Chapter 3 - Writing troubles

Summary

Rilke's Paris period was punctuated by doubts about whether sheer hard work could resolve deeper questions about creativity and originality. Eclectic borrowing, already at issue in a poem like ‘San Marco’, is negatively presented in Rilke's novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, a project that preceded the New Poems and continued beyond them. Malte's retelling of family stories and Danish history does not coalesce to create the luminous unity that Ruskin had observed in Saint Mark's cathedral. As Malte's desperation over his lack of narrative ability increases, he borrows more extensively from other sources. Even the novel's final segment, a reworking of the prodigal son story, is presented as a hypothesis, not as a narrative in its own right.

The textual mosaic of the novel itself is a creative achievement that continues to dazzle readers today. Yet Rilke was not so sure that he had succeeded. He terminated his work on the novel only while dictating its final version to a stenographer, and fell into a severe depression immediately after its publication in 1910. Rilke saw his protagonist's attempt to become a full-fledged writer as a failure, and he advised his readers to interpret the work ‘gegen den Strom’ (against the current). In spite of these admonitions, however, he himself felt exhausted and directionless once the novel had gone to press. A long period of creative troubles began.

Rilke's poetry during the second decade of the century gives voice to several concerns.