The Poet Rilke and the Puppet
Rainer Maria Rilke was one of the greatest lyric poets in the German language. His works are about everyday things, but they can also move into mysticism and experiences beyond the bounds of explanation. One aspect of his work that does not get that discussed is puppets. But to look more closely is to see how Rilke used puppets as a point of contact between humans and a non-earthly realm.
Music in the Tuileries. By Édouard Manet. 1862. Via Wikimedia Commons
Early Years
Most of the critical commentary on Rilke and the puppet focuses on the Duino Elegies. But as a young man, he had already become impressed with the Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck, after seeing several German productions.
For Rilke, the best renditions of a Maeterlinck drama were to avoid recourse to Stimmung [mood, temper, tone, pitch] to allow for gestures that could best express feeling about which there was nothing equivocal but extended for the sake of dramatic climax: ‘The marionette has only one face, and his expression is fixed for all time’.[i] To this, Cristina Grazioli adds: ‘Its movements are reduced to the essential, visible from a distance and recognizable by a community.’[ii]
To Rilke, exaggeration and too much effort only caused an imbalance, distorting the drama out of shape. In Maeterlinck, Rilke saw a definite solution to the rather aesthetically dissolute tendencies in the theatre of the fin de siècle.
Maeterlinck's innovations were accountable and could be applied as a technique to raise the quality of theatre everywhere. In his 'Letter to an Actress', Rilke advises that characterization should follow the example of the marionette and that to succeed at acting in a Maeterlinck play, 'one has to forget that one was acting'.
For Maeterlinck, the entire body is an expressive surface, he 'did not imagine faces but bodies', which allowed him to tap into what was 'fundamental' to what we believe are individualized sentiments.[iii] Rilke saw new opportunities for theatre, as it should ‘have the same privilege as painting, of being able to hold the grand language of the human body and develop it’.[iv]
Puppets Make a Regular Appearance
Puppets make a regular appearance in Rilke’s oeuvre, with a common leitmotif of absence and surrogacy. In an early poem, ‘The House Where I was Born’ [‘Mein Geburtshaus’] he recalls a ‘salon lined with blue silk’ containing ‘a richly silver-sequened puppet costume’ [ein Puppenkleid, mit Strähnen /Dicken Silber's Reich betresst].[v]
In his autobiographical novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, the main character occasionally encounters dolls, puppets and unworn clothes. In the words of Cristina Grazioli, ‘These figures of the poetic ritual transforming the visible into the invisible were very important for the conception of the Duino Elegies’.[vi]
Comparison of three of the main Greek column styles—Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian. Via Britannica
An overview of Rilke’s work shows that puppets remain a presiding presence as not only shells of memory, but, in the very Symbolist sense, as vehicles of suggestion and of the strangeness and magic from which dreams and fantastic artistic images are made.
Rilke’s Main Work on Dolls
Rilke’s most sustained critical exposition on dolls is in an essay written in 1914 as a response to an exhibition of wax figures of the puppeteer Lotte Pritzel he had seen in Munich the year before. These particular dolls were intended as part of an artist’s oeuvre, and were not expressly for children.
Dolls for the showcase. By Lotte Pritzel. 1911. Via World4.eu
Pritzel was well known in her time for her mannered figures with their detailed faces, elongated bodies and hands, and odd costumes, which were strongly reminiscent of the languorous and menacing figures drawn by the British aestheticist Aubrey Beardsley. In 1987, twenty-five years after her death, the Munich Puppet Theatre Museum held an exhibition entitled 'Dances of Vice, Horror and Ecstasy', supposedly taken from a description by a dancer belonging to a troupe impersonating her dolls on stage in the 1920s.
‘The World of Childhood is Past’
In keeping with the sombre air of these dolls, and their reputation as sharing much with the values of the decadent movement, Rilke begins with on a shatteringly grim note: these dolls live outside of the realm of children. ‘The world of childhood is past’.
Dolls for the showcase. By Lotte Pritzel. 1911. Via World4.eu
Removed from childhood, these dolls are of an adult world and even ‘prematurely old’ and ‘entered into all the unrealities of its own life’,[vii] suggesting an imperfect, limbotic state between childhood fantasy and the adult constructions of the world.
Shortly after Rilke falls into a reverie over the curious and ineffable aura that dwells over objects that were mediators of love or misery, but had captured a perceptible spirit because of the attention lavished on them, such playing cards worn from countless games of Patience that become a focal point for the sad hopes that have turned out unexpectedly'.[viii]
But with dolls, precisely because they are the focal point of so many of our emotions, the poetic, life-worn pregnancy of everyday objects is altered to reveal the falsity and failure of our efforts to ignite our own life in the lifeless.
Most likely with a similar observation made earlier by Baudelaire,[ix] Rilke lamented that we invest far too much in the puppets and its lack of a soul, or rather that the hollowness of the ‘puppet soul’ accounts for one of the great childhood disappointments.[x]
No amount of begging or imprecation can break the spell of the doll's inscrutability. But in this, Rilke also draws a parallel with God, who became 'famous mainly by not speaking to us'.[xi] There is a many-sided alienation in our relationship with the doll since we locate the need to overcome the basic alienation of existence. We must face the extent to which we have duped ourselves, especially in how we had invested so much in it.
Dolls for the showcase. By Lotte Pritzel. 1914. Via World4.eu
The Doll is the Eternal Stranger
The doll is the eternal stranger. Yet we persist in spending energy the illusion of its animism: 'we are so busy keeping you in existence that we had not any time to grasp what you were.'[xii]Rilke suggests that despite our nervous disappointment in the doll, we maintain a repudiation of its deadness, presumably to safeguard the realization in ourselves of the immanence of death in us all, and, for that, that death inhabits us all as a precondition of life.
When the puppet appears in the Elegies, it is a (non-)presence that is not entirely confined to sad loss since it is also the symbol of transformative overcoming. Puppets are a kind of pure corporeality in which the difficulty of masks and appearances is resolved: 'I do not want these half-filled masks,/But rather the puppet. It is whole. I want/ To endure the shell and the wire and/Its face looking outward. Here. I am before it.’ [Ich will nicht diese halbgefüllten Masken,/Lieber die Puppe. Die is voll. Ich will/ den Balg aushalten und den Draht and ihr / Gesicht aus Ausehn. Hier. Ich bin davor.][xiii]
Kleist and the Fourth Duino Elegy
Rilke was well acquainted with Kleist's essay ‘On Marionette Theatre’ having studied it in 1913, although there is no concrete evidence to assume knowledge of Jean Paul's earlier dialogue of the puppets and the angels (where humans are puppets devised by angels), however Rilke brings the two works into a compelling synthesis.
Echoing Kleist, the puppet is the body divested of the complications and noise of everyday consciousness. While the puppet symbolizes pure physicality, the Angel, as configured in the Elegies, complements pure consciousness untrammelled by physicality; one is ‘absolute object’ and the other ‘absolute subject’.
In the Fourth Elegy, their conjunction results in a metaphysical union:
…when I am in the mood,to wait before the puppet stage, no,to watch so intensely, that, so that my watchingwill finally be compensated, where an angelmust come as player, to move the body.Angel and puppet: now finally a play.Now they come together, what we alwaysdivide in us being there. Now first arisesfrom our seasons the cycleof all change. Over and above usplays the angel. See, the dying,will unlikely sense, how full of pretenseall this is, what we endure. Allis not itself. Oh childhood hours,there behind the figures more as onlyof the past and before us not the future.[xiv]
The space of childhood, which the puppet represents, is one of attentive presentness, without foreboding, premonition, or hesitation. Although the child will also die, it has not yet internalized its mortality and with it the terror of imminent loss and oblivion.
Dolls for the Showcase. 1914. Via world4.eu
Puppetry is, we may assume, superior to poetry, since good poetry can only come from worldly skill, while the puppet simulates innocence unmediated by verbiage. The clarity of action is purer than words, which cannot escape between us and the world. Words mediate our world while action is literally in the world, immediate.
But in recalling the earlier essay, 'Puppets' such success only works in theory or poetically. For it is the puppet that is also the transition from childhood to maturation. The realization of its deadness leads to the confirmation that we, too, will meet a similar fate.
As a reminder of childhood, puppets are, for Rilke, figures of childhood delusion and alienation. In the words of Gross, in the oscillation of life and alienation, Rilke grants dolls 'an unknowable and unusable subjectivity, making their burning an unusable sacrifice, an unstable loss’.[xv]
It is tempting to add that Rilke reinvokes the ancient ritual of burning dolls and effigies as a warning of death that at the same time, gives us a temporary reprieve from our trepidation. In providing the spectacle of death, we remind ourselves that we are still alive. Alienation and comfort are bound together in their agonistic but necessary union.
Puppets as a Reminder of Disappointment and Loss
But if this disappointment was to occur in childhood as a tragedy, it is a farce when it occurred in adulthood. In the same time between Rilke’s crafting of the ‘Puppets’ essay and the appearance of the Duino Elegies, in 1919, his contemporary, the Viennese painter Oskar Kokoschka had a replica of his former lover, Alma Mahler, made by a dressmaker Hermione Loos.
Kokoschka doll representing Alma Mahler. 1919. By Henriette Moos. Via Wikimedia Commons
Its genesis was a matter of some obsession for Kokoschka, who lavished great attention on its descriptive and diagrammatic prototypes. He stipulated that a furry velour be used for the skin of Alma's life-size doll for the sake of his stimulating caress. Special clothing was also made for her.
When it was delivered a witness, Edith Hoffman recounts that ‘the anti-climax was terrible’ for ‘The doll, whom he had endowed with all the attributes of grace, attractiveness and the glamour of a love-thirsty heart, was still a doll’.[xvi] Nonetheless, his relationship with the doll lasted for a year and a half, half the time of the real Alma, where the artist obsessively painted and drew it.
In a final fit of pique, because it was only a doll, Kokoschka beheaded Alma No. 2, soaked her in red wine and removed her to the rubbish.[xvii]
References:
[i] Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Das Theater des Maeterlink’ (1901), Sämtliche Werke v. 5, Frankfurt: Insel Verlag, 1965, 482
[ii] Cristina Grazioli, ‘Mensch (Tod) und Kunstfigur: Figures of Death and Otherness in the Reflections of Rainer Maria Rilke and Oskar Schlemmer’, in Carole Guidicelli ed., Surmarionettes et mannequins: Craig, Kantor et leurs heritages contemporains, Lavérune and Charleville-Mézières: L’Entretemps Édtions and Institut International des Marionettes, 2013, 167
[iii] Rilke, ‘Brief an eine Shauspielerin’, Sämtliche Werke, v. 6, 1966, 1178-1191.
[iv] Ibid., 1189
[v] Rilke, Die Gedichte, Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1986, 41
[vi] Grazioli, ‘Mensch (Tod) und Kunstfigur’, 168
[vii] Rilke, ‘Puppen: Zu den Wachs-Puppen Lotte Prizel’, Sämtliche Werke, v. 6, 1063.
[viii] Ibid., 1066.
[ix] See the epigraph to the final chapter of this book.
[x] Rilke, ‘Puppen’, Sämtliche Werke, v. 6, 1072
[xi] Ibid., 1068.
[xii] Ibid., 1072.
[xiii] Rilke, Die Gedichte, 641-642
[xiv] …Wenn mir zumut ist,
zu warten vor der Puppenbühne, nein,
so vollig hinzuschauen, um mein Shaun
am Ende aufzuweigen, dort as Spieler
in Engel hinmuss, der die Balge hochreisst.
Engel und Puppe: dann ist endlich Shauspiel.
Dann kommt zusammen, was wir immerfort
entzwein, indem wir da sind. Dann entsteht
aus unseren Jahreszeiten erst der Umkreis
des ganzen Wandelns. Über uns hinüber
spielt dann der Engel. Sieh, die Sterbenden.
Sollten sie nicht vermuten, wie voll Vorwand
das alles is ist, was wir lesiten. Alles
ist nicht es selbst. O Stunden in der Kindheit,
da hinter den Figuren mehr als nur
Vergangenes war und vor uns nicht die Zukunft.
Ibid., 643
[xv] Gross, The Dream of Moving Stone, 156.
[xvi] Cit. Marquard Smith, The Erotic Doll, 124.
[xvii] For the best account of Kokoschka’s obsession, see Ibid., 108-135.
