Rilke, Modernism and Poetic Tradition

Modern Language Review, The, Oct, 2001 by Torsten Pettersson

Rilke, Modernism and Poetic Tradition. By JUDITH RYAN. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1999. xi 256 pp. 40 [pounds sterling].

By means of close readings of selected texts, this study follows Rilke's writing career from its inception in the early 1890s to the poet's last efforts in 1926. It presents two strands of argument which are partly independent, partly intertwined. The first has to do with Rilke's indebtedness to the literary and cultural tradition and his attempts to transcend it. His 'anxiety of influence' is often illustrated, though Harold Bloom's book is mentioned only once in passing. In these parts of her study, Judith Ryan's great asset is her extensive knowledge of writers such as Goethe, Holderlin, Eichendorff, Baudelaire, Mallarme, and Valery, as well as sculptors and painters such as Rodin, Klee, and Picasso. She discusses in illuminating detail parallels and contrasts which are either new discoveries or established references which have not been probed sufficiently in previous scholarship. Among the former, a 'Nordic' model for Malte, Franziska zu Reventlow's novel Ellen Olestjerne (1903), may be noted. In many other cases it is not clear whether we are dealing with a model known to Rilke or with a more general intertextual analogy. This, however, is not so much a failing on Professor Ryan's part as it is an inevitable aspect of the comparative methodology which she applies when relating Rilke to the relevant cultural background.

The second strand of argument presents the author's claim that, at least starting with Der Cornet (1899), Rilke's output is characterized by a gradual movement towards modernism which, after important stages in such works as Malte and the 1918 poem 'An die Musik', continues in the Duineser Elegien and the Sonette an Orpheus. The usefulness of such a contention obviously depends on what one means by 'modernism'. Judith Ryan, disconcertingly, offers no introductory delimitation and never discusses the concept at any length; it characteristically does not appear in the index. For all that, one gathers from passing references that modernism is above all taken to be distinguished by 'the preference for fragmentariness over wholeness, the fascination with paradox, and the dissolution of subject-object boundaries' (p. 89; compare pp. 41, 97, and 100). From a somewhat different angle, the important chapter entitled 'The modernist turn' then announces at the outset that Rilke's modernism 'has two faces: it moves, on the one hand, toward a concept of poetry as essence that extends the Symbolist notion of 'pure poetry', and on the other, toward a revival of the classical German poets' elegiac invocation of more coherent traditions' (p. 156).

In the textual analyses offered, these various facets are all in evidence, but their most distinctive feature is in fact the recurring claim that given poems should be considered to be metapoetic even when they do not seem to make any reference to the composition of the poem in question or to the writing of poetry in general. Here one may detect, in a moderated form, an underlying inspiration from the poststructuralist concern with the self-reflexivity of literary texts. The resulting interpretations are novel and exciting, and in some cases hazardous. 'Du im Voraus | verlorne Geliebte' addresses a beloved woman who is never encountered but whose presence the speaker divines in both a rural and an urban environment. Surely it is a speculative exaggeration to maintain that this poem 'is above all a revocation of Goethe's views on reality, poetry and the possibility of original expression' (p. 147)?

Judith Ryan's emphasis on Rilke's modernism is, then, less clearly focused and in some respects less persuasively argued than her meticulous demonstration of his recalcitrant indebtedness to the poetic tradition. Nevertheless, it is an energetically pursued and provocative view which should draw both consonant elaboration and productive dissent from other workers in the field.

TORSTEN PETTERSSON UPPSALA UNIVERSITY