Tales of the Obscure (Other Language Authors #1)

Image: penguin.com.au

If English readers have heard the name E.T.A. Hoffmann, it is most likely in the context of his most famous work, Der Sandmann (The Sandman), and its reception in Freud's essay on 'The Uncanny'. 

Telling the tragic account of the protagonist Nathanael's madness and death, Der Sandmann interweaves fairy-tale fantasy à la Brothers Grimm with a profound insight into human psychology and the forces of the elusive 'unconscious'. However, investigations into the darker sides of human nature are not just found in this one novella - this recurrent theme is part of what makes Hoffmann's whole oeuvre such a compelling read.

At the heart of Der Sandmann is a tale of childhood trauma. We discover early on that, when he was young, Nathanael had covertly seen his father and a lawyer named Coppelius at work on alchemy – shocking enough – but had then seen his father killed in an explosion, and Coppelius steal devilishly away. As a result, Nathanael associates the lawyer with the fabled Sandman, who steals the eyes of children who won't go to bed, and feeds them to his children in the moon.

Herr Hoffmann himself

(A fairly likely story, I'd say).

The effects of this overpowering childhood experience reverberate throughout the novella: when he encounters the barometer and glasses maker, Coppola, the grown-up Nathanael believes him to be Coppelius in disguise. The theme of eyes (or fear of losing them) forms something of a motif – Coppola's glasses, the telescope Nathanael uses to spy on his beloved Olimpia, the hollowness of her sockets because she is effectively a robot, the telescope at the look-out tower from where Nathanael falls to his death, having sighted Coppelius...

Freud defines the uncanny as the reappearance of something with which one was once familiar, but has since been repressed, and the recurrence of Coppelius-figures and prosthetic eyes are the very manifestations of Nathanael's repressed trauma which may send a shiver down our collective spine. 

Not only does this suggest that E.T.A. Hoffmann had a great insight into how to create gripping and uncanny narrative fantasies, but also shows his understanding of the effects of trauma and mental illness. Certainly, eyes come back to haunt Nathanael; but the severe 'hysterical' fit the protagonist suffers when he takes out Coppola's telescope and sees Coppelius demonstrates Hoffmann's acknowledgement of a quite explicit link between trauma, external stimuli which evoke the repressed, and pantomime/illness responses to them. In this respect, he was well ahead of many of the physicians of his time.

Almandin (Image: webmineral.com)

But we should not judge E.T.A. Hoffmann just on the merits of one novella. If Der Sandmann explores the unconscious in the form of repressed trauma, Die Bergwerke zu Falun (The Mines of Falun) goes one step further, by examining repressed desires. At the start of the novella, we meet Elis Fröbom, a man depressed after his mother's death, unwilling to go back to sea, from where he has just returned. As the tale goes on, Elis is driven on towards the Mines of Falun by unknown, mysterious forces, unseen hands, and the uncannily recurrent figure of the old miner Torbern – all of which seem to be figments and projections of his own increasingly distorted imagination. He falls in love with the beautiful Ulla Dahlsjö, and they become engaged - but on the day of their wedding, Elis disappears down the mine in search of the near-mythically scarce Almandine stone, never to resurface.

The centre of Falun, Sweden

There are fairly strong insinuations of Oedipal desire throughout Die Bergwerke zu Falun, with Elis' relationship to his mother described in ambiguously sexual terms. Consequently many have interpreted Elis' attraction to the mines of Falun as representative of his attraction to a womb-like orifice of The Symbolic Mother, and have seen the search for Almandine as the attempt to express this unutterable desire. The fact that Elis has a dream in which his beloved Ulla doubles up with his mother and the imaginary 'Queen' of the Mines of Falun, makes it clear that this is not just the retrospective product of nebulous psychoanalysis; E.T.A. Hoffmann was, in fact, surveying the territory which Freud would go on to popularise in the early twentieth century.

Through Die Bergwerke zu Falun and Der Sandmann, Hoffmann created something of an aesthetic sensation by combining portrayals of madness with the concise poetic prose of the novella. Looking back, we can also perceive the seedlings of so many ideas concerning the human mind which would only become 'popular' in the early twentieth century. But even if you're not on the look out for the uncanny (or E.T.A Hoffmann's understanding of human psychology. Or trauma. Or repression. Or Oedipus), Hoffmann's writing style – enigmatic, fantastic, utterly compelling – makes his novellas well worth the read.