Dialogical Midwifery in Kleist's Marquise von O

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JOHN H. SMITH

Dialogic Midwifery in Kleist's Marquise von 0 and the Hermeneutics of Telling the Untold in Kant and Plato

On n'en dit pas moins [du sexe], au contraire. Mais on le dit autrement; ce sont d'autres gens qui le disent, a partir d'autres points de vue et pour obtenir d'autres ef- fets. Le mutisme lui-meme, les choses qu'on se refuse a dire ou qu'on interdit de nommer, la discretion qu'on requiert entre certains locuteurs, sont moins la limite ab- solue du discours, l'autre cote dont il serait separe par une frontiere rigoureuse, que des elements qui fonc- tionnent a cote des choses dites, avec elles et par rap- port a elles dans des strategies d'ensemble. Il n'y a pas a faire de partage binaire entre ce qu'on dit et ce qu'on ne dit pas; il faudrait essayer de determiner les differentes manieres de ne pas les dire, comment se dis- tribuent ceux qui peuvent et ceux qui ne peuvent pas en parler, quel type de discours est autorise ou quelle forme de discretion est requise pour les uns et les autres. II n'y a pas un, mais des silences et ils font par- tie integrante des strategies qui soustendent et traversent les discours.

It [sex] was not spoken of any less. On the contrary. But it was spoken of differently; different people spoke of it, from different points of view and to achieve different effects. Silence itself, the things that one refuses to speak of or that one is prohibited from naming, the discretion required among certain speakers-these are less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than the elements that function alongside the things said, with them and related to them in overall strategies. It is not a question of imposing a binary opposition between what is said and what is not said; rather, it is necessary to try to determine the different ways of not speaking of things, the way things are distributed among those who can and who cannot speak of them, the type of discourse that is authorized or the form of discretion that is required for one or another group of speakers. There is not one but many silences, and they form an integral part of the strategies that sustain and traverse discourses. Foucault 38-39 (my emphasis)'

Es sind die gestorten und erschwerten Situationen der Verstandigung, in denen die Bedingungen am ehesten bewuf3t werden, unter denen eine jede Verstandigung steht.

Situations in which understanding is disrupted and

made difficult are most likely to make us conscious of the conditions necessary for all understanding.

Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode 361

Er kann, wie ein echter Redekiinstler, sagen, was er will, ja er hat die ganze Finesse, die den Dichter aus- macht, und kann auch das sagen, was er nicht sagt.

Like a true rhetorician he [Lilienstern] can say what he wants to; indeed, he has the full finesse that makes the poet, and he can also say, what he does not say.

Kleist, Werke und Briefe 7572

Alles dies . . . ist mit auBester Geschicklichkeit kurz und knapp und mit einer gewilen frauendrztlichen Ob- jektivitit vorgetragen.

All this . . . is depicted briefly and succinctly with the greatest dexterity and with a certain gynecologic objectivity. Fontane 143 (my emphasis)

G OETHE DEFINED the novella as a genre that rises above "mere storytelling" 'bloB3 Erzahlung' by depicting the "occurrence of

an unheard-of event" 'eine sich ereignete unerhorte Begebenheit.'3 In Die Marquise von 0, Kleist goes Goethe one better: his narrator describes the events of the tale as an "unheard- of play of fate" 'ein unerhortes Spiel des Schick- sals' (132), but this unheard-of play, one could say, revolves around the occurrence of an untold event. Many critics writing on the story have emphasized the significant dash at the end of the second paragraph that marks the point where the unheard-of event-the count's rape of the unconscious marquise-literally goes untold (106).4 To place this dash at the center, to see this elision as the novelistic turning point-rather than, say, the one passage that narrates the marquise's state of mind as she decides to take her life into her own hands (122)-is to make this a tale of the untelling of an event.

In particular, the figure of the midwife, who must confirm and express what others already

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Dialogic Midwifery in Kleist's Marquise von 0

more or less know-namely, the marquise's inexplicable pregnancy-serves a unique hermeneutical function in Kleist's novella. The midwife must be called in from the outside, as a neutral other, to engage the marquise in a dialogue that helps reveal the existence of a being and a thought inside the marquise's body and mind. The marquise's mother formulates this function in a "famous oxymoron" (Cohn 130) when the marquise requests a midwife to comment on her apparently pure inner state: "A pure consciousness, and a midwife!" 'Ein reines Bewu3tsein, und eine Hebamme!' The conversation with the midwife "supplements" the marquise's immediate consciousness (Derrida, Grammatologie 203-34), mediates in the birth of an idea before the birth of the "little Russian." This intermediary figure, who neither conceives nor bears children but who is necessary for a literal and metaphorical birth, links Kleist's text to a hermeneutical tradition stretching from Plato through Kant (and well beyond). Not only do images of midwifery and childbirth appear in these writers but, more important, the narrative form proposed by these writers indicates that intellectual midwifery takes place as an ironic dialogue. From Plato's theory of dialectics, through Kant's discussion of dialogic teaching methods, to Kleist's broken dialogues in indirect speech, one hermeneutical and narratological principle can be traced: indirect and mediated dialogues with some other have the unique and indispensable ability to engender thought, expression, and genres.5 The realistic novella, of which Kleist's is one of the first major examples in German literature, grows out of this humble ironic conception that a dialogic midwife must be present to bring knowledge, or an awareness of nonknowledge, into the world in language.

In a detailed analysis of Kleist's mode of narration in the Marquise von 0, Michael Moering unites all the indirect and "unconscious forms of expression" 'unbewuBte Aul3erungsformen' under the terms "wit" and "irony" and emphasizes the role of the latter in the novella.6 On the surface we seem to have a "detective story," a peculiar "whodunit," in which a woman searches not for a common criminal but for the unknown father of her child. And yet, because something always seems left unsaid by the narrator, there is another, ironic level that invites rereading even after the perpetrator is known (Barthes 15-16).7 Since

irony says what it does not mean and means what it does not say, it provides us with an initial rhetoric of the untold. Perhaps the most obvious technique of ironic indirectness is the often discussed use of gesture. Faces are always turning red; the marquise faints twice; the mother finds herself speechless; tendernesses are offered, sometimes extravagantly accepted, sometimes not at all. While all these gestures seem to reflect the characters' states of mind, none of them reveals the untold experience transparently, especially not for the characters. The narrative, despite a rich reper- toire of dramatic, even filmic expressions, never permits the characters to communicate their feelings directly but, rather, relies on indirect modes of telling and nontelling.8

Beyond this irony of gestures, the linguistic irony has a still greater effect. Numerous fields of tension are established among what is said, the speakers' modes of discourse, and the secretive unspoken center of the novella. Moering calls the entire story "a parody of the language and morals of the respectable [polite] world" 'eine Parodie der Sprache und Moral der vornehmen Welt' (238). The narrator uses ironic descriptions, like the gestures, at points of intersection between the external sphere of societal discourse and the inner attitudes of the characters. He constantly adopts the superficial language of the characters, and they slip into his language. Like partners in a mul- tilingual dialogue, the narrator and characters change linguistic positions. They must simultane- ously interpret three languages: the militaristic, the bourgeois, and the religious.

The story begins, for example, in a militaristic vein with the retelling of how the count "ordered a nightly attack and conquered the citadel by storm" 'ordnete einen nachtlichen Uberfall an, und eroberte die Festung mit Sturm' (105), a vic- tory that leads to the elided rape; and later, after his impetuous marriage proposal, the mother ex- claims "that he seemed accustomed to conquer- ing ladies' hearts, like citadels, in full charge" 'daB er Damenherzen durch Anlauf, wie Festungen, zu erobern gewohnt schiene' (114), a military image taken from the narrator that is all the more peculiar because of what it fails to say about the conquest of the marquise. The father uses another, more pointed and ironically blind military image once the marquise is practically en- gaged to the count: "I must surrender to this Russian already for the second time!" 'ich muB

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John H. Smith

mich diesem Russen schon zum zweitenmal erge- ben!' (118). After the count's first departure, the narrator remarks dryly, like a self-satisfied bourgeois, "Everything returned now to the old order of things" 'Alles kehrte nun in die alte Ordnung der Dinge zuriick,' but the very next sentence introduces the marquise's "repeated discomforts" 'wiederholte Unpasslichkeiten,' the unnoticed dis- ruption of the "old order" (109); and for a while both the old and the new, the bourgeois order and the unexplained disorder in its womb, are allowed to exist in the story in a witty, even though inexplicable and uncomfortable, juxtaposition. Fi- nally, the various religious images used to describe the count point to the major ironic reversal that complicates the perception of what has transpired. The marquise first sees him stepping majestically out of the flames "like an angel from heaven" 'wie ein Engel des Himmels' (105). Later in the story, after an apparent resurrection, he arrives in the house "like a young god" 'wie ein junger Gott.' The marquise reinterprets these narrated descriptions literally when she is forced to contem- plate the possibility of a divine conception, since the father is still unnamed.9 Hence, when the count enters the house on the feared morning of the third, dressed in the same uniform that he had worn at the conquest of the fort-and of the marquise-the value of his appearance is reversed, since the bar (or dash) of repression has been crossed. Now the marquise perceives him as a "devil" 'Teufel,' sprinkles holy water to exorcise the house, and flees (140). Thus, the narrator himself, engaging the characters in an ironic interplay, seems to shift perspectives with their images and social languages-militaristic, bourgeois, religious.

And yet, because the languages of the story never fill in or illuminate the empty center, they remain suspended over it in a state of ambiguity. These various discourses speak past one another, are somehow beside the point-or the dash. No phrase, as Moering points out, is "harmless and innocent" 'harmlos und naiv' (238; see Moering 233-42 for numerous other examples). By not telling the event, each act of untelling and broken communication has a double and more significant implication.

The story, in fact, consistently addresses the literal difficulty the characters have in expressing what is on their minds. This difficulty, so often discussed in metaphysical and epistemological

terms (Miiller-Seidel 502; Kommerell; Moering 239), begins mundanely with writer's block. The count says at one point, for example, "that he reached for the plume a number of times to give vent to his feelings in a letter to the commandant and the marquise" 'dalJ er mehrere Male die Feder ergriffen, um in einem Brief an den Herrn Obristen und die Frau Marquise seinem Herzen Luft zu machen' (111); by not writing, however, he makes the rest of the tale possible. Later, after having written "in the meantime a second time" 'inzwischen zum zweitenmal' (127)-a question- able act of communication since we learn only af- terward that the marquise laid the letter aside with the comment "that's all right" 'es ware gut' (131)-he appears at the gate of the country house; he is denied entry, and the guard asks him "in an ambiguous manner ... if he might perhaps be the Count F ?" 'auf eine zweideutige Art . . . ob er vielleicht der Graf F . . . ware?' (128). Does the question imply that the marquise read his letter and was expecting him? Precisely because this act of writing both succeeds and fails, the story continues and ambiguities abound.

Oral communication fares no better than writing in the tale. The narrator carefully orchestrates what is said, how it is said, who says what, and what is not said. Dialogues have, in fact, a particularly privileged and problematic status in the novella. Many critics have remarked on the narrative shifts from objective reporting to dramatic exchanges between the characters (Fontane 247; Kayser 173-76; Kommerell 304-05; Beckmann 48-50; Fries 1317-18; Moering 230-34, 242-44). On the one hand, the objectivity of the narrator (who begins appropriately with an indirectly quoted newspaper announcement) grants him a position above the characters. On the other hand, his frequent use of their language, and their use of his, implicates both in the same unheard-of play. The dialogues become especially significant because their interruptions and indirectness reveal a painful and humorous awkwardness inherent in the situation and its attempted linguistic solution. Often the tension between the private untold and the social discourse reaches such a peak that the irony takes on the character of a farcical but also highly critical comedy. In the dialogues, wit is generated by the threefold union of the reader's knowledge, the narrator's coyness, and the characters' failure to mention what is actually being spoken about.

205




While what they fail to say undermines the social codes in general, what the text specifically criticizes, by depicting the inability of social discourse to deal adequately with the marquise's predicament, is the language of the patriarchal order. At one point the narrator says, "The wife of the commandant .. . .strove in vain to bring this situation to language. The commandant, however, always requested, in a manner that seemed identical to a command, absolute silence" 'Die Obristin . . . suchte vergebens, diesen Um- stand zur Sprache zu bringen. Der Kommandant bat immer, auf eine Art, die einem Befehle gleich sah, zu schweigen' (131). The silence the father imposes on the mother is telling.10

Not only can the marquise's father and mother not talk about her issue but, more important, the marquise herself and the count, who still live within the boundaries of the patriarchal order, are condemned either to silence or to linguistic forms that circumscribe and periphrase the event. Sig- nificantly, for example, the first mention of the marquise's peculiar abdominal discomforts is abruptly cut off when the father enters the room: "the conversation was broken off and the entire subject . . . forgotten" 'das Gesprach ward ab- gebrochen, und der ganze Gegenstand . . . ver- gessen' (109). Similarly, the count's two-minute courtship completely disrupts social practice because he tries to defend "his reputation, . . . this most ambiguous of all character traits" 'seinen Ruf, . . . diese zweideutigste aller Eigenschaften' without mentioning "the single contemptible act" 'die einzige nichtswiirdige Handlung' that moti- vates the telling (112). And later in the story the polite dinner conversation in which "the topic was to come to language" 'dieser Gegenstand zur Sprache kommen wiirde' gives way instead to an embarrassing silence when the count describes a dream with "numerous traits that were interesting in the light of his passion for the marquise" 'mehrere, durch seine Leidenschaft zur Marquise interessante Ziige' (116-17). The dream of the sul- lied swan makes for bad table manners since it makes all too clear-at least to the readers-that the discourses of the text are uneasy dialogic dis- placements from the unnarrated center.

The central dialogue between the count and the marquise in the garden is likewise a dance of hints around the initial blank. This is one scene in which the hidden knowledge could have come out directly in language. Indeed, the count assures her

that he is virtually "all-knowing" 'allwissend' (129), so that everything should be basically cleared up, since the problem, one would think, is merely for him and her to say what they know. But this is the problem of the narration. The count has had a hard time writing about "it," and now he stands face to face with the marquise. The following exchange, if it can be called that, takes place:

Just a single, secret, whispered-! said the count, and grasped hastily for her smooth arm as it slipped away from him.-I don't want to know anything, responded the Marquise, pushed his breast violently back, rushed up the ramp, and disappeared.

Ein einziges, heimliches, gefliistertes-! sagte der Graf, und griff hastig nach ihrem glatten, ihm entschliipfen- den Arm.-Ich will nichts wissen, versetzte die Mar- quise, stieB ihn heftig vor die Brust zuriick, eilte auf die Rampe, und verschwand. (129)

What follows "a single, secret, whispered" is another dash, this time with an exclamation point. Such punctuational suspension occurs often in the story, but this dash seems more interesting and disturbing than most. The narration steps in with an "abortive graphic sign," to paraphrase Dorrit Cohn's formulation of the "pregnant graphic sign" for the first dash (Cohn 129). It strives to conceal what is by now common knowledge and prevents the characters from stating anything directly. Rather than a "single, secret, whispered" word (if that is the missing element of the sentence), a circuitous dialogue is engendered in which the characters must struggle to communicate amid the constant interruptions of the narration. Although the unheard-of event remains untold, it is not as if the readers, and perhaps the characters at some level of consciousness, do not "know" something about it. After all, the count is "all-knowing" and the marquise knows enough not to want to know more. Knowledge in this tale, however, divides into two categories: the "heard," which is expressed in socially acceptable terms but which is off the mark; and the unheard-of, which is never told but which depends on what is told and which seeps through the cracks in the dialogic exchanges between characters as well as between the narrator and the characters. The ironic dialogues suppress direct expression but thereby reveal a more significant knowledge, precisely

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because it is untold and unheard(-of). One way of explaining why and how expression

is suppressed is to see the narration fusing in this "precarious idyll" (Weiss's phrase) with the marquise's perspective. Her own suppression-"I don't want to know anything"-imposes the dash. She censors the narrative. Since the marquise does so as an act of will, she must know that something lies under the dash. Dorrit Cohn has pur- sued this interpretative angle furthest by analyzing the story in terms of the marquise's psychological task vis-a-vis her own carnal knowledge ("Wis- sen"), that is, in terms of her repressing her eros and raising it to consciousness ("Bewul3tsein") (136-37)." While I completely agree with Cohn's psychological analysis of the marquise, I am still left with narratological questions: Why and how does the narration tell the tale of the untold eros? Why and how does the narrator play with social discourses rather than say, or have the characters say, what should be said straight out? What kind of art is this in which the untold can never be told or expressed directly, in which knowledge cannot rise unmediated to the surface, in which a ques- tionable conception requires so much dialogic midwifery?

The marquise and her mother raise these questions indirectly themselves at a central point in the story. The marquise explains that she feels torn between a sense of her purity and "my own inner feeling that is all too familiar to me" 'mein eigenes, innerliches, mir allzuwohlbekanntes Gefiihl' of what it is like to be pregnant (122). On the one hand she has no conscious knowledge of a conception, but on the other she feels an awareness growing within herself. She wants to lay her soul bare to her mother, but she does not know what to think, that is, what to say, about her condition. Her condition ("Zustand," "Umstand") knows, so to speak, more than she does. As in the garden scene, it would seem that she should be able to express her true feeling directly and unam- biguously. And yet, the inner knowledge of her pregnancy cannot be delivered without the as- sistance of some external other. She needs the in- tervention and indirect mediation of a midwife. Her mother balks at her indirectness: "A pure consciousness, and a midwife! she exclaimed, and lost all words" 'Ein reines Bewul3tsein, und eine Hebamme! sagte sie, und die Sprache ging ihr aus.' The mother's speechlessness seems an appropriately ironic response to her daughter's re-

quest for the speech of some other (Fries 1324). While the marquise can find no trace of unvirtu- ous transgression in her memory, she nonetheless requires a midwife to clarify her "incomprehen- sible condition" 'unbegreiflichen Zustand' (123). She has no words for her condition. Thus, what is at issue here, as in the other indirect dialogues of this tale, is not just knowledge-which the marquise possesses as feeling, sensation, and consciousness-but the roundabout mode of expressing knowledge. I propose that the marquise needs a midwife to draw out indirectly what she herself already knows of her condition in the same way that dialogic exchanges are needed to deliver the untold indirectly.

The marquise's story is not the only place in which Kleist couples a mode of narration with themes of knowledge and childbirth. The entire essay "Uber die allmahliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden" 'On the Gradual Com- pletion of Thoughts While Speaking'-probably written in 1805, shortly before the Marquise von 0-deals with the dialogue and its unique ability to help the partners give birth to knowledge together. In this fragmentary essay, addressed to his friend Riihle von Lilienstern, Kleist explains that if you are struggling with a cognitive problem whose solution escapes you, you should discuss it with some other person. The essay begins, "If you want to know something and cannot arrive at it by meditation, then I advise you . . . to talk about it with the next acquaintance who comes your way" 'Wenn du etwas wissen willst und es durch Meditation nicht finden kannst, so rate ich dir . . . mit dem nachsten Be- kannten, der dir aufstoBt, dariiber zu sprechen.' What you cannot discover by "brooding for perhaps hours on end" 'ein vielleicht stunden- langes Briiten' you can attain by talking. Not that you should expect a direct answer from your partner, Kleist adds; "rather you should first of all just tell him about it" 'vielmehr sollst du es ihm allererst erzahlen' (319). Of course, the "it," about which you just talk, has a peculiar status since, properly speaking, it both already exists and does not quite yet exist. Rather it comes into being by means of indirect interaction with the other in the struggle for expression. You should use every rhetorical trick in the book to keep the dialogue alive, to bring your own vague ideas to life gradually

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and circuitously. Kleist describes the situation in two classic Kleistian sentences:

However, because I do have a vague idea that stands in some distant relation to that which I seek, if I just boldly begin talking, my mind, out of the necessity to find an end for the beginning, will, as the speech continues, give a final clear shape to that confused idea, indeed it does so in such a manner that the knowledge, to my amazement, will be complete when the periodic sentence closes. I intermix inarticulate sounds in my speech, extend and exaggerate conjunctions, add an ap- positional phrase, where it really is not necessary, and make use of other artificial devices that can stretch out my speech, all this in order to gain the time necessary for the production (or fabrication) of my idea in the factory of reason.

Aber, weil ich doch irgend eine dunkle Vorstellung habe, die mit dem, was ich suche, von fern her in einiger Ver- bindung steht, so pragt, wenn ich nur dreist damit den Anfang mache, das Gemiit, wahrend die Rede fort- schreitet, in der Notwendigkeit, dem Anfang nun auch ein Ende zu finden, jene verworrene Vorstellung zur volligen Deutlichkeit aus, dergestalt, daB die Er- kenntnis, zu meinem Erstaunen, mit der Periode fer- tig ist. Ich mische unartikulierte Tone ein, ziehe die Verbindungsworter in die Lange, gebrauche auch eine Apposition, wo sie nicht notig ware, und bediene mich anderer, die Rede ausdehnender Kunstgriffe, zur Fabri- kation meiner Idee auf der Werkstatte der Vernunft, die gehorige Zeit zu gewinnen. (319-20)

These sentences, with their circuitous form and in- herently dialogic movement, seem to enact the very process they describe. Their narrative structure conveys the essential hermeneutical principle that understanding, also self-understanding, is born only in a linguistic give-and-take.12 One could say as well that these sentences describe the indirect route that the dialogic narrative of the Marquise von 0 follows from a dark and vague feeling ("dunkle Vorstellung," "innerliches Gefiihl," "unbegreifliche Empfindung") to an odd and surprising form of knowledge.

Toward the end of the essay on the gradual completion of thoughts, Kleist speaks of oral ex- aminations as a particular type of dialogic exchange. Direct questions are difficult, even impossible, to answer directly, he says, and so the wise teacher delays a little, giving students time to formulate indirectly what they know. Kleist describes the need for dialogue as follows:

It is so difficult to play on the instrument of a human

mind and to entice from it its proper tone; it is so eas- ily put out of tune by untalented hands that even the most practiced connoisseur of men, who has mastered, to speak with Kant, the art of intellectual midwifery, would still strike the wrong chords because he is un- familiar with the postpartum needs of his patient.13

Es ist so schwer, auf ein menschliches Gemiit zu spiel- en und ihm seinen eigentlichen Laut abzulocken, es ver- stimmt sich so leicht unter ungeschickten Handen, daB selbst der geiibteste Menschenkenner, der in der He- bammekunst der Gedanken, wie Kant sie nennt, auf das Meisterhafteste bewandert ware, hier noch, wegen der Unbekanntschaft mit seinem Sechswochner, Mi3- griffe tun konnte. (324)

A special art of midwifery ("Hebammekunst") is required, then, that will not expect an act of communication to tell or express a thought but that will allow a thought to be born out of a circuitous interchange that does not directly state the case. The problem for Kleist, his characters, and his readers lies not so much in the epistemological or psychological status of pure or vague ideas as in a speaker's dependence on social discourse to express any knowledge. 4 The discourses are not of our own choosing. Rather, we are born into them and depend on them to give birth to our ideas. We cannot expect them to capture with perspicuous immediacy that which lies within us. In fact, our minds do not contain ideas that are any more transparent than the cloudy linguistic medium of our social setting. And yet, the midwifery of a dialogue can establish, even if ironically, the conditions for expressing a kind of knowledge. As Kleist writes in the essay, "it is not we who know, but it is first of all a condition in which we find ourselves that knows" 'nicht wir wissen, es ist allererst ein gewiBer Zustand unsrer, welcher weiB' (323). We cannot simply say what is in our "pure consciousness"; we must create a special situation or condition ("Zustand," "Umstand") in a dialogue. In other words, the peculiar circumstances of the marquise's pregnancy ("andere Umstande") demand and allow for a pregnant dialogic circui- tousness ("Umstandlichkeit").

Where problems of knowledge and expression arise for Kleist, as the quotation from his essay indicates, Kant is not far behind. The mention of Kant refers, most likely, to paragraph 50 from the section "Methodenlehre" ("Methodology") in

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Kant's 1797 work Die Metaphysik der Sitten ("The Metaphysics of Morals"; Schriften, vol. 6).'5 Here Kant discusses the method of teaching the doctrines of practical reason, the means by which students come to recognize and express the moral law within themselves. Kant proceeds through a number of possible methods-for example, the fragmentary and the catechismal-and concludes that only one method is truly appropriate, namely, the dialogic method ("die dialogische Lehrart"). He writes:

For if someone wants to examine the reason of another, this can only take place dialogically, that is, in such a manner that teacher and student ask and answer each other reciprocally. The teacher guides the apprentice's line of thought by merely unfolding the disposition to certain concepts in the student by means of presented case studies (the teacher is the midwife of the student's thoughts).

Denn wenn jemand der Vernunft des Anderen etwas ab- fragen will, so kann es nicht anders als dialogisch, d.i. dadurch geschehen: da3 Lehrer und Schuler einander wechselsetig fragen und antworten. Der Lehrer leitet durch Fragen den Gedankengang seines Lehrjungers dadurch, daB er die Anlage zu gewiBen Begriffen in demselben durch vorgelegte Falle blos entwickelt (er ist die Hebamme seiner Gedanken). (6: 478)

This passage, and Kleist's explicit reference to it in the essay on the gradual completion of thoughts, seems particularly significant because it suggests a Kant-Kleist connection that differs from the one commonly accepted.

Many Kleist scholars emphasize the pessimism resulting from the famous Kant crisis. As is well known, Kleist experienced grave and fundamen- tal epistemological doubt, following his reading of Kant's Critiques, about whether we could know anything about the world as it is ("an sich"). In his much quoted letter to Wilhelmine von Zenge of 22 March 1801 (630-36), he noted the possibility that we see the world through "green specta- cles" ('griine Glaser) and will never know the true color of reality. He felt in his "crisis" that Kant opened the door to radical skepticism by separat- ing the realm of understanding, which has knowledge only of appearance ("Erscheinung"), from the world of practical reason, which strives for and attains knowledge of the absolute moral law within us. Kleist's faith in the enlightenment

ideals of teleology and progressive learning reached its low point in the letter to Wilhelmine, where he writes "that here on earth no truth can be found"; "we cannot decide if what we call truth truly is truth or if it only appears so to us"; and "it is in vain for us to strive to acquire some property that will follow us into the grave" 'daB hienieden keine Wahrheit zu finden ist'; 'wir konnen nicht entscheiden, ob das, was wir Wahrheit nennen, wahrhaft Wahrheit ist oder, ob es uns nur so erscheint'; and 'alles Bestreben, ein Eigentum sich zu erwerben, das uns auch in das Grab folgt, ist vergeblich' (634). Such statements do in fact accompany him at least as far as his grave: shortly before his suicide he wrote, "I die because there is nothing left for me to learn or acquire on earth" and "my entire jubilant concern can only be to find an abyss deep enough to throw myself into it with her [Henriette Vogel, with whom he had a suicide pact and whom he shot in the heart before shooting himself in the mouth]" 'ich sterbe, weil mir auf Erden nichts mehr zu lernen und zu erwerben iibrig bleibt' and 'meine ganze jauchzende Sorge nur sein kann, einen Abgrund tief genug zu finden, um mit ihr hinab zu stiirzen' (qtd. in Graham 77).

Such remarks amply support a belief in the an- nihilating effects of Kant's philosophy on Kleist, a belief that unites all critics. They differ, in fact, merely on the specific origins of the crisis.'6 In Die Metaphysik der Sitten, however, the references to the "dialogic didactic method" 'die dialogische Lehrmethode' and the "midwife of thoughts" in- dicate that Kant offered Kleist a new positive insight as well. That insight combines moral and epistemological concerns with narratological ones. For while we may not be able to know the world directly, indirect dialogues and conflicting perspectives can help us attain a different, though equally valid, kind of knowledge. I do not wish to deny that Kleist may have felt, and that his characters occasionally express, an abysmal pessimism and skepticism. But such despair arises when dialectical thinking breaks down and gives way to a strict dichotomy between a "pure idea" and its "impure expression."'7 The choice between these alternatives has indeed no happy solution. But in the Marquise von 0 and "On the Gradual Completion of Thoughts While Speak- ing," Kleist abandons the opposition, which he found in Kant (and in post-Kantians like Fichte and Reinhold), for the sake of the middle ground.

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Dialogic Midwifery in Kleist's Marquise von O

No "pure idea" exists prior to and independently of the mediation of some mode of expression. Hence there is nothing to be made "impure." The "dialectical" Kleist of the Marquise von 0 does not deny absolutes, but he dialogically undermines the pseudoabsolutes that attempt to exist without the aid of a seemingly oppositional other (Miiller-Salget 191, Renk 31-51, Dyer 79, Martin 144-52). Hence, the mother's oxymoronic exclamation at the center of the tale seems absurd and deceptive only to a monocausal society, for dialectically speaking there is no "pure consciousness" without the mediation of a talkative midwife. Thus one could argue that Kleist offers a Hegelian reading of Kant. Kleist differs from Hegel, however, because he does not draw out the full positive implications of dialogue as a philosophy and logic of dialectics. Rather, he remains in the position of "negative irony" that Hegel reserves for Plato and the Romantics (Hegel 441-67).18 Kant introduced Kleist, so to speak, to a special ironic and Platonic art of dialogic midwifery.

Now Kant, as we know from his dry, systematic prose, was no practicing expert in the art of dialogic midwifery. Rather, the master of philosophical and narratological dialogues was Plato, or the talkative other before him, Socrates (Derrida, Carte postale 14; Ulmer). In fact, another possible source for Kleist's reference to Kant and the intellectual midwife, besides the Metaphysics of Morals, can be found in Kant's 1803 work Piidagogik ("Pedagogy"; Schriften, vol. 9), where Kant mentions Socrates specifically as the founder of this unique dialogic art: "In the formative edu- cation of reason one must proceed Socratically. Socrates, namely, who called himself the midwife of the knowledge of his listeners, offers in his dialogues, which Plato to some extent preserved, examples of how one can draw out many things from reason, even with older people" 'Bei der Ausbildung der Vernunft muB3 man sokratisch ver- fahren. Sokrates namlich, der sich die Hebamme der Kenntnisse seiner Zuhorer nannte, gibt in seinen Dialogen, die uns Plato gewissermaBen auf- behalten hat, Beispiele, wie man selbst bei alten Leuten manches aus ihrer Vernunft hervorziehen kann' (9: 477).19 This explicit reference leads us from the marquise's midwife, whose word sup- plemented a supposedly pure inner consciousness, to the beginnings of a hermeneutical tradition grounded in the actuality of the dialogue situa-

tion.20 Plato discusses the art of dialogically aid- ing the gradual birth of ideas in a late dialogue, the Theaetetus, named after the young boy with whom Socrates converses.21 The Theaetetus is significant and fruitful for a discussion of Kleist's narrative techniques because it unfolds a theory and practice of attaining knowledge through indirect dialogic exchanges. Furthermore, the kind of knowledge acquired in both Plato and Kleist is surprisingly negative and ironic. Plato's dialogue thus opens within Kleist's tale a hermeneutical situation in which the acts of telling and expressing knowledge find their limits and fulfillment in acts of nontelling, silence, and indirect speech.

Socrates begins the dialogue simply enough with the question of "what knowledge really is" (146A). Whereas Kant's dialogic teaching method strives for knowledge of the moral law and whereas Kleist's characters grapple with the knowledge of some unheard-of and untold event, Plato's partners discuss the very problem of knowledge itself. At first Socrates implies sardon- ically that the search for an answer will be child's play. Of course, the speakers quickly discover the difficulty of the question, and when the young Theaetetus describes the hard time he is having with such a complex conception as knowledge itself, Socrates replies with a reference to childbirth: "You are suffering the pangs of labour, Theaete- tus, because you are not empty but pregnant" (148E). Whereupon the young partner responds in a fashion reminiscent of the Marquise von 0: "I do not know, Socrates; I merely tell you what I feel" (148E).

At this point the dialogue makes an apparent digression as Socrates goes on to explain why he is the best person to help the boy through his intellectual labor pains. Socrates is the son of a midwife, "a noble and burly woman" called Phaenarete. She introduced him as a boy to the many skills that accompany the art of midwifery. But the philosopher Socrates can do much more still, since he applies midwifery to the conceptions of the mind:

SOCRATES: So great, then, is the importance of midwives; but their function is less important than mine. For women do not, like my patients, bring forth at one time real children and at another mere images which it is difficult to distinguish from the real. For if they did, the greatest and noblest part of the work of the midwives would be in distinguishing between the real and

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the false. Do you not think so? THEAETETUS: Yes I do. (150C)

Of course, Socrates and Theaetetus had never met the marquise, a woman who transfers the poten- tial doubts of intellectual conceptions onto her body and thus has difficulties distinguishing whether she has conceived a reality or a phantom. Nor do they know her "burly" midwife. Socrates goes on to say:

But the greatest thing about my art is this, that it can test in every way whether the mind of the young man is bringing forth a mere image, an imposture, or a real and genuine offspring. For I have this in common with the midwives: I am sterile in point of wisdom . . . but those who associate with me, although at first some of them seem very ignorant, yet, as our acquaintance ad- vances, all of them to whom the god is gracious make wonderful progress. . . . And it is clear that they do this, not because they have ever learned anything new from me, but because they have found in themselves many fair things and have brought them forth. But the delivery is due to the god and me.

(150D-E)

Socrates thus points to the need for an external other to bring forth that which lies in some form within the darker regions of the self. This other, like the interlocutors mentioned in Kleist's essay on the gradual completion of thoughts or like Kant's teacher of practical reason, provides not conclusive assertions but, rather, indirect responses, interruptions, and, most important, silence, as a reflective mirror to help the partner formulate and clarify thoughts. Socrates closes his monologue by offering his services as intellectual midwife to Theaetetus:

Now I have said all this to you at such length, my dear boy, because I suspect that you, as you yourself believe, are in pain because you are pregnant with something within you. Apply then to me, remembering that I am the son of a midwife and have myself a midwife's gifts, and do your best to answer the questions I ask as I ask them. And if, when I have examined any of the things you say, it should prove that I think it is a mere image and not real, and therefore quietly take it from you and throw it away, do not be angry as women are when they are deprived of their first offspring. (151B-E)

Over the course of the circuitous dialogue, Soc- rates leads his young interlocutor through a series of definitions of knowledge taken in part from

Protagoras, Heraclitus, and Empedocles. The three principal definitions of knowledge around which the dialogue revolves are (1) knowledge is sensible perception, (2) knowledge is true opinion, and (3) knowledge is true opinion with reasoned explanation. (All three are also placed into question in Kleist's novella.) One of the most notable aspects of this particular dialogue is that the speakers never arrive at any one satisfactory definition of knowledge. Rather, Socrates is content that together they have dismissed the major in- valid conceptions by means of the give-and-take of the dialogue situation; that is, by means of cal- culated rhetorical questions and irony, Socrates has disabused his partner of false ideas concern- ing knowledge. Neither of the partners actually says what knowledge is; they do not give expression to an independently existing state of affairs. This is not to say that the dialogue serves no pur- pose, for even though it concludes without an unambiguous statement about knowledge, it nonetheless creates a linguistic situation or condition-in Kleist's vocabulary, a "Zustand" or "Umstand"-in which a more complex dialectical and ironic knowledge emerges. At the end Soc- rates explains that while the dialogue has not provided Theaetetus with a concrete answer, it has prepared him ethically for future conceptions:

If after this you ever undertake to conceive other thoughts, Theaetetus, and do conceive, you will be pregnant with better thoughts than these by reason of the present search, and if you remain barren, you will be less harsh and gentler to your associates, for you will have the wisdom not to think you know that which you do not know. (210C)

Thus, the form and outcome of the dialogue allow the partners to share in a search that results not in a clear solution but in ironic self-awareness of their imprecise, discontinuous, dialogic medium.

The Platonic dialogue with Theaetetus contains striking thematic similarities to ideas and images found in Kleist: the problem of attaining and expressing knowledge; the images of childbearing, peculiar or uncertain pregnancies, and a midwife to depict the struggle for the expression of knowledge; and the question of which conceptions are fruitful and which imagined.

And yet, we can move beyond the similarities of theme to those of narrative form. Neither the

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Platonic dialogue nor the Kleistian novella unfolds in a linear fashion but, rather, each uses discourses from other spheres to talk around the basic issue: Socrates discusses the positions of his philosophical competitors, and Kleist's characters and narrator constantly speak in militaristic, bourgeois, and religious images that do not mean what they say. Both Plato and Kleist unfold their works in the ironic gap that opens up between what is said and what is not said. The untold or the unspeakable, bound up with knowledge, acts not as a hindrance to understanding but as a hermeneutical impulse to circuitous exchanges. That is, the aporia that accompanies our discourse, which might seem a failure to communicate, en- genders the search for modes of expression.22 For Plato and Kleist, the very form of the search is more important than the conclusion, since they emphasize and call attention to their narratives as problematic dialogues. After all, both Kleist's explicit reference to Kant's image of the "midwife of thoughts" and Kant's explicit and implicit references to Socrates's unique art concern the "dialogic method."

Bringing together this assortment of texts by Kleist, Kant, and Plato illuminates four crucial aspects of Kleist's narrative and the genre of the novella. First, the reference to Kant in the essay "On the Gradual Completion of Thoughts While Speaking" helps explain the immediate philosophical background of the novella; that is, it answers the question Dorrit Cohn has asked: why is the problem of morality in Kleist's tale intricately connected to the problem of knowledge?

For Kant, knowledge, conscience, and consciousness ("Wissen," "Gewissen," and "Bewuf3tsein"), all of which play roles in the novella, are not to be related directly. What can be truly known for Kant is the moral law within us, the quiet voice that tells us to distinguish good from evil by means of the categorical imperative. But at the level of appearances ("Erschein- ungen"), to which language also belongs, we know only through the mediation of the limited faculties of our understanding. For Kleist, however, the moral issue facing the marquise and the count, that is, the issue of maintaining a purity of spirit, cannot be separated from the epistemological and psychological problems of learning and expressing knowledge indirectly and

impurely. Kleist's interpretation of Kant does not stop naively at the gap that supposedly exists in philosophy between subject and object, knower and known. Rather, Kleist's reworking of Kant in tales like the Marquise von 0 opens up the possibility of a dialectical hermeneutics23 that con- centrates on telling and nontelling as forms of mediation ("presented case studies" 'vorgelegte Falle,' as Kant calls them).

In fact, I think we can see how Kleist's literary treatment complicates the philosophical model, for Kleist works with a variety of real, ideological, and not so logical languages. Because his characters have social positions to protect, their languages constantly mask as much as they express.24 As Kleist said of his friend Rihle von Lilienstern (see the epigraph at the beginning of this essay), the poet must be a rhetorician who can say anything, adopt any position, especially the position that remains unstated. Philosophers always hope they can say what they mean and what is the case-otherwise they must, a la Witt- genstein, remain silent. But a poet like Kleist has the "finesse" to leave what is meant unsaid, so that it can be brought forth in the dialogism of conflicting discourses.

Second, the topos of intellectual midwifery ("Hebammekunst der Gedanken"), which we en- countered in Kleist, Kant, and Plato, illuminates the peculiar wedding of motifs: the problematic pregnancy and the difficulties of expression. Although, as Diinnhaupt points out, Cervantes's exemplary novel La Fuerza de la sangre ("The Power of Blood") most likely provided Kleist with the idea of a moral tale about a woman who conceives unknowingly, the image of the midwife introduced by Kleist relates his novella to a different intellectual and hermeneutical tradition. Kleist's novella is thus exemplary not so much of the rapist's depravity or of the family's need to save face at all costs-the concerns in Cervantes's novel-but rather of the means for talking about such unheard-of events. The apparently inexplicable pregnancy, when viewed from the perspective of intellectual midwifery in Kant and Plato, becomes the perfect symbol for problems of explanation, understanding, and expression.

Third, the narrative form of this midwifery, according to all the authors I have discussed, is dialogic. The mother's oxymoron, "A pure consciousness, and a midwife!" becomes paradigmatic for the form of narration: some form of

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midwifery is needed to supplement the knowledge inside the characters, the narrator, and the reader. In Bakhtinian terms we can say that Kleist's novella consists of ironically dialogized heteroglossia, a patchwork of languages taken from different social spheres (the military, the bour- geoisie, and religion), each of which is under- mined because it fails to express directly the untold event. If, according to Bakhtin, the novel "is a phenomenon multiform in style and vari- form in speech and voice," the novella, for Kleist, comprises various "linguistic levels and. . . different stylistic controls" (Imagination 261) that interact with a silent partner to parody "normal" communication. As Moering suggests, the discourse of the novella is "a parody of the language and morals of the respectable world" 'eine Parodie der Sprache und Moral der vornehmen Welt.'25 All the characters and even the complic- itous narrator engage, so to speak, in quasi- Platonic dialogues in which one partner remains silent; and that silence reveals the both painful and fruitful incommensurability between modes of social discourse and the heart of the matter. As Bakhtin says, novelistic dialogues "push to the limit the mutual nonunderstanding represented by people who speak in different languages" (Imagi- nation 356).26 One of these voices, in Kleist's narrative, is silence.

Finally, I would propose, again following Bakh- tin's lead, that Kleist's unique mode of establishing a dialogue between the told and the untold

helps give birth to a new genre in German literature. Like the series of little Russians ("eine ganze Reihe von kleinen Russen") that the marquise and the count procreate after their marriage and be- lated year-long courtship, Kleist's text also helps engender a series of texts-the genre of the realistic novella.27 This significant genre of nineteenth- century German literature can be defined not so much by its external characteristics-its brevity, the "Dingsymbol," the "Wendepunkt"-but by its dialogization. Whereas the novel strives for a fully orchestrated polyphony that engages as many social voices and languages as possible, the German novella relies on a simpler hermeneutical dialogue that mediates between external expression and internal, inexplicable events or thoughts.28 From Kleist through Keller, Fontane, Storm, Hauptmann, and Musil, the realistic novella thrives on an indirect dialogue between the known and unknown, the uncanny and the marvelous,29 the socially sayable and the unspeakable unheard-of. While the novella's dialogue between the told and the untold can criticize modes of social discourse as inadequate, it does so with an air of Socratic irony. For the knowledge that helped give birth to the novella and that the novella con- tinually helps bring forth suggests that there is no knowledge outside the dialogic interplay between telling and nontelling.30

University of California Irvine

Notes l Unless otherwise indicated, all translations into English

are my own. 2 The quotation is from a letter to Ernst von Pfuel describ-

ing Riihle von Lilienstern, to whom Kleist dedicated the essay "On the Gradual Completion of Thought While Speaking." Except where oiherwise noted, parenthetical page numbers in Kleist citations refer to volume 2 of his Samtliche Werke und Briefe.

3 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, conversation with Ecker- mann, 29 Jan. 1827: "... denn was ist eine Novelle anders als eine sich ereignete unerhorte Begebenheit. Dies ist der eigentliche Begriff, und so vieles, was in Deutschland unter dem Titel Novelle geht, ist gar keine Novelle, sondern blos Erzahlung, oder was Sie sonst wollen" '. .. for what is a novella if not the occurrence of an unheard-of event. This is its proper definition (or concept), and hence many a German work that goes under the title novella is not a novella at all

but mere storytelling, or whatever you wish to call it' (6: 40). For a discussion of some problems connected to this generic definition, including the question of whether or not Goethe, given the context, actually meant such a broad application, see "Goethe: 'Die unerhorte Begebenheit,' " LoCicero 27-45. See also Wiese 14-23; Bennett 9; Schroder 13-20, 74-93, 119-52; Kunz, Novelle and Die deutsche Novelle. See as well Ellis's theoretical introduction to Narration (1-45), which takes excep- tion to the attempt to isolate simplified "characteristic features" of the Novelle, such as the "striking event," the "thing symbol" 'Dingsymbol,' or the "turning point" 'Wen- depunkt.' Swales attempts to resuscitate many of the criteria rejected by Ellis in principle (13-20). I reevaluate such generic criteria below.

4 See Fries, who speaks of "the secret of the famous dash" (1316). Fries also quotes Gunther Blocker's hyperbole: "There is probably no other punctuation mark in world literature com-

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prising as much event and fate as this dash.... The gram- matically quite unmotivated dash after the 'Hier' comprises, cryptically, the whole story" (240; Fries 1316). See also Cohn 129. (I would like to express my thanks to Dorrit Cohn for her advice on an earlier form of this essay.)

5 The work of Mikhail Bakhtin and Hans-Georg Gadamer continues this tradition to our own time. Bakhtin's essays in The Dialogic Imagination (1935) serve as a silent partner to my essay. His concepts of "heteroglossia"-"another's speech in another's language" (Imagination 324)-"ideologemes" (332-33), "dialogization" (331-66), and the multilayered literary "word" accompany my entire discussion of dialogic midwifery. In fact, Bakhtin concludes his essay with an image that relates his study thematically to mine: "For, we repeat, great novelistic images continue to grow and develop even after the moment of their creation; they are capable of being creatively transformed in different eras, far distant from the day and hour of their original birth." (I am grateful to Patricia Atwood at Princeton University for confirming the presence of a number of such birth images in Bakhtin's original Russian.) The image of the "dialogic midwife" helps give birth to the discourse of the novella.

A passage in Bakhtin's work on Rabelais also contains images that point out his interest in this area of gynecologic and obstetric medicine. He writes:

We must stress first of all that this image of the physician in the prologue of the Fourth Book contains substantial popu- lar elements. Rabelais' physician is unlike the caricature of the professional narrow-minded doctor in the literature of a later period. The Rabelaisian image is complex, universal and am- bivalent; this paradoxical figure is a composite of Hippocrates' noble physician "equal to God" and of the scatophagus who devours excrement in antique comedies, mimes, and medieval facietes. The physician is essentially connected with the struggle of life and death in the human body and has a special relation to childbirth and the throes of death. He participates in death and procreation. He is not concerned with a completed and closed body but with one that is born, which is in the stage of becoming. The body that interests him is pregnant, delivers, is sick, dying and dismembered. In one word, it is the body as it appears in abuses, oaths, and generally in grotesque images. (179; my emphasis)

This description of Rabelais's physician could be applied as well to Kleist's midwife, a dialogic figure opposed to the doctor ("Arzt") and taken from outside, below the realm of the respectable consciousness of the other characters. This "popu- lar element" introduces both laughter and an implicitly critical perspective on society. Precisely the midwife's crass and talkative otherness vis-a-vis polite society, as represented by the phallocentric and technocratic doctor, creates the tension that allows for a dialogue and the birth of a new awareness.

6 Moering offers certainly one of the most comprehensive and insightful works on Kleist's narrative (on Marquise von 0, 231-92). He uses the concept of wit ("Witz"), which was crucial to poetic theory and practice in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to point out Kleist's transformation of traditional modes of writing. And he uses irony to reveal the unique interplay of comedy and tragic seriousness in Kleist's style.

7 Fries remarks on the two levels of the story. On the one

hand, the discovery of the father seems to clarify all issues: "As a 'whodunit' this denouement resolves the factual enigma completely and thereby seems to exclude, thematically, any need for interpretation" (1318). And yet, on the other hand, the marquise's first fainting spell raises a question about the extent of her knowledge that constitutes an unsolvable "enigma of ... undecidability" (1317). Hence, at another level besides the thematic, the "enigma" of this story is more than a mere puzzle. See also Lugowski: The Marquise von 0 works "formal wie eine Kriminalgeschichte ohne Polizei und schlieBlich auch ohne Verbrecher" 'formally like a detective story without police and, in the last analysis, without a criminal' (151); Cohn: "We may note, first of all that . . the narrator, both by what he tells and by what he conceals, has structured his novella as a mystery story" (129-30); and Koopmann.

8 The ability to capture this play of extravagant, though puzzling gestures certainly contributed to the success of Eric Rohmer's film version of the novella, although the camera and Rohmer's direction could not capture the tale's narrative sub- tlety. Quoted in Berthel, Rohmer gives three reasons why the translation of Kleist's novella into the medium of film "gelingt hier gleichsam wie von selbst" 'succeeds here as if by itself:

Erstens, weil die Dialoge des kiinftigen Films schon vollstan- dig ausgearbeitet sind in einer Form, die ganzlich un- theatralisch ist, die, wie wir meinen, glatt "iiber die Leinwand gehen" miilten; weil die Dialoge in direkter Rede stehen oder, in indirekter Rede geschrieben, auBerst leicht umzusetzen sind.

Zweitens, weil sich der Erzahler jegliche Andeutung der inneren Vorgdnge seiner Helden versagt. Alles ist von aufien her beschrieben und mit der gleichen Ungeruhrtheit betrachtet wie durch das Objektiv einer Kamera. Die Beweggriinde der Personen lassen sich nur durch die Beschreibung ihres Verhaltens hindurch erahnen. Der Film ist hier also der Er- zahlung gegeniiber nicht im Nachteil, da sie ja gerade die Moglichkeit zur Introspektion an keiner Stelle wahrnimmt.

Drittens, weil Kleist uns mit auBester Prazision, besser als der gewissenshafteste Drehbuchautor, iiber die Gewohnheiten, Bewegungen, Auj3erungen seiner Helden Auskunft gibt. ...

First, because the dialogues of the future film were already completely worked out in a thoroughly untheatrical form. They could, I think, be projected smoothly onto the screen since they were written in direct speech or, when in indirect speech, were extremely easy to transpose.

Second, because the narrator refrains from giving the slight- est indication of the characters' internal processes. Everything is described from an external standpoint and viewed with the same lack of emotion as through a camera lens. We can only suspect the characters' motivations through the descriptions of their behavior. The film, therefore, is not at a disadvantage vis-a-vis the tale since the narration at no point exploits the possibilities for introspection.

Third, because Kleist offers us information about his characters' habits, movements, and expressions with extreme preci- sion, better than the most conscientious scriptwriter.

(110-11; my emphasis)

9 The count's reversal from angel to devil dominates the text, at least retrospectively from the last line:

. . .and when the count once asked the marquise in an idyllic

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John H. Smith moment why she, on that morning of the fearful third, though she seemed prepared for the most vile man, fled from him as from a devil, she replied as she threw her arms around his neck: he would not have appeared to her at that point like a devil had he not, at his first appearance, seemed to her to be an angel.

. . . und da der Graf in einer glucklichen Stunde seine Frau einst fragte, warum sie an jenem fiirchterlichen Dritten, da sie auf jeden Lasterhaften gefasst schien, vor ihm, gleich einem Teufel, geflohen ware, antwortete sie, indem sie ihm um den Hals fiel: er wiirde ihr damals nicht wie ein Teufel erschienen sein, wenn er ihr nicht, bei seiner ersten Erscheinung, wie ein Engel vorgekommen ware. (143)

Fries offers one of the most exciting readings of this reversal, explaining the marquise's radical transvaluation by means of a Lacanian (i.e., Freudian plus Levi-Straussian) analysis (1316-22). In the light of her rejection of her real father (as representative of the social order), she turns to a divine "symbolic father" whose image in her mind, for a time, replaces the real father. The appearance of the real father of her child shatters the illusion, thereby "deconstructing" the two total- ities of the social and the symbolic orders. While I fully agree with Fries's analysis, I wish to look in more detail at this "deconstruction," that is, at the ways in which Kleist undermines each order by playing one against the other.

10 As Fries points out in his reading, the feminine is held up in the tale as an inexplicable, unnarratable object, revealing in its unnarratability the failure of the scientific model, the "im- potency of phallocentrism" (1299). I hope to show that Kleist's use of dialogic midwifery offers an alternative to the inadequate discourse of phallocentrism. Just as for Fries the literary discourse of the feminine disrupts the "scientific model," so too the dialogism of the midwife surpasses the monologue of the doctor.

11 Cohn investigates the configurations of terms around the word "Wissen"-"wissentlich," "BewuBtsein," "bewufltlos," etc. The rape occurs when the marquise is "unconscious" 'bewuBtlos'-and not "in a faint" 'in Ohnmacht,' as one familiar with typical gestures of Kleist's characters would expect. More important, Luther uses the term "unknowing" 'un- wissentlich' in translating the account of the Virgin's impregnation by the Holy Ghost (Luke 1.34).

12 There are remarkable parallels between Kleist's essay and Gadamer's discussion of the function of conversation in Wahrheit und Methode, pt. 3, "Die ontologische Wendung der Hermeneutik am Leitfaden der Sprache" ("The Ontological Shift of Hermeneutics Guided by Language") (361-466). The section opens, for example, with these Kleistian comments:

Wir sagen zwar, daB wir ein Gesprach "fuhren," aber je eigentlicher ein Gesprach ist, desto weniger liegt die Fuhrung desselben in dem Willen des einen oder anderen Partners. So ist das eigentliche Gesprach niemals das, das wir fuhren wollten. Vielmehr ist es im allgemeinen richtiger zu sagen, daB wir in ein Gesprach geraten, wenn nicht gar, daB wir uns in ein Gesprach verwickeln.

While we say that we "conduct" a conversation, actually the more effective a conversation is the less its conduct lies in the

will of one or the other partner. The actually effective conversation is never one that we would want to conduct. Rather, it is more appropriate to say that we get into, or even get caught up in, a conversation. (361)

13 Kleist's image here is impossible to translate. The term Sechswochner is a masculine neologism based on the feminine form Sechswochnerin, which designates a woman six weeks after having given birth. Kleist thus literalizes the midwife metaphor by rendering the male interlocutor pregnant. It can also be argued that the Marquise von 0 also literalizes the image of dialogic midwifery.

14 In the essay on the gradual completion of thoughts, Kleist deals with the French Revolution and the implications- indeed the radical effects-of forming thoughts while speaking in a given social situation. The specific example is Mirabeau's speech before the national convention. In a manner typical of the narrators in his stories, Kleist quotes from Mirabeau's speech but consistently interjects his own comments to describe how Mirabeau gained violent inspiration from the spectators. The expressions on the listeners' faces gave the speaker the fire he needed to begin a revolution. Concluding this increasingly intense contrapuntal interplay among speaker, audience, and narrator, Kleist comments, "Seen in this way, it was perhaps the twitch of an upper lip or an ambiguous play with a cuff that caused the overthrow of the order of things in France" 'Vielleicht, daB es auf diese Art zuletzt das Zucken einer Oberlippe war, oder ein zweideutiges Spiel an der Man- schette, was in Frankreich den Umsturz der Ordnung der Dinge bewirkte' (321). One will recall that in the Marquise von 0 the "old order of things" was interrupted by peculiarly intense dialogues and seemingly meaningless bodily "discomforts." This reference connects the novella and the essay as responses to the modes of discourse and rhetorical interactions accompanying sociopolitical upheavals.

15 For a discussion of this reference, see Kleist, Gesammelte Werke 4: 249 and also Muth 54-55. The other possible source of this phrase is discussed below.

16 Ernst Cassirer argues that Fichte intervened to shatter Kleist's beliefs (166-78). Ludwig Muth claims that the second part of Kant's third critique (on teleological judgment) had a greater effect on Kleist than the first or second critique. See especially Muth's conclusion (77-78). Ulrich Gall proposes Karl Leonhard Reinhold's subjective relativism as the perpetrator of Kleist's crisis (esp. 86-135). He writes, "Der durch Reinhold vermittelte Kantianismus trifft Kleist intellektuell (Preisgabe der wissenschaftlichen Plane) wie moralisch (Unmoglichkeit zukunftsorientierten Handelns)." And further, "Damit erscheint uns aufgrund biographischer, inhaltlicher und chronologischer Untersuchung die Reinhold-These wesentlich hohere Wahrscheinlichkeit fur sich in Anspruch nehmen zu konnen als alle bisher geauflerten Begruiindungsversuche" 'The Kantianism mediated through Reinhold affects Kleist both in- tellectually (abandonment of scientific plans) and morally (im- possibility of future-oriented action).' And, 'Hence, on the basis of biological, thematic, and chronological analyses we conclude that the Reinhold thesis seems to have a claim to con- siderably greater probability than all other attempted explana- tions' (130). While I do not wish to pursue his "Reinhold thesis," I do consider it significant that Gall connects the epistemological crisis to a moral one.

Ilse Graham, with an insightful analysis of mirror images

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Dialogic Midwifery in Kleist's Marquise von O in Kleist's letters, cleverly sweeps aside the problem of textual sources, proposing instead a deeper psychological reason for Kleist's despair (73-77). She writes, ". .. what we tend to en- visage as an abrupt break had been simmering in the poet before it finally surfaced; and after a short acute phase it retreated to become one element of unrest amongst others, and one which Kleist himself, for a while at least, rated ambiva- lently and by no means only negatively" (58). By the end of her analysis, however, she apparently concludes that in fact the Kant crisis produced negative effects on Kleist that were con- verted into more positive attitudes by a leap of faith (76-77). Her argument thus seems to proceed along the lines that Kant suggests in the preface to the Critique of Pure Reason where he states that he hopes to limit reason to make room for faith (3: 19). I do not think it necessary to jump to an existentialist reading of Kleist, since he himself often stresses the inescapa- bility of our dialogic linguistic medium.

In a similar vein, Beckmann raises doubts about the possibility of interpreting Kant's effects on Kleist, because Kleist's "linguistic skepticism" should prevent the interpreter from hastily linking statements in letters to existential workings of the author's mind (9-11).

17 See Lindsay for an example of a nondialectical reading of Kleist. He begins with a classic understatement: "One of the features of this world that worry Kleist is the high incidence of imperfect communication. Again and again in his dramas and stories we find examples of human beings failing to achieve proper understanding of one another even when they are basically well-disposed and try very hard to do so" (57). He concludes that Kleist posits an ideal of "immediate, direct and full communication" as "an absolute value" and as an "aspect of the divine" (67). Such an approach based on a kind of "leap of faith" is not unrelated to more "existentialist" readings, like Sokel's. Beckmann, in contrast, defines consciousness (I think more fruitfully) as a dialectical interplay of the inner and the outer: "Mit dem Begriff des BewuBtseins soll das Phanomen der Innerlichkeit, worunter die psychischen Prozesse begriffen werden, mit den objektivierten Formen der psychischen Tatig- keit (Begriffe, Wertvorstellungen, usw.) dialektisch verkoppelt werden" 'The concept of consciousness is intended to couple dialectically the phenomenon of subjectivity, including the psychic processes, with objectified forms of psychic activities (concepts, representations of value, etc.)' (8).

18 Hegel also refers to midwifery in his discussion of the Socratic method:

Das Zweite ist nun das, was Sokrates bestimmter seine Heba,,,- mekunst genannt hat, die ihm von seiner Mutter uberkommen sei, den Gedanken zur Welt zu helfen, die in dem Bewul3tsein eines jeden schon selbst enthalten sind,-eben aus dem konkreteren unreflektierten Bewultsein die Allgemeinheit des Konkreten oder aus dem allgemein Gesetzten das Gegenteil, das schon in ihm liegt, aufzuzeigen ....

The second [feature] is that which Socrates more specifically called the "art of midwifery," which was handed down to him by his mother. It allows him to aid in bringing forth thoughts into the world that are already held in each person's consciousness-that is, to point out the universality of the concrete in the more concrete unreflected consciousness or the op- posite already existing in that which is universally posited. . . (462)

The reference to Hegel helps situate Kleist's narrative technique in the philosophical reflections of his time. Hegel criticizes the irony of the Romantics for establishing a "genial" and quasi- divine standpoint from which to criticize all others (460). Kleist, like Hegel, differs from the Romantics and comes closer to the Socratic position in that he allows his irony to develop internally. As Hegel writes of Socrates: "Alle Dialektik la3t das gelten, was gelten soll, als ob es gelte, la3t die innere Zer- storung selbst sich daran entwickeln,-allgemeine Ironie der Welt" 'Every dialectic allows the validity of that which is supposedly valid to stand as if it were valid, thereby allowing the internal, destructive contradiction to develop on its own- universal irony of the world' (460). This observation applies, I believe, to Kleistian irony as well.

19 There is a touchingly self-ironic element in this passage (rare for Kant) since, at seventy-nine, he was himself one of the "older people." See also Kleist, Gesammelte Werke 4: 249. What might be at issue in the apparently undecidable choice between these two possible references is whether Kleist returned to Kant as late as 1803. (It is also possible that he read an anonymously published biography of Kant that quotes Kant's work on pedagogy.) The assumption that Kleist reread Kant would support a nuanced interpretation of the "Kant crisis," since it would imply that Kleist did not reject all philosophical knowledge and the pursuit of knowledge when he read Kant the first time. Ulrich Gall does in fact argue that Kleist grap- pled with Kant's philosophy of right once again in the years 1805-06 (163-72), though Gall sees Kleist as a strict Kantian, even in Michael Kohlhaas and Prinz Friedrich von Homburg. I see no reason not to assume that Kleist was familiar with both the 1797 and the 1803 references to "intellectual midwifery." The issue then becomes a question of a Kant crisis and its dialectical resolution.

20 See Gadamer, Platos dialektische Ethik. Gadamer, the father of modern philosophical hermeneutics, returns in this collection of essays to the father of the ancient tradition. He writes of Platonic argumentation as opposed to Aristotelian conceptual analysis: "[Platonische] Dialektik dagegen lebt aus der Kraft dialogischer Verstandigung, aus dem verstehenden Mitgehen des anderen, und ist in jedem Schritt ihres Ganges getragen von der Vergewisserung uiber die Zustimmung des Partners" '[Platonic] dialectic, on the contrary, thrives on the power of dialogic understanding, on the understanding con- currence of the other, and is borne along with every step of its course by the confirmation of the partner's agreement' (13).

21 I am grateful to Scott Abbott of Vanderbilt University for first making me aware of the Theaetetus.

22 In Schleiermacher's famous quasidefinition of the hermeneutical enterprise, misunderstanding is the step necessary to encourage the search for understanding. Schleiermacher writes, "Hermeneutik ist die Kunst, MiBverstand zu ver- meiden" 'Hermeneutics is the art of avoiding misunderstanding' (Hermeneutik 29). And further, misunderstanding is a constitutive feature of Sch!eiermacher's hermeneutics insofar as "das MiBverstehen sich von selbst ergibt und das Verstehen auf jedem Punkt mul3 gewollt und gesucht werden" 'misunderstanding arises on its own and understanding must be desired and sought for at every point' (Hermeneutik 31, pars. 15 and 16). In "The Promise of Interpretation," Hamacher deals with what he calls the "hermeneutical imperative." He argues that the connection between ethics and hermeneutics is established, appropriately, by Kant, later picked up by Schleiermacher, and

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then unmasked by Nietzsche. For Kant, the "demand" 'Forderung,' "promise" 'Versprechen,' or "command(ment)" 'Gebot' to understand the speech of the other brings with it an ethical imperative.

23 See Hamacher, Pleroma, for a discussion of Hegel's reworking of Kant and of Hegel's working out of a "dialektische Hermeneutik" (simultaneous with Kleist's encounters with Kant) in his theological manuscripts.

24 In viewing the literary, novelistic "word" as a fusion of the formal and the ideological, I again follow Bakhtin's approach to the "stylistics of discourse." He opens his essay "Discourse in the Novel" with the theoretical program:

The principal idea of this essay is that the study of verbal art can and must overcome the divorce between an abstract "formal" approach and an equally abstract "ideological" approach. Form and content in discourse are one, once we understand that verbal discourse is a social phenomenon. ... It is this idea that has motivated our emphasis on "the stylistics of discourse." (Imagination 259)

25 The novella includes numerous parodies that use silence as a counterpart(ner) to inadequate speech. The imposed propriety of the count's marriage proposal, for example, alienates the highly proper father of the marquise. The rela- tionships between the daughter and her parents are strained to the point where the father can only dictate a formal letter asking her to move out, because "under reigning conditions" 'unter den obwaltenden Umstanden' he obviously has no per- sonal mode of communication (124-25). And when daughter and father once again unite, their tears flow together and their lips touch in erotic silence and a mixture of farce, sentimen- tality, and perversion; they are happily reconciled without overtly raising the issue of problematic fatherhood. The marquise's mother responds to the newspaper announcement with the significant gesture of forced silence: "The commandant's wife lost, even before she was halfway through reading this unheard-of announcement, all speech" 'Der Obristin verging, ehe sie noch auf die Halfte dieses unerhorten Artikels gekom- men war, die Sprache' (131-32). Furthermore, the marquise and the count, though they both know and desire the same thing, exchange only broken acts of communication. And finally, the narrator himself orchestrates this polyphony of dialogic indirectness by carefully oscillating between a narrative that does not tell all and dialogues that are, literally, in indirect speech. The narrator's voice does not overcome the many-voiced and often silent dialogism but, rather, delights in unfolding it with stylized irony.

26 This statement has a remarkable parallel in Gadamer's Wahrheit und Methode, quoted in part as an epigraph at the beginning of this essay:

Situations in which understanding is disrupted and made difficult are most likely to make us conscious of the conditions necessary for all understanding. Thus, that linguistic process is especially telling in which a conversation in two different languages is made possible through translation.

Es sind die gestorten und erschwerten Situationen der Ver- standigung, in denen die Bedingungen am ehesten bewul3t werden, unter denen eine jede Verstandigung steht. So wird der

sprachliche Vorgang besonders aufschluf3reich, in dem ein Gesprach in zwei einander fremden Sprachen durch Uberset- zung und Ubertragung ermoglicht wird. (361-62)

27 It is noteworthy that the three major historical preforms of novelistic discourse isolated by Bakhtin correspond to elements of the novella that inform or grow out of Kleist's tale: (1) the Socratic dialogue, which, according to Bakhtin, introduced the need to express conflicting positions to capture and criticize ironically other Weltanschauungen (Imagination 22-29); (2) the comical and sentimental parodies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which involve both a styliza- tion of respectable society and a translation of foreign traditions-whereby "the birth of novelistic prose in Germany is especially paradigmatic" (Imagination 378); and (3) the realistic novel of the nineteenth century, which stresses the social and ideological origins of all discourse.

28 Swales summarizes this criterion in slightly different words in a section entitled "The Tension between Subjective and Objective" (36-38):

This whole question of subjectivity of the novelle is a recur- ring feature of theoretical discussions of the genre. Indeed, many commentators have seen the tension between subjective and objective as the hallmark of the novelle. . . . Friedrich Schlegel, an early theoretician, sees the genre as "well suited to the indirect and, as it were, symbolic depiction of a subjective mood and intention-indeed of the deepest and most in- dividual of such moods." Manfred Schunicht, a recent critic, describes the "spectrum of this form" as follows: "On the one hand, strictest objectivity, the distance of the reporter, a perspective that, with every means at its disposal, objectifies; on the other, concealed behind the fiction, a structured reality in- formed by a subjective teleology, through whose artistic con- cealment the subjective reality is passed off as the seemingly given reality." (36)

29 See Todorov. The fantastic "occupies the duration of this uncertainty" between the marvelous ("the supernatural accepted") and the uncanny ("the supernatural explained") (25; see also 41-58 for a discussion of genre under the sign of the fantastic).

Cohn concludes her discussion of the Marquise von 0 with an attempt to locate it within the tradition of the novella in a different way. She argues first of all that the novella revolves around not just a "Wendepunkt" but a point of "omission" (139-42). She quotes F. Schlegel's definition of Witz, which contains "such a single beautiful oddity" 'eine solch einzig schone Seltenheit.' Hence I fully agree with her that the novella grows out of a counterpoint between the expressed and the elided. Instead of pursuing this "dialogic" relation, however, she turns to a stimulating discussion of the proximity of novella to fairy tale ("Marchen").

30 Perhaps the most, eloquent statement of this basic principle can be found in Barbara Johnson's characterization of her approach to literature:

If this volume has any overall preoccupation, it is perhaps the importance of the functioning of what is not known in literature or theory. Far from being a negative or nonexistent fac- tor, what is not known is often the unseen motivating force

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Dialogic Midwifery in Kleist's Marquise von O behind the very deployment of meaning. The power of ignor- ance, blindness, uncertainty, or misreading is often all the more redoubtable for not being perceived as such. Literature, it seems to me, is the discourse most preoccupied with the unknown, but not in the sense in which such a statement is usually un- derstood. The "unknown" is not what lies behind the limits of knowledge, some unreachable, sacred, ineffable point toward which we vainly yearn. It lies, rather, in the oversights and slip-

ups that structure our lives in the same way that an X makes it possible to articulate an algebraic equation. What literature often seems to tell us is the consequences of the way in which what is not known is not seen as unknown. It is not, in the final analysis, what you don't know that can or cannot hurt you. It is what you don't know you don't know that spins out and entangles "that perpetual error we call life." (xx)

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