230
PARTISAN REVIEW
works; they are the Purgatory through which all his characters must
pass and from which the tragic ones do not emerge. Even
his
first
play,
Die Familie Schroffenstein,
was a tragedy of errors. In comIC
situations the sinister enigma may give place to a paradox that can
be unraveled by ingenuity; this is the case in
Der,Zerbrochene Krug.
Sometimes, as in
Die Marquise von 0.,
the events themselves finally
offer a solution; in the weaker works, such as
K iithchen,
a
deus ex
machina
is required. There are many variations:
Das Erdbeben in
Chile
begins with a
deus ex machina,
the earthquake, but this only
serves to sharpen the tragic irony of the denouement. In
Amphytrion,
Kleist's admirable adaptation of Moliere's comedy, we see the given
enigma deepen into a mystery; the error, which was a mere pretext
for social comedy in Moliere, strikes such deep roots in Kleist's Alc–
mene, her perplexity is so much increased by her deeper response to
Jupiter's divinity, that the play hangs on the verge of tragedy.
The question of truth and error is intimately bound up with
the excessive passions which destroy Kleist's characters. These ex–
cesses result from the disorientation which occurs when error has
wholly obscured the truth. In many cases, as in
Michael Kohlhaas,
the error manifests itself as injustice; but injustice is a suppression of
truth on the ethical plane. The resulting disorientation is funda–
mentally the same.
If
there is no absolute truth, the individual can
accept no authority but that of
his
own impulses: these impulses may
proceed from his conscience, from his senses or from
his
intellect;
but
all
three are isolated, autonomous and exposed to all the dangers
of a conflict with incalculable and merciless powers.
Kleist was one of the first German writers to face---{)r at least
to suffer-the full implications of those peculiarly modern processes,
the isolation of the individual consciousness and the fragmentation of
reality into islands of pure subjectivity on the one hand, mere me–
chanistic phenomena on the other. (These processes, in our own
time, have culminated in the nihilism of such German writers as G.
E.
Winckler-who wrote about the "affliction of thinking"-and
Gottfried Benn, whose anti-humanism is based on his unwillingness
to admit any point of contact between the fantasies generated by an
isolated ego and a society which is only of statistical interest.) That
is why Kleist was inclined to judge
his
own art in terms of a conflict
between reality and imagination---{)r, in other words, between the
