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No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher. Printed and bound in the United States of America. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for. Hans Christian Andersen / [edited and with an introduction by] Harold Bloom. p. cm. — (Bloom’s modern critical views) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7910-8129-X (alk. paper) 1. Andersen, H. C. (Hans Christian), 1805-1875—Criticism and interpretation. I. Bloom, Harold. II. Modern critical views. PT8120.H26 2004 839.8’136—dc22 2004015306 Contributing Editor: Janyce Marson Cover designed by Keith Trego Cover photo: © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS Layout by EJB Publishing Services All links and web addresses were checked and verified to be correct at the time of publication. Because of the dynamic nature of the web, some addresses and links may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. Every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyrighted material and secure copyright permission. Articles appearing in this volume generally appear much as they did in their original publication with little to no editorial changes. Those interested in locating the original source will find bibliographic information in the bibliography and acknowledgments sections of this volume. Contents Editor’s Note vii Introduction ix Harold Bloom Introduction to Hans Christian Anderson 1 Elias Bredsdorff The Fairy Tale of Andersen’s Life 7 Wolfgang Lederer Andersen’s Literary Work 27 Wolfgang Lederer Andersen’s Heroes and Heroines: Relinquishing the Reward 33 Celia Catlett Anderson Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales and Stories: Secrets, Swans and Shadows 39 Jon Cech Nemesis of Mimesis: The Problem of Representation in H.C. Andersen’s Psychen 51 Karin Sanders Hans Christian Andersen—The Journey of His Life 75 Hans Christian Andersen vi Contents War Alison Prince 93 Hans Christian Andersen and the European Literary Tradition 115 Niels Kofoed Heroes in Hans Christian Andersen’s Writings 175 Aage Jørgensen Kiss of the Muse: 1860–1865 189 Jackie Wullschlager Counteracting the Fall: “Sneedronningen” and “Iisjomfruen”: The Problem of Adult Sexuality in Fairytale and Story 215 Jørgen Dines Johansen Chronology 227 Contributors 233 Bibliography 237 Acknowledgments 241 Index 243 Editor’s Note My Introduction seeks to define what it is in Hans Christian Andersen’s strongest stories that has achieved permanence for them, with particular emphasis upon aspects of “The Little Mermaid”, “The Wild Swans”, “The Snow Queen”, “The Red Shoes”, “The Shadow” and “Auntie Toothache”. Elias Bredsdorff dwells on Andersen’s universalism, while Wolfgang Lerderer considers both the writer in the work and the work in the writer. Andersen’s protagonists are seen by Celia Catlett Anderson as blending folklore and Christian spirituality, after which Jon Cech examines the storyteller’s dark humors and personal vulnerability. Sexual ambiguity, pervasive in the stories, is related by Karin Sanders to problems of representation in Andersen, who then appears as self- dramatist in an essay written by a namesake. Denmark is the storyteller’s context is studied by Alison Prince, a prelude here to this volume’s most substantial essay, Niels Kofoed’s placement of Andersen in European literary tradition. Aage Jørgensen reads Andersen as a dialectic of recognition purchased at the high cost of emotional waning, while the biographer Jackie Wullschlager finds something of the same pattern in the writer’s homoerotic romances, and Jørgen Dines Johansen analyzes the evasions of adult sexuality so characteristic of Andersen’s art. vii HAROLD BLOOM Introduction Andersen’s prime precursors were Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott, and his best work can be thought of as an amalgam of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the almost as magnificent “Wandering Willie’s Tale” from Scott’s Redgauntlet, with a certain admixture of Goethe and of the “Universal Romanticism” of Novalis and E.T.A. Hoffman. Goethean “renunciation” was central to Andersen’s art, which truly worships only one god, who can be called Fate. Though Andersen was a grand original in his fairy tales, he eagerly accepted from folklore its stoic acceptance of fate. Nietzsche argued that, for the sake of life, origin and aim had to be kept apart. In Andersen, there was no desire to separate origin and aim. It cost his life much fulfillment: he never had a home of his own or a lasting love, but he achieved an extraordinary literary art. Like Walt Whitman’s, Andersen’s authentic sexual orientation was homoerotic. Pragmatically, both great writers were autoerotic, though Andersen’s longings for women were more poignant than Whitman’s largely literary gestures towards heterosexuality. But Whitman was a poet-prophet, who offered salvation, hardly Christian. Andersen professed a rather sentimental devotion to the Christ child, but his art is pagan in nature. His Danish contemporary, Kierkegaard, shrewdly sensed this early on. From the perspective of the twenty-first century, Andersen and Kierkegaard strangely divide between them the aesthetic eminence of Danish literature. In this ix x Harold Bloom introduction to a volume of Andersen-criticism, I want to define precisely the qualities of Andersen’s stories that go on making them imperishable, as we approach the bicentennial of his birth in 2005. Kierkegaard himself rightly analyzed his own project as the illumination of how impossible it is to become a Christian in an ostensibly Christian society. Andersen covertly had a rather different project: how to remain a child in an ostensibly adult world. I myself see no distinction between children’s literature and good or great writing for extremely intelligent children of all ages. J.K. Rowling and Stephen King are equally bad writers, appropriate titans of our new Dark Age of the Screens: computer, motion pictures, television. One goes on urging children of all ages to read and reread Andersen and Dickens, Lewis Carroll and James Joyce, rather than Rowling and King. Sometimes when I say that in public I am asked afterwards: it is not better to read Rowling and King, and then go on to Andersen, Dickens, Carroll and Joyce? The answer is pragmatic: our time here is limited. You necessarily read and reread at the expense of other books. If we lived for several centuries, there might be world enough and time, but the reality principle forces us to choose. I have just read through the twenty-two Stories of Hans Christian Andersen, a new translation from the Danish by Diana Crone Frank and Jeffrey Frank. Andersen called his memoir, The Fairy Tale of My Life, and it makes clear how painful was his emergence from the working class of Denmark in the early nineteenth century. The driving purpose of his career was to win fame and honor while not forgetting how hard the way up had been. His memories of being read to by his father from The Arabian Nights seem stronger than those of the actual circumstances of his up-bringing. Absorbing the biographies of Andersen is a curious process: when I stand back from what I have learned I have the impression of a remarkable directness in the teenage Andersen, who marched into Copenhagen and collapsed himself upon the kindness of strangers.