judith ryan, validating the possible. thoughts and things in james, rilke, and musil

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Validating the Possible: Thoughts and Things in James, Rilke, and MusilAuthor(s): Judith RyanSource: Comparative Literature, Vol. 40, No. 4 (Autumn, 1988), pp. 305-317Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of the University of OregonStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1771191 .

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FALL 1988

Volume 40, Number 4

JUDITH RYAN

Validating the

Possible: Thoughts and Things in James, Rilke, and Musil

IN HIS POEM "Les Fenetres," Mallarm6 envisages the notion of

falling through the mirror into the space behind it; in the last

analysis, he says, it is impossible, for it would doubtless mean to fall, with featherless wings, throughout eternity:

Est-il moyen, 6 Moi qui connais l'amertume, D'enfoncer le cristal par le monstre insulte Et de m'enfuir, avec mes deux ailes sans plume -Au risque de tomber pendant l'terniti?(33)

The mirror, of course, has often been used as a symbol of art, and it has usually had two meanings: first, the idea of mimesis, in which the mirror is a surface that simply reflects the world of actuality; second, an essentially Romantic idea, is that of the mirror as a symbol of the

poetic transformation of reality, a device that heightens the real and raises it to a higher power of itself. Mallarm6's desire to fall through the mirror is an extension of this thought, but in conceiving of mirror-

space as potential physical space it marks a new phase in the use of the mirror-image. Lewis Carroll's Alice is the one who finally takes the

plunge, stepping through the looking-glass into a world that strangely illuminates the contradictory logic of our own. The important thing about Alice's looking-glass world is that it is not a pallid imitation of the real world; it is, in its own way, equally real-a valid (though other) version of the world we know. The very idea of stepping into the looking-glass world marks a significant turning-point in the concep- tualization of the mirror, whose image had been regarded up to that point as in some sense "unreal," even if some thinkers saw it as present- ing a kind of higher truth than the world of the actual. In the early

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twentieth century the philosopher Edwin Bissell Holt, discussing the

ontological status of delusions, fantasies, and hallucinations, also examined the properties of mirror-space (Kuklick 345). This he re-

garded as a sub-class of ordinary space, since except for its lateral inversion it retained all the other properties of space as we know it. From this he argued that it would be wrong to say that hallucinations were subjective or "in the brain"-we did not say this of mirror-space.

Rilke brings up this issue in his novel Malte Laurids Brigge, in a

passage about a metal container standing on a mantlepiece in front of a mirror. The result, Malte writes, is that "dahinter noch eine Biichse

entsteht, eine tiiuschend iihnliche, imaginfire, eine Biichse, auf die wir

gar keinen Wert legen, nach der aber zum Beispiel ein Affe greifen wiirde. Richtig, es wiirden sogar zwei Affen danach greifen, denn auch der Affe wfire doppelt, sobald er aufdem Kaminrand ankdime (Siamtliche Werke 6:876). Malte's formulations here slide precariously between two

points of view: the first treats the mirror-image as a purely imaginary phenomenon that only a monkey would be silly enough to take for real; the second, however, treats both the monkey and his reflection as

phenomena of equal valence, speaking of "two monkeys" rather than of the monkey and his image.

In what sense can we say that mirror-space is real? How can we

declare, for example, that the virtual image is the same distance behind the mirror as the object is in front of it? Is there not a fundamental contradiction between this use of the verb "to be" and our designation of the image as "virtual"? A similar contradiction is contained in the title of this essay. What does it mean to "validate the possible"? Nor-

mally, we distinguish the possible from the actual, and a good deal of traditional philosophy has devoted itself to the problem of validating what we thus regard as the actual. But the problem takes on a whole new dimension in the empiricist philosophies that developed in the latter half of the nineteenth century. In this framework, familiar dichotomies

began to collapse: in particular, the distinction between subjective and

objective reality came to be understood as merely a convenient way of

thinking about the world. Similarly, the possible and the actual were

conflated; for WilliamJames, for example, the possible did not transcend the actual experiences of finite beings (Kuklick 285). By the same token, thoughts were no pallid reflections of actual reality: thoughts and things had the same status.

One of the best fictional treatments of this issue is to be found in

Musil's novel Die Verwirrungen des Zaiglings TbrleB. T6rleB first confronts the problem in connection with mathematics. His problem concerns the ontological status of unreal or imaginary numbers. On the one

hand, they seem somehow different from real numbers, which represent

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actual quantities or measurements. The surprising thing for T6rleB, however, is that one can operate with them just as well as with real numbers:

Denk doch nur einmal so daran: In solch einer Rechnung sind am Anfang ganz solide Zahlen, die Meter oder Gewichte oder irgendetwas Greifbares darstellen k6nnen und

wenigstens wirkliche Zahlen sind. Am Ende der Rechnung stehen ebensolche. Aber diese beiden hingen miteinander durch etwas zusammen, das es gar nicht gibt. Ist das nicht wie eine Briicke, von der nur Anfangs- und Endpfeiler vorhanden sind und die man

dennoch so sicher fiberschreitet, als ob sie ganz dastiinde?(81)

T6rleB's image of a bridge which has pylons but no middle, yet which can be crossed just the same, exemplifies very well the empiricist problem. His friend Beineberg urges him to take a pragmatic attitude. As

long as one can operate with the unreal numbers, one should not be concerned about their status, Beineberg claims. But T6rleB persists in

trying to validate the possible, seeing his experiences with the other

boys in the attic room as another part of this attempted validation. After the final crisis, when he flees from the boarding-school and is

eventually brought back to face a commission consisting of the headmas- ter and various teachers, he tries again to explain what it was he was

looking for. The teachers wish to be sympathetic, the mathematics master suggesting that T6rleB was concerned with metaphysics, the

religion teacher that he was interested in the transcendent. In vain

T6rleB struggles to convince them that he has been seeking something quite different; in vain he tries to explain to them the nature of the

experiences he has gone through. But since these experiences have to do with the abolition of conventional barriers between world and self, thoughts and things, his increasingly convoluted explanations sound like the ravings of a madman. Giving up their attempts to make sense of his words, the teachers seem to believe that he is having a breakdown. But if we look attentively at the end of T6rleB's long explanatory speech, we can see in it a reformulation of the problem of mirror-space that concerned Edwin Holt:

Jetzt ist das voriiber. Ich weiB, daB ich mich doch geirrt habe; Ich fiirchte nichts mehr. Ich weiB: die Dinge sind die Dinge und werden es wohl immer bleiben; und ich werde

sie wohl immer bald so, bald so ansehen. Bald mit den Augen des Verstandes, bald mit den anderen . . . (143-44)

T6rleB has arrived at a most important insight, one that unfortunately escapes his teachers. He has come to understand that the actual and

the possible are related to each other in a special way in which the one does not exclude the other. One might say that his new way of seeing "bald mit den Augen des Verstandes, bald mit den anderen" resembles that well-known optical illusion (known as the "figure-ground phenome-

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non") in which the black parts at the side represent two profiles facing each other and the white space in the center looks like a large goblet. Depending on one's mental set, one can make the picture seem to

represent faces or a goblet, but never both at once. One can only alternate between the two visions: the question of which one the picture actually represents is an invalid one. T6rleB realizes this when he says, "die Dinge sind die Dinge und werden es wohl immer bleiben." But the question is one readers persist in asking of texts whose basis is in this way empiricist.

When T6rleB speaks of the "click" in his head he is referring to the

phenomenon of alternating visions. Similarly, Ulrich's response (in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften) to his sister's suggestion that they are Siamese twins with a kind of intercommunicating nervous system is to take it

alternately as a monstrous joke and as an actual fact of their existence. In The Spoils of Poynton, Henry James seems to refer almost directly to the figure-ground phenomenon:

It seemed to Fleda not difficult for each to know of what the other was thinking-to know indeed that they had in common two alternating visions, one of which, at moments,

brought them as by a common impulse to a pause. This was the one that was fixed; the other filled at times the whole space and then was shouldered away.(10:230-31)

And in his short story, The Real Thing, James explores how an alternating vision of the real and the unreal can directly affect the person experienc- ing it. Here a gentleman and lady who have lost their fortune offer themselves as models-"the real thing"-to a second-rate artist who earns his living by doing book illustrations. It turns out that a little

Cockney girl is a much more effective and seemingly realistic model, and the artist must give the noble couple a sum of money to make them go away. Nonetheless, he claims at the end that, although the

experience may have condemned him to remain second-rate forever, he is "content to have paid the price-for the memory"(18:346). He has learned the value of the invisible bridge: his disappointment with the "real thing" has helped him, in effect, to validate the unreal.

A more sophisticated version of this problem is developed in James's novel The Ambassadors. We might even say that the story is the account of Strether's attempt to validate a possibility. The possibility, as conceived by Mrs. Newsome and her friends in Woollett, Mass., is simply that her son Chad is involved in an illicit and sordid affair. Strether is

dispatched to investigate the matter; but France, as he well knows, is a different world in which the dreadful possibility has quite another value than in Woollett, Mass. If he validates the possibility, however, it will no longer be a possibility-it will be an actuality. And so he is more than willing to accept Chad's friend's contention that the suppo-

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JAMES, RILKE, MUSIL

sition is wrong. In doing so, Strether in effect redefines the possibility. He redefines it by taking over Little Bilham's suggestion that Chad's

relationship with Mme de Vionnet is a "virtuous attachment." And Strether's subsequent understanding of the new world in which he finds himself and of what he regards as Chad's wonderful development is colored by his new presupposition. When he finally sees Chad and

Mme de Vionnet out boating in the countryside, it seems as if actuality had countermanded possibility. But the scene begins with Strether's

perception of the landscape as a picture, and the revealing boating excursion is itself but a familiar literary topos. This view of things enables Strether to move beyond the common-sense interpretation of the relationship as his friends in America would see it. He refuses to let the beautiful possibility be replaced by a sordid actuality. Instead, the two fuse to create a new reality that incorporates them both. To- wards the end, Strether says to Sara Pocock, who has been sent over from the States to untangle the situation:

Everything has come as a sort of indistinguishable part of everything else [... ] Our general state of mind has proceeded, on its side, from our queer ignorance, queer miscon-

ceptions and confusions-from which, since then, an inexorable tide of light seems to have floated us into our perhaps still queerer knowledge.(21:201)

Strether's knowledge is "queer" not only because it does not fall into

any of his accustomed categories of thought, but also because it has

proceeded directly from a misconception. Like T6rleB, Strether has walked across a bridge that isn't there. More importantly, perhaps, Strether's view of the thing-the way in which he has allowed the

possible to suffuse the actual-seems quite palpably also to have affected Chad. It is Strether's mental elimination of the barrier between the sordid and the beautiful that permits Chad to let go of his life in France and return to America on a new basis. It is like T6rleB's sum in which the unreal numbers have had an actual effect upon the real ones.

When the actual and the possible are conceived as having the same

ontological status, all of our familiar modes of thought are cast into

disarray. One of the most troubling literary attempts to address this

problem is Musil's story Tonka. It is the tale of a young man who has fallen in love and set up house with a simple girl. After some time, Tonka becomes pregnant; but when her companion tries to calculate the probable date of conception, he finds that it must have occurred

during a period when he was absent. Yet Tonka maintains persistently that the child is his. When Tonka finally dies in childbirth, it is of a disease that must have originated with the father of the baby and have been transmitted to her by the fetus. Since the young man does not himself have the disease, the possibility that he might have fathered

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the child, as Tonka claims, appears to be negated. Yet on another level of his being he seems persuaded that in some sense Tonka was not

lying when she declared her faithfulness to him. Now that Tonka is

dead, the matter cannot be clarified. In the last analysis, we must

accept that Tonka's view of herself is just as valid as her friend's fear of its opposite. This irreducible ambiguity has its roots in Musil's belief in the equivalence of the actual and the possible, a way of thinking that has been articulated from the very beginning of the story. Here Tonka is seen as part of a single continuum with the environment:

An einem Zaun. Ein Vogel sang. Die Sonne war dann schon irgendwo hinter den Biischen. Der Vogel schwieg. Es war Abend. Die Bauernmaidchen kamen singend fiber die Felder. Welche Einzelheiten! Ist es Kleinlichkeit, wenn solche Einzelheiten sich an einen Menschen heften? Wie Kletten!? Das war Tonka. Die Unendlichkeit flief3t manch- mal in Tropfen.(264)

This complex interrelatedness of self and world, thoughts and things, is made more explicit in a later passage:

Er brauchte nur zum Fenster hinauszusehen, so schob sich pl6tzlich in die Welt eines unten wartenden Droschkenkutschers die eines voriibergehenden Beamten und es ent- stand etwas Aufgeschnittenes, ein ekelhaftes Durcheinander, Ineinander und Miteinander auf der Strafle, ein Wirrwarr von bahnenziehenden Mittelpunkten, um deren jeden ein Kreis von Weltgefallen und Selbstvertrauen lag, und das alles waren Hilfen, um aufrecht durch eine Welt zu gehen, der das Oben und Unten fehlte. Wollen, Wissen und Fiihlen sind wie ein Kndiuel verschlungen; man merkt es erst, wenn man das Fadenende verliert; aber vielleicht kann man anders durch die Welt gehen als am Faden der Wahrheit?(292)

Tonka's function has been to illustrate to the young man this insoluble

tangle of thoughts and things. We judge the tale wrongly if we imagine that we are meant to solve the mystery of the baby's paternity. The

point of the narrative, rather, is to demonstrate a radical ambiguity: the co-existence of the actual and the possible on the same plane.

Henry James's The Turn of the Screw is an even more pointed example of this problem. Its double narrative structure makes the issue more evident than the modified third-person technique of The Ambassadors or of Musil's Tonka. The outer frame is formed by a group of people telling ghost stories. Some of those present simply wish to be gruesomely entertained, like the woman who, on hearing of the existence of the

story, remarks with glee: "Oh, how delicious!"(12:148). The owner of the governess's manuscript takes no notice of her. Instead, he looks at the narrator "as if, instead of me, he saw what he spoke of." This

immediately places the story into the category of something that depends on a special kind of vision. The governess, as she writes down her experiences, is clearly convinced that the apparitions exist. To the extent that she is so convinced, she is, from the empiristic point of view,

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recounting an experience as real as any other. But her mistake, if one can put it that way, is to attempt to verify this possibility. One of the discoveries she makes as she tries to do so is that of the strange alter- nation between the actual and the possible, as we have seen it in the

figure-ground phenomenon. For although the strange apparitions, Miss

Jessel and Peter Quint, are in fact intruding upon the everyday domes-

ticity of the governess and her young charges and thus appear as a kind of interruption of reality, she feels when confronted with them that the ghosts are more real than she herself: "While these moments lasted indeed I had the extraordinary chill of a feeling that it was I who was the intruder"(257). The apparitions strangely co-exist with

impressions from the "real" world: they take their place in what the

governess feels to be gaps in her stream of consciousness, just as Rilke's mirrors exist in the spaces between time.' The governess's description of her predecessors' appearances bears a remarkable resemblance to William James's account of how attention is simultaneously focused and "fringed" or-perhaps even more relevant--of the way in which certain lapses of memory, such as forgetting a name, are not "empty" gaps but ones that resist being filled by any other kind of substance.2 The governess describes the phenomenon in some detail:

After these secret scenes I chattered more than ever, going on volubly enough till one of our prodigious, palpable hushes occurred-I can call them nothing else-the strange, dizzy lift or swim (I try for terms!) into a stillness, a pause of all life, that had nothing to do with the more or less noise that at the moment we might be engaged in making and that I could hear through any deepened exhilaration or quickened recitation or louder strum of the piano. Then it was that the others, the outsiders, were there.(12:245- 46)

When the governess perceives the ghosts along with actual reality she senses what she calls "a fierce split in my attention"(303)-a wonderful

description of how it would feel if we could manage to see both the

goblet and the profiles at one and the same time. If we think about this problem, we can see that it also underlies, at

least in part, the situation faced by Rilke's Malte Laurids Brigge. Malte's grandfather, Graf Brahe, has a remarkable attitude to the relation between the actual and the possible: for him, all phases of time co-exist equally, so that ghosts of friends long dead are as familiar to him as the living members of his household. For Malte, however, there is no such easy continuum. He remains caught in the alternating vision

dilemma. When Malte and his mother look at old pieces of lace, they imagine that they have stepped into marvelous gardens and hothouses;

I "Ihr mit lauter L6chern von Sieben/ geffillten Zwischenriiume der Zeit" (1:752). 2 W. James 251; on the notion of the "fringe," cf. 258 and 275-276.

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and as the description proceeds, the subjunctive gives way to the indi-

cative, as if indeed the imagined had become the real. They grope their

way through snow-laden branches in a fantasy landscape summoned

up by the old lace, and finally his mother says: "Oh, jetzt bekommen wir Eisblumen an den Augen"(SW 4:835)-a statement that so man-

ifestly regards the imaginary as real that it alarms them. Malte and his mother are left with innumerable pieces of lace to roll up and put away.

Of the many attempts Malte makes to validate the possible, I shall discuss here only two of the more prominent. The first is his experience with the man suffering from St. Vitus dance, whom he sees walking along in front of him on a Paris street. Malte hypothesizes that he can lend this man his will-power, and for a while the attempt seems to succeed. The jerky movements that threaten to burst out of the man seem subdued and restrained by Malte's intense effort. His strange idea that the boundaries between one self and another can be broken down seems for a time to have been validated. But in the end, the disease reasserts itself: the man falls down in a fit and is hidden from Malte's sight by a crowd of anxious bystanders. The experiment appears to have failed.

Malte's childhood experience with the mirror in the attic, however, seems to prove the opposite. While trying on old clothes, Malte conceives the hope that the costume he has put on might actually transform him, and he runs to the mirror to confirm this. To his surprise, the mirror

reality seems to be more "real" than the actuality. Fleeing in terror from the apparition in the mirror, Malte first loses his voice, then his

consciousness, and falls down into a faint before the uproariously laugh- ing servants. This experience seems to prove that the possible can be

validated, and it gives us a sense of some of the horror that pertains to this conception. For as in the alternating images of the figure-ground phenomenon, validation of the possible seems to extinguish the actual, if only for a moment.

In contrast to the works by Musil and Henry James that I have discussed here, Rilke's Malte Laurids Brigge is far less firmly anchored in empiricist thought. Where Musil knew of empiricism through the work of Ernst Mach, on whom he wrote his dissertation, and Henry James knew of it through his brother William, Rilke had no access to

comparable sources, although, to be sure, the entire impressionist move- ment in which his work has its origins was dependent on the empiricist view of things (cf. Diersch). Rilke's novel is fraught with a basic inde-

cision, whether the problem he addresses is that everything is subjective (cf. Ryan) or that there is no boundary between subject and object. Many passages in the novel confirm a tendency in Rilke to move in what

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is essentially an empiricist direction: such key sentences as "Es ist kein Dach iiber mir und es regnet mir in die Augen," or "Ich bin der

Eindruck, der sich verwandeln wird" suggest a thoroughly empiricist interpenetration of the inner and outer worlds. One of the problems Rilke seems to be treating in Malte is whether possibility can be ac- tualized without depriving it of its quality, so to speak, of possibleness. Twelve years later, he treats the problem again in his sonnet on the unicorn (which in turn relates to the section on the Dame a' la Licorne

tapestries at the end of Book I of Malte). Here he playfully claims that the unicorn came into being simply as a result of the thought that such an animal might exist; yet he makes it clear that it comes into existence in a special way: the end of the sonnet depicts the Virgin holding the mirror up before her, and the poet states that the unicorn exists "im

Silber-Spiegel und in ihr"(1:753). This is an excellent example of the

equation of mirror-space with mental space, and a wonderful depiction of the ambiguous status of the imaginary.3

One consequence of empiricist thought is the assumption that such ideas are as real as anything else. It is important to distinguish this

notion, however, from other turn-of-the-century ideas that are based on other presuppositions. Hofmannsthal's Ein Brief assumes a distinction between thoughts and things by the very fact that it calls in its conclusion for a "stumme Sprache der Dinge." His is a very different

attempt to abolish dualistic thinking, essentially by abolishing language. Though some of Rilke's ideas are related to those of the Chandos-letter, others remain closer to empiricism. When Malte speaks of "die Zeit der anderen Auslegung" (6:756) in which, as he puts it, one word will not remain upon another, he is expressing a thought very similar to that of Hofmannsthal's Lord Chandos. And the famous passage where Malte repeatedly asks: "Ist es m6glich?" (726-28) also addresses-

amongst other things-the problem of the disjunction between language and reality. But at the same time, as we have seen, Malte is also concerned with what he sees as an interpenetration of self and world or even, in the passages where he describes himself as "ein Nichts" (726), as a "world without a self."4

Rilke's Neue Gedichte rest upon fundamental assumptions that include the interchangeability of thoughts and things, though they also seem to assume the necessity of a kind of dialectic of transformation not

really compatible with this idea. Thus on the one hand the structures of these poems rest upon a belief in the higher valence of the "invisible" and the assumption that the function of art consists in turning the visible into the invisible. On the other hand, Rilke casts around his

3 Cf. also his poem "Das Gold," 1:578-579. 4 Virginia Woolf's formulation (204). Cf. also James Naremore.

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objects a whole network of images such that thoughts and things extend in a single line with each other. His poems on flamingos or the gazelle exemplify this underlying idea of interchangeability (629-30;506). Little is said about the supposed object of the poem; instead, a series of

metaphors and similes is adduced, at such length indeed that they even

begin to obliterate the object. The metaphors take on a life of their

own, at least as vivid as that of the object they describe. In a poem like Die Fensterrose one is more inclined to remember the huge cats

pacing around in a circle than the rose window for which these cats are an explanatory equivalent.

Significantly, Henry James uses a similar technique, building up complex images around-not concrete objects, as Rilke does, but around

thoughts and possibilities. The following example from The Golden Bowl is characteristic:

He remembered to have read, as a boy, a wonderful tale by Allan Poe, his prospective wife's countryman-which was a thing to show, by the way, what imagination Americans could have: the story of the shipwrecked Gordon Pym, who, drifting in a small boat further toward the North Pole--or was it the South?-than anyone had ever done, found at a given moment before him a thickness of white air that was like a dazzling curtain of light, concealing as darkness conceals, yet of the colour of milk or snow. There were moments when he felt his own boat move upon some such mystery. The state of mind of his new friends, including Mrs. Assingham herself, had resemblances to a great white curtain. He had never known curtains but as purple even to blackness-but as producing where they hung a darkness intended and ominous.(23:22-23)

The curtain image here almost takes over from the thing it is intended to describe-Prince Amerigo's bewilderment in his relation to his new American friends. Similarly, the pagoda image that begins Book II of The Golden Bowl is a good deal more than merely an objective correlative for a state of mind:

This situation had been occupying, for months and months, the very centre of the garden of her life, but it had reared itself there like some strange, tall tower of ivory, or perhaps rather some wonderful, beautiful but outlandish pagoda, a structure plated with hard, bright porcelain, coloured and figured and adorned, at the overhanging eaves, with silver bells that tinkled, ever so charmingly, when stirred by chance airs. She had walked round and round it-that was what she felt; she had carried on her existence in the space left her for circulation, a space that sometimes seemed ample and sometimes narrow; looking up, all the while, at the fair structure that spread itself so amply and rose so high, but never quite making out, as yet, where she might have entered had she wished.(24:3)

Clearly, this is not simply a simile found by the narrator to express Maggie's state of mind. It is Maggie's own actualization of her thoughts and feelings, and the image helps her to gain new awareness of her situation. In fact, the pagoda idea appears to have a direct effect upon her ability to think her situation through. The passage concludes:

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"Something had happened; it was as if a sound, at her touch, after a

little, had come back to her from within; a sound sufficiently suggesting that her approach had been noted" (24:4). The image of the pagoda is the invisible bridge that helps Maggie proceed from one side of the

abyss and land sure-footedly on the other. As with Rilke, the images and metaphors are notjust an attempt to translate into words something otherwise inexpressible; they are actually instrumental in the progres- sion from one state of awareness to another.

There are several consequences of this way of seeing things. For one

thing, it involves a new conception of the status of poetry. To be sure, Rilke did not fully understand this-hence his crisis after the completion ofMalte Laurids Brigge. He remained to the end of his life unsure whether his aim should be to try to effect a transformation of the actual or to validate the possible as an equal element of our experience. The Elegien subscribe to the former, the Sonette to the latter view.

Bringing empiricist concepts to bear may also put into a new light some critical controversies that have been remarkably persistent. With

regard to Henry James, some critics, notably Richard Hocks and Shlomith Rimmon, have argued in favor of a kind of irresolvable am-

biguity. But others continue to debate such questions as whether the

ghosts in The Turn of the Screw are to be taken seriously or not. Seeing The Turn of the Screw in an empiricist context not only eliminates the

grounds for this debate, but also places the text more squarely within the framework ofJames's work in general.

With Musil, who is well known to have been influenced by empiricism, one might have expected certain controversies to have been clarified long since. From the empiricist point of view, there can be no

problem about the ending of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. If the actual and the possible have the same ontological status, it is irrelevant to ask whether "der andere Zustand" can be realized or not. It is real, simply, insofar as it is hypothesized. After all, the whole "Parallelak-

tion," upon which the early part of the plot depends, is itself merely the parodistic actualization of an idea. The novel's conclusion only appears problematic when we assume-falsely-a kind of duality between the actual and the possible that does not exist for Musil.

In the case of Rilke, we are able, from this new viewpoint, to resolve such critical debates as whether Malte succeeds or fails, the question whether the Neue Gedichte can be called "Dinggedichte," and even the

problem of Rilke's relationship to Romanticism. These issues take on

a new dimension once we recognize Rilke's ambivalent position on the borderline of two philosophies. I would like to conclude by interpreting Rilke's well-known poem, "Archaischer Torso Apollos" in the light of this conflict in his thought:

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Wir kannten nicht sein unerh6rtes Haupt darin die Augendipfel reiften. Aber sein Torso gliiht noch wie ein Kandelaber in dem sein Schauen, nur zuriickgeschraubt,

sich hlIt und glanzt. Sonst k6nnte nicht der Bug der Brust dich blenden, und im leisen Drehen der Lenden k6nnte nicht ein Ldicheln gehen zu jener Mitte, die die Zeugung trug.

Sonst stiinde dieser Stein entstellt und kurz unter der Schultern durchsichtigem Sturz und flimmerte nicht so wie Raubtierfelle;

und brdiche nicht aus allen seinen Rdindern aus wie ein Stern: denn da ist keine Stelle, die dich nicht sieht. Du mult dein Leben dindern.

(1:557)

The poem is remarkably like TbrleB's invisible bridge: its operative moment is the fact that certain parts of the statue no longer exist-

namely, the head and the genitals. The mental and reproductive facul- ties are of course two crucial features that distinguish human beings from inanimate objects; yet this object seems to possess them on another

level, by stimulating their existence in the imagination of the beholder. In this sense, the statue is not a self-contained "Ding" (in accordance with Rilke's own theory about the Neue Gedichte5), but rather a phenomenon of which an important component subsists only in our minds. The torso is as much a part of us as an object in space outside of us: our

thoughts, in other words, are part of the thing. This explains the final

simile, in which the torso is said to burst its bounds like a star. Seeing the statue this way adds another dimension to what would otherwise be simply a very trite-if not thoroughly puzzling-conclusion: "Du muBt dein Leben iindern." This is not just a lofty praise of art's far-

reaching effect on the beholder. Once we accept what the statue dem- onstrates to us, that thoughts and things are part of a single continuum, then we must indeed change our whole relationship to our existence.

Harvard University

" See his letter to Clara Rilke of 8 August, 1903 (Briefe 55).

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Works Cited

Diersch, Manfred. Empiriokritizismus undlmpressionismus. Berlin: Riitten und Loening, 1973.

Hocks, Richard. Henry James and Pragmatistic Thought. A Study in the Relationship between the Philosophy of William James and the Literary Art of Henry James. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1974.

James, Henry. The Novels and Tales ofHenry James. 26 vols. New York: Scribner's, 1907-17.

James, William. Principles of Psychology. New York: Holt, 1890.

Kuklick, Bruce. The Rise of American Philosophy: Cambridge, Massachusetts 1860-1930. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977.

Mallarm6, St6phane. Oeuvres Completes. Ed. Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry. Paris: Gallimard, 1961.

Musil, Robert. Prose, Dramen, Spaite Briefe. Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1957.

Naremore, James. The World without a Self New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973.

Rilke, Rainer Maria. Briefe. Vol. 1. Ed. Karl Altheim with Ruth Sieber-Rilke. Wiesbaden: Insel, 1950. 2 vols.

Siimtliche Werke. 6 vols. Frankfurt: Insel, 1955-66.

Rimmon, Shlomith. The Concept of Ambiguity: The Example ofJames. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977.

Ryan, Judith. "'Hypothetisches Erzihlen': Zur Funktion von Phantasie und Einbildung in Rilkes 'Malte Laurids Brigge.'" Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft 1971: 341-374.

Woolf, Virginia. The Waves. 1931. London: Hogarth, 1976.

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judith ryan, validating the possible. thoughts and things in james, rilke, and musil

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