Three things strike me about this chapter:
- Bardelys continues his practice of short chapters
- The danger returns with magic
- Bardelys shifts his hero’s character back around
Chapter Length. Bardelys has made a pattern of using short chapters. It will be interesting to see if he will keep this up or if he will vary the length of his chapters. In general it strikes me that over the past several chapters, he breaks whenever he comes to any significant ‘bump’ in the narrative.
Magic. Magic has come back into the tale, the closer we are to the Forest. This then might have been at the back of Bardelys’s mind when he made his Groening-stead chapters so un-magical: the closer the tale takes us to the Black Forest, the stronger the magic becomes. Only Edgar, Mother Groening’s half-mad brother, has smelled at all of magic back in the friendly house, and he seems to have been touched by the Forest, and might even be in league with it.
Once again Bardelys is trying here to overcome his earlier mistake of identifying the Forest, and wicken, as ‘wild but not evil.’ He makes a specific reference to this remark of Hans’s Father, and has Hans mentally correct his dead Father’s judgment. This is about as good a way as there is of undoing a mistake of this kind: talk about it openly. ‘I know I told you so-and-so, but in fact that was wrong, and the truth of the matter is this-and-that.’ An additional benefit may be wrought out of this technique or strategy: since the talesman has changed his story once, we readers cannot be sure that he will not change it again. Which is it, is the Schwarzwald only wild, or is it malevolent? It might even be the case that Bardelys himself is of two minds on this question, and means to leave this at the heart of his theme. Wilderness, the un-human, can certainly be dangerous to men, but is it a conscious, willful threat, or an ignorant, even ‘innocent’ one?
We will have to follow this thematic question closely as the tale carries on, and see whether the talesman definitely decides it one way or the other.
Character. Hans recalls his banter with Father and his own words, ‘Six wins all tricks.’ This is more like the shifty coal-biter than the more-innocent and innocuous stay-at-home character type. It further suggests that Hans will fall into the archetype of the Trickster, a type that makes sense for a youth who has not shown any great physical prowess. Hans is not big for his age, he is not overly strong – at least Bardelys has not made mention of any such thing, and the omission seems deliberate: Hans never acts as though he is a strong lad, except for the one point when he breaks out of the wicken-army camp by bumping up against one of a knot of soldiers – and even then Bardelys stresses not the strength and size of his hero, but his knowledge of how to attack an opponent in the childish game he knows.
Knowledge is the Trickster’s forte.
Thus we have now been offered three different character types for the hero:
- Coal-biter
- Stay-at-home
- Trickster
Maybe Bardelys is unable to make up his mind here. (Although it is true that the Trickster often wears many hats, and can appear to play the part of other archetypes when it suits his purpose.)
The final image of this chapter is the most gruesome yet in the tale. Bardelys drew a veil over the deaths of Hans’s family, and left them offstage; we only heard with Hans his Mother’s dying scream, but we saw none of the corpses, nor how the dreadful trees disposed of them. Young Bertie Groening, on the other hand, is left (literally) twisting in the wind.
(Composed on keyboard Sunday, November 16, 2008)
