Building a mood
Hans spends his first day at Groening-stead, but it is an odd one. After breakfast, he sleeps all day, and begins a nightlong vigil. Already his experiences have placed him far from his fellow-men.
Here we find some traces of Magic reappearing in Bardelys’s tale. The chapter has little enough overt action, and yet builds a strangeness about Hans and his experience, like a veil that swings between him and the common, everyday actions of the men and women of the farm. Even though Hans seems to sink back for a time into childhood, and even begins to accept that the events of the Dreadful Night were in truth no more than his nightmare, we can see that going back to what he was is no longer any choice for him. He can try, but the effort will fail – we can see it, even if Hans himself still can’t.
A new character is introduced, Wendel, Mother Groening’s brother. From his remarks, we can believe he is not quite sane, or that he too has glimpsed the evil acts of the wicken-things in the Black Forest. He seems to know only too well what Hans has spoken about, and his final words regarding the ground fog echo the warning Hans got from his Granny.
It seems Hans feels a bit relieved when the household goes to bed, leaving him alone. He can’t sleep, as though he is now becoming a creature of the night himself. He goes outside, breathes in the cool dark air, and encounters again Otto, who seems to be waiting for him.
It is on this moment of the encounter that the chapter ends, begging us to read on and discover what business Otto has with Hans.
The effect of the periods of sleep and waking, the hypnotic firelight, and the mix of dreams and mundane activities, create a mood that is somewhat dreamlike in itself, and seems to me better-drawn than the actual nightmare when the trees tore down the house. It leaves us, along with Hans himself, separated from the common men and women of Groening-stead, somewhat adrift, and expectant. It is as though we felt the farmstead might suffer an attack any moment of the weird wicken-things – as though we would welcome such an attack.
And indeed, who wouldn’t? We are reading a dark fairytale, after all, and mundane activities must begin to bore us, unless they appear under the lens of such atmosphere and strange mood as we find here. Like the audiences watching Alfred Hitchcock’s film The Birds, we are complicit in the evil, for we long for the excitement and terror and weirdness of the rising wicken-creatures.
(Composed on keyboard Wednesday 12 November 2008)
