How to Die in the Twentieth Century
Rainer Maria Rilke, transl. Edward Snow | The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge | Norton | 2022 | 201 Pages
In the same year, one century ago, that T.S. Eliot caterwauled over a world wracked by God’s flight, Rainer Maria Rilke found Him in the listless gaze of an animal:
We, only, can see death; the free animal
has its decline in back of it, forever,
and God in front, and when it moves, it moves
already in eternity, like a fountain.
Rilke was never one for metaphysical shortcuts: confronted with an anxious age premised on the death of God, he was not content to make of the poem a hysterical lament (prey to melodrama in his personal life, it never once touches his work). Instead, he found dignity in the difficulty of seeking to upend that premise entirely, forging a specifically modern availability of poetic divination above and beyond that age’s depredations. It is in this respect that Rilke’s Duino Elegies, published one month after The Waste Land, are its complement and counterpoint. Where the latter solicited stark formal innovations in compensation for an essentially retrograde idea of divinity (something basically equivalent to myth that Eliot was (no wonder) to find lamentably absent in an age of automatic weapons, popularized idiocy and the rent atom), Rilke deployed what is possibly the oldest form of lyric known to Western culture—The Elegies’ rhythms recall by times the tidal flows of Archilochus, at others shades of Pindar in a cadence swaying between the declarative and fluid—albeit imbuing these ancient measures with the most urgently contemporary renovations of the spirit. Little wonder that Eliot, for all the paucity of his wasteland, could eventually find solace only in turning and turning to the last resort of an earthly institution, the Church. While last year’s centennial of The Wasteland received much more attention than that of The Duino Elegies, the scope of modern poetry’s mandate (let alone our spiritual lives) is compassed in the berth of their poles.
Perhaps all great poets evince a characteristic fealty for a particular divine attribute. If this was aseity for Eliot, for Rilke it was simplicity—an unimpeachable oneness that brooks no cleavage. Simplicity exceeds its human analogue, unity, the aesthetic ideal of Western art since the Renaissance and what, as the articulation of parts and whole, admits a prior rift to be mended by Form. What is simple, however, foreruns rupture: it is impervious to language and thought, which constitutively rive word and referent, concept and object. The simple contours the horizon of what is sayable and thinkable, an unavailable self-sameness that draws their frontiers by the names of “silence” or “madness” respectively. Barred from thought, it is perhaps what Spinoza fantasized as “Substance,” or what Duns Scotus called “Univocity.” Barred from language, it is that to which poetry, being the endeavored reconciliation of sound and sense, is the prolegomenon . . . thus what Rilke surmised in the bestial eye:
it feels its life as boundless,
unfathomable, and without regard
to its own condition: pure, like its outward gaze.
And where we see the future, it sees all time
and itself within all time, forever healed.
He called this das Offene—the Open. It is an obscure thought. Just as Einstein was melding space and time into a single unified manifold, where parallel lines intersect and the shortest path is a curve, the Open describes a speculative geometry of space’s radical continuity, entailing the synonymy of infinite separation and intimal proximity. It harks the dissolution of stereotyped perspective, so that our most basic metaphors of immanence and transcendence, grounded as they are in the optical one, are uncannily transfigured. What is epitomized in the pregnant vacancy of the animal eye is this collapse of our primary ontological divide—“Animals came from over the horizon. They belonged there and here. Likewise they were mortal and immortal,” as John Berger says of them. The simultaneity and superposition of there and here . . . this is to make of transcendence no imperious Other cordoned to the elusive recess of a mythic past irreparably lost or a utopian future interminably deferred, but their there transduced into the availability of this here. This is the prospect of total transvaluation averted from the grand stylings of Eden or Parousia, and turned towards something gleaned in slantness to our commonplace, a song of innocence subtending our earshot, a Pelagian critique of everyday life.
If the Elegies stoke the vision of a modern Jacob’s Ladder, Rilke’s encounter with his beatific animal in the Eighth announces the advent of its summit, where the sublime terror of the First’s famous opening lines no longer incurs vertigo but a vantage of ranging spiritual acuity that would preside over his work before his death a few years later. In the Ninth Elegy the diffident animal finds itself transformed into a pair of “lovers / . . . wearing down, imperceptibly, the ancient threshold of their door,” and in the Tenth into a Beatrice-like figure known only as Klage (“lament”) who guides him to an Empyrean vision of “the southern sky, pure as the lines / on the palm of a blessed hand, the clear sparkling M / that stands for Mothers” (as Dante himself saw in Paradiso XVIII). Then there is the high plateau of the Sonnets to Orpheus, the parting cadenza of a career that had mined the deepest formal resources of the German language but leaves off virtuoso stylings for something more like a single, sustained high note of praise and holistic quietude at its end. Here the Open finds its epitome in the figure of Orpheus in conversation with the animal: “Creatures of stillness crowded from the bright / unbound forest . . . you built a temple deep inside their hearing.”
Yet paradise’s solace must proceed from purgatorial ascent. This is not only a matter of the preceding Elegies in whose most celebrated passages Rilke would wrestle with the angels, but the entire life of the poet up until that point. After all, is not the ultimate division to be reconciled by the artist that of Art’s constitutive divide from its object, that is with Life itself? Simplicity as not merely an aesthetic but an existential criterion? One must change one’s life. Like the painter vying to impossibly vault the bounds of his frame or the dandy aspiring to make a performance of existence, Rilke aspired to an act of mimesis so radical and pervasive as to collapse into the wild heart of life, a singular continuity of artwork and biography, creator and creation, wherein all might be “aesthetically justified.” This is to take holism not as a telos to be achieved, but the abiding principle of a Lebensprojekt: that a life, more than being an incidental litter of experiences, might down to its smallest details be constructed as a singular and integral arc, continuous, indecomposable, underwritten by a single function. In other times, this was called destiny. It was Rilke’s vocation to make, with peerless resolve and intensity, a life and poetic testament coinciding as a total act. It was his definitive pathos to have done so in an era defined above all by the ruthless fragmentation of experience. If the Elegies and Sonnets are the apotheosis of this trajectory, his only novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge is without doubt its agonied volta.
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Malte is a protean thing. Edward Snow, perhaps the preeminent English translator of Rilke’s poetry, has finally turned his hand to it and produced what is perhaps the best of the legion of attempts to render its heady amalgam of genres, tone, and characters within a consistent and driving idiom, at once robust and yet fluid as is the hallmark of the Rilkean line. Malte, Rilke’s only novel, is not only bereft of anything like a linear narrative, but an affront to cohesion: such “notebooks” are not a doctored structural conceit, but read like the direct transcription of a wildly divagating mind. Struggling to catch a foothold in a prodigious collage of its own devising, it trails a roving tangle of impressionist sketches and exquisite prose poems, character studies and impromptu parables, aphoristic interjections, critical disquisition, slapdash marginalia, cityscapes and dreamscapes, all evoked in alternating palettes of modernist disquiet, medieval gothic, and undulant oneirism. This mind is that of its eponymous Malte Laurids Brigge, an aspiring young poet of Danish and distantly noble extraction. Its written testimony is at once framed as a Künstlerroman cliché—he moves to Paris where he reads, daydreams and complains, at once fostering a needling Weltschmerz and a nascent poetic vocation—and refuses the trope, yielding no global movement towards the revelation of a consolidated artistic self. No Dedalean road to Damascus, but that self as an abyss to founder in. And if it invites biographical parallels—whole sections are lifted from his correspondence of the period, while certain episodes, such as one where the young Malte recalls dressing as a girl and playacting for his mother as his sister who died in infancy, mirror Rilke’s own life—its imaginative virtuosity discourages any reduction to some proto-autofiction. Indeed, perhaps the only thing unanimously noted by Malte’s readers is its dreamlike quality. Few books so strangely evoke a sense of waking reverie in the sheen of irreality that varnishes its world, its defiance of conventional plot for a queer narrative logic, obscure if somehow definitive, that threads its scenes, and perhaps most oddly its imperviousness to memory—even after multiple rereadings, the book declines to linger as a whole, instead doing so as a disarray of arresting images, wayward phrases and enigmatic ambience, with each rereading itself characterized by persistent déjà vu.
Malte was the work Rilke found most difficult to write. He is a poet who did not compose verse so much as he was possessed by it. The eerie assurance of his diction, his penchant for stark declaratives, and his status, with Celan, as perhaps the greatest twentieth century poet of the second-person, derives precisely from this sense not of ad hoc invention but otherworldly transduction permeating his work. One does not summon but is summoned at the beck of the Muse. Indeed, few poetic careers have been so defined by protracted years of fallow punctuated by manic inspiration as Rilke’s. There is, most famously, the First Elegy, composed in a single night (January 21st 1912), before he began the Second the very next day; there is also his early Book of Hours, which was written in three week-long sprints set a couple years apart.
Malte, however, was no swift birth. It occupied and ravaged Rilke for six years, from 1904 to 1910, casting a pall over the decade he lived in Paris. As late as November 1909, he claimed he was “wrestling with a large, intractable work . . . infinitely stronger than [himself]” as the reams of sketches, drafts and detours accumulated, as illness and writer’s block insistently intervened. Even in a life largely whiled in angst, these were some of the worst of times for Rilke: a deteriorating marriage to a woman he did not love, the traumatic death of one he did, humiliations personal and artistic, and, of course, poverty . . .wretched, disgraceful poverty. The site of his own deepest ignominy, Paris was to become his Sodom, a sweeping emblem of modern degradation. Yet written by a man coming apart at the seams in a world increasingly uprooted, Malte is not simply a descriptive gloss of biographical or societal discombobulation. It is most vitally an attempt to staunch this as a task of the utmost personal and artistic urgency. Where Eliot was content to reactively shore fragments against his ruin, Rilke’s unwavering synthetic animus pursued a unity beyond mere collage. In dramatizing an epoch’s central anxiety, Malte sought an accordingly profound solution: how to reweave its fledgling temporalities not merely in concatenation but willful form, and so reap continuity from a perforated world, a feat of enjambment in the widest sense.
He was, of course, not alone in this endeavor. This was after all a Paris in the birth pangs of early Modernism. Although Rilke is so often characterized as a sui generis poet, this is less a reflection of genius than the fact that his major interlocutors during this time were artists—above all for Rilke, Auguste Rodin, and Paul Cézanne—focused on conjuring novel forms of space adequate to their era’s flux, thus staging assaults on the Classical paradigm of art. This, the doctrine prevailing since the Renaissance, was a doctrine that suppressed earthly time, taking stasis to be the simulacrum of an unmoved and godly eternity, and so subjugating the figure to the strictures of the line. Nature, of course, has no lines and so the draughtsman's stroke or sculptor’s gesture are impositions on it, premised on his presumptive dominion. Art was thus one more exercise of Man’s Right as the divinely elected steward of his environment to ply and partition it at will. And yet in fin-de-siècle Europe, Man had clearly become outstripped by this environment of his own devising, the jarring accelerations of urban life tapping on any pretense to stilled serenity, the line’s enclosure dislocated in the orbit of a center which cannot hold. In different ways, Rodin and Cézanne attacked the line’s supremacy, and so the classical division of art with life, by introjecting time into form, rendering it plastic in a figure tumescent with it.
Rodin pursued this by radicalizing the line, dynamizing it, not so much carving a contour as plucking it to leave it perennially quivering. Take, most famously, the outward quietude of The Thinker whose contemplative stillness is belied by “the strength of a man of action,” or else the Caryatide “whose weight appears in all her limbs like the continued act of falling,” or the monumental Balzac “whose heaviness was completely lost in the fall of the cloak . . . all heaviness had become light and rose and fell.” It is this auratic tremor that is appropriate to the modern moment: “They are not like the movements preserved in ancient statues . . . innumerable points of transition have arisen and it was clear that the life of the modern man . . . was spent in these transitionary states.” Indeed, it was the swirling gravity of these figures that had originally drawn Rilke to Paris in 1902 to write a book on Rodin (his other prose masterpiece besides Malte and one of the great art monographs of the century), eventually becoming his secretary for a time. By 1905 their relationship had become fractious (he was dismissed within a year, with a series of breaks and reconciliations to follow), as was perhaps inevitable in an encounter of two minds who opted for monomaniacal devotion to their art as their profoundest ethical obligation—indeed, this was precisely the lesson Rilke drew from the sculptor, the supremacy of work.
Nevertheless, by this point Rilke had gleaned and processed his inheritance from his master, distilling this into the New Poems of 1907 and 1910. These were his so-called “thing-poems,” each the pristine evocation of its object—a Buddha “touching space the way it does itself,” a swan “infinitely still and sure.” Evacuated of any lyric “I,” they are at once self-contained and wasteless paragons of poetic economy, and yet no Cold Pastoral, infused as they are with a stickling movement: a bowl of roses that “gestures from vibrations so minute / that they’d remain invisible, did not / their rays fan out into the universe”; a torso of Greek statuary, eloquent not in spite of but precisely through its mutilation by time, in turn demanding you too live by its accord and so change your life. One and a half centuries earlier, Gotthold Lessing, epitomizing the Classical view, had advanced an influential argument that sundered poetry and sculpture according to their attitudes to time, the one consigned to diachronic language and the other the icon of a singular, pregnant instant. In reading Rodin, Rilke had refuted Lessing’s so-called Laocoön hypothesis and in doing so put the lie to an entire era’s artistic orthodoxy, reconciling such fissures under the aegis of an indissoluble Art.
Then there was Cézanne, who chose not to intensify the line but explode it, restoring the plane to the unbridled continuity of life. The brushstroke no longer bounds a figure but is borne into a teeming vector field of forces, tracing its riptides and ebb, perspective no longer a mathematical diktat, but a drama of implicated energies:
From a million small irrepressible movements a mosaic of life at its most persuasive is being composed; objects vibrate into one another and out into the air, and their cool freshness gives the shadow a clarity and lends brightness and spirit to the sun. In the garden there is no central focus; everything is everywhere, and to miss nothing you would have to be a part of everything.
Rilke never met the great painter, who was only beginning to win renown in these final years of his life, but was no less taken with him. An exhibition at the 1907 Salon d’Automne was to prove a turning point. Rilke proceeded to go almost every day for some weeks. It was nothing less than a revelation for him, as is testified by his gushing letters of that summer: “I can tell you how much I’ve changed by the way Cézanne is challenging me now. I am on the way to becoming a worker.” His novel evidences the lessons of the painter in the descriptions of “faded yellow of the books, the violet-brown of the bindings, the more commanding green of a portfolio: everything harmonizes, has value, takes part, and creates a fullness where nothing is lacking.” Elsewhere he imported wholesale passages from his correspondence of this time, where “you can feel what a light-green carriage can be on the Pont-Neuf or some red that can’t contain itself.” At this precise same time, on the other side of the Seine, Picasso and Braque were responding to this new field of possibility opened by the deposition of line and plane as the governing motifs of Western painting by multiplying the plane, and hence recuperated this as an artistic matter in a plurality of frames. Cézanne’s proposition runs deeper in hazarding the frame’s abolition altogether, and even if he too ultimately resorted to the aesthetic, substituting a principle of force and flow for one of frame, the gauntlet persists. Where The New Poems were Rilke’s aesthetic response to the demands of dynamic form, the line infinitely elasticized, Rilke read into Cézanne the possibility of refusing artistic recuperation altogether. This is to say that for him it remained an eminently existential question, and Malte was its primary arena.
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The possibility of a life unbound, objects unbuttressed of their perimeter, the indiscretion of near and far. That is freedom, yes, but like most of its radical forms, it is a terrifying one. As has been known since the Greeks, there is an inverse relationship between freedom and terror, art and life; what emancipates on the canvas must rile in the flesh. Taken as an existential metaphor the line, the fundamental fact of boundary, is become death. As was all too well known to Prometheus or Tithonus, to be extricated from the inevitable is no blessing but a curse. From its inception, Western culture has taken death as the ultimate purveyor of form ("the mother of all beauty"), its curt finality as what hews a life into bookended resolution. Already in Homer its three major paradigms are outlined: in Achilles, the heroic death of sacrifice, wholly and presently meaningful in its fulfillment of prophecy; in Patroclus, the mourned death made meaningful in retrospect, absence monumentalized in the working-through of culture; and finally that of Hector, a meaningless death without recompense or memorial save a desecrated body. Modernity ushered in a grossly Hectorian age.
The existential quandary of the fin-de-siècle was not the pervasion of death, as many would have it, but something far more unnerving: its absence, trivialized by the force of mass culture and industrialized slaughter, the faceless crowd and the anonymous statistic, and so the dispossession of our inmost certainty. Only fifty years before, Baudelaire could flâneur the selfsame Parisian streets as Malte and see in the death of a clochard or beggarwoman an image of valor, a paltry if unmistakable heroism won in a futile act of will: as Malte claims of him, “It was his task to perceive in this terrible thing, which seemed only a repulsive anomaly, the Being that validates all existence. Beyond choice, beyond refusal.” But for Rilke even this ambivalent dignity is now foreclosed, begging Malte’s most insistent focus:
Of course everyone was free to divide their experience into halves, but that the dividing lines were pure invention. And I lacked the ingenuity to devise any for myself. Every time I tried, life made it clear to me that I knew nothing of them.
Malte is above all a book about how to die in the twentieth century.
Thus is Rilke’s noble Dane doomed for a certain time to walk the Parisian night, his vagrant testament a catalog of knells, rattles and deathbed ignominy, evanescent eulogies and wretched confession, stolid bodies and queer agencies sidling at life's penumbra. This is epitomized in his vision of Paris, no milieu of Belle Époque romance but a whited necropolis. From the novel’s jarring opening sentence we are confronted with an image that contains in genesis all that shall follow:
So people do come here to live; I would have thought they came to die. I have been out. I saw: hospitals. I saw a man who stopped and swayed and dropped to the ground. People crowded around him—so I was spared the rest.
A death occluded by that paradigmatic agent and symbol of the modern, the urban crowd. A few pages later ensues what might as well be the novel’s manifesto as Malte gazes upon the Hôtel-Dieu:
In the days of King Clovis people were already dying in a handful of beds here. Now there are 559 for them to die in. A kind of assembly-line of dying, of course. And with such an enormous rate of production, the quality of individual deaths may suffer a bit, but never mind about that. It’s quantity that counts. Who cares anymore today about a lovingly crafted death? No one. Even the rich, who can still afford to die in full, are beginning to grow neglectful and indifferent. The desire to die your own death is becoming more and more rare. A while longer, and it will be as rare as living your own life…You arrive on the scene, you find a ready-made life, all you have to do is put it on. You wish to go, or you’re forced to leave: no problem: Voilà votre mort, monsieur.
Where death is no more one’s own but an externalized and indiscriminate imposition, the life that owes its form and horizon to it is likewise made incidental, a “ready-made” affair. For Malte, a self alienated from death cannot possess or know itself; his Paris is one populated by “thrown-away scraps, husks of people spit out by fate.” Proscribed the possibility of self-coincidence heralded in death, his jottings compile the emblems of modern affliction that would recur throughout existentialist novels of the subsequent decades. There are masks, such as where Malte recalls sifting through his parents’ costume drawer as a child, and dons one to encounter in the mirror:
this huge, terrifying stranger before me . . . I lost all sense of myself, I simply ceased to be. For a single second I felt a painful and futile longing for myself—and then only he remained; there was nothing except him.
He wretches then faints in terror. The mask is no longer what conceals authentic sentiment or ulterior intention, the duplicity grounding the human comedies of the nineteenth century novel, but only hides another mask, an infinite regression void of any “true” self. Doubles and doppelgängers abound where this self contends with its slippage, a simulacrum bleared by leakage: “we would like to remove our makeup and all that is false and real. But somewhere a piece of disguise we forgot about still sticks to us . . . with neither real existence nor a part to play.”
It is a self alienated as much from its environment as it is from itself: three decades before Roquentin presaged apocalypse in a chestnut tree, Malte is engulfed in visions of a horrific panpsychism. From an early, unforgettable image of “a pane of glass shatter[ing] . . . the large shards laughing and the small splinters snickering as they hit the ground,” his premonitions take on a wider ambit:
The world of things has been observing us for centuries now . . . los[ing] their taste for their natural, silent purpose . . . they grow listless and negligent, and people are not at all scandalized when they catch them red-handed in some licentious act.
In stark contrast to the “thing-poems,” where this self-sufficiency of the object endowed it with the idealized aspect of an icon, the object’s autonomy in Malte garners nefarious shades when broaching the cordon of art to mingle with experience, its freedom now an affront: “there actually was some conspiracy of which this object was the secret sign.”
Accordingly, Malte may be read as a series of attempts to recuperate this “unpacked self strewn all around me” and so redress this double alienation of the modern self. If the self was already produced out of an alienation from divine simplicity, its form rendered through alterity, and the modern quandary is one where even this consolation is disbarred, the most simple solution would be to countermand this dispossession with a new figure of constitutive alterity, one beyond death. Much of the novel seeks this in Malte’s childhood as a prelapsarian metaphor of lost innocence, shifting its frame from the squalid Paris of his present for the austere northern clime of his past. Yet no solace is found. Malte’s first nostalgic excursion to the rural estate of his youth yields no image of holistic innocence untouched by experience, but only the harrowing account of his father’s death—“it was the wicked, princely death that the chamberlain had borne with him his entire life, nourishing him from within . . . that death which now sat at Ulsgaard and lavishly squandered every ounce of itself.” If his father thus gains some sense of identity in death, this is only at the cost of the utmost abjection, bedbound and howling in protracted agony for weeks, heaping indignities on those around him, evincing an unfulfillable desire:
Demanding the dog, demanding that people laugh, talk, play, hush, and all at the same time. Demanding to see friends, women, people who had died, and demanding its own death: demanding. Demanding and screaming.
As Malte will eventually deem, “I prayed for my childhood, and it has returned, and I feel that it is just as difficult now as it was then, and that growing older has done me no good at all.” He proceeds to only venture further back in time in search of an unsullied purity, hence the several impromptu fictions that hark back to the medieval, and the consistently gothic flavor to his anecdotes, whose anti-modernity stems not from the likes of a Pre-Raphaelite romanticism but the morbid reality of the times, “the heavy, massive enmity of that era.” The tale of a hunting party, led by the court jester, recovering the mutilated body of the Duc de Lorraine; the queer insanity of Charles VI of France—the pervasiveness of death in all of these visions brings him no nearer to a reconciliation with it. His is predictably a life inhabited by ghosts at every turn, the vestige of those out of joint with time, unable to well and truly die:
I was overcome, for the first time in my life, by something like the fear of ghosts. It came to me like a vision that all these confident, well-defined grown-ups, who just moments before had been talking and laughing so easily were going around bent over, occupied with something invisible; that they conceded that something was there that they couldn’t see. And the terrible thing was that it was stronger than all of them.
Masks and ghosts, childhood and bygone times . . . none furnish the succor he craves, not mortal resolution but irresolute agony. He is, however, malcontent to tragically wallow. Malte’s true perspicacity lies not in trying to replace death with some new avatar of alterity by which to figure the self—memory, history, things, or other minds—but to reconceive of the basic premises of the geometric metaphor altogether and refuse to find form in the reclamation of any such limit. To refuse to repair the torment of unbounded space with a renewed classicism of art or life that reinstalls the line—or any other aesthetic principle—but instead eschew the logic of boundaries, of hylomorphic form, entirely. Can we think a self modeled upon the paradoxical geometry of a figure that somehow contains its own frontiers? This is a form forged not in a tarrying with the extensive, but a furrowing that is intensive. The line’s expansion turned upon itself into contraction unto a point: the enigmatic omega of this involution being called solitude. Malte is one of the great books of loneliness.
Solitude is not aristocratic disdain nor any affective state, but a structural ideal: the hypothesis of a simplicity subtracted from every situation. A self without world, which is to say the diametric analogue of death: a figure of supreme detachment albeit garnered through the intensification of what is inner rather than the extinction of the outer. Against the intolerable freedom of undeath that dissolves the metaphysical fact of an inside and outside, and the alienation that proscribes restoring this boundary in the form of a death that we might again call our own, solitude augurs solace in conceiving that double alienation as no affliction but the very condition of a new holism: to be deprived of limits is terrifying when they are our only way of conceiving form, but should we have ulterior means of doing so this deprivation might also be reconceived as an entrance into something like simplicity. Solitude is what alchemizes alienation into beatitude: “Only a small step, and my deep misery would become blessedness.” This is precisely what Malte identifies in great art, such as Ibsen’s that speaks to him of “our life, which had slipped inside us, and had continued to withdraw there, to so deep a place that one could scarcely conjecture about it anymore.” Elsewhere, he attributes to Beethoven:
The visage of one whose hearing a god had closed, so there would be no sounds other than his own. So he would not be misled by what is murky and ephemeral in the realm of sounds—he who had within him their clarity and permanence.
Needless to say, this is a basically religious gesture. It is well-noted that the currency of gnostic motifs appreciates in troubled times, and Malte’s advocacy for a kind of transcendental psychosis is in turn a kenosis—a rapturous evacuation of the self whereby it becomes a vessel for divine plenitude, Being and Nothingness being twin names of the inconceivable simplicity that is God. Ecstatic communion the dialectical rebound of community foresworn: “life is difficult by reason of its simplicity. It has a few elements whose magnitude is out of all proportion to our little existences. The saint, refusing fate, chooses life and comes face-to-face with God.” Malte’s course tracks a slow divestment of the shackles of the Parisian inferno dominating its first half for, if not a paradise, a limbo that is the scene of an attempted autohagiography. This transition emblematizes nothing less than his epitaph as a Romantic poet, half in love with his own death-fetish, forsaken by his Absolute and hence consigned to endlessly tarry with the ruses of thwarted desire . . . and the augury of his greatness as a modern one. The intimations of a novel immortality are ironically found in an ancient resource, one pioneered by the early Church Fathers:
I could imagine that back then the saints did experience such things, given the headlong zeal with which they started with God, immediately, whatever the cost. We no longer expect this of ourselves. We sense that he is too difficult for us, that we must postpone him, so that we may slowly accomplish the long work that separates us from him. But now I know that this work leads to battles just as fraught as those which sainthood encountered; that such trials plague anyone who is solitary for the sake of the work, just as they plagued god’s solitaries in their caves and desert shelters, long ago.
Whether Malte finds absolution is naturally an open question. Salvation is a private concern between the saint and his maker, unavailable to prying eyes that would otherwise despoil the solitude that is its condition. The mystic’s abnegation, his fastidious unsaying of the world, is undone by a single ‘yes’. No such deliverance for the poet, however. Insofar as all art has its genesis in an inexorable affirmative gesture—a creation, a poiesis—no art may testify to solitude. Every artist is Fallen, divorced from the grace of a private language: “My God, if only something of this could be shared. But would it exist then, would it exist? No, it is only at the price of solitude.” Indeed, is not the history of Modernism since Malte that of coming to terms with the unavailability of true silence, that the only silence we may know is itself just another rhetoric. Art is solely a thing of the interval, and its culmination is its suicide. Some years later, Maurice Blanchot nearing this place from another angle, would call the insurmountable approach of this limit, which he took to be paradigmatic of twentieth century literature, the Malte-Experience. Whatever we make of Malte, Rilke did not achieve it: the novel’s completion brought no relief but the deepest depression of his life that would persist for three years until the first stirrings of the Elegies in him. After all, the point, the geometric figure of solitude, is as much a human machination, absent from nature, as is the line of Classicism he sought to dissolve. Inexistent outside the minds of men, it is at once the site of our utmost intimacy with the Simple, a condensate ceding maximum space to a blank canvas, and yet an irrevocable blemish on that canvas’s purity, and so the elementary figure of our infinite separation from it. This makes of poetry—true poetry—either a task that is more difficult even than sainthood, or else simply a fool’s errand altogether. There is a dignity specific to either option.
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The book’s final act does not emend this ambiguity. Rilke had originally intended to conclude with an extended sketch of the life of Tolstoy—who is Malte Laurids Brigge, after all, but the wayward son of Hadji Murat? A squeamishly awkward encounter with the great doyen of Russian letters, whom Rilke had traveled to see some years earlier, left too sour a tinge, however, and Rilke ultimately opted for a retelling of the parable of the Prodigal Son, albeit cast in his own idiosyncratic light. The Parable of the Prodigal Son is not theologically contentious. It is unequivocal in its message: the election of the penitent over the righteous, the meaninglessness of ends without means. Rilke’s rendition in contrast is utterly cryptic. For one, it undercuts the canonical version’s climax: the father’s forgiveness has become a misrecognition, a “love of which they were so vain and . . . had nothing to do with him”, homecoming an alienation where “it became obvious how little access they had to his thoughts and feelings.” Indeed, grace here is no longer a benefaction from on high, but something nurtured from within. The Son’s poverty is a “life in the dunghills” but also the enigmatic premise of a transfiguration, of “hours filled with discovery . . . like someone who hears a magnificent language and feverishly resolves to write it.” Abjection is an apprenticeship, but not simply as a precondition to the redemption that shall negate it. Rather there is a transfiguration that directly inheres in it, as the Son becomes “wholly engrossed in mastering every aspect of his inner nature” before he ever returns home. Redemption is no longer a transaction but an available, if esoteric, given. Inklings of what shall become the Open. Salvation reckoned no more as private property, divine bequeathal, but communized, unanimous in potential. Homecoming itself is redundant when a home is made of the alien, these terms in fact meaningless under the aegis of reconceived space: “What poet is skillful enough to reconcile the length of those days with the shortness of life? What art is broad enough to call forth both his slender, cloaked form and the vast space of those enveloping nights?”
The Son finds his method in solitude, too, but of a more extreme kind. This is “the legend of a man who didn’t want to be loved.” He leaves his home in refusal of “the approximate life . . . prepared for him,” love being the deepest breach of the autonomy he holds supreme—“How often then he was reminded of the troubadours, who feared nothing more than being answered.” Although this mirrors the conventional telling, his perdition is not just the impetus to reverse these terms, penance a thing beaten into man like an ill-bred dog until, his arm twisted, he can accept divine love. Instead, if solitude at first countenances the rejection of love, it meets this impossibility not in a humbled return to the lover, but the infinite focus of its own love, pared of every object not only in space but in time: “My God, how much there was to cast off and forget; and you really did have to forget; otherwise you’d betray yourself when they persisted.” A faith so radical as to be divested even of its telos. A love that loves to love nothing but love. Something here of Eckhart’s Rose ohne Warum; or what Aristotle intuited in noêsis noêseôs noesis . . . an icon of perfect recursivity, a dynamism that is a love disinherited of every particular object, and so loving no object in particular loves unanimously without rejoinder: “He did not love, except insofar as he loved existing.” Solitude again as the inflection point of Being and Nothing, interminable agony and the succor of death. And yet one complication: this Son must return. And when he does he is forgiven. Not, however, for his infraction, but on the contrary, it is “Forgiveness. Forgiveness for what?—Love. My God: love.” From a man who refused to accept love, he becomes one who must be absolved for loving all. Is this to say that redemption is not for man, but for the prodigal God who has left us, grace our highest sovereignty and yet an ironic one given that it is superfluous should the Father, unlike His Son, remain ever unresurrected? Is this to say that the poet, as one who must necessarily fail in his divine solitude, is also thereby redeemed precisely in the exhibition of this incapacity each time he comes back to us, that is, each time we infringe upon his solitude in the act of reading? Again, there is a dignity specific to either option.