From Cosmic Neutrality, by Fredric Jameson. London Review of Books. Vol. 33 No. 20 · 20 October 2011 pages 17-18:
[T]his particular fairytale is perhaps not so affirmative when it comes to the value of chance meetings. It tells of a country boy who seeks, not to make his fortune, but only to return home with it (he has just served an apprenticeship of the traditional seven years and received his accumulated savings in the form of a lump of gold). In the first of many chance meetings, admiring the alacrity of a passing horseman, Hans is offered the horse itself in exchange for the troublesome lump of gold, an offer he is happy to accept. Then, after being thrown by the horse, he is not unwilling to exchange it for a cow, led by a farmer who explains the advantages of its sustenance, in the form of milk, butter and cheese. But it milks poorly, and a passing butcher persuades him of the benefits of a young pig, for which he gladly exchanges it; a bargain then soon enough replaced by the swap of a fat goose; and so on and so forth until he loses the final avatar – a grindstone – in a well and, no longer burdened by that weight either, joyously reaches home with nothing left in his pockets at all. ‘There is no man under the sun so fortunate as I,’ he cries happily as he greets his mother. We should take into consideration the possibility that this really is a happy ending...This ending is quite different from typical happy endings, but perhaps its closer to what we have now, as in Pontoppidan's 'Lucky Per':
The place had a special attraction for [Per] personally and, as he now realised, just because of its sterile and sad deserted nature, its full solitude. It seemed to him that he never had looked so deeply into himself as at that moment. It was as if he saw the ground of his own Being uncovered and was staring at it. When, in spite of all the good fortune that had come his way, he wasn’t happy, it was because he had not wanted to be happy in the general sense of the word.
...‘Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux,’ Camus concluded superbly, at the end of his book on the uselessness of passion. In just that way we must imagine that the fairytale of stupid Hans has a happy ending; and that Lucky Per himself has managed to get beyond success or failure.
