The Transubstantiation of Melancholia to Mysticism: Jouissance in Rilke's The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

Relying on Kristeva's Black Sun and Powers of Horror, this essay fills the gap of psychoanalytic criticism on Rilke's novel by exposing the melancholia and abjection it contains. Malte, as well as the text, disavows the loss of Maman, planting the novel in the Imaginary. The theory of unrequited love, at the heart of The Notebooks, springs from Malte's cleaving to the mother (the melancholic avows the disavowed loss and so identifies with abandoned women in love), serving as a bridge between melancholia and mysticism. The jouissance of melancholia transforms into the jouissance of mysticism, a transubstantiation fortified through Malte's attraction to and identification with Parisian “outcasts,” whose filth lends them grace. Abjection is turned into a spiritual condition. Rilke's version of the Prodigal Son clinches the relation of unrequited love to Lacan's sexuated category of the not-all or the Wo/man who doesn't exist (which includes mystics such as Saint John of the Cross), finally linking the Wom/an in unreciprocated love to cloth/weaving/tapestries and therefore to the interwoven text itself. Just as the lace-making women of the book dwell in the lace, where they receive “eternal being,” the “eternal being” of the abject figures inheres in The Notebooks itself.