Rilke and the outcasts of ‘Malte Laurids Brigge’ by Agnieszka Klimek

RILKE AND THE OUTCASTS OF

‘MALTE LAURIDS BRIGGE’

by Agnieszka Klimek

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910) is the only novel by the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke. In this novel the narrator, who is the only distinct character, describes his experiences in Paris. Arriving in this city as the only descendant of an aristocratic Danish family, Malte sets himself the task of becoming a poet but the Paris that Malte discovers is not the city of artistic elegance as described by Walter Benjamin in the Arcades Project. It is not even a city of artistic extravaganza as depicted by Charles Baudelaire in his poems. The Paris that Malte discovers is a city of dirt, poverty and sickness. Shocked by his discovery Malte needs to learn how to cope with Paris before he learns how to become a poet.

In the first entry to his notebooks (11 September, Rue Toullier ) Malte describes his first encounter with the city. Malte sees Paris through its hospitals, through its streets which are full of dirt and noisy automobiles. His senses are fully alert, but cannot bear the smell and the sound of the city. Malte’s disgust with Paris is so strong that even a baby or a pregnant woman repels him. Most of all Malte hates the fact that in Paris he is anonymous. Malte fears that deprived of his identity he will no longer be able to defend himself against these horrifying images of the city . It has often been suggested that the main issue of The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge is how Malte experiences Paris. In The Cambridge Companion to Rilke Huyssen argues that Malte’s experiences in Paris result in a deep crisis of subjectivity from which he cannot recover. In The Cambridge Companion to the Modern German Novel Pike argues that the city as experienced by Malte was to shape the form of the modern novel. In his Introduction to The Beginning of Terror: A Psychological Study of Rainer Maria Rilke Kleinbard linked Malte’s Parisian experiences to that of Rilke,

who suffered similar anxiety while he was staying there.

However, it is not only the city that Malte struggles to cope with, but also those who dwell in it; in particular the poverty-stricken, who not only inhabit the streets, but also haunt Malte’s imagination. A poor woman, startled by Malte’s footsteps, looks up and leaves her face buried in her hands. Horrified by the sight of her, Malte nonetheless cannot tear his eyes away for fear of seeing something much worse: “ I was appalled to see the inside of the facial mask, but I was far more terrified still of seeing a head bare and stripped of its face.” In this case it is not only the image of the covered face that terrifies Malte but what might be left of the face when the old woman removes her hands.

It is possible to argue that the outcasts of Paris in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge uncover a problem which is much more complex than just poverty and sickness in Paris at the beginning of twentieth century. It is possible that Malte fears the outcasts of Paris because in his observations of the poor he discovers a problem which he is unable to grasp. In the same passage where Malte describes the old woman he writes, “The poor should not be disturbed when they are lost in thoughts. The thing they are trying to think of may yet come to them.” Malte connects his observation of the outcasts of Paris to a profound insight: those who are poor, dirty and sick are closer to an understanding that Malte is unable to grasp. They are faces removed from their masks; and the first thing Malte learns in his task of becoming a poet is that they can be observed but they should not be disturbed. The question of the secret that the outcasts of Paris possess still remains unresolved. In his essay What Are Poets For? the German philosopher Martin Heidegger brings to examination the question which the aspiring poet Malte Laurids Brigge is unable to ask. In this essay, Heidegger explores the precise nature of a poet; moreover, the nature of a poet in difficult times when the death of god and birth of technology displaces the poet from the centre of life. From the beginning of his essay Heidegger stresses the fact that it is a hard task for a poet to find his place in an age of impoverished thinking and belief. Correspondingly, Malte cannot find his place in Paris at the beginning of the twentieth century but in distinction to Malte, who wants to learn how to see in order to become a poet, Heidegger suggests that seeing is only one part of poetic becoming. As the examination of the passage where Malte watches a poor woman shows, Malte believes that he

need only observe the object in order to make it a subject of his poetry. However, Heidegger suggests that the only way to make the object the subject of poetry it is to experience it. Furthermore, for Heidegger this experience takes a very specific form. The true poet must experience the world in its purest and therefore most intense form, which is the world as an abyss: “In the age of the world`s night, the abyss of the world must be experienced and endured. But for this it is necessary that there be those who reach into the abyss.” For Heidegger only those poets who have the courage to experience the abyss are the real poets of our destitute times. But in order to grasp what Heidegger understood as “the abyss” it will be useful to explore some of his basic philosophical ideas.

Heidegger’s thought belongs to a branch of philosophy called phenomenology. Unlike other philosophical systems, which are based on our power to reason through abstract thought, phenomenology is an enquiry that begins from our observation of everyday life. Heidegger makes existence a basic pillar of his major work Being And Time. For Heidegger our existence, that is, the structure of our conscious being, is the only essence that can be present in the world. Heidegger defines Dasein, which is his name for our form of being and the key concept of Being and Time, as the happening of existence, that being which is only insofar as its own being is at issue for it. As with Dasein in Heidegger’s Being and Time, the abyss in What Are Poets For? is being as presence that cannot be analyzed but only experienced. In this respect the outcasts of Paris possess a secret which is nothing but being. They are dirty, they are poor and meek, but they simply are but instead of experiencing them as being, Malte tries to analyze them as individuals, and that is probably the reason why Malte fails the task of becoming a poet. He would rather imagine himself as one of those happy poets of the past who: “tells of his window and of the glass doors of his bookcase, which offer a pensive reflection of the solitary, dearly loved distance.”

Strolling around the streets of Paris, Malte comes across the ruins of a damaged house. Broken walls can no longer hide the truth of being in the uncovered pipes and pieces of broken furniture. This demolished house shows being stripped of its idealised image. The wall that is broken can no longer hold this image. Malte is shocked by this view: “I swear I broke into a run the moment I recognized that wall. For that is the terrible thing: I recognized it.” As Heidegger suggested “fear is anxiety, fallen into the

world.” Malte fears the wall but his anxiety is inspired by what the wall used to cover. His problem is how to refuse all idealisation and accept being in its only, and therefore real, form.

Malte’s identification with the outcasts of Paris underlines a deep issue. By trying to analyze rather than experience this part of society Malte fails in his task of becoming a poet because he misinterprets the concept of being. As Heidegger has suggested in his essay What Are Poets For? only the experience of real being holds a promise of real poetic experience. But Malte is too frightened to step into the abyss and believes that it is enough to watch the abyss from a safe distance. Although Malte’s identification with the outcasts of Paris holds for him a promise of real experience it also reveals the possibility of a threat. As Maurice Blanchot has pointed out, Malte’s fear of the outcasts of Paris uncovers a dangerous side of human nature: “The fear which arises in Malte [is an] anguish born out of oppressive strangeness, when all protective security is gone and suddenly the idea of human nature, of a human world in which we could take shelter collapses.” As Blanchot suggests, there must be something about human nature that threatens Malte. Even if Malte’s description of his experiences in Paris is hyper-sensitive and difficult to assess, there might be a recurring pattern in his portrayal of the outcast of Paris. Throughout the first part of The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge Malte describes the poor in a very strange manner. While depicting them Malte gives them features of animals.

In one of his descriptions of the outcasts Malte gives them carnivalesque features. The term carnivalesque was introduced by Mikhail Bakhtin in his work Rabelais and His World to blur the boundary between what is animal and what is human. On the one hand, the people that Malte describes are still human with their dirty faces and untidy clothing but on the other hand, their body movements reveal something animalistic. At one moment, “they grin and wink at each other when no one is looking” and at another they “cling to a wall, a lamp post, a Morris column, or they dribble slowly down the street, leaving a dark, dirty trail behind them.” Similarly, in Malte’s description of a sick man who he follows along the Boulevard Saint-Michel there is no clear division between the features of the man and those of an animal. On the one hand, Malte watches the sick man who is experiencing powerful convulsions related to his illness but on the other, Malte sees in this man something inhuman: “Then his dark eyes flashed and he swaggered towards me with a satisfied air.” In Malte’s eyes the sick

man is reduced only to his body which is full of compulsion, ugly and too animalistic to merit a human nature.

H. R. Klieneberger argues that Malte is in a deep conflict with others. For Klieneberger, Malte is one of the last literary characters to suffer from “the romantic conflict between the individual of genius and the environment.” But as we have seen above, unlike the romantic hero Malte is not in a conflict with humanity but with human nature. It is the close scrutiny of human nature, which in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge is represented by the outcasts of Paris, which repels Malte and which he cannot accept. Furthermore, in Malte’s eyes the outcasts of Paris, dirty, sick and dejected, have more to do with animals than human beings. Malte’s exaggerated prejudice uncovers a threat which had troubled humanity since the publication of The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, where he claimed that the human race is not a product of cultural advance but of biological processes. For instance, in his work The Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals Darwin compared the way in which humans and animals express their emotions and found many similarities between them.

From the end of nineteenth century literature has been trying to conquer the biological aspects of human nature. In particular Naturalism aimed to turn the laws of biology to literary work. In Naturalism on the Stage Emile Zola defined Naturalism as an “experiment on man” that can analyze and explain natural laws. Similarly, Malte also confronts the biological side of human nature but unlike Naturalism, which tries to contain it, his strategy is to escape. Garber has suggested that Malte escapes reality by turning to the memories of his childhood in Ulsgaard. Malte often recalls memories of his childhood but at some point his past also becomes uneasy and disturbing. While reflecting on his past Malte feels divided and lost, as his frequent allusions to portraits and mirrors suggest.

For Malte, the best way to escape the animal in human nature is to find consolation in beauty. The only part of his past that Malte finds fully comforting is the one that brings the memory of Abelone, who for him was a pure incarnation of beauty. It is probably not an accident that the first part of The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge finishes with Malte imagining a kind of paradise where humans and animals are divided. Moreover, this is only possible in the presence of Abelone: “The animals gathered it up, and almost achieving simplicity in her majestic raiment, she steps forward.” But to distinguish between man and animal could be even more dangerous

than to combine them. The outcasts of Paris are still there. To deny them is to reduce them to something worse than they really are. Malte’s fantasy of a new Eden reveals a real threat. It is a desire for perfection that tends to reject and destroy everything that is imperfect in our race. The same urge to perfect humanity is the machine culture that unfolded in the tragedy of the concentration camps. The danger of this position is stressed by Agamben in The Open: Man and Animal: “Perhaps concentration and extermination camps are also an experiment of this sort, an extreme and monstrous attempt to decide between the human and the inhuman.”

Malte’s identification with the outcasts of Paris should be taken more seriously than simply an artistic crisis that the aspiring poet experiences in his youth. It opens difficult questions about being and the concept of human nature. However, Malte misunderstands both and interprets them as a possible threat. The concept of being as the only form of existence terrifies Malte. The real, biological nature of human beings repels him. But on the other hand Malte’s fear is the vehicle of Rilke’s novel, Heidegger’s judgment about the authentic artistic experience is possibly too restrictive to apply here since unlike Philosophy literature does not have to reach a conclusion. As Rilke commented in a letter to his wife: “And suddenly (and for the first time) I understand the fate of Malte Laurids. Isn’t it this: that this test exceeded his capacities, that he failed the trial of reality […]? The book of Malte Laurids, once it is written, will be but the book of this insight, proven in the failure of one for whom it was too vast, too great.” Perhaps it is the fact that Malte misunderstands everything around him that makes The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge such an original literary work.