My Heart Burns: E.T.A. Hoffmann's The Sandman

 My Heart Burns...

E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Sandman (translated by Christopher Moncrieff): Tale of an Obsession

Venice by night: Friedrich Schiller's "The Ghost-Seer" (translated by Andrew Brown)

Venice by Night... "The Ghost-Seer" by Friedrich Schiller

(Alma Classics edition, translated with an introduction by Andrew Brown)

The rise of Gothic fiction in the second half of the 18th Century, also referred to as “first wave Gothic”, is generally portrayed as a peculiarly English phenomenon.  This is hardly surprising, considering that the novel widely (if not uncontroversially) considered to be the first Gothic novel is Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764).  It set the blueprint for a dark literary genre, obsessed with terror, death and the otherworldly, and was soon followed by works in the same vein by other English authors such Ann Radcliffe, William Beckford and Matthew “Monk” Lewis.  It would be a mistake, however, to consider this movement in ‘splendid isolation’ from what was happening in the rest of Europe.  Indeed, some of the defining elements of the Gothic are shared with Continental literature of the period, shaped by the ideals of Early Romanticism and the proto-Romantic Sturm und Drang movement.  German readers, in particular, had a particular appetite for horror novels, some of which were translated into English or adapted by English authors.  In writing “The Monk”, Lewis drew upon homegrown Gothic, but also upon German ‘horrid novels’.

One of the seminal works in the Continental canon is Der Geisterseher – Aus den Papieren des Grafen von O** (generally rendered in English as “The Ghost-Seer” or “The Apparitionist”), a strange novel by the poet, dramatist, novelist and philosopher Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805).  It first appeared in instalments in the journal Thalia between 1787 and 1789, only to be abandoned and left unfinished by Schiller who, apparently, developed a great antipathy to his own creation.   It has just been published on the Alma Classics imprint, in a translation by Andrew Brown who also provides an introduction, placing the novel in the philosophical and cultural context of its period.

The protagonist of the novel is the Prince of ------------------ who, we are given understand, is the third in line to the throne of Protestant state.  On a sojourn in Venice, the Prince becomes involved in a secret society known as the “Bucentauro”, a group of debauched members of high society, amongst whom count several influential prelates.  He also falls in love with a mysterious “Greek” woman.  All of this, however, could well be a front for an even shadowier Catholic group intent on converting the Prince to “the only Church outside of which there is no salvation”, fleecing him of his family’s riches in the process.  The Prince is, in fact, being stalked by an elusive figure he refers to as “the Armenian” who is, according to some accounts, a protean spy for the Inquisition and, according to others, a Faust or Melmoth-like figure who has achieved immortality through devilish means.

Arthur von Ramberg (1819-1875), Der Prinz
(illustration for Schiller's The Ghost-Seer)

It all sounds very convoluted, and it is.  On his part, Schiller purposely adds to the confusion through the narrative devices he opts for.  The first part of the story is recounted in the first person by the Count of O***, a friend and companion of the Prince.  After the Count leaves Venice to attend to personal business, the story continues in epistolary form, through letters sent by Baron von F_________ , a member of the Prince’s retinue, to the Count, updating him on the latest developments in connection with the Prince.  Both narrators are, by their own admission, unreliable narrators, who do not always understand the strange goings-on in which they find themselves.  The narrators cannot trust their senses – we, as readers, cannot take them at their word.  This is truly a novel where, to quote the Bard, “nothing is, but what is not”.  The work’s fragmentary nature is compounded by the fact that it was left unfinished.  Reaching the last page of  book feels like stepping out of a dream or hallucination, whose details and meaning lie tantalisingly out of reach.

The philosophy behind “The Ghost-Seer” is also curiously ambivalent.  It is often held up as an example of Schiller’s Enlightenment ideals – to me, this is not that obvious.  Take the author’s approach towards the supernatural.  On the one hand, much of the novel’s atmosphere (and its title) is drawn from the otherworldly aspects of the plot, with one of its key scenes a seance-like occult ceremony presided by a shady character based on the Count of Cagliostro.  Subsequently, Radcliffe-like, Schiller has his Prince unravel the supernatural elements, revealing them to be mere smoke and mirrors.  Yet, the explanation is so complicated, that like the Count, we are almost tempted to reject it in favour of a belief that something otherworldly must have been going on.  The same could be said of Schiller’s attitude towards religion.  Unsurprisingly for a Gothic novel, Catholics get quite a lot of bad press. But Schiller seems equally critical both of the drearier, stricter strains of Protestantism and, at the other extreme, of ‘freethinking’ unbelief. 

For an unfinished, slim novel(la), The Ghost-Seer has proven surprisingly influential, possibly because of the questions it poses only to leave unanswered.  It gave rise to a particular sub-genre of the Gothic – the “secret society novel”, variously referred to in German as the Bundesroman or the Geheimbundroman.   It is also one of the first works to exploit Venice as a backdrop for dark and/or supernatural  fiction, a tradition which continued with E.T.A. Hoffmann, Heinrich Zschokke and in the 20th century, Thomas Mann and Daphne du Maurier.  La Serenissima it may be called, but its alleys and canals, decaying palaces and hidden campielli whisper strange secrets, if only one were to listen...

Friedrich Nerly, View of the Grand Canal

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Schiller’s An die Freude was famously set to music by Ludwig van Beethoven in the choral finale of his 9th Symphony.  Apart from that, however, there are few famous settings of his poetry, although one should mention Franz Schubert’s forty-four lieder based on Schiller’s poems.

On the other hand, the writer’s plays have proven particularly popular in opera adaptations.  Verdi was a particular fan:  I Masnadieri is based on The Robbers, Giovanna d’Arco on The Maid of Orleans, Luisa Miller on Intrigue and Love, Don Carlos on the eponymous play and La Forza del Destino, partly, on Wallenstein.

Here’s then, a Schiller musical “dessert”,

First on is a scene from the Third Act of I Masnadieri, the work which, together with The Robbers, is most often cited as an example of Schiller’s “Gothic” streak.

Gioacchino Rossini is best known for his comic operas. However, his last theatrical work, Guillaume Tell based on Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell, is a grand opera rich in Romantic ideals, including several “nature scenes” reflecting the concept of the Sublime.

To end, a contemporary work by composer and cellist Graham Waterhouse.  Composed in 2005, Der Handschuh is a melodrama for cello and speaking voice, composed to mark the 200th anniversary of Schiller’s death.

Grim(m) tale? The Jew's Beech by Annette von Droste-Hülshoff

The Jew's Beech by Annette von Droste-Hülshoff

Annette von Droste-Hülshoff (1797-1848) was born into an aristocratic Catholic family near Munster and spent most of her life in rural Westphalia. She never married and rarely tasted city life. This notwithstanding it appears that she was well aware of the prevailing literary trends of the day and her apparently "limited" life experiences did not stop her from exploring deep philosophical issues in her works.

Take this strange novella - "The Jew's Beech". It is, ostensibly, a murder mystery inspired by true events - the unsolved murders of a forester and a Jewish moneylender - which were recorded in the archives of the author's family. The story itself however is just a pretext for an exploration of such themes as good and evil, the corruptibility of young minds and the stifling prejudices which, in a small community, can cloud the minds of even the best of people. 

Annette von Droste-Hülshoff was primarily a poet and Die Judenbuche is her only piece of prose. For better or for worse, it is very much a poet's work. Let's start with the weaknesses first. A master storyteller could have made a nail-biting thriller out of this. Von Droste-Hülshoff however seems blissfully unconcerned about narrative conventions. Many facts are left unexplained, new characters appear with barely an introduction, the structure sometimes feels lopsided with flashbacks and flashforwards. Then there is the famously obscure ending, which lends itself to multiple interpretations and raises more questions than it answers. It leaves one wondering whether the author was being consciously obscure - a proto-(post)modernist, if you will - or whether she was merely unable to tie up the plot's loose ends. 

But in the novella's weaknesses lie also its strengths. The work is rich in allusion and metaphor - chief amongst them the striking image of the lone beech tree of the title. Although the book is firmly rooted in reality, the atmosphere conjured up by the novella is straight out of Brothers Grimm - magical forests, eerie apparitions and unsettling premonitions abound. Indeed this has been justly described as a "Gothic" work - it has many of the genre's tropes and is close in style to the literature of the "Uncanny" exemplified by Hoffmann and like-minded authors.

Alma Classics edition cover

English editions of this novella are rare. The Oneworld Classics edition I read (now reissued as part of the Alma Classics series) uses the 1958 translation by Doris and Lionel Thomas and includes an introduction and timeline.

It may not be "entertaining" in the usual sense of the word and is ultimately frustrating as a murder mystery, but this strange work is certainly worth reading.

Vacanze italiane : Antal Szerb's "Journey by Moonlight"

An Italian Honeymoon - Antal Szerb's "Journey by Moonlight"

On honeymoon in Italy, Mihály chooses a solitary nocturnal ramble in the back alleys of Venice over the pleasures of the bridal bed. It doesn’t take a psychology guru to realise that the marriage is not off to the best of starts. His wife Erszi knows that, this being her dreamy and eccentric Mihály (rather than her practical first husband Zoltán), the explanation for his erratic behaviour is most likely complex and slightly illogical. And that’s exactly what it turns out to be. 

After a (not so) chance encounter with an old acquaintance - János Szepetneki – Mihály decides to recount to Erszi his obsessive youthful friendship with siblings Tamás and Éva Ulpius, to whose “ring” he belonged together with said János and the ascetic Ervin. Oiled by a bottle of Italian wine, and egged on by Erszi’s insistent questions, Mihály implicitly reveals (despite his protestation to the contrary) that his relationship with Tamás and Éva had strong erotic overtones and that this might have something to do with his strange and evident discomfiture with the marital state. What is certainly clear is that Tamás’s eventual tragic death left a long-term mark on the close coterie of friends.

This long “psychoanalytic” session reminded me of a very different novel – Murakami’s Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage . And, like Murakami’s, this novel does develop into a “pilgrimage” of sorts - its first part ends with Mihály, not altogether innocently, contriving to catch a wrong train and separating himself from Erszi. In the subsequent parts of the book, we follow Mihály as, against the backdrop of an Italy exotic, magical, seductive and frightening, he tries to recapture the decadent aura of his youth.

Antal Szerb’s 1937 “Journey by Moonlight” (or, to give its title in its literal translation, “Traveller and the Moonlight”) is one of the best-known of modern Hungarian novels. It certainly deserves to be much better appreciated outside Szerb’s native country. Like all great classics, it is a multilayered work which lends itself to a variety of readings. It is, in its own weird way, a comedy of manners, with a streak of playfully sardonic humour always bubbling just beneath the surface. It is also a novel of “magical realism” written before the term was invented. It is an exploration of pre-World War II society – indeed, at its most obvious and superficial level, it presents to us a cast of characters who are all trying, unsuccessfully, to escape the bourgeoisie they find so suffocating. 

But, as translator Peter Czipott points out in the insightful afterword to this Alma Classics edition, a major theme in the novel is Szerb’s exploration of “nostalgia”. What Mihály is after are the dreams and ideals of his youth, now sadly replaced by humdrum, everyday life. But is it at all possible to go back in time? At one point towards the end, one character warns another not to try to live “someone else’s life”. But, the novel seems to be telling us, our youthful selves are as distant from us as “someone else”.

Szerb was not primarily a novelist, but a literary scholar who published respected works on the history of Hungarian and world literature. He lived for a time in Italy – his descriptions of the country are partly autobiographical but, in a quasi-postmodern twist, they also (knowingly) reflect common literary portrayals of the Bel Paese which Szerb knew so well through his studies. Indeed, one cannot help feeling that this is not the Italy of the Italians, or even that of the Rough Guides and Lonely Planet. This is, by turns, the darkly fascinating and haunting Italy of the Continental Gothic novels, the decadent Italy of fin-de-siecle writers (Mann’s Death in Venice comes to mind), Goethe’s sun-washed Land, wo die Zitronen blühn...

Journey by Moonlight might not always be an easy read, but it certainly is one which repays the effort and which is likely to reveal new depths if revisited. This Alma Classics edition is highly recommended, not only for its fluent translation, but also for its useful explanatory notes.

This edition published February 24th 2016 by Alma Classics (first published 1937 as Utas és holdvilág)

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What music to go with this novel?  Two suggestions:

Elisabeth Grummer sings "Kennst du das Land...", a Goethe setting from the opera Mignon, by Ambroise Thomas

And then, of course, some decadent Mahler, now forever linked with the haunting images of Visconti's Death in Venice: