«Je n’ai rien à faire au dehors!». The Passages of the Threshold in the Early Maeterlinck’s Production

Abstract

The purpose of this contribution is to show the various implications of the subject-theme of the threshold in Maurice Maeterlinck’s poetry and essays, connecting it to the platonic myth of the cave and to other philosophical references of modernity (De Certeau, Benjamin, Blumenberg, Bachelard, Durand, Deleuze) through a comparative method of crossed reading between literature and philosophy. The results obtained concern the subject-matter of the glasshouse, a central theme in Maeterlinck’s poetry, as a nocturnal centre of transvalorization, according to the imagination theory by Gilbert Durand; the importance of glass and silence as bodies of a mystical production of secret and cipher language, after the Loss of a direct symbol of Divinity (De Certeau); the presence of Leibniz’s categories of Possible and Virtual as interspaces between dead and living creatures, according to the interpretation of Leibniz’s thought by Deleuze; the importance of the cave in its relationship with the glasshouse as a space devoid of the perturbations of historical time and as utopia of the end of History (Benjamin, Blumenberg). The conclusion shows Maeterlinck’s evolution from a poetry of nocturnal closed space as wait of event (Death), to a day-like conception of nature as space of allegorical purification of desire, in contrast with the underground spaces of the totalitarian states. This conception finds in the figure of the temple-cave an important configuration, as the title of an essay of 1902: The buried Temple (Le Temple enseveli) shows.

Keywords

• caverna
• serra
• segreto
• virtuale
• tempio