Anecdotes often achieve their effect by surpassing their own extravagance and this one is no exception. The French are at the edge of town!” But the thirsty soldier insists on his glass of brandy and, even though the frantic innkeeper offers to send him off with the entire bottle free of charge, lingers for a second, and then a third glass of the deliquescent amber, the hiss of French bullets audible on all sides. “God in heaven,” replies the innkeeper, “see to it, friend, that you scram out of here. Suddenly a Prussian cavalryman bursts into the roadhouse courtyard and, sheathing his sword, orders a brandy. Inexorably, Napoleon’s soldiers are closing in. The village outside Jena, where the innkeeper has his business, has already been abandoned by the frantically retreating Prussian troops. In his “Anecdote from the Recent Prussian War” (1810), Kleist has an innkeeper relate a story, the ostensible point of which is to demonstrate that, had the Prussians only had more men like the lone cavalryman featured in his tale, they would certainly have defeated the French. Acknowledgement, a variant of Hegelian “recognition,” deserves to replace the now faded and, in Sartre’s use, merely technical notion of appreciation. The aim, rather, is to limn the contours of Kleist’s artistic achievement such that acknowledgement of its originality and importance is felt to constitute an intellectual obligation. Needless to say, the account of Kleist’s work I develop here does not aspire to exhaustiveness. Call this the non-formalistic criticism of form. Such criticism brings the form of an aesthetically achieved world to light and demonstrates how that form is made salient linguistically, rhetorically, narratively, dramatically, and so forth. To free up the metaphysics of an artistic world, then, is to solicit the deep criteria (or categories) that organize that world. ![]() La tâche du critique est de dégager celle-ci avant d’apprécier celle-là.” 1 The concept of metaphysics Sartre employs refers, on my reading, to the hardly controversial thought that literary works generally (not only novels) render worlds imaginatively present, and that these worlds exhibit principles of intelligibility. The brief examination of the work of Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811) conducted here is intended as an essay in criticism in the spirit of Sartre: “Une technique romanesque renvoie toujours à la métaphysique du romancier.
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