E. T. A. Hoffmann’s weird and crazy novella The Golden Pot: A Modern Fairytale, a landmark of fantasy literature, was published two hundred years ago. The branch that grew out of this story includes Carroll’s Alice books, George MacDonald’s dream novels, John Crowley’s Little, Big, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman – the kinds of stories things and people are constantly transforming into other things and people, where it is not entirely clear which parts of the story are dreams and which are “real,” or if there is even a difference.
Anselmus, a college student in Dresden, and a nebbish, or perhaps a schlemiel, in quick succession is cursed by a witch and falls in love with a green snake with “magnificent dark-blue eyes” who appears with her two snake sisters in a tree on the banks of the Elbe.
All was silent, and Anselmus saw in the three gleaming, shimmering snakes gliding through the glass towards the river; with a swishing, rushing sound they plunged into the Elbe, and as they vanished into its waves a crackling green flame shot up and flew obliquely towards the town, fizzling out as it went. (First Vigil – The Golden Pot has not Chapters but Vigils).
Most Hoffmann characters who wander into another state of being are under the influence of something and Anselmus has been smoking his “health tobacco.” The snakes turn out to be the daughters of a wizard-salamander who is from Atlantis, where – anyways a bunch of crazy nonsense follows.
Normal people, like Anselmus, just walking around in their everyday city, suddenly slip into a fairy tale world that has somehow overlaid the everyday world. So lots of metamorphoses, people into birds and door-knockers; birds into flowers; flowers into birds:
Once more Anselmus was astonished by the magnificence of the conservatory, but he could now perceive that many of the strange flowers hanging on the dark bushes were in fact insects resplendent in gleaming colours, flapping their little wings and dancing and flitting in a swarm as though caressing one another with their probosces. As for the rose-pink and sky-blue birds, they had turned into fragrant flowers… (Eighth Vigil)
Hoffmann’s great discovery was that he could his assemble this hodgepodge of esoteric symbols, taken from myth or alchemy or Freemasonry but stripped of their original meaning. He could arrange some so that they created meaning of their own, his meaning. “You will then believe that this magnificent realm is much nearer at hand than you had previously thought,” writes the narrator in one of several interruptions addressed “outright” to the reader (Fourth Vigil).
And the fact is that it does not matter much if the reader finds any coherent meaning at all. The sense of wonder and delight is all there.
I have been quoting from the Oxford World’s Classics The Golden Pot and Other Tales, tr. Ritchie Robertson. The post’s title is from the Seventh Vigil; I have mangled it a bit, but the spirit is right.
I will repeat what I have noted at Scott Bailey's blog, I continue to marvel at your ability to read so much so quickly. My reading abilities and opportunities are so curtailed that I am envious of what you able to accomplish.
ReplyDeleteI dunno. The Golden Pot is 83 pages, and I read it over the course of a week. I've been on Daniel Deronda for 3 weeks and am on p. 225.
ReplyDelete"quickly" is relative, is what I am saying, I guess. There's quicker. I gotta do something about Daniel Deronda or it's gonna take me another 2 months.
As I have suggested elsewhere -- well, in a way, at my own blog today -- I am becoming increasingly fond of Victorian reading habits: reading small, manageable installments of long, serialized novels (e.g., allowing myself two years to read Bleak House). I know of people who boast about their reading speeds, claiming to read 600 page novels in two evenings (and I remember D. G. Myers' claim that he had read Lonesome Dove in a single evening), but I have no understanding of either the boasts or the incredible reading speeds. So, now I move at my snail's pace even though I remember being "trained" to read more quickly in elementary school. That was actually a pedagogical goal with the SRA Reading Laboratory curriculum. I hated it.
ReplyDeleteVery interesting R.T. I'm also amazed when people claim to read a huge book 'in one sitting' or in an evening - I never really believe it. My own reading has been slowing down recently; this has partly occurred since I've been reading Proust. I can now appreciate being a slow reader whereas before I was a bit frustrated at not being faster.
Delete"now I move at my snail's pace even though I remember being "trained" to read more quickly in elementary school. That was actually a pedagogical goal with the SRA Reading Laboratory curriculum. I hated it. "
DeleteIt depends on circumstances. I used to be able to speed-read at about three pages a minute for professionally needed information. Not for very long, but you don't need to do it for very long- that's the point of it. However, you only do that out of a Gradgrinding concern with facts. Whether what you read is well-written or oddly-written is irrelevant- even inconvenient; you just want the information. Anything which distracts you from it, like good writing, is an inconvenience. Reading for pleasure is a completely different skill.
Hoffmann is wacky, inventor of magical realism and Romanticism (maybe there's no difference?). I can see how his stories lead directly to Meyrinck and Kafka and all the other German-language crazies. He is completely unpredictable and digressive and funny. And did I say wacky?
ReplyDeleteThat passage with the flowers turning into insects and the birds turning into flowers is pretty great stuff.
Romanticism is much bigger, endlessly bigger, uselessly bigger. So that John Clare writing a poem about a bird's nest is Romanticism, even though it is also obviously, in ordinary English, realism. Don't ask me why. No, I guess I kind of know why.
ReplyDeleteHoffmann, in terms of German Romanticism, is maybe closer to the end of the line than the beginning. They got an early start in Germany.
Inventor of magical realism - this is plausible. Predecessors like Tieck and The Magic Flute and Goethe's "Fairy Tale" are all set in fairy world. The Golden Pot is set in Dresden in 18XX when the fairy world invades. It's as if Shakespeare had set "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in London.
Hoffmann also (arguably) wrote the first detective story and the first horror story, so this kind of innovation is normal for him.
I really had to read Hoffmann to understand not just his influence, whatever that squishy word means, but how often he was directly ripped off. Imitated, that is more polite, closely imitated.
I loved the bird & flower passage, and it is richer if you've read the earlier passage it inverts, when the flowers were bids & vice versa, but I only wanted to include one.
Clearly I have only a dim idea of what is meant by "Romanticism."
DeleteI'm reading a bunch of German-language stories from the first half of the 20th century, and they all have that "fairy tale" tone to them, no matter how "realistic" they are. Hoffmann (I say based on one novel and two(?) stories) seems to go the other way: "I swear this is the real world, but there's that ghost over there, too."
I need to read more Hoffmann; I read his Tomcat Murr novel a few years ago and was delighted with the bits dealing with Murr writing his autobiography; such a whimsical, imaginative character.
ReplyDeleteGreat review; and I'm glad to see several of Hoffmann's works being reviewed on GLM4 as I sometimes think he gets forgotten.
ReplyDeleteI think it would be difficult to decide which is Hoffmann's best short story but for me it would be between The Sandman and The Golden Pot. When I first read The Golden Pot I literally had to re-read it the following day just to relive the fun that I had on my first read.
I really like the first sentence of the tenth vigil: 'I may be permitted, kind reader, to doubt whether you have ever been enclosed in a glass bottle, unless some vivid dream has teased you with such magical mishaps.'
I would explain the Romanticism business in my forthcoming post, if I understood it myself.
ReplyDeleteHoffmann is a creepy, goofy giant of literature. Really far-reaching. And German literature is suffused with him. Freud's (readable, useful) essay "The Uncanny" is practically a piece of Hoffmann criticism.
Jonathan, that's a great line. The possibility, almost the assumption, that I the reader have in fact had that dream, that is the finest touch.
Eleven translations of works by Hoffman, in older translations, can be found at EBooks@Adelaide
ReplyDeletehttps://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/h/hoffmann/eta/
The University of Adelaide ought to be embarrassed. How hard would it be to include the most basic information - translator, date of publication, anything about the source. The #1 argument against e-texts: you often don't know what the heck you are reading.
ReplyDeleteHaving said that (and noting that these texts may be under copyright in the U.S.), the best ones are, as I remember them: "The Sandman," "Mademoiselle de Scudery," "The Cremona Violin," maybe "The Entail," and the rest I don't remember. Key missing works: "Princess Brambilla," "Master Flea," "My Cousin's Corner Window," "The Automata," "Mines of Falun," "Nutcracker and the Mouse-king," um, "Rat Krespel" (not about a rat), and I again forget. The Devil's Elixir, but that's a novel.
How was that for some empty opinionating? I should write more list posts.
For whatever reason, public domain translations often do not attribute translator credit. The copyright laws of Australia are more liberal than USA or UK. I asked attorney neighbor of our about cyber copyright law in the Philippines and he laughed and said basically on foreign authored books anything goes.
DeleteOf course a new translation published by Oxford with modern translation and notes would be better but there are no public libraries in much of the second and third world and with delivery charges and custom fees a paper book can cost above $30.00. So on E texts all are not perfect but I am grateful to
DeleteWas cut. To Univ. Of Adelaide staff for their efforts. They make no money, have no ads or requests for donations. Their Proust and Stendhal translations are attributed to moncireff.
Delete"Their Proust and Stendhal translations are attributed to moncireff. "
DeleteA very interesting biography of Scott Moncrieff- Chasing Lost Time- has recentlybeen published.
Roger, you are right. I posted on it a few months ago
Deletehttp://rereadinglives.blogspot.com/2014/09/chasing-lost-time-life-of-c-k-scott.html
For billions of potential readers it is E texts or nothing.
ReplyDeleteWe don't need to rehearse the social benefits of electronic texts in order to criticize them. Same goes for printed texts. It's not either / or.
ReplyDeleteWhat Proust has to do with any of this is a mystery.
I somewhat lost the thread of this conversation shortly after my comments about reading speeds, but -- with your permission -- I will add a small tidbit about e-texts v. printed texts: for better or worse, the proliferation of e-texts are forcing reconsiderations of the laws and ethics related to copywrite protections; moreover, since reading is such a personal, idiosyncratic praxis, it is only natural that choices of e-text or printed texts are personal and idiosyncratic (i.e., there is nothing inherently good, bad, or ugly about either option). Now, without further meandering, I am going to choose something from my bookshelves (loaded down with ink-and-paper) for my Thanksgiving Day reading, and -- as I do so -- I wish everyone a blessed Thanksgiving (and that includes Proust and his cookies).
ReplyDeleteI liked your post and the refresher. I think this was one of his first stories I ever read and remember I loved it. I need to re-read it. He was so influential, you're right. This is much more colorful than most of his other famous stories. I never saw an influence on George MacDonald but now that you mention it.
ReplyDeleteWonderfully colorful. Princess Brambilla matches it for color, but not many others.
ReplyDeleteMaybe I will keep reading Hoffmann along with the 200th anniversaries. The Devil's Elixir would be for next year then. A novel with one color.