E. T. A. Hoffmann and the Serapiontic Principle: Critique and Creativity (review)

Despite the copious attention E. T. A. Hoffmann has attracted as one of the great storytellers of the nineteenth century, he has far less often received acclaim as a romantic theoretician until the past two decades—rather, critics usually regarded him as flighty, superficial, and inconsistent in comparison to his earlier colleagues. Hilda Meldrum Brown’s study of the “Serapiontic principle,” treating what she considers Hoffmann’s attempt to unify some of his aesthetic principles under a single perspective, reflects a new critical direction that appreciates Hoffmann as a serious and profound thinker. Her work reveals how the Serapiontic principle serves as theoretical underpinning for, and as observable performance of, the creative process she traces in Hoffmann’s writing.

Brown clearly does not intend an interpretation of the works as the main thrust of her analysis, but rather investigates the operation of the Serapiontic principle in them. Perhaps the most significant aspect of this study is its scope: instead of restricting herself to the four-volume collection of tales Hoffmann published under the title Die Serapionsbrüder (1819–21), as earlier studies have done, Brown seizes the opportunity to follow the red thread of this concept through much of Hoffmann’s overall production of novellas, stories, and Märchen, from the earlier collections of Fantasie- and Nachtstücke through the later Prinzessin Brambilla and the posthumously published “Des Vetters Eckfenster.” She demonstrates a vast and deep knowledge of Hoffmann’s works, as well as of the critical traditions informing the most recent analyses of the tales. Even more significant is her nuanced grasp of Hoffmann’s creative genius, which repudiates the unfortunate myths that have plagued Hoffmann’s reputation and appreciation as a first-rate theoretician, ever since early critics dismissed him as merely an overly imaginative inebriate.

Brown divides her book into two main sections: in the first, she discusses Hoffmann’s formulation of the principle and its significant evolution over the fourteen years of the artist’s literary career. As Brown’s investigation makes clear, long before the four volumes of Die Serapionsbrüder appeared, Hoffmann had already accomplished significant work and had laid a strong theoretical foundation, especially in his famous preface to the Fantasiestücke (1814–16) in praise of Jacques Callot’s fanciful, early seventeenth-century woodcuts of commedia dell’arte characters. In the “Overture” to the first part of this study, she maintains that the Callot essay is the earliest developed Serapiontic formulation, emphasizing the activity of “inneres Schauen” while focusing the center of the creative process in the artist’s utilization of the fantastic and the grotesque. Important elements include irony, the combination of both the serious and the comic throughout life as well as in art, and finally the “importance of the reception process, especially the interactive aspect of narrative technique” (29). Reception is crucial in virtually all of Hoffmann’s works: the author or editor draws the reader time and again into the creative process as an active participant, and the act of reading becomes a parallel to authorship itself. In the following chapter discussing the central thematic text of the Serapionsbrüder collection, “Der Einsiedler Serapion,” Brown shows how Hoffmann’s thinking had progressed in developing a more specific and sophisticated formulation of the principle against the backdrop of major romantic philosophical currents, including material he developed after his readings of Schelling and Schubert.

Next, Brown turns her attention to Hoffmann’s expansion of the principle in two essays that also appeared in the Fantasiestücke, both of which examine the creative process in the production of music: “Der Dichter und der Komponist” and “Alte und neue Kirchenmusik.” She illustrates how Hoffmann uses the language of Naturphilosophie and the major romantic philosophers as “points of reference” (52), while he develops the concepts in unique and original ways, emphasizing especially the ambiguity of experience and its dogged resistance to resolution and closure. The...