Tiffany, "The Lyric Automaton" (Rilke)

[Dave Monroe]

... more from Daniel Tiffany, Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric
(Berekely: U of California P, 2000), Chapter 3, "The Lyric Automaton,"
pp. 63-94:

... Rilke's great essay on dolls seeks (but fails) to wrench the doll
more forcibly from the world of childhood, thereby placing the poet in a
more ambiguous and more traumatic realtionship to teh starnge muse of
the doll.  Indeed, he infers that the doll, as an idea or figure, is not
a possession of childhood but rather its subjecty.  For, in his
estimation, it is not children but tehir dolls that grow up and become
independent ...  (75)

[Here, Tiffany is referring to Rainer Maria Rilke, Puppen, trans. by G.
Craig Houston as "Some Reflections on Dolls," in Where Silence Begins:
Selected Prose by Rainer Maria Rilke (New York: New Directions, 1978)]

... there can be little doubt that the doll, as an emblem of modern
lyric, is essentially an automaton.  the doll's fundamental alienation
from childhood signals a return to its place in the history of
technology and its mechanical philosophy.  In the context of Rilke's
essay, however, teh revolution of the doll constitutes a return to a
place it has never been, to a crypt prepared for it long ago, in the
trope of a mechanical bird.  (75)

Although Rilke never explicitly associates the doll with lyric, the doll
appears in Rilke's oeuvre as a belated, though not entirely unexpected,
permutation of the angel, the most persistent and fully developed figure
of the poet in all of Rilke's work.  (75)

Here [in the Book of Images] angels appear as "souls" and are associated
both with lyric (as "intervals" of "melody") and with a model of
seriality ("each and each alike") that evokes the soullessness, the pure
exteriority, of the automaton.  As an "inetrval," moreover, the angel is
clearly a medium.

["Intervals" "each and each alike" a la those "delta-t's"? Hm ...]

Severla years later, an angel makes a celebrated visit in the New poems
(107) as "L'Ange du Meridien" ....   In this passage, teh angel
addressed is a figure carved in stone (though "sympathetic"), thereby
emphasizing, as in teh earlier poem, teh angel's eidetic nature ("mouth
as from a hundred mouths distilled").  More reamrkable, from the prseent
standpoint, is teh sundial that the angel is holding; for the
iconography of "L'Ange du Meridien" (a sculpture on Chartres [as in
Henry Adams, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres] cathedral) almost certainly
invokes the themes (if not teh actual devices) of teh Heronic
tradition.  More specifically, the angel in this powm calls forsth in
poetic terms the correlation of the clock and the angel of method in
mechanical philosophy.  We can therefore regard the "impartial sundial,
upon which/ the day's whole sum is balanced equally" as mirroring the
figure of the angel, as a materialization of the angel's mechanical--and
clairvoyant--mind. (76)

The angel that appears in the second Duino elegy retains a place in the
discourse of souls, yet its character (as a bird) has become
inscrutable, a sign of danger eliciting the poet's song .... (77)

In one of Rilke's most haunting reflections on the enigmatic character
of teh doll, he writes "One was so busy keeping you alive that one had
no time to determine what you were" ([Rilke, "Dolls"] 49).  The irony of
the doll's precarious vitality turns on its immortality (its kinship to
the angel) and the imamteriality of its provisions; for teh doll is "fed
like the 'Ka' on imaginary food ..." ([Rilke, "Dolls"] 43).  Even more
disturbing is the impression that the doll is at once sentient and
inert, awake and asleep ... (77)

The doll is a "stranger to us" ([Rilek, "Dolls"] 47); yet, more than
merely inscrutable, it is genuinely malevolent, like "something that
made a noise and could hardly wait to submerge us and the whole room by
exerting its full powers" ([Rilke, "Dolls"] 46).  The doll's menace
appears to reside in teh ambiguity of its material prseence ... (77)

Hence in contrast to "the inanimate, the touching, teh deserted, the
thoughtful aspect of amny things," the doll is "the horrible foreign
body on which we had wasted our purest ardor ... the superficially
painted watery corpse" ([Rilek, "Dolls"] 45).  Indeed, the riddle of the
doll';s materiality can be resolved only by elaborating the trope of the
cadaver.  (78)

... Rilke asserts that we destroy the immaterial doll-soul by seeking to
care for it, mistakenly, in the material doll.  Thus the authentic
doll-soul, which is invisible, succumbs to our delusions about the
actual doll, thereby recapitulating teh dialectic of the visible and the
invisible that goversns the figure of the angel.  In Rilke's eyes, the
invisible doll is the authentic one.  Furthermore, in an extraordinary
inversion of the assumptions about immateriality of the soul, teh actual
dolls become the maggots (Larven) that consume the cadaverous (and
somehow vital) substance of the doll-soul.  It is precisely at this
moment that the ambiguity of the German word Puppe (and teh English word
"puupet") comes most powerfully into play.  For Puppe menas both "doll"
and "pupa"; hence the doll, in Rilke's essay, must be understood as a
chrysalis that undergoes material transformation.  Yet it is not the
physical doll, but the doll-soul, that Rilke describes as suffering the
transformation undergone by a cadaver, a paradox that recalls Epicurean
notions of a flame-like material soul.  (78)

In Rilkean terms, since the doll is the very emblem of the lyric object
and its ambiguous substance, every object can be said to undergo a
transformation in which the object's soul--its invisible foundation--is
rendered in terms of physical corruption.  (79)

Within a year of teh composition of the "Dolls" essay, Rilke had
composed the fourth Duino elegy, in which the doll finally encounters
its double, the angel.  Echoing Kleist's distinction, the poet refuses
the dancer's "disguise," preferring instead the puppet's primitive grace
... (79)

... Rilke, elaborating Kleist's aesthetic ideology, suggests that the
simplicity of the doll's barbaric form is commensurable only with the
incorporeality of the angel.  The anguished dialectic of doll and
doll-soul is resolved in the figure of the angel, as Rilke explains in a
letter of 1925: (79)

[And here Tiffany cites The Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Jane
Bannard and M.D. Herter Norton (New York: Norton, 1969), vol.2, pp.
375-6:]

The angel of teh Elegies is that creature in whom the transformations of
the visible into the invisible, which we are accomplishing, appears
already consummated.  For the angel of the Elegies, all past towers and
palaces are existent, becxause long invisible, and teh still-standing
towers and bridges of our existence already invisible, although (for us)
still persisting physically.  The angel of teh Elegies is that being who
vouches for the recognition of the invisible of a higher order of
reality.

[Tiffany, p. 80.  And back to ...]

>From this last statement in particular, it becomes apparent that the
intuitions of Rilke's angel, especially its recognition of an invisible
reality within the physical realm, are strongly reminiscent of teh
angelic mind conjured by Leibniz as an emblem of mechanical philosophy
(which grassps the invisible causes of sensible bodies).  Thuis, if the
angel is "that creature in whom the transformation of teh visible into
the invisible ... appears already consummated," then the doll is that
figure in whom metamorphosis appears as a problem, in whom the
dematerialization of objects is incomplete, ambiguous, or even
inscrutable.  (80)

... the Rilkean figures of doll and angel tend to submerge questions of
grace or beauty in a milieu of uncertain trauma--the effect of suffering
visited on them, or to be visited on their human counterparts....  With
its dreadful manifestation as a corpse, the doll becomes a physical
experiment, and its traumatic air idnetifies it as a provocative and
even transgressive object. The violence implicit in La Mettrie's [in his
L'Homme-Machine] yoking of hedonism and mechanical philosphy anticipates
the modern conversion of teh ostensible object of pleasure, teh
automaton, into an experimental figure of boundless suffering, ill-will,
and provocation.  (80)

The transformation of teh double--the doll--into a relic of inscrutable
loss informs Walter Benjamin's iunderstanding of toys as well ... (80)

... and so forth.  But I figured, seeing as you, not to mention Pynchon,
are all interested in Rilke ... gotta go, but, in the meantime, on that
confluence of angelic and the mecahnical, do see the following:

Miller Frank, Felicia.  The Mechanical Song: Women, Voice, and the
Artificial
    in Nineteenth Cnetury French Narrative.  Stanford: Stanford UP,
1995.

Poizat, Michel.  The Angel's Cry: Beyond the Pleasure Principle in
Opera.
    Trans. Arthur Denner.  Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1992.

Whilst the former, to the best of my knowledge, has yet to be put out in
paperback, it's been important enough to me to shell out yet ANOTHER
thirty-five samoleans when my first copy went missing.  The latter is
often cheaply available remaindered.  I've seen it frequently at the
Powell's Books near the University of Chicago, for example, or see
Hamilton Books @ http://www.hamiltonbook.com/ ...