VV(18): Grace

[Dave Monroe]

"A remarkable innovation would be the use of automata,
to play Su Feng's handmaidens.  'A German engineer is
building them,' said Itague.  'They're lovely
creatures: one will even unfastened your robe. 
Another will play a zither--although the music itself
comes from the pit.  But they move so gracefully!  Not
like machines at all." (V., Ch. 14, Sec. i, p. 396)

"'What are you like unclothed?  A chaos of flesh.  But
as Su Feng, lit by hydrogen, oxygen, a cylinder of
lime moving doll-like in the confines of your costume
... You will drive Paris mad.  Women and men alike.'"
(V., 
Ch. 14, Sec. ii, p. 404)


>From Paul De Man, "Aesthetic Formalization: Kleist's
Uber das Marionettentheater."  The Rhetoric of
Romanticism (New York: Columbia UP, 1984), p. 262-90
...

"Balanced motion compellingly leads to the privileged
metaphor of a center of gravity; from the moment we
have, as teh aesthetic implies, a measure of
phenomenality, the metaphor of gravity is unavoidable,
in sequential art forms such as narration or dance, as
is the metaphor of light in synchronic arts such as,
presumably, painting or lyric poetry.  The great merit
of the puppets, 'thoe outstanding quality one looks
for in vain in the large majority of our dancers,' is
that they follow 'the pure law of gravity (das blosse
Gesetz der Schwere).'" (p. 286)

"On the other hand, it is said of the same puppets,
almost in the same breath, that they are antigrav,
that they can rise and leap, like Nijinsky, as if no
such thing as gravity existed for them.  The
contradiction is far-reaching: if one gallicizes
antigrav by hearing the French 'grave' in 'grav,' then
one can hear in antigrav a rejection of the
seriousness connoted by Gesetz der Schwere, in which
Scwere has all the implications of Schwermut and
heavy-heartedness.  The undecidability between
seriousness and play, theme of the story of the bear,
would then be resolved in a very Rilkean synthesis of
rising and falling.  By falling (in all the senses of
the term, including the theological Fall) gracefully,
one prepares the ascent, the turn from parabola to
hyperbole, which is also a rebirth.  Caught in the
power of gravity, the articulated puppets can rightly
be said to be dead, hanging and suspended like dead
bodies: gracefulness is directly associated with dead,
albeit a dead cleansed of pathos.  But it is also
equated with levity, an un-seriousness which is itself
based on the impossibility of distinguishing between
dead and play.  Rather than speaking of a synthesis of
rising and falling one should speak of a continuity of
the aesthetic form that does not allow itself to be
disrupted by the borderlines that separate life from
death, pathos from levity, rising from falling.  More
than Rilke' angel, the puppet inhabits both sides of
these borders at the same time." (pp.. 286-7)

Discussing Heinrich von Kleist, "On the Marionette
Theater" (1810) ...

http://www.cc.emory.edu/ENGLISH/DRAMA/HistDrama2/KleistMarion.html

And, sorry, note that "chaos of flesh" vs. "the
confines of your costume" ...

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