21. spoken words have greater vibrancy than written words. Andersen placed great stock in the oral, not only through the conversational tone he maintained in many of his narratives but also through his practice of reading the stories out loud to adult audiences (he always insisted on complete silence). The student-poet, although devoted to the written word, finds oral expression a more congenial mode of communication.
22. “you’ll be as good as Dickens.” Andersen had met Charles Dickens in 1847 and was ecstatic that his admiration for the writer was returned, as he reported in a letter of July 22, 1847, to Henriette Wulff: “We seized each other by the hand, gazed in each other’s eyes, laughed and were overjoyed. We knew each other so well, even though we were meeting for the first time—it was Charles Dickens. He is very much like the best image I had formed of him.” What began as a promising friendship ended in 1857 when Andersen overstayed his welcome by several weeks at Dickens’s country home in Gad’s Hill, Kent. After Andersen’s departure, Dickens pinned a note to the door of the room in which the Danish author had slept: “Hans Andersen slept in this room for five weeks—which seemed to the family ages!” Dickens is held up here by the aunt as a model of popular success.
23. “You paint when you speak.” Auntie Millie unknowingly alludes to Horace’s famous dictum in the Ars Poetica: ut pictura poesis (as is painting so is poetry), a phrase that has served as the point of departure for many treatises on the relationship between painting and writing. The lengthy description of the home in which the student lives could be seen as a poetic genre painting, enlivened by its attention to detail. Just as poets may strive to attain the power of painters to represent reality, so too painters can make an effort to endow their images with meaning and action.
24. I was the only one in the story. Thus far the student’s descriptive powers have been limited to effects rather than actions and interactions. In the next narrative, he will move from the mode of mere representation to psychological analysis and emotional depth.
25. Auntie had gone to the theater. Auntie is repeatedly associated with the arts, primarily in her ability to reminisce and shape memories, but also in her role as a supporter of the arts, encouraging her nephew to become a poet and attending theatrical events. She embodies in some ways the seductions of popular culture, representing the voices of approval that greet those who provide mindless confections for the public.
26. And it happened. The odd description of the walk home (trudging, lifting, falling softly) and of undressing, preparing beds, and locking doors adds a weirdly erotic quality to this episode. Capped by the phrase og det skete (and it happened), the events take on a confusing quality, in part because of the use of double entendre where it seems entirely out of place.
27. although not as cozy as Auntie’s parlor in the wintertime. Unlike Auntie, the poet is unable to insulate himself from the outside world and its acoustical assaults. He is not only tormented by the noises that surround his flat but also subject to invasions from icy blasts. And it is in his porous abode that Auntie Toothache can materialize.
28. a shadow on the floor began to take shape. With the onset of the toothache comes the visit from Auntie Millie’s double—it is no coincidence that she makes her appearance on the night that the real aunt is sleeping in the flat. “Madame Toothache” serves as a reminder of decay, absence, and the futility of trying to create something that is of lasting value. Her spectral shape—first as a shadow, then as a line drawing, and finally as a three-dimensional figure draped in a cloth—emerges only gradually, after the narrator has rehearsed one more time the origins of the various noises in the house. Note also that the play of shadow and light (those chiaroscuro effects) lead to her materialization.
29. Her Horrible Highness. Auntie Toothache invites comparison to other regal female figures in Andersen’s work, most notably the Snow Queen, who also appears when it is snowing, but who emerges from whiteness rather than from the interplay of light and dark. Both Auntie Toothache and the Snow Queen, like the allegorical figure of Death in “The Story of a Mother,” have a chilling effect, like the icy winds of winter.
30. And then she began to play. Auntie Toothache, despite her hostility to the student, is something of an artist, although she aims to produce pain rather than pleasure through her music. As early as 1831, on a journey to Berlin, Andersen complained bitterly about an “unbearable toothache”: “My teeth are monstrously painful. The nerves are in fact delicate tangents that imperceptible movements of air play upon, and that’s why those teeth are playing the devil with me—first piano, then crescendo, all the melodies of pain at every shift in the weather” (Diaries, 25). And from Rome he complained about an “excruciating toothache” and how his teeth played a “nervous orchestra.” The depth of his pain becomes evident in his elaborate descriptions of dental agony: “A solid Danish toothache cannot be measured against an Italian one. The pain here was focused on the tangents of the teeth, as if Liszt were playing them, sometimes in front, sometimes at the back, while my left canine sang the Diva’s part with embellishments, roulades, and crescendos. There was a unity, a power in the whole, and soon I did not feel like a person at all” (Travels, 117–18).
31. “Will you finally admit that I’m more powerful than poetry?” Auntie Toothache is the apostle of bodily pain, which, as Elaine Scarry has pointed out, shuts down language and has the power to undo the world. Scarry cites Virginia Woolf’s shrewd observation about headaches and their applicability to more severe forms of pain: “English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver or the headache. . . . The merest schoolgirl when she falls in love has Shakespeare and Keats to speak her mind for her, but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry” (Scarry 1987, 4). Auntie Toothache stands in stark opposition to the arts and disciplines that include poetry, philosophy, mathematics, and music in large part because she is completely spectral, a figment of the imagination that, like pain, cannot be described and put into words. And yet, much as pain is positioned as the obverse of creativity, it is also conflated with creativity in the student’s life (as in Andersen’s), becoming its unwilling accomplice.
32. “You dear sweet child.” Auntie Toothache repeats Auntie Millie’s words to the student, making a mockery of her tender feelings for her nephew.
33. “Die, melt away like the snow!” Andersen often captures the transitory nature of life in the melting snow and in clouds that dissipate with the wind. At the end of “The Snow Queen,” the ice is melted by Gerda’s kisses and Kai returns to the world of mortals, and in “The Snowman,” the figure of the title, predictably, melts with the arrival of spring. Inger in “The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf” is released from her torment by a ray that operates faster than the “sunbeams that melt the snowmen that boys build outdoors.”
34. It is not in verse, and it will never be published. Ironically, the student’s “poetry,” even if not in verse, ends up making it into print through Andersen’s publication of the story “Auntie Toothache.” The student remains unnamed and may not achieve “immortality,” but his story circulates, first as handwriting on sheets that become wrapping paper for groceries, then in the oral narrative that is embedded in the text, and finally in print form with Hans Christian Andersen as author.
35. Everything ends up in the trash. One critic shrewdly comments that “Auntie Toothache” challenges our expectations about endings. Citing Henry James, who declared that endings are places where there is “a distribution . . . of prizes, pensions, husbands, wives, babies, millions, appended paragraphs, and cheerful remarks,” he points out that Andersen “inverts the wealth bestowed by the end into a poverty that claims only a few scraps of paper as its legacy and turns on art itself, the very thing to which it aspires” (Kramer, 7). Of course, the fact that we, as readers, continue to take in the story of the student suggests that there is, contrary to the assertion about everything ending up in the
trash, the possibility of constant renewal and revival through art. The poet lives on, or, if not the poet, then at least the story he has written, even if some copies of it may end up in the trash.
The Flying Trunk
Den fly vende kuffert
Eventyr, fortalte for Børn, Ny Samling, 1839
A fairy tale with an embedded fable, “The Flying Trunk” offers both exotic romance and social satire. Even with a setting in Turkish lands and motifs from The Thousand and One Nights, the tale is distinctively Danish, with characteristic Andersen touches. The haughty matches that flare up and quickly extinguish were evidently meant to mock contemporary Danish critics. The section with speaking objects was originally intended to be a separate story called “The Matches,” with the pots, tinderbox, and quill pen each representing a different social acquaintance. The caged nightingale might be a reference to Andersen himself, who can also be seen as the nomadic merchant’s son, forever destined to tell tales rather than to settle down and marry a princess.
“The Flying Trunk” stages Andersen’s ambivalence about home and abroad in dramatic terms, and, for that reason, I have included it in the section of tales for adult audiences. On the one hand, the author of fairy tales seems to delight in the trivial chitchat of the domestic objects, orchestrating their conversations to reveal their shallow, narrow-minded views. Yet he also sends his hero into exotic lands and delights in grotesque caricatures of its inhabitants. Just as Chinese Emperors punch their subjects in the stomach, the Turks are presented in stereotypical terms, wearing gowns and slippers and tossing their slippers up to their ears when they witness something astonishing. In the end, the merchant’s son elects to travel around the world, settling down nowhere. A nomadic existence seems to suit him best, as he turns from the world of commerce, then magic, to storytelling.
There was once a merchant so wealthy that he could pave an entire street and maybe a little alley as well with silver coins, but he didn’t. He had other ways to use his money. When he spent a penny, he received a dollar in return. That’s the kind of merchant he was. And then he died.
His son inherited his entire fortune and lived extravagantly. He attended costume balls every night, made origami dragons out of bank notes, and skipped stones on the lake using gold coins instead. With a life like that, money can vanish quickly, and it did, until finally he was left with no more than four pennies. He had nothing to wear but a pair of slippers and an old dressing gown. His friends no longer cared about him,1 since they couldn’t go out on the town together, but one of them, who was nice, sent him an old trunk and said, “Pack up!” That was very nice of him, but he had nothing to pack, so he just sat down in the trunk.
It was an odd trunk. As soon as you pressed on the lock, the contraption would fly through the air, which is what happened to him. Swoosh, up the trunk went with him over the chimneys, high above the clouds, farther and farther away. Its bottom began creaking and he was terrified that it would fall to pieces, for he would have had quite a spill! God help us!
He arrived in the land of the Turks2 and hid the trunk in the forest under dry leaves. Then he went into town. He could do that without problems, because the Turks all walk around wearing just what he was wearing: a dressing gown and slippers. First he encountered a nanny with a little child. “Hello, Turkish nanny,” he said. “Tell me about that large castle over there near the city, with the windows set up so high.”
KAY NIELSEN
The merchant’s son arrives in Turkish lands with a burst of light and energy. The crescent, which is on the Turkish flag today, appears in each one of Nielsen’s illustrations for “The Flying Trunk.”
“The king’s daughter lives there,” she said. “Since it has been foretold that some man will make her very unhappy,3 no one is allowed to see her unless the king and queen are present!”
“Thank you,” said the merchant’s son, and he went into the forest, sat down in his trunk, flew up to the roof, and climbed in through the princess’s window.
She was lying on the sofa, fast asleep. She was so beautiful that the merchant’s son had to kiss her.4 The princess awoke and was dreadfully frightened, but he told her that he was the god of the Turks and that he had come down to her from the sky. She was quite happy about that.
The two sat next to each other, and the merchant’s son told the princess tales about her eyes. They were the loveliest dark pools, with thoughts swimming in them like mermaids. He described her forehead, which was like a snow-covered mountain with the most magnificent chambers and images. And he told her about the stork, who brings adorable babies.
He told lovely stories, and then he proposed to the princess, and she accepted right away.
“But you must come here on Saturday,” she said, “The king and queen will be here for tea5 then! They will be very proud that I am going to marry the god of the Turks, but be sure that you have a really lovely fairy tale to tell, because my parents are especially fond of fairy tales. My mother likes them to be serious and have morals, but my father likes them to be funny, so he can laugh!”
“Then I will bring a fairy tale as my bridal gift,” he said. And then they parted. The princess had given him a sword covered in gold coins that he really needed.
Off the merchant’s son flew. He bought a new dressing gown, then he settled down on a spot in the forest and made up a fairy tale. It had to be finished by Saturday, and that’s not as easy as you might think.
At last he was finished, and by then it was Saturday.
The king, the queen, and the entire court came to tea in the princess’s rooms. He was welcomed in such a charming way!
“Could you please tell us a fairy tale?” the queen asked. “One that is profound and instructive.”
“But one that will also make us laugh,”6 said the king.
“Absolutely,” he said, and began telling his own story. But we must listen carefully to it.
There was once a bundle of matches, and they were extraordinarily proud of their noble heritage. Their ancestral tree—that is to say, the large pine tree from which they were splinters—had been a great old tree in the forest. The matches were now lying on a shelf between a tinderbox and an old iron pot, and they told the two of them about their youth.
“Yes, that was the life back then,” the matches said. “We were really living in the lap of luxury! Every morning and every evening we drank diamond tea that came from the dew; we soaked up rays of sunshine all day long while the sun was out; and we heard stories from the little birds. We knew that we were rich, because the hardwood trees were only dressed up in the summer, while our family could afford to wear green in the summer and winter. When the woodcutters came, there was a huge upheaval, and our family was scattered. The main trunk became the mast of a magnificent ship that could sail around the world if it wanted to. The other branches went other places, and we now have the job of bringing light to the down-trodden masses. That is how aristocrats of our kind ended up down here in the kitchen.”
“My story is entirely different,” said the iron pot, the one right next to the matches. “Ever since I came into the world, I’ve been scoured and boiled many times! I take care of substantial things and I am, when it comes right down to it, the finest object in the house. My only joy—after dinner, that is—is lying on the shelf all clean and shiny and having a good chat with my friends. But, with the exception of the water bucket that sometimes goes down into the courtyard, all of us spend our lives indoors. Our only source of news is the market basket, but she talks in such a distressing way about the government and the people that just the other day an old ceramic pot got so upset that he fell over and broke into pieces! The market basket is surely liberal-minded, I can tell you!”
“Now you’ve talked too much,” said the tinderbox, and the steel struck the flint so it sent out sparks. “Couldn’t we just have a pleasant evening?”
“Oh yes,” said the matches. “Let’s talk about who among us is the finest!”
&nbs
p; “No, I don’t like talking about myself,” said the clay pot. “Let’s have some evening entertainment. I’ll start by telling about something that everyone has experienced. We can all relate to that kind of thing so well,7 and that’s a nice feeling: On the shore of the Baltic Sea among the Danish birches—!” “That’s a lovely start,” said all of the plates. “That is definitely going to be a story that we can enjoy.”
“Yes, that is where I spent my youth, with a quiet family; the furniture was polished, the floors were washed, and the curtains were changed every two weeks.”
“You really know how to tell an interesting story,” said the feather duster. “You can tell right away when a woman is telling a story. There’s such a clean streak in it!”
“Yes, you can feel that,” said the water bucket, who, out of delight, made a little hop and then clattered on the ground.
The pot continued telling its story, and the ending was as good as the beginning.
All of the plates clattered with joy. The feather duster took some green parsley out of the storage room and crowned the pot, knowing that this would annoy the others, and thought, “If I crown her today, she’ll crown me tomorrow.”
“Now I want to dance,” said the poker, and danced. God save us, how it could raise its single leg! The old chair cover over in the corner ripped just from watching it! “May I please be crowned?” asked the poker, and she was.
The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen (The Annotated Books) Page 46