The Black Spider

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The Black Spider
first published in 1842

This translation first published by John Calder (Publishers) Ltd in 1958
Reprinted by John Calder (Publishers) Ltd in 1980
First published in the USA in 1980 by Riverrun Press Inc.
This edition first published by Oneworld Classics Limited in 2009
Translation © John Calder (Publishers) Limited, 1958, 1980

Front cover image © Getty Images

Printed in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe

ISBN: 978-1-84749-108-4

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Introduction

Chronology

The Black Spider

J
EREMIAS GOTTHELF was the pseudonym by which the Swiss pastor Albert Bitzius, who died in 1854, was known as a writer of prose fiction. When his first novel
Der Bauernspiegel (
The Peasants’ Mirror)
appeared, he was thirty-nine years old, a married man with three children, and Protestant minister in the quiet village of Lützelflüh, some twenty miles to the east of Berne. His was, or appeared to be, essentially a practical temperament. He was indifferent to theoretical theology, and saw religion as something to be experienced and to be lived. Keenly interested in education, social welfare and politics, settled and happy in his family life, with a first-hand intimate knowledge of the farming community in which he worked, it might seem strange that he should turn to novel-writing and, after the publication of his first novel, pour out during the next sixteen years a varied succession of imaginative writings with a power and fluency that only ceased with his death. A man of immense vitality, he continued to be pastor of his large and scattered parish as well as to be an educationist and freelance journalist during these years, when he wrote his twelve long novels and some forty shorter tales, and in addition one extensive novel fragment, some essays and briefer works. In a letter of December 1838, Gotthelf describes the breakthrough of his creative writing in the following terms:

Thus I was hemmed in and kept down on all sides, I could express myself nowhere in free action. I couldn’t even tire myself out riding, and if I had been able to go riding every other day, I should never have written. You must realize now that a wild life was moving within me of which no one suspected the existence, and if a few expressions forced their way out of my mouth, they were taken as mere insolent words. This life had either to consume itself or to break forth in some way or other. It did so in writing. And people naturally don’t realize that it is indeed a regular breaking-out of a long pent-up force, like the bursting-forth of a mountain lake. Such a lake bursts out in wild floods until it finds its own path, and sweeps mud and rocks along in its wild flight. Then it gets cleaner, and may become quite a pretty little stream. My writing too has broken its own path in the same way, a wild hitting-out in all directions where I have been constricted, in order to make space for myself. How I came to writing was on the one hand an instinctive compulsion, on the other hand I really had to write like that if I wanted to make any impression on the people.

When first published in 1842,
Die schwarze Spinne (The
Black Spider)
aroused relatively little interest; the novel
Uli
der Knecht (Uli the Farmhand),
which had appeared a year earlier, with its realism, humour and contemporary setting, was the work by which Gotthelf was first to become at all generally known outside Switzerland. It was not until the twentieth century that
The Black Spider
became the most widely read of its author’s works. In 1949, Thomas Mann wrote that there was scarcely a work in world literature that he admired more than
The Black Spider
, and its position as one of the outstanding examples of narrative fiction in the German language is now generally recognized. Perhaps the psychological theories of Freud and Jung and the nightmare fantasies of Kafka had to be absorbed before the European imagination was ready for Gotthelf’s
The Black Spider.

The story opens idyllically, a conscious idealization of the peasant-farming way of life. The christening celebration in a farmer’s family would be a homely scene of a type in which Gotthelf must frequently have taken part. Indeed the farm itself was about ten miles from Gotthelf’s house and church at Lützelflüh, and the present Hornbachhof near Wasen is built on the site of the farm which he knew. The little valley of the river Grüne, with its darker patches of forest mingled with the brighter colours of the cultivated land and the scattered red-roofed farmsteads, presents a friendly, peaceful atmosphere now, as no doubt in Gotthelf’s day. It is not an Alpine landscape; to the north can be seen the blue line of the Jura, and from vantage points in the district the peaks of the Bernese Oberland are on a clear day distantly visible to the south. But the valley itself is enclosed by green hills rather than high, rocky mountains. The localities named in the tale are not fictitious. The Bärhegenhubel is a hilltop some 770 feet above the valley. It is about three miles to the east of Sumiswald, with its “Bear” Inn and round table, and its nearby Kilchstalden, or “church slope”; the tree-clad Münneberg rises a little further beyond to the west of the village.

The humour and everyday realism of the framing narrative are more typical of Gotthelf’s writing generally than is the legend of the black spider which forms the central interest of the tale. At one time Gotthelf planned to write a connected cycle of legendary-historical stories which should form a sequence of pictures from the Bernese past. This plan was never carried out, but a number of individual tales on these themes were written, of which
The Black Spider
is the best. This is a plague legend, and it is known that the valley was ravaged by plague in 1434. The spider theme is linked with motifs from ancient myth – the cheating of the Devil, human sacrifice, the imprisonment of the demon within a beam of wood, and others – which stretch back from legendary material of Bernese origin to remote manifestations. Hans von Stoffeln, the tyrannical knight whose harshness drives his shifty and hapless peasants into the fateful pact that precipitates the plague, was master of Sumiswald from 1512 to 1527; the historical figure, however, was known as a generous ruler, and he is in fact commemorated in one of the windows of Sumiswald Church. The Teutonic Order to which he belonged was in control of this district from 1285 to 1698, when the Sumiswald area passed into the charge of the canton of Berne. At the time of the first and more important of the two legendary narratives which are related at the christening celebration, the Order was an important military and colonizing organization, though by the seventeenth century, when the second visitation of the spider takes place, it was without authority in these lands and on the verge of disintegration. Two narratives of a historical-legendary character are thus enclosed within the framework of the Ascension Sunday christening celebration, and the unifying theme of the whole work is the baptism of children. In the legends the onslaught of the plague is described with a combination of realism and fantasy that brings myth into daily life as the battle between good and evil. Throughout the tale we are conscious of the presentation of the divine and the diabolic as co-existent with the material and human world.

Gotthelf was essentially a spontaneous and original writer, owing little to literary traditions or fashions. Echoes of the Bible are more easily discernible than any other reading influences. He wrote in a German style that was unmistakably his, colloquial, racy and shot through with local Swiss idioms, and yet at the same time massive and rocklike, capable of visionary sweep and power. The writing in
The Black Spider
often gives a sense of being written in a fury of impetuosity which is careless of conventional grammar and syntax; Gotthelf is, as it were, creating his own language and style as well as his own characters and action.

The version that follows is based on my edition of the German text, which was revised from the original manuscript now in the archives of the Stadt- und Hochschulbibliothek in Berne. For further information about this story the reader is referred to this edition (Jeremias Gotthelf,
Die schwarze
Spinne
, Oxford: Blackwell, 1956) and for a fuller account of Gotthelf’s life and works to my study
Jeremias Gotthelf:
An Introduction to the Swiss Novelist
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1953).

– H.M. Waidson

T
HE SUN ROSE OVER THE HILLS, shone with clear majesty down into a friendly, narrow valley and awakened to joyful consciousness the beings who are created to enjoy the sunlight of their life. From the sun-gilt forest’s edge the thrush burst forth in her morning song, while between sparkling flowers in dew-laden grass the yearning quail could be heard joining in with its love-song; above dark pine tops eager crows were performing their nuptial dance or cawing delicate cradle songs over the thorny beds of their fledgeless young.

In the middle of the sun-drenched hillside nature had placed a fertile, sheltered, level piece of ground; here stood a fine house, stately and shining, surrounded by a splendid orchard, where a few tall apple trees were still displaying their finery of late blossom; the luxuriant grass, which was watered by the fountain near the house, was in part still standing, though some of it had already found its way to the fodder store. About the house there lay a Sunday brightness which was not of the type that can be produced on a Saturday evening in the half-light with a few sweeps of the broom, but which rather testified to a valuable heritage of traditional cleanliness which has to be cherished daily, like a family’s reputation, tarnished as this may become in one single hour by marks that remain, like bloodstains, indelible from generation to generation, making a mockery of all attempts to whitewash them.

Not for nothing did the earth built by God’s hand and the house built by man’s hand gleam in purest adornment; today, a festal holiday, a star in the blue sky shone forth upon them both. It was the day on which the Son had returned to the Father to bear witness that the heavenly ladder is still standing, where angels go up and down, and the soul of man too, when it wrenches itself from the body – that is, if its salvation and purpose have been with the Father above and not here below on earth – it was the day on which the whole plant world grows closer towards heaven, blooming in luxuriant plenty as an annually recurring symbol to man of his own destiny. Over the hills came a wonderful sound; no one knew where it came from, it sounded as if from all sides; it came from the churches in the far valleys beyond; from there the bells were bringing the message that God’s temples are open to all whose hearts are open to the voice of their God.