportunity to give uninterrupted devotion to his writing. Clara would come as soon as she could, but they would live in separate quarters, and he intended that they should see each other only on weekends. Ruth, at nine months of age, would be left in the care of her mother’s parents.

My chapter on Rilke’s relationship with Clara offers a detailed examination of his motives for marrying her and the reasons for his decision to give up their home in Westerwede, where he had hoped that they would guard each other’s solitude and foster each other’s writing and sculpture, while raising a child. Here I shall give a brief, selective account of Rilke’s life at the time in order to provide a biographical context for my analysis of the novel begun in January 1904, which draws on his experiences during his first year in Paris.

In the summer of 1902 Rilke’s cousins cut off the allowance which his Uncle Jaroslav had provided for his university studies. Forewarned by his cousins in January, Rilke had begun looking for other means of support, but he was determined never to take the kind of full-time job his father had long been urging on him. The many letters he sent to potential patrons brought little in return. He was commissioned to do a study of the artists whom he had known in the Worpswede colony (in which he had met Clara and her friend, the painter, Paula Becker, while living there during September 1900)—Fritz Mackensen, Otto Modersohn (Paula’s husband), Hans am Ende, Fritz Overbeck, and Heinrich Vogeler, the gifted Jugendstil designer and illustrator, whose work and cloistered style of living he admired. At the time he did not foresee that Paula Becker, who had fascinated him no less than Clara in those heady days of September 1900 at Worpswede, would someday be recognized as the only major artist to have come out of that group. He does not mention her in his monograph on the Worpswede artists. A grant from the Concordia Society of Prague also helped support the couple in Westerwede during the spring of 1902, as did the fees for his book reviewing. But there was nowhere near enough to keep the family of three going.

Rilke had other reasons for breaking up his family. His letters tell us that the little household in Westerwede did not give him the emotional support, nurture, and fulfillment he had hoped for in marrying. On the contrary, his home there had remained painfully foreign to him. For some time his wife and child had seemed unwelcome intruders. Having his own home and family had done nothing to remedy his sense of his unreality. They had only intensified it. He felt that his existence as husband and father, under pressure to find an adequate income, in the village so close to Clara’s parents, was “destroying” him.1 His state of mind in Paris during 1902 and 1903 was influenced by the failure of his expectations that his marriage with Clara would give him the strength he needed to overcome his fears and that a house and family of his own would provide a refuge from the menacing chaos of the world around him without endangering his solitude.2

The focus of Rilke’s working life during his first few months in Paris was Rodin. In chapter 1 I offered some indications of the ways in which Rilke’s study of the sculptor’s methods and his work may have influenced the writing and structuring of The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. My chapter on the poet’s relationship with the sculptor provides a detailed analysis of Rodin’s effect upon Rilke and his writing. When Rilke first arrived in Paris, the great artist seemed a center of strength in the frightening disorder of the city. At the beginning of August 1902 he had written to Rodin, addressing him as “My Master,” revealing the extent to which he had idealized the sculptor before meeting him and the nature of his expectations. He expressed the wish that the books which he had published might be in Rodin’s possession. Unfortunately, the sculptor could not read German, and Rilke’s works had not yet been translated. He confessed, “All my life has changed since I know that you exist, my Master,” and he contrasted his own good fortune with that of young aspiring artists who feel forsaken because they cannot find a master who will provide them with “an example, a fervent heart, hands that make greatness” (Letters 1:77).

Warmly welcomed by the sculptor, he was not disappointed. His adulation grew. One can find it in letter after letter during the next few years. Writing to Otto Modersohn on December 31, 1902, after four months in Paris, he described the “cruelty,” “confusion,” and “monstrosity” of the city in which the dying, the physically and mentally ill, the grotesque forms of dehumanization, the people who had lost their way in the city’s noise and chaos and could not find purpose or direction or any sense of self among the anonymous masses, all threatened to overwhelm his sanity. “To all that,” he wrote to Modersohn, “Rodin is a great, quiet, powerful contradiction” (Letters 1:93-94). Possibly, the sculptor’s “example” fostered the artistic mastery, the control and skill which Salomé found, the following summer, in his vivid descriptions of his borderline experiences, the accounts of his own troubled life which he used with slight revisions in creating the Paris existence of Malte Laurids Brigge. (Malte is twenty-eight—Rilke’s age when he began the novel—and lives on the rue Toullier near the Luxembourg Gardens, where Rilke himself had lived during September 1902; even the month is the same.) But for many months even the powerful presence of the “Master” could not effectively contradict the deeply disturbing effects of the city and the multitude of fears which it aroused in the young poet.

“Oh a thousand hands have been building at my fear,” he wrote to Lou in July 1903. The people he saw were “fragments of caryatids on whom the whole pain still lay.... twitching like bits of a big choppedup fish that is already rotting but still alive. They were living on nothing, on dust, on soot, and on the filth on their surfaces” (Letters 1:108-9). His letters and The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge make it clear that he was projecting his sense of himself onto these people.

Malte’s thoughts about radical alterations of mind, self, and world teeter on a thin ledge of uncertainty between the fear that he is mentally disintegrating and the hope that he is going through a frightening process which will bring the poet in him to birth. In the following passage he is responding to the dying of a stranger in a crémerie: “Yes, he knew that he was now withdrawing from everything in the world, not merely from human beings. One more moment, and everything would lose its meaning, and this table and the cup and the chair he was clinging to would become unintelligible, alien and heavy.” Malte realizes that something very similar is taking place in him. He understands the experience of someone dying who cannot find anything familiar in the world around him. Filled with fear, he wishes that he could console himself with “the thought that it’s not impossible to see everything differently and still remain alive” (51-52).

Malte wonders if these disturbing changes in him may be a necessary preparation for truly original perception and thought. Near the beginning of The Notebooks he expresses the belief that he is “learning to see” (5, 6). He has discovered that each person has several faces. Some wear the same face for thirty years and keep the others “in storage” (6). These faces will be worn by their children and, sometimes, by their dogs. If we follow Malte thus far, interpretation seems relatively easy. Roughly speaking, a face in this passage seems to mean a personality or an identity. He has discovered that a child may take on a face which has remained hidden in his parent. Often children unconsciously assume the latent personalities of their parents by identifying with them.

Malte does not say all this. But it is implicit in what he does say. And it is consonant with Rilke’s belief, repeatedly expressed throughout the novel and in his poems and letters, that so much of what goes on in the mind and between persons is unconscious. Thinking of mind or psyche as space, Rilke imagines “an interior” inaccessible to consciousness, into which all our thoughts and perceptions sink. We do not know what is going on in the “interior.” But images which come up out of those depths reveal the ways in which earlier perceptions have been transformed there. Malte’s conception of “learning to see” has obvious affinities with Freud’s ideas about unconscious mental processes, though there is no clear evidence that Rilke was influenced by Freud’s theory while he was writing the early parts of The Notebooks: “I don’t know why it is, but everything enters me more deeply and doesn’t stop where it once used to. I have an interior that I never knew of. Everything passes into it now. I don’t know what happens there” (5).

Malte notes that we “wear” our faces “like gloves.” Everyone knows that a face can become a mask. But, reading further, you can see that this is not what Malte means when he turns from people whose personalities are fairly consistent throughout much of their lives to those who “change faces incredibly fast,” until at an early age, maybe forty, “their last one is worn through ... has holes in it, is in many places thin as paper.” Through the widening holes, “little by little,” we begin to see “the nonface” (“das Nichtgesicht”), “and they walk around with that on” (6-7). Is he thinking about people who burn themselves out too quickly? Certainly not just that. The notion of a person going through a rapid succession of personalities suggests instability, an absence of psychic continuity and integrity, an inability to develop a strong, lasting sense of identity. The image of a face “thin as paper” suggests that the sense of self is tenuous and fragile.

But what is the “Nichtgesicht,” the “nonface”? Does this refer to someone who continues to function without any strong sense of self or inner coherence, a person whose existence is unthinking, uncomprehending, guided by momentary impulses and feelings, external pressures and influences? That might be a description of many people lost in the confusion of modern urban life. A number of Rilke’s poems about faces warn us not to settle for this simple conclusion. In Rilke, Valéry and Yeats: The Domain of the Self Priscilla Shaw connects the “nonface” in The Notebooks with a poem about faces which Rilke wrote in December 1906.3 Here “das Nicht-Gesicht” does not refer to the facelessness of those who have lost self and soul in the chaos of the great cities. The poet asks if we do not implore whoever or whatever allots us our portion “for the non-face/which belongs to our darkness”:

flehen wir zu dem Bescheidenden

nächtens nicht um das Nicht-Gesicht,

das zu unserem Dunkel gehórt?4

He asks his face how it can be the face for such an inner life, in which continually the beginning of something is rolled together with its dissolving:

Gesicht, mein Gesicht:

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Wie kannst du Gesicht sein für so ein Innen,

drin sich immerfort das Beginnen

mit dem Zerfliessen zu etwas balk.

The poet thinks of forest, mountain, sky, and sea, heaving themselves out of their depths. They have no face like ours. Those great masses provide him with images of the serene perfection and harmony of something completely at one with itself, utterly lacking in self-consciousness and any sense of the division between world and self. Rilke reflects that even animals sometimes find their faces too heavy and ask that they be taken from them. These lines recall the dogs in The Notebooks that wear their masters’ faces. The thought that animals have faces which they find oppressive implies that they do not lack self-consciousness and a sense of the separation and opposition of self and world, self and other, however vague such awareness may be in them.

The poet’s longing for the “non-face” “which belongs to our darkness” seems to be a desire to lapse without fear into the internal flux, which is chaotic, unfathomable, and incomprehensible. This would involve a complete release from the strain of self-consciousness, which awareness of one’s own face intensifies. Rilke imagines the inner darkness as a vortex and as depths (“Wirbel” and “Tiefen”), as a wilderness (“Wildnis”) in which paths are lost in the dread of the abyss (“sich verlieren ins Abgrundsgraun”) almost as soon as one is lucky enough to find them (WDB 2:11).

What the poet seeks in his longing for the “non-face” which belongs to his darkness, what he thinks he may find by waiting patiently in unfathomable inner flux, is the radiant unity and intensity of being which he hears in a bird’s call. Its call makes its tiny heart “so large” and “at one/with the heart of the air, with the heart of the grove”:

wenn ein Vogellaut, vieltausendmal,

geschrien und wieder geschrien,

ein winziges Herz so weit macht und eins

mit dem Herzen der Luft, mit dem Herzen des Hains....

(WDB 2:13)

This passage brings to mind the prose fragment “An Experience” (1913), Rilke’s description of his sense of fusion with the cosmos, concentrated in his feeling that a bird’s call was vibrating just as intensely within him as in outer space, that he and the universe were completely absorbed into that single resonant sound. This experience in a garden on Capri made the space within and around him “one region of the purest, deepest consciousness.” With eyes shut so that he might forget his body’s separateness from the environment, he felt “the gentle presence of the stars” within him.5

In the poem quoted above the bird’s luminous cry is heard by someone who, time and again, as often as it dawns, soars like “steepest stone,” implicitly like a mountain or a colossus. This seems to be the god invoked at the beginning of the poem, “in whom I alone ascend and fall and lose my way” (“in dem ich allein/steige und falle und irre” [WDB 2:11]). The poet discovers this god in himself in the whirling, unfathomable darkness, when suddenly, without warning, he becomes capable of song which has the luminous unity and intensity of the bird’s cry, expressing his affinity with air, sky, forest, mountain, sea, and grove. The poem implies that the poet must give up his face or faces, allow the non-face to come through, and wait in the unfathomable inner darkness, if he is to find and to become that deeper unity, power, and radiance of being which is his genius, the god who towers above his ordinary self (WDB 2:13).

Malte’s reflections upon faces and the “non-face” culminate in a passage which differs in substance and mood from this poem, as he recalls a frightening experience of radically original perception when he startled a woman holding her face in her hands on a Paris street corner:

The woman sat up, frightened, she pulled out of herself, too quickly, too violently, so that her face was left in her two hands. I could see it lying there: its hollow form. It cost me an indescribable effort to stay with those two hands, not to look at what had been torn out of them. I shuddered to see a face from the inside, but I was much more afraid of that bare flayed head waiting there, faceless. (7)

A face comes off. A head is flayed. Perhaps no other image of mutilation is so threatening, not even the cutting off of breasts or genitals. Nothing can be more horrifying than the photo of a face blasted away in war, or eaten away by fire, acid, or animals. Obviously, this is because we associate or identify the face with the person.

Underlying the passage quoted above is a fantasy of psychic disintegration. The language seems to imply that the woman is unselfed, left without self or soul. Like so many other figures in the novel, she is an image of what Malte fears may happen to him. Implicit also is fear of sudden exposure of the selfless, amorphous, helpless mass of psychic plasma underlying the coherent, self-aware person and public personality.

The imagery of faces thin as paper, wearing through, riddled with holes, expresses the fear that one’s private thoughts and feelings will show, despite one’s efforts to hide them. And there is the related fear, implied in the description of the woman, that we shall be seen as selfless, amorphous, and dehumanized, like the dead, the living dead whom Malte describes as husks, and the insane.

Malte sees the woman’s face lying in her hands. Does this suggest that in the moment of violent fear the woman’s hands have become as expressive as a face? Rodin taught Rilke that hands could express the inner life as well as faces do. But it is the hollow form of the face which Malte sees in the woman’s hands. I take this to mean that the sight of the woman’s hands gives him the idea that her face has come off. He has seen her fall forward into her hands and then pull herself up out of them “too quickly, too violently.” The sight of them, emptied, frightened, open, thin as they are, flashes upon his mind, by way of association, the image of the face peeled away, and then the image of her naked, helpless facelessness in this moment of shock and fear.

I have said that, in this Notebooks entry, faces seem to represent personalities or identities. In the description of the woman the face seems to mean something deeper, more inclusive, a sense of self, a sense of oneself as a person, for whom the inner life has or seems to have the unity given it by a viewpoint, by the feeling that there is someone experiencing, desiring, fearing, choosing, not just a flux of experiences, desires, fears, choices. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche, like Hume before him, argues that this is an illusion, a fiction. But many psychoanalysts, beginning with Freud, have observed that such a sense of self does have a basis in the unifying organization of an “ego” and in the unity and separateness of the body. The sense of self has a number of sources. The privacy of the mind suggests its separateness and autonomy. Action following upon choice suggests that there is an agent who makes decisions and acts upon them. Consistent patterns of feeling and thought and consistency in the way things are viewed suggest that someone is there (where?) who experiences these feelings and has this viewpoint. The description of the woman whose face comes off in her hands reflects the fear that this someone, this person or self who Malte feels he is, may be lost.

A number of clinician-observers and theorists have discussed the origins of the association of face with self and person. One of the most highly respected observers of early infant behavior, R. A. Spitz, tells us, “The inception of the reality principle is evident at the three-months level, when the hungry infant becomes able to suspend the urge for the immediate gratification of his oral need. He does so for the time necessary to perceive the mother’s face and to react to it. This is the developmental step in which the ‘I’ is differentiated from the ‘non-I.’ ”6 D. W. Winnicott and other analytic theorists have concluded that an infant experiences a responsive mother’s face as a reflection and thus a confirmation of his own existence. Watching an empathetic mother’s face, an infant also gets to know a great deal about what he is like. Her face is a mirror in which her baby finds himself.7

Phyllis Greenacre points out that we never see our own face in the flesh, only in a pane of glass or water or some other mirroring surface, only as a reflected image or as an image in a photograph or a painting, which is felt to be unreal and disconnected, not the living thing itself. (This truth brings to mind Plato’s cave and the myth of Narcissus, who cannot find adequate confirmation of his existence and reality in his mirror image. His death can be read as a metaphor for the dissolution of the isolated or solipsistic self. Narcissus fascinated Rilke, who valued solitude. In Malte he portrays the ways in which isolation strengthens the imagination but also fosters narcissistic illness.) As the reflected image in a pane of glass or in water is felt to be unreal, Greenacre argues, a child needs someone else, whose face responsively mirrors his, to support his sense of the living reality of his own distinctive self.8 In Collected Papers on Schizophrenia and Related Subjects, Harold Searles observes that for the patient whose sense of self is weak the analyst’s face often performs the maternal function of mirroring.9 I shall return to this subject in subsequent chapters when I focus upon Rilke’s relationships with his mother and other women.

This preliminary discussion of mirrors and mirroring will make some readers think of Jacques Lacan’s well-known essay “The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in the psychoanalytic experience.” Lacan calls “the mirror stage,” lasting from six to eighteen months of age, “a drama ... which manufactures for the subject... the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body image to a form of its totality that I shall call orthopaedic—and, lastly, to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity.”10 For Lacan the child’s experience of his mirror reflection at approximately six months results in his assumption of an image. This early “identification,” however, is at odds with the infant’s experience of its own body at that time as fragmented and uncoordinated and with the closely related lack of any developed sense of psychic coherence and integration. The image offered the child in the mirror foreshadows the gradual development of an integrated sense of self and ego. But it also helps to lay the foundation for enduring, if often unconscious, alienation from oneself and others. The mirror image is, obviously, external, inverted, reflected, and its physical unity is sharply out of sync with the infant’s other experiences of psycheandbody. The child’s identification of himself (herself) with the image in the mirror, a misperception, anticipates the mediation of his (her) relationships with self and others by such images and, hence, that underlying, often unconscious sense of alienation. Eventually, Lacan argues, language and other kinds of symbols, too, will mediate these relationships and play a large part in the creation of the sense of a unified self. I have interpreted mirrors and mirroring in Rilke’s life and work with the help of other psychoanalytic theorists (among them, Searles, Spitz, Winnicott, R. D. Laing, and Heinz Kohut) rather than Lacan, because I have found their insights and the matrices of clinical experience which support and substantiate them more illuminating than his writings.

II

The image of the woman’s face coming off in her hands, frightening, horrifying as it is, obliquely suggests Malte’s dread of mental disintegration, which a number of passages in The Notebooks reveal. If Malte were a real person giving us a report of an experience, we might say that he has unconsciously projected the psychic disintegration which he fears in himself onto the woman, embodying it in a fantasy of a face coming off. Is this a hallucination? Is it imaginative perception? Perhaps, Rilke would have wanted us to retain our negative capability in reading this Notebooks entry, and to refrain from forcing it into one category, excluding the other.

Malte’s fantasies of physical and mental fragmentation and of the dissolution of boundaries between himself and his world originate in his childhood. In a subsequent entry he recalls an episode, from that time in his life, which clearly represents a lapse in the integrity of body, mind, and will. While drawing, he lets a crayon fall under the table. Kneeling on an armchair has made his legs so numb that “I didn’t know what belonged to me and what was the chair’s.” Boundaries between the self and the external world have dissolved. In the child’s mind differentiation and integration break down at the same time. Under the table Malte sees his own hand as a separate creature with a mind and will of its own:

[A]bove all I recognized my own outspread hand moving down there all alone, like some strange crab, exploring the ground. I watched it ... almost with curiosity; it seemed to know things I had never taught it, as it groped down there so completely on its own, with movements I had never noticed before ... it interested me. I was ready for all kinds of adventures. (94) Then the boy sees another hand come “out of the wall.” The two hands grope blindly toward each other.

The boy is horrified. “I felt that one of the hands belonged to me and that it was about to enter into something it could never return from. With all the authority that I had over it, I stopped it, held it flat, and slowly pulled it back to me without taking my eyes off the other one, which kept on groping. I realized that it wouldn’t stop, and I don’t know how I got up again” (94).

This delusion expresses the child’s sense that the integrity of body and self has broken down. What he has long thought was a part of himself is threatening to cross the boundaries which separate him from everything and everyone else and to become a part of the world of resistant objects and opposing wills. There is an implicit danger that, if this can happen, perhaps any part of body or psyche can separate itself from the child and cross that line into the alien, threatening other. For a little while Malte does not think he has the power to stop his hand from joining that strange other hand and thus entering “into something it could never return from” (94).

In The Ego and the Id (1923), Freud observed that the sense of a separate, unified ego develops with the gradual discovery that the body is a separate entity. Psychiatrists and psychologists working with schizophrenics often find that the disintegration of the self is reflected in the decomposition of the body image. Harold Searles describes the fantasy of a schizophrenic patient “that the building in which she was housed consisted, in actuality, of the disjointed fragments of a human female body.” The same patient expressed her belief that Searles was “anatomically unintegrated.” Searles says that these fantasies “had to do with her coming closer to an awareness of the full depth of ego fragmentation ... which had long prevailed in herself.”1

He also cites two 1961 studies of disturbances in body image during experiments in sensory deprivation, comparing the disturbances reported in these studies with those of his schizophrenic patients. According to one of these reports, in the minds of several subjects “the arms seemed to be dissociated from the body.” In another experiment one of the subjects “feared that his body parts would disappear and disintegrate.”

In The Nonhuman Environment, Searles cites a 1955 study of “Variations in ego feeling induced by d-lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD-25),” which reports that persons taking LSD-25 felt that their skin and their hands and feet no longer belonged to their bodies. “The individual feels that his body is not his, that it functions automatically.” His hands seem to move autonomously. Searles observes that some schizophrenics go through this kind of experience for long periods of time.2 Ultimately, as this study suggests, the loss of integration involves a withdrawal of “ego feeling” not only from parts of the body and then the body as a whole, but also from mental phenomena, from emotions and thoughts, so that they too seem separate, independent, and alien.

In Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl, not a body but a face disintegrates into separate, independent parts, like a cubist painting, in the mind of the schizophrenic girl, who suspects that the “independence of each part” is the source of her fear and that it keeps her from recognizing the face, though she knows it belongs to her analyst, whom she calls “Mama.”3 Unconsciously she projects the psychic disintegration which she fears in herself onto “Mama.” Her unconscious confusion of Mama with herself reflects the pervasive weakness of her ability to differentiate between herself and others.

Of course, we can also read Malte’s story about the hand as an account of the supernatural, something concocted out of Rilke’s fascination with ghosts and kindred phenomena, which was encouraged by his visit to Scandinavia in 1904. And one can see in this story, as in the passage about faces, the influence of Rodin. In the first part of his book on the sculptor, written in 1902, Rilke argues that the unity of an artistic object, a painting or a sculpture, does not have to coincide with the unity of some other object in the world. The artist discovers new unities, drawing upon a number of things to make one of his own, creating “a world out of the smallest part of a thing.” Rilke’s chief examples are the hands sculpted by Rodin. Though they stand alone, separate, they are no less alive. A number of them seem as expressive as faces of emotions, states of mind, and personality types—anger, irritation, sleep, waking up, weariness, loss of desire, criminal tendencies, for example. “Hands have a history of their own, they have, indeed, their own civilization” (WSR, 104-5).

Rodin’s sculpture fostered Rilke’s development of ideas originating in fantasies and fantastical experiences remembered from the poet’s childhood, many of which returned in Paris, brought back by the illness portrayed in Malte. Conversely, accounts of psychic disintegration or fragmentation in The Notebooks, insofar as the novel is autobiographical, reveal at least part of the motivation for Rilke’s absorption in Rodin’s disintegrative and reintegrating sculpture.

In the second half of The Notebooks, Malte’s account of Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy, obliquely echoes the story of the hand in Malte’s childhood. The duke’s hands seem to have a life and a will of their own. Malte compares them to “the heads of madmen, raging with fantasies.” But it is the duke’s blood which becomes the focus of Malte’s implicit belief that the essential weakness which defeated and destroyed this bold lord was a lack of integration. Malte imagines that the duke was “locked in” with his “foreign” blood, that it terrified him in the expectation “that it would attack him as he slept, and tear him to pieces.” In Malte’s fantasy this powerful noble, remembered as Charles the Bold, was completely subject to this alien, half-Portuguese blood, which he could not comprehend. He could not “persuade” it that he was emperor or that it should fear him. As Malte imagines Burgundy, eventually his blood, realizing that he was “a lost man,” “wanted to escape.” And, of course, it had its way when the duke died (192-93).

Rilke wrote to his Polish translator, Witold von Hulewicz, that the historical figures in The Notebooks should be seen as the “vocabula of [Malte’s] distress,” and that the “evocations and images” of these accounts of historical figures “are equated” with “his period of distress” (Letters 2:371). But the portrait of Charles the Bold shows Malte distancing himself, to some extent, from the fear of fragmentation, as his artistic mastery enables him to externalize and objectify his anxiety in this interpretation of the duke’s life.

In earlier sections of The Notebooks, Malte’s attempts to retrieve his childhood threaten to shatter whatever psychic wholeness he has been able to develop. The episode of the hands seems too distant to be dangerous, “an event that now lies far back in my childhood” (91). Not long before this, however, thirty pages earlier, Malte notes that, with the return of his childhood in memory, at the age of twenty-eight he is no less vulnerable and susceptible to his old anxieties.

Describing the recurrence of a childhood illness, Malte writes that it brings up out of the unconscious whole “lives” which he has never known about. Yet these strange “lives” have greater strength and a more powerful hold on his mind than familiar memories of what he once was and did. Amid the “tangle of confused memories” arises the terrifying childhood delusion of “the Big Thing.” As much as anything else in The Notebooks, this delusion, which comes back with all its original power, epitomizes Malte’s continuing lack of integration. He compares the Big Thing to a cancer, an alien hostile life in the body over which a person often has little or no control and which is likely to destroy him from within. His blood flowed through it. Like a dead limb it was a part of him but did not belong to him, which is to say, it did not respond to his will. He compares it to a second head. In its ambiguity it resembled an alien personality which emerges from the unconscious to engulf the individual. It swelled and grew over his face, “like a warm bluish boil,” covering his mouth, and then his eyes were “hidden by its shadow” (61-62).

The Big Thing calls to mind accounts of advanced schizoid and schizophrenic illness, in which an individual becomes increasingly anxious that he will be absorbed, ingested, and annihilated by the introjects (“distorted representations of people”), which are, as Searles explains, experienced “as foreign bodies in his personality.” These “infringe upon and diminish the area of what might be thought of as his own self” and often threaten to obliterate the self.4 The fantasy that the Big Thing covers Malte’s face, his mouth and eyes, suggests that it threatens to prevent him from eating, speaking, breathing, and seeing, as well as from being seen.

This account of the return of a childhood delusion follows descriptions of patients in a hospital. Among these are several images of partial or complete effacement. Bandages cover a head, except for one eye “that no longer belonged to anyone” (56). On his right is a large, unintelligible mass, which, Malte then realizes, has a face and a hand, but the face is empty of memories, of character, of will. The clothes look as if undertakers had put them on, and the hair as if it had been combed by members of that indispensable profession. All around him in the hospital Malte sees faces, heads, and bodies in which a person has been lost, obliterated. His fascination with these sights reflects his fear of being depersonalized or dehumanized. He imagines that the chair in which he is sitting must be the one he has been “destined for” and that he has come to “the place in my life where I would remain forever” (59-60).

Another closely related episode is one in which Malte, as a child, puts on a costume, then confronts himself masked in a mirror. The reflection of the masked figure destroys the child’s sense of self. Worse still, he feels that a “stranger” invades his body and takes it over. This experience, like the delusion of the Big Thing and the episode of the hands, reveals the weakness of differentiation in Malte. His sense of boundaries between himself and other people and objects is tenuous. He is apt to merge with them. Ambiguously, he is engulfed by the mirror (“I was the mirror”) and by the “monstrous reality” of the “stranger” in it. His account of his earlier vulnerability to annihilation and engulfment also suggests a flimsy, fragile sense of identity in the adult who feels that he has changed very little since that time in his childhood.

The terrifying experience of engulfment is triggered by the boy’s feeling that he is trapped in a mask and costume. Fearing that he will be caught inside the close-fitting mask, with his hearing muffled and his vision obstructed, feeling that he is being strangled by the strings of the cloak and that the turban and the mask are pressing down on him, he rushes to the mirror. His hands, moving frantically, seem disconnected from the invisible boy and the mask in the mirror. In this disturbed state of mind he imagines that the mirror has come to life, that it is stronger than he is, that it has the power to invade, obliterate, and completely replace him. It forces upon him

an image, no, a reality, a strange, incomprehensible, monstrous reality that permeated me against my will. ... I lost all sense of myself, I simply ceased to exist. For one second, I felt an indescribable, piercing, futile longing for myself, then only he remained: there was nothing except him. (107)

III

The fantasy of “the Big Thing” expresses, among other feelings, the fear of death. It is connected with an earlier passage in which Malte wonders if the “almost nourishing smile” on the faces of pregnant women doesn’t come from their sense of having “two fruits” growing in them, “a child and a death” (16). In this passage Rilke has converted the fantasy of death developing within one like another organism, not subject to one’s will or control, from a source of fear into an idea which gives comfort and even pleasure and is, for this reason, an aid against the dread of death which is the central and most pervasive fear in the novel. The fantasy of the Big Thing and the notion that death is like a fetus within us reflect the same kind of anxiety, the same sense of separate lives or even autonomous beings, within us that are part of us and yet independent of us. They are both rooted in an experience of body and psyche which can develop into paranoid schizophrenia.1 But the conception of death as fetus and fruit growing within also reflects the strengths of ego and imagination that enabled Rilke to defend himself against the threat of mental disintegration by transforming the worst of all internal dangers, the developing potential sources and causes of death in body and mind, into images which suggest natural, healthy growth and creativity.

The idea that a person’s death grows in him like a fruit, evolving out of his genetic inheritance and his experience, conscious and unconscious, gives meaningful coherence to Malte’s account of the end of his paternal grandfather, Christoph Detlev Brigge. In this narrative, which Rilke considered Malte’s most fully achieved piece of writing, the chamberlain is transformed into the regal, frightening personality and thunderous voice of the death which has been developing within him throughout his lifetime: “This voice didn’t belong to Christoph Detlev, but to Christoph Detlev’s death. Christoph Detlev’s death was alive now, had already been living at Ulsgaard for many, many days, talked with everyone, made demands.... Demanded and screamed” (13). Malte imagines that this swollen, shouting figure was nurtured by every “excess of pride, will, and authority that [Christoph Detlev] had not been able to use up during his peaceful days” (15). One can see how this notebook entry might come from the mind that produced the delusion of the Big Thing. Here the fantasy of an autonomous, latent inner being which emerges from within and engulfs the self, giving rise to terrifying delirious behavior, becomes creative, shaping the conception of death which unfolds in this compelling narrative. With this entry, Rilke thought, Malte achieved the “inexorability” of “objective expression” which he (the poet) had discovered in Baudelaire’s “Une Charogne” and Cezanne’s paintings (Letters 1:314).

Here dying brings disintegration of the ego, with all its structure and defenses. Malte’s recollection that the chamberlain was no longer there, that he could no longer see what was going on around him, that his face was unrecognizable, that the shouting voice seemed to belong to someone or something else—these remembered details call to mind the delirium which often overwhelms the dying. Defenses are down; control is gone. Much of what the dying have not expressed in life, much that was repressed, comes out.

The Notebooks reveals Rilke’s unusual access to large areas of experience ordinarily denied and repressed. This access was often involuntary, and it made life perilous and sanity precarious. Rilke was willing to endure frightening experiences of partial disintegration because he felt that they were the price he had to pay for sustaining his contact with the sources of feeling, fantasy, and insight which were the reservoirs of the extraordinary wholeness essential to his genius.

IV

Concerning the “monsters” and “dragons” which he had discovered in the “horrible dungeons” of his own psyche, Rilke wrote in 1904, “We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them.”1 A letter to “Merline” (Baladine Klossowska), written sixteen years later, develops and clarifies this point, arguing that “the monsters” within us “hold the surplus strength” which makes it possible for men and women of genius to transcend their ordinary human frailties and limitations.2

The third Duino Elegy, begun in January 1912 and completed late in the fall of 1913, reflects these ideas in language and imagery which suggest Rilke’s growing interest in psychoanalysis at the time. Lou AndreasSalomé introduced the poet to Freud late in the summer of 1913. The following year, recalling this meeting with Freud and the Swedish analyst Poul Bjerre, he wrote, “These men were important and significant for me, their whole orientation and method certainly represents one of the most essential movements of medical science.”3 In the Third Elegy the poet imagines himself as a child going down into a beloved inner wilderness, a primeval forest within him. As he descends with love into the gorges of his own interior, into more ancient blood, what he encounters is fearful, still satiated with devoured fathers. Every terrible thing he meets recognizes him, winking with mutual understanding. What is hideous and shocking smiles. The poet wonders how the child, going down into his own depths, can help loving these monstrosities which are parts of himself and smile at him with narcissistic tenderness seldom equaled even by maternal love.

... Liebend

stieg er hinab in das altere Blut, in die Schluchten,

wo das Furchtbare lag, noch satt von den Vatern. Und jedes

Schreckliche kannte ihn, blinzelte, war wie verständigt.

Ja, das Entsetzliche láchelte ... Selten

hast du so zärtlich gelächelt, Mutter. Wie sollte

er es nicht lieben, da es ihm lächelte....

(WDB 1:451)

If, as the first Duino Elegy tells us, the realization of beauty depends upon our capacity for enduring terror, how does an artist come to trust, take possession of, and even love the objects of his fear and the fear itself? Psychoanalysis can sometimes help patients to achieve mastery over their anxieties or, at least, make it possible to feel more at ease with them. Rilke, who had been “on the verge of undergoing analysis,” decided not to because he thought that it would tame the lions and monsters in him and thus kill the energy he needed to surpass himself. Exposing his “most secret powers,” it would undermine “an existence that owed its strongest impulses precisely to the fact that it did not know itself” (R&B:IC, 109).

One alternative to undergoing psychoanalytic therapy was to find guidance for mastering his fears and using them creatively and models with whom he could identify in some of the artists whom he most admired, especially several in his father’s generation—Tolstoy, Cézanne, and Van Gogh.

Death was among the most fearful monsters living in the psychic depths. It was also among the greatest potential sources of creative energy. In 1915, reacting to the slaughter going on around him, Rilke wrote a letter in which he conceived of God and death as parts, “never before broached, of the human mind” (Letters 2:148). (His ideas on this subject have obvious affinities with the theory of a death “drive” which Freud formulated in Beyond the Pleasure Principle[1920]. But the poet’s intuitions are free from the pretentions to scientific validity which have aroused criticism of Freud’s speculations.) Death, he thought, was something we feel alive at the center of our being. In our fear of it we repress this sense of it and project death into the world around us, where it seems to threaten us from a multitude of sources. We find external means to defend ourselves against it: science, in particular, medical science, with its increasing capacity for controlling nature; religion, which Rilke attacks for glossing over death with its notion of an afterlife (Letters 2:316), and the distractions and narcotics of modern urban life, which Rilke describes in the tenth Duino Elegy, including a bitter beer named “Deathless” (“Todlos”). As we all know, these stratagems produce emptiness and numbness.

Rilke found an alternative to such defensiveness in Tolstoy, whom he met twice during his travels in Russia with Salomé (April 1899 and May 1900). Both Salomé and Rilke have left accounts of those two visits. When they met Tolstoy in Moscow in the spring of 1899, the travelers were full of excitement about the religious fervor of the crowds celebrating Easter in the city’s chapels and churches. The old man expressed his indignation against Russian Orthodoxy, urging them not to be taken in by “the superstitions of the people.”4 A year later, visiting Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana, they found him in a dreadful mood, arguing loudly with his wife, who was equally inhospitable. After encountering him briefly, they were kept waiting for hours, until at last he offered them a choice between having lunch with his family and walking with him on his estate. They accompanied him while he talked about the landscape, Russia, God, and death, picking flowers, savoring their fragrance, then tossing them away. Rilke’s accounts of this walk differ. According to one, the poet understood everything their host was saying, except, occasionally, when the wind interfered. Elsewhere he recalls that much of what Tolstoy said was inaudible in the windy meadows, among the birches.5

Rilke’s reactions to the author of War and Peace were complex and varied. Among the most fertile was his image of Tolstoy as an artist exceptionally gifted with “a feeling for life,” a responsiveness which did not deny or repress the multifarious forms of death that pervade it, “contained everywhere in it as an odd spice in the strong flavor of life” (Letters 2:150). He had opened himself to the full intensity of his fear of death; yet, at the same time, because of “his natural composure,” he was a perceptive observer of even his most emotional states of mind. Rilke’s conception of such a division in consciousness resembles the psychoanalytic notion of splitting the ego. “One thinks, feels, and acts subjectively, but at the same time observes such behavior in a quasi-objective manner.”6 Tolstoy’s openness to his own fear of death and his gift of selfobservation enabled him to infuse that terror with “grandeur” in his works, to transform it into “a gigantic structure ... with corridors and flights of stairs and railless projections and sheer edges on all sides” (Letters 2: 150-51). His freedom from ordinary defensiveness against the dread of death and his ability to create and sustain the combination of the feeling man and the introspective observer helped to make it possible for him to write his strongest works, including “The Death of Ivan Ilych.” This story, like his great novels, reveals the force with which he felt his fear as well as his ability to transform it into “unapproachable reality” (Letters 2: 151).

For Rilke, the creative process leading to the achievement of great work places the artist “in danger” because he must be open to his “personal madness” and must go all the way through an experience which that “madness” makes increasingly “private,” “personal,” “singular,” and lonely. The unsupported isolation of his striving is necessary because discussing one’s “personal madness” with someone else would deflate its energy and force. Rilke’s letters reveal that this sense of the creative process originated in his own experience. Describing his work on The Notebooks, he says, “[I]n it I seemed to be clutching all my tasks together and running them into me, like that single man who in hand-to-hand fighting takes on all the lances opposed to him” (Letters 2:25). He was also clearly aware of the motives that led him to place himself in such danger. The work of art, he wrote, brings “enormous aid” to the artist, because it provides evidence of his integrity and authenticity. If he seems close to insanity at times, the completed work reveals the internal “law[s]” which have remained invisible in his disordered thoughts, like the form of an organism contained in genetic codes in the first fetal stages, affording the artist ample “justification” of his deviations from accepted norms.7

To the great poet his poems can reveal what for the ordinary person it might take years of analysis to disclose—the unconscious (“invisible”) laws which govern one’s experience, are at least partly responsible for one’s misery and happiness, and, once known, are open to change. In June 1907, when Rilke explored these ideas, such revelations, coming from his own art, did not seem to threaten the efficacy of the “secret [inner] powers” which in 1912 and 1913 the temptations of psychoanalytic therapy made him anxious to protect against exposure by some disciple of Freud.

Writing to his wife on June 7, 1907, Rilke named another motive for subjecting himself to the inner “violence” which makes great art possible (Letters 2:17, 41, and 19). Because he felt such a need for solitude, his communion with his poems, fiction, and nonfiction prose was often far more satisfying and fulfilling than his contacts with other people (see Letters 1:121). He also observed that the artist’s accomplished works make possible a deeply satisfying kind of communication in which people show one another what they have become through their work and in this way offer mutual help and support (Letters on Cézanne, 5). Aspiring to an extraordinary degree of self-sufficiency which would sustain the long periods of solitude he required to do his work, he nonetheless understood that he needed other people’s responses to confirm the sense of his own reality, of his “unity and genuineness,” and the self-esteem which his poems and fiction nurtured.

Rilke indicates another way in which his work was a form of “selftreatment” (Letters 2:42). In one of his Letters to a Young Poet he supposes that emotional illness “is the means by which an organism frees itself of foreign matter,” and he urges the young poet not to try to suppress his neurosis, but to encourage it, to “have [the] whole sickness and break out with it” (LYP, 70). Perhaps, in The Notebooks, more than in any of his other works, Rilke felt that his writing could help him free himself from alien thoughts and feelings brought to consciousness by his fears. When his anxieties had flourished to the point of threatening to destroy his sanity, he projected them into the mind and life of his fictional surrogate. The process of exorcising “foreign matter” would be complete only when Malte could be detached from himself and given a separate existence. On finishing the novel, he felt he had managed to do this (see Letters 1:362).

Earlier interpreters of The Notebooks have argued that Malte served as a kind of psychological scapegoat for his author, taking upon himself the illness that plagued Rilke, carrying it away.8 This line of thought recalls Freud’s observations about Dostoevsky’s characters in his essay “Dostoevsky and Parricide.” Freud argues that some of the characters in Dostoevsky’s works enact the crimes which the author and his readers unconsciously would like to commit, and thus bring fulfillment of forbidden desires through the author’s and the reader’s unconscious identification with them. Then they satisfy the demands of the author’s and the reader’s superegos by going through punishment for these crimes.9 Rilke himself encourages the “scapegoat” interpretation in a letter to Salomé in which he asks whether Malte, “who is of course in part made out of my dangers, goes under in it, in a sense to spare me the going under” (Letters 2:32).

By externalizing and objectifying his sickness in a novel, a writer may be able to distance and detach himself from it. Seeing it more clearly in the images and language of his novel, he may gain a better understanding of the illness and thus achieve a larger degree of control over it. The imposition of literary form and style on the raw material of the novel deriving from his illness may help to give him the confidence that he can master it.

But Rilke’s letters also express the belief that the writing of The Notebooks may have exacerbated his sickness. He feared that his attempt at self-exorcism had been a disastrous failure, that instead of enabling him to externalize his illness and 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).