Rainer Maria Rilke’s Dark Ecology

Abstract

Rainer Maria Rilke’s significance for a modern eco-poetics has attracted ever-increasing interest over the past two decades, with sophisticated ontological, phenomenological, and even ethological approaches to his animal poems, as well as such late poetic figures as ‘das Offene’ in Duineser Elegien (1923). However, many of these readings have worked from the persistent premise of a mystical — Romantically inflected or even monistic — conception of nature, grounded in an idealized (re-)union of subject and object and inner and outer spaces. By contrast, this article suggests that we can learn far more from the points of mismatch, irreconcilability, and alienation to be found in the ‘thing poetics’ of Rilke’s so-called ‘middle’ period (1902–1910). Arguing in dialogue with Timothy Morton’s call for a ‘dark ecology’ and working from Rilke’s own theoretical reflections in his Worpswede monograph (1903), I trace out the convoluted entwinements of subject and object, mind and matter, and nature and artifice across both parts of Neue Gedichte (1907 and 1908), and in Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (1910). Morton calls for a form of ecological thought that might learn to ‘love’ the ‘non-identical’: in other words, properly and truly to recognize the ‘irreducible otherness’ within our myriad environments. My essay considers what that theoretical love might look like in the poetic practice of one of the great German-language modernists.¹

1 I would like to thank Rüdiger Görner, Christa Jansohn, and Friedhelm Marx for their comments on an earlier version of this essay.

Keywords:

• Rainer Maria Rilke
• Timothy Morton
• Romanticism
• Dark Ecology
• Ecocriticism
• Eco-poetics
• Phenomenology
• Neue Gedichte, Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge, Worpswede

Notes

1 I would like to thank Rüdiger Görner, Christa Jansohn, and Friedhelm Marx for their comments on an earlier version of this essay.

2 Robert Musil, ‘Rede zur Rilke-Feier in Berlin am 16. Januar 1927’, in Robert Musil, Tagebücher, Aphorismen, Essays und Reden, ed. by Adolf Frisé (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1955), pp. 885–98 (p. 893).

3 Ibid., p. 893.

4 Ibid., p. 894.

5 See, for example, Malte Herwig’s assessment of the significance of the biologist and proto-systems theorist Jakob von Uexküull in ‘The Unwitting Muse: Jakob von Uexküll’s Theory of Umwelt and Twentieth-Century Literature’, Semiotica, 134.1 (2001), 553–92 <https://doi.org/10.1515/semi.2001.043>. On Rilke’s mediation of anthropomorphism through alterity in the elegiac figure of ‘das Offene’, see Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, ed. by Werner Hamacher and trans. by Kevin Attell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), esp. p. 60. For the most sophisticated reading of the middle- and late-period work (in particular) as embodying a phenomenological engagement with the material and animal world, see Luke Fischer, The Poet as Phenomenologist: Rilke and the New Poems (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015). On Rilke as one representative of an ecocentric ‘environmental modernism’, see Sabine Lenore Müller, ‘Environmental Modernism: Ecocentric Conceptions of the Self and the Emotions in the Works of R.M. Rilke and W.B. Yeats’, in From Ego to Eco: Mapping Shifts from Anthropocentrism to Ecocentrism, ed. by Sabine Lenore Müller and Tina-Karen Pusse (Leiden: Brill, 2018), pp. 39–59 <https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004358324_004>.

6 Emphases in the quotations throughout this essay are invariably the authors’ own.

7 My in-text citations are drawn from Rilke’s Werke. Kommentierte Ausgabe in vier Bänden, ed. by Manfred Engel, Ulrich Fülleborn, Horst Nalewski, and August Stahl (Frankfurt a.M.: Insel, 1996), vol. I: Gedichte 1895 bis 1910, ed. by Manfred Engel and Ulrich Fülleborn; vol. II: Gedichte 1910 bis 1926, ed. by Manfred Engel and Ulrich Fülleborn; vol. III: Prosa und Dramen, ed. by August Stahl; and vol. IV: Schriften, ed. by Horst Nalewski.

8 For the most extensive study of this engagement, see Michael Kahl, Lebensphilosophie und Ästhetik. Zu Rilkes Werk 1902–1910 (Freiburg i.Br.: Rombach, 1999).

9 See Fischer, p. 93.

10 See Wolfgang G. Müller, ‘Neue Gedichte / Der Neuen Gedichte anderer Teil’, in Rilke-Handbuch. Leben — Werk — Wirkung, ed. by Manfred Engel (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2013), pp. 296–318 (pp. 296–97).

11 Andreas Kramer, ‘Rilke and Modernism’, in The Cambridge Companion to Rilke, ed. by Karen Leeder and Robert Vilain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 113–30 (pp. 125–26).

12 Fischer, p. 9; cf. pp. 71–72 and 198–207.

13 Sabine Lenore Müller, p. 52.

14 On Rilke’s complex continuation of aspects of German Romanticism, see Fischer, esp. pp. 90–96; and H. R. Klieneberger, George, Rilke, Hofmannsthal and the Romantic Tradition (Stuttgart: Hans-Dieter Heinz, 1991), esp. pp. 35–70.

15 Cf. Hubert Zapf, ‘Cultural Ecology as a Transdisciplinary Paradigm of Literary Studies’, in Ecological Thought in German Literature and Culture, ed. by Gabriele Dürbeck and others (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017), pp. 145–57 (p. 152).

16 See Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), pp. 4–5 and 9.

17 Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 195.

18 Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), pp. 5–6.

19 Morton, Ecology without Nature, p. 5.

20 Ibid., pp. 16–21.

21 Ibid., p. 188.

22 Ibid., pp. 196 and 185–86; and The Ecological Thought, p. 15.

23 Cf. Morton, Dark Ecology, esp. pp. 130–34.

24 See Morton, ‘Here Comes Everything: The Promise of Object-Oriented Ontology’, Qui Parle, 19.2 (2011), 163–90 (pp. 165–67) <https://doi.org/10.5250/quiparle.19.2.0163>.

25 See Morton, Ecology without Nature, p. 99; and ‘The Dark Ecology of Elegy’, in The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy, ed. by Karen Weisman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 251–72 (p. 260). It is worth noting that the frame of dark ecology has been recently, and productively, deployed by Heather I. Sullivan and James Shinkle in their reassessment of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s botanical writings: see Sullivan and Shinkle, ‘The Dark Green in the Early Anthropocene: Goethe’s Plants in Versuch die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu erklären and Triumph der Empfindsamkeit’, Goethe Yearbook, 26 (2019), 141–62 <https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvb937kp.11>.

26 See Joachim W. Storck, ‘Leben und Persönlichkeit’, in Rilke-Handbuch, ed. by Engel, pp. 1–25 (pp. 4–5).

27 Ben Hutchinson, Rilke’s Poetics of Becoming (Cambridge: Legenda, 2006), p. 92.

28 See Larson Powell, The Technological Unconscious: Nature in Rilke, Benn, Brecht, and Döblin (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2008), p. 69.

29 See Manfred Engel and Ulrich Fülleborn, ‘Kommentar’, in KA I, pp. 587–1035 (pp. 932 and 974–75).

30 On the dialectics of intimacy and distance, und inner and outer, in Rilke’s aestheticization of death, see Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. with an Introduction by Ann Smock (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), e.g., p. 125; and, much more recently, Marielle Sutherland, Images of Absence: Death and the Language of Concealment in the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (Berlin: Weidler, 2006), e.g., p. 15.

31 Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 19th edn (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2006), p. 263.

32 Sigmund Freud, Gesammelte Werke, ed. by Anna Freud, 18 vols (London: Imago, 1991), XIII: Jenseits des Lustprinzips (1920), p. 41; XII: ‘Das Unheimliche’ (1919), p. 257.

33 Rilke, ‘An Lotte Hepner’, 8 November 1915, in Rilke, Briefe aus den Jahren 1914 bis 1921, ed. by Ruth Sieber-Rilke and Carl Sieber (Leipzig: Insel, 1938), p. 90.

34 Morton, Ecology without Nature, p. 72.

35 Eric Santner, On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 2.

36 Theodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann and others, 20 vols (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1970-2003), VII: Ästhetische Theorie, p. 199; cf. p. 203.

37 Morton, Ecology without Nature, p. 188.

38 Powell, p. 81.

39 Alfred Doppler, ‘Die poetische Verfahrensweise in Rilkes “Neuen Gedichten”, in Rainer Maria Rilke. Wege der Forschung, ed. by Rüdiger Görner (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1987), pp. 334–49 (p. 347).

40 In his cogent recent reading, Charlie Louth identifies ‘an almost inevitable sadness’ attending the transience of objects that accompany our equally transient lives: see his Rilke: The Life of the Work (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), p. 135.

41 See, for example, David Wachter, ‘Amoeba, Dragonfly, Gazelle: Animal Poetics Around 1908’, in Biological Discourses: The Language of Science and Literature around 1900, ed. by Robert Craig and Ina Linge (Oxford: Lang, 2017), pp. 371–96.

42 Martin Swales, ‘Zwischen Moderne und Postmoderne? Überlegungen zu Rilkes (sogenannten) Dinggedichten’, in Rilke und die Moderne, ed. by Adrian Stevens and Fred Wagner (Munich: Iudicium, 2000), pp. 155–64 (p. 161).

43 Ibid. p. 160.

44 Cf. ibid., p. 162.

45 See Morton, Ecology without Nature, pp. 31–35.

46 Ibid., p. 30.

47 Fischer, pp. 172, 209.

48 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. by Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 146.

49 Ibid., pp. 133–34.

50 Bernhard Waldenfels, Bruchlinien der Erfahrung (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2002), p. 91.

51 See Morton’s discussion of the ultimate indissolubility at the heart of Merleau-Ponty’s chiasmus in Ecology without Nature, pp. 69–70.

52 Martin Heidegger, Holzwege, 8th edn (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 2003), pp. 32–33; cf. p. 50.

53 Ibid., pp. 27, 28.

54 Despite Heidegger’s attunement to that non-identity, Morton still imputes to his essay a form of ‘ecorhapsody’ — an intensified form of ‘ecomimesis’ — in Ecology without Nature, pp. 56–58.

55 Rilke, in Rainer Maria Rilke / Lou Andreas-Salomé. Briefwechsel, ed. by Ernst Pfeiffer, rev. edn (Frankfurt a.M.: Insel, 1975), p. 130.

56 See Walter Benjamin, ‘Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire’, in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, 11 vols (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1972), I.2, p. 615; and Freud, ‘Jenseits des Lustprinzips’, Gesammelte Werke, XIII, pp. 26–27. Cf. here Andreas Huyssen, ‘Paris / Childhood: The Fragmented Body in Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge’, in Modernity and the Text: Revisions of German Modernism, ed. by Andreas Huyssen and David Bathrick (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), pp. 113–41 (esp. pp. 131–35).

57 See this exposition in Santner, pp. xv and 16–17; cf. Adorno, ‘Die Idee der Naturgeschichte’, in Philosophische Frühshriften, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann, Gesammelte Schriften, I, p. 356.

58 See Freud, ‘Das Unheimliche’, in Freud, GW, xii, p. 236.

59 On the centrality of ‘the uncanny’ to a dark ecology, see Morton, The Ecological Thought, esp. pp. 50-58; and Dark Ecology, esp. pp. 112–20 and 136–40.

60 See Morton, Ecology without Nature, pp. 151 and 185–86.

61 Morton, The Ecological Thought, p. 9; and Ecology without Nature, pp. 105–9.

62 Cf. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. by Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), pp. 9–10 and 56.

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Robert Craig

Robert Craig teaches German and English literary and cultural studies at the Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg. He has published on German Modernism, posthumanism, the medical humanities, the relationship between literature and science and literature and history, and the philosophy of social media technologies. He is the author of Alfred Döblin: Monsters, Cyborgs and Berliners 1900–1933 (Cambridge: Legenda, 2021), and the co-editor, with Ina Linge, of Biological Discourses: The Language of Science and Literature around 1900 (Oxford: Lang, 2017).