Rainer Maria Rike, 1893-1908: Poetry as Process - A Poetics of Becoming

Ben Hutchinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351196376
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Langues

"Rainer Maria Rilkes' early verse is often seen as having little relevance to the great achievement of the middle years, the Neue Gedichte. Yet the very different styles of the juvenilia and this new maturity are united by a preoccupation with processes of motion and growth which governs both his life and work. In this meticulous philological study, Ben Hutchinson reassesses every level of Rilkes early poetry, from its motives and metaphors to its very grammar and syntax, in order to trace what he terms a poetics of becoming. With careful attention to rhythm, resonance and linguistic detail, he illuminates both the hidden patterns of the poetry and the artistic context of the fin-de-siecle. From its roots in the intellectual climate of the 1890s to the poems inspired by Rodin in 1908, Rilkes stylistic development is set against the surprising consistency with which he pursues this poetics of becoming."

Part I

Chapter 1
The Contemporary Climate

Der moderne Dichter [...] ist besonders gut geschult. Der objektive Realismus vergangener Jahrzehnte hat ihn mit der Natur und dem Leben in Verkehr gebracht und sein Auge geübt für die Dimensionen der Dinge. Der vorhergegangene Idealismus der Objektivität mit seiner Schonfarberei wirkte wie eine sentimentale Kindheitserinnerung gerade herein, als der Realismus im Naturalismus untergegangen war, und machte, daß man leise begann, statt von den Dingen, mit den Dingen zu sprechen, also; "subjektiv' zu werden. Und nun folgte im Subjektivismus eine Parallelentwickelung wie seinerZeit innerhalb der objektiven Welterkenntnis. Man lernte die eigene Seele betrachten, wie früher die äußere Umgebung, man wurde auch hier Realist und Naturalist den intimen, inneren Sensatiorieri, wie vorher den äβeren Ereignissen gegenüber und lernte wie früher die Welt, nun ebenso genau die eigene Seele kennen, das heißt man fand in sich selbst Alles reicher und vielgestaltiger wieder, was man in der objektiven Schulzeit außerhalb der eigenen Persönlichkeit gesucht hatte. Man war ganz unerwartet Zu einer Art von Pantheismus gelangt, mit dessen Gottesbegriff man sich immer mehr zu identifizieren geneigt war, und Sie werden begreifen, daß dieses Wachsen, dieses plötzliche Überallhinreichen, dieses Alleswerden und Allwerden eine herrliche Befreiung, einen hohen, stürmischen Siea; bedeutete und in einer eroßen, lauten Beeeisteruna; seinen Ausdruck suchte. (KA IV, p. 68-69)

That the young Rilke had a keen sense of the artistic context into which he was emerging is illustrated by this extract from his lecture 'Moderne Lyrik' (1898). As an ambitious young poet he was at pains to associate with the leading artistic figures of the day dedicating poems to writers who might further his career and taking care to review the right people. This preoccupation with contemporary art and literature inevitably played a large role in determining his own idiom and his developing interest in processes of becoming, the patterns of growth and movement to which he alludes in the above extract. Indeed, the fact that his principal artistic influences were all contemporary, late nineteenth century figures, suggests that this interest in 'dieses Alleswerden' can only be understood as a response to the cultural context of the turn of the century.

The four principal sources of influence on this interest can be provisionally identified, following Rilke's own pronouncements and the work of subsequent scholarship, as Jugendstil art, Jens Peter Jacobsen, Maurice Maeterlinck and, less obviously but perhaps the most subtly, Nietzsche. (More speculatively Emerson too can be seen as a significant presence in these early years, since Rilke read him in the winter of 1897—98 in German translation.) In 1904 Rilke himself declared whom he deemed to be his most important influences, in his answer to Ellen Key's question ' Welche Einflüsse?':

Einflüsse von Jacobsen, Jens Peter Jacobsen, den die Leute vergessen, und der mir der Liebste, Nächste und Gebendste ist: der Unerschöpfliche, der sah und wusste. [...] Philosophen habe ich fast keine gelesen, überhaupt wenig Bücher; Einiges von Nietzsche und Maeterlinck, die ich aber auch nur als Dichter verstehe, als Verwandler, nicht als Festsetzer und Gesetzgeber.¹

In this initial chapter it will be considered how these early influences helped shape the poet's idiom and interests, reflected across the range of juvenile poetry, prose, drama and criticism that emerged in this period before the decisive trips to Russia. How did they all contribute in their differing ways to the central concern of the young Rilke, the creation of a dynamic sphere of art removed from the stasis of everyday life?

Youth, the promise of a coming generation, was clearly the driving force of the contemporary aesthetic as it looked to a new century. The reassessment of past religious and scientific assumptions brought about by Darwinian evolutionary theory had fostered a widespread interest in processes of organic growth, as Hans Faletti suggests: 'Die Idee der Metamorphose oder Verwandlung wurde aus folgenden Quellen geschöpft: aus Darwins Lehre, aus der Naturphilosophie des Fin-de-siècle Vitalismus, wie zum Beispiel im Pantheismus von Bölsche, und aus Nietzsches ewiger Wiederkunft'.² The consequences of this concatenation were Nietzschean, a metaphysics realigned in the wake of an obsolete God: 'Die traditionelle Seinsmetaphysik, der ens, verum, bonum und pulchrum konvertibel waren, soil nun von einer Philosophie abgelöst werden, die Bewegung, Vergehen, Werden als erste Prinzipien (gegenüber einem statischen Sein) kennt, heraklitisch entgegengesetzte Krafte in allem wesentlich am Werk sieht.'³ This, as Walter's subtitle suggests, was in very broad terms the 'geistige Situation der Jahrhundertwende': the Oxford Companion to German Literature, for instance, quotes Rudolf Alexander Schröder as remembering that 'we were all of us more or less under Nietzsches spell'.⁴ Yet precisely because of the extraordinary pervasiveness of Nietzsche's idiom it is notoriously difficult to pinpoint his exact influence on Rilke. This does not mean, however, that we should throw up our hands in surrender, as Keith May suggests: 'the notion of influence [of Nietzsche on Rilke] is too obscure for sensible discussion'.⁵ Rather, we can seek to explore this general influence through a specific issue, Rilke's incipient interest in processes of becoming.

Lou Andreas-Salomé, in her book on Nietzsche (one of the very first full appraisals of him) which formed part of Rilke's introduction both to her and to the philosopher, characterizes Nietzsche's thought as incessantly dynamic: 'eine in sich selbst zurücklaufende, niemals stillstehende Bewegung, — das ist in Wahrheit das Kennzeichnen der ganzen Geistesart Nietzsches.'⁶ If, indeed, there is a single common theme among the various works of an often self-contradictory philosopher, then it might be said to be this unquenchable 'Werde-Lust',⁷ the individual's 'Wille zur Macht'. This had long since become apparent by the time that Heidegger presented the terms as synonymous in his 1950 collections of essays Holzwege ('Das Werden, das ist für Nietzsche der Wille zur Macht').⁸ This is what Rilke, along with most of his contemporaries, took from his philosophy; as he told Ellen Key he understood Nietzsche 'nur als Dichter [und] Verwandler, nicht als Festsetzer und Gesetzgeber'. This means, in practice, that he received his ideas less as rigorous academic philosophy and more as generalized cultural imperatives, as did all his generation in Germany. It is more pertinent, in other words, to explore how Rilke interpreted this diffused version of Nietzsche than to analyse Nietzsche's thought itself. Erich Heller, for instance, writes in perhaps the best known essay on Rilke and Nietzsche that 'the writings of the young Rilke show Nietzsche neither assimilated nor transformed, but rather imitated and sometimes vulgarized.'⁹

It is only relatively recently, in fact, that the importance of Nietzsche for the young Rilke has come to be acknowledged, since attention has tended to concentrate on the philosophical resonance of the later elegies and sonnets. Thus in 1975 J.R. von Salis could claim that 'Nietzsches Werk hat Rilke nicht gelesen, er wollte sich nicht mit ilirn beschäftigen',¹⁰ or in 1978 Bruno Hillebrand could state, in his survey Nietzsche mid die deutsche Literatur, that 'im Frühwerk [Rilkes] gerade ist Nietzsches Denken kaum aufspürbar.'¹¹ Irina Frowen started to correct this imbalance in 1987 with her essay 'Nietzsches Bedeutung für Rilkes frühe Kunstauffassung',¹² in-which she discusses Rilke's 1900 notes on Die Geburt der Tragödie. More recently Richard Detsch has written a more substantial, though at times speculative, book on Rilke's Connections to Nietzsche (2003),¹³ whilst Rüdiger Görner has published both a short essay entitled 'Wie ich Nietzsche überwand. Zu einem Motiv der Nietzsche-Rezeption bei Rilke, Döblin und Hugo Ball'¹⁴ in 2003, and a more substantial book containing passing discussion of the relationship in 2004, Im Herzwerk der Sprache.¹⁵

The one text by Nietzsche with which we know for sure that Rilke engaged in detail was Die Geburt der Tragödie (although his very early reference in the 1895 essay 'Böhmische Schlendertage' to the 'Gruppe von Menschen, die Nietzsche die "historischen" nennt' [KA IV, p. 20] suggests at least a passing knowledge of Unzeitgemäβie Betrachtungen)¹⁴In his marginalia to Die Geburt der Tragödie he discusses the Apollme and Dionysian tendencies in music and drama, and in particular how the ancient chorus relates to its modern equivalent in contemporary theatre.¹⁷ What is then the implied role of the contemporary artist? The continuing creativity of God, Rilke writes, depends upon the free play of art, since His freedom was limited by being tied to the project of Creation:

Aber nicht sein ganger Wille ist mit der Schöpfung verknüpft. Musik (Rhythmus) ist der freie Überfluß Gottes, der sich noch nicht an Erscheinungen erschöpft hat, und an diesem versuchen sich Künstler in dem unbestimmten Drange, die Welt nachträglich in dem Sinne zu ergHnZen, in welchem diese Stärke, weiterschaffend, gewirkt hätte... (KA IV, pp. 161—62)

Nietzsche's emphasis here on the artistic imperative, on the will of the individual creator, certainly found fertile soil in Rilke's literary ambitions. The poet's son-in-law Carl Sieber, for instance, unequivocally defines Rilke's mother's legacy to him as

den Willen. Das ist es ja eben, was uns bei Rilke immer wieder überwältigt: dieser unbeugsame Wille zu seinem Werk, der alle Hindernissff des schwachen Leibes und ihn nicht gemäßer Verhältnisse überwand, — bei ihm der Wille zur Wirklichkeit, bei der Mutter der Wille zum Schein.¹⁸

This, perhaps, is what Heller means when he famously describes Rilke as the 'St. Francis of the Will to Power' — that he is a more modest disciple of the same ethic of self-realization.¹⁹ Sieber's terminology is certainly borne out by an early dramatic fragment of Rilke's that stakes everything on precisely this strength of will:

Luisa: 'Du Glückliche!'

Zena: 'Wieso?'

Luisa: 'Nun so: du kannst Alles tun, was du willst.'

Zena: 'Unsinn. Das kann jeder. Es kommt einzig aufs Wollen an.'

(SW IV, p. 870)

This is entirely characteristic of the early Rilkean idiom: the emphasis is on a constant expansion of the self, relating '[ein] Sehnen, das niemals sich stillt" to the pathetic fallacies of a world in spring-time, as one of the epigraphs for his FlorenXer Tagebuch (1898) suggests:

Unser Wille ist nur der Wind,
der uns drängt und dreht,
weil wir selber die Sehnsucht sind,
die in Blüten steht. (TF, p. 13)

This poetic of subjectivity descends via Nietzsche²⁰ through to the idolization of the self in Jugendstil aesthetics: George's desire to see 'den Leib vergöttert und den Gott verleibt'²¹ is implicit in the titles like 'Mir zur Feier' and 'Dir zur Feier' of Rilke's collections of the late 189os, 'Der Mensch selbst wird schließlich zum Kunstwerk, denn es ist seine eigene Form, sein Schonheitsideal, sein Stil', Richard Walter writes.²² The logical conclusion of this is the celebration of the artist as the most highly evolved form of humanity, the Zarathustrian 'Übermensch' defined for the late nineteenth century by Nietzsche, and de...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: 'Werden' and its Variants
• PART I
• PART II
• Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index