232
PARTISAN REVIEW
involved in taming his "monstrous" fantasies;
it
is the intensity of
this struggle that justifies the analogy of music, of a mathematical
structure raised on a basis of unreason. Kleist's best works are like
products of the successful collaboration between a maniac and a
mathematician. That is why Kafka could learn from Kleist to illu–
minate nightmare with a daytime lucidity; not to explain his para–
doxes, but to render them; and, however outrageous his visions, to
preserve the outward assurance of a somnambulist.
Kleist could theorize as well as any critic who knows from his
own experience what he is talking about; but he left his theories be–
hind as soon as he started work on a story or a play. Here
all
his
thought was dramatic, preceded and precipitated by action. How–
ever carefully, even painfully, executed, his works create the illusion
that the author leaped before he looked. In his stories, Kleist plunged
straight into the action, skillfully regulating its speed, but rarely stop–
ping to moralize, analyze or reflect.
This
is the opening of one of
them:
In M., an important town
in
Northern Italy, the widowed Mar–
chioness of 0., a lady of excellent reputation and the mother of several
well-bred children, announced in the newspaper that for reasons un–
known to her she found herself
in
an interesting condition, that the
father of the child she was about to bear should present himself and
that, out of considerations for her family, she was resolved to marry him.
The long sentence, with its wealth of subsidiary clauses, is typi–
cal of Kleist's narrative style, designed to convey as much detailed
information as possible without interrupting the flow of action. For
the same reason he preferred reported speech, which can be packed
into similar sentences. In this way the reader is swept on from shock
to shock, with no time to formulate his objections.
The dramas demand a little more exposition; but Kleist reduces
it to a minimum by avoiding explanatory soliloquies-still the rule
in his time-and by an extraordinary capacity for reproducing the
very processes of thought in his dialogue. We do not need to be told
about Homburg's state of mind; as soon as he appears, his manner
conveys the precise state of almost trance-like distraction which Kleist
wished to convey. Both his plays and stories are singularly lacking
in passages of 'poetic' abandonment; in the plays there is a single
dominant tension, never relaxed by irrelevant emotions, in the stories
