Abstract

At the end of his attack on my use of the psychoanalytic model for the interpretation of literature, Heller raises the question concerning what the task of the literary critic is or ought to be. His own "sketch of the Kleistean theme's historical ancestry and its later development," he says, seeks to deepen and enrich the reader's appreciation of Kleist's literary art, the artistry of his phrasing, the persuasiveness of his incidents, the conclusiveness of his examples." By implication he suggests that my method does not have this end—that is, appreciation—for its goal. In this he is partially right. "Appreciation" in Heller's sense is not as directly a goal for me. But does Heller's method of intellectual history and literary relation meet his own criteria of deepening and enriching the reader's appreciation of Kleist? In his capsule treatment of Great Thinkers of the Western World from Plato to Marx, we learn that many writers besides Kleist treated Kleist's theme of man's fall from unconscious grace. What exactly does this tell us about Kleist's treatment of it? How does it deepen the reader's appreciation of Kleist's literary art, the artistry of his phrasing, the persuasiveness of his incidents? It doesn't. It isn't even about Kleist. Although Heller tells us that it is the "thought" and "imagery" which "make for the great distinction of the essay" , his evidence for this consists, in the case of the former, in his tracing the history of the essay's thought and, in the case of the latter, in his statements that Kleist's use of the puppet as the exemplar of the unselfconscious graceful being is "unusual" and "novel" and that his bear story, though it may lack "in immediate plausibility," "gains in making Kleist's point" and is "a memorable exemplar" of the "art of grotesque inventions that are capable of floating for quite a while above and between the comic and the serious before landing with scintillating effect in one domain or the other" . Margret Schaefer is a lecturer in the department of psychiatry at Northwestern University Medical School. She responds here to Erich Heller's "The Dismantling of a Marionette Theater; or, Psychology and the Misinterpretation of Literature" , in which he discussed her article, "Kleist's 'About the Puppet Theater,"