Sand-Man and the Uncanny

posted by Caroline Picard

What follows is an excerpt from Freud’s essay on The Uncanny. You can read the paper in its entirety by going here.

Jentsch writes: ‘In telling a story one of the most successful devices for easily creating uncanny effects is to leave the reader in uncertainty whether a particular figure in the story is a human being or an automaton and to do it in such a way that his attention is not focused directly upon his uncertainty, so that he may not be led to go into the matter and clear it up immediately. That, as we have said, would quickly dissipate the peculiar emotional effect of the thing. E. T. A. Hoffmann has repeatedly employed this psychological artifice with success in his fantastic narratives.’

This observation, undoubtedly a correct one, refers primarily to the story of The Sand-Man” in Hoffmann’s Nachtstücken, which contains the original of Olympia, the doll that appears in the first act of Offenbach’s opera, Tales of Hoffmann, but I cannot think — and I hope most readers of the story will agree with me — that the theme of the doll Olympia, who is to all appearances a living being, is by any means the only, or indeed the most important, element that must be held responsible for the quite unparalleled atmosphere of uncanniness evoked by the story. Nor is this atmosphere heightened by the fact that the author himself treats the episode of Olympia with a faint touch of satire and uses it to poke fun at the young man’s idealization of his mistress. The main theme of the story is, on the contrary, something different, something which gives it its name, and which is always re-introduced at critical moments: it is the theme of the ‘Sand-Man’ who tears out children’s eyes.

This fantastic tale opens with the childhood recollections of the student Nathaniel. In spite of his present happiness, he cannot banish the memories associated with the mysterious and terrifying death of his beloved father. On certain evenings his mother used to send the children to bed early, warning them that ‘the Sand-Man was coming’; and, sure enough, Nathaniel would not fail to hear the heavy tread of a visitor, with whom his father would then be occupied for the evening. When questioned about the Sand-Man, his mother, it is true, denied that such a person existed except as a figure of speech; but his nurse could give him more definite information: ‘He’s a wicked man who comes when children won’t go to bed, and throws handfuls of sand in their eyes so that they jump out of their heads all bleeding. Then he puts the eyes in a sack and carries them off to the half-moon to feed his children. They sit up there in their nest, and their beaks are hooked like owls’ beaks, and they use them to peck up naughty boys’ and girls’ eyes with.’

Although little Nathaniel was sensible and old enough not to credit the figure of the Sand-Man with such gruesome attributes, yet the dread of him became fixed in his heart. He determined to find out what the Sand-Man looked like; and one evening, when the Sand-Man was expected again, he hid in his father’s study. He recognized the visitor as the lawyer Coppelius, a repulsive person whom the children were frightened of when he occasionally came to a meal; and he now identified this Coppelius with the dreaded Sand-Man. As regards the rest of the scene, Hoffmann already leaves us in doubt whether what we are witnessing is tee first delirium of the panic-stricken boy, or a succession of events which are to be regarded in the story as being real. His father and the guest are at work at a brazier with glowing flames. The little eavesdropper hears Coppelius call out: ‘Eyes here! Eyes here!’ and betrays himself by screaming aloud. Coppelius seizes him and is on the point of dropping bits of red-hot coal from the fire into his eyes, and then of throwing them into the brazier, but his father begs him off and saves his eyes. After this the boy falls into a deep swoon; and a long illness brings his experience to an end. Those who decide in favour of the rationalistic interpretation of the Sand-Man will not fail to recognize in the child’s phantasy the persisting influence of his nurse’s story. The bits of sand that are to be thrown into the child’s eyes turn into bits of red-hot coal from the flames; and in both cases they are intended to make his eyes jump out. In the course of another visit of the Sand-Man’s, a year later, his father is killed in his study by an explosion. The lawyer Coppelius disappears from the place without leaving a trace behind.

Nathaniel, now a student, believes that he has recognized this phantom of horror from his childhood in an itinerant optician, an Italian called Giuseppe Coppola, who at his university town, offers him weather-glasses for sale. When Nathaniel refuses, the man goes on: ‘Not weather-glasses? not weather-glasses? also got fine eyes, fine eyes!’ The student’s terror is allayed when he finds that the proffered eyes are only harmless spectacles, and he buys a pocket spy-glass from Coppola. With its aid he looks across into Professor Spalanzani’s house opposite and there spies Spalanzani’s beautiful, but strangely silent and motionless daughter, Olympia. He soon falls in love with her so violently that, because of her, he quite forgets the clever and sensible girl to whom he is betrothed. But Olympia is an automaton whose clock-work has been made by Spalanzani, and whose eyes have been put in by Coppola, the Sand-Man. The student surprises the two Masters quarrelling over their handiwork. The optician carries off the wooden eyeless doll; and the mechanician, Spalanzani, picks up Olympia’s bleeding eyes from the ground and throws them at Nathaniel’s breast, saying that Coppola had stolen them from the student. Nathaniel succumbs to a fresh attack of madness, and in his delirium his recollection of his father’s death is mingled with this new experience. ‘Hurry up! hurry up! ring of fire!’ he cries. ‘Spin about, ring of fire — Hurrah! Hurry up, wooden doll! lovely wooden doll, spin about — .’ He then falls upon the professor, Olympia’s ‘father,’ and tries to strangle him.

Rallying from a long and serious illness, Nathaniel seems at last to have recovered. He intends to marry his betrothed, with whom he has become reconciled. One day he and she are walking through the city market-place, over which the high tower of the Town Hall throws its huge shadow. On the girl’s suggestion, they climb the tower, leaving her brother, who is walking with them, down below. From the top, Clara’s attention is drawn to a curious object moving along the street. Nathaniel looks at this thing through Coppola’s spy-glass, which he finds in his pocket, and falls into a new attack of madness. Shouting ‘Spin about, wooden doll!’ he tries to throw the girl into the gulf below. Her brother, brought to her side by her cries, rescues her and hastens down with her to safety. On the tower above, the madman rushes round, shrieking ‘Ring of fire, spin about!’ — and we know the origin of the words. Among the people who begin to gather below there comes forward the figure of the lawyer Coppelius, who has suddenly returned. We may suppose that it was his approach, seen through the spy-glass, which threw Nathaniel into his fit of madness. As the onlookers prepare to go up and overpower the madman, Coppelius laughs and says: ‘Wait a bit; he’ll come down of himself.’ Nathaniel suddenly stands still, catches sight of Coppelius, and with a wild shriek ‘Yes! “fine eyes — fine eyes”!’ flings himself over the parapet. While he lies on the paving-stones with a shattered skull the Sand-Man vanishes in the throng.

This short summary leaves no doubt, I think, that the feeling of something uncanny is directly attached to the figure of the Sand-Man, that is, to the idea of being robbed of one’s eyes, and that Jentsch’s point of an intellectual uncertainty has nothing to do with the effect. Uncertainty whether an object is living or inanimate, which admittedly applied to the doll Olympia, is quite irrelevant in connection with this other, more striking instance of uncanniness. It is true that the writer creates a kind of uncertainty in us in the beginning by not letting us know, no doubt purposely, whether he is taking us into the real world or into a purely fantastic one of his own creation. He has, of course, a right to do either; and if he chooses to stage his action in a world peopled with spirits, demons and ghosts, as Shakespeare does in Hamlet, in Macbeth and, in a different sense, in The Tempest and A Midsummer-Night’s Dream, we must bow to his decision and treat his setting as though it were real for as long as we put ourselves into this hands. But this uncertainty disappears in the course of Hoffmann’s story, and we perceive that he intends to make us, too, look through the demon optician’s spectacles or spy-glass — perhaps, indeed, that the author in his very own person once peered through such an instrument. For the conclusion of the story makes it quite clear that Coppola the optician really is the lawyer Coppelius and also, therefore, the Sand-Man.

There is no question therefore, of any intellectual uncertainty here: we know now that we are not supposed to be looking on at the products of a madman’s imagination, behind which we, with the superiority of rational minds, are able to detect the sober truth; and yet this knowledge does not lessen the impression of uncanniness in the least degree. The theory of intellectual uncertainty is thus incapable of explaining that impression.

Jung and Wagner

posted and written by Caroline Picard

I wrote this in response to a class I took in which we were invited to interpret Wagner using Jungian theory, a strategy outlined by Marie-Louise von Franz in here book The Interpretation of Fairy Tales. In other words, each fairy tale takes place within the psyche of a single patriarch or matriarch. In applying that strategy to The Ring, Wotan would ostensibly become the primary psyche. Each subsequent character thus represents a facet of his internal self, (i.e. anima/subconcious/conscious).

A Useless Crisis

Wagner’s Ring is a failed enterprise.

At least if we are to consider the ultimate significance of the work in the terms laid out, namely that The Ring is a portrait of a single psyche, Wotan, who destroys himself and everything he holds dear.

I have some real problems with the proposed interpretative scheme. While in one sense the Jungian quest for self offers a neat and tidy means to access the material, the result is devastating. There is no point to the pain inflicted upon the characters. Under such a light, the opera may as well depict Amy Winehouse—or some other celebrity nightmare where people make bad and even nihilistic decisions. By giving Wotan the center of the operatic universe, one is left simply with an expression of uselessness. He learns nothing in his quest, beyond proving that he is capable of both building and destroying relationships. While I’m content with tabloid stories that parallel such an arc, I cannot believe that an opera (with 10,000 books written about it in the first year of its completion) would study Wotan’s depressive personality.

At the very least I imagine a myriad of alternative interpretative platforms. For instance:

One could argue that Wotan does not seem quite at the center of the Wagner’s world. While he is presented as the patriarchal figure, he is a patriarch for only one aspect of the world he inhabits. We are aware of other orders, the Rhinemaids inhabit another. The Nibelungs, while subservient to Wotan, seem more like a colonized population with its own intrinsic hierarchy. While Alberich is their leader, Alberich happens to be subservient to Wotan. The Rhinemaids, function differently; they are not subservient in the same way and neither are the giants, who rule the land, and therefore must be bargained with. Erda, also, is an independent being; her world is one with the Norns who weave an epic story to which the world (and Wotan) must subscribe. Under this light, there one can examine the opera politically—as a metaphor for political relationships between countries.

Using such an interpretation, the characters themselves represent groups of people, or human motifs.

It also occurred to me that the characters have a peculiar relationship with their environment. They inhabit space—woods, caves, houses, cliffs, rivers etc.—as humans do. Which is to say they do not have an animated relationship with their environment; at no point does one feel like Wotan made the world. While he may affect lightening and thunder, he is an actor on a stage and he is dependent on the environment of that stage. The world, their physical geography, is the thing that supports the characters, functioning as a different center.

The characters are the surface of the opera. Their follies are not devastating because the characters are foolish; because the energy comes from something beneath them; energy manifested in the music. While Wotan, Alberich, the bird, Brunnhilde represent and realize their leitmotivs, it is the accumulated soup of the interactive and self-aware music (i.e. Wagner as a composer constructed this work in such a way that the various leitmotivs work together), which supports the libretto. The libretto cannot exist without its orchestral buoy. Looking at the work that way, the opera only seems to be about the plight of the Wolsungs. The opera is really about the energy, temporal structure and synergetic collusion of voices; a collusion that takes place in the background, just as the environment is the background. I’d make the argument that Wotan cannot be the center, because the world isn’t reliant on him. Instead, it seems like what remains in the aftermath of The Twilight of the Gods is the soup of an on-going music.

To that end, it’s possible that Wagner is critiquing the seeming infallibility of order. The authority of Wotan’s hall—what initially seemed impenetrable—explodes in fire. Yet even that sky, the thing Wotan claimed to rule, will endure. For the bird needs a place to flit, as the river needs something to reflect. In other words, the Norns will continue weaving beyond Wotan’s demise.

Other ideas that seemed fruitful possibilities in divining the meaning of The Ring Cycle related to free will, or even the Norns/Fates and what their agency was. Or even Freud’s death drive. I also found myself thinking about love, and how love played out in the work. It seems largely a loveless piece. Neither Freia nor Fricka boast any love. Wotan does not seem especially close to anyone close to him; when he is inspired to love he alienates himself from his object of affection, whether that object is Siegmund, Brunnhilde or Siegfried.

All this to say that, while I did enjoy learning about Jung and applying his binary ontology to The Ring, it felt like an oppressive framework, one which did not ultimately make sense of what the story was about, or for. Perhaps it is overly idealistic of me to assume that art provides a sense of legitimacy to the otherwise existential banality of life. At the same time, because I think it’s impossible to create something objectively, there is a necessary interpretation that goes into each and every body of work, each and every life(style). And while I’m content with the opera’s apocalyptic conclusion, it seems to me that it is only Wotan’s world that ends. In fact, the message is that the rest of everything else continues.

p.s. there was an especially funny interaction in my class where the professor argued that the dragon was a woman (in the above sequence it comes out from underground, like a vagina, say), and that Siegrfried’s subsequent ability to understand what birds/animals say, and interpret the real meaning of people’s words (even when they are trying to deceive him) is because the “blood of the dragon” that he accidentally drank is actually menstrual blood.