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Kleist’s Four Causes: Narration and Etiology in Das Erdbeben in Chili

Kleist’s Das Erdbeben in Chili (1807) both destroys and reconstitutes human society, revealing the core essence of the social order. It also shakes through several registers of storytelling, displaying the central principles of narrative possibility. These two seemingly incommensurable categories are shown to be related in the tale. A necessary web of narrative strategies is at work in the representation of society, and the elasticity or binding adhesiveness of the web is determined by varying notions of social causation inherent in the mode of storytelling assumed by the narrative voice. As chance, quite likely, would have it, the four successive registers of explanation invoked by the narrator can be read as a cogent commentary on Aristotle’s parsing of causation and contingency.2 This essay identifies four modes of Kleistian etiology that are polymorphously analogous to Aristotle’s famous four causes. Far from simply tearing down the edifice of Western philosophical traditions, Kleist’s story presents an involved exegesis