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Chapter 3
INTRODUCTION:
- In this chapter, we pursue the theme of Romantic lives through a tale, 'The Sandman' (1816), by one of the greatest European Romantic writers, E.T.A. Hoffmann.
- We have been exploring three writers' avowedly autobiographical depictions of their lives, considering in particular their representations of themselves as Romantic writers, and subsequent representations of them as Romantic authors.
- We turn away from autobiographical versions of the Romantic life to experimental fictive representations. From writers who each exploited versions of a single persona, we turn to look at a writer who adopted a dizzying succession of personae.
- Hoffmann's work is often said to represent the culmination of German Romanticism.
- His experience of the changes brought about by the Napoleonic Wars was arguably, however, more immediate than that of any of the British writers.
(Sandman):
· It suggests a structural complexity of doubling and parallelism; and it also suggests a juxtaposition of the supernatural with the everyday.
· It insists that the real world and the fantastical are contiguous and simultaneous. It is the nature of Romantic vision to apprehend this simultaneity.
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Three Romantic Writers
· 'The Sandman' opens with letters ostensibly written by two of the story's central characters, Nathanael and Clara.
· These precede a long section of narration in the voice of a fictionalised authorial persona: the 'Hoffmann' figure.
· This narrating persona begins by addressing the reader directly in the first person, though his overt use of I disappears as his narrative gains momentum.
· There are three fictive versions of the Romantic writer, with each of the three 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.
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Activity 1 = imp
1) How is each of these Romantic narrators characterised? Attend to their style of expression, as well as to what they tell us about themselves.
· 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 authenticate his memory as an accurate one.
· Clara's voice, by contrast, 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, and comfortingly urges him to 'Keep your spirits up'.
· Underlying her pragmatic dose of therapy though is a hint of anxious uncertainty: 'I don't quite understand'; I only have a dim idea'.
· The fictionalised author-figure in the third extract 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.
· That single-minded absorption might be something his readers too have experienced, but the Romantic writer credits his particular insight with a 'prismatic radiance' which is all his own.
2) What similarities do you detect between these three narrators?
· Despite the evident differences between the anguished turmoil of Nathanael, Clara's rational concern to cairn him, and the author-figure's highly self-conscious account of how he sought to open his story in a striking way, these three fictional Romantic writers display some similarities.
· They declare themselves in tones of intense passion (even the apparently sensible Clara refers to 'the pain in my very soul'). They share a characteristically Gothic vocabulary of 'menacing fate', 'dark powers and forces', and 'strange' and 'portentous' stories. They each exhibit a confusing mix of obsession and detachment. And, interestingly, all three writers 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'. 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 endeavour to both capture and transcend reality.
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 this book?
· No doubt you spotted the continuities between the troubled figure of Nathanael depicted here and De Quincey's depiction of 'a self undone by its dreams' (see Chapter 3, p. 95).
· 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.
· The theme of inescapable memory connects back to the autobiographical persona of Wordsworth's The Prelude.
· 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 Shelley's 'Ode to the West Wind'.
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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 is thwarted by her anxiety about what she imagines as Nathanael's 'deep perturbation of spirits' and 'state of mind'.
- And 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 poet can do no more than capture the strangeness of reality, like the dim reflection in a dull mirror' (p. 319).
Notice:
How the authorial persona inserts himself into the story as an eyewitness, and claims acquaintance with its characters?
- Try to stay alert to any judgements this persona offers through the more knowing viewpoint of irony and with the benefit of hindsight.
- And be aware of the ways in which this fictionalised version of Hoffmann-the-writer channels and subtly manipulates the story's complex and unstable mix of common-sense explanation and the Gothic horrors generated by an imagination out of control.
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Way of seeing: eyes and 'I'
***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.
· At the moment when the fictionalised 'Hoffmann' takes over the narration, he steps back from recounting events and instead describes the mood of obsessive inspiration in terms of vision.
· It prompts; he says, 'a strange, fixed stare as though you were trying to make out forms, invisible to other eyes, in empty space' (p. 318).
The idea that there is more than one way of seeing.
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Activity 2
· In the first of these scenes, 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' (p. 311). 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.
· 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 Nathanaei 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 (p. 325). The spectacles take on a life of their own, the multiple versions of reality they offer leaving Nathanael disorientated and overwhelmed.
· The spyglass, on the other hand seems to bring 'objects before one's eyes with [the] clarity, sharpness, and distinctness' (p. 325) 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.
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These ways of seeing 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. But 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.
***Coppola (whose name means 'eye-sockets' in Italian) introduced initially as a barometer-seller, this pattern of eyes and seeing is so important:
- Selling barometers as a front, concealing Coppola's darker secrets. There is a further level of meaning in Hoffmann's linking of barometer and spyglass.
- 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 spyglass — 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' (p. 325)
- In both cases, perception depends on a scientific instrument which may not be entirely reliable. And 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.
*** 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: 'I made the eyes ... I made the clockwork' (p. 332).
- Olimpia's own terrible fate is symbolised by the tearing out of her eyes: she has 'no eyes, just black caverns where eyes should be' (p. 332) - exactly like the figures in the child's earlier nightmare vision.
- When Spalanzani picks up the eyes and hurls them at Nathanael 'so that they struck him on the chest' (p. 332), it is plain that in his estimation the eyes, and the 'life' they gave to the doll, belong most properly to Nathanael.
- The story indicates that Nathanael has invested everything - his whole way of seeing life — in his idealising 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.
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Childhood trauma and Romantic subjectivity
The famous founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939):
'The uncanny'
- Freud 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.
- The notion that childhood experience is a significant shaping influence on the adult self is, of course, one that you have already met in relation to Wordsworth's handling of the memory of a drowning in The Prelude-, one of the 'spots of time' which act as reservoirs for the poetic imagination.
- the philosopher Rousseau's 'interest in the way in which adult behaviour seems to be related to traumatic experiences in childhood and adolescence finds echoes in Wordsworth's interest in the continuing power of childhood memory within the man' (p. 30).
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Activity 3 = imp
Compare the adult Nathanael's assessment of his formative childhood memories with the adult Wordsworth's 1799 reflection on his memory of the drowning. How does each of the speakers , sum up the remembered event? And how do they explain its impact on them?
· Nathanael of course associates the remembered episode in his father's study with 'fear and terror', but sums it up in terms which are unexpectedly matter-of-fact and dismissive: 'I was caught eavesdropping and was roughly treated by Coppelius'. 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. And he notes how the 'independent life' of the imagination has invested the memories with abiding significance - a significance he later goes on to describe as nourishing.
· 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 initially notes the immediate physical impact of his traumatic encounter: he was laid low with a 'Violent fever', from which he was subsequently cured.