Pictor's Metamorphoses (3 page)

While fantasy in the unadulterated form that it displays in “Pictor's Metamorphoses” (where we are dealing literally with an “other-world” in Tolkien's sense) occurs infrequently in Hesse's mature works, it is fair to say that the tendency toward fantasy is evident in his writing from childhood to old age. Indeed, fantasy can be called the hallmark of Hesse's major novels of the twenties and thirties, the surreal quality that disturbs critics of a more realistic persuasion: for instance, the Magic Theater in
Steppenwolf
or the fanciful scenes in
The Journey to the East,
where reality blends into myth and fantasy. Indeed, fantasy is a state of mind into which Hesse and his literary surrogates enter with remarkable ease. Toward the end of
Demian,
for instance, Emil Sinclair encounters his friend after a long separation and is introduced into the enchanted home presided over by Demian's mysterious mother. Once again, we find the familiar juxtaposition of reality and fantasy. “Outside was reality: streets and houses, people and institutions, libraries and lecture halls—but here inside was love; here lived fantasy [
das Märchen
] and the dream.” And what, after all, is the province of Castalia as depicted in Hesse's last great novel,
The Glass Bead Game,
if not a magnificent and sustained projection of a fantasy? In sum: any complete appreciation of Hesse must take into account this central tendency in his work. The most concentrated period of
Märchen
composition occurred, as noted, from 1913 to 1918, and the eight fantasies of those years were published in 1919 in a volume with the simple generic title
Märchen
(translated as
Strange News from Another Star and Other Tales
). However, the sustained obsession with fantasy in its various manifestations—folktale, literary fairy tale, dream, satire, rumination—is apparent only in a collection like the present one, which contains nineteen fantasies in chronological sequence covering a period of more than sixty years.

It would be a mistake to regard the tendency toward fantasy, in Hesse or other writers, as mere escapism. True, the classic periods of fantasy have been those ages (Napoleonic Germany, Victorian England, Weimar Germany, and America in the 1960s) when technological reality was perceived as so overwhelming that the individual began to question its values and measure them against other ideals. But fantasy, with its explicitly didactic tendency, represents not so much a flight from confrontation as, rather, a mode in which the confrontation can be enacted in a realm of esthetic detachment, where clear ethical judgments are possible. Indeed, fantasy often reveals the values of a given epoch more vividly than the so-called realisms it may bring forth. In any case, a generation that decorates its walls with the calendars of the Brothers Hildebrandt while perusing Tolkien's
Lord of the Rings,
that hastens from meetings of the C. S. Lewis Society to performances of space fantasies like
Star Wars,
has mastered the semiotics necessary to decode the hidden signs of “Pictor's Metamorphoses” and Hesse's other fantasies.

T
HEODORE
Z
IOLKOWSKI

Lulu

A YOUTHFUL ESCAPADE

In Memory of E. T. A. Hoffmann

1

T
HE LOVELY OLD TOWN
of Kirchheim had just been washed clean by a brief summer downpour. Everything looked new and fine; the red rooftops, the weather vanes and garden fences, the shrubs and chestnut trees along the embankments shimmered gaily in the sun, and the statue of Konrad Widerhold with his stony better half, agleam in the quiet light, enjoyed its robust old age. The warm sun shone through the purified air with renewed strength, turning the last raindrops that hung on the branches into blazing sparks; the inviting, broad path along the embankment was flooded with splendor. Children skipped happily along in a row, a little dog yelped exultantly at their heels; along the line of houses, a yellow butterfly traced restless curves in flight.

Under the embankment's chestnut trees, on the third bench to the right of the post office, beside his friend Ludwig Ugel, sat the itinerant aesthete Hermann Lauscher, who launched a spirited and charming discourse on the benefactions of the newly fallen rain and the reemergence of the azure of the heavens, embellishing his monologue with fanciful observations about matters which were close to his heart, tirelessly rambling, as was his wont, on the meadow of his rhetoric. During the course of the poet's long, eloquent address, the amused and silent Herr Ludwig Ugel repeatedly cast sharp glances toward the main road to Boihingen, looking out for a friend who would be coming to meet them.

“Don't you agree?” the poet cried out with gusto as he rose up slightly from the bench. Its straight back had become uncomfortable. What's more, Lauscher had been sitting on some dry twigs. “Isn't it just as I say?” he repeated, while his left hand brushed away the twigs and smoothed out the creases they had made in his trousers. “The Essence of Beauty must lie in Light! Don't you agree that that's where it is?”

Ludwig Ugel rubbed his eyes; he had not been listening to what his friend was saying and had only caught Lauscher's last question.

“Certainly, certainly,” he hastily replied. “But from here you can hardly see a thing. It's just over there, in back of the Schlotterbecks' barn!”

“What? What did you say?” Lauscher demanded vehemently. “What's in back of the barn?”

“Why, Oetlingen, of course! Karl's got to be coming from there; there isn't any other way.”

Disagreeable and silent now too, the itinerant poet fixed his eyes on the bright, broad main road. And we can leave these two young men sitting and waiting on their bench; the shade is sure to last there for another hour. In the meantime, let us turn our attention beyond the Schlotterbecks' barn. There we will find neither the village of Oetlingen nor the Essence of Beauty, but rather the awaited third friend, the student of jurisprudence Karl Hamelt, returning from Wendlingen, where he had spent his vacation.

Though not misshapen, his figure, in growing prematurely plump, had acquired a touch of the comical in its corpulence; in his shrewd and capricious face, a powerful nose and oddly plump lips were at odds with inordinately full cheeks. His broad chin fell in rich fleshy folds over his narrow stand-up collar; and his short hair, in disarray and sopping with perspiration, brazenly stuck out between his hat and his forehead. Stretched out to full length on his back in the grass, he gave every appearance of sleeping peacefully.

Tired from traveling in the midday heat, he really had fallen asleep; but his slumber was far from peaceful. A most singular and fantastic dream troubled it. He dreamed that he lay in an unfamiliar garden, under strange trees, reading an old book whose pages were of parchment. The book was written in characters that boldly and chaotically looped and tangled through one another, in a completely foreign language, one which Hamelt neither recognized nor understood. And yet he could read and understand the contents of the pages; for again and again—whenever he grew tired—out of the inextricable tangle of flourishes and script, pictures magically arose, shone in bright colors, and again sank out of sight. These pictures, flashing up one after another as in a magic lantern, portrayed the following, extremely old, true story.

*   *   *

T
HAT SAME DAY
on which the talisman of the bronze ring was stolen from the Laskian Spring by means of black magic and fell into the hands of the Prince of Dwarfs, the bright star of the House of Ask began to pale. The Laskian Spring dried up into naught but a barely visible silver thread. The earth beneath the Opal Palace began to sink; the subterranean vaults swayed and started to crack. Great devastation befell the lily garden; the double-crowned royal lily alone managed to hold itself proud and tall, but only for a little while, for the Serpent Edelzung had breathed a tight lasso of hoarfrost around its stem. In the desolate City of Ask, all gaiety and music were silenced; since the last string of the Harp Silversong had snapped, not a note of music sounded even in the Opal Palace. Day and night the King sat by himself, like a statue, in the great banquet hall; he could not cease marveling at the decline of his happiness, for he had been the happiest of all kings since Mirthful the Great. A sad sight he was to behold, King Sorrowless in his red robes, sitting in his great hall, marveling and marveling; he could not weep, he had been born without the gift of sorrow. And he marveled at still another thing: mornings and evenings, instead of the music he was accustomed to hearing played, there was only a huge silence, and from behind the door to her room, the gentle weeping of Princess Lilia. Only rarely did a brief, austere burst of laughter shake the King's broad chest, and this merely out of habit. In former times, not a blessed day had passed without his laughing twice four-and-twenty times.

His retinue and servants had scattered to the four winds; apart from the King in the hall and the sorrowing Princess Lilia, only one member of the household remained: the faithful servant Haderbart, who, besides filling the posts of court poet and court philosopher, performed the duties of court jester as well.

But now the Prince of Dwarfs shared the power of the bronze talisman with the Witch Poisonbreath, and one can imagine to what ends they used it.

The glorious days of the House of Ask were coming to an end. On the evening of a day on which the King had not laughed even once, he summoned the Princess Lilia and the faithful Haderbart into his presence in the empty banquet hall. A thunderstorm filled the sky; framed by the huge, black, vaulted windows, sudden bolts of lightning palely lit the hall.

“I haven't laughed at all today, not even once,” said King Sorrowless.

The court jester stood before the King and pulled one of his most audacious faces; but the grimace made his troubled old face look so distorted and desperate that the Princess had to avert her eyes, and the King just shook his heavy head without laughing.

“Music! Bring out the Harp Silversong!” King Sorrowless commanded. “Music, there must be music!” he said, and his cry sorrowfully resounded in the hearts of the other two; for the King did not know that the harpist and all the other musicians had left him, these two faithful companions being all that remained of his household.

“The Harp Silversong no longer has any strings,” said the faithful Haderbart.

“No matter, it must be played,” said the King.

Then Haderbart took Princess Lilia by the hand and left the hall. Through the withered lily garden he led her up to the dried out Laskian Spring, scooped up the last handful of water from its marble basin, and poured it into her right hand; then they returned into the presence of the King. From the Laskian water the Princess fashioned seven shining silver strings for the Harp Silversong; but there was not enough water for the eighth, and she had to make it with the help of her own tears. And now, her empty, trembling hand gently stroked the strings of the harp, so that once again the old, sweet, joyful sound issued and swelled blissfully. But no sooner had she plucked a string than it snapped, and when the last string sounded and broke, an enormous thunderbolt burst from the heavens, and the whole vault of the Opal Palace came crashing down. But the last Song of the Harp went as follows:

Hushed Silversong will be,

Both harp and melody,

But on its strings will sound someday

Once more this ancient roundelay.

(End of the true story of the Laskian waters.)

*   *   *

T
HE STUDENT
Karl Hamelt did not awaken from his dream before his two friends—having grown impatient—had walked down the road a bit and found him lying in the grass. They reproached him in no uncertain terms for his dawdling. Hamelt responded with silence, except for bidding them “Good morning” with a cursory nod.

This made Ugel especially indignant. “Good morning, indeed!” he flared. “It hasn't been morning for some time! Couldn't wait for us, eh? I can see you've been to the tavern in Oetlingen; the wine's still glowing in your eyes!”

Karl sneered and pulled his brown felt hat farther down over his brow. “Never mind,” said Lauscher. The three friends turned toward the town, passed the railroad station, crossed the bridge over the stream, then meandered along the embankment until they reached the King's Crown. Not only was this inn their favorite Kirchheim watering hole, it was also the temporary lodgings of the itinerant poet.

As the three friends approached the stairs that led to the inn, the heavy doors of the house suddenly flew open, and plummeting toward them at lightning speed came a highly agitated, white-haired man with a gray beard and an angry red face. In consternation, the friends recognized the old crank and philosopher Turnabout, and they barred his way at the foot of the stairs.

“Stop right there, my good Herr Turnabout!” the poet Lauscher called out to him. “How does it happen that a philosopher can lose his sense of balance like this? Just turn around, my esteemed fellow, and tell us your troubles inside, where it's cool!”

With a sidelong, acute look of distrust, the philosopher raised his shaggy head and peered at the three young men. “Oh, so it's you,” he cried. “The whole petit cénacle! You'd better hurry and go inside, my friends. Go in and drink your beer and wonder at what you'll find in there; but please don't insist on the company of this poor, broken-down old man, whose heart and brain are in the clutches of demons!”

“But, dear Herr Turnabout, whatever is the matter with you today?” Ludwig Ugel asked sympathetically. But immediately thereafter he found himself staggering from the blow of the philosopher's fist in his side, and propped himself up against the railing of the staircase. The old man ran down the street, cursing and raging.