The Shadow

We've probably all experienced the sensation: somewhere, somehow, we saw a new possibility open up before us, or felt a strange impulse to follow a desire that we could hardly name. We were wise, or so we thought, to resist the temptation, to stay on the path of our sober-minded, plan-in-advance selves. And then, perhaps years later, we wondered why, and what things might have been like if we hadn't.

Hans Christian Andersen's "The Shadow" takes up this question -- decidedly one that haunts adults rather than children -- in a strange allegory that reads like a fairy tale but burns at the soul like some mad tale of Poe. And like Poe (and Shelley, Gogol, Dostoyevsky, and many others), Andersen hit upon the folk legend of a double, or doppelgänger, as a metaphor for this desire deferred. With roots deep in popular folklore, these tales of someone with an uncanny resemblance to one's self are chilling enough as far as they go -- for it seems that there's only room in the universe for one of them: either the double or the self must die.

In Andersen's tale, the "learned man" (perhaps "scholar" would be a more apt English translation) permits his shadow to do pursue a course of action he himself was too timid to attempt, and initially counts himself fortunate. The lack of a shadow, after all, was but a minor inconvenience -- what of it? The twist here is that this decision precipitates the birth of a separate entity, one that eventually comes to possess all of the boldness and sense of purpose that the student lacked. The student, gradually and inexorably, is fated to become the shadow's shadow, and eventually even less than that.

Many people assume that fairy tales ought to teach some moral lesson. They forget that, in their original forms, most folktales had no such lesson; it was moralizers such as Perrault (who published the most popular versions of "Cinderella" and "Little Red Riding Hood") who attached morals to them, in part to make them safe for family reading, to harness their wild imaginings in the name of civilizing influence.

But although "The Shadow," like many of Andersen's tales, has a sort of moral in it, there's also a strong contravening force: if we are to avoid the fate of the unfortunate scholar, we must in fact act on our desires, must sometimes step outside the moral and personal codes that bind us. And indeed, anyone who creates -- whether a writer of fictions, a visual artist, or a filmmaker -- is already engaged in the shadow business.

The poet William Blake, in his diabolical Proverbs of Hell, perhaps put it most bluntly: "Better murder an infant in its cradle than nurse an unacted desire."