The Mysterious Pregnancy

Colloquium on Kleist’s The Marquise of O-

Being notes taken by Phoebe L- and Bronwyn K-, to which are added sundry inventions

by them, all for the amusement of their friend, Francesca Z-, traveller, who leaves

only a trail of forwarding addresses.

I.m. William Maidment

Francesca of Patagonia, Gotland or Southern Armenia,
Where are you now? Are you travelling by raft
With a spinnaker of mosquito net in the upper Amazon?
Are you at M- or N-, enjoying the anonymity
Which Kleist gives his story of the Marquise
By transposing its setting ‘from the north to the south’?
We are here in the dim, high-ceilinged Muniment Room

Where in dormitory days we hid from one another
And where in term we sat solemnly to share

The spiralling pleasures of sequences of lectures

On Novalis, the Schlegels, Schellings and Schiller.

A winter sun, evasive behind mist hedges, has risen.

Phoebe is, as usual, behind the defunct tile stove.

Returning for a symposium on Kleist’s novelle

We have resolved to take notes and compile from them

A garland of leaves which we will send to you

At some Poste Restante address which may find you

Sooner or later, depending on the vagaries

Of the El Niño and other Strange Attractors

(To use the term lately so popular over here)

Including rumours reaching us of your pregnancy.

Dearest Fran,

We know that as an admirer of Kleist, and The Marquise of O- in particular, you would have liked the colloquium. Phoebe suggested that we should take notes for you, and it is these which together with sundry additions we send you now. Odyssean Fran, whose whereabouts are always uncertain, when and under what skies may this package ever reach you? Of course we were not able to attend every session of this conference, but in some instances we have included notes compiled by others. Do you remember Felicity? (She is in your hockey photograph, distracted, in the back row.) Felicity took some scrappy notes and also succeeded in distracting us on a few occasions. We have also not resisted the temptation, already familiar to you, to include passages of verse renderings of the story. This was Phoebe’s suggestion, in the form of a challenge, made in a note rather ostentatiously passed along the row to me (as in those days so long ago under raised eyebrows) during a particularly dull paper.

News meanwhile has reached us, via postcards, of your experiences in M-. We read into them something of the uncertainties besetting the Marquise. You do seem determined to sustain that ultimate Kleistian theme, viz. the prodigious disparity between cause and effect. Causation and its strange and devious byways have lost none of their fascination since our discussions, still fondly remembered, in the gymnasium, from our halcyon and salad days. Our pleasure then in the sceptical view, that the billiard ball is ‘not seen to cause’ movement in the one it strikes, suggests now, as our lives diverge increasingly, an extreme case: the red ball is struck; nearby but untouched, the black one moves towards the pocket. And Kleist’s Kant-crisis, causing doubts about the possibilities of certainty in human affairs, seems as pervasive here as ever. But you, Fran, have taught us that the Kleistian perplexity implicit in everything may in fact be enjoyable. Thus we have been mindful of your preference for gossip over discourse, for peripheries over centralities, caprice over gravity, your ‘prodigious appetite for marginalia.’ And our versifications , which have been chiefly a way of reading,

have become the dominant aspect of the colloquium. We have, I hope, been wary of rhetoric (while not quite wringing its neck) and have resisted the frequent spectre of metaphor.

Phoebe sends her affectionate greetings and the injunction not to do anything we would not do, advice which we assume you have already neglected. We think of you often and wonder where you are, white-water rafting down turbulent days. How we admired your boldness of decision in leaving as you did. You were almost as decisive as Count F, though perhaps less restricting, since you are free, or so we like to think, while his destiny was largely determined by one sudden impulse. Still, the ideal is perhaps a marriage of the impetuousness of the Count with the forbearance, patience and serenity of the Marquise, a conjunction which we also like to think you have in some measure achieved.

Our note-taking has been perhaps a less happy conjunction of enthusiasm and distraction; we have seated ourselves near windows too often. We have fallen into Kleistian dreaming. But we send them knowing your readiness to embrace the arbitrary, which figures so frequently in the life and works of Kleist. We enclose also, for good measure, lest you do not have one to hand on your luxury quinquireme, a copy of the excellent translation of The Marquise of O-, which Penguin have brought out as one of their charming little pocket-handkerchief books.

Bronwyn and Phoebe.

¦

Perhaps it could be seen as Kleistian forgetfulness that sometimes we address you directly and sometimes Bronwyn and Phoebe appear in the third person.

Bronwyn and Phoebe have decided to versify The Marquise of O. The occasion is a Colloquium on Kleist and his novella. During and between sessions they begin, interspersing their verse with reports on points of interest in the papers.

At the opening session participants are asked, as an exercise, to begin by summarising the plot. Here are our attempts.

These may prove useful when we get underway on our version in iambics.

We include Felicity’s effort which, it turned out, was largely based on The Oxford Companion to German Literature:

… The heroine of the title, Julietta, Marquise von O…, is a widow, mother of two children, and daughter of the Obrist von G… She finds herself, through the discovery of an inexplicable pregnancy, in a situation of embarrassment and distress; for she experiences not only public scandal and expulsion from her father’s house, but also the protestations of her own innocent heart against a seemingly impossible condition. Her unusual situation causes her to take the equally unusual step of appealing publicly, through a newspaper, to the father of her expected child to confess to his identity, adding that she feels obliged to marry him. To her horror she finds the man who joyfully presents himself to be Graf F…., an officer in the Russian army. He had been of late the object of her gratitude and admiration, for she owed her life to his courageous conduct. It was he who rescued her from rape at the brutal hands of Russian soldiers who had stormed the fortress, of which her father was commandant during an invasion of northern Italy. Reconciled with her parents, but not with the Count, she weds him in fulfilment of her promise. However, a year after the birth of her son she comes to terms with the fallibility of her heroic rescuer, whose image had been shattered by the revelations following her advertisement. Graf F… had taken advantage of a swoon which left her unconscious in his arms at her father’s fortress. Recognizing his devotion and repentance to be true and constant, and resigning her ideal of perfection, Julietta celebrates in a second wedding the fulfilment of earthly happiness in true love and forgiveness.

Phoebe and I rose to the challenge:

The Marquise a virtuous widow finding herself mysteriously pregnant places an advertisement in the paper. Some months before in a dual assault upon her father’s citadel and her own self, after rescuing her from rapacious soldiers, Count F- has himself made her pregnant without her knowledge. After a brush with death and convalescence he has startled the Marquise by returning apparently from the dead. Startlement increases to perplexity when the Count immediately proposes marriage. The Commandant, impressed by the Count’s gallantry, is concerned that he risks his reputation by refusing his commission to Naples. At length the Count is persuaded to wait for an answer from the Marquise until his return from delivering these despatches. Meanwhile, in his absence, disquieting symptoms recur in the Marquise. A doctor and then a midwife confirm her impossible suspicions. Her mother and father are outraged, her father banishes her to V- (after a melodramatic confrontation in which he discharges a pistol). In the serenity at V- the Marquise begins to accept the mystery of the new life she is bearing. She has the idea of placing the advertisement.

The Count climbs the wall and finds Julietta in the garden. He is repulsed. He determines to place an advertisement of his own in reply. The Marquise’s mother visits her and tests her daughter’s innocence by pretending that the groom, Leopardo, has confessed. The Marquise’s abashed perplexity convinces her mother. Reunited they return to M-. The Commandant is persuaded too, and a tearful and passionate reconciliation results. In accordance with the Count’s advertisement – at 11 on the 3rd – they wait. The Count arrives, is contrite. At last the Marquise’s mother realises — ‘how stupid we have been’. The Marquise at first refuses to marry but agrees, on her own conditions. These thaw gradually until, at length, happiness prevails and ‘a whole series of young Russians now followed the first’.

Last night when we arrived at college, we walked along the dim corridors, where little seems to have changed. There is a new carpet square in the large foyer but on walls above the staircase hang the same old pictures. And above the turning in the stairs is the photograph in which you are smiling, front row centre, hockey sticks crossed.

This morning the first thing Phoebe did was to inspect the coffee arrangements. An urn of boiling water, another of coffee, large glass jugs of milk. The coffee she pronounced ‘standard conference grade.’ She promised tomorrow to make us ‘some decent coffee — such as Count F- might have had in Naples.’

We now regale you with several of the first day’s speakers on the much-discussed device of the dash – that odd gap, that prolonged punctuation during which the count impregnates the Marquise. As you well remember, early in the narrative, the Marquise is rescued by an invading rabble by the Count. This is followed by the crucial sentence:

‘She now collapsed in a dead faint. Then – ’

Here is a selection from our notes:

The pregnant pause in the narrative. The dash and concealment.

The dash: ‘She now collapsed in a dead faint. Then — ’

The various uses of anacoluthon in Kleist.

Kleist’s “Kant-crisis”, his letter on the subject to his half-sister, Ulrike. After reading the first book of the Critique, he had known that bolt of lightning, doubt of the rational.

Fainting and loss of consciousness. The Marquise. Other examples in Kleist’s tales.

Humour and irony in Kleist. The sceptical separation of cause and effect is essentially a humorous device.

Kleist and Cole Porter (!) The Count repels the five soldiers attacking the Marquise. She faints.

In olden times a glimpse of stocking

Was looked upon as something shocking.

ie a transition from classic to romantic. ‘Anything goes’ = romanticism. Kleist (1777-1811) at the dawning of Romanticism.

The dash, ‘the most protracted instance of punctuation in literature’:

The Count has rescued the Marquise from the rabble of his own soldiers. Across the dash (near the opening of the story) which famously indicates a lapse of some minutes, the seeds of the story are sown. The Marquise collapsed in a dead faint. During this dash the Count has impregnated the Marquise without her knowledge, having only just rescued her from the rabble.

The dash seen as an emblem of narrative itself, in which the reader supplies essential or additional events.

The sentence which follows the dash: ‘The officer instructed the Marquise’s frightened servants who presently arrived, to send for a doctor; he assured them that she would soon recover, replaced his hat and returned to the fighting.’

Gaps in the narrative through which we see events.

Compare the point in The Defence of Nabokov where the narrative makes a knight’s move.

The dash which marks the impregnation of the Marquise is a companion to the dash with which Sterne ends A Sentimental Journey. In the case of Kleist, the dash masks an unfathomable and base action from which the whole narrative proceeds to its felicitous ending; in Sterne the dash indicates a similar consummation which remains forever devoutly to be wished.

Standard conference quality coffee followed.

We imagine you, Fran, reading this, seated in the bosun’s chair and smoking a large Cheroot.

And here, Fran, is our version of the opening which you so admired.

A widow of unquestioned character

The Marquise of O-, now resident

In leafy M-, in northern Italy,

Finding herself in puzzling circumstance

Placed in the paper this advertisement:

She begged the father of her future child

To make himself now known to her, that she

For all her family’s sake might marry him.

The afternoon’s sessions distract us.

A list could be made of swoons and fainting:

‘In a voice still weak from her recent swoon…’

‘When she heard the pistol shot in her husband’s bedroom and saw her daughter rushing out of it she had fainted away.’

‘On hearing these words the Marquise fainted’

And so on.

But we continue, with a single foray into hendecasyllables which at once we rejected:

Three years before this strange event the husband of the Marquise
To whom she was most tenderly attached had lost his life
While travelling in France. This sudden shock (her mother felt)
Was best assuaged by the expedient of leaving V-,
Her country house and with her children living once again
In her parental home. The Commandant, her father, felt
Delightedly protective of her in this circumstance
But soon this life of comfortable serenity — painting,
The education of her children, care for her parents’ health —
Was suddenly disturbed by war.

It was Phoebe who formulated our criteria: the avoidance where possible of metaphor, extraneous gloss, thickening of texture.

When Russian soldiers fired the citadel,
The Marquise, running from a fierce grenade,
With other members of the household, fled
And in the fitful darkness found herself
Seized by the rabble, borne off and attacked,
When suddenly a Russian officer,
Hearing her cries, beat off these shameless men.

To her he seemed an angel sent from heaven,
And then she fainted. Then she fainted. Then —

And we say nothing of the Russian General’s investigation of the attack on the Marquise by the five soldiers, and their execution.

At daybreak when the fires had been contained
The Russian General came to claim the town
And courteously met the Commandant

(The devoted father of the poor Marquise)
Who praised the bravery of a certain Count
Who had ensured the safety of his daughter.

Meanwhile the Marquise, recovered from her swoon,
Desired to meet and thank her rescuer,
But learnt that with the general exodus
The Count had left.

The Commandant must now vacate the fort
And with his family took a house in town
Preferring to remain at M-. And soon
They were appalled to learn that this same Count
Whom they had never had the chance to thank
Had, leaving M- that very day, been killed.

To learn more details of this sad event
The Commandant went to the post-house. There
He learnt that on the battlefield the Count,
As he was wounded, cried, ‘Julietta!
This bullet now avenges you.’

The Marquise could not be consoled: to think
That when, presumably through modesty,
The Count declined to see her in her room,
She had not gone to him herself! She grieved
For the unfortunate lady he invoked
Who strangely bore her name.

Weeks passed. The Commandant, his wife and son
And the Marquise and her two children, grew
Accustomed to their house at M-. However
The Marquise frequently was indisposed.

And then one day to everyone’s amazement
The footman entered and announced, ‘Count F-.’
The Commandant, his wife and daughter, cried,
‘Count F-?’

Francesca of Rimini, you who can never be reached by telephone there, where are you while we ponder our choice of which session to attend? An impossible choice: 10 a.m. —

Should it be Determination and Determinism : The Search for Engendering Cause or would we venture into Linearity and Perplexity: Narrative Structure in Kleist? Phoebe allowed herself a rueful smile, and I, a grimace. Phoebe went to one and I to the other. Afterwards we thought that perhaps we should have gone for a walk by the lake.

‘Count F- !’

The Count explained that he had suffered wounds
So great that he despaired of life and lay
For months in sombre shadow. All this time
His every thought had been of the Marquise.
Her presence in his mind had been a source
Of such delight and pain as to be quite
Indescribable.

He went on. After his recovery
He had rejoined the army but could not
Restore his peace of mind. Often, he said,
He had been on the point of taking up
His pen, and writing to the Commandant.
Then suddenly he was assigned the task
Of taking messages to Naples, even
Perhaps to Constantinople. Thus
He found himself in M- in transit, being
Unable to resist this meeting, and
To ease his pain asking the Commandant
For his daughter’s hand.

The Count relinquishing the lady’s hand
Explained that, wounded, fearing for his life
He lay for several months until the wounds
At last began to heal, and all this time
His thoughts were always of her.

We came back to our rooms after an evening seminar, On The Unpredictable to find someone had short-sheeted my bed. And I thought for a delicious moment you had returned.

We are getting on well without metaphors! We incline to Flaubert’s Dictionary: ‘Metaphors: Always too many in poetry. Always too many in anybody’s writing.’

The mother of the Marquise said
She still could not begin to understand
That, having left for Naples with despatches,
A man of honour like the Count
Should send these back to Z-, and risk
Disgrace and ruin for no other reason
Than that, in M-, a conversation lasting
At most five minutes should have failed
To win the hand of one he did not know.
Her husband and her son agreed.
The Marquise was dismayed to find herself
The object of impetuosity
And feared the Count could not be swayed
By reason or advice. All were agreed
The Count was over-confident
And seemed accustomed to win ladies’ hearts,
Like fortresses, by storm. The Commandant
Now standing at the casement window saw
The laden carriage of the Count draw up
Outside the house, the horses quiet,
Shaking their harness ready to depart.
He went downstairs and was alarmed to see
The Count sealing a letter which he gave
His adjutant together with
The military despatches he himself
Had been entrusted with. This Count
Was clearly mad, intending to remain
And forfeit honour and career, to win
A widow’s hand.

The Marquise, agitated, looked aside.
‘Why, after all,’ her mother said, ‘you could
Perhaps say that until he has returned
From Naples, you’ll accept no other suitor.’
‘Of course,’ the Marquise said, ‘That I can say
But fear it would not be enough for him
Since all he does he does with urgency.’
‘Let me take care of that,’ her mother cried
Elated at the prospect of intrigue.

Gleaned from the Public Lecture:

The moral worth of an action consists ‘not in the purpose to be attained by it but on the maxim in accordance with which it is decided upon’. Consider Count F-’s assault upon the unconscious Marquise in the light of this precept of Kant’s. To what degree does its eventual happy outcome alter in retrospect the moral status of an action?

On reading the first book of Kant’s Critique, Kleist suffered his Kant-crisis. He stands at the threshold of the modern era facing Uncertainty which to him seems to be a dislocation of cause and effect. Like dust in dusk light this uncertainty pervades everything.

Count F- has suffered such a crisis. He has rescued the Marquise, only to find she has fainted and is insensible in his arms. The Categorical Imperative, namely that moral action may be accompanied by pleasure but must not be determined by it, fills the air.

Day Two. An afternoon storm. The Mysterious Pregnancy.

… Despite the Marquise’s pointed questioning of the midwife her parents cannot accept that her conception could be immaculate…

… The characters are the victims of sudden changeability: the Count’s heroism turns to infamy; the Marquise and her mother swoon or faint at critical moments; her father rejects her as abruptly as he receives her after her absence at V-. This teetering of emotions in the balance contains the seeds of Kleist’s humour…

… Like Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, so The Marquise of O- is driven forward by male aggression and ends in serenity. This progression is accompanied by the gestation of the child.

Fran, we see you running before a brisk sou’wester into the Azores, low on provisions, living on ship’s biscuits, strapped to the mast and reading our overlapping verses.

(Hendecasyllables again: a last flutter)

The Count picked up his hat, went to the lady, took her hand
And said, ‘Well, Julietta, this now sets my mind at rest.
And yet — and yet, it was my dearest wish that even now
We should have married.’ ‘Married!’ cried the family in one voice.
‘Married, yes, with all my heart,’ replied the earnest Count
Kissing her hand and bowing low to all the company.

(Fourteeners banished forthwith.)

Weeks passed. The Marquise and her family
Were still as puzzled by this suitor Count
As if they’d found one morning in the grounds,
The relics of a dinosaur.

Weeks passed. They saw no other visitors.
The Marquise felt much puzzled by the Count
A puzzlement as great as might have been
Had fossils of some ancient dinosaur
Been found in her own garden.

Fran, You will note but not deplore / the presence of this dinosaur.

Of course no such device occurs in Kleist. Phoebe — for it was she — may well have been composing these portions in the foyer of the Natural Science Museum adjoining our lecture theatre.

Weeks passed. The days retained a puzzled air.
The Commandant received a courteous note
In which the Count reported his success
In Naples and his hopes of coming home;
He wrote as if the engagement were confirmed.
But once again the Marquise was unwell.
The strange indisposition now returned,
And she could not pretend she did not feel
A change in her figure.

Her mother urged her if she felt unwell
To see the doctor. But for several days
The Marquise felt reluctant, ill at ease.
But then she felt so strange that she agreed,
And so the doctor came.

The doctor claimed that he would stake his life
On this opinion. Standing at the door
About to leave he dropped a glove and stooped.
The Marquise said, ‘But doctor, can you say
How this is possible?’ The doctor smiled,
Drew on his gloves and said, ‘I’m sure, my dear,
You don’t need to be told the facts of life.’

‘Think carefully,’ her mother said again.
‘If you have erred, though that would grieve me greatly,
Still it could be in the end forgiven.
But if to avoid our censure you invent
Some fable which requires the overturn
Of Nature’s laws and dare to reiterate
Blasphemous vows knowing my readiness
To trust you, then that would be worse,
Far worse, and I could never feel the same
About the daughter I had always loved.’

‘Oh may the doors of heaven be one day
As open to me as my heart is now
To you, my dearest mother. I have concealed
Nothing!’ This declaration, uttered with
Such passionate solemnity, so moved
Her mother that she smiled and said,
‘O God, my dear, dear child, how touchingly
You speak. But come, my child, what do you fear?’
She lifted her, and pressing her to her heart,
Said, ‘Are you ill?’ She led her to the bed.
But weeping copiously the Marquise cried
That she was well and there was nothing wrong
Except this strange, incomprehensible
And extraordinary condition. ‘Condition?’
Cried her mother, ‘What condition?’

‘But look! Your cheeks are burning hot. Your limbs
Are trembling. What did the doctor say?’
‘The doctor told me I will have a child.
And this impossibility, dear mother,
Oppresses me with weariness.
Send for the midwife, and, as soon as she
Confirms it is not true, I shall regain
All my composure.’

The midwife was announced. The Marquise lay
Still agitated in her mother’s arms.
Her mother spoke, attempting to explain
The onset of this inexplicable,
Persistent notion which had seized her daughter.
For despite a virtuous widowhood
She felt it necessary to submit
To this examination. Silently
The midwife nodded, and then spoke of heat
And blood and youth, impetuosity,
And, finishing her task, said frequently
She’d seen such cases where a widow thought
She lived sequestered on a desert isle —
But often in these cases (she had found)
The gay corsair who visited by night
At last would come to light. On hearing this
The Marquise fainted. Still her mother, moved
By natural affection sought to bring
Her much-wronged daughter back to life. But then
On seeing her revived she cried aloud,
‘O Julietta will you not confess
And tell us who the father is?’ And when
The Marquise answered only that she thought
She must go mad, her mother rose and said,
‘Go from my sight! I curse the wretched day
I bore you,’ and then left the room.

In our daily transcriptions we have been over-anxious to convey the Marquise to V-, so that the Count could approach her there (and be rebuffed). But we must quickly insert the scene with her father in tears, the discharged pistol, and her banishment to V-.

Her father turned, and would not look at her
And as she tried to follow him, he cried,
‘Leave me. Go from my sight,’ and tried to slam
The door. But when she cried imploringly
He suddenly desisted and, as she
Entered the room he strode across it, still
Refusing to acknowledge her. She fell
And, trembling, clasped his knees, when suddenly
A pistol which he seized went off just as
He snatched it from the wall. The shot passed through
The ceiling. ‘God preserve me,’ cried the Marquise
Rising from her knees, as pale as death,
And fled her father’s room. Reaching her own
She ordered that her carriage should be brought,
Dressed both her children, and began to pack.

Meanwhile Count F, detained in Naples, wrote
A second time to stress the urgency
With which the Marquise should consider all
The circumstances which might still arise
Which could make it imperative for her
To honour any undertaking made
Between them. He for his part, certainly,
As soon as it might fall within his powers,
Would expedite his swift return from Naples.
This letter was sent on to V-.

Not knowing that the Marquise had already gone
In banishment to V-, the Count arrived
In M-, encountering absence everywhere.
The Commandant received him with an air
Of some embarrassment and hastily
Excused himself at once and left his son
To entertain the Count. This son soon told
Of the disgrace his sister had incurred,
Of her removal in the coach to V-,
His father’s disapproval at the thought
That she should still retain her children there —
At which the Count looked anguished and exclaimed,
‘Why were such obstacles put in my way?
Had we but married this might not have been!’
And, hearing this, her brother stared wide-eyed,
Thinking the Count in some way quite deranged.
But vowing now to follow her to V-,
The Count put on his hat and left at once.

Taking a horse he galloped out to V-.
Dismounting at the gate, he saw no-one.
He stared through iron bars at lawn and trees.
The porter suddenly appeared and said
The Marquise was at home to no-one, no-one —
Family or friend.

Pretending to depart, instead he climbed
A low back wall and came upon
The Marquise reading in a little grove.
She looked enchanting, undisturbed.
Her pregnancy was clear and even when
She merely sat and read, she seemed
To be at work protecting one unseen.
He felt enchanted by that form
And by the strange, unrealisable fact
That he was its engenderer.
He spoke. He praised her grace and innocence.
Gently he put an arm about her waist,
But she repulsed him, standing up in haste,
And in alarm escaped behind closed doors.

Vexed with himself to let her slip away
From his very arms, he went to find his horse.
He mounted, feeling great despair.
To cast off all the secrets of his heart
He still had not confessed to her. It was
An abject figure who rode back to M-.

One aspect of the colloquium which has confirmed our thoughts of you, inventive Francesca, has been the readiness of speakers to invent peripheral detail. For instance, in elaborating on the midwife’s reference to the Virgin Mary, we have had a paper largely devoted to paintings of The Annunciation. This speaker attempted to throw light on the Marquise’s perplexity — since in both cases the pregnancy is strange but exemplary, and the male element covert. How well I remember, Francesca, our seeing together the Leonardo in the Uffizi.

Scattered notes from a long day of lectures:

‘Unwittingly I’ve wandered into the moonlight’ — Kleist’s The Prince of Homburg.

Kleist’s technique in this drama relies heavily on mime and interjection. And the frequent use of anacoluthon underlines the psychology. This breaking off in dialogue parallels the breaking off in consciousness of the characters and the sudden changes in fortune, or, in the case of Count F-, a sudden break in moral purpose.

Kleist returns again and again to the same themes. One is that of the ‘unconscious seduction’. A year before the Marquise of O-, in Amphitryon (following Plautus and Molière) Alkmène is bewildered because, in order to possess her, Jupiter has taken the form of her husband. Thus, like the Marquise, in a sense she has had sexual relations without knowledge of the fact. Similarly in The Duel, a later story, the lady Littegard has and has not spent the night with a lover since unknown to him her place has been taken by her maid.

A second theme is that of the fainting or lapse of consciousness or awareness. The Marquise faints at her rescue by the Count (and at other times in the tale). Similar lapses dominate The Prince of Homburg. In this, Kleist’s last play, the anacoluthon has severed the Prince from public purpose, honour and duty. In the moonlit garden as the play begins he is discovered in a kind of reverie half waking, half sleeping, weaving a laurel wreath. He has found a glove which has fallen from the hand of Natalie, the Elector’s niece. He dreams of her and later recognises her as the subject of his dream. This sleepwalker is to lead the cavalry in pursuit of the Swedes; instead he dreams of Natalie. This entails dereliction of duty such as Count F- threatens in his proposal to the Marquise: rather than take despatches to Naples he will wait her reply.

The trance-like determination of action is a means of subverting direct cause and effect relations … Beginnings of Romanticism … Keats’ drowsy numbness … separation of thought and action. It is no surprise that the role of the Prince of Homburg came to be identified with that most lyrical of actors, Gérard Philipe.

The weakening of cause and effect connections facilitates too the sudden reversal of fortune common in Kleist (see The Earthquake in Chile or numerous instances in The Prince of Homburg — the Elector wrongly thought dead, the Prince wrongly thought dead, the Prince wrongly accused). It finds its most gentle expression in The Marquise of O-… Peripeteia, the sudden dazzlement, a gazing into the sun: Count F- stands with the unconscious Marquise in his arms … Mersault in Camus’ L’Etranger under the influence of the Algerian sun kills the Arab whom he passes on the beach.

The trance in Kleist …Mesmer and theories of Animal Magnetism … G.H. Schubert and the two kinds of dreams, the one expressing anxiety the second as revelation of God in Nature….

The following gem from one of today’s papers deserves quotation marks and italics: ‘We find here features of both Classicism and Romanticism. But Kleist resists classification into either school as resolutely as Count F- resists the bewildered protests of the Marquise and her family in his attempts to marry her.’ This sort of forced figure is irritating, is it not?

And you, Fran, were particularly dismissive of such.

Someone spoke about loss of consciousness, so-called Freudian mistakes, webs of bewilderment. We were invited to consider examples from ordinary conversation: ‘I’m sorry, I wasn’t paying attention.’ ‘I was miles away.’ ‘Would you mind repeating that?’ etc.

For Kleist, narrative is a series of bewildering events.

The central motif in The Marquise of O- is the confusion and uncertainty of the Marquise; this embodies the view of narrative itself as an unfolding of the inexplicable.

We are asked to compare the growth of detective fiction from Poe’s The Purloined Letter and mysteries of the locked room: the locked room as the domain of the narrative, and so on.

This idea was, as I recall, sustained at length. But Phoebe and I were remiss at the window. Swans on the lake. Winter trees complicit. Shimmer and shimmy of water.

‘Reader, I Married Him’: Happy Endings in C19 Fiction. Ending of The Marquise of O- the quintessence of the Romantic conclusion: the sly prediction of eventual happiness long forestalled, the lightening of tone and acceleration towards this cadence…

Compare the acceleration at the end of numerous works of Beethoven.

The present tense of exposition. Compare vernacular accounts of recent gossip, “So she comes in and she says …” So, the recounting of narrative in the present tense: “She is sitting in the garden at V- when she hears a noise near the wall, she turns and sees the Count standing beside her…” This highly particular use of the present tense, a kind of present tense of recapitulation is perhaps the tense to which all narrative aspires… Suspension in time … arrested action … apposite to the Kleistian startlement. In the case of The Marquise of O-, so finely modulated is Kleist’s narrative that we recollect it as if entirely in this critical present.

We resume with the chastened Count.

That evening dining in the inn at M-,
Regretting still his failed campaign at V-,
He met Julietta’s brother who at once
Enquired if he had won his sister’s hand.
The Count said curtly that he had not, but
A letter soon would set the matter right.
The Commandant’s son noted from his tone
This strange obsession still was unassuaged.
He rang and asked to have the waiter bring
The news sheet so that its advertisement
Might counsel caution — for it seemed that soon
His sister was to make a different choice.
The Count flushed suddenly, leapt up and cried,
‘At last! I know now what to do,’ and seized
And shook that brother’s hand.

Meanwhile at M-, another argument.
The Commandant now wanted to expunge
All traces of his daughter’s memory
And took her portrait from the wall. Further,
He spoke of ordering his son to V-
To bring his daughter’s children back to M-
Into his care. His wife thought this was wrong.
Her husband was persistent. Tempers frayed.
Then, at breakfast, the advertisement…
The Commandant raged even more. This was,
He said, some sort of ruse. The wicked girl
Was claiming still to be an innocent.

Yet three days later when the groom
Brought in the news sheet still wet from the press
The Commandant was even more amazed.
His wife was almost speechless. But she read:
If the Marquise of O- will be home
At eleven on the morning of the 3rd
In her father’s house at M- the man
Whom she is seeking will present himself.

‘Now, tell me,’ cried his wife, ‘What do you make
Of this?’ ‘Why, she is infamous! So sweet
A face, such eyes, a cherub’s innocence
Behind which lies the cunning of a fox!’
‘But what, in heaven’s name, if this is meant
To be a trick, what can her purpose be?’
‘Her purpose? It is clear that she has planned
To make us welcome her with open arms
Then on that morning, by some cock-and-bull
Contrivance which the two of them devise
Hope I will say, “My dearest little girl,
I did not know, who could have thought, forgive
Our harshness, let us all be friends again.”
I’ll have a bullet ready for the man
Who steps across my threshold on the 3rd,
Or perhaps we’ll have the servants throw him out.’

His wife said that she found herself inclined
To think that of the two alternatives,
One, that their daughter should be quite so base
Or, two, that some strange quirk of fate occurred,
She would reject the first.

Julietta’s mother travelled secretly to V-.

Beneath a palm-tree’s shade they sat. Her mother said,
‘A man has answered your advertisement.’
The Marquise cried in consternation, ‘Who?
Who was it? Who replied? Tell me his name.’
A fringe of sunlight spread across the grass.
‘Why, who else but the very man you sought,
Whom you addressed in your advertisement.’
‘But who was he? What man? What is he like?’
‘My dear, why don’t you try to guess his name?’
‘To guess? But dearest mother, how could I know?’
Gauze shadows moved towards them on the lawn.
The Marquise rose in agitation. ‘Tell
Me his name I beg of you.’ ‘He’s known to us.
He fell down at your father’s feet. He wept,
Confirming everything.’ ‘His name? His name?’
‘Well then, it is our Leopardo, he
Who brought me here today, who even now
Waits in the outer room for you to speak. ’
The Marquise cried in disbelief. ‘The groom!
But how? And when? I cannot understand.
And yet perhaps. O God in Heaven! Once
I fell asleep in midday’s cloudless heat,
And when I woke the shadow of a cloud
Hung over me, and Leopardo stared.’
Her mother fell across her knees. ‘My dear
Forgive me if you can. All this was lies.’

That afternoon in tears of happiness
They travelled back together arm in arm.
The small barouche swayed gently, and they laughed
At Leopardo handsome at the reins.
The Marquise said, ‘But still I wonder who
Will bravely knock upon my father’s door.’

Today’s lecture with its promising title, Post-Coital Amazement: Unconscious Seduction and the Revelations of Confusion turned out to be more confusion than amazement.

To what extent is the authorial voice a knowing one? May — should — there be a suggestion of limited knowledge and this be the source of irony? ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged…’ ‘All families are unhappy families…’ Part of our pleasure in these openings is our trust that the voice, while speaking in universals, is soon to reveal particulars about which we may make our own (and wiser) judgements. Or we might urge that it is precisely the privilege of the reader to allow himself the luxury of doubts, suspicions, alternative complicities… Our pleasure in Kleist’s opening too is that it must soon yield to the pleasures of uncertainty and doubt.

Lunch. We sat outdoors in a walled courtyard perhaps not unlike the grounds at V- where the Marquise sat alone. At any moment the Count might clamber over the wall. We are inside looking out since at one point the wall allows a view of lake, reeds and a few lilies.

When we question the veracity of the authorial voice, when we introduce the inevitable question of irony it is like questioning whether these birds are singing or speaking.

The Count approaches the Marquise by climbing over the wall at V-. She still does not know who is the father of her child. He sees her form “charmingly altered”. Let this stand as a figure for perception of the world in general.

The Count leaving V- is like the forlorn narrator of the Wintereise.

That night he meets her brother in the inn.

He sees the advertisement and resolves

To reply by another.

The same speaker revisits Cole Porter:

After Julietta has run indoors locking the doors behind her the Count stands in frustrated puzzlement. It seems that his only decisive action has been that initial and illicit one; the rest has been a haze of uncertainty, a wash of effects coming long after their initial cause. He meditates:

What is this thing called love,

This funny thing called love?

Who can solve this mystery?

Two more mysteries. This morning’s speaker: ‘A modern painter remarked, “Nothing is abstract for me. Yet there is nothing more abstract than reality.” Can we not sense this paradox prevailing as the Count climbs the wall at V- and sees the Marquise now visibly pregnant, reading alone? Our view of reality is that of the Count’s. He sees potentiality, the future made visible yet incomprehensibly attached to a single past deed which he can scarcely believe happened. The mystery of force-at-a-distance and particularly at a distance in the past.’

We are reluctant to leave these sunlit scenes at V- in which the Count visits and the mother of the Marquise travels secretly to test her daughter’s innocence.

But nearing M- their mood became
More serious. The Commandant must still be told,
He who had been so adamant. His wife
Installed her daughter in her former rooms
And slipped away.
After an hour, quite flushed,

And secretly elated, she returned,
Embraced her daughter once again and said,
‘That doubting Thomas! Why! It took an hour
To tell him what was always obvious,
And now he sits there weeping abject tears.’
‘Who is weeping?’ the Marquise asked. ‘Why, only he
Who has the greatest reason to repent.’
‘My father? All of this on my account?’
‘If I had not been tearful all the while
I should have burst out laughing at him. No!
Do not run to him. He must come to you,
For it was he who wrote the letter, he
Who sent you from this house.’

But even now

They heard his footsteps in the passageway.

‘Oh let me go to him,’ the Marquise cried.
Her mother shook her head. ‘No! He must come
To you. He’s been so stubborn. Why did he make
Such misery for us all? Firing that gun,
Dictating such a letter to you — Why,
He has behaved abominably and so
Must make his peace with you.’ The corridor
Rang heavily to shuffling steps and sobs.

Our style should be as thin as the airmail paper on which it is typed.

No-one in the lecture room. A sound like bellbirds outside. The lake stretching away out of sight. Coffee urn empty. Afternoon staring down the barrel.

Do you remember an inn, Francesca? The inn where so long ago in our salad days Phoebe outdid us all on the garden swing sailing so high that we shouted out thinking her about to execute a complete circle. This morning I woke to find I was dreaming of this swing and had transposed it from our walking tour to the Marquise’s garden at V-.

The Renaissance Annunciations are mentioned again not only because of the obvious associations with mysterious conception in Kleist … but because the paintings speak of an obsessive serenity. Can obsession be serene? The Marquise of O- is the record of an obsession and it is undoubtedly serene.

Another day, another lugubrious speaker:

The tale rests on moral ambiguity, an action initially repugnant which leads through puzzlement and the gentleness of contrition to general felicity. Kleist thereby constructs a drama in which conflict is peripheral or replaced by puzzlement … in the manner of the detective story (which would evolve later in the century) whose enjoyment rests upon a merely token act of violence and the explanation of an apparent impossibility.

In The Marquise of O- Kleist has hit upon a theme which could be said to stand for all literature; namely, the main character discovers in the course of the story something which has once, without her awareness, happened to her.

And in The Theme of Rescue in the Growth of the Novel the speaker invokes Austen. When Harriet Smith and Emma are rescued from vagabonds by Frank Churchill, the incident has a significant consequence: Harriet later refers to her ‘rescuer’. Emma (and we) take this to mean Frank Churchill but in fact she means Mr Knightley who has ‘rescued’ her by asking her to dance after Mr Elton’s refusal to do so.

To the Onlie Begetter of Unexpected Tours Ltd, Francesca, you better than most could pass judgement on the edict that Kleist’s narrative method encourages us to expect the unexpected.

But enough! Let us advance to that point in our Version, where the Reader, encouraged by the sanction Now Read On, is nudged forward by the device, Meanwhile after a restless night…

The night was spent in long drawn-out suspense
And now the dreaded, hoped-for morning came.
The clock rang out the morning hour, eleven
Like someone calling from another room.
The Marquise and her mother sat
Arrayed as for a wedding day.
Their hearts beat loudly like the brittle clock.
The eleventh stroke still echoed in the room
When Leopardo entered and announced the Count.
What consternation! ‘Shut the doors!’
At such a time as this that he should come!
‘We are not at home to him.’ The Marquise rose
And was about to thrust the groom
Into the hall and lock the doors herself
When the Count entered, nobly grave, arrayed
Precisely in the same brave uniform
He had been wearing then so long ago
When he had carried all by force.
The Marquise felt confused and shamed,
She turned, about to leave the room. And yet,
And yet — her mother took her arm, and said,
‘My Julietta, stay. Stay. Who else
Are we expecting here today?’

Sheer confusion
Gathered in its arms the startled Marquise,
And snatching up a handkerchief she turned
To leave the room, then heard her mother’s voice.
‘Why, Julietta! How stupid we have been!’
The Count knelt at her feet. Confusion grew.
Her mother urged him to stand up. The Marquise, pale,
Retreated to the sofa. Her mother said,
‘Go to her. Let us all be reconciled.’
The Count again knelt, but the Marquise stood
And called out, ‘Go away. Go away.
I was prepared to meet a vicious man
But not a devil.’

The enigmatic wedding was announced.

The Count was not allowed to join the wedding group
Until they reached the entrance to the church.
During the ceremony the Marquise stared
Quite rigidly at altar images
And did not grant one fleeting glance at him
With whom she was exchanging vows. Afterwards
The Count offered her his arm but at the door
The Countess bowed and took her leave of him.

Her father asked if they might hope to have
The honour of his company from time to time
In the apartments of his daughter — whereupon
The Count said something unintelligible
And raised his hat to all the company — and disappeared.

The Marquise took his arm only as far
As necessary to proceed as man and wife
Along the aisle, then at the vestry door
She bowed and took her leave. Her father said
He hoped the Count might, on occasions, dine
With them and be received in those apartments
Where the Countess would reside with them.
The Count, too, bowed and raised his hat and turned
And disappeared. He took a house at M-
And did not see his wife for several months.
His quite exemplary conduct in regard
To contact with the Marquise led at last
To an invitation to the christening
Of his new-born son.

The Countess, still confined, sat in her bed.
Her guests congratulated her and, from the rear,
The Count discreetly greeted her. He left
Amongst the other offerings two scrolls:
The first turned out to be a deed of gift
Conferring 20,000 roubles on his son;

The second was a will by which his wife
And mother of his son was made sole heir
To all the Count’s estates.

From that day on, her mother had resolved
The Countess should be visited by him
As frequently as possible. And soon
Each evening the Count was made a guest.
His instinct told him that, considering
The imperfection of the ordered world
He could assume he was forgiven. Thus
Began a second wooing of his wife.
And when a year had passed he’d won from her
A second, now less compromised, consent.
A second wedding happier than the first
Then led to all that happy family
Returning to the country house at V-.

A series of young Russians now ensued
After the first. Great happiness prevailed
And, once, the Count enquired of his wife
Why on that dreadful third day of the month
She’d fled from him as from a devil’s gaze.
And with her arms thrown round his neck she sighed
And answered that she could not possibly
Have ever seen a devil in him then
Had he not seemed an angel when they’d met.

From the final day:

An old joke tells of a Russian gentleman who has difficulties with English. He is speaking of his wife and their surprise that she is ‘expecting’ since they had thought her (searching for the right word) ‘impregnable’ (then correcting himself) ‘inconceivable’ (and then) ‘unbearable.’

The speaker apologised for this indulgence while clearly pleased by it. I passed a note to Phoebe: ‘Next we’ll be offered the equally appropriate old riddle, “What three words does the bride think of as she enters the church? (Aisle, altar, hymn)”.’

Francesca, if you are still reading, greetings! (And if you are not, ‘greetings!’)

In the queue to the urn we heard a woman say she ‘had the same experience as the Marquise.’(!) We assumed she meant a pregnancy apparently uncaused, we pressed forward, eager for details. How frustrating in the jostle and noise at the urn to hear no more.

The introduction to the Kleist translations suggests that the theme of a woman advertising to find the identity of the father of her child is common in folklore. They cite Montaigne’s account of ‘a widow country-woman reputed very chaste and honest’ who asks the parish priest to publish in the church the same request as the Marquise makes. A swain admits to taking advantage of her ‘very tippled with wine’ and asleep. The two are married ‘and both live together at this day’.

I remember how much you approved Kleist’s last sentence, ‘Throwing her arms round his neck, she answered that she would not have seen a devil in him then if she had not seen an angel in him at their first meeting’ — and, now that you are sailing somewhere down the Nile or up the Amazon, we are pleased to send this sentence, amplified somewhat, ballooning into a spinnaker to propel you, we hope, (in the fullness of time) back to us.

— Bronwyn,

Phoebe.