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kestrell_The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr_ by E. T. A. Hoffman, translated by Anthea Bell (Penguin, 1999)
While I've been an avid reader of the works of E. T. A. Hoffman for many years, I had mostly focused upon his stories which are most often categorized as gothic horror, such as "The Sandman" and "The Nutcracker and the Mouse king," the latter being the story upon which Tchaikovsky based his ballet "The Nutcracker."
Hoffman was one of the German Romantics, so his fiction often makes use of fairy tale and folklore, but Hoffman also added his own preoccupations with music, alchemy, and automata. He was also fascinated by the life of the city, and I consider him to be possibly the earliest writer of urban fantasy. In addition, Hoffman was very interested in psychology, especially the individual's secret inner landscape of dreams, fantasies, and desires, which often make us strangers even to ourselves. Freud used Hoffman's work to illustrate his own concept of the uncanny, and Jung found Hoffman's work equally fascinating, to the degree that all of Jung's archetypes can be found in Hoffman's works.
All that being said, summarizing what _The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr_ is about is a near-impossible task, as Hoffman takes the strange and startling to new heights in this novel which is considered to be his masterwork.
The novel consists of two parallel stories, one the memoirs of the cat Murr, a cat who aspires to be an artistic genius, and the second that of the Kapellmeister Kreisler, a musician and composer who aspires to create sublime music. An editor's note explains that this was a typesetting error of a sort, as Murr had written his own memoirs upon papers which originally held the biography of the Kapellmeister, so the two stories had become mingled together. This creates a very startling palimsest in which, just as we are getting to some important incident which Murr or the writer of the Kapellmeister biography are about to reveal, the story breaks off and switches to the other storyline. For this reason, readers who are driven to distraction by non-linear narratives should avoid this novel like the plague. On the other paw, fans of postmodern lit may wish to try this novel, as it possess many of the earmarks of that genre, despite existing at least a century before the postmodern period began.
While Hoffman's intention was, to some degree, to use his feline hero to parody Goethe's melodramatic Romantic heroes, the doubled storyline cannot be reduced to pure parody for, if Murr's over-the-top self-glorification (really, Hoffman captures a cat's character wonderfully) serves to reveal the self-grandizing and self-absorbtion of the Romantic hero, the Kapellmeister's storyline serves to illustrate the struggle to use art as a light for revealing all that is best and oneself and the world, even as that world prizes pretty superficiality above emotional depth, petty power plays above artistic complexity, and reputation above authentic relationships.
The two narratives cannot be described as being merely polar opposites, with the cat's adventures serving merely as an ironic or ridiculous foil for the larger ideas contained within the narrative about the musician Kreisler. Kreisler's experiences are often Hoffman's, for Kreisler is a semi-autobiographical representation of himself which Hoffman used in a number of his stories. Hoffman was a musician and composer, aside from also being the master of the real tomcat Murr upon whom the fictional Murr is based, and Hoffman, similoar to the modern novelist Milan Kundera, creates narratives which are composed along the lines of music, with elements of harmony and melody, leitmotif, and variation.
So what is _The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr_ about? Some of the elements include: the artistic life, the uses of imagination and creativity, psychology, dopplegangers, the transition from the Enlightenment to the Romantic movement, sex versus love, passion versus pretense, not to mention the cat (and a bit with a dog).
For some more coherent literary criticism, see this post from The Lectern blog
http://thelectern.blogspot.com/2009/06/life-and-opinions-of-tomcat-murr-eta.html
While I've been an avid reader of the works of E. T. A. Hoffman for many years, I had mostly focused upon his stories which are most often categorized as gothic horror, such as "The Sandman" and "The Nutcracker and the Mouse king," the latter being the story upon which Tchaikovsky based his ballet "The Nutcracker."
Hoffman was one of the German Romantics, so his fiction often makes use of fairy tale and folklore, but Hoffman also added his own preoccupations with music, alchemy, and automata. He was also fascinated by the life of the city, and I consider him to be possibly the earliest writer of urban fantasy. In addition, Hoffman was very interested in psychology, especially the individual's secret inner landscape of dreams, fantasies, and desires, which often make us strangers even to ourselves. Freud used Hoffman's work to illustrate his own concept of the uncanny, and Jung found Hoffman's work equally fascinating, to the degree that all of Jung's archetypes can be found in Hoffman's works.
All that being said, summarizing what _The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr_ is about is a near-impossible task, as Hoffman takes the strange and startling to new heights in this novel which is considered to be his masterwork.
The novel consists of two parallel stories, one the memoirs of the cat Murr, a cat who aspires to be an artistic genius, and the second that of the Kapellmeister Kreisler, a musician and composer who aspires to create sublime music. An editor's note explains that this was a typesetting error of a sort, as Murr had written his own memoirs upon papers which originally held the biography of the Kapellmeister, so the two stories had become mingled together. This creates a very startling palimsest in which, just as we are getting to some important incident which Murr or the writer of the Kapellmeister biography are about to reveal, the story breaks off and switches to the other storyline. For this reason, readers who are driven to distraction by non-linear narratives should avoid this novel like the plague. On the other paw, fans of postmodern lit may wish to try this novel, as it possess many of the earmarks of that genre, despite existing at least a century before the postmodern period began.
While Hoffman's intention was, to some degree, to use his feline hero to parody Goethe's melodramatic Romantic heroes, the doubled storyline cannot be reduced to pure parody for, if Murr's over-the-top self-glorification (really, Hoffman captures a cat's character wonderfully) serves to reveal the self-grandizing and self-absorbtion of the Romantic hero, the Kapellmeister's storyline serves to illustrate the struggle to use art as a light for revealing all that is best and oneself and the world, even as that world prizes pretty superficiality above emotional depth, petty power plays above artistic complexity, and reputation above authentic relationships.
The two narratives cannot be described as being merely polar opposites, with the cat's adventures serving merely as an ironic or ridiculous foil for the larger ideas contained within the narrative about the musician Kreisler. Kreisler's experiences are often Hoffman's, for Kreisler is a semi-autobiographical representation of himself which Hoffman used in a number of his stories. Hoffman was a musician and composer, aside from also being the master of the real tomcat Murr upon whom the fictional Murr is based, and Hoffman, similoar to the modern novelist Milan Kundera, creates narratives which are composed along the lines of music, with elements of harmony and melody, leitmotif, and variation.
So what is _The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr_ about? Some of the elements include: the artistic life, the uses of imagination and creativity, psychology, dopplegangers, the transition from the Enlightenment to the Romantic movement, sex versus love, passion versus pretense, not to mention the cat (and a bit with a dog).
For some more coherent literary criticism, see this post from The Lectern blog
http://thelectern.blogspot.com/2009/06/life-and-opinions-of-tomcat-murr-eta.html
no subject
Date: 2011-03-02 11:27 pm (UTC)In general, I really appreciate the horror recommendations and interview links you've been pulling together. I've been feeling underexposed to the genre, mainly because when I was a teenager publishers seemed to veer mostly into gore and slasher stuff, which doesn't hold my interest. It's great to have a guide to direct me back toward the good stuff. Thank you.
no subject
Date: 2011-03-03 01:07 pm (UTC)Seriously, if you are looking for the literary, non-gory horror, you can always look to what Ellen Datlow is editing. Her Best of Horror anthologies are the best field guides to the best horror writing. Baen's Webscriptions has these in various non-DRM ebook formats so you can get copies for any device on which you may be reading.