1 - The Poetics of Somniloquence: The Cultural-Historical Context

Summary

In sleep and dreams we once again go through the curriculum of earlier humanity.

— Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

Schubert, Gmelin, Käthchen

IT IS AXIOMATIC that art does not occur in isolation. Nevertheless it seems remarkable that as his interests in the sciences gradually gave way to his literary propensities, Kleist managed to discover so fertile a middle ground — a kind of twilight zone, actually — in which science and art converged in such a productive albeit bizarre way. In hindsight one can now see that the realm in which this took place, the preoccupation with what the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries knew as animal or electrical magnetism, required science to cede considerably to art.

An array of phenomena closely associated with romantic Naturphilosophie, such as somnambulism, debilitating stupors, and cataleptic trances beset protagonists of novels and dramas during Kleist's time in almost epidemic proportions. Exponents of German Naturphilosophie, poets and scientists alike, showed a keen interest in psychic states that blurred the line between the conscious and the unconscious. Still, the frequency of somnambulism and its analogues in Kleist's writings seems unusually high and therefore of special significance given the relatively small compass of his oeuvre. This suspicion is strengthened by the fact that with Kleist this kind of passivity nearly always befalls its victim at a moment of critical and decisive consequence for the overall progression of the plot, whereas in the works of other contemporary writers such instances usually have the status of only secondary motifs.