Raccontare la città tra immagini e parole. Ritratti urbani nei libri fotografici

Abstract

This communication traces the poetic construction of the Paris urban imaginary in Rilke’s works from 1910 to 1913, through the cardinal points of its biographical itinerary among cities like Toledo and Ronda, on a round trip where the French capital stands as a resistance space. It is in the pages of Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (1910) where Rainer Maria Rilke faces the main discussion of modernity: the absence of form. The protagonist, Malte, is defined as “I, Brigge, 28 years of age and known to no one. I sit here and am nothing”. A negative that also involves the urban settings of Paris where the action takes place: the Bibliothèque Nation-ale, the boulevards and the surroundings of the Hospital Pitié-Salpêtrière, full of death, empty streets and faceless women. Among them, “men who slowly slide. Most begin to resist”. A resistance to the loss or absence of form which brings the poet to the lan-guage of things, in clear opposition to the views of Paris that Charles Baudelaire had built in his Petits Poèmes en prose (1869), and in anticipation of the objects rebellion that Malte feels as a symptom of his disease. Years before, his Ding-Gedicht (Poem-Thing) had led him to the study of Auguste Rodin and Paul Cézanne’s work through essays, letters and poems, coming back the artistic object to a new centre. And the scenario would be Paris, in a wait that Malte recognized as “the time of another explana-tion, in which the words will be unleashed, and each meaning will be undone as a cloud and will fall like water. Despite my fear I am, however, someone who resists between the big things”.