1.
A few pages before the end of the second volume of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Lebens Ansichten des Kater Murr (The Life and Opinions of Tomcat Murr), a curious episode epitomizes a theme central to the novel. A dissolute prince, Hector, is living in sin in Naples with a dancer and, also, running after streetwalkers. During that pursuit, Hector encounters, an old, crippled gypsy woman begging on Toledo Street – Hoffmann was a lawyer and objective facts interest him: he doesn’t hesitate to provide addresses for the bizarre events that his books recount. The gypsy woman is a sort of witch, familiar to us from 19th century opera, and she denounces Hector for wasting his resources lusting after whores when he could be enjoying the favors of a “lovely angelic child who is madly in love with you.” (In Hoffmann’s stories people are always falling in love at first glance or, even, become smitten upon looking at cameo pictures, a motif also derived from opera as in Mozart’s Magic Flute – sexual passion is unpredictable, convulsive, irresistable. The notion of derivation is inexact here: these operatic sources, of course, derive from literary sources: long-forgotten, if once popular plays and novellas.) Hector ignores the wretched and violent beggar – she was arrested the previous day for beating up a water-seller with her crutch. He attributes her words to the fact that she is merely a “common procuress” – that is, just a pimp. Some time passes but “on the promenade Villa Reale” (another address, this time a fashionable one), Hector descries a beautiful young maiden in the company of an elderly, well-dressed duenna. The old woman walks with a limp and, when she cackles, Hector recognizes the elegant matron to be the gypsy-woman who accosted him on the street. The question arises: is the gypsy disguised as a virtuous older chaperone, or, did the respectable matron disguise herself for some reason as a filthy gypsy hag? Hector sees the two women entering a coach and, possessed by yearning, he runs “madly” after the conveyance. Later, Hector consults his banker, one Signor Alessandro Sperzi “residing in the Largo dell Piane”. He asks the banker about the old woman escorting the beautiful and wealthy young maiden. It turns out that the matronly duenna is “Frau Magdala Sigrun”, associated with a well-to-do banking family in Augsburg (a German-speaking principalilty). The banker remarks on her disguise with words to the effect: “the fact that she sometimes disguised herself as a gypsy was a strange fancy (eine wunderliche Grille) easy to understand in this land of the freedom of masquerade (Maskenfreiheit).”
(I am using Anthea Bell’s 1999 translation of Hoffmann’s novel. The author’s German is difficult – it’s hard to decipher unfamiliar words from context because Hoffmann’s prose is kaleidoscopic, mutating constantly and unpredictably from one thing to another. He is also highly allusive, uses legal jargon, and the subject matter is often arcane. In addition, Hoffmann, often, writes in interminable sentences with thickets of dependant clauses, a bit in the style of Lawrence Sterne or Jonathan Swift or, in German, Lichtenberg’s commentaries on Hogarth engravings. Sterne, in particular, was one of Hoffmann’s masters. For these reasons, I found Bell’s translation invaluable in checking my sometimes sketchy understanding of the German prose. However, Bell translates accurately, but freely – for instance, I would translate the sentence above as: “The fact that she sometimes mimicked a gypsy was a strange caprice that one might easily forgive in this land of the freedom of masquerade.” My version, I think, is closer to the banker’s language that invokes a hypothetical observer willing to overlook the elderly woman’s perverse whim – after all, that’s how we do things here in Naples; this is not just my opinion but the general tendency of thought on this matter – an eminently bourgeois interpretation by the banker that normalizes what is completely bizarre.)
Of course, the Banker’s explanation is no explanation at all. And the episode on the street with the gypsy-beggar woman is a bit of Hoffmann’s customary stage decoration, a mise-en-scene that always defaults to the uncanny. This bit of business is intended to create a sense of impending doom – indeed, the relationship with the young woman as, perhaps, portended by the gypsy’s solicitation, ends in attempted fratricide as well as poisoning. But, more fundamentally, the episode points to a persistent and obsessive theme in all of Hoffmann’s literary work – identity is infinity malleable; anyone can become anyone else. Everyone presents one face to the world while concealing a sinister secret self. In Hoffmann’s proto-detective novel, Fraulein Scuderi, the great and famously skilled jeweler, Cardillac is revealed to be a madman and serial murderer. In Tomcat Murr, the feline protagonist tries out various personae – he’s an ardent lover, poet, scholar, a lad in a drinking fraternity and, even, willing to make (unsuccessful) attempts to be a dog. Characters are afflicted by bizarre mental illnesses and fission into schizophrenic identities. Two young women regard the composer, Kreisler, the other hero of the book, as a “blue dragon” – it’s impossible to understand how this can be – and fear him as a sort of monster. (The maidens allude to a play by the commedia dell’ arte writer, Gozzi, that features an articulate, lethal creature of that sort.) In Tomcat Murr, Hoffmann retreats a little from the psychic chaos in his most radical book, Princess Brambilla, a wild fantasia set during the Venetian carnival, in which everyone transforms into everyone else whilst mythical figures pretending to be human roam the streets crowded with masked revellers. (Brambilla was a “bridge too far” for most contemporary critics although some like Heine admired the book intensely – in my view, it’s so persistently unstable with characters morphing into weird forms on every page as to be nearly unreadable.) Ultimately, Hoffmann’s fundamental recognition is two-fold: we’re all acting and, also, all improvising: identity is something that we make up as we go – the self contains multitudes, often at war with one another.
2.
E.T.A. Hoffmann isn’t exactly unknown today. Neil Gaiman refers to Hoffmann’s signature work in his book The Sandman and Michael Powell (and Emeric Pressburger’s) brilliantly inventive, and frightening, filmed adaptation of Offenbach’s opera The Tales of Hoffmann remains available on a Criterion DVD although one doubts that it’s a bestseller. But the writer’s short stories and longer works like Tomcat Murr are simply too bizarre and overwrought to remain persuasive to contemporary sensibilities. Hoffmann is excessive – he always finds the border at which plausibility and, even, good taste come to an end and, then, blithely steps over it. His books are full of Romantic effusions that are tedious to read today – and that Hoffmann implicitly criticizes as hysterical and destructive: it’s often impossible to know whether his purple prose is intended seriously or as a parody -- more likely, I think, the latter. Furthermore, his texts are rebarbative, bristling with exotic allusions, place names, addresses as we have seen, and unreliable narrators. Hoffmann was a satirist and bleakly amused by the fashions of his day, and his works are both grotesque tales of the uncanny as well as penetrating Menippean satire. Menippean satire, expressed in works like Apuleis The Golden Ass and Petronious Arbiter’s Satyricon, is intrinsically difficult – these works involve collages of disparate material linked together by argumentative discourse or dialogue expressing wildly varying points of view. Hoffmann’s prose is full of surreal and loquacious characters quarreling with one another against a ramshackle framework of episodic narration that is, often, disjointed and incongruous. Hoffmann multiples the difficulties that his work presents by almost always presenting the effect first and the cause later – sometimes dozens or, even, hundreds of pages after the picturesque event depicted. Kreisler, one of central protagonists in Tomcat Murr, has been given a cameo portrait that, when displayed, literally knocks adversaries to their knees. This magical talisman, employed with devastating effect throughout the book, is only explained, and, then, inadequately in the last couple paragraphs of the 322 page novel (in nearly microscopic print in Bell’s translation). Generally, Hoffmann presents everything as a mystery – as I have noted, one of his most famous novellas is the precursor to today’s detective novels. Sometimes, he provides the solution to the riddle – sometimes, he doesn’t. Accordingly, the reader proceeds slowly through his prose, groping a way forward among enigmas without much confidence that any of this will be rationally explained. Hoffmann’s influence is decisive on Edgar Alan Poe, a writer who imitates him on every page. Sentence by sentence, Poe is the greater writer; but Hoffmann is more madly imaginative and ingenious. However, the German’s effects are diffuse, an anathema to Poe who applied strict, obsessive (although also insane) principles of ratiocination to impose unity on his works. Poe clings to reason like a drowning man clings to a spar from the ship destroyed by the maelstrom. Hoffmann was a famous lawyer and, later, an appellate judge – logic was his professional metier and he is surrounded by reason of the most oppressive kind and, therefore, takes refuge in bizarre flights of fantasy.
Hoffmann’s sense that identity is neither stable nor unitary derives from the many roles that he played in his life. Born in Koenigsburg, East Prussia, Hoffmann was a polymath. He loved music and became one of the most renowned and penetrating critics of that art during the period in which classicism was gradually developing into the Romantic art of Beethoven, Schumann, and Schubert. (Hoffmann was seven years younger than Beethoven and died five years before him in 1822.) In numerous reviews and essays, Hoffmann championed new developments in music, writing in his characteristically dithyrambic and ecstatic style. The “A” in his name, E.T.A. Hoffmann, was assumed – he named himself “Amadeus” after Mozart, a composer that he revered. Hoffmann supported himself as a student by giving piano lessons and he was a gifted musician. He is credited with more than 80 compositions including several operas and his works were widely performed during his lifetime. On occasion, he actually conducted orchestras for operas, notable Mozart’s Don Giovanni and The Magic Flute. He could draw well also – too well, as it happened, since he was fired from one of his first government jobs for distributing malicious caricatures of his bosses.
After completing a law degree in Koenigsburg, Hoffmann moved to Berlin, the capitol of Prussia, where he made a name for himself as an aggressive and highly capable lawyer. (Like Kafka, he was naturally gifted as an attorney and, apparently, enjoyed working as a lawyer). Initially, Hoffmann was a government prosecutor and, apparently, highly effective. Later, he was elevated to the appellate court and wrote many legal opinions per curium. His legal endeavors led him to encounters with abnormal psychology, the mental states of murderous criminals and madmen, and Hoffmann carefully studied contemporary psychotherapy. (He is also a decisive influence on Freud). He was also interested in galvanism, alchemy and chemistry, mesmerism and other sciences and pseudo-sciences. Waves of rebellion swept through Germany in the wake of the French Revolution. Although Hoffmann was a fervent admirer of Rousseau, he was also a Prussian and, therefore, devoted to law and order. In that capacity, Hoffmann was appointed to the Commission of Inquiry set up by authorities to investigate revolutionary activity -- that is, claims of treason charged against political opponents of the regime. Hoffmann distinguished himself by his fair-minded and judicious approach to these charges – he advocated for acquittal with respect to most of the defendants. Later, Hoffmann came under judicial scrutiny himself. His last work Master Flea was deemed seditious and censored by the authorities. Hoffmann was charged with various offenses but died before trial.
In my library, I have a heavy volume from the set of Hoffmann’s collected works constituting his “juridical briefs and opinions”. In the preface, the editor warns that the book is not light reading and that most will find the intricate language, replete with technical terms and Latin phrases, as well as the enormous bureaucratic sentences “somewhat difficult to appreciate.” I’ve dipped into the volume and, of course, it is unreadable. I bought the book used but it seemed brand new and I found no traces that anyone had ever opened the book, let alone attempted to read it.
3.
The plot of Tomcat Murr is unimportant, incidental to Hoffmann’s primary concerns, the deployments of spooky Gothic elements against a broadly satirical background. Sometimes, Tomcat Murr spoofs its uncanny aspects – it’s hard to grasp whether he is imitating the Gothic effects of The Monk or making fun of them. In any event, the novel’s double narrative, the stories of Tomcat Murr and the half-mad composer, Kreisler, don’t cohere into any continuously developed plot. Furthermore, and even more radically, Hoffmann doesn’t really make much effort to rhyme the cat’s adventures with the romantic and eerie events in Kreisler’s story – the parallel narratives, as in Faulkner’s Wild Palms, proceed, more or less, independently from one another. (This may be an effect of the fact Tomcat Murr is unfinished – Hoffmann promises the reader a third volume of the novel scheduled to appear around “Easter” but the book wasn’t written and Hoffmann died before he could perform on that commitment. Critics speculate on the content of the unwritten third book, a completely futile endeavor. Some think that Hoffmann would have endeavored to fuse the two strands of the novel in the last volume, but this would have difficult because the author kills off his feline narrator at the end of Book Two.)
A fragment due to Hoffmann’s death, Tomcat Murr is also composed of fragments. At the outset, the book’s editor informs us that the literate tomcat delivered his manuscript to the printer interpolated with sheets of paper used to blot excess ink spilled on the feline’s narrative. These sheets of paper (Makulatur-Blatt – a fancy way of saying “waste paper”) comprise a biography of Johannes Kreisler, a Kapellmeister or “music director” retained at the Court of one of the German-speaking micro-principalities, an imaginary place called Sieghartsweiler. The cat’s handwriting is messy: Murr uses a sort of cuff made from a shirt collar to hold the pen in his paw and, so, there are many pages of blotter paper scattered throughout the text of his narrative – in fact, about 60% of the novel is comprised of Kreisler’s waste-paper biography. By an error, it is alleged, the printer set both texts (the cat’s autobiography and Kreisler’s story) so that the book presented to the public is a series of fragments – ten pages of Murr, twelve or so pages of Kreisler repeated across the length of the novel, itself a fragment that breaks off after the completion of its second volume. The two narratives proceed in a roughly diachronic form – that is, both plots start at the beginning and move toward various climaxes; Hoffmann’s climaxes tend to be moments of revelation in which enigmas earlier installed in the narration are solved or, at least, illuminated. However, both Murr and the unnamed narrator of the Kreisler biography are prone to surprising shifts of tone, flashbacks, and subsidiary stories inserted within the broader narrative – that is stories within stories. Furthermore, the reader’s comprehension of the plot is complicated by the fact that there is considerable text posited as missing in each strand of the novel. Hoffmann likes “cliffhanger” effects and, generally, ends each fragment with a surprising development or crisis, but, when the story resumes, the plot has skipped ahead. This creates an effect integral to the book – that is, the concealment of important narrative information in the gaps between fragments. Historians of literature sometimes assert that the fragment is the form characteristic of European romanticism. Under the pressure of strong, idiosyncratic emotion, narratives and literary structures blow apart, yielding shards of highly charged text. If this is true, then, Tomcat Murr represents the Romantic novel par excellence.
Tomcat Murr is vain, pretentious, narcissistic, and vengeful – on occasion, he threatens critics with his sharp claws. Murr’s custodian, not really his master because cats are insubordinate and independent, is a magician named Abraham Liskov. Abraham rescued Murr when he was a kitten – he was part of litter of kittens that someone was drowning. Abraham is a scholar and student of the dark arts and Murr has learned to read and write by closely observing him. From time to time, Murr wanders from Abraham’s dwelling but, in most cases, he finds the greater world threatening and not congenial to his somewhat rarefied sensibility and, so, inevitably he returns to his care-giver. (Abraham admires the cat and feeds him on milk porridge and sausage.) Murr writes various essays for the edification of “young cats” and his literary endeavors provide Hoffmann with a forum to satirize different forms of romantic-era discourse – sometimes, Murr, who fancies himself a great poet, writes verse that borrows the diction and emotional valence of early Goethe; on other occasions, he is witty and discursive, like Laurence Sterne. The Murr fragments comprise a parody of the classical Bildungsroman and parts of the book evoke Goethe’s two novels describing the education of Wilhelm Meister.
Hoffmann provides Murr with a sidekick, Ponto the poodle. Ponto is servile and pompous, initially a pet owned by Lothario, an absurd professor of aesthetics at the local university. (Later, Ponto leaves poor Lothario when the professor’s wife is seduced by a cad, Baron Alcibiades von Wipp. The disloyal Ponto carries love letter back and forth between Lothario’s wife and the Baron and, later, is proud to have the Alcibiades as his master.) Ponto is imagined as a well-spoken, but foolish philistine, a type important to the German romantics of this era. Philistines were imagined as the enemies of artists, stolid bureaucrats with dull minds, numb to the higher things in life. For a time, Murr tries out this lifestyle but unsuccessfully and, for most of the book, he is an avowed enemy of the establishment, a feline proto-revolutionary. Murr joins a typical German drinking fraternity and ends up fighting a duel. Hoffmann plays the duel for suspense and the scene is actually thrilling in a grotesque way. The drinking parties with fellow cats, involving much singing and excessive consumption of something called “punch” leads to severe hangovers (the joke is that a hangover is called a Katzenjammer in German – that is, “cat misery”; another gag is that the cats fancy themselves great choral singers, although the humans who hear them don’t agree and throw buckets of ice water on them; the cats are, so to speak, “caterwauling” although they don’t know it.) A wise old cat dies and Hoffmann stages a spectacular funeral with a protracted discourse by a feline orator that, apparently, parodies obsequies common to the era.
Murr is amorous and much of his autobiography recounts his various love affairs. In his youth, he loves Miesmies (“Kitty”), a mesallience since she is illiterate and unimaginative. After the funeral, at the Leichenschmaus (“the funeral banquet”), Murr encounters Mina, another attractive female that he courts. Mina turns out to be Murr’s own daughter, apparently conceived with Miesmies, but our libertine narrator blithely informs us that love-affairs with one’s offspring are not prohibited in the world of cats. At the end of the book, Murr is experimenting with inter-species romance – a young greyhound bitch, Minona purports to admire Murr’s poetry (she claims to have memorized it) and the vainglorious cat tries to make her his mistress. Minona is associated with a canine literary club – the dogs are described as dolts and fools. We last see Murr, listening with disdain to Ponto’s account of his adventures as a go-between, carrying love letters and tryst assignations between the licentious Baron Alcibiades and Lothario’s wife.
Each section narrated by Murr commences with a grandiloquent (and tedious) preface of general observations leavened with philosophical reflections. Murr’s prose-style is intricate and hard to read, even Hegelian in its obscurity on occasion. However, these parts of the book are merely “throat-clearing” and, after a page or so, the text reverts of Murr’s mock-heroic exploits. Murr is a great plagiarist and periodically the editor intervenes to denounce the feline author for presenting passages from Schiller and Shakespeare as his own. On the last page of the second volume of the book, the editor abruptly announces that Murr has unexpectedly died, but that fragments of his unpublished works will be cited in the next volume of the novel – a work that Hoffmann, ailing and involved in litigation over Master Flea, never began.
The book’s plot involving Kreisler is much more complex, but, also, more conventional. Kreisler’s narrative, presented as a biography, will be familiar to readers who have read Eichendorff’s From the Life of a Good-for-Nothing and other books by Hoffmann: the story involves an intricate love-triangle complicated by all sorts of digressions, flashbacks, and romantic complications. The stage-machinery is operatic: palace gardens full of hidden trysting places, a monastery in the mountains, complex masquerades, some lurking ghosts (for instance a painter who committed suicide), gypsy-witches, and various species of madness – schizophrenia and paranoia feature prominently. Notwithstanding the Sturm und Drang mechanics that drive the plot, the tone is blithe and, often, satirical. Hoffmann mocks the pretensions of Prince Irenaeus, the pompous and self-aggrandizing ruler of a domain about the size of a postage stamp. Irenaeus has two children, a son, Ignaz who seems to be a congenital moron (he has obsessive compulsive disorder and plays at executions) and a marriageable daughter, Hedwiga. Irenaeus is motivated to seek a suitable husband for Hedwiga – his tiny kingdom is subject to the depredations of its neighbors and, in fact, has been reduced by aggression to little more than a palace and expansive garden. Irenaeus badly needs royal allies and so he schemes to effect an alliance by marriage, probably at the expense of poor Hedwiga. Irenaeus is also the guardian of another maiden, Julia – it’s implied that Julia is also Irenaeus’ daughter as a result of a liaison with Baroness Benzon, one of the ladies in the Court.
Irenaeus employs Kreisler as his Kapellmeister. Kreisler is the son of an organ builder who created lavish baroque instruments, organs garlanded with cherubs and trumpet-blowing angels (some of them mechanically animated). Unfortunately, the sound created by these organs is atrocious – the instruments look good but sound awful. Kreisler has been neglected by his tyrannical father, entrusted to the care of an abusive uncle – Kreisler calls the man “Uncle Woe” (Weh-Oheim). Taught to play the piano by his “Woe-Uncle”, Kreisler becomes a gifted, if highly unconventional, musician. When he hears a properly constructed organ, Kreisler is inspired to take up his father’s trade, although by this time he has fled his paternal home. During his wanderings, Kreisler encounters Abraham Liskov, later the human patron to Murr the tomcat. Abraham is a conjuror capable of all sorts of legerdemain – he can create doppelgaengers by use of “an astral lamp,” muffles sound so that eavesdroppers are thwarted, and operates an oracle called “The Invisible Girl”. “The Invisible Girl” is a glass sphere that seems to answer inquiries presented to it, speaking in the voice of a young woman who can not be seen. We first meet Abraham contriving an elaborate fireworks display in the gardens of Irenaeus palace – the pyrotechnics go spectacularly wrong. Abraham encourages Prince Irenaeus to hire his young protegee, Kreisler, as court musician. Unfortunately, this leads to misfortune.
When Kreisler is introduced at Court, both Julia and Hedwiga conceive an immoderate, ecstatic passion for him. Kreisler loves Julia, probably because she is talented singer. (She performs his secular and religious works from time to time in the novel.) The Kapellmeister is indifferent to poor Hedwiga. Irenaeus has imported the scion of another noble family into the household – this is Prince Hector, a German who has developed some bad and licentious habits from his sojourn in Naples. Hector woos Hedwiga but seems to desire a love affair with Julia. When Hector stalks Julia in the garden, Kreisler intervenes, terrifying the aristocratic young man with a mysterious talisman, a cameo portrait given to him by his mentor Abraham. A mysterious phantom haunts the large, wild garden surrounding the palace. Everyone is terrified and the dim, ostentatious Irenaeus suspects a sinister cabal plotting to topple him from his already unsteady throne. Kreisler, thwarted in love, retreats to a monastery where he drinks heavily with an alcoholic monk, Father Hilarius, and stages various masses and requiems. Hector has vanished. A strange, fearsome prelate from Italy arrives at the monastery and, because he is insanely ascetic, bans the performance of Kreisler’s music. This monk, Cyprianus, conceals a dark secret, a moral lapse, that has turned him into a religious fanatic. It turns out that Cyprianus is Hector’s brother and that a rivalry between the two siblings led Hector into attempted murder (and the poisoning of the young woman who was the source of this sibling rivalry).
Kreisler returns to Irenaeus’ palace where we learn that Hector has been haunting the garden, dwelling with a servant in the various pavilions on the premises. When Hector, who has been stalking both young women, is discovered, the dimwitted Irenaeus is thrilled. Hedwiga, thwarted in her love for Kreisler, has succumbed to catatonic hysteria. Aroused, at last, from her paralysis, she demurs to her father’s wishes and agrees to marry Prince Hector, who continues, however, his efforts at seducing Julia. Irenaeus betroths Julia to the half-wit Ignaz. This situation is obviously untenable: Ignaz has the mind of a seven-year old and Hedwiga, who is willing to marry Hector for her father’s sake, doesn’t even like, let alone love, the arrogant and libertine prince. It is this romantic conundrum that Hoffmann establishes for solution in the novel’s denouement in the unwritten volume three.
What follows is sheer speculation: I suspect that Irenaeus will demand that Abraham contrive an elaborate pageant for the wedding complete with brilliant and thunderous pyrotechnics. The double wedding (Hector and Hedwiga / Julia and Ignaz) will involve heavily veiled brides. In the chaos of fireworks and smoke, Kreisler, disguised as Ignaz, will be wed to Julia. It’s not clear to me what Hoffmann will do with Hector and Hedwiga. My guess is that Hedwiga will be banished to a convent, but there will meet Cyprianus, who repented his austere fanaticism at the end of Book Two. Hedwiga and Cyprianus will end up married. Hector, I suppose, will have to be killed or disposed of in some other way – maybe, he will return to military service in Naples and die on the battlefield. Prince Irenaeus will marry his former inamorata, Baroness Benzon who has served as his confidante and advisor throughout the two preceding volumes and recognize Julia as an heir, thereby enriching Kreisler. Although Hoffmann fills his stories with spectral and uncanny events, he tends to favor happy endings and, although I may have some of the details wrong, I suspect that I have accurately imagined the tenor of the book’s ending.
4.
Strange influences abound in Tomcat Murr. My plot summary suggests that the novel’s subject, unlike its bizarre form, is somewhat conventional. The Murr narrative is a jolly Bildungsroman with satirical interludes involving parodies of German literary forms prevalent during the period. Kriesler’s story is an elaborate Gothic novel involving a complex romantic triangle. But, the texture of the book is gnarled and grotesque, studded with allusions and foreign phrases, weird with apparently supernatural effects. I say “apparently” because Hoffmann, like Conan Doyle, for instance, generally provides realistic explanations for occurrences that are initially portrayed as occult and ghostly.
In fact, the boundary between real phenomenon and the supernatural is porous. Hoffmann describes love as a kind of galvanism. The touch of the beloved induces a literal shock – Hoffmann invokes no fewer than three different electrical species (eels, rays, and the cutlass fish), specified, of course, by their Latin zoological names, to characterize the galvanic energy of erotic love. The gloomy park surrounding Irenaeus’ palace is full of specters. Abraham creates a Doppelgaenger that torments Kreisler using an “astral lamp.” The text is replete with examples of abnormal psychology: Ignaz seems to be both autistic and simple-minded (he execute small animals to Julia’s horror); Cyprianus is a morbid religious fanatic; Irenaeus is paranoid, constantly fearing rebellion; a young painter, Ettlinger, thwarted in love has drowned himself in the stream that flows through the gardens and his unquiet ghost seems to haunt the thickets and pavilions; in a spectacular scene, Princess Hedwiga becomes rigid and catatonic, a hysterical reaction to her misfortunes in love. The moods of characters are mercurial – they change from wild ecstasy to profound despair in the course of a sentence or two. Everyone seems on the brink of a schizophrenic breakdown, all lit by the bizarre radiance of exploding fireworks.
Hoffmann delights in florid landscapes, but his pen-portraits invoke the dark and gloomy, proto-romantic paintings of Jacob Ruisdael. There’s always a thunderstorm approaching through the electrically charged air. Of course, the picturesque park at Sieghartsweiler exists in an great amphitheater ringed by rugged mountains and gorges. Ominous undertones throb beneath even brilliantly lit scenes.
Kreisler, whose biography the book purports to present, is an uncanny figure himself. He imagines the world is synaesthetic terms: Julia’s beauty embodies the sound of his musical compositions – she is that to which his art aspires. Organs are ornately decorated but sound terrible. Kreisler hears tones that no one else can perceive. Throughout the book, he invents instruments to play the music that he alone can imagine. Great wires are strung between palace towers to sound as an aeolian harp. He builds a water organ and, then, an organ made entirely from paper, and contrives other strange instruments. The music that he makes is eccentrically tuned – we learn that employs micro-tone in his compositions and had innovated strange and eerie chords.
In Tomcat Murr, the plot is incidental to a series of uncanny (unheimlich) details that create an ominous, brooding atmosphere, a pervasive gothic tone, notwithstanding aspects of the novel that are clearly intended to be jocular, even funny after the manner of slapstick comedy. The book’s tone oscillates wildly from one extreme to another just as the narrative stutters and jerks back and forth between the adventures of the vainglorious cat and the half-crazed musician.
5.
A comparison with Edgar Alan Poe is illustrative. Poe is heavily influenced by Hoffmann, much of the American’s fame based on conveying into English prose effects invented by the German.
During his time in Naples and his apprenticeship as a magician in Hoffmann’s novel, Abraham encounters a sinister Italian mountebank named Severino. (Tomcat Murr is indebted to the Bildungsroman to the extent that it portrays Abraham, like the young Goethe, educating himself by immersion in the delights and appalling passions prevalent in Italy.) Severino has invented an illusion called “The Invisible Girl” (unsichtbar Maedchen). In a small chamber, a querent addresses questions to a glass sphere. The sphere seems to reply, issuing oracular pronouncements in the voice of a young girl. Abraham discovers that the trick relies upon a small, emaciated child, purchased from itinerant gypsies, named Chiara. Confined in a tiny box, Chiara is hidden in the room and responds to the inquiries posed by the customer who has paid to have his or her fortune told. Chiara seems to have some kind of second-sight. In a Dickensian flourish, we learn that the more Severino beats her, the better her ability at pronouncing plausible and, even, inerrant prophecies. Abraham rescues the young girl and Severino falls sick and dies. Thereupon, Abraham assumes Severino’s name by which he becomes widely known as a magician and conjuror in Naples. Furthermore, Abraham continues to exploit the gifts of the abused child – he operates the “Invisible Girl” illusion for his own profit and becomes renowned for that exhibition. However, Abraham falls in love with Chiara and, ultimately, makes her his wife and, then, at the height of their fame, she mysteriously vanishes. (The riddle of Chiara’s disappearance awaits solution, I assume, in the unwritten Third Volume of the novel.) Chiara’s evaporation into thin air is the great sorrow of Abraham’s life and he is afflicted by this grief throughout the book.
In the course of this subplot, Hoffmann mentions in passing another famous illusion of his era, Maelzel’s chess-playing Turk. The Turk was an automaton, powered by gears and springs that worked audibly to cause the robotic figure to manipulate chess pieces on a board displayed atop a cabinet to which the robot was affixed. The chess-playing Turk was skilled and accepted challenges from all comers, generally winning his matches. Of course, the concept of the chess-playing automaton is a precursor to experiments in artificial intelligence such as Deep Blue, IBM’s computer chess master. (Deep Blue played Gary Kasparov in 1996 – Kasparov won the series of matches 4 to 2; however, the headline was that Kasparov, a reigning world champion chess grandmaster, was defeated by the machine twice. Kasparov thought he detected “creativity” in some of Deep Blue’s play and accused IBM of using its human chess masters to guide the program’s play. What Kasparov thought was “creativity” turned out to be an error, an inadvertent loop in Deep Blue’s programming.)
In 1836, Maelzel’s chessplaying Turk, invented almost sixty years earlier by the German clockmaker and artificer Wolfgang von Kempelen, finally made its way to Richmond, Virginia. By this time, the machine was very old, threadbare, and, probably, not working very reliably. Nonetheless, the automaton played a series of games against Richmond opponents, winning most of them. (Losses were ascribed to the machine’s age and ill-repair.) Edgar Allan Poe claimed to have witnessed this exhibition, although as is typical with him, there is considerable doubt as to whether the writer actually saw the machine in action. Probably, he read detailed newspaper accounts and, in his persona, as “Hoaxy Poe” (a moniker invented by the critic Daniel Hoffman), the writer simply claimed to be present. (If Poe had been in the room, it seems obvious that he would have challenged the mechanical Turk to play chess with him, something that he doesn’t claim to have done.)
Poe’s essay “Maelzel’s Chess-Player” was published in The Southern Literary Messenger, April 1836. The author denigrates previous “attempts at explanation” as “too obviously absurd to require comment, or refutation” or as “bizarre”. In fact, earlier accounts of the automaton’s operation – “that a dwarf actuated the machine” or that “a well-taught boy” concealed in the cabinet adjacent to the robot – parallel Hoffmann’s glance at a solution to the enigma of the chess-playing mechanical Turk and are, in fact, more or less equivalent to what Poe argues, albeit in greater detail. Poe sets up a “straw man” argument to demolish, namely that the automaton as a “pure machine” somehow is capable of playing chess. So far as I can tell, no one ever really thought that the robot worked as a “pure machine” without human intervention. Indeed, Poe remarks that neither of the chess-playing Turk’s exhibitors, Baron Kempelen, its maker, and Maelzel, the subsequent owner of the device when it reached Richmond almost sixty years later, ever exactly claimed that automaton operated as a pure machine. (Nineteenth-century standards for truth-telling seemed to have allowed suggestive ambiguity or equivocation but not outright deceit and fraud. Poe is careful not to accuse the exhibitor of actually lying about the Turk’s operation.) Midway through the essay, Poe states the obvious: “Some person is concealed in the box during the exhibition.” Of course, this is what previous commentators expressed in their writings and consistent with Hoffmann’s parenthetical remark about the Turk. But Poe, who is always at pains to show that he is the most intelligent person in the room, regards prior speculation about the machine’s operation as inadequate, simply because the writers fail to explain in detail how the illusion was created. Poe’s essay is obsessively and fanatically explicit as to his suppositions about the exact manner in which the trick was performed. His so-called “decisive”solution (claimed in the third sentence of his essay) differs from earlier writing on the automaton in that Poe engages in “ratiocination”, that is, the application of deductive logic to the enigmas posed by the Turk. In this respect. “Maelzel’s Chess-Playing Turk” can be read as adjuncts to his detective fiction, for instance, “The Purloined Letter” or “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” It’s not enough to state a hypothesis, Poe demands that any theory about how the Turk operated be proven by objective evidence beyond any shadow of doubt.
Like Flannery O’Connor, every sentence written by Edgar Allan Poe, must be regarded as allegorical. The strange and contorted logic in “Maelzel’s Chess-Playing Turk” seems excessive to the subject matter, after all, merely an old-fashioned side-show exhibit when the threadbare Ottoman reached Richmond in 1836. Some topic of general philosophical importance, accordingly, seems to be at stake in Poe’s prosecutorial and forensic analysis of this old illusion. The question on which Poe deliberates is how do we distinguish a “pure machine” (Poe supplies the emphasis) from a machine activated by human agency – that is, a “partial machine.” Human beings are “partial machines” – that is assemblies of vein, artery and tissue knit together with a web of nerves; galvanism proved that human beings were, at least, in part machines – dead tissue, Poe observes, could be reanimated, or compelled into motion, by the application of an electrical charge. (As we have seen, the idea of an electrical charge animating emotion is also fundamental to Hoffmann.) Poe himself was a partial machine – that is, a human calculator operating to apply logic (ratiocination) in such a way as to mathematically deduce truths. But, of course, as Poe’s stories demonstrate, there is more to the “partial machine” of a person than merely a system of valves and pumps. People are more than “meat machines” – they are ensouled; that is, there is a ghost in the machine. Hence, at stake in Poe’s essay on the Turk is nothing less than a sort of negative demonstration of what constitutes a “partial machine” – how do we distinguish between what is purely machine and what is only partially machine, that is, human?
Poe adduces several criteria observed in the Turk’s operation that convince him that the machine is only “partial” – that is, that there is a ghost concealed in the mechanism. As opposed to pure machines, human agency is unpredictable and involves irregular motions – the Turk’s chess moves aren’t akin to clockwork. Humans deliberate and the Turk pauses in its operation to consider unexpected moves made by its adversary. Humans are fallible and the Turk sometimes makes bad moves and, even, loses on occasion. We are readily distracted whereas animated clockwork is impervious to such influences; Poe notes that the machine is designed in such way as to eliminate visual or sound cues that might distract its concealed operator. Humans like mirrors and the Turk’s interior seems to be mirrored to multiply reflections and, thereby, create an intricate illusory space in which the actual chess-player can hide. We are creatures guided by our senses. A clock or mechanical duck (one of Poe’s examples of earlier automatons) work fine in utter darkness. But the Turk is always exhibited in bright light, presumably so the operator can see the playing board. Finally, we feel pain. The Turk, inhabited partially, by a human being can’t make certain motions – these would require contortions too painful for the operator to endure. Underlying Poe’s analysis is anxiety about whether we can reliably differentiate between mechanical simulacra and real people – this is a concern more relevant to us today than it was to Poe’s genteel antebellum readers.
Ultimately, the solution to the enigma of the chess-playing Turk, like the revelation of most illusions produced by conjurors, is trivial. Poe tells us that the interior of the cabinet contains a concealed void 3 foot 4 inches vertically by 2 foot 6 inches deep and 2 foot 4 inches wide. (The crazy specificity of these dimensions is typical of Poe; he says the void is “fully sufficient to accommodate a man very much above the common size” – a questionable assertion that creates a shiver of claustrophobia in the reader; it’s easy to think of “The Premature Burial” when perusing “Maelzel’s Chess-Player.”) When the automaton was exhibited by its inventor, Baron von Kempelen was accompanied by an Italian assistant, a fellow who vociferously denied any understanding of the game of chess. But when the Italian was taken ill, matches with the Turk were suspended and Kempelen’s assistant was never visibly present when the automaton was in operation. The owner of the Turk, Maelzel, when it played in Richmond was assisted by a man named Guillame (or William) Schlumberger “about the medium size but with a remarkable stoop in the shoulders.” When the Turk was exhibited in Richmond (at the Dancing Academy of M. Bossieux, Poe tells us with characteristic obsessional precision), Schlumberger was taken ill. By coincidence all chess matches with the Turk were canceled until the man recovered. “The inferences from all this we leave (Poe writes) without further comment to the reader.”
The chess-playing Turk is grotesque, a aesthetic category that fascinated the Romantics. The automaton occupies the twilight zone between the animate and inanimate, the human and the mechanical. Heinrich von Kleist explores similar themes in his notable essay “On the Marionette Theater”, a writing from 1810 that, like Poe’s text, concerns questions of human agency, self-consciousness, and free-will. In Hoffmann’s novel, Severino, the wicked mountebank and his successor, Abraham (who has assumed the name “Severino”) travel about with Chiara, the ghost in the machine, locked in a sort of casket. Chiara, who becomes Abraham’s muse and wife, suddenly escapes from the confines of Hoffmann’s novel – she simply vanishes without a trace. Hoffmann had no illusions about the chess-playing Turk, although his speculations possess the quality that Poe called “absurd” – I don’t know whether Poe was familiar with Tomcat Murr, although I suspect that he was. Hoffmann says this about Chiara and the Turk:
Chiara was often obliged to spend whole days crouching in the box...She went on journeys with Severino in the same box. Chiara’s was a dreadful, unhappy fate like that of the dwarf whom the famous Kempelen carried about with him and who had to play chess hidden inside the Turk.
Walter Benjamin begins his essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History” by describing the operation of the chess-playing Turk. Then, he says:
One can imagine a philosophical counterpart to this device. The puppet called “historical materialism” is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight.
