The Marquise of O and Other Stories Read Free Page A

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 toonly 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 momentarydramatic 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