Standing and Falling in Heinrich von Kleist

Author(s): Helmut J. Schneider

Reviewed work(s):
Source: MLN, Vol. 115, No. 3, German Issue (Apr., 2000), pp. 502-518
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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 Standing and Falling in
Heinrich von Kleist

Helmut J. Schneider

I
Critics have often commented on the extent to which Heinrich von
Kleist's fiction relies on gestural commentary. In his dramas and
novellas alike, Kleist complements his characters' action and speech
with succinct accounts of their bodily involvement, typically a facial
expression, gesture, position or movement in space. The effect of
these highly recurrent "stage directions" is less one of sheer descrip-
tiveness or psychological depth, as in realist writing, but rather a kind
of mise-en-scene, a singular combination of corporeal concreteness
with choreographic stylization, of spatial depth with theatrical pat-
terns. Kleist's repertoire of body language ranges from the drama of
a character fainting to the subtle moment of a blush or turning pale,
to everyday acts like sitting or rising, stepping to a window and
looking out, opening a door and holding its latch, donning a hat,
grasping a cane, extending an arm, or holding a hand-not to
mention his particular aversion to the "ugly twitch of the upper lip,"
on which his essay "Uber die allmahliche Verfertigung der Gedanken
beim Reden" goes so far as to blame the outbreak of the French
Revolution.'
This impressive register of body movements and expressions frus-
trates, however, any attempt to decode it unambiguously. On the one

1Heinrich von Kleist, SdmtlicheWerkeund Briefe. Ed. Helmut Semdner, Vol. I/II
(Muenchen: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1984) II, 321. (This edition will be quoted in the text;
translations are mine.)

MLN115 (2000): 502-518 ? 2000 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

 M LN 503

hand, Kleistian gesture pays homage to ceremonious codes of the

aristocracy and church, but generally places them in an alien context
that bends or even perverts their traditional meaning. Prominent
examples include the chivalrous demeanor of Don Fernando facing
the blood-thirsty mob in the "Erdbeben in Chili"; its reverse in
"Michael Kohlhaas," when the populace defiles the Junker; and the
act of kneeling in adoration of a wholly worldly figure, as do the
heroine in Kdthchenvon Heilbronn,Elvire in "Der Findling" and the
mother in the "Marquisevon 0...." On the other hand, Kleist makes
ample use of emotional body language like crying, blushing, or
blanching, but only to challenge sentimentality's assumption that
these "natural signs" of the soul express an immediate, unadulterated
truth. In his work the "truth" of body language is inextricably
connected to a particular situation and set of contingent circum-
stances in which the narrative figure acts and reacts; manifestations of
the soul turn into a function of the external scene and must be read
accordingly.
The syntagmatic organization of Kleist's gestural language, then,
breaks the paradigmatic orders both of the traditional codes and of
the natural sign, and subjugates their meaning to a defined situ-
ational context. In the process, new patterns emerge that are not
easily described, but endow the Kleistian narrative with its character-
istic bodily quality, i.e., the insistence with which he renders corpo-
real internal and external processes like feeling, thinking, speaking,
or acting, anchoring them in his characters' flesh and bone. Not for
a moment is the reader to forget that the represented events take
place or originate in characters that are, philosophically speaking,
"embodied subjects." Nevertheless, as I suggested above, a well-
rounded plasticity of individual character or action is not the effect of
this mode of narration. It produces, rather, patterns of movement
("Bewegungsmuster"), in which individual figures serve as compo-
nents of an overriding scenic arrangement. Kleist's gestural language
may thus be described as "graphic," as opposed to "plastic" or
"intuitive" ("anschaulich"); its arbitrary, temporal, and contingent
character is, moreover, wholly consistent with the subservience of the
individual to the event and situation that is a hallmark of his writing.
In what follows, I wish to concentrate on one gestural figuration
that is of particular significance for Kleist's language of the body and
hence useful in articulating the "bodily" construction of his poetic
texts: the variations of standing and falling that mark key moments of
Kleistian plot and characterization. Of course, these also designate
504 HELMUTJ. SCHNEIDER

elemental human gestures, indeed the most elemental of all if one

recalls the significance of an erect posture within anthropological
tradition. For the eighteenth century especially-note the anthropo-
logical interests of authors from Pope to Herder and Kant-standing
upright, rising to one's feet in order to confront the world and face
one's fellow human, distinguished man from animal and symbolized
his moral autonomy.2 Correspondingly, falling-swaying, stumbling,
sinking down, or collapsing-designated the failure to live up to this
distinct position and served as a reminder of human frailty. Religious
and metaphysical symbolism underscored this essentialization of the
vertical human posture, the most portentous example being, of
course, the biblical fall, on which Kleist grounds a brilliant theatrical
and theoretical play with body metaphors in Der zerbrochne Krug (The
BrokenJug) and his essay "Uber das Marionettentheater."3
Standing upright also represented, of course, the poise, self-esteem
and self-assertion of the aristocracy: "standing" (and fighting) for
one's name, honor and just cause. Combined with the stoic and neo-
stoic-Christian values of steadfastness and endurance (constance,
"constantia," "Standhaftigkeit"), the notions of mettle and dignity
provided classicist and baroque tragedy with a value system that was
confirmed in the protagonist's tragic fall. Conversely, the "fall"from
worldly height permitted the heroic ethics of composure to be
demonstrated. Kleist's reliance on gestural constellations is over-
determined by this historical and literary-historical tradition, whose
paradigm of the symbolic body he deconstructs. In the next section I
will continue to anchor Kleist's gestural commentary vis-a-vis this
tradition, before turning in part III to textual examples of standing
and falling that illustrate what might be called the choreographic
constitution of the Kleistian "subject"through the demise or "fall"of
the symbolic body. Finally, in part IV, I will explore "standing" and
"falling" as an organizational principle structuring the Kleistian
narrative, which holds itself up precisely by self-destructing.

2 Cf. for
example Johann Gottfried Herder, Ideen zur Philosophieder Geschichteder
Menschheit.Ed. Martin Bollacher (Frankfurt/M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1989)
11Off.,Erster Teil, Viertes Buch.
3 Cf. the
essay by Gerhard Neumann, "Das Stocken der Sprache und das Straucheln
des Korpers. Umrisse von Kleists kultureller Anthropologie," Heinrich von Kleist:
Kriegsfall-Rechtsfall-Siindenfall. Ed. Gerhard Neumann (Freiburg: Rombach, 1994)
27ff.
 MLN 505

II
In his first drama (and his first poetic work), the ambitious tragedy
RobertGuiskard,Kleist takes up the traditional (Aristotelian) drama-
turgical dimension of the standing/falling figuration in a way that
already suggests his "corporeal engagement." He turns the symbolic
fall of the hero into the literal fall of the body. As far as can be seen
from the remaining fragment, which contains only the opening
scenes (Kleist burned the full manuscript shortly after completion in
1803), the play depicts the protagonist's physical attempt to stand
erect and affirm his power. The Norman duke's army, ravaged by the
plague, is unwilling to continue fighting. While the leader Guiskard
exhorts his weakened and distressed soldiers to hold out, rumors of
his own infection have already spread and his rivaling sons have
begun fighting over the succession. Though he is said to have been
seen "stretched out" and "apparently not in command of a single
limb" (I: 168), his supporters point reassuringly to his strong will
power: "Doch sein Geist bezwingt sich selbst / Und das Geschick"
(I:168). Guiskard takes great pains to parade his vigorous good health
before the public: "Ob ich wie einer ausseh, der die Pest hat? / Der
ich in Lebensfull hier vor euch stehe? / Der seiner Gliederjegliches
beherrscht?" (I: 170). Yet even as he speaks, his knees soften and he
has to be supported by an army drum ("Heerpauke") as he "lets
himself gently down." Thus, the instrument designed to arouse the
euphoria of battle is rendered a mere brace for the sick hero, as his
own assertive speech assumes a "subdued" tone. Verbal protestations
of control are no match for the infected body.
Underlying the dramatic dynamism of these scenes is a symbolic
relation between the body of the military leader and the "body"of his
army as well as the genealogical body of his line of successors.
Guiskard'sinsistence on full mastery over "each of his limbs" stands in
stark contrast not only to his own apparent infirmity, but to the
weakness of his army and the discord of his sons. The background for
this relation is the medieval notion of the "king's body" and the "body
of the state," which Kleist, however, leaves behind by stressing the
leader's physicality and eliminating the transcendent dimension of
the body.4 The symbolic dimension of the hero's "standing might"
consists not in an eternal, ideal body superimposed on the mortal

4 Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King's TwoBodies:A Study in MedievalPolitical Theology

(Princeton, NJ.: Princeton UP) 1966.

506 HELMUTJ. SCHNEIDER

flesh, but rather in an interdependence between the "health" of the

collective and the individual body. One might say that Kleist "natural-
izes" the symbolic relation of the tradition. Just as the hero's fall is
literalized, so is the monarch's "incarnation" of the collective with its
strength or weakness.
The motif of the plague is significant here in implying the
dissolution of individual boundaries and the melding of an undiffer-
entiated "mass." By becoming part of the infected mass, the sick
leader loses his power to represent it; he dissolves into the collective
instead of rising above it and symbolizing it with his ideal persona. In
the baroque Trauerspiel,the monarch's moral or physical demise was
symbolic of the disruptive worldly (carnal) powers threatening the
stability of the state. But even as he fell victim to these powers, his
stature as supreme symbol of the collective order was maintained,
even enhanced.5 In the RobertGuiskardfragment, it is the inherent
symbolic capacity itself that is challenged. By being subjected to the
anonymous sway of the epidemic, the individual body of the monarch
forfeits its potency as representative of the collective. The physical
gesture of sinking or falling, then, beyond signifying a plunge from
the height of power/health-in what I have called the literalized
version of the tragic "fall"-also refers to the collapse of the tradi-
tional political symbolism.
By undermining the tragic hero as the embodiment of a "higher"
body, Kleist introduces an element of dramaturgical self-reflexivity
into his tragedy that can be further illustrated by a glance at his last
drama, Prinz von Homburg.Here Kleist subverts the convention of
heroic tragedy by means of the hero's metaphorical "fall," which
forms the center of the dramatic action. The young prince, who after
a stunning military victory is sentenced to death for failing to carry
out orders, reflects on his somber fate in a fashion reminiscent of the
baroque topoiof transitoriness and abrupt shift of fortune: "Werheut
sein Haupt noch auf der Schulter tragt, / Hangt es schon morgen
zitternd auf den Leib, / Und ubermorgen liegt's bei seiner Ferse"
(I: 686). Compare with this the following lines from Andreas Gryphius'
TrauerspielLeoArmenius,in which the beleaguered hero contemplates
the fate of every monarch: "Gilt denn nichts / als Fall und Stehen //
Nichts denn Cron und Hencker-Strang? // Jst dann zwischen Tieff

5Walter Benjamin, Der Ursprungdes deutschenTrauerspiels,GesammelteSchriften.Ed.

Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhauser (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp Verlag,
1991) Vol. I, 249ff.
 M LN 507

und Hohen // Kaum ein Sonnen Vntergang? [...] Printzen! Gotter

diser Erden / Schau't was vor euch knien muB! // Offt eh' es kann
Abend werden // Knit ihr unter frembden FuB!"6Kleist rewrites the
baroque author's timeless truth about the worldly fortuitousness of
up and down, ruling and defeat, as an individual existential experi-
ence. It is the utter fear of death, dramatized in drastic, naturalistic
confrontation with his open grave, that makes the prince crumble in
desperation before standing back up with the resolve to "glorify the
law" by willfully accepting his sentence. Kleist's adolescent hero
manifests no metaphysical truth on and with his body, but rather
undergoes a psychological development in which imagining his own
death leads him to appreciate the self as part of a higher order, that
of the "state." The gestures and metaphors of standing and falling
underscore the psychological dialectics with a poetological reference.
The tragic hero's fall from might and glory, used as means to shape a
"modern" individual, also signals the new dramatic form of "Schau-
spiel": The interiorized fall makes the tragic death superfluous.
One might sum up the political and dramaturgical implications of
the standing/falling configuration discussed thus far as the "fall of
the symbolic body." Even a cursory review of Weimar classicism's
nearly contemporaneous drama, exemplified by Schiller's DieJungfrau
von Orleans and Goethe's Die natiirliche Tochter(both 1800), reveals the
persistence (or renaissance) of the older model of the heroic body. In
Schiller's tragedy the heroine's corporeal fall and spiritual rise is
pointedly choreographed: After her erotic temptation in the confron-
tation with the Englishman Lionel, Johanna "blanches, and sinks to
the ground" (end of act III). In contrast to this display of frailty, she
later frees herself from her British prison (the bondage of the body)
and, after being mortally wounded leading her countrymen to final
victory, rises to her feet in a symbolic transfiguration: "Sie steht ganz
frei aufgerichtet, die Fahne in der Hand" (end of act V). In Goethe
the inauguration of the auratic body is more complex. The heroine's
fall from the horse in the opening scene foreshadows a painful
process in which she finally accepts the fate of remaining hidden in
the anonymous "middle condition" of the bourgeoisie in order to
spare herself for a brighter future. The drama holds out a strong
promise of restitution for the symbolic monarchical body now threat-
ened by the disruptive forces of the revolution.

6Andreas Gryphius, Dramen. Ed. Eberhard Mannack (Frankfurt/M.: Deutscher

Klassiker Verlag, 1991) 60 (end of act II).
508 HELMUTJ. SCHNEIDER

The sheer impossibility of such restitution is most forcefully con-

veyed in Kleist's Der ZerbrochneKrug, incidentally conceived and
largely written only a few years after the two classical dramas. This is
the comedy of a double fall undergone by each of its two heroes. The
first is the beautiful jug, whose fall to the ground shatters the highly
symbolic historical scene-the scene of a feudal investiture of power-
engraved on it. Trivialas it seems, the devastation ("Krugverwiistung,"
I: 220) of the revered jug marks the irreparable fall of the symbolic
body of power, the "body of the king." The play links this fall to
another that is equally trivial and meaningful; the sexual fall of the
village judge, Adam, who has abused his power to blackmail a young
woman and now presides over a trial of his own-as yet unrevealed-
crime. This "Adam's fall," his forced plunge out of the maiden's
window, has resulted in the perpetrator's severe physical disfigure-
ment, which corresponds with the disfigurement of the jug at
precisely the same moment. As the play opens, the judge attempts to
explain his cuts and bruises to an all too curious scribe, with the
telling name Licht. He claims to have fallen out of bed, whereupon
Licht wonders if he experienced an "unmetaphorical fall" ("Unbildlich
hingeschlagen?"). Adam's reply is at once witty and profound: "Ja,
unbildlich. Es mag ein schlechtes Bild gewesen sein" (I: 177). The
"real,""unbildlich" fall is the destruction of the image (or production
of the non-image, "Unbild"). In the context of the whole play, it
amounts to nothing less than the demise of the power of iconic
representation, the defacement of the symbolic imagery of the state
and community. Just as the judge qua authority figure is disfigured in
face and body, so too has the age-old icon of the jug been shattered,
its clerics and courtiers mere fractured bodies, bits and pieces on a
million shards.
Thus, in Der Zerbrochne Krugthe comic fall proves no less significant
for the fate of traditional bodies of power and their representation
than the tragic fall. Of course, the very genre of comedy challenges
the integrity and sanctity of authority with the vital powers of the
flesh. But Kleist carries the potential of comedy to a point of
historico-philosophical articulation. The stumbling and bungling
clown wins the trial pitting him against the grandstanding (or rising)
tragic hero.
 M LN 509

III
The references to the dramatic traditions of tragedy and comedy help
put the Kleistian use of the standing/falling constellation into
historical focus. But its full significance emerges only when we look
more closely at the specific forms it takes in the structure of the
narratives themselves. To stand or to fall in Kleist's poetic cosmos
signals the individual's inner strength or weakness vis-a-vis the exter-
nal world. On an elemental physical level, the gesture indicates the
characters' preparedness (or non-preparedness) to cope with circum-
stances, to face the situation, which for the most part means to tackle
the unforeseen and dangerous, stand up to challenges and defend
oneself against assailants. The vertical dimension of the Kleistian
body-choreography is a constant reminder that life is a battle, that to
constitute oneself as individual subject is, in fact, to fight. In a short
essay "On Reflection" ("Von der Uberlegung"), a father advises his
son of the disadvantage of thinking while acting: "Reflection" has its
due place only after the action has run its blind course under the
guidance of the (fighting) instinct, after the opponent has been
defeated. The whole of life, Kleist has the father say, must be
embraced as in a wrestling match. The title word "Uberlegung"
assumes in this context the literal ring of "laying (oneself) over
(somebody)," a literalization of metaphor which is typical for Kleist's
writing as it deconstructs the ideal-ideological suppositions of abstract
notions.7
Kleist's Penthesilea is the war story par excellence, in which the
protagonist's entire identity rests on battling against an antagonist
who is simultaneously an object of desire. The off-stage battles
between Achilles and the Amazon queen, reported in elaborate
teichoscopias, are grandiose "mating duels" between partners of super-
human dimensions. Before they appear on stage, we have "seen" the
two figures, i.e., heard about them, as they both stand grand in victory
and prostrate in near-defeat. The spectacular choreography of stand-
ing and falling, chasing and being chased, is a form of passionate
combat in which each of the lovers wants as badly to succumb as to
win. "Ich will zu meiner FfiBe Staub ihn sehen," Penthesilea raves, but

7Another prominent example of Kleist's play with the material root meanings of
abstract words is his essay on marionettes, where he teases out the physical core behind
key terms of the contemporary philosophical and aesthetic idealism. Cf. Helmut J.
Schneider, "Deconstruction of the Hermeneutical Body: Kleist and the Discourse of
Classical Aesthetics," Body & Text in the Eighteenth Century.Ed. Veronica Kelly and
Dorothea E. von Micke (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994) 209-226.
510 HELMUT J. SCHNEIDER

at the same time charges her arrow to "drag him down painlessly"
with the "most gentle embrace" to her bosom (I: 343, 349). Under
Amazon law, she must "fell" as her lover whomever the God of War
sends her way on the battlefield. But this imperative is jeopardized by
a deeply eroticized ambivalence in which aggressiveness and the
desire to yield are explosively mixed. "Falling" for somebody coin-
cides with standing tall in the wish to become the desired person's
object of desire; total surrender becomes inseparable from total
victory. The drama acts out to the extreme the paradox that the lovers
can only find themselves in the utter subjection toand ofthe other. As
we shall see shortly, this paradox is constitutive for the Kleistian
subject, who is invariably subjectedwithin a body of works that
undermines the idealist notion of mastery.
Against the mythological background of Penthesilea, the body
movements of standing, falling and rising reach hypertrophical
dimensions and gain cosmic significance. After Achilles has fallen
and is saved from capture only by the queen's own fall, while
attempting to climb a steep precipice, he is hailed by his men as the
sun rising over the distant horizon:

Seht! Steigtdort uberjenes BergesRiicken,

Ein Hauptnicht, ein bewaffnetes,empor?
Ein Helm, von Federbuschenuiberschattet?
Der Nackenschon, der machtge, der es tragt?
Die Schulternauch, die Arme, stahlumglanzt?
Das ganze Brustgebild,o seht doch, Freunde,
Bis wo den Leib der goldne GurtumschlieBt?
(I: 333)
Before he then appears on stage, Achilles brings his Amazon
persecutors to a fall that is described in no less hypertrophical terms:
Ein Knauel,ein verworrner,vonJungfraun,
Durchwebtvon Rossenbunt: das Chaoswar,
Das erst', aus dem die Weltsprang,deutlicher.
[...] Dochjetzt-ein Wind erhebt sich;Tagwirdes,
Und eine der Gestiirztenrafftsich auf.
(I: 336)
From this moment of cosmic annihilation, which is also the moment
of the "first chaos from which the world was created," Penthesilea
rises-reborn-to take up her pursuit again. She revels in hyperbolic
images that transcend all human dimensions, but in doing so is
unable to suppress the wish to lay herself down in surrender at her
 M LN 511

chosen one's feet. When encouraging Penthesilea to turn her defeat

into a triumph of self, Prothoe likens her sister to a vault or arch
holding itself up precisely because each of its blocks is poised to fall.
The image she invokes again reiterates the paradoxical coincidence
we saw in the battle scenes of falling and rising, only here it is
condensed to a rising by falling, creating by annihilating:

So hebst du dich empor?-Nun, meine Fiirstin,

So seis auch wie ein Riese! Sinke nicht,
Und wenn der ganze Orkus auf dich driickte!
Steh, stehe fest, wie das Gewolbe steht,
Weil seiner Blocke jeder sturzen will!
Beut deine Scheitel, einem SchluBstein gleich,
Der Gotter Blitzen dar, und rufe, trefft!
Und laB dich bis zum FuB herab zerspalten,
Nicht aber wanke in dir selber mehr,
Solang ein Atem Mortel und Gestein,
In dieserjungen Brust, zusammenhalt.
(I: 367)
The same image appears already in an early Kleist letter, where it
provides an "indescribable consolation" in a moment of existential
crisis: A despondent Kleist is wrestled out of his suicidal mood by the
sight of an arched gate whose architectural cohesion provides reassur-
ance "that I too would hold up when everything else lets me down"
("daB auch ich mich halten wiirde, wenn alles mich sinken laBt"
[II: 593; November 16, 1800]). The arch resurfaces once more as an
image of birth or rebirth in the novella "Das Erdbeben in Chili," as
Jeronimo is rescued from prison and the natural catastrophe by the
simultaneous fall of two opposing walls that form an arch through
which he can escape. (II: 145-146) It has often been remarked that
the image of the Gewolbesturz can be taken as an emblem for the
Kleistian subject who emerges through, and as the coincidental
function of external circumstances, or more dramatically, who owes
his or her existence to the "coincidental" space of survival in the
midst of catastrophe.8 Within our context of the gestural imagery of

8A brilliant analysis of the image is given by Werner Hamacher, "Das Beben der
Darstellung." PositionenderLiteraturwissenschaft.AchtModellanalysenam Beispielvon Kleists
"Erdbebenin Chili".Ed. D.E. Wellbery (Mfinchen: C.H. Beck, 1985) 154ff. Hamacher
takes the arch also as the structural image of the Kleistian narrative and its undermin-
ing of the representational mode (cf. section IV of my essay). Cf. also Helmut J.
Schneider, "Sozialgeschichtliche Werkinterpretation. Der Zusammensturz des Allge-
meinen." (Ibid.) 110ff.
512 HELMUT J. SCHNEIDER

standing and falling, the emblem expresses with the utmost economy
the paradoxical movement of a standing not simply despiteor against
falling (cf. RobertGuiskard), but by falling. More often than not in
Kleist, standing is a rising from the fall-or rather, to underscore the
crucial point, a rising not just from and afterthe fall, but in the midstof
falling.9
Prothoe's exhortation that Penthesilea should face divine lightning
head on and refuse to sway even if her body splits right through the
middle seems to make a radical claim for autonomy that would belie
the stress I have placed on the Kleistian subject's interdependence
with the world. But as the architectural metaphor of the "keystone"
suggests, the lightning strike splitting the body "in two" would
simultaneously bind it together "as an arch." The immaterial prin-
ciple of self invoked here is similar to a natural law that governs the
body (eachbody being just one particular case, "Fall"),yet does not, as
transcendent substance, rise above or beyond its materiality. Analo-
gous to the law of gravity asserting itself in the falling rocks, the self
asserts itself in the "fall"of the body. Likewise, the Kleistian faintings
are signs of strength as well as weakness, i.e., of a strength through
weakness; the world's instability (cf. the "gebrechliche Einrichtung
der Welt" invoked at the end of the "Marquise von O ..." [II: 143])
causes the self to withdraw within itself and thus calls it into being in
the first place. When Sylvester in Kleist's first drama, Die Familie
Schroffenstein,emerges from a prolonged state of unconsciousness,
into which he had fallen upon being falsely accused of murdering his
nephew, he declines medical help and praises the regeneration of his
(inner) self which lets him stand up again:
Wasmich freut,
Ist, daBder Geist doch mehr ist, als ich glaubte,
Denn flieht er gleich auf einen Augenblick,
An seinen Urquell geht er nur, zu Gott,
Und mit Heroenkraftkehrt er zuriick.
(I: 82)
Kleist undermines the metaphysical dichotomies of self and world
and of spirit and body. He does not resolve them by giving priority to
either side, but rather uses traditional (religious, idealist) language in

9 The most recent discussion of the arch, here taken as an emblem of the structural
principle of paradox governing the Kleistian text and its reading, is Bianca Theisen,
Bogenschluss:KleistsFormalisierungdes Lesens (Freiburg: Rombach Verlag, 1996).
 M LN 513

order to stage the constitution of self and subject as a struggle

between two different entitities: one self and the other self, the self
and the "world,"the spirit ("Geist") and the body. We find the same
subversion in "Die Marquise von O...," when the marquise is
banished from her father's house and stripped of her social existence.
At the moment of her abjection she claims her children against
patriarchal rule and displays a defiance which the narration repre-
sents as an act of self-discovery:"Durch diese sch6ne Anstrengung mit
sich selbst bekannt gemacht, hob sie sich plotzlich, wie an ihrer
eigenen Hand, aus der ganzen Tiefe, in welche das Schicksal sie
herabgestiirzt hatte, empor" (II: 126). Of crucial importance is that
this exceptional display of moral autonomy results from the quasi-
instinctual self-defense against destructive demands from the outside,
not the least of which is the unwitting pregnancy, which splits her
body against itself and from her consciousness. The significance of
the marquise's sexual "fall"lies in the heteronomy of her body, which
throws her out of her social and normative bonds and endows her
with a self-determination opposedto, rather than grounded on, her
consciousness. It is the surrenderof her "reason" to the fact of the
unconscious pregnancy (her fall and her split) as part of the "great,
holy and inexplicable institution of the world" (II: 126) that gives her
the strength to endure.
If rising presupposes falling, then the opposite also holds true that
standing tall is the condition for falling. This dialectic returns us to the
question of Kleist's relation to the classical tragic tradition, which has,
in fact, a subtextual presence in the preceding discussion of the
Kleistian "subject."For the "birth"of the self out of-and in the midst
of-the catastrophe of the body/world is analogous to the spiritual
redemption of the tragic hero in and through death; again we might
say it is the latter's naturalization.Likewise recalling heroic tragedy, only
exceptional figures experience the quasi-redemptive, i.e., self-liberat-
ing catastrophe in Kleist. When Prothoe comments on Penthesilea's
gruesome murder of Achilles and ensuing suicide, saying that her sister
"sank,weil sie zu stolz und kraftig bluhte" (I: 428), she invokes another
prominent Kleistian image that counterpoints the arch emblem: "Die
abgestorbne Eiche steht im Sturm, / Doch die gesunde reiBt er
schmetternd nieder, / Weil er in ihre Krone greifen kann" (I: 428).
The image was first used by Sylvesterin Die FamilieSchroffenstein when,
just subsequent to the passage quoted above, he reflects on his own
weakness and regained strength, adding that the noble man need not
accept the unavoidable blow with equanimity:
514 HELMUT J. SCHNEIDER

[...] der Gleichmut ist die Tugend

Der Athleten. Wir, wir Menschen fallen
Ja nicht fur Geld, auch nicht zur Schau.-Doch sollen
Wir stets des Anschauns wurdig aufstehen.
(I: 84)

Clearly the remark is directed against the stoicism of the tragic hero,
which already Lessing had attacked as inhuman and "for show."
"Sinking" in the face of an irresistible fate is the lot of humankind,
including, and especially so, powerful, exceptional individuals; every-
thing depends on the dignity with which one rises to one's feet again.
As the formulation "worthy of being looked at" suggests, the invoked
notion of dignity implies an aesthetic dimension. But this is a deeply
troubling dimension that is at once indispensable to the self-affirming
act of rising and standing and yet poses a fundamental danger to it.
As I hope to demonstrate in my concluding section, the constellation
of standing and falling in Kleist comes into its own only once one
takes this aesthetic dimension into account.

IV

In Kleist's novella "Der Zweikampf," Friedrich von Trota takes on a

count who falsely maligns the reputation of a young woman. The
duel, to which the title refers, is framed in hyperbolic terms recalling
those of Penthesilea: "wie zwei Sturmwinde einander begegnen, wie
zwei Gewitterwolken, ihre Blitze einander zusendend, sich treffen,
und, ohne sich zu vermischen, unter dem Gekrach haufiger Donner,
geturmt um einander herumschweben" (II: 246). Kleist takes pains to
distinguish the two men's fighting styles in terms of mobility and
defensive vs. offensive strategy. Trota takes the defensive, standing
Schild und Schwert vorstreckend, auf dem Boden, als ob er darin Wurzeln
fassen wollte, da; bis an die Sporen grub er sich, bis an die Knochel und
Waden, in dem, von seinem Pflaster befreiten, absichtlich aufgelockerten,
Erdreich ein, die tfickischen StoBe des Grafen, der, klein und behend,
gleichsam von allen Seiten zugleich angriff, von seiner Brust und seinem
Haupt abwehrend. (II: 246)
He owes his initial success in the duel to what Kleist literally calls his
"impalement on one and the same spot" ("Einpfahlung auf einem
und demselben Fleck" [II: 246]), and it is his departure from this
immobile, purely defensive stance that costs him the match. The
moment he leaves his "von Anfang herein gewahlten Standpunkt"
 ML N 515

(II: 246), he stumbles, falls to his knees, and receives a near fatal blow
from his opponent. His cause appears to have lost, as he and the
woman are sentenced to burn at the stake. But the plot takes a
miraculous turn when Trota recovers from his severe wounds, while
his opponent dies from what seemed to have been a mere flesh
wound received early on in the fight.
The true "fall," leading Trota to abandon the "Art natfrlicher
Verschanzung, die sich um seinen FuBtrittgebildet hatte" (II: 246), is
to accomodate the demands of the spectators dissatisfied with the
defense orientation of his performance. Much as in the famous
mirror episode of Kleist's essay "Uber das Marionettentheater," the
awareness of being looked at throws man out of the unity with
himself, splits him against himself. There is a clear analogy between
Trota's strategy in the first part of the duel and the essay's fencing
bear, who from his stance chained to a post easily fends off the attacks
of an opponent who tires himself out with relentless but futile lunges
and feints. Neither Trota nor the bear fight "for show"; neither
projects an image of himself or perceives himself with the eyes of
another. But how, then, are we to read the affirmative note with which
Sylvester would rise in a manner "worthy of being seen" ("des
Anschauns wfirdig")? Clearly the difference lies in the negative
moment of an intentional, self-conscious posing. Kleist distinguishes the
aristocratic notion of "dignity,"for which specularization is indispens-
able, from individual self-representation, which for him is invariably
self-exteriorization, even dissimulation-"Selbstdarstellung" as "Selbst-
verstellung" (for which Herr C.'s description of two ballet scenes in
the marionette essay provides another good example: arguing that
conscious acting equals a loss of grace, Herr C. shows how the
moment the dancers assume the role of a desiring or desired subject,
they loose touch with their bodies, bending "as if to break," or
relocating the soul "in the elbow"; put differently, they fall out of
themselves).
Yet the distinction between an "authentic" dignity "to be looked at"
and a self-alienating posing for the gaze of the other cannot be drawn
easily, if at all. At stake is ultimately the issue of representation itself.
The dignified posture of rising and falling entails the "presentation"
of an image to a potential spectator. As we have seen, Robert
Guiskard's"robust"("blihend") appearance before his men is feigned
and veils his "true," invisible physical condition. The self-referential
dimension of the play to which I alluded, includes the hero's on-stage
playing of himself. On the other hand, "falling" (in Guiskard's case,
516 HELMUTJ. SCHNEIDER

the physical dissolution by the pestilence) as the condition for an

"authentic" standing-what I have called a "standing-by-falling"-is at
core unrepresentable, if representation is taken in the classical
understanding as giving firm shape and contour to a represented
object. Kleist's work abounds with examples of unrepresentable and
unrepresented falls; here alone we have encountered the teichoscopias
of Penthesilea,the "unbildlich" fall of judge Adam that occurs before
the curtain is drawn, and of course the fall of the Marquise ("bildlich,"
i.e., metaphorical, but no less corporeal), which is compressed into
the linguistic void of the famous dash.
A paradoxical and irresolvable tension, then, opens up between the
unrepresentable fall, which is also the breakdown of representation,
and the "representational" (dignified) standing, with its uncomfort-
able proximity to posing. What one might call a "true" standing
occurs only at fleeting moments when a posture suddenly takes shape
amidst the chaos of falling: Sylvester awakening from his unconscious-
ness; the beautiful youth in the "Marionettentheater" recognizing
himself for a second in the posture of the Greek statue, before
destroying his own graceful shape in the attempt to objectivize it,
seduced by the gaze of the other; or-a less conspicuous example-
the chivalrous Don Fernando emerging from the catastrophe of the
earthquake in the idyllic middle part of "Erdbeben in Chili" to
become the "godlike hero" (II: 158) of its gory finale.
The "Erdbeben" novella also points to Kleist's aesthetic resolution
of the paradox. In this text, the falling/standing constellation is
inscribed in the inherent structure of the narrative. Put differently, it
translates into a narrative configuration.The story consists of two
catastrophes, the earthquake in the beginning and the mob hysteria
at the end, which frame the short-lived, paradisiacal happiness of the
rescued lovers. The whole novella appears to be constructed on the
model of the Gewolbesturz (which also functions, as we have seen, as a
motif in it): the space of survival in the midst of the very catastrophe
that made survival possible in the first place; standing by falling. Only
here, in fundamental variance from the emblem of the vaulting arch,
the void of the middle is filled with idyllic images charged with
metaphysical presuppositions. These ideological (most notably teleo-
logical) assumptions betray the accident of the coincidental falling by
misconceiving it as an intentional act of God or Providence, leading
the protagonists to misrecognize the sheer chance of their rescue as
the agency of a superior wisdom that has chosen to privilege them.
"Standing by falling" thus becomes a conscious (self-)positioning;the
 M LN 517

self is not content to owe its "birth"to naked contingency but inserts
itself into a higher order.
This resistance to senselessness is not primarily a psychological
feature in Kleist. Rather, the psychological, even anthropological,
plausibility of endowing accident with meaning must be regarded as
motivationfor the narrative structure of the novella, which it manifests
on the thematic level. This structure consists of a concatenation of
contingencies that produces breathing spaces along its way, seducing
characters and readers alike to anchor the breathless course of events
in a stable and meaningful architecture, only to then engulf them
ever more powerfully. "[. . .] mitten in diesen graBlichen Augenblicken,
in welchen alle irdischen Guter der Menschen zu Grunde gingen,
und die ganze Natur verschfittet zu werden drohte, [schien] der
menschliche Geist selbst, wie eine schone Blume aufzugehn" (II: 152).
The "beautiful flower of the spirit" rising from chaos holds out no
metaphysical certainty or promise; this is a misreading for which the
lovers pay with their life. It denotes rather an immaterial effect
resulting from the fall of the material world and from the breakdown
of (its) representation. Once this effect of the void becomes material-
ized and represented, once the "falling" solidifies into a "standing"
forgetful of its genesis, or, to invoke Kleist's own image, once the
spiritual flower is elaborately depicted (as it is in the novella's idyllic
section) and no longer just a metaphor for the unrepresentable, it
becomes estranged into a theatrical arrangement.10
The Kleistian narrative,then, in epic and dramatic texts alike, can be
read as the aesthetic realization of the arch image, in that its own
formal architecture is upheld by the coincidence of accidental happen-
ings-fallings, "Vorfalle,""Zufalle"-which unite to form a "suspended"
whole. The syntagmatic line of (catastrophic) events is intermittently
arrested by the paradigmatic "freeze-frames" of meaning. On the

10The
gesture of kneeling (mentioned at the beginning of this essay) very often
refers to an icon which represents-embodies in the sense of the "holy body of the
king"-such an unrepresentable event; the most salient example is the picture of
Colino in "Der Findling," which Elvire idolizes in sickly adoration. This picture
remembers/reifies the daring rescuer of her life and the scene of his feat. When Nicolo
steps into the frame of that picture, the contrast of his grandstanding and Elvires
prostration is especially marked: It is the contrast between a reified representation (in
the two-fold sense of that word) and a blind subjection in which the living dialectics of
standing and falling (which the Kleistian text as a whole tries to articulate) is arrested.
One can also say: it is the supremacy of the paradigmatic over the syntagmatic. With
this, the symbolic body (of the hero, the king) returns into the Kleistian text-but of
course, only to be destroyed again (as is the case in "Der Findling").
518 HELMUTJ. SCHNEIDER

aesthetic level, these resting points function as self-referential manifes-

tations of narrative closure. Consequently, the relentless exposure of
this closure deconstructs the very technique of narrative. The gestures
of standing and falling are crucial to this deconstructive interplay of the
vertical and horizontal dimensions of the narrative. Kleist's writing
owes its singular materiality to an elaborate choreography of the body
that also discloses its aesthetic anatomy.
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