E.T.A. Hoffmann's Fantastic "Tales"

E.T.A. Hoffmann, the artist and his cat
confront the Prussian Bureaucracy

A few weeks ago I stumbled across the comment that E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776-1822) was “the first master of modern fantasy.” This made me curious, since honestly I did not know anything about him beyond “The Nutcracker” and his general reputation for the uncanny. Since I needed something to listen to during upcoming fieldwork, I got an audiobook of one of the many collestions of his “Tales.”

Hoffmann was 13 years old when the French Revolution began and 39 when Napoleon was defeated, so he came of age with the era of revolution and continental war. He earned his living as a bureaucrat for the Prussian state but was in his heart a Romantic in the most profound sense. Which is an interesting fact about human nature. He had his first really good job as a legal official in Prussian-ruled Poland, which meant that he was in Warsaw in 1806 when Napoleon's army marched in. (Wikipedia says “The Prussian bureaucrats lost their jobs. . . they divided the contents of the treasury between them and fled.” Which is just the kind of thing that might happen in a Hoffmann story.) Hoffmann later ended up stuck in the middle of the Battle of Dresden, bullets whistling through the house where he was taking shelter. And when the war finally ended and he got another good job, he fell ill with syphillis, which, among other things, killed him at the age of 46.

After reading or listening to eight Hoffmann tales, some of novella length, I have formed my own idea of where to place him in literary history. I think what it means to call Hoffmann's works “modern fantasy” is that they are set in a world of unbelief. In a Hoffmann story, people sometimes get a glimpse of the fairy world, but if they dare to mention it their friends tell them to stop working so hard, cut back on the drink and get some rest. After beholding the battle between the toys, led by the Nutcracker, and the minions of the Mouse King, Clara wants to tell her family but then thinks, “Of course none of them would believe me. They would only laugh at me.” 

On the other hand the stories themselves are for the most part quite traditional, firmly rooted in the fairytale universe. Hoffmann's world is full of princes and princesses, sometimes recognized and sometimes in hiding or under spells that make them forget who they really are. There are wizards, witches, talking animals, faraway kingdoms with outlandish names. One of his tricks is to take a character who has magical or sinister associations in folklore – an apple-selling crone, a natural philosopher, a wandering poet, a scholar of ancient languages – and, after introducing these people in a naturalistic way, show that they have magical powers after all. 

In Hoffmann's stories, as in fairy tales, the magical other world is always close by; but for Hoffmann the gate can only be opened by special people under special circumstances. Hoffmann was a Romantic, and for him the person able to cross into other lands is above all the poet. In one of the most famous stories, “The Golden Pot,” the hero eventually does marry a fairy princess and go to live in Atlantis. Dear reader, he says, you may well be jealous, but you should not be, because you can also live in the fairy realms whenever you like, through poetry. Others who manage to cross include a grown man who still acts in many ways like a child, a pair of lovers, and an overwrought man haunted by a tragic past.

Hoffmann had a fascination with doubles. He shared this with the German literati of his time; Goethe swore that he had seen his own doppelganger on the street in Bonn. In one of Hoffmann's stories two regular citizens of Rome dress up as the prince and princess of an exotic kingdom, who just happen to be in Rome visiting for the carnival, and great confusion ensues. The two ordinary Romans end up believing for a time that they are the real prince and princess, and this somehow, in a very Romantic way, makes them into better, nobler souls.

Hoffmann also had a thing for stories within stories. The written version of “The Nutcracker” devotes half its words to a story the toymaker Drosselmeyer tells Clara about how a prince came to be transformed into the Nutcracker. In general, if things ever are explained in a Hoffmann story, they are explained by a long and often rather tedious mythical tale; but just as often the relevance of the mythical tale is not at all obvious, and one wishes it had been left out.

Longwindedness is, I found, one of Hoffmann's two biggest faults. I don't think he was being paid by the word, but he certainly wrote like he was. The other weakness is the problem he had making the fairy world wonderful. When the Other Lands are only hinted at, they can seem marvelous, but when they are described they become pages of purple prose about Suessian flowers and buildings carved from gem stones. In “The Golden Pot” the hero is presented with a choice between marriage to an earth girl who is pretty and charming in an ordinary way and the magical daughter of the King of the Salamanders, and despite the vast weight of adjectives lavished on the Salamander's daughter (beautiful, wondrous, gleaming, etc.) I thought the ordinary girl seemed like the more tempting choice.

Making things wonderful is just hard. Consider all the trouble Christian writers have making heaven appealing. In The Lord of the Rings the hints we get about the ancient cities of the elves make them seem amazing, but when you read about them in The Silmarillion they are pretty drab. Like Hoffmann, H.P. Lovecraft devoted pages of overwrought prose to the gemstone cities of the Other Lands (he must have read Hoffmann, I think) but the effect is to make me think my suburb is a nicer place to live.

The same goes for horror, of course; in very few horror stories does the final reveal live up to the dark hints one gets at the beginning. Hoffmann has a dark reputation but at least in the stories I read, there wasn't much to be afraid of. Sometimes things are weird and confusing, but not at all scary.

Illustration to “The Golden Pot” by Alexander Pavlenko

What did magic mean to Hoffmann? 

I don't want to be too simplistic, because a lot happens in these stories, written across 20 years, and the atmosphere in them varies a great deal. But to me the core is that magic is gnosis; magic is the secret knolwedge that allows us to make sense of our chaotic world. In “The Golden Pot” the narrator tells us straight out that in Atlantis, as in poetry, “the sacred harmony of all being is revealed as the deepest secret of nature.” Through their crazy Roman carnival, our two young lovers reach some kind of understanding that makes them love each other more deeply and face the future with more confidence. When other characters learn that they are actually princes or princesses under a magic spell, mist falls from their eyes and they finally see things clearly. 

This is a major part of what we mean, I think, by Romanticism; a belief in a kind of knowledge one cannot study but may reach through art, love, and experience, a knowledge that lifts us up above the sordidness of human life and makes us, for a while, the princes and princes of Trebizond or Atlantis. Hoffmann rewrote fairytales in the light of this understanding. Sometimes the results are marvelous, but more often the flood of words gets in the way.