The Märchen by Randall Jarrell
"The Märchen" by Randall Jarrell is a complex and layered poem that intricately weaves together elements from various Brothers Grimm fairy tales to explore profound themes of personal narrative and existential struggle. Central to the poem is the character of Hansel, who embodies both the archetypal hero and Christ-like suffering, navigating a surreal forest that symbolizes the intersection of reality and storytelling. The narrative is marked by its challenging structure, with abrupt shifts between dream and action, reflecting the chaotic nature of life and the myriad influences that shape our experiences.
Jarrell's poem delves into the darker aspects of fairy tales, featuring witches, wicked stepparents, and the inevitability of suffering, portraying Hansel's journey as a quest not only for survival but for meaning amidst adversity. The forest serves as a metaphor for the complexities of human desires and the entangled stories that define existence. Despite its difficulty and the varied interpretations it invites, the poem raises thought-provoking questions about fate, change, and the search for understanding in a world filled with uncertainty. Ultimately, "The Märchen" challenges readers to contemplate the possibility of transformation amidst the burdens of inherited narratives and personal suffering.
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The Märchen by Randall Jarrell
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition
First published: 1946 (collected in Losses, 1948)
Type of work: Poem
The Work
“The Märchen” is one of Jarrell’s longest and most difficult poems, which merges the stories of the Brothers Grimm to produce a complicated meditation on the relations between a person’s stories, one’s grand narratives, and a person’s life. The forest in which all the events happen is both reality and the stories people create. The main character is Hansel, but he is also identified with Christ. He does not follow a variation of Hansel’s actions alone but also follows the stories of other characters in the Grimm stories. Thus, the title, “The Märchen,” suggests the fairy tales or folktales, all taken together. The narrative is a melange of many fairy tales and other stories as well, including the Christian story. Difficulty with the narrative itself may be one of the reason that few critics have discussed this poem, and those who do come up with differing interpretations.
The forest is filled with actions and wishes, odd crossings of fairy tale characters, superstitions, and beliefs. Hansel is a suffering hero whose destiny seems to be to suffer for others. He is a part of all the stories about heroes who are invented to overcome all the evils of the world, represented as witches, wicked stepparents, darkness, death—all the dark threats which cannot really be overcome in life. Motives and reasons are lost in the forest, and the narrative shifts from dream to action, from reality to imagination, abruptly and without transition. All the archetypal heroes of the folktales merge and mesh. The only way to escape from the predestined doomed endings is to change—a difficult, if not impossible, task. At the end the speaker asks, “Have we not learned/ Neither of beasts nor kingdoms nor their Lord . . . /Neither to rule nor die? To change, to change!”
Bibliography
Burt, Stephen. Randall Jarrell and His Age. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.
Chappell, Fred. “The Indivisible Presence of Randall Jarrell.” North Carolina Literary Review 1, no. 1 (Summer, 1992): 8-13.
Cyr, Marc D. “Randall Jarrell’s Answerable Style: Revision of Elegy in ’The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.’” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 46, no. 1 (Spring, 2004): 92-106.
Flynn, Richard. Randall Jarrell and the Lost World of Childhood. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990.
Hammer, Langdon. “Who Was Randall Jarrell?” Yale Review 79 (1990): 389-405.
Jarrell, Mary. Remembering Randall: A Memoir of Poet, Critic, and Teacher Randall Jarrell. New York: HarperCollins, 1999.
Pritchard, William. Randall Jarrell: A Literary Life. New York: Farrar, 1990.
Quinn, Sr. Bernetta. Randall Jarrell. Boston: Twayne, 1981.