1/7/2024 0 Comments Voicey contemporaryThe combination of “righteous and appalling” in the first sentence of Michael Kohlhaas is more appalling still because of the matter-of-fact tone. “With the best will in the world toward this poet, I have always been moved to horror and disgust by something in his works,” wrote Goethe, “as though here were a body well-planned by nature, tainted with an incurable disease.” In a time of rational humanism and Enlightenment optimism, he laid down in polished rows a vision of life that was chaotic and inscrutably tragic. In his own lifetime he was appreciated by few, and he managed to alienate, through deed or art, those who tried to support him. ![]() In the words of Stefan Zweig, Kleist “pushes sobriety to excess and talks to the reader through clenched teeth.” This combination of passion and soldierly reserve horrified his contemporaries. But it is not correct to say that Kleist’s prose style is merely plain or reportorial, that it measures the distance between wild interior life and repressive social forms rather, it takes the reportorial to the extreme, showing it as a form of grotesquerie. I have heard the good advice that if you dress in boring clothes, you can get away with bad behavior. Kleist, a Prussian-born figure of nineteenth-century tragedy who died in a murder-suicide pact at the age of thirty-four, was the author of five feverish plays (and one fragment), a handful of essays, and eight prose stories that paired analytic rigor and restraint with plots that were shocking or even lurid. There are no metaphors in the first paragraph of Michael Kohlhaas, no figures of speech-just the dispassionate accounting of existential suspense. He almost never wastes time with description of a landscape or a face. Kleist’s prose is nested with clauses that move swiftly from action to action, simultaneously suggesting logic and a lack of reason time and situations are condensed coincidences proliferate, and events pile up like accidents. His sense of justice led him to robbery and murder. In the village that still bears his name, he owned a farm that provided him with a comfortable living the children his wife gave him he brought up in the fear of God, to be hardworking and loyal there was not one among his neighbors who hadn’t benefited from his charity and his fair dealing in sum, the world would have blessed his memory, if he hadn’t followed one of his virtues to excess. Until his thirtieth year, this unusual man would have been accounted the very model of a good citizen. He is not a quiet everyman who can shed light on the issues of the day. No one beginning either book could ask, Why am I reading this? You are reading it because Michael Kohlhaas was one of the most righteous and appalling individuals of his time. Put it next to the first sentence of The Trial, written more than a century later, and you will see why Kafka considered Kleist one of his “true blood-relations.” Their eccentric and all-encompassing styles alter everything they touch while deflecting attention away from the narrator and toward the subject of the story. So begins Michael Hofmann’s marvelous new translation of Heinrich von Kleist’s novella Michael Kohlhaas, first published in 1810. In the middle of the 16th century there lived on the banks of the Havel a horse dealer by the name Michael Kohlhaas, son of a schoolmaster, at once one of the most righteous and appalling individuals of his time. To encounter style in a time of voice can be shocking: it has the authority that our age, and our literature, reject. ![]() To encounter real literary style is almost always to encounter the past, because style itself is a remove, an art of arrangement that puts the tale and the way it is told before the person telling it. Voice is inherently contemporary, the node of an interlocking web of other contemporary values: authenticity, personality, identity, speaking one’s truth. Where style is manufactured or arch, a mask that distances, voice, despite being performed and constructed, is a tool of immediacy and intimacy. Voice is easily confused for, but importantly distinct from, style. There is no cult so fervent in contemporary fiction as the cult of voice. Translated from the German by Michael Hofmann. Michael Kohlhaas, by Heinrich von Kleist.
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