Ursula Franklin, The Angel in Valéry and Rilke.

University of Oregon
The Angel in Valry and Rilke Author(s): Ursula Franklin Source: Comparative Literature, Vol. 35, No. 3 (Summer, 1983), pp. 215-246 Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of the University of Oregon Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1770619 . Accessed: 09/03/2014 11:04
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URSULA FRANKLIN
The
Angel
and
in
Valery
Rilke
N THIS century, when Deus Absconditus has become, gradually and inexorably, Deus A bsens, or even deus mortuus, the concept of the angel-that immortal messenger, soldier, and celebrant of the Hidden God, His manifestation to men-has become largely meaningless to the educated West. Hence it is all the more remarkablethat two of the century's greatest poets, in two different national traditions, have found the Angel not merely an attractive metaphor but a symbolic vehicle which, secularized and transmuted, conveys their intellectual and artistic essence. Angels permeate the entire textual cosmos of both Valery and Rilke in diverse forms and varying modes of poetic expression; these symbolic figures, moreover, reach their most imposing proportions in their creators' culminating works. For Rilke, as he frequently stated, that culmination could never have come about without his encounter with Valery.1 In this study I shall trace some of the significant configurations of the angel image in each of the poets, note how that image conveys for each poet themes essential to his poetic vision, and finally examine and comment on the fundamental differences between the two poets in their understanding and use of the image-on the way their angels reflect their basic, often diametrically opposed, attitudes as poets. Valkry's angels are scattered throughout the voluminous oeuvre, as well as the volumes of Notes that fed it for half a century. The poet's early angels recall the Symbolist atmosphere and the artistic cult that produced, through many transformations, the hieratic angelic figures of the early correspondence with Gide,2 and those of poems like "Le
1 See Ren&e Lang, "Ein fruchtbringendes Mif3verstiindnis:Rilke und Val'ry," Symposium,13 (1959), 51-62; and MoniqueSt. H6lier, A Rilke pour NoHl (Bern, 1927), p. 21. 2 Andrd Gide-Paul Vale'ryCorrespondance 1887-1942 (Paris, 1955), pp. 80, 83. 215
COMPARATIVE
LITERATURE
Jeune Pretre,"3 "Solitude" (0, I, 1585), the early "Narcisse" (pp. 1551-61), and the liturgical angel of the unfinished "Messe angdlique" (pp. 1589-90), all written in the early 1890s. Soon, however, Valery analyzed this aesthetics and its products, as well as their Schopenhauerian underpinnings, with an objective lucidity that already announces his own emancipation.4This emancipation from the Symbolist aesthetics, which the young poet already understood with the objective clarity of a "regard d'Ange," was brought about, moreover, by an intense sentimental crisis in 1892, which made him abandon the poetic for the analytic mode (O, I, 19-20). Val'ry's predisposition toward the angel archetype is likewise reflected in such rare childhood reminiscenses in the Notebooks5 as the story of "ma petite maison" and the "histoire de ma chute" which later became the prose poem "Enfance aux Cygnes" (O, I, 297). From the outset, then, the angel figure is associated with the notion of the Fall, while numerous Notebook passages sketch out the defensive mechanism of a vulnerable, insular adolescent by means of an inner split in which one half of the Self-the lucidly angelic-observes and analyzes the suffering other-the human half, including both self and other (s) in its objective intellectual analysis (cf. C, XVII, 224; XVIII, 784). This inner strategy culminated then in the resolution of the crisis of 1892, frequently recalled in the Notebooks (cf. C, XXII, 842-43; XXIII, 756-57). At this point, Valery appropriated the Angel-Narcissus Gestalt as his personal imago. Narcissus provided the model for the de'doublement interieur dividing the Self into actor and spectator,"while
3 Paul Valeiry,Oeuvres,ed. Jean Hytier, 2 vols. (Paris, 1957-1960), I, 1578.All quotations from Valery's work will refer to this edition, unless otherwise indicated, and be cited in the text as O, followed by volume and page numbers. 4 See the interesting letter to a friend in which the nineteen-year-oldpoet explains: "Ce siecle qui meurt, a de mille fagons 6tudi6,diss6qu6,exalt6 ou honni cet Eternel Feminin ... Enfin, pronongantle definitif anatheme,vient Schopenhauer qui condamneradicalementla femelle, et de qui procede toute cette jeune ECOLE dont je te parlais ... Pour elle, la femme n'existe plus. Toute la tendresse, tout 1'epanchement qu'elle occasionnaitjadis--on le reporte vers de vagues formes CATHOLIQUES. On ne craint pas de parlerAje ne sais quel Dieu avec l'equivoque parole et l'ardeur d'un amour de chair ... Ce regain de ferveur religieuse, dont les Verlaine, les Huysmans (en quelquespages curieuses) voire les Mallarm6, sont les magnifiquesAp6tres, n'a pas d'autresracines, que le d6daindu Sexe bite. Quelle chose curieuse de voir produireen notre siecle, des oeuvres d'une 6motion mystique aussi intense que 'Parsifal,' que certains pieces d' 'AMOUR' ou de L'ALBUM DE VERS ET DE PROSE. (Mallarme)" (Bibliotheque litteraire Jacques Doucet, Paul Valery catalogue Pr6-Teste, No. 113; in the Bibliotheque Sainte Genevieve,Paris) 5 Paul Valery, Cahiers, facsimile ed. (Paris, 1957-61), XVIII, 218-19. All
citedin the will referto this edition, hereafter fromValery'sCahiers quotations

text as C, followed by volumeand page numbers. 6 Valery, sufferingfrom his love affair, for example,writes two series of letters,
whathe suffersandwhichhe doesnot send,whileto Gide love lettersexpressing 216
VALERY AND RILKE
the Angel-always linked by Valery to Narcissus-furnished the ideal image for intellectual lucidity, isolation, and superiority both over the Self, with its vulnerability, and over others. Armed with this new sense of angelic vision and will, the young law student forsook poetry for mathematics and began to write for himself -the Notebooks-rather than for a public. His major theme became the exploration of the "Moi ang6lique" that was to assume many masks in a poetic universe to which he returned after the failure of the "Universal Arithmetic."7 The poet's early crisis and its resolution through the analytic, "scientific" exploration of the psyche are brilliantly reflected in the prose text "La Revelation anagogique" which makes up the last of the Histoires brisles (0, II, 466-67). The "Abstract Tale," originating from a Notebook version of 1938, is dated MDCCCXCII in the text, a mythologized and symbolic transformation of the 1892 experience and its consequences. Here it is not the Self, or one half of it, but its two warring factions that are figured as "two terrible angels," Nous and Eros, against each of which the moi must defend itself equally. The "Anagogical Revelation" is a Valeryan version of Jacob's Struggle with the Angel, which objectifies and symbolizes an inner victory of the Self over it (s) self (ves) ; commemoratingthe battle and the victory of 1892, its "revelation" is that of the "abstract,"analytic and scientific method -that of the Angel-by which those other powers, the evil angels Eros and Nous, who fuse into one "Anti-ego" threatening the moi, that is itself, can be overcome.8 This Cartesian dualism remained fundamental in Valery, always supporting a dichotomized vision of the Self, its angelic aspiration for complete lucidity ever threatened by the incomprehensible forces on which it depends, its human reality. Thus Teste, one of Valery's most purely intellectual heroes, in part inspired by Poe, though "dur comme un ange," could never have subsisted "dans le reel" according to his creator (0, II, 13). The most famous fragment of the Teste cycle, "La Soiree avec Monsieur Teste" (at the theater) (0, II, 15-25), which celebrates the hero's most eminently angelic trait, his lucid "regard," stands under the sign (epigraph) of Descartes. Teste, moreover, is the
he writes letters analyzing what he observes happening to his vulnerable self (Gide-Vale'ry Correspondance, pp. 110, 122, 130, 160-61). Here Val&ryalready links the myth of Narcissus to himself, "Narcisse" the vulnerable other half of his Moi ange'lique. 7 Nicole Celeyrette-Pietri,in her magistral work Vale'ryet le Moi des Cahiers t l'oeuvre (Paris, 1979), esp. pp. 9-75, has discussed extensively Valery's "Fascination Mathematique," the constructionand the ultimate failure of the "Univerwith an "algebredu moi." sal Arithmetic,"and his preoccupation 8 Celeyrette-Pietri, p. 170: "Le 'Conte abstrait' . . . racotntel'invention du Systame, entenducommereduction 1l'Absolu."
217
COMPARATIVE
LITERATURE
man of the Possible; he "&taitle maitre de sa pens6e," and "s'il eit tourne contre le monde la puissance reguliere de son esprit, rien ne lui eiit r'sist6" (0, II, 18, 19). But Teste does not need to exercise his latent strength: "Mr. Teste est-il autre chose que le possible, I'incarnation du possible en tant que-nous en usons et disposons? Et ce possible-li, est-ce pas-ce que l'on entend par intellectuel" (C, XI, 768) ? Teste, a celebration of the angelic Moi pur, a moi become a pure crystal of lucidity, finally culminates in the "Homme de verre" (0, II, 44), a figure reflecting this inconceivable mental lucidity while, at the same time, suggesting its fragility. An angelic figure related to Teste is that of "Agathe" (O, II, 138892), his nocturnal sister, who did not see the light of day until after the poet's death.9 I have discussed this text elsewhere at some length, and suggested why Valery might have chosen not to "finish" or publish "Agathe."'o "Agathe" was to become a fragment of the night of the hero in the Teste cycle, a mono-dialogue of a mind-Teste's-beholding itself think during a fragment of a night, a theme later fully orchestrated in "La Jeune Parque." We will not follow Agathe through the mental phases of her nocturnal voyage, but will meet her at its climax, when her introspective mind has become a virtual system, independent of any content, forming "un systeme nul ou indifferent a ce qu'il vient de produire ou approfondir, quand 1'ombre imaginaire doucement cede a toute naissance, et c'est l'esprit" (0, II, 1392; my italics). Here "Agathe" has reached the Absolute of the Angel, imaged in Valery's last poem, "L'Ange," in the Angel's spiritual diadem, "la couronne de la connaissance unitive,... oif toutes les id6es vivaient 6galement distantes entre elles et de lui-meme, et dans une telle perfection de leur harmonie et promptitude de leurs correspondances, qu'on eiit dit qu'il eit pu s'evanouir, et le systeme, itincelant comme un diademe, de leur necessite simultanee subsister par soi seul dans sa sublime plenitude
(0, I, 206; my italics).

Another of Valery's heroes of the intellect-"le personnage principal de cette Com6die Intellectuelle qui n'a jusqu'ici rencontr6 son po'te"is his L6onard de Vinci, who first appeared in an article in La Nouvelle Revue in 1895, entitled "Introduction ia la Methode de Leonard de Vinci." This "commande" has become, like Teste, one of the poet's most celebrated texts, republished in 1919, now preceded by "Note et digression"; both were republished in 1933, along with a third essay, "Leonard et les philosophes," which had first appeared separately in Commerce in 1920, all three texts now accompanied by retrospective
9 Paul Valery, Agathe (Paris, 1956). to See my "The White Night of Agathe: A Fragment by Paul Val'ry," in EFL, 12 (1975), 37-58. 218
VALRRY
AND RILKE
marginal notes written from 1929 to 1933. Here Valery sketched no historical Leonardo, but rather "ce qui m'apparaissait alors comme le pouvoir de l'esprit" (O, I, 1155), that is the angelic Self wearing the mask of the great Renaissance genius, whom he called "l'ange-Lionardo." Teste's "que peut un homme ?" is Leonard's obsession also, and his motto is Hostinato rigore, that of the historical figure. Leonard is, like Teste, a hero of the "regard," the "regard d'Ange." An entry of the 1930s reads: "Roman Conte Description par l'ange-Lionardo. L'ange-celui qui voit les divers ordres" (C, XVI, 841). But Leonard surpassed Teste in that he realized his potential in creativity and explored the mysteries of the body as well as those of the mind. Leonardartist-scientist, homo faber par excellence-confronts the phenomenal world and masters it: "I1 est le maitre des visages, des anatomies, des machines. Il sait de quoi se fait un sourire" (0, I, 1175). In a Notebook entry of the 1920s entitled "Lionardo," Valery notes that Leonard possesses, like no other artist, the precise sense of the forms of nature, concluding, "II est l'ange de la morphologie" (C, XI, 199). But like Teste, Valery's Leonardo rejects the human individual(ity) in himself that would make him a mere man among others; for these ideal projections of the Self have no semblable, any more than do the angels, each of whom is a species to himself, as Valery had learned from Thomistic angelology." Leonard, like Teste, aspires to the angelic vision which reduces the world to its object, without being itself object for another: "C'est une maniere de lumineux supplice que de sentir que l'on voit tout, sans cesser de sentir que l'on est encore visible, et l'objet concevable d'une attention etrangere; et sans se trouver jamais le poste ni le regard qui ne laissent rien derriere eux" (0, I, 1217). When we turn to Valery's lyric poetry of the period, we realize that his farewell to poetry was, indeed, not absolute. Though many of the pieces published in 1920 in Album de vers anciens were written before the 1892 crisis, the recueil contains some important poems written later, though all, of course, before "La Jeune Parque," whose composition spans the years 1913-17. One of the most significant poems of the "periode aigue," the Teste
11 In 1910 Valery had regularly attended the courses of Father Hurteaux on Saint Thomas Aquinas'Summa (cf. O, I, 34), and the Thomistic angel-that pure LeonardIntelligence,each one a species to himself-has left its markon Val&ry's. Val&ry'smarvelous intellect immolates the individual that carries it-"se sent conscience pure: il ne peut pas en exister deux. [I1] est le moi, le pronom universel, appellationde ceci qui n'a pas de rapportavec un visage" (0, I, 1229)to becomea uniqueand universal Self. In anotheressay Val&rynotes that "ce que j'avais dit des triangles, saint Thomas le professe des Anges, lesquels 6tant tout seul de son chacun d'eux est n&cessairement immaterielset des essences separ&es, esp&ce.11 faudrait done en toute rigueur ne jamais dire deux triangles, ni deux anges, mais un triangle et un triangle, un ange et un ange" (0, II, 955).
219
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
years,12is "Profusion du soir" (0, I, 86-89), begun around 1899 and reworked many times. Its subtitle, "Poeimeabandonn . . . ," might well allude to its creative history. We recall that for Valery no poem was ever "finished,"13and that he liked to compare poetic to musical composition, so that poets would produce, "a la mode des musiciens, une diversit6 de variantes ou de solutions du meme sujet" (0, I, 1501). I have discussed in a previous study how this theory of composition is linked to the "fragmentary"form of much of the poet's work,14and it pertains to our poem, which is made up of fragments: one opening sonnet and eleven "sections" of varying length and rhyme schemes, all of them variations on the abundanceof a sunset reflected in the "regard" of an Angel, "L'Ange frais de l'oeil nu."15The poem is a hymn to the eye, introducing an image which integrates the Angel's purity with that of his vision: after the death of the sun, the "cool Angel of the naked eye" announces the birth of a thought in the mind and a star in the sky:
L'Ange frais de l'ceilnu pressentdans sa pudeur, Haute nativite d'6toile6lucid&e, Un diamantagir qui berce la splendeur...
(0, I,86) The poetic fragments are musical variations on the reciprocal interaction of world and mind through the eye that is fecundated by the phenomena of nature, out of which it creates the meaning it confers on the world-"Une maternit6 muette de pensies" (p. 89). The creative eye forms divinities out of the clouds of an evening sky, and a Swimming Angel whose every stroke measures the celestial space:
Et sur les rochesd'airdu soir qui s'assombrit, Telle divinit6s'accoude.Un ange nage. Il restaurel'espacea chaquetour de rein.
(p.88) The beautiful anagram marries the male and the female, intellect and affect, the angel's union with the maternal Ur-element, in a vision that is, of course, entirely of the beholder's creation: the transformation of exercice dansle monde" (0, I, 1477).
12 The poet reminisces: "Je regrette le temps ouije jouissais du souverainbien (cette libert6 de 1'esprit)... Je ne souhaitais que le pouvoir de faire, et non son
13 In "Calepind'un poete,"Val&ry explains that "uneoeuvre n'est jamais nicessairementfinie, car celui qui l'a faite ne s'est jamais accompli" (0, I, 1450-51). 14 See my The Rhetoric of Valery's Prose Aubades (Toronto, 1979), pp. 7-9. 15 CharlesWhiting, Valery: Jeune Poete (Paris, 1960), p. 123,calls "Profusion du soir" Val&ry's"premiergrand poeme de l'intellect"; and James Lawler, The Poet as Analyst (Berkeley, 1974), pp. 74-116,giving a detailedexaminationof the poem's many unpublisheddrafts and variants as well as a thoroughlydocumented and definitive exegesis, reminds us that it was importantfor Valery to the very end of his creative career, as it is alluded to by the protagonist of Mon Faust in 1940.
220
VALERY
AND RILKE
an evening cloud. The poem's persona is an eye-protagonist who has shed the "person," so that it poetizes this process (so frequently described in the Notebooks and in prose texts like "Monsieur Teste" and "Note et digression"). The text continues:
d'unpersonnage, Moi, qui jette ici-bas 1'ombre Toutefois d6lie dans le plein souverain, Je me sens qui me trempe,et pur qui me dedaigne!
The shadow of the "personnage" is not merely "cast" but "thrown off," and this self-disdain has rendered the Moi pur. The publication of "La Jeune Parque" in 1917 marked Valery's triumphant return to poetry, with a poem whose subject is related to "Agathe" and thus to Teste,16 as it constitutes another transformation of the great subtext-"la Conscience de soi-meme"-now musically orchestrated into lyric fragments. And though the figure of the Angel is not manifest in the poem's "'surface"imagery, the Ange/Narcisse configuration is an inherent part of its underlying "deep-structure":
HarmonieuseMOI, differented'unsonge, Femme flexibleet fermeaux silences suivis
D'actes purs ! ... Dites! ... J'6tais 1'gale et l'epouse du jour,
Seul supportsouriantque je formaisd'amour A la toute-puissantealtitudeadoree ... (O, I, 99)
This harmonious Moi suggests the Angel, as do the "pure acts" and the doree"upward surge of love to the sun-"altitude ador&e"-"altitude whose support is the adoring mind, a mind that carries the meaning of the universe, is its mirror and reflection: "Tout l'univers chancelle et tremble sur ma tige, / La pensive couronne &chappe a mes esprits" (p. 102). The Young Fate's death would rob the world of its meaning, and her "crown of thought" recalls the Angel's "spiritual diadem." But at the end of her nocturnal voyage, the Young Fate rejects the angelic "purete du Non-etre" for life. Valery has told us how, after the years of patient work on this major poem, the "Charmes" burst forth almost spontaneously. Their opening and closing poems, "Aurore" and "Palme," were originally one, their kinship still recognizable in the fragments' common stanzaic form as well as a certain parallelism of vocabulary.17Dawn is preeminently the
du poIme est la peintture 16 Valery explains: "Songez que le sujet v&ritable d'une suite de substitutions psychologiques, et en somme le changement d'une conscience pendantla duroe d'une nuit" (0, I, 1613) ; and in a letter he writes: "Le sujet vague de l'oeuvre est la Consciencede soi-meme; la Consciousnessde Poe, si l'on veut" (Lettres a quelques-uns, Paris, 1952,p. 124). 17 See James R. Lawler's examinationof this parallelismin Lecture de Valdry (Paris, 1963), p. 31.
221
COMPARATIVE
LITERATURE
moment of the Moi pur, and "Aurore" constitutes its lyric celebration. While it celebrates the poet's matutinal confidence and his virile taking possession of the world, "Palme" (O, I, 153-56), again about the creative process, appears indeed like the first poem's feminine "other half," a poem about maternity. In the form of a parable, it tells about the secret gestation and patient maturation, finally the miraculous birth of the poem-the palm tree's "fruit mfir" (p. 155). The tree, we recall, is one of the poet's richest symbols for the mind, its roots anchored deep in the maternal earth, and its crown reaching toward the sun.s8 Both the symbol of the Palm and the form of the parable confer a biblical quality on the poem, whose religious solemnity is enhanced by the appearance of an Angel "of formidable grace" in the opening stanza. It is the Angel of the Annunciation who visits the poetic mind to bring gifts of both earthly and spiritual food, and who "speaks to his vision":
De sa grace redoutable Voilant Apeinel'dclat, Un ange met sur ma table Le pain tendre,le lait plat; Il me fait de la paupiere Le signe d'unepriere Qui parle Ama vision: -Calme, calme,reste calme! Connaisle poidsd'unepalme Portant sa profusion! (pp. 153-54)
This loveliest Angel of Valery's lyric poetry is recalled in a Notebook entry from his later years commenting on the "Leonardesque beauty" and the "supreme poetry" of the Angel of the Annunciation:
Les Ecritures sont pleines de themes extraordinairement beaux. Plus riches que les anciens-lesquels ont trop de mythes a monstres. L'Annonciationest une merveille-Bien L6onardesque-avec l'6moi et le myde la Ficondation--en dessous. st&re Le point de tendressecritique situ6 entre l'acte (ici, mystique) et le germe dans la chair de la vierge-C'est une id6e extraordinaire, d'une "po6sie"supremeL'Ange l'annoncebien simplement,et il a grandementraison. (C, XXVI, 282) We recall here that Rilke especially loved "Palme" and gave it one of
his most accomplished Umdichtungen.'9 In the best known of the Charmes, "Le Cimetiere marin," Valery's most dualistic poem in which the antithetical motifs of "connaitre" and "Itre," timelessness and cyclical return, the universal and the personal, are contrapuntally invoked, we recognize the angelic in the persona whose hubris would project him beyond the human. And the poet's
is See Pierre Laurette,Le ThIme de l'arbrechez Vale'ry(Paris, 1967). 19 Rainer Maria Rilke, Briefe (Wiesbaden, 1950), II, 391. 222
VALPRY AND RILKE
recollection about its creative process is itself the demonstration of dualism, being one of the rare commentaries by a modern poet about poetry that dissociates content and form.20 The form came first, and then needed to be "filled"; and the themes to fill that form were to be from the poet's affective and from his intellectual life, to culminate in the contrast of "la mort" and "la pens'e pure." The protagonist is, in fact, again the Moi divided, intellect and affect, in a setting recalled by Valery's personal memories, sun and sea, celebrating the universal archetypal elements of fire and water symbolic of "esprit" and "corps." Though the definitive version contains no angel, except those sculptures vainly decorating the graves, the Moi's "orgueil" and the hubris projecting it beyond human mutability are angelic traits par excellence; and a "great angel" appeared, in fact, in one of the poem's drafts.21 Pride and hubris were the fatal traits of the brightest of angels, the fallen Lucifer and hero of "Ebauche d'un serpent" (0, I, 138-46), Valery's poetic version of the third chapter of Genesis. We have noted that the motif of the Fall is intrinsically related to the Valeryan angel from the outset, and to the "angelic self" whose construction is inspired by an aspiration to a "higher" state. Among the numerous Notebook passages on the Fall which have found their way into Valery's published work are two fragments from Tel Quel (0, II, 696) which have a direct bearing on the poem:
L'Ange ne differe du Demon que par une certaine reflexion qui ne s'est point encore present6ea lui. Chutes. a) IIy a eu deux grandeset myst'rieuses chutes. Chutedes Anges, chute de dirait un g0om&tre. l'homme: catastropheshomothetiques, Tout ce qu'ILfit devait donc tomber; b) Toute religion fond6e sur l'idee d'une chute initiale se trouve en proie aux douleursde la discontinuit6. 20 In the 1930s,the poet explained both the genesis and the intent of his famous poem in "Au Sujet du Cimetidremarin"-how it first imposed itself on the poetic consciousness as a rhythm, then a metric and strophic figure that needed to be "filled": "Quantau Cimetieremarin, cette intention ne fut d'abordqu'une figure d'une rythmiquevide, ... Il me proposaune certaine strophe de six vers et l'id&e sur le nombrede ces strophes, et assur&e par une diversit6 de compositionfond&e tons et de fonctions a leur assigner. Entre les strophes,des contrastes ou des correspondancesdevaient etre institues. Cette derniere condition exigea bient6t que le poemepossibleffit un monologuede 'moi,'dans lequel les thamesles plus simples et les plus constantsde ma vie affective et intellectuelle,tels qu'ils s'etaientimposes a mon adolescenceet associes a la mer et a la lumiere d'un certain lieu des bords de la mediterran&e, fussent appeles,tramps," opposes ... "Tout ceci menait a la mort et touchait la pens&e pure . . . Je savais que je m'orientaisvers un monologueaussi personnel,mais aussi universel que je pourrais le construire... Un assez long travail s'ensuivit" (0, I. 1503-04). 21 See Lloyd J. Austin, "Paul Valery composeLe Cimetieremarin"in Mercure de France (janvier-avril 1953), p. 600. 223
COMPARATIVE
LITERATURE
c) Mais une Creation est une premiere rupture. A l'origine du monde, deux actes, l'un du createur, l'autre de la creature. L'un fonde la foi, et l'autre .. . la libert6. With "homothetic," i.e., "similar in construction and position," Val&ry points to a parallelism, in fact, between not merely the Fall of the Angels and the Fall of Man but between the Fall of Man and the Fall of God! For God's Fall, as the Serpent will explain, is the very Creation itself, the entire universe being the "flaw" in the pure Nothingness:
Soleil, soleil ! ... Faute 6clatante ! Toi qui masques la mort, Soleil, ...
Toi, le plus fier de mes complices, Et de mes pieges le plus haut, Tu gardesles cceursde connaitre Que l'universn'est qu'und6faut Dans la puret6du Non-etre! I (O, I, 138-39) Teste, the angelic, the pure, "dur comme un ange," we recall, disdained manifesting his essence, for the Fault and Fall of genius is to make himself known. Teste had preferred himself: "Je me suis pr'f'r'. Ce qu'ils nomment un 6tre superieur est un &tre qui s'est trompS" (0, II, 15), and from the "&tre superieur" to the "Highest" it is but a step. "Chaque esprit qu'on trouve puissant, commence par la faute qui le fait connaitre" (p. 16), and "le Tout-puissant" is no exception: Cieux, son erreur! Temps,sa ruine! Et l'abimeanimal,beant! ... Quelle chute dans l'origine Etincelle au lieu de neant! .. (O, I, 139) Reflecting toward the end of his life on the work he has created and on that which he left undone Valery muses in 1944: Age, degradation... c'est que je me trouve par-ci par-la en presencedu seigneur Yo-Mismo-Non de ce 'moi pur,'mon eternel agent-Mais d'un personnageMoiAuteur de telles oeuvres... Je decouvre que j'ai fait-tout autres choses que celles que je pensais avoir faites. Je me dis, avec mon Serpent que l'ytre est un defaut dans la purete du Nonetre (C, XXVIII, 89) .22
22Valery's fascination with the serpent-he chose a serpent entwined around a key as his personalemblem-and especially the archetypaluroboros,the serpent swallowing its tail (sketches of which aboundin the Notebooks), lies beyond the scope of this discussion. What concerns us here is the Serpent'sangelic past that has made him what he is in the Garden: the devil, who never forgets his former proximity to the divine, whose ways he therefore knows better than any other creature. The fact that Nietzsche's Zarathustraalso privileged the snake among creatures invites interesting reflections. 224
VALE~RY AND RILKE
As Valery's poetic career reaches its zenith with these major poems of Charmes, the angelic self is threatened by a great human love in the encounter with "Beatrice" (Catherine Pozzi). And while the youthful crisis of the 1890s had been exorcized by "Monsieur Teste," Beatrice will "chastize" his creator for his idolatry--"O Lionardo [Beatrice's et appelation for the poet] che tanto pensate! Amour fut la r&compense le chatiment tout inattendus de cette quantite de pens6es" (C, VIII, 374). As regards Monsieur Teste, "Love and Mr Teste--I fait sa theorie et puis-Jamais en paix !" (C, X, 538, 531) ! As the early crisis was instrumental in the construction of the angelic self, so the mature one marks its evolution as reflected in the mirror of the many ouvre; in of these to the later, experiences importance Valery points years their effect on the Ego scriptor:
Aofit 40 Insomnie ... Je revis ma grande maladie mentale d'amourde 91-92--et quelques annees apres- ... La litterature ou plut6t, tout ce qui est spirituel, fut toujours mon anti-vie, mon anesthetique.Mais ces sensations cependantfurent un puissant excitant intellectuel-le mal exasperait le remede-Eupalinos en 21, La Danse en 1crit en 6tat de ravage. Et qui le devinerait?" (C, XXIII, 589-90) 22,
Both Dialogues were written "sur commande,"23and we recall how enthusiastic Rilke, who translated both, was about "Eupalinos,"24 while the dance motif was to assume a growing significance in his own poetry.25"Eupalinos ou l'architecte" (0, II, 79-147) culminates in the hero's great apostrophe to his body, the artist's prayer to his mortal form:
"O mon corps, qui me rappeleza tout moment ce temperamentde mes tendances, cet equilibrede vos organes, ces justes proportionsde vos parties ... prenez garde a mon ouvrage; enseignez-moisourdementles exigences de la nature, et me communiquezce grand art dont vous etes dou' ... Donnez-moide trouver dans votre alliance le sentiment des choses vraies; moderez, renforcez, assurez mes pensees . .Mais ce corps et cet esprit, ... mais ce fini et cet infini que nous apportons, selon sa nature, iil faut "a chacun present qu'ils s'unissent dans une construction bien ordonnee."(0, II, 99-100)
"Quelle priere sans exemple !" exclaims Socrates, who in the "immense leisure" of immortality judges and condemns his mortal past and dreams of another life. "Qu'est-ce donc que tu veux peindre sur le neant ?" Phedre asks, and Socrates, reformed, replies: "L'Anti-Socrate
23 About the "commande" of "Eupalinos"and the form it imposed,see Valery, Lettres, p. 214; about "L'Ameet la danse,"Lettres, pp. 190-91. 24 See Rilke's letter of 1921 to Gertrud Ouckama Knoop in Briefe, II, 268:
25 I have discussed the treatment of that motif in Mallarme, Val&ry, and Rilke in "Mallarme'sLiving Metaphor: Valery's Athikte and Rilke's 'Spanish Dancer,'" in Pre-Text, Text, Context: Essays in Nineteenth-CenturyFrench Literature (Columbus,Ohio, 1980), pp. 217-27.
"... dieser groBleherrliche 'Eupalinos.' "
225
COMPARATIVE
LITERATURE
... Ce sera donc ... le constructeur" (p. 142). The "anti-Socrate" reflects the anti-Teste, and their defeat is that of the Angel. "L'Ame et la danse" (0, II, 148-76), as its title suggests, celebrates both body and soul, as Socrates, his physician, and Phedre, at a banquet, discourse on the most bodily of the arts. Both "esprit" and "corps," as Valery's Leonardo had taught already, inspire every artist and creator. And, inspired by his Beatrice, the poet celebrates the body and its arts which enlighten the soul and mind.26 Valeiry had, of course, already before the "Beatrice" crisis become an "anti-Teste," namely, the creative poet whose conversion is reflected in the Dialogues ; many Notebook entries, like the following, mirror that change: "Vers ce temps-la les hommes commenceirent a comprendre que la veritable connaissance est creation ... que la creation est vie, que le faire est le seul 'savoir' " (C, The beautiful contemporary prose poem sequence "A B C"27celebrates the marriage of "esprit" and "corps" in one of Valery's most accomplished prose aubades ;28 but the images of the "angel of light" and his sleeping beloved, "femme endormie," reveal again the fundamental polarity and insuperable duality within the Self: "Sur le seuil de la premiere heure et de tout ce qui est possible, je dors et je veille, je suis jour et nuit ... L'ame s'abreuve a la source du temps, boit un peu de tendbres, un peu d'aurore, se sent femme endormie, ange fait de lumiere, se recueille, s'attriste, et s'enfuit sous forme d'oiseau jusqu'd la cime a demi nue dont le roc perce, chair et or, le plein azur nocturne." Finally, with the "Fragments du Narcisse" of 1926,29Valery returns to the classic figure of the divided Self, always linked to and eventually merging with that of the Angel, "L'Ange-(au bord) de la fontaine," title of the earliest draft of the poet's last work, the prose poem "L'Ange." The "Fragments du Narcisse," which contains some of Valery's most accomplished lyrics, consists, we recall, of three numbered sections: the protagonist's aspiration to embrace and compre26 See Alexandre Lazaridis, Valdrypour une podtiquedu Dialogue (Montreal, 1978), p. 176. 27 Publishedin Commerce: Cahiers trimestriels,5 (automne 1925), 4-14. 28 I have discussed the sequence in "A Valeryan Trilogy: The Prose Poems 'A B C,' " CentR,20 (1976), 244-56. 29We recall the early "Narcisse"sonnet of September1890 (0, I, 1554) which predatesthe poem the young Valkry had submittedto the judgmentof Mallarme, the "Fragmentsdu Narcisse" of the early 1920s which found definitive form in the 1926version of Charmes,and finally the "Cantatedu Narcisse" written in the late 1930s "sur la demandede Mine GermaineTailleferre pour servir de libretto musicienne"(0, I, 403). When a une cantatequi a et6 compos&e par cette eiminente Valery gave a lecture "Sur les Narcisse" in 1941,he remarkedthat "ce theme de Narcisse .. . est une sorte d'auto-biographie poetique"(0, I, 1557), recalling the famous tomb of Narcissa in the Botanical Garden of Montpellier which had inspiredhis early "Narcisse." 226
VIII, 879).
VALtRY AND RILKE
hend his "inepuisable Moi" (0, I, 126), the rejection of human love, finally the aspiring Self conquered by night and death. Longing for transcendence and immortality, the Self is condemned to a temporal existence-the motif of Time is modulatedthroughout the poem through the melodies of sunset and nightfall over the forest and their reflection in the fountain-of which death is an inherent part. Numerous Notebook passages, like this one from the mid-1920s, link the figure of Narcissus to death and mutability:
'Narcisse' N'est-ce point pensera la mort
que se regarder au miroir ? N'y voit-on pas son perissable ?
L'immortely voit son mortel. (C, X, 848)
This will be the theme also of Valery's last poem, as sketched already in the 1921 Notebook: "Une sorte d'ange 6tait assis sur le bord d'une fontaine. Il s'y regardait et se voyait homme, et en larmes, et en proie a une douleur [tristesse] infinie" (C, VIII, 370). Another angelic figure that had preoccupied Valery for many years is Semiramis.3oIn both the poem, "Air de Semiramis" (0, I, 91-94), and "Semiramis: mdlodrameen trois actes et deux interludes" (0, I, 182-96), the queen's aspirations to meet her lover, the Sun, are expressed in verbs stressing vertical tension. In the melodrama's third act, Semiramis, echoed by the chorus, sings her soaring aspiration: "Altitude, mon Altitude, mon Ciel" (p. 191). Finally, mounting the parapet, she rises toward the altar she has built to the Sun and prostrates herself upon it to be taken up-into the ultimate "purete du Nonitre"-and consumed by its fire: "Je prierai le Soleil, bient6t dans toute sa force, qu'il me reduise en vapeur et en cendres"; her prayer is heard: "Une colombe s'envole. L'Autel vide brille au soleil" (0, I, 196). Semiramis reaches and crosses over that "borne," the extreme limit from which there is no return. It is precisely the cyclical returns of the natural, temporal order that she conquers in her blazing ascension. For her angelic orgueil, like that of the Parque or Mallarme's Herodiade, rebels against the endless repetitions imposed by a body-Schopenhauer redivivus-and its appurtenanceto Nature. The angelic ambition projects the Self beyond the space-time limitations of human reality, the particularization and individuation that ties the mind to a specific human life with its history and personality, and condemns it to a Nietz30 Her origins go back to an "abandoned, unfinished" poem of 1899 (cf. Whiting, p. 147). She first appeared in 1920, under the title "Simiramis (Fragment d'un tres ancien poeme), still lacking some of the stanzas that make up the last piece of Album de vers anciens.
227
schean "ewige Wiederkunft." Zarathustra had sighed: "Ach, der Mensch kehrt wieder ! Der kleine Mensch kehrt ewig wieder !"31And this human fate that Zarathustra accepts-"amor fati"-the Angel re" jects. "La vie," says Valery in a 1930 entry, "s'oppose l'intelligence par sa forme p'riodique ... L'intelligence est du type: une " fois pour toutes," and " 'L'esprit' (le plus esprit de l'esprit) r6pugne la repetition" (C, XIV, 574; and XXVI, 291).32 A passage from Melange, a variation on the Fallen Angel, reads:
Un esprit allait voir cesser son 6tat; il devait tomber de 1'6ternit6dans le : Temps, s'incarner "Tu vas vivre !" C'6taitmourirpourlui. Quel effroi! Descendredans le Temps!
( , I,299)
One year after the me'lodrame"Semiramis," in 1935, Valery wrote a series of free-verse "Paraboles" (O, I, 197-201)83 to accompany twelve watercolors by Lulu Albert-Lasard, who had been one of Rilke's close friends and painted one of the well-known portraits of him. With the epigraph of the last three lines of "Die Flamingos" from Neue Gedichte, Valery discreetly commemorates his friendship with the German poet, while the subtitle of the Rilke poem, "Jardin des Plantes," at the same time serves to set the stage for "Paraboles": the Garden of Eden, where the Angels were as pure as the Beasts-before the advent of Man:
Quandil n'y avait encore que 1'Angeet 1'Animaldans ce Jardin,... Et quandDieu, et les Choses,et les Anges et les Animaux Et la Lumierequi est Archange Etaient tout ce qui 'tait, CE FUT L'ARE DE PURET2. (0, I, 198)
But this purity of paradise is destroyed by man, homo duplex, who appears under the sign of sorrow and pain heretofore unknown in the Garden: "I1 n'etait ANGE ni BETE; / Je le connus par une souffrance sans pareille" (p. 199). The culminating apostrophe to the Angels then sums up some of the angelic traits we have traced in the oeuvre :
ANGE, disait en moi Celui dont je possedaissi bien la presence, ANGES, leur disait-il, Merveilles 6ternellesde l'amouret de la lumiere,
31 Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke in Zwei Biinden (Munich, 1967), i, p. 699. 82 Ned Bastet has analyzed the opposition of "esprit"to the cyclical operation of nature of which it partakes in connectionwith Valery's late angelic figure, his Faust in "Faust et le cycle" in Entretienssur Paul Valdry (The Hague and Paris, 1968), pp. 115-28. 33 Part of the text appeared,with very slight modifications,in Melange under the title "Psaumedevant la bate" (0, I, 356-57).
228
VALIRY AND RILKE
Actespurs 0 seulement connaissables parle desir Par1'espoir, parl'orgueil, parl'amour, Partoutce quiest Presence d'absence, Toutefois Vousm'etes mysteres quibrillez demoi-meme... duplushautdegr6 Un peuau-dessus ( , I, 200) From the early 1920s on, from the time marked by "Eupalinos," the gravitational force arresting the Angel's "transcendance en purete" is human love, and the harmonization of Eros and the Angelic, without compromising either, constitutes the dramatic conflict of much of Valery's mature work. It is the theme of the drafts of the "L'Ange et l'amour" fragments, significantly never completed and still among the unpublished documents of Valery's dossier "Ange" ("Cahier Gladiator 1920-1925") at the Bibliotheque Nationale, a dossier which also contains the successive drafts of Valery's last poem.34 "L'Ange et l'amour" human love, a theme taken projects the Angel's descent-Fall-(in)to up again in the Faust fragments that also remained "unfinished." In 1941, Valery published etudes pour "Mon Faust," containing the fragments of Lust, La Demoiselle de Cristal, and Le Solitaire ou les maledictions d'univers, Feerie dramatique (0, II, 276-403); and the figure of Faust, which preoccupied the poet for many years as borne out by Notebook entries as early as the 1920s (cf. Cahiers X and XI), is yet another mask of the angelic Self. The dramatic fragments of 1941 represent again the attempt to reconcile Eros and Nous by transforming the one into the other in Lust, while in Le Solitaire the conflict between "etre" and "connaitre"attains a dramatic climax. Whereas Lust, as the name with its Goethean allusion suggests, deals with Love, Le Solitaire presents the confrontation of a Cartesian Faust and an antagonist in whom we recognize one of his own extremes, a dehumanized absurdity demonstrating Pascal's thought (No. 358) that "le malheur veut que qui veut faire 1'angefait la bite."3" A Notebook entry contemporary with the Faust fragments sets forth the problem: FaustIII.
Comment"l'esprit" voit l'acte d'amour ? ... Il faudrait dans Lust, un acces dans F. qui operit la transformation(en scene) " de l'actiond'amour; de l'6tat Er6s l'etat Nous avec A) vue transcendante I4 1 wish to express my special gratitude to Mme Florence de Lussy of the BibliothequeNationale for permittingme to examine the dossier "Ange" in connection with the preparationof a more extensive study of Valery's angelology. 35 See Kurt Weinberg'sbrilliant analysis of The Figure of Faust in Vale'ryand Goethe: An Exegesis of "Mon Faust" (Princeton, N.J., 1976).
229
and the remainder of the notation suggests what the fourth Act of Lust might have been, could it have been written:
Puis ... (peut-etre?) retourEn somme, l'enchantement rompu-la scene de Lebwohl-a moins de la placer apres quelquefaute de la Lust. Ni meme faute mais qui brise l'6dificecristallintout harmonique.(C, XXIV, 16)
Thus the final act would have been tragic, the downfall of the couple, the failure of the attempted marriage of "esprit" and "corps" in the mythopoetic figures of Faust and Lust. It would, in fact, have been the story of the Fall. Ned Bastet's critical presentation of a wealth of "Textes inedits : Quatri&me acte de 'Lust' "36 shows how deeply Valery was absorbed in the dramaticproject of the transformationof "ordinary love" into "le grand amour" that would reconcile the warring halves of the Self, the "terrible angels" of the "Revelation anagogique." And the drafts confirm the defeat of Eros by Nous, the failure of the transformation of the one into the other, and the Pyrrhic victory of the Moi ang'lique.37 It is a Faust, "restored to the desperate and triumphant void" of his angelic Moi pur who, at the end of Le Solitaire, refuses the ultimate temptation, the enticements by the "Fees" to "start all over again" -cyclical return-with life:
Moi qui sus 1'ange vaincreet le demontrahir, J'en sais trop pouraimer,j'en sais trop pourhair, Et je suis exced6 d'etreune creature.
(O,II,402)
A great angelic text contemporary with the Faust fragments is the tale of the Angel's visitation of the couple, "Elihu" and "la fille de Chanaan," in the twenty-fourth Notebook (C, XXIV, 21-23) which contains the many entries on "Faust III." The biblical quality of the text (in the Bible Elihu is an interlocutor of Job, Job 32) again distances and mythologizes the Angel-Eros conflict which here, too, remains unresolved, and the text in fragmentary form. But in this text, Elihu defends human love against the flaming Angel's admonitions in one of the poet's most beautiful apologies pro vita and the human against the "esprit pur" imaged as the messenger of a biblical and jealous god. One of Valery's last angelic figures is "le dernier Atlante," directly linked in the Notebooks to the angelic Self (cf. C, XXVII, 475), and
36 "Textes inedits: Quatrieme acte de 'Lust' " in Cahiers Paul Valdry II: "Mes (Paris, 1977), pp. 51-158. theCdtres" 37 Bastet, p. 106: "L'acte IV aura eu pour but d"''puiser' la tentative de l'1r6s et d'aller jusqu'au bout de ses malfices, avant de restituer Faust au vide et le plus et triomphant de la conscience qui a dejou6 tous les pieges de la vie, desesprer perilleux de tous, 'le piege epouvantable de la tendresse.' "
230
VALERY
AND RILKE
appearing in the ceuvre in the posthumously published prose sequence

L'lle de Xiphos (0 II, 437-50) in the Histoires brisees. In Valery's
version of the ancient myth of the sunken island, that utopia, under the sign of the Sword, the angel's emblem par excellence, evokes an Eden to whose inhabitants the wisest of humanity would be "mere children counting on their fingers"; they are so infinitely superior to man that, the poet suggests, we might better call them "anges ou demidieux" (O, II, 436). Finally, all of these angel-figures converge in Valry's last poem, the prose poem "L'Ange" (O, I, 205-06), completed two months before his death, but whose drafts reach back over more than twenty years.38 In the figure who in his reflection in the fountain sees a weeping--human -face, Valery's Angel and Narcissus blend. But the Narcissus-Angel's wholeness is broken, the dichotomy of "connaitre" and "etre" now imaged and accentuated in the juxtaposition of the Angel's "couronne de la connaissance unitive" and the face of sorrow that bears it. And while the limpid transparency of the one--"etincelant comme un diademe"-remains infinitely remote from the sad opacity of the other, the tears-"une Tristesse en forme d'Homme"-remain incomprehensible to the Angel:
disait-il, T&techarmanteet triste, il y a donc autre chose O mon &tonnement, quela lumiere?" Et il s'interrogeait dans l'univers de sa substance spirituelle merveilleusement pure, oi toutes les idees vivaient egalement distantes entre elles et de lui-m~me, et dans une telle perfection de leur harmonie et promptitudede leurs correspondances, qu'on elit dit qu'il eitt pu s'evanouir, et le systeme, etincelant comme un de leur necessite simultaneesubsister par soi seul dans sa sublime plenidiadi~me, tude. Et pendantune iterniti, il ne cessa de connaltreet de ne pas comprendre.
Mai1945.
While in Valery the Angel is absorbed by the Moi angelique almost from the outset, in Rilke we deal with a pluralistic image of a poetic universe in which "keine Ideologie restlos dominieren kann."39And despite their importance in the later poetry, angels are relatively rare in Rilke's earliest collections, where they are influenced and shaped, moreover, by the various artistic traditions in which the poet immersed himself to nurture his art. The seven "Engellieder" of Mir zur Feier, written in the 1890s and thus contemporary with the waning of Valery's Symbolist phase, stand under a "Gebet" in which the persona releases the guardian angel of
38
forthcoming in Romanic Review.
I have given an extensive reading of this poem in "Valkry'sBroken Angel,"
39 Anthony Stephens,Nacht, Mensch und Engel, Rilkes Gedichtean die Nacht (Frankfurt, 1978), pp. 163, 252, et passim.
231
his childhood so that both may grow.40 The modest cycle, marked by the young poet's characteristic verbal virtuosity, thus already suggests the motif of "besitzlose Liebe" which will later assume great significance in this poetry where it will always be linked, directly or obliquely, to the angel nexus. The one lyric and several prose angels of the Florenzer Tagebuch41reflect Rilke's Italian experience and the influence of Renaissance art, while those of Das Buch vom m5inchischen Leben (SW, I, 263, 269-70, 286-87), in which the Angel already begins to usurp the place of god, are inspired by the Russian venture. The WorpsawederTagebuch contains lyric prose passages celebrating Jugendstil angels under the sign of Vogeler,4 culminating in verse which will be echoed in the Marien-Leben of 1912, dedicated to that friend. One of those early angels from a poem originally dedicated to Rilke's young wife, and then reworked for Das Buch der Bilder (1902) under the title "Der Schauende,"is most significant. Here the Angel becomes the poet's great "Gegenspieler," one of his major roles in the mature poetry. This Angel, moreover, has now completely usurped the place of god : Angel and Poet, though worlds apart, touch in art; for through the artist the finite reaches toward the Absolute, whose personification is now no longer god but the Angel. And in the confrontation with the Angel in which he is defeated, the Poet extracts his inspiration from that infinitely greater force, as Jacob did his blessing:
Wen dieser Engel iiberwand, welcher so oft auf Kampfverzichtet, der geht gerechtundaufgerichtet und groBaus jener harten Hand, die sich, wie formend,an ihn schmiegte. Die Siege ladenihn nicht ein. Sein Wachstumist, der Tief besiegte von immer Grolerem zu sein.
I,460) (STY,
The biblical topos, which grows into one of the major themes of Rilkean angelology, is celebrated here for the first time. Other angels of this collection are similar to those of earlier ones, all of which develop an increasing remoteness between an obscurely-working god and his bright messengers, thus moving toward the eventual assimilation of the former by the latter.
40 Rainer Maria Rilke, Siimtliche Werke, ed. Ernst Zinn (Frankfurt, 1955), I, 156. All quotationsfrom Rilke's work will refer to this edition, unless otherwise indicated,and be cited in the text as SW, followed by volume and page numbers. 41 Rainer Maria Rilke, Tagebiicher aus der Friihzeit (Frankfurt, 1973), pp. 12-120,esp. pp. 15, 18,28, 83, 94. 42 Rilke, Tagebiicher,pp. 273-74. See also Kurt Eugene Webb, Rainer Maria Rilke and Jugendstil (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1978), pp. 22 ff.
232
VALARY
AND RILKE
With Neue Gedichte (SW, I, 481-642) of 1907-08, Rilke's art and angels enter a new phase, now under the sign of Rodin.43The collection's first part contains "Der 01baumgarten"in which the Angel fails to come to the forsaken Christ, and "L'Ange du M&ridien,Chartres," inspired by the cathedral angel that the poet had admired with the sculptor.44 Both the Old Testament and the cathedral angels are infinitely beyond human concerns-beyond Time, beyond Christ's suffering even--and of that sublime indifference and impassibility that will characterize the Duino angels. Thus also "Der Engel" who, should he choose to visit man-his traditional function-would come, again, as his ideal adversary to test him in a nocturnal struggle like, once more, Jacob's. And this Angel, too, has replaced god, as his angelic hands assume the re-creative function:
Sie [the Angel's hands] kiimendenn bei Nacht zu dir, dich ringenderzu priifen, und gingen wie Erziirntedurchdas Haus und griffen dich als ob sie dich erschiifen und brdichen dich aus deinerForm heraus.
(SW,I, 509)
The collection's "Anderer Teil" contains several angels, like the traditional biblical figure of the "Tr6stung des Elija" and those of "Das Jiingste Gericht," recalling the poet's earlier treatment of that picturesque theme. "Die Versuchung," however, contains forbidding angels entirely of Rilke's own invention, in a nightmarish vision possibly suggested by Hieronymous Bosch's great triptych of "The Temptation of Saint Anthony." In "Rosa Hortensie," echoing the earlier "Blaue Hortensie,"45 the flower's beautiful fleeting color is received into the invisible by invisible angels, a motif of great importance: the sublimation of the most precious of our world to the angelic. The two remaining angel poems both feature annunciatory angels, though "Don Juans Auswahl," linked to the Kierkegaardian motifs of "besitzlose Liebe" and unrequited lovers,46 hardly fits the tradition. In "Mohammets Berufung," on the other hand, Rilke evokes the archangel Gabriel in one of his memorable missions, and this most splendid of annunciatory angels
43 See Brigitte Bradley, R. M. Rilkes Neue Gedichte,ihr zyklisches Gefiige (Bern and Munich,1967), pp. 5-17. 44 See Rilke's letter to his wife relating that visit, in Briefe, I, 120-21. 45 Judith Ryan, in Neue GedichteUmschlag und Verwandlung(Munich, 1972), p. 28, remindsus that Rilke thought at one time of using these two as title poems for the two parts of Neue Gedichte. 46 For the influence of Kierkegaard on the poet's love mythology, which, as noted earlier, is linked to the angel nexus, cf. Frederick G. T. Bridgham,Rainer Maria Rilke: Urbild und Verzicht (Stuttgart, 1975), esp. pp. 1-35, "Renunciation in Love: The Example of Kierkegaard." 233
COMPARATIVE
LITERATURE
so far recalls the poet's interest in Koranic angelology.47 The poem, which we read as an allegory for the poet's consecration for his calling through the Angel, demonstrates, moreover, Rilke's concept of the "Umschlag," the sudden miraculous change from one state into its opposite-here the confused and frightened merchant's transformation to prophet of the holy Word:
Der Engel aber,herrisch,wies und wies ihm, was geschriebenstandauf seinem Blatte, undgab nicht nach und wollte wieder: Lies. Da las er: so, da8 sich der Engel bog. Und war schoneiner, der gelesen hatte und konnteund gehorchteund vollzog.
(SW,I, 638)
In the sketches and posthumously published poetry written from 1906 to 1909, the angels become gradually more and more remote from their origin in traditional iconography and Scripture. We recall here a cathedral cycle of August 1907, in whose first poem the poet sings a hymn to the human heart and to the pain out of which the cathedral and its rose window were created; he prays that his own heart may endure what surpasses it, even to the very angels:
es k8nnenplStzlich,lautlos das vollenden was wir, zu gro3 fiir uns, beginnensehn, und lichelnd, in der einen von den Blenden alles, bis an die Engel, iiberstehn. (SW, II, 351)
The emphasized "k6nnen" will become an important notion in the late poetry and especially in the Elegies, vaguely reminiscent of Valery's "que peut un homme ?" But whereas in Valery the "pouvoir angelique" -a Teste's-refers almost exclusively to heightened intellectual virtuality, in Rilke "k6nnen" has a wider and deeper meaning, including that of leisten, of accomplishing Dasein, existence itself, to both the intellectual and emotional limits of human possibility, to where the angels begin. The angels, like their broken statues in the cathedral of Notre Dame, are man's ultimate projection of himself. In the cycle's second poem, the poet says: "Fiihlst du nicht wie wir uns unbegrenzter / in dem allen immer wiederholen? / ... diese Stiicke Engel, das sind wir" (SW, II, 351). In a fragment of 1909, the persona despairs of the Angel's, rather than god's, intervention. How, he asks god, could the Angel possibly come down to man without denying his angelic
essence ?
47 See the famous letter to Hulewicz many years later (1925) about the Angel of the Elegies, inspired in part by "den Engelgestalten des Islam" (Briefe, II, 484). 234
VAL~ERY
AND
RILKE
Wie diirfte denn ein Engel, Herr, in dies Vernachtete und Niezerteilte steigen: Im Himmel wiirden alle auf ihn zeigen und ihn verleugnen. (SW, II, 372)
The poet has now totally inverted the traditional order of angels as intermediaries between man and an inaccessible god, as the persona freely confesses to god his despair of being worthy of the Angel's attention. These "Entwiirfe," then, show vividly how Rilke increasingly diverges from the traditional angelology as he develops his own. The two long Requiems (SW, I, 643-64) of 1908, which develop Rilke's notion of "der eigene Tod," also contain angels. In commemorating the young painter Paula Becker-Modersohn, the poet projects his overwhelming sorrow and pain at her untimely death to the angels; while in the poem for Kalckreuth, the young poet who had ended his life by suicide, the poet-persona, reconciled, hears the other's angel articulate the poetry of the departed new and gloriously. As the angels assume a progressively more significant role in Rilke's poetry, we see them, contrary to Valkry's, remain distinctly separate from the lyric Self that projects them. Only once does the poet-persona identify with the angel, in the sketches of poems to Marthe, where he assumes the role of the angel revealing her radiance to that child of misery (SW, II, 381-83). But the angels are back in their heaven in the Marien-Leben (SW, I, 665-81), written one year later (1912) at Duino.48 This cycle is dominated by magnificent angels whose radiance outshines that of their divine master; we recall that these poems were written mere days before the onset of the First Elegy with its shattering Auftakt to the Angels. Of the fifteen poems, taking us from Mary's birth to her death and assumption, the most noteworthy is the "Verkiindigung," in which the entire world seems to disappear, as it were, into the irradiating glance uniting Mary and Gabriel:
aber daB er dicht, der Engel, eines Jiinglings Angesicht so zu ihr neigte; dal sein Blick und der, mit dem sie aufsah, so zusammenschlugen als wire drauBen pl6tzlich alles leer und, was Millionen schauten, trieben, trugen hingedrfingt in sie; nur sie und er; ... dieses erschreckt. Und sie erschraken beide. (pp. 669-70)
The intensity of the angelic glance as it meets that of the Chosen One
48 About the genesis of the Marien-Leben, cf. J. F. Angelloz, Rainer Maria Rilke: Leben und Werk (Zurich, 1955), p. 284.
235
annihilates the world about them and even frightens the blessed pair themselves. What wonder, then, as the poet says in the First Elegy, that if an angel, even a compassionate one, should take man unto his heart, he would be destroyed by that radiant presence ? A suppressed outcry to the great Angels is the broken opening chord of the first of the Duineser Elegien (SW, I, 683-726), a hopeless, shattering cry, for "Wer, wenn ich schriee, h6rte mich denn aus der Engel / Ordnungen?" Marie von Thurn und Taxis, to whom the Elegies are dedicated, recalls the genesis of what is probably one of the most famous lines of German poetry, as related to her by the poet.49 This most amazing record of poetic Diktat brings to mind Valery's "Les dieux, gracieusement, nous donnent pour rien tel premier vers; mais c'est a nous de faqonner le second, qui doit consonner avec l'autre, et ne pas &treindigne de son aine surnaturel" (0, I, 482). Valery, whose poetic technique has so frequently been contrasted with that of Rilke,50 describes this miraculous conception better than any other fellow-poet again in a 1931 Notebook entry, entitled "Sesame," where he writes: "Le commencementvrai d'un poime ... doit venir a l'auteur comme une formule magique dont il ignore encore tout ce qu'elle lui ouvrira. Car elle ouvre en effet-une demeure, une cave et un labyrinthe qui lui 6tait intime et inconnu" (C, XV, 301). "Who, if I cried, would hear me from the angels' / orders ?" opens that intimate and unknown labyrinth that it will take the poet ten years to explore and construct; and the entire structure is, from the outset, dominated by the Angels:
mich dennaus der Engel Wer, wenn ich schriee,hSirte Ordnungen?undgesetzt selbst, es nihme einer mich pl6tzlichans Herz: ich verginge von seinem Dasein. Denn das Sch6ne ist nichts stairkeren als des SchrecklichenAnfang, den wir noch grade ertragen, es so, weil es gelassen verschmiht, und wir bewundern uns zu zerst6ren.Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich. (p. 685)
The Angels have now become the inaccessible figures of the sacred and noumenal; they are "terrible" like those of the Bible. But the Duino Angels exceed the biblical messengers, as they have themselves become the telos of a lyric voice speaking for modern man."5Frank Wood sees
49 Marie von Thurn und Taxis Hohenlohe, Erinnerungen an Rainer Maria Rilke (Munich, 1933), p. 41. See the fine study by Priscilla Washburn Shaw, Rilke, Valdry and Yeats: 50o The Domain of the Self (New Brunswick, N.J., 1964) ; and most recently, Maja Goth, Rilke und Valdry: Aspekte ihrer Poetik (Munich, 1981). See also Judith Ryan, "CreativeSubjectivity in Rilke and Valery," in CL, 25 (1973), 1-16. 51 See the Catholictheologian RomanoGuardini,Rainer Maria Rilkes Deutung des Daseins (1953; rpt. Munich,1961), p. 29. 236
VALERY AND RILKE
in these angels "the ultimate court of appeal from experience, the symbolic goal of the artist's striving," whose "frigid exclusiveness conditioned by the absolute existential vulnerability of man."52 . . is
The Second Elegy opens with an echo from the great angel opening of the First: "jeder Engel ist schrecklich"; but now the poet's suppressed cry has become praise of those "almost deadly birds of the soul." Then the lyric voice nostalgically evokes an earlier age, when a heavenly Father would send his messengers down to earth, with a reminiscence of the biblical episode of Tobias, in which Raphael himself became the guardian angel and traveling companion of the youth on his initiation journey: "Wohin sind die Tage Tobiae, / da der Strahlendsten einer stand an der einfachen Haustiir ?" (p. 689). But those days are past, for now the Angel's approachwould kill us: hinter denSternen derErzengel Traite jetzt,dergeffihrliche, einesSchrittes undherwfirts : hochaufnurnieder unsdaseigeneHerz.Werseidihr? schlagend erschliig
(p. 689)
is then answeredin the secondverse paraThis terrifiedinterrogation in to the Angelsin all of Rilkean most the magnificent apostrophe graph -all of modern-poetry, whichevokesDionysius' hierarchies, heavenly and the soaringbaroque angelsof a Tintoretto:
Friihe Gegliickte,ihr VerwShntender Sch6pfung,
Grate Hohenziige, morgenr6tliche derbliihenden allerErschaffung,-Pollen Gottheit, Gelenke desLichtes, Throne, Gfinge, Treppen, ausWonne, Tumulte RiiuneausWesen,Schilde entziickten stiirmisch Gefiihls. But all this swirling motion is then suddenly arrested, as the Angels become mirrors drawing the beauty flowing from them back into themselves. In emanating their own-not god's-radiance only to reabsorb it into their own essence, the angels are the opposite of man, who breathes himself out and away, his strength diminishing with each breath: "Ach wir / atmen uns aus und dahin; von Holzglut zu Holzglut / geben wir schwitchern Geruch." But, asks the persona, would the angels, perhaps-"as if by mistake"--salvage some of our being scattered out into the cosmos, as they retrieve "their own ?" If we could only become mingled with their features by the merest hint! But no, we are entirely lost, and they do not notice us as, in a whirl, they return to themselves. The Second Elegy stresses the impossibility of the Angels' slightest concern with the human, as they are caught up in their
52Rainer Maria Rilke and the Ring of Forms (New York, 1970), p. 151.
237
COMPARATIVE
LITERATURE
whirling self-preoccupation and self-realization.53From the Duino winter of 1912 also stems the opening section, the angel passage of the Tenth Elegy, destined already then to become the final one.54Here the aloof angels are finally conquered into consent, the poet, his mission accomplished, singing praise to "consenting Angels": "Dass ich dereinst, an dem Ausgang der grimmigen Einsicht, / Jubel und Ruhm aufsinge zustimmenden Engeln" (p. 721). Duino gave Rilke the beginning of his culminating work-but then the Angels disappeared. Unable to continue the Elegies, Rilke went to Spain, and a Notebook passage reveals not merely the profound effect of Toledo and El Greco but the formation of an Angel figure-that stream that flows through both realms and the element that permeates the spiritual atmosphere which includes both the living and the dead, the visible and the invisible -which is not El Greco's but Rilke's own:
Nichts wie Toledo, wenn man sich seinem Einflu3 iiberliel3e, verm6chte in solchem Grade zur Darstellung des Ubersinnlichen auszubilden ... Greco, getrieben von den Verhdltnissen Toledos begann ein Himmelsinneres einzufiihren, gleichsam oben himmlische Spiegelbilder dieser Welt zu entdecken ... Der Engel ist bei ihm nicht mehr anthropomorph wie das Tier in der Fabel, auch nicht das ornamentale Geheimniszeichen des byzantischen Gottesstaates. Sein Wesen ist fliel3ender, er [the angel] ist der Flul3, der durch beide Reiche geht, ja, was das Wasser auf Erden und in der Atmosphare ist, das ist der Engel in dem gr6sseren Umkreis des Geistes, Bach, Thau, Trainke, Fontine des seelischen Daseins, Niederschlag und Aufstieg.55
Finally, at Ronda, inspiration returned, not to complete the Elegies but to write "Die Spanische Trilogie" and a group, if not a cycle, of poems, "Die Gedichte an die Nacht." As the theme of the Night had been linked to the Angels in the First and Tenth Elegies, the angels now play a major role in the Night poems. The most significant Ronda poem, addressed "An den Engel," contrasts the angelic and the human and culminates in a desperate cry to the Angel, again not to be heard, but to be illuminated merely by his great radiance:
Starker, stiller, an den Rand gestellter Leuchter, oben wird die Nacht genau. Wir ver-geben uns in unerhellter Z6gerung an deinem Unterbau... Unser ist den Ausgang nicht zu wissen aus dem drinnen irrlichen Bezirk,
53 See Ulrich Fiilleborn's and Manfred Engel's recent publication of drafts of the beginning of the Second Elegy in Materialien zu Rainer Maria Rilkes "Duineser Elegien" (Frankfurt, 1980), I, 56-58. 54 See Rilke's letter to Lou Andreas-Salome, written ten years later, in Briefe, II, 310-11. 55 Fiilleborn and Engel, pp. 79-80.
238
VAL~ERY
AND
RILKE
du erscheinst auf unsern Hindernissen und begliihst sie wie ein Hochgebirg... Engel, klag ich, klag ich ? Doch wie wdire denn die Klage mein? Ach, ich schreie, mit zwei Hblzern schlag ich und ich meine nicht, geh6rt zu sein. (SW, II, 48)
We hear something infinitely anguished in these lines; for the lament is no longer even that of a human voice, but that desperate beating "with two pieces of wood" that "does not intend to be heard" anyhow. And as angelic luminosity here magnifies human negativity, this Angel is, again, man's ideal opposite.56This Angel is, moreover, much closer to those of the first Elegies than to those of some of the other Night poems, in which we find a shift away from separation and remoteness toward reciprocity between Angel and Self.57 This changed orientation becomes apparent in "Bestiirz mich, Musik" (SW, II, 60-61), and in the poems of the Night group completed in Paris from 1913 to 1914, like "Atmete ich nicht aus Mitternaichten" (pp. 70-71), where the persona turns from the Beloved to the Angels, calling them to reap the harvest, "dieses blaue Leinfeld," of his heightened state of being. Here the angels are barely disguised figures for the Muse, for inspiration, in a poetological economy that transforms the energy of Eros into Art, a phenomenon we frequently encounter in Valery. In "So, nun wird es doch der Engel sein," the Angel drinks his sustenance from the poet's features, replacing woman in a mystic consummation with a strong erotic undercurrent:
So, nun wird es doch der Engel sein, der aus meinen Ziigen langsam trinkt ... Diirstender, wer hat dich hergewinkt ? ... Und ich fiihle flieBend, wie dein Schaun trocken war, und bin zu deinem Blute so geneigt, daB ich die Augenbraun dir, die reinen, v6llig iiberflute. (p. 71)
This imagery of flowing recalls the "FluB-Gott des Bluts," the Eros of the Third Elegy which was conceived at the same time as these Night poems. In the following poem of the group, the persona again sends the Beloved away, as the Angel is already "irresistibly approaching behind
56 This figure, like the Duino Angels, has indeed become a metaphor for the inexpressible, a notion developed in Karl Greifenstein's "Der Engel und die Dimension des Unsiglichen bei Rainer Maria Rilke," Diss. Ruprecht-Karls-Universitait 1949. 57 For a most lucid exegesis of "Die Gedichte an die Nacht," as well as their "Entstehungsgeschichte," see Stephens.
239
the stars in the East." We recall that this poetic theme of the unknown Beloved and her rejection in favor of the Angel-the conflict between Eros and Art, again reminiscent of Valery-almost coincided with the appearance of the Unknown Beloved, Magda von Hattingberg, in the life of the poet who, like his persona, had to reject her for the Angel.58 The "inconceivablepolarity of life and extreme work" is again reflected in the sequence of "Gedichte fiir Lulu Albert-Lasard" (SW, II, 21725) of 1914. With the Fourth Elegy, written in Munich in two November days of 1915, the angels reappear. In this most complex and most despairing of the Duineser Elegien, created in the second war year, the principal theme is again man's existential situation in a world in which he is not at home, controlled by incomprehensible forces, imaged here with the false dancer and then the marionette performing on the puppet stage.59 The persona, a solitary spectator, alone in the cold, forsaken theater before the stage of his heart, would force an Angel down to play by the sheer power of his persistence and at the cost of utter solitude. For only if the Angel played these puppets would there be real action, the Heideggerian "authentic"existence:
wenn mir zumutist, zu wartenvor der Puppenbiihne, nein, so v6llig hinzuschaun, um mein Schauen da23, am Ende aufzuwiegen,dort als Spieler der die Bfilgehochreil3t. ein Engel hinmuB,
Only the Angel could bring about that "Umschlag" from the unauthentic to the authentic:
Engel und Puppe: dann ist endlich Schauspiel. Dann kommtzusammen,was wir immerfort entzwein,indemwir da sind. Dann entsteht aus unsernJahreszeitenerst der Umkreis des ganzen Wandelns.tVberuns hinfiber spielt dannder Engel. (SW, II, 698-99)
The Angel must (hinmufi) come-but will he? Will the Umschlag to salvation come about? Then the Fourth Elegy suddenly, in the same line, returns to the theme of "die Sterbenden," the dying who are closer to that unity that escapes us, and who, in their having crossed over from this to the other side, understand how "unreal"our existence is: "Alles
58 See Rilke's letter of June 8, 1914,to Lou Andreas-Salomefor the effects and the lesson of the "BenvenutaErlebnis,"in Briefe, I, 499-504. 59 See H. F. Peters' summaryof some of the highly divergent interpretations of the poem in his Rainer Maria Rilke: Masks and the Man (New York, 1960), pp. 136 ff. 240
VALEIRY AND RILKE
ist nicht es selbst"; existence is "unauthentic,"the Existentialists would say. And from the dying, we pass to the other extreme of life-childhood; for children, too, exist more authentically in their world, "when behind the figures there was more / than merely past and before us not the future." But that was merely brief, "the interval between world and toy" of pure becoming. The themes of death and childhood then fuse in the closing section with the "Kindertod / aus grauem Brot," recalling that "gray gust of wind" from the empty stage above. We can accept, nay understand, murder and murderers, but the death of a child, "den ganzen Tod, noch vor dem Leben so / sanft zu enthalten und nicht b6s zu sein, / ist unbeschreiblich."For once in these Elegies death finds no acceptance but leaves the poet stunned. By now, Rilke's Europe is plunged into senseless death and destruction, and it will be a long while before the Angels come. Rilke had to wait for his for many years. After the war, in 1921, Rilke found his last abode, Muzot, and the poetry of Valery. The following year the Duineser Elegien were at last completed, in a great surge of inspiration within an incredibly short time in February of 1922-when the poet also "received" the fifty-five
Sonette an Orpheus.
The Fifth Elegy was composed last, on February 14, and Rilke then placed it centrally into the already completed cycle, replacing a former Fifth, "Gegen-strophen" (SW, II, 136-38). In the Fifth, the central "Saltimbanque"Elegy, under the sign of Paris and Picasso, the elegiac lament over the human condition takes us from the puppet stage to the street acrobats, the "fugitive ones" symbolizing modern man."0These acrobats perform a life routine requiring consummate skill, but become mechanical and meaningless. Only their children are not yet completely reduced to their roles in'life, as we see from the young boy acrobat's tears and smile. And here the lyric voice calls on the Angel, to gather up that most ephemeral, but most precious, expression of the heart: dasLiacheln...
Engel ! o nimms,pfliicks,das kleinbliitigeHeilkraut.
60 Like the preceding elegy, the Fifth offers a wealth of suggestiveness, ambiguity and complexities that have resulted in many different, and at times conflicting, interpretations,of which Franz J. Brecht discusses some fifteen in his examination of the text, Schicksal und Auftrag des Menschen: Philosophische Interpretationzu Rainer Maria Rilkes Duineser Elegien (Munich, 1949), pp. 13739. Two principalorientations emerge. One sees the homeless acrobats and their fleeting and mechanicalperformanceas an image of modern man; the other, one of whose most significant representativesis Eudo C. Mason, takes the Saltimbanquesfor a symbol of the poet. I agree, rather, with Jakob Steiner, who thinks "dag die Fahrenden nicht die Kiinstler vertreten, ... sondern da13sie fiir die Menschen fiberhauptstehen und deswegen als Symbole des Menschen gesetzt sind, weil an ihnen gewisse allgemeine Zilge des Menschen besonders deutlich hervortreten"(Rilkes Duineser Elegien, Bern and Munich, 1969,p. 103).
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COMPARATIVE
LITERATURE
Schaff eine Vase, verwahrs! Stells unterjene, uns noch nicht offenen Freuden; in lieblicherUrne riihms mit blumigerschwungigerAufschrift: "SubrisioSaltat." (SW, I, 703)
Like the heavenlyvoices of the holy womenof "Beguignage" (SW, I, 535), like the gloriousevanescentcolor of the "Rosa Hortensie" (p. 633), or the painovera friend'searlydeath(the Requiems),the child's fleetingsmile is projectedto the angelswith whom it may subsist and valueof the surviveour passing.The imagerysuggeststhe redemptive smile,a "small-blossomed healingherb"for whichthe Angel mustform a specialvessel. One feels that the Angel will indeedcometo perform the serviceof salvation. Fromthe sceneof the Saltimbanques' routineon theirworn-outcarto theirparents'meaningless their children condemned pet, perpetuate where the to another Parisian we continue existence, "showplace," winds named Madame and twists-as Lamort, milliner,significantly the acrobatswere wrung, bent, and twisted-her rufflesand ribbons, whichfigure"therestlessways of the earth,"that is, our aimlessstrivdeath.Then, in the poem'sfinal ing, to end eventuallyin a meaningless of "ein[en] the Angel,withthe invocation sectionthe personaaddresses of Platz, den wir nichtwissen"whichcontrastswith that "Schauplatz" Lamortwhichwe knowonlytoo well: Madame
Engel ? : Es wire ein Platz, den wir nicht wissen, unddorten, auf unsiglichem Teppich,zeigten die Liebendendie's hier hohenFiguren des Herzschwungs,
ihre niebringen, kiihnen biszum K6nnen
ihre ihre ausLust, Tfirme niewar, nur aneinander woBoden lingst,

lehnendenLeitern,bebend,-und k6nntens,
Toten. lautlosen vordenZuschauern rings,unzihligen

(p. 705)
This hypothetical subjunctivelyevoked showplacecontrastswith the of "real"showplace the big city, as reflectedin Malte; here,in an ideal place, the acrobats'worn carpetwould be replacedby an "indescribthemselves able"one, and the mechanical, spirituallydead performers "theirdaringhigh figuresof the wouldnow becomelovers performing heart'smomentum, / theirtowers of desire."They wouldachievethat Dasein we havediscussed(see p. 234). Yet, this idealand of "k6nnen" of expandedsphere being is only invokedthroughthe Angel, and we do not knowit; it is a mythicrealm,whoseguidingfigureis the mythopoeticAngel.
The Sixth Elegy, begun in 1912 at Duino and completed in February 1922, is devoted to another mythic figure, but a human one: the hero. 242
VALI~RY AND RILKE
It is perhaps for this reason that the poet does not invoke the Angels in this poem which sings the praises of the exemplary human existence, exemplified in the biblical Samson. In the Seventh Elegy, a high song of praise-"Hiersein ist herrlich" -completed in one day on February 7, the poet conveys his bequest to posterity: the transformation of the fleeting visible into the lasting invisible inner world, the "Weltinnenraum." Evoking the monuments with which civilizations have covered the earth, he calls on the Angel as ultimate authority and final court of appeal. The Angel is to bear witness to human greatness and preserve its most precious works from the destruction of time-as he had "saved" a fleeting smile, or the heart's pain, or beauty before:
Engel, dir noch zeig ich es, daI in deinemAnschaun steh es gerettet zuletzt, nunendlichaufrecht. Siulen, Pylone, der Sphinx, das strebendeStemmen, grau aus vergehenderStadt oder aus fremderdes Doms.
And the Angel must not merely save, but admire and praise their greatness:
0 staune,Engel, dennwir sinds, wir, o du Gro8er,erzihls, dal wir solches vermochten,mein Atem reicht fiir die Riihmungnicht aus.
Thus here the Poet's and the Angel's functions almost fuse: to preserve the fleeting in praise is the Poet's mission par excellence. Yet, in the end, the poet-persona recalls that the deadly Angel cannot come; his invocation-imaged in the open hand and outstretched arm-becoming both a calling and a warding off:
Glaubnicht,daS ich werbe. Engel, und wiirb ich dich auch! Du kommstnicht. Denn mein Anruf ist immervoll Hinweg; wider so starke Str6mungkannstdu nicht schreiten.Wie ein gestreckter Arm ist mein Rufen.Und seine zum Greifen obenoffene Hand bleibtvor dir offen, wie AbwehrundWarnung, UnfaBlicher,weitauf. (pp. 712-13)
This gesture of the outstretched arm, whose hand remains open and does not grasp the incomprehensible (unfa/3lich) Angel, creates an extraordinary tension between the Poet and that invisible power whose presence sustains and yet would destroy him. The lines invoke the image of a biblical prophet calling out to his terrible, invisible god. The Eighth Elegy, which once more intones a lament over man's tragic existence in a world where, as the poet had said in the First, 243
COMPARATIVE
LITERATURE
"we are not very reliably at home," contains no angels. The Ninth Elegy once more questions the meaning of human existence, and finds it in the world's need of us, who through our "sagen" and naming give it permanence and meaning, "Sind wir vielleicht hier, um zu sagen: Haus, / Briicke, Brunnen, Tor" (p. 718). But is not the Poet the "Sagende"-and "der Wagende," according to Heideggerabove all others ?61Thus we encounter here one of the great unresolved questions in poetry since Mallarm6: can the "explication Orphique de la terre" really save Man, or only the Poet? With "sagen" then heightened to "rfihmen,"we pass, in fact, from the more generally human to the distinctly poetic mission; and it is here that the Angel is invoked again, for the poet must praise the things of this world to him, his transcendental witness:
ihm Preise dem Engel die Welt, nicht die unsfigliche, kannstdu nicht gro8tun mit herrlichErfiihltem; im Weltall
Drumzeig wo er fiihlender fiihlt,bistdueinNeuling.
ihm das Einfache,das, von Geschlechtzu Geschlechtern gestaltet, als ein Unsriges lebt, nebender Hand und im Blick. Sag ihm die Dinge. Er wird staunenderstehn.
(p. 719) The poem closes with the poet's affirmation of the mission conferred upon him by the earth, the great message also of the Seventh Elegy, to preserve the fleeting visible world in the inner, invisible one: "Erde, ist es nicht dies, was du willst: unsichtbar / in uns erstehn ?" This transformation is man's-the poet's-reason for being, and that greater realm including both the visible and the invisible, the living and the dead, the "double realm," is that of the Angel, who must sanction the poetic transformation. I have already discussed the great opening angel passage of the Tenth Elegy, conceived and composed with the first poems of the cycle, an elegiac cycle in which lament grows into affirmation and the terrible, inaccessible Angel is at last brought to earth-an admiring sanction and validation of the Poet's endeavor: the Orphic transformation and preservation of the world. In the famous letter to his Polish translator Witold Hulewicz, written in 1925, Rilke hesitates to "explain" the Duineser Elegien; "und bin ich es, der den Elegien die richtige Erklirung geben darf? Sie reichen unendlich iiber mich hinaus." But then he does give some suggestions for reading the difficult texts. The Elegies affirmboth life and death, as death is but the other, "uns abgekehrte Seite des Lebens"; the distinction between a "here" and a "beyond" is merely a limited and false perspective: "Die wahre Lebensgestalt reicht durch beide Gebiete,
61 Martin Heidegger, Holzwege (Frankfurt, 1972), pp. 287-95.
244
VALARY
AND RILKE
das Blut des grol3ten Kreislaufs treibt durch beide: es gibt weder ein Diesseits noch Jenseits, sondern die groBe Einheit in der die uns fibertreffenden Wesen, die "Engel," zu Hause sind."62 The great Duino Angels never returned in Rilke's remaining work and are absent from the Sonette an Orpheus, where the Angel is absorbed in the sonnets' guiding presence, Orpheus, mythic poet and god of the "double realm," who, like the Angel, is at home among both the living and the dead. And in Rilke's French poems, the angels are very different, inspired by a different-foreign-language. Angels, then, permeate the entire poetic cosmos of both Valery and Rilke; in both poets, these dominant symbolic figures reach their most imposing proportions in their creators' culminating work-a culmination that for Rilke, according to the poet, could not have come about without the Valeryan encounter. Yet we are struck by the divergence of these angels. Whereas in Valery the Angel becomes progressively internalized and absorbed into the "Moi angelique," in Rilke the figure remains distinct from the lyric Self in order to serve as its ideal Opposite and "Gegenspieler," like the Angel of Jacob. Valery, who tried to assimilate the angelic into his human psyche, remained,paradoxically but also logically, essentially dualistic to the end, as figured in his last poem's broken Angel. Rilke, on the other hand, declined to force the lyric Self and the Angel into an impossible union, thus preserving the integrity of each. The Rilkean universe attains, nevertheless, an idealmythopoetic-unity in the "Weltinnenraum" and the "double realm," the Angel's and the Poet's, where death is but "the other side of life" and the underlying configuration is the sphere. When in Rilke Angel and Poet do blend, both are assimilated into a new mythopoetic figure: Orpheus. The poets' diametrically opposed existential, ontological stances shaped their Angels and the textual cosmoses from which they emerge -into angelic fragments projected unto various personas in Valkry, poet of a textual universe largely made up of fragments; into the inaccessible figures of the noumenal in Rilke, vitally essential and yet profoundly threatening to the persona of the poet of closed cycles--even to that of the Elegies at last. In Rilke the Angels remain, as they began, iconic-the early Jugendstil figures, the many biblical angels and those inspired by art, finally evolving into the no longer imageable but nevertheless whole and "terrible"Angels of the Duineser Elegien. In Valery, the Angel, after the early Symbolist incarnations, and aside from such rare biblical messengers as those of "Palme" or the tale of "Elihu et la fille de Chanaan," subsists as ideal intellectual aspiration, as the
62
Rilke, Briefe, II, 480-81.
245
COMPARATIVE
LITERATURE
unique all-seeing unseen "regard," influenced by Thomistic angelology. Thus, a Teste's conceptual configuration of the "homme de verre," or the related "tete r6fringente" of the Notebooks' ego scriptor, and finally Narcissus' "diademe spirituel," or the "couronne de la connaissance unitive" of the last poem. The Angels also reflect, of course, their creators' basic-and frequently diametrically opposed-attitudes as poets: Valery utilized his work as a means, for the sake of the Moi that had also absorbed the Angel; Rilke, on the contrary, surrendered himself wholly to his work, immolating himself for it and calling on the Angel to witness that sacrifice and bless it in fruition. But in both poets we find the conflict of Eros and Art, love-lifeand artistic creativity, associated with the Angel nexus, an association which reveals one of the Angel's most important roles: that of the Muse who, paradoxically protective and cruel, assures the realization of the poet's vocation. Thus, even secularized, these modern Angels are both messengers of "the divine calling" and guardians of "the religious life," ever threatened by the demands and the temptations of the other, "ordinary," existence. And whether the Angel comes from deep withina mere matter of perspective. Valery-or from above-Rilke-is In Valery, where the Angel was almost from the beginning (1892) the symbolic image of the intellectual Self-whether analytic or poetic -victorious over the affective and the sensual and the person (al), the Angel is threatened only by human love; and the impossible harmonizing of Eros and Angel dominates most of the late work. Its fragmentary, "unfinished" quality, moreover, suggests that the conflict remained unresolved. The tension between life, love, and art, his poetic mission, shaped Rilke's entire existence; and it is most poignantly objectified in the "Gedichte an die Nacht" whose Angels defeat the Beloved. The theme of deceived love and defeated lovers haunts the Valeryan Narcissus fragments and Rilke's Elegies, which celebrate the victory of the Angels not merely thematically but by their very existence. And whether the culminating Rilkean and Valeryan Angels signal their creators' victory or defeat-tears of rapture (Tenth Elegy), tears of sorrow ("L'Ange")-is, again, a mere matter of personal and temporal perspective; for what remains, after all, for survival, for these texts' posterity of readers, is the lasting poetry of Man's agon with the Angels. Grand Valley State Colleges
246

Ursula Franklin, The Angel in Valéry and Rilke.

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Ursula Franklin, The Angel in Valéry and Rilke.

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University of Oregon

citedin the will referto this edition, hereafter fromValery'sCahiers quotations

whathe suffersandwhichhe doesnot send,whileto Gide love lettersexpressing 216

VALERY AND RILKE

(0, I, 206; my italics).

Seul supportsouriantque je formaisd'amour A la toute-puissantealtitudeadoree ... (O, I, 99)

VALPRY AND RILKE

VALE~RY AND RILKE

"... dieser groBleherrliche 'Eupalinos.' "

VALtRY AND RILKE

L'immortely voit son mortel. (C, X, 848)

VALIRY AND RILKE

appearing in the ceuvre in the posthumously published prose sequence

forthcoming in Romanic Review.

I have given an extensive reading of this poem in "Valkry'sBroken Angel,"

VALERY AND RILKE

VALEIRY AND RILKE

ihre niebringen, kiihnen biszum K6nnen

ihre ihre ausLust, Tfirme niewar, nur aneinander woBoden lingst,

Toten. lautlosen vordenZuschauern rings,unzihligen

VALI~RY AND RILKE

Drumzeig wo er fiihlender fiihlt,bistdueinNeuling.

Rilke, Briefe, II, 480-81.

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