Dances of the Self in Heinrich von Kleist, E. T. A. Hoffmann and Heinrich Heine (review)

In regard to the art of the dance, the default position, so to speak, for this study is the classical ballet that dominated the stage in the nineteenth century. It is the bodily movement counterpart to the Winckelmannian sculptural ideal, striving for vertical elevation, causing the body to disappear, and concealing bodily pain as alleged of the Laocoön sculpture. It requires the disciplining of subjectivity and spontaneity. It therefore can be understood as conservative and repressive, so that subversive writers, such as Kleist, Hoffmann, and Heine, regard it with hostility and imagine alternative modes of dance.

In Kleist’s essay on the marionette theater, classical ballet teaching produces failure. As against the vertical tendency of ballet, “[s]oul takes shape in a curved line” (33); Kleist appears to be revising or at least reversing Schiller’s opposition of grace with self-consciousness and defines a tension between weight and weightlessness. Bodily movement is performance, oscillating “between the wish for authenticity and the need for posing” (35). Ruprecht comments on the feminization of the male dancer, noting that when the youth imitating the thorn-drawer loses his gracefulness, he recovers his gender as a man, though a failed one. Ruprecht pursues the recurrent motif of falling throughout Kleist’s works, from which rising is a kind of relative survival.

If the Marionettentheater permits a reasonably optimistic reading, Hoffmann’s vision is much darker. Hoffmann disliked ballet and its music; he did not include a ballet in his opera Undine. He prefers “a synthesis of movement, mime and meaning” (63) and the carnivalistic randomness of the commedia dell’arte to the disciplined repetitiousness of the classical mode. Repetitiousness is thematic in Der Sandmann, in the regularity and flawlessness of the automaton Olimpia and in Nathanael’s “re-enactments of the traumatic primal scene” (67). Nathanael lacks the self-knowledge to escape the traumatic repetition, while the narrator is saved by the irony that his character lacks. The fantastic choreography of Prinzessin Brambilla is liberating, countering repetition with creative theatricality and metamorphosis. Yet the dancers frighten themselves also; “their delight in role-play is but the reverse of a pathological surrender to a schizophrenic sense of self” and “[t]he dancing Giglio becomes a mirror of the reader who tries to get hold of the text” (93). Nevertheless, “dialogic dances engender stability through motion, a form of stability that the paralysed Nathanael lacks” (95).

As has long been noted, dance motifs are significant in Heine’s writing. Ruprecht concentrates most of her attention on the dancing of Mademoiselle Laurence in Florentinische Nächte, which does not achieve classical purity and wholeness; its deformation of classical myth mirrors the modern mind, transgresses conventions, and prefigures forms of modern dance. In the course of the discussion Ruprecht undertakes something that has never been done before: she moves from her discussion of Heine to an analysis of the ballet Giselle, the scenario of which Gautier took from Heine’s Elementargeister. The result is what one would expect; the ballet conventions oblige Giselle’s movement to be confined, while Laurence’s dance “breaks with the code of movement set by classical ballet technique” (114) and leads to a new aesthetic.

I have here confessedly attempted to abstract the sort of interpretive points that interest me most from a dense and abstruse cultural-studies discourse that roams from Freud to, among others, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, and Judith Butler; thus I have doubtless truncated the aspect of the study that may be of most interest to others. Still, the broad synchronic range of cultural studies can foreshorten interpretation. This seems to me particularly the case with Heine; for all the acuteness of the close reading of Laurence’s performance, it does not comprehend the full significance of dance for him. Ruprecht begins the section with the bacchanalian ball in the Briefe aus Berlin, remarking of it that “it...