Member-only story
does the reader ever receive reliable information?
ambiguity in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman”
Anyone reading E.T.A. Hoffmann’s story The Sandman — first published in 1816 in the first volume of Night Pieces — for the first time expects a text of dark romanticism: a children’s fairy tale about the Sandman, who gouges out the eyes of the wicked. Anyone who has finished reading it no longer knows what they actually read. Was Nathanael insane? Was Coppelius the same person as Coppola? Was Olimpia an automaton or a girl? Was it all just a figment of the imagination — or was it not? Hoffmann’s story is a masterpiece of strategic indeterminacy.
The story begins with three letters: Nathanael, a college student, writes to his friend Lothar and his fiancée Clara about a childhood memory that has come back to haunt him. Coppelius, a lawyer and a repulsive guest of his father’s, was, to the boy, the embodiment of the Sandman, who sprinkles sand into children’s eyes, makes their eyes fall out bloody, and throws them to his own children to devour. One night, little Nathanael eavesdrops on his father and Coppelius as they conduct alchemical experiments; when he is discovered, Coppelius threatens him with glowing eyes. Shortly thereafter, his father dies — in an explosion that Nathanael believes was the work of Coppelius.
