E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776-1822) & Victor Hugo (1802-1885)
I. Goethe, Kleist and Hoffman
Goethe was fascinated with puppets since childhood. He wrote a marionette play in 1769, Das Jahrmarkts-Fest zu Plundersweilern (Junkdump Fair) – uses puppetry to invoke the old medieval fairgrounds—“the audience is regaled with the rough humor and slapstick of the traditional puppet theater.” (Segel 12) It makes use of French ombres chinoises (projected Chinese silhouette puppets) to present a biblical parable. Segel suggests that Goethee could have seen a French puppeteer who exhibited the form at a Frankfurt fair in 1774. It is these allegorical puppets in Goethe’s play who denounce the immorality of the characters. In Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, Goethe depicts a young man who defied his father’s disapproval by taking an interest in puppet theatre. An apparent cipher for Goethe himself, the character is transfixed by how the puppets are animated, how a performer brings an object to life. (14)
Kleist wrote Uber das Marionettentheater in 1810. “By devoting a serious essay to a popular theatrical form largely regarded in Kleist’s time as a diversion for children and an unsophisticated populace, the dramatist sought to explore the possible contribution of ‘low’ or ‘popular’ culture to a reanimation of ‘high’ art.” (Segel 14) “On a higher level, Kleist’s essay on the marionette evidences the Romantic belief in the cognitive and creative superiority of the unconscius over the conscious, of spontaneity and intuition over reason. Because the puppet, or marionette, lacks the ability to think, to reason, it can be made capable of an extraordinary fluidity of motion, of movements beyond the reach of the living actor. precisely because he can think and reason, because he is always conscious of his actions and gestures, the living actor can never achieve the spontaneity of the marionette; thus the grace of the inanimate figure remains ever elusive.” (15)
“Affectation appears… when the soul is located at any point other than the center of gravity of movement.” (16)
Marionettes possess countergravity: “the force that lifts them into the air is greater than that which binds them to earth.” (16)
Hoffman wrote The Sandman (1816) and various other nachtstucke (night pieces) with some inspiration from Kleist. Sandman is a kind of Pygmalion story of the madness of a young man who falls in love with a mechanical woman. Freud would be inspired by this and other Hoffman stories to develop his idea of the unheimlich (the uncanny)—that supremely gothic fascination that we feel towards beings that are somehow inbetween life and death, such as animated automata and performing objects.
II. Heinrich von Kleist’s Uber das Marionettentheater (1810)
Kleist’s essay, “On the Marionette Theatre” describes an encounter between himself and an associate who is an afficionado of the puppet stage. He lauds the grace of the inanimate human representation, which he connects with its perfect subjection to natural mechanics and gravitation. He and his associate agree that it is the marionette’s absence of human consciousness while replicating the superficial human form that allows it to evoke a connection to the divine. The associate relates another story in which a bear easily parried his own attacks with a sword. The animal moved economically and gracefully in harmony with gravity, succumbing to no deceptions or imbalances. Von Kleist imagines that an actor who could imitate such motion would evoke a transcendent aesthetics.
Kleist envisions the human sphere as graceless, ignoble and debauched. His metaphysical views of consciousness might both be rendered reasonably as circles with human space/time occupying an arc with marionette space and divine space on either side and connecting on the opposite side of the circle from human space. A human, occupying conscious space may reach divine consciousness by travelling directly to it along the circle (i.e. the path of the great sage.) However, Kleist (via Kant) believes that the limitations of human reason make this path impossible. He suggests instead to reach divine consciousness by way of absence of consciousness where they meet on the opposite side of the circle. Put another way, human space/time is seen as the cage that prevents man from experiencing the divine. The marionette moves in accordance with the laws of the universe, not those of humanity. The transcendence of the performing object for Kleist is absolutely predicated on the notion of a gulf between socialized human space/time and divine universal space/time. He also considers that the marionette, as a human image, serves as a specifically human space within divine universal laws.
Kleist’s ascription of grace to the suspended marionette might also be thought of as the opposite of Diderot’s description of David Garrick as the unfeeling craftsman of emotion. Indeed, the kind of spontaneity and naturalness that Kleist ascribes to the marionette at the beginning of the nineteenth century is paradoxically closer to what Stanislavsky will promote at the end of the nineteenth century. Both Kleist and Stanislavsky both believe that it is the lack of self-consciousness that allows a performer to seem spontaneous onstage. For Kleist, this is grace, for Stanislavsky, the reality of doing.
III. Victor Hugo's Hernani (1830)
As we discussed in class, the 1830 premiere of Hugo's Hernani was important at least as much for the "riot" it sparked as for the play itself. This confrontation is often seen in retrospect as the victory of Hugo and the romantics against the old guard of neoclassicists. After this, the French drama moved further towards the kind of values we've been discussing for the past few weeks. For Hugo, what was particularly important here is that the new drama, built on the inspiration of Shakespeare, would derive pleasure from the juxtaposition of the sublime and the grotesque. From Hugo's perspective, the sublime incorporated all the enobling and mystical aspects of Nature and the kind of grace that Kleist invokes in his essay on marionettes. It might be seen as a transformation of the old classical aesthetic of beauty to be more in line with post-revolutionary romanticist sentiments. The grotesque, in contrast, contains all that is earthy and coarse in the ordinary realm of human life; bawdy humor, deformation and ugliness, lack of civilization and refinement. Think of Hugo's story of The Hunchback of Notre Dame-- a paradigmatic mingling of the sublime and the grotesque!
Hugo's Hernani suggests this mingling of the sublime and the grotesque through startlingly ignoble behavior on the part of noble characters, ordinary speech mixed with lofty declarations, and most especially the character of Hernani himself: a bandit with an noble code. The play also challenges the conventions of French neoclassicism in a variety of ways. For example:
• The naturalistic acting style that Hugo developed for his actors (moving freely within the setting rather than in front of it. Actors sitting on or leaning against the scenery)
• Furthermore, emphasis on environment (portrait scene in which attention is called to each of the portraits).
• Emphasis on specific costuming
• Breaking out of alexandrines (short speeches and stichomythic dialogue)
• portraying violence onstage
Although Hugo distanced himself from the popular melodrama, there is much in this "high" romantic drama that resembles that genre. After the French revolution, European dramatists looked to represent a world in which heroism could be found amongst ordinary people, and the welfare of the people and their nation was a greater good than the honor of kings and aristocrats.
