The Devil's Elixirs

Medardus is a Capuchin monk whose besetting sin, before the novel even starts, is vanity in his own gift for eloquent preaching; when he gains access to a relic kept in his monastery, a flask reputed to be the Devil's own elixir once used to tempt Saint Anthony, curiosity and self-regard together are enough to make him drink it. What follows reads as Hoffmann's answer to the Gothic double: Medardus leaves the monastery under a false identity and is repeatedly mistaken for, and eventually pursued by, Count Victor, a man who looks exactly like him and whose crimes Medardus cannot always be sure he didn't commit himself. Hoffmann never lets the reader settle on whether Victor is a literal double, a hallucination, or evidence that Medardus has simply lost the ability to distinguish his own actions from someone else's.

The doubling is inherited rather than accidental. Medardus eventually learns his family descends from a painter, Francesco, cursed generations earlier for an obsession with painting Saint Rosalia using a model he should never have desired, and that the elixir, the monastery, and Medardus's own uncontrollable passion for Aurelie, who may be his own half-sister, are all threads of the same ancestral sin working itself back out through his body. Hoffmann's Romanticism treats identity as something that can be inherited like a disease, and madness less as an individual failure than as an old family debt finally coming due.

The novel frames Medardus's account as a manuscript discovered and edited by a fellow monk, Brother Spiridion, complete with the editor's own doubts about how much of the narrative to trust, a device Hoffmann uses to keep the reader outside the story looking in at an already-unreliable confession rather than inside Medardus's mind without mediation.

Hoffmann's doubles predate Freud's essay on the uncanny by over a century, but Freud drew on Hoffmann's fiction directly, elsewhere on 'The Sandman,' to build the concept, and Dostoevsky, an attentive reader of Hoffmann in Russian translation, wrote The Double in 1846 with Medardus's fractured, unreliable sense of his own actions clearly in the background. What Hoffmann isolates here, decades before either writer had the vocabulary for it, is the idea that a self can be haunted less by an external monster than by an alternate version of its own impulses it refuses to acknowledge as its own.