John H Smith

We often speak of a text “pregnant” with meaning. But how does it give birth? Certainly not through the intervention of monologic doctoring but, rather, with the aid of “dialogic midwifery.” In Kleist's Marquise von O, the tale of an unexplained conception and pregnancy, the art of ironic dialogism, though never directly giving expression to the peculiar state of affairs, helps give birth to interpretation and to the genre of the realistic novella. The circuitous narrative technique of telling and untelling, which supplements consciousness as a midwife assists a woman in childbirth, links Kleist's text to a hermeneutic tradition stretching from Plato through Kant (and well beyond).

... the longed-for mediation. ... awareness (like Kant's famous line about the awareness that follows from our vision of the starry heavens above and the moral law within20) and ... Ohne große weltliche Besitzthümer lenkte und vereinigte Ein Oberhaupt, die großen politischen Kräfte. ...

The lexeme Ach (ah, alas), though hardly a concept, let alone a traditional philosophical one, plays an important role in Goethe’s writing as a means of enacting and performing some of the poet’s fundamental conceptual principles. The very mode of this interjection’s production in speech—which makes possible the voicing of the almost imperceptible flow of breath through a mild constriction of the throat—embodies Goethe’s dialectical understanding of the conjunction of materiality and spirituality (from spiritus, which in Latin means breath). With its prominent use in a number of works in verse (including Faust), where it often serves to initiate or interrupt a line, this common interjection offers a heterodox Goethean reconceptualization of the creative process as an opening and a bridging. It thereby also captures a caesura within being that is comparable to the transitions between inhalation and exhalation.