Holes and Excesses: On Wit and the Joke in Kleist's "Anecdote from the Last War"

Holes and Excesses:

On Wit and the Joke in Kleist's "Anecdote from the Last War"

The example of a joke that I would like to present comes with the attribute of being perhaps "the most tremendous [ungeheuerste] joke to have passed human lips since the beginning of time" and is thereby marked as more than a mere example.¹ The superlative introduces it as a joke that could stand for other jokes or even the whole genre of witticisms. It comes from Heinrich von Kleist's "Anecdote from the Last War," which appeared on October 20, 1810 (signed with the letter "x") in the Berliner Abendblätter that Kleist himself edited.

This joke makes its appearance at a time when wit [Witz] drops out of the field of poetics after having been temporarily subsumed under the concept of a faculty. Henceforth wit will be either included in the aesthetics of genius or excluded altogether from the new field of aesthetics emerging in the second half of the eighteenth century, since wit indicates a strong and disturbing connection between epistemology and poetics. In the early nineteenth century, a shift in meaning will occur in the word "wit" from designating a faculty to a use and form of language. As Freud has it, the change is from the kind of wit you can have to the joke that you make.² My reading of Kleist's Witz will reference the contemporary theory of wit proposed by Jean Paul, who introduced "Witz" into the nineteenth-century lexicon in his Vorschule der Aesthetik (School for Aesthetics), as well as Freud's Witztheorie, especially his definition of wit as an involuntary occurrence ["ein ungewollter Einfall"].³ "Einfall" is a concept that is untranslatable into English. When relating to semantics, Einfall has been translated as an "idea" or "notion." However, the particular wit of the Freudian "ungewollter Einfall" is lost. It is the intrusion that characterizes the joke as an "ungewollter Einfall" (we do not know why we laugh, or only too late when we are already laughing). It is also Freud who points to the violence of explosive laughter (Ausfälligkeit) at a joke that is necessary for the joke's completion and corresponds to the violence of the "Einfall" or intrusion. It is this correspondence between Einfall and Ausfall that can be found in the Prussian drummer's joke recounted in Kleist's "Anecdote." Excess (Ausfall, from the Latin excidere, to fall out) characterizes a joke's success, which manifests itself in explosive laughter.

My proposal is that in Kleist's "Anecdote from the Last War," we are confronted with the literality of the letter, that is, the text's insistence on its visible graphic form; writing manifests itself as a barrier to the ostensible semantic transparency that the signs seem to convey. But more than this, the exteriority of writing reveals itself as an excess of utterance over any intentional meaning.⁴ In Kleist's "Anecdote," the visible exteriority of writing is actually the point [der Witz] of the text. Exteriority is exposed in the joke but also as the joke that the text makes. It is a text about a joke that makes one itself; it is not only the telling but also the staging of a remarkable joke. The text presents the potential of being taken apart [Zerlegbarkeit] as the shaky foundation of every written text.⁵

In Kleist's "Anecdote," we are told of a joke made by a Prussian drummer who after the defeat at Jena continued the war against Napoleon's army on his own. He was "arrested by a troop of French gendarmes that tracked him down and was taken into town and sentenced to death by firing squad, as befitted his actions." The drummer's last wish revealed him as an "individual . . . who had no equal in...