J. Willard Marriott Library University of Utah Electronic Reserve Course Materials ‘he copyright law of the United States (Title 17, United States Code) governs the making of photocopies or other reproductions of copyrighted material. Under certain conditions specified in the law, libraties and archives are authorized to fumish a photocopy or other reproduction, which is not to be used for any purpose other than private study, scholarship, or research, If'a user makes a request for, or later uses a photocopy of reproduction for or Purposes in excess of “fair use”, that user may be liable for copyright infringement.Frew: WMo derai Grd Mee Text » Kevstoae 1 Cornea Modernising Ed Andras Heyssen age Dard Bethe, New Yore : Colum bis LB (4g 4. Paris/Childhood: The Fragmented Body in Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge Andreas Huyssen La modemité, est le ransitore, fe fugit le contingent, la moivé de Mare, dont Mautre est Péternel et 'immuable. Charles Baudelaire ‘The psychological basis of che metropolitan type of individuality consist in the imtensification of nervous stimulation which cevales from the swt and uninterrupted change of outer and inner stimuli. Georg Simmel If ever there was a German poet said to embody the essence of high modernism, it surely must be Rainer Maria Rilke. And if literary modernism found its uhimate manifestation in lyric poetry, then Rilke's Sonette an Orpheus and his Duineser Elegien had to be full-fedged embodiments of this privileged art form of the twentieth century. The poetry of the macure Rilke certainly seemed to fulfill the stringent requicements traditionally made of modemist poetry, stich as origi- nality of voice, the work as hermetically closed to the outside world, self-sufficiency, and purity of vision and language, all of which would guarantee the work's timelessness and transcendence. Bur in recent years such codifications of modernism have increas: ingly come under attack for being too narrow, and we have ccme to tunderstand them as themselves historically contingent—related to the[216] ANDREAS HUYSSEN a limited subjectiviey” derermining the text via the three interweaving, clusters of Malte’s learning how to see, his remembrances, and his attempts to narrate.* While many of those ceadings are quite insightful and compelling, in their attempts to secure a place for Rilke’s text in the canon of the modernist novel, they almost invariably lack an interest in cead- ing Malte's experiences and remembrances psyehoanalytically, let alone historically. Given the methodological premises of high modernist criticism, ot, for that matter, of existentialis criticism, it comes as tno surprise that psychoanalytic readings of Rilke stand almost rorally apart from the rest of Rilke scholarship and that the insights of psy- cchoanalysis have by and large been shunnec by Rilke scholars as ir+ relevant for the literary and aesthetic assessment of the novel.” Suck ‘methodological abstinence is no longer plausible since the theoretical rum in recent lirerary criticism has radically changed the ways in which ‘we conceptualize the relationship of psychoanalysis to writing and. reading. Once we begin r0 understand subjectivity as social construct, mediated through language, family structure. gender positioning, and, historical experience, we can attempt to develop alternative forms of psychoanalytic readings, readings that are no longer divorced—as Psychoanalytic interpretations often used to be—either from aes thetic considerations or from historical-political questions, iT Thus the aim of this essay is not ro provide a more updated psy- ‘choanalytic reading of Malte in the narrow sense, nor simply t0 re ‘couple Malte with his author whose symptoms the text would display and displace in narrative form. The aim of the essay is a larger one, By focusing on the overwhelmingly powerful, even haunting imagery ‘of the fragmented body in Malte, I want to inquire into the relation ship between Malte’s childhood experiences. so vividly remembered during his stay in Paris, and his perceptions of the modern city that recent research has shown to be quite representative for the literature of the early twentieth century." My hypothesis is that the relevance Of Rilke's novel for an expanded understanding of lierary modecn- ism has something ro do with the way in which the text suggests connections between aspects of early childhood experience and the eariscHipHooD [117] disrupting, fragmenting experience of the modern city. Ifstch a vead- ing can be sustained, then it should also be possible to map Malte onto a discourse that, from Baudelaire via Georg Simmel to Walter Benjamin, has attempted co define the pacamerers of the experience of modernity as cendered by the literary text via a theory of percep- tions of city life, perceptions as much dereemined by outside stimuli 4 they are dependent on psychic processes. But before we get t0 the larger issue of how to read in Malte the dialectic of what Simmel described as the tragic split between objective and subjective culture, let me first focus on the nature of Malte’s experiences as Rilke ren ders them in the text, Cities have always emphasized thar the basic experience of Malte, the 28-year-old aristocratic Dane who comes to Paris with artistic ‘and intellectual aspirations and begins to record his life ecsis in his notebooks, is one of ego-loss, deindividualization, and alienation. Often this disintegration of the ego is attributed to Malte's city experiences alone, and his childhood, which also features dissolutions of self is said merely to foreshadow, to anticipate the later experiences. Nor only is stich a narra-teleological account not tenable, oblivious as it is to the much more complex narrative structure of the novel and to the always problematic “inmixture” of past and present in narration, but the very thesis of disintegration of self, of Bnt-ichuong,"! actually presupposes a stable self, a structured ego, a personality in the sense ‘of bourgeois culture and ego psychology that could then show symp- roms of disintegration under the impact of the experience of the mod- ce city. What if Malte had never fully developed such a stable ego? ‘What if, to put it in Freudian terms, the id/ego/superego structure, which after all is not @ natural given but contingent on historical change, had never fully taken hold in Malze so that all the talk of its disintegration was simply beside the point? What if the fixation on. the ego, which the late Freud has in common with traditional non- psychoanalytic notions of self, identity, and subjectivity, was simply not applicable to Malte? What if Malte represented a figucation of subjectivity thar eludes Freud’s theory of the steucture of the psychic apperatus and that cannot be subsumed under Freud's account of the oedipal? Perhaps we nced an entirely different psychoanalytic ac- count for what has usually been described as disintegration of self and loss of ego in Rilke’s novel. I is particulacly the haunting imagery of the body—Malte’s own[118] ANDREAS HUYSSEN body and the bodies of the Fortgeworfemen, the members of the Pais underclass as they collide with Malee in the streets—that can give us a clue here. The text is obsessively littered with descriprions of body parts (the hand, the abscess, the torn-off face of the poor woman, the second head, the big thing) and of bodily sensations, Such images of threatening body fragments, which take on a life of theie own, are paralleled by descriptions of people (the patients at the Salpertiare hospital, the woman on the streetcar) that focus almost fetishistically fon separate body organs. In every case the imaginary unity of the body surface is disrupted: from his glance at the rash on the baby’s forehead on the first page 10 his close-up perceptions of the Salpetrigre patients’ eyes, legs, throats, hands, Malte does not see ho- listically. Rather he perceives fragments, and this bodily feagmenta- tion causes his anxieties, anxieties of bodily organs growing out of bounds, exploding inside the body, swelling the body beyond rec- cognition and altering or destroying its surface unity. Clearly, these are not primarily anxieties of loss in the sense of the Freudian ac- ‘count of castration anxiety; they are rather anxieties of excess, of flowing over, of unstable bodily boundaries. Significantly, these anx- ieties are often followed by a sensation of a total dissolution of boundaries, a merging of inside and outside that is also experienced by Malte as chreatening and invasive, Indeed, itis important to insist that these experiences of excess are not to be misread as positive expansions of self, as a dynamic of liberated flows of desire in the mode of Deleuze and Guattari's schizo body, or as a pleasurable symbiotic merger of self and other, along the lines, say, of Freud’s notion of the oceanic self. Rilke's constant use of the imagery of disease and filth, aggression and death clearly points in a different direction. Indeed, we face the paradox that these visions of bodily excess are simultaneously experiences of loss. But itis not the localizable loss of the Freudian account that is at stake here; it is a mote totalizing loss, a wiping out of identity, a voiding of a sense of self, as in the often-quoted passage: How ridiculous. I sit here in my litle room, I Brigge, who am twenty-eight years old and completely unknown. I sit here and am nothing. And yet this nothing begins to think . Or, perhaps less abstractly, after his experience with the epileptic on the Pont Neuf: PARIS/CHILDHOOD. [119] \What sense would there have been in going anywhere now; I was empty, Like a blank piece of pape, | drifted along past the houses, up the boulevard sein (71) The nothing that begins to think, the blank piece of paper that, it seems, is waiting (© be written on—obviously a connection is sug- ‘gested here between the voiding of self and writing, and I will come back to that later. Bur first let me stay wich the way in which Rilke presenes such dissolutions of the boundaries of the self. Already at the beginning (of the novel there is a description of such a crisis of boundaries, lim ited here, it seems, to the specifics of auditory perception. Malte de- scribes his sensations while lying in bed with the window open: Electric trolleys speed clattering through my room. Cars deive over me. A door slams. Somewhere a window pane shatters on the pavement; lean hear its large fragments laugh and js small ones giggle (4) But che breakdown of the inside/outside boundary is not limited to auditory perception, In the famous passage in which Malte describes ‘he horrifying, altost hallucinarory recognition of the residual inside wall of 2 demolished house as outside wall of the adjacent building, revealing an inside that is no longer there, the loss of boundary is clearly described in 2 visual dimension, And the wall of the apart. ‘ments thus exposed is described in a language that again approxi- mates the human body, just a5 throughout the novel the dissolution of boundaries affects the boundary between the body and things, the animate and the inanimate: I was, s0 to speak, not the first wall of the existing houses, . but the last of the ones that were no longer there, You could see it inside. You could see, a its various stories, bedroom walls with wallpaper sill sticking to chem; and here and there a piece of floor of ceiling. Neat these bedroom walls there remained, along the entice length of the oucee wall, a dirty space through which, in unspeakably nauseating, worm-soft digesive moves ‘ments the open, rust-spotted channel of the rile pipe crawled. The gaslight jets had left dusty gray eraces atthe edges of the ceiling: they bent here and thece, abruptly, can along che walls, and plunged into a black, gaping hole shat had been torn there, (46, translation modified) And the passage ends with Malte’s terror: | swear I began to ran as soon as | recognized this wall. For that's what is hocrible—chat I did recognize it. I recognize everything here, and that's why it passes right into me: itis at home inside me.[120] awpaeas nuyssen Indeed, tine experience of hotror cannot be attributed to the city alone, which, as it were, would overwhelm an overly sensitive but, step-down, authentie subject. True, che horror passes right into him ‘outside to inside, but it also is already at horse in hin, Thus even i¢ Malte may initially hope to get some relict by remembering his child. hod, ie very soom becomes clear that his childhood itslt is packed with very similar experiences of the horcifying and the uncanny: the experience of being voided in the dinner hall at Umekloster ("it sucked al images out of you,” 26); the terror of the appearances of the ghosts of Christine Brahe and Maman’s sister Ingeborg; the experience of the fragmented body with the hand coming out of the wall toward Malte while he is groping for a pencil in the dark under the table; the childhood diseases and hallucinatory anxieties; and, above all the mitror scene, It is true chat his first reflections about his child hheod suggest a funclamental difference between now and then, the ‘ity and che country, the factory-produced death in the big city hos. pital as opposed to the individual death of the old days: “When t think back to my home, where there is no one left now, it always Seems to me that things must have been different back then’ (10), But already here the reader should ger suspicious. For despite its os. fensible gesture as stacement of fact, this phrasing rather expresses desire (“must have been") and hesitation (“ie seems to me”), And while the following reminiscences of grandfather Brigge's death ae the estate may indeed be a good example of what Malte means by a ath oF one’s own, the description of the ehamberlain’s body grow. ing larger and larger and swelling out of the dark blue uniform ae a result of his deadly disease already contains the same images of un- controllable body growth and violent deformation that haunt Malte in his various Paris encounters with the man in the erémerie, the ep. leptic, the patients in che hospical, Malte’s loneliness in Paris malecs him want to escape into the past: “If at least you had your memories, Bur who has them? If childhood were there: it is as though it had been buried, Perhaps you must be old before you can reach all that, | think ie must be good to be old” (17). But then Malee’s childhood resurfaces with a vengeance, and soon enough he recognizes that rather than providing reliet his memories compound the crisis of his life im Paris: “I prayed fo rediscover my childhood, and it has come back, and I feel that ir is just as heavy as it used to be, and that growing older has served no purpose at all” (64, translation modified), PaRIS/cHILDHOOD [121] Jacities between Malte’s in a first axempt to read the basic simil cin sas Dans experencss one might upg, flowing Froud that we ae facing he a kind of repetition compulsion, fa Das Unbemliobe, Freud argues hat the uneanny i “hat ls of the ing hs eds bak to something long known 0 ey once ery fame" Fre als points out that he uncanny experince comes sour hen sepresed infalecomplexes ave bse vie y ‘when the primitive beliefs we have surmounted seem sreeimne be confess" Of our hea ference Malte doesnot ase "exprince™ the uncanny in Pasi. He abo deseribes ieee abot st wo hog ya i ye athe ister, of cours, itis Rilke himself who is engage in wosking hr P ih alte weite about them is Paris/childhood experiences by having Mi m trates Singh abate ft Sto Book about Rilke 928)" andthe plication of he Bin voles of Rule’ lene (52 fa sgrous separation of Mate fom hi a thor, as if we could have Malte without Rilke’s childhood anxieties, is as ludicrous as a total identification of Malte with Rilke would be. Rilke himself pur ie suecinely enough: “Er [Malee] war mein {eh und war ein anderer.”” ao sit my peimary interest ac this stage of the argument concern te lavorshp besvmn Mae sid ie, which hasbeen dlcurented fay well rather concerns the question eo what x the “impression” of the city criggers the repetition compulsion ihr mere cman? Cou Mahe choo ons ve roken loose with equal force in any other circumstances? the ex wees cen mcny fore peton compan fact Fee afer all goes so far sw aim tha "whee the uncay comes frm infanae comolees the question of material reality 8 ite irelevant its place is taken by psychical reality.” Bu in op position to Fread, I want ro suggest tha iis actully Matt's pee Beale experience ofthe cy thas egy the resus of el food drtbenes and confront ile /Male wih hs neesity rough them: the city, as it were, functioning, in a very un ‘outs spi ay the Prowse made fal he ildhod ans sc clued to the paras of he fagmented os Bo ore roaching the relationship between modernization and figuration ejected, wets sly to under the oes of Mate'sphantasms 0 the fragmented bouy, a task tha Eh ex ise(222) ANDREAS HUYSSEN does not engage in, but rather complicates through a constant shift: ing between authorial subject and fictional subject, At this juncrare it should be noted that Freud's text also draws our attention to the uncanniness of severed! limbs as they appear in lit- rary texts such as E. T. A. Hoffman's Der Sandmann ot Wilhelm Hautf's Die Geschichte von der abgebauenen Hand. Of course, Freud interprets these phenomena in terms of his theory of castration anx- icty, which, as I shall argue, is nor ceally applicable in the case of Malte, Only as an afterthought, which is not further elaborated, does Freud mention the uncanny (ear of, and fascination with, the idea of being buried alive, a “phantasy of inter-uterine existence.” Here indeed Freud comes very close to the problematic that is articulated. in the novel, and it is interesting to note that we know from Lou Andreas-Salomé's accounts that Rilke himself did have one such dream.” Ukimately, however, Freud's interpretation of the uncanny is only pertinent to a reading of Rilke's novel in that it emphasizes the phenomenon of repetition compulsion in uncanny experiences. In ‘order to understand the specifics of this eepetition compulsion, how- ever, one needs a different framework, one that is not locked into the oedipal mode. m1 Such an expanded account of the uncanny in phantasy life, I éhink, is present in the work of post-Freudian psychoanalysts’ such ay Melanie Klsin, Margaret Mahler, Michael Balint, and others, all of whom have focused on what commonly is called the “preoedipal” phase of child development, the phase of symbiotic unity of child and mother and the painful process of separation of the child from the mother." Ie is no news to Rilke readers that Malte's relationship 0 his mother, and later to his mother's youngest sister Abelone, is far more important in the narrative than his relation to his father. Male's key childhood experiences revolve around che realim of the Brahes, his mother’s family, rather than the Brigges, the family of his father ‘Ghosts in Malte’s Denmark, which one would expect to be male and ‘mouthpieces for the law of the father, are invariably female in this novel: Christine Brahe and Ingeborg, both of whom furthermore be- Paris/cHitpHoon [123] long to the mother’s side of the family. And then there is Malte's powerful and deeply peoblematic identification with fertininity, first asa litle boy when he pretends to be his own sister Sophie and dresses up in gc's clothes in order to relish his emotional identification with his mother in scenes of secret intimacy that one might read as at- tempts at a secondary symbiosis; later as an adult and a fledgling writer in Paris when his anxiety-ridden identification with the Fort _geworfenen, the Paris steeet people, 1s displaced by his joyful iden- tification with die grossen Liebenden, the abandoned women in love, from Sappho via Gaspara Stampa, Mariana Alcoforado, and Louise Labé to Bettina Brentano, Significandy, in both eases the autobio- graphic parallels of shese identifications with the feminine are well documented."* Once again Malte serves as a screen for Rilke’s pro- jections. ‘The dominance of che mother's sphere in Rilke's novel is so over- whelming chat even Freudian readers like Erich Simenauer have had to corcede that there is remarkably litte oedipal repression going on here. indeed, | would claim that the Notebooks have to be read pri- ‘marily in terms of the dyadic relationship between Malteand’Maman Fhe in tra of the oedipal teangle, not to be sire in the sense oF an either/or, but certainly in the sense emphasized by post-Freud- ian psychoanalysis that che dyadic relationship with the rnother that precedes the oedipal triangle can produce psychic disturbances ofits own when the transition from symbiosis to object relations is not made successfully. Among these disturbances, murderous phantasies of the violent, fragmented body’, anxieties of fragmentation, of ob- jects that enter the body or grow inside it, fear of merger and dis- solution are paramount, as Melanie Klcin and others have shown in their work with very small children and in analyses of psychosis. In such patients hallucinatory, ecstasylike states abound, intensities of affect that are not worked over by consciousness, and that even in analysis remain impenetrable to narrative articulation. The conela- sion researchers have drawn is that such patients either lack the Freudian instance of the ego or that its development has been fan- ddarneatally disturbed in the teanstion from the symbiotic to the post- symbiotic phase. Ie seems evident that Malte’s hallucinatory perceptions of disso- lution and his phantasms ofthe fragmented body, either in childhood[24] ANDREAS HUYSSEN or in Paris, can be well accounted for by such prychoanalytic work. ‘The puzzling question, however, remains why the adult Maite should suffer ar all from such eaely childhood traumas. After all, his rela- tionship with Maman is presented as successfully “symbiotic” throughout, as thoroughly nurturing, so that the typical roots of later disturbances do not seem to pectain. In other words, neither is Max man the harsh and unnurturing mother who rejects her child t00 early or never really accepts i; nor is she the overprotective mother who does not allow the child to perceive himsclf as object separate from the mother. One answer to this question, I would suggest, can emerge if we superimpose whar we know of Rilke's childhood onto the childhood of che novel's protagonist. As has been amply docu. ‘mented, Phia Rilke was the harsh mother who was both unaccepting of her son (“guilty of being second-bora to a girl who had lived conly a few weeks after bith) and overprotective and all-embracing, (Or, rather, she alternated between these two states either by with: drawing fom baby René, who, in his frst year of life, had tweney- four different wetnurses and caretakers," or by showering him with attention when she paraded him in lite gi’sclcthes in front of her friends. The anger and hatred that Rilke harbored for his mother is well known, but it is not matched by anything in the novel. It is as if Rilke, by writing the novel, reared an ideal mother image for him. self, the inother he always desired, bur could not have, The psychic necessity of chs fictional creation becomes evident if one considers the guile felings that accompanied his relationship ro Phia all bis liter suil feelings not of an oedipal kind of desiring union with the mother bbur rather of hating the person he most desired and who, given her character and psychic dispositions, continually withdrew from that desire. The results of that powerful and never resolved double bind in Rilke’ life are Malte’s phancasms of the fragmented body, his anx- ieties of dissolution of boundaries, and a fundamental lack in ego development and object relations as they appear in the novel. The contradiction constitutive of the nacrative, then, is that Rilke creates the figure of an ideal mother (Malte), but that the ral mother Rilke’) is inscribed into the text via Male's psychic disturbances, which have to be read as natratively displaced from the ceal subject to the fc- {ional subject, PARIS/CHILDHOOD [25] Vv Once we have read the hallucinatory perceptions of Malte as being to be carried into the room in which his mother had died a long time ies eb tne forse doy absentia hing Down ot Ol back whith some ce and hd aly pando eves ar Teed y fe oe an coe ranpied ander sly ope aes were, {Soe sd nan broke, wus auc pu sek in lacs he domed Orton at fhe ware beh eco een own hind tlegolien wee te fees, And rom sine tne sometig ly l wri oe sound ome he sg ell wih car found one hard erque Hor bt bvekng are a tue hn Saree bess eee aren Laver on inthe novel when Male falls sc in Parsee lose Fears of his childhood resurface, impressing on the reader that the fear of ting to pie is nothing expecentialy new in his We lost trae hte sginTe fer hat» eal olen hed wicking Gato teen oy Mane ay be ddan shy al mers thee a ide oto ony hai ay be than had Ste nd hence rh he edu sh oped ot {idrmayum no pay and case when ose keg en era mack into that ‘The imagery of shattering objects is finally woven back of the fragmented body in a crucial passage where Malte describes,[26] ANDREAS HUYSSEN his anxiety of separation as fear of death and then conjures up an image of apocalypse in writing and language that might bring his pains to an end: Bur the day will come when my hand wil be distant, and if elie so write ic will write words that are not mine. The tie of thar othe interpretation will davn, when there shall no be left one word upon another, and every meaning will dissolve like a cloud and fall down like rain. . . . ehis time, will be writen. Lam the impression that will eansform ite (2 £) This of course would be the moment of the modernist epiphany, the transcendence into a el of wring that woul env all cone tingency behind and achieve some ultimate truth and coherence, However, Malte recognizes that he cannot take the step “to under- stand allthis and assent to ie” because “I have fallen and [ can’t pick ‘myself up because 1 am shattered to pieces" (53). Prerequisite for taking that step, for cuing misery int bis, Malte pats scone te be some notion of self har remains oure oF Nie Fen Fencompassing and whose writing would achieve tr ‘that other “glozious language” (257). What Malte expr the intense modernist longing for another kind of language that would, in psychoanalytic and ontogenetic terms, correspond to a phase pre: ceeding the developinent of language, which is after all constituted ‘quintessentially as differentiation, But the desie for such a fluid lan- sage before differentiation is accompanied by Malte's equally strong acknowledgment (at least 2 this point in the novel, chough perhaps not at its very end) that suck a language cannot be attained, that the desire for it is an impossible, even dangerous desice. Consequently he turns back to writing another's, not she other, language, He copies othets” ets TH HS AOVvel, texts that serve him as prayers. A Baudelairean prose poem and a passage from the Bible are collaged here into the narrative, proving how diseanc Malte is from the “time of that other interpretation.” Malte’s discourse, indeed, is not the authentic, transcendent discourse of modernism that provides, in Wilhelm Emrich’s phrasing, “unendiiche Sinnfille,” an unlimited plenitude of meaning; his discourse remains rather the discourse of ‘Yarious others: that of Baudelaice and the bible as well av thar of Rilke’s letters and a variety of other historical texts. Most important, ‘though, itis Rilke’s unconscious that speaks with a vengeance in this novel. Lam tempted to say that itis Rilke who is being written al- ready while Male is sill waiting for this to happen, but if that is so then it must also be said that Rilke’s being written is an encrely di ferent kind from the one Malte imagines and prophesies. Finally the fear of shateering, when tied to the lack of an imaginary unity of self eg0, of identity, as well as to the desire and fear of symbiotic fusion, culminates in the famous mirror scene, chat child- hhood experience which, as Lou Andreas-Salomé has pointed out, Rilke transplanted from bis own life ino Malte’s. Malte's mitror scene, however, produces the exact opposite of what Lacan has described in his seminal work on the mirror stage.” Where in Lacan an antic- jpatory sense of identity and unity of the subject is first constivated when the toddler jubilantly discovers his oc her full bodily reflection in the mirror, precisely the failure of such imaginary unity to come about via the mirror image characterizes Malte’s experience.” tm- portant for my argument here is nor the fact that Lacan analyzes this Anticipatory self-recognition as a misrecognition, in the sense thae the mirror image i not the self, but cemains outside the self serves as its reflection, isin the position of the other to the self, What is im- portant for a reading of Rilke’s novel is the face that Malte never even reaches the stage of imaginary identification of self with the mirror image, which functions like a visual representation of the uni- tary, fully differentiated, and fortified ego. On the contrary, the mir- ror experience in the novel is not one of pleasurable confirmation of an identity, even an imaginary one, but an experience of total shat- tering, of being overwhelmed and wiped out, Of course, another if- ference between Lacan's and Rilke's micror scene is that Maite is not jst looking at his plain self but is actually playing dzess-up in front ff the mirror, which adds yet another level of complication, the con- scious play with identity. Let us nov take a closer look at how the mirror stage is symbol- ically reenacted and remembered in the novel, Fitst of all, fis mm- portant to note that dhe horrors of the scene, which resurface with full force in Malte’s account, cannot be attributed to feverish hal- lucinations. Traumatic anxiety is not brought forth here by disease and “the world of these fevers” (roo), but it emerges when Malte[128] ANDREAS HuYSsEN inadvertently oversteps the boundaries of the world of normal, taken- for-granted identities: Bur when you playa hy youll, aalway, fe eould happen tat yo in site wel otf sagen, erly is wo a found yourslfn creustnces thot war complacent anny inable (gar nicht abeuseben), (ror) tie * ‘Malte plays dress-up in the out-of-the-way attic guest-rooms at Uls- gaard, puts on old costumes and ancestral clothes, and then rales pleasure at seeing himself in the mieror. He loves these disguises be- ‘cause they heighten his coutradictury feelings about himself, but as 4 result of his ego-weakness they can also become quite overpow- ering: ~ ke was then cha fist came o know the influence tht can emanate from 4 particular costume, Hardly had T put on one of them when I had to admit ‘hat it had me in its power; that it dictated my movements, my facial expres. sion, even my thoughts, (£05) But Malte maintains conscious and playful control of the mise-en- scdne, He remains aware of the fact that he is both subject and object of the look, and he maintains a sense of identity through all of his disguises; Those dies, though never wen so far a 1 make me feel a strange ine onthe contrary, the more complete my tanstormaton the wor convinced Iwas of my own ie. I gw bolder and bolder; Bane yl Netra ihe my kl thing ysl pin Beyond a oa tr ‘That security of playing with images of self in disguise, the pleasure of seeing himself secing himself—as Lacan purs it with reference «0 Valéry's La Jenne Parque—is disrupted when Malte discovers an at- moire full of paraphernalia for masquerades, gets transported into a kind of intoxication in which he randomly dresses himself in scarves, shawls, veils, and spacious cloaks, and then steps in front of the mi ror in order to seek his magnificent image. While turning around in front of the mirror in order “to find out what I actually was" (106), he knocks over, owing to his limited vision behind the mask, a small table carrying a number of fragile objects that now shatter and break { on the floor. The aesthetic play with mirror images and identities | turns into existential disaster: t ParisjcHupHOOD [129] The twa useless, green-vilet porcelain parrots were of course shattered, each ina diferent, malign way. Asmall bowl had spilled out its pieces of candy, Which looked like insects in their sill cocoons, and had osed its cover fat away-—only half of it was visible, the other half had completely disappeared. Dur the most annoying sight of all was a perfume bore that had broken into a thousand tiny fragments, from which the remmane of some ancient tssence had sparted ous, shae now formed a scan witha very repulsive phys- iognomy on the light rug. (106) Malte quickly tries to clean up the mess, but, hampered both in vision and in movement, he is unsuccessful and is caught by a violent rage against hic “absurd situation.” Desperately he wies to free himself feom his costume in front of the mirror, but he only succeeds in en- angling himself further. And then something happens to Malte that cannot be accounted for by the theory of the mirror stage at all. His desire to see and to learn how to see—later in life his stared Paris project—is stopped cold; the gaze becomes fundamentally problem- atic, split, as it were, between secing and being seen: Hot and furious, I rushed to the mieror and with difficulty watched, through my mask, the frantic movements of ray hands. But the miceor had been wait- ing for just this, ts moment of eevenge had come. While I, with a bound: Tessly growing anguish, kept tying to somehow squeeze out of my disguise, it forced me, 1 don't know how, #9 look up, and dictated ro me an image, no, a realty, a strange, incomprehensible, monstcous reality that permeated te against sy will for now it was the stconger one, and I was the mirror. T stared a this Lange, sereifying stranger in feont of me, and felt appalled to be alone with him, Bur at the very mornenc I thought this, the worst thing happened: I lost all sense of myself, I simply ceased to exist. For one second, [elt an indescribable, piecing, fue longing for myseli, chen only he re: ‘mained: there was nothing except hie, (107 It is clear that Malte’s traumatic fear about the image turning into a teal Doppelganger and reducing the real self to an illusion explodes rot at the sight of the strange ereacure in the mirror alone but rather at the point when he knocks over the table and breaks the perfume bottle. The experience of shattering objects, combined with the heavy and pervasive vapor of the spilled perfume, suddenly ruptures his ability co play at disguise and masquerades. A cotal loss of self, aban: donment to an absurd and unrecognizable mirror image, is the result. But the conjunction of mirror image and fragmentation is even fur- ther emphasized by the text. Even the micror sueface isn’t whole, nor does it have the usual transparency of reflection:1» fal fo the nearest grest-room, in front of the tall, narrow mirror, which was made up of irregular pieces of green glass. Ab, how I tembled * to be there, and how ehsilling when i was: when something approached out Df the cloudy depths, more slwiy than myself, fr the mictor hardly ' an enyself, for the mieror hardly believed Ie and, sleepy as it was, dit want to promptly repeat what I had cited 10 it. Bue in the end it had tm, of courte. (203) Given its peculiar makeup, this mirror itself is incapable of providin the imaginary det ar unity of he Body canopies, wines in Maite’s fragmentation, The mirror voids him, sucks all images of self our of him, and leaves him, at the end of the scene, lying on the floor “just like a piece of cloth" (108), eeduced to a stage of infantile ‘motor incoordination (Lacan). ‘This variant of the Lacanian mirror scent is so crucial for an un. deoeanding of the Notebooks not just because it confirms Malte" ego deficiency but because it opens up the problematic of seeing and belig seen, We must remember here, first, that vision i cence for Rilke’s experience of the city and for the construction of his aesthetic, and, second, that Malte describes his own life crisis with the words: “Lam learning to see” (5 and 6). But as the mirror scene shows, there is no seeing without being seen, This basic split in the organization of the copie lof couse played major ele in Sates Hop oa Nothingness, and it also appears in Lacan’s later essay “The Split Berween the Eye and the Gaze.” tn this essay Lacan goes beyond the argument of the mirror stage and distinguishes the narcissistic méconnaissance of the specilat image—Malte seeing himself secin himselt—from a sop sination mated by what Lica cle te “pre-existence 0 the seen of a given-to-be-seen,”” The gaze is al- ways deeply implicated in processes of desire, and for Rilke this fact ‘cannot appear as anything but a basic contamination of vision. ‘The Passage in Maite could then be read as a breaking open of the initial Rarcissistic identification with the specular image, a disruption of narcissistic satisfaction by the recognition that there is no purity, no ‘oneness of vision, but that the scopic field is always already split. Male’ ce experience with the mirror thus contains already is relationship to the Paris outcasts whose gaze pursues him every wherein his wanderings though the cy, His learning to ve ee sistently distupted and spoilt by the fact that he is being seen, an object of the gaze rather then its privileged subject. It is here, then, PARIS/CHILDHOOD [131] that Malte’s childhood experiences mesh with his experiences of the modern city for which Simmel and Benjamin have emphasized the _ prevalence of vision over hearing,” Iris perhaps primarily this con-” ‘ce with the problematics of vision that places Rilke’s novel squarely within the culture of early twentieth-century modernism, But this is also the place where a fundamental concradiction emerges,” 1 contradiction that may well be paradigmatic for a certain constel- lation in modernism in general, Just as Rilke’s modernism success- fully articulaces the problematics of vision as a central experience of metropolitan modernity, it alto constructs an aesthetic designed to evade the very problem that gave rise to it in the first place. Thus “Malte’s whole project in the second part of the'novel can be read as ‘an attempt to elude the gaze, 70 undo the split between the eye and the gaze, and to restore some imaginary purity of vision and of writ- ing via the myth of the “women in love” and the parable of the prod- igal son with which the novel ends. 1 is difficule to think that Malte’s project was nor close to Rilke’s own heart, even though Rilke has- ‘Malte fail in his astempt ro learn how to see and to create that other. lasiguiage. Thar failure, I chink, is all bue inevitable. The text ivself SHOWS Why the desire to get out of the strucrures of desire and teri- porality and to enter into a realm of purity of language and vision is a dead end, both cheoretically and aesthetically. Rilke may still identify with Malte’s project, bur, as T will argue, by the end of the novel that project reveals itself to be hopelessly vitiated. v Let me rurn now to the broader question of metcopolitan experience and the mechanisms of perception. Ihave shown how, in the process of writing his Paris diary, Malte himself becomes increasingly aware that his country childhood was aetually haunted by the same kinds of phantasms thar make life miserable for him in the big city, and he senses that tis the city iself that makes his childhood resurface. As 1am not satisfied! with a mectanical Freudian reading of this repe- tition compulsion, which would put all the emphasis on the carly childhood experience alone, I still want to explore further why ic is the city char nor only triggers the repetition compulsion but also com-[132] ANDREAS HUYSsEN pels the effort co work it through, to displace it into fictional dis. course. The question is whether there is not some more substantial Tink beeween Malte’s psychological constitution and che experience cof modemity as produced by urban life in the late nineteenth and carly twenticth centuries, Perhaps che constellation of city experience and the carly childhood trauma of the fragmented body can tell us something about modernist subjectivity that may not only be para- igmatic for a certain kind of modernist male artist but also have broader implications, One of the major accounts of perceptions of madern city life and their psychic implications since the mic-nineteenth century was elab- orated aesthetically by Baudelaire, critically by Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin." Ac firs sight, Malte seems quite distant from the central concerns of these writers. As an artist; he certainly has noth- ing ruch in common with Baudelaire's painter of modern life, exeept pethaps that vision is as central to Baudelaite’s work as itis to Rilke’s If the experience of modernity, as described by Baudelaire, Simmel, and Benjamin, has centrally to do with the celationship of the artist to the metropolitan crowd, then Rilke’s Malte seems a rather atypical protagonist. Sure, the crowd is there in Malte, as “a hidden figure” (Benjamin's term for the crowd in Baudelaite’s poetry) rather than sa described reality, something like a scrcen onto which Malte pro- jects his phantasms of the fragmented body and from which he then escapes ino the solitude of his rented room. But moving through the ‘rowds does not energize Malte as it energizes Baudelaire, Baudelaire describes the crowd as an “immense source of enjoyment,” as “an enormous reservoir of electricity” in which the man of genius finds inspiration, even ecstasy. In this sense Malte clearly is not a man of the crowd, nor is he @ flaneur or dandy, nor is he ever concerned with fashion as a key element of modernity. The issues of exchange, ‘commodification, and emerging consumerism, which are so power. fully worked out by Simmel and Benjamin, are all but absent from Rilke's novel. And Benjamin's concern with the impact of a news- paper and information culture on the structure of experience appears in Rilke at best as part of a vague and fairly unoriginal critique of the superficiality of modern civilization against which he posits the project of modernist writin The point of comparison is elsewhere. It is in the theory of per- PARIS/CHILDHOOD (433) ception, shock, and shock defenses that, according to Simmel and Benjamin, transformed the basic structures of human experience in the nineteenth cenrury. In his essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” Sime! has argued that the metropolis exeates psychological condi- tions having to do with the “rapid crowding of changing images, the shacp discontinuity in the grasp of a single glance, and the unex- pectedness of onrushing impeessions."”” Against che threats of an ever- changing environment metropolitan man develops a protective organ that Simmel describes thus ‘The seaction to metropolitan phenomend is shifted to that organ whieh is lease sensitive and gute cemoue from the depth of the personality. Inulle- thal rds sean ro preserve subjective ife against the overwhelang power ‘of metropolitan life : Simmel then goss on to lnk that protective nella with the rater‘ acess ofthe money exonomy and deste blaénes, ‘rave inference, anda genetal bain of discrimination as key feanwes of eropoltan psychic ie, The same pattern of trpe- tation appears in Benjamin's 1999 nay "Some Modlin Bandar” Simm’ binary oppostion of swbecive vers obec tre elture reappears in Benjamin inthe poycbownayicaly more couples epponaon beeen Erfarng snl Evins, Emerg ae Gedichini: Benjamin uses Fre thet com Beyond the Pease Prep ha onscusnes plays «major ele inthe proton against Still (Resa) and sha becoming congcou and te insrption memory races ae mutually exclave, What Sime nd Benin fave in common the notion that concouses neuales he sock Cxperience of meropoian ile and that hi neralaton i ese tal for tel preservation, even if the price for sich slfpreceration isan mpoverahmen of experience inthe emphatic sent, an arophy of subject, Avihis poi, we run up agunst a problem we hal encountered cates naff content nrg onthe stent of conscious nes To provide Reeshute agit traumate breakdown, protec Hon gaint the stimol shock, and acridensof et He the cy, Reema an Simmel plc assume a pychi nace in control, the conscious ego. What ele is this consciousness ut part ofthe armor ofthe fortified ego, which, in Lacan's account, achievesfirst imaginary shape duting the mieror stage, and which proves itself in fending off the shocks and assaults of city life on human pereep- lion. That, for Benjamin, was the essence of Baudelare's “herois fof modern life" Here it becomes clear that the Simmel Freud- Benjamin account of the psychic processes triggered by the modera city experience does ice apply to Malte. The main problem Malee has in his encounters with the city is precisely his inability to protect himself against the chaos of stimuli and shocks. This inability is of course rooted in his psychic constitution, in his childhood past. By juxtaposing past and presen, Rilke actually focuses on a dimension ‘of experience chat neither Simmel nor Benjamin incorporates into his reflections." ‘Therefore Malte experinces the city very diferently from, say, Benjamin's Baudelaire, Rather than pariying the shocks of mod: ‘em life with his poetic imagination—an image that Benjamin took from Baudelaie’s “Le Soleil”—Make is totally defenseless against the shocks of the city, which penetrate right down to the deepest Lajers of unconscious memory traces, hung themselves, as it were, like shells into the quatty of Malte’s unconscious childhood memo. ties, breaking loose large chunks chat then float up tothe surface 25 fragments in the narrative, Ironically, the eect the city has on Malte is precisoly the effect Rilke feared from psychoanalytic eatment, Rilke's statement about psychoanalysis—"Es isc furchtbar, die Kindheie so in Brocken von sich zu geben” —has often been used by erties to keep psychoanalysis ac bay in their readings. Lite did they notice that spiting out his childhood in bits and pieces is pre= cisely what Rilke does in his novel, even though he does so in an aesthetically highly controlled way. Forced by his experience with the shocks and assaulis of the modern city, Malte reproduces fragment upon fragment of his pas, fragments that lack, eo be sure, the unify ing incervension of the analyst or, for that matter, of the tradieional ‘narrator who would impose a linear order of representation and pet: Spective onto the seemingly chaotic material. In Rillo's case, the modernist narrative with its tortured subjectivity, its experimental fuptures and discontinuities, emerges our of the constellation of a childhood trauma of the fragmented body with the shattering and unavoidably fragmentary experience of the metropolis. The absence ‘of an adequate Reigichutz, resulting from a deficienty developed ego, characterizes Malte Laurids Brigge and determines thé course of the PaRis/cHILDHOOD [135] narrative, thus making the Paris/childhood constellation central to any reading of the novel, The broader question remains as to what extent Malte may be a paradigmatic case of male subjectivity within modernity. If che ways in winich Malte reacts to city experience cannot be grasped with Simme!'s o¢ Benjamin’s account of the experience of modernity, per haps these accounts are deficient, oc at least nor generalizable. Malte might be quite cepresentative for another psychic disposition pro- duced, oa ew exacebneds by modernization, and characterned by ego deficiency, phantasms of fragmentation anxiety, and lack of dkfersve mechanisrs agtne he assault of modernization on the senses and the psyche. Already in Freud’s days this disposition must have beea much more common among men than the disposition Freud theorized, with ies emphasis on ego, consciousness, and sublimation. [At least that is strongly suggested by the investigations of Klaus ‘Thewoleit in Male Phantasies, which constructs the imagination of the fascist male in ways very different from Freud or, for that matter, the Frankfurt School.” I is indeed striking to see—and one is at first reluctant to admit that Malte shares quite a number of traits ‘with the “fascist male” as analyzed by Theweleit: basic psychic dis- tusbances going back @ an unsuccessful separation from the sym- biotic scage, vacillations between paranoia (Malte’s constant fear of being seen) and phantasms of omaipotence (the creation of the new language), narcissistic disturbances, idealization of the mother com- bined with an inability to form ‘asting relationships with women, fears of being overwhelmed, engulfed, reduced to nothingness. This said, we must immediately backtrack. Of course, Malte is anything but the fascist male. Where Theweleit's Freikorps men, out of “un- resolved” symbiosis, develop fantasies of violence and destructive cage and direct this aggression oueward against anything thar connotes femininity, Malte actually identifies with the feminine and his violent phantasies are invariably and masochistically directed against himself onily. Where the Freikorps man forges his male identity out of a fear Of the feminine and develops an image of the male body as armored terror machine, simultaneously longing and fearing to explode on the battlefield, Malte deals with the ambivalence between desire for fu- sion and the fear of it in a nonaggressive way. Rather chan turning to violent action against the femiaine, he appropriates the feminine136] ANDREAS HUYSSES and uses it t0 ereate the modernist aesthetic, the phantasmagoria of ‘8 magnificent new language that will speak him, bur that has never yer been heard, a language that would transcend, or rather precede, language as we know it, precede the mirror phase, as it were, and folfill the narcissistic desiees of omnipotence and fusion, It is easy enough to interpret Malte’s reflections on the divine, on transcendent love, on the necessity of loving rather than being loved, ‘on the prodigal son’s celation to God as Malte’s way of overcoming fragmentation and working toward fusion, symbiosis, reconciliation of everything that is split or shattered. Thete is also no need to elab- crate how his concern with narrative and temporality, his attempt t0 create a narrative in which time would be suspended, his projective identifications with figures of the distant historical past all aim in the same direction. It is also easy co see chat Malce's identification with femininity, 19 a love without object isin itself highly problematic, ¢ paradigmatic case of a male-imagined femininity. While this aspec: of che novel, strongly foregrounded only in the second part, may be read as a ctitique of the property inscrip- tions and the violence of male possessiveness in the bourgeois insti- tutions of love and marriage, Malte's reflections on Gaspara Stampa, Mariana Alcoforado, Louise Labé, Betcina Brentano, and finally Sappho also reproduce typical bourgeois idealizations of female self lessness and renunciation. Any ambivalence is lost, however, when the identification with the feminine is nacratively retracted at the very end of the novel, The woman writer as die grofe Liebende no longer provides the model for Male. After al, it was commonly held at the tum of the century that the male artist can appropriate femininity while the woman with artistic aspirations does violence 10 her na- ture."* With his rewriting o” the biblical parable of the prodigal son as che one who loves but coes not want to be loved, the one who will be written and is longing for the modernist epiphany of that other language, Rilke redelivers the project of writing back to a male authorial voice. The novel ends with a retraction of that breaking of she patriarchal chain—“Today Brigge and nevermore” (159)—that seemed s0 central to Malte's life and writing project. The identifi cation with femininity has fulfilled ies function: ic has allowed Malte to escape from city terror and childhood trauma into reconciliation, But this reconciliation is achieved on the basis of a problematic male sopriation of the feminine that whimately serves only to sohe the ‘of male creativity, ro help Malte move closer to that ever elsive purity of vision and of language. Rather than providing a soluion, the ending of Malte strikes me as the culmination of a series of evasions of the spits and terskons that tear the protagonist apart, evasions also of the reality of che experiences of modern city life. Rather than read the second part of the novel as an achievement of narrative coherence, I see it zs ab= fessive evasion in every sense, existential as well as aesthetic. { also Cannot read the ending as tragic failures the novel just comes :0 the end of a dead end. Despite this failure, Rilke's greatness pethaps lies Inthe fat that he dss net ae ransform Malte’ fat ino an epiphany, not even into a nogative epiphany. Rilke had great dif fealty wah the ending of the novel, snd he knew - What ke had co offer modernist prose, { would argue is alli the frst part which «focuses radically and uncompromisingly on che truth of an unrecon- ciled and antagonistic present. One only needs to follow the trajec: tory of Malte’sidemificatory strategies from his pained and paranoid identification with the Paris street people, ro an imaginary and bod ifess femininity of the “women in love,” co the mystificatory use of the biblical story of the prodigal son co note the progressive dema~ terialization, the flight from the reality of his experiences and hs sub- jectivity. The city recedes as the novel goes on and the conerete mem dries of childhood are soon overtaken by mere phantasms of wish= fulfillment. Iris no coincidence that the new glorious language will ‘speak through Malte rather than being spoken by him. The modeen- ise aesthetic of transcendence and epiphany constructs itself tere as 2 simultaneous voiding of subjectivity, which is more an avoiding of ‘an unanchored and threatening subjectivity that has become too hard to beat. In Rilke's novel, the dream of another language, central ro the modemist aesthetic at the turn of the cencury, is just another projection, another imaginary, another micror image in which the trauma of the fragmented body and that of an unavoidably frag mentary and multiply split language is finally dissolved, the experi- tence of modemity transcended. The best that can be said about the end of Malte is that reconciliation is only anticipated, not realized. But reconciliation is nevertheless false, just as delusory in its promise of an anticipated narcissistic fusion in and with a kind of fluid, non[138] ANOREAS HUYSSEN Uifferentiaved language as the Lacanian mirror image is delusory in its anticipation of the unity of the subject. Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge is both a powerful articulation of a crisis of subjec- tivity under the pressures of modernization and an equally powerful evasion of the problem. It pecjects the very real and yet impossible desire for fusion and symbiosis into the aesthetic realm, the realm of language where it cannot be fulfilled any more easily than in reality. Lf Rille’s work embodies one cf the most persuasive instances of high modernism, chen the Notebooks represents that moment in his work in which he himself calls that project into question in the very process of articulating i. The novel is < case of high modernism against itself ‘That is what makes it such fascinating reading in a postmodern age. Notes Hugo Friedrich, Die Strukter der modermen Lyrik (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 19). 2. Of course the criteria of negativity, dominant in the high modernist readings, could be seen as porallelto the existentialist emphasis on alienation and Geworfanhet, except that existentialism pur a stronger emphasis on 2 notion of self thas the high moderist readings, and justifiably so, had begun to put in doube, ‘Expy Otto Friedrich Bollnow, Rilke (Stursgare: Kohlhammer, 1951) ‘Most eecently, Judich Ryax has again emphasiied this poine in her essay “Rainer Maria Rilke: Die Anfzeichmungen des Malte Lourids Brigge (ioz0)," in Dewezche Romane des 0, jabyhunderis, ed. Paul Micheel Lirzeler (Konigsteio: Athensum, 1983) ‘ '. Theodore Ziolkowski, Dirensions of she Modern Novel (Princeton: Pringeton University Press, 1960), 36. Ernst Fedor Hoffmann, “Zum dichterischen Verfahcen in Rilkes “Aufzeichmungen des Malte Lauride Brigge,” in Rilke’s “Aufzeichungen des Malte Laurids Brigge,” ed. Hartnue Engelhardt (Frankfurt am Mai: Sube- amp), 21 7. Ulrich Pilleborn, “Form undSinn der Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids ‘Brigget Riles Prosabuch und der moderne Roman,” tid. 175-97 5 Judith Ryan, “‘Hypochetiches Erethlen’: Zar Funktion von Phar ‘asic und Einbildung in Rilkes ‘Malte Leurids Brigge,'” ibid 244~79, lo a ‘certain eegiser, Ryan’s approach is not chat different from Fulleborn’s, ex: ‘cept thar she emphasizes subjeceiey rather than the objectivity of narrative 9 The majoe’ exception sills Erich Simenauer’s Rainer Maria Rilke PARIS/CHILDHOOD [139] Legende und Mythos (Becn: Verlag Paul Haupt, 2953}. The reiection of a psychoanalytic approach was often simply based on the observation that Rilke himself refused explicitly co subject himself ro analysis, ro. Thomas Anz, Literatur der Existent:Litearische Psychopathograpbie und ihre sozale Bedentung on Bridexpressionems (Sesagaee: Metaer, 1977). ‘Anz explains Male's ansieies and incecuites primarily as those of the art ist outsider whose social postion is increasingly devalued and who therefore begins to question the validity of eadicional norms and meanings. In this aecouns, Malte's problems with perception and with himself result only from the changing social position of the are under the onslaught of modern ation and the traumatic experience ofthe city. The fact that all of Malte’s problems have cher oot in his childhood, which is precisely not “die hei fre Welt der Vergangenheit” (64), falls through the cracks of Ana's 3 proach.—For a critique of Anz's treatment of Malte and a more complex focus on Maite’s reflections on the social function of writing in bourgeois society, see Brigite L. Bradley, Zu Rille’s Malte Lawrids Brigge (Bern snd Manich: Francke, 1980), ep. $6 te. Paradigmatially analyzed by Walter Sokel, "Zwischen Existenz und \Weltinnenraum: Zum Prozess der Enr-Iehung im Malte Laurids Brigge,” in Probleme des Eraihlens; Festschrift fr Kate Hamburger, ed. Fritz Mactini (Geotygart: Klet, 1971), 222—33. 1, Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Mate Laurids Brigge, tans Stephen Mitckell (New York: Random Howse, :985), 22. Al further page references wil be given in the text 15, Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny," Collected Papers, 4 (New York: Ba- sic Books, 1959), 360. 4. Weide 403. Low Andreas-Salomé, Rainer Maria Rilke (Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1938) Andreas-Salom is one ofthe few eeties who emphasized the importance of Rilke's Factured and ambivalent celationship to his own body and co gender for reading of the Notebooks. 6. Many of the relevane levters are now easly available in Rilke’s “Aufecichmungen des Malte Lawrids Brigge,” ed. Haremat Engelhardt. 17, Maurice Bere, Rilke ix Frankreich (Vienna, Leipzig, Zucich: Herbert Reichner Verlag, 1998), 114. Translation: “He was my seif and was an other.” 14, Freud, “The Uncanny,” 49). Translation modified. 19, Ibid 397. to, Low AndesasSalooné, Aue der Schula bei Freud, ed. Ernst Pfeiffer (Ze sich: M. Niehans Verlag, 1958), 273. 1t_ Michael Balint, Therapeutisehe Aspekte der Regression: Die Theorie der Grandstoranrg(Stattgart: Kloet Cotta, 1970); Macgaret S. Mahler, Syra- bose wid individuation, x (Stuttgart: KlettCorza, 1972); Melanie Klein, Das Seolenleben des Klenkindes wd andere Beitrige zur Psychoanatyse (Rein- bek: Rowohle,x073).[40] ANDREAS HUYSSEN + #2, Both Lou Andreas-Salomé and Erick Simenauer have provided the rl- ‘evant facts and interpretations, 23. Carl Sieber, René Rilke: Die Jugend Rainer Maria Rilkes (Leiprig: Insel Verlag, 1932), 60, Also mentioned in Simenaues, Riles 245. 24. Translation modified, The erucial phrase “wail ich zerbrochen bin" is inexplicably missing in the English eranslation. 45, Andreas Salomé, Rilke, 48. 26, Jacques Lacan, “The Mitror Stage,” its: A Selection, tans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977). 1, Whether Lacan is righe or wrong with bis analysis of the mirror stage as pivotal in development is not my concern here. There ace indeed good. ‘essons to believe that che mieroring process is already under way at a mach catler stage and does not need to be interpreted a thoroughly pessiist- cally as Lacan does. What is at sake in the novel is at any fate not the clinical event but rather ies metaphoric reenactment. In this context, how ever, Lacan's account allows me to reread the scene in support of my general argument about Malte’sego-weakness, 28, [want to mention 2¢ least two more instances that make the reading ‘of this scene in relation co Lacan's account s0 appealing. Fist, Lacan hirmselé theorizes the relationship between the phantasm of identity a5 linked to an image of the fortified body and the developmentally earlier, but comple- ‘mentary phantasm of the fragmented body, thus permitting us to cead this ‘mirror scene in relation ro Maite's persistent anxiety of body fragmentation. Second, it muse be mote than coincidence thae both Rilke and Lacan make ‘explicit references ar crucial junctures of theic vexts to thar pechaps para sligmatic painter of the fragmented body, Hieronymous Bosch. See Rilke, Malte, 184 £3 Lacan, Eovite, 4-5, 2. Jacques Lacan, "The Split Berween the Eye and the Gaze,” Four Fi damenial Concepts of Psychoanalysis, rans. Alan Sheridan, (New York. Noston, 1978), 7 430. Thus Benjamin quotes Simmel's efletions approvingly in his essay “*Das Paris des Second Empiee bei Baudelaire,” Gesammelte Schriften, v2 (Frankgfure am Main: Subrkamp, 1974), 540- 31s Ritke actually heard some of Simmel’s famous lectures on modernity in Berin, and Baudelaire’s poetic prose clearly provided a model for Rilke’ ‘own prose in the Novebooks, especially in che fragmentary seginents of the firse pact. Benjamin in corn not only made Baudeaice the centerpiece of his writings on the prehistory of the nineteenth century, but he also was very familiar with Simmel’s work. As to Benjamin's relationship to Rilke, i seems clear that he never thought much of Rilee’s petty, which to him wa fatally vitiated by its origins in Jugendstil. In the only text where he deals with Rilke, he does not mention the Notebooks. Walter Benjamin, “Rainer Maria Rilke und Franz Ble,” Gesammelte Schriften, 4:1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhekamp, 2972) 455 & PARIS/CHILDHOOD [142] 32. Chatles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life," in Baudelaire: Se- lected Writings on Art and Artists (London, New York: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 1961), 399 6 4 Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life," The Sociology of Georg Simmel, rans. and ed. Kuct H, Wolff (New York: The Free Press, 1984), 400 ‘si Ibid, 440 & 38. However, Benjamin does deal with this dimension of experience in his moze autobiogeaphic texts such as Berlin Childhood. 436. Translation: “Ic is tetifying to spie out one's childhood like that in bits and pieces." Quoted in Eraat Pfeifer, “Rilke und die Psyshoanalyse,” Literaturissenschattiches Jahrbuch, Neve Folge +7 (976): 2%. 437. Klaus Theweleit, Male Phantases, vol. x (Mitmeapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982). Vol. 2 forthcoming. Theweleit shows that i is not the desire for the authority of the father that is at sake, but eather a desce for fusion, 438, That Rilke shared chs view was pointed out by Simenauer, Rilke, 634.