*(Or, How Nathaniel Got a Piece of Sand Lodged in His Eyes and he could only get it out by jumping)
One of the most interesting paradoxes in literature is that between reality and fantasy, as the very nature of the medium continually challenges the author to demonstrate the validity and credibility of his narrative. Many of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s short works stress the malleability of the boundary between the two, and consequently readers are encouraged to create a cohesive structure – frequently one which originates from only a subtext or marginalia within the narrative itself – upon which to analyse the text. Der Sandmann further entertains the frequently roguish nature of reality in literature, in part by its very title and the implications of a dreamer upon his own story, as well as by Hoffmann’s often muted use of humour to satirize the act of reading itself, or more precisely of a reader’s interpretation of his narrative. Most of the issues that Hoffmann addresses in the story are channelled through the main character Nathaniel, while the more self-referential critique of the creative process occurs by directly conversing with the reader. Even more substantially however, Hoffmann is seeking to examine the relations between individuals that are superficially normal, yet contain much that remains hidden to external observers; there is much to be revealed about the true nature of Nathaniel’s familial relations. Madness is of course the extreme condition that the author finds in Nathaniel’s character, and yet others seems equally disturbed if not in quite so conspicuous a manner. In this fashion he is studying the very nature of literature as a voyeuristic medium, and indeed as an intrusive process. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of Der Sandmann is that the reader never has the narrative completely within his or her grasp; one is not positive whether the events that occur are objective reality or remain subject to Nathaniel’s madness.
The very title of the text suggests that Hoffmann wishes the reader to question the credibility of the narrative, or at least of the narrator. Initially, Nathaniel himself relates the story, and throughout the remainder of the text the reader retains several artifacts from his viewpoint. Most glaring is obviously Nathaniel’s physical description of the advocate Coppelius. His vilifying portrait of whom he calls the Sandman – his “ochre-yellow face”, “large, heavy nose”, and “crooked mouth” which let out a “strange hissing sound” (89) – remains imprinted on the reader, and upon Coppelius’s later appearances one shares Nathaniel’s profound sense of dread. Such is true despite the fact that few of the other characters react in a similar manner to the old man. Although Nathaniel’s mother and sisters seem much more troubled by the fact that Coppelius will be removing the father from the family for scientific experimentation than by Coppelius himself, for the remainder of the text one sides with Nathaniel in believing the advocate to be a malignant figure. A closer scrutiny of the text seems to counter such a view, however. Nathaniel’s first letter to Clara, ostensibly written for Lothario, does not seem to be a mere correspondence, but a carefully fabricated narrative designed to convince Clara of the reality of the Sandman. Events are chronologically reorganized for maximum effect: one hears of the Sandman long before Nathaniel introduces Coppelius, despite the latter’s prolonged acquaintance with his family. Upon encountering the advocate for the first time it is relatively easy for the reader to agree with the narrator and acknowledge Coppelius as the feared Sandman, yet Nathaniel only later provides evidence of Coppelius’s evil nature, mentioning how he and his siblings dreaded visits from the old man. Further insights are allowed by the sequence in which Nathaniel describes an incident with Coppelius in which the latter “seized [him] so violently that [his] joints cracked, unscrewed [his] hands and feet, and fixed them on again now in this way, now in that” (91-2). In fact, for a great deal of his narrative it seems quite clear that he remains in a state of dreaming while awake. At the very least, Nathaniel has begun to confuse his dreams with reality, and yet of this fact he remains unaware; in such stressful situations he loses consciousness and falls into a sickness. Upon rising from sleep, however, Nathaniel does not attribute his strange experiences to a dream, but instead asks “Is the sandman still here?” (92). Objective reality for him has now become an existence in which such fantastical events as occur when the sandman is present are not questioned.
Logic of this sort is certainly the realm of the deranged, and indeed by the end of the text there is no question of Nathaniel’s lunacy. Furthermore, the text hints at possible reasons for his madness which do form a plausible and psychologically motivated explication of Hoffmann’s narrative. Nathaniel’s relations with the members of his family are problematic at best. He admits that he and his sisters “saw little of our father all day. Perhaps he was very busy” (86), although to most readers acquainted with working parents such does not seem to stray far from normality until Nathaniel’s dependency upon his father is questioned. The time spent with their father seems far from wholesome, as they are placed in strange positions of subjugation and isolation. Nathaniel doesn’t explicitly state his own feelings towards his father, although in one instance he lowers his defences and allows that “an invincible timidity” (88) prevented him from speaking with his father. While he is here referring to inquiries about the Sandman, of greater consequence is that Nathaniel would feel that he must conceal such issues from his father. There are a few cues to suggest that Nathaniel is not alone in his mental instability, however. The problems within the family are perhaps best presented by Nathaniel’s mother, who remains to a great extent a marginal figure throughout the text. Indeed, it is her silence which is most telling. In two places Nathaniel describes her as “gloomy” in relation to her husband, first during the instances when he silently smoked while the children were reading, and later when Nathaniel hides himself in his father’s room. In each case his mother is gloomy just prior to a visit from the Sandman, and indeed she would alert the children of his impending arrival. Possibly the two are linked in a manner akin to Jekyll and Hyde, the sandman being the father’s more violent temperament; certainly such a concept of dual personality is not foreign to Hoffmann. In this regard, Nathaniel’s apparently innocuous question to his mother, “who is this sandman who always drives us away from Papa? What does he look like?” (86), becomes a much more loaded inquiry. It would not be improbable for Nathaniel to sublimate his knowledge of his father’s abusive nature into the myth of the Sandman, despite Hoffmann’s insistence not to allow such to advance far beyond mere supposition. The author does allow some room for controversy, however, as one could argue that it was Coppelius himself who was the agent of abuse upon the children: “He used always to call us the little beasts; when he was present we were not allowed to make a sound, and we cursed the malign and repellant man who deliberately sought to ruin for us even the most minute pleasure” (90). On this point Hoffmann himself is largely ambiguous although the narrators of the text – both Nathaniel and the later unnamed narrator of the ‘prose’ section – each condemn Coppelius, although the latter is for obvious reasons much more subdued than Nathaniel. A more easily defended position can be argued, suggesting that Nathaniel lost control of his mind at a later date than childhood and then reinvented his past, projecting his insecurities and psychological defences back into his memories and confusing them with the myth of the Sandman: “the sandman was now no longer that boogeyman of the nursery tale ... no! he was now a repellent spectral monster” (90), meaning of course Coppelius. Several other aspects of his recollection other than Coppelius himself have been changed to become incorporated into this fantasy, including “what I had for so long taken to be a wall-cupboard was, rather, a black cavern, in which there stood a small hearth” (91). It is not impossible to reason that the cupboard is now, and has forever remained, a simple cupboard. Similarly exaggerated is Nathaniel’s description of the family’s reaction prior to Coppelius’s final visit. They seem to know that the father is going to be killed during this visit and are consequently very apprehensive: “Tears started from my mother’s eyes. ‘But father, father!’ she cried. ‘Must it be so?’” (93). Viewed in its entirety Nathaniel’s letter does appear to be a colourful re-interpretation of his past.
Hoffmann does allow a brief glimpse past the ambiguity of the narrative during the dream sequence with the hearth when Nathaniel states that his father looked like Coppelius. Much can be construed from this brief phrase, and indeed it could be used to support the notion forwarded above that they are in reality the same individual. Alternately, Nathaniel could be comparing the two figures in an attempt to rationalize his father’s death. Surely such a traumatic event would have had a drastic impact on the young Nathaniel, and blame could be easily transferred to an individual such as Coppelius, who would in effect be guilty of robbing the father of his identity. There is of course no evidence in the text that the advocate was truly affiliated with the explosion which killed his father, and indeed that Nathaniel implicates the ‘sandman’ without any valid foundation is made explicit: alone in his room he hears the explosion and cries out “This is Coppelius!” (93). Furthermore, a threat of vengeance is made which, discounting the accountability of Coppelius in his father’s death, seems to foreshadow Nathaniel’s suicide at the end of the text: “I have resolved to get the better of him and, whatever the outcome may be, revenge my father’s death” (94). Latent throughout the text is an element of Nathaniel’s guilt over his father’s death. To him perhaps it stems from his inaction to expose Coppelius for the villain Nathaniel believed him to be. It is possible to extrapolate somewhat of a more consistent answer from several details which appear to be secondary in Hoffmann’s text. Throughout Nathaniel’s dealings with both Coppelius and the optician Coppola, references to eyes are made – “lov-ely occe, lov-ely occe” each of them says. More important is the dream sequence already mentioned above:
‘Eyes, bring eyes!’ Coppelius cried in a dull hollow voice.
‘Little beast! Little beast!’ he bleated, showing his teeth. Then he pulled me up
and threw me on to the hearth, so that the flames began to singe my hair.
‘Now we have eyes – eyes – a lovely pair of children’s eyes!’ .... my father raised
his hands imploringly and cried: ‘Master! Master! Let my Nathaniel keep his
eyes – let him keep them!’
.... ‘The boy can have his eyes then, and keep use of them’
(91)
Arguably, Nathaniel has seen something traumatic in his childhood which he has since repressed and sublimated into the Sandman fantasy, and which becomes manifest in terms of his fascination and repulsion of eyes. While his attempts at creative works are ultimately rejected by the other characters, the writing process does have a pacifying effect on Nathaniel, although even here he can not escape his fetish with sight, and eyes in particular. His composition is quite revealing:
[Nathaniel] heard Clara’s voice: ‘Do you not see me? Coppelius has deceived
you: those were not my eyes which burned into your breast; they were glowing-
hot drops of your own heart’s blood – I still have my eyes; you have only to
look at me!’ .... Nathaniel looked into Clara’s eyes, but it was death which
gazed at him mildly out of them.
(105)
It is quite possible to interpret this fixation originating from seeing his father’s body after the explosion. A body subject to such a violent death is a very gruesome sight, especially for a relative, and certainly some form of psychological defence would emerge.
Nathaniel’s affair with the automaton Olympia triggers his final descent into madness leading to his suicide. He had thought her a perfect companion, and one whom he could project his values upon. She does not question his artistic experiments but remained seated, listening intently. His own emotional detachment is made explicit through Olympia; she lacks a true voice, merely repeating ‘Ah, ah’, and yet Nathaniel feels that “what Olympia said of his work, of his poetic talent in general, came from the depths of his own being, that her voice was the voice of those very depths themselves” (118). With her he feels that he can communicate anything he desires, and indeed one could argue that he has found in Olympia an agency lacking from his own childhood: that of his own voice. Much like his repulsion/attraction to the eye signifier, his relationship with Olympia carries within it the seeds of his continued madness. Despite his desire for a largely emotionless relationship, certainly professor Spalanzani’s daughter was bound to be exposed as an automaton at some point. To Nathaniel this knowledge is a terrifying surprise uncovered when the professor and Coppola are fighting over the robot:
Nathaniel stood numb with horror. He had seen all too clearly that Olympia’s
deathly-white face possessed no eyes: where the eyes should have been, there
were only pits of blackness – she was a lifeless doll!
.... At this point Nathaniel saw that a pair of blood-flecked eyes were lying
on the floor and staring up at him; Spalanzani seized them with his uninjured
hand and threw them at him, so that they struck him in the chest.
(119-20)
The correlation between this incident and Nathaniel’s dreams from childhood, as well as his later creative endeavours, is far too great to be mere coincidence. Hoffmann seems to be emphasizing the fact that single traumatic events can trigger madness, as occurs to Nathaniel after being struck with Olympia’s eyes. He repeats this performance atop a tower at the end of the text, whence he throws himself to his death. It is therefore likely that this single incident triggered memories from childhood with which he could not cope. One may forward the supposition that in the experiments carried out by Coppelius and Nathaniel’s father, they were attempting to create an automaton of their own, yet either failed or the former took the creation himself much as he had done with Spalanzani. Perhaps Nathaniel had seen several of these stunted creations – maybe some unattached limbs, heads without eyes, or a torso – and could not separate them from dead humans. Suppositions such as these must remain so.
Hoffmann does not allow the reader to interpret his text in so simple a fashion, however; indeed, he seems to revel in the ambiguity of his text. Throughout the story Hoffmann seems to remain a step ahead of the reader’s own interpretation, and it is largely through a variety of narrative voices that this is successful. The first instance in which such can be observed is Clara’s response to Nathaniel’s letter. Her reaction to his story is a rational one – that everything he had experienced occurred solely in his mind, and that he must forget such childish delusions – and is likely to be similar to the reader’s initial interpretation as well. She does in fact hint at the line of reasoning which I have here followed, by implicating Nathaniel’s father in his son’s mental instability: “your father, altogether absorbed in the deceptive desire for higher truth, would have become estranged from his family” (96). Furthermore, she disavows the existence of Coppelius as a harmful entity, most notably concerning his father’s death, “Your father surely brought about his own death through his own carelessness, and Coppelius is not to blame”. Certainly it would be easy to conclude as she does, yet several aspects of the text counter such an easy answer to Nathaniel’s madness. Almost in passing, near the end of the text, Hoffmann presents several characters who comment on the automaton sequence, some trying to understand it in the ‘realistic’ terms of Olympia’s yawns as “the sound of the clockwork winding itself up”, while another forwards that the entire episode was “an allegory, an extended metaphor” (121). One almost gets the sense that Hoffmann is ridiculing the readers themselves in this passage, as if he could presuppose every possible interpretation of his text and counter it. Such seemingly minor passages initially succeed in keeping the reader from following a single interpretation. Most significant to Hoffmann’s apparent desire to detain his text in ambiguity, the narrator who appears after Nathaniel’s second letter seems to himself believe in the malicious nature of Coppelius-Coppola, if not in the sandman itself. This usurpation of the narrative shields the reader from any of Nathaniel’s further writings, which would have revealed his lunacy far too effortlessly. This second narrator continues the villainous description of Coppola that Nathaniel had first implanted in the reader, using such epithets as “the repulsive ... Coppola” (103) and “the sandman Coppelius” (109). The scene in which Coppola fills a table with many eyeglasses is itself much like a dream; it seems improbable that the optician could contain so many pairs of glasses and telescopes upon his person, and yet the narrator relays such information as if it were fact. One begins to question whether such fantastical occurrences were truly fantasy and not part of objective reality of which the narrator is ostensibly a part. Furthermore, Hoffmann-as-author increasingly intrudes into the narration as the text nears its conclusion. At the end of the text the narrator has knowledge of Coppelius emerging among the crowd gathered around the tower, taciturnly goading Nathaniel to jump, and then disappearing. He then concludes with a short description of Clara’s new life. Such information would have been impossible for the ‘narrator-friend’ to have obtained, and consequently one must conclude that it is Hoffmann himself who is here speaking.
Reflecting on the prior narration at this point reveals that Hoffmann has been playing with the slippery signification which is suggested by the story’s title. For him this slippery signification becomes physical, much as the sandman himself is a doppelganger, changing form between the advocate Coppelius and the optician Coppola. Dream becomes reality, and one cannot determine whether Coppola’s eyeglasses are merely that, or instead “a thousand eyes [which] gazed and blinked and stared up at Nathaniel, ...[whose] flaming glances leaped more and more wildly together and directed their blood-red beams into Nathaniel’s breast” (109-10); certainly the latter is more real for Nathaniel himself. One also gains the awareness that it is relatively simple to construct a narrative upon which to base one’s life, as Hoffmann seems to suggest – by means of ambiguous episodes such as that involving Olympia – that reality is sufficiently strange and fantastic that madmen can create an insane logic out of the chaos of normal life. It is this ambiguous boundary between fact and fiction which makes Hoffmann’s tale of madness – which is ultimately what the narrative is – much more than a simple tragedy of a young student’s downfall.
Bibliography
Hoffmann, E.T.A. The Sandman. Tales of Hoffmann. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Toronto:
Penguin Books, 1982.
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