Fairy Tales.”
“Oh sure, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Rumpelstiltskin, The Frog
Prince, Hansel and Gretel . . .”
“And many more. In Norway we had Asbj0rnsen and Moe, who traveled
around the country collecting ‘folks’ own tales.’ It was like harvesting a juicy
fruit that was suddenly discovered to be both good and nourishing. And it was
urgent—the fruit had already begun to fall. Folk songs were collected; the
Norwegian language began to be studied scientifically. The old myths and
sagas from heathen times were rediscovered, and composers all over Europe
began to incorporate folk melodies into their compositions in an attempt to
bridge the gap between folk music and art music.”
“What’s art music?”
“Art music is music composed by a particular person, like Beethoven.
Folk music was not written by any particular person, it came from the people.
That’s why we don’t know exactly when the various folk melodies date from.
We distinguish in the same way between folktales and art tales.”
“So art tales are ... ?”
“They are tales written by an author, like Hans Christian Andersen. The
fairy tale genre was passionately cultivated by the Romantics. One of the
German masters of the genre was E.T.A, Hoffmann.”
“I’ve heard of The Tales of Hoffmann.”
“The fairy tale was the absolute literary ideal of the Romantics—in the
same way that the absolute art form of the Baroque period was the theater. It
gave the poet full scope to explore his own creativity.”
“He could play God to a fictional universe.”
“Precisely. And this is a good moment to sum up.”
“Go ahead.”
“The philosophers of Romanticism viewed the ‘world soul’ as an ‘ego’
which in a more or less dreamlike state created everything in the world. The
philosopher Fichte said that nature stems from a higher, unconscious imagi-
nation. Scheliing said explicitly that the world is ‘in God.’ God is aware of
some of it, he believed, but there are other aspects of nature which represent
the unknown in God. For God also has a dark side.”
“The thought is fascinating and frightening. It reminds me of Berkeley.”
“The relationship between the artist and his work was seen in exactly
the same light. The fairy tale gave the writer free rein to exploit his ‘universe-
creating imagination.’ And even the creative act was not always completely
conscious. The writer could experience that his story was being written by
some innate force. He could practically be in a hypnotic trance while he
wrote.”
“He could?”
“Yes, but then he would suddenly destroy the illusion. He would
intervene in the story and address ironic comments to the reader, so that the
reader, at least momentarily, would be reminded that it was, after all, only a
story.”
“I see.”
“At the same time the writer could remind his reader that it was he who
was manipulating the fictional universe. This form of disillusion is called
‘romantic irony.’ Henrik Ibsen, for example, lets one of the characters in Peer
Gynt say: ‘One cannot die in the middle of Act Five.’ “