Reading and Studying Literature
Florafoza
Hoffmann-Week14.pptxChapter four: E.T.A. Hoffmann: fantasy lives
Prepared by: Dr. Hend hamed
Assistant Professor of English literature
Introduction: e.t.a. hoffmann
Hoffmann (1776-1822) (the same death year as Shelly) was one of the greatest European Romantic writers.
When studying Hoffmann, we’ll be turning away from autobiographical versions of the Romantic life to experimental fictive representations.
Hoffmann’s work is often said to represent the culmination of German Romanticism.
Introduction: e.t.a. hoffmann
Due to the Napoleonic Wars, Hoffmann was forced to flee back and forth across Europe.
In 1805, Prussia came under the control of Napoleon, and the Prussian Civil Service was disbanded; Hoffmann’s already erratic career as a civil servant collapsed and he was forced to live in Warsaw.
In 1807, he was deported to Berlin by the French authorities, where he nearly starved to death.
Introduction: e.t.a. hoffmann
In 1808, he went to Bamberg as theatre musical director.
In 1813, Hoffmann found himself more or less on the battlefield of the Battle of Dresden, and was then caught up in the Battle of the Nations.
He began to produce a substantial amount of writing, publishing his first collection of short stories in 1813.
Recalled to Berlin to a post in the judiciary, Hoffmann continued to support himself until his death largely by producing fiction and criticism.
Introduction: e.t.a. hoffmann
Author of 2 novels, 7 literary fairy tales, and 60 other ‘tales’ or ‘pieces’ along with a large body of important music criticism, Hoffmann was extensively read both in German and in French translation across Europe and America in his lifetime.
He didn’t appear in English translation until the middle of the 19th century.
Hoffmann’s work exerted considerable influence on the subsequent development of the short form of the ‘tale of mystery and imagination’.
Introduction: Les Contes D’hoffmann
Les Contes d’Hoffmann, a play made about the life of Hoffmann, was produced in 1851.
The play was made through the use of 3 of his ‘tales’ (‘A New Year’s Eve Adventure’ – ‘The Sandman’ – ‘Councilor Krespel’).
Introduction: Les Contes D’hoffmann
The play was fundamentally faithful in its depiction of Hoffmann’s life as a man and as a writer:
It preserves the author’s arguably well-deserved reputation as a heavy-drinking genius.
It replicated his habit of framing up his stories collectively and internally as tales told to and discussed with a band of male friends.
It pays homage to a habit of recasting unhappy love stories in thinly disguised fictional form to the great annoyance and embarrassment of everyone else concerned.
Introduction: Hoffmann’s personae
Hoffmann had a habit of crafting personae for himself:
As a music critic, he adopted the persona of one Johannes Kreisler (Fig 4.1 P. 103), an imaginary violinist and conductor.
Within his stories, he repeatedly appears as a character under his own name as either ‘Theodore’ or ‘Hoffmann’.
As the editor of the journals, he presents himself as a man called ‘the travelling enthusiast’. These journals are themselves addressed to Hoffmann as their first reader.
Introduction: Hoffmann’s tales
Hoffmann’s tales are throughout characterized by an oscillation between voices located in the real world of contemporary Berlin and voices prey to dreams and visions and living in ‘a strange magical realm’.
The tales were published under titles such as ‘Fantasy Pieces’ and ‘Night-Pieces’, titles calculated to evoke ideas of darkness, obscured vision and the world of dreams.
In fact, they evoke fantasy and the fantastic – which maybe defined as literature which is interested in portraying events that could not happen in real life.
Introduction: Hoffmann’s tales
In this sense, fantasy and the fantastic are the opposite of realism, which specializes in portraying the everyday in faithful detail.
Hoffman’s stories have since come to be known as ‘literary tales’, to signal their kinship with another kind of story, the ‘children’s and household tales’ published in 1812 by the Brothers Grimm.
Introduction: Hoffmann’s literary tales
The ‘literary tales’ had an important prehistory within literature in German as allegorical tales set inside longer stories.
A recent editor of Hoffmann’s works, Everett Bleiler, notes that ‘these often appeared as symbolic kernels or germs within the larger context of a story, offering in frankly poetic and mythical form the point offered more or less realistically in the full story. The marchen (literary tale) was thus a microcosm within a macrocosm’. This suggests a structural complexity of doubling and parallelism; and it also suggests a juxtaposition of the supernatural with the everyday. For example, ‘The Sandman’ insists that the real world and the fantastical are contiguous and simultaneous.
The sandman: thee romantic writers
‘The Sandman’ opens with letters ostensibly written by two of the story’s central characters, Nathanael and Clara.
There precede a long section of narration in the voice of a fictionalized authorial persona: the ‘Hoffmann’ figure we encountered.
This narrating persona begins by addressing the reader directly in the first person.
What confronts us here 3 fictive versions of the Romantic writer, with each of the 3 providing their own perspective on events.
The effect is not only to produce a fragmented structure, but also to demonstrate the difficulty of obtaining any definitive account of reality.
The sandman: thee romantic writers
Read:
Extract 1: (From Nathanael’s opening letter to Lothar) P. 107-8
Extract 2: (Clara’s reply to the misdirected letter) P. 108
Extract 3: (The fictionalized author explains his motivations for telling the story) P. 108-9
The sandman: thee romantic writers
How is each of these Romantic narrators characterized? Attend to their style of expression, as well as to what they tell us about themselves.
A- Nathanael presents himself as the victim of extreme feelings, and of events beyond his control.
His exclamatory register betrays the heightened emotional sensitivity of a mind troubled by ‘dark forebodings’ and the compulsive rehearsing of a ‘fatal memory’.
At the same time, his account of the occasion which sparked this reaction is matter-of-fact and draws on the conventions of realism (the exact specification of time and date).
The sandman: thee romantic writers
How is each of these Romantic narrators characterized? Attend to their style of expression, as well as to what they tell us about themselves.
B- Clara’s voice strikes us as one of commonsense reassurance; she explains away Nathanael’s fears as the product of a ‘phantom’ self and of his misguided ‘belief’ in malevolent powers.
- Underlying her pragmatic dose of therapy is a hint of anxious uncertainty: ‘I don’t quite understand’, ‘I only have a dim idea’.
The sandman: thee romantic writers
How is each of these Romantic narrators characterized? Attend to their style of expression, as well as to what they tell us about themselves.
C- The fictionalized author-figure adopts a confidential and conversational tone, but portrays himself as a Romantic visionary: ‘absorbed’ by the tale he has to relate and ‘powerfully’ impelled to tell it.
The sandman: thee romantic writers
2) What similarities do you detect between these three narrators?
They declare themselves in tones of intense passion
They share a characteristically Gothic vocabulary of ‘menacing fate’, ‘dark powers and forces’, and ‘strange’ and ‘portentous’ stories.
They exhibit a confusing mix of obsession and detachment.
They all refer to the difficulty of communicating what they want to say: ‘how am I ever to convey to you’, ‘I have with some labour, written down’, ‘they are unable to find words’. Thus, there is a sense here of a crisis in the Romantic vocation: a suspicion that language may be inadequate to the enormity of the Romantic visionary’s endeavor to both capture and transcend reality.
The sandman: thee romantic writers
3) What resemblances can you identify between the personae of these three fictional Romantic writers and any of the Romantic selves we have encountered in the preceding chapters of the book?
1- The troubled figure of Nathanael resembles De Quincey’s depiction of a ‘self undone by its dreams’.
2- The direct way in which the authorial persona discusses his writing dilemmas with the reader resembles the Opium-Eater’s remarks about his inability to compose his narrative into a connected shape.
3- The theme of inescapable memory connects back to the autobiographical persona of Wordsworth’s Prelude.
The sandman: thee romantic writers
3) What resemblances can you identify between the personae of these three fictional Romantic writers and any of the Romantic selves we have encountered in the preceding chapters of the book?
4- The image of the Romantic writer as a visionary unsure of his own expressive powers might remind us of the figure of the poet articulated in Shelly’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’.
The sandman: thee romantic writers
In each of these three fictional personae, we have a construct of the Romantic writer whose imagination has in some way exceeded their control:
Nathanael is ‘vainly struggling’ to escape from the imagined threat posed by the barometer-seller.
Clara’s inclination to turn the story into a joke in thwarted by her anxiety about what she imagines as Nathanael’s ‘deep perturbation of spirits’ and ‘state of mind’.
The authorial persona, with more than a hint of irony, declares ‘the prismatic radiance’ of his own imagination to be beyond his power as a writer to convey.
The sandman: thee romantic writers
As you read the story, notice:
How the authorial persona inserts himself into the story as an eyewitness and claims acquaintance with its characters,
Stay alert to any judgements this persona offers through the more knowing viewpoint of irony and with the benefit of hindsight,
Beware of the ways in which this fictionalized version of Hoffmann-the-writer channels and subtly manipulated the story’s complex and unstable mix of common-sense explanation and the Gothic horrors generated by an imagination out of control.
Ways of seeing: eyes and ‘I’s
Seeing, sight, and vision form a prominent strand of connecting imagery.
Nathanael wishes fervently that Lothar ‘could see for yourself’.
Clara employs the words ‘dark’ and ‘dim’ to refer to forces beyond her understanding.
The authorial figure not only repeats the word ‘vision’, but also refers to the ‘prismatic radiance’ of his own creative impulse.
Ways of seeing: eyes and ‘I’s
The idea that there is more than one way of seeing, and that the Romantic artist might be equipped with a special and privileged way of seeing, is this explored in ‘The Sandman’ through the recurring pattern of references to sight, vision, and above all, to eyes.
Ways of seeing: the double figure of Coppelius/ coppola
Nathanael’s Opening letter:
In this scene, eyes and the fear of their loss are at the core of the remembered nightmare of the child Nathanael: ‘It seemed to me that human faces were visible on all sides, but without eyes, and with ghastly, deep, black cavities instead’.
Neither child nor reader is clear at this stage about the nature of the experiment taking place in the father’s study; but reading retrospectively we realise that the eyes are the last and most difficult additions to the dolls.
Being able to see thus becomes a symbol of existence: to see is to be.
Thus, when the Sandman throws a handful of sand into your eyes and you are forced to close them, you are cut off from feeling and thinking. Existence returns only when you awake and see again.
Ways of seeing: the double figure of Coppelius/ coppola
2) The Scene in which Coppola sells the spyglass to Nathanael:
The scene in which Coppola brings spectacles and spyglasses for sale to Nathanael’s lodgings provides a key point in this pattern of imagery.
At first, Nathanael is baffled by Coppola’s cry ‘I’ave beautiful eyes-a to sell you’; but then he sees the spectacles piling up and instantly imagines them as ‘flaming eyes’ which ‘flickered and winked and goggled’ at him.
The spectacles take on a life of their own, the multiple versions of reality they offer leaving Nathanael disoriented and overwhelmed.
Ways of seeing: the double figure of Coppelius/ coppola
2) The Scene in which Coppola sells the spyglass to Nathanael:
The spyglass, on the other hand (which in fact magnifies rather than corrects the version of reality that we see), seems to bring ‘objects before one’s eyes with the clarity, sharpness, and distinctness’ of accurate and single vision.
It seems that Hoffmann is establishing two ways of seeing here: the spyglass way in which vision is apparently unproblematically improved; and the spectacles way, which renders reality subject to countless subjective and bewildering perspectives.
Romantic views of perceiving reality
These ways can be understood as metaphors for different Romantic ways of perceiving reality.
The distorting lenses of the multiple pairs of spectacles demonstrate how perception is vulnerable to the vagaries of individual subjectivity: the ‘eyes’ of the spectacles represent the innumerable ‘I’s who see the world in different ways.
On the other hand, the spyglass can in theory provide privileged access to a single truth. What the events of ‘The Sandman’ demonstrate is that even this heightened perceptive faculty of the Romantic imagination can render the truth obscure and inaccessible, and even fatal, when it is misapplied.
Romantic views of perceiving reality: coppola
Why should Coppola (whose name means ‘eye-sockets’ in Italian) be introduced initially as a barometer-seller if this pattern of eyes and seeing is so important?
We might perhaps interpret selling barometers as a front, concealing Coppola’s darker secrets.
Also, both of these instruments mediate between ourselves and the external world. We tap the barometer and that conditions our sense of the weather. We use a spy-glass (a man-made invention) to see a distant object, and that conditions our sense of the reality of the object. When viewed through the spyglass, Olimpia’s ‘eyes seemed to sparkle more and more vividly’.
Romantic views of perceiving reality: coppola
In both cases, perception depends on a scientific instrument which may not be entirely reliable. Through the deft exercise of irony, the spyglass, which ought to enable Nathanael to see more clearly, becomes the instrument of his blindness to Olimpia’s true status as a mechanical doll.
Romantic views of perceiving reality: the scene of olimpia’s death
The scene of Olimpia’s death brings the recurring theme of eyes and sight to a powerful climax, and demonstrates how ways of seeing are fundamental to self-identity.
Coppola and Spalanzani argue their competing claims to have given ‘life’ to Olimpia through respectively providing the eyes and the clockwork mechanism.
Olimpia’s own terrible fate is symbolized by the tearing out of her eyes exactly like the figures in the child’s earlier nightmare vision.
When Spalanzani picks up the eyes and hurls them at Nathanael, it is plain that in his estimation the eyes, and the ‘life’ they gave to the doll, belong most properly to Nathanael.
Romantic views of perceiving reality: the scene of olimpia’s death
The story indicates that Nathanael has invested everything – his whole way of seeing life – on his idealizing love for Olimpia and what she represents: passion, transcendence, poetry. When that way of seeing fails, the coherence of the ‘I’ fractures, and he loses his mind and his sense of identity.
Sigmund Freud’s reading of ‘the sandman’
Sigmund Freud’s (1856-1939) – the famous founder of psychoanalysis – discussion of ‘The Sandman’ appears in an article written in 1919 on ‘the uncanny’, where he treats the story of Nathanael and his nightmare fate as if it were one of his own case studies.
At the heart of Freud’s thinking is the idea that the experiences we have as a child shape our adult identities, and in particular, our sexual selves.
Nathanael versus wordsworth
Read P. 114 – 115
Compare the adult Nathanael’s assessment of his formative childhood memories with the adult Wordsoworth’s 1799 reflection on his memory of the drowning. How does each of the speakers sum up the remembered event?
How do they explain its impact on them?
Nathanael versus wordsworth
Nathanael associated the remembered episode in his father’s study with ‘fear’ and ‘terror’.
The memory serves as a prelude to ‘the most terrifying moment’ of his father’s death – the next episode in the story he is so eager to tell.
The autobiographical narrator of The Prelude reflects as an adult on his memory of the recovery of the drowned man, describing it as just one among many ‘tragic facts of rural history’ that he remembers from his childhood.
He remarks that such memories in retrospect evoke ‘far other feelings’ than those experienced at the time.
He, also, notes how the ‘independent life’ of the imagination has invested the memories with abiding significance.
Nathanael versus wordsworth
The creative ‘mind’ of Wordsworth’s autobiographical narrator has thus allowed him to distance and absorb a traumatic childhood memory of loss, guilt, and death, into a story of the maturing of his poetic imagination.
The memory is valued for what it might mean for the coherent story of the growth of the poet’s mind.
By contrast, the effect of memory on Nathanael is much less benign.
Nathanael’s initially notes the immediate physical impact of his traumatic encounter: he was laid low with a ‘violent fever’, from which he was subsequently cured.
Nathanael versus wordsworth
In the longer term, the disturbing episode in the study is mapped onto the occasion of his father’s death.
The impact of Nathanael’s memory is to burden him with feelings of unresolved loss and inescapable fate, and with a poetic imagination driven by compulsion.
Wordworth’s tale of the drowned man appears not long before the section in the 1799 Prelude in which the narrator recounts the death of his own father. For this narrator, the sense of loss attached to the death of the father provides him with a kind of steadying perspective.
Nathanael versus wordsworth
For Nathanael, the memory of his father’s loss does not supply perspective but further distorts it.
The death of the father has apparently stunted his growth from childhood to adulthood, and he finds himself in a ‘colourless’ adult present in which the anxiety of childhood trauma remains unprocessed and undiluted.
The uncanny
Freud explains this impact of childhood memory in ‘The Sandman’ in relation to his concept of the ‘uncanny’ or ‘unheimlich’. In German, this term gains most of its meaning as the opposite of ‘Heimlich’, which usually means ‘homely’ or ‘familiar’.
According to the German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775-1854), ‘unheimlich’ is that which ought to have remained hidden, but has nonetheless come to light.
Later, when discussing ‘The Sandman’, Freud provides a further definition, couched in psychological terms: “An uncanny experience occurs either when infantile complexes which have been repressed are once more revived by some impression, or when primitive beliefs which have not been surmounted seem once more to be confirmed”.
The uncanny
The sudden appearance of the barometer seller revives a repressed memory in Nathanael which is a composite of the story of the Sandman, and Coppelius’s threat that his eyes will be pulled out.
In Nathanael’s retelling the repressed memory links his experience in the room that seems both workshop and torture chamber, the return of Coppelius a year later, and the death of his father.
The particular ‘infantile complex’ that Freud refers to is the fear of castration.
The uncanny
Freud reads ‘The Sandman’ as a case study of Nathanael – a man marked by a boyhood failure to pass beyond and repress the fear of castration, encapsulated in his horrified remembering of Coppelius’s threat to pull out his eyes.
Nathanael suffers from unresolved guilt, feeling that he is in some way responsible for his father’s death, and from an unresolved fear if Coppelius who seems to be a double for his father.
‘Homely’ & ‘uncanny’: clara & Olimpia
The relationship between the ‘homely’ and the ‘uncanny’, the familiar and the strange, is equally important for the story’s treatment of its own female characters.
There are many parallels between them; in fact, they double one another.
Clara’s first attempt at describing herself through Nathanael’s eyes tells us of her characteristic ‘calm and deliberation’ in the face of crisis.
Olimpia reveals her as a similarly composed and balanced figure: ‘a tall, very slim woman, beautifully proportioned and magnificently dressed’.
‘Homely’ & ‘uncanny’: clara & Olimpia
Clara is subject to criticism for being ‘unresponsive and prosaic’, and in parallel, at Spalanzani’s ball ‘criticism was levelled particularly at the rigid and silent Olimpia.
Both are repeatedly described as cold.
These women both exemplify the ‘Heimlich’ in that they fulfil the socially approved role for women as the passive, modest exemplars of domestic virtue.
The main difference between the two is that Clara is allowed a voice and a measure of agency in the action of the story, whereas Olimpia is ‘entirely passive’.
‘Homely’ & ‘uncanny’: clara & Olimpia
Clara sees, Olimpia is seen.
Clara’s role is to contain the flights of Nathanael’s imagination by opposing them, and thus anchor him back to reality; whereas Olimpia’s complaint responses indulge his extremes if fantasy.
Both are presented are presented as the direct or indirect products of masculine creative endeavor.
‘Homely’ & ‘uncanny’: clara & Olimpia
READ PASSAGES ON P. 319-320 AND 330:
What strike you as the similarities and differences between these descriptions?
The narrator’s assessment of Clara is tempered by the detachment of humour.
We are told twice about Clara’s ‘sly, ironic smile’ and the narrator offers apparently sincere praise for her ‘warm-hearted’ tenderness, and ‘acute, discriminating mind’.
He seems to be providing a balanced judgment of a woman who, he implies, should be valued for her internal personal qualities rather than her external beauty.
‘Homely’ & ‘uncanny’: clara & Olimpia
READ PASSAGES ON P. 319-320 AND 330:
What strike you as the similarities and differences between these descriptions?
In the descriptions of Olimpia, we are given two starkly opposing views of the woman which can’t be reconciled.
The focus is on physical body, finding her face and figure ‘regular’ but her gaze and movement uncannily lifeless.
Nathanael laud the depths of Olimpia’s ‘soul’, recognizing himself in the ‘inner world’ of her love.
The reader is persuaded by the author-figure’s view of Clara, but Nathanael’s view of Olimpia is deluded because he is the only one who holds it.
‘Homely’ & ‘uncanny’: clara & Olimpia
READ PASSAGES ON P. 319-320 AND 330:
2) How do the descriptions convey that both women are, in their different ways, constructed as the artificial creations of men?
- The description of both women is framed by reference to art.
Hoffmann’s description of Clara is interrupted by a telling digression on some of the ways in which painters, poets, and other creative workers have attempted to render female beauty in artistic form.
In the description of Olimpia, credits are given to her appearance of beauty to the creative work of craft rather than art. Her movement is ‘produced by some mechanism like clockwork, and her singing, playing, and dancing exhibit the ‘soulless timing of a machine.
‘Homely’ & ‘uncanny’: clara & Olimpia
READ PASSAGES ON P. 319-320 AND 330:
3) How are we invited to respond to these efforts of artificial creation?
Hoffmann’s comic jibes at the devices and pretensions of painters and poets invite unambiguous skepticism towards the artistic idealization of the female form.
The tale suggests a critique of the efforts of both artists and scientists to reconstruct the feminine ideal in imaginary form.
Thus, both women, in different ways, act as a critique of the masculine Romantic imagination. Clara’s clear-sighted but rational sensibility would seem to throw into sharp relief the distortion and sickness of Nathanael’s vision. Olimpia is a mere mechanical doll, equally reveals his idealizing vision as creative but deluded.
Art and automata: Frankenstein
Frankenstein (built of Mary Shelly’s novel published in 1818) is an enthusiastic student of science who sets about creating another human being, by galvanizing inanimate body parts with electricity. At a later point in the novel, he goes on to destroy the female companion that he makes for his monster.
Nathanael’s creative project is literary rather than scientific, but is equally associated with a project of animating the inanimate.
Nathanael is the embodiment of Romantic imagination, which becomes self-devouring in its excess of aspiration.
Like Frankenstein, Nathanael is ultimately destroyed by the paradox of the Romantic artists’ condition as the critic Roder describes it: ‘to remain subject to the constraints of the temporal world while his imagination makes him yearn for the higher realm of the ideal’.
Frankenstein
Nathanael’s love for the automaton Olimpia is itself parodic of the love of the invisible world of transcendence.
Nathanael represents a distorted version of the Romantic author.
The narrator informs us that ‘in the past Nathanael had shown a special gift for composing charming and vivid stories’ (this belief that the Romantic writer has some ‘special’ quality is of course familiar).
Nathanael’s ‘special gift’ has, however, been warped by the introspective mood which loads him to dwell on ‘dreams and premonitions’.
It results, moreover, in compositions which have become ‘gloomy, unintelligle and formless’ and infected by what Clara perceives as ‘dismal, obscure, tedious mysticism’.
The fantasy narrative poem
READ P. 321 – 322 (The section of ‘The Sandman’ in which Nathanael writes his fantasy narrative poem about the impending destruction of his relationship with Clara, and then reads it aloud to her).
What effect does the act of writing the poem have on Nathanael?
The exercise of the imagination involved in creative writing appears on the surface to have a therapeutic effect.
Nathanael is ‘calm and collected’ when absorbed in the process of composition, and sufficiently detached to revise his work and submit it ‘to the constraints of meter’.
While he is writing the poem, he is able to converse with Clara ‘in a lively, cheerful manner about pleasant matters’.
The fantasy narrative poem
READ P. 321 – 322 (The section of ‘The Sandman’ in which Nathanael writes his fantasy narrative poem about the impending destruction of his relationship with Clara, and then reads it aloud to her).
What effect does the act of writing the poem have on Nathanael?
All of his real-world fears and nightmarish forebodings have been channeled into the act of literary creation and for a moment, it seems as if Nathanael might be able to contain the darker side of his imagination by subjecting it to the distancing and control of the writing process.
The fantasy narrative poem
READ P. 321 – 322 (The section of ‘The Sandman’ in which Nathanael writes his fantasy narrative poem about the impending destruction of his relationship with Clara, and then reads it aloud to her).
2) What is the effect of its content when he reads it aloud, both to himself and later to Clara?
The content of the poem and Nathanael’s reaction to it reveal that writing poetry has simply become a means for the fictional Romantic author to indulge his wildest fantasies.
The ‘black hand’, the recurring ‘circle of flames’, and the violent waves which ‘rear up like black giants with white heads are visions of a hallucinatory quality.
The fantasy narrative poem
READ P. 321 – 322 (The section of ‘The Sandman’ in which Nathanael writes his fantasy narrative poem about the impending destruction of his relationship with Clara, and then reads it aloud to her).
2) What is the effect of its content when he reads it aloud, both to himself and later to Clara?
On reading the poem to Clara, Nathanael; is again ‘entirely carried away’ from reality by the force of the imaginary world which possesses him.
The romantic imagination: art
Hoffmann’s story show us, then, how a fervent authorial imagination allowed to run riot can too easily mutate into destructive delusion.
The story, however, also offers us an alternative, apparently healthier, version of the imagination, and an analysis of where Nathanael’s approach to the creative Romantic life has gone wrong.
Nathanael is not the only figure in this story who seems to embody the equivocal nature of Romantic art and the Romantic imagination.
An alternative, more powerful figure for the Romantic artist might rather be Dr. Coppelius.
The romantic imagination: art
A diabolical seducer, who possesses the power of enduing his automaton with apparent life, and who is capable of appearing in multiple forms, Coppelius is just one version of an ambiguously demonic figure who appears repeatedly in Hoffmann’s fiction.
Very frequently, such figures appear in connection with technology, and especially with automata, which particularly fascinated Hoffmann.
Automata
READ TWO EXTRACTS P. 122-4:
The first deals with a formal visit that two friends pay to Professor X -, celebrated for his connection with a particularly mysterious automaton, the ‘Talking Turk’, who appears to be able to read the very soul of his questioner.
The second described their discovery, while on a walk beyond the town, of the Professor wandering in his garden, which another friend describes as ‘his mysterious laboratory’.
Compare what these two extracts have to say about the nature of art and Romantic genius.
Automata
The first passage describes the Professor as a man of the utmost ingenuity in producing musical machines, but also a showman and ironist.
The second one describes him as a true Romantic artist who produces music which, though possibly using some sort of technology, seems to transcend it.
The ‘revelations’ that the friends had hoped from the first display are provided by the second.
The story is concerned to distinguish true art from fake. True art channels the transcendent, however imperfectly, and is associated with the natural; fake art may be perfect but is merely mechanical.
The transcendent in Hoffmann
Hoffmann, like other Romantic contemporaries, experimented constantly to try to find an appropriate form and language through which to convey an apprehension of the transcendent – and its dark double, madness and delusion.
Typically, the structure of Hoffmann’s stories embodies uncertainty and open-endedness, an open form that will be dreamlike or visionary, filled with repetition and yet fragmentary.
The language will draw attention to its own limitations.
The entire story will poise in a delicate balance the rational and the unexplained, or even supernatural.
The transcendent in Hoffmann
Of all of Hoffmann’s ‘Tales’, ‘The Sandman’ is probably the least imperfect in form or inconclusive in story.
It is also the most inclined to ascribe the supernatural to psychological disturbance.
Yet, it conforms to this description of the Romantic aesthetic to the extent that it does not fully resolve the tensions between what its three narrating voices perceive as reality.
conclusion
We discussed the following in this chapter:
The multiple personae Hoffmann crafted for his professional life are paralleled in ‘The Sandman’ by a fictional recasting of the narrating ‘Hoffmann’ figure,
How the treatment of Nathanael offers a skeptical view of the tendency of the Romantic artist to fantasize and idealize,
Hoffmann’s stories juxtapose the Heimlich with the uncanny, the deluded with the rational, the unified with the divided self, and the idea of crafted fakery with that of true creative genius,
Hoffmann’s vocation of the Romantic artist is to find a form and language which will accommodate such oppositions in an open and unresolved co-existence.
