De(ar)ranged minds, mindless acts and polemical portrayal in Kleist and Canetti

Abstract

In my paper, I aim to deal with the representation of normality and insanity in third-person narration from the point of view of rhetorical narratology. As a point of departure, I will briefly sketch the quarrel between narratology (Dorrit Cohn) and New Historicism (John Bender). From this debate, the interesting challenge can be derived to arrive at a more performative and historically sensitive notion of madness as filtered through narrative form. While recent tendencies have highlighted the experiential and mental implications of the narrative representation of deranged minds, I aim to bring into play a more external and historical dimension of the attribution of normality. In my view, this can be facilitated by means of a rhetorical approach highlighting the stylistic expressivity of a narrator's indirectness. In order to illustrate this approach, I will discuss the role of polemical portrayal in Heinrich von Kleist's essay On the gradual completion of thoughts (1800) and in Elias Canetti's novel Die Blendung (1935, Engl. Auto-da-fe, 1946, with a brief glance to its remediation as a radio play in 2002). Kleist's and Canetti's narrators remain reticent on the condition of their protagonists' mental well-being. The latter can be said to be mindless in the sense that their minds, rather than accessed, are circumscribed and linked to (corporeal) externalities through narratorial indirection. The broader ambition is to present a feasible framework to make compatible the rhetorical-narratological interest in formal and stylistic characteristics with the study of the interaction of various discourses, media and contexts