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.
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