The Marquise of O and Other Stories by Heinrich von Kleist Read Free Book Online

Kleist was acquainted with it, and in general with the fact that compulsive singing is a feature of the religious madness syndrome, evidently related to glossolalia or echolalia. But he also appears to have known that such ‘singing’ can in some cases be weird, cacophonous and terrifying. The report by Claudius was doubtless a source for his story, but an even more curious and striking parallel case occurred in England at the end of January 1973 and was widely reported in the press. The following extracts are from the
Daily Telegraph
of 2 February 1973:
    Two young men and a woman, members of an American-based religious cult which encourages its followers to put themselves into a hypnotic trance, were in the psychiatric unit of Great Yarmouth hospital last night.
    They were taken from a house in Stafford Road after neighbours, frightened by continuous wailing and chanting for three days, called in police and local church leaders…
    The Rev. Stanley Miller… identified the chanting as a perverted form of glossolalia – a term for ‘speaking in tongues’, the mind having no control of what is said… It was the continuous chanting of one phrase, ‘Baby Jesus’, which frightened neighbours in the terrace…
    Mr Miller added that when he saw the two women and three men in the house on Wednesday night they were in such an advanced state of trance as to be possessed by the devil. ‘Theireyes were closed and what they were doing was manifestly evil. The chanting was spine-chilling’…
    The Times
reported a neighbour as saying: ‘The chanting was something I never want to hear again. It was spine-chilling and could be heard fifty yards from the house.’ Similarly, the chanting of the four brothers in Kleist’s tale, when they begin it after their return from the church, wakes the neighbours who rush to the inn in horror to see what is going on.
    In
St Cecilia
Kleist is taking us two ways into the realm of the uncanny: first there is the phenomenon of the madness itself, the psychotic manifestation in which, as Freud would say, the repudiated or repressed material re-emerges or returns to the supposedly rational surface of life. But secondly – and this appears to be the point that Kleist particularly wanted to emphasize – this sudden and seemingly pathological conversion of four anti-Catholic militants takes place in circumstances that cannot be wholly accounted for without supposing some sort of supernatural intervention. Only one of the nuns in the convent knows how to play and conduct the mysterious Italian Mass which, on the Abbess’s instructions, is to be performed. This particular nun, Sister Antonia, is on the morning of the festival lying mortally sick in her cell; nevertheless, she appears at the last moment, seats herself at the organ and conducts the music with triumphant and devastating effect. But witnesses later testify that Sister Antonia had never left her cell or even regained consciousness, dying the same evening. The conclusion seems to be that St Cecilia herself has impersonated Sister Antonia in order to save her convent and punish the ‘blasphemers’.
    In the elaborated extension of the story for the book version, Kleist arranges the events in a manner that seems specifically designed to highlight the mysterious central occurrence, namely the direct intervention of the saint. The final version begins with two paragraphs of narration whichtake the reader only as far as the moment during the Corpus Christi Mass when, contrary to expectation, the sacred music proceeds without interruption. This narrative then breaks off, ending merely with a reference to the convent’s further half-century of prosperity until its secularization at the end of the Thirty Years War. The third paragraph takes up the tale six years after that Corpus Christi Day, introducing a new character who is not mentioned in the original version, and whose