Answerable Aesthetics: Reading "You" in Rilke - w/ quotes in English

William Waters Answerable Aesthetics: Reading “You” in Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo” [All-English version. This essay was published, with quotations in German, in Comparative Literature 48:2 (1996).] The work produced is a thing among things, able to be experienced and described as a sum of qualities. But from time to time it can come face to face with the receptive beholder in the flesh. — Martin Buber, I and Thou There is something about the act of reading that is exemplary for conduct. — Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo” has become a literary touchstone, regularly anthologized, translated and interpreted since its first publication in 1908. It appeared as the opening poem in Rilke’s New Poems: The Other Part (Sämtliche Werke 1: 557),1 standing as a companion piece to the “Early Apollo” which began the 1907 New Poems (SW 1: 481); it often has been taken to epitomize the several layers of meaning in Rilke’s undertaking to write “Dinggedichte” – poems about things, often artworks, but also poems that themselves seem dense, contoured, weighted, and “thinglike.”2 The poem can serve admirably as another kind of exemplar, however: it is in many ways paradigmatic of that large but underrecognized body of poetic texts addressed to an unidentified “you.” 1 Rilke’s Sämtliche Werke will be abbreviated henceforth as SW and references will be given in the text. 2 The term “Dinggedicht” is not Rilke’s; it was introduced by the critic K. Oppert in 1926. 2 What people inevitably remember of this poem, in fact, is its dramatic last half-line: “You must change your life.” Many critics raise and variously settle the question of the “participant roles” – to use a linguistic term – involved in this address. Some readings assume that it is the statue speaking, others the god Apollo, and still others the speaker or poet; “you,” in turn, is taken to mean the beholder of the statue, or the poet/speaker again, or the reader of the sonnet. These multiple alternatives are a function of the indeterminacy of a poem with respect to communicative context: usually we cannot say decisively who is “speaking” to whom, with reference to what larger context, in a lyric poem.3 And corresponding to this indeterminacy, the answers that we as readers settle on determine our reading in important ways – not least in terms of whether we like the poem, respond emotionally to it, feel (as some readers do) imperiously preached to in the poem’s conclusion, or merely approach the whole with critical irony. But our individual strategies for managing this loose, indefinite “you” have in each case to do with the stance we ourselves take up vis-à-vis a poem and its claims.4 Theorists of narrative have developed a substantial body of work which at first seems to be pertinent here, focused at one very productive end on the reader and the operations of reading, and at the other on a taxonomy of the functions that the word “you” can fulfill in narrative fiction: designating narratee, protagonist, “mock” reader, inscribed or implied readers, and so on. (We have come some distance from the first puzzled critical responses to Butor’s La 3 Our answers, if we have them, come from outside the poetry itself, like J.S. Mill’s famous dictum that “poetry is overheard” (“What is Poetry?” [1833], quoted in Tucker), which is of course itself not the last word on the subject. Recognition that poetry’s “you” merits discussion as a topic in itself is very limited, probably in part because of the tradition of genre theory which Mill’s idea represents. See Eliot, Grabher, Holden, and, on Whitman’s “you,” Hollis. 4 I mean “loose” here not in the sense of “blurred” (Holden’s word for the ambiguous “you”), but rather almost something like “unleashed” – loosed by the underdetermined pragmatic context. 3 modification.)5 But the pronouns and deictics of the lyric poem seem to be, as Käte Hamburger argues (285–96), epistemologically different from those of narrative fiction. And without story or diegesis, lyric poems have no “protagonist” and thus cannot address him or her in the second person — the technique of “true” second-person narrative, which has stimulated most recent narratological interest in the “you” form (see Fludernik). An elementary typology of addressees is a useful step in studying the lyric as well, but it must be based on the particular configuration of “participant roles” (Levinson 61–73) or “footings” (Goffman) each address entails as a communicative act, rather than on embedded levels of address. The distinctions between prototypical apostrophe (“With how sad steps, Oh moon, thou climb’st the skies”), prototypical reader address (“Pray thee, take care, that tak’st my book in hand”) and address to a contemporary (“Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus”) hold for a great deal of poetry, and remain key lines of reference for that other quite large corpus of work where they are, as dividing walls, breached or crumbled away.6 This indeterminacy happens so easily – not just in famously puzzling cases like the second person in the poems of Paul Celan or John Ashbery – because “you” tends to hail; it calls everyone and everything by their inmost name. The second person pronoun is address itself. One can read unidentified “I” or “she” with comparatively small concern, but the summons of unidentified “you” restlessly tugs at us, begging identification. Thus a centrally important 5 The criticism dealing with the second person in narrative is extensive; see Fludernik’s bibliography. Warhol’s study Gendered Interventions deserves mention as a salutary reminder that actual readers may, in defiance of such helpful critical postulates as the “narratee” or “implied reader,” feel personally addressed by a fictional “you.” 6 Sidney, Jonson, Catullus (random examples). I would also argue for separate categories for address to God (“Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend / With thee” [Hopkins]) and to the poet’s self. The impersonal “you” would deserve special attention, because of the frequency with which this vestigial “address” blends imperceptibly into reader- or self-address in poetry (see Holden). 4 question, it seems to me, is our “tilt” of reading when confronted by such a call. How will we stand? I wish to contend that this positioning of ourselves as readers is a question of responsiveness, of conduct, even of obligation. This moral vocabulary is perilous, however; it easily gains the upper hand over, and so falsifies, accounts of aesthetic experience which draw on it. The best way I know to keep the question of readerly answerability “true” is to raise it during actual acts of reading poetry. Thus the present essay develops its argument, which bears on a general poetics and a conception of readership, in the context of a close reading of “Archaic Torso of Apollo.” I aim to work out the following perspective: the unusually vulnerable position of a reader whose responsiveness to the text extends even to the feeling (implausible as it may be) that she herself is the poem’s intended addressee. “Archaic Torso of Apollo” is one of many poems addressed to an unidentified “you” which encourage, and act on their readers to produce, just this vulnerability. Like the ball thrown aloft in Rilke’s poem “The Ball,” the poetic text arranges (almost choreographs) its readers into attitudes of reception. That poem apostrophizes the ball, “[you] who, when you rise,” . . . suddenly from high above show those playing a new location, arranging them as if it were a dance, in order then, awaited and desired by all, swift, simple, artless, completely nature, to fall into that cup of upstretched hands. (SW 1: 639-40) As a model of reading, this image represents an ideal; actual readers (even more than actual ballplayers) are unruly and erratic individuals. It might be argued that the image is especially idealized in the particular case of Rilke critics: certainly not all readers of Rilke have admitted this sense of personal interaction with his poems. Indeed, Kathleen Komar notes with respect to 5 the line “You must change your life,” “This demand is frequently rejected by readers, resulting in an array of irritable . . . readers and critics” (222 n.13). R.A. York (93-94) is one such who declares he must “endorse” all complaints about “Rilke’s indifference to his readers.”7 I am not asserting that poems simply control their readers; the distance between the views just cited and my own reading of Rilke is proof enough of that. But I believe that critics who dismiss Rilke’s claim on his readers are missing something, something that the “popular” audience (particularly in the USA, where sales of Rilke’s poetry in translation are remarkably high) perhaps understands much better. Although this shortcoming has partly to do with the history of trends in Rilke scholarship, it is also a function of a larger neglect of poetry’s “you” forms – a neglect that reflects the limitations professional criticism has set on the stances available to the serious critic vis-à-vis the text and its claims. At the least, Rilke’s sonnet is an indispensable test-case for inquiring into the connection between the “you” of poetic address and the idea of moral answerability. Culminating its poetic description of an artwork with the conclusion “you must,” “Archaic Torso of Apollo” is surely the locus classicus for the dovetailing of aesthetic encounter and ethical imperative. Since the meaning of that famous concluding imperative “You must change your life” is not in those words alone but in their context and situation of utterance, the discussion that follows will move carefully through the poem, describing the kind of reading that could necessitate the conclusion “You must change your life.” Archaic Torso of Apollo 1 We never knew his unheard-of head 7 York cites, in support of this view, such noted Rilke critics as Holthusen and Mason. Mason, with impressive hauteur, declares that reading Rilke’s poetry presents “the illusion (which only the less intelligent fail to recognize as an illusion) of entering into communication with a kindred spirit.” I would like to turn Mason’s point inside out: it is exactly this “failure” that criticism would have to achieve in order to understand, rather than ward off, Rilke’s second-person engagement with his readers. 6 2 3 4 in which the eye-fruit ripened. But his torso still glows like a gas lamp, in which his gaze, screwed back to low, 5 6 7 8 holds fast and shines. Otherwise the surge of the breast could not blind you, nor a smile run through the slight twist of the loins toward that center that bore procreation. 9 10 11 Otherwise this stone would stand deformed and curt under the shoulders’ transparent plunge and not glisten just like wild beasts’ fur; 12 13 14 and not burst forth from all its contours out like a star: for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life. A striking fact about “Archaic Torso of Apollo” is that no “Apollo,” and no pronoun “he” which would stand in for him, actually appears in the poem. This omission has directly to do with the fundamental conceit of the poem, the idea that there may be “someone home” in this statue. There is “an Apollo” in the title; on the other hand, the genitive case form displaces the god to (grammatically speaking) a subordinated status, to less than full presence. Apollo haunts this poem; he does not appear in it. The possessive adjective “his” (three instances in the first quatrain) carries forward the impression of a presence. This word is anaphoric: it functions as a pointer to some anchoring antecedent. Surely, we may think, “his” refers to Apollo. But this begs the question at the heart of the poem: whom exactly do we mean? Generally speaking, a statue may be called “Apollo,” even perhaps referred to as “he”; but we do not therefore think to relate to a statue as if it were another person (much less a god). The more thoroughly we examine the statue, the more likely we are to refer to it as “it” – or, tellingly, “the Apollo” – which better reflects our way of responding to it as an object. But Rilke is interested in just this slight ambiguity, where the viewer of an artwork may teeter on the edge of finding some living presence in it, a “he” rather 7 than an “it” – or even more dramatically, a “you” whom the viewer feels relating directly to herself. Our ways of relating to selves on one hand and objects on the other are very sharply differentiated; Rilke situates this poem exactly along the divide between these two relations, depending on and making use of the differentiation between them. For example, it would alter our experience of the poem dramatically if we met it in an English translation that rendered the German possessive sein as “its” rather than “his”: e.g., “We did not know its unheard-of head.” Such a choice would palpably go against the poem’s raison d’être, its project of playing off against one another our experiences of inert objects and of living, relating selves. In a sense the first two instances of “his” (“his head,” “his torso”) prepare the way for the third. If we ask “whose head?” and “whose torso?” the inert statue, the stone likeness of a man (or god, who in any case himself looks like a man) lets us give the half-answer: “Oh, his – the Apollo’s”; or, “His – the head and torso of this stone likeness of Apollo.” (It is a half-answer because it does not acknowledge the strangeness of combining “his” with an “inanimate” object, or, in English, “the” with a personal name.) But with “his gaze” (4), the question (“whose?”) really should acquire a kind of urgency – and does, though it may not be fully felt until the poem’s end. The other remarkable thing about “his gaze,” besides the question of attribution relating to “his,” is, in German, its nominalizing of the verb schauen. This verbal noun is set up as parallel to the two previous nouns modified by “his,” introducing, in effect, “his gaze” (sein Schauen) as one of the principal constituents of the statue alongside “his head” and “his torso.” The concretized image is the more striking for its concision: “his gaze” seems oddly directionless, or rather, with “screwed back,” pregnant with some unexpressed direction or object-relation. This sense of containment (which may remind us of the Marquis de Belmare in Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge: “For those eyes, nothing would have had to be 8 there; they had it in themselves” [§44; SW 6: 848]) is strengthened by the verb sich hält. Alongside the meaning persists or holds out (which carries forward the idea of “still” [3]), sich halten is also a verb applied to the posture or carriage of the human body: holds itself, carries itself. The verb “sich hält” is the predicate of “his gaze.” But the bodily connotations are apt: a sculpted torso is the art form which expresses what we mean by carriage or posture – it is “about” how a human body “holds itself.” (Think of Rodin.) If we want to give a place to the corporeal overtones of the verb sich hält in the poem, we may read backwards to corporealize sein Schauen [“his gaze”], to reduce or suspend the boundaries between this nominalized infinitive and the body itself. This is a direction already taken by the poem, in its grouping of “gaze” with “head” and “torso.” Moreover, when the reader reaches the sonnet’s climax in lines 13 and 14 – “for here there is no place / that does not see you” – the shudder he may experience comes from the complete erasure of just these boundaries, from the sudden reappearance of gaze as torso, and vice versa. The substantivized activity of Schauen corresponds as well to another feature of the poem. This putatively inanimate art-object roils with internal movement. This movement concentrates first around body parts (or “torso parts”) – “breast,” “loins,” “shoulders.” All three appear in the genitive case, and the nouns that these genitives depend on are each verbal derivatives: “the surge / of the breast” (5-6), “in the . . . twist / of the loins” (6-7), “the shoulders’ . . . plunge” (10). In each case what might be regarded as the main verb belonging to each part of the body – surge, twist, plunge [biegen, drehen, stürzen] – is compressed, as it were, into a noun, and this has certain marked effects. First, with the sense of motion in the statue’s components already made present in the grammatical subject, it is as if there were room freed up for further and more daring predicates. Second, the “players” in producing the poem’s (and the statue’s) effect are not the breast, but the surge of the breast; not the loins, but the twist of the loins, and 9 not the shoulders, but the plunge of the shoulders.8 The body’s components recede behind their vectors. Moreover, these possessive phrases all belong to the register of the art critic; one would be unlikely to speak of a living body, a person, in this way. The movements of the torso, breast, loins and shoulders are both ongoing and utterly frozen, like the movements of the figures on Keats’s Grecian urn. But Rilke’s Torso is not so placid as Keats’s urn; kinesis inheres in, even constitutes, this statue, and the gradually increasing motion of the three underlying verbs bend (this is the literal meaning of biegen, which I translate above as surge), twist, and finally plunge seems to accumulate in the poem. This intensification, together with the poem’s intricate grammatical slalom of verbs, is largely responsible for a sense of “inner momentum bordering on the compulsive” which virtually “hurtles the reader through the poem” (Snow xii). In condensing the internal dynamism of the torso into nominalizations, the poem suggests a comparison with the essays Rilke wrote about Rodin’s sculpture. There Rilke writes that motion is in fact proper to sculpture, because proper to every “conscientious and credible interpretation of life” (SW 5: 157). The sculptors of antiquity (classicism notwithstanding) knew this too; and even the works of the earliest cultures are alive with movement: Even the stones of earlier civilizations were not without movement. In the restrained, hieratic gestures of ancient religions the restlessness of living surfaces was contained like water within the walls of a vessel. Through taciturn gods in sitting posture there passed currents, and in those standing there was a movement like that of a fountain rising from the marble and returning to it, filling it with many ripples. Movement was not contrary to the spirit of sculpture (that is, to the essence of the thing); only such movement as is incomplete, as is not balanced by other movement, such movement as passes beyond the object itself. (Rodin part I [1902]; SW 5: 158) Neither the current in the seated figures nor the fountain-like gesture that rises outside the bounds of standing statues and then returns is a precise equivalent for the grammatical “screwing back” 8 In the first two phrases as well, the enjambment, the “bending” or ”twisting” of the poem’s lines just between “bend [Bug]” and “twist [drehen]” and their respective genitives exemplifies what Edward Snow describes as “Rilke 10 that presses verb into noun and noun into action. But the shared thought in the essays and the poem is that sculpture is not a matter of rest but of movement, and that this movement is a kind of interaction of the plastic thing with itself: “It makes no appeal to the world; it seems to carry within itself its own justice, the reconciliation of all its contradictions and a patience great enough for all its burdens” (SW 5: 157). The last sentence quoted in the description of the “stones of earlier civilizations” makes an even more provocative juxtaposition to the Torso sonnet. The final clause asserts that the movement that does run counter to the “spirit” (Sinn) of sculpture is “only such movement . . . as passes beyond the object itself.” These words cannot help suggesting the final tercet of the Apollo sonnet, with its image of the stone bursting, star-like, “forth from all its contours.” In this respect the poem is bolder than the Rodin essays. But one may doubt if there is any real contradiction between the views implied in these two evocations of sculpture: the conclusion of the sonnet, whatever interaction or confrontation is depicted (or stimulated) there, does not seem to come about because the Torso “makes . . . appeal to the world”; on the contrary, it is exactly because the statue meets Rilke’s (and Rodin’s) criterion of “complete self-absorption” (SW 5: 159), because it does not require or expect anything from outside itself, that we are so struck by it. This apparent paradox is squarely at the center of the poem’s concerns, to the extent that in concluding with “You must change your life,” the poem exemplifies art “teaching” not – despite appearances – by precept, but rather, like the sculpture of Rodin, by example. Part of the force of the poem’s final sestet is the way it joins, in subject and predicate, two opposed images that show this coincidence of indifference and great impact (“complete selfabsorption” and “passing beyond itself”). The noun “this stone” (9) marks the poem’s only handling line and syntax as ‘materials’ out of which to sculpt contours and build torques and tensions” (xi). 11 moment of complete solidity, plainness, and unbudgingness, thus throwing into sharp relief the dynamic life attributed to the statue in every other line. It is this same solid “this stone” which, still acting as the subject of a verb coming three lines later (“would burst”), finally breaks “forth from all its contours / out like a star” (12-13). The epiphanic revelation of stone as star occurs in a shattering of “contours” (Ränder). In one sense, the word Rand – literally “border, edge” – is “about” inside and outside, containment and noncontainment, incorporation and exclusion; the word itself suggests the question of its being exceeded or infringed. To this extent, the borders of the stone are made present in the poem only so that they may be swept away. But in another sense, if we are not to take the phrase in bald literalness (shards of flying stone, the statue in rubble), then in some way it makes sense to say that the stone torso can burst out of its contours because it has those contours – one can almost say, it is those contours. The thing can exceed itself only (and paradoxically) because it is contained within itself. And this is particularly so because it is so markedly contained – “screwed back.” Another connotation of the word Ränder, inevitable in a discussion of a poem, takes the point further: the word means “margins.” The poem is itself exemplary of what is predicated of the statue: it reaches beyond its margins (to its reader), but its startling power to do so comes from its containment within its margins, from its compression and boundedness as a sonnet. The dramatic moment of “bursting forth” in the final tercet undoubtedly brings the emotional contour of the poem to a peak, although the colon at mid-line sustains the suspense and intensity on through the final sentence. This climax is achieved in many ways. One of the most recognizable is the way the simile “like a star” seems to release, at incalculably higher voltage, the same light that was a contained glow, “screwed back,” in the first stanza. But 12 actually in the first stanza “screwed back” modifies “gaze,” and not, as we are likely to think, “gas lamp”: his torso still glows like a gas lamp, in which his gaze, screwed back to low, holds fast and shines. (3-5) The conflation of seeing and emitting light is central to the poem; it explains the use of “for” (14) when that light finally reemerges – releasing and reversing the poised containment of “holds fast” – “like a star: for here there is no place / that does not see you” (13-14). The sheer confidence, even air of inevitability, contributed by that logical operator “for” belie the remarkable complexity of its presupposition. What moment in the poem initiates the linking of seeing and shining? As we first look at the passage just cited (lines 3-5), it appears that it is there that “gaze” is first figured as a kind of radiance, appearing in a context where everything else – except the word “torso,” of course – could belong to the vocabulary of gas lamps (Kandelaber). But if we follow the passage back to the prior context of the poem’s opening lines, the picture becomes more intricate. We never knew his unheard-of head in which the eye-fruit ripened. But his torso still glows like a gas lamp . . . The force of the adversative “but,” particularly together with “still,” is clearly to suggest that what follows – the glowing of the torso – is a compensation for and even a remnant of what is absent: “his . . . head” and, more especially, “the eye-fruit.” The trope, then, begins earlier than we had thought, with “But / his torso still glows,” which directs attention to the metonymic movement from head to torso but at the same time almost casually performs the much more conceptually challenging metaphoric substitution of radiance for sight. 13 Here we must take another step backwards in attempting to understand the function and interrelation of these tropes, to discover the source and implications of a second poetic gesture that seems almost to go unnoticed as the weighty line-final Aber (‘but’) foregrounds the metonymic shift from head to torso. That is, it surely is remarkable that a statue could be said to “see” at all. But, interestingly, the poem’s logic tends to suggest that the marvel is that this one can still see, without a head. The basic presupposition of sight is elided – or at most surfaces subtly in the phrase “in which the eye-fruit ripened.” The poem concentrates on suggesting that the statue sees and shines as it does precisely because the head is missing; like blind Teiresias, the statue has “vision” through the loss of its eyes. But in this case the compensation (sight / light) does not just exceed the loss (a marble head); it is of a wholly different order. Loss is a stupendous generator. The idea of seeing first enters the poem in the word Augenäpfel, a boldly defamiliarized version of Augäpfel ‘eyeballs.’ There is something oddly anatomical about the image. On the one hand, Augäpfel are incongruously fleshy for a statue, too organic; on the other, eyeballs seem too much the anatomist’s term to be naturally applied to a living person. This “unnaturalness” is the greater here because the eyeballs are situated not in eye-sockets, nor even in a face, but simply – with the phrase “in which” – in “his head.” This loose housing contributes to the eyes’ uncomfortably detached quality. Rilke’s coinage, which re-asserts the latent image of apples, Äpfel, by breaking the word’s familiar shape and expanding “Aug-” ‘eye’ back to its own free-standing lexical plural, estranges the image in a different direction. Anatomical overtones are reduced, horticultural ones introduced. The crucial, ultimately humanizing verb “ripen” helps to secure the image by tying it into a dense network of signification that continues through the poem. 14 There is perhaps no other word in the sonnet that provides a more pointed contrast than does “ripened” to the 1907 poem “Early Apollo,” where the vegetative metaphors are also “earlier” (for example, “the still leafless / branches” [SW 1: 481]). This difference points up the distance between the two poems’ title words “early” and “archaic” – it is the distance between early spring and a time after the apple harvest.9 Both statues have one metaphorical foot in the realm of time and change – the “Early Apollo” will sprout a rose garden “only later” (8), and the powerful gaze of the “Archaic Torso” is a kind of heady Spätlese of ripened apples, suggesting more the “last oozings” of the “cider-press” in Keats’s “To Autumn” than the never-bare trees of the English poet’s Grecian urn. In fact, “Archaic Torso of Apollo” can be read as a kind of interesting challenge to the view of art put forth in Keats’s ode.10 Rilke is aware of the same paradoxical “foreverness” in which the figures on the urn are held; and his poem, and the torso (even lacking genitals), are themselves “forever warm and still to be enjoyed” (“Urn” 26). But Rilke’s ripening, dynamic, almost “inhabited” statue makes a much stronger claim on the reader than does the art of the Urn. A better comparison in this respect would be Keats’s uncanny “This Living Hand.” What the torso poem claims is a role of active and even disruptive intervention in human life or human consciousness, quite unlike the self-contained circularity and calm of the Urn. The verb “ripen” is one of the sonnet’s three past-tense verbs, each appropriately associated with one of the three nouns naming what is missing from the torso (the first two, “knew” [1] and “bore” [8], relate to “head” and “procreation” respectively). But as we have 9 Although the words are near-synonyms for the art historian, “early” suggests youth and springtime, while “archaic” conveys great age, deep-rootedness, the work of time. 10 It is at least plausible that Rilke did know Keats’s poem at this time. In 1911 Rilke, given a translation of Keats, writes to the sender, “I thank you for the translation from the English, by which I hope really to get to know Keats, whom I have hardly read as yet” (Schnack 380). But if he had read any Keats at all (as “hardly” suggests), the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” would have been one of the likeliest candidates. 15 already seen, these absences are, in Rilkean fashion, productive; things lost or past reappear in other forms, or continue to make their influence felt in palpable (indeed amplified) ways. If we read “backward” from the word “gaze,” which develops the idea of “seeing” first introduced in “eye-fruit,” the verb reifen – in German, maturing as well as ripening – may suggest more than vegetative imagery. Specifically, the sense of the human maturation process may also come into play. Particularly as a quality seen in another’s eyes, reifen may convey a gradual growth of wisdom, a process of completion that is cast, here, in wholly organic terms. This completedness is itself a developed quality, a quality of time – and situated, as here, in the “windows of the soul,” this means above all a human quality. This humanity is crucial for the poem’s eventual conclusion. The great power of the torso’s gaze would mean little to our lives if the eyes were, for all their chiseled beauty, still entirely stone, if their light were only a cold and elemental dazzlement. Thus the word reiften figures back into the question of the kind of presence that may inhabit the statue, specifically suggesting an unexpected fellow-creatureliness in that presence. This suggestion, in turn, sets into the background of the poem a possibility of real human relation with this inhabited art-thing. Anticipating the poem’s progress and conclusion, we might say that ground is prepared for the irrational but inevitable thought that oneself as reader – you, “your life” – is finally addressed, as one can only be addressed by a fellow being. Not only “his gaze” but also the head itself seems to reappear in the smile that appears in the poem’s, and the torso’s, middle: Otherwise the surge of the breast could not blind you, nor a smile run through the slight twist of the loins toward that center that bore procreation. (4-8) 16 Even this exquisite smile is expressed in a verb of motion, gehen (“run, go”); and again, the motion seems stubbornly inherent in the stone torso and actually partly constituent of it. The smile goes “in the slight twist / of the loins” – both smile and going are included in, happen as part of, and emerge from the nominalized verb Drehen ‘twist.’ This torso smiles at us, perhaps somewhat erotically; his is a graceful, easy nakedness, inviting and returning our gaze. Rilke’s Rodin essays return several times to the contrast between the narrow, constrained face with which we habitually express ourselves and at which we look when we see others, and the more open, ranging and generous expressions of the body: Life showing in the face, full of reference to time and as easily read as on a dial, was, when seen in the body, less concentrated, greater, more mysterious and eternal. There it wore no disguise. Where it felt indifference, it showed indifference, and in the proud it was proud; leaving the stage of the face, it had let fall its mask and revealed itself as it was behind the coulisses of clothing. (Rodin part 1; SW 5: 150-51) The frank smile of the naked figure, “as it is,” leads our eyes, following the slight twist in the hips, to the central sight, the erotic focus, “that center” – “procreation,” which is absent. But the generative center is no less forceful here for appearing in the past tense. Like the “unheard-of head,” its very absence may be the real token of its active significance, as a kind of displaced or virtual presence, in the surrounding torso and poem. The lines contribute very strongly to our sense of the statue’s aliveness; more than any other word in the poem, “procreation” conveys an image of the living body. It brings the statue more intensely alive by seeming to announce reproductive potency; but also – both in the smile that leads to this empty center (“in the slight twist / of the loins”) and in the verb bore, which asks us to imagine the otherwise slightly abstract “procreation” as carried, or hanging – it is the eros of the torso that calls us to respond to it as to a living human body. That this can be accomplished while we know that the genitals are gone and the body is stone is exactly the poem’s purpose: as was said 17 earlier, “Archaic Torso of Apollo” lies along the divide between, and makes use of the dividedness of, our relations as human beings to fellow selves on one hand and to things on the other. The poem has in mind the play of opposites, the continual, almost respiratory exchange between presence and absence, between inhabited selves and blank objects. The pairing of procreation with the verb tragen ‘bear’ also suggests a reading of the line as carrying forward the idea of “ripened” – the other past-tense verb associated with a missing body part. Tragen can be used to speak of trees bearing fruit, fields yielding crops, or a woman’s carrying a child in pregnancy. All are meanings drawn from the same register of organic growth as ripen and, closer to hand, procreation. The line then could become a botanical image of the torso’s genitals (like his eyeballs) budding, growing and ripening to maturity: the body bears forth procreation, which is its own ability to bear forth.11 I have omitted throughout this discussion the poem’s most memorable line and virtually all verbs. It has been necessary to leave this topic till last, precisely because the workings of the poem’s verbal structure are so fundamental to our experience as readers and to the poem’s effect on us: the verbs tie everything together. The dynamism and inner momentum, the sonnet’s relentless drive to its conclusion (meaning here both “end” and “logical result”), and many other aspects of the poem appear in a new form once we have the verbal structure in view. One of the most immediately striking features of the poem in German is its proliferation of imperfect subjunctives, and with them, negatives.12 With the first “Otherwise” (5), the poem begins to work by negating and exempting: but the force of the imperfect subjunctive in German 11 One thinks in this context of Rilke’s relatively racy “Seven Poems” (SW 2: 435-38), and those poems’ sexual/vegetable imagery: “the full bud of his life-member,” “You raised up my seed to a sudden tree” (435), and so on. 12 There are five subjunctives and six occurrences of “not” in the poem’s 14 lines. In the welter of umlauted subjunctive forms, even the indicative verbs “sich hält” and “glänzt” may seem visually, and phonologically, to join in the subjunctive action. 18 is that what is affirmed in this mood – “Sonst stünde dieser Stein entstellt und kurz” / “Otherwise this stone would stand deformed and curt” – is visionary, fictional, an excursus away from what is the case. The conjunction sonst ‘otherwise’ opens up an alternative, an “other wise,” that imbues each clause with a sense of two simultaneous possibilities. The word also belongs to a logical structure; in this tense and mood, it introduces a retroactive mustering of evidence for a previously stated conclusion. “His torso glows; otherwise all these described things would not be happening”: or, more paratactically, “All these things are happening, and that’s how you may be sure that what I first said is true.” But two things about the use of “otherwise” attenuate this sense of logical connection: first and most importantly, each image is vivid and arresting enough that it is difficult for a reader to subordinate it mentally to the “thesis” of lines 1-5. We tend to be struck by each individual image in its immediacy. Secondly – and this is really an extension of the first point – the cascade of five clauses grammatically governed by “otherwise” develops its own rhythm and imagery so that, while the sense of some kind of “proof” being carried out may not be entirely lost, it recedes behind the continual, repeated gesture of doubledness, of imperfect subjunctives opening up one of two alternatives, one possibility overlaying another, unspoken one in the hypothetical space of “otherwise . . . not.” This simultaneity of alternatives may be easiest to see in the line just quoted, the one not cast in the negative: “Otherwise this stone would stand deformed and curt . . .” (9). At this point in the poem, it is apparent that the basic image of this line is “not the case”: “The stone stands deformed and curt” would be the flat antithesis of the poem’s description of the torso. But here is the stark image nonetheless; this line opens the sestet; its sounds are vividly suggestive and alliterative: everything is present to make us see this image of what is, actually, not the case. The 19 point of this effect, and the virtuosity of the “otherwise” clause with its contrafactual verb “would stand,” is that the line brings us to see in one and the same instant both this fictional scene and its inverse image, the truth. “Would stand” morphologically warns us that this “standing” is contrary to fact, not to be believed, a mere fiction – and we know by now that this torso is too inherently dynamic to simply “stand.” But for all that, “would stand” is still a thirdperson singular form of “stand”; it is the predicate of “this stone”; and in this way this same word launches the articulation of the fictional scene – depicting the statue as doing exactly that: standing, “deformed and curt.” Both alternatives, fiction and truth, are produced, so to speak, in a single grammatical gesture. There is something odd about the way I have been using “fiction” and “truth.” What the poem casts as fiction – that a statue with missing parts might be seen as stone, “deformed and curt” – is in fact an ordinary, common-sense view of what is plainly the case. The poem’s fiction is everyday truth. Conversely, and even more obviously, what the poem (in negating the other otherwise-clauses) presents as the truth, namely the image of a glowing, gazing statue, goes utterly over into our sense of fiction, fancy, “poesy.” The poem’s truth is, for us, fiction. In sum, the sonnet engages in a complicated play of what is and what is not, both within its own grammatical-imaginative world and with the reader directly, by expressly pitting its own logical patterns as the inverse of our nonpoetic, or extrapoetic understanding. Thus in the negative, the “otherwise”-clauses seem to evoke the dynamism of the statue against an implicit background of its not happening, not being able to happen – in short, of its own impossibility. And some of the force of the vision derives from the reader’s sense that that background, the notion that these things are impossible, is exactly our own fundamental, extrapoetic conviction. We do not believe that statues can shine or look. One experiences simultaneously one’s habitual disbelief in the thing and the thing actually happening. Similarly, 20 the poem prepares the way for a reader to feel the effect of the statue to the full because this effect is felt against a background of its own absence. A brief comparison to another poem may make this accomplishment clearer. A similar poetic gesture, of intensifying the feeling for what is present by simultaneously imagining its absence, is the basis of “Lullaby,” another poem from New Poems: The Other Part. Some day when I lose you, will you still be able to sleep, without me to whisper over you like a crown of linden branches? Without me to stay awake here and put words, almost like eyelids, on your breasts, on your limbs, down upon your mouth. Without me to lock you up and leave you alone with what is yours like a garden thickly sown with mint-balm and star-anise. (SW 1: 631) The poem evokes the loving attentions of the speaker within a framing conception of the speaker’s own absence. In this case, the speaker “disappears” by invoking a future wherein his voice will not be speaking, and repeats the withdrawal several times with the echoed words “without me to. . . .” To put it another way, the reader, “you,” is invited to hear the voice while seeing no one there to speak. The emotional truth of the poem comes from the way that this scenario touches on our sense of our own mortality. Like Whitman under our bootsoles, or Keats holding out his living hand, Rilke here speaks from the grave. The withdrawals of “I” are convincing because, like the “background” of impossibility in the torso poem’s description of the statue, they correspond to a fundamental extrapoetic conviction: it is an empty space that is speaking so tenderly of its own loving nonexistence. 21 This point brings us to one of the central themes of Rilke’s work: the experience of life and death together, as a single thing. In “Archaic Torso of Apollo” and “Lullaby,” the poems invite us to appreciate what is happening against a background of it not happening. Although the theme of death in Rilke’s work has been copiously discussed, it has not been observed how poems like “Archaic Torso” and “Lullaby” actually perform, in a way, Rilke’s understanding of presence and absence. Instead of only thinking conceptually about how life and death or presence and absence can be felt together in one gesture, or one moment, we can actually experience something of these coincidences by agreeing to be the readers of Rilke’s poems, by consenting to be “you,” the poems’ addressee. Like the torso itself, these poems take charge of our experience of them, and enact themselves upon us as readers. In “Lullaby,” the whispering voice speaks to us of its silence, repeatedly staging a withdrawal into a scene of its own nonexistence (“without me to . . .”) – all the while continuing to be present and speaking. In “Archaic Torso,” the subjunctive predicates of the statue are poised before the alternate possibility of their own unreality. They initiate moreover an interactive play with our own conceptions of truth and fiction that begins by inviting us to imagine, and then to see that our imagining transcends the imaginary. The subjunctive, negated sonst-clauses touch upon the sense we have of the world at those times when we are not reading literature, when we do not willingly suspend our disbelief. By speaking to this ordinary level of life as well as to the reader’s imagination, the poem’s “you” may penetrate past the cul-de-sac of rhetorical apostrophe into your own particular situation: “You must change your life.” This famous last line is puzzling at first partly because its origin is to be sought as much in the sonnet’s linguistic performance as in its ideas or images. It is the shape and felt depth of the subjunctive clauses, the unspoken possibilities each “otherwise” opens up alongside those spoken of, the place that this grammar gives to our disbelief and astonishment that finally give us 22 the feeling that it is we who are being seen – although we are not sure whether by the statue or the poem. This moment – “for here there is no place / that does not see you” – all at once turns eight lines of shining back into seeing, solidifies eight lines of subjunctives back into the indicative, and turns loose the hitherto contained “gaze,” nova-like, upon its suddenly explicit object, you – “dich” (6). In one way, the double negative actually acts very like the subjunctives: stretched across the enjambment, the sentence plays with the possibility of either (but not both) of the negatives (“no place,” “does not see”) being in effect – again “shadowing” its propositional content with the inverse idea that the stone cannot see us at all. Clearly, though, the great force of this moment comes from its quintessentially Rilkean evocation of totality by the negation of negation. The grammar directs our attention to what the nonexistent does not do, and once again, this summoning of a background of absence serves dramatically to intensify the vision of what is – in this case, the complete, unflinching way we are seen by the statue. The completeness of this gaze seems to be the origin of the conclusion “you must.” The phrase is not really an external prescription, much less the terrible judgement of a god; rather, this “you” has much of the “I” to it, the voice that one uses to speak to oneself, so intimately does the poem speak at this point. Read in this way, almost internally, the line is the poem’s logical conclusion as well as its ending. Because the torso is as it is, it sees us; and because the statue’s gaze is complete itself, it sees us too as complete. Through its absent, ripened eyes we can see ourselves in an unaccustomed wholeness – an insight we naturally want to live up to. Thus “You must change your life” points to a process in oneself which has already begun in, and takes place as part of, the activity of reading the poem – it is not something in the future, something we could pencil in on the calendar. It is, to put it another way, an aesthetic response. This final imperative may be, in a strict sense, incomprehensible. Insofar as the sentence articulates an anticipated aesthetic response, insofar as it is also the reader’s murmured, “I must 23 change my life,” its meaning is not fully available to the eye that looks over the poem without becoming the poem’s reader, “you.” Moreover, the way this moment is anchored in our private interaction with the poem makes it difficult to spell out in informative general terms the “why” or “how” of “You must change your life.” This same phrase appears in Malte Laurids Brigge, in the context of the actress Eleonora Duse’s decision (as Malte imagines it), during a performance, to abandon pretense. Malte writes in apostrophe, “It came over you to be yourself . . .”: Those limp doors, those false curtains, those objects that had no reverse side, drove you to contradict them. You felt how your heart intensified unceasingly toward an immense reality and, frightened, you tried once again to take people’s gaze off you like long gossamer threads ––: But now, in their fear of the worst, they were already breaking into applause: as if to ward off, at the last moment, something that would force them to change their life. (§65; SW 6: 924) What kind of thing is it that would force one to change one’s life? The facile answer is “art,” but for Duse, it is “reality,” being herself. It is the actress’s highest art to drop art altogether, to be simply herself in the midst of theater. Duse’s removing her mask recalls Rodin’s discovery (quoted earlier, SW 5: 150–51) of how life itself dwells in the body (“leaving the stage of the face, it had let fall its mask and revealed itself as it was behind the coulisses of clothing”), but in “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” even the metaphorical vestiges of protection are gone: there is no stepping back, no standing in the wings, no clothing. The moment of nakedness is the same for the stone torso as for the actress who stands revealed as herself before the audience. And just as in the torso poem, the onlookers receive – even if unwillingly – the injunctive force that somehow radiates from this real art. The question for us must be: what kind of critical treatment can do justice to this imperative? At least part of the answer is signalled in the “you”-form of the torso poem: a second-person stance is sought, or at least a criticism that can acknowledge second-person claims 24 (and the difficulty, and importance, of doing critical justice to them).13 The applause of the spectators is a desperate evasion, trying to deflect reality by interpreting it as performance, mere theater. This is one kind of possible – indeed probable – critical mishap. Another kind of slip on the part of Rilke’s readers might be that for which he himself chided Gräfin Sizzo in closing his second letter to her: And one more thing, Countess: be so good as to withdraw my letter from the environment of your autograph collection and permit my words to remain alive and as such, now and then, to reach you. The contradictions latent in this plea against the enshrinement and objectification of Rilke’s “words” are evident when we return our thoughts to the poetry: poetry’s (literature’s) special character as language depends, in large part, on our ancient contract to handle these utterances as, in Hölderlin’s words, “inedible and unfading writing,” to put them away as a kind of enduring inscription or monument that never ceases to impart its message and never succeeds in imparting it fully. Always finding its targeted receiver anew, poetry nonetheless cannot stop pressing on in search of him or her – and both of these movements are enabled by the way we set literature apart from other, more “edible” kinds of discourse. Paradoxically, the “environment of the autograph collection,” or something akin, permits Rilke’s writing to be preserved long enough to reach us at all, as something we call “literature.” But Rilke’s emphasis in his letter – and, I think, the emphasis in many “you” poems – is on the other side, equally fundamental: the written word’s demand for encounter, for real relationship, presence, even intimacy. If his own absence from the poem, and (in death) from the world, leaves us, his readers, vulnerable, alone, responding wholeheartedly to the call of someone who is after all not there, then perhaps in that very attitude 13 Charles Altieri describes the place and value of such a criticism in his essay “Life After Difference: The Positions of the Interpreter and the Positionings of the Interpreted.” 25 of answering we find ourselves best positioned to discover within us the particular force and meaning of changing our lives – of our answerability. Works Cited Altieri, Charles. “Life After Difference: The Positions of the Interpreter and the Positionings of the Interpreted.” Canons and Consequences: Reflections on the Ethical Force of Imaginative Ideals. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1990. 291–317. Buber, Martin. Ich und Du. 1923. Heidelberg: Schneider, 1983. Eliot, T. S. “The Three Voices of Poetry.” On Poetry and Poets. London: Faber and Faber, 1957. 89–102 Fludernik, Monika, ed. Second-Person Narrative. Spec. issue of Style 28.3 (1994). –––. “Second-Person Narrative: A Bibliography.” Style 28.4 (1994): 525–548. Goffman, Erving. “Footing.” Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: U Penn P, 1981. 124-159. Grabher, Gudrun M. Das lyrische Du: Du-Vergessenheit und Möglichkeiten der DuBestimmung in der amerikanischen Dichtung. Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1989. Hamburger, Käte. Die Logik der Dichtung. 3rd ed. Frankfurt: Ullstein Taschenbuch-Klett Cotta, 1980. See esp. 285–96. Holden, Jonathan. “The Abuse of the Second-Person Pronoun.” The Rhetoric of the Contemporary Lyric. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1980. 38–56. Hölderlin, Friedrich. “Patmos.” Ansätze zur letzten Fassung. Gedichte. Ed. Jochen Schmidt. Frankfurt a.M.: Insel, 1984. 191–194. Hollis, C. Carroll. Language and Style in Leaves of Grass. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1983. Houston, G[ertrude] Craig, trans. Where Silence Reigns: Selected Prose by Rainer Maria Rilke. New York: New Directions, 1978. Keats, John. “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Complete Poems. Ed. Jack Stillinger. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982. 282–83. 27 Komar, Kathleen. Transcending Angels: Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies. Lincoln: U Nebraska P, 1987. Levinson, Stephen C. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983. 61–73. Nussbaum, Martha C. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. New York: OUP, 1990. Oppert, K. “Das Dinggedicht.” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 4 (1926) 747–83. Rilke, Rainer Maria. Briefe an Gräfin Sizzo. Ed. Ingeborg Schnack. Frankfurt: Insel, 1977. Letter of 15 Dec. 1922. 12. –––. Sämtliche Werke in Sechs Bänden. (Abbreviated SW.) Ed. Ernst Zinn. Frankfurt: Insel, 1955–1966. Schnack, Ingeborg. Rainer Maria Rilke: Chronik seines Lebens und seines Werkes. 2 vols. Frankfurt: Insel, 1975. 380. Snow, Edward. Introduction. New Poems: The Other Part. By Rainer Maria Rilke. Trans. Edward Snow. San Francisco: North Point, 1987. ix–xviii. Tucker, Herbert F. “Dramatic Monologue and the Overhearing of Lyric.” Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism. Ed. Chaviva Hošek and Patricia Parker. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985. 226–43. Warhol, Robyn R. Gendered Interventions: Narrative Discourse in the Victorian Novel. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1989. York, R. A. The Poem as Utterance. London: Methuen, 1986.