William Waters, Answerable Aesthetics. Reading You in Rilke.

University of Oregon
Answerable Aesthetics: Reading "You" in Rilke Author(s): William Waters Source: Comparative Literature, Vol. 48, No. 2 (Spring, 1996), pp. 128-149 Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of the University of Oregon Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1771651 . Accessed: 09/03/2014 11:13
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WILLIAMWATERS
Answerable Aesthetics: in Rilke Reading 'You"

Das geschaffene Werk ist ein Ding unter Dingen, als eine Summe von Eigenschaften erfahrbar und beschreibbar. Aber dem empfangend Schauenden kann es Mal um Malleibhaft gegenilbertreten. MartinBuber, Ich und Du (17) There is something about the act of reading that is exemplaryfor conduct. MarthaNussbaum,Love'sKnowledge (48)
ILKE'S TORSO APOLLOS"has become a "ARCHAISCHER literary touchstone, regularly anthologized, translated and interpreted since its first publication in 1908. It appeared as the
opening poem in Rilke's Der neuen Gedichte anderer Teil (Sdimtliche Werke 1: 557),1 standing as a companion piece to the "Frfiher
Apollo" which began the 1907 Neue Gedichte(SW 1: 481); it often has been taken to epitomize the several layers of meaning in about Rilke's undertaking to write "Dinggedichte"-poems that seem often but also themselves artworks, dense, things, poems 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 insufficiently examined body of poetic texts addressed to an unidentified "you." What people inevitably remember of this poem, in fact, is its dramatic last half-line: "Du muBt dein Leben findern." Many critics raise and variously settle the question of the "participant roles"1Rilke's Sdimtliche Werkewill be abbreviated henceforth as SW and references will be given in the text. 2The term "Dinggedicht" is not Rilke's; it was introduced by the critic K. Oppert in 1926.
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ANSWERABLE AESTHETICS
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; "du," in turn, means 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 "du" have in each case to do with the stance we ourselves take up vis-a-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 modification.)5 But the pronouns and deictics of the lyric poem seem to be, as KditeHamburger 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
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 Herbert 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 T.S. Eliot, Gudrun Grabher, Jonathan Holden, and, on Whitman's "you," C. Carroll Hollis (especially 88-123). 41 mean "loose" here not in the sense of "blurred" (Holden's word for the amby the biguous "you"), but rather almost something like "unleashed"-loosed underdetermined pragmatic context. I The criticism dealing with the second person in narrative is extensive; see Monika Fludernik's bibliography. Robyn 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."
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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
"true" second-person narrative, which has stimulated most recent narratological interest in the "you"form (see Fludernik). An elementary typology of addressees is of course a useful step in studying the lyric as well, but it must be based on the particular configuration of "participant roles" (Stephen Levinson 61-73) or "footings" (Erving Goffman) each address entails as a communicative act rather than on embedded levels of address. The distinctions between prototypical apostrophe ("With how sad steps, O 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-notjust 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 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 that 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 "Archaischer Torso Apollos." 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. "Archaischer Torso Apollos" is one of many poems addressed to an unidentified "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).
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which encourage, and act on their readers to produce, just this vulnerability. Like the ball thrown aloft in Rilke's poem "Der Ball," the poetic text arranges (almost choreographs) its readers into attitudes of reception. That poem apostrophizes the ball, "der, wenn er steigt,"
... den Spielenden von oben auf einmal eine neue Stelle zeigt, sie ordnend wie zu eirierTanzfigur, um dann, erwartetund erwfinschtvon allen, rasch, einfach, kunstlos,ganz Natur, dem Becher hoher Hinde zuzufallen. (SW 1: 639-40)
As a model of reading, this image represents an ideal; actual readers (even more than actual ball-players) are unruly and erratic individuals. It might even 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 the line "Du muft dein Leben findern," "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. "'
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 United States, 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-ai-vis the text and its claims.
7York 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.
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LITERATURE COMPARATIVE
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 de"du muft," scription of an artwork with the conclusion "Archaischer Torso Apollos" is surely the locus classicus for the dovetailing of aesthetic encounter and ethical imperative. Since the meaning of that famous concluding imperative "Du muBt dein Leben indern" is not in those words alone but in their context and situation of utterance, the discussion that follows will move fairly carefully through the poem, describing the kind of reading that could necessitate the conclusion "Du muft dein Leben indern."
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 Archaischer Torso Apollos Wir kannten nicht sein unerh6rtes Haupt, darin die Augenipfel reiften. Aber sein Torso glilht noch wie ein Kandelaber, in dem sein Schauen, nur zurfickgeschraubt, sich hilt und glinzt. Sonst k6nnte nicht der Bug der Brust dich blenden, und im leisen Drehen der Lenden k6nnte nicht ein Licheln gehen zujener Mitte, die die Zeugung trug. Sonst stfinde dieser Stein entstellt und kurz unter der Schultern durchsichtigem Sturz und flimmerte nicht so wie Raubtierfelle; und briche nicht aus allen seinen Rindern aus wie ein Stern: denn da ist keine Stelle, die dich nicht sieht. Du muft dein Leben dindern.
A striking fact about "Archaischer Torso Apollos" is that no "Apollo," and no pronoun "er"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 "sein" (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, "sein" 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 132
AESTHETICS ANSWERABLE
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 precisely this slight ambiguity, where the viewer of an artwork may teeter on the edge of finding some living presence in it, a "he" rather 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 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'etre, 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 "sein" ("sein Haupt," "sein 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 halfanswer: "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 "sein Schauen" (line 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 "sein Schauen," besides the question of attribution relating to "sein," is the nominalizing of "schauen." This verbal noun is set up as parallel to the two previous nouns modified by "sein," introducing, in effect, "sein Schauen" as one of the principal constituents of the statue alongside "sein Haupt" and "sein Torso." The concretized image is the more striking for its concision: "sein Schauen" seems oddly directionless, or rather, with "zurfickgeschraubt," pregnant with some unexpressed direction or object-relation. This sense of containment is strengthened by the verb "sich halt." Alongside the meaning "persists" or "holds out" (which carries forward the idea of "noch," line 3), "sich halten" is also a verb applied to the posture or carriage of the human body: holds itself, carries itself. The verb "sich hfilt" is the predicate of "sein Schauen." But the bodily 133
connotations are apt: a sculpted torso is the artform 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 "sich hdilt" in the poem, we may read backwards to corporealize "sein Schauen," 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 "Schauen" with "Haupt" and "Torso." Moreover, when the reader reaches the sonnet's climax in lines 13 and 14"Denn da ist keine Stelle, / die dich nicht sieht," the shudder he may experience comes from the complete erasure of just these boundaries, from the sudden reappearance of "Schauen" 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")-"Brust," "Lenden," "Schultern." All three appear in the genitive case, and the nouns that these genitives depend on are verbal derivatives: "der Bug / der Brust" (lines 5-6), "im ... Drehen / der Lenden" (lines 6-7), "der Schultern ... Sturz" (line 10). In each case what might be regarded as the main verb belonging to each part of the body"biegen," "drehen," "stfirzen"-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 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 "die Brust" but "der Bug der Brust," not "die Lenden" but "das Drehen der Lenden," and not "die Schultern" but "der Sturz der Schultern."8 The body's components recede behind their vectors. Moreover, these genitive 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 in8 In the first two phrases as well, the enjambment, the "bending" or "twisting" of the poem's lines just between "Bug" and "Drehen" and their respective genitives exemplifies what Edward Snow describes as "Rilke handling line and syntax as 'materials' out of which to sculpt contours and build torques and tensions" (xi).
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creasing motion of the three underlying verbs "biegen," "drehen," and finally "stfirzen" accumulates 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 nominalizations, the internal of the torso into dynamism 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 it is proper to every "gewissenhafte und gliubige Auslegung des Lebens" (SW5: 157). The sculptors of antiquity (classicism notwithstanding) knew this too; and even the worksof the earliest cultures are alivewith movement:
verhaltene Gebirde uralter Kulte war die Unruhe lebendiger Flichen eingeschlossen, wie Wasser in die Winde des GefaBes.Es waren Str6mungen in
den verschlossenen G6ttern, welche saBen, und in den stehenden war eine Und sogar die Steine ilterer Kulturen waren nicht ruhig. In die hieratisch
Gebirde, die wie eine Fontdineaus dem Steine stieg und wieder in denselben zurfickfiel,ihn mit vielen Wellen erfillend. Nicht die Bewegung war es, die dem Sinne der Skulptur (und das hei3t einfach dem Wesen des Dinges) widerstrebte;
es war nur die Bewegung, die nicht zu Ende geht, die nicht von anderen im
Gleichgewicht gehalten wird, die hinausweist fiber die Grenzen des Dinges. (Rodinpart I [1902]; SW5:158) 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 Zuriickschrauben 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 Ruhe but of Bewegung,and that this movement is a kind of interaction of the plastic thing with itself: "Eswendet sich nicht an die Welt; es scheint seine Gerechtigkeit in sich zu tragen, die Auss6hnung aller seiner Widerspruiche und eine Geduld, groB genug ffir alle seine Schwere" (SW5: 157). The last sentence quoted in the description of the "Steine ilterer Kulturen" makes an even more provocative juxtaposition to the Torso sonnet.9 The final clause asserts that the movement that does run counter to the Sinn of sculpture is "nur die die hinausweist uiber die Grenzen des Dinges." Bewegung...
9 Out of context, the sentence could be ambiguous. The context argues for G. Craig Houston's version: "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" (101).
135
These words cannot help suggesting the final tercet of the sonnet, with its image of the stone bursting forth, star-like, "aus allen seinen Rindern." 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 "wendet sich .. . an die Welt"; on the contrary, it is
exactly becausethe statue meets Rilke's (and Rodin's) criterion of "Ganz-mit-sich-Beschfiftigtsein" (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 "Du muBt dein Leben indern," the poem exemplifies art "teaching" notdespite 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 ("Ganz-mit-sichand "Hinausweisen"). The noun "dieser Stein" Beschiftigtsein" marks the (line 9) poem's only moment of complete solidity, and plainness, unbudgingness, thus throwing into sharp relief the attributed to the statue in every other line. It is this dynamic life same solid "dieser Stein" which, still acting as the subject of a verb coming three lines later ("briche"), finally bursts "aus allen seinen Randern / aus wie ein Stern" (12-13). The epiphanic revelation of "Stein" as "Stern" occurs in a shattering of "Rainder."In one sense, the word "Rand" 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 can almost say, it is contours because it has those contours-one 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-"zurfickgeschraubt." inevitable in a disAnother connotation of the word "RIinder," cussion of a poem, takes the point further. The poem is itself exemplary of what is predicated of the statue: it reaches beyond its 136
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 "ausbrechen" 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 "wie ein Stern" seems to release, at incalculably higher voltage, the same light that was a contained glow, "zurfickgeschraubt," in the first
stanza. But actually in the first stanza "zurilckgeschraubt" modifies "Schauen," and not, as we are likely to think, "Kandelaber": sein Torso gliiht noch wie ein Kandelaber, in dem sein Schauen, nur zuriickgeschraubt,
sich hilt und glinzt. (3-5)
The conflation of seeing and emitting light is central to the poem; it explains the use of "denn" when that light finally reemergesreleasing and reversing the poised containment of "sich halt""wie ein Stern: denn da ist keine Stelle / die dich nicht sieht" (lines
13-14). The sheer confidence, even air of inevitability, contributed
by that logical operator "denn" 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 above (lines 3-5), it appears that it is there that "Schauen" 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.
Wirkannten nicht sein unerh6rtes Haupt, darin die Augenipfel reiften. Aber sein Torso glilht noch wie ein Kandelaber...
The force of the adversative "aber," particularly together with

"noch," is clearly to suggest that what follows-the "Glihen" of the for and even a remnant of what is abtorso-is a compensation sent: "sein ... Haupt" and, more especially, "die Augendipfel." The
trope, then, begins earlier than we had thought, with "Aber / sein Torso gliiht noch," 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. 137
Here we must take another step backwards in attempting to un-
derstand 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"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 "darin die Augenaipfel reiften." 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 "Augendipfel," a boldly defamiliarized version of "Augfipfel," "eyeballs." There is something oddly anatomical about the image. On the one hand, "Augdipfel" 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 "darin"-in "sein Haupt." This loose housing contributes to the eyes' uncomfortably detached quality. Rilke's coinage, which re-asserts the latent image of apples, "Apfel," by breaking the word's familiar shape and expanding "Aug-" 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 "reifen" helps to secure the image by tying it into a dense
network of signification that continues through the poem. There is perhaps no other word in the sonnet that provides a
more pointed contrast than does "reiften" to the 1907 poem "FriuherApollo," where the vegetative metaphors are also "earlier" (for example, "das noch unbelaubte / Gezweig," SWI: 481). This difference points up the distance between the two poems' title words "frfih" and "archaisch"-it is the distance between and a time after the "Vorfrfihling" apple harvest.10 Both statues
10 Although the words are near-synonyms for the art historian, "friih" suggests youth and springtime, while "archaisch" conveys great age, deep-rootedness, the work of time. 138
have one metaphorical foot in the realm of time and change-the "Frilher Apollo" will sprout a rose garden "spiter erst" (line 8), and the powerful gaze of the "Archaischer Torso" is a kind of heady "Spitlese" 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, "Archaischer Torso Apollos" can be read as a kind of interesting challenge to the view of art put forth in Keats's "Ode."" 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 "die Zeugung"!), are themselves "forever warm and still to be enjoyed" ("Urn," line 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 "reifen" 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, "kannten" [line 1] and "trug" [line 8], relate to "Haupt" and "Zeugung" respectively). But as we have 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 "Schauen," which develops the idea of "seeing" first introduced in "Augenipfel," the verb "reifen"-in German, maturing as well as ripening-Lmay 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
11 It is at least plausible that Rilke knew Keats's poem at this time. In 1911 Rilke, given a translation of Keats, writes to the sender, "Ich danke Ihnen filr die Ubertragung aus dem Englischen durch die ich Keats, den ich kaum noch las, recht eigentlich kennenzulernen hoffe" (Ingeborg Schnack 380). But if he had read any Keats at all (as "kaum" suggests), the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" would have been one of the likeliest candidates. 139
the torso's gaze would mean little to our lives if the eyes were, for all their chiselled 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 "Kunst-Ding."Anticipating the poem's progress and conclusion, we might say that here ground is prepared for the irrational but inevitable thought that oneself as reader-"du," "dein Leben"-is finally addressed, as one can only be addressed by a fellow being. Not only "sein Schauen" but also the head itself seems to reappear in the smile that appears in the poem's, and the torso's, middle:
Sonst k6nnte nicht der Bug der Brustdich blenden, und im leisen Drehen der Lenden k6nnte nicht ein Licheln gehen zujener Mitte, die die Zeugung trug. (4-8)
Even this exquisite smile is expressed in a verb of motion, "gehen"; and again, the motion seems stubbornly inherent in the stone torso and actually partly constituent of it. The smile goes "im leisen Drehen / der Lenden"-both smile and going are included in, happen as part of, and emerge from the nominalized verb "Drehen." 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:
Das Leben, das in den Gesichtern wie auf Zifferblittern stand, leicht ablesbar und voll Bezug auf die Zeit,-in den K6rpern war es zerstreuter, gr6B3er, geheimnisvoller und ewiger. Hier verstellte es sich nicht, hier ging es nachlissig, wo es nachlissig war, und stolz bei den Stolzen; zuriicktretendvon der Bfihne des Angesichtes, hatte es die Maske abgenommen und stand, wie es war, hinter den Kulissender Kleider. (Rodinpart 1; SW5:150-51)
The frank smile of the naked figure, "wie es ist," leads our eyes, following the slight twist in the hips, to the central sight, the erotic focus, "'jene Mitte"-"die Zeugung," which is absent. But the generative center is no less forceful here for appearing in the past tense. Like the "unerh6rtes Haupt," its very absence
140
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, "Zeugung" brings forth 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 ("im leisen Drehen / der Lenden") and in the verb "trug," which asks us to imagine the otherwise slightly abstract "Zeugung" as carried, or hanging-it is the eros of the torso that calls us to respond to it as
while we to a living human body. That this can be accomplished know that the genitals are gone and the body is stone is exactly the poem's purpose: as was said earlier, "Archaischer Torso Apollos" 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 "Zeugung" with the verb "tragen" also suggests a reading of the line as carrying forward the idea of "reiften"-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 "reifen" and, closer to hand, "Zeugung." 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.12
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.
12One thinks in this context of Rilke's relatively racy "Sieben Gedichte" (SW2: 435-38), and those poems' sexual/vegetable imagery: "die volle Knospe seines Lebensgliedes," "Du hast mir ... zum jihen Baum den Samen aufgezogen" (435), and so on.
141
One of the most immediately striking features of the poem is its proliferation of imperfect subjunctives, and with them, negatives."1 With "Sonst k6nnte nicht" (line 5), the poem begins to work by negating and exempting: but the force of the imperfect subjunctive in German is that what is affirmed in this mood"Sonst stfinde dieser Stein entstellt und kurz"-is visionary, fictional, an excursus away from what is the case. The conjunction "sonst" 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 "sonst" 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 "sonst" 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 "sonst... nicht." This simultaneity of alternatives may be easiest to see in the line not cast in the negative: "Sonst stfinde dieser Stein entstellt und kurz ... " (line 9). At this point in the poem, it is apparent that the basic image of this line is "not the case": "Der Stein steht entstellt und kurz" 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 seethis image of what is actually not the case. The point of this effect, and the virtuosity of the "sonst" clause with its imperfect subjunctive, is that the line brings us to see in one and the same instant both this fictional scene and its
13 There are five subjunctives and six occurrences of "nicht" in the poem's 14 lines. In the welter of umlauted subjunctive forms, even the indicative verbs "sich mayseem visually, and phonologically, tojoin in the subjunctive hilt" and "glmnzt" action.
142
inverse image, the truth. "Stfinde" morphologically warns us that this "stehen" 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, "stfinde" is still a thirdperson singular form of "stehen"; it is the predicate of "dieser Stein"; and in this way this same word launches the articulation of the fictional scene-depicting the statue as doing exactly that: standing, "entstellt und kurz." Both alternatives, fiction and truth, are produced, so to speak, in a single grammatical gesture. But 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, "entstellt und kurz"-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 "sonst"-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 "sonst"-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, 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 "Schlaflied," another poem from Der neuen Gedichteanderer
Teil:
Einmal wenn ich dich verlier, wirst du schlafen k6nnen, ohne
daBich wie eine Lindenkrone 143
mich verfluistre fiber dir? Ohne daBich hier wache und Worte,beinah wie Augenlider, auf deine Brfiste,auf deine Glieder niederlege, auf deinen Mund. Ohne daBich dich verschlieB und dich allein mit Deinem lasse wie einen Gartenmit einer Masse
von Melissen und Stern-Anis. (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 "ohne daB ich . . ." To put it another way, the
reader, "du," 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 "ich" 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. 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 "Archaischer Torso Apollos" and "Schlaflied," 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 "Archaischer Torso" and "Schlaflied" 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 "du," the poems' addressee. Like the torso itself, these poems take charge of our experience of them, and enact themselves upon us as readers. In "Schlaflied," the whispering voice speaks to us of its silence, repeatedly staging a withdrawal into a scene of its own nonexistence ("ohne daB ich .. .")-all the while continuing to be present and speaking. In "Archaischer Torso," the subjunctive 144
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. It is in speaking to this ordinary level of life as well as to the reader's imagination that the poem's "du" may penetrate past the cul-de-sac of rhetorical apostrophe into that reader's own particular life: "Du muBt dein Leben findern." 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 "sonst" opens up alongside those spoken of, the place that this grammar gives to our disbelief and astonishment that finally give us the feeling that it is we who are being seen-although we are not sure whether by the statue or the poem. This moment-"denn da ist keine Stelle, / die dich nicht sieht"-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 "Schauen," novalike, upon its suddenly explicit object, you-"dich." 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 ("keine Stelle," "nicht sieht") 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 "du muBt." The phrase is not really an external prescription, much less the terrible judgment of a god; rather, this "du" has much of the "ich" 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 com145
plete. Through its absent, ripened eyes we can see ourselves in an unaccustomed wholeness-an insight we naturally want to live up to. Thus "Du muBt dein Leben findern" 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, "Ich muB mein Leben dindern," its meaning is not fully available to the eye that looks over the poem without becoming the poem's reader, "du." 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 "Du muBt dein Leben findern." 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, "Eskam dich an, du selber zu sein .. .":
Die schlappen Tiuren, die hingetiuschten Vorhinge, die Gegenstinde ohne Hinterseite drfingten dich zum Widerspruch. Du filhltest, wie dein Herz sich unaufhaltsam steigerte zu einer immensen Wirklichkeit und, erschrocken, versuchtest du noch einmal die Blicke von dir abzunehmen wie lange Fiden -: Aber da brachen sie schon in Beifall aus in ihrer Angst vor Altweibersommers dem AuBersten:wie um im letzten Moment etwas von sich abzuwenden, was sie
zwingen wfirde, ihr Leben zu indern. (?65; SW6: 924)
Assuming that the phrase "means" the same thing here as it does in "Archaischer Torso Apollos," 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 "Wirklichkeit," sich selbersein. The paradox is that 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, SW5:150-51) of how life itself dwells in the body ("zurficktretend von der Bfihne des Angesichtes, hatte es die Maske abgenommen und stand, wie es war, hinter den Kulissen der Kleider"), but in "Archaischer Torso Apollos," 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 if unwillingly-the intorso poem, the onlookers receive-even junctive force that somehow radiates from this real art. 146
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 "du"-form of the torso poem: a second-person stance is sought, or at least a criticism that can acknowledge second-person claims (and the difficulty, and importance, of doing critical justice to them).14 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 Grafin Sizzo in closing his second letter to her: "Und noch dies, verehrteste Graifin: holen Sie gnfidigst meinen Brief aus den autogrammatischen Umgebungen zur-ick und gewThren Sie meinem Wort, ein lebendigeszu bleiben und als solches, ab und zu, Sie zu erreichen!" (12). The contradictions latent in this plea against the enshrinement and objectification of Rilke's "Wort" are evident when we return 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 H61lderlin's words, "uneBbare und unverwelkliche Schrift," 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, their "autogrammatische Umgebungen," or something akin, permit Rilke's writing to reach us at all, as something we call "literathe emphasis in ture." But Rilke's emphasis in his letter-and fundamental: the written word's demany "you"poems-is equally mand 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 of answering we find ourselves best positioned to discover within us the particular force and meaning of changing our lives-of our answerability.
Boston University
14 Charles Altieri has begun a philosophical elaboration of the place and value of such a criticism.
147
COMPARATIVE
LITERATURE
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 University Press, 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 Style28.3 (1994). "Second-Person Narrative: A Bibliography." Style 28.4 (1994): 525-48. ----. Goffman, Erving. "Footing." Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981. 124-59. Grabher, Gudrun M. Das lyrische Du: Du-Vergessenheit und M5glichkeiten der DuBestimmung in der amerikanischen Dichtung. Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1989. Hamburger, Kate. Die Logik der Dichtung. 3rd ed. Frankfurt: Ullstein Taschenbuch-Klett Cotta, 1980. Holden, Jonathan. "The Abuse of the Second-Person Pronoun." The Rhetoric of the ContemporaryLyric. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980. 38-56. H61derlin, Friedrich. "Patmos." Ansfitze zur letzten Fassung. Gedichte. Ed. Jochen Schmidt. Frankfurt: Insel Taschenbuch, 1984. 191-94. Hollis, C. Carroll. Language and Style in Leaves of Grass. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 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, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982. 282-83. Komar, Kathleen. Transcending Angels: Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987. Levinson, Stephen C. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Nussbaum, Martha C. Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Oppert, K. "Das Dinggedicht." Deutsche Vierteljahrsschriftfiir Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte4 (1926) :747-83. Rilke, Rainer Maria. Briefe an Grifin Sizzo. Ed. Ingeborg Schnack. Frankfurt: Insel, 1977. Letter of 15 Dec. 1922. Sdimtliche Werke in Sechs Bdnden. Ed. Ernst Zinn. Frankfurt: Insel, 19551966. Schnack, Ingeborg. Rainer Maria Rilke: Chronik seines Lebens und seines Werkes.2 vols. Frankfurt: Insel, 1975. 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 Ho'ek and Patricia Parker. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. 226-43.
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ANSWERABLE
AESTHETICS
Warhol, Robyn R. Gendered Interventions: Narrative Discourse in the Victorian Novel. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989. York, R. A. The Poem as Utterance. London: Methuen, 1986.
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Answerable Aesthetics: in Rilke Reading 'You"

through the poem" (Snow xii).

The force of the adversative "aber," particularly together with

Here we must take another step backwards in attempting to un-

memorable line and virtually all verbs. It has been necessary to

daBich wie eine Lindenkrone 143

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