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Episode 559 - The Sandman - Part 2 (Patreon)

Published:
2021-08-12 16:00:06
Imported:
2022-01
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We're concluding our coverage of E.T.A. Hoffman's weird masterpiece The Sandman!

Special thanks to rock star reader Levi Nunez! Check out Loot the Body!

Next up: Urban Legends and Random Obsessions!

Comments

Jason Thompson

Re: the ending scene of Clara, I think it’s mostly Hoffmann showing mercy to her. She goes on to live a good life and isn’t caught in this tragic madness. At the same time, it reinforces that Nathaniel was always Other, was always doomed. Which adds to the horror, thinking that the whole thing was inevitable thanks to his childhood experiences, or his very nature.

Anonymous

I was going to write a whole long thing about Freud and The Uncanny as a comment on episode 1, but I figured I'd save it for episode 2, and I guess that's good, because you saved me from having to write most of it! Freud does seem to throw in some pet theories in his essay -- why would having your eyes torn out be a metaphor for castration? Isn't eye-ripping bad enough to be its own thing? But I do I think Freud is right on in analyzing this story as Uncanny Horror. It's about the unfamiliar being suddenly revealed as familiar (a stranger resembling a scary guy from your childhood), but also the familiar is revealed as unfamiliar (a seeming-human turning out to be inhuman). But one thing I think Freud leaves out is that The Uncanny also involves the intrusion of some perceived *active agency* into a situation that ought to be simply natural. When we feel an Uncanny sensation, we don't just say, "that's weird." We react by trying to perceive some intentional cause for it. When there seems to be a hidden hand at work behind things -- a dollmaker manipulating an artificial woman; an alchemist conspiring to drive you crazy; a hidden connection between a childhood fairy tale and your adult problems -- it's a seed for paranoia. As Bob Dylan put it, "Something is happening here, but you don't know what it is."

Anonymous

Did the unreliable narrator and seeming slipperiness of reality remind anyone else of "The Repairer of Reputations," by Robert W. Chambers? I found it interesting that Chad and Chris seriously considered the possibility that Nathaniel is himself an automaton. I had previously encountered this story through THE TALES OF HOFFMANN, a 1951 film adaptation of Jacques Offenbach's opera based on "The Sandman" and two other works by E.T.A. Hoffman. That movie was made by The Archers, the same team responsible for THE RED SHOES, which includes a scene from another version of "The Sandman," the ballet COPPÉLIA. In both THE TALES OF HOFFMAN and COPPÉLIA, the automaton's suitor is unambiguously human; however, in the ballet, Dr. Coppelius plans to steal the hero's soul in order to bring his creation to life. My interpretation of Hoffmann's tale, strongly influenced by these adaptations, is that Nathaniel on some level believes that his father and Dr. Coppelius took a part of his soul to use in their alchemical work, though whether this is true or a idée fixe that destroys him cannot be definitely answered. On a lighter note: guys, you covered a story about magic eyeglasses and didn't make even one THEY LIVE joke? I am bewildered and dismayed.

Anonymous

I got the feeling from the story that it was a kind of trauma that scarred the narrator. Often times people will interprete traumas differently, sometimes even as alien abductions.

Jeff C. Carter

‘The Polar Express’ was the gold standard for The Uncanny Valley, but allegedly that is no longer the case. As the state of the art has advanced, what once seemed near-human but soulless now appears to contemporary audiences as cartoony and harmless. I wonder if this also works in reverse? We see old pictures of hand carved Halloween masks, burlap costumes and greasepaint clowns and are freaked out, but in their day they were likely pleasant to look upon. I dub this effect the “Ynnacnu Plateau”.

Anonymous

Now that you've done The Sandman, I really hope you'll do the Nutcracker for a Christmas episode some time, because it is one of the most bonkers out there stories I've read - this one is tame and logical in comparison.

Anonymous

Coppelius and the professor arguing over the automoton put me in mind of one of Grant Morrison's early JLA stories, where T.O. Morrow (who built Red Tornado) teams up with Professor Ivo (who built Amazo) to build Tomorrow Woman, another highly advanced robot. Her mission on the surface is to infiltrate and destroy the Justice League (as one does) but of course by story's end Tomorrow Woman sacrifices herself to save the day. It is revealed that this was Morrow's actual plan, to create a living person with free will, while Ivo just wanted to mess with the JLA - sort of like the professor in "The Sandman" who worked for twenty years to build Olympia and Copppelius who has more sinister, inscrutable plans. Also, Copppelius and Nathanial's dad weren't doing alchemy; that's Clara's explanation. But Nathanial reports seeing a mask or face without eyes... they were building automotons. Which feeds the notion than Nathanial himself is one. Any dreams about unicorns? And when his skull shatters on the cobbles, what comes out... gears and clockwork? Was Nathanial "more human than human" because Coppelius helped build him, more advanced even than Olympia? Or am I looking for logic in a story that defies it? Either way, I came in expecting a story about a sandman, like that episode of the Real Ghostbusters, and got Blade Runner instead.

Anonymous

"Realistic" dreams are super confusing when you are a young kid. I mean, life in general is confusing enough. Nobody wants to tell you anything because they don't understand it either. The boundary between the weirdness of life and weirdness of dreams is thin. I can't decide if Hoffman wanted to evoke that feeling in us, or use that in order to comment on a certain type of person (proto-emo). Someone so caught up in their own ennui, they can't see those of them around them clearly. We can't use him to gauge the reality of his story and we aren't offered any other first person narrative.. We'd need to see what everyone else is seeing to make a determination.

Anonymous
>>65647245

An active agency? Does that include spontaneous changes in the natural order?

Anonymous

During your coverage of The Sandman, I was reminded of the excellent horror film Tourist Trap (1979). It has a similarly uncanny theme with its moving mannequins and eyeless faces, and it even blurs the line between person and mannequin at times.

Anonymous

I really enjoyed this story and your conversation about it, gents. At times you seemed as bewildered by the story's construction as you would about the inner workings and purpose of an automaton. At other times, I wondered if the protagonist just needed a good waifu pillow.

Anonymous

Coming here straight from part 1 as I don't want to spoil it for anyone reading along. On the read-through I hadn't caught that his hands were removed and reinstalled. That combined with his apparent fears that the world is deterministic, and of course his fiancee turning out to be a literal automaton, has me wondering whether he thought of himself as being exactly that. He certainly thinks it of Clara at the end there, based on his mad ramblings.

Anonymous

Nathaniel thinking that Clara was an automaton at the end reminded me of Capgras Syndrome, which is featured in one of my favorite graphic novels: Transreality by Chris Lackey!

Anonymous
>>65727258

Absolutely! Please do The Nutcracker and the Mouse King for Christmas

Anonymous

Thank you for covering this story. I think one of the interesting things that I missed on first reading is the deliberate choosing of the character names. Nathanael means "gift of God" which can be a descriptor of how Nathanael views himself (ie. narcissist), Clara means "light or shining" which aligns with her inherit goodness, Siegmund means "defender or protector" which aligns with his character trait of trying to save his friend Nathanael, Lothar means "renowned warrior" which makes sense given his quickness to challenge Nathanael to a duel. I think there is too much there for it to be a coincidence. Also, my husband Jack has some fascinating thoughts about this tale which I've included below: --------------- I’m a history student, with a primary interest in the intersection of politics, the Arts, and gender/sexuality in modern France and Australia. While the Prussian context may be somewhat different to the French one around the same period as E T A Hoffmann was writing “Der Sandmann”, and I don’t want to position myself as an ‘expert’ by any means, I think there are possibly some interesting connections that the characters of Clara and Nathanael have to the contestation between what we might broadly call the Enlightenment and early Romanticism. Nathanael is fairly clearly the kind of Romantic protagonist that people are familiar with, just as Clara’s practical and ‘scientific’ nature corresponds with our received understanding of the Enlightenment. What people may be less aware of is the extent to which Clara corresponds with the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s conceptualisation of the ideal, ‘natural’ woman. Rousseau actively advocated for a correspondence of womanhood with what we might now recognise as the middle-class ‘ideal housewife’ who, while practical, authentic etc, confines herself exclusively to the domestic sphere. In line with the period’s focus on knowledge of Classics, however- in France, at least- this incorporated the appropriation and veneration of forms of ideal womanhood that drew from Roman history (particularly of mothers and wives who were stoic, calm, intelligent, patriotic etc). Hence we see Clara’s practicality, wisdom and heroism while also seeing her fulfil her ideal role as natural mother at the end of the text. On your point regarding the remarks about Clara’s appearance, these also mimic a contemporary artistic debate in France at the time (which has some connection to European art discourse more broadly). By the late 18th Century and the French Revolution, art had come to be dominated by Neo-classicism- ‘history painting’. Its star began to wane from the final years of the Revolution onward, with Romanticism arising as a reaction against it and being in its early stages at the time of Hoffmann’s writing. One of the charges most commonly lobbed at Neo-classical art was that it was mathematical and overly masculine/unfeminine in principle- terms that Hoffmann employs in describing Clara: her exact symmetry, her chaste bust (the busty, curvaceous, eroticised female nude rose to increasing prominence in art during the 19th Century, having abated briefly when Rococo fell out of fashion during the 18th Century), and her appearance of being cold and unfeeling (despite her ‘deep, tender, feminine disposition’- back to Rousseau etc. again). By contrast, Olimpia is far closer to the Romantic ideal: what we might call conventionally beautiful, but ultimately somewhat hollow and more of a sexual/sensual object to the viewer: in effect, a posed doll. Hoffmann, I think, was (gently, and with no small degree of personal insight and self deprecation given his own Romantic leanings) at least partly satirising contemporary discourse. While I don’t think it should be read simply as allegory, I think it certainly positions many of the earlier ideals that Clara embodies (her ‘sensibility’ and authenticity, her pure rationalism) as inimical- even fatal- to the (budding) Romantic. In saying all that, I’ve brutally summarised and over-simplified the complexity of these things enough, but otherwise you’d get an entire thesis. ------------

Anonymous

I think there are many ways to look at the story, different levels that coexist, but the aspect of schizophrenia really strikes me. The disease often comes out in the early 20s of the afflicted, the age that I took Nathaniel to be. It's tragic when people see a childhood companion become increasingly paranoid and obsessed, until they may become impossible to be with. Many people with psychotic disorders tend to take different aspects of their environment and use them to tell their story. The newscaster seems to be speaking directly to you, or the man selling barometers seems to be the man who killed your father and so on. Nathaniel initially listens to the advice of Clara and Lothar, but as his symptoms advance, this becomes harder to do and his reality seperates from theirs. I don’t want to oversimplify the story into just being about mental illness; the aspects of automata are fascinating, but the theme of a schizophrenia-like psychosis seemed strong.