Hans Christian Andersen and the Image
By : Mogens Davidsen
The intimate knowledge and confidence, many of us have with Hans Christian
Andersen's fairy tales, is to a large extent due to the pictures that an
infinite number of illustrators have attached to the texts. This
circumstance, the attraction towards actual visualization for those who have
the skills, emphazises the fact that Andersen first and for all was a man of
the eye, with a formidable ability to generate images through words. Already in the book Skyggebilleder
from 1831, which describes the poet's meeting with Germany, Andersen cultivates
a pittoresque style:
From a site in the garden, that streched towards a part of the Ocker river,
one would find one of the most friendly landscapes imaginable. It was a bleach-pond,
a large meadow, yellow of flowers; somewhat distant were archaic spots between
beaches and tall poplars, and in the horizon rose Harzen with Brocken heaving
as a grey thunder-cloud between the rest of the sunlit cloud mountains, -
it was a complete painting! In the mountains, one only has foreground without
background, and in the plains the opposite, foreground, yes, but no background;
here were both, as one would wish.
So the poet should do as the painter: describe reality as was it a painting
with foreground, background, perspective, and so forth:
One finds plains and mountains, cities and images of phantasy, little
pieces, quickly drawn with pen and ink. The poet doesn't yield to the painter!
The pittoresque in Andersen's early writings lives on in the fairy tales in the
sense, that "the seen" often nourishes the creation of the tale. The
story becomes a version - an interpretation, so to speak - of an
image. As an example, one could mention the story "Psyken" ("The
Psyche") from 1861, on which Andersen comnents:
An event from my first stay there (in Rome) 1833-34 came to my mind
and gave me the first germ. A young nun was to be buried, they dug her grave,
and found in it a magnificent statue of Bacchus.
The image from which the tale emerges, is this burial - seen as a symbol:
from the grave arises the statue. That is the basic image of the tale, its myth,
one could say: The untried love (the nun) versus the transformed eroticism (the
work of art). From this complex arises Andersen's story about the artist as a
tormented creature on the edge of society, without any contact with ordinary
life in a social-erotic sense of the term; and conseqently it becomes the
story about confusing art with reality. One could go a step further, claiming
that the nun not only represents untried love, but rejected or
suppressed eroticism, enevitably producing its "contra-image" -
the unrestrained sensualism: Bacchus. And thus configurating a "creative
paradox” of good and bad, voluptuous and sanctimonious, dionysian and
apollonian; a creative paradox to which I shall return.
We find in Andersen's writing a lot of examples where the image is there before
the story. The inspiration has a visual origin in pictures we might not
understand or be conscious of. (An obvious example is of course Billedbog
uden Billeder from 1840.)
These preliminary remarks aim at emphazising that Andersen's literary use of
pictures is very far from a traditional illustrative purpose. His images are
raw material, they are present before the story, before the "meaning”.
From Hans Christian Andersen: A Poet in Time
Odense University Press, 1999
Translated by the author
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