1. Introduction: The Poet as Mental Refugee
For all their fame and renown as Parisian prowlers and pre-eminent practitioners of flânerie, Rainer Maria Rilke and Charles Baudelaire —or at least their narrative voices— spend a remarkable amount of time indoors, to the point that it would seem that the private room is as privileged a setting for their literature as the busy city-street. The love of interiors is not exclusive of these two writers; on the contrary, it appears to be one of the common threads of modern literature. One recalls, for example, that when Proust opens Remembrance of Things Past with an elegiac description of the processes of waking up and falling asleep, the private room becomes an image of great importance:
I had seen first one and then another of the rooms in which I had slept during my life, and in the end I would revisit them all in the long course of my waking dream: […] rooms where, in a keen frost, I would feel the satisfaction of being shut in from the outer world.
In this passage, as in the work of Proust at large, the physical setting of the room is intimately tied to a kind of mental activity that can be termed inner experience. Proust —and with him most modernist writers, including Rilke and Baudelaire— is primarily concerned with such experience; that which, like a room to which only one person has the key, is accessible only for the subject who experiences it. One could then posit that these elements are not independent from each other; and that, as Proust’s text suggests later on, the room is a metaphor for the mind: “I had succeeded in filling [the room] with my own personality until I thought no more of the room than of myself.”
This movement towards interiority, as a modern literary phenomenon, seems to have historical and sociological causes. It arises as a defense mechanism that the individual uses to protect himself from the growing social pressures of modernity. The mind and the private room become a refuge from the street and a safe heaven from what Georg Simmel called “the sovereign powers of society.”The “blasé attitude” that the father of social theory describes as a “protection of the inner life against the domination of the metropolis” can be read as a description of interiority. After all, in it is implicit a “turning inwards” of the subject. This description seems compatible with the anti-social nature of the works of Rilke and Baudelaire, for whom interiority seems to be a response to an exterior that threatens their very existence as individuals. The antagonism to other people and to exterior events described by Simmel as directly proportional to the “intensification of consciousness”coincides precisely with the privileging of inner experience seen in the work of modernist writers. Faced with the totalizing socialization of the modern city —what Baudelaire, greatest of all physiognomist, would call “the tyranny of the human face” the poet retreats into his room and into his subjectivity —and modern poetry is born.
With its many blessings and protections, however, interiority also brings isolation. The interior man begins to doubt if communication with an external other is at all possible. Indeed, as the narrative voices of Rilke and Baudelaire soon discover, locking oneself up in a room can provide protection from a threatening world and safeguard one’s individuality, but it also seems to preclude any chance of communion with others. This isolation becomes twice problematic when the narrative voices realize that they suffer from profound solitude, a burning desire for this apparently unfeasible communication. The narrative voices of Rilke and Baudelaire, for all their displays of disgust at social interaction, are constantly calling for someone —usually their mothers— to visit their rooms. Baudelaire’s paraphrasing of Pascal puts it extremely lucidly: “Almost all our woes come from not being capable of remaining in our rooms.” The problem, of course, is that it is impossible to remain forever alone in one’s room.
This tension between the desire to be a distinct, independent individual and yet also be an integral part of the world can be called the anguish of interiority. This essay will attempt to describe the use that Rilke and Baudelaire try to make of interiority as a means of preserving individuality, then point out the problems that this defense mechanism presents for them, and then sketch what appears a solution: writing, poetry itself.
2. Becoming Interior I: Death and Aristocracy in Malte Laudris Brigge
The use of interiority as a defense from the de-individualizing tendencies of modern society is first apparent in Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laudris Brigge when the titular protagonist discusses the differences between dying in a hospital and dying at home. Rilke has his protagonist write: “In the Hôtel de Dieu, [people] die in five hundred and fifty nine beds. It is a factory production line. […] The wish for a death of one’s own is becoming ever more infrequent.” To die in a hospital is to die a public, indifferent death, identical to the deaths of hundreds of people. To die in a private room at home, however, is different; it is a distinctive, unique death, tailored precisely to the size of the individual. Malte exemplifies this with his narration of the death of his grandfather, Chamberlain Brigge: “The rambling old manor was too small for [Chamberlain Brigge’s] death. […] He was forever demanding to be carried to one room to the next. […] He would be borne upstairs [and] he would enter the room where his sainted mother has passed away twenty-three years ago. […] The dogs in particular seemed immensely excited to be in a room where everything had its smell.” The connection between spatial interiority and personal individuality is evinced by the dog’s reactions: a room where everything has its smell is a room that has been taken over by the particular smells of its occupants. Perhaps there is here an implicit contrast with the chemical, aseptic, de-humanized smell of public hospitals. In any case, when the Chamberlain finally expires in the same room where his beloved mother passed away, he dies a true individual.
In the same description of the death of his grandfather, Malte writes: “In sanatoriums […] you die one of the deaths available at the institution. […] If, however, you die at home, the natural choice is that courteous death the genteel classes die.” In what at first sight appears as mere snobbishness, Rilke’s character also links individuality and interiority to social class. For Malte, the aristocratic character seems to be a marker of individuality, opposed to the undifferentiated mode of being of the “common people.” His hatred —or rather his fear— of what he terms the cities’ “untouchables” responds less to reactionary politics than to a fear of becoming de-individualized. The true tragedy of poverty is the tragedy of the modern city: anonymity. This fear of the untouchables is stated most clearly later on, during Malte’s description of his visits to the Bibliotèque Nationale:
In the busiest of streets, a little man or an old woman will suddenly appear, nod, show me something and disappear again, as though all that was needed had now been attended too. It is possible that one day they will even venture as far as my room. […] But here [in the Bibliothèque Nationale], my dears, here I am safe from you. One needs a special card to have access to the reading room.
Malte is terrified that these “untouchables” will irrupt into his room, violating his interiority and thus destroying his individuality. The passage, moreover, serves to demonstrate a link between physical and mental interiority: the acts of reading and writing, pure mental activity, become associated with the reading room itself. The “untouchables” of the city are entirely exterior; they do not read and write. Since they do not have access to the reading room, it must follow, that they do not have the complex interior life of the aristocrat.
For Malte, then, aristocracy is synonymous with individuality; it is an objective and external system of distinction. As such, when modernity eats away at the old aristocratic order, it also threatens the existence of independent individuals. The death of Malte’s grandfather is by equal parts pre-modern and aristocratic, and these two characteristics are closely linked to each other. Here, again, individuality is linked to private spaces: “[Now] one has no one and nothing oneself, and one travels the world with a suitcase and a box of books, and when all’s said and done, no curiosity at all. What kind of life is it, with neither house nor inherited things nor dogs?” This is when the inward turn occurs for Malte: since he has lost his ancestral home, the only way left for him to differentiate himself from the crowd are his rented room, his thoughts, and his memories: “If only one had one’s memories at least. But then, who does? If only one had a childhood —but it is as if it were buried deep.” The Notebooks constitute precisely an attempt at unburying those memories, and in fact the physical notebook itself could be seen as a representation of private space and a substitute for the old manor house. After all, journals —like rooms— are fitted with locks to which only one person has the key. This is, then, how interiority is born: since the external order of differentiation that existed in the aristocratic age has disappeared, Malte must retreat into his subjectivity and create a private system that allows him to see himself as different from the people he sees in the street.
3. Becoming Interior II: Lies and the Odiousness of Society in The Parisian Prowler
Throughout his “Little Prose Poems,” Baudelaire comes off as a dedicated misanthrope. In the Dog and the Scent-Bottle, for example, he compares the public to a dog who cannot differentiate the finest perfumes from excrement: “You, unworthy companion of my dreary life, you resemble the public, which must never be offered delicate perfumes that exasperate them, but only meticulously selected garbage.”If Malte is afraid of the people of the city, Baudelaire is disgusted by them —to the point that merely touching their skin is difficult: “Today I] greeted about twenty persons, fifteen of whom I didn’t know; distributed handshakes in the same proportion, and without eve the precaution of buying gloves.” This hatred for the anonymous members of the metropolitan crowd sometimes takes the form of outright violence, as in The Bad Glazier, where the narrative voice describes his arbitrary attack on a poor craftsman whose only crime is not making life beautiful:
“I went to the balcony and I grabbed a little pot of flowers, and when the man reappeared at the door entrance, I let my engine of war drop down perpendicularly on the back edge of his pack. […] Drunk with madness, I shouted at him furiously: “Make life beautiful! Make life beautiful!”
Indeed, Baudelaire’s main complaint of the inhabitants of the city seems to be an aesthetic one: they are both ugly and incapable of perceiving beauty, completely useless as both producers and consumers of art. This aesthetic incapability is intrinsically tied to their hypocritical moralizing, exemplified by the odious dictum of the journal editor encountered in At One O’clock in the Morning: “Here we are on the side of respectability.” Elsewhere, the narrative voice spits out at another journalist: “I especially want my damned journalist to let me enjoy myself as I like.” The crowd, Baudelaire seems to uphold, is incapable of making life beautiful because they do not see past their moralities: they want everything and everyone to be the good, that is, exactly the same. This equation of all people and of all things by definition excludes beauty, which is always born from uniqueness and individuality. The poet’s “adoration of evil” is then an attempt at an aesthetic differentiation: Baudelaire separates himself from the disgusting inhabitants of the city by “boasting (why?) of several bad deeds [he] never committed, and cravenly denied some other wrongs [he] carried out with joy.”
The relation of this aesthetic-immoralist method of individuation to interiority lies in Baudelaire’s self-questioning: the “why?” of the last quote, brought to the reader’s attention by a set of parenthesis, is an invitation to reflection. Why, indeed, does the poet need to lie about his evil deeds, if his aim is solely to show to the philistines that he is not like them? Perhaps it is because, through insincerity, he achieves an even more profound kind of individuation. His lie creates interiority; it builds a dichotomy between his inner and outer self, providing him with the private joy of knowing that no one truly knows him. Lies are, after all, a preeminent example of inner experience.
It is significant that Baudelaire should betray his turn toward interiority in At One O’clock in the Morning. The action of the poem is very simple: the narrative voice returns to his room after a long day enduring a “dreadful life” in a “dreadful city.” As such, Baudelaire’s creation of psychological interiority through lies becomes closely associated with the very physical privacy offered to him by his room: “First, a double turn in the lock. I think this turn of the key will increase my solitude and fortify the barricades at present separating me from the world.”Baudelaire’s lie is, after all, a linguistic turn of a key, the creation of a metaphysical barricade separating him from the world. Returning to the incident of the flowerpot and the glazier, it is significant that Baudelaire should attack the poor man from his balcony; a space that is not only interior but also, in both a literal and figurative sense, above —this last term understood with the dual meaning of the French word supérieur. His senseless act of violence, like his lie, is an expulsion of the other from his two interiorities: his room and his inner self.
It then evident that the narrative voice of The Parisian Prowler and the titular protagonist of The Notebooks of Malte Laudris Brigge are trying to achieve the same feat: an assertion of their individuality in the face of a society that threatens it. Though the paths they traverse in order to achieve this are formally different, the content of their actions is the same: it constitutes a retreat into private interiors, both physical and psychological.
4. The Anguish of Interiority I: Isolation in The Parisian Prowler
Judging by how much anguish separation from the world causes Rilke and Baudelaire, it would almost seem that they have been too successful in their creation of a private interiority —as if, like madmen, they had immured themselves in their own rooms. The suffering brought forth by this excessive success in the defense of individuality becomes manifest as a fear of the impossibility of communication, exemplified by Malte’s reflection on an incident in his childhood:
I already felt that something had come into my life, mine and none other, that I alone would have to bear with me henceforth, forever and ever. I somehow vaguely [foresaw] that that was how life would be: full of special things that are intended for one person only and cannot be put into words. […] I pictured what it could be like to go through life filled with inner experience, in silence.
And indeed, the interior man is condemned to silence —or at least to an empty language that fails at communicating the true nature of his experience. This is what Baudelaire describes in The Eyes of the Poor, a bitter diatribe against a lover who is as incapable of understanding as the poet is of explaining himself “Ah, you want to know why I hate you today! It will probably be less easy for you to understand why than for me to explain; for you are, I believe, the most beautiful example of feminine impermeability anyone can meet.” Somewhat disingenuously, the poet projects his failings on his lover; it is actually he who is impermeable and impenetrable, and, by his own standards, feminine. His lover, as it turns out later, is in fact quite transparent, and openly expresses how she feels. When a family of poor people stares at the couple as they dine in an elegant café, Baudelaire describes the situation in the following manner: Not only was I moved by that family of eyes, but I felt a little ashamed of our glasses and decanters, larger than our thirst. I turned my gaze towards you, dear love, in order to read my thoughts there. As I was plunging into your eyes […] you said, “I can’t stand those people with their eyes wide open like entrance gates! Can’t you ask the headwaiter to send them away?
The anguish here, however, comes from the fact that the experience expressed by his lover differs from that of Baudelaire. The same phenomenon —a family of poor people staring into a café— provokes in them diametrically different responses. Both Baudelaire and his lover are subjective and interior, they exist in separate rooms, so to speak, and this fact destroys the illusion of communion that is common to almost all Western conceptions of love. Baudelaire acknowledges this explicitly:
We had indeed promised each other that all our thoughts would be shared with each other, and that our two souls would henceforth be one. —Anyway, there is nothing original about this dream, except that, dreamed by everyone, no one has realized it.
The difference between Baudelaire and his lover is, of course, that the lover does not think twice and naively shares her thoughts, distasteful as they are, with the poet; whereas he remains silent and impermeable. “How difficult to understand each other,” Baudelaire complaints, “and how incommunicable thought is, even among people who love each other!” Taking into consideration the fact that Baudelaire’s lover does not seem to have much trouble communicating her thoughts to him, it seems that the problem is exclusively the poet’s. Baudelaire’s metaphysical barricades have turned against him.
Indeed, Baudelaire’s refusal to communicate his experience to his lover may very well respond to the extremely defensive stance that he takes in relation to his individuality. In On Nietzsche, Georges Bataille, the great theorist of interiority and coiner of the terms anguish and inner experience, describes the danger that all acts of communication represent for the integrity of the individual:
I only communicate outside of me by letting go or being pushed to this outside. Still, outside of me, I don’t exist. There’s no doubt in my mind that to let go of existence inside me and to look for it outside is to take a chance on ruining or annihilating precisely whatever it is without which the outer experience wouldn’t have appeared in the first place —the self […] We are crushed by twin pincers of nothingness. By not communicating, we’re annihilated into the emptiness of an isolated life. By communicating, we likewise risk being destroyed.
Baudelaire treasures his individuality so much that communication becomes a very real problem from him. Malte echoes this concern when he writes: “My God, if only some of this could be shared. But would it then be, would it be? No, it is only at the price of solitude.” Isolation is the price of interiority, and as the language that Baudelaire uses in The Eyes of the Poor makes very clear, this is a source of great discomfort for the inner man. What he calls his “hatred” for his lover is in fact a kind of envy: she, simple as she is, is capable of expressing what she feels and is therefore not alone.
5. The Anguish of Interiority II: Solitude in The Notebooks of Malte Laudris Brigge
In one of the few times that Malte makes a definite attempt at communicating with another person, he writes a letter to his mother. The attempt is, of course, self-defeating: Malte’s mother has been dead for a long time. Despite that, the letter is telling: it betrays Malte’s profound solitude and his desire of communicating the very experiences that he deemed incommunicable. In a move typical of his style, the intended recipient of the letter remains unclear and indeterminate for more than half of the text, until the letter reaches an explosive emotional climax:
O insensible window on the world, O doors kept carefully shut, O the olden ways of living, adopted, approved, but never fully understood. O the silence on the staircase, the silence in the next room, the silence high under the ceiling, O Mother: O you, the only one who dealt with all that silence, back in my childhood; who took it upon herself, saying: Do not be afraid —it’s me.
Malte seems to be complaining of the irremediable divide that his interiority has created between himself and the rest of the world, and his very language —“insensible window on the world,” “doors kept carefully shut”— highlights his use of the physical room as a metaphor for metaphysical interiority. The invocative tone of the missive —“O Mother, O you, the only one…”— could very well be interpreted as a prayer or a request: Malte, alone in his rented room, is dying of solitude and is asking his mother to come back from the dead and pay him a visit. This reading is strengthened by the narration —eerily similar to one of the most famous passages in Proust— that Malte makes of an episode of his childhood:
Maman never came to me at night —or rather, she did come once. I had been screaming and screaming, […] At length they had sent the carriage for my parents, who were at a great ball given by the Crown Prince. […] Maman came [into my room], [and took] me in her bare arms. And I, with an astonishment and rapture I had never felt before, touched her hair and her small, immaculate face and the cold stones at her ears and the silk that fringed her bloom-fragrant shoulders.
This passage also further evinces the connection between psychological and physical interiority: the mother’s visit to Malte’s room is also a visit to his innermost self —a moment of communion and communication. Such a moment is valuable for Malte because of its rarity: there is nothing that indicates that ever since then —with the possible exception of a mysterious liaison with an older woman— has Rilke’s protagonist had a visitor to his room. His profound nostalgia for that moment is then indicative of the anguish of his present condition.
Another similar episode serves to exemplify the connection between this longing for communion and the failing of language seen earlier in Baudelaire:
The fever raged within me and dredged up from deep below experiences, images, facts I had known nothing of; I lay there, surfeited with myself, and waited for the moment when I would be commanded to layer it all back into me. […] I made a start, but it grew beneath my hands; it resisted; it was much too much. […] And then I screamed, half open as I was, I screamed and screamed. And when I began to look out of myself once again, they had been standing about my bed for a long time. […] And my father ordered me to say what the matter was. It was a friendly, muted order, but it was an order nonetheless. And he grew impatient when I made no answer.
Malte is unable to tell his father what is wrong with him because there are no words that could express his inner experience; very much in the same vein that Baudelaire is unable to communicate his feelings to his lover. Likewise, Baudelaire has his moment of invocation; at the end of his most interior of poems, At One O’clock in the Morning, the author of The Flowers of Evils calls out to the spirits of those who in the past have communed with him: “Souls of those I have loved, souls of those I have sung, fortify me, sustain me, remove from me untruth and the world’s corrupting fumes.” Though it may be unfair to make reference to extra-textual sources, a basic knowledge of the highly oedipical biography of the poet could allow one to count Baudelaire’s mother as one of those “souls of those I have loved” that he calls out to, thus establishing a further parallelism between the two poet’s response to the anguish of a silent and solitary room.
6. Writing: A Solution to the Problem of Interiority?
In From Anguish to Language, the introductory essay to Faux Pas, Maurice Blanchot writes what amounts to an explanation of how writing itself could be seen as a solution to the isolation and solitude of interiority:
A writer who writes “I am alone” […] can seem a little ludicrous. It is comical to be aware of one’s solitude while addressing a reader, making use of means that keep one from being alone. […] The “I am alone” of the writer has a simple meaning (no one is near me) that the use of language only seems to conflict.
Blanchot was a close friend and collaborator of Bataille, and so the use of the word anguish in the title of his essay is far from innocent. His point is fascinating: writing is, fundamentally, an act of communication, and many of the complaints of Baudelaire and Rilke —“How difficult it is to communicate!”— are, in fact, self-cancelling. The poets complain of the impossibility of transmitting their inner experience to others, and yet their poetry beautifully and effectively performs precisely that action. The very act of writing is an exteriorization of experience: interiority, when written, ceases to be purely interior. Someone has remarked that all diarists are, to put it paradoxically, closeted exhibitionists: every private journal contains within itself an implicit invitation, perhaps even a desire, for someone to read it. The same can be said of the famous Notebooks of Malte Laudris Brigge, which perhaps explains the almost voyeuristic pleasure one gets when reading them. Baudelaire’s great grievance against the impossibility of communication, At One O’clock in the Morning, is in fact addressed to his lover, to whom he refers in the second person: “Do you want to know why I hate you today?” Baudelaire performs in writing what he did not do with speech, but the action remains the same: his thoughts, his experience, become public.
The very texts in question seem to point towards this solution. When Baudelaire writes: “Lord my God! Grant me the grace to produce a few beautiful verses to prove to myself that I am not the lowest of men, that I am not inferior to those I despise,” he implies that writing itself can also be a mode of differentiation from the crowd; a way of preserving one’s own individuality without isolating oneself completely from the world. On the contrary: writing engages the world directly through contact with the Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère!
For Malte’s part, near the beginning of the Notebooks, after what amounts to a succinct description of everything that is problematic in modernity, Rilke’s protagonist states that he considers writing a calling and a mission:
Anyone —anyone who has had these disquieting thoughts— must make a start on some of the things that we have omitted to do; anyone at all, no matter if he is no the aptest to the task: the fact is, there is no one else. This young foreigner of no consequence, Brigge, will have to sit himself down, five flights up, and write, day and night: yes, that is what it will come to —he will have to write.
Again, the room appears —“he will have to sit himself down, five flights up”— but the passage seems to imply that the poet has a public obligation, almost a civic duty to write. Writing, as an act of the mind, is private and interior —but, as an act of language, communication and exteriority are inscribed in its very essence. One is safe in assuming that Malte does most of his writing in his room —“Now I am sitting in my room, I can try to reflect calmly on what has happened" — and yet his writing is full of vivid descriptions of cityscapes and city people. When writing, Malte is at the same time in his room and out in the world. He has achieved what Baudelaire termed “incomparable privilege of the poet,” the ability to be, at will “himself and an other.” That privilege, of course, is nothing else than the ability to be interior —that is, an individual— and exterior at the same time.
Sinceramente,
NMMP
