Notes on Recent Reading 46 (Kleist, Didion, Soupault)

The Prince of Homburg (Kleist)

     To me the most striking thing about this play is not the prominence of an extreme military code of discipline not irrelevant to the author’s family, for centuries prominent in the Prussian army.  The Prince wins a great victory, but, due to his love-dreaminess, violates orders.  For this he is condemned to die.  In the end the Elector pardons him buts finds him (temporarily) too scrupulous to accept this mercy.  We may be reminded of a samurai story, though for Kleist the whole tension is, I suppose, between heart and mind.  Among the numerous complications even this thread of the plot engenders are the questions of whether the Elector had been sincere (he certainly seemed to be) when threatening the firing squad and what role the unanimous petition from other soldiers may have had.  The most dramatic and radical questions arise with the final words of the play in which the Prince, who had been subjected to a mock execution, asks if he is dreaming and Kottwitz replies “Ein Traum, was sonst," causing the protagonist to fall into unconsciousness again. 

     Perhaps the most emotionally powerful portion of the play is the pathetic passage in which the noble and courageous warrior is reduced by fear of death to abject begging. 

     The play has been justly compared to Shakespeare’s late romances for its hovering between comedy and tragedy and its magical resolution. 

 

 

 

A Book of Common Prayer (Didion)

     In Joan Didion’s reports from Central America in the New York Review of Books, later the basis for her 1983 book Salvador, the revolutionary crisis was unforgettably described.  There can be little doubt that her fierce images and ideological restraint informed the opinion of at least the American intelligentsia.  Before the violence, supported always by a pernicious US influence, became so widespread, she had depicted a fictional banana republic in her 1977 novel, set in a Boca Grande that is strikingly reminiscent of O. Henry’s Anchuria in Cabbages and Kings.   The utter and complete corruption, the domination by wealth and guns, the oligarchy that always governs in spite of democratic and left-wing charades, are historically accurate and unfortunately remain the norm in Central America.  Even when revolutionaries came to power they turned into the tyrants their younger selves had despised. 

     That society, though, is purely the setting, establishing the tone of cynical self-absorption that is normal in Boca Grande, within which the drifting Americans, in particular the distrait Charlotte Douglas, pass their time.  The narrator Grace Strasser-Mendana, who, like everyone else, has no political values, is practically the only realistic dependable observer, her accuracy buttressed by her scientific training.  Yet in the last line she reflects, “I have not been the witness I wanted to be.”

     Marin comes across with very little personality, hardly even a true believer, so dulled she is in defensive insouciance.  She seems purely a reflection of the then-current news of the Symbionese Liberation Army (though the originals were more touching and true and finally tragic).  I would have thought that there might have been room for a few manifestations of idealism or nobility from the Boca Grande guerilleros as well.  Ah well, once again, history has vindicated cynicism.

     For me the best passages were those in which the characters tossed aggressive verbal barbs amongst themselves, getting nowhere at all.  At times they sounded almost like Ronald Firbank characters.  Good fun there.

 

 

 

Lost Profiles (Soupault)

     The subtitle of this slim 1963 volume, “Memoirs of Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism,” is better justified than the title itself.  The old avant-garde has been canonized and what had once been rebellious groupings apart from the prior artistic power structure have now becomes standard art history.  Which is not to say boring.  Here one may find reminiscences of Breton, Crevel, and Reverdy from a central figure in Paris Dada and a co-founder of Surrealism (though he was expelled for refusing to join the Communist Party).  He conveys the ambience of the early twentieth century counterculture, emphasizing rebellion and the role of scandal.  Those who came of age in the sixties might find his account of the scenes of his youth particularly engaging. 

     He records portraits of Apollinaire, Henri Rousseau, and some less likely figures such as Proust and Joyce as well as an appreciative piece on Baudelaire.

     This edition was translated by Alan Bernheimer with a pleasant afterword by Ron Padgett and published by City Lights.

 

 

Kleist’s Anecdotes and Fables

 

      Among his duties as editor of the Berliner Abendblātter, Heinrich von Kleist wrote feuilletons to fill the journal’s pages.  Sometimes these were like the News of the Weird of the day, sometimes little fables of his own composition. In the small scope of the form, Kleist sometimes manages to create the same tone characteristic of the rest of his oeuvre: a sort of bemused wonder in the face of a fate at once utterly indifferent and yet capable of fiercely ironic circumstances, the subject experiencing the strongest of passions while suspended in a dispassionate cosmos.

     Among the admirers of these little works was Franz Kafka, whose friend Max Brod claimed not only a stylistic similarity but also psychoanalytic parallels between the two writers.  (See Franz Kafka: a Biography, p. 32 ff.) 

          Though it is more artificial in English than in German, the primary quality I ought to preserve was Kleist’s lanky, wandering syntax, unfolding phrase by phrase just as lived experience arrives a bit at a time.

     Brief comments in italics follow each translation.

 

  

Anecdote from the most recent war

     The most monstrous joke perhaps that has passed men’s lips since the world was created was made by a drummer who, I believe, served in the last war in what was then the Puttkamer regiment, a man of whom, as you will soon hear, neither Greek nor Roman history can offer any counterpart.  After the Prussian army had fallen in Jena this man had got hold of a gun with which he alone carried on the battle, such that he shot any French who came within range on the country roads, striking them down and plundering them until a squad of French gendarmes managed to track him and seize him, dragging him into the city where, as it happened, he was condemned to be executed.  When he was brought to the place where the sentence was to be carried out, knowing well that any defense was now impossible, he asked the colonel commanding the detachment for one favor.  When the colonel, his officers crowding about him in waiting and wondering what the man might say, asked what he requested, the man pulled down his pants and said that he would like to be shot in the anus so that he might avoid having a new hole in his skin.  One must note the of the man who, in this extremity, never departed from his role as a beater on sound skins.   

 

     The reader may think of Orwell’s condemned man, stepping aside a puddle to avoid wetting his feet on his way to being hung.  In a way, this drummer maintained his dignity in defeat no less than did Montaigne’s tribal victim who spit at his captors while under torture but with the characteristic Kleistian bizarre individuality.  Thus he earned the poet’s applause.  Surely simply displaying his rear was a sly form of humiliating his captors, since his stated motive is patently absurd.

     Freud taught that jokes are a method for handling anxiety, and mortality is certainly a source of distress.  The soldier’s “Shakespearean quality,” his faithfulness to his role, first evident in his refusal to surrender, persists in a more pointedly dramatic if bizarre form at his execution.  

 

 

Anecdote

     A Capuchin monk accompanied a Swabian to the gallows on a very rainy day.  On the way the condemned man complained to God that he had to walk such a bitter route in such poor and hostile weather.  Wishing to provide Christian consolation, the Capuchin said, “You rogue, why would you complain like that when you need go only one way, while I must make my way back again in this weather.”  -- Whoever can feel how dreary it is for one, on even a fine day, to make one’s way back from a place of execution, will not find the expression of the monk to be foolish.

 

     While the friar may have merely meant to suggest with the orthodox thought that the world is a constant affliction and that there follows a better world (for some at least), he expresses it in such a slyly Kleistian manner that the condemned man’s last moments may have been spent puzzling over them. 

     An English speaker will have little trouble imagining the connotations of the word he uses to address the prisoner “Lump.”  It suggests more a scamp or rascal than a sinner on the threshold of Hell.  The last line poignantly indicates that the Capuchin was bemoaning the state of humanity, so fallen as to build gibbets and use them.   One who did not find an execution to be “dreary” would be a monster more frightening than those of legend.

 

 

The Dog and the Birds

     Two honorable pointers who, schooled by hunger, had come to think themselves quite smart captured anything they spotted on the ground, and one day seized a bird.  The bird, at a disadvantage as he was not in his element, gave way and hopped this way and that while his opponents felt they had triumphed; then, all at once, though sorely pressed, he lifted his wings and lofted into the air, leaving the dogs standing like oysters, those heroes of the pasture, their tails between their legs, gazing after him.

     Moral: When you mount into the air, the wise can only stand and gape.

 

     The story would not exist were it not for the fact that that bird and canine occupy different realms.  When they intersect first one and then the other is at a loss.  The pointers’ sheepish stupefaction in the end follows moments after the bird had felt itself doomed.  The moral to which the author points is heady with optimism.  Kleist surely thought of himself as that bird in joyful flight, having leapt free of limitation, though tomorrow, of course, he may not make good an escape.  

     Note that the dogs are not denied the title they have earned through their hunting.  They are capable heroes, but at a loss when out of their element.  Even the most modest of creatures is at home in its element, each has a sort of perfection which will fail out of context.  The story could have been told by Zhuang Zhou.

 

 

A Fable with No Moral

     “If I only had you,” said the man to a horse that stood before him in saddle and bridle but would not let him mount, “if I only had you as first came out of the woods, an uneducated child of nature, I could lead you quite easily over hill and dale as easily as a bird flies, just as seemed good to me, and that would be good for both of us.  However, you have learned many things, things which I, standing alone before you, as I now do, do not know, such that in the riding arena I must go to you (which God forbid) if we are to understand each other.” 

 

     Horse and man here, like dog and bird before, have irreconcilable visions.  Harmonious cooperation may be imaginable while remaining unachievable.  It is a prelapsarian fantasy, this symbiosis without friction, all the more as each gains learning and culture and strays ever further from that tightly woven interdependency we suspect must surely underlie our present confusion.  The flight of the bird lingers as an image, an ideal of psychic liberation.

Kleist’s “A Poet’s Letter to Another”

 

A new translation of Kleist’s “Brief eines Dichters an einen anderen” precedes a discussion of the author’s poetics. 

1.      A Poet’s Letter to Another

 Recently, when I found you reading my poetry, you went on with extraordinary eloquence about form and applauded me using the terms of the school where, you like to presume, I was educated.  You praised me in a way that made me feel ashamed, dwelling on the appropriateness of the underlying meter, of the rhythm, of the charm of melody and the purity and correctness of expression and the language in general.  Please allow me to say your mind lingers on those topics by your own choice.  It would have proven the greatest worth, had you not noticed these characteristics at all.  If I could grasp my heart while composing, detach my thoughts and present them to you without any further elaboration, you too, friend, it seems to me, would find nothing then lacking.  A thirsty person cares little about the bowl but rather is concerned with the fruits that are brought to him in it.   It is only because the thought, like certain evanescent, unrepresentable, chemical substances, must be linked with something more coarse and physical in order to appear visible that I use such devices when I write to you, and you then go looking for speech, language, cadence, and musicality.  Delightful as these things may be to the extent that they reveal the spirit, still, in and of themselves, when observed from this higher point of view, they are nothing but a genuine, if understandable and necessary, evil.  With reference to such things, art can only strive to conceal them as much as possible.  I take pains to do my best to give my expressions clarity, the verse form significance, and to lend grace and life to the sound of the words.  My goal is that the art should not appear at all but rather the thought alone which the words embody.  For it is a characteristic of all correct form to express the spirit instantly and without mediation while a deficient form, like a bad mirror, is constricting and can bring nothing to mind but itself.   If as your first impression, you praise the formal qualities of my little unpretentious literary works, you arouse in me quite naturally a concern that my poems possess altogether false rhythmic and prosodic associations and that your consciousness fastens on the melody or the pattern of the verses matters entirely removed from what had I had really cared about.  Otherwise why would you fail to respond to the spirit I took pains to put into words just as one would do in conversation, when I had hoped to encounter your spirit with my own without attention to the clothing of my thought?  Your insensitivity to the heart and essence of poetry and your highly developed responsiveness for form and the accidental (amounting nearly to disease) dominates your judgement as a result, I would say, of the school of thought from which you come.  Doubtless this is not the intention of that school which is as clever as any that has appeared among us, though not entirely without fault, considering the paradoxical mischief of its teachings.  But this insensitivity to the essence and core of poetry, with the irritability developed up to the point of illness, for the accidental and the formal, is a habit of your mind in general due to the school from which you come.   I have noticed that, when reading the work of writers altogether different from me, your eye cannot, to use a proverbial expression, see the forest for the trees.  When we take Shakespeare in hand, how unproductive are the interests to which your taste leads you in comparison to the great, sublime, cosmopolitan resonances this splendid poet should awaken in your heart!  How could I be concerned about repartee and witty wordplay on the bloody field of Agincourt?  Or when Ophelia says of Hamlet “O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown!”  Or Macduff of Macbeth “He has no children.”  What value then remains to the iambs, rhymes, assonances and such devices, to which your ear is always attuned as if nothing else mattered? - Farewell!

 

 

2.       

     Heinrich von Kleist’s “Brief eines Dichters an einen anderen” is a manifesto of hyper-Romanticism, fetishizing the value of imaginative production and suggesting that artistic works carry content that is miraculously beyond language, though necessarily expressed in inadequate words.   With a kind of belated neo-Platonic weakness for the abstract, Kleist, a writer whose works consist of words and words alone, insists that the materiality of his discourse, the ink on the page or sounds in the air, is an unfortunate concomitant of its more essential ethereal message.  This latter and more significant burden of his poetry proves, however, ineffable. 

     What makes this claim all the more Romantic is the heightened value attributed to poetry when properly understood which for Kleist borders on religious revelation.  For him the thoughts welling from his heart are paramount.  Just what these are he does not say, but he boldly maintains that that his poetry is required for life, like fruit to a thirsty man.  Ideally, he notes, the reception of poetry might resemble a conversation in which the mind of the reader engages that of the writer, but such an encounter is precluded by the reader’s obsession with literariness itself which blocks the vision of the reality beyond the page the writer seeks to project.  Kleist’s correspondent, he complains, cannot properly appreciate poetry due to his allegiance to a particular misguided “school” with presumably some variety of an academic or neo-Classical view of art as craft.  Such a view, Kleist maintains, misses the poetry, perceiving only the poetic usages.

      He makes, then, two claims.  First, endows the aesthetic product with immense if ill-defined potential and second, he insists that literary reception must be unselfconscious and, in a sense, preverbal, a matter of mind meeting mind in which words are potentially obstacles.  Such claims might seem both arrogant and obscurantist.  Kleist certainly conveys no interest in the other poet’s work, yet the reader has only Kleist’s passion to certify that his vision and his poetry are at all superior to those of his correspondent.  These grand claims are as well undermined in part by Kleist’s concession that his work is weighed down from the first by the “coarse” material of language.

     This posture could be taken as an index of the poet’s enthusiasm.  Like a shaman he assumes the role of messenger delivering revelations from beyond, and, like the shaman, he depends largely on faith.  In a more modest way writers today assert similar authority when they say that a poem “just came to me,” that “I couldn’t help writing it.”   

      Many people, of course, apart from critics, consume art with a minimum of analytic attention to its machinery.  For centuries the art that conceals art has been praised, but that is a refinement of craftsmanship, the polishing that erases the marks of the constructor’s hand, the final flourish of skill.  Kleist’s disavowal of literary professionalism is something else altogether, more a matter of mysticism or spirituality than of art alone.  In the Platonic hierarchy philosophy always trumps poetry.

      Yet Kleist’s importunate assertion of the importance of his utterance, his desire to silence competing poets and hold the stage alone, does not really differ from what any artist must do, seeking to attract attention to a single voice in a vast cacophony of voices.  Whether the maker is modest or not personally, on the page or on the gallery wall each can only scream for attention just as we all did as infants.  And as for the literary devices, those are like to magician’s (and the shaman’s) bag of tricks, and the show would be ruined were all its secrets out. 

      Kleist’s letter could be read as well as a lament for the inadequacy of signifiers, a frustrated struggle to escape the fabric of discourse.  Since, even with the substantial enhancements of rhetoric, signifier is always to some extent incongruent with signified, the writer is condemned to a kind of eternal failure, never quite able to embody his consciousness fully and precisely in words, unable to program every reader with precisely the desired algorithm. 

     Kleist’s letter dramatically articulates the Romantic elevation of art to a virtually religious significance while at the same time undercutting itself by describing the artist’s failure to communicate his mental concept to his friend and fellow poet.  He balances this ambivalence by an homage to Shakespeare’s success, implying that his own effusions have something at least in common with that author’s sublime genius than with mere earth-bound literary theory. 

      I have always considered that in literary theory (as in politics) he who acknowledges a partisan position is more reliable than one claiming objectivity, for such a claim means only that the critic either does not recognize or does not care to admit bias.  Kleist’s idea that art is above calculation and craft is less a critical principle than a rhetorical figure similar to the love poem that says “words cannot describe her beauty.”  Surely he was himself conscious of the labor and skill required to construct literary works.  Thus this letter has more in common with twentieth century literary manifestoes, meant to provoke and attract attention more than to set forth and defend a set of contentions about the aesthetic text.

      In “Über die allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden” (“On the Gradual Construction of Thoughts While Speaking”) Kleist explicitly recommends emptying the mind as a strategy not merely for the proper reception of poetry, but for problem-solving in general.  He says that simply to begin speaking on a topic, without prior plan, will produce new insights and solutions.  Troping on “l'appetit vient en mangeant,” he says, “l’idee vient en parlant.”

      These ideas are presented more artfully and suggestively in the better-known essay “Über das Marionettentheater” (“On the Marionette Theater”).  There the acting of the puppets is praised over that of humans specifically because a pesky human consciousness will cloud the waters by introducing “affectation” (“Ziererei”).  The fifteen-year-old whose beauty captured a stranger’s attention in the baths can no longer maintain his charm once he is aware he is being observed.  Self- consciousness is the curse of the exile from Eden.  Here Kleist explicitly claims that thought leads not to wisdom and beauty but to their loss.  Enlightenment can only arise in its absence. 

      Kleist here provides a specific quasi-scientific image to illustrate his vision. 

  

We can see how in the organic world as reflection lessens and darkens, grace emerges and comes to the fore more brightly.  It is just like passing through the intersection of two lines to come out on the other side of that point after passing through infinity or the image in a concave mirror which, after vanishing into the distance, suddenly appears again right in front of us.  In this same way grace emerges when understanding has passed through infinity.  Grace will appear most purely in a human form with either an infinite consciousness or none at all.  That is, either in the puppet or in the god. [1]

 

 Whether there is any topographical meaning to Kleist’s figure I cannot say, but the question seems moot since the meaning is clearly that bipolar oppositions are ultimately unified as the extreme of one is transformed into its contrary.  The use of similar structures is common in mystical and apocalyptic thought and familiar in such Christian concepts as the mortal deity, the virgin mother, leaving the father to join the father, and death made eternal life.

   The reader of Kleist’s letter might then assume that the heart’s truth the writer is so anxious to deliver is simply that the individual might ideally attain through poetry a position of sublime wisdom from which one can see that, in the last analysis, contraries are illusory and one may in contemplation unite with the cosmos.  In art such an alteration of consciousness does not follow from systematic reasoning.  On the contrary, it arrives when one forgets oneself.  The vanishing ego suddenly is succeeded by an oceanic feeling. [2]  Kleist’s examples from Shakespeare demonstrate that, far from arising from philosophic disputation, this enlightened state of mind may be inspired by the sympathetic experience of strong, even tragic experience which he says creates in the soul “great, sublime, cosmopolitan resonances.”

 

 

1.  The passage is sufficiently opaque that I include here the original German and an alternative translation. 

Wir sehen, daß in dem Maße, als, in der organischen Welt, die Reflexion dunkler und schwächer wird, die Grazie darin immer strahlender und herrschender hervortritt. - Doch so, wie sich der Durchschnitt zweier Linien, auf der einen Seite eines Punkts, nach dem Durchgang durch das Unendliche, plötzlich wieder auf der andern Seite einfindet, oder das Bild des Hohlspiegels, nachdem es sich in das Unendliche entfernt hat, plötzlich wieder dicht vor uns tritt: so findet sich auch, wenn die Erkenntnis gleichsam durch ein Unendliches gegangen ist, die Grazie wieder ein; so, daß sie, zu gleicher Zeit, in demjenigen menschlichen Körperbau am reinsten erscheint, der entweder gar keins, oder ein unendliches Bewußtsein hat, d. h. in dem Gliedermann, oder in dem Gott.

This is the rendering of Idris Parry published in the Southern Cross Review #9: "We see that in the organic world, as thought grows dimmer and weaker, grace emerges more brilliantly and decisively. But just as a section drawn through two lines suddenly reappears on the other side after passing through infinity, or as the image in a concave mirror turns up again right in front of us after dwindling into the distance, so grace itself returns when knowledge has as it were gone through an infinity. Grace appears most purely in that human form which either has no consciousness or an infinite consciousness. That is, in the puppet or in the god."

 

2.      Kleist is much closer to Romain Rolland’s original usage of the term than to Freud’s diminished meaning, though even for Freud this feeling fades as the separate ego develops at the end of breast-feeding. 

Kleist’s Zoroaster

Gebet des Zoroaster (Heinrich von Kleist, 1810)

Prayer of Zoroaster

(From an Indian manuscript, discovered by a traveler in the ruins of Palmyra)

O God, my father in heaven! You have given to humanity a free, marvelous, and abundant life. Powers of endless sorts, divine and animal, play together in his breast, enough to make him king over the earth. Nevertheless, overcome by unseen spirits, he lies for some astonishing and incomprehensible reason in chains and fetters. Misled by error, he abandons the highest and sets off toward wretchedness and nihilism, stricken with blindness. Yet, he likes himself in his condition; and, if the people of earlier times had never been and the holy songs that tell of it had vanished, we would have no idea of what peaks, o lord!, one may look about. Now and then you allow the scales to fall from the eyes of one of your sons that he whom you have chosen may glimpse the foolishness and error of his kind. You prepare him with the quiver of speech so that he, fearless and loving, may go among them with arrows, some sharp, some gentle, with which to wake them from the fabulous somnolence in which they lie. I, too, o lord, in your wisdom you have chosen, though unworthy for this work, and I can only follow orders. Penetrate me head to foot with the feeling of misery to which this age has sunken and with insight into all wretchedness, half-measures, deceit, and hypocrisy that are the consequences. Steel me with the ready strength to draw the bow of judgement and to choose the arrow with prudence and discernment, such that I encounter each individual appropriately: to cast down the fame of the transitory and incurable, to frighten the vicious and warn the erring, to tease the fools with the mere sound far over their heads. And teach me to weave a wreath with which I might crown in my own way those who please you. More than anything, o lord, may love awaken for you without which nothing, even the slightest, can succeed; so that your empire is glorified and expanded through all of space and time.



Zoroaster in German Romanticism


     Heinrich von Kleist’s “Gebet des Zoroaster” (“Zoroaster’s Prayer”) was published as the lead article in the first issue of his extraordinary short-lived daily periodical the Berliner Abendblätter. Almost a manifesto, it suggests the passion and ambition he brought to the first newspaper of Berlin. More broadly, it provides a succinct statement of Kleist’s Romantic sensibility. Zoroaster himself, the Persian prophet, has virtually nothing to do with Kleist’s cri de coeur and serves primarily as the poet’s mouthpiece, yet the choice of persona is nonetheless significant.
     The rise in trade and the assertion of imperial domination by European powers stimulated the vogue for chinoiserie in decorative arts and design. European writers in the eighteenth century, like more recent science fiction writers, used the perspective of the Other to provide new and critical perspectives on their own societies. [4] Among the many examples are Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (1721), Johnson’s Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (1759), Voltaire’s Zadig subtitled Histoire Orientale (1747), and Beckford’s Vathek, first published as An Arabian Tale (1786).
     Apart from profit, fashion and social criticism, Asia also drew the attention of philosophers, including many who were dissatisfied with the Enlightenment faith in reason. In Germany and France such writers as Hamann and Herder have in recent years been considered to constitute a Counter-Enlightenment movement, to use Isaiah Berlin’s term. Only at the end of the eighteenth century were Europeans able to begin reading translations of major non-Christian works of spirituality, some by Christian missionaries interested in effectively combating the idolatry of the heathens, but others by Europeans who found profound wisdom in the East. [5]
     Interest in Zoroaster himself was surprisingly widespread. Jean-Philippe Rameau wrote an opera Zoroastre (1749). Guillaume Alexandre de Méhégan published a similarly titled novel in 1751 (claiming to be a translation from the "Chaldaean") in which Zoroaster was a wise ruler. Johann Friedrich Kleuker translated Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron’s 1771 French version of the Avesta into German in 1776 as Zend-Avesta, Zoroasters Lebendiges Wort. Voltaire not only made his Zadig a Zoroastrian, he also wrote the article “Zoroastre” (based in part on Thomas Hyde’s life of Zoroaster) in the Dictionnaire Philosophique (1764) in which he declares Zoroaster “the first of men after Confucius.” [6] Yet Voltaire also reacted against the supernatural and mythic stories of the prophet concluding “One cannot read two pages of the abominable rubbish attributed to this Zoroaster without pitying human nature.” [7]
     Writers who valorized emotion and imagination joined Voltaire in his criticism of the sociopolitical order, but some found his rational Deism spiritually wanting. Many sought wisdom in the unconscious, the child, the uneducated, the “primitive,” and the exotic. Such privileging did not begin with Rousseau nor did it end with nineteenth century realism. Yeats’ use of elements of Theosophical lore, Isherwood’s of Vedanta, and Ginsberg’s of Buddhism are likewise examples of Western literary appropriation of Asian cultural materials, with varying mixtures of the traditional and the novel. Blake revered the “ancient Poets” without specifying any in particular because their position in the childhood of humanity was enough to lend them authority. With the same Romantic bias some Americans think that the practices of native people must exemplify a mysterious greater wisdom.
     The praying persona has only the name of Zoroaster, which served Kleist as an empty tablet on which to write what he wished, but his use of the “Oriental” name entailed a weighty load of association. Like Blake in England, he seeks to restore a sense of the divine lost in the Enlightenment. His own crisis of faith is associated by most critics with his reading of Kant which led him to conclude that “dass hienieden keine Wahrheit zu finden ist” (“truth is not to be found here below”). [2]
     Zoroaster’s name allowed Kleist, not to convey information about the ancient prophet or his followers, but to express himself. By claiming to produce a translation of a non-Christian document, he might address the divine as he chose without danger of rebuke from the pious. He could fiercely denounce his own society with less worry about the censors.
     “Zoroaster’s Prayer” is driven by a passion which clearly is that of its author, though generalized and conventionalized. Inspired by what can only be called faith, it opens with an address to God the Father, and proceeds to enthusiastic praise of humans as kings of the earth, given marvelous powers. Though Zoroastrianism is a radically dualistic vision like the later Manichaeism, the origin of suffering and wickedness is here unspecified except as the result of error to which people have become habituated, even perversely attached. Correction can come according to the prayer, not through reasoning, but through a sort of grace that grants rhetorical skills to prophets who are chosen by God, the “quiver of speech,” “bow of judgement,” and well-chosen convincing “arrows” of argument. The speaker concludes by extolling love “without which nothing, even the slightest, can succeed; so that your [God’s] empire is glorified and expanded through all of space and time.” [3] The speaker s recommends the specifically non-rational values of faith and love, though he is rather foggy about the basis and the character of that belief, there is no doubt about his dissatisfaction with the spirit of the age.
     German Romantics sought in a variety of ways to register dissatisfaction with rationalism as a sufficient means of investigating the world. The Schlegel brothers did important philological work on Asian texts and linguistic study while seeking the novelty of a non-European perspective as well as founding the house organ of German Romanticism the Athenaeum in 1798. Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder and Ludwig Tieck praised medieval and Renaissance art over that of their own day primarily for its perceived greater emotion. Herder and Schelling expounded a Naturphilosophie based in the subjective, while to Scheleiermacher religion was “essentially an intuition or a feeling.” [8] Like Novalis whose “blue flower” represented a novel and similarly vague sort of mysticism, Kleist spoke for a revolution in sensibility in which Asian spirituality played an oppositional role recognizable to those who recall the popularity over a period of years of books like Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet (1923), Black Elk Speaks (1932), the Richard Wilhelm/Cary Baynes I Ching (1950), and the Coleman Barks version of Rumi (We Are Three 1987 and a great many more publications since). Zoroaster might repeat his prayer today with little loss of relevance. He would surely find readers sufficiently Romantic still in the twenty-first century to feel its resonance. After all, others both before and since Heinrich von Kleist have declared with him that “all you need is love.”




1. Berliner Abendblätter, 1stes Blatt., den 1sten October 1810. The journal not only took an unusually independent political stance under censorship, it published Achim von Arnim , Clemens Brentano , Wilhelm Grimm , and Friedrich Schleiermacher among others as well as informed articles on scientific developments. It lasted only six months; eight months after the journal’s demise, Kleist killed himself.

2. Letter to Wilhelmine March 22, 1801. A substantial discussion of the philosophic influences is available in D. F. S. Scott, “Heinrich von Kleist's Kant Crisis,” The Modern Language Review, vol. 42, No. 4 (Oct., 1947), pp. 474-484. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3716801?seq=11#metadata_info_tab_contents

3. One might have thought that God’s empire already extended through all space and time.

4. See Jürgen Osterhammel (trans. Robert Savage), Unfabling the East: The Enlightenment's Encounter with Asia.

5. To give only two examples Abraham Hyacynthe Anquetil du Perron, who translated the Avesta in 1771 after long study with Parsi scholars and divines and Charles Wilkins, translator of the Bhagavad Gita (1785). Blake did a painting of Wilkins and the pandits on the occasion of the Gita’s publication; it is unfortunately lost.

6. “Zoroastre était le premier des hommes après Confucius.”

7. “On ne peut lire deux pages de l’abominable fatras attribué à ce Zoroastre sans avoir pitié de la nature humaine.”

8. In his Addresses on Religion 1799. The German title is significant: Über die Religion: Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern (On Religion: Lectures to the Sophisticated among its Despisers).

Rereading the Classics [Kleist]

Kleist’s drama is also rewarding but not nearly as immediately entertaining as the stories. I hope to treat his plays in a future post.


Kleist is the great narrator of self-consciousness. His essay “On the Puppet Theater” suggests that, since the Fall, humans are at something of a loss, having lost the absolute rightness of animals [1] without gaining in compensation the omniscience of the divine. Though the opinions are given with ironic distance through the persons of a dialogue, the author seems in fact to have felt Angst bordering on despair until his death in a suicide pact with Henriette Vogel in 1811 when the writer was thirty-four. Some biographers say the poet came to the conviction that life was not worth living based on his reading of Kant which left him a helpless skeptic. Others have made a good deal of what might reasonably be taken to be partially repressed homosexuality and his close relationship with his cross-dressing half-sister Ulrike. His existential sensibility, though, was doubtless natural to him, of a piece with his Poe-like interest in the Gothic and his fiercely painful sense of irony.

The form of the Novelle is most appropriate for Kleist’s imagination. In a phrase often used to characterize the form, Goethe said that the Novelle should detail a “strange, unheard-of experience.” [2] With this license as well as the era’s taste for the supernatural, Kleist could compose with a very free hand, and he excelled at plotting. Of course, most of the world’s stories have been told with little regard for verisimilitude. Folk tales, fables, allegories, parables, Longus, the Legenda Aurea, Boccaccio, Margaret of Navarre, through the great German Novelle of the nineteenth century, none had much concern with direct representation of everyday events.

Given the freedom allowed by the form, Kleist proceeded to bend circumstance beyond coincidence into paradox. “The Marquise of O--” opens with a bizarre notion: a high-minded and aristocratic lady is advertising publicly to find who might be the father of her baby. No sooner has the reader swallowed this notion then the narration is suddenly swept up in the madness of war with flames, explosions, and soldiers bent on rape. The story works out at somewhat greater length than strict economy might suggest and, at the end, just when the neat denouement is imminent, the Marquise rejects her reappeared lover, This proves a mere hiccup as she accepts him eventually, but the reader wonders what further oscillations might occur beyond the tale’s horizon.

In “The Duel” the innocent Littegarde similarly finds herself unjustly maligned; even the divine verdict seems to have condemned her. She suffers the moral equivalent of Job’s afflictions, appearing guilty without having sinned.
Michael Kohlhaas, hero of what is doubtless Kleist’s best-known story, was, the reader learns at the outset, “one of the most upright and at the same time one of the most terrible men of his day” which sounds a bit like what one might have said of Old John Brown of Osawatamie. Philosophically, the principled horse-dealer enacts the disaster of idealism. His refusal to accommodate to the gravely flawed institutions of his day leads inevitably to his death. Still, his integrity remains a powerful statement both of the inevitably “failed” society around us and of the all-but-foolhardy rectitude of those who challenge it. Who will not cheer when Kohlhaas issues manifestos from the provisional Capital of the World? But who would join him?

In Kleist’s world (as indeed in all times) the wheel of fortune can turn exceedingly swiftly. The students in “Cecilia” change in a moment from light-hearted though anti-clerical to morbidly serious and pious. In “The Foundling” a kindly act leads to destruction as the most benevolent of men is drawn by circumstance into gradual brutalization until he actually embraces hell. In “The Earthquake in Chile” the dramatic noose is pulled tight from the very start. Love brings tyranny; love’s persistence brings a couple of death penalties. The lovers are miraculously saved, though thousands of other lives are lost in the process. Finally, their victory proves illusory, or at any rate temporary, and they are killed by a post-apocalyptic mob among the city’s ruins, a mob that fancies itself doing God’s work by killing a pair of lovers.

“The Beggarwoman of Locarno” is a simple little karmic haunt, illustrating how what dangers threaten the soul of the proprietor of a wealthy estate. Its primary appeal is Poe-like, a pure relish for the creepy.

Kafka thought so highly of Kleist that he described his predecessor as a “blood-relation.” In a rare public performance, he chose to read aloud from “Michael Kohlhaas.” The earlier writer’s influence, in both world-view and narrative style, led Oskar Walzel, in an early review of “Die Verwandlung” (“The Metamorphosis”) and “Die Heizer” (“The Stoker”), to find “etwas Kleistisches.” [3] Though Kleist may have thought himself the loser in his contention with an Olympian Goethe, he now seems prescient, like Byron a Romantic existentialist. Kleist’s essay “On the Gradual Production of Thoughts Whilst Speaking” anticipates the concept of the unconscious, recognizes the strength of the irrational, and portrays language as a tool for the discovery of knowledge but as one which is always to some extent inadequate.

The space between readings is politically evident. Kleist’s military service, described as the result of family coercion by most biographers, seemed exemplary to the Nazis. The playwright’s characters who might be today considered Existentialist “men of action” in an absurd world struck the Third Reich as admirably nationalistic. After a performance of The Prince of Homburg Goebbels said of him “What a man!” [4] In some respects a mirror image of this distortion was provided by East German critics who, primarily because of “Michael Kohlhaas” made him a proto-socialist. In fact Kleist adopted the progressive politics of most Romantics. For instance, he applauded the French Revolution, considering it a beneficial if insufficient opening toward liberation.

His rhetoric is consistent with the carnival ride of his plotting. Kleist took full advantage of the ability of his German language, just when a sentence may seem to be coming to a natural conclusion, to throw off new clauses with dependent phrases hanging in clusters, yet, realizing that all effects are heightened by contrast, he also employed the barest paratactic annal-like phrases to convey his hairpin narrative turns. His stories resemble folk narrative in their dependence on incident and the deadpan lack of affect. The reader is virtually never told what goes on in a character’s mind yet there is never any doubt.

For all his apparent sensationalism and singularity, all his neuroses and depression, indeed, to a large extent because of these characteristics, he portrayed a world recognizable to most of us in the twenty-first century.



1. The speaker tells a marvelous story, worthy of Zhuangzi, of a fencer’s duel with a bear whose unerring responses never fail to block the human’s artfully cultivated moves.

2. In one of the conversations with Eckermann. The German phrase is a “seltsamen, unerhörten Ereignis.”

3. Walzel found “something Kleist-like.” "The Stoker” is the opening chapter of the unfinished novel Amerika.

4. In fact, two twentieth century members of his family, Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist-Schmenzin and his son, though still maintaining the military tradition, participated in plots to assassinate Hitler.