|
COPYRIGHT 2003 Boston University
E Pluribus Unum. In God we trust.
--US Treasury
Es ist nicht Fluchtigkeit noch unbeholfene Charakterzeichnung der Autoren, wenn in den kritischen Augenblicken die Schranzen, kaum da[beta] sie Zeit zur Besinnung sich gonnen, den Herrscher verlassen, zur Gegenpartei ubertreten.
[It is not a sign of superficiality (fleetingness) or clumsy characterization on the part of the authors that, at critical moments, the sycophants (courtiers) abandon the rulers and switch to the other side as soon as they grant themselves a moment of reflection (or: without any pause for reflection).]
--Walter Benjamin
KLEIST'S NARRATIVE DIE VERLOBUNG IN ST. DOMINGO, WRITTEN AND PUBISHED three times in the year of his suicide and its bizarre circumstances at the Wannsee near Potsdam in 1811, should perhaps first and foremost be read as an exploration and exposition of the conditions of the impossibility of reading and interpretation. These conditions of this possible impossibility are no longer transcendental but historical and textual. The site at which the narrative takes place, the holy island of St. Domingo (Haiti), is thoroughly shaken by a revolutionary insurrection of the black slave-population against the tyranny of its white colonial masters from France. This revolutionary setting, ignited--as it were inadvertently by inconsiderate steps ["unbesonnene Schritte"] of the French National-Convention itself, (1) provides the fragile force and extremely volatile background in and against which the narration occurs. Or, to be a little bit more accurate, the narrative demonstrates from its very inception that the revolutionary conditions under which narration explores the possibility of its own possibility or continuity are nothing but the unintended effect of its own occurrences, of its own taking place in a way that eludes narration's thematizing and theorizing grasp. (2)
What takes place in the revolutionary uprising of displaced black slaves against their equally displaced colonial, white masters is not simply the inversion of power-relations which would leave the possibility of narration and reading unaltered. Rather, what takes place in Die Verlobung in St. Domingo upsets the revolutionary setup and its consolidating rhetoric of dialectical inversions and of binary oppositions by employing the insignia of a revolutionary rhetoric--most of all the guillotine--in order to undercut the rhetoric of revolution which characterizes the beginning of the story. To that effect, Kleist shifts our attention to two parties, who are both implicated on either side of the revolutionary conflict, yet are somehow distinguished from the openly clashing, fighting factions of the black immigrants and their French oppressors. Two members of these opposing parties are the protagonists of the story: a Swiss officer, named Gustav von der Ried, who tries to lead his family of 12 members across revolutionary territory toward the safe haven of Port au Prince, from where they wish to depart the island in order to return to Europe, and Toni, the 15-year-old European born daughter of Babekan and step-daughter of Congo Hoango, a "ferocious negro," as the story characterizes him. He killed his master, M. Guillaume de Villeneuve, and took possession of his plantation after he had presumably destroyed it in its entirety. Gustav, having left his family behind in a safe place, arrives at this plantation in the shelter of the night in order to ask its new inhabitants of color for food in the shape of bread and wine, which are, of course, also the privileged signs and media of the Christian onto-semiology. (3) On a purely thematic level, the story continues to narrate a sequence of events, including two inserted stories, which are designated to articulate and prepare for the strange encounter between Toni and Gustav. It is an encounter that takes place across and beyond racial, sexual and class boundaries.
At the same time, the story narrates its own relation to the engagement of its protagonists, which is never really consummated. This is to say that the engagement occurs as an historical event which is, like all traumatic events, not only withdrawn from the conscious perception of those who are involved in it--namely Gustav and Toni--but from the narrative and narration as well. However, as the title demonstrates, (4) the engagement represents the focal point of the story, not because it is beyond its limits of representation, and certainly not because it represents an attempt to establish some harmonious, communicatively established synthesis between the fiercely fighting opponents. The engagement reflects neither an aesthetic sublation of conflict, nor the paradoxical representational mode of the sublime, which can only represent the traumatic event that lies beyond its reach negatively, i.e. precisely by failing to represent it.
Neither beautiful nor sublime, Kleist's story about the problematic engagement of its protagonists is first of all an engaging exploration of the epistemological status and character of literature and figurative language, including its own. More precisely, Kleist's text engages itself and its in- and external reader by staging its exploration of the epistemological dimensions of literary language as the suspension of its readability. Ironically and tragically, its insight into the epistemological unreliability of language and its figuration is paid for by a hermeneutic blindness and the pathological effects it generates: murder and suicide. However, blindness and insight are not presented as oppositional perspectives at the disposition of the reading and interpreting subjects, for they are inscribed into each other as mutually exclusive, yet interdependent aspects of the semantic structure of literary texts. In the case of the novella Die Verlobung in St. Domingo, this inscription of incompatible, yet interdependent meanings is reflected in the paradoxical process in which the engagement between the two protagonists, Gustav and Toni, takes place as an act that seeks to reconstruct itself as an imposition of meaning and the process of its reading. Thus the engagement "figures" the aporetic semantics of the narrative that bears the same title. And it is not without irony that this narrative is interrupted at precisely the point where it invokes the synthetic, communicative, social function of language by figuring it as the sexual consummation of the engagement. This is also the point where the narrative shifts to the reader or the act of reading which seeks to confer a particular significance on the sexual, physical, purely referential act. This point, which is also a passage and a crossing from one side to another, a crossing which operates on itself to the extent that it also crosses out the possibility of being on either side preceding the crossing, (5) seeks to synthesize at once the difference between the opposing factions in the narrative and the incompatible performative and constative dimensions of language, thus dissimulating the difference between the figurative and the referential function of language in the act of reading. This act of reading that closes and arrests the displaced void, the gap from which its own possibility emerges, is an ideological act par excellence. (6) As we shall see later on, the shift from the narrative to its reading will incisively affect both, thus exposing the process of interpretation of the engagement to the aporetic semantics of the literary text.
In short, Kleist's Verlobung figures itself as an allegory of reading (7) by staging the collision and collusion of the literary text and its interpretation, and by suspending the epistemological status of its figurative statements upon which the figuration of the interpretation relies. Kleist's narrative is not an allegory of reading without questioning the reading of allegory; it is not a figure of interpretation without doubting the reliability of the interpretation of its figures; and it stages the need for upholding the tension between mutually exclusive meanings generated by one and the same sign, figure and text, a vital tension which the staged interpretation of the engagement, figured in its interpreting participant Gustav von der Ried, seeks to destroy. This vital function is at once condensed in and dissimulated by the central "Stelle" of the text, which is also a "Stelle" of an act of reading that demands to be read, i.e. that demands to be exposed as an incisive knot which condenses and unravels the aporetic logic that the narrative gradually unfolds. (8) Thus the text partakes in the analysis of acts of interpretation which the latter resist. And as such it displays and enacts itself as a resistance to a theory.
Pervading and traversing the forms of representation which emerge from the engagement as the signifier of an uncommunicable linguistic event, which promises and thereby performs the constitution of reliable, trustworthy signs, the course of the narrative shift towards the act of reading engages the reader to turn the "Stelle" that signifies the engagement of the two protagonists into a semantic object, a signified, thereby subjecting it to a hermeneutic exegesis, to manipulation and instrumentalization. It does so especially in the theorizing gaze of the male protagonist Gustav, whose precarious position and apprehensive disposition turn him, from the very beginning of the story, into the figure of an obsessive reader. He is constantly seeking to assert and assure himself of the significative, cognitive, phenomenological and referential function of language and those signs whose unequivocality and reliability become a matter of life or death for him.
Gustav's extreme and dramatic position, his exposition to existential dangers, as well as his allegorical role as a figure of reading, have the tendency to lure the reader of the story into the suicidal trap of an identification with the male protagonist's reading strategies and his entire valuesystem. From this perspective, the monstrous suicide at the end of the story assumes an eminently critical significance, shocking the reader into a reconsideration of his/her own interpretive desires and anxieties. After having killed his fiancee, Toni, because he is convinced that she has betrayed him, Gustav shoots himself, having placed a pistol into his mouth, from such an angle that "his skull is shattered and clinging in parts to the walls." The suicide, a narratological consequence of Gustav's insistence upon the epistemological primacy of a theorizing and interpreting consciousness and the representational integrity of linguistic forms, can be read as the critical corrective of a hermeneutic disfiguration of language's ironic structure. However, this corrective is also an ironic "restoration" of the deadly force of irony and as such is still predicated upon the premises of the hermeneutic misreading, which it negates. Critical irony, in other words, is marked as an unsuccessful attempt to perform the textual work of mourning that it calls for. Consequently Gustav's suicide does not mark the end of the story.
But we have rushed too far ahead perhaps, and it is now time to recall the sequence of events that leads to engagement, murder and suicide in more detail. I will concentrate on the function of the engagement (as narrative and theme) as a metaphor for the withdrawal of its condition of possibility, and as a metaphor for the hermeneutic disfiguration of this withdrawal. Thus I hope to demonstrate how Kleist's text is able to cope with the threat that the ironic gap dividing language into incompatible dimensions (performative; constative) presents to the ability to interpret without denying its indispensability for a successful act of reading. Both aspects are inscribed into Gustav's and Toni's respective reading of their engagement.
Before this engagement actually occurs,--an event, which is already an interpretation of an event whose significance is highly ambiguous and not immediately accessible the parties of the engagement fight on opposite sides of the revolution. Thus the engagement signals the performance of Toni's switch from one side to the other, from the insurgents to the fleeing family, from black to white, from the house of Congo Hoango to the passers by, from girl to woman, from naive to sentimental, etc. From the point of view of the black rebels, Toni's physiognomy--her skin is yellow, since she is the "illegitimate," "bastard" offspring of a Frenchman and her creole mother, Babekan--qualifies her to perform with cunning reason, i.e., with the deception of aesthetic appearance and seductive naivete, the task to stall the stay of white guests in Congo Hoango's house until the "ferocious negro" returns from his devastating raids in order to kill them immediately.
It should be added that Babekan, Toni's mother, a mulatto, encouraged her daughter not to deny any caresses to the white strangers, except for the ultimate sexual engagement. The violation of this taboo, the deflowering of her virginity (and, by extension, of figurative language), is subject to the ultimate violence which the...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
