Heinrich von Kleist’s Prose Style - an Introduction

What is it about?

Heinrich von Kleist (1777 – 1811) led a short and frequently troubled life, a displaced aristocrat who at once longed for and resented the more personable trappings of the bourgeoisie. Outside of literature, where he turned to prose after his initial dramatic ambitions met with critical failure, he tried himself at law, science and economics, and later publishing, yet he was too restless and had too little business sense to pursue such ventures to lasting success. These biographical vagaries deeply inform the tensions within Kleist’s narrative prose style, which is examined here in minute detail. Coming from drama, Kleist’s prose diction is infused with prosodic eloquence, and his narrative threads with action rather than novelistic reflection. Somewhat paradoxically, his urgent diction is also rather dry and factual, which is explained by his formative training as a legal clerk. The resulting syntactic contours are striking – long and complex sentences that are filled with detailed interjecting clauses, which themselves are frequently interjected. Because the interjections are often more interesting to read than their framing sentences, the reading experience is rather disruptive, and the recounted facts and viewpoints constantly need to be revised. This disruptiveness is compounded by the frequent use of Latin and French grammaticisms, and the syntactic references of the sentences often stretch well beyond their ends, which can become rather confusing. At the same time, Kleist’s overexplicating use of conjunctions, another remnant of his legal writing – and as such also evoking his later admirer Franz Kafka – compels the reader to infer a sense of narrative causality even where this is lacking. Indeed, research frequently ascribes an “unreliable narrator” to Kleist; although the narrator’s tone suggests omniscience and impartiality, he frequently slips into adopting figural perspectives instead, and the resulting divergences can be jarring. The following sample sentence, from "The Duel", demonstrates the stylistic complexities that the reader faces in Kleist's prose: "Sir Friedrich von Trota, his chamberlain, most disconcerted at what had happened, took him, with the help of a few other knights, to the palace, where he could barely muster, in the arms of his distraught wife, the strength to read out, to a congregation of Imperial vassals, who, at the latter’s behest, had been gathered in great haste, the Emperor’s deed of legitimation; and after the vassals, not without some lively resistance, since by law the Crown should now fall to his half-brother, Count Jacob Rothbart, had fulfilled this last, unequivocal request, and, on the condition of obtaining approval of this from the Emperor, recognised Count Philipp as heir to the throne, and in turn his mother, since he was still a minor, as custodian and regent: he lay down and died."

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Photo by Jack Hunter on Unsplash

Photo by Jack Hunter on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Heinrich von Kleist is one of the most widely read German writers of the long 19th century, yet among Anglophone readerships, his work remains largely unknown outside the confines of German studies. While the stories have been translated into English comparatively often, Kleist’s nested syntax is usually made at least slightly more palatable to Anglophone tastes, and no critical translation edition for scholarly use has existed until now. In the two volumes of “The Stories of Heinrich von Kleist”, the stories are presented bilingually with copious amounts of annotation in aid of textual comprehension, drawing attention to lexical shifts in meaning, to intertextual references and parallels, to commonalities between the stories, and to translatological points of interest; individual story commentaries provide further historical context as well as basic interpretational angles. A foreword by Tim Mehigan discusses the intellectual framework in which Kleist was operating as an author. The article at hand, which is the introductory chapter of the first volume, is closely focused on Kleist’s prose style; in its breadth and detail, it is unprecedented in Anglophone Kleist research and provides an excellent basis for any reader wishing to understand the precise mechanics of Kleist’s elusive style.

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