Kleist’s Four Causes: Narration and Etiology in Das Erdbeben in Chili

Kleist’s Das Erdbeben in Chili (1807) both destroys and reconstitutes human society, revealing the core essence of the social order. It also shakes through several registers of storytelling, displaying the central principles of narrative possibility. These two seemingly incommensurable categories are shown to be related in the tale. A necessary web of narrative strategies is at work in the representation of society, and the elasticity or binding adhesiveness of the web is determined by varying notions of social causation inherent in the mode of storytelling assumed by the narrative voice. As chance, quite likely, would have it, the four successive registers of explanation invoked by the narrator can be read as a cogent commentary on Aristotle’s parsing of causation and contingency.² This essay identifies four modes of Kleistian etiology that are polymorphously analogous to Aristotle’s famous four causes. Far from simply tearing down the edifice of Western philosophical traditions, Kleist’s story presents an involved exegesis of etiological theories. It turns out that instead of merely replacing ancient (or Enlightenment) teleology with modern skepticism, as most scholars read the story, Erdbeben suggestively yokes ancient and idealist cosmologies together in a symbiotic complex.

As a story inspired by the catastrophic Lisbon earthquake of 1755 and the generation of theodical debates about the causes of evil that followed, Erdbeben has unsurprisingly provoked many reflections on contingency and causation.³ Werner Hamacher noted how the structure of Kleist’s story resembles an arch—the force of two chance catastrophes resting on each other to support a space for the possibility of narration, but which simultaneously weigh towards its destruction. He offers an unsettling and undermining critique not only of the story’s own narrative form, but of the representational mode in general. “Darstellung ist—suspendierter—Sturz” (157). Helmut Schneider takes up Hamacher’s stress of the trope of ‘falling’ in the story, but props up the figure of ‘standing’ over against it. Most ‘stands’ in the traditional sense of taking an intentional stance indeed prove to trip themselves up in Kleist. Schneider goes further, however, to locate in the novella an “aesthetic resolution” to the paradox posed between what he calls the “unrepresentable fall” and “representational (dignified) standing” (“Standing and Falling” 516). The reading of Das Erdbeben in Chili presented here stands (or wobbles) on the rubble mounds of both of these insightful glosses of the story’s deconstructive work, but takes care to listen closely to the narrative voice in order to distinguish precisely its stance in relation to the characters and events it describes.⁴ It turns out that the modulations in the registers of narration reveal much not only about the story’s deconstructive suggestiveness, but also about its constructive power. In fact, falling and contingency make up just one fourth of the narrator’s explanatory strategies. The tale can be read not only as a metaphor for the precarious quaking of representation, but also as a thorough taxonomy of modern understandings of causation.

Aristotle’s four causes are fundamental to his own philosophy and to the entire history of science. Their explication in book 2 of the Physics sets in motion the line of reasoning that leads all the way to the intricate cosmology that culminates much later in the Metaphysics. The influence of Aristotle’s etiology, variously interpreted, has meanwhile held later scientists and philosophers in thrall, whether through reverential devotion or rebellious rejection. At root, however, the four causes are simply a catalogue of the ways humans can answer the question “why?” To account for any observed change, one must investigate: what the object’s made of (material cause); its shape or governing ratio (formal cause); what brought it about (efficient or mechanical cause); and for what end or purpose (final cause).⁵ Aristotle might offer the following account for the zufällige Wölbung that saves Jeronimo amidst the destruction of the prison: two buildings, constructed in order to incarcerate criminals for the safety of citizens (final cause), are shaken to collapse by an earthquake (efficient cause). The stone...