Artist's Book Yearbook 2003-2005 - Book Arts - University of the ...

them, not hidden but veiled? Mull them over,
or read on? Having found one such page, do
you search for others or leave it until later?
Are the words a commentary, an exegesis, a
counterpoint?
Read. For the story is thrilling -- in two
paragraphs the young Jeronimo has attained
the summit of his happiness (in Constantine's
version), consummated his love (in Taylor's)
and an elided nine months later, Josepha sinks
down to the ground in labour. By the third
paragraph she, rendered criminal, is on route
to the scaffold. By the fourth, young ladies
(Taylor) or pious daughters of the city
(Constantine) hang out windows to view the
spectacle offered to (Constantine) or mounted
for (Taylor) divine vengeance. Then, just as
Josepha is about to be beheaded (Constantine)
or burnt at the stake (Taylor), and while
Jeronimo is testing the knot on his self-made
noose -- the earthquake.
Having enjoyed the rubble, the screaming
people on burning rooftops, the men and
animals struggling with the flood, we pass
outside the city gate with Jeronimo. He faints,
comes to, and a spirit of bliss takes hold of him
as a west wind blows, and he looks down on the
loveliness of the land. Josepha in the meantime
has seen a convent-full of nuns crushed, the
corpse of the archbishop, her father's house
submerged in a lake boiling with red vapour,
and the destruction of the law court where her
sentence was passed. She too has escaped the
city and has crept, baby in arms, into a dark
valley shaded with pine trees.
I can read no longer without thinking of the
time of the writing (probably 1806), and of the
writer, of Kleist (1777-1811). The hills, the
valley, the pines and the hordes of distressed
people without number bring me back in time
into the mental space of the last years of the
eighteenth, the first years of the nineteenth
century. But whose time? Not only can I not
propel myself back – well who could? -- but I do
not even know German. Literally, I must read
in translation. Constantine, properly, translates
through Kleist’s older contemporary, Kant
(1724 –1804) and other philosophers. Taylor
through the philosophical poet Coleridge
(1772-1836). And I – astigmatic, myopic and
68
presbyopic, read, at the beginning of the 21st
century, through scratched plastic obsolescent
National Health Service trifocals. A (largely
second-hand) Freud and his followers when I
read down, a vibrant unreachable indubitably
post-modern far distance as I read up. Always a
blur as I move through the middle. Would
someone who knows more be helped or
hindered by a greater background knowledge?
All I can assert is that there is a difference
between
“…and as though one fearful impression had
driven all previous impressions from his
[Jeronimo's] mind he wept for joy that life in
its sweetness so full of bright phenomena was
still his to delight in [Constantine]”
and
“as though that one terrible event had
completely banished all earlier visions from
his mind, he now wept for joy that he was still
able to revel in the manifold delights that life
had to offer [Taylor]”.
An impression or an event? Joy that life exists
and that the bright phenomena are still there
for us to delight in? Or joy that one can still
revel in the delights, rather than sink into
dejection and melancholy? The passages
neither evoke, nor mean the same thing.
By now the rhetorical devices which shape the
story begin to reveal themselves. Our reading
post-dates the emergence of a critical
vocabulary which accommodates such insights,
and we can foresee that the story will fold back
on itself, and that Josepha and Jeronimo, will,
after the passage of a day of horror and a night
full of wonder, meet the death to which they
were on route as the story opened. The desire
of the story is to hold out or tantalise with the
threat of their deaths, postpone it with vivid or
lyrical descriptions, and then, in a shortish
paragraph, bring about their deaths, and the
death of a baby – not of their baby, little Philip,
but of little Juan. This doubling back, postponed
through wandering and puffed with
incident, is the space of the story. It would be
tedious to tell you the plot.