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Threadsin ThreeSections:
A Readingof TheNotebooks
ofMalteLauridsBrigge
ELEANOR HONIG SKOLLER
15
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16
The Notebooks
ofMalte LauridsBrigge
17
mother: a scene of separation fromthe mother,of expulsion fromthat"desparate paradise"4 occasioned by the interventionof the father,the Nom-duPare. The scene occurs when Malte falls ill and his motherand fatherare
brought back froma ball. "'What nonsense to send for us,' he [Father]said,
speaking into the room withoutlooking at him"; and Malte is leftalone to
endure his fever.He no longer has Maman, only "Maman's dance-card and
whitecamellias,whichI'd neverseen beforeand whichI laid on myeyeswhen
I felthow cool theywere" (87).
There are threadsthatconnectMaman's dance-card(wherenames of men
are inscribedin a seriesof substitutions
thatare thedance partners)and white
camellias lyingon Malte's closed eyes which,when open, gaze on the empty
jewel-casket in my epigraph. The three objects, dance-card, camellias and
but of themall, thejeweljewel-casket,all femininefripperies,are significant,5
casket is crucial to Malte's emergence as a poet, not merelyas a symbolof or
link with the feminine,but as constitutiveof his writingself.
Jewel-casketis M. D. HerterNorton'stranslationforRilke'swordSchmucketui.6Norton's choice mightat firstglance seem overstated:he could have used
jewel-box or jewel-case. A closer look however vindicates him. This may
indeed be an instancein whichnuance and meaning,ratherthanbeing lostin
translationare, on the contrary,found. As JeffreyMehlman demonstratesin
his essay, "Portnoy in Paris," a translationoften renders visible what was
unseen in the originallanguage.7 The German word (Schmucketui)
is itselfan
unusual one, elegant,even precious,containingwithinit the Frenchworditui
meaning container,case or box. Rilke'sfancyingup of theword forjewel-box,
or the diminutive,Schmuckkiistchen,
usually Schmuckkasten
mayhave led Norton
to decide on 'jewel-casket." It is significantthatin Americanusage the word
casket means coffin-usually a fancyor elegant one.
Norton's choice of translationhighlightsone of Rilke'smost pronounced
concernswhichhe statessuccinctly
in theopeninglineof a late versefragment:
"Lifeand death:theyare one, at core entwined."8In a letterto a Swissfriend
about the production of the Duino Elegiesand the Sonnetsto Orpheus,Rilke
writes of "the determinationconstantlymaturingin me to keep life open
toward death... ." 9 But perhaps most tellingof his involvementwith the
imbricationof life and death are the opening lines of The Notebooks
themselves: "So, THEN people do come here in order to live; I would sooner have
thought one died here" (13).
The hyphenbetweenjewel and casketis, in the Nortontranslationat least,
an elastic distance between life and death. The jewel-casket:a box for gems,
petrifiedand rockymatter,reminderof coffin:a containerforthe dead, is, at
the same time, Freud's "jewel-case... a favouriteexpression for the female
genitals... ." o10Thus a locus forthe possibilityof lifethatis a "circuitousroute
to death" can be said to reside in thejewel-groove.The "traceof melancholy"
that lightensit is a glimmerof the exquisite pain of knowledge: the sightof
nothing,the emptyfemalespace thatcontainsnothingbut can shape itselfto,
sheathe, whateverfillsit,the malleable mold: "and whata melancholybeauty
it gave to women when theywere pregnantand stoodthere,in theirbig bodies,
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18
The Notebooks
ofMalte LauridsBrigge
19
II
It seems that women have made few contributionsto the discoveries and inventionsin the historyof civilization;there is,
however,one techniquewhichtheymayhave invented-that of
plaiting and weaving. If that is so, we should be tempted to
guess the unconsciousmotiveforthe achievement.Nature herselfwould seemto have giventhemodel whichthisachievement
imitatesbycausing the growthat maturityof the pubic hair that
conceals the genitals.The step thatremainedto be takenlay in
making the threads'Zadhereto one another,while on the body
they stickinto the skin and are only matted together.If you
rejectthisidea as fantasticand regardmybeliefin the influence
of lack of a penis on the configurationof femininity
as an idWe
fixe,I am of course defenseless.
-Sigmund Freud
20
Malte has lovely memories of lace and Maman: "'Shall we look at them,
Malte?' she would say and was as joyful as if we were about to be given a
present.. ." (121). And then theywould unroll the lengthsof lace thathad
been sewn togetherand wound on a spindle and would watch the various
designs unfold before them. Each one created an ambience.Some laces were
dense and opaque, othersopen and loose,dizzying,saddening,Binche,Alenlon
and the "long trackof Valenciennes." Withthe last one, the veryfinepillowon our eyes'" (122).
laces, "Maman said: 'Oh, now we shall get frostflowers
And threads of frostflowers
and white camellias, of closed and open eyes,
resurface in the text.
Rilke, like Barthes,is captured by the suggestivepower of lace and writes
of it as emblematicof a great human labor thatcan produce "However slow,/
this thing,not easier than life,but quite /perfect,and oh, so beautiful..... " "9
Becoming a poet, like the labor of lacemaking,is slowwitharduous attention
to detail. In the lacy surface of The Notebooks
the emergence of the poet is
enmeshed withtheovercomingof loss (of the mother,of theself),withsurpassing the other, and with learning to love with a "penetrating,radiant love"
(214). And women are the teachers: "For centuriesnow they[women] have
performed the whole of love; theyhave played the fulldialogue, both parts.
For the man has only imitatedthembadly. ... What ifwe were to startat the
outset to learn the work of love, which has alwaysbeen done for us?" (119,
121). Were men to do so, theywould become lacemakersand poets "male
mothers"20-as Nietzsche calls them.
Maman and Malte intuit,as theyrewindthe spindle,the powerfullyevocative, femininestrengthand complexityof the fragilelaces. "'Justthink,ifwe
had to make them,'said Maman, lookingreallyfrightened.I could notimagine
that at all. I caught myselfhavingthoughtof littleinsectsincessantlyspinning
these thingsand which on thataccount are leftin peace. No, of course,they
were women" (122). The lack of a penis, the configurationof femininity,
is
marked by makingpresentwhatis absent,by seeingsomethingthatis nothing,
by the play of the unconscious. "The text,in short,is a fetish"21and the
reader, using the same psychiceconomy of denial that the child uses upon
seeing the lack of the female genital,can exclaim over and over, "I knowvery
welltheseare onlywords,butall thesame.. ." 22 The poet daydreamsand writes
his desire in an infiniteline of substitutions:"There are tapestries,Abelone,
wall tapestries. I am imagining that you are here; there are six tapestries:
come, let us pass slowlybefore them" (111).
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The Notebooks
ofMalte LauridsBrigge
21
III
This is the Creature
This is the creaturethere never has been.
They never knew and yet,none the less,
theyloved it the way it moved, its suppleness,
its neck, its verygaze, mild and serene.
Not there,because theyloved it, it behaved
as though it were. They alwaysleftsome space.
And in thatclear unpeopled space theysaved
it lightlyreared its head, withscarce a trace
of not being there.They fed it, not withcorn,
but only withthe possibility
of being. And thatwas able to confer
such strength,its brow put fortha horn. One horn.
Whitelyit stole up to a maid-to be
withinthe silvermirrorand in her.
-Rainer Maria Rilke,
trans.J. B. Leishman
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22
shape of the pubic hair thatcoversthe genitals,is the delta, the mouthof the
river,source of life. In about 1571 FranCoisClouet, in his painting"Diane de
Poitiers,"25showed such a draped opening in whichis seen threewomen. In
the foreground,at the opening is "Diane de Poitiers,"seen onlyfromthewaist
up. Her expression is pensive and intelligent,her bare breasts,nubile,seem
perfectlyshaped. Just to the rightand slightlybehind her, a wet-nursewith
round, veryfullbreastsis sucklinga swaddled infant.Her leeringsmilegives
her face a stupid look. Between the twowomen is a bowl of fruitand the head
of a cherub figure. In another room behind them is the thirdwoman who
appears to be liftinga roundjug thatreiterates,in the recessesof the painting,
the roundness of the breasts,the heads of the baby and the cherub,and the
fruitthat fillthe foreground.Even furtheraway,behind the woman withthe
jug, at the side of the fireplaceis a hangingthatshowsa seated whiteunicorn.
Here, too, the unicorn is present in a draped opening of a female space, a
space of desire and fecundity:the purityof possibility.
It is as ifthe painting,laterthan the tapestriesbysome sixtyyears,allowed
the viewer a look into the mysteryof the desire of the woman only to reveal
SamuelH. KressCollection
NationalGalleryofArt,Washington
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The Notebooks
ofMalteLauridsBrigge
23
24
NOTES
1. Rainer Maria Rilke, TheNotebooks
ofMalteLauridsBrigge,trans.M. D. HerterNorton(New
York: Norton, 1964). All page referencesare found in the textin parentheses.
2. Arthur Rimbaud, letterto Georges Izambard in Rimbaud,ed. and trans.Oliver Bernard
(1962; rpt. Baltimore: Penguin, 1966), p. 6.
3. Rainer Maria Rilke,Duino Elegiesand The SonnetstoOrpheus,trans.A. Poulin,Jr. (Boston:
Houghton MifflinCo., 1977), p. 143.
4. Marcel Proust,Swann'sWay,trans.C. K. ScottMoncrieff(New York: The Modern Library,
1956), p. 32.
5. Michele Montrelay writes in "Inquiry into Feminity,"MIF, No. 1 (1978), p. 93 of the
masquerade of femininityconsistingin a "piling up of crazy things,feathers,hats and strange
baroque constructionswhich rise up like so manysilentinsignias."
6. Rainer Maria Rilke,Werkein drieBanden,III (Frankfurtam Main: Insel Verlag, 1966), 325.
7. JeffreyMehlman, "Portnoyin Paris,"Diacritics,II, No. 4 (1972), 21-28.
8. JohnJ. L. Mood, ed., trans.,RilkeonLoveand Other
(New York: Norton,1975),p. 69.
Difficulties
9. Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnetsto Orpheus,trans. M. D. Herter Norton (New York: Norton,
1962), p. 130.
10. Sigmund Freud, Dora: An Analysis
(New York: CollierBooks, 1963),p. 87.
ofa Case ofHysteria
11. FriedrichNietzsche,TheGayScience,
trans.WalterKaufmann(New York: Vintage,1974),p. 38.
12. Montrelay,p. 96.
13. H61'ne Cixous, "The Laugh of theMedusa," trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, in New
An Anthology,
FrenchFeminisms:
eds. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron(Amherst:Univ. of
Mass. Press, 1980), pp. 249-50.
14. Mood, p. 93.
15. Robert L. Mitchell,rev. of Poitiques:thioriecritiquelittiraires.
MichiganRomanceStudies,1
(Ann Arbor, Michigan: Michigan Romance Studies, 1980) in TheFrenchReview,54 (1980), 332.
16. WilliamWordsworth,Selected
ed. Mark Van Doren (New York: The Modern Library,
Poetry,
1950), p. 487.
17. Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill & Wang, 1974), p. 60.
18. Ibid.
19. Rainer Maria Rilke,NewPoems,trans.J. B. Leishman(New York: New Directions,1964),p. 99.
20. Nietzsche, p. 129.
21. Barthes, S/Z, p. 160.
22. Roland Barthes, The Pleasureof theText,trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill & Wang,
1975), p. 47.
23. Annis Pratt,"Aunt Jennifer'sTigers: Notes toward a Historyof Women's Archetypes,"
FeministStudies,4, No. 1 (1978), 178.
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TheNotebooks
ofMalteLauridsBrigge
25
University
ofWisconsin-Milwaukee
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