Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Pollock, Katherine

Titel

Reading Texts Performatively: Disruptive Gestures in Heinrich von Kleist

Ist Teil von

• Goethe yearbook, 2023, Vol.30 (1), p.95-111

Ort / Verlag

Rochester: North American Goethe Society

Erscheinungsjahr

2023

Quelle

Literature Online (LION)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• 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).1 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.2 While forms have long been considered precarious in Kleist's texts, focusing on materiality and corporeality forces us to go beyond textual representation and consider the margins of meaningful order as it materializes. The Kleistian concept of gesture, therefore, deviates significantly from the classical eighteenth-century gestural paradigm established by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Johann Jacob Engel, in which movements of the body are visible signs of the human mind.19 Illuminating the semiotic dimension of gesture, Lessing theorized that gestures are "natürliche Zeichen" (natural signs) with an image character associated with the plastic arts that-in contrast with pantomime-are not mere substitutes for speech with conventional meaning. [...]gestures are implemented to augment the "willkürliche Zeichen" (arbitrary signs) of the actor's speech and to express a subjectivity on the stage that can be immediately apprehended.20 In his aesthetic essays, Kleist's concept of gesture distances itself from the sign and the human mind and involves the dynamics of human and nonhuman bodies. Nothing, meanwhile, is more helpful than a gesture from my sister, as though she ivished to interrupt; for my, in any case, already strained mind will only be all the more roused by this external attempt to wrest a train of thought on which it was set, and like a great general, when pressed by changing battlefield conditions, I too will find my intellectual capacity stoked to yet a higher degree of performance.