Trembling Drums. The Permeable Membranes of Rilke’s “Weltinnenraum”

Abstract

At first sight, looking at Rilke’s Duineser Elegien and Sonette an Orpheus when thinking of utopian, dystopian or heterotopian spaces represented in literature seems an unlikely choice. It is Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge which immediately lend themselves to an analysis within this paradigm, with its highly subjective description of a metropolis, with a narrator who is constantly, simultaneously in the past and in the present, with a constant disintegration of space and the I, which could be read as an ultimate study in Foucauldian heterotropes. And, I am sure, an interesting article could be written with this focus, perhaps culminating in a series of direct pointed questions: Is Malte himself actually alive as the ‘I’ that narrates the text? Or, is this rather the perspective of a revenant, who can pass easily through walls and time while making up plausible excuses why, in the entire text, nobody directly addresses him, so that he himself could just as well be invisible to the other characters in the text? But this will not be my undertaking in this article.