Rilke e l’oriente by Daniela Liguori (review)

Der Berg (The mountain), a poem written between 1906 and 1907, is perhaps one of the most emblematic places to approach the relationship between Rainer Maria Rilke and the East. The mountain we are speaking of is Fujiyama, to which the celebrated Japanese painter Katsushika Hokusai dedicated two woodcut cycles. Presumably, Rilke came into contact with Japanese art through Edmond Goncourt, who had devoted precisely to Hokusai a major critical study in 1908. Another version of the story sees Rilke as having read the monograph on Hokusai by Friedrich Perzynski, published in 1904 in the same series where Rilke’s Worpswede was issued. But let us read the text first:

Sechsunddreißig Mal und hundert Malhat der Maler jenen Berg geschrieben,weggerissen, wieder hingetrieben(sechsunddreißig Mal und hundert Mal)

zu dem unbegreiflichen Vulkane, …¹

On several occasions, the artist tried to capture the essence of the mountain, to ‘translate’ it into painting. However, Fujiyama does not fully lend itself to the yoke of representation: “Seiner Herrlichkeit nicht Einhalt tat”—the mountain prevents its “magnificence” from becoming a ‘freeze frame shot.’ On the contrary, “far away and unparticipating” (teilnahmslos und weit), “grown from form to form” (von Gestalt gesteigert zu Gestalt), the mountain still rises up, intact, as an impenetrable “appearance” (Erscheinung). It is hard not to read, in this description, an indirect approach to the Montagne Sainte Victoire in Provence, that is, that specific ‘pictorial insistence’ (Peter Handke even spoke of a Lehre der Sainte Victoire) thanks to which Cézanne (to whom Rilke dedicated many writings) persisted relentlessly, in the last years of his life, in depicting a single subject: the absolute mountain that, like Hokusai’s Fujiyama, embodied for the French painter the supreme appearance, the deepest essence of which, however, is doomed to remain unrepresentable.

Even just from this quick example, we can perhaps begin to guess the ‘nature’ of the relationship between Rilke and the East, to which Rilke e l’oriente, the remarkable book by Daniela Liguori, is dedicated—and in which an entire chapter is precisely devoted to the relationship between Rilke and Hokusai. If it is true, as noted by Bassermann, that “Rilke did never deal seriously with the oriental wisdom—India, China, Japan—and he knew of it only what he met by chance,”² it is equally undeniable, however, that there are many correspondences between his thought and Indian, Japanese, and Chinese aesthetics. As Liguori shows, a large number of explicit references can be foregrounded in support of these correspondences. Although perhaps remaining short of a philologically articulated relationship, they still offer enough material to establish the link between Rilke and the East as a coherent research topic. The keystone of Liguori’s research is hence not—nor could it be, for the above-mentioned reasons be limited to—a mere historical-critical analysis of passages in which Rilke ‘deals with’ the East. Conversely, and with much acumen and expertise, the book focuses on the aesthetic implications and therefore on the theoretical thickness that the bond with the East acquires in the work of the great Bohemian poet.

Why, then, was Oriental wisdom so important to the author of the Sonnets to Orpheus? How did the knowledge it carries enter into relationship with Rilke’s poetical ‘needs’? Liguori explains this clearly at the beginning of her study. Rilke identifies in the Orient “the signs of a ‘Dasein’ which differs from the Western one. It is different because it is not the ‘expression’ of a powerful subjectivity exerting its desire of possession and its will to dominate everything, but rather of an ego which, without any privileges, is an impermanent part of the world” (p. 13). Liguori’s claim allows us to summarize the fundamental features of Rilke’s interest in the Orient and in Eastern thought, which represents a privileged focus to rethink the relationship with things beyond the groundless and unsatisfactory bipolarity between a subject and an object...