Holes and Excesses: On Wit and the Joke in Kleist’s “Anecdote from the Last War”

❦

Bettine Menke

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 aes-thetics emerging in the second half of the eighteenth century, since wit indicates a strong and disturbing connection between epistemol-ogy 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

1 Berliner Abendblätter, Leaf 18, 20 Oct. 1810, vol. 1, 73–74 in Heinrich von Kleist, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. Helmut Sembdner, 2 vols. (München: C. Hanser, 1965) II:268 (hereafter SW). The text is also printed in Heinrich von Kleist, Sämtliche Werke: Berliner Ausgabe, eds. Roland Reuß and Peter Staengle, vol. II:7 (Basel : Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 1988–) 96 (hereafter BA).

MLN 122 (2007): 647–664 © 2007 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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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 “unge-wollter 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 “Anec-dote.” 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

2 Sigmund Freud, Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten (1905) Gesammelte Werke: Studienausgabe, vol. 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1970) 15. References to the English translation are to Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1989) 8. The above-cited passage, however, is a quota-tion from Theodor Lipps, Komik und Humor: Eine Psychologisch-Ästhetische Untersuchung (Hamburg: Voss, 1898) 78.

3 Freud speaks of the joke as an involuntary occurrence [“ungewollter Einfall”]. Freud, Jokes, 207; Der Witz, 157. Samuel Weber explains, “Einfall ist der Sprachgebrauch des immer zu spät zu sich kommenden Bewußtseins: Eigentlich weiß es von nichts, oder [...] von jener ‘Absenz’, die mit der Präsenz des Witzes zusammenfällt,” in S. Weber, “Die Zeit des Lachens,” Heilloses Lachen: Fragmente zum Witz, ed. Wissenschaftliches Zentrum für Psychoanalyse, Psychotherapie und Psychosoziale Forschung (Kassel: Jenior und Pressler, 1994) 87.

4 I am referring to Shoshana Felman, The Scandal of the Speaking Body: Don Juan with J.L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003) iv and Freud, Der Witz.

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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 drum-mer 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 Greek or Roman history.” When asked what it was he wanted, “He pulled down his pants and said: ‘Would they please shoot him in the . . . so that the s... wouldn’t get a h... in it.’”6 When we try to enunciate what is written, it becomes clear that we are dealing with effects specific to writing. The point of Kleist’s “Anecdote” is made by presenting the drummer’s witty enactment, both a physical and verbal performance, in the medium of writing.

The drummer’s joke is, first of all, an instance of acting out: a dis-play of grotesque corporeality. His exposure exhibits the body not as something beautiful and complete, but as the “grotesque body,” which is the “opposite of a complete stage,” as described by Mikhail Bakhtin and Renate Lachmann.7 The “grotesque body” is contrasted with the “new bodily canon” emerging in the eighteenth century that “presents an entirely finished, completed, strictly limited body . . . shown from the outside as something individual,” in which “that which protrudes, bulges, sprouts, or branches off” is negated and “all orifices . . . are closed.”8 The negation of the grotesque ambiguity of the body leaves a private body that is subject to the laws of psychology and complete in itself. The limits between this body and the outside world are set up to exclude ambiguity and to constitute the new individual body as a unity complete in itself and assured of remaining separate and closed. The integrated form determines the relation between inside and outside as one of totalizing inclusion. In return, the body becomes the model for any kind of aesthetic integration. The grotesque body, in

5 The German suffix “-barkeit” means the ability or capability of something, in this case that of the text to be taken apart, dismantled, or broken up into parts. To call this a capability or potential is paradoxical.

6 “Zog er sich die Hosen ab und sprach: sie möchten ihn in den . . . schießen, damit das F... kein L... bekäme.” SW II:268.

7 All subsequent citations in English are taken from Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1965) 303–05.

8 Renate Lachmann, foreword, Rabelais und seine Welt: Volkskultur als Gegenkultur by Mikhail Bakhtin, trans. Gabriele Leupold (Frankfurt am Main: Surkamp, 1987) 38.

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contrast, consists of orifices and convexities that give birth to another body.9 The grotesque body as such is a double body, full of ambiguity, doubled in itself. Certain bodily acts have the power to turn the body inside out, acts like penetrating, expelling, dismembering, defecation, and devouring. As excessive acts, they refer back to the grotesque body and expose it as the very body negated in the individual expres-sive body. Turning the body inside out via certain bodily acts is also what happens in laughter. Renate Lachmann draws attention to the German expression Sich-Ausschütten-vor-Lachen;10 the English “to split one’s sides laughing” calls up something similar, as does the French éclater de rire.11

Through his exposing enactment the drummer seems to be pleading to have his body left intact. And yet it is his gesture that exposes the body as something that is not closed or whole even before the entry of a bullet. He turns around and displays the hole through which the inside is turned out and the grotesque body is born in its duality. By contrast, the mouth is an orifice not of exposing but of integration. It regulates the inclusion of the outside in the body’s interior, while also closing the one off from the other. In exposing a hole that constitutes another orifice, albeit one without a face, the drummer severs the link between speech and its supposed human origin in a being with a face. The text of the “Anecdote” maintains a telling silence about this other orifice. However, this silence does not work to keep the body whole and intact; rather, it insists upon the omission, which is itself pointed out and marked through the punctuation “...”.

The speech accompanying the drummer’s bodily acting-out is an integral part of his joke.12 Certain portions of the soldier’s witticism

9 Lachmann, 37. The (grotesque) body is “nie als fertiger zu denken, sondern immer als werdender, vergehender, offener. Durch die besondere Betonung aller Körperpartien und -teile, die sozusagen über die glatten Grenzen eines geschlossenen Korpus hin-ausgehen (Nase, Phallus, Bauch, Hintern) wird im Körper selbst die Grenze zwischen zwei Körpern abgebildet” (38). In French witticism may also be translated as saillie (a projection, overhang, hump or hunchback) or a blague (a pouch for tobacco).

10 Lachmann, 39. Ausschütten means to pour out a liquid; the reflexive form implies that a person who laughs pours himself or herself out.

11 See Felman, The Scandal, 87. “Thus the act of provoking laughter . . . by causing a slip (by tripping) leads to the act of exploding.”

12 It is to be doubted that the “ständige Angaben über Mienenspiel, Tonfall und begleitende Gebärden” in Kleist’s texts manifest the unity of body and soul. Rather, the gestures bear witness to the fact that “sprachliche Äußerung einerseits und Gebär-densprachliches, Paralinguistisches andererseits in ein dissonantes Verhältnis treten können.” See Heinz-Dieter Weber, “Zu Heinrich von Kleists Kunst der Anekdote,” Der Deutschunterricht 30 (1978): 20. If the dissonance between a behavior in gesture and in

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are omitted in Kleist’s text, the omissions being marked as follows: “would they please shoot him in the . . . so that the s... wouldn’t get a h... in it” [“sie möchten ihn in den . . . schießen, damit das F... kein L... bekäme”].13 A feeling for decency might motivate the first omission, although it would be less the drummer’s than the author’s. But why are both “skin” and “hole” so clearly indicated and at the same time substituted by dots? These are two words which could very well be written out in a literary text, and in fact they are, along with “Hintern” [behind], in a different, earlier version of the anecdote published under the title “A Witticism (occurring) at the Moment of Death” [“Sonderbarer Einfall im Augenblicke des Todes”]:14 “I ask to be shot in the behind, so that the pelt may stay intact” [“Nun, so bitt’ ich (...) mich im Hintern schießen zu lassen, damit der Balg ganz bleibe”].15 In Kleist’s later “Anecdote,” the ellipses or suspending dots conceal the words and make them secret by withholding them while simultaneously marking their omission. Initially it would seem that the three ellipses function in different ways: whereas in the last two instances each dot marks the omission of precisely one letter by taking its place, the three dots in the first case seem to visualize the omission not of letters but of words. However, in the original edition of the text in the Berliner Abendblätter there were four dots instead of the three one finds in current editions of Kleist’s works: “sie mögten ihn in den . . . . schießen.”16 These four dots may replace and stand for four letters.17 But they also draw attention to the literality of the word: its potential for being dismantled into letters and falling apart at the threshold of becoming a word or even thereafter.

speech is to be taken as paradigmatic, the regularity and the recognizability of human behavior are not at all secure.

13 SW II:268.14 Johann Adam Bergk, Sammlung von Anekdoten und Charakterzügen aus den beiden

merkwürdigen Kriegen in Süd- und Nord-Deutschland in den Jahren 1805, 1806 und 1807, vol. VII:3 (Leipzig: Baumgärtner, 1807–1813) 246–47. See BA-Quellensammlung Q109601A in Berliner Ausgabe, eds. Roland Reuß and Peter Staengle, CD-ROM (Frankfurt am Main: Stroemfeld, 1997).

15 Bergk, 246–47. See BA-Quellensammlung Q109601A. In a letter from 23 October 1810, Kleist himself refers to “Beobachter an der Spree” (SW II:913). He also states, “Das Wochenblatt [wurde] in Berlin schon vor dem Sonntag ausgeliefert.” Cited in Helmut Sembdner, Die Berliner Abendblätter Heinrich von Kleists, ihre Quellen und ihre Redaktion (Berlin: Weidmann, 1939) 87–88.

16 It is correctly reproduced only in BA II:7, 96.17 In German, there is also the euphemism of the vier Buchstaben, the four letters,

that stand in for Popo or butt. See Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm, “Vier Buchstaben,” Deutsches Wörterbuch: Nachdruck der Erstausgabe, vol. 26 (1854–1860; München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1984) 261.

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The double textuality of this text goes beyond any cryptographic decipherability, even if it is possible to spell out its meaning. In the earlier version, “I ask to be shot in the behind so that the pelt remains intact” could be read as having a double meaning.18 The “good sense” of its witticism might then be found in the field of politics.19 The French occupying forces, thinking in strictly economic terms, want to make the best use of any body, even a dead one, and the same goes for the body of a country.20 But in the case of Kleist’s “Anecdote” the printed omissions reach beyond this understanding, doubling the double talk. The text corresponds to the drummer’s way of exposing the grotesque body by staging its medium: script as a performance of letters and blank spaces.21 The text is visualized as a stage or “the-ater of letters” that discloses the other scene, the scene of writing.22 Whereas in the realm of understanding, i.e., from the perspective of the unity of words, letters are to be forgotten to make sense, here letters are allowed to enter the stage of writing organized by the text. Their reference is beyond the unity of the word—the entity to which meaning is ascribed. The letters point to the fact that the potential for being dismembered is the prerequisite for anything to be read together, and they do so precisely by being omitted and substituted by

18 Bergk, 246–47. See also BA-Quellensammlung Q109601A.19 Freud speaks of the “good sense” a joke makes; it is one of the two “faces” that

a joke shows Freud, even if the sense is gone when the joke succeeds and results in laughter. See Freud, Der Witz 146; Jokes, 147–48, 158, 160, 190.

20 Moreover, after the routing of the Prussian army, the drummer was already operat-ing ambush-style [“aus dem Hinterhalt”] at the moment of his death. The tactic was developed by partisans fighting against Napoleon’s troops. The drummer’s actions could be read as those of a “Sans-culotte” as well as an obscene provocation to the French. Cf. Bergk, 246; BA-Quellensammlung Q109601A; and “Beobachter an der Spree” 22 October 1810, SW II:913. For an analysis of the French influence on Kleist’s language, see Michael Moering, Witz und Ironie in der Prosa Heinrich von Kleists (München: Wilhem Fink, 1972) 159–60, 139–40, 153).

21 The possibility of transgressive representation is indicated in “Theater: Ueber Darstellbarkeit auf der Bühne” (BA II:7, 93), which immediately precedes Kleist’s “Anecdote.” An actual military execution by firing squad must be excluded from the stage since it is repugnant. See Sibylle Peters, “Wie Geschichte geschehen lassen? Thea-tralität und Anekdotizität in den ‘Berliner Abendblättern,’” Kleist-Jahrbuch (1999): 84–86. Something similar is going on in Heinrich von Kleist’s “Der Griffel Gottes” (Kleist, Berliner Abendblätter, 5 October 1810, Leaf 5, BA II:7, 28, SW II:263), where possible recombinations and variations in spacing between letters are applied, such that the verdict of three words is impossible to interpret directly or clearly: “vielmehr sind sie ein Veränderliches, Bedingtes und Vergängliches.” See Fabian Dierig, “Zu ‘der Griffel Gottes,’” Brandenburger Kleist Blätter 11 (1997): 19–21.

22 Thomas Schestag, “Bär,” Geteilte Aufmerksamkeit. Zur Frage des Lesens, ed. Thomas Schestag (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1997) 179.

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punctuation marks. The dots mark the inherent substitutability of the word’s elements. This shatters the unity of the word’s body. Written signs are staged as operators, indices of replacement, pure markers; they become visible as punctures punctuating the words.23

Conversely, the joke, the “most tremendous” as well as “most mon-strous joke” [“der ungeheuerste Witz”],24 whether made by Kleist or the drummer, also stages the lettered quality of the text. When Kleist presents “the most monstrous joke to have passed human lips since the beginning of time” through the drummer’s persona, the drummer is not the only one who has replaced the mouth with other orifices. As soon as the joke is cited, it is no longer uttered by human lips, but by the text or writing itself. Scripturality assumes the role of making the joke. Staging writing as that which consists of letters precisely by replacing these letters reveals writing as a medium for disassembling. Writing is shown as that which does not “pass human lips” and which cannot be produced by a human voice or attributed to a human face. Hence the fictitious human face that personifies the comprehensibility and plausibility of any text is crossed out and peforated here.

The signs outside the alphanumeric set of characters draw attention to themselves and their existence before and beyond meaning. They turn against even the “witty speaker” himself: the speaker’s desire to keep his skin whole cannot be fulfilled. According to the drummer’s last wish, the bullets intended to hit him shall enter his body only where the one exposed hole has been waiting for the violent intru-sion of the other. This one hole is indicated by punctures in the text. In its multiplied holes the text itself argues against that which the speaker, the drummer, pretends to mean and wish. Typographically, it plays out what the actor in the narration wanted to avoid. Here, in black and white, the hole becomes visible in punctures, that is, the one hole multiplied into many printed holes or points of interrup-tion and disruption. The exposed hole that negates the ideal body’s wholeness and the regulated relation between inside and outside is manifested in the text through a metonymical repetition spelled out in staccato marks or excessive punctuation that is not regulated by any author. The marks themselves (“...”) perform the perforation of

23 For a discussion of signs apart from the alphabet, like the dash, which the human voice cannot reproduce, see Friedrich A. Kittler, Aufschreibesysteme 1800–1900 (München: Fink, 1985) 262–63.

24 The full line reads, “den ungeheuersten Witz, der vielleicht , so lange die Erde steht, über Menschenlippen gekommen ist.” “Ungeheuer” covers a broad range of meaning from tremendous and terrible to monstrous and uncanny.

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wholeness (w-h-o-l-e)—the wholeness of the word, the sentence, and the body—and exposes its hole-ness (h-o-l-e).

Typographical marks perforate the text throughout. The repeatedly appearing dots are indexical signs which may invite an iconic interpre-tation as holes, but this interpretation remains empty as the (mere) punch line and as a lack that is shown by punctures. Typographically, the text enacts the joke it retells in the form of a Stichelei : a stitching or a needling, a raillerie manifest in the punch(ed) line.25 Considering that this joke has no single but multiple authors or, conversely, none—we are dealing after all with an anecdote without an author and a text signed by the letter “x”26—one can hardly decide who the joke is on: Is it on the Frenchmen insofar as the drummer turns his helpless situation around and assumes authority? Or is the joke on the drummer who is too attached to the skin, whether it his skin or that of the drum? Or is it, in the end, a joke on the author of the anecdote, whose place is left empty and marked by an “x,” the author who realizes the drummer’s witty idea (his Einfall) in written form as punctuation or Stichelei and who may have thought he had authority over the joke?

To speak of the drummer’s witty Einfall is to allude to Freud’s char-acterization of the joke as an unwanted occurrence [“ungewollter Einfall”].27 Along with Freud, Samuel Weber characterizes the “Einfall” as “the language use of consciousness which always comes to itself too late. Consciousness knows nothing or . . . is only aware of that absence which coincides with the presence of wit.”28 Kleist’s “Anecdote” allows for the intrusion of letters and even the literal collapse [Einfall] of writing itself, which insists on being composed of moveable elements that can be disassembled and newly combined or substituted, thereby resisting the anthropomorphism of meaning.

The “F...” for “Fell”—translated as “skin” or “hide”—characterizes

25 Stichelei literally means stitching, pricking, needling, sneering, and gibing and translates the French raillerie into German.

26 Peter Fenves writes, “What the ‘an’ in ‘anecdote’ negates is authority. Under no condi-tion can auctoritas express itself anecdotally” and “What anecdotes generally withhold . . . is evidence. Instead of giving evidence, they pass along hearsay,” in P. Fenves, Arresting Language: From Leibniz to Benjamin (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001) 152–53. Regarding anecdotes, see also Bernhard Greiner, Kleists Dramen und Erzählungen: Experimente zum ‘Fall’ der Kunst (Tübingen: Francke, 2000) 386–87. Relating to the medium, see Sybille Peters, “Von der Klugheitslehre des Medialen. (Eine Paradoxe.) Ein Vorschlag zum Gebrauch der ‘Berliner Abendblätter,’” Kleist-Jahrbuch (2000): 158.

27 Freud, Jokes, 207; Der Witz 157. “In the formation of a joke one drops a train of thought for a moment and . . . it then suddenly emerges from the unconscious as a joke” (208).

28 S. Weber, 87.

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the body as an animal body and marks what is specifically non-human and non-anthropomorphic in the “monstrous joke,” the tremendous and terrible joke that is said to have perhaps “no equal in Greek or Roman history.” It realizes a transgression of the beautiful that is quite different from antique pathos or the sublime.

The interaction between the text that insists on its scripturality and the exposure of the grotesque body it speaks about character-izes Kleist’s “Anecdote.” This interaction takes the form of a gesture that is directed against the aesthetics of the time. At the end of the eighteenth century, aesthetics stressed representation as embodiment [darstellende Verkörperung], which found its paradigm in the individu-ally expressive and beautiful human body. Around 1800, aesthetic representation was thought of as the animated embodiment of a soul contained in its interior, whereas the marble surface or exterior was to remain sealed. This embodiment acts simultaneously as the soul’s expression. In Kleist’s “Anecdote,” what enters the stage is the opposite of the anthropomorphism of the self-enclosed surface of representa-tion, and it does so through a typographical perforation.

In the developing aesthetic concept of representation as animated embodiment, wit was either rejected as the opposite of spirit [anima], that is, it was devalued and excluded, or it was included in the aesthet-ics of an animated body but with prescribed limits. In his Vorschule der Ästhetik, Jean Paul sees “Witz” as coming close to metaphor and there-fore translatable as an “imaginary or metaphorical joke” [“bildlicher Witz”]. For this, “bildlicher Witz” has to be clearly distinguished from “unbildlicher Witz” (based on mere esprit).29 But the case of Jean Paul is not quite so easy.30 His celebrated formula for “Witz” as “the priest in disguise who couples every pair” [“der verkleidete Priester, der jedes Paar kopuliert”]31 creates a viable model developed by Vischer and later quoted by Freud in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious.32

29 Jean Paul, Vorschule der Ästhetik, Jean Paul: Sämtliche Werke, ed. Norbert Miller, vol. I.5 (München: Hanser, 1963), 182–91. All citations in English translation are taken from Jean Paul Richter’s School for Aesthetics, intro. and trans. by Margaret R. Hale (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1973). In this edition “bildlicher Witz” is translated as “figurative Wit” (129–34) and “unbildlicher Witz” as “nonfigurative Wit” (123–25), which is misleading. The bashing of the French wit or esprit is to be found in School for Aesthetics, 134, 142; Vorschule, 188, 200.

30 Jean Paul’s concept of “Witz” as well as the ubiquity of witticisms in the text that lays out this concept contradicts this hierarchical opposition. See Bettine Menke, “Jean Pauls Witz: Kraft und Formel,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift 76 (2002): 201–13.

31 Jean Paul, School for Aesthetics 123; Vorschule 173.32 Freud, Jokes, 7, 9–10, 14–19; Der Witz, 15, 20–23.

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The priest in disguise covers up what seems to be the force of the witty coupling. This coupling trick is based on “speed,” on the “juggling, punning rapidity of the language, which makes half, third or quarter similarities into equalities by finding for two things a single predica-tive sign.”33 Jean Paul’s example for this kind of homonymic pun is the zeugma: “I sharpen ear and quill” [“Ich spitze Ohr und Feder”].34 The basis of sameness created by a word is illusory or even deceptive [“Trug”].35 With the priest in disguise a seeming fulfillment of the coupling takes place through the investiture of sense, which is neces-sary for the understanding of the joke. However, this investiture reveals itself as “mere” appearance, a presumption that remains nothing but an imputation of fulfillment and whose cover is blown. At the end of the nineteenth century, Theodor Lipps discusses this interplay in Komik und Humor: Eine Psychologisch-Aesthetische Untersuchung in which he defines Jean Paul’s concept of wit as lending an utterance a meaning we know cannot logically be meant by it.36 The “lent” meaning dissolves into mere nothingness, but this nothingness is linguistic productivity itself, the nonsense in which meaning may be generated ceaselessly. Nothingness of meaning is the complementary side of performative excess or the excessive forcefulness of the statement that overpowers its meaning.37 In her reading of Austin, Shoshana Felman focuses on the concept of the performative as the excess of utterance over the meaning of the statement.38 Here we have the scandal that Felman

33 “Die taschen- und wortspielerische Geschwindigkeit der Sprache, welche halbe, Drittel-, Viertel-Ähnlichkeiten zu Gleichheiten macht, weil für beide ein Zeichen des Prädikats gefunden wird.” Jean Paul, School for Aesthetics, 123; Vorschule, 173–74.

34 Jean Paul, School for Aesthetics, 124; Vorschule, 174.35 Jean Paul, School for Aesthetics, 129; Vorschule, 182.36 Lipps states, “Wir leihen einer Aussage einen Sinn, und wissen, dass er ihr logi-

scherweise nicht zukommen kann” (60–62, 92). Lipps is not only quoted by Freud, but also named as someone whose book Freud could not do without to write Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (Freud, Introduction to Jokes, 5). See also Lipps 60–61, 84–86: “In jedem Falle besteht der psychologische Process, den die witzige Aussage in uns hervorruft [...], in dem unvermittelten Übergang von jenem Leihen, Fürwahrhalten, Zugestehen zum Bewusstsein oder Eindruck relativer Nichtigkeit” (85).

37 Lipps, 92. He writes on the following page, “die Worte allerdings sind beim Witze jederzeit dem, was sie meinen, in gewissem Sinne fremd, in dem [...] Sinne nämlich, dass sie nach gemeiner Denk- und Ausdrucksweise das Gemeinte nicht scheinen be-zeichnen zu können” (93). “Wir fragen nicht mehr: was will das? Wir antworten auch nicht mehr: das ist gemeint, sondern wir wissen: So ist es gemacht [...]. Diese [...] Er-leuchtung, wie es gemacht ist, die Einsicht, dass ein nach gemeinem Sprachgebrauch sinnloses Wort das Ganze verschuldet hat, diese völlige Lösung, d.h. Auflösung in nichts, erzeugt die Komik” (95).

38 Felman states, “The ‘force of utterance’ is constantly in excess over the meaning of the theoretical statement” (80).

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speaks of. Insofar as the success or felicity [Glücken] of a performative is bound to the uncontrolled excess of utterance over statement, it is indistinguishable from failure; success or failure of the performative becomes uncontrollable.39 The same goes for the effectiveness of a joke. According to Freud, what makes a joke successful is an excess manifested in laughter. The result is explosive laughter, bodily contor-tion, and the discharge of excess energy used to no end, not even to the understanding of the joke.40

For Jean Paul, a joke is “not a child born as a conclusion of the two ideas coupled.”41 It is rather a “jump” or a “spark.” The force of wit is empty productivity, an effect like lightning; wit exists only insofar as it wastes itself.42 The “imaginary or metaphoric joke” [“der bildliche Witz”], however, is seen in a different light. In broad daylight, under-standing completes itself as both a metaphorical and metaphorological phenomenon:

The same unknown power which in its flames melted into a single life two such heterogeneous beings as body and spirit repeats this ennobling and fusing process [inside and outside of us]. Meanwhile without deduction or transition it forces us to free the light fire of the spirit from the weight of matter, thought from sound, the powers and movements of a spirit from the parts and features of the face, and thus generally to infer inner movement from outer . . . so the physical exterior mirrors the spiritual exterior.43

This is what constitutes metaphor, which instantaneously and without mediation finds “the similarity between the bodily world and the world of

39 Felman explains, “Radical negativity (or ‘saying no’) belongs neither to negation, nor to opposition, nor to correction (‘normalization’), nor to contradiction (of positive and negative, normal and abnormal, ‘serious’ and ‘unserious’, ‘clarity’ and ‘obscurity’)—it belongs precisely to scandal: to the scandal of their non-opposition” (104).

40 Freud, Jokes, 96, 178; Der Witz, 79, 137. See S. Weber, 81, “Nous ne savons, dit de même Freud, (...) ce qui nous fait rire,” and Felman, 86, “‘We do not know,’ Freud says similarly, ‘. . . what we are laughing about.’”

41 Jean Paul, School for Aesthetics 121–23; Vorschule 171, 173–74: “Nicht ein Schluß-Kind aus beiden Vorstellungen.”

42 Jean Paul, School for Aesthetics, 141; Vorschule, 198. It is bound to its “Überfluß”(overflow). See Marianne Schuller, “Der Witz oder die ‘Liebe zum leersten Ausgange,’” Heilloses Lachen, 16.

43 Jean Paul, School for Aesthetics, 129–30; Vorschule 182: “Dieselbe unbekannte Gewalt, welche mit Flammen zwei so spröde Wesen, wie Leib und Geist, in ein Leben ver-schmelzte, wiederholt in und außer uns dieses Veredeln und Vermischen; indem sie uns nötigt, ohne Schluß und Übergang aus der schweren Materie das leichte Feuer des Geistes zu entbinden, aus dem Laut den Gedanken, aus Teilen und Zügen des Gesichts Kräfte und Bewegungen eines Geistes und so überall aus äußerer Bewegung innere [...], so spiegelt das körperliche Äußere das Geistige.”

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the spirit” contemplated by the mind’s eye.44 If, as a result, imagination [“bildliche Phantasie”] is “strictly bound to unified images, because they must live, which a being composed of conflicting members cannot do,” then wit that wants to present “only a lifeless mosaic . . . can force the reader to jump at every comma.”45 With and in the act of coupling, wit executes a jump and creates a fissure: the meta-metaphor given by the body that is not whole and which consists of heterogeneous members [Glieder]. In the comma we have a sign in place of the empty “force” that constitutes the witty coupling. The comma is a mark that itself has no meaning or reference but takes part in the written organization by intervening in the chain of signifiers. Its intervention is in this instance a choreographic notation for the mere enactment of nothing.

Both Jean Paul and Freud are suspicious of wordplays or puns, which in Jean Paul’s treatise are paradigmatic for the “unbildlicher Witz.” They are produced by accident [Zufall], and are indeed a Zufall, a meeting by chance, an accidental coupling, a coincidence.46 This chance offered by language leads Jean Paul to his formula of “a wild coupling without a priest.”47 However, mere coincidence is “pure” chance only insofar as it imputes a causality, whose “foundation” is the precarious literality of the connection.48 In puns, like Lehre and Leere or bore and boar, similarity exists only at the level of the signifier. As soon as this coincidence is revealed, it seems less an accident than a motivated connection: meaning is conjured up. On the other hand, this is given only by language; it is a meeting by chance [Zufall]. The pun or play on words concerns the “illegitimate union of two con-cepts” that “causes a moral and logical scandal” insofar as it suggests

44 Jean Paul, School for Aesthetics, 122; Vorschule, 172: “Das witzige Verhältnis wird angeschauet.”

45 Jean Paul, School for Aesthetics, 133; Vorschule, 187–88: “Daher ist die bildliche Phan-tasie strenge an Einheit ihrer Bilder gebunden—weil sie leben sollen, ein Wesen aber aus kämpfenden Gliedern es nicht vermag—; der bildliche Witz hingegen da er nur eine leblose Musaik geben will, in jedem Komma den Leser zu springen nötigen.” “[Der Witz] will nichts als sich und spielt ums Spiel—[...]—seine Systeme gehen in Kommata hinein—er ist atomistisch, ohne wahre Verbindung—.” ( Jean Paul, Vorschule 201, School for Aesthetics 133).

46 “Accidental” derives from the Latin accidere, to fall towards, which is a literal transla-tion of the German word Zufall, as in the expression, “Das ist mir zugefallen” (I got it without even working toward it; it is a gift).

47 Jean Paul, School for Aesthetics, 137–38; Vorschule; 193–94.48 Jean Paul, School for Aesthetics, 138; Vorschule, 193–94: “If we believe a coincidence

that we perceive is a pure one, without any possible admixture of causality, it no longer satisfies us, nor do we use the word coincidence.”

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a substantial fulfillment of the relation and insofar as the substance of the relation is revealed as spurious.49

The “h...” and “s...” in Kleist’s anecdote can be considered a struc-tural model for the paranomastic wordplay or pun. According to Renate Lachmann, in mannerism the conceit can be characterized as the “evaporation” [“Verflüchtigung”] of the tertium comparationis ; the metaphor’s term of comparison vanishes.50 Here, we are facing a further twist. The punch line is not only literally devoid of substance, but finds a literal enactment above and beyond the realm of letters: “...”. The possibility of dismemberment is the basis and the binding force. This basis is empty in its repetition; it is mere rhythmic or met-onymic dispersal of the punch line as punctuation.

If, according to Jean Paul, the point of the joke lies in the “free-dom of the mind which is capable of turning its eyes away from the thing towards its signs,” Jean Paul is speaking of the productivity of language, which results in the ceaseless production of meaning. This theoretical insight is turned back against its interpreter.51 Wit is the suspension of meaning that results in ambiguity: Is one really dealing with meaningful speech or, according to Jean Paul, just with “gam-bling chips in word play” [“Spielmarke[n] des Wortspiels”]52 or, in the case of Kleist’s text, with punctuation marks, empty punch-lines? One cannot decide whether one is dealing with profundity or just trivial mirth, and according to Felman, this inability to decide is the veritable scandal of a successful joke. What constitutes the performative is the utterance’s force which does not integrate into the meaning of what is uttered.

In his Vorschule der Ästhetik, Jean Paul aims to set limits to this sort

49 Sarah Kofman, Die lachenden Dritten: Freud und der Witz, trans. Monika Buchgeister and Hans-Walter Schmidt (München: Verlag Internationale Psychoanalyse, 1990) 48–49. Regarding Freud’s example of traduttore and traditore, see Jokes, 36, 147–48; Der Witz, 35, 113–14.

50 Renate Lachmann, Die Zerstörung der schönen Rede: Rhetorische Tradition und Konzepte des Poetischen (München: Fink, 1994), 103–04. This is not included in the English ver-sion. See Renate Lachmann: “‘Problematic Similarity’: Sarbiewski’s Treatise De Acuto Et Arguto in the Context of Concettistic Theories of the 17th Century,” Russian Literature 27:2 (1990): 239–52.

51 In plays on words, modes of combination and disassembly have proved to be as unreliable as they are unavoidable for establishing the relationship between ideas. Nevertheless, many interpreters of jokes still fall prey to the misconception: “Some similarity is to be expected from things with identical echoes” ( Jean Paul, School of Aesthetics, 137; Vorschule, 193; and Freud, Jokes, 147; Der Witz, 113).

52 Jean Paul, School of Aesthetics, 136: “the play money of puns;” Vorschule, 192.

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of uncontrolled discharge, proceeding to remove from the realm of wit [Witz] the mechanism at work before the formation of the word, excluding it first on the level of the syllables, then of the letters.53 On the level of letters, this mechanism is particularly dangerous: letters have the power of producing wit by insisting upon the meaningless-ness of the production of meaning as such, the nonsense of the pro-duction of sense. Around 1800, this danger was represented by the letter itself that succeeded in taking the stage. This is why Jean Paul describes a decline in forms of wit. First, he eliminates the pun or “the gambler’s play on words” [“der Wortspielerwitz”], then the still “legitimate caprice of the multidimensional syllabic puzzle,” then the “letter-play” (anagram) and even the more miserable anagrammatic charade (logogriph), and finally the “wretched hunchbacked chrono-gram,” a numerical anagram that dismantles words by making specific capitalized letters readable as Roman numerals.54 Here, letters have turned into obstacles to any linear reading of the word as meaning by insisting upon the lettered quality of the word. Letters take the stage, breaking away from and fracturing the concept of representation as embodiment for which anthropomorphic form was the paradigm.

In displaying the grotesque body that, by exposing itself, turns the whole situation around, Kleist’s witty drummer represents the excess of the utterance over the statement or beyond that which the linguistic form is supposed to embody. This excess manifests itself in the text as something that does not “pass human lips.” The word is disassembled into its letters. When marks substitute for letters, they point to the substitution or the enactment of the substitution as a puncture or punctuation and its empty rhythm. Whereas letters are usually read together or assembled to become meaningful entities—a procedure in

53 The danger is that “the pun turns the eye too easily from the great and broad to the details of details, from those fiery angel-wheels in the prophet’s vision to the rotifera of syllables” [“Räder-spiel-werk”] ( Jean Paul, School for Aesthetics, 139; Vorschule, 195). The idea of language as machine negates any human element. Regarding the many puns in Friedrich Schlegel’s “Über die Unverständlichkeit,” de Man writes, “There is a machine there, a text machine, an implacable determination and total arbitrariness . . . which inhabits words on the level of the play of the signifier,” in Paul de Man, “The Concept of Irony,” Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997) 181.

54 Jean Paul, School for Aesthetics 139; Vorschule, 195. One example in English is, “My Day Is Closed In Immortality” (relating to the death of Elisabeth I, 1603). More examples are enummerated in Alfred Liede, Dichtung als Spiel: Studien zur Unsinnspoesie an den Grenzen der Sprache, vol. II (1963; Berlin: de Gruyter, 1992) 82, and Poetische Sprachspiele: Vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Klaus Peter Dencker (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2002) 62, 97–98, 104.

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which gaps are bridged or ignored and letters are completely dissolved and absorbed into the meaning of the word—the letters in Kleist’s “Anecdote” call attention to the fact that each semantic unit can be taken apart, and that this possibility of falling apart is the origin of these units.55 Letters are substituted by typographical signs or dots, which graphically display the ability of language to be taken apart by enacting this potentiality. Thus, Kleist’s text turns writing into a “theater of letters.”56 Here, it is not characters which take the stage but signs that are outside the alphanumeric set. Similar to the comma, which in Jean Paul’s theory of wit is set against metaphor, these punctuation marks assume an almost choreographic function.57 They intervene and interrupt to produce meaningful units (clauses); however, this intervention presents itself as an arbitrary intervention when it is not filled with meaning. The intervening force is then manifest as empty punctuation. Here signs, which are usually operators, function as marks that insist upon their unmotivated intervention. They are indices of an empty enactment.

In the incident of Kleist’s “Anecdote,” signs outside the alphanu-meric set are staged as indices of a substitution. On the one hand, they guarantee the readability of the semantic units “skin” and “hole” by replacing them. On the other, they show writing to be a combina-tion and recombination of moveable letters by exposing the fact that writing requires scansion and that scanning precedes any semantic unit. Scattered signs are organized into the typeface as percussions of the word.

This allusion to the field of audibility is called up by the text since the “skin” also refers to the skin of the drum. The double reference is suggested by Kleist’s addition or Zu–Satz to the “Anecdote”: “One cannot help noting the Shakespearean quality here, since with his joke, the drummer did not overstep his professional sphere.”58 If this

55 This is discussed in the anecdote “Der Griffel Gottes,” Berliner Abendblätter I, 5 Oct. 1810, 28. See also Carol Jacobs, “The Style of Kleist,” Uncontainable Romanticism: Shelley, Bronte, Kleist (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989) 171–96 and Dierig, 19–21.

56 Schestag, 179.57 What is prescribed is the jump or repeated jumps “from comma to comma” ( Jean

Paul, School for Aesthetics, 133, 125; Vorschule, 188, 176).58 “—Wobei man noch die Shakespearesche Eigenschaft bemerken muß, daß der Tam-

bour mit seinem Witz, aus seiner Sphäre als Trommelschläger nicht herausging.” The reference to Shakespeare might be read as an allusion to his punning, but can also be seen as relating to his increasing influence on German discussions of theatre. See Bianca Theisen, “Der Bewunderer des Shakespeare,” Kleist-Jahrbuch (1999): 87–108. Incidentally, the text immediately preceding the “Anecdote from the Last War” also includes a refer-ence to Shakespeare. In “Darstellbarkeit auf dem Theater,” Kleist asserts that the battle

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reference to Shakespeare, which both makes a pun and talks about one, allows us to take the skin of the drum (in German, das Fell der Trommel) into account, then the punning can be extended further since Trommelfell is also the word for eardrum. The eardrum vibrates without understanding just as the drum’s “skin” does. What is to be heard is pure communication to the ear, which partakes in the oscillations of sound in the mode of reverberation. However, it is the text that evokes the drummer’s sphere, the skin of his drum and the eardrum. In the end, the text makes the joke that at first seemed to be the drummer’s. The text had already contributed its share to the drummer’s Einfall, when writing “skin” in the form of “s...,” instead of, say, the word “pelt” which we find in the earlier version of the anecdote rewritten in Kleist’s “Anecdote.” The typeface of the text lets the drummer drum through its graphic punctuation (“....”) which presents the written text as mere rhythm. Anticipating the resounding blows and competing with them, the text renders visible by its own punctuation the rhythm of the drum and continues this rhythm in its metonymic punctuation. This takes place in the percussion of the word or in a written opera-tion in which the letter functions simultaneously as a body, that is, as a literal and corporeal instance. The addition to the drummer’s joke characterizes him as self-referential as well as the text whose sphere is invoked in this comment. Through its joke about percussion and punctuation, the text refers to the page, which once was made of skin, on which text is typographically organized, laid out, and disseminated. This is the Schauplatz, the stage or scene of writing. The dots operate metonymically as a mute performance of rhythm with the result that writing is revealed as empty in its exteriority, its simultaneous retreat and presence as marks, its punctuation and metonymic performance, its chance and excess. Writing ultimately approaches meaningless noise, however silent its black and white may be.59

We have seen that the text emphasizes its scripturality through rhythmic interventions marked by punctuation. We see something similar in the text’s addition [Zusatz], which indefinitely postpones its closure. The relevance of this additional sentence [Zu-Satz] lies in

scene in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar exemplifies what should not be presented realistically in drama (BA, II/7: 93–95). See Peters, “Wie Geschichte geschehen lassen,” 85.

59 The marks create rhythm, but in their shattering of the text they approach laugh-ter, the éclater de rire, which would not appear in the text as words either (Felman, 87). Laughter follows the joke and “makes” the joke retroactively (Freud), becoming the second medium of the joke in addition to the words used to tell the joke. See: S. Weber, 81.

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its supplemental quality.60 In this supplementarity the text’s peculiar punch line is to be found, which it no longer delivers (that is, if this text, whose literal intrusion [Einfall] is inspired by the drummer’s expo-sition,61 even makes a joke at all).62 The supplementarity is marked by a dash (“—”), another sign beyond the alphanumeric set. The dash sews together what it separates, holding the joined elements apart.63 The shift into the metatextual register in the last sentence is thus held in suspension and precludes the text’s closure and self-containment. The heterogeneous assemblage of this text, which retells and rewrites an anecdote, is appended with a stitch, and at the same time, a gap: “—”. The text is performed as an assemblage, and as taking part in the assemblage of the Berliner Abendblätter, which is not one work (neither one nor a work).64 In the insistence of its scriptural marks

60 A sentence may be taken as “auktoriale Leseanweisung,” whatever this might consist of. See H.-D. Weber, “Zu Heinrich von Kleists Kunst der Anekdote,” 22.

61 The reference to Shakespeare may be read as alluding to Kleist’s own “Falstaff-Miszelle,” published 31 Dec. 1810 in Berliner Abendblättern: “Falstaff bemerkt, in der Schenke von Eastcheap, daß er nicht bloß selbst witzig, sondern auch schuld sei, daß andere Leute (auf seine Kosten) witzig wären. Mancher Gimpel, den ich hier nicht nen-nen mag, stellt diesen Satz auf den Kopf. Denn er ist nicht bloß selbst albern, sondern auch schuld daran, daß andere Leute (seinem Gesicht und seinen Reden gegenüber) albern werden” (BA II/7: 385; SW II:346). See H.-D. Weber, “Zu Heinrich von Kleists Kunst der Anekdote,” 22. For Kleist’s mixing of Shakepeare’s texts, see Sembdner’s note in SW II:930–31. This is a model for the induction of wit through the witticism of the joker. But Kleist’s “Anecdote” is more complicated, since the telling of the joke is at a further remove: ‘par ricochet,’ to borrow a formulation used by Freud to describe how “I” as the joke-teller laugh “by a reaction from the other person upon myself” (Freud, Jokes, 191; Der Witz, 146). He who can make the listeners laugh is able to make the transition from being simply the re-teller of the joke to producing the joke of the one who is characterized as ‘Trommelfell schläger’.

62 The additional sentence recalls another disappointing last sentence, the author’s comment on a word of consolation offered by a monk to a man condemned to death: “Wer es empfunden hat, wie öde Einem, auch selbst an einem schönen Tag, der Rückweg vom Richtplatz wird, der wird den Ausspruch des Kapuziners nicht so dumm finden” (BA II:7, 275). It is this added sentence that ruins the joke.

63 Jean Paul says concerning dashes, “Gedankenstriche sind Furchen ohne Samen—sind Linien, die der Chromantist zu lesen gedenkt, und für deren Bedeutung der Zufall nicht gesorgt—[...]—sind Brücken, über die Klüfte unähnlicher Materien geschla-gen—sind Mittel, unsere Bewunderung vom Genuss ihres Gegenstandes zu trennen,” in Jean Paul, Über die Schriftstellerei, Werke, ed. Norbert Miller, vol. II.1 (München: Carl Hanser, 1974) 424. Like the comma, the dash functions as a kind of choreography of reading or the “dance of digression.” See “Antrittsprogramm” in Titan, Jean Paul, Werke, ed. Norbert Miller, vol. I.3 (München: C. Hanser, 1999), 68; Alice A. Kuzniar, “Titanism and Narcissism: The Lure of the Transparent Sign in Jean Paul,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift 60 (1986): 454–56.

64 First, textuality without a face is present in the typographic staging of the medium of writing as a moveable organization; second, the text’s anonymous origin is emphasized in that it is called an anecdote. This re-telling is neither a literary work, nor can it be

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and of the medium in which it appeared (the volatile “leaves” of the Berliner Abendblätter65), the text of the “Anecdote from the Last War” confronts the exteriority of letters—the accident that befalls every text’s intention and every reading.

University of Erfurt (translated by Isabel Kranz, Karsten Schöllner, and Tove Holmes)

said to have a single author. Even the medium in which the “Anecdote” appeared is changeable: Evening Leaves [“Abend-Blätter”] and “fliegende Blätter, die bleiben im Ver-Fliegen, die als bleibende (ver-)fliegen.” See Jacques Lacan, “Das Seminar über E. A. Poes ‘Der entwendete Brief,’” Schriften I, ed. Norbert Haas (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975) 25–26.

65 In “hearing” the “leaves” in the “Abendblätter,” I refer to Peter Fenves’s insight, “The pages of the Berliner Abendblätter . . . these regularly appearing, rustling evening leaves” are “a place of refuge for the purely sonorous” (Fenves, 172–73, also 162, 166–67).