kagablog

Gershom Scholem (Translation and Notes by W. C. Bamberger)  

ON JUNE 20, 1918, Gershom Scholem made a note in his journal: “I’ve attempted a critique of Malte Laurids Brigge based on Walter [Benjamin’s] rules. Perhaps, or certainly, there will be much more to say.”2 Scholem was then living in Bern, Switzerland, where he had moved in order to be close enough to Benjamin to meet and talk with him nearly every day. Scholem hadbeen planning a study of Biblical lamentations, and read Rainer Maria Rilke’s novel largely because Benjamin had told him that Rilke had incorporated a lament.3 The “rules” which Scholem used were in part taken from a conversation the pair had had the afternoon of June 17th, a summation of which Scholem recorded in his journal.  

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge is Rilke’s only novel. In it, the title character, an aspiring poet, is trying to find a new, detached, way of looking at the world—at buildings, city streets, people, paintings, even the family ghost. Because Sartre’s Nausea is seen as being directly inspired by Rilke’s novel, many claim it is an early Existentialist novel. The translator of the (2)008 edition sees it as one of the first Modernist novels. Both may be true (and Goethe clearly hovers nearby), but such categories will only come as afterthoughts. What strikes the reader immediately about Malte Laurids Brigge is the near‐melodramatic emotional level: angst, screams, a mysterious house, the walking ghost, hints of incest and androgyny. The novel appeared as the Gothic was becoming the Expressionist.  

Scholem at this time was a 20‐year‐old university student of mathematics and philosophy with strong anarchist sympathies (he had been expelled from both his high school and his father’s house for co‐writing an anti‐war letter). He had already begun reading the mystical Kabbalist texts that would soon come to dominate his intellectual life. He was at this time in a perpetual state of intellectual intoxication due to his daily conversations with Benjamin. He was also (perhaps) feigning madness to evade military conscription, and suffering from unrequited love.He was as high‐pitched as Rilke’s novel, and was using intellectual effort to hold himself together. 

For a reader to understand “what happens” in the novel through these notes alone would be difficult, but this is not Scholem’s goal. These rather hermetic notes, apparently written only for himself, are an attempt at gathering some of the new ideas he was encountering, an exercise in combining some of Benjamin’s ideas with his own to see if a useful set of philosophical and analytical tools miht result. What we have in place of literary criticism is an Expressionist criticism (something perhaps only Baudelaire had previously written successfully), and it should be read as much as a primary as a secondary one. This critique is, in fact, virtually incomprehensible without reference to the intellectual context in which it was written (and which is as much the subject of this essay as is the novel). This translation with notes is a provisional first step toward providing such a context. As Scholem wrote, “Certainly there will be much more to say.”  

ALL KNOWLEDGE may be acquired in two ways. The legitimate way is through insight into the metaphysical laws that order things. The coherence of this knowledge is systematic even where it appears in poetry. The invisible presence of this system—which shines through the limit, which approaches enunciation—is the guarantee of uncorrupted knowledge. (4) This coherence is not simply like the fundamental law of the works, rather it, so to speak, underlies it, is suspended in the limited endlessness of the system whose power is guaranteed by the substance of its knowledge. It is not the task of poets to develop this system, only to render it in plain language. Such poetry can never conflict with the system. It has found the neutral, more coincident sphere in language, which is responsible for its knowledge. This knowledge is unequivocal, and by this will it first be recognized. It has overcome myth by way of rigor of language and in reverence for the good, the ability to produce which is however denied it. Where it becomes mythical, it becomes so by virtue of its own decision, in a new context that it develops for itself. (5)

It is otherwise with that knowledge which celebrates its greatest triumph in this book. This is an illegitimate knowledge, one that can only be called ghostly. “The double, which can be drawn into no unity, is the law of the ghostly world.” (6) Ghostly knowledge is that which originates in the redoubling of the incredible. Exactly this emerges in the Notebooks in the most terrible way. The mythic daemonic sphere that is ambiguous doesn’t dominate here (7)—it is too commonly the case that a book of this kind could still attain meaning—rather the ghostly originates in the recognition of the sexual mixture. Everything mixes. This is Brigge’s principle. He enters things like a ghost. How else should he recognize others as ghostly as well? His life is no different from that of a ghost.   

Rilke does everything to attest to this. What Rilke’s compression seeks to hide behind music8—as the difficult‐to‐discover basis of its remarkable repulsiveness—lies here open to the light of day, without all those ornamentations that complicate seeing through all the palaver. In prose Rilke had to reveal it. The fact is that the knowledge in his prose and poetry are absolutely identical, indistinguishable. But in the novel the ghostly is rolled out in plain sight, while in the poetry it is always hidden. Rilke has insights, but they are illegitimate. This is because they are nothing more than colons of the ghostly sphere,9 in which the double (in a potentialization of the highest order) succeeds, in inexpressible uncertainty, in becoming language and thus knowledge. The novel comes into being by way of the (failed) attempt to simulate a continuity of these colons. An immense chaos, whose raging storms in uncanny succession crystallize in this knowledge, is concealed down to its last detail in the novel.  

Rilke wants to hide the fact that Brigge is a ghost; for if he manages to do so, the surprise will have succeeded: to capture a nameless sphere for the beauty, into which one dispatches a courageous hero who devotes himself to her, and they conquer a surprised world before they are recognized. This is the sight that the book offers to the middle‐class critic. He believes everything. He believes Brigge is a person who has sharpened the highest humanity in himself; believes that here continuous existence is rolled out through deep knowledge; and that what is between the pieces is of the same kind as that which stands there. This, however, is a mistake. Between the pieces lies the whole nameless world of the ghostly, and in the pieces it rises into language like an ocean wave in a storm, which it, true to its ghostly law, strips of all decisiveness. “He was a poet and hated the approximate.”10 Rilke invented this deep truth because otherwise the book, in which it stands, would be destroyed. The precision of the book is ghostly, apparitional. For at the least attempt to examine this so thoroughly averted, seemingly estranged language and knowledge a little more closely, everything becomes an impenetrable fog, everything redoubles.   

But within the ghostly lives the ghost. Or, more accurately, it is the ghost that renders everything ghostly. The truth about Brigge cannot more frightfully and nevertheless more suitably be expressed than to say that he haunts things. He destroys them and in his notebooks allows the double of that original, that which is female in it, to emerge. Because only the female in things excites him. The female is the continuum in which he succeeds in his boundless mixing—even in this he is a typical Ghost. Never was a book more dreadful.  

All of this expresses itself completely through style. The style of this book can be grasped only in a limited way; it is limitless. It is like a great flood: not all things acquire language—that would be Revelation—but they are flooded with language. They become ghostly in spirit. Rilke’s language is boundless. It denies itself nothing. It is in every way ghostly: a reader trying to arrive at something through this language will certainly be reminded of that. There are pages in this book of such supernatural horror they seem as if only a Ghost could have engendered them, pages in which nothing is given to the reader. Every relative clause is a new trick that the ghost plays on the reader. The entire world is reduced to an apparition, and Malte Laurids Brigge goes around in it. All language has become soulless, because chaos has transformed it into female beauty. God is the last metaphor, and the more he is the highest danger threatening the ghostly, the more the ghost—from a distance that really is no such thing, rather only a new phase, a branch of Pantheism, the Religion of the Ghostly—lies to him. The world, language, and God: these three are made female in this book. But Rilke is not Buber: he doesn’t sleep with this female. (11)  Rather he—the Ghost—mixes with it. He enters into it. His feasts are those days on which he enters things. His sex is so deeply ghostly that he becomes lecherous. Because this book is lecherous: it is without desire, but it wants to be taken, just as it takes things to transform them.   

This appears terribly in the way of love in this book. The book betrays it: because Brigge praises Bettina. (12) What does praise of Bettina signify in this book? The ghost, who only appears to be a man, greets and defends his past in Bettina. But more still, Bettina becomes the ghost’s accusation against the demon. (13) This mute, terrible struggle is fought at decisive points of the book. Brigge is a ghost that fights against the demon that conquers him. And in this defeat he seizes the ultimate means: he rises from the ghostly in a lament. This is the ultimate point in the entire book: the citation in the first volume of a lament. (14) It is terrible to recognize that the single most peerless page in this book, the source of its humanity, is not written by Brigge. It can also be said that the entire book is the attempt by a ghost to lament about myth. Because the lament in the Bible allows the expectation that there are weapons against the demon of which the world of ghosts sspects nothing.   

In Abelone (15) is this desperate attempt made. Love in the notebooks is a great fraud, because ghosts do not know love. Brigge loves only things, where and while he mixes with them. The conclusion of the book is the dark presentiment that the ghostly is condemned. Despair creates a gap, and the Prodigal Son16 can be the crossing into a world in which the orders of things are firmly grounded. Love is the place toward which all ghosts stretch ad infinitum, because entry into that place is denied them. Thus arises a conception of love as a measure of a ghost’s despair, and Brigge attempts to foist this conception upon people.   

Ghosts do not know death, because in the world of the ghostly there is no death. Hence the huge role death plays in the Notebooks. The ghost tries in vain to explain to himself what death is for humanity. He invents a law that calms him (and delights the bourgeois reader as well, because it is new and powerful): men are as immortal as things, while demons die. Death is the medium of the demonic, which he admires. And this admiration gradually dissolves him, because he should resist it—he is a ghost—yet his attempts to do so are feeble: he wants to defend himself against the myth, and yet not forfeit death, in which alone to him immortality appears to beckon. This tears him apart and makes it possible to recognize the ghost. Death shatters the continuity that the Notebooks seek to simulate. Once again, mysticism fails.  

The hypothesis of the limit arises in his center. The knowledge that there are limits, is the lesson of this book—a lesson it tries to deny—and out of the darkness the messianic time shines in the lament. (17)

1 Scholem’s original text is to be found in Gershom Scholem: Tagebücher II, 1917–1923 (ed. Gründer, Kopp-Oberstebrink and Niewöhner) (Frankfurt am Main: Judischer Verlag, 2000), 292–296. The translation of Rilke’s novel used here is by Burton Pike (Champaign and London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2008). 2 Scholem, 242. All translations from the Tägebucher II are my own, with the permission of the publisher. 3 Scholem noted this in a journal entry dated June 2, 1918. Ibid., 232. A year later, he was still pinning down details: on July 25, while searching through a volume of dirges in a library in Switzerland, he identified the source as Job 30, in Luther’s translation, Ibid., 497. See also note 14 here.

4 In his memoir Walter Benjamin: A Friendship (trans. Harry Zohn) (New York: New York Review Books, 2001), Scholem wrote, “Sometimes [Benjamin] used the terms system and teaching almost interchangeably” (75). In these notes Scholem seems to be using “system” with just this undertone. 5 What Scholem means by “myth” and “mythical” is not defined in the text. Note 17 below provides one possibility, but Scholem’s definition of, and attitude toward, myth was very changeable at this time. 6 Benjamin had read to Scholem from notes (which have not survived) he had written on dreams and clairvoyance. The section on clairvoyance included “the law of the ghostly: If a being (which is always androgynous) is lost there appears, in a parallel process, a double which is its female self. The double which cannot be drawn into a unity is the sign of the ghostly.” Tagebücher (238). This became one of the primary “laws” Scholem employed in writing his note. As to why the ghostly double is female? In this instance, as with other clues Scholem has left in his journals, our understanding can only be partial. 7 This is a reference to Scholem’s idea that morality cannot exist without the “demonic” ambiguity of both sin and goodness. In a journal entry dated June 17, 1918 Scholem writes that philosopher “[Hermann] Cohen knows that the demonic is ambiguous (as are dreams),” 240. Scholem took this from Cohen’s Der Begriff der Religion im System der Philosophie (1915). Cohen wrote, “Human morality . . . can only be released from demonical ambiguity if the connection is severed between sin and grief.” (Scholem, 240, n18)

8 Scholem here refers to compression in Rilke’s poetry, which he did not care for. 9 “Colons” is here used in the sense of a long clause, common in classical rhetoric and in Biblical textual studies. Also, the German word for the colon as a punctuation mark is “Doppelpunkt,” which resonates with Benjamin’s “Doppel.” 10 Rilke, 124.

11 Already at twenty, Scholem had, after a period of initial enthusiasm, become disillusioned with Martin Buber, seeing him as an opportunist with a weak moral sense. 12 Rilke included references to famous (though in the text unnamed) artists and writers in Malte Laurids Brigge. Burton Pike explains the Bettina reference: “At age 22, in 1807, Bettina [von Arnim] had been introduced . . . to Goethe, who was almost 60. . . . Bettina later embroidered [their subsequent correspondence] quite a bit for publication. Malte, taking the exchange at face value, clearly favors the youthful ardor of her letters over Goethe’s guarded responses, for Rilke a demonstration of the superior power of women’s power to love over man’s” (Rilke, 196). This oversimplifies Brigge’s reaction. See note 14 below. 13 By this Scholem may in part have meant that Brigge was comparing Abalone, his young aunt with whom he is involved (see note 15 below), to Bettina, whom he sees as being saint-like, eternal—“Everywhere she placed herself deeply into being, as part of it, and whatever happened to her was eternally part of nature; there she recognized herself and crystallized herself out of it most painfully, guessing her way back with effort from old documents, conjuring herself like a ghost, and enduring” (150–151). If so, he may again have been interpolating the idea of the female “double which cannot be drawn into a unity.” Abalone, being a real rather than an ideal woman, one who demands attention for herself, could never be part of a perfect unity. Is Scholem demonizing her here? 14 The lament—“My harp has become a lament, and my flute a weeping”— appears on page 39 in Pike’s translation. So Scholem locates the book’s “ultimate point” only a fifth of the way through the novel. 15 He is first drawn to her singing: “If it us true that angels are masculine, one might well say there was something masculine in her voice: a radiant, heavenly masculinity. . . .” (Rilke, 42) They have an affair, but Brigge neglects her “in the midst of our most blissful time” in favor of reading. When Abalone reads Brigge one of Bettina’s love letters to Goethe: “ her voice grew and finally almost resembled the [angelic]

voice I knew from her singing” (150). As he reads further in the correspondence Abalone is subsumed and replaced by Bettina, whose he sees as having “spread herself out as broadly as if she were writing after her death” (Ibid.). He comes to feel that Goethe neglected Bettina in the same way he neglected Abalone. But he defends Goethe (and himself) by saying that neither could have done any differently. Bettina’s letters point out how a “loving woman always exceeds the beloved man. . . . Her devotion wants to be immeasurable: this is her happiness” (152). Goethe’s less-involved response was because love such as Bettina’s (or any woman’s) “needs no response, it contains summons and answer in itself. . . . But he would have had to humble himself . . . and write what it dictated . . . kneeling” (151). 16 Brigge feels that the story of the Prodigal Son is “the legend of him who did not want to be loved” (Rilke, 184). In Brigge’s version of the story, the Prodigal Son wanted no longer to be around anyone who knew him, anyone whom he could affect positively or negatively, but to be free to live detached and indifferent. If the Prodigal Son returns home he renters the world where “Trifles might still change, but on the whole one was already the person they took one for; he for whom they had long since constructed a life out of his small past and their own desires. . . .” (185). At the novel’s conclusion, Brigge decides he “[does] not yet want to” make such a return (191). He prefers to remain detached, at home only in the world of ideas. This may be Scholem’s temptation, as well. 17 Scholem and Benjamin had spoken of the world as having three eras, “the ghostly, the demonic, the messianic (as I suggested we call it [rather than that of “revelation”]). The actual content of myth, which fills the demonic era, is the tremendous revolution that ended the ghostly era. Myth is polemical against the ghostly. The creation of Eve from one of Adam’s ribs is a polemic” (Scholem, 238). This final sentence suggests that Scholem believes Brigge will ultimately perish as a result of his attempts at self-isolation.