Jacob Haubenreich The Materiality of the Manuscript:

Textual Production in Rainer Maria Rilke’s Berner Taschenbuch

Language spills onto a clean, blank page. The text of the so-called “Berner Taschenbuch,” the preserved portion of the manuscript of Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge) (1910), begins mid-sentence: “[…] the woman could not be dismissed for that reason”1 (see fig. 5–1). Although “that reason” is not identified on this page, the English translation of this sentence fragment can stand alone as an independ-ent clause. The German original, a dependent clause that would follow a subordinating conjunction, however, cannot: “[…] man die Person daraufhin nicht entlassen könne.” Like flecks of dried blood, these words hang on the edge of a precipice, a massive gaping wound that becomes invisibly bandaged in print:

Einmal, als die Köchin sich verletzt hatte und sie sah sie zufällig mit der eingebundenen Hand, behauptete [Maltes Großmutter], das Jodoform im ganzen Hause zu riechen, und war schwer zu überzeugen, daß man die Person daraufhin nicht entlassen könne.2

The gaping precipice on which these words hang cannot be breached because the first part of the manuscript (also contained in a notebook like the Berner Taschenbuch), which corresponds to the first half of the work, is no longer extant, presumably destroyed during the Second World War. While we can return to examine the handwritten traces

1 Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, trans. Michael Hulse (London: Penguin, 2009), 79. 2 Rainer Maria Rilke, Kommentierte Ausgabe, ed. Manfred Engel, et al. (Frankfurt/M.: Insel, 1996) 3:540. Herafter cited as KA. “Once when the cook had cut herself, and my grandmother chanced to see her with her hand bandaged, she claimed the whole house reeked of iodoform, and it was difficult to convince her that the woman could not be dismissed for this reason.” (Ibid.)

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that lurk beyond the seemingly stable façade of the printed text of the second part of the novel,3 the first part of the novel rests on a void.

Figure 5–1. Reproduction from the “Berner Taschenbuch,” 3. (See note 3.)

In the pages directly preceding this, preserved only in print editions, Malte narrates a scene at his grandmother’s dinner table. She becomes outraged over a few “innocent” (“unschuldige”) wine stains on the spot-less tablecloths. Then, something “unprecedented and utterly incom-prehensible” (“etwas nie Dagewesenes und völlig Unbegreifliches”) causes her to “break off mid-sentence” (“mitten im Satze stehen lassen”). 4 Malte’s grandfather, Chamberlain Brigge, begins to pour

3 A facsimile edition was released August 2012. Rainer Maria Rilke, Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge: Das Manuskript des ‘Berner Taschenbuchs.’ Faksimile und Textgenetische Edition, ed. Thomas Richter and Franziska Kolp (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2012). 4 Rilke, Notebooks, 79.

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himself a glass of wine, yet when the dark red fluid reaches the top of the vessel, he does not stop pouring. The liquid overflows the boundaries of its glass container, spilling messily onto the pristine table linens.

Wine stains on a tablecloth, like drying blood surrounding a flesh wound, like ink stains on paper. The flow of Margrete Brigge’s speech, cut off mid-sentence, mirrors the flow of text in what would have been the first notebook of the manuscript, cut off mid-sentence, to be resumed on the first page of the Berner Taschenbuch. In this way, like the overflowing wine, the flow of the text (in liquid ink) also “spills over” the edges of the container, the first notebook, onto the clean, pristine pages of the Berner Taschenbuch. The cook, then, might also be grasped meta-textually, preparing a meal to be consumed by guests, like a writer who produces a text to be “consumed” by readers. Moreover, like the author and the process of writing, much remains largely unseen: the work’s genesis, the cook and her toils, the cutting of plant and animal flesh, the manipulation of kitchen instruments, a body versed in the movements and rhythm of the kitchen, but which is wounded in the process—remain largely unseen. The cook is like the author who, seemingly intolerable, has been absent from the dining halls of most contemporary literary theory in the last several decades. With a disproportionate focus on a final product, the text has been divorced from the hands that produced it, like a meal that miraculously emerges from a kitchen that remains behind closed doors.

Although unseen, invisible, the presence of the cook and her wounded body remains perceptible in the faint smell, the trace, of iodoform that infiltrates the banquet. Similarly, the author and his process of writing continue to be felt, perceived as a spectral presence, in the space of the literary work. 5 Returning to the manuscript of Rilke’s Aufzeichnungen, reconsidering the work through

5 Compare Jacob Haubenreich, “Text-Corporality and the Double Rend of the Page: The Specter of the Manuscript in Rilke’s Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge,” Monatshefte 105, no. 4 (2013), Seán Burke, The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008) and Benjamin Widiss, Obscure Invitations: The Persistence of the Author in Twentieth-Century American Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), particularly 1-41.

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the materiality of its production, examining its emergence into being through the physical act of writing, the scrawling of the pen across paper,6 we discover a number of moments in which the physical space of writing and the fictional space of the text merge into one another. In such moments, the materialities and process of “writing” (in all its interlingual multivalence, as “Schreiben” or “écriture”)7 are self-flexively signified symbolically, indexically, and visually (iconically, in Peircian sense):8 writing as literature, as poesis, and as physical act, as a negotiation of various materialities (the materiality of the signifier, the materiality of the body, and the materiality of the manuscript).9 At times, the process and materiality of writing are explicitly thematized. Yet as I will explore, many descriptions in the text function more like symptoms, abberant or distorted symbols that fail to adequately symbolize or communicate directly, yet allow, in this case, the materialities of writing to surge forth into the represen-tational field.10 Sensual, tactile descriptions of punctured and decaying

6 The process of writing itself is, of course, unobservable; the manuscript presents only material traces. Compare Stephan Kammer, “Reflexionen der Hand: Zur Poetologie der Differenz zwischen Schreiben und Schrift,” in Bilder der Handschrift. Die graphische Dimension der Literatur, ed. Davide Giuriato and Stephan Kammer (Frankfurt/M. and Basel: Stroemfeld, 2006). 7 Compare Almuth Grésillon, Literarische Handschriften: Einführung in die ‘critique génétique,’ trans. Frauke Rother and Wolfgang Günther (Bern: Peter Lang, 1999), 29. 8 Regarding the visual dimension of the manuscript page, see Davide Guiriato and Stephan Kammer, Bilder der Handschrift: Die graphische Dimension der Literatur (Frankfurt/M.: Stroemfeld, 2006); George Bornstein and Theresa Tinkle, eds., The Iconic Page in Manuscript, Print and Digital Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001); and Sybille Krämer, “‘Schriftbildlichkeit’ oder Über eine (fast) vergessene Dimension der Schrift,” in Schrift, Bild, Zahl, ed. Sybille Krämer and Horst Bredekamp (Munich: Fink, 2003). 9 Compare Rüdiger Campe’s notion of “Schreibszene,” Rüdiger Campe, “Die Schreibszene. Schreiben,” in Paradoxien, Dissonanzen, Zusammenbrüche: Situationen offener Epistemologie, eds. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Karl Ludwig Pfeiffer (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1991), 760. 10 Compare Didi-Huberman’s discussion of symptomaticity in Confronting Images, trans. John Goodman (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), 260-261. It is also clear that the materiality of production was significant for Rilke. Rilke’s process and conception of literary production were significantly influenced by the practices of Rodin and Cezanne. For commentary on the

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flesh and blood figure the materials of paper and ink not only symbolically, but also analogically, asserting a relationship of material iconicity and ontological connectedness. 11 Emerging out of the interaction between the various materialites of writing—that is, the materiality of the signifier, the materiality of the manuscript, and the materiality of the body that writes, the boundaries of which at times dissolve, and then reassert themselves—Die Aufzeichnungen reflects in various ways and through various modes of self-reflexive (re)presentation the (im)materiality of its production. The world of this work is not simply a language world, a written reality an infinite textual unfolding; it is specifically a reality written by hand in ink on paper.

Rilke’s text does not simply reflect on the process and materiality of writing; rather, the materialities of writing remain interwoven into the matrix of the text itself, even when the threads are not visible. The text in its (im)material constitution becomes a palimpsest, containing traces of the materialities of writing that produce it and remain incorporated within it. 12 The flesh of the hand/body that writes becomes enmeshed in the materiality of the manuscript, haunting both the material and immaterial form of the printed text and troubling the distinction between process and product, between writer and the material form of the Neue Gedichte, see Rilke’s letter from August 19, 1907 in Hartmut Engelhardt, ed., Materialien zu Rainer Maria Rilke ‘Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge’ (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1974), 26-27. Regarding the material form of the Aufzeichnungen, Rilke wrote to Kippenberg on June 9, 1910: “[…] seit zwei Tagen ist das Postpaket da; nun gibt es also wirklich die ‘Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge.’ Ich habe das Buch viel in der Hand; ich habe es besehen, befühlt, aufgeschlagen an vielen Stellen, schließlich ganz gelesen […]. Ich denke bei alledem an den grünen Pappband vor allem; die geheftete Ausgabe ist vorzüglich in ihrer Art; aber, das werden Sie verstehen, die andere geht mir am nächsten: i s t für mich das Buch. Ich kann mir eigentlich nichts darüber hinaus vorstellen (es sei denn, daß noch ein Leseband hinzukäme) […]“ (Ibid. 88-89). See also Rilke’s letters from November 8, 1908 and Febuary 13, 1910 (Ibid., 46, 79). Regarding Rilke’s attunement to the materiality of his writing implements more generally, see Giuriato, Davide, “Paper and Poetics,” Configurations 18 (2010). 11 Kaja Silverman, Flesh of My Flesh (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 4, 8-11, 28, 80. 12 On the manuscript as palimpsest, compare James Whiston, The Practice of Realism: Change and Creativity in the Manuscript of Galdós’s ‘Fortunata y Jacinta’ (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 2004).

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written, between text, avant-texte, and paratext. Returning to the scene of writing, then, enables us to address what Roger Chartier has recently characterized as a fundamental divide within contemporary literary studies between frameworks emphasizing “the immateriality of works and the materiality of texts.”13 In various ways, the novel works to undo the fixity of the printed form14 that it ultimately assumes, allowing the materialities of writing, the unbounded “space-time” of writing (Thüring),15 and perhaps even the “past of nonlinear writing” (Derrida)16 to resurface. The activity of the text philologist is to participate in this destabilization by returning the work to the condition of fluctuation through which it emerged (and continues to emerge) into form.17

13 Roger Chartier, Inscription and Erasure: Literature and Written Culture from the Eleventh to the Eighteenth Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), ix. 14 Compare Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographical Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962). 15 Hubert Thüring writes that “durch die Möglichkeit des jederzeitigen und be-liebigen Fort- und Umschreibens wird der Schreibprozess potenziell unab-schließbar selbst dort, wo der fertige Text als gedrucktes Buch das anvisierte Ziel darstellt und auch noch nachdem dieses Ziel passiert worden ist. Auf diese Weise bildet sich eine subjekt- und schriftbezogene Raum-Zeit von unbes-timmten Koordinaten heraus: Die Grenzen zwischen Subjekt und Schrift, innen und außen, Anfang und Ende, Eigenem und Fremden, Einbildung und Wahr-nehmung, Vergangenheit und Gegenwart, Präsenz und Absenz können im Schreibprozess prinzipiell in jedem Moment verschoben, aufgelöst oder neu ge-zogen werden und dies mehr oder weniger explizit, mehr oder weniger perfor-mativ, mehr oder weniger reflektiert.” Hubert Thüring, “Streichen als Moment produktiver Negativität” in Schreiben und Streichen: Zu einem Moment Produktiver Negativität, ed. Lucas Marco Gisi, et al. (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2011), 47–70. (56). Regarding the linearity of reading the printed text and the alinearity of writing, see Grésillon, Literarische Handschriften, 26. 16 Derrida writes in Of Grammatology that writing, especially phonetic writing, is rooted in a “past of nonlinear writing” yet characterized by a “suppression of all that resisted linearization,” Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 85-86. 17 Regarding the instability of the text over the course of its edition history, see Margreta de Grazia, “The Question of the One and the Many: The Globe Shakespeare, The Complete KING LEAR, and the New Folger Library Shake-speare,” Shakespeare Quarterly 46, no. 2 (1995), especially 247-48.

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Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (1910), most commonly known in English translation as The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge and most aligned generically with the epistolary novel or the Tagebuch-Roman (i.e. journal or diary novel), 18 comprises a collection of Aufzeichnungen (written sketches)19 of Malte Laurids Brigge, a young poet and member of the Danish aristocracy who has rejected his social position and ventured to Paris. Overwhelmed by the experience of the modern metropolis, confronted at every corner by death, Malte’s old ways of viewing and understanding the world begin to collapse and his reality is brought into fluctuation.20 Malte begins to notice a new, abject class of human lurking in the shadows of Paris, on the margin of the human symbolic order. He calls these figures the “Fortge-worfenen” (KA 3, 481), the discarded ones, and increasingly feels that he belongs to them. Bombarded by sensory impressions against which he has no protection, Malte does the only thing he can, in part to fend off a growing anxiety: “Ich habe etwas getan gegen die Furcht. Ich habe die ganze Nacht gesessen und geschrieben […]“ (KA 3, 464). Malte’s Aufzeichnungen are products of his Sehenlernen, an attempt to penetrate through the ruins of old worldviews and see in a new way; an attempt to find a language, or a mode of narration, with which he can capture this new mode of seeing. The cognitive acts through which Malte constructs and orients himself toward a new reality—perception, memory, and narration—transform the objects they grasp and re-

18 See Lorna Martens, “Reliable Narration: Rainer Maria Rilke’s Die Aufzeich-nungen des Malte Laurids Brigge,” in The diary novel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985) and Ulrich Fülleborn, “‘Werther’ – ‘Hyperion’ – ‘Malte Laurids Brigge:’ Prosalyrik und Roman,” in Studien zur Deutschen Literatur: Festschrift für Adolf Beck zum siebzigsten Geburtstag, ed. Ulrich Fülleborn and Johannes Krogoll (Heidelberg: Winter, 1979). 19 As Rilke wrote in a letter to Gräfin Manon zu Solms-Laubach (April 11, 1910), “was nun das Buch ausmacht, ist durchaus nichts Vollzähliges. Es ist nur so, als fände man in einem Schubfach ungeordnete Papiere und fände eben vorderhand nicht mehr und müßte sich begnügen“ (Engelhardt, Materialien, 82). 20 Regarding the nature of reality in the Aufzeichnungen, see Andrea Cervi, “The Composition of Reality: Rainer Maria Rilke, Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge,” in The German Novel in the Twentieth Century: Beyond Realism, ed. David Midgley (New York: Edinburgh University Press; St. Martin’s Press, 1993).

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present. Were there a single idea that captured the sense of the novel, it would be change, transformation, one might even here use the term “editing.” Malte’s writing explores the spaces of possibility, of fluctuation and of transformation, that are opened through the collapse of existing structures. On the grammatical level of the text, the indicative perpetually opens into the space of the subjunctive; reality and possibility—multiple realities, numerous possible worlds—exist alongside one another.21

A few words on the manuscript itself. The “Berner Taschenbuch,” the largest surviving portion of the manuscript of Die Aufzeichnungen, housed at the Schweizerisches Literaturarchiv in Bern, is a cloth-bound notebook, approximately 200 pages long, and measures 14 × 8 cm. As a working manuscript, numerous words, lines, passages, and entire pages are crossed out. This is also the case with the so-called Tolstoi-Schlüsse, the “alternate endings” to the novel, which, in heavily edited form, were first published posthumously in the Sämtliche Werke (1955-66). In some cases, the deleted passages (Durchstreichungen) of text remain legible in the manuscript: a single line slices through a line of text, or a passage is marked out with a grid of crisscrossing lines.22 In other cases, lines or passages are furiously expunged and, like a palimpsest, the uncanny presence of the crossed-out words remains visible. Often demarcated in editions by large blank spaces between sections, divisions between Aufzeichnungen in the printed text are marked in the manuscript with a single pen line that transects the width of the page, if at all. Finally, the pages of manuscript are filled to the very edges: there are no margins, and as such, potentially “meta-discursive” commentary is interwoven with the primary discourse itself.

The publication of the facsimile of the “Berner Taschenbuch,” the surviving portion of the manuscript Rilke’s Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge, participates in a wave of renewed interest in modern

21 Compare Judith Ryan, “‘Hypothetisches Erzählen:’ Zur Funktion von Phantasie und Einbildung in Rilkes ‘Malte Laurids Brigge,’” in Engelhardt, Materialien. 22 Compare Thomas Richter, “‘diese amorphe Sprache’ – Versuch einer Systematisierung der Streichungen in Rilkes Entwurfshandschrift zu den Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge,” in Schreiben und Streichen: Zu einem Moment produktiver Negativität, ed. Lucas Marco Gisi, et al. (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2011).

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literary manuscripts, which has emerged from media studies and the New Philology in the 1990s.23 Until recently, most facsimile editions of modern manuscripts have been of Reinschriften or fair copies.24 In the wake of the recent and ongoing massive facsimile editions of Friedrich Hölderlin25 and Friedrich Nietzsche’s Nachlässe (literary estates),26 as well as recent facsimile editions of the work of Franz Kafka,27 Robert Walser, 28 and Walter Benjamin, 29 I propose a methodology that conceives of literary work as both a material and immaterial phenome-non. In other words, a phenomenon by which the distinction between the process and the product is elided into “production.” In doing so, my 23 See the special issue “The New Philology” of Speculum 65, no. 1 (1990), and especially Stephen Nichols introduction, “Philology in Manuscript Culture.” See also Karl Stackmann, “Neue Philologie?” in Modernes Mittelalter: Neue Bilder einer populären Epoche, ed. Joachim Heinzle (Frank-furt/M.: Insel, 1994) and Katheryn Starkey and Haiko Wandhoff, “Mouvance – Varianz – Performanz: Die New Philology und der unfeste Text,” in Walther von der Vogelweide und die Literaturtheorie: Neun Modellanalysen von ‘Nemt, frouwe, disen kranz,’ ed. Lydia Myklautsch and Johannes Keller (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2008). 24 Facsimile editions of fair copies penned by Rilke include Rainer Maria Rilke, Das Testament: Faksimile der Handschrift, ed. Ernst Zinn (Frankfurt: Insel, 1974); id., Ausgewählte Gedichte aus den Jahren 1902-1917: Faksimile der Handschrift, ill. Max Slevogt (Frankfurt/M.: Insel, 1975); id., Über den jungen Dichter (Baarn, Holland: Arethusa Pers Herber Blokland, 1991); id., “Hasszellen, stark im grössten Liebeskreise…”: Verse für Oskar Kokoschka. Faksimile der Handschrift, mit unveröffentlichten Briefen, ed. Joachim W. Storck (Marbach a.N. : Deutsches Literaturarchiv, 1988). 25 Friedrich Hölderlich, Sämtliche Werke: Frankfurter Ausgabe. Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, ed. Dietrich E. Sattler (Frankfurt/M.: Roter Stern: Stroemfeld, 1975-2008). 26 Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1967-); and Paolo d’Iorio, ed., Digitale Kritische Gesamtausgabe and Digitale Faksimile Gesamtausgabe, Nietzschesource, http://nietzschesource.org. 27 Franz Kafka, Historisch-kritische Ausgabe sämtlicher Handschriften, Drucke und Typoskripte, ed. Roland Reuß and Peter Staengle (Basel: Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 1995-). 28 Robert Walser, Kritische Ausgabe sämtlicher Drucke und Manuskripte, ed. Wolfram Groddeck and Barbara von Reibnitz (Basel: Stroemfeld; Basel : Schwabe, 2008-). 29 Walter Benjamin, Werke und Nachlass: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 2008-).

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work is informed by recent scholarship on the history of the book by authors such as Roger Chartier and Margaretta de Grazia. My own work, however, concerns itself not just with print editions, with “final” forms of literary texts or, in the case of de Grazia, with stagings of Shake-speare’s plays, but it also attends to the materialities of production and the relationship between the handwritten and printed text, in an effort to show how instabilities shaping the material production of literary works continue to manifest themselves even in the “final” printed edition.

Die Aufzeichnungen serves as a potent case study because, in various ways, the printed text points back to the process and materiality of its production, encouraging us to “look through” the printed text (with our own kind of “Neues Sehen”) at the “implied manuscript” lying beneath. At moments, the text explicitly references the presence of a manuscript; a number of passages in the printed novel are bracketed in parentheses, and footnoted “im Manuskript an den Rand geschrieben” (KA 3, 531, 587, 592, 603, 617, 629).30 On the one hand, this note indexes the real-existing manuscript, the “Berner Tashenbuch.” But I will suggest that these notes evoke, upon further consideration, an imagined or implied manuscript whose “presence,” behind the printed façade of the work, is continually referenced in less obvious or explicit ways: structurally, thematically, and through the fabric or network of images and figures of which the novel is composed. In the remaining sections, I attempt to offer an impression of the degree to which the form, thematics, and texture of the Aufzeichnungen are directly shaped by the process and the materialities of writing.

During their encounter with the text, readers are bombarded by descriptions of wounds, rashes, the cutting of flesh, and bodily abjection.31 There are numerous passages in which writing is directly 30 These editorial comments seem to suggest the presence of an implied or fictional editor like that of Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers. Interestingly, these passages are demarcated in the “Berner Taschenbuch,” yet it would be erroneous for several reasons to assert that the footnotes referencing notes in the margins of a manuscript, which appear even in the Erstdruck, refer directly to the real-existing manuscript. Most obviously, the “Berner Taschenbuch” has no empty margins, as Rilke wrote up to the very edges of the page. The first example (KA 3, 531) is not preserved in any extant manuscript, and as such can only be imagined. 31 Elsewhere, I approach these descriptions through the Deleuzean notion of sensation and discussions of anti- or post-hermeneutics (Haubenreich,

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connected to the body and blood specifically.32 Within this web of mutilated figures, bandages become significant meta-textually, mirroring the Durchstreichungen that pervade the manuscript. On the hand-written page, these strike-throughs cover over text-wounds, places of linguistic deletion and material accretion, and hold the body of the manuscript together by bridging the gaps between fragments of what would otherwise be severed text. And we find these images and materialities of writing figured within the characters and objects of the text itself. For example, during a visit to the Salpêtrière hospital, Malte is overwhelmed by the omnipresence of bandages:

Und viele Verbände gab es. Verbände, die den ganzen Kopf Schichte um Schichte umzogen, bis nur noch ein einziges Auge da war, das niemandem mehr gehörte. Verbände, die verbargen, und Verbände, die zeigten, was darunter war. Verbände, die man geöffnet hatte und in denen nun, wie in einem schmutzigen Bett, eine Hand lag, die keine mehr war; und ein eingebundenes Bein, das aus der Reihe herausstand, groß wie ein ganzer Mensch. (KA 3, 493)33

Like the Durchstreichung that bridges inky passages of mutilated text, bandages cover bloody wounds, holding together the surrounding flesh. Given the close relationship between the forms of manuscript and human body throughout the Aufzeichnungen, the text demands that we

forthcoming). Regarding the fragmentary body and corporeality in the Aufzeichnungen, compare Andreas Huyssen, “Paris/Childhood: The Fragmented Body in Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge,” in Modernity and the Text: Revisions of German Modernism, ed. Andreas Huyssen and David Bathrick (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989) and Eric L. Santner, The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 188-244. 32 See KA 3, 561 and 467. These passages resonate with a Zarathustrian notion of writing in which the boundary between matter and spirit is dissolved: “Von allem Geschriebenen liebe ich nur das, was einer mit seinem Blute schreibt. Schreibe mit Blut: und du wirst erfahren, daß Blut Geist ist” (Nietzsche, Werke, VI-1.44/4.48). 33 “And there were bandages, everywhere—bandages wrapped layer upon layer around a whole head till only one single eye was to be seen, belonging to no one; bandages that concealed and bandages that exposed what lay beneath them; bandages that had been undone and in which, as in a soiled bed, a hand that was no longer a hand now lay; and a bandaged leg that stuck out from the row of people, big as a man” (Rilke, Notebooks, 37).

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consider the strange insistence on bandages, the extra material supports of bodies in this narrative, in terms of the materiality of the Textkörper, the “body” of the text. Malte’s descriptions of these bandages—some of which completely cover the wound while others show what lies beneath—resonate, almost eerily, with the description of the “Arten oder Verfahren des Streichens”34 offered by Thomas Richter, the editor of the facsimile edition of the Berner Taschenbuch:

– Einzelne Wörter oder Sätze mit einem Strich Der Text bleibt gut lesbar bei einer solchen einfachen Streichung. – Ganze obsolete Absätze sind ein- oder zweimal diagonal gestrichen (darin können sich dann ältere Streichungen befinden). Auf solche Passagen […] folgt immer unmittelbar eine Neuformulierung des entsprechenden Passus; der frühere Text bleibt – in seiner varianten Qualität– gut lesbar – Kompletttilgung Darüber hinaus lassen sich mehrere Arten dickerer Streichungen beobachten, die eindeutige Tilgungen von Varianz darstellen. Hierbei gibt es wohl (mindestens) zwei unterschiedliche Arten: die Wel-lenlinie, die am ehesten zwischen dem einfachen Strich und der „Kompletttilgung“, die wirklich tilgen, unleserlich machen soll, anzusetzen ist, und eben diese komplette Tilgung, die mit mehreren Strichen durch-geführt sein kann, als verdichtete Wellenlinie oder als Schraffur, als eine totale Schwärzung der Manuskriptstelle. (my emphasis)35

34 Richter, “‘diese amorphe Sprache,’” 190-191. 35 Ibid. “—Individual words or sentences with a line. The text remains legible with such simple strike-throughs.—Obsolete paragraphs are diagonally crossed out once or twice (within which, one also can find older strike-throughs). A new formulation of the corresponding passage always follows directly after the crossed out passage; the earlier text remains—in varying quality –legible.—Complete deletion. In this case, one can observce various kinds of thick strike-throughs that represent clear deletion of variance. Here there are (at least) two differend types: the wavy line, which can be best placed between the simple strike-through and the “complete deletion,” which really deletes and seeks to make illegible, just like the complete deletion, which can be executed with numerous strikes, with concentrated wavy lines or with hatching, a total blackening of the manuscript space” (my translation).

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The activities of Tilgen, Durchstreichen, and Fortwerfen (erasure, deletion, and throwing away) play a tremendous role in Die Aufzeichnungen, both materially and thematically.36 Just as we saw in the scene which opens this paper, the actual material process of writing is transformed into figures within the space of the novel. What is most striking about Richter’s systematization of the types of Streichungen is the distinction between those that cover (“verbergen”) and make illegible (“unleser-lich”), and those that show what lies beneath them, that allow the text to remain legible (“lesbar”). Not only does this description of the Streich-ungen resonate with Malte’s own description of the bandages, but Malte’s account of the wounded, fragmented bodies on hospital beds also seems to describe the visual appearance of the manuscript page more generally (see fig. 5–2).

Figure 5–2. “Berner Taschenbuch,” 168-69.

36 Compare the notion of “Streichkultur,” Lucas Marco Gisi, et al., eds., Schreiben und Streichen: Zu einem Moment produktiver Negativität (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2008), 10, and Thüring, “Streichen als Moment produktiver Negativität.”

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Cut up into sections that the writer struggles to fit together, the text of the manuscript is divided into hunks and bits. This textual passage about fragmented bodies and body parts covered in bandages, mirrors the form of the mutilated, divided, wounded, barely intelligible manuscript pages. To some degree, the montage-like appearance of the manuscript is actually preserved in print editions, which consists of 71 Aufzeichnungen that often seem quite disconnected. However, in the print edition, the messy fragments of the manuscript have been stitched together, coagulating into a Frankenstein monster, a form intelligible as a body, yes, but a foreign one. The Durchstreichungen in the manuscript function like bandages—or more appropriately perhaps, like sutures—that hold the body together, preventing it from falling apart until its pieces can reconstitute themselves in printed form. Through the process of printing, the “wounds” of the manu-script seem to heal over. Although easily overlooked, scars still remain and point to the suffering that the body of the manuscript, cotermi-nous with the body of the writer, has endured, and which remain part of its constitution. For in this case, the decimated body of the manuscript survives, maintained in its feverish state in the archive, a hospital of Textkörper.

Figure 5–3. “Berner Taschenbuch,” 32.

The corporeality of writing once again plays a role in the final example I will offer from Die Aufzeichnung in which Malte describes the scene of narrating/writing of Count Brahe, Malte’s maternal grandfather. Malte orients himself toward this model of narrating in seeking a new mode

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of writing within which to realize his Neues Sehen. Count Brahe dictates his memoirs to Abelone, his daughter, who also serves as his Aufschreiberin and writes down the Count’s dictation by hand. Turning to the manuscript page on which this passage was composed, we find that this depiction of writing is self-referential, that the description of Brahe directly mirrors the appearance of the manuscript page and the process of Schreiben and Durchstreichen (see fig. 5–3):

… Manchmal sprang er auf Manchmal sprang er auf, wenn die Erinnerugen zu heftig kamen und ging in seinem nilgrünen Seidenschlafrock Manchmal sprang er auf und redete in die Kerzen hinein, dass sie flackerten. Oder ganze Sätze mussten wieder durchgestrichen werden und dann ging er heftig hin und her und wehte mit seinem nilgrünen seidenen Schlafrock…37

“Oder ganze Sätze mussten wieder durchgestrichen werden…” (“or whole sentences had to be crossed out again”). In this passage, the narration of the act of Durchstreichen is directly preceded in the manuscript by several attempts to compose sentences, each abandoned and crossed out. The narration of Durchstreichung corresponds directly to the act of Durchstreichung in the text. Moreover, the “Sprunghaftigkeit” (jerkiness) of the Count’s movement reflects the lurching repetition of writing something and striking through it over and over. Yet more specifically, the accumulation of deictic preposi-tions describing the Count’s movement—he jumps up, spoke into the candles, lines get crossed out, he goes back and forth, up and down (“hin und her”)—capture the unrestrained movement of the pen 37 […] At times he would jump up At times he would jump up, when the memories came too powerfully and would pace in his nile-green silk dressing-gown At times he would jump up and talk into the Candles, such that they flickered. Or Whole sentences had to be struck out And then he would pace powerfully to and fro And billowed with his nile-green silk Sleeping gown… (my translation)

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during the action of writing. Unlike the production of a typewritten text, the production of a handwritten text can proceed in any direction on the page.

The flickering of the candlelight when the Count speaks into it also reflects the act of writing and crossing out. “Speaking into the candles, such that they flickered”: the flickering of the candlelight registers the physicality, the breathiness, of the Count’s words. The flickering of the candle acts as a visual trace of his words as they pass through space. Similarly, reading through the lines of text, alternate beginnings to the sentence that have been crossed out, produces a “flickering” effect, both visually and semantically, as fragments of ideas are activated and then immediately extinguished. This flickering also echoes the billowing of the folds of cloth—like pages of text disturbed by the breeze—of the Count’s dressing gown.

In approaching the manuscript in this way, we attend not only to the semantic content of the passage, which can be illuminated by comparing variants crossed out in the manuscript; but also, and more significantly, to the visual iconicity of the manuscript page. 38 Moving back and forth between the printed text and the manuscript pages, we witness the way in which the space of the writer, the space of the manuscript page, and the fictional space projected by the work come briefly into contact and overlap, allowing them to bleed into one another. These spaces become incorporated into one another, in-extricably enmeshed within the text of the Aufzeichnungen, which self-referentially points to both the act and the space of writing, as well as the space, the shape and the materiality of the manuscript page itself.

One can thus bridge the divide between the “immateriality of works and the materiality of texts” by considering writing as a process that emerges out of interactions and tensions between various materialities, agencies, conceptions, and modes of production: between the material and immaterial, between the phenomenological and semiological, between the visuality and semantics of text (handwritten and printed). 39 Writing also emerges through tensions between

38 Compare Giuriato and Kammer, Bilder der Handschrift; Bornstein and Tinkle, The Iconic Page, and Krämer, “‘Schriftbildlichkeit.’” 39 See Peter L. Shillingsburg’s distinction between “semiotic text” and “material text” in Resisting Texts: Authority and Submission in Constructions of Meaning (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 71.

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different modes of production: between the reproduction and produc-tion of meaning in language, between representation and presentation, between linear and a-linear, hermeneutical and anti-hermeneutical modes of writing.40 The production of the literary work, of textual meaning, happens via the perpetual circulation or movement between these different modes and materialities. Like the interaction of areas of high and low atmospheric pressure, which produce a storm, the work is produced through the interaction between these different fields.

By returning to the manuscript of the Aufzeichnungen and attending to the materialities of writing, we are able to see (with a kind of Neues Sehen) how the circulation between the materialities of writing, between the body of the writer and the body of the text, is severed during the process of printing. 41 By undoing in various ways the illusory fixity of the printed form, the work allows the materialities of writing, the time-space of writing (Thüring), or the “past of nonlinear writing” (Derrida) suppressed by print, to resurface. Even in the printed work, the materialities of writing continue to be felt, manifest-ing themselves in unexpected places, haunting the rooms and passageways of the printed text.

40 See Dieter Mersch, Posthermeneutik, Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, Sonderband 26 (Berlin: Akademie, 2010), Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Diesseits der Hermeneutik: Die Produktion von Präsenz, trans. Joachim Schulte (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp 2004), Tanja Prokic, Anne Kolb and Oliver Jahraus, eds., Wider die Repräsentation: Präsens/z Erzählen in Literatur, Film und Bildender Kunst (Frankfurt/M.: Peter Lang, 2011), and Anne Kolb, “Lachen: Zur Präsentierung des Präsens bei Kafka, Beckett und Bataille,” in ibid. 41 Compare Bruno Latour’s model of “circulating reference” in Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1999), 24-79.

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