Pictor's Metamorphoses Read Free Page B

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.”
    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