The Materialities of Writing in Rilke’s Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge By Jacob Haubenreich A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in German in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Winfried Kudszus, Chair Professor Niklaus Largier Professor Dorothy Hale Spring 2013 Contents Acknowledgments iii INTRODUCTION THE MATERIALITIES OF WRITING . 1 The Aufzeichnungen as Case Study . 8 Returning to the Manuscript, Real and Virtual . 12 Entstehung and Entstehungsgeschichte: the Material Emergence of the Aufzeichnungen 14 CHAPTER ONE THE FLICKERING PRESENCE OF THE DURCHGESTRICHENE . 20 Orality and Literacy, Handwriting and Print, Language and Presence . 22 The Space of Storytelling … . 24 … and the Space of the Page . 28 Durchstreichen and the Play of Signification . 33 Gemeinsamkeit, Einsamkeit; Absterben gewisser kulturen…: Handwriting and Media Shift . 37 Toward a Kairopoetical Narration? . 41 Erzählen /Schreiben / Dichten . 46 The Wunder of Writing . 52 Excurse One: Receiving the Stigmata . 56 CHAPTER TWO (TEXT-)KÖRPERLICHKEIT AND THE DOUBLE REND OF THE PRINTED PAGE 59 Twitching: The Streets of Paris and the Space of the Page . 61 “Jetzt wuchs es aus mir heraus wie eine Geschwulst”: das Große and the Project of the Novel . 64 Blood and Ink, Body and Text . 65 Textual Bandaging . 70 The Breakdown of the Symbolic Order and the Logic of the Symptom . 73 Figuration, Sensation, and the Haptic Visuality of the Manuscript . 75 Gushing a Material’s Strangeness: The Double Rend of the Printed Page . 76 Excurse Two: The Word Made Flesh: Reading as Transubstantiation . 80 CHAPTER THREE BODIES OF DEPARTURE, MATEREALITIES IN FLUX . 88 Fortwerfen and Durchstreichen . 89 Veränderung: Gender and the Materialization of Representation . 91 Zerstreuung . 98 The Hauntological Structure of the Aufzeichnungen . 101 The Ghost of the Prodigal Son . 104 Manuscript as Haunted House . 107 The Textual Innenseite . 110 Excurse Three: Malte’s Neues Sehen and the X-Ray . 115 i CHAPTER FOUR AUTHORIAL HAUNTINGS: BREAKING THE FRAME . 121 The “Death” of the Author? . 125 Autobiography and Intertextuality . 130 Autobiography as Narrative of Transformation . 133 Whose Hand is it that Writes? . 138 Breaking the Frame: Material Intertextuality and the Transpositional Mode . 141 CONCLUSION CIRCULATING REFERENCE AND THE LITERARY WORK . 150 Bibliography 155 ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would first like to thank my dissertation committee. It is foremost to my advisor and dissertation chair, Winfried Kudszus, whom I owe the greatest debt for our many hours of conversation and for helping me to experience the dissertation project as something in perpetual evolution with the potential to move in new directions. Indeed, that has made and continues to make the project so exciting. It was Professor Kudszus who first introduced me to Rilke’s Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge. This dissertation would not exist without his support, encouragement, dedication, and consideration – intellectual, professional, and personal – over the course of my time at The University of California, Berkeley. Time and time again, Dorothy Hale went above and beyond in her role as a so-called “outside” committee member, a moniker that belies her intensive engagement with my thinking and writing, which has significantly shaped the dissertation’s methodological framework. Her excitement about my work and her conviction that a slim manuscript might bear the pressure of big claims have given me the confidence to be bold in my thinking. Niklaus Largier has been a model of that elusive combination of fiery intellectual curiosity and a calm confidence that ideas have a way of working themselves out. He never seemed to waver in his faith that I would find my way through some of the difficult landscapes that I traversed with this dissertation and, so, for the most part neither did I. I would also like to thank my other teachers and mentors at The University of California, Berkeley, and Washington University in St. Louis for the roles they have played in shaping my intellectual development: Deniz Göktürk, Elaine Tennant, Karen Feldman, Claire Kramsch, Irmengard Rauch, Hinrich Seeba, Erin McGlothlin, Lutz Koepnick, Jennifer Kapczynski, and Matthew Erlin. This dissertation was funded by a research grant from the American Fulbright Foundation and the Swiss government, which allowed me to work closely with the “Berner Taschenbuch” at the Swiss Literature Archive in Bern. I am grateful to Franziska Kolp and Irmgard Wirtz for facilitating my research in Bern, and particularly to Thomas Richter for his support of my Fulbright application and his assistance and guidance during my examination of the “Berner Taschenbuch.” My friends from Berkeley Elizabeth Ferrell, Jenny Sakai, Karl Whittington, and Azadeh Yamini- Hamedani have helped me in too many ways to count throughout graduate school and the dissertation process. I thank them especially for their enthusiasm for and engagement with my work – reading and editing drafts – and for their love and emotional support. I thank my parents, Suzi and Joe Haubenreich, for their continual love, encouragement, and faith in me, and for not only helping to finance my education, but more importantly for allowing and enabling me to pursue the path I have chosen. My sister, Mary Haubenreich, has been my constant cheerleader. I am so thankful to my grandparents Mary Ann and Paul Haubenreich for their significant role in cultivating my interest in travel, the arts, and foreign cuisines, in particular through our trips in Italy and throughout Germany and Austria. Connie and Dick Hyman have also been a huge source of support and encouragement. iii Lastly, but above all, I am grateful to Aaron Hyman, not only for his love, patience, and belief in me throughout my many years of graduate study and dissertation writing, but also for the numerous ways he has contributed substantively to my dissertation research. His theoretical insight and art historical knowledge, as well as our many inspirational museum visits throughout Europe, have helped me to hone my thinking about the visuality of the manuscript and the relationship between literature and the visual arts more generally. His intensive engagement with my thinking and his tireless and thoughtful editing of drafts have not only been invaluable for the completion of the dissertation, but have modeled a level of intellectual rigor that has challenged me to be a better scholar. iv Introduction The Materialities of Writing Language spills onto a clean, blank page.1 The text of the “Berner Taschenbuch,” the preserved manuscript fragment of Rilke’s Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge), begins mid-sentence: “…the woman could not be dismissed for that reason.”2 The English translation of this sentence fragment can stand alone as an independent clause; the German original, a dependent clause that would follow a subordinating conjunction, however, cannot: “…man die Person daraufhin nicht entlassen könne.”3 Like flecks of dried blood, these words hang on the edge of a precipice, a massive gaping wound that becomes invisibly bandaged in standard print editions of the novel (see fig. 1): Sie konnte es nicht ertragen, daß jemand im Hause erkrankte. Einmal, als die Köchin sich verletzt hatte und sie sah sie zufällig mit der eingebundenen Hand, behauptete sie, das Jodoform im ganzen Hause zu riechen, und war schwer zu überzeugen, daß man die Person daraufhin nicht entlassen könne.4 The precipice on which these words hang cannot be breached because the first part of the manuscript, corresponding to the first half of the work, is no longer extant.5 While we can return to examine the handwritten traces underlying the printed text of the second half of the novel, the first part of the text rests on a void.6 In the printed pages leading up to this moment in the text, Malte narrates a scene at his grandmother’s dinner table. She becomes outraged about a few “innocent” [unschuldige] wine stains on the spotless tablecloths and begins accusing and reproaching no one in particular. Then, 1 On the semiotics of the blank page, see Thomas Macho, “Shining oder: Die weiße Seite,” Weiß, ed. Wolfgang Ullrich and Juliane Vogel (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 2003), 17-28; Uwe Wirth, “Logik der Streichung,” Schreiben und Streichen. Zu einem Moment produktiver Negativität, ed. Lucas Marco Gisi, Hubert Thüring and Irmgard M. Wirtz (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2008), 24. 2 Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, trans. Michael Hulse (Longon: Penguin, 2009), 79. 3 A more literal translation is as follows: “one could not dismiss the person thereupon.” 4 KA 3 540. “She could not bear it when someone in the house was sick. Once when the cook had cut herself, and my grandmother chanced to see her with her hand bandaged, she claimed the whole house reeked of iodoform, and it was difficult to convince her that the woman could not be dismissed for this reason” (modified from Hulse 79). 5 Regarding the various manuscript phases in the history of the novel’s composition, see Manfred Engel, Nachwort, Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge, by Rainer Maria Rilke (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1997), 319-322. 6 The manuscripts themselves were not the direct source for the printed text. Unable to finish a fair copy of the manuscript, Rilke’s publisher Anton Kippenberg invited him to Leipzig to dictate the work orally. This oral dictation, along with the typoscript produced from it, which was presumably destroyed in the Second World War, constitute a distinct phase of the work’s generation. See Engel 322. 1 Figure 1. The first pages of text in the “Berner Taschenbuch” (BT 2-3). The first line reads “man die Person daraufhin nicht entlassen könne.”7 something “unprecedented and utterly incomprehensible” [etwas nie Dagewesenes und völlig Unbegreifliches] causes her to “break off mid-sentence” [mitten im Satze stehen lassen].