The socio-political satire serves as a foil to reveal the higher realm. The Murr narrative focuses on bourgeois affectations; the Kreisler story on the court with its corrupt ruling class. Throughout, we witness a superannuated absolutism, ridiculously given to Frenchified protocol and outer form, as grotesquely apparent in the dog Ponto as in Prince Irenaeus, who represents a governing class bereft of all ability to govern. It is not difficult to relate some of the novel’s absurdities to political and social actuality. Napoleon’s baneful influence affects Kreisler’s career, just as it did Hoffmann’s, and indeed the French Emperor briefly appears in the novel as the ‘Colossus’. This explains the curious ambiguity of Sieghartsweiler, the village where the action takes place. At one level, the tiny Sieghartsweiler court simply parodies Germany’s so-called duodecimo principalities, states such as Pipi and Popo in Büchner’s Leonce und Lena. However, the curious ambiguity surrounding Hoffmann’s principality, which the Prince apparently lost one day when it fell from his pocket, and which no longer actually governs anything, but exists merely as a charade, points firstly to the German States under Napoleonic rule and, more widely, to their subsequent problematic legitimacy. Accordingly, while the ruling family generally satirizes the aristocracy’s degeneration, Prince Ignatius’s infantile playing with china cups may, more specifically, recall the State-owned Prussian China Works, just as his cruelty in executing an innocent bird may swipe at Prussian militarism. And Murr’s club resembles the very ones Hoffmann investigated as a judge. His temporary alienation from his friend the dog Ponto mocks the rise of German nationalism in these clubs, just as his duel recalls their antiquated cults which had such sorry consequences in later German history. Ponto’s master, the cuckolded teacher of aesthetics, Professor Lothario, represents the forces of reaction. Typically, he wishes to stamp out the cats’ alleged secret gatherings and advocates using force to suppress them. The novel’s satirical buffoonery, then, has a sinister side, and attacks very real political problems.
Through its satire, the novel pursues truths of another order, relayed to the reader against an apparently chaotic background. The Kreisler biographer in the novel voices the same inability to provide a chronological narrative as do the original Kreisleriana, which open by quoting Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste: ‘Where does he come from? – Nobody knows – Who were his parents? – The fact is unknown!’ Abrupt discontinuity characterizes Kreisler and the narrative. This is the emotional and structural fragmentariness that inspired Schumann’s Kreisleriana, Opus 16, of 1836, which is loosely based on Hoffmann’s Kreisleriana.12 Such fragmentariness and seeming incoherence point to a higher continuity, beyond conventional representation. This unity is symbolized by the sublime, the ideal realm represented by music and by phenomena like synaesthesia, described in the Kreisleriana in the following celebrated ‘Highly Scattered Thought’:
Not only in dreams but also in the state of delirium which precedes sleep, and above all when I have heard much music, I discover an agreement between colours, tones and scents. It seems to me as if they were all created in the same mysterious way by rays of light and must then unite in a wonderful concert. – The scent of deep red carnations affects me with a curious magical power; involuntarily I sink into a dreamlike state, and as if from a great distance I can hear the deep notes of the basset-horn rising and falling.13
This passage, a locus classicus for the Symbolist ideal which Baudelaire echoes in his sonnet, ‘Correspondences’, and which still reverberates in Rimbaud’s ‘Les Voyelles’, provides a key to Hoffmann’s writing, in linking unusual psychic states with art, music, nature and divine creation. The treatment of plot, mind and art in Murr all indicate an underlying unity behind apparently disparate appearances.
Endowing his cat with consciousness, speech and the ability to write, imputes to the animal kingdom the same type of soul as possessed by human beings, indicating that man and beast both express the same, fundamental ‘world spirit’. Against Cartesian divisions between mind and matter, The Tomcat Murr asserts a continuity between celestial spirit, human mind, animal being and mechanical substance. Nature seems alive. Animals can talk. Human beings, like the young Prince, can exist with a sub-human mentality. Others, like Hedwiga in her cataleptic condition, can act like machines. Yet others, like Master Abraham’s beloved Chiara, may submerge their identity in a mechanical contrivance such as ‘the Invisible Girl’. Body and soul are not opposites, but form a continuum.
The spiritual realm beyond appearances frequently makes itself felt among the characters. Master Abraham represents this world, and his Invisible Girl provides a rationally explicable emblem for the higher psychic sphere. Dreams, strange affinities, correspondences, animal magnetism and electric shocks all point to the existence of an arcane region, beyond empirical fact. Murr is linked to it by the electricity that gathers in his fur, and hears a lecture on animal magnetism that explains our affinity with the world spirit. Kreisler and Hedwiga are joined as if by an electric shock. Dreams, like Kreisler’s vision in the monastery, provide mental access to this higher sphere, and throughout, Hoffmann plays with mysteries to invoke a genuinely occult world, whereby the spine-chilling techniques – like Beethoven’s thunder – manifest the terrors of the sublime.
Another means of access to the higher sphere lies in myth. In works like The Golden Pot, Hoffmann implies that myth is not just the pattern, but the essential substance of life. This mythical dimension remains largely latent in The Tomcat Murr, though it becomes more substantial at certain points, as towards the end of the first volume, when the Princess dreams a fairy-tale in which Prince Hector is transformed into a dragon-like monster. References to the ‘dragon’, the ‘basilisk’, ‘paradise’ and the ‘Devil’ hint at a mythical dimension which, conceivably, the final volume might have explicated.
Art, however, provides the novel’s chief access to spirituality, as when in Volume One Kreisler recognizes through his artist’s love for Julia a grand and heavenly synaesthetic vision. The beloved’s angelic image conveys light, fire and eternal longing to the artist, whom she thereby transports to a perfect realm. The key facets to artistic experience that Kreisler elaborates are love and longing. Longing, Sehnsucht, is an absolute in Romantic art. Through what late in Volume Two Kreisler calls ‘love and pious longing’, humanity may renounce the physical world and transcend to a spirituality which lies in the beyond. Yet the aesthetic vision by which art becomes a new religion has a moral core. Echoing the ideals of love, hope and constancy enunciated in The Golden Pot, the Abbot finally expresses the novel’s humanistic beliefs in the closing pages: ‘A constant mind, a firm resolve, but most of all a deep, true feeling that lies in the breast like a wonderfully prophetic perception, if united together will do more than the keenest understanding…’
Reflecting Friedrich Schlegel’s ideal of a ‘progressive universal poetry’ that was to comprise poetry, criticism, rhetoric and prose, as well as science and philosophy, The Tomcat Murr attracts diverse disciplines, debates and ideas into its orbit, lightly displaying immense learning in the most scintillating (and entertaining) way. For rhetoric, the cat’s absurd funerary oration will serve. As for poetry, Murr provides it. Medical lore surfaces with the doctor. Master Abraham introduces gadgets galore. Discourses on art and music provide the aesthetics. Encountering such multivarious data, unwittingly the willing reader is drawn to discover a veritable encyclopaedia of recondite knowledge. At the same time, though, one detects, operating throughout, the strong moral sensibility described by the Abbot. Beside the Romantic, we must also recognize Hoffmann the Realist, the contemporary of Jane Austen. Running through the Romantic form, outgrowing its early Biedermeyer context, The Tomcat Murr displays the moral vision and exact eye of nineteenth-century Realism. Altogether, it offers the big-hearted response to a small-minded age, and dignifies court and bourgeoisie alike with the nobility of aesthetic transfiguration.
While Hoffmann was completing Volume Two, his gifted pet died
. As Hoffmann wrote to Hitzig:
Hereby I beg humbly to announce to sympathetic patrons and friends, that on the night of 29–30 Nov. this year, after a short but severe illness, my beloved ward, the Tomcat Murr, died in the fourth year of his promising existence, and awakened to a better life. Whoever knew the immortal youth and saw him tread the path of virtue and justice, will understand my deep grief and honour it – by silence.
Berlin, 30 Nov. 1821 Hoffmann
Hoffmann announces the sad news to his public in his postscript to the novel. Ironically, Murr’s death means that his well-planned book will remain a fragment. His papers will instead be inserted into the hitherto fragmentary Kreisler tale. In a further irony, it now seems that the Kreisler story is destined for completion. This sounds plausible. The loose ends which the narrator demonstratively points out during the Kreisler narrative would require more space to tie up than the tomcat’s story. Whereas the latter leaves nothing unresolved, the last Kreisler fragment elaborately stage-manages the plot, as if anticipating a lengthy denouement. Such scene-setting contradicts the old critical view that the novel was an intended fragment, in the Romantic style, or that it was unfinishable, though how the novel would conclude must remain pure speculation.
Since Hitzig claimed that the unwritten Volume Three would show Kreisler ending in madness, writers and critics – among them George Sand – have fruitlessly tried to answer the plot’s unanswered questions. The possibility of a tragic conclusion might be supported by Master Abraham’s prediction that Julia is lost. However, the Abbot appears to foretell her marriage to Kreisler, which points towards an ultimate reconciliation. The tragic end belongs, I think, to an earlier stratum of Hoffmann’s work, more in tune with the Kreisleriana. The generally comic pattern in the late writings, such as Master Flea, invokes the harmonies of The Tempest. Following this line, there could be a positive end. Other late works, too, overcome the sufferings of Künstlerliebe in genuine human love. Yet these issues must always remain obscure. The reader is left to suffer that delicious pain at imaginary knowledge which Hoffmann recognized as the heart of the Romantic experience. And thanks to Anthea Bell’s excellent translation, a true labour of devoted love, this is a pleasure which a new generation of English readers are now able to share.
Jeremy Adler
NOTES
1. Sir Walter Scott, ‘On the Supernatural in Fictitious Compositions; and particularly on the Works of Ernst Theodore William Hoffmann’, The Foreign Quarterly Review (London: 1827), 97f.
2. George Sand, Oeuvres Autobiographiques, vol. II (Paris: 1971), 984.
3. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary. A Story of Provincial Life, translated by Alan Russell (Harmondsworth: 1950), 234.
4. See Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, edited by Graham Petrie (Harmondsworth: 1967), 453f. (vol. VI, chapter 40) and 576 (vol. IX, chapter 5).
5. E. T. A. Hoffmann, Sämtliche Werke, edited by Rudolf Frank, vol. IX (Munich and Leipzig: 1924), 467.
6. Cited after R. Murray Schafer, E. T. A. Hoffmann and Music (Toronto and Buffalo: 1975), 20.
7. See Verlaine: Selected Poems, chosen, translated and with an introduction by Joanna Richardson (Harmondsworth: 1974), 172–5.
8. Gerhard R. Kaiser, E. T. A. Hoffmann (Stuttgart: 1988), 139ff.
9. I owe this description to the translator, Anthea Bell.
10. See Brigitte Feldges and Ulrich Stadler, E. T. A. Hoffmann. Epoche – Werk – Wirkung (Munich: 1986), 225.
11. I am indebted here to the discussion by Hartmut Steinecke in his edition, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Lebens-Ansichten des Katers Murr (Stuttgart: 1982; 2nd edn 1986), 498.
12. Against the usual view, however, Charles Rosen claims that The Tomcat Murr, not the Kreisleriana, inspired Schumann. Personally, I remain unconvinced by this insufficiently supported but minor point in a major, and wonderfully illuminating, study. See Charles Rosen, The Romantic Generation (Cambridge, Mass.: 1995), 672.
13. E. T. A. Hoffmann, Kreisleriana, edited by Hanne Castein (Stuttgart: 1983), 39f. For an English version, see E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings: Kreisleriana, The Poet and the Composer, Music Criticism, edited, annotated and introduced by David Charlton, translated by Martyn Clarke (Cambridge: 1989), 79–165, especially 105.
FURTHER READING
TRANSLATIONS OF HOFFMANN INTO ENGLISH
Selected Writings, edited and translated by Leonard J. Kent and Elizabeth C. Knights (Chicago and London, 2 volumes: 1969); the chief edition to date.
The Devil’s Elixirs, translated by Ronald Taylor (London: 1963).
Three Märchen, translated and with an introduction by Charles E. Passage (Columbia: 1971); contains Klein Zaches, Princess Brambilla and Master Flea.
R. Murray Schaffer, E. T. A. Hoffmann and Music (Toronto and Buffalo: 1975); includes Ritter Gluck, Ombra adorata, Don Juan, Beethoven’s Instrumental Music and other texts.
Selected Letters, translated and edited by Johanna C. Sahlin (Chicago and London: 1977).
Tales of Hoffmann, selected and edited with an introduction by R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: 1982); contains eight stories, including Mademoiselle de Scudery, The Sandman, The Entail and The Mines of Falun.
E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings: Kreisleriana, The Poet and the Composer, Music Criticism, edited, annotated and introduced by David Charlton, translated by Martyn Clarke (Cambridge: 1989); the standard text.
The Golden Pot and Other Tales, translated and edited by Ritchie Robertson (Oxford: 1992); also includes The Sandman, Master Flea, My Cousin’s Corner Window and Princess Brambilla.
STUDIES OF HOFFMANN IN ENGLISH
Harvey W. Hewett-Thayer, Hoffmann: Author of the Tales (Princeton: 1948).
Ronald Taylor, Hoffmann (London: 1963); an excellent introduction.
Kenneth Negus, E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Other World (Philadelphia: 1965).
Horst Daemmerich, The Shattered Self. E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Tragic Vision (Detroit: 1973).
James M. McGlathery, Mystery and Sexuality. E. T. A. Hoffmann – vol. I: Hoffmann and his Sources (Las Vegas, Berne and Frankfurt: 1981); vol. II: Interpretation of the Tales (New York, Berne and Frankfurt: 1985).
M. Kuhnke, ‘E. T. A. Hoffmann’, in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie (vol. 8, London and New York: 1980), 618–27.
HOFFMANN’S INFLUENCE
Palmer Cobb, The Influence of E. T. A. Hoffmann on the Tales of Edgar Alan Poe, Studies in Philology 3 (Chapel Hill: 1908; reprinted, New York: 1963).
Wulf Segebrecht, ‘E. T. A. Hoffmann and English Literature’, in Theodore G. Gish et al., Deutsche Romantik und English Romanticism (Munich: 1984), 52–66.
Charles E. Passage, The Russian Hoffmannists (The Hague: 1963).
Norman W. Ingham, E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Reception in Russia, Colloquium Slavicum (Würzburg: 1974).
Elizabeth Teichmann, La Fortune d’Hoffmann en France (Geneva and Paris: 1961).
Rosemary Lloyd, Baudelaire et Hoffmann. Affinités et influences (Cambridge: 1979).
ENGLISH STUDIES OF THE TOMCAT MURR IN SCHOLARLY JOURNALS
Diana Stone Peters, ‘E. T. A. Hoffmann, “The conciliatory Satirist”’, in Monatshefte 66 (1971), 55–73.
George Edgar Slusser, ‘Le Neveu de Rameau and Hoffmann’s Johannes Kreisler. Affinities and Influences’, in Comparative Literature 27 (1975), 327–43.
Steven Paul Scher, ‘Kater Murr and Tristram Shandy’, in Comparative Literature 28 (1976), 309–25.
Michael T. Jones, ‘Hoffmann and the Problem of Social Reality. A Study of Kater Murr’, in Monatshefte 69 (1977), 45–57.
Lawrence O. Frye, ‘The Language of Romantic High Feeling. A Case of Dialogue Techniques in Hoffmann’s Kater Murr and Novalis’ Heinrich von Ofterdingen’, in Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift 49 (1979), 520–45.
Peter W. Nutting, ‘Dissonant or Conciliatory Humour? Jean Paul’s Schmelzle and Hoffmann’s Kater Murr’, in Neophilologus 69 (1985), 414–20.
; Ritchie Robertson, ‘Shakespearean Comedy and Romantic Psychology in Hoffmann’s Kater Murr’, in Studies in Romanticism 24 (1985), 201–22.
Howard Gaskill, ‘Open Circles. Hoffmann’s Kater Murr and Hölderlin’s Hyperion’, in Colloquia Germanica 19 (1986), 21–46.
NOTE ON THE ILLUSTRATIONS
The four illustrations printed in this volume are engravings by the Berlin artist Carl Friedrich Thiele (ca. 1780–ca. 1836) after the original drawings for the book-covers of The Tomcat Murr by E. T. A. Hoffmann. They are reproduced from the front and back covers of the first editions of volumes I and II, Lebens-Ansichten des Katers Murr, published in Berlin by Ferdinand Dümmler in 1819 and 1821 respectively.
VOLUME ONE
EDITOR’S FOREWORD
No book stands in more need of a foreword than the present work, since without some explanation of the strange way in which it is put together, it is bound to seem an oddly assorted hotchpotch.
The editor therefore begs the kind reader really to read this foreword.
The aforesaid editor has a friend, a friend with whom he is united heart and soul, and whom he knows as well as he knows himself. One day this friend spoke to him more or less as follows: ‘My dear fellow, you’ve had a number of books printed and you know all about publishers, so it will be easy for you to find one of those gallant fellows who, upon your recommendation, will publish a work which has already been written by a young author of the most outstanding talent and brilliant gifts. Do take the man under your wing; he deserves it.’
The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr Page 4