‘Hoff-mania’
Christopher Clason (ed.), E. T. A. Hoffmann: Transgressive Romanticism
Liverpool University Press, 272pp, £90.00, ISBN 9781786941213
reviewed by Polly Dickson
If you’re willing to loiter in the cold in the cemetery at Hallesches Tor, Berlin, on the evening of the 24 January, you will find yourself witness to a curious spectacle. Every year, on the anniversary of ETA Hoffmann’s birthday, members of the Hoffmann Society gather at his grave to commemorate his life. Their festivities include drinking, reading from his works and letters, and pouring wine onto his grave, to the cheer ‘In Hoffmanno!’ It may come as a surprise to a general reader, perhaps familiar with few of Hoffmann’s works beyond The Sandmann, made famous by Freud’s interpretation in The Uncanny, or Nutcracker and Mouse King, the tale on which The Nutcracker is based, that Berlin – the place where Hoffmann worked as a judge and rose to literary fame – still bears up the traces of a quiet but lively cult of ‘Hoff-mania’. You do, of course, need to know how to look for it. Opposite the new location of his old favourite haunt in Gendarmenmarkt, Lutter und Wegner (whose own-brand fizzy wine carries a picture of Hoffmann on the label), there is a small commemorative statue of his bust, mostly hidden by a bush. When I took students to see the statue last year, there was an empty bottle of wine perched beneath that, too.
Given his obsession with fractured personalities and doubles, it is curiosity fitting to the author that Hoffmann leads a kind of doubled afterlife – one in the popular imagination, and one across university syllabuses – and that these two lives experience strange moments of crossover. Occasionally, at academic events focused on Hoffmann, the energy in the room has led me to wonder whether all assembled participants were students and scholars of Hoffmann, or whether we were fans of Hoffmann, and where the one identity might fold into the other. Such, perhaps, is the problem of the Romantic Enthusiast, whose enthusiasm, according to Friedrich Schlegel, should always be counterbalanced with a healthy dose of detached irony. Tributes to Hoffmann fuelled by such enthusiasm have recently seen something of a surge. The ETA Hoffmann Portal, a para-academic resource presenting scraps of biographical information and literary analysis alongside scanned manuscripts from the Berlin State Library’s extensive archive, was launched in 2017. At last year’s Berlinale, a Russian animation directed by Stanislav Sokolov premiered shortly after what would be Hoffmann’s 242nd birthday, following 15 years of stop-again-start-again production. The dreamy Hoffmaniada unapologetically blends fictionalised sequences from Hoffmann’s life with scenes taken from his tales.
Christopher Clason’s edited collection E. T. A. Hoffmann: Transgressive Romanticism, a rather less unexpected and playful modern tribute to Hoffmann’s life and works, nonetheless proves an equal enthusiasm in academic studies of Hoffmann. Clason’s rather vague subtitle Transgressive Romanticism raises a number of questions. What is the particular shape and character of a Hoffmannesque ‘transgression’? Is Romanticism itself not inherently concerned with all kinds of crossings over and transgressions – with parts of the subjectivity that war against one another? Seemingly little concerned with relating Hoffmann’s ‘transgressive Romanticism’ to other Romanticisms, the collection probes the particular subversions in the areas of law, aesthetics, and society represented and enacted by Hoffmann’s fictions. In doing so it aims, Clason writes in his introduction, to present a picture of Hoffmann as a clear-sighted social critic adept at ‘showing the boundaries or social norms of the status quo and then confronting them, crossing them, and breaking them down’. This might well be expected from a writer of fictions that deal with irrational horror, aberrant psychologies and supernatural crime whose other existence was as a judge. Hoffmann’s readers have, since Théophile Gautier, who called him a ‘réaliste violent’, recognised the terrible clarity of his visions.
Hoffmann’s reception has been coloured by the sense that he is a character just as weird and as interesting as his own creations. In the first French edition of his works, for example, a heavily fictionalised biography of Hoffmann was given as an appendix, as if it were the final volume in the collection. It is impossible, and undesirable, to hold apart the character of an author from his or her works. We are as likely to say that Hoffmann is a realist or a ‘ghost-seeing fantasist’, or a ‘modern author before his time’ (Clason), than that his works are realist, proto-Modernist, etc. Much of this is simply the trappings of language – it has to do with how we talk and write about artistic productions and the real people behind them. ‘Hoffmann’ becomes a rather smudgy shorthand for his texts; the adjective ‘Hoffmannesque’, in turn, has become a label liable to be clapped on to anything the least bit uncanny or grotesque. But we are even inclined to talk about Hoffmann’s sharp vision or his ‘falcon’s eyes’ (Walter Benjamin) in a way that, if you let it, feels like a confusing transposition of something very bodily and vulnerable into otherwise less material discussions about narrative mode. Hoffmann’s texts are, after all, so full of fictional eyes and optical devices – telescopes, reflective mirrors; even a pair of bushes in The Sandman that are described in a way that calls back the villain’s eyebrows – that I have often wondered whether he was short-sighted himself. At other times it seems more like a joke: like he’s winking, or staring at us, from where he’s carefully inscribed himself on the inside, looking out.
Whether or not it can be usefully considered a ‘transgression’, one of Hoffmann’s favourite and most daring narrative conceits is his concern with the flimsiness of the relationship between the stuff of fiction, the framing constructs that hold that ‘stuff’ in place, and whatever it is that lies beyond the frame – the real, reality, the world, the writer, the reader, you, me, Hoffmann, Hoffmann’s eyes. In the final chapter of The Golden Pot, the fictional narrator confesses that he is having trouble finishing the story, suffering from an intense writer’s block. One of the characters of his tale, the salamander Lindhorst, writes him a letter suggesting they meet, whereupon, in a bizarre twist narrated with laconic calm, the narrator drinks the character down in a glass of punch, and thus, a little drunk, is able to finish his story. In A New Year’s Eve Adventure, the anonymous ‘editor’ of the tale concludes with an address ‘you, my dear Hoffmann’ himself, confessing that he is often prone to visions such as those that he has narrated in the tale.
Such interfering ‘editor’ figures are strewn across his work, alongside Doppelgänger, ghosts, and living portraits, all teeming and vying with one another for a claim to life-likeness. For Beate Allert in her chapter in Transgressive Romanticism, Hoffmann’s works have a knack for upsetting the conventional order of mimetic structures, such that these illusory beings make more of a claim on the ‘real’ than the bourgeois reality that underpins them. Julian Knox’s chapter, also concerned with questions of life and representation, focuses on Kater Murr (The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr), a bizarre work that combines the draft autobiographies of a musician and of his tomcat, Murr. A later editor of Kater Murr unceremoniously separated the two autobiographies, assuming it to be a mistake. Knox shows deftly how the novel mobilises transgressions of prevailing literary forms and constraints in order to present something more authentic, if not necessarily more appealing to a readership attuned to the Bildungsroman form. Knox’s essay captures the quiet drama of mismatched fragments that nonetheless belong together: there are many ways to write a life, and, after all, ‘the ways lives are written in books are rarely the same as the ways in which our actual lives are lived’.
Transgressive Romanticism, which ranges over an impressive breadth of material and offers some compelling close readings, did not give me an entirely clear picture of what is ‘transgressive’ about Romanticism in general, or about Hoffmann’s particular version of Romanticism in accordance or discord with other forms of it. But in its attention to questions of life, biography and representation, it offers a valuable insight into how academic criticism of Hoffmann, since his very earliest readers, has relied on an investment in the author’s self-staging as a character. If that can feel or look, at times, like a kind of madness or mania, then it’s a reading that Hoffmann demands of his readers, in his own rather extraordinary ability to make himself visible in unexpected places. A quiet citation from the memoirs of one of Hoffmann’s contemporary editors, CF Kunz, included in Frederic Burwick’s chapter on Hoffmann’s stage decorations, illustrates this nicely. Kunz describes how Hoffmann, while dutifully painting the ‘pleasant curlicues’ of the stage scenery for a set, would occasionally include representations of himself and his colleagues staring out from ‘some corner of the decoration’, of which ‘the public would naturally perceive nothing’ – unless, presumably, they knew how to look for it.
Given his obsession with fractured personalities and doubles, it is curiosity fitting to the author that Hoffmann leads a kind of doubled afterlife – one in the popular imagination, and one across university syllabuses – and that these two lives experience strange moments of crossover. Occasionally, at academic events focused on Hoffmann, the energy in the room has led me to wonder whether all assembled participants were students and scholars of Hoffmann, or whether we were fans of Hoffmann, and where the one identity might fold into the other. Such, perhaps, is the problem of the Romantic Enthusiast, whose enthusiasm, according to Friedrich Schlegel, should always be counterbalanced with a healthy dose of detached irony. Tributes to Hoffmann fuelled by such enthusiasm have recently seen something of a surge. The ETA Hoffmann Portal, a para-academic resource presenting scraps of biographical information and literary analysis alongside scanned manuscripts from the Berlin State Library’s extensive archive, was launched in 2017. At last year’s Berlinale, a Russian animation directed by Stanislav Sokolov premiered shortly after what would be Hoffmann’s 242nd birthday, following 15 years of stop-again-start-again production. The dreamy Hoffmaniada unapologetically blends fictionalised sequences from Hoffmann’s life with scenes taken from his tales.
Christopher Clason’s edited collection E. T. A. Hoffmann: Transgressive Romanticism, a rather less unexpected and playful modern tribute to Hoffmann’s life and works, nonetheless proves an equal enthusiasm in academic studies of Hoffmann. Clason’s rather vague subtitle Transgressive Romanticism raises a number of questions. What is the particular shape and character of a Hoffmannesque ‘transgression’? Is Romanticism itself not inherently concerned with all kinds of crossings over and transgressions – with parts of the subjectivity that war against one another? Seemingly little concerned with relating Hoffmann’s ‘transgressive Romanticism’ to other Romanticisms, the collection probes the particular subversions in the areas of law, aesthetics, and society represented and enacted by Hoffmann’s fictions. In doing so it aims, Clason writes in his introduction, to present a picture of Hoffmann as a clear-sighted social critic adept at ‘showing the boundaries or social norms of the status quo and then confronting them, crossing them, and breaking them down’. This might well be expected from a writer of fictions that deal with irrational horror, aberrant psychologies and supernatural crime whose other existence was as a judge. Hoffmann’s readers have, since Théophile Gautier, who called him a ‘réaliste violent’, recognised the terrible clarity of his visions.
Hoffmann’s reception has been coloured by the sense that he is a character just as weird and as interesting as his own creations. In the first French edition of his works, for example, a heavily fictionalised biography of Hoffmann was given as an appendix, as if it were the final volume in the collection. It is impossible, and undesirable, to hold apart the character of an author from his or her works. We are as likely to say that Hoffmann is a realist or a ‘ghost-seeing fantasist’, or a ‘modern author before his time’ (Clason), than that his works are realist, proto-Modernist, etc. Much of this is simply the trappings of language – it has to do with how we talk and write about artistic productions and the real people behind them. ‘Hoffmann’ becomes a rather smudgy shorthand for his texts; the adjective ‘Hoffmannesque’, in turn, has become a label liable to be clapped on to anything the least bit uncanny or grotesque. But we are even inclined to talk about Hoffmann’s sharp vision or his ‘falcon’s eyes’ (Walter Benjamin) in a way that, if you let it, feels like a confusing transposition of something very bodily and vulnerable into otherwise less material discussions about narrative mode. Hoffmann’s texts are, after all, so full of fictional eyes and optical devices – telescopes, reflective mirrors; even a pair of bushes in The Sandman that are described in a way that calls back the villain’s eyebrows – that I have often wondered whether he was short-sighted himself. At other times it seems more like a joke: like he’s winking, or staring at us, from where he’s carefully inscribed himself on the inside, looking out.
Whether or not it can be usefully considered a ‘transgression’, one of Hoffmann’s favourite and most daring narrative conceits is his concern with the flimsiness of the relationship between the stuff of fiction, the framing constructs that hold that ‘stuff’ in place, and whatever it is that lies beyond the frame – the real, reality, the world, the writer, the reader, you, me, Hoffmann, Hoffmann’s eyes. In the final chapter of The Golden Pot, the fictional narrator confesses that he is having trouble finishing the story, suffering from an intense writer’s block. One of the characters of his tale, the salamander Lindhorst, writes him a letter suggesting they meet, whereupon, in a bizarre twist narrated with laconic calm, the narrator drinks the character down in a glass of punch, and thus, a little drunk, is able to finish his story. In A New Year’s Eve Adventure, the anonymous ‘editor’ of the tale concludes with an address ‘you, my dear Hoffmann’ himself, confessing that he is often prone to visions such as those that he has narrated in the tale.
Such interfering ‘editor’ figures are strewn across his work, alongside Doppelgänger, ghosts, and living portraits, all teeming and vying with one another for a claim to life-likeness. For Beate Allert in her chapter in Transgressive Romanticism, Hoffmann’s works have a knack for upsetting the conventional order of mimetic structures, such that these illusory beings make more of a claim on the ‘real’ than the bourgeois reality that underpins them. Julian Knox’s chapter, also concerned with questions of life and representation, focuses on Kater Murr (The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr), a bizarre work that combines the draft autobiographies of a musician and of his tomcat, Murr. A later editor of Kater Murr unceremoniously separated the two autobiographies, assuming it to be a mistake. Knox shows deftly how the novel mobilises transgressions of prevailing literary forms and constraints in order to present something more authentic, if not necessarily more appealing to a readership attuned to the Bildungsroman form. Knox’s essay captures the quiet drama of mismatched fragments that nonetheless belong together: there are many ways to write a life, and, after all, ‘the ways lives are written in books are rarely the same as the ways in which our actual lives are lived’.
Transgressive Romanticism, which ranges over an impressive breadth of material and offers some compelling close readings, did not give me an entirely clear picture of what is ‘transgressive’ about Romanticism in general, or about Hoffmann’s particular version of Romanticism in accordance or discord with other forms of it. But in its attention to questions of life, biography and representation, it offers a valuable insight into how academic criticism of Hoffmann, since his very earliest readers, has relied on an investment in the author’s self-staging as a character. If that can feel or look, at times, like a kind of madness or mania, then it’s a reading that Hoffmann demands of his readers, in his own rather extraordinary ability to make himself visible in unexpected places. A quiet citation from the memoirs of one of Hoffmann’s contemporary editors, CF Kunz, included in Frederic Burwick’s chapter on Hoffmann’s stage decorations, illustrates this nicely. Kunz describes how Hoffmann, while dutifully painting the ‘pleasant curlicues’ of the stage scenery for a set, would occasionally include representations of himself and his colleagues staring out from ‘some corner of the decoration’, of which ‘the public would naturally perceive nothing’ – unless, presumably, they knew how to look for it.