Ghostwriting Modernism (review)

Abstract

When staying in the Duino castle for his second, longer and more productive visit, Rilke, always the perfect guest, got involved in his benefactor's passion, spiritualism. The Princess of Thurn and Taxis organized four séances in September and October 1912 for Rilke and her son Pascha who had discovered he had mediumistic powers—Rilke's protocols have documented the scene. The automatic writing on the board connected them with an "Unknown Lady" who beckoned the participants from a bridge in Toledo. Almost immediately Rilke decided to leave Duino for Spain, making arrangements to spend the winter in Toledo. He would return several times to the evocation of beautiful dead women's spirits in his poems. This vignette is typical of a dominant spiritualist culture that testifies to the way most Modernist poets, writers and artists related to spiritualist invocation of famous or anonymous ghosts: hesitating between ironical skepticism and enthusiastic suspension of disbelief, they often took these messages sent to them from beyond the grave as signals that could fan the waning fire of inspiration or allow them to make sudden decisions in cases of writer's block, protracted unrest or traveler's anxiety. Even those, like Joyce, who professed their cynicism openly, ended up using these otherworldly sessions as literary material, parodying them hilariously, milking them for their obvious comical effects as in several passages of Ulysses, or so as to settle personal accounts with more "literary" mediums as in Finnegans Wake, especially in III, 3.