Dividing time: musical memory and the dis-closure of fate in E.T.A. Hoffmann's Die Automate.(Critical essay)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-DEC-06

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"DER TURKE WOLLTE, WIE DU BEMERKT HABEN WIRST, DURCHAUS nicht antworten" ["the Turk was most unwilling to answer me, as I daresay you observed"], (1) and one can appreciate the oracle's initial reticence. Here comes Ferdinand, the Romantic poet, and he wants to learn his rite, when the Romantic poet, by definition, has always already known his fate. The fate of the Romantic poet, as if the reader didn't know, is to lose the better, feminine part of his soul in early childhood, and to spend the rest of his life trying to restore that part, thus to regain the wholeness he once enjoyed. The question he puts to the oracle can only concern his anima, and his possible re-union with her: "die Geliebte meiner Seele ... die ich schon von fruher Kindheit an im Herzen getragen, die mir ein feindliches Geschick nur so lange entrissen, und die ich Hochbegluckter nun wiedergefunden" (S 336). (2) Because the poet has already cast "Schicksal" as the perpetrator of this primal tear, the only thing left for "Schicksal" to decide, or its spokesman to announce, is whether the poet's yearning to restore his wholeness will be fulfilled: "Werde ich kunftig noch einen Moment erleben, der dem gleicht, wo ich am glucklichsten war?" (S 337). (3) The Turk eventually obliges Ferdinand with an answer whose meaning is, at first sight, clear: "Unglucklicher! in dem Augenblick, wenn du sie wie dersiehst, hast du sie verloren!" (4) As Oedipus himself was forced to see, however, the most unambiguous, least enigmatic oracles are often the most treacherous, and fate manages to retain its strangeness even when it seems to speak most clearly, as indeed it must in order to remain fate. The paradox governing the oracle has always been that its true meaning can never become clear to the hero until after the mysterious work of fate has been completed. In this case, as we shall see, it is through the ambiguity of words such as "verlieren" that the Turk maintains his silence. In contrast to Oedipus' fate, however, Ferdinand's fate maintains its strangeness not by destroying him, but precisely by denying him the destruction he so fervently anticipates: his persistent conviction is that the fulfillment of the oracle, as the repetition of the primal tear, will bring his death. The trick that fate holds in reserve consists in denying the poet the fatal closure he so desires.

I have summarized the tale in this tendentious manner in order to suggest that what is at stake in this confrontation is not the poet's fate per se, but the manner in which fate's alterity to the poet is enunciated, or encoded. The oracle in this case is not a human being, but an automaton--the "redende Turke" ["talking Turk"]--and so the awfulness of his pronouncement lies primarily not in the event that it predicts (whatever that may be), but in the source and medium of the pronouncement itself. Confrontations in Hoffmann's tales such as that between Ferdinand and the redende Turke are typically read in terms of the "fatal threat" posed by the other--thus following the poet's own suggestion--whereas what I take here to be the critical and characteristic feature of Hoffmann's treatment of alterity is that, for all its ineluctability, the form in which alterity "finally" (re)emerges remains to be decided. This tale does indeed participate in the universal problem of Hoffmann's poetics, namely that the sacred "inner life" of the artist is never secure from the trespasses of the profane, mortal sphere at its limit. (5) Ferdinand's friend, the composer Ludwig, gives expression to this typical anxiety in the loathing he directs towards the title character of the tale:

Mir sind ... alle solche Figuren, die dem Menschen nicht sowohl nachgebildet sind, als das Menschliche nachaffen, diese wahren Standbilder eines lebendigen Todes oder eines toten Lebens, im hochsten Grade zuwider. (S 330). (6)

The oracle distinguishes itself among the many manifestations of the uncanny other in Hoffmann's tales through its singular openness, such that the "mortal threat" (7) becomes just one possible enunciation of alterity among others. What this study will attempt to show, then, is that Hoffmann employs this topos in order to point to a certain opening in the artist's confrontation of alterity. Within the oracle's essential interpretability lies the insight that alterity is less an existential fact the artist is forced to confront, and more an existential decision he is forced to make, and to make as an artist.

In this reading of Die Automate, then, I will seek to develop the connection between the tale's exposure of fate as a Romantic "illusion" and its peculiarly open-ended quality: Hoffmann's dis-closure of narrative as such as a means of configuring alterity. I see in the tale's defiantly, even joyously ambiguous conclusion an invitation to go beyond a certain either/or that has informed the majority of the literature on Hoffmann with respect to the issue of artistic freedom. "Given" the ongoing contest between self and other, or the sacred interior and the profane exterior in Hoffmann, commentators have generally taken one of two positions with respect to what is at stake in this contest. The alternatives arising from this contest are I) that Hoffmann's oeuvre is wholly and "fatally" delivered into the grips of an impossible decision, (8) or 2) that Hoffmann's oeuvre contains, on the contrary, a hidden tendency toward the "integration" of interior and exterior, or some sort of post-Goethean model of reconciliation. (9) The position that I put forward here is that this basic framework, while not without justification, obscures what is at stake in much of Hoffmann's fiction, and especially, as here, in his music fiction. There is a decision available to Hoffmann's protagonist, but this decision concerns not whether he is free from alterity, but what form his un-freedom assumes. The decision that he faces is not whether to struggle against alterity or resign himself to it, but how to confront alterity, given the duplicity (10) of human existence, and given that this duplicity is never simply "given." As an author, that is, Hoffmann is less interested in the philosophical resolution of the problem than he is in exploring how it plays itself out within various narrative settings. The question of duplicity for Hoffmann is a question concerning the proper narrative guise of alterity: how does, or should, the encroachment of alterity unfold in (or be folded into) the story of the artist's "inner life"? The open endings of these tales do not efface alterity, but re-cast it as something other than fate, at least in its mortal aspect as Fate. In an era that had given rise to Zacharias Werner's Schicksalsdramen, such re-casting can be taken to be the polemical aim of these tales.

"Re-casting" must also be understood here in the sense of metalworking, since this paper is most concerned not with the "characterization" of fate, but with the temporal framework through which the irruption of alterity takes shape. The "tear" and "mortal threat" form just one such temporal framework, or "chronotype" (11) of alterity. The selection of this tale is then motivated, secondly, by the prominent role of music in it, since within Hoffmann's complex narratology, I shall argue, music signifies the possibility of recasting the temporality of alterity. In particular, it signifies the uncanny, as opposed to the demonic chronotype of alterity. In the most general terms, that is, the appearance of alterity in Hoffmann's fiction oscillates between that of a demonic force operating "from outside" the subject--one that can thus be configured as a properly "foreign power"--and that of an uncanny force operating "from within," which thus cannot be demonized. In Die Automate, alterity is configured either, in accordance with Ferdinand's premonition, as that which will destroy life, or, in accordance with Ludwig's formulation, as that through which death becomes indistinguishable from life "as it is lived." Music then constitutes the exemplary, perhaps even "original" guise of the uncanny for Hoffmann due to the peculiar manner that the system of harmony re-temporalizes death. Already in the Kreisleriana, alterity emerges in musical time by means of the "Zahlenverhaltnisse" ["numeric relations"] at work in the system of harmony: the numeric relations that, together with the "mystical" rules of counterpoint, awaken an "inneres Grauen" ["inner horror"] as they are revealed to him in the works of J. S. Bach. (12) Such "mechanical" relations introduce death into the very texture of time, and so expose the temporal immanence of death in life, as opposed to the imminence of death, as the chronological limit of life. As a discrete chronotype of alterity, music is then especially well-suited to intervene in the demonizing narrativization of "fate," and to confuse the categories of "before" and "after" that serve to re-establish the clear division between life and death, or interior and exterior in such narratives. The critical, though easily overseen divergence of the demonic and the uncanny thus constitutes the opening in the artist's confrontation of alterity in Die Automate, and it is by means of this disclosure that Ferdinand will, in the end, overcome the "tragic fate" to which he had been beholden.

In what follows, I will first of all seek to elaborate the sense in which Fate is exposed as an imaginative artifact in Hoffmann's fiction, allowing music to emerge as an alternative chronotype. The middle section will then outline how this opposition is played out in Die Automate, producing a fracture within its complex narrative framework, but then leading to a certain "resolution" in favor of the musical configuration of alterity. Music's capacity to intervene in the narration of Fate, however, further depends upon its duplicitous participation in both chronotypes, as is best illustrated in his musical-critical writings. The later sections will then focus on how music serves in this tale as a kind of hinge between otherwise incommensurable temporal frameworks, and in this way is able to undo, or re-direct, the artist-protagonist's urgent desire to ground his existence in the "primal rupture" of subjectivity. It is this oscillation between the two chronotypes in music that creates the space in this tale for its ambiguous, and oddly comic ending.

I. The Construction of Fate / reflective, anti-dramatic aria

Looking beyond Die Automate to Hoffmann's entire oeuvre, it can be ascertained that this Fate in fact never forms the unreflected temporal substrate of the narrative. Fate is never simply that within which the protagonist is passively untangled, since he also works to promote this topos from within the narrative. Sometimes, as I will develop further in connection with Der Sandmann (1816), Fate's fictional status is suggested through raise en abime: the already self-reflective primary narrator delivers an account of Nathanael's impassioned efforts to "confront" his horrible fate by writing it. In the earlier tale of the automated oracle (1814), this participation is marked, on the one hand, by Ferdinand's eagerness to visit this side-show attraction (not to mention his acute sensibility for how best to solicit a "real" answer from it (13)), and, on the other hand, by his strangely under-motivated interpretation of its prophecy. Although the talking Turk's message had not contained the merest allusion to death, Ferdinand is convinced that the "injury" he sustains in receiving this message is a fatal one. He confesses to Ludwig, "dass der Turke in mein Innerstes gegriffen, ja, dass er mein Innerstes verletzt hat, so dass ich den Schmerz wohl nicht verwinden werde, bis mir die Erfullung des grasslichen Orakelspruchs den Tod bringt" (S 333). (14) While the central mystery of the tale lies in the automaton's ability to deliver such penetrating answers, the question that has not been addressed in the Hoffmann literature is why Ferdinand is so determined that his fate be a fatal one.

In order to diagnose Ferdinand's Schicksalsverfallenheit, it is first necessary to examine the nature of his injury. He feels himself to have been violated or penetrated--"heute ist eine fremde Macht feindselig in mein Inneres gedrungen!" (S 337) (15)--due to the fact that, as his answer reveals, the talking Turk has gained access to his inner life of remembrance. The Turk, or the "foreign powers" that operate through the automaton, has discovered a cherished memory that Ferdinand had never divulged to anyone, not even to Ludwig. The surface-memory here involves a chance encounter with a woman at an inn--"not" a sexual encounter, but a metempsychotic encounter that is both staggering and oddly staggered. Having returned from a drunken outing with his friends, Ferdinand first hears the woman's voice as she sings an Italian aria-melody in an adjacent room. She later appears to him in a dream, where the two are united in synaesthetic ecstasy: "unsere Worte, unsere Blicke wurden zu herrlichen anschwellenden Tonen, die wie in einem Feuerstrom zusammenflossen" (S 336). (16) On the morning after, he gains a "real" glimpse of her--and she of him--just as she is leaving by carriage. This recounted sequence of communicable events, however, further refers to an abysmal, non-figural sphere of remembrance. For even though he had neither heard her melody before, nor seen her in a waking state, he is convinced in his dream that she, as the "beloved" of his soul ["Geliebte meiner Seele" (S 336)], emerges from the deepest recesses of his childhood. The ecstasy of his dream thus becomes a "reminder" of primal unity.

The sweet secret of his heart ["zartes Geheimnis meines Herzens" (S 337)] is borne in memory, and it is because Ferdinand feels himself to be spiritually consubstantial with this anamnestic fantasy that the talking Turk's penetration of this secret is so threatening. The automaton's oracle would seem to introduce an arcane mnemotechnics into the poet's anamnesis, drawing his memory up from its abysmal depths into a kind of surface. Indeed, the automaton seems to be able to render private memories into medial events that are even dimly perceptible to third parties: at the same time that the Turk gives his answer, Ferdinand seems to hear ["war es mir, als horte ich"] the melody again, as does Ludwig, albeit only as a vibration and a vaguely musical tone. (17) What must also be noted, however, is that this penetration does nothing to weaken or debilitate the life of remembrance that, at least since Wilhelm Meister, had been the original source of the artist's sacred calling. (18) On the contrary, it seems to reanimate this life, albeit in a particularly unsettling way. The text of the aria-melody naturally includes the imperative to remember--"Mio ben ricordati s'avvien ch'io mora"--and indeed the Turk's oracle and intonation seem to remind Ferdinand, leading a bachelor's life of vain amusements, of the existence of his muse. If the oracular performance serves to reanimate the inspirational faculty of memory, then, this can only further confuse the sense in which he will eventually "lose" his anima. Whereas the loss Ferdinand anticipates is one where something would be subtracted from life, i.e. from the life of the soul, the loss that is already manifest in the oracle's penetration of the soul is one of expropriation: the life of the soul continues, and even stronger than before, but it no longer "belongs" to the poet. As Ludwig explains, the poet's soul has been placed "in einen ... geistigen Rapport" ["in a spiritual rapport"] with the automaton, and thus experiences an "Ekstase, die eben der Rapport mit dem fremden geistigen Prinzip erzeugte" (S 343). (19) The poet's inner life does not face death, but becomes interfused with death.

In this sense, the "loss" sustained by the soul is not just something foretold by the oracle, but something enacted by means of the oracle. The movement between these two discrete senses of "loss" thus also corresponds to the slippage from the (possible) content to the deathly-mechanical "medium" of the message. A plausible explanation of Ferdinand's interpretation is then that he means to avert this slippage from content to medium--or that he "means" in order to avert this slippage. Ferdinand needs to attribute a...

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