|
Volume 12, Number 1 (1988) reprinted by permission Legal Studies Forum RECONCILIATION AND ALIENATION IN KLEIST'S "MICHAEL KOHLHAAS" AND DOCTOROW'S RAGTIME1 RICHARD STERNE Simmons College novel, Ragtime (1975),2 concerns a character named Coalhouse Walker Jr., an American black musician who is a contemporary of Scott Joplin, the ragtime composer and pianist. Walker, after suffering base injustices at the hands of white men who consider him an uppity Negro, patiently attempts to gain legal redress. His efforts fail, however, and his fiancee dies of injuries she incurred while trying to petition the Vice-President of the United States on Coalhouse's behalf. The grief-stricken Walker then turns to violence, with a faithful band of urban guerrillas, in an effort to obtain a justice that has become, in part, revenge. The Coalhouse Walker episode, one of several interwoven strands in Doctorow's novel, was directly inspired by Heinrich von Kleist's early nineteenth century German novella, "Michael Kohlhaas"3 (1810). Doctorow has acknowledged his indebtedness to the Kleist story, an indebtedness obvious to a reader familiar with it as well as with Ragtime.4 What I find more interesting, however, than the similarities between the two works are differences in tone and perspective which reflect important cultural differences between Kleist's era and our own. We can certainly find alienation in "Michael Kohlhaas" (not surprisingly, it was a story that Franz Kafka greatly enjoyed),5 but the work also belongs to an idealistic tradition in European thought and literature. In this tradition, human beings are not regarded as cosmic or social aliens, but as participants in an ordered universe and a society governed by ethical natural law. The concept of natural law is adumbrated by Sophocles when his Antigone speaks of the immutable, unwritten laws of heaven. These laws, she claims, command her to bury her brother; and thus she must disobey the king's edict which forbids his burial because he has been a traitor to the state. In Plato's Republic, idealistic Socrates responds to Thrasymachus's cynical definition of justice as "the interest of the stronger,"6 by arguing that on the contrary, justice consists in a harmonious interrelationship of social classes. Socrates sees this harmony as the imitation of an eternal idea of harmony. The closely related notions of a cosmic order or harmony, and a natural law that transcends positive laws, were to constitute a major theme in European writing contending with the cynical theme articulated by Thrasymachus until late in the nineteenth century. The concept of natural law, which can be found in Aristotle, then in Cicero and in Roman jurisprudence, was given a Christian interpretation by Augustine (who, however, held little hope that sinful man in the corrupt earthly city could obey God's natural law), and later by Aquinas and Dante, whose view of man as a rational social being recalls the ancient Stoics' emphasis upon the importance of human brotherhood. In the seventeenth century, the Dutch jurist Grotius, who "regarded international law as natural law applied to nations,"7 said that natural law would hold even if there were no God. And in the eighteenth century, by the eve of the American and French revolutions, the theory of natural law "had been turned into a theory of natural rights."8 Thomas Jefferson's triad of natural rights -- life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness -- is, like the French revolutionists' "liberte', egalite", fraternite'," a variation on the old theme of natural law at a point in history when the sense of a universal rational community ("from China to Peru") was fading. What was replacing that sense of community, when Kleist wrote "Michael Kohlhaas," was the pervasive notion of a society of individuals whose chief duty was to get rich, or at least avoid poverty, and who were governed by positive laws which had no transcendental basis, but were determined by custom and utilitarian concerns. With the ascendency, in the later nineteenth century, of such hard-boiled concepts as the survival of the fittest, the class struggle, and the belief, expressed by Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov, that if God does not exist, "everything is permitted," the idea of moral natural law seemed, to most modern minds, no longer pertinent. Thrasymachus had triumphed: it is his notion of justice as the interest of the stronger that fictional works concerned with justice have predominantly reflected during the past hundred years.9 I shall be arguing in this paper that the Coalhouse Walker episode in Ragtime enforces the Thrasymachean view that justice is simply what the strongest -- J.P. Morgan is, in the novel, the master symbol of ruthless economic and political power -- will it to be. This is not to say that Doctorow approves the state of things that he depicts. But the Coalhouse Walker episode (and Ragtime as a whole) conveys a desolate sense of the alienation of modern society from the idea of fraternity which is at the heart of the natural law tradition. I shall also be arguing that "Michael Kohlhaas" differs markedly from Ragtime in that it exhibits a tension, characteristic of the Romantic period (Scott and Balzac, for example, exhibit it)10 between a belief in ethical natural law and an interpretation of justice as the interest of the stronger. Kleist ultimately evokes, it seems to me, a sort of absurd reconciliation between natural law and a judicial process which, although it has been manipulated by powerful men, retains at least some integrity. "Michael Kohlhaas," a story inspired by an historical episode,11 concerns a sixteenth century horse-dealer from Brandenburg who repeatedly attempts to gain legal redress for wrongs done in neighboring Saxony to two of his horses, and one of his grooms, by the subordinates of an arrogant Junker, or knight. The conflict is between a bourgeois with a solid social position--Kohlhaas's home town is called Kohlhaasenbruck--and an aristocrat who treats him with contempt. Kohlhaas's quest for justice, however, is from the outset more than a purely personal matter. For he has learned of "daily injustices" committed at the Junker's castle against travellers; and he comes to feel that he has a duty "to the world at large to exert all his powers in securing redress for the wrongs already perpetrated and protection for his fellow citizens against such wrongs in the future." This "praiseworthy feeling," as Kleist calls it (121), is heightened by the wholehearted encouragement given to Kohlhaas by his wife, Lisbeth, to "put a stop to abuses of this kind" (126). But Kohlhaas's efforts to obtain legal relief, first in Saxony where the injustices against his horses and groom were committed, and then in his native Brandenburg, are frustrated by relatives of the Junker, who hold high office in the governments of these two electorates of the Holy Roman Empire. It is only, however, after Lisbeth dies of injuries inflicted by a bodyguard of the Elector of Brandenburg, to which prince she had attempted to present a petition on her husband's behalf, that Kohlhaas turns to violence. Ignoring Lisbeth's dying plea that he obey the Biblical injunction to forgive his enemies, Kohlhaas draws up an edict in which, "by virtue of the authority inborn in him,"(137) he orders the Junker, Wenzel von Tronka, to return to Kohlhaasenbruck his two black horses which had been worked nearly to death in the Junker's fields, and to fatten them in person in Kohlhaas's stables (138). What is most important in the story at this point is the conflict between Kohlhaas's wife's feeling that he should forgive the Junker, and Kohlhaas's insistence that the Junker compensate the injustices he has done. What, Kleist seems to be asking, is our deeper ethical responsibility (or higher commandment of natural law) - to forgive those who have wronged us, or to demand that they do whatever can be done to set things right? Kohlhaas, receiving no reply from von Tronka to his demand for specific performance, attacks and burns, with the aid of several grooms, the knight's castle. Followers of von Tronka, and a relative, are killed during this assault. But von Tronka himself escapes. Grimly, Kohlhaas composes at the ruined castle what he calls a "Declaration under the Writ of Kohlhaas," calling upon the whole country "to withhold all aid and comfort" from the Junker, against whom he is engaged in what he calls a "just war." Furthermore, Kohlhaas requires the inhabitants "to surrender the Junker" to him "on pain of death and the certain destruction by fire of whatever they possessed (140-141)." Realizing, however, that he can't make good on this threat with his tiny band of ten, Kohlhaas puts out a recruiting writ which brings him an army of unemployed men attracted by the prospect of pay and plunder. With this army he burns the town of Wittenberg, where he has learned the Junker is hiding. And a notice fastened to a Wittenberg church door threatens to continue the razing of the town until von Tronka is turned over to him. After two more fires, the terrified townspeople prevail upon their governor to remove the Junker from Wittenberg. He is transported, secretly, to Leipzig, whither the well-informed Kohlhaas immediately follows him, and sets that place on fire. He now issues a writ calling himself "an emissary of the archangel Michael," come to punish all who side with von Tronka. And at the end of still another manifesto, in which he appeals to the people to join him in establishing a better order of things, he signs, with what Kleist calls "a touch of madness," "Given at the seat of our Provisional World Government, Lutzen Castle (148)." Kohlhaas's language, if it does seem a bit mad, also recalls that of a philosopher with whose writings Kleist was familiar: Immanuel Kant. In his treatise, "Perpetual Peace" (1795), Kant argued that the "international law" which Grotius had regarded as natural law applied to nations, was actually not international at all, since the individual nations were "under no common external authority." In order to end the international anarchy which perpetuated war, Kant called for a "federation" of nations under a "covenant of peace."12 It is worth noting that Michael Kohlhaas, before experiencing injustice, first at the hands of the Junker and then at the hands of the politicians who prevented him from obtaining legal redress, had been "a paragon of civil virtues (114)." When he came to perceive moral chaos where he had expected to find moral order, he dreamed of changing the world. His "madness" lies in the disparity between the ambition that his language indicates and the meagreness of his chance of fulfilling it. Kohlhaas's World Government manifesto is followed by a coup de theatre, for which Kleist had found a basis in his sixteenth century source. Kohlhaas's depredations have attracted the angry attention of a famous former rebel, Martin Luther. Luther, of course, had once used a Wittenberg church for his own posting purposes, and had later been excommunicated by the Pope. Now an "establishment" figure, he causes proclamations to be posted throughout Saxony, denouncing the horse-trader as "the very embodiment of injustice," and warning him that he will end his life on the gallows (149-50). Kohlhaas reveres the leader of the Reformation. Immediately upon reading Luther's attack upon him, he leaves for Wittenberg, visits Luther by night, and explains that society has cast him out by refusing him the protection of its law. If, says Kohlhaas, Luther will obtain for him a safe conduct to Dresden, capital of Saxony, in order that he may re-open his legal case against the Junker, he will disband his army. Although Luther balks at this proposal because of the revenge that Kohlhaas has already taken with his sword upon the Junker, he softens when the horse-trader says he means to show in court that his wife has not died in an unjust cause. Still, Luther asks him if he would not have done better to forgive the Junker "for your Redeemer's sake, and take the horses away, thin and scraggy as they were." This, we recall, is essentially what Kohlhaas's dying wife had wanted him to do. Kohlhaas replies, "...maybe, or maybe not. If I had known that itThere is no touch of madness here. Rather, there is a profound awareness within Kohlhaas of the tragedy precipitated by his persistence in a quest for justice, justice not solely for himself but for others whom the Junker had treated with contempt. In effect, Kohlhaas is saying to Luther what a rebellious Luther had once said, "Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise."13 Although indignant at Kohlhaas's refusal to forgive the Junker, Luther does write to the Saxon Elector, requesting an amnesty for Kohlhaas who, he declares, should be treated not so much as a rebel against the Crown, than as a foreign invading power. It is ironic that while the horse-dealer's non-violent efforts to secure justice had failed, and indeed culminated in Lisbeth's death, the murderous violence committed by his army has won him a written plea for amnesty from a celebrated preacher of submission to civil authority. But this is not the only irony in the Luther episode. For Kohlhaas, having publicly proclaimed his intention to establish a better moral order, and having set up a Provisional World Government, now abandons his principles and his followers: he promises to disband his army, and go peacefully to court over what he has referred to as a bushel of oats. There certainly is absurdism in "Michael Kohlhaas"; Kleist does anticipate Kafka. Luther's letter proves effective. The Saxon Elector grants Kohlhaas an amnesty. But then, through a complex series of events -- including the Saxon Elector's betrayal of the horse- dealer, and a bargain with Saxony by the Elector of Brandenburg, who is remorseful over his earlier failure to aid his loyal subjects -- the following judicial arrangement is made. Kohlhaas is to be put on trial in Berlin for having broken the peace of the Holy Roman Emperor, upon whom Saxony's original amnesty is not binding. And a lawyer from Kohlhaas's native Brandenburg is to sue the Junker in a Dresden court for redress of the horse-dealer's personal grievances. The strange, mixed results of this arrangement are that the Junker is at last condemned to two years in jail, and that on the day of Kohlhaas's execution for his crimes against the Emperor's peace, he is given back, in good condition, to his great joy, the two black horses which had been so miserably mistreated. There is, however, an additional episode in the novella which is bizarre, but important from the viewpoint of our concern with the tension between natural law and Thrasymachean cynicism in "Michael Kohlhaas." Shortly after Lisbeth's death, the horse-trader, who had set out in quest of the Junker, stopped at a town fair which was also attended by the Elector of Saxony. An old gypsy woman, whom the Elector had asked to tell his fortune, approached Kohlhaas in the crowd and announced to him that if the elector wanted to know his fortune, he would have to ask the horse-trader about it. She then gave Kohlhaas a sealed piece of paper which she called an amulet that would save his life. Later in the story, when Kohlhaas is being taken to Berlin to be tried for breaking the Emperor's peace, he angrily rejects an offer from an emissary of the Elector to grant him his freedom in exchange for the sealed paper. While Kohlhaas is in prison, awaiting execution, he is visited by the gypsy, who now bears a remarkable resemblance to Lisbeth, and who tells him that the Elector has learned from her that his fortune--the destiny of his house--is grim. The Elector, she further informs him, is desperately anxious to obtain the details i n the sealed "fortune." And she urges the horse-trader, for the sake of his children, to trade the fortune for his life. But Kohlhaas despises the Elector for having broken his word to him with respect to the amnesty, and he tells the gypsy that only her unequivocal request will make him part with the paper which "in so miraculous a way gives me satisfaction for everything I have suffered. (207)." The gypsy concedes that in many ways he is right, and that he may do as he pleases. On his execution day, Kohlhaas receives a written warning from the gypsy that the Elector plans to disinter the paper immediately after Kohlhaas's burial. The horse-dealer forestalls that move with panache: striding up to the Elector, he unseals the paper, reads what is written on it, swallows it, and as the Elector faints, turns to the scaffold, where his head is lopped off. It is notable that the gypsy, who so strongly resembles Kolhaas's wife, both urges conciliation on him and sympathizes with his desire to keep, out of contempt for Saxon elector, the sealed fortune. May Kleist be suggesting that there are circumstances to which no clear law of reason applies? That there are appropriate limits to conciliation and forgiveness, even though forgiveness is a central tenet of Christian (if not of Greek and Roman) natural law? If Kleist seems, in the Gypsy episode, to be balancing agape and vengeance, he appears to be making an absurd reconciliation in the novella of natural law with the state's judicial processes; for it is only by committing murderous depredations, in violation of natural law, for which he is condemned in a trial, that Kohlhaas wins a courtroom hearing for his just accusations against the Junker--and thus achieves the Junker's imprisonment, the restoration of his own horses, and compensation for the medical expenses of his groom. In my own view, the single most arresting element in "Michael Kohlhaas" is the horse-trader's brief effort to establish a world government founded on justice. Kleist here seems to be actuated by a Kantian sense of natural law, even if his protagonist's proclamation is quixotically premature. We shall see how Doctorow, in Ragtime, sardonically alters this episode in Kleist's novella. Coalhouse Walker Jr., the character in Ragtime who corresponds to Kleist's respectable bourgeois horse-dealer, is a black man with no status in early twentieth century American society. There is pathos in the "Junior" at the end of Coalhouse Walker's name. For nothing at all is known about his parents. Apparently he was born in St. Louis, had known and admired the ragtime composer, Scott Joplin, and had paid for his piano studies with money he earned as a stevedore. But no high school records exist for Walker, and it's not known how he acquired his impressive vocabulary and his dignified manner of speaking. The man is essentially an alien in a Caucasian society in which, as the narrator ironically observes, "there were no Negroes (4)." What he means, of course, is that Negroes were invisible as persons; they existed, in early twentieth century America, only in their generality, as members of a group--as immigrants did, and poor people, and women. It is by acting as a human being, rather than as a member of a stereotyped group, that Coalhouse Walker gets into trouble. He is driving along a New Rochelle, New York, road in his new Model T Ford (black, of course, like Michael Kohlhaas's mistreated horses), when he is stopped by members of the Emerald Isle Engine, a company of volunteer firemen. They demand a toll of him, as a toll was demanded of Kohlhaas at the Junker's castle. To the firemen, many of whom are clearly recent immigrants, Walker is an "uppity Negro" -- who is he to own a new Model T? -- and must be taught a lesson. Here, instead of a conflict between a haughty aristocrat and a solid bourgeois, as in Kleist's novella, we have a conflict involving racism and economic envy, between relatively poor whites and a Negro who is behaving as if he has a white man's right to drive a car along a public road. The Fire Chief, Willie Conklin (the name sounds like "Wenzel von Tronka"), replies to Walker's reasonable objection to paying a toll, by gratuitously insulting him. Whereupon Walker goes off to lodge a complaint, unsuccessfully as it turns out, with a policeman. When he returns to his Ford he finds mud spattered on it, a hole in its top, and a human excrement on its back seat. At the corresponding point in Kleist's story, Kohlhaas is able to initiate an inquiry into the injustice that has been done him. But when Walker complains vehemently to the cop he'd earlier appealed to unsuccessfully, he is himself arrested -- on such imaginative charges as drunkenness, and causing a nuisance. Neither the white New Rochelle citizen who bails him out of jail -- this is Father, head of a family whose members we know in Ragtime as Mother, Mother's Younger Brother, Grandfather, and the Boy (who narrates the events of the novel) -- nor Coalhouse Walker is able to find a lawyer who will press Walker's claim for repair and restitution of his desecrated Ford. But Sarah, a lovely young black woman who has borne a child to the much older Walker, and who after a long courtship finally agreed to marry him, conceives the notion of petitioning the United States government in his behalf. She goes to the New Rochelle hotel where, she has learned, President Taft's Vice-President (we are in 1912) will be speaking; she runs toward the Vice-President, and is fatally injured by a militiaman who shoves his rifle butt against her chest to prevent what he fears is an assassination attempt. In Kleist's story, Kohlhaas's wife's idea of petitioning the Brandenburgian Elector seems not completely impracticable. Sarah's venture, however, is hopeless in a society that relegates blacks to positions as servants and menials, and that fears or hates them when they act as independent persons. After a Harlem funeral for Sarah, at which the mourners are mostly Coalhouse's fellow musicians, Walker turns to violence. With a band of young black men he makes a buckshot attack on the firemen of the Emerald Isle company. Several firemen are killed, and a boiler in the firehouse explodes, frightening all of New Rochelle. Two New York City newspapers print letters from Coalhouse which the New Rochelle newspapers have refused to publish: Walker demands in these letters that "the infamous Fire Chief of the Volunteers" be "turned over to my justice" (243), and that the Model T be returned to its original condition. And like Kleist's Junker, hiding out in Wittenberg, then Leipzig, Willie Conklin -- hiding out in fear of his life in the New Rochelle Police Station -- becomes "a despised person everywhere (252)." Coalhouse Walker Jr., of course, has aroused intense fear everywhere. Father, who had posted bail for him, is now advising the police on how to set up defenses against what he calls "a peaceful man driven mad by circumstances not of his own doing (249)." Walker, however, has gained one white ally in Mother's Younger Brother. This lost, unhappy young man feels the injustice that has been done to Coalhouse; and knowing, as he tells Walker, how to blow things up, he avails himself of the resources of Father's (his brother-in-law's) fireworks factory in order to do some dynamiting for the black urban guerrillas. Nobody, it's worth noting, corresponds to Mother's Younger Brother in Kleist's story. His role in Ragtime is evidently to point up, by the unique stand that he takes as a white man fighting for Coalhouse, the massive social rejection of Walker as soon as the frustrated Negro turns from impotent protest to violence. A week after the guerrilla army's buckshot attack on the Emerald Isle, Municipal Fire Station No. 2 in New Rochelle is blown up by Walker's men, and nobody suspects who has masterminded this new act of terror. Walker's second public letter is now printed in New York City newspapers. It demands that "the white excrescence known as Willie Conklin be turned over" to Coalhouse's justice, and that the Model T be returned to its original condition. Like Kohlhaas, Walker declares that until these demands are met the rules of war will prevail. He signs the letter, however, in a way that is notably different from Kohlhaas's signature: Coalhouse Walker Jr., President, Provisional American Government (255). This is a claim to power in a national state, rather than the claim to moral authority that Kohlhaas makes as head of a "Provisional World Government." The Kantian notion of World Government is, as we have seen, founded on the concept of natural law. But the national state is the sole political power that even a good man like Coalhouse Walker is capable of conceiving in a modern world alienated from the idea of natural law. It is significant that in Kleist's novella, Martin Luther appears on the scene, at first to chastise the horse-trader publicly, but then to intervene on his behalf when he is persuaded that Kohlhaas has actually been made an outlaw by society. Luther thus takes a stand for justice, in seeking to reconcile the bitterly angry Kohlhaas with the Saxon government. But nobody in Ragtime performs a conciliating role like Luther's. An alienist, hired by the New York World newspaper, solemnly declares that the letter in which Walker calls himself President, Provisional American Government, is quite "advanced in its signals of mental deterioration," and that it would be a strategic mistake to deal with someone in the throes of progressive madness as if he were open to reason (274). This psychiatric diagnosis of Walker demeans him in its blindness to his sense of injustice. Kleist attributes to Kohlhaas a "touch of madness" when he speaks of his "Provisional World Government," but Kohlhaas's enemies do not put him beyond the pale of rational discourse. In Ragtime, even when Coalhouse Walker's Ford is resurrected from the New Rochelle pond into which it had been pushed, and the automobile stands as tangible proof of Walker's grievance (274-75), the Mayor and Board of Aldermen denounce the "colored madman (274)." What appears to everybody as the final proof of Coalhouse's insanity is his guerrillas' occupation of J.P. Morgan's Library, with its celebrated art collection, on 36th Street in Manhattan. (That this event -- like many others in Ragtime in which historical persons are involved in ways that startle the reader -- never occurred in historical time, does not bother Doctorow. In an essay called "False Documents," he writes: ... as a novelist ... I could claim that history is a composition is seen to be greater and moreCoalhouse's intention in this demarche is to make J. P. Morgan a prisoner in his own home, and hold him as a hostage for Fire Chief Conklin. However, two reconnoiterers for Coalhouse have mistaken Morgan's white marble Library for his house, which is next door, and furthermore have not learned that Morgan is actually at sea, bound for Rome and Egypt. So what Coalhouse does, once his ordnance man, Mother's Younger Brother, is ensconced with his dynamite in the Morgan Library, is to telephone the Manhattan District Attorney, and threaten to blow up the place in twenty-four hours if his demands are not met: the return of his car "in just the condition it was when my way was blocked"; and for the life of "my Sarah .... the life of Chief Conklin (319)." While, as I have noted, nobody in Ragtime plays a role comparable to Luther's in supporting Kohlhaas's claim that the state has actually made him an outlaw, an American historical figure does at this juncture in Ragtime play a significant part. But his behavior indicates very clearly the difference between Doctorow's moral despair and Kleist's qualified idealism. The American historical figure is Booker T. Washington, who of course had risen from slavery to national prominence in the late nineteenth century as an eloquent advocate of conciliation of whites in order that Negroes might make social and ecomonic progress. Absolutely opposed to all agitation by blacks, Doctorow's Washington is horrified, and for that matter feels personally insulted, by what he tells Walker (for he has been permitted to enter the occupied Library) is his "misguided criminal recklessness (325-26)." But then, modulating from anger to what he intends as reasonableness, he asks Walker to accompany him out of the building, saying that he will intercede for the sake of mercy "that your trial shall be swift and your execution painless (327)." Now Walker admires Washington, as Kohlhaas did Luther (Doctorow reminds us explicitly of the Kleist story by mentioning portraits of Luther by Cranach on the red silk walls of the Morgan Library), and Washington's plea elicits a modification of Coalhouse's demands. Walker tells the Negro leader that if the Fire Chief brings his restored automobile to the front of the building, he will come into the street with his hands raised. But Washington, hearing only a rejection of the plea he has made, walks out. In short, everyone in the society that Doctorow depicts-- except for a radical like Emma Goldman who is glad that Walker has appropriated the property of a man who "has done some appropriating of his own" (322), and except for Mother's unhappy Younger Brother--is virtually deaf to Walker's plea for justice. In Kleist's novella, the government of Brandenburg, whose Elector is remorseful over his failure to have done justice to Kohlhaas before Lisbeth's death, promotes the arrangement of concurrent trials, the outcome of which is equity, at last, for the horse-dealer, before his beheading. In Ragtime, the Coalhouse Walker problem is efficiently solved by J.P. Morgan himself. He cables to the Manhattan District Attorney: "GIVE HIM HIS AUTO, AND HANG HIM." It is true that this solution is unsatisfactory to the District Attorney, who wants simply to execute the "coon" (331). Coalhouse's guerrillas, on the other hand, are bitterly disappointed by Walker's willingness to accept an amnesty for them--he has insisted on this--in addition to the restoration of his Ford by the Fire Chief, in return for his own surrender. But Walker has wanted to die since the death of his Sarah. The violence he has committed has been inspired chiefly by his angry grief over her death. When, in fulfillment of the bargain he has made with the District Attorney, he walks out into the street and is shot down by policemen who fire on him at will, his death has the quality of a sacrifice. Walker's black followers, however, seem to have been actuated chiefly by a desire to strike back at white men, and to get power for Coalhouse--a name they use as if it is a mystical body of which they are a part.15 Mother's Younger Brother does have a keen sense of the injustices that have been done to Walker. But by the end of his life, which occurs in Mexico--after he has driven there in Walker's restored Ford, to fight for the Zapatistas he seems obsessed with violence. And he leaves an ironic legacy. For Doctorow tells us that In the year and a half of his life before hisCoalhouse Walker, with his intense sense of personal injustice, his love so strong for his fiancee that he no longer values his own life after she loses hers on his behalf and his loyalty to and affection for his followers that cause him to give himself up in order to ensure their safety, is a moving figure. But alienated from a society that fears and hates a proud Negro, he also seems to exhibit some of the atomistic tendencies of our modern culture. It is never clear that, in attempting to secure redress for his own grievances, Coalhouse hopes, as Kohlhaas does--at least at first--to obtain redress for wrongs done to others. And Walker's calling himself President of a Provisional American Government suggests not an aspiration to establish a better social order, but a desire to be top man in a society that has driven him to bitter despair. Michael Kohlhaas, on the other hand, incarnates a natural law that retains some vitality in the early nineteenth century society in which Kleist wrote his novella. The horse-dealer is acting not only on his own behalf, but on that of others who have suffered injustice, when he "proclaims" a Provisional World Government. Indeed, his conception of a social order more just than the one against which he has waged bloody war, is reminiscent of the prophetic vision, or hope, of Isaiah and Micah: Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, the November, 1986 meeting in Philadelphia of the American Legal Studies Association. For criticisms which led me to revise a few segments of that paper, I am indebted to colleagues in the Simmons College Department of English, especially David Gullette and Lowry Pei. 2. Citations from E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime (New York: Bantam Books, 1976), will be identified by page numbers in parentheses in the body of the article. 3. Heinrich von Kleist, The Marquise of 0 -- and Other Stories, trans. David Luke and Michael Reeves (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1978). Citations of "Michael Kohlhaas" from this work will be identified by page numbers in parentheses in the body of the article. 4. For a brief summary of similarities between Kleist's story and Doctorow's novel, see John Ditsky, "The German Source of Ragtime," E.L. Doctorow: Essays and Conversations, ed. Richard Trenner (Princeton: Ontario Review Pr., 1983) 179-81. 5. Martin Greenberg, in the preface to his translation of Kleist's Marquise of 0 -- and Other Stories (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1973), says (27) that Kafka liked to recite "Michael Kohlhaas" aloud to his friends, and that he once gave a public reading from it in Prague. 6. Scott Buchanan, ed., The Portable Plato: Protagoras, Symposium, Phaedo, and the Republic, trans. Benjamin Jowett (New York:Viking Press, 1948) 298-99. 7. Contemporary Civilization Staff of Columbia College, Columbia University, Introduction to Contemporary Civilization in the West: A Source Book, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia U. Pr., 1946) 1:878. 8. A.P. d'Entreves, Natural Law: An Introduction to Legal Philosophy (London: Hutchinson and Co., 1951) 60. 9. Notable examples of such fictional works are Tolstoy's Resurrection, Kafka's Trial, Dreiser's American Tragedy, Camus' Stranger, and Kundera's Joke. 10. In Honore' de Balzac's "The Red Inn" [1831], Philosophic Studies, III, trans. G. Burnham Ives, La Comedie Humaine (Phila.: Geo. Barrie and Sons, 1899), a young Frenchman living in materialistic France a few decades after the Revolution, discovers that a young woman whom he loves will inherit from her father a large sum of money which he had obtained through robbery and murder. The woman knows nothing of her father's crimes, but the protagonist, not wanting to benefit from them, has scruples about asking her to marry him. He convokes a "sanhedrin" composed of friends whom he particularly trusts, and asks them to vote anonymously either in favor of or against his proposing to the heiress. The result of the vote is eight in favor, nine against. But when it occurs to him to count the number of "sanhedrin" members who are roughly his own age, he finds nine, and concludes that their "no" votes were altogether cynical: each of these men, whose values were formed during what the protagonist obviously considers the dishonest decades following the French Revolution, wants to marry the wealthy woman himself. Ethical natural law has been upheld only by the members of the tribunal who belong to an older, more scrupulous generation. Sir Walter Scott's The Heart of Midlothian ( 1818) is another early nineteenth century variation on the conflict between an ethical and a Thrasymachean concept of justice. 11. On the "old chronicle" which was Kleist's historical source, see Walter Silz, Heinrich von Kleist: Studies in His Works and Literary Character (Philadelphia: U. of Pa. Pr., 1961) 186. 12. Contemporary Civilization Staff, Introduction to Contemporary Civilization, 1:886-887. 13. Roland H. Bainton, Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther (New York: New American Library, 1955) 144. 14. Trenner, E.L. Doctorow: Essays and Conversations, 24. 15. Barbara Foley, in "From U.S.A. to Ragtime: Notes on the Forms of Historical Consciousness in Modern Fiction," repr. Trenner, E.L. Doctorow, Essays and Conversations, criticizes (167) Doctorow's "willful manipulation of the historical record," observing that "the terrorist bombings of the 'Coalhouse' gang, their designation of themselves as the 'Provisional American Government,' their takeover of the Morgan mansion as a symbolic political gesture--these are elements more distinctly reminiscent of the 1960's than of the ragtime era." |
