This, at least, is the story as Kleist might have completed it: the story of an individual grievance developing, with fascinating and dreadful realism, through ever-increasing complexities until it becomes a major affair of state and is then brought to a paradoxical but impressively logical resolution. It is thought that the Kohlhaas chronicle was originally suggested to Kleist as the theme for a drama; it has obvious theatrical potential, and this was in fact well exploited recently by James Saunders in his brilliant stage adaptation of the story under the title Hans Kohlhaas, which was produced at the Questors Theatre in London in 1972 and also broadcast as a radio play (it has also been produced in Germany). Mr Saunders used the sequence of events outlined above, with no essential alteration, merely filling out some of the details and accommodating the present-day taste for Brechtian distancing effects. The result had great force and unity. Unfortunately, however, Kleist was not content to finish Michael Kohlhaas on those lines, but introduced a bizarre and fantastic sub-plot which seriously damages the artistic structure of an already long and complex narrative. This added material, which Mr Saunders wisely omitted, contains the episode of the gypsy-woman and her mysterious prophecy about the fate of the ruling dynasty of Saxony, which she writes on a piece of paper and gives to Kohlhaas as a kind of talisman which he can use to bargain for his life with the Saxon Elector. The latter learns at the time of the horse-dealer’s extradition to Brandenburg that it is he who is in possession of this fateful secret, and desperately tries every means to have him rescued or pardoned or somehow to retrieve from him the piece of paper which Kohlhaas carries with him everywhere; but Kohlhaas goes to his death rather than surrender it. The Elector, as he sees it, has cheated him by solemnly promising him an amnesty and then violating it in connection with the Nagelschmidt affair. Warned by the gypsy-woman, who also turns out inexplicably to be a kind of Doppelgängerin of his dead wife, that the Elector intends to recover the paper from his body after his execution and that for this purpose he will be standing incognito beside the scaffold, he removes it from around his neck just before putting his head on the block, tantalizingly reads it to himself in full view of the man whom he knows to be the Saxon Elector, and then swallows it so that it is lost for ever.
There are several artistic objections to this digressive subplot. For one thing, Kohlhaas’s final action destroys the sense of reconciliation at the close. Despite having at last, on Luther’s authority, received absolution and taken the sacrament, he dies gratifying a thirst for revenge, like Piachi in The Foundling. Moreover, the fact that the old gypsy-woman has furnished him with this last and only weapon of vengeance against the Elector, and generally added fuel to his vindictiveness, makes nonsense of the supposed identification of her with his deceased wife who had died begging him to forgive his enemies. It might be argued that Kleist intends all along to stress the obsessive, irrational element in Kohlhaas’s nature and to suggest, especially in the final scene, a psychologically realistic obscurity in the distinction between justice and vengeance – an illustration in advance, as it were, of the truth of Nietzsche’s punning aphorism to the effect that ich bin gerecht (I am just) really means ich bin gerächt (I am avenged). On the other hand it seems that Kleist was certainly motivated by an artistically extraneous desire to discredit Saxony. As we have seen, he had at about the time of completing Michael Kohlhaas become a fervent spokesman of the patriotic campaign of hatred against Napoleon. A few years earlier Saxony had joined the Confederation of the Rhine, the group of German states allied to France and enjoying Napoleonic protection; this had been in 1806, not long after the disastrous defeat of Prussia at Jena. Accordingly, in The Battle with Hermann, the King (as he now was) of Saxony had under a transparent allegorical disguise been represented as a traitor to the German cause. In 1810, filled with hopes of a Prussian resurgence, Kleist found it appropriate to invent in Michael Kohlhaas the notion of a prophecy foretelling the fall of Saxony and the future prosperity of Brandenburg–Prussia; he could thus underline the latter’s historic mission and greatness, which he was to celebrate again in Prince Friedrich of Homburg.
His reasons for adding the gypsy episode may also have included a literary intention, misguided in this case, of deliberately creating mystery. Michael Kohlhaas has the dramatic urgency of the best of Kleist’s other stories, but none of their economy of means. Its ever increasing and ever more confusing complications suggest that the narrator wishes to lose both himself and the reader in an impenetrable world, in a maze of detail and coincidence. The mystifying affair of the old woman was to have been, perhaps, the culmination of this process, raising it to a supernatural level. Not only the Holy Roman Emperor, but God himself, or Fate, is brought into play. Whereas, for example, The Earthquake in Chile implicitly raises theological questions and, as will be seen, certain other stories (The Beggarwoman of Locarno, St Cecilia, The Foundling) introduce or suggest a dimension of the more-than-natural, they all do so with great subtlety and tact. In Michael Kohlhaas the ‘real’ and the ‘fantastic’ are not compellingly fused but clumsily mixed. Close inspection of the episode of the gypsy’s prophecy shows it to have been cobbled on to the rest of the text with considerable carelessness. As already mentioned, the Phoebus fragment stops precisely at the point where Kohlhaas, after his wife’s funeral, rides off to attack Tronka Castle. In the book version he accidentally meets the Elector of Saxony while he is being escorted to Berlin and, not recognizing him, tells how he acquired the mysterious piece of paper kept in a lead locket which he has worn round his neck ever since. It was, he says, on the very day after his wife had been buried, and while he was on his way with armed followers to Tronka Castle, that he encountered simultaneously the Electors of Saxony and of Brandenburg, who were conferring in Jüterbock. He goes on to relate how, in the evening, the two princes had mingled with the crowd in friendly conversation, and how he, having paused at an inn with his men, stood idly watching them speak to the old gypsy-woman, in an incident roughly following the pattern of the meeting of Macbeth and Banquo with the three witches. Brandenburg frivolously asks the woman to make a prophecy about himself and receives an auspicious answer; Saxony does the same but the woman, instead of replying, writes her answer on a piece of paper and hands it to Kohlhaas. All this happens in public, in circumstances in which the horse-dealer, although not near enough to the two Electors to hear their conversation with the gypsy, obviously has easy access to them, and they are after all the ultimate judges in his dispute with the Tronka family. He gives in his account, however, no explanation of why he did not at least attempt to petition them for justice, nor does he even mention that it occurred to him to do so. It seems that he merely stood looking on, even exchanging a genial remark with the gypsy-woman when she approached him, as if the death of his wife and the events leading up to it had never happened. Thus the sub-plot, at its point of juncture with the main line of the Kohlhaas story, involves a gross improbability of behaviour on the part of Kohlhaas himself. This reinforces the reader’s impression that the whole thing is an artistically unfortunate afterthought; a further explanation may be that Kleist wanted to appeal to the popular taste, at this peak period of German Romanticism, for folkloristic, fairytale-like material. He had done the same thing in Kätchen of Heilbronn which for that very reason, although arguably the weakest of his plays, was the only one to be produced with some degree of success in his lifetime. But Kleist was ‘romantic’ and irrationalistic in too profound a sense to have needed to make such concessions to literary convention.
If the weighty realism of Michael Kohlhaas is stylistically and structurally marred by an ill-considered excursion into the region of the fantastic and the uncanny, this is not to say that in certain other works he did not cross or approach its frontier with greater success. The Beggarwoman of Locarno is a case in point. We may note in this connection the peculiar nature of convincingly uncanny or eerie effects in literature. They are borderline effects, depending for their force on what is not said ra
ther than what is said, on suggestion, insinuation and reserve rather than on whimsical elaboration. They require realism and rationality as their background and starting-point, precisely because they consist in the confounding of reason. But reason and realism must be there to be confounded. This point was made by Freud in one of his most interesting papers, The Uncanny (Das Unheimliche,1919). Using as his chief example a story (The Sandman) by Kleist’s near-contemporary E.T.A. Hoffmann, he attempts to interpret psychologically that type of experience or situation which we commonly describe as ‘uncanny’ and the literary effect that corresponds to it. Essentially, as he shows, an uncanny phenomenon is something quite ‘impossible’ which intrudes into the ‘real’ world of common sense: the recrudescence (or apparent recrudescence) of a primitive magical world which the adult rational consciousness has taught itself to repudiate. It is in this sense impossible, for instance, that the dead should still be alive, that one and the same person or thing should simultaneously be in two different places or should both exist and not exist. Thus, the strictly uncanny effect cannot be achieved in a work of literature which is wholly fantastic, such as a straightforward fairy-story; there must be a realistic background or frame of reference, the norms of which are at one point inexplicably breached by the re-emergence into it of the impossible, repudiated world. It follows that the ghost-story is the uncanny story par excellence. The Beggarwoman of Locarno is a ghost-story, a miniature masterpiece of the uncanny genre, wholly succeeding in the area in which Michael Kohlhaas has failed, and surpassing anything that had been or was to be achieved by Hoffmann or any of the other writers commonly classified as Romantics, not excepting The Sandman, which is itself an outstanding exception. If Michael Kohlhaas achieves dramatic effect by sheer cumulative power and urgent flow, The Beggarwoman of Locarno does so by brilliant concentration and organization. In one of his most penetrating essays in literary analysis, Emil Staiger has shown that this brief story is an integrated microcosm of interacting functional parts, an intellectual whole exactly similar in principle to one of Kleist’s long complex sentences with its multiplicity of subordinated, functionally interrelated elements. As at the level of grammatical structure, so at that of narrative composition, the organizing mind of the dramatist is reflected: what goes before prepares what is to come, what comes recalls what has gone before. Unobtrusively, without recourse to any conventional devices of atmospheric description, tension and suspense are generated, an explosive climax carefully prepared. Details are included for the significance they later take on: at the beginning of the story, for example, when the Marquis roughly tells the old beggarwoman to spare him the sight of her by crossing the room to lie down again behind the stove, the direction in which she is to move across the room is mentioned, implying apparently no more than an irritable gesture of the Marquis’s hand; and this, as we later discover, is the very direction in which her ghost will move, night after night, from one corner of the room to the other. But not only the mind of the dramatist is betokened by this story – it is also the Kleistian mind which incessantly seeks, like Kohlhaas, to impose a rational pattern on a world which in reality moves by a different dynamic. In this particular case the eeriness is increased by the fact that the Marquis, when he becomes aware of the haunting, nevertheless does not seem to remember the comparatively trivial incident of his inhospitable behaviour to the old woman who is now avenging herself so strangely. He does not identify the audible but invisible ghost, and his rational intellect, despite mounting evidence, refuses to acknowledge its incomprehensible reality. The climax comes when, at his third and final attempt to establish the truth, he is accompanied by his dog, a creature whose perceptions are not limited by human rational consciousness. As Staiger points out, Kleist highlights this dramatic turning-point by dropping the hypotactic sentence-structure and also by moving into the historic-present tense (this stylistic device cannot be satisfactorily reproduced in English). The dog, as soon as it hears the ghost, also sees it, and backs away from it in obvious terror, across the room, towards the corner in which the woman had died. The Marquis, though panic-stricken, still remains uncomprehending, but his reason gives way and he destroys both the house and himself. He is following the remorseless logic of an obsession, falling victim to a world which in an unaccountable way refuses to forget what his conscious mind refuses to remember. On this analysis there seems to be not only a particular subtlety in Kleist’s art, but also an especially close correlation between his art and his self-destructive psychological make-up.
The Marquise of O and Other Stories Page 3