Pictor's Metamorphoses

 

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Contents

The year of composition follows each title; in most cases, first publication in German also occurred that year

 

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Introduction by Theodore Ziolkowski

Lulu
(1900)

Hannes
(1906)

The Merman
(1907)

The Enamored Youth
(1907)

Three Lindens
(1912)

The Man of the Forests
(1914)

The Dream of the Gods
(1914)

The Painter
(1918)

Tale of the Wicker Chair
(1918)

Conversation with the Stove
(1919)

Pictor's Metamorphoses
(1922)

The Tourist City in the South
(1925)

Among the Massagetae
(1927)

King Yu
(1929)

Bird
(1932)

Nocturnal Games
(1948)

Report from Normalia
(1948)

Christmas with Two Children's Stories
(1950)

The Jackdaw
(1951)

Books by Hermann Hesse

Copyright

Introduction

I
N AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
entitled “Childhood of the Magician” (1923), Hermann Hesse confessed that it had been his overriding ambition, while he was a child, to become a magician. This ambition stemmed from a dissatisfaction with what people conventionally call reality. “Very early I felt a definite rejection of this reality, at times timorous, at times scornful, and the burning wish to change it by magic, to transform it, to heighten it.” In his childhood, the wish was directed toward external childish goals—to make apples grow in winter or to fill his purse with gold and silver. Looking back, however, Hesse came to realize that his whole subsequent life had been motivated by the desire for magic powers—though by magic he now meant the transformation of reality, the creation of a wholly new reality, in his writing.

Certainly the distrust of everyday “reality”—it is characteristic that he customarily bracketed the term with quotation marks to indicate what he regarded as its tentative, problematic nature—remained a conspicuous theme in Hesse's thought throughout his life. In 1930 he wrote to a reader: “I don't believe in our politics, our way of thinking, believing, amusing ourselves; I don't share a single one of the ideals of our age.” Ten years later he stated in another letter that “it is becoming apparent that the so-called ‘reality' of the technologists, the generals, and the bank directors is growing constantly less real, less substantial, less probable.”

At the same time, Hesse inevitably coupled his rejection of present “reality” with an assertion of his faith in a higher truth. “I am not without faith,” he continued in the letter of 1930. “I believe in laws of humanity that are thousands of years old, and I believe that they will easily outlive the turmoils of our times.” In 1940 his denial of “so-called reality” concluded with the claim that “all spiritual reality, all truth, all beauty, all longing for these things, appears today to be more essential than ever.”

This perceived dichotomy between contemporary “reality” and eternal values produces the tension that is characteristic of Hesse's entire literary oeuvre. The heroes of his best-known novels—Demian, Siddhartha, Harry Haller of
Steppenwolf,
Goldmund, H.H. in
The Journey to the East,
and Joseph Knecht, the magister ludi of
The Glass Bead Game
—are men driven by their longing for a higher reality that they have glimpsed in their dreams, their visions, their epiphanies, but tied by history and destiny to a “reality” that they cannot escape. At times, however, Hesse sought to depict that other world outright, and not simply as the vision of a figure otherwise rooted in this world.

Northrop Frye has observed that “fantasy is the normal technique for fiction writers who do not believe in the permanence or continuity of the society they belong to.” Accordingly, fantasy is the appropriate generic term for Hesse's attempts—both in his fiction and, as we shall see, in his painting—to render the world of which his fictional surrogates can only dream. In his classic essay “On Fairy-Stories” (1939), Tolkien defined fantasy as “the making or glimpsing of Other-worlds,” and many of Hesse's works display precisely the “arresting strangeness,” the “freedom from the domination of observed fact,” that Tolkien has elsewhere called the essential qualities of fantasy. But fantasy, as the tension between an unsatisfactory “reality” and an ideal reality suggests, is more than the creation of other-worlds
per se.
A more precise definition might specify that fantasy is a literary genre whose effect is an ethical insight stemming from the contemplation of an other-world governed by supernatural laws.

By far the most common form of fantasy practiced by Hesse was the fairy tale or, to use the somewhat broader German term, the
Märchen.
Symptomatically, his earliest extant prose composition was a fairy tale entitled “The Two Brothers” (included here in the piece called “Christmas with Two Children's Stories”). In this
Märchen
from the pen of the ten-year-old Hesse, a crippled child runs away from home because he is despised by his strong and handsome older brother. Arriving in the mountains, he is adopted by the dwarfs who mine diamonds there. Years later, the older brother, having lost the use of his right arm in the wars, wanders into the mountains. Meeting his brother, whom he fails to recognize, he begs a crust of bread. The younger brother leads him into the cave and offers him, instead, all the diamonds that he can dig out by himself. When the one-armed beggar is unable to extract a single jewel, his host says that he would gladly permit the man's brother to assist him. Thereupon the beggar, breaking into tears, admits that he once had a brother, small and crippled yet good-natured and kind, whom he had callously driven away. At this display of remorse, the younger brother discloses his identity, and the two brothers live happily together ever after.

When he analyzed this bit of juvenilia many years later, Hesse noted that it was based not upon his own experience—he had never wittingly seen a diamond, much less a mountain of jewels inhabited by dwarfs—but upon his reading, notably the Grimms'
Fairy Tales
and the
Arabian Nights.
These two collections, with which Hesse became acquainted as a child, remained his favorites throughout his lifetime. In 1929 he singled out the
Arabian Nights
for inclusion in his ideal “Library of World Literature,” calling it “a source of infinite pleasure.” Although all the peoples of the world have produced lovely fairy tales, he continues, “this classic magic-book suffices for our library, supplemented solely by our own German
Märchen
in the collection of the Brothers Grimm.”

Hesse was not simply stating the obvious on the basis of limited knowledge; he knew what he was talking about. In an extended career of book reviewing, he appraised many collections of fantasies from countries all over the world, including Richard Wilhelm's edition of Chinese fairy tales, a translation of Somadeva's folktales from India, a twelve-volume set of Oriental tales, Enno Littmann's anthology of Arabian
contes des fées
from Jerusalem, Leo Frobenius's edition of African folktales, and Douglas Hyde's volume of fairy tales from Ireland. He welcomed new editions of Musäus's classic anthology of German folktales as well as Andersen's fairy tales. He recommended Friedrich von der Leyen's international collection of
Märchen
along with an anthology of the world's finest fairy tales, edited by his friend Lisa Tetzner, who was well known in the twenties as an author and reciter of
Märchen.

Hesse was not merely a connoisseur of fairy tales; he also understood something about their history and theory. He knew that folktales employ a limited stock of familiar motifs that recur in constantly varying configurations, and he was aware of the Oriental sources of many European tales as well as the ancient sources of many medieval tales. Fairy tales, he wrote in 1915 (in an essay on “German Storytellers”), are documents that reaffirm “the eternally identical structure of the human soul in all peoples and all lands.” The fairy tales of the world provide us with incomparably valuable examples of “the genetic history of the soul.”

In the light of this predilection, it is hardly surprising that Hesse undertook, from time to time, to write
Märchen
of his own—works in which the techniques and motifs of the international repertoire of fairy tales are much in evidence. At first glance, this fascination seems predictable in a writer who often asserted his fondness for Oriental culture and German romanticism, two of the principal sources for the fairy tales of the world. Yet we must not take too much for granted. Why, to put it most simply, does a mature writer in the twentieth century write fairy tales?

We can start with Hesse's thoughts. When he compared his early story “The Two Brothers” with a similar tale written some sixty years later by his grandson, Hesse observed that in both cases a wish is magically fulfilled, and in both cases the narrator has constructed for his hero a role of moral glory, a “crown of virtue.” In short, both tales are characterized by elements of the supernatural (magical wish fulfillment) and by an explicit ethical dimension.

We see precisely the same pattern underlying Hesse's most entrancing fairy tale, “Pictor's Metamorphoses.” When Pictor first enters the garden of paradise, he is captivated by the continual transformations that all nature is undergoing: he sees a bird turn into a flower, the flower into a butterfly, and the butterfly into a colored crystal with magical powers. Before he has fully comprehended the laws of transformation, yet eager to become a part of that wonderful process, he seizes the magic stone and overhastily wishes to be transformed into a tree. After his metamorphosis, Pictor realizes that he is still not part of the cycle of transformation because, unlike all the other creatures in the garden, he has remained single, he is not a pair. Hence he is doomed to retain a specific form. Many years later a young girl comes into the garden, picks up the stone, and is transmuted into the tree along with Pictor. Now, in their new unity, they undergo transformation after blissful transformation. In other words, the device of double wish fulfillment is used to illustrate a moral situation: the first wish creates the plight which is subsequently resolved by the fulfillment of the second wish.

Hesse is also capable of using the elements of the
Märchen
for purposes of humor or irony. In “Tale of the Wicker Chair,” a talking chair precipitates the ethical insight: a young dilettante has been inspired by reading a biography of Van Gogh to try to paint the simple objects in his garret. When he discovers how difficult it is to paint even a wicker chair, he decides to give up painting for what he considers the easier job of writing. In a later
Märchen
it is suggested that “Bird” may be the bird from “Pictor's Metamorphoses”; but he is also an allegorical projection of Hesse himself, who was known to his third wife by the nickname
Vogel
(“bird”). At first regarded fondly as a queer eccentric by the inhabitants of Montagsdorf (Monday Village, a pun on Montagnola, the Swiss village where Hesse lived), “Bird” is eventually driven away when a price is put on his head by foreign governments and the villagers begin to shoot at him. Again we find the magical transformation—which psychoanalysis calls a theriomorphic projection—that gives rise to a heavily allegorical tale with pronounced ethical implications. Indeed, the whole tale is very lightly veiled autobiography. But here Hesse has added a further ironic twist. After Bird's disappearance, various legends begin to circulate about him. “Soon there will be no one left who can attest that Bird ever actually existed.” Future scholars will no doubt prove, Hesse suggests, that the legend is nothing but an invention of the popular imagination, constructed according to folkloristic laws of mythmaking. Here Hesse uses the form of the
Märchen
to make an ironic comment on the academic study of fairy tales, which tends through its analysis to disenchant the very object of its study, as well as the scholarly assessments of his own works, to several of which he alludes playfully in the text.