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Reading and Writing the Architecture of the Body in Kleist's

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Reading and Writing the Architecture of the Body in Kleist's Matthew Pollard Reading and Writing the Architecture of the Body in Kleist’s Penthesilea Although Kleist’s Penthesilea has both antagonized and fascinated numerous critics, it is nonetheless striking that most scholarship has not discussed its depiction of the body in any great detail. This essay provides a reading of how this play deploys and repre- sents the body as a construct, rendering and rending it as a site of displacement, frag- mentation and inscription. By examining the relationship between the body and meta- phors of architecture, this essay draws further connnections between the body, the forging of meaning, and the act of writing. As a “geniales Ärgernis”1 for both contemporaries and critics, Kleist’s tragedy Penthesilea has both endured outright rejection and enjoyed extensive critical attention since its inception. Ranging from Goethe’s refusal to accept the play’s foreignness to his understanding of antiquity2 to our modern validation of the work as one of German literature’s most puzzling,3 Penthesilea offers to the reader an interpretative challenge, a provocation accurately summed up by Ruth Angress: “[Kleist] preferred to entertain an audience by shocking them into awareness rather than edifying them with idylls and ideals. Perhaps the time has come when we can appreciate the boldness of a combination of classi- cal and popular/sensational ingredients in serious literature rather than deplore it”.4 While its near-unperformability – despite Kleist’s deployment of teicho- scopic effects to relate rather than show physical violence – has frequently consigned it to the invisible theater, its calculated yet passionate affront to the- atrical taste has promoted rather than hindered its status as an object of inter- pretive and performative experimentation. With his Penthesilea, Kleist “wußte, daß er [...] Grenzen überschritt und Tabus verletzte: Grenzen der Bühne und 1 Helmut Sembdner (ed.): Heinrich von Kleists Lebensspuren. Dokumente und Berichte der Zeitgenossen. Frankfurt/M. 1992. P. 232. 2 Cf. Peter Goldammer: Heinrich von Kleists Penthesilea. Kritik der Rezeptionsge- schichte als Beitrag zur Interpretation. In: Impulse. Aufsätze, Quellen, Berichte zur deutschen Klassik und Romantik. Ed. by Peter Goldammer and Walter Dietze. Berlin and Weimar 1978. Pp. 200-231; Helmut Sembdner: Lebensspuren. Pp. 228-238; Helga Gallas: Antikenrezeption bei Goethe und Kleist: Penthesilea – eine Anti-Iphigenie. In: Momentum dramaticum. Festschrift for Eckehard Catholy. Ed. by Linda Dietrick and David John. Waterloo 1990. Pp. 209-220. 3 Jost Hermand: Kleists Penthesilea im Kreuzfeuer geschlechtsspezifischer Diskurse. In: Monatshefte 87.1 (1995). Pp. 34-47, here p. 34. 4 Ruth Angress: Kleist’s Nation of Amazons. In: Positionen I. Beiträge zur Germani- stik. Heinrich von Kleist 1777-1811. Ed. by Peter Horn. Capetown 1977. Pp. 5-28, here p. 9. 366 Schauspielkunst seiner Zeit, [und ...] des Einfühlungsvermögens der Zu- schauer”.5 In light of its depiction of a strong female figure, described by Em- mel as a “gigantisches Bild der erotischen Maßlosigkeit”,6 Jost Hermand’s critical account (in both senses) of Penthesilea scholarship has recently evoked the spectacle of a “Kreuzfeuer geschlechtsspezifischer Diskurse”. In his rejec- tion of “wilden Interpretationen” which rely largely on Kleist’s few and cryp- tic remarks on his play, Hermand recognizes the effectiveness of a feminist approach that links the drama to Kleist’s ideological position, without retreat- ing to the timeless ahistory of the mythological, archetypal, psychological, or biological.7 Helga Gallas further testifies to the play’s richness, by outlining at least six prevalent ways of viewing the text: as “Staatskritik”, “Kampf der Deutschen mit Napoleon-Achill”, “Widerspiegelung des Kampfes Goethe – Kleist” (cf. Mommsen), “Manifestation des mörderischen Wesens von Liebe und Sexualität”, “Manifestation von Homosexualität” and finally “Ausdruck verschiedener narzißtischer Störungen”.8 While this work continues to provoke psychoanlytical readings of the characters’ mental processes,9 it is also clear that Penthesilea foregrounds the creation and destruction of the body. Nutz’s insight, that Penthesilea is a “Körperdrama” built around the read- ings and misreadings of bodily signifiers, serves as this reading’s point of departure. This drama depicts the reading, misreading, and appropriation of bodily sign systems. Such sign systems function through Penthesilea’s omnivo- rous gaze fixed on the body of Achilles, which on the one hand constructs Achilles and then, on the other, transforms the hungry eye into the hungry mouth in a process of increasingly deadly proximity.10 This essay exegetically itemizes Penthesilea’s discourse of the body, drawing out the broader implica- tions of such collisions, interactions, and stigmata for the politicized body and the Amazonian body politic. Finally, the architectural metaphors of suspension and collapse serve as building blocks for an analysis of the protagonists’ self representation. This drama performs a paradox: the return of the body, in and through language and visual presentation as the center of dramatic action, and 5 Maximilian Nutz: Lektüre der Sinne. Kleists Penthesilea als Körperdrama. In: Heinrich von Kleist. Studien zu Werk und Wirkung. Ed. by Dirk Grathoff. Opladen 1988. Pp. 163-185, here p. 163. 6 Felix Emmel: Das ekstatische Theater. Prien 1924. P. 154. 7 Jost Hermand: Kleists Penthesilea. P. 44. 8 Helga Gallas: Kleists Penthesilea und Lacans vier Diskurse. In: Kontroverse, alte und neue. Akten des VII. Internationalen Germanistenkongresses Göttingen. Ed. by Inge Stephan and Carl Pietzcker. Tübingen 1986. Pp. 203-212, here p. 203. 9 Cf. Helga Gallas: Kleists Penthesilea; Joachim Pfeiffer: Kleists Penthesilea. Eine Deutung unter den Aspekten von narzißtischer und ödipaler Problematik. In: Kontro- verse, alte und neue. Pp. 196-202; Gerhart Pickerodt: Penthesilea und Kleist. Tragödie der Leidenschaft und Leidenschaft der Tragödie. In: Germanisch-Romanische Monats- schrift 37 (1987). Pp. 52-67. 10 Michel Chaouli: Devouring Metaphor: Disgust and Taste in Kleist’s Penthesilea. German Quarterly 69.2 (1996). Pp. 125-143. .
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