READING HEINRICH HEINE

The real Heine: Atta Troll and allegory 141
There seems little doubt that Heine has here combined the familiar image
of Jacob’s Ladder from Genesis 27, the traditional association of the seven
Pleiades with the Great Bear, and a much more obscure allusion to Hoffmann’s
tale Der goldne Topf (The Golden Pot). When its hero Anselmus first
glimpses the magic snake Serpentina with whom he falls in love, we read:
But atthat moment a trio of crystal bells seemed to peal out above his head; he
looked up and saw three little snakes, gleaming in green and gold, coiled round
the branches and stretching their heads towards the evening sun. 24
In Die Romantische Schule, Book II, (B 3, 440) Hoffmann’s coarse and
unromantic effects are used as a foil for the delicacy of Novalis; and a little
later he is compared unfavourably with Arnim as an author of ghost stories.
But neither this critical context in Heine’s work nor Heine’s reliance on
Hoffmann’s Doppelgänger motif in Buch der Lieder explains the purpose of
this casual parody.
The details are precise: the direction of the gaze, the insistence on arithmetic
exactness, the sense of colour, the musicality of the effect, and even
the doubtful diminutives are all present. Perhaps Atta Troll himself is supposed
to have read Hoffmann and to be like those who had read him in his
own time – in Heine’s description, ‘people whose nerves were too strong
or too weak to be affected by gentle harmonies’ (B 3, 440). The reader’s
successful recognition of a source text in the allusion of parody is no real
help in any attempt to interpret the poem by decoding it. In this way,
parody and its sense of the localized detail (of style, theme, or imagery)
resists the larger claims of allegorical reading. What we may be tempted to
think of as a web of allusions is more like a series of highly localized distractions.
The local is the focal, as the site of a parodic emptying of meaning
from the cited texts. It is, of course, the sentimentality of Freiligrath’s
poem that irritates Heine, but his own writing draws attention in detail
to the failures of lyrical language and of the whole discourse that goes
with it; Atta Troll can only digress through an accumulation of gratuitous
exempla.
digression
The fundamental structure in which Heine’s parody-allusions present
themselves is that of interruption and a recurrent breaking-off. The casualness
of his tone distracts from the regularity of these digressions, in a
manner which has suggested comparison with Sterne. At the centre of Atta
Troll Heine places a sequence of such apparent digressions – including