beggarwoman

Of course, we have been told that the castle now lies in ruins, so the fact that the beggarwoman is lying on a bed of straw on the floor may not be altogether a good thing.

Reading, Begging, Paul de Man 2005

A prospective buyer, a knight, is invited to spend the night in the very room where years before the beggarwoman had fallen, although nobody seems to recall anything about the incident.

Reading, Begging, Paul de Man 2005

The beggarwoman slips when she rises up, and the same phrase describes the way in which a rumor rises up among the servants that there is something strange afoot in the bedroom.

Reading, Begging, Paul de Man 2005

At the outset, we are informed that the Marquis just happened to walk in on the beggarwoman, but the detail is immediately mitigated by the further qualification that this was the room in which he usually kept his guns, as if it was only "somewhat" accidental that he went there after having been hunting.

Reading, Begging, Paul de Man 2005

The beggarwoman happens to fall because he happens to drop by.

Reading, Begging, Paul de Man 2005

The beggarwoman slides — sie glitscht — but the fall never becomes the kind of glitch in a system that could be corrected or expelled as something foreign.

Reading, Begging, Paul de Man 2005

The Marquise is said to assist the beggarwoman out of pity; the Marquis is described as oddly horrified when he hears the story about a ghost, although he does not understand why — but rather than rounding out the representation of a situation, these points serve to give us the impression that we are being provided with just enough information to facilitate the most formal of links between sentences.

Reading, Begging, Paul de Man 2005

If his legacy remains, like that of the beggarwoman, tenuous, it is because he offers us a lesson about the inability of our allegories of intellectual history to account for the linguistic structure of the events they strive to depict.

Reading, Begging, Paul de Man 2005

Kleist's twenty-sentence novella would therefore be an allegory of events, a tale in which no occurrence — the slip of the beggarwoman, the death of the Marquis — can be understood by situating it within a deterministic logic that would purport to explain what it means by referring it to something else.

Reading, Begging, Paul de Man 2005

Just as the ghost echoes the demise of the beggarwoman, retracing her journey across the room, so almost every other detail turns out to have a prior verbal analogue, as if even a text this short could do little more than re-quote itself.

Reading, Begging, Paul de Man 2005