The Life and Opinions of Kater Murr by E. T. A. Hoffmann

First published:Lebensansichten des Katers Murr, nebst fragmentarischer Biographie des Kapellmeisters Johannes Kreisler in zufälligen Makulaturblättern (2 vols., 1819, 1821; The Educated Cat, 1892; better known as The Life and Opinions of Kater Murr, with the Fragmentary Biography of Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler on Random Sheets of Scrap Paper, 1969)

Type of work: Kunstlerroman

Time of work: The late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries

Locale: Siegharsweiler (a town), Sieghartshof (a court), and the Abbey of Kanzheim—all in Germany

Principal Characters:

• Murr, a literate tomcat living, loving, and writing in Sieghartsweiler with Meister Abraham Liscov, and later with Johannes Kreisler
• Johannes Kreisler, a conductor, composer, and music tutor
• Furst Irenaus, the former ruler of a small principality who continues to hold court in Sieghartshof
• Meister Abraham Liscov, an inventor, organ builder, magician; the counselor to Furst Irenaus, and mentor of Kreisler
• Benzon, a widow in her thirties, the former lover and present manipulator of Irenaus
• Julia, her daughter, who is in love with Kreisler but is engaged to Irenaus’ idiot son, Ignatius
• Princess Hedwiga, the hypersensitive daughter of Irenaus, who is engaged to Prince Hector, whom she loathes

The Novel

E.T.A. Hoffmann, who introduces himself as the editor of Murr’s manuscript, informs the reader in the preface that this novel consists of the reminiscences of Murr the cat, interrupted at seventeen places by pages from an anonymous biography of the composer Johannes Kreisler which was used by Murr as scratch paper and sent to the printer by mistake. While the Murr material runs in a straightforward if interrupted chronology, the Kreisler biography (which constitutes more than half of the novel), supposedly torn at random from the book by Murr, lies like a jigsaw puzzle in need of reconstruction by the reader. For example, the first section to be read belongs chronologically with the material of book 3 of the novel, which Hoffman did not live to complete. In summarizing the events, it will be necessary to deal with the two biographies separately.

Murr’s “Life and Opinions”—the title reflects the influence of Laurence Sterne’s humorous novel Tristram Shandy (1759-1767)—is divided into four parts. In “Existential Feelings: Boyhood Months,” Murr tells of his being saved from drowning by Meister Abraham Liscov, of his learning to read and embarking on a literary career, and of his friendship with the poodle Ponto and his subsequent mastery of poodle language. Murr’s love affair with the cat Miesmies, which ends when she betrays him for another tomcat, forms the central episode in the second chapter, “The Life and Experiences of the Youth.” In the next chapter, Murr is saved from philistinism by his friend Muzius and becomes a “Bursche.” (Hoffmann is parodying the student organization called the “Burschenschaft,” or “brotherhood,” which tried to liberalize German society.— He successfully fights a duel with Miesmies’ seducer. The brotherhood is crushed by dogs and their human masters, who kill Muzius. The final chapter, “The Maturer Months of Manhood,” shows Murr visiting the “higher world” of canine social gatherings, a privilege granted him through his fame as a poet and through his friendship with Ponto, whose transfer from one master to another as a result of his discovery of an adulterous liaison is narrated at great length. In a final note, the “editor,” Hoffmann, informs the reader that “bitter death has snatched away the clever, educated, philosophical, poetical Kater Murr in the middle of his beautiful career,” and that the projected book 3 will contain the rest of Kreisler’s biography, together with reflections and comments from the later period of Murr’s life, when he lived with Kreisler.

A double triangle forms the basis of the Kreisler plot: Kreisler feels a conscious though idealized attraction to the musically talented Julia and an unpleasantly physical attraction—described as an electric shock when their hands touch—to Princess Hedwiga. Both women love Kreisler but are condemned to arranged marriages: Furst Irenaus engages Hedwiga to the handsome but murderous Prince Hector so that he can perhaps regain a principality to rule; the widow Benzon, in order to gain the patent of nobility, which is her sole desire, convinces Irenaus to let her daughter, Julia, marry his son Ignatius, who has the mental capacities of a seven-year-old and could hence scarcely consummate the marriage.

Prince Hector, on the other hand, who harbors the secret that he has murdered his brother in a spar over a woman (coincidentally the illegitimate daughter of Benzon and Irenaus), is powerfully attracted to Julia. Kreisler defeats Hector’s attempt at seduction by transforming their tete-a-tete into a recital in which he accompanies Julia at the piano. He finally chases Hector away by showing him a portrait of his brother, given to Kreisler by Meister Abraham for just such a purpose. Infuriated, and frightened by Kreisler’s knowledge of his fratricide, the prince sends his adjutant to kill the composer. The shot misses, and Kreisler fatally wounds the assassin, escaping afterward to the Benedictine cloister at Kanzheim, where he composes for the musical monks. The Abbot Chrysostomus, on instructions from Benzon, who has perceived her daughter’s attraction to the musician, attempts without success to convince Kreisler to enter the order. When the fanatically ascetic monk Cyprianus arrives and denounces Kreisler’s music as impious, Kreisler defends himself by showing the monk the portrait, thus indicating that he is aware of a connection between Cyprianus and Hector. Indeed Cyprianus is the murdered brother, saved by a miracle.

Though the reader cannot be certain what ending Hoffmann would have given the novel, it is clear that the scene would have returned to Sieghartshof and that the plot would have centered on foiling the planned double marriage. It seems likely that mistaken origins would be cleared up: that the dark-skinned Hedwiga would have been revealed to be of Gypsy origin, swapped as a baby for Julia, who would then be the rightful daughter of Irenaus. Kreisler, who was reared by an aunt and later an uncle and remembers nothing of mother or father, might also be of royal blood, perhaps Julia’s brother or half brother. Hoffmann would thus have been able to resolve Kreisler’s attraction to Julia while at the same time preventing a marriage which is taboo for the Romantic artist. There are also some indications that Kreisler would have entered a period of insanity.

The Characters

Kater Murr is a parody of the self-proclaimed literary genius whose every sentiment, poem, and idea reads as cliche or plagiarism. Indeed, the editor sometimes intervenes to point out passages which Murr has quoted verbatim from William Shakespeare or from Kreisler. Through such citations, however, Murr is made to appear the very paradigm of the Romantic artist: He is singularly unsuccessful at practical life, unable even to venture into the city without getting lost, and all of his love affairs—including an incestuous relationship with his own daughter—end unhappily.

Hoffmann uses the contrast between Murr and Ponto to turn the distinction between feline independence and canine servitude into an analysis of two basic human types, which he might have called “artistic” and “bourgeois.” Ponto obtains everything that he desires by self-humiliation and flattery without regard to his own freedom or to moral considerations. When his first master, tricked into believing him degenerate by a wife whom Ponto had exposed as an adulteress, starts to beat him, Ponto has no qualms about going to the wife’s lover, Baron von Wipp, or carrying the lovers’ billets-doux under his collar. Dogs are thus identified in general with the upper classes, the police, and the whole repressive social system of Hoffmann’s Germany. Murr, whatever his failings, remains free and unhypocritical and hence evokes a certain sympathy in the reader. Even the egotism which is his most striking trait reveals a frankness that other geniuses lack.

Kreisler shares with Murr an essential freedom and detestation of hypocrisy and an inability to integrate himself fully within society. As opposed to Murr, everything about him is unique and original, but it is precisely that originality—particularly the ironic brilliance of his rhetoric, always verging on nonsense—which prevents anyone besides Meister Abraham, who has been his teacher since childhood, from knowing him. Kreisler is perceived by Julia as the essence of goodness, by Hedwiga as the essence of sensuality, by Benzon as a danger, and by almost everyone else as a madman. Indeed, Kreisler’s greatest fear is of being destroyed by the madness which he senses is pursuing him. Insanity for Kreisler is embodied in the figure of the mad painter Ettlinger, whom Kreisler resembles and whom he at one point sees as literally stalking him in the famous Doppelganger motif. Similarly, Kreisler was created by Hoffman as a more bizarre version of himself: Kreisler’s inserted narration of his childhood is a thinly disguised autobiography of Hoffmann.

Most of the other characters are archetypes: Meister Abraham is the omniscient good fairy, providing the hero with magic weapons at the appropriate moments; Hedwiga, who spends most of the novel in fits and trances, represents the mysterious drives of the unconscious; Benzon is the scheming parvenu contrasting with the buffo role of Irenaus. Finally, Julia is the chaste damsel in distress whom Kreisler loves from afar. The Life and Opinions of Kater Murr then presents the reader with a remarkable variety of character types, drawn from fairy tales, from romance, from theater and opera, and from Hoffmann’s own Romantic imagination.

Critical Context

Hoffmann gained world fame through his short fiction; his efforts in the novel form, begun late in his career, have received less attention. The Life and Opinions of Kater Murr, however, besides its central if ambiguous position in the history of the Bildungsroman genre (and of its variant, the Kunstlerroman), is also a brilliant and influential representative of the possibilities of Tierdichtung (animal literature), of the relation between music and literature, and of Romantic narrative art in general.

The autobiographical figure of Kreisler, developed first in “Johannes Kreislers des Kapellmeisters musikalische Leiden” (1810; the musical sufferings of Johannes Kreisler the Kapellmeister), is one of the best and most influential representations of the Romantic hero and artist. As the quintessential individual, he stands in conflict with society, and Hoffmann used this novel as he had rarely used his novellas to satirize almost every aspect of German civilization. Each location of the novel thus centers on one of the three estates of German society and its failures: the triumph of form over feeling in the aristocratic world of Sieghartshof, the aesthetic epicureanism of the monks at Kanzheim, the hypocrisy and self-importance of the burghers and academics in Murr’s Sieghartsweiler. Finally, opposed to these there is the world of nature, home of the irrational and of artistic inspiration, appearing to Hedwiga as an absolute danger and to Kreisler as a refuge.

The Murr section manages to satirize nearly every aspect of contemporary German politics and history: the student movements that had played an important role in Germany’s struggle for independence and unification; Philistertum (middle-class stagnation); and, most prominently, practically every poetic, scientific, and moral writing of the age, from the Enlightenment to Romanticism, from the educational theories of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi to the genre of the Bildungsroman.

The Life and Opinions of Kater Murr represents an absolute negativity, an irony which ironizes even itself, the final bitter outpouring of a man who had been disappointed in love, in art, and in politics and who could already feel the paralysis which would kill him a year later. Yet remarkably, the bitterness of The Life and Opinions of Kater Murr is completely transcended by its wit, its highly suspenseful plotting, and the brilliance of its language. In short, it is the “musical” masterpiece that Hoffmann always dreamed of composing.

Bibliography

Hewett-Thayer, Harvey W. Hoffmann: Author of the Tales, 1948.

McGlathery, James M. Mysticism and Sexuality: E.T.A. Hoffmann, Part Two: Interpretations of the Tales, 1981.

Negus, Kenneth. E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Other World: The Romantic Author and His New Mythology, 1965.

Rosen, Robert S. E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “Kater Murr”: Aufbauformen und Erzahlsituationen, 1970.

Taylor, Ronald. Hoffmann, 1963.