1.
Introduction to E.T.A. Hoffmann's writing in The Sandman.
The fantasy tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann have often been cited as the precursors
to modern science fiction. The Sandman, written in 1817, is the
story of a young, possibly deranged man in love with an automaton.
It remains a classic example of the grotesque Romanticism of the
nineteenth century and a preeminent forerunner of contemporary
robot and android stories.
The word robot comes from the Czech word robota meaning " drudgery" , "servitude" or "forced
labor," especially
the so-called "labor rent" that survived in the Austro-Hungarian
Empire until 1848. The concept of robots, however, dates much further
back. In classical mythology, the deformed god of metalwork (Vulcan)
created mechanical servants ranging from intelligent, golden handmaidens
to more utilitarian three-legged tables that could move about under
their own power.
Automata, self-propelled
devices that simulated human functions, grew increasingly popular
in the 18th century. An early mechanic named Jacques
de Vaucanson created an android that played the flute and a mechanical
duck that reportedly ate and defecated. What fun! Though they were
sold as mere novelty items, their "living" characteristics
provided fuel for the century's heated debates surrounding "free
will and determinism." Were human beings truly autonomous?
At the turn of
the eighteenth century, literary responses to robots began to reflect
fears that
humans would be replaced by their own creations.
Hoffmann's writing in The Sandman was a bridge, along with works like
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, to the nineteenth century German
preoccupation with romanticism and the grotesque.
In common usage,
grotesque refers to art characterized by an incongruous mixture of
human and
animal parts, monstrous, unnatural and ludicrously
odd. It was the "incongruous" quality in Hoffmann's
writing that led Freud to champion the story as the quintessential
literary embodiment of the "uncanny." He proposed that
the uncanny must begin with details of the everyday and familiar. These
are then followed by repressed desires and fears (early and close to
home) that begin to take over. The result is a distortion of perceptions,
a journey into the unconscious and an "incongruity" between
the familiar and the strange, the man and the animal, the reality and
the unreality.
2. An Exploratory
Presentation:
A Scene from An Adaptation of Hoffmann's The Sandman
The Gertrude Stein Open Lab
Sarah Smirnoff and her collaborative
team of programmers, designers and animators (Hal Eagar, David Frackman,
Steven Koch and Micheal Oberle)
set out to adapt The Sandman with human performers and digital puppets
(created with multimedia software). Smirnoff, the director and writer,
felt that the story's psychoanalytical examination of fear and
evil provided the perfect venue for creating a system of theatrical
interaction between human and digital "actors."
Smirnoff's collaborative team presented their scene with one
human performer, Tony Bingham, playing Nathaneal and three digital "puppets" playing
the characters of Olympia, Klara and Coppelius/Sandman (manipulated
by puppeteer Terra Gillespie).
While Smirnoff's adaptation stays faithful to Hoffmann's
story, the theatrical presentation was told entirely from Nathaneal's
point of view (as opposed to using Hoffmann's unbiased third
party narrator). The physical qualities of Olympia, Klara and Coppelius,
their "depth" and "emotional availability," reflected
the subjectivity of this perspective. The design team used the one-dimensional
physical life and appearance of the puppets to convey Nathaneal's
sense of alienation and isolation from other characters.
"Hoffmann plays with the irony that the only person who felt
alive to Nathaneal was, in reality, an automaton," Smirnoff says. "Following
the scene we presented, Nathaneal falls in love with Olympia. Despite
the fact that she can only speak the words ‘ah ah,' Nathaneal
feels that no ‘being' has ever understood him better."
The adaptation of the text
with digital puppets presented ample opportunity to work in dialogue
with Hoffmann's distortion of perceptions
and the atmosphere of the uncanny. Smirnoff hopes to have Olympia transform
from a digital puppet into a human performer in the next scene. This
directorial choice is a fitting theatrical equivalent to the text's
literary irony.
Freud theorizes that Nathaneal's
fear of losing his eyes, an obsessive fear haunting him from his
very childhood, triggers the evocation of
the extraordinarily "uncanny" atmosphere in the writing.
The story is full of references to eyes, optical instruments, points
of view (i.e. looking through curtains and windows, through a perspective,
from a tower, etc.) and other images and motifs pertaining to vision.
The design team created moving, blue-colored eyes for Klara, the digital
puppet. In the presentation, the eyes slid back and forth bearing a
striking resemblance to "reality" while, at the same time,
evoking countless references to cornball horror films and thrillers.
This could very well be the contemporary version of Freud's "uncanny," this
sensation that the "fake" (technology) is creating everything
we perceive as "real." It is the familiar from the strange
indeed.
Smirnoff and her collaborators
plan to continue work on their adaptation, exploring theatrical systems
of movement and interaction between human
and digital "actors."
Meanwhile, The Sandman, as a text, remains open to interpretation
as a symbolic fantasy of the unconscious mind, a prescient vision of
the future or a fairy tale from a naive past. It could be argued that
Nathaneal is reduced to an impotent puppet in the end, crushed beneath
the fateful determinism of hostile forces. If so, it is hard to imagine
a more evocative finale for exploring the theatrical relationship between
artists and emerging technology.
