UC Davis

Being and death are two philosophical themes in Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies. The poet discerns that the anonymous death of mass is prevailing in modern society, due to modern man’s lack of awareness of their own existence in the world. This inauthenticity, partly as an outcome of materialism which arbitrarily sets a dual relation between man and things, is criticized by the poet, along with an inner quest of one’s authentic being, a non-subjective self. The means Rilke pursues to touch the inner existence as an antithesis of phenomenal object, to purify the representation, hence, to have man recover from loss and absence through restoring a harmonious man-world relation, is the transformation of consciousness. Based upon Heidegger’s hermeneutic works on poetics, this paper tries to interrogate the philosophical themes of being and death in Duino Elegies through closing reading. The letters of the poet, and his early work would be examined with a focus on their existential themes, in order to clarify that special point of Rilke’s thanatology made by Duino Elegies, the impersonality of death, which is symbolized as the Angel’s indifferent beauty. Several models of consciousness would be addressed for a better understanding of Rilke’s concepts of transformation and the invisible. One is of German poet Heinrich von Kleist, wherein the hierarchical structure consciousness is presented with the tree image, while the other is borrowed from Rilke’s metaphor, that consciousness is like a pyramid, its vast base turns to be the consciousness of the totality of being. This paper tries to answer the following questions: How could man through transformation transcend the limitations of self-consciousness? How, death, in its disillusioned impersonality, is demanded by the Duino Elegies for man’s full presence of existence as his ownmost potentiality of Being? The final question, along with a review of the whole elegies, is on the relation between art and humanity: through its mystic flow of images, how does poetic language present such ineffable transformation, insofar as there is a hope in art to redeem man from a universal loss in the modern age? In regard of Rilke’s Open (das Offene) and world-inner-space (Weltinnenraum), the metonymy of the animals, plants, and the Angel would be analyzed to know how they are connected to the same continuum of consciousness, and how transcendence takes place in the very extremity of such metaphysical field.