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Description
"The Flying Trunk" is a story about the effects of storytelling, and in this respect it resembles many others that appear among Hans Christian Andersen's 156 or more fairy tales. Like other such tales, it juxtaposes the near and the far, the familiar and the exotic, the domestic and the fantastic. It warns its readers against the dangers of having money, and the very different danger of having dreams. It tells of inheritance, travel, exile, and the sustaining power of the imagination. These were to be vital themes for Andersen throughout his life, reflecting the transition from his romantic roots to a homeless, restless, proto-modernist search for the world beyond the self.
"The Flying Trunk" ("Den flyvende Kuffert" [1839]) begins when a successful merchant dies and leaves a fortune to his son. The unnamed son squanders his fortune, and when there is no more left, he receives a trunk with the instruction to "Pack up." Since he now has nothing left to pack, he climbs inside it and is carried off to the land of the Turks, where the King's daughter fails in love with him. He wins her with a story, and promises to win over her parents, too, but this time he must tell a story that is both instructive and amusing in order to satisfy both her mother and her father. The story he relates is one of Andersen's best kitchen dramas, in which all the domestic utensils compete with one other and with the matches, insisting upon their superior pedigrees and status. The market basket, it is said, is "an out-and-out radical," and is urging the rest of the household to put things straight when the kitchen maid comes in, and everyone freezes: "They all stood still; no one uttered a syllable" (H. Andersen, Fairy Tales 1: 198, 201). The maid lights the matches, and they enjoy their brief moment of glory before being burned out. Naturally this story wins the princess for the merchant's son, and their betrothal is celebrated with fireworks, but a spark from one of them sets light to his magic trunk. Without it, he cannot fly back to the palace, where the princess is left grieving for his departure. The merchant's son must now make his living "trudging round the world, telling stories. But they're not so jolly as the one he told about the matches" (204).
"The Flying Trunk" records something of where Andersen had come from and something of where he was going, as well as demonstrating the range of voices, devices, and forms of narrative he could command. Jens Andersen has pointed out that the inset story "portrays the Danish critics of the day as fiery little matches that impetuously flare up but go out almost as soon as they're lit." He adds that it was written for actress Fru Heiberg and her family circle, and the various domestic items can be identified with particular members of the family or their friends (270). This story ventriloquizes these items--matches, iron pot, tongs, market basket--so brilliantly and so colloquially that Brian Alderson has recorded eight different English versions of the market basket's speech to the rest of the kitchen (18-20). All of these items would have been familiar to Hans Christian as a child: he would have seen and played with them in the little room at Munkemollestrede in Odense, the room that had seemed so "big and rich" to him when he was very small (Bredsdorff 17). It was here his father kept his cobbler's bench, his mother cooked on the stove, and all of them slept. Andersen's father's legacy to him was not a merchant's fortune but a love of poems and stories--an invitation to the life of the imagination that, like the stork or the flying trunk, could carry you over land and sea. Hans Christian's mother's legacy was the everyday world, the immediate, the practical, the domestic--the world of the laundress, and of the shirt collar beneath the iron. Upstairs on the roof she grew herbs and flowers in an old chest: "my mother's sole garden ... In my story of the 'Snow Queen' that garden still blooms" (H. Andersen, Fairy Tale, 2). "The Flying Trunk" may also reveal something of how Andersen saw himself--as a wastrel with no interest in the practical, as a dreamer, an entertainer, a person with moments of brilliance but inclined to blow the advantages they brought.
In the inset story Andersen creates comedy out of the superiority of the matches and their innocently self-destructive social aspirations. In this respect they anticipate later Andersen characters such as the Fir Tree, the Snowman, the absurdly class-conscious ball in "The Sweethearts, or the Top and the Ball," and the Darning Needle, while the leather in "The Old House" and the snails in "The Happy Family" are not only self-destructive but also snobbish, as are the matches in "The Flying Trunk" inset. That apparently naive kitchen tale is, of course, highly sophisticated, and is subtly connected with the rest of the framing story: the King and his Queen can laugh comfortably at the snobbery of the domestic items, no doubt because they themselves are securely placed above the rest of the court. The spark that ignites the flying trunk echoes the kitchen maid setting light to the matches, and so suggests an element of unconscious self-destruction in the merchant's son as well, thus linking the storyteller to the contents of his story.
The narrative complexity of Andersen's stories (and "The Flying Trunk" is a typical example) parallels that of his wonderful paper cuts, where one shape is set inside another, and repeated forms ripple through the whole design. Such complexity... |
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