He is a modernist artist who feels challenged to find a language for the transitory, the repulsive, the broken and abject aspects of the modern world. Malte is determined to ‘learn to see’, to face, absorb and express the negative aesthetic of this new urban reality.
Malte feels exposed, isolated and alienated, facing the challenge of writing, of forging and sustaining a sense of self and a personal relation to death. Paris is an anonymous, merciless, industrialised city: teeming with vehicles, overcrowded, unbearably loud, ridden with poverty, insanity, disease and institutionalised death. He is a semi-autobiographical figure who also resembles Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Malte is a young Danish flâneur of noble origin adrift in Paris at the beginning of the twentieth century and trying to become a poet. Rilke continues his experimentation with structure during this middle period with one of the first great modernist novels, Malte Laurids Brigge.
Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910)
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