The golden pot, p.37
The Golden Pot, page 37
“So, you’ve still got an appetite after all, dear cousin?” I asked.
“Oh, yes,” he replied with a pained chuckle, “as you will soon be able to attest for yourself.”
The invalid servant rolled him into the room. The proffered dishes comprised a middling soup bowl filled with a beef broth, a single soft-boiled egg propped up in a heap of salt, and half of a dinner roll.
“A single bite more,” my cousin quietly and wistfully remarked, as he pressed my hand, “even the most minuscule additional piece of the tenderest meat engenders the most excruciating pain, dispels my last ounce of courage to face life, and extinguishes the last little spark of humor that flashes every now and then.”
Motioning in the direction of the sheet of paper attached to his bed screen, I flung myself on my cousin’s chest and pressed him hard against me.
“Yes, cousin,” he cried out with a voice that cut me to the quick and filled me with heartrending sorrow. “Yes, indeed: “Et si male nunc, non olim sic erit!”
My poor cousin!
Skip Notes
*1 Hoffmann’s last lodgings, at Taubenstraße 31, corner Charlottenstraße 38/39, overlooked the Gendarmenmarkt in Berlin.
*2 If things are bad now, they may take a better turn in the future. (From an ode by Horace).
*3 Latin saying: Enough said!
*4 A children’s schoolbook widely used in Europe from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century.
*5 A Latin quotation from Horace: Parturiunt montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Literally: The mountains are in labor and a piddling mouse will be born. By implication: To make a mountain out of a molehill.
*6 An allusion to Die Schöne Mullerin (The Lovely Miller Maiden), a song cycle by Franz Schubert (1797–1828), based on poems by Wilhelm Müller (1794–1827).
*7 Jack-of-all-trades.
*8 A formerly working-class neighborhood in the heart of Berlin.
*9 Latin expression, roughly translatable as: to be surprised by nothing.
Facing the Music: The Melodious Imaginings of E.T.A. Hoffmann
An Afterword
On weekdays I’m a jurist, and a bit of a musician, my Sundays are devoted to drawing, and come evening I’m a quick-witted author until late at night.
E.T.A. Hoffmann
Not far from his perch at the corner window overlooking Gendarmenmarkt, the central marketplace in Berlin where Hoffmann last surveyed life, paralyzed and in the painful end stage of syphilis, his tombstone in Cemetery III of the congregations of the adjacent Jerusalem Church and New Church bears an epitaph that reads like an abridged resumé: “E.T.W. Hoffmann, Counselor of the Court of Appeal, outstanding in accomplishment, as author, composer and painter.” The man better known to posterity as E.T.A. Hoffmann plied diverse talents and packed parallel careers into a mad-dash life that lasted a mere forty-six years.
Born on January 24, 1776, in Königsberg, East Prussia, Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann later opted to change his second middle name to Amadeus in homage to Mozart. Alongside the wildly imaginative tales for which he is justifiably famous, Hoffmann also composed eight operas and light operas, twenty-three musical themes for plays, ballets, and melodramas, multiple masses, a miserere, a symphony, thirty vocal works, and sixteen piano sonatas and chamber music pieces, most of which have either been lost or forgotten. He also wrote landmark music criticism notable for, among other insights, a keen appreciation of the felicitous marriage of words and notes in operas and other vocal compositions.
Speaking through his fictional alter ego, Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler, in tongue-in-cheek writings published in various literary journals of the day, Hoffmann burst into print, fording the divide between tune and text.
But while his own richly evocative fictions inspired the memorable melodic creations of others, notably Jacques Offenbach’s opera The Tales of Hoffmann, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker, and Robert Schumann’s Kreisleriana (Opus 16), Hoffmann himself never achieved the success he sought on the concert stage. Yet like few other authors before or since, music informed every fiber of his being, seeping into the very marrow of his writing, not only inspiring narratives directly relating to musical themes, but also infusing his phrasing with a rich mellifluence that leaves the reader with the sense of stories sung.
Consider the following passage from “Ritter Gluck,” Hoffmann’s first published narrative, drafted in 1809 and issued in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, in Leipzig, a respected musical newspaper at a time when music really mattered in cultivated German society; Hoffmann subsequently included it in his first collection, Fantasiestucke in Callots Manier (Fantasy Pieces Conceived in the Manner of Caillot), published in 1814. An account of the narrator’s meeting with a mysterious stranger who may either be the eponymous composer Christoph Willibald Gluck or else a brilliant lunatic, the tale is an attempt to compose with words a virtual tone poem evoking the psychic state of musical inspiration:
Hah, how in heaven’s name is it possible to even intimate the thousand some odd paths to musical composition! It is a broad thoroughfare, which all romp along, whooping and crying: ‘We are the anointed ones! We’ve made our mark!’ Passing through the ivory gate, you reach the realm of dreams; there are precious few who see the gate even once, and far fewer who ever pass through it! […] Madcap figures pass back and forth, but they have character – some more so than others. They keep a low profile on the high road; you can only catch sight of them on the far side of the ivory gate. […] Many are entrapped by their reverie in the realm of dream, they dissolve in their dreams […]; but only a handful, awakened from their dream, […] arrive at the truth— the supreme moment has come: contact with the eternal, an unspeakable experience! The sun looks on, it is the tonic triad, from which chords, starlike, shoot down and spin around you with flaming filaments. Enmeshed with fire, you lie there, until Psyche swings herself up to the sun.
Music constituted for Hoffmann a kind of sacred spell and as such may have proved too holy, too precious, too ineffable to toy and tinker with. But words bore no such aura and were consequently free to fiddle with, unencumbered with self-imposed restrictions.
“Ritter Gluck” can also be read as a kind of confessional. In the persona of the narrator, Hoffmann acknowledges his own failed attempts at musical composition. His interlocutor is clearly an embodiment of the author’s own musical musings and longings. The fact that Hoffmann was best able to evoke such sonorous euphoria in words, rather than notes, must have proved both immensely gratifying and infinitely frustrating to him.
In any case, music continued throughout the author’s life to embody for him both an artistic and a spiritual ideal after which he strove. This intangible ideal not only inspired fiction directly relating to music, but also sparked in the echo chamber of his imagination such fulminous outbursts as “The Sandman” and “The Golden Pot,” the two enigmatic tales for which he is best known. In these and other phantasmagorical narratives, Hoffmann allowed himself to take prodigious artistic liberties, wildly leaping back and forth across the border between the physical and the metaphysical, the perceived and the imagined, the accessible and the unattainable, hazarding with language the daring leaps of his musical idols, Mozart and Beethoven. The astute reader can sense the notes pulsing inside his words and recognize his narratives as the quasi-musical compositions that they are.
* * *
The opposition between the accessible and the ideal also plays itself out in his plots. In both “The Sandman” and “The Golden Pot,” Hoffmann’s male protagonists waver between their attraction to actual flesh-and-blood women and the seemingly irresistible lure of ideal objects of desire – an automaton in the former narrative and a sultry green snake in the latter – invariably opting for the ideal over the actual and consequently descending into madness. One cannot help but wonder if his characters’ unflinching preference for the impossible was a consequence of the “grass is always greener” syndrome, or rather, contingent on some unresolved childhood trauma in the author’s own life.
Fascinated by the man and his imaginings as a potential minefield for psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud repeatedly sought to posthumously stretch him out on the virtual analytic couch and dig into his dreams. In Freud’s late work, Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion (Moses and Monotheism), completed in 1939, he included the following aside:
E.T.A. Hoffmann liked to trace back the source of the wealth of characters that fed his fictions to the play of images and impressions he gleaned as a suckling babe at his mother’s breast on a weeklong journey by postal coach.
Much as the author might have fostered this far-fetched fiction about himself, it is impossible to confirm, indeed unlikely, that such a rife imagination could have been stoked by even the most precocious infant’s photographic memory.
What is certain is that Hoffmann mythologized his childhood and his mother. He was the product of an unhappy union; his parents separated in 1778, when he was only two years old, at which point he lost contact with his father and moved back with his emotionally cold mother to her maternal home. The reconstituted household was headed by a strict, unforgiving grandmother, two batty maiden aunts, and a repressed, albeit musically inclined, bachelor uncle, whose sole saving grace from the boy’s perspective was that he encouraged him to take up music. A virtual automaton, his mother often spent the whole day motionless, staring into the void, and died in despair a year later. His uncle had studied law, but abandoned the profession after losing his first court case, withdrawing into premature and permanent retirement. Except for a kindly childlike aunt, the adults remained essentially aloof to the child in their midst. Hoffmann came of age in this emotionally arid environ, taking refuge in his reveries, embroidering his longings with imagined memories of intimacy with an idealized and loving mother.
Freud had already delved into Hoffmann’s rife imagination in a famous early essay, “Das Unheimliche” (“The Uncanny”), written in 1919, in which he hailed the author as “the unsurpassed master of the uncanny in literature.” In the essay, Freud focuses his attention on “The Sandman,” a tale of a student’s descent into madness, dated on the original manuscript, “One o’clock in the morning, November 16, 1815,” and first published in his short story collection Die Nachtstücke (The Night Pieces), in 1817.
Traumatized in childhood by an ominous sometime associate of his father who half-jokingly threatened to tear out the inquisitive boy’s eyes, Hoffmann’s protagonist, Nathaniel, later conflates a traveling oculist with his childhood bugbear; through the lens of a spyglass he buys from the latter he glimpses and immediately falls head over heels for Olympia, the dazzling daughter of his professor, and promptly drops his old flame Clara. Olympia, alas, turns out to be an automaton. Upon witnessing the comely robot have her eyes torn out and thereafter be literally torn apart in the course of a quarrel between the professor and the oculist, Nathaniel suffers a nervous breakdown. He returns to his native town, where Clara, with whom he has since reconciled, cares for him in his convalescence. All appears to be going well between them, until Nathaniel goes off the deep end again, believing he has spotted his old demon in the crowd, and in a psychotic fit, attempts to toss Clara from a tower window, from which he ultimately leaps to his death.
Freud traces a fondness for mechanical automata back to a common childhood fixation, reminding with considerable insight “that at a very early age of make believe, the child does not distinguish sharply between the living and the lifeless and is particularly fond of treating its doll as a living being.”
Freud furthermore conflates the eyes with the genitals, and concludes that “the uncanny element in ‘The Sandman’ can be traced back to fear of the child’s castration complex” – a somewhat far-fetched contention perhaps more linked to Freud’s own fixations than those of Hoffmann.
Whatever childhood trauma it does or does not tap, the terrifying tale and its author had a profound literary influence, particularly abroad, nourishing the eerie narratives of Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Nikolai Gogol, and Oscar Wilde, among countless other authors of note. “The Sandman” also inspired a novel by German novelist and screenwriter Thea von Harbou, which in turn inspired her husband, film director Fritz Lang, to collaborate with her on the silent film classic Metropolis. French Surrealist André Breton viewed E.T.A. Hoffmann as a pivotal forerunner and pathfinder and included “The Sandman” in his Anthology of Black Humor, published in 1940. The tale later primed the American science fiction writer Philip K. Dick to pen his tour-de-force novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, upon which Ridley Scott based his 1982 cult classic film, Blade Runner.
However we choose to interpret such enigmatic tales as “The Sandman” and “The Automaton,” also included in this collection, Hoffman’s interest in and concern about the early-nineteenth-century mechanized figurines featured at fairs in his day – particularly those that also play music and still decorate Christmas show windows to this day —”constitutes one of the earliest condemnations of the burgeoning industrial omnipresence of machines,” as one biographer, Peter Braun, points out. “He saw in them, not only a threat to human beings, but also, and in particular, a menace to music,” excising the vital human element of variability and reducing it to a stiff, mechanical motor of music.
“The Golden Pot,” first published in 1814 in the third volume of his Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier, likewise traces a student’s descent into folly. The love object here is an imaginary green talking snake named Serpentina, first glimpsed by the delirious protagonist, Anselmus, wriggling around the trunk and branches of an elderberry tree. The shape of the snake evokes phallic phantasies, but we had best leave it to future Freudians and biographers to delve into Hoffmann’s complex libido.
Hoffmann’s fascination with madness was informed by his acquaintance with the physician Adalbert Friedrich Marcus, who in 1789 founded the Bamberger Allgemeine Krankenhaus, where he treated emotionally disturbed patients with hypnotic methods based on Franz Anton Mesmer’s theory of animal magnetism.
* * *
What matters to posterity is not so much the root of his intuition, as how Hoffmann the writer transformed such infantile traumatic flashes into unforgettable fiction. A thin, little man with deep-set eyes, sharp features, and porcupine-like, spiked hair, with a fiery temperament and wit enough for multiple personalities, Hoffmann apparently penned the tales bubbling up from his unconscious at lightning speed. According to his diary, he wrote “The Sandman” over a period of eight days, while simultaneously attending to the responsibilities of his day job as a jurist.
This is how his friend Julius Eduard Hitzig described him in the first biography devoted to the author:
Hoffmann was very short in stature, had a yellowish skin color, very dark, almost black hair that sprouted from low down on his forehead, gray eyes that did not express much when he was still and peering forward, but which sparkled and took on an uncommonly crafty look when he winked, as he often liked to do. His nose was fine and bent, his mouth tightly closed. […] He particularly prized his muttonchop whiskers, and combed them carefully close to the corners of his mouth. […] In his entire outward appearance, one was particularly struck by an extraordinary sprightliness.
Hoffmann peppered his texts with revelatory clues concerning his character, as, for instance, in the comic description of his fictional alter ego, Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler:
His friends maintained that nature tried a new recipe when cooking up his character traits, and the experiment had failed. Too little of the phlegmatic had been added to his over-excitable disposition; his imaginative faculty all too often got fired up to a dangerous degree and upset the balance of his equilibrium, a character trait absolutely essential to the artist, enabling him to get along with the world, and to compose works of the sort that the world really needs to a higher degree than they even know.
There is another hardly veiled self-portrait in “The Golden Pot”:
…such an individual need be of a childlike poetic disposition. This disposition is often found in youths who are scorned by the crowd on account of the great simplicity of their manner and because they are totally lacking in worldly sophistication.
In yet another passage, from “Counselor Krespel,” Hoffmann’s tale of a maniacally overprotective father who forbids his daughter to sing, first published in 1818 in his friend the Baron de la Motte Fouqué’s popular literary journal Frauentaschenbuch, the author once again appears to be describing a character with definite parallels to himself:
“There are people,” he said, “from whom nature or some calamity tears away the veil behind which the rest of us engage in our mad doings unnoticed. They resemble thin-skinned insects that appear misshapen in the buoyant, visible squirming of their minuscule muscles, though they soon reassume their proper shape. Everything that in us remains merely imagined, in Krespel turns into action. The bitter irony that our well-behaved spirit ordinarily keeps under control in our conduct and actions, drives Krespel to mad gesticulations, twists, and turns. But that is his lightning rod. What emanates from the earth he gives back to the earth, retaining a flicker of the divine spark; and so, I believe, his mind is perfectly in order, notwithstanding the seeming madness of his antics.
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