Uzoka,Deborah chinonyerem
DAVID JOSEPH
Longhorn beetle portrait
Macro wild life photography
Abstract
This paper discusses the problems of mimesis in Rainer Rilke’s Duino Elegies. Mimesis is essential in all theories of literature though interpreted in different ways, both in the school of critics and in discourse analysis. This essay explores the concept of mimesis from the perspective of Plato and Aristotle. Plato believes in the existence of the ideal world; a work of art –which reflects nature— is twice as far from the reality it represents. This is found in Rilke’s work in his choice of words and symbolic representations of the angels and salvation, but not with the typical Christian interpretation. The essay further reveals that language, love, and beauty pose problems to the representation of art. It concludes that Rilke explores nature through the lens of beauty, love, and death as decided in Duino’s Elegies.
Keywords: Nature, Literature, Arts, Imitation
Introduction
Mimesis is derived from the Greek word that means “imitation”, though in the sense of re-presentation, rather than copying.” In ancient Greece, mimesis was an idea that governed the creation of works of art in particular, with correspondence to the physical world understood as a model for beauty, truth, and the good.
Duino Elegies is a collection of ten poems published in German in 1923 by the Bohemian-Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke. The poems are described as elegies and, indeed, contain quite a bit of lament and melancholy. It covers a wide range of human’s emotions to nature. According to Martin Heidegger,”the long way leading to the poetry is itself one that inquires poetically and Rilke comes to realize the destitution of the time more clearly. The time remains destitute not only because God is dead, but because mortals are hardly aware and capable even of their mortality” (Heidegger 96). This suggests that people are disconnected from the fact that they are finite beings and will eventually die. Here, Heidegger argues that the path that ultimately leads to poetry is itself a poetic one and emphasizes that one should not be oblivious to their mortality because it will result in a sense of destitution in human existence on earth.
Additionally, Plato and Aristotle link the text to the outside reality, inquiring into the history of the uses to which words have been put in literary history and how language behaves in a certain way in literature than anywhere else.
Appearance of Beauty
Rilke explores the nature of mankind’s contact with beauty, and its transience, noting that humanity is forever only getting a brief, momentary glimpse of an inconceivable beauty and that it is terrifying. In the First Elegy, Rilke describes this experience, defining beauty as “…nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still able to bear, and we revere it so, because it calmly disdains to destroy us”(Rilke, First Elegy 4-5). Rilke depicts an infinite, transcendental beauty with the symbol of angels. However, he did not use the traditional Christian interpretation of angels. He sought to utilize a symbol of beauty, divorced from religious doctrine, and embodied a tremendous transcendental secular angel; however, Rilke commented that he was greatly influenced by the depiction of angels found in Islam. For Rilke’s symbol of the angel, Freedman Ralph has this to say “Beyond human contradictions and limitations in a higher level of reality is the invisible” (67). This aligns with the thought that beauty is estrangement, a terrible beauty.
However, as mankind comes in contact with this terrifying beauty represented by these angels, Rilke is concerned with the experience of existential angst in trying to come to terms with the coexistence of the spiritual and earthly. He portrays human feelings as alone in a universe where God is abstract and possibly non-existent, “where memory and patterns of intuition raise the sensitive consciousness to a realization of solitude”(Gass 84). Rilke depicts the alternative, a spiritually fulfilling possibility beyond human limitations in the form of angels.
Similarly, Aristotle’s arguments upon mimesis, both in general and in a specific sense, have an aesthetic quality, since he does not take imitation as a social, moral, or political phenomenon but as an activity of the artist. This aligns with Akwanya’s statement when he says that Aristotle’s use of the word imitation reflects an attitude towards the literary text, whereby it substitutes for something else (Discourse Analysis, 125). We can see this substitution in the second elegy:
What use is that: they cannot hold us, we vanish inside and around them. And those who are beautiful, oh, who holds them back? Appearance, endlessly, stands up in their face and goes by.
All appearance, even that of beauty is evanescent and flows by,and our being evaporates. The Angel’s beauty is not because it conforms to the norm. In the book, Aesthetics and the Theory of Criticism “ A work of art gives a man an opportunity to get rid of painful and troubled feelings arising from the imagination of an imminent evil that may cause destruction and pain on the part of the citizen (294). This implies that pity, fear, and emotions are part of human nature which may give rise to causing destruction and pain on the part of the citizen if not properly handled. Rilke finds a strange beauty where humans see the transience, limitations, incapacity for transformation, and death of complexity beyond man’s grasp. This is exemplified in the very few lines of the opening elegy “For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, that we are still able to bear, and we revere it so, because it calmly disdains to destroy us. Every Angel is a terror.” Here speaks about the terror of eternity which stands on time rather than being on time.
Speaking on the theme of Love, Death, and Language, Rilke uses the images of love and lovers as a way of showing mankind’s potential and humanity’s failures in achieving the transcendent understanding embodied by the angels. In the Second Elegy, Rilke writes:
“Lovers, if Angels could understand them, might utter
Strange things in the midnight air” (Rilke, Second Elegy 37-38).
Beginning with the first line of the collection, Rilke’s despairing speaker calls upon the angels to notice human suffering and to intervene. There is a deeply felt despair and irresolvable tension in that no matter man’s striving, the limit of human and earthly existence renders humanity unable to reach out to the angels. The narrative voice Rilke employs in the Duino Elegies strives “to achieve in human consciousness the angel’s presumed plentitude of being” (Sword 68). Here, Lovers represent the extremes of material, sensual delight, and the bliss of physical relationship which is insufficient to justify existence. Rilke writes in the second elegy:
And yet, when you’ve endured the first terrible glances and the yearning at windows,
And the first walk together, just once, through the garden:
Lovers, are you the same? When you raise yourselves one to another’s mouth, and hang there-sip against sip: O, how strangely the drinker then escapes from their action.
From the excerpt, it could be deduced that lovers fail to maintain the eternity of the initial relationship beyond their first desire, walk. Also, physical love is evanescent.
Strikingly, Rilke stresses the need for man and for woman lovers. Beneath the consciousness of love, Rilke reveals that the male love is ignorant of the subconscious power of his instincts as depicted in the third elegy “What does he know himself, of that lord of desire, her young lover, whom she nows distinctly, who often out of his solitariness, before the girl soothed him, often, as if she did not exist, held up, dripping, from what unknowable depths, his godhead, oh, rousing the night to endless uproar?” This suggests that the human condition of existence, continuity with the past, and the recapitulation in childhood development is expressed much later in sexuality where the feminine and the masculine elements need to be fused to create the whole desired life.
On the issue of Death, Rilke argues that being newly dead in mind is a state of strangeness. Strange which depends on the processing contents of memory, transforming in timeless region as there is no sharp distinction between death and life. This aligns with Aristotle’s claims that the poet’s job is “to say what can happen in strictly probable or necessary sequence” (The Poetics, 18). Here, Rilke makes up this happening by the use of the angels against the human error of perception. As represented by Rilke, death is ephemeral. It passes by not just between the living and the unborn but focuses on the immeasurable seething of all generations, past to come.
On language representation between nature and humans, Rilke detects a world of uneasiness with complex language-driven thoughts about the creatures of the natural world. Language could be analyzed in other ways. For example: In terms of symbolism, it constitutes a new reality as the power of language brings out theoretical reasons, the truth, and objective experience. For instance, in the eighth elegy, the attribution to Night read is thus:
Oh, and the night, the night, when the wind full of space
wears ourfaces- whom would she not stay for, the longed-for,
gentle, disappointing one, whom the solitary heart with difficulty
stands before.
From the excerpt above, the night is personified as a female being, unable to satisfy humans’ longings, faced with difficulty in the universe as the hardest task of all. The choice of language used in the representation reveals that the poet offers his ideas directly to the world in accordance with the laws of probability or necessity. Just as history tells us what may happen, poetry in turn expresses the universal, as the poet represents the universal in his choice of words, a quest for the ultimate truth. Plato objects to mimesis on the fact that there is no relationship between what is imitated and what is real. Furthermore, mimesis designates the ability to create expression and representation on the part of poet, painter, and actor, both in a general and specific sense. Language lies as the basis of word constructions, so it poses a threat to the actual representation of truth and good.
In conclusion, the nature of discussion on the concept of mimesis as a theory of art changes according to the person who discusses the term and the way he deals with the term. Just like Akwanya remarks “Art is something that we encounter in our social world as one of the presences that make up that world, without which, one can hardly speak of a social world” (Verbal Art, 55). Mimesis as an art of imitation has since from antiquity been discussed to refer to the relation between reality and representation. Also, Duino Elergy reveals moments of joy and lament as the two sides of the coin being seen in Rilke’s poetry which could be attributed to his style of writing as regards human and nature.
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David Joseph is an award-winning and globally recognized professional macro wildlife photographer from and based in Nigeria. David recently landed 3rd Place in Close Up Photographer Of The Year (CUPOTY) 5, Animals Category. His love for the little and “unseen heroes of our world” began in 2020, when he was still taking pictures with his phone. While his favourite subjects to photograph are frogs and spiders, he does welcome every other bug. Currently, David’s gear set-up for his pictures include an OM System (formerly Olympus) EM-5 II, paired with Olympus 60mm macro lens, a Godox V350o flash plus diffuser (made by his friend and fellow pro macro photographer, Brendan – @cygnustech, from Australia). More of his photos can be found on his Instagram – @abcdee_david.