“Well, upon my word, you are very ungrateful,” said the Student angrily; and he threw the rose into the street, where it fell into the gutter, and a cart-wheel went over it.
“Ungrateful!” said the girl. “I tell you what, you are very rude; and, after all, who are you? Only a Student. Why, I don’t believe you have even got silver buckles to your shoes as the Chamberlain’s nephew has”; and she got up from her chair and went into the house.
“What a silly thing Love is,” said the Student as he walked away. “It is not half as useful as Logic, for it does not prove anything, and it is always telling one of things that are not going to happen, and making one believe things that are not true. In fact, it is quite unpractical, and, as in this age to be practical is everything, I shall go back to Philosophy and study Metaphysics.”
So he returned to his room and pulled out a great dusty book, and began to read.
* * *
† Oscar Wilde: Complete Short Fiction, ed. Ian Small (London: Penguin Books, 1994), pp. 12–18.
1. In classical mythology, a mountain nymph who repeats the last words uttered by others.
CRITICISM
ERNST BLOCH
The Fairy Tale Moves on Its Own in Time†
Certainly good dreams can go too far. On the other hand, do not the simple fairy-tale dreams remain too far behind? Of course, the fairy-tale world, especially as a magical one, no longer belongs to the present. How can it mirror our wish-projections against a background that has long since disappeared? Or, to put it a better way: How can the fairy tale mirror our wish-projections other than in a totally obsolete way? Real kings no longer even exist. The atavistic and simultaneously feudal-transcendental world from which the fairy tale stems and to which it seems to be tied has most certainly vanished. However, the mirror of the fairy tale has not become opaque, and the manner of wish-fulfillment that peers forth from it is not entirely without a home. It all adds up to this: the fairy tale narrates a wish-fulfilment that is not bound by its own time and the apparel of its contents. In contrast to the legend, which is always tied to a particular locale, the fairy tale remains unbound. Not only does the fairy tale remain as fresh as longing and love, but the demonically evil, which is abundant in the fairy tale, is still seen at work here in the present, and the happiness of ‘once upon a time,’ which is even more abundant, still affects our visions of the future.
The young protagonist who sets out to find happiness is still around, strong as ever. And the dreamer, too, whose imagination is caught up with the girl of his dreams and with the distant secure home. One can also find the demons of old times who return in the present as economic ogres. The politics of the leading 200 families is fate. Thus, right in America, a country without feudal or transcendental tradition, Walt Disney’s fairy-tale films revive elements of the old fairy tale without making them incomprehensible to the viewers. Quite the contrary. The favourably disposed viewers think about a great deal. They think about almost everything in their lives. They, too, want to fly. They, too, want to escape the ogre. They, too, want to transcend the clouds and have a place in the sun. Naturally, the fairy-tale world of America is more of a dreamed-up social life with the kings and saints of big business life. Yet, even if it is deceiving, the connection emanates partly from the fairy tale. The dream of the little employee or even—with different contents—of the average businessman is that of the sudden, the miraculous rise from the anonymous masses to visible happiness. The lightning of gold radiates upon them in a fairy-tale-like way. The sun shines upon them from commanding heights. The name of the fairy-tale world is publicity (even if it is only for a day). The fairy-tale princess is Greta Garbo. Certainly, these are petty bourgeois wishes with very untrimmed, often adulterated fairy-tale material. However, this material has remained. And where does one ever really get out of the bourgeois style of living? Yet, there is a certain surrealistic charm in presenting old, fairy-tale materials in modern disguise (or, also, in divesting them of their apparel). It is precisely the unbound character of the fairy tale that has floated through the times that allows for such developments, such new incarnations in the present, incarnations that not only occur in the form of economic ogres or film stars.
However, if one turns from here, that is, from the old story that remains eternally new, to the really new and newest history, to the fantastic changes of technology, then it is not surprising to see even here a place for forming fairy tales, i.e., for technological-magical utopias.
Jules Verne’s Journey around the World in Eighty Days has by now become significantly shortened in reality, but The Journey to the Middle of the Earth and The Journey to the Moon and other creative narrations of a technological capacity or not-yet-capacity are still pure formations of fairy tales. What is significant about such kinds of ‘modern fairy tales’ is that it is reason itself that leads to the wish projections of the old fairy tale and serves them. Again what proves itself is a harmony with courage and cunning, as that earliest kind of enlightenment which already characterizes Hansel and Gretel: consider yourself as born free and entitled to be totally happy, dare to make use of your power of reasoning, look upon the outcome of things as friendly. These are the genuine maxims of fairy tales, and fortunately for us they appear not only in the past but in the now. Unfortunately we must equally contend with the smoke of witches and the blows of ogres habitually faced by the fairy-tale hero in the now. The fairy-tale hero is called upon to overcome our miserable situation, regretfully just in mere fairy tales. However, this takes place in such tales in which the unsubjugated often seems to be meant—tiny, colorful, yet unmistaken in aim.
* * *
† Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1988), pp. 163–66. Originally published 1930. © 1987 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, by permission of The MIT Press and Suhrkamp AG, Berlin.
ERNST BLOCH
From Better Castles in the Sky at the Country Fair and Circus, in Fairy Tales and Colportage†
Little duck, little duck,
Hansel and Gretel need some luck.
No way to go, no bridge in sight.
Take us across on your back so white.
Hansel and Gretel
Then we went back to bed. But I didn’t sleep. I lay in bed awake. I thought of help. I struggled to reach a decision. The book I had been reading was entitled The Cave of the Robbers in the Sierra Morena, or the Angel of the Oppressed. After my father had come home and had fallen asleep, I climbed out of bed, crept out of the room, and got dressed. Then I wrote a note: “I don’t want you to work yourselves to death. I’m going to Spain. I’ll get help.” I placed this note on the table, put a piece of dry bread into my pocket along with some pennies from my bowling money, went down the stairs, opened the door, took a deep breath again and sobbed, but very, very softly so that nobody could hear. Then I walked without making a sound until I reached the market place where I followed the Niedergasse out of town toward Lichtenstein and Zwickern, toward Spain, country of the noble robbers, the helpers of those in distress.
Karl May, Mein Leben und Streben
(My Life and Strivings)
If sailor tales to sailor tunes,
Storm and adventure, heat and cold,
If schooners, islands, and maroons
And buccaneers and buried Gold,
And all the old romance, retold
Exactly in the ancient way,
Can please, as me they pleased of old,
The wiser youngsters of today:
So be it, and fall on! If not,
If studious youth no longer crave,
His ancient appetites forgot,
Kingston, or Ballantyne the brave,
Or cooper of the wood and wave:
So be it, also! And may I
And all my pirates have the grave
Where these and their creations lie!
Robert Louis Steve
nson,
Treasure Island,
To the Hesitating Purchaser
It is not uncommon that random wandering, random hunting expeditions of the imagination flush out the game which methodological philosophy can use in its neatly ordered household.
Lichtenberg1
Toward dusk may be the best time to tell stories. Indifferent proximity disappears; a remote realm that appears to be better and closer approaches. Once upon a time: this means in fairy-tale manner not only the past but a more colorful or easier somewhere else. And those who have become happier there are still happy today if they are not dead. To be sure, there is suffering in fairy tales; however, it changes, and for sure, it never returns. The maltreated, gentle Cinderella goes to the little tree at her mother’s grave: little tree, shake yourself, shake yourself. A dress falls to her feet more splendid and marvelous than anything she has ever had. And the slippers are solid gold. Fairy tales always end in gold. There is enough happiness there. In particular, the little heroes and poor people are the ones who succeed here where life has become good.
The Courage of the Clever Heroes
Not all of them are so gentle that they simply wait for goodness to come. They set out to find their happiness, the clever against the brutes. Courage and cunning are their shield; intelligence, their spear. Courage alone would not help the weak very much against the mighty lords. It would not enable them to knock down towers. The cunning of intelligence is the humane side of the weak. Despite the fantastic side of the fairy tale, it is always cunning in the way it overcomes difficulties. Moreover, courage and cunning in fairy tales succeed in an entirely different way than in life, and not only that: it is, as Lenin says, always the existing revolutionary elements that tie the given strings of the story together here. While the peasantry was still bound by serfdom, the poor protagonist of the fairy tale conquered the daughter of the king. While educated Christians trembled in fear of witches and devils, the soldier of the fairy tale deceived witches and devils from beginning to end—it is only the fairy tale that highlights the “dumb devil.” The golden age is sought and mirrored, and from there one can see far into paradise.
But the fairy tale does not allow itself to be fooled by the present owners of paradise. Thus, it is a rebellious, burned child and alert. One can climb a beanstalk up into heaven and then see how angels make gold. In the fairy tale Godfather Death, the Lord God himself offers to be the godfather in a poor man’s family, but the poor man responds, “I don’t want you as a godfather because you give to the rich and let the poor starve.” Here and everywhere, in the courage, the sobriety, and hope, there is a piece of the Enlightenment that emerged long before there was such a thing as the Enlightenment. The brave little tailor in the Grimms’ fairy tale kills flies in his home and goes out into the world because he feels that his workshop is too small for his bravery. He meets a giant who takes a rock in his hand and squeezes it with such strength that water drips from it. Then he throws another rock so high into the air that one can barely see it. However, the tailor outsmarts the giant by squeezing a piece of cheese into pulp instead of a rock, and next he throws a bird so high into the air that it never returns. Finally, at the end of the fairy tale, the clever tailor overcomes all obstacles and wins the king’s daughter and half the kingdom. This is the way a tailor is made into a king in the fairy tale, a king without taboos, who has gotten rid of all the hostile maliciousness of the great people. And when the world was still full of devils, there was another fairy-tale hero, the youth who goes forth to learn what fear is. He resists fear all along the way. He sets corpses on fire so that they can warm themselves up. He bowls with ghosts in a haunted castle, captures a bearded old man, who is the head of the evil spirits, and thus wins a treasure.
The devil himself is often outsmarted in the fairy tale. A poor soldier tricks him by selling his soul under the condition that the devil fill the soldier’s shoe with gold. But the shoe has a hole, and the soldier puts it over a deep pit. Thus the devil must drag sack upon sack filled with gold until the first cry of dawn. Then he dashes away, the victim of a swindle. So, even shoes with holes in them can serve for the best in fairy tales if one knows how to make use of them. This is not to say that mere wishing and the simple fairy-tale-like means of achieving a goal are not mocked. But this mockery is enlightened, and it is not discouraging. In times of old, thus begins the fairy tale about the frog prince, when wishing still helped—the fairy tale does not presume to be a substitute for action. Nevertheless, the smart Hans of the fairy tale practices an art of not allowing himself to be intimidated. The power of the giant is painted as power with a hole in it through which the weak individual can crawl triumphantly.
* * *
Play and magic together have carte blanche in the fairy tale. Wish becomes a command. There is no difficulty in carrying it out. Neither is space or time divisive. In Andersen’s fairy tales there is a flying trunk that lands in the country of the Turks, and there are magic boots that carry a judge back into the fifteenth century. In 1001 Nights a magic horse flies and arrives in heaven, and it is right there that the most powerful force that fulfills wishes waits with folded arms: the genie of the lamp. It is most significant that the richest of all fairy tales, Aladdin and the Magic Lamp, is based upon nothing but utensils for wishing for what is not available. Smoke-works are ignited. The deceitful uncle murmurs mysterious words, and suddenly the cave opens up. There are hidden treasures which are piled up in the name of Aladdin. An underground garden appears, and the trees are covered with jewels instead of fruit. The slave of the ring and the genie of the lamp step forward—both representative of hallucinated primordial wishes for power, for power that is not limited to certain goods as in the fairy tale The Magic Table. Rather, the genie of the lamp brings his master everything, anything his heart desires. The genie of the lamp provides countless treasures, physical beauty, and courtly art on command, elegant speech as well as elegant wit. He builds a castle overnight, the most glorious the world has ever seen, with treasure chambers, royal stables, and an armory. The stones are made out of jasper and alabaster, the windows out of jewels. It is an easy command to carry out. And in the very next moment the lamp transports the palace from China to Tunis, then back to its old place without the carpet at the entrance to the castle, even moving at the behest of the wind. Also, the magic slate that provides the deceitful uncle with knowledge about everything that happens in the world cannot be overlooked: “But now, on a day to remember, he conceived a sand table, and he spread the figures around and studied the sequence of their movements attentively. And in the very next moment he determined the sequence of their movements, the mothers as well as the daughters.”—It is the same geometrical table whose power enabled the magician in Tunis to learn about the faraway treasure in China that Aladdin obtained. Nothing but countless ways to fulfill wishes, nothing but via regia to attain in the fairy tale as quickly as possible what nature itself outside the fairy tale refuses to grant human beings. In general, the technological-magical digging for treasures is the fairy-tale component itself in this type of fairy tale, for the discovered treasure symbolizes above everything the miracle of the quick change, of sudden luck. Astuteness and smoke-work are necessary in the Aladdin fairy tale. Astuteness alone is sufficient in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Gold Bug, a secularized fairy tale about treasure hunters, and also in Stevenson’s Treasure Island. But it is still the treasure in these semi-fairy tales (which turn into adventure stories) that makes for tension and provides the turn of events. It is the very touchstone, which unlocks life and allows its splendors to be acquired. In this way the technological-magical fairy tale sets possessions as its goal only indirectly and out of need. It sets the transformation of things that are the available utility goods at any time as its goal. Instead of painting the short covers, which one has to stretch for, it portrays an old bed of nature. It intends—in order to designate the home territory of all the magic tables and also of the magic again with one fairy t
ale—it means to be the land of milk and honey. With milk and honey in it, it sounds moreover as if one were already hearing a social fairy tale, as if one were already hearing a state fairy tale, simpler in the goods it provides, but even more nourishing than the others.
* * *
The Wild Fairy Tale as Colportage2
Even in the fairy tale things do not proceed gently from the beginning. There are giants and witches in it. They block the way. They make the protagonists spin the whole night through. They lead people astray. In contrast to the much too gentle or precipitous blue sky, there is a kind of fairy tale that is very rarely considered as such. It is a wild kind of turbulent fairy tale. It is very rarely recognized not because it degenerates easily into trash, but because the ruling class does not like tattooed Hansels and Gretels. In other words, the turbulent fairy tale is the adventure story. The best way that it continues to maintain its existence today is as colportage. Its face bears the expression of a neglected crude creature, and this is the way it often appears. Nevertheless, colportage consistently reveals traits of the fairy tale, for its hero does not wait as in the magazine stories, until happiness falls into his lap. Nor does he bend down and pick it up as though it were some bundle thrown at his feet. Rather, its hero remains related to the poor swineherd of the folk tale, the daring protagonist, who sets corpses on fire and slaps the devil over the head. The hero of colportage shows a kind of courage, often like that of its readers, that have nothing to lose. And an affirmed piece of do-nothingness emanates from the runaway protagonist who does not end up dead. When he returns, he has the aroma of palms, knives, and swarming Asian cities around him. The dream of colportage is: never again to be trapped by the routine of daily life. And at the end there is: happiness, love, victory. The splendor toward which the adventure story heads is not won through a rich marriage and the like as in the magazine story but rather through an active journey to the Orient of the dream. * * *
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