Writing as Paradox in Rilke's Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
speaking world, Rilke's novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (191O)1 has elicited a curious mix of responses. Nevertheless there is a shared assumption to much of this commentary. Perhaps filtered through the experience of Rilke's poetry (preoccupied as it is with essences and inwardness and the articulation of Being), many critics read the thematic concerns of the novel through a perceived opposition between being and existence. Thus for Peter Ruppert, "Make's idea of a love that is pure subjectivity" is "an attempt to be rather than to exist" (Ruppert 33), while for Diana Festa-McCormick, "Paris has brought to the fore the meaninglessness of existence but, at the same time, the necessity of a full realization of one's being within the vacuum that entraps him" (FestaMcCormick 82). There are many variants of this. Make's alienation as against "the law of his own being" (Crowhurst 63); "a transformation of everything external that is subject to physical laws and time, hence to transitoriness and death, into inner substance which takes of the feelings of subjective and personal identity" (Graff 249-250); the accidental versus the essential (Woods); appearances or images versus reality (Crowhurst); disintegration as opposed to integration (Kleinberger, Soken, Scholz); and so on: these are all employed by critics to get at much the same kind of opposition Ruppert is driving at.