The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr, Page 3

  Hoffmann’s legal career flourished in Berlin, no less than did his career as a writer. As a Kammergerichtsrat, roughly equivalent to a QC, he was promoted to the Appeal Court in 1821, at which he deputized for the Court President. In 1819, as the political reaction against the freedoms heralded by the French Revolution asserted itself, Hoffmann was placed on a Commission of Inquiry set up by Frederick William III to investigate the alleged perpetrators of high treason. Hoffmann distinguished himself by his fairness, writing testimonials for unjustly imprisoned intellectuals. The climax came over the investigation into Friedrich Ludwig Jahn (‘Turnvater Jahn’), the philologist, teacher, nationalist and pioneer of the physical training movement, which was to play a major role in developing German self-consciousness, and who was a key figure in the German clubs or Burschenschaften satirized in The Tomcat Murr. Though he was a man hardly to Hoffmann’s taste, he defended Jahn with masterly balance, but could not prevent him from being detained at Spandau from 1819 to 1825. Hoffmann’s position brought him into increasing conflict with Karl Albert von Kamptz, Director of the Police Commission, whom he satirized in his last great fairy-tale, Master Flea. The book was cut by the censor and proceedings were initiated against Hoffmann, but he did not survive to see them concluded. As staunch a defender of liberty at the end, as, from the start, he had been a proponent of aesthetic freedom, after being struck for some time by progressive paralysis, E. T. A. Hoffmann died in Berlin on 25 June 1822.

  III

  The Tomcat Murr, Hoffmann’s second and last novel, was to be his magnum opus, as he implied in a letter to Hitzig. ‘What I now am and can be, will be shown pro primo by the Tomcat…’ Its centrality can be explained partly by the novel’s long prehistory, through which it became imbued with all Hoffmann’s multivarious vitalities – including musical freedom, operatic excess, judicial balance, pictorial clarity, psychiatric insight and narrative zest – and partly by the choice of protagonists, the agonized Kapellmeister Kreisler, Hoffmann’s long-standing alter ego, and – whimsically – the delightful tomcat Murr, his own dearly beloved pet – a classic dark tabby with some paler striping9 – aged about two when Hoffmann began the novel, and whom, to judge by Hoffmann’s moving account, he and his wife seem to have cherished as a surrogate for the child they so tragically lost.

  Hoffmann started the Tomcat in spring 1819, completed Volume One in the autumn, and it appeared before Christmas 1819, dated 1820. He promised to begin Volume Two immediately, but did not start before the next summer, working simultaneously on Master Flea, and completing it early in December 1821. It appeared before Christmas 1821, dated 1822. The book concludes with a postscript which promises to publish Volume Three the following Easter. However, when Hoffmann died, he had not begun writing it, and the novel remained unfinished. Yet even as it stands, the fragment is complete in itself. It remains unique among his works, not least because Hoffmann produced his own cover-designs for each volume, by virtue of which The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr becomes a literary Gesamtkunstwerk.

  The novel’s roots extend to the start of Hoffmann’s career, from the early parody in the 1790s to the Kreisleriana of 1810–14. These first introduced the Kapellmeister and one of Murr’s ancestors, the speaking chimp in A Letter from Milo the Educated Monkey to his Friend Pipi in North America. Such motifs may have crystallized into the first thoughts for a novel. According to Hoffmann’s diary for February 1812, he then considered a ‘musical novel’ and, writing to Hitzig in April, he planned further essays to be collected as ‘The Clear Moments of a Crazy Musician’. He mentions a novel again in 1812 and 1815, but abandoned it in 1818. By the time the Tomcat surfaced, the scheme had, according to Hoffmann, become ‘something completely different’. We may infer that the idea for the double-novel belongs to his final phase.

  The novel’s central idea, presented in Hoffmann’s Foreword, is the fiction that a talented autodidact, the cat Murr, has written his autobiography, and in so doing used the printed sheets of a book about the musician, Johannes Kreisler, as a blotting-pad. When Murr’s autobiography went to press, Kreisler’s biography was accidentally reprinted too with the result that both stories now alternate in the final product. The Tomcat thus depends on fictions – the fiction of Murr’s talent, of his book, of Kreisler’s biography, and of their accidental splicing. Such serendipity is the mother of comic invention and creates a bizarre narrative situation, shot through with ironies, as a web of illusion develops around genuine facts such as Murr’s existence in the real world and the autobiographical data Hoffmann attributes to the fictional Kreisler. There are constant mirrorings in the novel as well when art reflects life, and life imitates art. At one point, the plot follows The Marriage of Figaro, and elsewhere talismanic paintings both reflect and affect the action. Not the least irony is the further fiction that Murr’s biography is the main work, whereas Kreisler’s is an incidental appendage. Length redresses the balance. Murr’s tale takes up about forty per cent, Kreisler’s about sixty.

  Murr’s wilful destruction of Kreisler’s book, by which his work becomes a palimpsest, signals the novel’s fascination with reflections and plagiarism. This is also evident in the innumerable quotations from Goethe, Shakespeare, Mozart and many others. Literature arises through a dialogue with earlier art, being both imitation and aesthetic cannibalism. While Murr’s pompous name-dropping satirizes cultural pretensions, at a deeper level the literary cannibalism affirms how art depends on earlier art to survive. Names like ‘Hector’ and ‘Achilles’ indicate that art after Homer consists in rearranging shards – like shaking coloured glass in a kaleidoscope.

  There are some parallels for Hoffmann’s narrative method. The double-biography recalls Plutarch’s parallel lives of Greek and Roman heroes, to which Hoffmann’s well-educated tomcat duly refers. And the method suggests Jean Paul’s Life of Fibel, which comprises a life-story and various snippets torn from another book. The title, as already noted, recasts Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, and the speaking-cat recalls Tieck’s Puss in Boots. By contrast, the Kreisler tale recalls the genre of the artist’s biography, as represented by Wackenroder’s novella about the mad musician, Berglinger. These recollections not withstanding, in structure and character the Tomcat is unique.

  Nothing quite prepares us for The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr. The book effectively reinvents reading. As we turn the page, we confront alternating fragments, to be hurled inexorably from one narrator to another, by turn delighted and bewildered, teased and enthralled. Just as we become familiar with a story, it breaks off at a dramatic climax, whereupon confusion and momentary tedium set in as we accustom ourselves to the other tale, which again stops just when we have become absorbed. By its repeated shocks the narrative buffets us between two worlds.

  The novel’s two halves are linked by Master Abraham, Murr’s owner and Kreisler’s mentor. This effects a structural unity. Other details, like the references to Kreisler in the Murr biography and that to Murr in the first Kreisler episode, strengthen the connection. Hoffmann’s final postscript promises closer links in Volume Three, which was presumably to create the synthesis in this witty dialectic. As it is, the elements remain antithetical.

  The protagonists prove to be opposites, too, Murr being the lovable cat, a calm, integrated, vain, self-satisfied and confident bourgeois who enjoys an unproblematic relation to his comrades and the opposite sex. Yet as lover, scholar, singer, poet, philosopher and fighter, Murr is also a remarkably integrated all-rounder, a true Renaissance creature. Kreisler, by contrast, is the neurasthenic, anguished genius, unable to find a niche in society or to satisfy his desires; an artist whose wildly pendular moods swing between radical extremes, from the plainly ridiculous to the loftily sublime. He is presented as Hamlet, Touchstone and the melancholy Jaques rolled into one, and his fictional birthday elides Mozart’s name-day (Johannes Chrysostomos’ Day, i.e. 27 January) and Hoffmann’s own birthday (24 January) into one. His sparkling volatility
, his inner turmoil and intellectual insight exercise a powerful fascination. Indeed, in a footnote to his classic Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler claims for Kreisler’s character a significance comparable to Faust or Don Juan.

  Hoffmann peoples the Tomcat with a host of sharply-drawn characters, sketched as vividly as caricatures, defined by some trait or foible which etches them in the mind’s eye like a leitmotiv. And yet, each is saved from one-dimensionality by facets that bestow true humanity. The mysterious, Faust-like magus Master Abraham is closely associated with his machines and curiosities, like his ‘marine trumpet’. Prince Irenaeus constantly frets about protocol and speaks an absurdly Frenchified German. The imbecile Prince Ignatius plays endlessly with his china cups. Madame Benzon never ceases with her machinations. The tipsy Father Hilarius mixes Latin into his speech. These individuals are throughout juxtaposed in a series of musically evolving antitheses and complementary relationships presented in duets, trios, quartets and so on. Master Abraham vies with Madame Benzon for ascendancy at court. The bourgeois Julia is contrasted with the aristocratic Hedwiga. Prince Hector, the sinister Italian Prince, is Kreisler’s antagonist. Later, Prince Hector is also linked and opposed to his brother, Cyprianus. Master Abraham is given an antithetical counterpart in the wise Abbot. Such doublings question notions of freedom and individuality. A mysterious affinity links Kreisler and Hedwiga, suggesting perhaps a complex family-tree. Personality seems unstable. The self seems liable to split and confront its doppelgänger, being at the mercy of strange outer forces or inner impulses. Thus the plot demonstrates the intricate but fragile bond that unifies the human family, a family which seems to be acting out its fate as mechanically as one of Master Abraham’s gadgets.

  The structure of the novel plays fickle games with time. The Murr action lasts only a few months and occurs chronologically in the interval between the first and last Kreisler chapters.10 The Kreisler narrative reverses time. Chronologically, the first Kreisler fragment in the novel actually follows the last: at the end, Master Abraham invites Kreisler to the celebrations he describes at the beginning. The Murr autobiography fills the time span between Master Abraham inviting Kreisler and Kreisler’s arrival. Murr offers a linear story, the Kreisler plot has a circular structure.

  The cat’s linear narrative is sequentially complete. Each section continues where the preceding one stopped. His autobiography is an unwitting parody of the Bildungsroman and the moralizing part-headings lend his life an exemplary quality. From the very first malapropism in his opening sentence, which applies the doomed Egmont’s words from Goethe’s play to his own birth, we recognize in Murr the parody of a sensitive soul, semi-educated in the classics, who wishes to impose his learning on the reader. With pompous sentimentality, Murr sets himself up as a model cat, and the successive phases in his career reflect his development, recounting his childhood and youth, his education, his friendship with Ponto the dog, his first romance, his marriage to Kitty and subsequent separation, his joining the cat club or Burschenschaft, his insight into the club’s emptiness, his deluded attempt to enter high society among the dogs, and his return to poetry and learning. As in a human Bildungsroman, the story relates how the cat repeatedly succumbs to delusion and reawakens to higher knowledge. It is ironic that this quasi-teleological narrative eventually meets an abrupt end in the cat’s death, which, like his constantly surfacing instincts, makes a mockery of his beliefs, subverting the coherent, logical universe that he takes such pains to represent. Ironically, it is given to the cat to sustain bourgeois order, which fails not because Murr is a cat, but because that very order makes no sense. He is the affectionately regarded vehicle, not the butt of satire.11 Via Murr, otherwise unmentionable topics can be subjected to a critique as amusing as it is devastating, as Hoffmann attacks vices that range from hypocrisy to depravity. The high point is surely the grand funeral for Muzius the cat, with Hinzmann’s brilliantly constructed funerary oration that descends into sheer bathos, and is immediately succeeded by Murr’s attempted seduction of his own daughter. In a delicious absurdity, Murr the cat behaves like a latter-day Richard III. His persistently linear narrative method reflects an unsustainable human convention, which can capture neither life’s incoherences nor its deeper patterns. Linear time belongs to rationality and cannot encompass the ultimate truths the novel seeks to convey, as represented in the Kreisler story.

  The Kreisler biography is a genuine fragment. There is no precise continuity between its sections, although after the initial inversion, the story continues largely chronologically. Ironically, though, while purporting to be a biography, it ridicules biographical conventions in describing Kreisler’s birth, and employs the typical devices of a mystery-novel. Nothing is as it seems. The ‘biography’ opens, characteristically, in mid-action, and its narrator makes a literary allusion to Rabelais. However, the reference leads into another circle, for it does not refer to Rabelais, but to ‘The Fragment’ in Sterne’s Sentimental Journey. In its turn, the Sterne passage purports to be a piece of waste paper, written in an ancient hand, possibly by Rabelais himself. The Kreisler narrative is thus entrapped in circularity. The motif is signalled by Kreisler’s name: der Kreis means a ‘circle’ and the verb kreisen means ‘to circle’. The circular structural principle, earlier evolved in Novalis’s The Novices of Sais, here provides the dominant narrative motif. When we eventually discover the Kreisler story’s reverse chronology, we ourselves begin to enter time’s infinite loop, approaching the absolute to which Kreisler aspires, where past, present and future merge as one.

  Numerous parallels ironically connect the two biographies. Murr is a would-be poet who enjoys caterwauling with his chums and sings a duet with his beloved Kitty, Kreisler a musician who composes choral music and sings a duet with Julia; both Kreisler and Murr fight duels; in both stories doctors must attend to the sick, and in both cases, a domestic remedy is applied. Sometimes a motif appears first in the Kreisler story, sometimes in the Murr plot; but in either case, the parallels effectively and sometimes amusingly unite the dual text.

  The narrative polarity closely corresponds to what Friedrich Schlegel called ‘romantic irony’: a variety of dialectic by which we are tossed between opposing viewpoints, each time returning to the previous one at a higher level, until eventually, we become free, to ‘float’ or ‘soar’. Hoffmann’s own preferred term, inspired by Shakespeare and Sterne, is humour. Reflecting Hoffmann’s stance, the Kreisler biographer disdains ‘contemptuous mockery’ and ‘malicious glee’, contrasting it with ‘humour’, ‘that rare and wonderful frame of mind which derives from a deep experience of life in its every aspect, from the conflict of the most hostile principles…’ (see p. 86). Hoffmannesque ‘humour’ stems from an awareness of duality as symbolized by the novel’s structure and exemplified by polarities like good and evil, mind and matter, self and other. Humour and irony themselves engage in a dialectic. Irony – the novel’s constant weapon – exposes the negative. Humour reveals the positive, and entails the acceptance of, and thereby the elevation above, negativity. Hoffmann’s ‘humour’, therefore, subsumes ‘romantic irony’. It is discussed in the argument about Kreisler between Madame Benzon and Master Abraham which goes to the heart of the novel. To the conventional Madame Benzon, Kreisler may seem bitter: she sees only the negative; however, to Master Abraham, the young composer ‘loves the kind of jesting which is engendered by the deeper intuition of the human mind’: his humour derives from the depths of the unconscious, it is ‘Nature’s finest gift’, and is allied to ‘the spirit of true love’ (see p. 179). Master Abraham, therefore, catches the positive reflection of humour in Kreisler’s negative irony. Such humour, which means benevolently accepting life in all its variety, connects the comic soul to the intelligence that governs the world.