The Marquise of O and Other Stories Read Free Page B

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 ofhis 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 literaryvein. 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