Selected Prose of Heinrich Von Kleist (28 page)

Kleist's prose may give pause to the contemporary English-speaking reader, accustomed, since Hemingway, to the simple and the succinct. Like Van Gogh in painting and Mahler in music, Kleist left no empty space, no room for silence or doubt. The effect can be a bit disconcerting.

The paragraphs often stretch for pages without a break. The sentences – which this translator decided, wherever possible, to leave largely intact – are complex syntactical puzzles, claustrophobic labyrinths of pronominally linked subordinate clauses joined by semicolons that confound any prospect of foreseeable closure.

The plots defy reason, driven more by single-minded obsession carried to the bitter end than by any novelistic norms – and in this, read eerily modern.

As to character development, such as it is, Kleist's protagonists resemble the mercilessly pummeled dummies in car crash tests and the anatomical figures in medical atlases, in which the outline of the digestive tract is visible under the musculo-skeletal system and the skin. You can practically hear the heart thumping and see the words congeal in a vapor of raw emotion, but try and identify with them and you'll fall flat. For this is neither a literature of relationships nor of confession, nor is it the instructive stuff of a Bildungsroman. As in classical Greek drama and Biblical narrative, the die has been cast from the start, and all the reader/spectator can do is watch in stunned
amazement as destinies spin out to their ineluctable end. “The Marquise of O . . . ,” an unlikely, albeit strangely compelling, account of a highborn Mary minus the halo, impregnated in her sleep, shocked contemporary readers, as much because of the author's detached telling, as on account of its socially unacceptable subject. Her mind made up from the start, the only development the marquise undergoes is in her womb. Ticked off by injustice, Michael Kohlhaas rages with a mechanical fury: all we can do is wait for his psychic batteries to drain. Josephe and Jeronimo, the ill-starred lovers in “The Earthquake in Chile,” make out, break out and march to their doom just as surely as the social norms and the walls of Santiago come tumbling down around them. Toni literally loves Gustav to death in “The Betrothal in Santo Domingo.”

Depending on how you view them, from the outside in or the inside out, Kleist's narrative structures, engineered to harness and channel the demiurges that drove him to the brink, are either emotional arches about to collapse overhead, or pressure cookers about to explode, that hold somehow, while the pressure gauge whirrs out of control.

His words overwhelm. His stories suck you into a visceral virtual reality. Surrendering, you stagger through the telling like a sleepwalker, gasping, unable to catch your breath or find your footing, trapped by the syntax, until finally Kleist lets you drop with a merciful period and an inkling of the human condition.

Peter Wortsman

 

*
The Marquise of O . . . , and Other Stories
, Criterion Books, 1960.

^†
In two letters from Franz Kafka to Felice Bauer, dated February 9–10, 1913, and September 2, 1913, Kafka praised “Michael Kohlhaas” and designated Grillparzer, Dostoyevsky, Kleist and Flaubert as “my true blood-relations.” Franz Kafka,
Letters to Felice
, Schocken Books, 1967.