The Germanic Review, 85: 171–188, 2010 Copyright c Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0016-8890 DOI: 10.1080/00168890.2010.504435 The Poetics of the Middle in Kleist’s “Michael Kohlhaas” Zachary Sng Heinrich von Kleist’s story, “Michael Kohlhaas,” has been often read as a demonstration of literature’s ability to cross over and intervene in a sphere other than its own. Kleist’s text is, however, replete with instances of thwarted crossing, impassable borders, and diversion into errancy. I argue that this tension points to Kleist’s profound ambivalence toward the logic of mediation and his doubts about whether language can function as a medium for the transportation and direction of force. I read the text as an exploration of a poetics of the middle and explore (via a brief discussion of Walter Benjamin’s “Zur Kritik der Gewalt”) the implications of such a reading for claims about the its performative efficacy. Keywords: Walter Benjamin, Heinrich von Kleist, law, mediation, performativity, vio- lence f the three elements of a well-constructed plot that Aristotle identified in the Poetics—a O beginning (archeˆ), a middle (meson),andanend(telos)—it is telling that our attention has so ostentatiously pooled around the first and the last, leaving the middle high and dry.1 The middle seems to suffer from a twofold problem: it is on the one hand less tangible than beginnings and endings, but on the other possessed of sufficient self-evidence to dodge critical notice. We find the middle indispensable, in other words, because something has to come between beginning and end, but our expectations of it are set pretty low.2 The secondary scholarship on Heinrich von Kleist’s story “Michael Kohlhaas” certainly bears out this characterization: an attention to the paired problem of beginning and ending, with a corollary neglect of the middle, has long been a hobby horse of its criticism. This is not surprising, given the striking symmetry of the text’s opening and closing gestures. Its subtitle refers to the historical chronicle from which it draws, and its final sentences invite the reader to consult history to see how the story continues for its main characters. The literary 1Aristotle, Poetics 2: 2–7. 2The most prominent among the few literary scholars who have engaged with the “middle” at length is probably Samuel Weber. See, for example, his Theatricality as Medium and Benjamin’s -Abilities. 171 172 THE GERMANIC REVIEW VOLUME 85, NUMBER 3 / 2010 text itself thus seems to be presented as a diverting interlude between historical book ends, an imaginative space flanked on both sides by things weightier and more concrete.3 Small wonder, then, that most readings of it are focused on its dramatic opening and closing scenes rather than on its somewhat problematic middle. The question of the middle could actually be addressed not just to the plot or narrative structure of Kleist’s text but also to its poetics. In Passions of the Sign, a study of revolutionary language in Germany around 1800, Andreas Gailus refers to the text’s opening and closing scenes as “clearly defined textual borders” that serve a double purpose: they draw a line of distinction between text and history but also act as signs of the story’s “pragmatic aspirations, the relation to the historical and political domain it aims to engage in.” From this perspective, the densely interwoven “border narratives” (107) that make up Kleist’s story reflect on how language institutes borders such as the one between literature and history, but they also reveal how it can undo those same boundaries. Through an analysis of performative force in Kleist’s writings, Gailus shows how literature’s ability to both construct and undo such borders, thus producing “change in the matter and meaning of history” (148), is a function of what he calls an “energetic dimension of speech” (141). A similar interest in the text’s performativity can be found in J. Hillis Miller’s “Laying Down the Law in Literature,” which underscores the numerous acts by which Kohlhaas the character and the text itself leave behind old jurisdictions in order to establish new ones. He reads, for example, the preposition “aus” in Kleist’s subtitle (“aus einer alten Chronik”) as a forceful launching of the text “from the safely grounded and lawful realm of history” into the realm of the literary, which is governed no longer by historical and legal realities but by “a law the story itself establishes” (86). This is the first of many crossings between history and fiction performed in and by the text, which can therefore be read as testimony to how literature can “intervene performatively into history” (102). In order for a literary text to lay down a law that is no longer confined to the literary but actually becomes “socially and historically effective” (104), however, it must bring something to a close and initiate something new, and it is in the space of the middle—the delicate threshold between ending and beginning—that this law-positing force of literature is located.4 Borders such as the ones between literature and history, language and action, writing and its effects, are drawn in order to be crossed, as these critics demonstrate with elegance. Sometimes, however, the crossing is fraught, and one is indefinitely stuck in the middle, detained at the border, redirected into a perpetual escalation and errancy that never resolves into arrival or even traversal. Such problems point to a different kind of middle being at work, emphatically dissimilar to the mediating middle that Aristotle imagines as a reliable ferryman from beginning to end, from point of departure to destination. A middle that refuses to mediate in this way acts as a disruption of directed trajectories and teleological movements 3Kleist draws considerably, as is well known, from the “Nachricht von Hans Kohlhasen,” which was published in Christian Schottgen¨ and George Christoph Kreysig, Diplomatische und curieuse Nachlese der Historie von Ober-Sachsen und angrentzenden Landern¨ (Dresden and Leipzig, 1731). 4Miller is, in fact, another critic who has called our attention to the unfairly neglected space of the middle in narrative; see, for example, the essays collected in Reading Narrative. This earlier work on narrative middles does not really feature prominently, however, in his reading of “Michael Kohlhaas.” SNG POETICS OF THE MIDDLE IN “MICHAEL KOHLHAAS” 173 and a challenge to the principles of transitivity and conductivity that define the medium. It also punctuates with an urgent question mark any claim about the ability of literature to intervene in history, politics, or any space beyond its own borders. The above-mentioned mediological complications are, in nuce, the ones that Kleist’s protagonist has to contend with. A horse-trader who travels frequently between Saxony and Brandenburg, Kohlhaas depends on border-crossings for his living, but a legally dubious detention and confiscation of his horses at the border sets into motion a string of injustices and misfortunes, and a series of violent acts of vengeance follows in their wake. This escalating madness carries the narrative toward a problematic conclusion marked by patently hollow justice and unsatisfactory resolutions. The central role that borders and crossings play in the text’s complicated choreography of movement is obvious; equally undeniable, however, is the fact that the story’s narrative and dramatic engine is driven by the thwarting of traversal rather than by its successful completion. For the bulk of the story, our would-be hero is caught in a medial nightmare: he shuttles back and forth between cities and states in a vain attempt to seek revenge and redress, writing desperate appeals for justice that are consigned to purgatorial deferral at the hands of corrupt intermediaries. What happens, then, if we read what Gailus refers to as “Kleist’s ambition to extend the reach of fiction into history” (108) and Miller as “the legislative power of a literary work” (104) as a reflection on and dramatization of certain complexities regarding the middle? This would make the frustrated crossings and delayed transport in Kleist’s text not just aberrations but symptoms of a problematic middle that will not efface itself to support acts of inauguration or closure. By remaining insistently medial, such a middle paradoxically establishes itself as both a pure medium and an absolute interruption of mediation. THE MEDIATIZED WORLD OF MICHAEL KOHLHAAS One of the primary roles of the middle is to facilitate passage, transport, and crossing between two poles (such as beginning and end), and an unmistakable indication of its breakdown in “Michael Kohlhaas” is the unreliable and inflationary circulation of writing in the story. Kohlhaas’s early attempts to seek redress for the illegal detention and abuse of his horses are almost exclusively conducted through letters of appeal. Writing, thus, promises at the outset to function as medium of communication that is also a mechanism of correction, for Kohlhaas’s missives aim to identify and remedy the kinks that inevitably occur in the elaborate network of political decision-making that makes up the Holy Roman Empire. Unfortunately, he is compelled for a number of reasons to hand his letters over to a number of intermediaries for delivery, including his own wife, who is disastrously killed in the course of discharging this duty. None of the communications end up arriving uncompromised at their proper destination—that is to say, in the hands of an impartial court or sovereign who can judge the merits of his case. Instead, they are diverted and rendered ineffective by the intervention of corrupt officials related to the Junker whom he is accusing of a criminal act in the first place.