Pioneer of the Literary Subconscious
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
Writers & Writing PIONEER OF THE LITERARY SUBCONSCDUS BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL The young man and the somewhat older companion whom he registered as his wife had seemed particularly happy as they...
...His verse dramas were judged unproduci-ble on the Classical stage...
...For that reason I read him again and again...
...Stung by the Sage of Weimar's rejection, Kleist descended to vulgar jibes about Goethe's morals...
...he cried of Goethe, then soon after sent him his verse play, Penthesilea, "on the knees of my heart...
...Like many other literary suicides, this Romantic tragedy made the writer famous overnight, creating a sympathetic audience among people who had ignored or rejected him while he lived...
...His pleasure in writing, however, was poisoned by his thirst for immortality...
...Both were haunted by the same sense of the world's absurdity, the same "night side of nature...
...He hoped to die a soldier's death, yet could not stand the military regimen and ultimately left the service...
...On the scaffold, though, he is instead crowned as a victor by the Emperor...
...The Marquise of O. and Alcmena (of Amphitryon) are both chaste, yet the noblewoman finds herself impregnated by a stranger and the Athenian wife unwittingly betrays her husband with a god...
...Since Kleist, alienated from his own Prussian background, felt more at home in the Jewish literary salons of Berlin, it is perhaps no surprise that there seems to be strong spiritual kinship between these two short-lived geniuses...
...He was one of Germany's most controversial budding authors, Hein-rich von Kleist...
...No wonder he shocked his contemporaries, schooled as they were in the rationalism of the Enlightenment...
...Taken a prisoner of war once by the French, he was asked for identification papers and handed over a sheaf of poems...
...andAn Abyss Deep Enough: Letters of Heinrich von Kleist with a Selection of Essays and A necdotes edited and translated by Philip B. Miller (Dutton, 294 pp., $16.95...
...Heinrich von Kleist: Plays edited by Walter Hinderer (Continuum, 341 pp., $17.50...
...Kleist came from a noble Prussian family of Slavic ancestry, famous for both soldiers and poets...
...Kissing-biting?Where is the difference...
...Amphitryon, rendered into English by Charles Passage, is a comedy of mistaken identities that darkens into a painful tale of loss of identity...
...Where will this wavering spirit of mine lead me, striving for everything, and yet discarding it indifferently as soon as it is touched...
...The two traditions set up a conflict in the young man that tore him apart...
...They discovered the woman seated on a bank, the man kneeling between her feet...
...Teaders, too, often felt Kleist was deliberately repelling them...
...Kleist's greatest achievement, Prince Frederick of Homburg, is presented here in a version by Peggy Meyer Sherry...
...Oddly, Kleist (1777-1811) received relatively little attention in this country until the recent publication of three books: Kleist: A Biography by Joachim Maass, translated by Ralph Manheim (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 313 pp., $22.50...
...Still, he was driven to the final act by a series of unlucky accidents, as well as callousness born of exasperation on the part of family and friends...
...For most of his short life, he scrounged money from his favorite sister while unsuccessfully trying to support himself as a writer...
...His grisly end shocked Germany into grasping the poignancy of his vision, even though it was left to the nation he had detested, France, to prove that his verse dramas could be staged as effectively as the Greek classics or Shakespeare...
...Kleist's naive early desire to discover a universal truth was shattered reading Kant, notably the philosopher's argument that values are relative...
...And yet if youth bends with every wind, and a vehement one fells it, this is not because it does not resist, but rather because it resists too strongly...
...Goethe's classical tastes were offended by the drama: The Queen of the Amazons, in love with Achilles, slays him, tearing his body with her mouth like one of her hunting dogs...
...According to Maass, "the very essence" of Kleist's writings is to be found in the interaction of opposing forces: "on the one hand, romantic madness...
...The temptation becomes understandable in the light of Kleist's plaint: "This forever tormented heart gives me nothing but pain...
...The first full-scale treatment of Kleist to appear in English, Maass' biography shows how its subject exemplified these paradoxes in his life...
...The Broken Pitcher, translated by poet Jon Swann, revels in the farce of acrooked judge whose duplicity catches up with him in the course of a trial...
...All of them suffer because their actions are too large to fit their constricting molds...
...He alienated everyone who might have helped him...
...When we truly love/It's easy to do one when we mean the other...
...Kleist wondered in one of his letters, included in the marvelous selection mAn Abyss Deep Enough...
...He had killed her, then himself...
...The Prince has saved the day in a crucial battle, but only by disobeying orders...
...But when the innkeeper's wife heard shots, she and her husband ran to investigate...
...Maass suspects that he suffered some kind of sexual dysfunction...
...The Prince of Homburg, fearless on the battlefield, turns coward at Court, abjectly bartering his honor and love in an attempt to save his life...
...For this breach of discipline he is condemned to die...
...Death long fascinated Kleist...
...Nevertheless, it captures the frenzy of Greek tragedy better than any modern drama I can think of...
...Maass observes that "those who wish to outlive the joys of youth must make peace with the world, and of that Kleist was incapable...
...He was obsessed with "the night side of nature...
...Kantian relativity is manifested in Kleist through twists that lead the most noble characters into base acts...
...She turned out to be the wife of a Berlin accountant...
...He was 34, when, broken in spirit, he carried out the suicide pact with a married woman who was not even his mistress...
...Fame...
...No, tell me...
...The two literary magazines he founded each failed within a year...
...He discussed killing himself for years, and had picked out the site by the Wannsee well in advance of the actual suicide...
...His relations with other writers proved as contradictory as everything else...
...Penthesilea is the work Kleist considered closest to his own soul, and its emotions are so excessive as to occasionally become ludicrous...
...Variations of this pattern were repeated with other potential sources of succor...
...What a strange thing it is that one cannot begin to enjoy it until one is no more...
...Somnambulism was Kleist's recurrent metaphor for unconscious influences, and the sleepwalking scene that opens the play establishes a dreamy atmosphere where characters act without understanding their motives...
...Besides introducing American readers to a seminal figure of the Romantic era, these volumes add to our understanding of the German literary tradition, for Kleist exercised a profound influence on Nietzsche, Rilke, Mann, and Brecht, to name a few...
...he lamented...
...Maass provides an insightful introduction to Kleist's work, which the reader may then begin to appreciate firsthand through the Plays...
...One can hardly blame his family for considering him a wastrel...
...Is it a dream...
...Writers & Writing PIONEER OF THE LITERARY SUBCONSCDUS BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL The young man and the somewhat older companion whom he registered as his wife had seemed particularly happy as they strolled along the picturesque Wannsee River on an autumn day in 1811...
...Appalled by Napoleon's conquests, he dreamed of a day when Germany, not France, would be Europe's dominant power...
...Humphrey Trevelyan's translation highlights the author's perception of the mysterious link between passion and violence...
...He was constantly escaping situations of his own making: "Always when his anguish was more than he could bear, he took flight-to another town, another country, some new activity and adventure-but what tempted him most was death...
...This latest volume of Continuum's estimable German Library series (an edition of Kleist's stories is to follow) contains four texts...
...Side by side with deepest despair 'in this wretched world,' he experienced with equal intensity a delight in this 'rich, sweet, colorful life,' and with apparent ease forged a [literary] harmony of such conflicting sentiments...
...The truth-loving hero of "Michael Kohlhaas" becomes a robber and murderer...
...Although he seems to have easily won the love of women, his relations with them evidently remained platonic...
...In the same way, Kleist destroyed himself because he recognized too clearIy"thedemon of absurdity that holds the world in bondage...
...Those he loved he treated with a mixture of deep affection and cruelty, "caressing and clawing with the same paw...
...His vision was meant to become a universal existential value accessible to everybody...
...In such masterpieces as the play Prince Frederick of Hamburg or the dreamlike story "The Marquise of O.," he proved himself a master at depicting our contradictory impulses and unconscious motivations...
...The striking image, subsequently used in the final chorus of Penthesilea, conveys the terse irony that would captivate Franz Kafka a century later...
...Kafka called Kleist's work "genuine poetry," and, in an assessment that remains valid for us today, said: "His whole life was spent under the pressure of the visionary tendency between man and fate, which he illuminated and held fast in clear, universally intelligible language...
...cries the thunderstruck Prince, and he is answered, "A dream, what else...
...The blasted oak: it stands unshaken through storms, but the burgeoning one is felled, because the storm can grasp its crown...
...Several civilian posts also required more conformity than he could tolerate...
...His writings are so eerily prophetic of 20th century psychology that Kafka called him "The root of the whole of modern Germany's art...
...Though the power of his style was readily acknowledged, his plots ran against the grain of the high-minded principles that were in fashion...
...on the other, the rigid bearing of a Prussian officer-an almost unbearable tension...
...The young man turned toward art as the only means of expressing the workings of a complex, chaotic world...
...a victim of terminal cancer, she had often begged her friends to kill her painlessly...
...I'll tear the wreath off his head...
...She explains, "So-It was a mistake...
Vol. 66 • October 1983 • No. 18
