Pictor's Metamorphoses (2 page)

In every case, then, from the fairy tale of the ten-year-old Hesse to the ironic fable of the sixty-year-old, the narratives that Hesse specifically labeled as
Märchen
display two characteristics that distinguish them from his other prose narratives. There is an element of magic that is taken for granted: wish fulfillment, metamorphosis, animation of natural objects, and the like. And this magic incident produces in the hero a new dimension of ethical awareness: the necessity of love in life, the inappropriateness of ambition, and so forth. To be sure, wonders and miracles occur in other forms of fantasy employed by Hesse: but elsewhere the miracle is regarded as an interruption or suspension of normal laws. In the legends, for instance, the miracle represents an intervention by some higher power (e.g., “The Merman” or “Three Lindens”) that underscores the special nature of the occurrence. The figures in the fairy tales, in contrast, accept the wonders as self-evident: they do not represent any intrusion of the supernatural into the rational world, because the entire world of the
Märchen
operates according to supernatural laws. Little Red Riding Hood takes it for granted that the wolf can talk; the wicked stepmother in “Snow White” consults her magic mirror just as routinely as a modern woman might switch on her television set; and the tailor's son is not astonished at a table that sets itself with a feast when the proper formula is uttered. Hesse's
Märchen
share this quality of self-evident magic. Pictor does not question the powers of the magic stone; the aspiring young artist is not astonished when the wicker chair talks back to him.

However, a world in which magic is taken for granted does not in itself suffice to make a fairy tale: it must also be a world with an explicit ethical dimension. Oversimplified interpretations have argued that the world of fantasy is one in which things happen in accord with the expectations of naïve notions of good and evil, right and wrong. More sophisticated theorists offer a different explanation: the fairy tale begins with a situation of ethical disorder and finally, after resolving the conflicts, reestablishes a new order. Still others regard the
Märchen
as the poetic expression of man's confidence that we live in a meaningful world. All the theorists agree that the supernatural events do not occur simply for the delectation of the reader or listener; rather, the fairy tale reminds us through its magic that despite all appearances to the contrary there is meaning and order in the world. As Bruno Bettelheim points out in
The Uses of Enchantment,
“the child can find meaning through fairy tales,” which offer an experience in moral education through which he brings order into the turmoil of his feelings. This is precisely the message of Hesse's
Märchen:
the characters are brought to an awareness of some principle of meaning that they had previously misunderstood. Indeed, the ethical dimension is pronounced in all fantasies, whether or not they display the explicitly supernatural element that characterizes fairy tales.

The impulse toward fantasy remained powerful in Hesse's temperament throughout his life. The fairy tale of “The Two Brothers” was written in 1887, when he was ten years old; “The Jackdaw” was a product of his seventies. Between those two extremes, the various forms of fantasy that Hesse employed reflect accurately the stages of his development as a writer. “The Two Brothers,” as Hesse recognized, was patterned closely after the so-called
Volksmärchen,
or popular fairy tales, that he knew as a child from the collection of the Brothers Grimm. His later fantasies are more profoundly indebted to the so-called
Kunstmärchen,
or literary fantasy, that has constituted one of the major genres of German literature for the past two centuries. In 1900, when he was finding his way as a writer and experimenting with the various forms offered by the German romantic tradition, Hesse was inspired principally by E. T. A. Hoffmann, whom he regarded as the “Romantic storyteller of the greatest virtuosity.” “Lulu,” an autonomous section of the early novel entitled
The Posthumous Writings and Poems of Hermann Lauscher
(1901), is based explicitly and in specific detail on Hoffmann's classic fantasy
The Golden Flower Pot
(1813). The tale was inspired by a holiday trip that Hesse made in August of 1899 with a group of friends from Tübingen who called themselves (as in the story) the petit
cénacle
and whose names and sobriquets are playfully modified in the text. By means of the Hoffmannesque device of an encapsulated myth, Hesse succeeds in narrating the story of their collective infatuation with the innkeeper's niece (named in reality Julie Hellmann) in such a manner that it occurs on two levels: a “realistic” one as well as a fantastic or higher one. Through his skillful and ironic imitation of the romantic conventions Hesse paid his greatest tribute to Hoffmann.

Soon Hesse rejected the neoromanticism of his youth and turned to a less fanciful type of narrative after the fashion of the great nineteenth-century realists. To be sure, the impulse toward fantasy was not simply to be denied. In “Hannes,” Hesse offered a realistic depiction of a contemporary who—because his consciousness has not yet undergone the characteristically modern dissociation and who therefore still enjoys a
Märchen
mentality that enables him to see God in the thunderclouds and to encounter Jesus on remote rural paths—is regarded by his neighbors as a simpleton. In general, however, having to find other outlets for his fantasy, Hesse chose a form consistent with his current realism—the legend, a genre in which the supernatural was not entirely implausible because it could be attributed to the mythic consciousness that existed in remote times and places (patristic Gaza in “The Enamored Youth,” Renaissance Italy in “The Merman,” seventeenth-century Berlin in “Three Lindens,” and prehistoric jungles in “The Man of the Forests”). As we noted, however, the supernatural occurrences in the legends are regarded as an interruption of normal “reality” and not, as in the fairy tales, as self-evident. But Hesse soon found other ways of dealing with fantasy.

Dreams always played a lively role in Hesse's psychic life, as he tells us in the late essay “Nocturnal Games.” The ominous precognitive dream of war related in “The Dream of the Gods” (1914) is significant because it signaled the unleashing of the powers of fantasy that Hesse had sought for more than a decade to suppress. During World War I, a variety of pressures—the death of his father, the deteriorating mental health of his first wife, the responsibilities for his three young sons, the burdens of his war-relief work in Switzerland—produced in Hesse an emotional crisis so severe that, in 1916 and 1917, he sought help in psychoanalysis. It was Jungian analysis, with its emphasis on dreams and their interpretation, that enabled Hesse to recover the childlike contact with the world of fantasy that he had attempted so long to repress. Hesse recognized what he owed to the insights of depth psychology. In a review of Oskar A. Schmitz's
Fairy Tales from the Unconscious
(
Märchen aus dem Unbewuβten,
1933), Hesse observed: “Finally, with the aid of a psychoanalytical method, he overcame the inhibitions that cut him off from his own fantasy and wrote these very readable fairy tales.” Hesse is speaking from personal experience because several of the fairy tales that he wrote during the war are barely disguised metaphors for the recovery of the past through psychoanalysis: notably, “Iris” and “The Hard Passage.” And in many of his fictional works—e.g.,
Demian
and
Steppenwolf
—dreams function as an outlet for fantasy.

Hesse was fully aware of the significance of the wartime
Märchen
and dreams in his personal development. In August of 1919 he wrote his publisher that
Demian
along with the
Märchen
that he composed from 1913 to 1918 were “tentative efforts toward a liberation, which I now regard as virtually complete.” By means of the fairy tale, he had succeeded in reestablishing the link with the unconscious that had been ruptured. Yet the fairy tale as a genre was only a passing phase in his literary career. In another letter of August 1919, he wrote to a friend that “the
Märchen
were for me the transition to a new and different kind of writing; I no longer even like them.” This wholesale rejection of his
Märchen
was a bit premature; some of his most charming efforts in the genre were still to come. However, the tone begins to change from the high seriousness of the wartime fables to the irony of “The Painter” and “Tale of the Wicker Chair,” which anticipate Hesse's movement toward social satire in the twenties.

It is no accident that these two fantasies deal with painters, for toward the end of the war years Hesse had discovered in painting a new avocation. For a time, indeed, he toyed with the notion of attempting an entirely new career as an artist rather than a writer. Although this shift did not come about, Hesse continued to paint until the end of his life. (Indeed, his accomplishments as a painter have only recently come to be more widely appreciated, thanks to major exhibits of his work since the centenary of his birth in 1977). For many years, moreover, he earned money for special purposes—during World War I for his war-relief work, and then during the thirties for the relief of refugees from Nazi Germany—by producing holograph editions of his poems on commission: characteristically, a handwritten copy of a poem, or group of poems, accompanied by original watercolor illustrations. “Pictor's Metamorphoses” (
pictor
is the Latin word for “painter”) celebrates and exemplifies this activity.

Following the separation from his first wife in 1919, Hesse moved to southern Switzerland, where he at first lived a relatively isolated life. Coming to realize eventually that this solitude was neither natural to him nor productive, the mid-fortyish writer courted and, in 1924, was briefly married to a much younger woman, the singer Ruth Wenger. “Pictor's Metamorphoses” amounts to an allegorical account, in fantasy form, of that love affair. The painter, entering the paradise of Ticino (as depicted in the accompanying aquarelles), first lives alone as a tree and then, recognizing his mistake, reenters the natural cycle of transformations by attaching himself to a beautiful young woman. It is significant that, apart from a limited edition in 1925, Hesse did not allow this work to be published until a facsimile edition of an early version was brought out in 1954. Here the text is so closely tied to the watercolor illustrations—indeed, the text emerges from them, as Hesse wrote to Romain Rolland when he sent a presentation copy—that the full meaning is apparent only when word and image are taken together. For three decades Hesse took enormous satisfaction from preparing new holographs of this fairy tale, in which the impulse toward fantasy is as pronounced in the illustrations as in the story itself. (The illustrations reproduced in this volume are those that Hesse did for a copy he presented in 1923 to Ruth Wenger.)

Hesse was by no means the only writer of his generation to be attracted to the genre of fairy tale or fantasy. Indeed, no period since German romanticism produced as many fairy tales as the years around World War I. This fact was noted by early reviewers of Hesse's first published volume of
Märchen
(1919). One reviewer, observing that so many new editions of old fairy-tale collections had appeared since the turn of the century and that so many writers had tried their hand at the form, concluded that “in certain epochs a particular preference for
Märchen
makes itself felt, not only on the part of the creators, but also on the part of the recipients. For, in the life of the spirit, supply and demand often reflect each other.” The benefit of hindsight has prompted literary scholars to inquire if perhaps a hidden affinity exists between the forms and contextual potentialities of the fairy tale and the ideas and goals of German expressionism. For virtually every major writer associated with expressionism experimented with the genre, including Hugo Ball, Ernst Barlach, Bertolt Brecht, Alfred Döblin, and Kurt Schwitters.

While a fascination with the unconscious world of dreams is conspicuous in expressionism, students of the period have emphasized in particular the socio-critical purposes to which the fairy tale was often devoted. The next group of Hesse's fantasies is certainly consistent with that generational tendency (notably, “The Tourist City in the South,” “Among the Massagetae,” “King Yu,” and “Bird”). The techniques of the fantasy—reification of abstract concepts within the framework of a simplified moral system—lend themselves to the exposure of existing social and cultural ills. Hesse shared the expressionist sense that the old social order was collapsing and that a new humanity was going to emerge from that chaos. So Hesse's use of the
Märchen
reflected the literary trends of the times, a fact of literary history that should be kept in mind if we hope to evaluate these works properly.

Hesse's late stories, while they bring no new variations in form, nevertheless display his continuing experimentation with the forms of fantasy. Indeed, the narrative is often encapsulated within a speculative framework in which the writer reflects on the nature of fantasy. “Nocturnal Games” embeds the account of several dreams in a rumination on the meaning of dreams in Hesse's life. “Report from Normalia,” the fragment of an unfinished novel that might well have grown into a satirical counterpart to the utopian vision of
The Glass Bead Game,
depicts a Central European country “in the north of Aquitaine.” “Normalia,” we are told, emerged by expansion from the parklike grounds of a onetime insane asylum to become the most rational nation in Europe. But Hesse, making use of a fictional device that has recently appealed to writers of the absurd, casts doubt on all our assumptions concerning “normality.” The narrator, it turns out, is ultimately unsure whether the former madhouse he inhabits has indeed become the seat of sanity in a mad world or whether it is not in fact still a madhouse. In “Christmas with Two Children's Stories” the two fairy tales—Hesse's own and the tale written by his grandson—generate a theoretical digression on the function and nature of fantasy. And in “The Jackdaw”—another example of Hesse's recurrent identification with birds—Hesse shares with us the manner in which his imagination plays with reality to generate stories about an unusually tame bird that he encounters at the spa in Baden. “And yet our imagination is not always satisfied with the most plausible explanation, it also likes to play with the remote and the sensational, and so I have conceived of two further possibilities beyond the probable one.”