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COPYRIGHT 2000 Boston University
THE POLEMICS BETWEEN NEW HISTORICIST AND POST-STRUCTURALIST camps having run their course, romantic studies has entered an accommodating phase. While we are aware that different approaches to the study of texts may rely on mutually exclusive assumptions and produce markedly divergent results, it has proven convenient to sacrifice ideological conviction and embrace the urge to have as many "perspectives" at our disposal as possible. The question is whether this inclusionary spirit deviates so far from romanticism's own conception of language and history as to amount to an outright abrogation of scholarship. We hope, for instance, that a formal analysis of linguistic structures can proceed hand in hand with an interpretation focusing on the cultural and sociological information literary works offer about their own production and reception. Yet one of romanticism's defining legacies is its challenge to the genetic understanding of origins and ends on the basis of which a text is treated as the product of its context, a challenge which suggests, among other things, that historicist notions of change and development rely on the very polarizations of form and content or synchrony and diachrony they reject as formalism.
These issues are all the more pressing given the extent to which the reception of romanticism is haunted by a sense that it is too romantic, indeed, that it is often little more than an extension of a discourse it repeats rather than critiques. In this regard, it is instructive to look at a problem where contemporary views appear decidedly un-romantic. There is an overwhelming consensus today that literature participates actively in social and political reality. Poetic language is celebrated for its creativity and denigrated for its violence, lauded for its systematicity and deplored for its whimsical, at times arbitrary behavior, yet in all cases, it is treated as anything but a dormant mode of idealization or harmless fancy. Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century thought made even stronger claims for poetry's participation in the world, but it did not share our confidence in a smooth modulation from literary to socio-political praxis. In texts as diverse as Shelley's "Defence of Poetry," Hegel's Asthetik, or Holderlin's "Uber die Verfahrungsweise des poetischen Geistes," literary language is accorded enormous power and championed as the pinnacle of thought, the founding of civil society, or the possibility of humanity's future. At the same time, these analyses invariably include a moment at which the poetic spirit confronts its own dormancy, idleness, or irrelevance, its constitutive failure to establish itself as a wholly reliable medium or means to an external end. The point at which language is generalized as the model for praxis proves to be the point at which it most directly challenges its own capacity to produce, act, or perform.
Heinrich von Kleist's oeuvre is a sustained exploration of the limits of literature's transformative powers. Taking off from the familiar Enlightenment problem of whether a political order can be grounded in an ethical system which is independent of empirical superstructures, Kleist's works confront a number of quandaries concerning the relations between representation, expression and self-determination. One crucial intervention is his reflection on what it means to break a universal law: what it means about a subjective agent that it confirms its status as rational only by violating a basic principle of reason, and what it means about the historical existence of a universal law that it becomes lawful only insofar as its sovereignty is transgressed. The play we will examine here in detail, Prinz Friedrich von Homburg, presents this as the question of whether any law can be recognized as a universal law of language, and if so, whether that law is a law of freedom or tyranny. Literature, it will be argued, is a historical phenomenon to be reckoned with not simply because of its capacity to present or represent, to posit or reproduce reality, but because it is the site where systems of ethics and politics fail to reconcile themselves to a common aesthetic paradigm in which a representational model of language would also serve as a model of human praxis.
Written in hope of securing the position of court poet for its author, Prinz Friedrich yon Homburg was such a failure that its reception is often cited as a reason for his suicide.(1) Uncertainties about precisely why the play did not live up to expectations reflect the broader uncertainties that confront any attempt to understand what it means. Does the drama praise and glorify the Prussian state, or does it mock it? Is the Prince an insightful hero or a buffoon? Is the Elector a noble statesman, a careless ruler, or a tyrant? In few texts is the general tonal orientation so obviously ambiguous. As the curtain rises, the Elector and his entourage discover Prince Friedrich sitting in the palace garden, "half-awake, half-asleep," weaving a laurel wreath. The intruders quickly assume the role of mischievous players and intervene. They snatch the wreath from him before he can crown himself with it and withdraw as he slowly comes to his senses. Five acts later, this scene is repeated in ritualistic fashion, except that this time the dreaming Prince is actually crowned with the wreath and given a hero's salute just before everyone rushes off to renew the war with the enemies of Brandenburg.
While the play opens and closes with a play within a play, there is a play in between. During the central battle scene, the Prince, Friedrich von Homburg, disobeys his Elector's orders and commands his unit to attack prematurely. For this act, he is sentenced to death, at which point several characters intervene on his behalf in an effort to have the sentence rescinded. Initially disinclined to take his predicament seriously, the Prince becomes distraught upon seeing the grave being dug for him. In a bizarre twist, the Elector, who has learned of his soldier's pathetic pleas for mercy, calls upon the Prince to decide for himself whether his sentence is just, whereupon the young soldier undergoes a transformation and announces that he is ready to acknowledge his misdeeds and die. The potentially tragic clash between the state and one of its subjects appears to be a source of genuine consternation, and the resolution of the drama seems to turn on its protagonist's struggles to constitute himself as a lawful rational agent.
Given the tendency to read Kleist's oeuvre as an engagement with Kantian philosophy, it is tempting to understand the play's conflict in terms of the confounding relation between knowledge and action at the heart of Kant's doctrine of moral autonomy.(2) In this interpretation, the Prince would be an example of a subject who prescribes for himself the very power to prescribe the law. This Prince would be a subject whose freedom renders him incomprehensible both to himself and to others, in which case the message of Kleist's play would be that we, the audience, can only aspire to be moral agents ourselves insofar as we comprehend the incomprehensibility of our own freedom. This line of analysis seems to be born out by the other figures in the play, who learn that the more one makes assumptions about the Prince's character or inferences about why he does what he does, the less comprehensible his behavior becomes. It is problematic, however, to view the Prince as a Kantian subject who lays down a universal law for himself, i.e., who acts only in such a way that the maxim of his action should become a universal law. In its final act, the play dissolves into a quasi-comedy. As the day of execution approaches, the Elector's forbidding tone softens into cheerfulness, and he behaves more and more like a playful, all-knowing god who has merely staged the entire event as a good-natured lesson for his pupil and is not sure why everyone else has been taking the whole affair so seriously. This shift in tone prompts a retrospective reassessment of the entire play, at which point it becomes evident that modulations between tragic and comic moments, often within the space of several speeches, are the norm throughout. Although certain scenes are undeniably ridden with pathos--e.g., the characters' grief at inaccurate reports of the Elector's death, the Prince's display of fear, or Natalie's impassioned pleas to the Elector--the Prince's "grave" error to attack too early is made only after Golz has surveyed the field and ascertained that victory is theirs. More importantly, the Prince's "fateful" decision to attack prematurely manifests itself with mechanical predictability. If the play turns on the attribution of responsibility, intention, and/or motivation(s) for a (mis)deed in battle, the inevitability of the errant behavior is prefigured to an almost absurd extent. Virtually all of the dramatic action prior to the Prince's decision to attack before receiving the proper command makes it clear that the Elector's orders will not be followed. Indeed, the "preparations" for the Prince's disobedience are so precise that for him to have executed his orders correctly would retrospectively have made most of Act 1 meaningless, or farcical.(3) Even if the rest of the play up until the last scene of Act 5 is viewed as a series of attempts by the Prince (and everybody else) to deal with the ramifications of his unusual behavior in the opening scene in the palace garden, the play's conclusion does not constitute closure or herald the conclusion of a process of intellectual or moral development, but instead divides the beginning and the end of the play from the rest of the drama.(4) The Prince is crowned with a wreath he wove himself. In between is (another) play about an error in battle and the efforts to come to terms with that error. So we are back where we started: What does the play mean? Should the audience be moved to laughter or tears? Does the misfiring of a tragic plot suggest a collapse into comedy, or should it have been clear since the opening scene that it was a mistake to speak of tragedy in the first place?(5)
The opening scene of Prinz Friedrich is an exercise in evaluating the state of the Prince, although the insights garnered here will be forgotten almost immediately by everybody who participates.(6) Unlike the bard of the play's dedication who aspires to be crowned by somebody else ("Sie halt den Preis in Handen, der ihm falle, / Und kront ihn die, so kronen sie ihn alle"),(7) the Prince is discovered in the palace garden, half-awake, half-asleep, weaving a wreath for himself. Or so Hohenzollern, in what will prove to be his very influential account of the situation, describes him:
Hohenzollern: Als ein Nachtwandeler, schau, auf jener Bank, Wohin, im Schlaf, wie du nie glauben wolltest, Der Mondschein ihn gelockt, beschaftiget, Sich traumend, seiner eignen Nachwelt gleich, Den prachtgen Kranz des Ruhmes einzuwinden. (22-26) [Hohenzollern: Like a sleepwalker--look, on the bench-- Where, asleep, as you would never have believed, Enticed by the moon, he is occupied; Adream in himself, like his own posterity He is weaving his own splendid wreath of fame.]
It is by no means clear when or where the logic of Hohenzollern's description leaves the dreamer. In a dedication of the self to the self, the Prince is said to be imitating his posterity ("seiner eignen Nachwelt gleich") by creating a wreath, an emblem of his future fame. With these remarks, Hohenzollern casts the opening events as a search for a mode of interpretation that will facilitate an understanding of this princely agent in terms of the Prince's attempts to dedicate himself--his fame, his future, his posterity--to himself. By understanding the Prince's weaving of a laurel crown as a proleptic act of self-affirmation, Hohenzollern suspends the Prince between a future of glorious deeds that may take place (perhaps as early as the next day on the battlefield), a future Nachwelt in which the Prince will no longer exist, and a present that exists only as a dream and that retrospectively will never have existed. In this schema, the Prince wins fame for his deeds by relating to them as though they were past achievements of a past subject, which is to say that even in the dream of fame, a dream of a relation between doer and deed, fame is still not something that you dream of winning for yourself, a point that the Elector makes quite aptly: "Im Traum erringt man solche Dinge nicht!" (76).(8) The dream of fame is a dream of a fame won improperly, a fame that...
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