Fairy Tales Horrify, Numb

Ask any tyke on the playground what a fairy tale is, and any of the following phrases might turn up: princesses, singing mice, mermaids, fairy godmothers. Fairy tales are defined by magic, which is why Kurt Scwhitters’ clever but often unimaginative book “Lucky Hans and Other Merz Fairy Tales,” newly translated by Jack Zipes, contains only two or three real “fairy tales.” The rest is a dark medley of fables, tall tales, parables, and even word games—all of them dark, most of them with unhappy endings.

Fairy tales do not have to be lighthearted. In “Bluebeard,” one of the oldest and most famous fairy tales, a young woman discovers a secret room full of the corpses of her husband’s former wives. The original “Little Mermaid,” by Hans Christian Andersen, finds Ariel’s less-lucky predecessor forfeiting her life to save her prince. In the Grimms’ fairy tale, Cinderella’s stepsisters mutilate themselves in order to squeeze their feet into the glass slipper. The grim plots and endings don’t negate the fact that they’re all magnificent stories. The problem with Kurt Schwitters’ Merz stories is that they seem to rely on their darkness as a sufficient claim to artistry.

The only apparent theme linking together the Merz stories, and the only conceivable reason why Zipes—a fairy tale expert—would claim in his introduction that they are subversive or unconventional, is their insistence that not everybody gets a “happily ever after.” That is all very well—and appropriate, since Scwhitters wrote them during the Nazi regime—but the question arises as to what about that fact warrants a collection devoted to these tales. Stephen Sondheim used the same theme in his 1986 musical “Into the Woods,” but he also incorporated comedy, nuance, and innovative new plots beyond “what happens after happily ever after” to create an imaginative musical drama. For Schwitters, whose multivalent creative drive yielded art across the spectrum of media—from painting to collage to sculpture—perhaps the fairy tale simply wasn’t his most interesting or effective venture.

As it is, some of the stories read like thinly-veiled editorials, with grotesque characters set in realistic places and situations. In the story “He,” a giant joins the army, where his size affronts his superiors and they arrest him for insubordination. The rest of the story revolves around the inefficacy of military bureaucracy, as the officers attempt to build a prison large enough to house the growing giant. Almost everyone dies by the end of the story. Many writers have used fiction as a vehicle for political protest—take George Orwell—but at least they create compelling characters or futuristic worlds, or use talking animals as allegorical stand-ins for statesmen.

Schwitters relegates the element of magic in his stories to exaggeration in the form of the grotesque and macabre. Again in the introduction, Zipes argues that the presence of these motifs make Schwitter’s stories fairy tales. But Zipes is mistaken, for they also appear in other genres, such as the Gothic story. Schwitters occasionally does borrow bits from conventional fairy tale plots, but he’s unable to employ them creatively. For example, the heroine of “The Proud Young Woman” rejects all her suitors—like the Princess and the Pea—but unlike the Princess who is wonderfully reformed by the trick her suitor plays on her, the proud young woman gradually grows old and ugly and dies. No fairy tale fan wants to read a story like that.

Schwitters’ collection is at greatest fault, not in its mislabeling, but in its lack of imagination. The intelligence at work behind these stories is generally apparent, but this fact outpaces creativity more often than not. Their existence seems contingent on Merz (the movement Schwitters founded in 1918—and his pseudonym during his life—that paralleled many of the ideas of Berlin Dada), rather than a strong contribution to its corpus. The language lacks distinction, the plots are sometimes nonexistent and more often overly didactic, and the symbols are tired. For example, in “The Little Clock Spirit and the Lovers,” a couple is disturbed by the thought that time is passing, which is symbolized by—you’ll never guess—the ticking of a clock.

For an idiosyncratic artist who created his own genre of art, Schwitters brought disappointingly little to the literary table with his fairy tales. Still, “Luck Hans” is not without its merits. Not surprisingly, the highlight of the book is visual rather than literary. Schwitters uses bizarre illustrative typography to narrate “The Scarecrow.” Though the story itself is not much more than a complicated “The House that Jack Built,” its innovative conversion of language into visual art strongly represents Schwitter’s definition of Merz, which “wants freedom from all fetters in order to shape things artistically.” All things considered, however, it seems there was a reason why Kurt Schwitter was remembered for his art, while his stories were, as the dust jacket says, “little known in any language” before now.

—Staff writer April B. Wang can be reached at abwang@fas.harvard.edu.