kowalik - kleist's essay on rhetoric (monatshefte v81n4 1989)

Kleist's Essay on RhetoricAuthor(s): Kleist and Jill Anne KowalikSource: Monatshefte, Vol. 81, No. 4 (Winter, 1989), pp. 434-446Published by: University of Wisconsin PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30166261Accessed: 14/12/2010 04:53

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Kleist's Essay on Rhetoric

JILL ANNE KOWALIK Princeton University

Although the complex, often mysterious, speech situations in Kleist's oeuvre have been pondered and discussed for decades, it is only relatively recently that scholars have noticed Kleist's essay "Uber die allmihliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden"' as an important quasi-theoretical statement on the relationship between language and thought as Kleist saw it, and as a key to understanding his literary works. The following study seeks to redefine the terms with which this essay has thus far been interpreted. For while it is generally agreed that Kleist wrote the essay to explain how language functions as a medium of mental process, there are significant textual indications that Kleist meant this essay additionally-and perhaps primarily-as a discourse on the use of language. In other words, he is interested here not only in the formal aspects of language as representation-what might be called the epistemological problem-but also in the pragmatic (rhetorical) function of language.2 Including both formal and pragmatic considerations in the interpretation of this essay not only allows for a better understanding of the essay itself, but also sheds light on Kleist's general concerns as an author.

To clarify how the pragmatic/rhetorical aspect of the essay has been overlooked, it is useful to examine some English translations of its title. The following are three examples:

(A) "On the Gradual Fashioning of Thought in the Process of Conversing"; (B) "On the Gradual Formation of Thoughts during Speech"; (C) "On the Gradual Completion of Thoughts While Speaking."3

All of the above translations could be renderings of the hypothetical title "Uber die allmihliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Sprechen." But Kleist used "beim Reden" because he wanted the words "eine Rede halten" and "Beredsamkeit" to occur to his reader as well. And whereas all three versions could refer to intimate, private exchanges, in two cases even to monologues, four of the five speech situations described in the

Monatshefte, Vol. 81, No. 4, 1989 434 0026-9271/89/0004/0434 $01.50/0 c 1989 by The Board of Regents of The University of Wisconsin System

Kleist's Essay on Rhetoric 435

essay are located in a public forum where an orator, a "Redner," holds forth to a small or large group. Furthermore, examples B and C are inappropriately indebted to the aesthetics of German Classicism. A Rick- ibersetzung could produce "Bildung der Gedanken" (B) and "Vollendung

der Gedanken" (C).4 Only Ilse Graham captures correctly a corresponding English term, "fashioning," which conveys the artificial, rather than clas- sical-organic, aspect of Verfertigung. She does not, however, appear to have perceived the significance of her choice of words, i.e., the fact that it refers to the transition around 1800 from the view of language as ergon to language as energeia.

For poets at the turn of the century, Verfertigung had become a pejorative term. Lessing had already used it in his Hamburgische Dra- maturgie to describe mechanical poetic composition in distinction to original creative production.5 He could do so because the term, since the Renaissance, had been associated principally with the (re)production of documents and official letters, a process that Lessing implies is at work in the writing of plays according to predetermined patterns. In the latter half of the 18th century, moreover, Verfertigung was used in a still more specialized sense: namely, to designate the composition of school essays, which, like other formulaic documents, were fashioned according to a body of rules now commonly referred to as Schulrhetorik. A title and a few quotations will illustrate this:

Handbuch zu richtiger Verfertigung und Beurtheilung aller Arten von schrift- lichen Aufs~itzen des gemeinen Lebens tiberhaupt und der Briefe insbeson- dere.6

Im Lateinischen und in der Anweisung zur Rede-Kunst, haben sie [die Schuler] so viel gelernet, dab man ihnen erlauben konnen [sic], ihre Ab- schieds-Reden durch eigenen FleiB und Nachsinnen zu verfertigen.

[Man will den Schuilern] nur so viel von den Regeln der deutschen Sprache beibringen, als n6tig ist, einen ertraglichen Aufsatz zu verfertigen.

Allein es ist ihm [dem Schiler] unentbehrlich einen guten Brief zu schrei- ben, eine deutliche Erzehlung oder Bericht zu verfertigen, und von einer Materie die er gelernt hat, einen verninftigen Aufsatz zu machen.

... gewisse prosaische und poetische Aufsatze, welche die Scholaren von Zeit zu Zeit verfertigen missen.

In the popular pedagogical treatises of the decades immediately preceding Kleist's activity, the word Verfertigung appears to have been the preem- inent terminus technicus for the composition of written texts in school and of speeches delivered from a manuscript. We may infer, therefore, that Kleist's essay bears at least a semantic relation to these pedagogical treatises, although it appears to represent also an intended commentary

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on them inasmuch as the final scene of the essay describes the examination of a student.

But there is additional evidence, both internal and external, that Kleist's essay was meant to be read in the context of popular pedagogical thinking of the late 18th century. The internal evidence is in the opening lines of the essay. In them, Kleist is setting forth to his friend Riihle, to whom the essay is addressed, the conditions under which one should speak. Kleist advises him to talk to any acquaintance at all about those questions that have aroused his curiosity, but cannot be resolved in sol- itary meditation. He then adds:

Ich sehe dich zwar grol3e Augen machen, und mir antworten, man habe dir in friuhern Jahren den Rat gegeben, von nichts zu sprechen, als nur von Dingen, die du bereits verstehst. (319)

But who is "man?" And on what occasion in the past was this said? The artistry and exactitude of Kleist's writing prevent us from finding in this typically Kleistian theatrical description of Riuhle a merely random observation. One possible and, indeed, obvious answer to such questions is that "man" is the school or Gymnasium professor, and that "in friuhern Jahren" refers to the time when the student was asked to prepare a Schulrede. That is, the student was asked to speak, not spontaneously, but from a probably memorized text that had been meticulously prepared in advance according to the rules by which essays were verfertigt. Kleist has indicated in his title, however, that the topic of his essay is not the production of documents but that of ideas, and that the means of production is not written, but rather oral, performance.

External evidence linking this essay to pedagogical treatises of the period, in addition to those already cited, is the title of a Preisaufgabe issued in 1779 in Berlin by F. G. Resewitz, and asking for the "bester Entwurf einer Methode den Styl junger Leute zu bilden und sie zu einer Fertigkeit zu bringen ihre Gedanken schriftlich auszudrticken." One response, submitted in 1786 by Peter Villaume (a follower, like Resewitz, of Basedow's ideas) bears the title "Methode jungen Leuten zu der Fer- tigkeit zu verhelfen, ihre Gedanken schriftlich auszudriicken."7 The sim- ilarity of Kleist's title to Villaume's is so great as to suggest a parody of the latter's essay, or of others like it which may have had similar titles. We do not know whether Kleist read Resewitz's or Villaume's work, but we do know that he was critical-like Lessing, whom he admired-of Basedow's mechanical pedagogical notions that advocated adherence to, or copying of, "positive" behavioral models.8

If Kleist's essay is interpreted, then, as a satirical commentary on late 18th-century pedagogical practices, it acquires a somewhat different significance from that proposed by those who have seen it strictly as a


reflection on language as an "organic medium" of thought. In their view, Kleist's argument is said to run as follows: The purpose of the essay is to demonstrate that discourse is necessary in order to develop thought. Speaking is "ein wahrhaftes lautes Denken" (322). But in order for this act of speaking/thinking to occur, the psyche of the speaker must first be "excited." This can be brought about either through an existential threat to the speaker, such as that faced by Mirabeau in the Estates General, or by a sympathetic interlocutor who can place the speaker/thinker in the proper (i.e., creative) frame of mind for producing ideas, as when a student faces a practiced and benevolent examiner. Excitation is necessary in order to arouse unconscious material, whose formulation in language constitutes a making-explicit of the unconscious in thought. This is a more authentic linguistic product than utterances based on purely "ra- tionalistic" pronouncements.

The difficulty with this interpretation is that it does not adequately account for all of the, sometimes highly parodistic, speech situations described in the essay, nor does it show how Kleist relates the five episodes to each other. For example, it does not explain why Mirabeau would perform well (become "excited") in the face of a threat, but why the student would do poorly in the same situation. Most problematic, however, is the continual assertion that Kleist is arguing for the reciprocal identity of discourse and thought. For the point of the essay is to demonstrate exactly the opposite: language can lack substance, and there are dangerous political consequences following from a naive equation of thinking and speaking. Interpretations based on the "organic model" of language thus produce conclusions that actually run counter to what Kleist says.

The general problem addressed by the essay is the relationship between powerful speech and right action. By raising this issue, Kleist, wittingly or unwittingly, situates himself historically at the very root of rhetoric as a discipline. Although the reception of the ancient rhetorical tradition in the 18th century is an enormously complex problem, and although the extent of Kleist's knowledge of this tradition is difficult, if not impossible, to establish, his own historical position can be more clearly apprehended by viewing it against the primary debate at the gen- esis of the discipline: that is, Plato's attempt to formulate a philosophic rhetoric in opposition to what he saw as the sophistic corruption of language.

Plato argues that the Sophists taught their students only how to speak well, or how to argue successfully in the courts, but not how to be good men. The Sophists are not interested, according to Plato, in deter- mining what is right, but only in winning their case. Success lies for them in clever words, in exploiting legal technicalities for the sake of rhetorical

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victory. In the Phaedrus, for example, Plato elaborates the distinction between merely successful sophistic discourse and good discourse. The best oration is produced by the speaker who is striving towards justice. Right speaking for Plato is only possible from one who is interested in right acting. Conversely, the just man will decide on his actions according to right thinking that has been carefully formulated in logos. The important point for our discussion is the necessary relationship that he draws between ethics and rhetoric. Neither category can be subsumed under the other: the good man does not "automatically" produce good speech, nor does good speech alone count as a measure of justice.

There are echoes in all the major rhetorical treatises of antiquity of Plato's insistence that the quality of a speech is a function of the orator's character. But his concept of a relationship (not an identity) between right acting and right speaking often was reduced to the statement that the best speaker, meaning the most powerful and impressive, is by def- inition the best man. This essentially sophistic notion of the orator sur- faces in the Renaissance-along with other (competing) notions of the orator, of course-and from there it migrates into the Enlightenment.

Because ancient rhetorical treatises were always conceived as part of the paideia, we may view their 18th-century counterpart as the pedagogical treatises generated during the educational reforms of the En- lightenment. The traditional ideal of the philosophic orator, preserved but not understood in the documents of Schulrhetorik, undergoes a historical permutation: out of a citizen who uses his verbal gifts and skills (ingenium and ars) to participate in and influence important decisions made by the community, the German Enlightenment creates a Biurger who, by virtue of basic competence in reading and writing, can assume a productive function in the economy and especially in the emerging bureaucracy.9 It is productive, however, in a limited sense. For while those involved in Geschdftsschreiberey or employed in a Kanzlei were expected to work somewhat independently, their reading of and com- mentaries on documents clearly were expected to remain within bounds that did not disturb the system. The educational purpose of Schulrhetorik was, therefore, not to produce creative minds, but instead reliable "pro- cessors" of paperwork. Essential to this new "rhetorical" training was a sophistic assumption of absolute equivalence between good writing skills and the use of Verstand. A good writer is eo ipso a "good" (i.e., bureau- cratically useful) citizen and therefore "rational."'o

Kleist refers precisely to this, the connection between education and bureaucratic service as a unified institutional strategy, on the very first page of his essay. Immediately after repeating what Rihle had been told in school, Kleist turns to his own dilemma while at work on documents:


Oft sitze ich an meinem Geschiftstisch iber den Akten, und erforsche, in einer verwickelten Streitsache, den Gesichtspunkt, aus welchem sie wohl zu beurteilen sein mochte. (319)

The enterprise, in which his "innerstes Wesen" is "begriffen," Kleist says with considerable irony, is "sich aufzuklaren." The observation is ironic because state institutions expected absolute allegiance ("risonniert so viel ihr wollt, ... aber gehorcht!") while nearly every Romantic viewed work within a bureaucracy as anything but a means of self-development. Kleist is now proposing to search for an answer to his question independently of solutions provided by another person or by institutional precedent. He suggests that one simply begin talking about it even though one does not know exactly what will emerge-advice that no contemporary student would have received. This passage is perhaps more frequently quoted than any other in the essay, but it is rarely given in full:

Aber weil ich doch irgend eine dunkle Vorstellung habe, die mit dem, was ich suche, von fern her in einiger Verbindung steht, so prigt, wenn ich nur dreist damit den Anfang mache, das Gemiit, wahrend die Rede fortschreitet, in der Notwendigkeit, dem Anfang nun auch ein Ende zu finden, jene ver- worrene Vorstellung zur volligen Deutlichkeit aus, dergestalt, da3 die Er- kenntnis, zu meinem Erstaunen, mit der Periode fertig ist. Ich mische un- artikulierte Tone ein, ziehe die Verbindungswrrter in die Lange, gebrauche auch wohl eine Apposition, wo sie nicht ngtig wire, und bediene mich anderer, die Rede ausdehnender, Kunstgriffe, zur Fabrikation meiner Idee auf der Werkstitte der Vernunft, die gehirige Zeit zu gewinnen. (319f.)

Those who view these words merely as a statement of the organic relation between thinking and speaking usually end their citation at "Periode fertig ist," thereby missing the obvious parody of a number of rhetorical notions (amplification, digression, ornamentation, etc.) and, hence, the significance of the passage as a whole. Furthermore, "Periode" is often discussed as if Kleist had simply written "Satz," but his contemporaries would have understood it as a rhetorical term referring to a complex sentence "fashioned" according to carefully applied syntactical rules. Kleist ironically registers his "Erstaunen" that the end of the period coincides with the finishing of the thought (the development of "Erkenntnis") because En- lightenment pedagogues had insisted on thoughts being clearly "conceived," i.e., absorbed and recombined, "durch Meditation" (319) from material laid before the student before a composition was begun. In addition, the phrases "Werkstitte der Vernunft" and "Fabrikation meiner Idee" reiterate the aspect of artificiality already discussed, and constitute Kleist's own humorous reference to the instrumentalization of reason in the 18th century.

The second sentence quoted makes clear that the verbal display is a power play designed to garner time for the furiously working mind as

440 Kowalik

it tries to bring forth an idea in language. The perceived threat is an attempt at interrupting him, i.e., at trying to tell him what he wants to know, which would limit his own discourse, or attempt at self-enlightenment, and transform him into a passive listener. His spirit (Gemit) nevertheless rises to the occasion "wie ein groBer General"[!], and the articulation of the idea is completed. Although speech is "in progress" during the active development of thought, the more important point is that verbal displays can lack significant content even while serving the strategic function of overpowering the listener (in this case, so that an idea can be worked out by Gemiut). Here, in his opening episode, Kleist insists on the discrepancy between the artificial rhetorical performance and articulated thought. By playing on the word "Periode," as well as on other rhetorical concepts, he appropriates terms from the arsenal of En- lightenment pedagogy and uses them to attack that tradition in order to describe his own concept of self-education. Kleist thereby acknowledges that the use of rhetoric always involves the exercise to power.

Rhetorical display is a poor source of knowledge, he goes on to say, because the greatest orators have not even known in advance what they were going to say. With this ironic reversal of the spontaneity topos, which holds that great words flow automatically from great conceptions, Kleist suggests that the mere appearance of rhetorical "thunderbolts" is no guar- antee of great thoughts behind them. He recounts the gradual way in which Mirabeau's "Donnerkeil" (320) was produced (i.e., as if the "Ba- jonette" [320] with which Mirabeau accomplished the "Vernichtung seines Gegners" [321] were a haphazard creation) in order to present both the positive and negative functions of the stunning verbal performance.

The Mirabeau episode, the second in the essay, thus has two pur- poses. First, it points out to one of its implied readers, the Prussian school professor, that politically effective oral performance can occur, or is more likely to occur, if the speaker (the student) has not been forced to deliver a written text memorized in advance. While scholars have quibbled over whether Kleist did or did not quote Mirabeau accurately, and while the historical Mirabeau was known to speak from texts written both by himself and by others for him, the issue is not whether Kleist's account is historically correct. The essay is a literary piece, and Kleist's observation is meant to make fun of a pedagogical system that paradoxically uses Schulrhetorik for the suppression of powerful orators who might bring about social change, in favor of the mass production of passive readers and writers (copiers).

Second, the episode demonstrates how effortlessly, as if by mystical force, passive listeners may be moved to action. In the context of a digression on animal magnetism, a topic of great fascination for Kleist, an electrified and electrifying Mirabeau is said to have virtually ignited


his listeners to action in an oratorical display compared to an electrical discharge through which his enthusiasm passes to his listeners." His "Elektrizitatsgrad" (321) was so high that his very presence brought about the events attributed to his words:

Vielleicht, da3 es auf diese Art zuletzt das Zucken einer Oberlippe war, oder ein zweideutiges Spiel an der Manschette, was in Frankreich den Um- sturz der Ordnung der Dinge bewirkte. (321)

Whereas in the first episode Kleist had observed that intellectually empty speeches can have strategic functions, here he asserts that the effective rhetorical display need not even contain words: a twitching lip will suffice as an exercise of power, to initiate the French Revolution, for example. Hence the most effective speeches are those in which the audience is poised to hear what the orator argues. He merely need exploit the pre- disposition of the audience to bring about a particular political outcome. The speaker is able to do this, Kleist suggests in the next episode, because a mere pretense of spontaneous emotion engenders the listener's trust in the wisdom of the orator.

While such pretense has belonged, since the earliest rhetorical treatises, to the accepted means of persuasion, Kleist's radical insight in his third episode is that the listener's acceptance of the pretense is a method of transferring responsibility for one's own destructive desire onto the "genius" of the speaker, whose "spontaneous invention" (Erfindung) cat- alyzes the violence. The episode describes the speech held by the fox in "Les animaux malades de la peste" by Lafontaine. "Man kennt diese Fabel," Kleist adds with a sarcastic double entendre, meaning not only the actual fable but also its plot, i.e., the ritualistic destruction of the weakest or dumbest member of a group, a very old problem indeed. Surely, in this case, it is hardly appropriate to speak of the "creative development" of an idea: the speech situation is one in which "der Fuchs dem L6wen eine Apologie zu halten gezwungen ist, ohne zu wissen, wo er den Stoff dazu hernehmen soll ..." (322, my emphasis). Rhetorical display legitimizes the unconscious desire for destruction by the mob, which then acts on words singularly devoid of rational sense, the fox describes the donkey as "der blutdfirstige! (der alle Kriuter auffriBt)..." (322).

Precisely at this point Kleist delivers his now famous "ein solches Reden ist ein wahrhaftes lautes Denken" (322), which is a bitterly sarcastic referral to how easily speech without substance passes for solid argumentation. In making violence acceptable, he argues, "die Sprache ist alsdann keine Fessel" (322) but the reverse. A parallel event is the "FluB priesterlicher Beredsamkeit" (155) in Kleist's Erdbeben in Chili. "Hier ist eine Stelle, die begreiflich macht, daB Kleist wichtig fuir uns ist

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und warum er es ist. Hiervon sollte nicht abgelenkt werden durch die Rede von Gesellschaftskritik, die das Verhiltnis von Gewalt und Sprache, das for unsere Epoche in all ihren politisch-gesellschaftlichen wie indi- viduellen Erscheinungen bestimmend ist, in diesem Fall auf das Thema klerikaler Herrschaft eingrenzt."'2

To review: the first three speech situations (the dialogue with his sister, to whom Kleist refers in the beginning; Mirabeau's performance; the fox's apology) all represent ironic reversals of the spontaneity topos in which he questions the intellectual content of rhetorical display. He also places these episodes on a scale of violence: the first contains strategy but no violence, the second, violence that may or may not have served an ultimate social good-Kleist felt the Revolution had not-and the third describes purely destructive violence based on preservation of obvious self-interest (the fox represents a group whose common goal is "das Un- gewitter von sich ableiten" [322]).

The question, however, is not whether Kleist viewed rhetorical performance per se as a good or an evil. Instead, we are being asked to revise our thinking about the status of rhetorical performance. By structuring the episodes as he does, Kleist asks us to give up the notion that the best speaker is the best man-because he is mistakenly felt to be a source of knowledge or wisdom-and replace it with the notion that good men can only develop in an environment that allows them to speak. His somewhat Rousseauistic search for the "good man," for l'homme instead of le ci- toyen, or Mensch instead of Biirger, led him to articulate in this essay a notion of discourse that was probably, but not necessarily, oral rather than written because documents tend to be more vulnerable than speech to institutional organization and control. Kleist's point (and here he dif- fers from Rousseau) is not the simple advocacy of spontaneous oral discourse as the best means of"making the unconscious explicit," as is nearly universally asserted, but the critique of all discourse, written and oral, that merely reproduces institutionally mandated models of speech.'3 He is seeking instead an ideal form of language that would not be subject to institutional co-optation, that would not necessarily be viewed as a source of "wisdom" (i.e., authority), and that would provide the condition of possibility for authentic humanism, an attitude that would allow less perfect (i.e., uncontrolled) utterances to occur in the community.

Kleist therefore offers in his fourth episode the example of those whose power over language is deficient and who as a result have trouble in social situations: "Leute, die sich, weil sie sich der Sprache nicht mich- tig ftihlen,... in der Regel zurickgezogen halten" (323). Such people can be encouraged to speak ("aufflammen") in a "Gesellschaft, wo durch ein lebhaftes Gesprich, eine kontinuierliche Befruchtung der Gemiter mit Ideen im Werk ist" (323). Of course, "Gesellschaft" is another double


entendre and refers not just to the lively conversation at "Teetische," but also to a society free of state censors. Speakers who have been officially or psychologically repressed-Kleist sees a dynamic relation between the two-have something to contribute: "Es ist wahrscheinlich, daB diese Leute etwas recht Treffendes, und sehr deutlich, gedacht haben" (323). But their inexperience prevents them from prevailing in a society in which discourse is viewed as a form of warfare:

Und iberhaupt wird jeder, der, bei gleicher Deutlichkeit, geschwinder als sein Gegner spricht, einen Vorteil iber ihn haben, weil er gleichsam mehr Truppen als er ins Feld fuihrt. (323)

Because clever, polished, and easily delivered speech - institutionally molded speech with Truppen behind it-is mistaken for knowledge, all rough, misshapen statements that differ from it in purely rhetorical quality are suppressed. And because rhetorically unpolished statements might lead to potentially new, therefore "revolutionary," ideas which may revise the existing power structure, the crucial fundamental incongruity of thinking and speaking is officially ignored or denied in pedagogical policy for the sake of political exploitation.

The paradigm with which Kleist illustrates the dynamic of open speech, potential knowledge, and political repression is the university oral examination. Suppose, Kleist suggests, that a student just happens to be asked a question such as "What is the state?" or "What is property?" (323). Such questions call forth two kinds of answers. Either the respond- ent may provide a quick and clever rhetorical display in which memorized definitions are rattled off and then forgotten, or he may give a confused but ultimately more serious answer based on what he has thought about the question but never been given the chance to express. Kleist says that "ohne vorhergegangene Einleitung" the student cannot answer "wo diese Vorbereitung des Gemiuts ginzlich fehlt" (323). Since critics usually miss the double significance of"Gesellschaft" in the fourth episode, it likewise does not occur to them that Kleist's meaning is not simply the student's need to "feel comfortable," but also that (Prussian) state censorship needs to be abolished.

The repressive examiner will assume that since the student stum- bles, he has no idea what the proper answer should be. The intelligent examiner will realize that knowledge of these difficult issues is not to be gauged by facile responses but by the degree to which a reflection on this problem has informed our character. "Denn nicht wir wissen, es ist al- lererst ein gewisser Zustand unsrer, welcher weiB" (323). The quotation appropriates another ancient topos, that of "divine possession," as with the rhapsode who spontaneously gives forth poetic truths while in a trance. Kleist uses this topos ironically to indicate the importance of

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knowledge as a state of mind, as opposed to mere verbal performance. Only "gemeine Geister" (324), those who have faithfully copied down in Aufstitze the definitions fed to them by the state-employed professor, will be able to appear to know. But knowing as a mental condition means that a concept must develop over the course of many conversations on a question, out of which a coherent set of ideas could emerge that is rooted in our character and not simply in our words.

The university oral examination is a direct historical descendant of the Roman schools of declamation. But whereas the Roman student, ideally at least, was being prepared by the use of fictional cases for real future conflict outside the school, Kleist shows that not only do the questions asked in the university examination not prepare the student for resolving social conflicts-over the constitution of the state, for example- but they actually preclude his subsequent participation as a citizen in those conflicts. The scenario goes as follows. First the professor fosters in his student the belief that rhetorical display is an indication of knowledge. (Actual rhetorical display in the 18th-century school, however, was based on careful written preparation according to accepted models in which spontaneity was feigned.) Then the professor asks a question about which no practice has been allowed: namely, "What is the state?" The student is suddenly and cruelly asked to take the convention of spontaneity literally, something that ensures his failure to produce a satisfac- tory response. After this traumatic experience, he hesitates to take up the question again at a later time. The professor, however, who fears for and protects his own reputation as an "enlightened" mind by cleverly asking the question, appears to have an interest in the development of political ideas among his students. But he leaves the examination, having successfully persuaded the student that discourse about the concept of"state" is a fruitless and painful endeavor-Kleist's word is "widerwirtig" (324).

We see in this confrontation more than the participation of the school system in repression by the state. Kleist also shows us the self- serving role played by the state in its equation of knowledge and verbal performance. Such a conflation, quite paradoxically, results in the eternal irreconcilability of thinking and speaking, because the possibility of their-to be sure, non-harmonious- relationship to each other is denied in an act of mutual identification. When intellectual substance cannot be distinguished from rhetorical display, speakers and listeners (or writers and readers) are prevented from giving an ethical evaluation of powerful discourse, which is the discourse sanctioned by the powerful. This in turn produces the most favorable climate conceivable for any state seeking unquestioning acceptance of its Realpolitik.

Interpretations of the essay that are based on an equivalence of language and thought run the risk of replicating, unwittingly, precisely


the cultural-political strategy described by Kleist. Such an interpretive position cannot challenge the paradoxical role of the state in maintaining an unresolvable discrepancy between thinking and speaking even as it conflates them because this position is ultimately grounded in the con- viction that Kleist's writing embodies a fundamental skepticism towards language, towards its ability qua medium to express thought adequately. Kleist saw himself as an "unaussprechlicher Mensch" (729f.), so this position holds, and his essay "Uber die allmihliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden" was an attempt at explaining how a Utopian spontaneous discourse might overcome the dilemma posed by the "in- adequacies" of language that are everywhere evident in his plays and narratives. Yet we miss the author's purpose in writing this essay, perhaps even his purpose as an author, if we confine our interpretation to a sup- posed exclusively epistemological problem in his oeuvre. For the essay reveals how Kleist's reflection on the relationship between language and thought is anchored in his cultural-political criticism. Isolating the formal question of representation from the pragmatic/rhetorical issues of language prevents us from recognizing his (unfulfilled) desire to capture and understand the shocking paradox, still with us, of "diese h6chste Sitten- losigkeit bei der h6chsten Wissenschaft" (681).

'Heinrich von Kleist, Stimtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. Helmut Sembdner, 7th ed., 2 vols. (Miinchen, 1984) 2: 319-324. All references to Kleist's works are from this volume of this edition and will appear in parentheses by page number in the text and notes.

2 An exception to the general neglect of the essay in terms of the rhetorical tradition is Gerald Gillespie, "Kleist's Hypothesis of Affective Expression: Acting-out in Language," Seminar 17 (1981): 275-282, who views the essay as part of the Romantic "epochal reaction against rhetoric as a heritage of fixed devices and memorized formulae" (280). The article does not analyze, however, Kleist's use of rhetorical topoi, nor does it discuss his funda- mentally pragmatic/rhetorical/political stance.

The sources are: (A) Ilse Graham, Heinrich von Kleist-Word into Flesh: A Poet's Quest for the Symbol (Berlin/New York, 1977); (B) Maria M. Tatar, Spellbound: Studies on Mesmerism and Literature (Princeton, 1978); (C) John H. Smith, "Dialogic Midwifery in Kleist's Marquise von O and the Hermeneutics of Telling the Untold in Kant and Plato," PMLA 100 (1985): 203-219. Gillespie does not translate the title.

4 The terminology of classicism is also found in one of the most influential interpretations of the essay, the one by Hans Heinz Holz in his Macht und Ohnmacht der Sprache (Frankfurt, 1962): 26-33, where the words bilden and ausbilden occur with reference to thought. See also Judith Schlanger, "Kleist: 'L'Id6e vient en Parlant'," Littrature 51 (Oct. 1983): 3-14, who speaks of"la formation des id6es." For an overview of"organic" notions of language in German Classicism and Romanticism, see Hans Arens, Sprachwissenschaft: Der Gang ihrer Entwicklung von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, 2 vols. (Frankfurt, 1969) 2: 119-130 and 155-227.

SCf. Hamburgische Dramaturgie, 36. Stiuck, in G. E. Lessings Simtliche Schriften, ed. Lachmann-Muncker, 3rd ed. (1886; reprint: Berlin, 1968) 9: 335, and Grimm, Deutsches Wirterbuch, 25: 328-30.

6 This and the following four quotations are taken from Heinrich Bosse, "Dichter kann man nicht bilden: Zur Veranderung der Schulrhetorik nach 1770," Jahrbuch far In- ternationale Germanistik 9 (1978): 80-125. Bosse gives currently available source materials

446 Kowalik

for (1) through (5) on pp. 88, 83, 93, 103, and 114, respectively. The original titles are restated here to provide context for the reader: (1) a work by Johann Friedrich Heynatz, published in 1773 and again in 1775 in Berlin; (2) from J. F. Hahn, Die Miglichkeit und Nutzbarkeit eines Curriculi Scholastici (Berlin, 1754); (3) from Johann Ignaz von Felbiger, Methodenbuch fitr Lehrer der deutschen Schulen in den kaiserlich-kaniglichen Erblindern (Wien, 1775); (4) from Henrich Martin Gottfried Krster, Anweisung die Sprachen und Wissenschaften verninftig zu erlernen und ordentlich zu studieren (Frankfurt und Leipzig, 1763); (5) quoted from the 1782 Bestimmungen of the St. Johannis-Schule in Hamburg.

7 Bosse, 105, n. 105. 8 Cf. Kleist's "Allerneuster Erziehungsplan" (329-335) and Lessing's critique of Ba-

sedow in his Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend, esp. 104. Stiick, in Simtliche Schriften 8: 233-236.

9 Cf. Bosse, 86-89, esp. n. 22, which quotes Peter Villaume: "Wir verlangen aber keine unnachahmliche Scribenten, die ohnehin nicht gebildet werden. Es werden nur simple, deutliche, verniinftige Schreiber verlangt, die in ihren Geschaften die Feder zu brauchen wissen. Ich sage mit FleiB Schreiber und Geschifte. Denn Autoren mussen wir nicht bilden wollen. Wir haben deren schon zum UberfluB, befugter und unbefugter. Also nur Ge- schiftsminner, Gesch.ftsschreiberey." The Instruction far den Unterricht in dem GroJ3herzoglichen Gymnasium zu Darmstadt of 1827 shows how successful this and similar arguments were: "Die Stylibungen sind zunichst den Bedirfnissen des praktischen Lebens gewidmet, indem sie alle Gattungen von Geschiftsaufsitzen umfassen, zuerst des niederen Geschiftstyls, wie Abschiede, Anweisungen, Anzeigen, Circularschreiben, Contracte, For- mulare, Obligationen, Quittungen, Rechnungen, Reverse, Schenkungsschriften, Schuld- scheine, Specificationen, Vollmachten, Vorschlige, Wechsel, Zeugnisse u.s.w. Hierauffolgen einige Gattungen des Canzlei- und Gerichtsstyls, z. B. Attestate, Berichte, Citationen, De- crete, Gutachten, Protokolle, Relationen, Scheine u.s.w., endlich einige Gattungen des Hof- styls, Bittschriften, Gutachten, Vorstellungen u.s.w." Quoted by Georg Jager, Der Deutsch- unterricht aufdem Gymnasium der Goethezeit: eineAnthologie (Hildesheim, 1977) 13. This now humorous proliferation of "genres" (so many that they must be alphabetized to be discussed) indicates how seriously such documents were taken.

,o See the sections beginning with "Denkschulung als Aufgabe des Unterrichts," in Horst Joachim Frank, Dichtung, Sprache, Menschenbildung: Geschichte des Deutschunter- richts von den Anfangen bis 1945, 2 vols. (Munchen, 1976) 1: 156-206. Frank demonstrates how Humboldt's concept of language as an organic structure was trivialized and popularized in the grammar books of the early 19th century, which were written on the premise of an identity between language and thought: "Der Mensch spricht, weil er denkt, und mit der Verrichtung des Denkens ist zugleich die Verrichtung des Sprechens gegeben" (Karl Fer- dinand Becker, Organismus der Sprache [1827] as quoted by Frank, 166). This notion was picked up by Raimund Jakob Wurst in his Praktische Sprachdenklehre of 1836: "Sprechen ist ein laut gewordenes Denken" (Frank, 174), a statement brilliantly anticipated and sat- irized by Kleist with his "Reden ist ein wahrhaftes lautes Denken."

' The fullest discussion of animal magnetism with reference to the essay is by Tatar, 82-120. For important new evidence, see Steven R. Huff, Starres Leben: The Problem of Passivity in the Works of Heinrich von Kleist (Diss. Princeton University, 1987), 37-85. The image of thunderbolts, which appears in the writings of animal magnetism, is a rhetorical topos with which Kleist would have been familiar. This is one example of double entendre, often employed by Kleist as a stylistic device.

12 Helmut Arntzen, "Heinrich von Kleist: Gewalt und Sprache," in Die Gegenwir- tigkeit Kleists, (Berlin, 1980), 70f.

13 Rousseau distinguishes between oral and written discourse according to qualities he views as inherent in language itself: "L'6criture ... substitue l'exactitude g l'expression. L'on rend ses sentimens quand on parle et ses idres quand on 6crit. En 6crivant on est forc6 de prendre tous les mots dans l'acception commune; mais celui qui parle varie les acceptions par les tons, il les determine comme il lui plait; moins g~n6 pour &tre clair, il donne plus A la force, et il n'est pas possible qu'une langue qu'on 6crit garde longtems la vivacit6 de celle qui n'est que parlre," see his Essai sur l'origine des langues, ed. Charles Porset (Paris, 1976), 67. Kleist, by contrast, does not polarize oral and written media according to a normative emotive-intellective antithesis.

kowalik - kleist's essay on rhetoric (monatshefte v81n4 1989)

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