Anthropomorphic Carrot

Having reached​ a point in his career when he could swat away the advances made by editors of literary magazines, E.T.A. Hoffmann asked a particularly demanding publisher to disabuse himself of the ‘unfortunate notion that I am suffering from a writer’s diarrhoea whereby, with every evacuation, some little story or novel makes its exit!’ In the same letter, written in January 1822, a few months before his death, Hoffmann called this ‘mechanical’ writing. In a letter written 26 years earlier to his friend Theodor von Hippel, Hoffmann, who was then living unhappily with his uncle in Königsberg, had complained of being surrounded by ‘machine-like people, who besiege me with their platitudes’. At that point, artistic activity represented an escape from the banalities of society. By the end of his life, it too seemed mechanical, an example of Vielschreiberei – writing in excess.

Hoffmann’s success as a writer came relatively late. He had a precarious career, working as a civil servant (he studied law at university), composer, music teacher, theatre director and set designer, and finally as a high-ranking functionary at the Supreme Court of Appeals in Berlin. Between the publication of his first short story, ‘Ritter Glück’, in 1809, when he was 33, and his death in 1822 from syphilis, he wrote more than fifty prose fictions. The pieces from the more hurried periods of his career tend towards the gimmicky and formulaic. There are repeated stock characters (hapless young male students, eccentric artists, squabbling scientists, witchy old women) and variations on the same plots, often love stories involving a disjuncture between a disappointing real world and an ideal alternative.

Both Jack Zipes’s The Wounded Storyteller and Peter Wortsman’s ‘The Golden Pot’ and Other Tales of the Uncanny include translations of ‘The Sandman’, Hoffmann’s most famous text. ‘The Sandman’, the ur-text on the Doppelgänger, has been the object of a dizzying number of readings, among them Freud’s essay on the uncanny, and must be one of the most frequently translated texts from German into English. It is the dense and unsettling story of a young man, Nathanael, who suffers from a fixation rooted in the nocturnal visitations during his childhood of his father’s mysterious friend Coppelius. As a boy Nathanael believes that Coppelius is the Sandman, a demonic figure who (so the family nursemaid tells him) throws sand in children’s eyes and makes them fall out of their sockets. One night, he hides himself in his father’s room to spy on Coppelius and his father, and watches them engage in an alchemical experiment. When Coppelius discovers Nathanael’s hiding place, he gleefully inspects the boy’s body, testing his joints as though he is a puppet, and threatens to remove his eyes. Not long after, Nathanael’s father is killed at home in a chemical explosion.

These traumatic memories are rekindled by a set of experiences Nathanael has at university. He thinks he has been revisited by the Sandman in a new form: Coppola, an Italian tradesman in optical devices. Coppola has made a beautiful female automaton, Olimpia, so consummate an illusion that as soon as Nathanael sets eyes on her – by means of a pocket telescope purchased from Coppola – he falls hopelessly in love. His level-headed fiancée, Clara, maintains patiently (though with increasing exasperation) that his bogeyman is nothing but a nightmarish delusion. But she is unable to make him see things her way and Nathanael throws himself from a tower after catching sight of the Sandman again through Coppola’s telescope.

Freud is interested in the strong visual inflection of Nathanael’s experiences – the consequences of looking, peering, peeping and being seen. Setting aside the Olimpia/Clara aspect of the tale, he interprets the ‘uncanny’ dimensions of the story in terms of the castration complex, charted by Nathanael’s fear relating to the loss of his eyes. Other critics have used the tale as a test case for their own critical programmes: Tzvetan Todorov mobilises it to demonstrate the way the genre of the fantastic operates; Hélène Cixous uses it as a key example of écriture féminine.

Hoffmann’s work is primarily known to us via other people’s versions or interpretations of his texts, including Alexandre Dumas’s The Tale of the Nutcracker. Zipes’s translation of ‘The Nutcracker and the Mouse King’, vividly illustrated by Natalie Frank, draws out the lurid goriness of the original tale, its fascination with the mechanised life of toys, and with the bodily and psychic injuries done to the young girl Marie as she enters into an adult love affair with the Nutcracker. After fighting away the Mouse King and his horde of mice and gorging her senses in the doll kingdom in the Nutcracker’s company, Marie wakes up under the Christmas tree. Her parents dismiss her adventures as the product of an overactive imagination. In the end, reality and dream fuse: Marie is married off to the Nutcracker, who turns up at their house in human guise as Godfather Drosselmeier’s nephew from Nuremberg. In accordance with an old prophecy, they become king and queen of the doll kingdom.

A few of Hoffmann’s works remain untranslated or partially translated, but most of the tales collected here have already been translated several times. Wortsman does tackle one of the less well-known texts, however, ‘Intimations from the Realm of Musical Notes’, a tale from the ‘Kreisleriana’, a haphazard cycle of essays on music apparently written by the fictional composer Johannes Kreisler, Hoffmann’s alter ego. Many of Hoffmann’s tales were published first in literary journals, but almost all of them were included in (and several written for) his three collections: Fantasy Pieces in Callot’s Manner, Night Pieces and The Serapion Brethren. Hoffmann’s use of the word Stück, or ‘piece’, as a label for his short prose fictions does some work to show that they function as part of something bigger, as projects in repetition and variation, or episodes in déjà vu.

Fantasy Pieces in Callot’s Manner (1814-15) is a collection of essays and stories written in homage to the French engraver Jacques Callot, known for his capricious, grotesque style. A description of Callot’s ‘manner’ in the preface sums up Hoffmann’s intended method: to capture a ‘shimmer of a certain Romantic originality’ through the use of spirited, bold forms. Night Pieces (1816-17) is a darker collection: it contains ‘The Sandman’ and other investigations of madness and delusion inspired by developments in early 19th-century psychiatry and work on dreams. Less warmly received than Fantasy Pieces, these were the tales – lurid, gothic, nightmarish – that stoked the ire of Walter Scott and others. The Serapion Brethren (1819-21) is Hoffmann’s longest and most complex cycle, in which he plays with the form of the frame narrative. A group who call themselves the Serapion Brethren, based loosely on Hoffmann’s own associates in Berlin, gather to recount stories that they then interpret and evaluate. Across their conversations they formulate a principle for their storytelling: the Serapiontic Principle, according to which storytelling should be the authentic imaginative communication of internal images, tempered by consideration for the narrator’s material constraints. Narrative practice must be balanced between absorption in fantasy and attention to the real world.

Hoffmann’s translators have subjected his cycles to endless rejigging, with each collection offering up a new image of Hoffmann to the uninitiated reader. Wortsman doesn’t explain his choice of texts and his collection feels a little desultory. In his version of ‘The Automaton’, originally published in The Serapion Brethren, part of the storytellers’ discussion is included at the end. Since the context hasn’t been given, this feels jarring. Some of his translation choices don’t work well. Near the start of his version of ‘The Golden Pot’, for example, the protagonist, Anselmus, is said to ‘plunk himself down’ by the side of the River Elbe and declare himself a ‘loser’. ‘Loser’ is Wortsman’s way around the original Kümmeltürke, an insult usually aimed at students: it is a racial slur loosely associating Turks with spice (Kümmel means ‘caraway’). The insult plays into the tale’s casual Orientalism: ‘The Golden Pot’ both satirises and shares the Romantic infatuation with Eastern fairy tales and legends. There’s no obvious English translation. Zipes opts for ‘bumbler’, which is closer to Hoffmann’s register.

Zipes’s selection has an explicit motive. In his introduction he argues that Hoffmann’s life was characterised by traumatic ‘disturbances’ that were ‘channelled’ and ‘worked through’ by his texts. The particular trauma that Zipes is interested in is the departure of Hoffmann’s father after his parents’ separation when he was a small child. A father figure appears in his stories, Zipes suggests, as ‘an omniscient adviser, ghost, bogeyman, or devil’s emissary’. This is true of ‘The Sandman’, with its haunting carousel of ersatz fathers, but Hoffmann’s mocking suspicion of male authority extends beyond any kind of father complex. Readers, biographers and translators have always been inclined to fuse the author with his fictions. Offenbach’s opera The Tales of Hoffmann depicts him as the protagonist of three of his stories, and both Zipes and Wortsman include a biographical chapter narrating Hoffmann’s life in terms that mimic his tales. It’s a tendency that follows Hoffmann’s own habit of incorporating fictional reflections of himself in his works. Kreisler, the musical genius who weaves in and out of his tales and novels, is a troubled artist figure, eccentric to the point of madness, condemned to live at the edge of polite society; like Hoffmann, he had an unhappy childhood. Brought up by a surly uncle, he sought solace in the arts.

Zipes is more convincing when he writes about the importance in Hoffmann’s work of the universal trauma of growing up and learning to live in the world, to shape our behaviour according to the arbitrary and often absurd expectations of family and other institutions (being ‘groomed’, as he puts it). The talented but clumsy student Anselmus in ‘The Golden Pot’ lands an apprenticeship with an eccentric, charismatic archivist called Lindhorst. Under the influence of the Arabic and Coptic texts he is made to transcribe (and presumably also the punch he’s been drinking), Anselmus sees Lindhorst as a fire-breathing salamander, engaged in a war with an interfering witch. Then he’s just an archivist again, irritated that Anselmus has spilled ink on his papers. Nathanael in ‘The Sandman’ falls in love with his professor’s daughter. He’s charmed by the attention she pays when he reads his poetry aloud – it’s a refreshing change from his fiancée, Clara, who can’t, or won’t, conceal her boredom. Olimpia’s attentiveness is explained when she turns out to be an automaton. This discovery makes his fellow students become suspicious of one another. At the end of the tale, after Nathanael has thrown himself to his death, his head is described as ‘smashed’, or ‘shattered’ (zerschmettert). There is a lingering sense that he might be made of something more brittle than flesh and bone – that he might be another kind of puppet, controlled by psychological or supernatural forces.

Hoffmann has an off-kilter status: he is integral to German literature courses, particularly at university level, but has an uneasy relationship to the canon. He is not a serious writer like Goethe or Mann, or a philosophical thinker, at least not in a systematic way. Unlike the other German Romantics, Hoffmann didn’t try to tackle the philosophical questions of his era – the epistemic revolutions set in motion by Kant, Fichte and Schelling – and so his fictions are less central to Romanticism but more readable than those of, say, Novalis or Schlegel. Having grown up and gone to university in Königsberg, where Kant spent his whole life (you could, apparently, set your clock by his daily movements to and from the lecture hall), Hoffmann knew the principles of Kantian philosophy but did not engage with it programmatically in his fiction, although it inevitably pokes through, especially when he considers the limits of human reason. Hoffmann seemed most occupied by the notion that our empirical experience of the world is only one possible way of making sense of it. As well as exploring the fantastic in a modern, urban context, he also paid attention to those things we might not ordinarily categorise as ‘real’ – dreams, fantasies and bogeymen – but that are real enough in their own way, if we alter our perspective. A man wanders the streets of Berlin and encounters a celebrated musician who has been dead for hundreds of years (he plays terribly). A man wakes up and finds that the colour green has disappeared. A young artist doodles distractedly and then meets people who look exactly like the figures he’s drawn. Two scientists squabble over their possession of a beautiful ‘islander’, whom the reader takes to be a ravishing Indigenous Hawaiian woman – until we find out that the islander is a rare insect.

Hoffmann’s stories are told in a fragmentary form. He has a proto-postmodern fondness, though one rooted in Romantic literature, for broken narrative structures, and for the use of the narrative voice as a character in his fiction (‘Hoffmann’ or ‘Hff’ himself occasionally makes an appearance). He likes displacements, doublings and frame narratives that spill into one another. Perhaps most of all, he is adept at taking something and repeating it with a small variation, representing an event from a number of shifting perspectives such that reality yawns open, embracing all sorts of possibilities. In the initial scene of ‘A New Year’s Eve Adventure’, the narrator describes his feelings of alienation in the suffocating atmosphere of a party at which his former lover, Julia, spurns him. His story of rejection is repeated in, and intensified by, the more fantastic stories told to him directly afterwards by two characters he meets in an inn. One of them has lost his shadow, the other his reflection: both are cast out from society as a result. The three stories cross over and reflect on one another, accumulating into a kaleidoscopic portrait of a disenfranchised self. Hoffmann appears at the end of this tale too and it has been read as an autobiographical fiction that deals with his ill-fated love for a teenage music student of his, Julia Marc. His repetition shapes events both within and between his texts – it raises the stakes of the uncanny in ‘The Sandman’, where the traumatic events of Nathanael’s childhood recur across his life, with the recurrence of the figure of the male scientist, mysterious explosions and optical injury (Olimpia is revealed as an automaton when her eyes spring from their sockets). Hoffmann’s tales induce a sense of déjà vu, tugging just enough at our readerly memory to make us experience the almost-knowing that Freud called the ‘uncanny’, and that Hoffmann termed ‘etwas fremdartig Bekanntes’ (‘something strangely familiar’). As much as it plays out structurally, within and across the tales (tales repeat themselves, characters return), the ‘strangely familiar’ is an aesthetic quality, the mark of his realism. The world Hoffmann gives us is one we recognise as real, because it is populated by tradesmen, lawyers, students and craftsmen, even as it is distorted by the intrusion of fantasy.

These complexities​ have made Hoffmann’s tales popular with both theorists and readers. On his birthday, members of the Berlin section of the Hoffmann Society gather at his grave and drink wine, toasting ‘In Hoffmanno!’ There was a minor scandal in the 1980s when one of the Berlin members vandalised a street sign, changing Hollmannstrasse to Hoffmannstrasse. Something about this enthusiasm can feel excessive. Critics are encouraged to be cautious about endorsing descriptions of literature as ‘enjoyable’ (enjoyable for whom? And at whose expense?). Hoffmann displays all the misogyny you would expect (I disagree with Zipes, who claims in his introduction that none of Hoffmann’s female characters is stereotyped). And his use of antisemitic caricatures prompted the renaming of the former E.T.A. Hoffmann Garden, which is next to the Jewish Museum in Berlin. But we should think a little more about the reasons people have continued to enjoy his stories.

Walter Scott wrote in a review for the Foreign Quarterly that Hoffmann’s ‘fantastic extravagances’ were symptomatic of fraught nerves and a sick mind. He was referring to ‘The Sandman’, but one wonders what he made of ‘The King’s Bride’, a fairy tale featuring an anthropomorphic carrot. After his death, and largely thanks to the shrewd marketing campaigns of his translators, Hoffmann became a literary sensation in France. This was when his name – and the ‘hoffmannesque’ or ‘hoffmannesk’ – came to signal the imaginative charge of le fantastique. Balzac, Gautier and Nerval were all influenced by his work. Wortsman and Zipes recount networks of influence from Gogol to Angela Carter to Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner. He has also had less savoury admirers. Almost all of the founding members of the E.T.A. Hoffmann-Gesellschaft belonged to the National Socialist Party, whose members saw him as an exponent of a ‘truly German literature’. But some of the most significant critical work on Hoffmann has come from Marxist scholars, including György Lukács, who condemned Romantic literature for its reactionary politics, but made an exception for Hoffmann, whom he declared ‘a truly great realist’. Hoffmann’s works were the most readily available of all German Romantic writers in the GDR, a state that prided itself on its literary culture and exercised tight restrictions on reading material. Christa Wolf, one of the most successful East German novelists, wrote a continuation of one of his novels. Hoffmann’s snide caricatures of the status quo, and particularly of the bourgeoisie, are important here. The GDR favoured his more realistic works, such as ‘Master Martin the Cooper and his Journeymen’. But at heart Hoffmann was quietly opposed to all forms of dogmatic authority. The implicit politics of his desire to make reality seem like a flimsy, more or less arbitrary layer of experience lie in the implication that alternative realities exist, and might be better than the one we’ve got.

‘My Cousin’s Corner Window’, included in Wortsman’s collection, takes the form of a dialogue between the anonymous narrator and his cousin, an author now on his deathbed – as Hoffmann was when he wrote the story – who was famous for ‘pumping out all manner of charming narratives’ (this is a bit of a leap from the original ‘allerlei anmutige Geschichten erzählte’, or ‘told all sorts of charming stories’). The author and his cousin tell each other tales about the people they see in the marketplace from the window of his Berlin apartment. The author remembers once strolling across the marketplace and noticing a flower girl reading a book. He realised with amused pride, and a little self-aggrandising bafflement, that the book was one of his own. He introduced himself.

‘Oh, my dear Sir,’ replied the girl, ‘that’s an odd book. In the beginning it sends you for a loop; but then it’s like you’re sucked in.’ To my considerable surprise, the girl gave a clear account of the story, so that I realised she must have read it several times. She repeated that it was a really odd book, sometimes she laughed out loud in the telling, sometimes she was on the edge of tears; she advised me, in case I hadn’t yet read it, to pick it up that afternoon from Mr Kralowski’s lending library, seeing as she changed books every afternoon.

Did the author expect an intellectual conversation about his tale? Or simply to bear witness to the enthusiasm of a fan? Either way, he’s disappointed, because it transpires that the girl doesn’t understand what authorship is. She asks him whether he wrote ‘all the books in Mr Kralowski’s stand’. The awkward encounter makes a quiet mockery both of the flower girl, who imagines that books pop up in the world ‘like mushrooms’, and the author, who feels a ‘profound humiliation’. The vignette shows Hoffmann’s amused puzzlement about the consequences of writing popular fiction in a world in which book-writing was becoming a commercial enterprise. The girl does like his book, even if she’s not the reader he had imagined for himself. But there’s a lingering suspicion of that readerly pleasure, of saleable fictions that amuse and entertain but tend towards the derivative or generic, or risk not being understood – ‘mechanical’ writing perhaps. Hoffmann’s decision to situate this scene in a city marketplace isn’t arbitrary: the value of reading is up for sale. His stories are concerned with the banal, the everyday, with disappointment and disillusionment.