This chapter considers the afterlife of the dead author from the point of view of adaptation. German author Heinrich von Kleist (1777—1811) constitutes an important case in point because of the asymmetry between his short life, beset by failure, and his extraordinary and illustrious posthumous existence. He serves to illustrate something interesting about literary corpses and corpuses, and what we do to them in the great cultural hereafter. In other words, adaptation is considered here as a pursuit catalysed by, if not predicated upon, the author’s demise and absence. Posthumous Kleist, I argue, must break the tethers binding him to any original Kleist—let us call him Kleist (c)—thereby allowing free room not only for endlessly new Kleists—Kleist (ɔ)—but even for entirely new and virtual works by these reanimated author-avatars. Of course, these Kleist avatars cannot act entirely independently (they are more puppets than gods in this respect). Their actions need to be steered by someone, but that cybernaut can be anyone, and even perhaps eventually, an algorithm. His death creates a space in which literary virtuosity is transformed by (and into) literary virtuality. And eventually, presumably, a virtual body of critical literature may emerge from and in relation to these entirely new works written by Kleist (ɔ).
Reviewing new publications on the subject of literary longevity for the TLS, Hal Jensen made an important distinction, between literary immortality on the one hand, and the literary afterlife on the other, claiming “that the former pertains to the literary work while the latter seems to be about everything else”.1 In this chapter, we shall consider Kleist in terms of this “everything else”.
As Gerhard Schulz presciently declared in 2003, there appears to be no end to Kleist at all.2 This is certainly the case as far as academic interest is concerned. As the most recent edition of the Heilbronner Kleist-Blätter’s invaluable biannual bibliographical update reveals, he is still alive and well in literary-critical circles: twenty-four pages of one of the latest issues is devoted to the newest scholarship, testifying to the vigour of dead Kleist’s corpus and to undimmed critical interest in an author whose life and oeuvre were comparatively short.3 Given this immense, you might say bottom heavy, apparatus of secondary texts, one might imagine that all had been said that could possibly be said about dead Kleist and his works; “imagine” being the operative word, since reading every word of what currently exists in the way of scholarly criticism would prove a very time-consuming, if not impossible task. And yet, apparently, there is always room for more. According to Schulz, this is because, despite all that has been written, we are still searching for him, and he is still somehow eluding us.4 I would argue, rather, that we are not looking for him at all. His afterlife is vibrant precisely because he is gone.
According to a useful and entertaining checklist that Heather L. Jackson offers in her recent Those Who Write for Immortality: Romantic Reputations and the Dream of Lasting Fame, literary posterity is composed of no fewer than twenty-two ingredients. And the vitality of a given author’s afterlife can be gauged by these markers:
- 1.Authorial ambition, the desire to be remembered;
- 2.Threshold quality, by which she means that a certain aesthetic standard must be met;
- 3.Threshold quantity, in other words, a sufficiently substantial body of work to constitute a corpus;
- 4.The number of copies in circulation / availability (including digitally);
- 5.Variety of the corpus, which is to say that the author has proven to be generically versatile, mastering a range of tones, forms, and contents;
- 6.The existence of authorial or eponymous adjectives, such as Kafkaesque, Byronic, Keatsian, and even Goethian;
- 7.The existence of a critical tradition, consisting of reviews and academic criticism, among other things;
- 8.Controversy surrounding the author and his or her oeuvre;
- 9.Associates: Weimar Classicism, George Circle, etc.;
- 10.Celebrity endorsements;
- 11.The availability of collected editions of the author’s work;
- 12.Biographies;
- 13.Reference books;
- 14.Translation and other international dissemination;
- 15.Visualisability: illustrations, photography, cinema, and Internet;
- 16.Locatability: association with a place or places, tourism, and shrines;
- 17.Inclusion in literary anthologies;
- 18.Variety or heterogeneity of the audience;
- 19.Adaptability: the readiness with which works can be appropriated by other media, such as music, painting, stage, and cinema;
- 20.Champions: literary societies, descendants, and keepers of the flame; individual advocates;
- 21.Educational uses: inclusion in school curricula;
- 22.Higher education: inclusion in the university canon.5
As cultural yardsticks go, this is a more than a serviceable list. But the curious case of the oddball Heinrich von Kleist and his continued—apparently uncontained—popularity (albeit mainly as an insider-tip, and largely in the German-speaking world) suggests that these might usefully be supplemented by a few further elements to account more fully for his literary longevity in particular, while also expanding our understanding of posthumous literary fame more generally. In other words, if we scrutinise why precisely Kleist has enjoyed such pronounced, vital, and we might even venture unnatural longevity, despite the brevity of both his life and oeuvre (biologically dead at the age of 34, and leaving behind only around a thousand pages of text, at least, so far—we shall return to these pesky ‘biological’ facts, and to this ‘so far’ in due course), the effect on the list is interesting. Moreover, his own original literature (we say original, although, of course, he was a notorious borrower, magpie, and self-plagiarist) is not quite as essential to the fame game as we philologists might like to think. In a version of reader-response theory, Italo Calvino significantly situates literary longevity not in the author’s works per se, but in the reader—understood as a reader-in-time—arguing that, even though the original books remain the same, “we [the readers] certainly have changed”, and so every “later encounter is therefore completely new”.6 Verbum scriptum non manet, it would seem.
While postmodernity has reimagined the static text as infinitely mutable or palimpsestic, literary biography—perhaps pushing back again this—has remained a fairly conservative genre, resistant in the main to this deep scepticism. By and large, our literary biographies speak as though the person of the author had a certain historical fixity and ontic givenness, providing a point of orientation in a world otherwise populated by unstable, shifting holotexts, and their eccentrically orbiting and concomitantly endless interpretations. And so there is, undeniably, an irreducible quality of realism and facticity in even the most adventurous literary biographies of Kleist.7 This question of biography is important because the author’s life is rightly granted a central place in Jackson’s enumeration of contributory factors in the chancy game of legacy. But Jackson does not mean this in any traditional sense. She illustrates her point in relation to another short-lived literary figure, Keats, whose truncated life itself made for such a gripping story that it contributed to his towering posthumous literary reputation perhaps as much as any Keatsian text. I say “story” to distinguish it from any raw historical facts of the poet’s actual existence. In fact, it drew in large part on a narrative that Keats himself had begun to craft during his lifetime: that of the “young, sensitive, gifted, unworldly artist cruelly mistreated and eventually destroyed by the literary establishment”.8 This, in turn, relied on well-known literary antecedents and cultural tropes, deriving much of its ability to compel audiences “from its close resemblance to mythical or ancient prototypes such as Adonis […] [and] literary counterparts such as Milton’s Lycidas”.9 Moreover, soon after his death,...