For most contemporary readers, the Grimm brothers’ tale, “The Godfather” will seem like one of the strangest stories ever published. But, in the prolific world of folk tales, where oddity is ubiquitous, “The Godfather” (Grimm #42) represents an entire genre of similar stories. In the sea of story-telling, “The Godfather” isn’t unique; rather it represents a genus so populous as to require its own Aarne - Thompson - Uther index number – the story defines motif ATU 332 (or KHM 44) and, in fact, the Grimm iteration of the story is the type for this category: ATU 332 characterizes “Godfather” tales. (The ATU index of folk tale motifs is the invention of a Finnish folklorist Annti Aarne; Aarne studied northern European Kinder und Hausmaerchen and classified the stories according to their predominant motifs. Most stories, as it happens, contain several indexed narrative types. Aarne’s work was published in 1910 in German and was refined by the American folklore scholar Stith Thompson about two decades later; the index was, further, refined by the German Hans-Joerg Uther in 2004. In one of Borges’ sketches, a colossal map is created that correlates to the terrain on a one-to-one basis – no one knows how to use a map that is as big as the territory that it depicts and, so, Borges tells us that the map falls into disrepair, decays, and that, in remote parts of the kingdom, great fragments of the map can be seen half-drowned in lakes or wrapped around forests. The ATU index is somewhat similar: it’s a map that is about the size of the territory that it represents and I’ve never been clear as to this mighty piece of folklore cartography is supposed to be used.)
A paraphrase of “The Godfather” is superfluous, although I will provide one. Grimm’s fairy tales, at least, in their earliest editions are so laconic that they read as if already paraphrased. And, in fact, I think their terse and skeletal form is significant – in many cases, the tales read like outlines upon a story-teller might improvise variations and details according to the circumstances of the telling. It’s my sense that many of these stories are telescopic – that is, the tale can be expanded or compressed in the telling so as to fit the time allotted for the performance. (Similarly, I think details in the story can be added or omitted according to the teller’s understanding of the audience and its expectations.) It’s a bit hard to summarize something that already seems to be a summary. Nonetheless, here is the story:
A poor man has innumerable children. The man has run out of candidates to serve as godfather for his most recent child. He has already enlisted “everyone in the world” as godfathers for his other children. Distressed, the man lies down and falls asleep. He dreams that he should go outside of the city gate and appoint the first person that he meets to be his child’s godfather. And, so, this is what he does.
A man standing outside the city gate agrees to be child’s godfather. The stranger, as he is called, gives the father a little bottle of water. The stranger says that, with this water, the father can cure anyone of anything – but there is a condition: the water allows the man to see where Death is standing at the sick person’s bed. If Death stands at the head of the bed, the person will survive and be healed. If Death stands at the foot of the bed, the patient must die.
The King’s son is sick. The father attends to the ailing child. Death is standing at the boy’s head and so the child is healed. A second son becomes ill. Again, Death stands near the boy’s head and so the father heals this child as well. A third child, then, sickens. Death stands at the boy’s feet and, so, he dies.
The father goes to the stranger’s house to tell him about what has happened. On the first level of the house, a broom and a shovel are bickering. The man asks them where the godfather lives. They tell him: “One flight higher.”
The man goes up the stairs and finds “a bunch of dead fingers lying there.” The man asks the fingers where the godfather lives and they say: “One flight higher.”
The man climbs the stairs to the third level in the house. He encounters a pile of skulls who speak: “One flight higher.”
The man goes up to the fourth floor of the house. There, fish are frying themselves in a pan. The fish tell the man that the godfather lives “One flight higher.”
The man reachs the fifth floor of the house. There is a door with a keyhole. Peeping through the keyhole, the man sees the godfather. On his head, there are “long, long horns.” The godfather gets into bed and covers himself.
The man says to the godfather that on the first floor of the house, he saw a shovel and broom quarreling. “How can you be so simple-minded,” the godfather says, “that was just my man-servant and maid.”
The man tells the godfather that on the second floor, he saw dead fingers. The godfather reproaches him for stupidity and says: “That was just salsify roots.”
The man tells the godfather that on the third floor, he saw skulls. “Those were just heads of cabbage,” the godfather replies.
“I saw fish frying themselves on the fourth floor,” the man says. At that moment, the fish enter the room and serve themselves on a platter.
The man says: “When I came to the fifth landing, I looked through the keyhole and saw that you had long, long horns.”
The godfather replies: “Now that’s just not true.” (In German: “Ei, das ist nicht wahr.”)
It’s tempting to interpret this tale symbolically – in other words, to ascribe meanings to the weird imagery. To some extent, I fall prey to this temptation in my remarks below. But, we should start by accepting the story on its own terms. As a performance told in real time, a person hearing the story wouldn’t have the leisure to define the incidents in the tale as allegorical or symbolic. For instance, the “fish frying themselves” doesn’t necessarily have a meaning beyond what is tersely represented in the story – the uncanny occurrence doesn’t stand for anything. In Maerchen, amazing events are like rocks and stones and trees – they have a sort of brute quiddity (“whatness”): that is, they just are.
In 1942, Martin Heidegger taught a seminar focusing on his idiosyncratic interpretation of Friedrich Hoelderlin’s ode, “The Ister.” (These lectures, conducted in Freiburg at the height of World War Two, are infamous on political grounds. But those contentious issues don’t concern us here.) Heidegger begins his account of the ode by arguing that readers should not interpret the poem symbolically or as an allegory – interpretations of this kind distract our attention from the verse by making it “metaphysical.” To Heidegger, great poetry is not metaphysical – that is, it can’t correlated to “spirit” or some suprasensuous or otherworldly realm. The poem exists for itself and is not a signifier of some higher realm. In other words, poems don’t “mean” in terms exterior to themselves. The error underlying Western metaphysics, which Heidegger rejects, is identifying the suprasensuous, that is, “spirit” with what is superior and true. Heidegger’s view is that poetry isn’t transcendent but immanent – it doesn’t look beyond itself to the “spiritual” and “symbolic” but, rather, is rooted in the earth, the sky and the way that human beings dwell on the earth and under the sky. Heidegger says that the Ister (or Danube – “Ister” is an archaic geographic term for the Donau or Danube River) doesn’t represent anything and shouldn’t be construed allegorically or as something exterior to its identity as a river. For this proposition, Heidegger cites the final lines in Hoelderlin’s ode: “Yet what that one does, the river / no one knows” (Was aber jener tuet, der Strom / weisst Niemand.)
Heidegger’s argument is that construing poetry in terms of symbolic meaning is an attempt to avoid the necessarily enigmatic character of the art – it makes what is concrete, if problematic, into “metaphysics.” The reader of poetry must respect the “enigma” or to use the German word, the “Raetsel” embodied in the text. Raetsel, meaning “enigma”, is rooted in the verb raten – that is, to counsel. The enigma, accordingly, contains counsel or advice. In the introduction to the 1812 edition of their Kinder und Hausmaerchen, the Grimm brothers identified the folk tales that they had collected with Poesie, that is, the “poetic imagination”. In fact, they also counsel against making the tales into something that they are not. And, so, I think it’s reasonable to bear this advice in mind when approaching “The Godfather” – at first, we have to accept the peculiar tale on the enigmatic terms that it presents to us.
Two-fold:
First, I think, we should notice that the story consists of two parts. The first involves the father’s quest for a guardian for his child and the healing water. It’s characteristic of Grimm’s stories that they are constructed from independent parts often only tenuously sutured together. Narratives are built from discontinuous blocks of material – this arises from the fact that stories are not independent or complete in themselves but are amplified or made more meaningful by adjacent tales.
In this case, the opening of “The Godfather” is related to another story “Godfather Death” (Grimm 44). “Godfather Death” is a very beautiful tale, much more “artistic” than “The Godfather” – that is, it is more symbolic and meaningful than “The Godfather” and, therefore, seems a more refined and esthetically pleasing story. (But, of course, this is to interpret Grimm’s stories according to esthetic canons not really applicable to them – meaning and esthetic qualities are “secreted” as it were unintentionally and involuntarily by these tales.) In “Godfather Death,” the father is given the choice of appointing either God or Death to be his child’s godfather. In a startling and blasphemous decision, the poor man nominates Death as his child’s godfather – God is unfair, elevating the wealthy and afflicting the poor; but Death comes for all human beings regardless of their rank or worldly goods. Death gives the child a gift, a healing salve but warns the his godson that there are limits to the potion’s power. If Death stands at the head of a bed, the sufferer will be healed. If Death stands at the foot of the bed, the sick person will die. The remainder of the story concerns the godson’s efforts to thwart Death’s decrees. Naively, the godson, who has become a famous doctor, decides that he can cheat death by rotating the bed in which the sick person is reclining. He gets away with this stunt twice. But Death is enraged, guides the famous doctor into a cave, and shows him an infinity of candles flickering in the darkness. When a candle is snuffed-out, the life represented by that flame comes to an end. Death ominously tells his godson that a candle that is “only burning a little is your life. Watch out!” (The scene in the cave is magnificently shown in Roberto Gavaldon’s Mexican film, Macario, produced in 1960).
“Godfather Death” differs from “The Godfather” in many respects. We are apt to view the differences so as to regard “Godfather Death” as a better, more artistically successful story than “The Godfather.” In “The Godfather”, the storyteller never mentions the godchild. It’s as if the speaker has forgotten the premise of the tale. “Godfather Death” makes the godchild, the protagonist of the story and logically develops the theme of the gift of healing powers. In “The Godfather”, the protagonist is the father and the gift intended for the stranger’s godson remains in the father’s hands. Whereas “Godfather Death” is about the arbitrary nature of life and death, “The Godfather” turns away from that theme toward the macabre comedy in the Stranger’s house, a grotesquerie that defines the uncanny nature of the godfather. As is characteristic of fairy tales, both narratives are rooted in a single premise, but the stories, then, radically diverge. The foundation is the same but the next “block” in the narrative creates a completely different structure.
Adam:
The man in “The Godfather” is exemplary, a representation of all humanity. He has so many children that he has “already asked everyone in the world to be godfather.” This is not merely a humorous exaggeration. The man is Adam, the father of all men and women. In Adam’s fall, death comes into the world. The first figure that Adam meets after his dream counsels him to “go outside the town gate” is the devil. The devil stands in a particular relationship to death. Either he is also death or death’s brother.
The devil:
We are conditioned by John Milton and theology to regard the devil as an awesome, even darkly majestic, spirit. But the devil that appears in Grimm’s fairy tales isn’t Milton’s Satan. He’s a buffoon, a shady con-man. In some stories, the devil has a wife who hen-pecks him. He has whiskers that intrepid heroes pluck from his beard. The devil in these tales isn’t God’s adversary – he doesn’t even believe in God. But this unimpressive barnyard figure is all the more dangerous precisely because he is so unprepossessing. It’s easy to beware of a satanic presence cloaked in brimstone and fire; the devil as clown and charlatan is much more deadly and insinuating.
The Woods:
In Grimm’s tales, the protagonist almost always ventures away from hostile circumstances entering the great woods. As Jack Zipes writes: “The woods is the mother of all things”, the “perilous realm” (to quote J.R.R. Tolkien) – the woods are lawless and, in them, anything is possible. In “The Godfather”, the woods don’t appear. Here the topography is even more abstract and stark: there is the enclosure of the city, apparently established by a wall, and there is the dangerous realm beyond the town-gate. City and the chaos owned by Death are separated by the porous membrane of a wall and gate. Traditionally, graveyards are outside the boundaries of the enclosed city. The devil wanders ravening among the sepulchers.
The Doctor
It’s no coincidence that the devil appears as a quack doctor, peddling a useless remedy against death. Death like the devil is our great adversary, but, also, our comrade, our bed-mate, as close to us as the pulsing of our carotid artery. The little bottle of healing water has no power. Death isn’t about to cede he authority to some country bumpkin. Rather, it is death’s posture with respect to the ailing person (either at the head or the feet) that controls whether the patient will survive. The “healing water” is just a prop to make the doctor look as if he has affected the outcome – the “little bottle” gives the doctor the appearance of authority, but it is really Death that is acting. If Death stands at the patient’s head, the sick man or woman or child has already been healed; the water doesn’t do anything. Humans fear death and will make a deal with the Devil to escape mortality. Notice, how the storyteller has already forgotten about the premise of the tale – the search for a fitting Godfather for the child of Adam. The child never appears in the story that now takes a turn away from the fraudulent remedy against death.
The turning
Three of the king’s sons fall ill. King here means the sovereign of the enclosed city, that is, the power of law and reason. Death stands at the head of two of the children and, so, they can’t die. Death stands at the foot of the third son. Therefore, he must die. The man realizes that he has been duped. The water doesn’t have any efficacy, although, of course, he can use it fraudulently to pretend that he is a great doctor. This is apparently unsatisfactory to the man. He desires to have the power over life and death and not merely the simulacrum of such power. So the man goes to remonstrate with Death or the Devil (since the two forces are aligned). The Maerchen says that the man wants to “narrate” (erzaehlen) what has happened to the Godfather. In effect, the man is a storyteller like the person imagined to narrate the tale to Grimm’s readers. To tell the story is to critique a situation and explain it’s significance.
The house
The Godfather’s house has five stories. Of course, the house is infinitely lofty. It has a story or level for everything in the world (cabbages, brooms and shovels) and everything that is not in the world (fish frying themselves and talking “dead fingers”). The man might be forced to climb forever, passing through interminable levels, before meeting the godfather. (This is how Kafka would imagine the ascent.) The storyteller is more merciful and shows us only five levels in the godfather’s infinite domain. Each level is linked by a verbal refrain: eine Treppe hoeher (“One flight higher”). Grimm’s Maerchen often have little rhymes, nonsense refrains, or other archaic-sounding verbal formulae embedded in them: consider, for instance, the chant that causes Rapunzel to let down her hair or Rumpelstiltskin’s little song accompanying the childish game that he performs, hopping around his cottage. “One flight higher” has the same function in “The Godfather” – it’s like the ghastly refrain “there’s room for one more” in a myriad of ghost stories involving deadly elevators or planes about to fall out of the sky. Eine Treppe hoeher, a gorgeous and sinister combination of long and short vowels, provides the storyteller with an opportunity to entertain his or her audience with a mini-aria, an occasion for the speaker to use a distorted voice or to improvise in basso profundo or falsetto tones.
Is the Devil’s palace inside the city or outside of the gate in its walls? I will leave that to you to work out.
The Broom and the Shovel
A broom and shovel are quarreling because they aren’t mere tools but actually a man and woman enchanted by the godfather. Death or the Devil (the godfather) makes slaves of human beings. The broom (a woman) and the shovel (a man) are, like all of us, instruments in the hands the godfather.
The Dead fingers
On the second level of Death’s mansion, dead fingers somehow speak. The godfather later claims that the dead fingers are Skorzenerwurzel, that is, salsify root. Salsify root is an edible vegetable sheathed in a mummy-brown peel or skin. In European folk-medicine, salsify root was thought to have healing properties – it’s akin to the water that the godfather gives to the man to heal his patients. Salsify heals snake-bite and is a remedy for heart problems. Salsify is rooted in the earth – the idea of being “rooted” is intrinsic to the German world: Skorzenerwurzel or Skorzen-root. Roots have magical characteristics because they spring from the dark loam of the earth. The salsify root shows us that the godfather controls healing magic, but, also, eats the dead – the roots are thought to be “dead fingers” by the man. Nonsense, the godfather says, this is just something that I eat. Death eats people.
The cabbage
On the third level of Death’s palace, the man encounters skulls that also tell him to seek the godfather “one flight higher”. Later, the godfather explains that the skulls were really just heads of cabbage. The palace, like Bluebeard’s castle, is full of corpses, dead and dismembered. These corpses are the godfather’s fodder. The godfather eats the dead, but, also, apparently can resurrect them, at least, to the extent that they are able to speak. Cabbages grow on the surface of the earth – they are mundane, commonplace. The Devil, as the father of lies, speaks to persuade the man that fragments of dismembered corpses revelatory of his true nature are really just the most humble and ubiquitous of vegetables, a fixture of every German root cellar and pantry. Cabbages remind us that vegetation grows and, then, dies in a seasonal cycle. As with the resurrected fingers (that are simultaneously roots), the godfather both kills, devours, and brings back to life.
The fish
On the fourth level of the godfather’s mansion, some fish are frying themselves. This image invokes a whole spectrum of Maerchen wish-fulfilment motifs: Tisch-deck-dich (“Table set yourself”) is table that magically produces delicious food; in some tales, purses replenish their contents and, therefore, are always full of gold coins; a pot of porridge overflows and threatens to engulf the world with sweet mush; roast fowl offer themselves to be eaten; sausages dance merrily before they are devoured. The godfather’s world involves eating and being eaten. Fish come from depths. They are pulled out of the dark, cold water. What lurks in the depths is the ancient dream of the Land of Cockaigne, the Big Rock Candy Mountains, a place where the curse of Adam that man must work to earn his food no longer applies. This is an ancient dream and one that is insidious. Notice that the godfather refutes the man’s perceptions of the broom and shovel, the dead fingers, and the skulls. But there is no refutation of the fish frying themselves, that is, the oldest and most pernicious of all wishes. At the climax of the story, the fish appear in the godfather’s chambers on the fifth and highest level of the mansion, presenting themselves to be eaten.
The horns
When the man peeps into the forbidden room – he looks through a keyhole – he sees that the godfather has lange, lange Hoerner (long, long horns). This is the final revelation in the Tower of Death, that is, that the godfather is the devil. As it is often said, the devil’s best tool for enthralling men and women is to persuade us that he doesn’t exist. In the tale, the devil modestly conceals his horns. He climbs into bed, maybe to hide his hooves and scaley skin and forked tail. Presumably, he wears a nightcap to conceal his horns. The devil tells the man that his perceptions are all wrong. Who are you gonna believe? Me or your lying eyes. Maybe, the man hallucinated the squabbling broom and shovel, the dead fingers, and the skulls. But the fish are indisputably in the room, servants of the godfather, and offering themselves for his delectation. The devil denies the existence of his horns, but we know that the horns are really there – just as the fish are present and ready to be eaten.
The godfather’s furnishings
The five stories at the godfather’s house encompass everything in the world. (Just as the man has asked everyone in the world to stand as his children’s godfathers). All tools, as well as men and women who use those tools, are the property of the godfather who is death and the devil. The sick, the ailing, those in need of healing by salsify root, the dead themselves are owned by the godfather. The vegetables on the surface of the earth that are the staples of life are the godfather’s property as is the cycle of dying and reviving vegetation. The abyss is the godfather’s and its depths and the denizens of those depths (dreams, fish, and the unconscious) are also his property.
The source
“The Godfather” was published in 1812. We know the story was collected from Amalie Hassenpflug the daughter of Huguenot emigrants to Hanau, Germany. (Her father was a bureaucrat, a government official.) Amalie was born in 1800 and so the Grimm brothers heard this profound and complex tale from a little girl. How did she know the story? Presumably, the Devil told it to her.
The Third Edition
The Grimm brothers liked this story enough to reprint it in all of the editions of the Kinder- und Hausmaerchen that they published. In their third edition, they made two minor amendments to the tale. The formula describing the devil’s lange, lange Hoerner becomes a “pair of horns” or, simply, horns. This isn’t an improvement. The repetition of the word lange (itself a word that sounds like what it means) provide each horn with its own adjective: there are two uses of lange because the devil has two horns. The other revision to the story also doesn’t improve it. Wilhelm Grimm (the author of most of the changes to the book) tells us that the man lauft aus – that is, ran away at the end of the story. Apparently, this is to allay the reader’s fears that the man has become another of the devil’s servants and, perhaps, even been eaten. I think its preferable for the reader (or listener) to be left pondering the fate of the man. What happens to those who come face-to-face with the devil?
Outside the city gate
Why doesn’t the man notice the godfather’s long horns when he encounters him outside the city gates? Of course, the devil goes in disguise so that we won’t recognize him. But how did he accomplish this particular sleight-of-hand – that is, hiding his horns? One of the best illustrators of the Grimm Maerchen was Otto Ubbelohde. This German artist illustrated the definitive version of the tales, published in three volumes by the Turm Verlag in 1906. Ubbelohde proves a simple and elegant solution to the problem of the godfather’s horns. He depicts the man meeting the godfather outside the city gates. The godfather is wearing a black, peaked sorcerer’s hat, presumably to conceal his horns.
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