This piece of news about a veritable mind-reading machine would have intrigued the Romantic writer Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann. It sounds like one of his own fantastic literary creations: a machine gains insight into our innermost thoughts and feelings by using a technology based on magnetism. This description indeed covers part of the plot of “Die Automate” (“The Automata”), Hoffmann’s enigmatic tale about automata that was written and first published in 1814.3 Five years later, it appeared in Hoffmann’s collection of stories Die Serapions-Brüder (The Serapion Brothers, 1819–1821). This essay explores how Hoffmann’s “The Automata” represents and reflects emotional human-machine interactions, with a particular focus on the role of music. It does so by paying special attention to emotions and to the “non-human” within the larger context of machines, which besides machines also encompasses the realms of animate and inanimate non-human nature.4 How does the non-human produce and transmit emotions in “The Automata”? How does it affect the protagonists’ feelings and how do they react? How does the story depict the functions of human-made music, of machine music, and of the music of nature in interactions where music alters the affective states of humans? How might Hoffmann’s literary evocation of the emotional and aesthetic “agency” of the non-human prompt readers to reassess their notions of human nature and of art?5 The emotional and aesthetic interaction between the human and the non-human through music can be regarded as the thematic core of “The Automata.”
The first part of this chapter outlines the cultural and aesthetic context of “The Automata.” The second part discusses “The Automata” by focusing on the non-human elements and their emotional effects on the human characters. The third part specifically addresses music and its relationship to emotions, the human, and the non-human. The essay concludes by pondering how Hoffmann’s “The Automata” can stimulate our twenty-first century imagination and provoke us to rethink and reclaim our ideas of art and of human nature.
The cultural and aesthetic context of “The Automata”
E. T. A. Hoffmann took a keen interest in the scientific and technological developments of his time, was fascinated with humanlike and musical machines, and in his diary he even expressed the wish to build an automaton himself.6 At the same time, he was influenced by German Idealism and followed contemporary debates in natural philosophy, medicine, and psychology. In these disciplines, a popular topic was animal magnetism (mesmerism), physician Franz Anton Mesmer’s concept of a natural force in all living beings – human and non-human animals – that can be tapped into for healing purposes. Mesmer’s theory of an invisible physical force or magnetic fluid had gradually developed into the idea of a mainly psychical power that enables a Magnetiseur or mesmerizer to place patients in a somnambulistic state to cure them. Hoffmann was so captivated by it that “traces of magnetism are to be found in virtually all his works.”7 The more sinister aspects of magnetism, such as the dark empathic power of the Magnetiseur to invade and manipulate the psychic life of the magnetized person, particularly preoccupied his poetic imagination.8
The aesthetic principles of German Romanticism, such as irony, self-referentiality, and the importance of the reader’s response, critically shaped “The Automata.” Romanticism’s emphasis on the effect of art is encapsulated in Novalis‘s definition of poetry: “Poésie = Gemütherregungskunst,” which means “poetry = the art of stirring the heart.”9 The word “Gemüt” means “soul” or “heart” and figures prominently in “The Automata,” where it serves as a term for subjective interiority, imagination, and emotion. Romantic literature appreciates those aspects of life that had been held in rather low esteem by the Enlightenment: the realm of feeling and the power of imagination. It privileges the fantastic, the dreamlike, ambiguity, and uncertainty. As far as the realm of nature is concerned, Romanticism focuses on the mysterious, the enigmatic, and the sublime.
All these Romantic elements can be found in “The Automata.” Moreover, Hoffmann came up with his own poetological concept, the “Serapiontic Principle.” As a general aesthetic principle, it can be also applied to other forms of art like music. It originates from the frame narrative of The Serapion Brothers, where it is established by the fictitious group of writers whose readings and conversations make up the book. The name “Serapiontic” refers to the very first tale about a hermit who commands exceptional poetical gifts, rooted in his imaginative powers, but who is possessed by the delusion that he is Saint Serapion. Lothar, one of the writers, wants Serapion to serve as the model of the newly founded circle of poets, except for his delusion. According to Lothar, the hermit lacks the “ability to discern that duplexity which uniquely determines our earthly existence.”10 Lothar elaborates on this concept of “duplexity” in a key passage that is fundamental to the whole book: “There is an inner world and a spiritual ability to behold it with full clarity in the perfect splendor of the most vibrant life. But it is our earthly inheritance that it is the outer world, in which we are confined, which operates as the lever that sets this ability in motion.”11
A poet capable of affecting his readers forcefully must be a genuine seer who truly inhabits the inner world his words are supposed to convey, just like Serapion. But unlike the insane hermit, the real poet does not lose sight of the outer world. Instead, he is aware of the material world as the outward “lever,” which has set his own inward experience in motion. By putting his pen to paper, the poet wields this lever himself to move his readers in an analogous way.12 To prevent his friends and himself from dull literary efforts, Lothar proclaims the “Serapiontic Principle,”13 which they should follow as “true Serapion Brothers”: “May each of us at least strive quite seriously to get a clear grasp of the picture he visualizes in his mind’s eye, – in every one of its forms, colors, lights and shadows, and then, when he feels himself thoroughly permeated and kindled by it, bring it out into outer life.”14
Hoffmann’s “Serapiontic artist” practices a specific Gemütherregungskunst (Novalis), a specific “art of stirring the heart”: by drawing on his inner visions he attempts to evoke a vivid and emotional experience in his audience.15 But what happens when soulless machines come into play? What does it mean when automata are p...
