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Differentiation between Self and Others in The Notebooks and Rilke’s Letters

I

During his first year in Paris, 1902-3, Rilke’s ability to differentiate himself from other people was often impaired. A letter to Salomé describes an experience in which the sense of mental and bodily separateness from others which underlies most adult relationships and contacts gave way to a frightening fantasy of being pulled into close identification, involving a partial merging of bodies and minds. This was his encounter with a man suffering from St. Vitus’ dance: “I was close behind him, will-less, drawn along by his fear, that was no longer distinguishable from mine.” Imagining that this stranger’s “fear had been nourished out of me, and had exhausted me,” he felt “used up” (Letters 1:115). As they became increasingly connected and the stranger seemed to feed on him, he felt that “everything” within him was being consumed. This experience was the source of an entry in The Notebooks.

Malte is drawn to an “emaciated” figure who becomes the focus of attention on the block, an object of laughter. Following the man despite an urge to cross the street to get away from him, he notices that he hops on one leg. When this hopping travels from his legs to his neck and hands, Malte feels “bound to him” (68). As the spasms increase, his anxiety grows with the stranger’s. With pounding heart he gathers his “little strength together” and begs the struggling St. Vitus dancer to take it. When the fellow finally loses control and the nervous spasms take over his body, exploding into “a horrible dance,” Malte is left feeling like “a blank piece of paper” (65-71).

What does the encounter mean to him? Why is he drawn into such close identification with this stranger?

The spectacle of St. Vitus’ dance speaks to his fear of going insane, of losing himself to uncontrollable forces which often seem on the verge of overwhelming him. The scene around the St. Vitus dancer awakens in Malte a dread of becoming an object of derision and revulsion. His desire to help the stranger is motivated by compassion, but also by his sense of affinity. If this fellow can overcome the convulsive compulsion of his nerves, his victory might answer Brigge’s need to believe that strength of will can win the struggle against his own fears and tensions. But Malte is also curious to see what happens if and when the fellow gives in, because he anticipates that he may soon go through a mental disintegration not unlike the cataclysm against which the other man is struggling. At the end of the episode the victim of St. Vitus’ dance is invisible, engulfed by his involuntary spasms and by the crowd that surrounds him.

In a highly illuminating essay, “The Devolution of the Self in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge,” Walter H. Sokel argues that when the St. Vitus dancer “gives in and his will collapses, something incomparably mightier, and truer leaps forth from him.” Professor Sokel supports his interpretation with the argument that the “expansive gesture,” “the spreading out of his arms, with which the dancer 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 motivates her to hide behind the play and her role. Hiding, she becomes so powerful that the audience which, she feels, has been “gnawing on” her face, breaks into applause “as if to ward off ... something that would force them to change their life.” Her fellow actors feel as if they are in a cage with a lioness (235).

Malte imagines her holding up a poem as a mask. Were Rilke’s poems and his fiction masks behind which he defended his strength and singular gifts from being drained away by the people around him? Did these masks become, paradoxically, powerful, if indirect, expressions of the inwardness which they were hiding? A poet expresses himself selectively in his poems. If we compare the more objective New Poems with his contemporaneous novel, which is sometimes autobiographical, and his letters, we can see that many of his poems, which do not seem to tell us anything about their author, were indirectly self-expressive. In writing about Eleanora Duse, who seemed to him to be very much like himself, was Rilke revealing obliquely that his poems, his novel, and Malte himself, as a fictional surrogate, concealed and expressed him at the same time? Here, too, I wonder if Nietzsche influenced the poet’s thinking. In Beyond Good and Evil, he asks if one does not write in order to hide what is within oneself.1 Kierkegaard, who interested Rilke as early as 1904, argued that all genuinely expressive and original writing is elusive and oblique (as figurative language and irony are indirect), concealing as much as or more than it communicates because the individual is and must remain essentially secret, incommunicable. According to the Danish philosopher, whenever “the process of communication is a work of art,” it is shaped by the underlying sense “that personalities must be held devoutly apart from one another, and not permitted to fuse or coagulate into objectivity.”2

I have mentioned Winnicott’s comment in The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment that artists often experience both “the urgent need to communicate and the still more urgent need not to be found.”3 Surely this observation fits Duse, as Malte imagines her. But does it describe Rilke?

Rilke’s prose piece entitled “An Experience” tells us that in 1913 he felt he was protected from psychological parasites and cannibals by an invisible barrier which “absorbed any relationship into itself and ... intervened like a dark, deceptive vapor between himself and others,” giving him “for the first time, a certain freedom” toward others and “a peculiar ease of movement amongst these others, whose hopes were set on one another, who were burdened with cares and bound together in death and life.” His inner life, defended by this “intermediate space,” had “so little reference to human conditions, that [most people] would only have called it ‘emptiness.’ “ But this would have been a radical misunderstanding. His “freedom” brought the poet not “emptiness” or illness but “joy” and “converse with Nature” (WSR, 37-38).

Recurrently Rilke saw masking as a defense of inner freedom, power, and creativity. Behind the mask the face was free to grow. This was as true for himself as it was for Eleonora Duse and the Prodigal Son. But, as we have noted, often the use of such a defense is compulsive, and the freedom it affords may be quite limited. At least in Rilke’s imagination Duse was compelled to use her role as a mask by her fear that the audience was devouring her face. In the Prodigal Son episode masking becomes a necessary defense against having one’s face and inner self altered through and through under pressures from one’s family. Still worse, a mask can swallow the face it is meant to protect. I have mentioned the Notebooks entry in which a mask obliterates the child who tries it on. In January 1912, not long before the first Duino Elegy came to him, describing his involuntary identification with people he met, Rilke says that he could step out of his room in an amorphous state of mind approaching chaos, and, suddenly finding himself an object of another person’s awareness, automatically assume the other’s poise. On such occasions he was amazed to hear himself expressing “well-formed things.” His assumption of a poise belonging to the person he met and his involuntary compliance with the other’s expectations of social behavior, masking the “lifelessness” and “chaos” he had felt in himself before these encounters, tended to engulf him, if only temporarily (Letters 2:37).

Reading Rilke’s letters and his biographers, one can see how he developed a persona out of the vocation which was central to his innermost sense of self. He played the role of the poet so well that it helped to win him the acclaim and support of many powerful and wealthy people. This is not to say that they were unaffected by his writings, only that the role the poet played among them made them all the more eager to have him with them, often in their homes, and to become his patrons. It was a mask which obviously reflected, to some extent, Rilke’s sense of himself, but also enabled him to veil and protect his inner life from the admirers who, he felt, were constantly draining his limited vitality and energy away, devouring the distinctive features of his face, the singular man and poet he was. In November 1907, for example, he described his mother’s friends in Vienna as eager to eat him up—though once they’d heard him read, they lost their hunger (see Letters 1:325).

The biographer Wolfgang Leppmann suggests that Rilke’s social personality, manners, and clothes were a protective camouflage which the poet developed to defend his inner freedom against impingements. Leppmann quotes Wilhelm Hausenstein’s sketch of Rilke in 1915: “The poet went about in a navy-blue suit and wore light gray spats. His delicate frame was somewhat stooped. ... His hands moved cautiously, without expansive gestures, in light-colored deerskin gloves. He carried a walking-stick. The presence of a distinguished figure was thus disguised beneath the conventional appearance of a man of the world.”4 Like the role of the poet, this social persona may have functioned in alliance with the “intermediate space,” the “dark deceptive vapor,” which, Rilke felt, defended him from the people around him.

Rilke’s fears of being devoured by those who loved and admired him lead me to wonder if his personas resemble the “false self” which, psychologists tell us, people plagued by such anxieties often develop to conceal and protect their innermost self against such dangers. The question is important because the “false self,” which I shall define more fully, is a self-defeating defense, which ultimately encourages feelings of futility and emptiness and the sense that self and world are insubstantial and unreal.5 Recurrently, at least until 1922, when he completed the Duino Elegies and wrote The Sonnets to Orpheus, Rilke was haunted by such feelings.

Winnicott observes that the false self usually originates in the failure of a mother to adapt herself with sufficient sensitivity and empathy to an infant’s needs. The mother intrudes her own needs and fears into the child’s consciousness long before he is mature enough to cope with them. Distracted, disconnected from the spontaneous flow of his own feelings and “thoughts” by these impingements, he may split himself into an inner core and a personality or personalities preoccupied with giving compliant reactions to his mother’s pressures and, eventually, to pressures from other people. This outwardly directed part of the infant psyche becomes a false self, governed by the need to gratify and placate other people. While appeasing them, it conceals and protects the inner core, the “true self,” which is as completely divorced as possible from the false self’s need to react to external pressures.6

Compliance is motivated by fear of engulfment, impingement, and depersonalization if one reveals one’s inner self, one’s true thoughts and feelings. But this defensive front may bleed, squeeze, corrupt, or swallow the inner self it is meant to protect. According to R. D. Laing in The Divided Self, the false self is experienced as being governed by “an alien will” or wills. Initially this is a parent’s will, however much it may be disguised. It may control one’s behavior, one’s body, one’s speech, even one’s thoughts, feelings, and perceptions.7 The false self may be compulsively impersonating as well as identifying with the person whose expectations exact compliance. This concept recalls Rilke’s unhappiness about his tendency to assume the poise of someone else, when, suddenly, he found himself “expressing well-formed things” which had nothing to do with his inner chaos and which completely concealed it. Were his aristocratic persona and the public role of the poet also examples of the schizoid false self, as Winnicott and Laing define it?

If we can say that Rilke did develop the kind of false self that analysts find in schizoid illness, we can discover its roots in the poet’s relationships with his parents during childhood. Rilke felt that Phia saw him entirely in terms of her preconceptions. He willingly complied when she insisted that her little boy play the role of a girl to replace the daughter who had died before he was born. As an adult he recalled that she had exhibited him to her friends as if he were a doll. While trying to satisfy her need for a daughter, he encouraged his father’s hope that his little son would grow up to be an army officer and thus fulfill Josef’s frustrated ambitions vicariously. Josef Rilke had been forced out of the army after ten years of service. He had little René doing military exercises and receiving medals. The boy did his best to please him, too.

Phia Rilke wrote verse. She read Schiller’s ballads to her son, persuaded him to memorize and to recite them, and did everything she could to foster in René the desire and the ambition to be a great poet.8 In Ewald Tragy, an early autobiographical novella, Ewald, Rilke’s surrogate, thinks of the mother who has left him as a sick woman who wants to be called “Fráulein,” sitting in a train compartment letting her fellow passengers know that her son is a poet.9 In his letters about his “unreal,” “ghostly” mother, Rilke expressed the fear that he was too closely identified with her, though he had been trying to separate and distance himself from her all his life (Letters 1:147). His devotion to a vocation that conformed to his mother’s wishes and his nearness as a poet to her conception of herself must have troubled him.

Malte’s retelling of the parable of the Prodigal Son reflects Rilke’s sense of the ways in which a false self may engulf one as it develops under pressures from one’s parents. Malte imagines that the mask of the false self which grows in response to the expectations, fears, hopes, and relentless scrutiny of a family threatens to become the son’s face. If that were to happen, all distinction between the outer false self and the inner true one would collapse; the former would replace the latter (251-54). A schizoid person lives in uncertainty and danger as he tries to detach and divorce his hidden “true self” from the false one, which increasingly absorbs it.

If a large part of one’s social experience is pervaded by the sense that what one says and does is controlled and shaped by other people and is false to one’s “true self,” relationships and contacts are likely to encourage feelings of paralysis and formlessness. The false self acts as a barrier protecting the inner self from engulfment, but it also confines the inner self, cutting it off from nurturing contacts with other people.10 There are a number of intimations in Rilke’s letters that the roles he played among his aristocratic hosts involved him in deception and self-deception, which were painful and debilitating. The letters suggest that his attempts to exist in harmony with his aristocratic friends forced him to live a dispiriting lie, to enact a false self. He longed to escape from them: “The good, generous asylums, such as Duino was and immediately thereafter Venice ... require so much adaptation each time ... and when at last one has got to the point of belonging to them, the only thing accomplished is the lie that one belongs” (To Lou Andreas-Salomé, December 19, 1912; Letters 2:81).

As for the aristocratic persona, caught in William Hausenstein’s description, it may well have originated in the pretensions of Rilke’s parents and those of his father’s older brother, Jaroslav, a paternalistic uncle, who paid for René’s studies in a commercial high school and then at the University of Munich, and gave his nephew an allowance which lasted until after Jaroslav’s death. This uncle put much time and effort into an attempt to link the family with old nobility. Though he failed to gain legal recognition of any such connection, his nephew, the poet, maintained all his life the myth of noble descent. Phia Rilke, whose father was wealthy and held the title of imperial counselor, no doubt thought she was marrying into a family descended from aristocrats. In her photos she often appears in long black dresses, which give her a rather absurd resemblance to some great lady of an earlier decade, and her striking expression of loftiness fits in with this impression. Josef Rilke was bitterly disappointed when he did not succeed in following the career of a military officer, once the exclusive privilege of the nobility. Later he also failed to obtain a job as the manager of a count’s estate, which would have enabled him and his family to live in the kind of proximity to a noble heritage which his son later found in the castles and palaces of his patrons. Josef’s career as a railway inspector decisively defeated all such hopes.11