New Year’s Eve 2023
‘Darkness had no effect upon my fancy . . .’ wrote Mary Shelley in Frankenstein, no doubt recalling the month in which she first drafted her Promethean fable whose ‘Abhorred monster!’ she had created in June 1816, the Year Without a Summer; or as her literary confrère, Lord Byron, described it in the bleak conclusion to his vatic, epoch-defining blank verse: ‘Darkness . . . was the Universe.’
The Birthplace of Frankenstein’s Monster? A short carriage drive from the heart of Geneva, Switzerland.
In 1816, following the thunderous volcantic eruption of Mount Tabora in the East Indies, the Northern Hemisphere was consumed by a sulphurous fog so dense that sunspots were visible to the naked eye. It was a time of famine, doubt and fear. ‘All was black. The brows of men by the despairing light wore an unearthly aspect . . .’
That darkness, too, had been shared by the Prussian fabulist, E.T.A. Hoffmann, himself a writer of transgressive grotesqueries, of fantastical humanoid automatons ‘endued with animation’, a sinister unhealthy preoccupation in the view of those stuffy contemporaries of his who branded him an ‘Outsider’ of a ‘lurid hue’, resistant to the intellectual gravitas expected of popular writers as proselytisers for a Greater Germany.
(Incidentally, the unfortunate Victor Frankenstein, a Genevese, would have been heartened and spared his traumatic guilt from his nights in Bavarian charnel-houses had he known that some 200 years later – this December 2023 – the ‘Greater Europe’ of the European Union agreed the proposed Regulation for the harvesting of Substances of Human Origin intended for human application.)
‘Wound Fever’ and Forbidden Light . . .
and a Beast named Blasphemy.
So . . . significantly, in 1816, Mary Shelley and Ernst Hoffmann, each a communicant with the spirit of the new Age of Galvanism, were neighbouring Romantics dwelling in Continental Europe and divided only by a distance no greater than London to John O’ Groats. Hence, over Berlin’s literary salons where the polymathic Hoffmann was feted, and over the shores of Lake Geneva at the Villa Diodati where the Shelley/Byron coterie wrote, too, in Gothic script, there swirled morbid broodings on the outer reaches of metaphysics, adrift in the poisoned upper air, as if strangely convoluted sunless plants had grown twisted and found sustenance searching for forbidden light.
Beneath this overcast gloom, then, which presided in 1816, it is perhaps no coincidence that Hoffmann’s own nightmarish fable of uncanny anthropomorphisation, written in the same year, finds an echo in the despair of Mary’s monster: ‘The fever of my blood did not allow me to be visited by peaceful dreams.’
For in Hoffmann’ Nutcracker (Berlin 1816) we find another profoundly troubled Mary – the child Marie – who like the author of Frankenstein is also prey to an ‘acute mental vision’ of a monster . . . in this case, the seven-headed Mouse King, more terrifying than the beast named Blasphemy (cf. Revelation 13.1 ‘And I saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads.’)
Freudians, of course, no doubt have discovered a bonanaza of interpretations in Hoffmann’s Nussknacker und Mäusekönig, a box of delights that includes – surely voyeuristically? – the unfettered fevered imaginings of atavistic threat and the blood of young girls. Certainly, at whatever dark level of Hoffmann’s forty-year-old consciousness, there is some fixation that’s impenetrably troubling.
Atavistic threat and the blood of young girls? Well, of all the enigmatic dramas enacted in Hoffmann’s disconcerting Kinderfabel, one plot twist still retains its power to surprise us in the tale’s transformation from the printed page of 1816 to Tchaikovsky’s celebrated ballet-féerie of 1892, even now performed in centres of culture throughout the world. (Our traditional Christmas ballet season in London is incomplete without it).
Consider Act 1 of the ballet, which closes with the Battle to defeat the Mouse King when Marie (Clara in the ballet) famously defends her Nutcracker from attack and – mirroring the action of the book . . . she reacts without thought. For the febrile girl of the Nussknacker could not ‘contain herself anymore . . . so grabbed her left shoe, without being clearly aware of what she was doing, and threw it at the King.’ (The original narrative in French, is faithfully rendered: ‘Et, en même temps, d’un mouvement instinctif, sans se rendre compte de ce qu’elle faisait, Marie détacha son soulier de son pied, et, de toutes ses forces, elle le jeta au milieu de la mêlée, et cela si adroitement, que le terrible projectile atteignit le roi des souris . . .’)
I cast out my shoe.
A shoe as missile? It is a symbol of submission as long-established as the Old Testament, see Psalm 60:8, ‘Over Edom will I cast out my shoe.’ See also Joshua 10:24: ‘Come near, put your feet upon the necks of these kings.’ In both instances, the phrase conveys a meaning of The Downtrodden, a people brought to subjection by a shoe.
However, in Hoffmann’s fable, the young heroine’s defeat of the Mouse King’s is shortlived, even, one might suspect, she is moralistically punished for her daring. For, in the melee she crashes backwards into a glass cabinet of toys and . . . ‘At that moment . . . Marie felt an even sharper pain in her left arm than before and sank to the ground, unconscious.’
When she awakes, she is told, ‘Nutcracker was lying on your bleeding arm and not far from you was your left shoe.’ A little later, a surgeon arrives and ‘He felt Mary’s pulse and she heard that there was talk of a wound fever.’
Surely it is not too fanciful for us to perceive Mary’s shattered display case and its scattered dolls and resultant blood as emblematic of shattered childish illusions?
I believe these authorial contrivances, from the culminating scene of Act 1, to be profoundly symbolic . . . for surely the young girl’s ‘Wundfieber’ (wound fever) is a sickly metaphor for her menarche?
In this belief I would not be alone in evoking the pale consumptive heroines of the early 19th Century, a literary device that may be found even earlier in Rousseau’s Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse, perhaps continental Europe’s most celebrated novel of the decadent aestheticisation of tuberculer maidenhood spiritualised by disease. (NB: the setting of Julie is Geneva).
This fascination with blood is observable too in a 19th Century fashion cultivated by calculating women who positively sought to look tubercular – the ‘flattering malady’– whereby a courtesan would not only entice her male devotees by seeming to suffer from a phthisic cough but would
dissimulate the blood in her sputum by pricking her gums with a pin.
(In this connection, it should be remarked that Hoffmann’s Nutcracker found its first translator in Alexandre Dumas père, the version in French that Tchaikovsky set to music for his ballet. The son of Dumas, Alexandre Dumas fils, of course, wrote that classic tale of love and consumption, La Dame aux Camélias, and, in this case, the clunking menstrual metaphor may be seen in the red camellias signposted by literature’s consumptive heroine nonpareil.)
Downtrodden . . . a footnote . . .
the perseveration of a ‘terrible projectile’ . . .
The following instances from myth and remembered times warn us that the shoe is a projectile to be genuinely feared . . . the ultimate defiant put-down, pancultural in meaning, when actions speak louder than words, and one’s antagonists must learn they are worthy only of subjection in the dirt under one’s heel.
The basest insult that can never be unsaid.
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Iraqi journalist Muntadhar al-Zaidi hurled his shoes at United States president George W Bush on 14 December 2008 in protest against Occupation. Shoes are considered exceptionally unclean in the Arab World. |
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Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, allegedly banged his shoe on his delegate-desk in protest at a speech by Philippine delegate Lorenzo Sumulong at UN General Assembly in New York City on 12 October 1960. |
