Heinrich von Kleist, Die Marquise von O …
Without thinking too much about it, I assigned Heinrich von Kleist’s 1808 novella The Marquise of O … for a senior seminar on German short stories. It seemed the right length, and I remembered that on a previous occasion, many years ago, discussion in class had been quite lively. Another convenience of the text is that it allows teachers to demonstrate to students the continued powers of exegetical readings—in particular, the sensus historicus by pointing to the emergence of newspapers as new media of mass communication at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and the sensus allegoricus by drawing the parallels between the announcement in the newspaper posted by the Marquise and the Annunciation to the Virgin Mary, the scene that is so deeply woven into the Western metaphysics of reading, transubstantiation, and reproduction.
To briefly summarize the story: in the turmoil of a military assault on the fortress defended by her father’s troops, a young, widowed Marquise tries to flee the assailants but faints. A few months later she finds herself pregnant. Steadfastly insisting on her chastity and abandoned by her family, she finally puts an advertisement in the local newspaper asking for the father to come forward at a specified time and place, promising to marry him. Meanwhile, a Russian officer who had been her protector during the assault returns and asks for her hand, which she refuses until the father of her child is found. On the appointed day the Russian officer reveals himself as her rapist. The Marquise is at first horrified but later relents and confesses that she had loved him since she first laid eyes on him.
As is not usual in my field, the seminar of seven students consisted entirely of young women. Their grasp of German was good, in two instances excellent. We began with a discussion of Kleist’s style, his extreme density and hypotaxis that to students read almost like a caricature of the German we had trained them to speak. I then asked them to summarize the story—my plan was to introduce the distinction between story and plot and then to talk about censorship around 1800. Two of the women said that they had tried to figure out the story together but couldn’t. It wasn’t a question of vocabulary. What they got was a story of a rape that detailed the shaming and abandonment of the victim and then ended with the marriage between rapist and victim. Surely, that couldn’t be right?
I had begun working on the present project at the time but had somehow not considered what it would mean for my teaching of texts that, like Kleist’s, have the potential to retraumatize students, or at least force them into a conversation that they might find uncomfortable. I knew that sexual assault, and perhaps even rape, was within the ambit of my students’ experiences on campus; I have also argued that we have no access to others’ experiences—can never “share” them—and therefore cannot even estimate how upsetting it might be to read about them or discuss them in class, in this case with a male teacher.
It is not a question of condemning Kleist for writing a story about rape; though in other stories he shows a worrying penchant for graphic violence, rape, in connection with middle-class rejection of aristocratic immorality, was a constant topic in the literature of the late eighteenth century, most famously perhaps in Samuel Richardson’s immensely popular Clarissa. I can give this background to the students; I can point to the artfulness with which Kleist avoids representing the rape and keeps even the main characters in the novella guessing. But no amount of exegetical labor can deny the “thatness” of my students’ experience, and its invisibility to me. The experiential approach to the reading of prose fiction claims to reach into the reality of a reader’s life—this is a case where this claim must draw consequences.
During my training in the late ’80s and early ’90s, Kleist was a favorite because he could serve as a counterfigure to the Goethe establishment without, however, rocking the foundation of the discipline, and because his prose and his dramatic imagination are at times so extreme that they offer themselves to close, deconstructive readings. Such readings, by implication, would disregard all “soft,” affective dimensions and try to dissolve the propositional and narrative surface of a text into its constitutive, counterintuitive, often incompatible elements. The famous dash which Kleist puts in place of a verbal representation of the rape has given rise to a voluminous literature on the theory of literary representation.
From the perspective here proposed, from which the experiential involvement of the reader in the reading is of paramount importance—especially of young, “uncritical,” “lay” readers—the abstraction from the affective dimension is not possible. Yet canceling Kleist or similar authors for undergraduate courses is equally absurd, if only because that would require abstract rules of selection that an empiricist approach cannot supply. This is a case where it helps to remember the pragmatic roots of radical empiricism. I can make the determination for myself that I will not teach this text to undergraduates without requiring the same from my colleagues who might be better prepared, better positioned, or more fearless than I am. The downside of my decision is minimal—there are plenty of other texts, even by Kleist, that I can teach instead. It is hard to take seriously the objection that a student’s education, or even their knowledge of German literature, would be compromised if they never read Kleist’s Marquise of O …