Reading Texts Performatively: Disruptive Gestures in Heinrich von Kleist

Summary

Abstract: This article investigates how Heinrich von Kleist's gestures interrupt cognitive processes and implicate the embodied reader in the text—as a participant in the collective performance of meaning. While Kleist does not present a comprehensive theory of gesture, he provides threads to follow that address the role of gesture in epistemology and aesthetics in two of his two well-known essays, “Über die allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden” (“On the Gradual Formulation of Thoughts While Speaking”) and “Über das Marionettentheater” (“On the Theater of Marionettes”). By reading these essays with and through Kleist's novella Das Erdbeben in Chili (The Earthquake in Chile), gestures become visible as productive interruptions of cognition that both disrupt hermeneutic interpretations and draw matter into the process of meaning-making—including the body of the reader. This dynamic comes into sharp relief when considered in conjunction with contemporary theories (e.g., those of Karen Barad, Donna Haraway, and Rebecca Schneider) of performance that illuminate the role of bodies in conceptual activity. With a performative approach, the reader can embrace their entanglement in the text and participate in the ongoing (re)configuration of meaning—two features that are unique to aesthetic engagement with Kleist's writing.

Keywords: gestures, embodied reading, intra-action, sympoiesis, aesthetics, hermeneutics, drama, prose, novella, narrative

HEINRICH VON KLEIST's gestures disrupt a fictional world, transforming the text into a performance rather than a revelation of truth. I nstead of providing insight into the psychology of the characters and the reality of the narrative cosmos, the movements of Kleist's bodies hold together a multiplicity of disparate possibilities in a single instant, exploding the logic that governs the text. Without the decisive cut that distinguishes the limits of textual meaning, the text overflows with energetic possibilities. Hans-Thies Lehmann terms this Kleistian trope, in which a moment is both charged with potential and on the verge of catastrophe, “Theater im Exzeß” (theater in excess). Orienting Kleist's novellas and dramas in the context of modern theater praxis, he argues that only a framework that considers narration to be one component that works in combination with bodies, movement, and sound can make headway in light of the contingent excess that is at odds with representation.