The Marquise of O and Other Stories (2 page)

But Kleist's relatively good fortune did not last. The initial popularity of the
Abendblätter
had been due much less to his own literary contributions than to articles on current affairs and above all, of course, to the sensational crime reports which during the first weeks were supplied to Kleist by the city chief of police. The government was embarrassed by some of the political comments and ordered strict censorship of the paper; its sales declined sharply and it closed down in March 1811, leaving Kleist in desperate financial straits. The small unofficial pension he had enjoyed from Queen Luise had ceased with her death, his own private means were long since exhausted, and his applications to rejoin the civil service or the army met, not surprisingly, with a cool reception. His most mature and balanced,
yet still deeply enigmatic play,
Prince Friedrich of Homburg
, was completed in September 1811 and dedicated to Princess Amalie Marie Anne, wife of Prince William of Prussia, the King's brother. But this work, though thoroughly patriotic in sentiment, found no favour with the royal family. Kleist's psychological realism, already shockingly manifested in
Penthesilea
, had led him to include in it a scene in which the young hero, unlike any proper hero, Prussian officer or gentleman, collapses into elemental panic at the prospect of his imminent execution and begs for his life at any price, like Claudio in Shakespeare's
Measure for Measure
. This breach of convention was found intolerable and the play was not published until ten years after Kleist's death, which followed soon after. The suicide pact with Henriette Vogel was executed on 22 November 1811, and on 28 December
The Times
carried the following report:

The attention of the people of Berlin has lately been very much occupied by the tragical adventure of M. Kleist, the celebrated Prussian poet, and Madame Vogel. The reports which were at first circulated with regard to the cause of this unfortunate affair, have been strongly contradicted by the family of the lady; and it has been particularly denied that love was in any respect the cause of it. Madame Vogel, it is said, had suffered long under an incurable disorder; her physicians had declared her death inevitable; she herself formed a resolution to put a period to her existence. M. Kleist, the poet, and a friend of her family, had also long determined to kill himself. These two unhappy beings having confidentially communicated to each other their horrible resolution, resolved to carry it into effect at the same time. They repaired to the Inn at Wilhelm-stadt, between Berlin and Potsdam, on the border of the
Sacred Lake
[sic]. For one night and one day they were preparing themselves for death, by putting up prayers, singing,
drinking a number of bottles of wine and rum
, and last of all by taking about sixteen cups of coffee. They wrote a letter to M. Vogel, to announce to him the resolution they had taken, and to beg him to come as speedily as possible, for the purpose of seeing
their remains interred. The letter was sent to Berlin by express. This done, they repaired to the banks of the
Sacred Lake
, where they sat down opposite each other. M. Kleist took a loaded pistol, and shot Madame Vogel through the heart, who fell back dead; he then re-loaded the pistol, and shot himself through the head. Soon after M. Vogel arrived, and found them both dead. The public are far from admiring, or even of approving, this act of insanity. An apology for this suicide, by M. Peghuilhen, Counsellor at War, has excited unanimously indignation among all who have the principles either of religion or morality…

The eight canonical stories, those published in the two-volume book edition of 1810–11, vary in length from the two or three pages of
The Beggarwoman of Locarno
to
Michael Kohlhaas
, which has the dimensions of a short novel. Kleist also filled up the pages of the
Berliner Abendblätter
with some miscellaneous anecdotes of lesser importance; in addition there is some reason to believe that he did in fact write a full-length novel (as he states in a letter of July 1811) though this has never come to light. It may have been destroyed by Kleist himself, or suppressed by his family with other revealing personal papers which were rumoured to be still secretly extant in this century but were finally lost during the Second World War. The present edition of the stories departs slightly from Kleist's own arrangement of them in the book edition, since it aims to approximate to the chronological order of their composition, or partial composition, so far as this is known. As we have noted, most of them first appeared in one or another short-lived periodical, exceptions being
The Foundling
and
The Duel
which were published in the book edition for the first time. the text of
St Cecilia or The Power of Music
in the same volume is an extended and improved version of the original story which had come out earlier. The preliminary fragment of
Michael Kohlhaas
, probably conceived in 1805, and printed in the November 1808 number of
Phoebus
, ran to
only a quarter of its final length. Apart from this more complicated case there seems to be no good reason for assigning to any of the stories a date of composition in whole or in part significantly earlier than that of their first publication. On this basis, the first (or first completed) stories were
The Earthquake in Chile
and
The Marquise of O
—. The former was probably written in 1806 or early in 1807, appearing in September of that year in Cotta's
Morgenblatt
; the latter, on which Kleist was probably working during his imprisonment in France, appeared in
Phoebus
in February 1808.

These two stories make an interesting stylistic contrast, although they might both be said to deal with a basically similar theme which is also that of the other stories and of most of the plays. Virtually all his important work reveals Kleist's epistemological obsession, his preoccupation with the tragic or potentially tragic deceptiveness of appearances in the world and in human nature. He constantly presents situations and characters which are disturbingly paradoxical and intractable to rational analysis; they point towards the ‘absurdity' of life, as Albert Camus was to call it nearly a century and a half later, and it is therefore not surprising that in his treatment of them he can range between the tragic and the comic modes.

The Earthquake in Chile
, in some ways the most remarkable of all the stories, is starkly tragic and raises, by implication at least, the deepest theological and existential questions, leaving them of course unanswered. It is constructed with consummate artistry and also serves as a particularly good example of the laconic self-effacement which is Kleist's typical stance as a narrator. In general his method is to abstain from comment on the events he chronicles, and indeed from almost any kind of explicit communication with the reader; where value-judgements occur in the course of the narrative they can usually be seen to be incidental and relative, arising from a kind of momentary
dramatic identification with the particular character in an immediate situation, rather than representing the author-narrator's overall viewpoint. Kleist here simply puts before us a sequence of events, based on the historical fact of an earthquake which destroyed Santiago on 13 May 1647; he had some knowledge of the details of this disaster, though it is not clear from what source. But uppermost in his mind must have been the famous earthquake of 1755 which not only shattered Lisbon but severely shook the optimistic theodicy of the Enlightenment. His story about the Chilean earthquake offers no explanation of why it has occurred, or rather it suggests a number of different possible explanations which cancel each other out. We are left with the impression that the author is no better placed to interpret his story to us than the reader or even the characters themselves. This ‘deadpan' narrative effect is one of the factors that give Kleist's work a more modern flavour than that of most of his contemporaries, and has led to its being compared with that of Kafka, who, it is known, greatly admired his stories.

Strictly speaking, Kleist does not maintain a wholly neutral attitude in his story of Jerónimo and Josefa but seems to invite our sympathy for the lovers and compassion for their fate. The paradoxes nevertheless remain. A young girl, forced into a convent against her will, cannot renounce her lover, becomes pregnant by him, and eventually collapses in labour pains on the steps of the cathedral during a solemn festival. She is condemned to death for fornication and sacrilege, and an enormous crowd makes elaborate preparations, in a spirit of sanctimonious vindictiveness, to watch her execution. A matter of minutes before what they describe as divine justice can take its course, Josefa's life is spared by the earthquake, which at the same time kills thousands of other innocent people. The earthquake also saves her imprisoned lover Jerónimo only seconds before he is about to hang himself in despair, shattering the walls of
his prison and terrifying him into a renewed desire for mere physical survival. It destroys both the just and the unjust, those who like the Abbess have been merciful to the young couple and those who have condemned them. The common disaster brings out in human nature both the best – heroic courage and self-sacrifice, mutual help and compassion, and the worst – the frenzied search for a scapegoat and the religious zeal that serves as a pretext for sickening cruelty. In the central section of the story the lovers are reunited, along with other survivors, in the countryside outside the stricken city, and in this idyllic interlude, the eye of the storm as it were, hope temporarily revives – the fabric of corrupt civilization has collapsed and what Rousseau regarded as the natural goodness of mankind has apparently been restored. But in the conclusion, with dreadful irony, Jerónimo and Josefa perish after all: returning to the only church in the city left standing to give thanks to God for their deliverance, they hear their sin denounced from the pulpit and are then recognized and lynched by a fanatical mob, only their child surviving when the wrong baby has been savagely killed instead. If the earthquake has been an ‘act of God', then human reason can make very little of God's deeds, unless on the hypothesis that he is an omnipotent and highly sophisticated devil. In two letters written in 1806 Kleist expresses the hope that, contrary to evidence, the world is not governed by an evil spirit, but simply by one who is not understood. At least
The Earthquake in Chile
renders impossible any theodicy to which the concepts of mystery and paradox are not central. The world as experienced here by human beings is theologically ambiguous, as is the world of real life; in this sense the story is radically truthful. It is no accident that it presents the church and the clergy in so unfavourable a light; at this level of questioning, the answers offered by conventional and institutional religion cannot avail.

The Marquise of O
— operates in a very different literary
vein. The mystery with which it deals is domestic and psychological rather than cosmic. In it Kleist refers to what he was fond of calling
die gebrechliche Einrichtung der Welt
, the faulty or imperfect or unstable structure or ordering of the world, the flaw in the scheme of things: but here he modulates this concept in a non-tragic direction.
Gebrechlich
strictly means ‘fragile', which the earth's crust in
The Earthquake in Chile
literally is. In the
Marquise of O
—, the phrase
gebrechliche Einrichtung der Welt
occurs at the end, when the world's ‘inherent imperfection' is invoked as a reason for the conciliatory conclusion of the story (P. 113); but at another crucial point (P.
93
) a significant variant of the idea is offered: the heroine thinks of the ‘order of the world' as not only ‘inexplicable'
(unerklärlich)
but also ‘great and sacred'
(gross und heilig)
, and we are told that she ‘wholly submits' to it, intellectually at least. She has still to learn the full facts of her particular situation, and to face her own feelings; when this more personal acceptance is in due course achieved the story reaches its foreseeably happy ending. It would be a mistake to take either the story or its ending too solemnly: as in the case of
Amphitryon
, Kleist's treatment hovers ambiguously between the serious and the comic. The contemporary setting of
The Marquise of O
— and the relative realism of its numerous and extensive dialogues (especially those in direct speech – an untypical feature) are consistent with an at least partly humorous intention; the style is pitched in an altogether lower key than that of most of the other stories. Although it must be conceded that the Marquise has in a certain sense been raped and that rape is not an unserious matter, it is worth noting that at no point is she threatened with anything more grave than a certain amount of social scandal and at worst a breach with her artistocratic family, of whom she is in any case financially independent. The basic idea – and here again
Amphitryon
is a parallel – has a long, ribald ancestry. Like that of rape by impersonation (Jupiter–Amphitryon–Alcmene)
the theme of a woman made pregnant without her knowledge (while asleep or drunk or in a swoon) has wide currency in world literature and occurs for example in the following anecdote from Montaigne's essay
Of Drunkennesse
(here quoted in Florio's translation):

A widdow Country-woman, reputed very chaste and honest, suspecting herself to be with childe, told her neighbours, that had she a husband, she should verily thinke she were with childe. But the occasion of this suspition encreasing more and more, and perceiving herselfe so big-bellied, that she could no longer conceale it, she resolved to make the Parish-priest acquainted with it, whom she entreated to publish in the Church, that whosoever hee were, that was guilty of the fact, and would avow it, she would freely forgive him, and if he were so pleased, take him to her husband. A certaine swaine or hyne-boy of hers, emboldned by this proclamation, declared, how that having one holliday found her well-tippled with wine, and so sound asleep by the chimnie side, lying so fit, and ready for him, that without awaking her he had the full use of her body. Whom she accepted for her husband, and both live together at this day.