The Marquise of O and Other Stories (4 page)

If the weighty realism of
Michael Kohlhaas
is stylistically and structurally marred by an ill-considered excursion into the region of the fantastic and the uncanny, this is not to say that in certain other works he did not cross or approach its frontier with greater success.
The Beggarwoman of Locarno
is a case in point. We may note in this connection the peculiar nature of convincingly uncanny or eerie effects in literature. They are borderline effects, depending for their force on what is not said rather than what is said, on suggestion, insinuation and reserve rather than on whimsical elaboration. They require realism and rationality as their background and starting-point, precisely because they consist in the confounding of reason. But reason and realism must be there to be confounded. This point was made by Freud in one of his most interesting papers,
The Uncanny
(Das Unheimliche,1919). Using as his chief example a story
(The Sandman)
by Kleist's near-contemporary E.T.A. Hoffmann, he attempts to interpret psychologically that type of experience or situation which we commonly describe as ‘uncanny' and the literary effect that corresponds to it. Essentially, as he shows, an uncanny phenomenon is something quite ‘impossible' which intrudes into the ‘real' world of common sense: the recrudescence (or apparent recrudescence) of a primitive magical world which the adult rational consciousness has taught itself to repudiate. It is in this sense impossible, for instance, that the dead should still be alive, that one and the same person or thing should simultaneously be in two different places or should both exist and not exist. Thus, the strictly uncanny effect cannot be achieved in a work of literature which is wholly fantastic, such as a straightforward fairy-story; there must be
a realistic background or frame of reference, the norms of which are at one point inexplicably breached by the re-emergence into it of the impossible, repudiated world. It follows that the ghost-story is the uncanny story
par excellence. The Beggarwoman of Locarno
is a ghost-story, a miniature masterpiece of the uncanny genre, wholly succeeding in the area in which
Michael Kohlhaas
has failed, and surpassing anything that had been or was to be achieved by Hoffmann or any of the other writers commonly classified as Romantics, not excepting
The Sandman
, which is itself an outstanding exception. If
Michael Kohlhaas
achieves dramatic effect by sheer cumulative power and urgent flow,
The Beggarwoman of Locarno
does so by brilliant concentration and organization. In one of his most penetrating essays in literary analysis, Emil Staiger has shown that this brief story is an integrated microcosm of interacting functional parts, an intellectual whole exactly similar in principle to one of Kleist's long complex sentences with its multiplicity of subordinated, functionally interrelated elements. As at the level of grammatical structure, so at that of narrative composition, the organizing mind of the dramatist is reflected: what goes before prepares what is to come, what comes recalls what has gone before. Unobtrusively, without recourse to any conventional devices of atmospheric description, tension and suspense are generated, an explosive climax carefully prepared. Details are included for the significance they later take on: at the beginning of the story, for example, when the Marquis roughly tells the old beggarwoman to spare him the sight of her by crossing the room to lie down again behind the stove, the direction in which she is to move across the room is mentioned, implying apparently no more than an irritable gesture of the Marquis's hand; and this, as we later discover, is the very direction in which her ghost will move, night after night, from one corner of the room to the other. But not only the mind of the dramatist is betokened by this
story – it is also the Kleistian mind which incessantly seeks, like Kohlhaas, to impose a rational pattern on a world which in reality moves by a different dynamic. In this particular case the eeriness is increased by the fact that the Marquis, when he becomes aware of the haunting, nevertheless does not seem to remember the comparatively trivial incident of his inhospitable behaviour to the old woman who is now avenging herself so strangely. He does not identify the audible but invisible ghost, and his rational intellect, despite mounting evidence, refuses to acknowledge its incomprehensible reality. The climax comes when, at his third and final attempt to establish the truth, he is accompanied by his dog, a creature whose perceptions are not limited by human rational consciousness. As Staiger points out, Kleist highlights this dramatic turning-point by dropping the hypotactic sentence-structure and also by moving into the historic-present tense (this stylistic device cannot be satisfactorily reproduced in English). The dog, as soon as it hears the ghost, also sees it, and backs away from it in obvious terror, across the room, towards the corner in which the woman had died. The Marquis, though panic-stricken, still remains uncomprehending, but his reason gives way and he destroys both the house and himself. He is following the remorseless logic of an obsession, falling victim to a world which in an unaccountable way refuses to forget what his conscious mind refuses to remember. On this analysis there seems to be not only a particular subtlety in Kleist's art, but also an especially close correlation between his art and his self-destructive psychological make-up.

In
St Cecilia
, as in
The Beggarwoman of Locarno
, his management of the ‘uncanny' element is again very much more skilful than in
Michael Kohlhaas
. The irruption of the inexplicable into an otherwise explicable world is here again very far from seeming to be a mere whimsical and stylistically alien digression: instead, it is once more the precise centre and appalling
pointe
of the whole tale.
St
Cecilia or The Power of Music
(to give it its full title) is described by the author as ‘a legend': it tells of a miracle supposedly performed by St Cecilia, the patron saint of music and also of a Catholic convent which existed (in the story, though apparently not in historical fact) in Aachen in the sixteenth century. The convent is threatened with destruction by a mob of Protestant iconoclasts; the riot is planned to start during the solemn Mass on the day of Corpus Christi, and the ringleaders are four brothers who with numerous followers have mingled with the congregation at the service which the Abbess, despite knowledge of the danger, insists on holding. An ancient and impressive setting of the Mass by an unknown Italian composer is performed in circumstances which turn out later to have been very mysterious. The performance unexpectedly strikes the four brothers into a state of strange religious madness: they begin fervently crossing and prostrating themselves, their companions are dumbfounded and the riot does not take place. The condition and behaviour of the young men compel the civil authorities to consign them to the lunatic asylum in Aachen where they remain for the rest of their lives; they spend their days gazing with rapt attention at a crucifix and never uttering a word. But at midnight they start to their feet and for one hour precisely they chant ‘in a hideous voice' something that resembles the setting they have heard of the
Gloria in excelsis
from the Mass. Their performance is, however, less like singing than like the howling of wild animals or of damned souls in hell; the impression of those who witness it is that the brothers are diabolically possessed, and Kleist's depiction certainly hints that they have been reduced to a state of automatism, when they rise ‘with a simultaneous movement' as midnight strikes. Kleist seems, moreover, to be quite well aware that the condition of the four young men could be regarded merely as a psychological phenomenon and that religious madness of one sort or another is a clinically attested fact.
He is known to have been interested in psychopathology and to have visited madhouses to look at their inmates. It is highly probable that in his conception of this particular story he had been influenced by an account written by the poet Matthias Claudius of four patients at an institution in Hamburg: these were, Claudius reports, four brothers who spent most of their time in silence, except that whenever the bell was tolled to signify that someone in the asylum had died, they would sing part of a dirge and had thus come to be known as the ‘death cocks'
(Totenhähne)
. Since this account resembles the St Cecilia story in several particulars there can be little doubt that Kleist was acquainted with it, and in general with the fact that compulsive singing is a feature of the religious madness syndrome, evidently related to glossolalia or echolalia. But he also appears to have known that such ‘singing' can in some cases be weird, cacophonous and terrifying. The report by Claudius was doubtless a source for his story, but an even more curious and striking parallel case occurred in England at the end of January 1973 and was widely reported in the press. The following extracts are from the
Daily Telegraph
of 2 February 1973:

They were taken from a house in Stafford Road after neighbours, frightened by continuous wailing and chanting for three days, called in police and local church leaders…

The Rev. Stanley Miller… identified the chanting as a perverted form of glossolalia – a term for ‘speaking in tongues', the mind having no control of what is said… It was the continuous chanting of one phrase, ‘Baby Jesus', which frightened neighbours in the terrace…

Mr Miller added that when he saw the two women and three men in the house on Wednesday night they were in such an advanced state of trance as to be possessed by the devil. ‘Their
eyes were closed and what they were doing was manifestly evil. The chanting was spine-chilling'…

In
St Cecilia
Kleist is taking us two ways into the realm of the uncanny: first there is the phenomenon of the madness itself, the psychotic manifestation in which, as Freud would say, the repudiated or repressed material re-emerges or returns to the supposedly rational surface of life. But secondly – and this appears to be the point that Kleist particularly wanted to emphasize – this sudden and seemingly pathological conversion of four anti-Catholic militants takes place in circumstances that cannot be wholly accounted for without supposing some sort of supernatural intervention. Only one of the nuns in the convent knows how to play and conduct the mysterious Italian Mass which, on the Abbess's instructions, is to be performed. This particular nun, Sister Antonia, is on the morning of the festival lying mortally sick in her cell; nevertheless, she appears at the last moment, seats herself at the organ and conducts the music with triumphant and devastating effect. But witnesses later testify that Sister Antonia had never left her cell or even regained consciousness, dying the same evening. The conclusion seems to be that St Cecilia herself has impersonated Sister Antonia in order to save her convent and punish the ‘blasphemers'.

In the elaborated extension of the story for the book version, Kleist arranges the events in a manner that seems specifically designed to highlight the mysterious central occurrence, namely the direct intervention of the saint. The final version begins with two paragraphs of narration which
take the reader only as far as the moment during the Corpus Christi Mass when, contrary to expectation, the sacred music proceeds without interruption. This narrative then breaks off, ending merely with a reference to the convent's further half-century of prosperity until its secularization at the end of the Thirty Years War. The third paragraph takes up the tale six years after that Corpus Christi Day, introducing a new character who is not mentioned in the original version, and whose introduction increases the story's dramatic poignancy: the mother of the four young men, having heard no news of them for all these years, comes to Aachen to make inquiries and to her horror discovers them in the madhouse, oblivious to everything but their strange monotonous life of religious contemplation and repetitive cacophonous chanting. She is told nothing about the connection between their madness and the intended iconoclastic riot, which has long been forgotten by most of Aachen. This omission of the explanatory connection creates a dramatic suspense which in the long fourth paragraph Kleist proceeds to resolve, using the device of retrospective (‘flashback') narration. The mother visits a further new character, the cloth-merchant Veit Gotthelf, a former friend of the brothers, and his account takes us back to the point at which the second paragraph ended. During the Mass on Corpus Christi Day six years before, he and the other would-be iconoclasts had been awaiting the signal to disrupt the service, which one of the brothers was to have given. But no signal was given: instead, the brothers had suddenly bowed their heads as the music began and sunk to their knees in an attitude of the utmost devotion. After the service their followers had dispersed in bewilderment; later, having vainly waited for the brothers, Veit Gotthelf and some friends went back to the convent church and there found them still kneeling in prayer. Then follows the vivid description of their strange and terrifying behaviour at the inn that night and their eventual consignment
to the asylum. But Veit Gotthelf's narrative still leaves one link missing: what is the explanation of the immediate and astonishing effect of the liturgical music on the four young disbelievers? The process of detection is not yet complete, Kleist's story is still circling around its own central mystery, namely the apparent celestial intervention. The disclosure of this is reserved deliberately until the penultimate fifth paragraph, in which the mother hears a second flashback account from the Abbess herself. This tells of the inexplicable double location of Sister Antonia, and of the official recognition of the whole occurrence as a miracle; the Abbess states in conclusion that she has only just received a letter from the Pope confirming this recognition. Having stopped just short of the central point three times we thus finally reach it and Kleist adds: ‘here this legends ends'. The double title
St Cecilia or The Power of Music
seems deliberately to leave open the question of whether the sudden conversion of the brothers is to be explained in terms of supernatural intervention or merely of psychopathology; the final narrative of the Abbess, with its evidence of Sister Antonia's incapacitation, seems to decide in favour of the former hypothesis; on the other hand, by the designation ‘legend', the narrator seems to disclaim responsibility for the truth of what the Abbess states. Thus an ambiguous balance is achieved. Again, the ‘miracle' is described with characteristic paradox as ‘both terrible and glorious' – as in
The Earthquake in Chile
, the divine action has a double aspect. The wrath of God or of St Cecilia smites the brothers into a state in some ways resembling demonic possession, though in other ways it is a state of contentment, and we are told that they eventually die a peaceful death after once more howling the
Gloria in excelsis
.

One other detail seems relevant in this context. Ever since the day on which it saved the convent, the score of the anonymous Italian setting of the Mass has been kept in the
Abbess's room. The mother of the four converts looks at it when she is there, and is told that this was the music performed on the fateful morning; she then notices with a feeling of dread that it happens to be standing open at the
Gloria
. The sentence describing her reaction suggests an association between music, cryptography, magic spells and ‘terrible spirits': ‘She gazed at the unknown magical signs, with which some terrible spirit seemed to be marking out its mysterious sphere…' The theme of the sinister and fatal fascination of music was one that also attracted E. T. A. Hoffmann, and it was to be given its fullest elaboration by another of Kleist's twentieth-century admirers, Thomas Mann, in his novel about the composer whose art symbolizes the black magic of Dr Faustus.

The Betrothal in Santo Domingo
to some extent resembles
The Earthquake in Chile
: both are stories about the tragic fate of two young lovers whose relationship is set against a background of disaster and violent social upheaval. Unlike Jerónimo and Josefa, however, Gustav and Toni perish not, in the last resort, because of external circumstances and the wickedness of other people, but because of a flaw in their own relationship. The essential theme here is not the cruelty of man to man (though, as usual, Kleist well illustrates this), nor even the unaccountable operations of God or nature or fate, but – as in
The Duel
and at least three of the plays – that of love being put on trial. The lover is confronted with an ambiguity of appearances, with ambiguous behaviour on the part of his beloved, which in the present case misleads him into a fatal misunderstanding, with tragic results. As in
The Duel
Kleist seems to construct the whole rather complicated story deliberately round this point, which becomes explicit in the girl's dying words, ‘You should not have mistrusted me'. He subtly uses the archetypal symbolic equation of black with evil and white with good to reinforce the ambiguity which leads to this mistrust. The circumstances of the tragedy are based on actual historical
fact, namely the war between the French settlers on the island of Santo Domingo (Haiti) and their former negro slaves, emancipated by a decree of the National Convention in 1794. The blacks have turned with murderous savagery on their white oppressors, and in 1803 the French have fallen back on Port-au-Prince where they are making a last stand against the advancing negro army led by General Dessalines. Into this situation Kleist inserts his fictitious story of Toni, the daughter of a mulatto woman and a white man, who lives with her mother on a plantation occupied by a band of negroes under the leadership of the brutal and ferocious Congo Hoango. He and his men have murdered the former white owners of the property and are now taking part in the campaign to exterminate all Europeans left on the island. If any white man seeks refuge in the house during his absence, Babekan and Toni are under Hoango's orders to detain him with feigned hospitality until the negroes return and kill him. Toni is for this purpose cast in the role of the sexually attractive decoy, to which she is well suited since as a quadroon or ‘mestiza' she has almost white skin. The young Swiss officer Gustav von der Ried, whom she and Babekan receive as a fugitive, is with good reason suspicious of their motives, and in particular the behaviour of Toni presents itself to him in an ambiguous light. As if to underline and polarize this ambiguity, already symbolized by Toni's complexion, Kleist makes him in the course of the evening's conversation tell two contrasting stories, one about a treacherous and vindictive negress who ensnared a white man and deliberately infected him with yellow fever, and the other about a virtuous and loving European girl to whom he had become engaged while living in France at the time of the Revolution, and who had sacrificed her life on the guillotine in order to save his. Toni is moved to tears by this second story, which he tells her while she is alone with him in his bedroom acting on her mother's guileful instructions. She falls into his arms and
he seduces her, partly on an impulse of genuine emotion and partly in order to win her love and thus increase the chances of safety for himself and his friends who are hiding in the woods nearby. Toni now for the first time truly loves a white man in whose murder she is supposed to be assisting; intent on saving the stranger, who has promised to take her back to Europe and marry her, she has to play a double role and allay the suspicions of her mother and of Congo Hoango, who returns unexpectedly in the middle of the night. She takes the only action open to her in these circumstances and ties her sleeping lover to his bed with a length of rope, pretending to Hoango that she has deceived and trapped the white man. Her ruse succeeds in that she gains time to run secretly to meet Gustav's companions and lead them back to the house to rescue him. But by the time they have successfully overpowered the blacks she has still had no chance to explain to her lover the real reason for her actions, and before she can do so he shoots her in rage and despair at her supposed treachery. In judging her motives he has had nothing to go by but the tangible evidence of his senses: to grasp something so intangible as the reality of her love, the real distinction between what she seems to be and what she is, would have required of him an act of intuition and faith which, at the moment of crisis, he cannot achieve. On discovering his mistake he kills himself also.

Unlike Goethe and Schiller in this as in other ways, Kleist seems to have had an interestingly pronounced sense of evil, which would be evident if
The Foundling
were the only thing he had written. This story again takes us into the realm of the uncanny and confronts us, seemingly, with the operation of some kind of malign magic, and certainly with the existence of terrifying, elemental psychological possibilities. The well-ordered and (apart from one rather strange and sad feature of his present second marriage) apparently happy existence of the rich Roman merchant
Piachi is invaded, accidentally it seems, by a fateful agent of destruction. Out of a plague-stricken city to which his business takes him, there emerges the orphaned foundling boy Nicolo, and Piachi's impulse of kindness towards him leads gradually to his own total ruin, beginning with the death of his own young son Paolo from the plague. Nicolo takes Paolo's place, is adopted and educated by Piachi, made a partner in his business, and becomes not only his heir but also the owner by deed of gift of almost all his property, including his house. For the events that ensue, Kleist is known to have had at least two literary sources. One is again Molière. The relationship between Piachi and his adopted son Nicolo is a tragic version of the story of Orgon and his bigoted and hypocritical protégé Tartuffe. (Nicolo, too, is described as bigoted, and frequents the corrupt clergy of Rome.) In both cases, when the protégé is finally unmasked in the act of trying to seduce his benefactor's wife and the latter orders him out of the house, he turns the tables by declaring that the house is now legally his and that it is for the husband to leave it. Kleist combines this with other motifs, one of which he took from the late Latin collection of tales attributed to Hyginus: the widowed Laodamia has a life-sized wax image made of her dead husband Protesilaus, places it in a kind of sanctuary in her bedroom and secretly worships it. As she is doing so one morning a servant looks through a chink in the door, sees her apparently embracing and kissing a man, and reports to her father that she has taken a lover.

Kleist's version of this idea gives it a morbid and eerie flavour. As we have already mentioned, there is something not quite normal about Piachi's marriage to his young second wife Elvira. It is for some reason childless (the boy Paolo was the son of Piachi's first marriage) and Elvira's emotions are romantically fixated on a young Genoese nobleman who, twelve years earlier, had saved her from a burning house when she was a child and had died of an
injury incurred during the rescue. Elvira still adores his memory, grieves inconsolably when anything reminds her of him, and secretly keeps a life-size portrait of him in a screened alcove in her bedroom. This private cult is known only to Piachi, until Nicolo eventually discovers it. He already bears malice against his young adoptive mother for her disapproval of his immoral way of life, which has also put him out of favour with Piachi; and when by chance he looks through Elvira's keyhole and sees her apparently kneeling at the feet of a lover, he relishes the prospect of being able to denounce this sham paragon of virtue. When he searches Elvira's bedroom in her absence, however, he discovers his error.