Kleist’s version of this idea gives it a morbid and eerie flavour. As we have already mentioned, there is something not quite normal about Piachi’s marriage to his young second wife Elvira. It is for some reason childless (the boy Paolo was the son of Piachi’s first marriage) and Elvira’s emotions are romantically fixated on a young Genoese nobleman who, twelve years earlier, had saved her from a burning house when she was a child and had died of an injury incurred during the rescue. Elvira still adores his memory, grieves inconsolably when anything reminds her of him, and secretly keeps a life-size portrait of him in a screened alcove in her bedroom. This private cult is known only to Piachi, until Nicolo eventually discovers it. He already bears malice against his young adoptive mother for her disapproval of his immoral way of life, which has also put him out of favour with Piachi; and when by chance he looks through Elvira’s keyhole and sees her apparently kneeling at the feet of a lover, he relishes the prospect of being able to denounce this sham paragon of virtue. When he searches Elvira’s bedroom in her absence, however, he discovers his error.
It is at this point that Kleist’s very characteristic variation on the Hyginus story begins. Three further motifs are introduced, all of them associated with the realm of the sinister and the occult. First, that of the Doppelgänger: Nicolo discovers that the figure in the portrait exactly resembles himself. Secondly, while idly toying one day with the six letters of a child’s alphabet that compose his name, he finds that it is an anagram of the name ‘Colino’ which he has heard Elvira murmur to the portrait. In traditional magical lore, anagrams and similar verbal devices have since antiquity played a well-recognized part, as have also such divinatory procedures as throwing down letters of the alphabet at random; this in fact happens in Ira Levin’s macabre novel about satanism in present-day New York, Rosemary’s Baby (1967), in which the heroine discovers by throwing down some letters that the name of her neighbour Roman Castavet is an anagram of the name of a well-known diabolist, Stevan Marcato. The third and crucial additional motif is that of the ‘uncanny’ mingling or confusion of the inanimate with the animate, the dead with the living, the portrait with the model. (There are many parallels to this idea, both before and after Kleist; Hoffmann, for instance, was attracted by the theme of automata, which he uses notably in The Sandman.) The impersonation by the evil Nicolo of his polar opposite, the virtuous and noble Colino, is in fact the central pointe and dramatic climax of this Novelle. Kleist skilfully prepares it and builds up to it, just as he does to the central incident with the dog in The Beggarwoman of Locarno. Nicolo discovers his affinity with the portrait and the connexion between the names; he remembers that Elvira fainted when, after a masked ball, by coincidence she saw him wearing the same costume as the Genoese knight of the portrait; and he notes how disturbed she becomes when he deliberately confronts her with the six letters rearranged to form the name ‘Colino’. He also discovers Colino’s identity and the mystery of his adoptive mother’s perpetual infatuation with a dead man. The impersonation scene itself, in which he exploits all these discoveries, has a dramatic force not unlike that of the crucial confrontation in Oscar Wilde’s story, The Picture of Dorian Gray, between the beautiful but profoundly corrupted Dorian and his alter ego or real self, the mysterious life-sized portrait which, hidden in an attic, has aged and grown foul, while he as the world knows him has retained the innocent youthfulness painted long ago by a man who saw him with the vision of a lover. (It may be noted that at the very beginning of The Foundling Nicolo is described as beautiful in a way that is ‘strangely statuesque’ – eigentümlich starr, literally ‘rigid’, a phrase suggesting some kind of portrait or mask.)
The remainder of Kleist’s story simply works out the logical consequences of this scene, the remorseless conclusion of a world turned mad and satanic: the death of the horrified Elvira after her secret fantasy has become a ghostly reality, the dreadful murder of Nicolo by Piachi, the transformation of this kindly old man into an obsessed avenger literally craving for Hell where, like Dante’s Ugolino, he may eternally torment this emissary of nothingness who has taken everything from him – his son, his property, his wife, his life, and his soul. We never discover who ‘Nicolo’ is, nor by what sinister coincidence or for what other reason he is the double of ‘Colino’ and is called by an inversion, as it were, of his name. The polarity which can lie within one and the same character, that of Kohlhaas, for instance, or of the angel-devil Count F—, is here externalized into two persons, each the opposite of the other. This ‘good-evil’ version of the Doppelgänger theme is also used by Hoffmann in his novel The Devil’s Elixir; R. L. Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is a later variant of it, and numerous others could no doubt be found.
In the last story, The Duel, as in the first, The Earthquake in Chile, God himself acts ambiguously. The Duel has a medieval setting and is based partly on a chronicle by Froissart and partly on an episode from Cervantes’ romance Persiles y Sigismunda. What seems to have interested Kleist was the idea he found in his source material that the procedure of trial by ordeal (here ordeal by single combat), which according to medieval belief was the ultimate and infallible method of discovering the truth when ordinary evidence could not establish it, might at times yield a misleading, seemingly incorrect answer. This theme, as incorporated in the apparent defeat of the heroine’s champion by Jakob Rotbart, is accordingly the dramatic pointe of The Duel, just as Toni’s binding up her sleeping lover is that of The Betrothal in Santo Domingo, the behaviour of the dog that of The Beggarwoman of Locarno, the portrait scene that of The Foundling, and the unearthly performance of the Mass that of St Cecilia. It has been objected that Kleist over-complicates the structure of The Duel by making the involved preliminary story of the murder of Duke Wilhelm, which was not in his sources, precede the main story of Littegarde and her champion Friedrich von Trota; but he must have felt this to be artistically necessary if the central enigma were to be convincingly and pointedly set up. The essential situation, as in The Broken Pitcher, Amphitryon, and The Marquise of O—, is that of the apparently chaste woman suspected of unchastity on the basis of seemingly damning evidence. The case against Littegarde would be weakened if Count Rotbart were obviously a scoundrel, but he is regarded as an honourable man by many and it is only because he is on trial for his life on a charge of murder that, as an alibi, he can seem justified in making (with a due show of gentlemanly reluctance) his disclosure that the night on which the murder was committed had been spent by him in Littegarde’s bedroom. Moreover, just as in Amphitryon Alcmene is bafflingly confronted with a golden diadem which must appear to be a love-gift from someone other than her husband, the Count is able to produce a ring which he declares Littegarde had given him on that night. (It may also be noted that both Littegarde and the Marquise of O— are widows, which of course makes their alleged misconduct more difficult to disprove.) But in Littegarde’s case there are not only worldly presumptions and specific evidence against her: proof seems to become absolute at the point where her champion, having appealed to the irrefutable judgement of God, is apparently defeated by her supposed paramour. Not surprisingly, she here undergoes a kind of mental crisis and ceases to believe even in her own innocence. Nowhere in Kleist’s work is the discrepancy between reality and appearance so sharply polarized. Littegarde’s despairing confession to Friedrich von Trota in the prison scene puts Trota to the ultimate test of the lover’s faith in his beloved, a subtle personal parallel to the public trial by ordeal he has undergone already. At first, overwhelmed by the monstrous contradiction between what he unquestioningly believed to be true and what now presents itself as true, that faith momentarily collapses and he faints, as the Marquise fainted when the midwife declared her to be pregnant, or Elvira when ‘Colino’ confronted her. But he recovers, and passes the test in which Gustav von der Ried had failed. He utters the words which sum up Kleist’s whole conviction of the limitations of rationalism, urging Littegarde to hold fast at all costs to her inne
r intuitive feeling that she is innocent, notwithstanding all the indications to the contrary and notwithstanding even the apparently contrary divine pronouncement. This point of crisis and positive faith having been reached, Kleist (or God) can proceed to the vindication of Littegarde on the basis of evidence: the mystery is not an irrational one at all; the narrator has the key to it all the time, as in The Marquise of O—, and therefore, like that story, The Duel does not end tragically. The difference between the two stories is that in The Duel the solution is not shared all along with the reader, to whom the narrative therefore presents itself with tension and tragic potential. Unlike Count F—, even Rotbart himself does not know the real explanation of what has happened, and nor does anyone else until the very end when it is discovered accidentally – or rather (in terms of the story’s medieval Christian frame of reference) revealed by God in his own time. On the night of the murder the Count has in fact been received at Auerstein Castle, but not by Littegarde as he fondly imagines; her maid-in-waiting, an abandoned mistress of Rotbart, has deceived the latter by impersonating Littegarde, in whom she knows him to be interested, has stolen her lady’s ring and given it to him, taking him in the darkness of the night to a sumptuous bedroom in a deserted wing of the castle. And in fact Rotbart has nevertheless been responsible for the murder of Duke Wilhelm, having employed a henchman to shoot him down; but in stating that he was with Littegarde on the night in question he has been in good faith. The real and paradoxical outcome of the duel therefore turns out to be entirely appropriate: Trota recovers from his seemingly mortal wound, while Rotbart dies slowly and horribly from his slight scratch, which has turned gangrenous. Informed of the maid Rosalie’s spiteful deception of him, he makes as he dies a public confession which at the last moment saves the lovers from being burnt at the stake for blasphemy, and the Emperor orders a modification of the statute about trial by ordeal: a clause is to be inserted indicating that this procedure will reveal the truth immediately ‘if it be God’s will’. If it is not his will, then presumably he will reveal it later. But does Kleist here imply that this later revelation will always, as in the case of Friedrich and Littegarde, be in time to prevent a miscarriage of temporal justice? Perhaps not; but if not, then ironically enough the whole ordeal procedure ceases to be reliable, and the conclusion of The Duel cannot be said to be unequivocally optimistic. In the last resort the inscrutability of God’s ways must be accepted; he cannot be magically compelled to answer questions. At best (as Kleist had suggested in 1806) the world is governed by a being who is ‘not understood’; and the presumptuous claim to understand him can be raised by those who are guided by nothing more than their own cruel passions, with the terrible consequences which The Earthquake in Chile makes manifest.
The world of all these stories is an unpredictable one, a world of dislocated causality on which inexplicable factors intrude and in which sanity is poised on the brink of destruction. They are the work of a rationalist tormented by his loss of faith in Reason and desperately searching for certainty, for an order which is not ‘gebrechlich’. In Kleisf’s life this search could only fail; the only imposable order was that of his art, an order of words, the strange patterns of his three or four dramatic masterpieces, the electrifying articulated structures of his narrative prose. The qualities of the latter which have made it the subject of much intensive stylistic scrutiny are of course the very qualities to which a translator cannot hope to do justice. He must merely seek to achieve a compromise that will suggest something of the simultaneous complexity and elegance of the original, while respecting the limits to which English syntax can reasonably be pushed. We have felt that a new attempt was justified: Martin Greenberg’s version (New York, 1960; Faber and Faber 1963; now out of print) was marred by too many errors of comprehension and taste, which we have tried to avoid, while remaining in good measure indebted to its frequent felicities.
Nigel Reeves and David Luke collaborated on the Introduction and on the translation of Michael Kohlhaas; the other seven stories were translated by David Luke.
The Earthquake in Chile
IN Santiago, the capital of the kingdom of Chile, at the moment of the great earthquake of 1647 in which many thousands lost their lives, a young Spaniard called Jerónimo Rugera was standing beside one of the pillars in the prison to which he had been committed on a criminal charge, and was about to hang himself. A year or so previously Don Enrico Asterón, one of the richest noblemen of the city, had turned him out of his house where he had been employed as a tutor, for being on too intimate a footing with Asteró’s only daughter, Doña Josefa. She herself was sternly warned, but owing to the malicious vigilance of her proud brother she was discovered nevertheless in a secret rendezvous with Jerónimo, and this so aroused her old father’s indignation that he forced her to enter the Carmelite convent of Our Lady of the Mountain.
A happy chance had enabled her lover to resume the liaison in this very place, and one quiet night the convent garden became the scene of his joy’s consummation. On the day of Corpus Christi, the solemn procession of the nuns, with the novices following them, was just beginning when, as the bells pealed out, the unhappy Josefa collapsed on the cathedral steps in the pangs of childbirth.
This incident caused an extraordinary public stir; without any regard for her condition the young sinner was at once imprisoned, and her confinement was scarcely over when by the Archbishop’s command she was put on trial with the utmost rigour. The scandal was talked of in the city with so much anger and the whole convent in which it had taken place was criticized on all sides with such harshness that neither the intercession of the Asterón family, nor even the wishes of the Abbess herself, who had conceived an affection for the young girl on account of her otherwise irreproachable conduct, could mitigate the strict penalty to which she was subject by conventual law. All that could be done was that the Viceroy commuted her sentence from death at the stake to death by beheading, a decision which greatly outraged the matrons and virgins of Santiago.
In the streets through which the culprit was to be led to her execution the windows were rented, the roofs of the houses were partly dismantled, and the pious daughters of the city invited their female friends to witness with them, in sisterly companionship, this spectacle about to be offered to divine vengeance.
Jerónimo, who in the meantime had also been imprisoned, went almost out of his mind when he was informed of this appalling turn of events. In vain he pondered plans of rescue: wherever the wings of his most reckless imaginings carried him, bolts and walls were in his way; when he attempted to file through the window bars this was discovered, and merely led to his being locked up still more strictly. He fell on his knees before an image of the Holy Mother of God and prayed to her with infinite fervour, convinced that she alone could save them now.
Yet the fearful day came, and with it an inward certainty of the utter hopelessness of his position. The bells that accompanied Josefa’s passage to the place of execution began to toll, and despair overcame him. Hating his life, he resolved to put an end to it by means of a length of rope which by chance had been left in his cell. He was standing by one of the walls under a pillar, as already related, holding the rope that would release him from this miserable world, and was in the very act of fastening it to an iron bracket attached to the cornice, when suddenly, with a crash as if the very firmament had shattered, the greater part of the city collapsed, burying every living thing beneath its ruins. Jerónimo Rugera stood rigid with horror; and as if every thought had been obliterated from his mind, he now clung to the pillar on which he had wanted to die, and tried to stop himself falling. The ground was heaving under his feet, great cracks appeared in the walls all round him, the whole edifice toppled towards the street and would have crashed down into it had not its slow fall been met by that of the house opposite, and only the arch thus formed by chance prevented its complete destruction. Trembling, his hair on end, his knees nearly giving way, Jerónimo slid down the steeply sloping
floor to the gap that had been torn through the front wall of his prison as the two buildings collided.
He was scarcely outside when a second tremor completely demolished the already subsiding street. Panic-stricken, with no idea of how to save himself from this general doom, he ran on over wreckage and fallen timber towards one of the nearest city gates, while death assailed him from all directions. Here another house caved in, scattering its debris far and wide and driving him into a side street; here flames, flashing through clouds of smoke, were licking out of every gable and chased him in terror into another; here the Mapocho river, overflowing its banks, rolled roaring towards him and forced him into a third. Here lay a heap of corpses, there a voice still moaned under the rubble, here people were screaming on burning house-tops, there men and animals were struggling in the floodwater, here a brave rescuer tried to help and there stood another man, pale as death, speechlessly extending his trembling hands to heaven. When Jerónimo had reached the gate and climbed a hill beyond it, he fell down at the top in a dead faint.
He had probably lain there quite unconscious for about a quarter of an hour when he finally recovered his senses and half raised himself up, his back turned to the city. He felt his forehead and his chest, not knowing what to make of his condition, and an unspeakable feeling of bliss came over him as a westerly breeze from the sea fanned his returning life and his eyes wandered in all directions over the fertile surroundings of Santiago. Only the sight of crowds of distraught people everywhere troubled him; he did not understand what could have brought them and him to this place, and only when he turned and saw the city levelled to the ground behind him did he remember the terrifying moments he had just experienced. He bowed his forehead to the very ground as he thanked God for his miraculous escape; and as if this one appalling memory, stamping itself on his mind, had erased all others, he wept with rapture to find that the blessing of life, in all its wealth and variety, was still his to enjoy.
The Marquise of O and Other Stories Page 5