Magical Realism and Surrealism in Grimmelshausen's Miraculous Bird's Nest
'Magical Realism and Surrealism' in a title suggests modern literature, but I acknowledge the influence of the 17th century writer Hans Jacob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen. Concepts like ‘surrealism’ and ‘magical realism’, as we understand them today, have no direct equivalent in the Baroque era. However, look beyond the terminology and we discover that Grimmelshausen’s work, particularly his Miraculous Bird’s Nest, is a masterpiece of magical realism blending into the surreal at many points.
Grimmelshausen’s philosophy of life
Just look at Grimmelshausen’s philosophy of life. He saw everything on earth as a representation of something higher. The world to him was something of an emblematic stage. This is why he doesn’t present anything in his writings as final. Every time ‘reality’ is encountered in life or described in his books, it reveals itself as illusory. He regarded external ‘reality’, and by extension, the ‘reality’ described in his work, as being nothing else but permanently shifting scenery. True reality, according to him, depends on one’s level of self-knowledge.
The Miraculous Bird’s Nest
Grimmelshausen’s motto ‘illusion deceives’, which underlies all his work, is heavily stressed in the Bird’s Nest – a novel intended to be a resource for the reader’s moral and spiritual development. Michael, the central character, is able to move about in society without being seen by anyone, thanks to the bird’s nest whose magic qualities render him invisible, allowing him to see ordinary life through the lens of magical realism.
The reader who spontaneously identifies with Michael becomes, like him, a voyeur, penetrating the secrets of society and unmasking people’s actions, thoughts and feelings which, he discovers, are caught in the web of self-deception and illusion: man has lost his way. Everything is upside down, the donkey rides the man and the cow milks the peasant woman – a topsy-turvy world, producing a sort of mad, surreal effect.
The ‘crooked ways of the world’
Having been severed from his true inner self, his divine essence, man has lost his compass and guide on his path through life. Thrown off course, he follows the ‘crooked ways of the world’ and is reduced to being no more than a surreal, dream-like shadow figure of his potential true inner self.
This theme is repeatedly emphasised in the Bird’s Nest and occurs even in the emblematic frontispiece of the novel. The ‘subscriptio’ begins with the words: ‘Through a bird’s nest I look at the crooked ways of the world.’ The illustration shows a cherub-like child who represents ordinary human beings, for example, the reader. The child is observing the world through a telescope, but all he can see is a pile of masks obstructing his view.
The world is represented, quite surreally, by a globe walking on two legs and following a crooked path. The figure of the Satyr, who represents the author, looks through the miraculous bird’s nest. The fact that he holds a mask behind his back means that he has unmasked the deceptive nature of the world and revealed its ‘inconstantia’ and ‘vanitas’ to the reader.
Most of the people in the novel are shown to be in such a condition of total self-delusion that they continuously behave like ignorant fools. Like a large painting, one by Brueghel perhaps, society with its different classes is spread out before the reader, and Michael brings this painting to life by looking at it through his ‘magical eye’, the bird’s nest.
Grimmelshausen’s Belief
The invisible protagonist looks into the minds and hearts of the people he meets and reveals their true thoughts and feelings. The society Michael observes is a ‘material’ society. Grimmelshausen believes that man has to free himself from the illusory temptations of the ‘material’ world, before he can progress spiritually.
Grimmelshausen advises those of his readers wishing to achieve this inner change and transformation to turn away from the ‘crooked path of the world’ and follow the long, arduous path of self-study that progressively leads to spiritual reality. The obsession with worldly riches, he says, prevents man from gaining spiritual riches.
A short parable in the Bird’s Nest illustrates the author’s concern, implying that material riches can never be an end in themselves, but they can be a useful reminder to stay vigilant for a man on the spiritual path.
Can you find heaven in material things?
On one occasion, Michael finds himself in a rich man’s house, a place of magical realism. He is struck by the acute sense of unreality, which he experiences in this place. This house is so meticulously kept and filled with so many incredible riches that Michael thinks he is in a doll’s house or in a painting. When he enters the garden belonging to the house, he is dazzled by its magnificence and splendour. Not surprisingly, the analogy with paradise at once forces itself upon him.
If Michael were to delude himself into believing that this material mirage is paradise, paradise on earth, then, according to Grimmelshausen, he would be indulging in topsy-turvy thinking and create, together with the rest of material-minded society, a topsy-turvy world – an insane and quite surreal world, as we might see it from our modern-day, though not necessarily more enlightened, perspective.
Grimmelshausen described a world seen through the device of invisibility; Michael saw how things were rather than how people thought they were. In my novel LOVE LIES, André inhabits the strange half-world between sanity and madness, a bit like Michael.
See: A. Beier, The moral and religious teaching in Grimmelshausen’s Simplician Cycle, with special reference to Das Wunderbarliche Vogelnest 1, PhD, University of Leeds, Department of German, July, 1987
© Dr. Arnfrid Beier January 2009
