Danish Literature as World Literature 9781501310010, 9781501310041, 9781501310034

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Danish Literature as World Literature

Literatures as World Literature Literatures as World Literature takes a novel approach to world literature by analyzing specific constellations – according to language, nation, form or theme – of literary texts and authors in their world-literary dimensions. World literature has been mapped and theorized in the abstract, but the majority of critical work, the filling in of what has been traced, lies ahead of us. Literatures as World Literature begins the task of filling in the devilish details by allowing scholars to move outward from their own area of specialization. The hope is to foster scholarly writing that approaches more closely the polyphonic, multiperspectival nature of the world literature we wish to explore. Series Editor: Thomas O. Beebee Editorial Board: Eduardo Coutinho, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Hsinya Huang, National Sun-yat Sen University, Taiwan Meg Samuelson, University of Cape Town, South Africa Ken Seigneurie, Simon Fraser University, Canada Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, Aarhus University, Denmark Volumes in the Series German Literature as World Literature Edited by Thomas O. Beebee Roberto Bolaño as World Literature Edited by Nicholas Birns and Juan E. De Castro Crime Fiction as World Literature Edited by Louise Nilsson, David Damrosch, and Theo D’haen Danish Literature as World Literature Edited by Dan Ringgaard and Mads Rosendahl Thomsen Romanian Literature as World Literature (forthcoming) Edited by Mircea Martin, Christian Moraru, and Andrei Terian Brazilian Literature as World Literature (forthcoming) By Eduardo F. Coutinho

Danish Literature as World Literature Edited by Dan Ringgaard and Mads Rosendahl Thomsen

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

N E W YO R K • LO N D O N • OX F O R D • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © Dan Ringgaard, Mads Rosendahl Thomsen and Contributors 2017 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the editors. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ringgaard, Dan, editor. | Thomsen, Mads Rosendahl, 1972- editor. Title: Danish literature as world literature / edited by Dan Ringgaard and Mads Rosendahl Thomsen. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. | Series: Literatures as world literature | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016034183 (print) | LCCN 2016040771 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501310010 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501310027 (ePUB) | ISBN 9781501310034 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781501310027 (ePub) Subjects: LCSH: Danish literature–Appreciation. | Danish literature–History and criticism. | Literature–History and criticism. | BISAC: LITERARY CRITICISM / European / Scandinavian. Classification: LCC PT7660 .D24 2017 (print) | LCC PT7660 (ebook) | DDC 839.81/09–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016034183 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-1001-0 ePub: 978-1-5013-1002-7 ePDF: 978-1-5013-1003-4 Series: Literatures as World Literature Cover design: Simon Levy Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.

Contents Contributorsvi Acknowledgementsviii Introduction: Danish Literature as World Literature  Dan Ringgaard and Mads Rosendahl Thomsen1 1

‘History of the Danes’: Saxo the Grammarian and Saxo the Rune Master  Pernille Hermann11 2 Travelling Ballads: The Dissemination of Danish Medieval Ballads in Germany and Britain, 1760s to 1830s  Lis Møller 31 3 Ludvig Holberg: A Man of Transition in the Eighteenth Century  Svend Erik Larsen 53 4 A Man of the World: Hans Christian Andersen  Karin Sanders 91 5 Straight into the Bliss of Knowing: Søren Kierkegaard’s Influence on Franz Kafka  Isak Winkel Holm 115 6 Modern Denmark: Brandes – Jacobsen – Bang  Annegret Heitmann 141 7 Towards a New World: Johannes V. Jensen and Henrik Pontoppidan  Jon Helt Haarder 167 8 Out of Africa, into World Literature  Lasse Horne Kjældgaard 193 9 Breaking New Ground – Danish Poets in the Intersection Between Modernism and Postmodernism  Anne-Marie Mai 209 10 ‘A faithful, attentive, tireless following’: Cultural Mobility, Crime Fiction and Television Drama  C. Claire Thomson and Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen 237 Index269

Contributors Jon Helt Haarder is Associate Professor of Danish Literature at University of Southern Denmark, Denmark. He has written numerous studies in performative autobiography on contemporary and modernist Scandinavian literature. He is an editor of www.henrikpontoppidan.dk. Annegret Heitmann is Professor of Scandinavian Literature at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany. She is the author of several books on Scandinavian literature, including Intermedialität im Durchbruch (2003) and (with H. Eglinger) Landnahme. Anfangserzählungen in der skandinavischen Literatur um 1900 (2010). Pernille Hermann is associate professor of Scandinavian literature at Aarhus University, Denmark. She has written and edited several publications on Old Norse literature and is co-editor of Handbook of Pre-Modern Nordic Memory Studies. Interdisciplinary Approaches (forthcoming). She is co-director and faculty member of the Harvard Summer School in Viking Studies at Aarhus University, and since 2016 she is adjunct professor at the University of Iceland. Lasse Horne Kjældgaard is Professor of Literature at Roskilde University, Denmark. He is a former director of the Danish Society for Language and Literature, editor of a new edition of Karen Blixen’s Min afrikanske farm (Out of Africa) and a co-editor of Literature: An Introduction to Theory and Analysis (2017). He is the author of a forthcoming work on literature and the welfare state. Svend Erik Larsen is professor emeritus of comparative literature at Aarhus University, Denmark and Yangtze River visiting professor at Sichuan University. He is co-editor of Orbis Litterarum and vice-president of the Academia Europaea. He has written numerous publications on literary and cultural history, history of ideas and semiotics. He is the author of Signs in Use (2002) and Literature and the Experience of Globalizaton: Texts Without Borders (forthcoming). Anne-Marie Mai is Professor of Danish Literature at University of Southern Denmark, Denmark. She is the author of a three-volume history of Danish literature and place, Hvor litteraturen finder sted I–III (2010–2012), and the

Contributors

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editor of several works on Danish and Scandinavian literature, including 100 Danish Poems: From the Medieval Period to the Present Day (2011), and the online Nordic Women’s Literature (http://nordicwomensliterature.net). Lis Møller is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Aarhus University, Denmark. She is the author of The Freudian Reading (1991), editor of the journal Romantik: Journal for the Study of Romanticisms and a co-editor of Literature: An Introduction to Theory and Analysis (2017). She is a recipient of the Georg Brandes Prize (2012). Dan Ringgaard is Professor of Scandinavian Literature at Aarhus University, Denmark. He is the author of several monographs on Danish poets. He is the volume editor of A History of Nordic Literary Cultures : Place Nodes (forthcoming) and a co-editor of Literature: An Introduction to Theory and Analysis (2017). He is a recipient of the Georg Brandes Prize (2011). Karin Sanders is Professor of Danish Literature at University of California, Berkeley, USA. She is the author of Bodies in the Bog and the Archaeological Imagination (2009) and a volume editor of A History of Nordic Literary Culture: Figural Nodes (forthcoming). Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen is Senior Lecturer in Scandinavian Literature at University College London, UK. He is the author of Scandinavian Crime Fiction (2017) and a co-editor of World Literature, World Culture: History, Theory, Analysis (2008). Mads Rosendahl Thomsen is Professor with special responsibilities of Comparative Literature at Aarhus University, Denmark. He is the author of Mapping World Literature: International Canonization and Transnational Literatures (2008) and The New Human in Literature: Posthuman Visions of Changes in Body, Mind and Society after 1900 (2013) and a co-editor of World Literature: A Reader (2012) and Literature: An Introduction to Theory and Analysis (2017). Claire Thomson is Senior Lecturer in Scandinavian Film at University College London, UK. She is the author of Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen (2013) and numerous articles on Scandinavian film and television. Isak Winkel Holm is Professor of Comparative Literature at University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He is the author of monographs on Søren Kierkegaard and Franz Kafka and numerous articles on European literature, politics and catastrophes.

Acknowledgements The editors would like to thank the Danish Ministry for Higher Education and Science and Aarhus University’s Research Foundation for their generous support.

Introduction: Danish Literature as World Literature Dan Ringgaard and Mads Rosendahl Thomsen

Denmark is one of the world’s smaller nations, ranking about in the middle of all nations in terms of population. Yet, the size of Denmark has varied throughout history and shaped the country’s self-understanding and its literature in significant ways. Today the nation of 5.6 million people is fairly homogenous with Danish as its official language, few minorities and little Danish spoken outside of Denmark (except when subtitled in television shows). It has not always been so. Prior to 1864, Denmark had a large German-speaking population in Slesvig-Holstein, and Iceland was under Danish rule until 1944. Norway was a part of Denmark until 1814, and the two nations’ languages are still quite similar to a degree that Henrik Ibsen can easily be read by Danes. Vast but scarcely populated Greenland and the smaller Faroe Islands, both partially independent, are the last remains of the Kingdom outside of the main land (a long peninsula with a short border to Germany and more than 500 islands that ensures that there is never more than 30 miles to the sea from any point), which also has a colonial past in India, Africa and the West Indies. Like any other nation, the conditions for literary life have changed dramatically due to societal organization and technological changes. Going through periods of feudalism, enlightenment, industrialized bourgeois to the contemporary post-industrial era, and from being a mostly illiterate society of peasants to an educated people in a highly productive economy have shaped literature. During this process the idea of the nation has changed, and hence also the idea of what the writer could achieve. In this respect, the much-willed international orientation of Hans Christian Andersen and Karen Blixen stand out, also in comparison with their contemporaries. They were writers who definitely did not see the nation as the only frame of their writing. But there are other ways to obtain international recognition. Søren Kierkegaard barely left Copenhagen

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during his short life, and his reputation in Denmark did not make it immediately clear that he would become a significant figure in twentieth-century philosophy thanks to the reinvigoration existentialist philosophers gave him, as well as the qualities of his original and at times novelistic style, which may have been better suited for the posterity than his present. The Czech-French author Milan Kundera defines two kinds of provincialism in his essay ‘Die Weltliteratur’. There is the provincialism of the large nations that do not see a need for a wider context for their literature. And there is the provincialism of smaller nations that cannot see how their literature can have a place among the large literatures of the world but rather see them as ‘something alien, a sky above their heads, distant, inaccessible, an ideal reality with little connection to their national literature’.1 Obviously, Kundera protests against both attitudes and calls for a wider engagement with other literatures and for seeing all literatures in a wider frame. But it soon becomes an open question which frame is the most suited. World literature is the widest possible context, but also so wide that one will need other kinds of qualifications for it to make sense. Theorists of world literature have made various suggestions that address this, such as David Damrosch’s constellations of works, or Franco Moretti’s focus on the spread of genres, that each in their way makes arguments for understanding literature beyond the nation. Kundera argues for the intermediate context as a valuable concept in an argument he has repeated many times, that Central Europe (and not Eastern Europe) is the context out of which his authorship grew. In ‘Die Weltliteratur’, he mentions Scandinavia as one of these intermediate contexts that can help literatures to think beyond themselves. But while the integration of the literary field in Scandinavia was strong at the end of the nineteenth century, the field is now much more scattered and influenced by a number of different contexts. Kundera does not suggest that there is one context that is right, and the layers of meaningful contexts should be seen as invitations for thinking anew rather than longing for a fixed home. One such highly influential shift of context appeared in literary critic Georg Brandes’ 1871 Copenhagen lectures about Main Currents in European Literature. As the title suggests, Brandes’ cosmopolitan view on literary history was founded in the metaphor of the wave. Looking back on the main currents of European 1

Milan Kundera, ‘Die Weltlitteratur’, in World Literature: A Reader, ed. Theo D’haen et al. (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 292.

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literature of the period spanning from the French Revolution of 1789 to the European uprisings of 1848, he observes, ‘one great leading movement with its ebb and flow, namely the gradual fading away and disappearance of the ideas and feelings of the preceding century, and the return of the idea of progress in new, ever higher-mounting waves’.2 Not only does Brandes conceive of literary history in the image of the wave, he also adheres to a Hegelian dialectics of action and reaction. The problem with Danish literature of the period, according to Brandes, was that the wave of action from the French Revolution never quite made it to the European Periphery of Denmark; instead the romantic reaction reached its shores, never left and wound up as a poor replica of itself. This is a general problem, he claims. Literatures of small nations such as the Danish are incomplete because some currents never reach them while others linger too long: ‘Apart from the fact that there are times where we do not know the thoughts and feelings of people, there are times where people have felt and thought, only on second hand, weaker and more feebly than elsewhere.’3 Brandes was by no means opposed to the idea of a national literature, however inadequate it might sometimes appear, but he insisted on a cosmopolitan, or in effect, European outlook: ‘The comparative view possesses the double advantage of bringing foreign literature so near to us that we can assimilate it, and of removing our own until we are enabled to see it in its true perspective.’4 In order to do this, he establishes a dialectical method of literary history and a centre–periphery model both of them conceived in the metaphor of the wave. That a liberal-minded Jewish intellectual as Brandes only seven years after Denmark’s devastating defeat to Prussia should claim the nationally much lauded Danish romanticism a European backwater caused uproar. However, Brandes’ lectures ended up as a more than just symbolic turning point for what was to become the Modern Breakthrough, not only in Denmark but also in Scandinavia. What followed was a flourishing of a common Scandinavian literary culture, and one that challenged Brandes’ understanding of centre and periphery. For a period it was, as Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane have suggested, the peripheries of Scandinavia and Russia that in some respects made up the avant-garde of European modernism. Henrik Ibsen’s plays were published 2

3

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Georg Brandes, Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature, Vol. 1 (New York and London: Boni & Liveright Inc. and William Heinemann Ltd, 1923), vii. Georg Brandes, ‘Indledning’, in Georg Brandes Samlede Skrifter, Vol. 4 (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandels Forlag, 1900), 3. Our translation. Brandes, Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature, vii.

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and premiered in Copenhagen, and Brandes’ ideas of an art engagé together with the works of among others Ibsen and August Strindberg, J.P. Jacobsen and Herman Bang were common denominators for the Scandinavian literature of the period. As Franco Moretti has pointed out, the counter image to the wave in literary history is that of the tree. What Brandes rejected was a consolidated national tree-construction known as the golden age of Danish art, science and literature and founded in the very first years of the nineteenth century around the poet and later professor of aesthetics Adam Oehlenschläger, the idealist philosopher Heinrich Steffens and the physicist and discoverer of electromagnetism Hans Christian Ørsted. Out of this flourishing environment strongly influenced by German idealism came among others Hans Christian Andersen, Søren Kierkegaard and the priest, poet and co-inventor of the particular Danish brand of high schools, N.F.S. Grundtvig. It was this culture that by 1871 seemed faded, to put it mildly, to Brandes. In this clash between the wave and the tree, the idea of Scandinavia, or the Nordic, very much functioned as an intermediate context. On the one hand, it was a steppingstone to Europe for the authors of the Modern Breakthrough, on the other, it was by no means foreign to the nation building of the romantic period. On the contrary, it was closely tied to it. The building of the national cultures within the Scandinavian countries converged in a common Viking and Medieval past. Here the History of the Danes by Saxo (around 1200), the vast number of ballads and folk tales that had been collected in the renaissance and again in the romantic period, as well as the sagas and eddas, including the Nordic mythology, played an important role. The sagas and eddas were written in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries , some of the sagas deal with nearly contemporary events, but the majority of them deal with events that take place much earlier. They are written by Icelandic authors, but they deal with Scandinavian topics, and they were known throughout the linguistically homogeneous region of Scandinavia. Coming out of the Middle Ages the history of Scandinavia developed into a colonial history of two kingdoms, the Swedish and the Danish, organized around two seas, the Baltic Sea and the North Sea. The authors of this period often had an allegiance to the crown but rarely to the nation. Whether it was the Medieval historian Saxo (approx. 1150–1220), the renaissance scientist and part-time sonnet writer Tycho Brahe (1546–1601), the daughter of Christian IV Leonora Christine (1621–1698), who wrote her extraordinary Memoirs in prison, the enlightenment playwright, professor of history and much more

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Ludvig Holberg (1684–1754), or the eighteenth-century poet, dramatist and author of an outstanding autobiography Johannes Ewald (1743–1781), they all had a European outlook. The colonial history within Scandinavia came to a halt when in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Norway, Finland and Iceland emerged as sovereign nations, and later, as already mentioned, a partial sovereignty was given to Greenland the Faroe Islands and also to the Åland Islands between Sweden and Finland. Looking at Scandinavia today from a global perspective, and in the wake of the internationalism of a strong mid-twentiethcentury modernist movement, it might be said that the international branding of Scandinavia as Scandinavian noir or Scandinavian design to some extent has blurred the identities of the respective nations. Although the literary field today in Scandinavia seems scattered and influenced by a number of different contexts when seen from the inside, the global gaze on Scandinavia recognizes a region rather than a number of nations. From this point of view it becomes clear that Scandinavia has in fact in several periods of history functioned as that which Kundera called an intermediate context for literature written in Danish or in Denmark. The aforementioned Johannes Ewald is an example of a minor language author of extraordinary quality that for various reasons never made it into the circuit of world literature. Not only are his poems, dramas and especially his autobiography, Lifes and Opinions (written between 1774 and 1778), major works of Danish Literature, the way the latter converses with and elaborates on the traditions of the European novel and autobiography is extraordinary by any standard. Another example of this minor language-destiny is the short stories of Steen Steensen Blicher (1782–1842). Their intricate enunciation and narrative structure, their mix of high and popular literature, and their local realistic grounding make them unique. Unlike Nicolai Leskov, with whom Blicher has many things in common, he never had a Walter Benjamin to introduce him into world literature. Realist novelist and Nobel Prize winner Henrik Pontoppidan had. Georg Lukács made his turn of the century novel Lucky Per a cornerstone of his seminal study of the novel. We mention Ewald and Blicher, and we could have mentioned others, not to engage in a provincial aspiration to let the two rise unto the world literary ‘sky above their heads’, but because their absence in this book points to the difference between a Danish Literary History and a book on Danish World Literature. There are authors central to the first who may not be interesting to the latter, but there are also those who are tantamount to the first and could have been part of the latter but for some reason are not.

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Danish literature measured It has long been possible to get a rough idea of the impact of individual authors through the sheer number of translations of their works, but the access to information of such matters has been vastly improved and expanded in the past decade. To give the writers of this volume a more nuanced picture of how the involved authors circulate, a report was made by Julie Kjær Markussen, MA in Comparative Literature, who collected information from a number of sources and made a series of comparisons to authors from Scandinavia and Europe. This includes first and foremost data on translations and library holding gathered through UNESCO’s Index Translationum and worldcat.org. The vast and very different data collected by Google was accessed through simple Google search, search on Google Books Ngram Viewer and Google Trends to give an impression of both long-term patterns in attention to the writers and the current impact of these. Amazon Sales Rank and Goodreads complemented the picture of contemporary interest and gave a more nuanced understanding of which works that were in particular demand today. This approach produced uplifting – seen from a Danish perspective – insights into to a wider and stronger impact than one would typically assume, or a much broader pattern of translations that can easily be forgotten. The global dissemination of Hans Christian Andersen’s work is astounding, also compared to authors’ from major literatures. The influence of other media is also easy to track, not least in the case of Karen Blixen whose work were made into two Academy Award winning films in the 1980s with a sharp rise in attention afterwards. A typical assumption would often take that fiction writers have more impact than critics but in the case of Georg Brandes it is remarkable how frequently he is referred to compared to the authors of his generation. However, the data also showed that the international reception of certain authors took place rather narrowly and that in particular that there is no guarantee that success in one European country will be noticeable in the other larger literatures of Europe, not to mention the world at large. It is also evident that while Danish television has had a recent boom internationally, the Scandinavian crime fiction scene is dominated by Swedish and Norwegian writers. But nuance is interesting in this respect. Ludvig Holberg is dwarfed in comparison to Moliére and Jonathan Swift, but most would be surprised to learn that he has actually been translated into forty-two languages, just as a number of 1960s poets whose work is not easily translatable or have any mass

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market appeal was in fact translated into a number of languages. Finally, there is a remarkable trend towards more attention to Scandinavian work in English in recent decades that had otherwise been mostly received in German or French, most likely as a testimony of increased internationalization, not least of literary criticism.

Contributions Danish Literature as World Literature is not only an investigation into the ways in which a national literature have interacted with the world, but it can, thanks to its chronological organization, also be read as a short history of Danish literature. Around 1200 the secretary to the archbishop of Lund, Saxo the Grammarian, finished his History of the Danes (Gesta Danorum). Written in Latin and modelled after classical historians and poets it was a work that was aimed at a European public and at the same time a political statement aimed at consolidating the church and the Danish king. Its international fame was secured by Shakespeare who came across Saxo’s story of Amleth and turned it into Hamlet. Pernille Hermann traces this and another historical trajectory of Saxo’s namely the romantic interpretation of him as the medieval source, and sorcerer, of the nation. Saxo himself belonging to a class of educated Europeans regarded Denmark as a geographically integrated part of Scandinavia, and the many legends and stories of his work were to constitute a national Danish memory. Another major early contribution to Danish literature as world literature is the rich corpus of medieval ballads. In her article Lis Møller traces their dissemination in Germany and Britain from the late eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century as part of the general ballad craze of the time, and she explicates their influence on major works by, among others, Johan Wolfgang von Goethe and Sir Walter Scott. One reason for the international success of the ballads are explained by their inclusion in a general interest in the Nordic, another reason is that many of them gained authenticity by having been collected and written down already in the renaissance. Thirdly, they appear to be of an outstanding quality. Another writer of explicitly European outlook and ambition is Ludvig Holberg. Born in Bergen, Norway, and a professor of History at the University of Copenhagen, he was indeed a citizen of the double monarchy of DenmarkNorway. Holberg published in numerous genres including epos, drama,

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autobiography, essays and scholarly works, some in Latin and some in Danish. Svend Erik Larsen circumscribes the activities of this multitalented enlightenment intellectual and traveller, meticulously measuring the nearness and the distance between his ideas and the present, not least the eighteenth-century preoccupation with universalities on the one hand, and the establishment of local vernaculars and with them the development of education, law, government and research on the other. Two writers have emerged from the booming literary environment of Danish romanticism and established themselves in world literature: Hans Christian Andersen and Søren Kierkegaard. The one constantly directed outwards towards Europe, ending up as one of the most translated authors of all times, the other circling between the desks of his apartment at night and the streets of Copenhagen at day laying the foundations to, among other things, existentialism. In her article on Andersen, Karin Sanders traces the development of the novels and travelogues before discussing the much more renowned fairy tales and stories. With the help of Georg Brandes and Walter Benjamin, she examines the various types of fairy tales, their double articulation of child and adult experience and their capacity to rewrite the real and turn to the overlooked in order to get to the truth. The article ends with a trail through the manifold afterlife of the works. Isak Winkel Holm looks into Søren Kierkgaard’s influence on Franz Kafka arguing that the impact of philosophy on literature isn’t one of ideas being allegorized in literary form but rather, with a term borrowed from David Wellbery, that of a ‘semantic preliminary’ that triggers the literary production of meaning. Taking his cue from Kafka’s correspondence on Kierkegaard and ending up in a reading of The Castle, the article traces the metamorphosis of a certain pre-eminently religious figure in Kierkegaard into a political and aesthetic strategy in Kafka. In the context of this book, the articles become an example of the dissemination of Danish world literature into canonical world literature. The so-called Modern Breakthrough in Scandinavia counts among its most prominent Danish members the criticism of Georg Brandes, the poetry, short stories and novels of Jens Peter Jacobsen and the short stories and novels of Herman Bang. Taking her cue from Bradbury and McFarlane, Annegret Heitmann points to the significance of Germany as a gateway to Europe for these writers and explains their modernity as a result of the manner in which their writings articulated the manifold process of modernization by way of new forms

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of expression. Heitmann focuses on the diffusion, reception and effects of their writings within the modern market and the global field of literature by tracing their very diverse biographies, bibliographies and poetics. Two of Denmark’s three Nobel laureates in literature, Henrik Pontoppidan and Johannes V. Jensen (recipients in 1917 and 1944 respectively; Pontoppidan shared the price with Karl Gjellerup), both published their most significant novels at the turn of the century. Jensen’s The Fall of the King (1900) and Pontoppidan’s Lucky Per (1898–1904) are both reactions to the modernization of society and to the increased secularization. Jon Helt Haarder shows how both authors created flawed masterpieces that were observant of the history of the nineteenth-century novel, but also found new ways of engaging with the desire for grand narratives, both on the personal and on the societal level, without offering any comfort to the reader. Karen Blixen, also known as Isak Dinesen, is an exceptional figure in Danish literary history. She wrote in English first and had a breakthrough as a very late debutante in the mid-1930s, thanks in part to the Book-of-the-Month-club in the United States. She translated her own work into Danish and lived in Denmark for the remainder of her life, after having returned from both a failed marriage and coffee plantation business in Kenya. In his article, Lasse Horne Kjældgaard emphasizes Blixen’s eclectic inspirations from her emigrant experiences, from world literature and from Scandinavia. This enables her to establish a gaze on things where nothing is quite at home, even the Danish or European contexts are defamiliarized, and where hierarchies between centre and periphery are challenged, as it was by her own success as a writer out of Denmark. Poetry traditionally struggles to become translated and even more so to attract a wider reading audience. Yet, a significant, perhaps surprisingly, number of Danish poets writing from the 1960s and onwards are available in other European languages. Even more so, it can be argued that Danish poetry from the second half of the twentieth century will be regarded as the strongest contribution to Danish literature of that period. Anne-Marie Mai demonstrates how seminal Danish poets, some of them still active in 2017, were influenced by international avant-garde poetry and art, but developed their own voice and styles whether they were mostly influenced by Beat writers or systemic approaches to poetry. The final article focuses on literature in the contemporary wider context of interest in Scandinavian film, TV-series, design and crime fiction. The last decade has witnessed a significant rise in export of cultural products from the linguistically more marginalized Scandinavia into the English-speaking world

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and from there further on. Claire Thomson and Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen trace the origins of the Scandinavian crime fiction boom, which is largely driven by Swedish and Norwegian authors, and circle in on how the idea of Scandinavian culture and even weather are parts of the explanation for the success of the genre. The article also shows how Peter Høeg’s Smilla’s Sense of Snow from 1992 became an at first glance unlikely international bestseller and later on a Hollywood movie, although it in many ways contains the same crime fiction elements and distinctive interest in the Nordic that is the hallmark of many crime novels. World literature is full of unlikely stories of fascination beyond borders; of authors who ended up circulating much more widely than they ever imagined, or works that were not thought of as world literature, but ended up being that. This is also the case with many of the cases presented in this volume between Danish and world literature.

Bibliography Bradbury, Malcolm and James McFarlane. Modernism. London: Penguin Books, 1991. Brandes, Georg. ‘Indledning’. Georg Brandes Samlede Skrifter, Vol. 4. Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandels Forlag, 1900. Brandes, Georg. Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature, Vol. 1. New York and London: Boni & Liveright Inc. and William Heinemann Ltd, 1923. Kundera, Milan. ‘Die Weltlitteratur’. In World Literature: A Reader, edited by D’haen, Theo et al., 289–300. London and New York: Routledge, 2012.

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‘History of the Danes’: Saxo the Grammarian and Saxo the Rune Master Pernille Hermann

William Shakespeare’s famous tragedy Hamlet: Prince of Denmark, from the early years of the seventeenth century, has as its most authoritative background Saxo the Grammarian’s (Saxo Grammaticus’ ) ‘History of the Danes’ (Gesta Danorum). The popularity of Shakespeare’s play throughout centuries constantly reminds new international audiences of Saxo’s medieval masterpiece, which was finished around 1210. Shakespeare’s play, which marks one of the absolute highpoints in the international reception of Saxo, is based on the story of the Danish prince Amleth. ‘History of the Danes’ is commonly divided into two parts, a legendary section (books 1–8) and a historical section (books 9–16), with the story about Amleth coming in the legendary part. It is only one among many stories in Saxo’s comprehensive text, which describes an unbroken line of Danish kings, from the first monarch, Dan, and ending with Valdemar I (the Great) and Canute VI. The text’s status as national literature is, however, not straightforward. First of all, it is written in Latin not in the vernacular Danish language, and secondly, it predates the rise of European nation states. The choice of language shows that Saxo was in part orientated towards the wider world, and that he might have aimed for an audience outside of Denmark. Yet despite this outward perspective, ‘History of the Danes’ represents an immensely important resource for medieval Nordic literary history, both its written and its non-written manifestations, and the text has – especially since the Renaissance when it was first printed and translated into Danish – been a central reference point in Danish literary history.

World literature But can ‘History of the Danes’ be considered as world literature? The status of literary texts between the national and the foreign is – like in comparative

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literature – a topic of debate in medieval studies.1 As in contemporary, globalized culture, the medieval world and its literatures require models of understanding alternative to those attached to the idea of the national. Medieval literature was affiliated with and derived from, on the one hand, very local communities and, on the other hand, with communities that were distributed across wide geographical areas. Ernst Robert Curtius demonstrated how in the Middle Ages literature was not kept within narrow spatial and temporal boundaries.2 Basing his examples on the connection of Latin literature with Classical texts, Curtius argued how individual texts deriving from different spatial and temporal environments fitted into a single and unified literary corpus. In many ways, ‘History of the Danes’ fits well into the broad picture of literature of the Latin Middle Ages, and topoi studies – in the form suggested by Curtius – offer one among other relevant approaches to the text. However, ‘History of the Danes’ is a text that evokes multiple registers, all of which need to be considered when defining its status; it is a text that presupposes a huge amount of oral lore, and even if the text is in many ways a witness to a connected web of European literature, it is also attached to local narrative traditions. In recent years the discussion about world literature has moved beyond the basic assumption that it consists either of literary works that have an extraordinary high quality or simply of literature from the world outside of one’s own.3 Besides the fact that ‘History of the Danes’ is actually a medieval text of high quality, some of the perspectives deriving from the current discussion of world literature, most of them coming from studies of modern literature, are enlightening for this piece of medieval literature. For instance, one perspective emphasizes that a literary work becomes world literature when it is received in a foreign cultural situation where it functions as an interactive space between different cultures.4 Shakespeare’s amplification of the story of Amleth demonstrates that ‘History of the Danes’ has actually functioned over time as such an interactive space. Another perspective underscores that formal compromises between foreign and local forms are criteria for world literature status and decisive factors for the

1

2

3

4

Paolo Borsa, Christian Høgel, Lars Boje Mortensen, and Elizabeth Tyler, ‘What Is Medieval European Literature?’ Interfaces. A Journal of Medieval European Literatures 1 (2015): 7–24. Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. W.R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952). Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, ed., Verdenslitterær kritik og teori (Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag, 2008). David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).

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development or evolution of new genres,5 a viewpoint that corresponds to the fact that ‘History of the Danes’ is very much the result of a dialogical relationship between local and foreign literary registers.

A literary memorial ‘History of the Danes’ was probably written in Lund, at that time part of the Danish realm, but now part of present-day Sweden. Saxo the Grammarian was a member of the Cathedral in Lund, where he was as a secretary (clericus) for the cathedral’s Archbishop, Absalon. Absalon died before Saxo finished the text, which was consequently dedicated to the Archbishop's successor, Anders Sunesen, as well as to King Valdemar II (the Victorious). Absalon belonged to the Hvide-family, a family that collaborated closely with the Valdemar dynasty, so the text is a result of a collaboration between powerful religious and secular groups. In the Prologue to ‘History of the Danes’, Saxo praises his patrons. When expressing the relationship between himself and Archbishop Absalon, he uses exordial topoi deriving from classical rhetoric and poetry:6 What man could have committed Denmark’s history to writing? […] So it came about that my small talent, though aware of its inadequacy for this massive assignment, preferred to strive beyond its powers rather than refuse the bidding […] Nervous therefore of shirking the command, I had to submit my clumsy shoulders to a burden untried by all writers of bygone ages; I obeyed with more presumption than efficiency, borrowing from the encouragement of my great patron the confidence which my own poor wits would not supply.7

Through this humility topos the author shows his modest and submissive status, and establishes a hierarchy between (the nervous and clumsy) author and (the great) employer. Absalon and his environment, the cathedral and the household, indeed provided the facilities that made it possible for Saxo to write ‘History of

5

6

7

Franco Moretti, ‘Conjectures on World Literature’, New Left Review 1 (2000): 54–68; Cf. Rosendahl Thomsen, Verdenslitterær kritik og teori. Cf. Inge Skovgaard-Petersen, Da tidernes herre var nær. Studier i Saxos historiesyn (København: Den danske historiske forening, 1987). The present article uses the most recent English translation of ‘History of the Danes’, which includes the parallel Latin text, see Karsten Friis-Jensen and Peter Fisher, ed. and trans., Saxo Grammaticus. Gesta Danorum. The History of the Danes, Vol. I–II (Oxford: Clarendon, 2015). Friis-Jensen and Fisher, Saxo Grammaticus, 3.

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the Danes’. But much authorial freedom might have been left in the hands of the Archbishop’s secretary, and Saxo could very well have been the one in control of the project: Essentially, the topos is a signal of the text’s rhetorical background, revealing its intertextual affiliation with classical literature. ‘History of the Danes’ is not only a literary project; it is indeed a political project too. Politically it presents two interrelated perspectives: An internal perspective concerned with the collaboration between king and church in Denmark, and an external perspective which is preoccupied with the position of Denmark in the wider world. Whereas the first perspective is indebted to powerstruggles within Denmark (and Saxo wrote in support of the families of Absalon and Valdemar), the latter situates Denmark in a European, political context, one that is directed towards the Holy Roman Empire, that is the German Empire, to the south, which made claim to be the heir to the classical Roman Empire.8 On a grand scale and from a European perspective, Denmark belonged to the geographical and cultural periphery of Christian Europe. This position on the periphery is recognized in Saxo’s topographic description of Denmark: The edges of this region, then, are partly bounded by another land frontier, partly enclosed by the waves of the adjacent sea. The interior is washed and encircled by the Ocean.9

In line with the mental geography of the time, Saxo considered the world to be circular and encircled by the ocean, and the northern part of Europe was placed close to the outer edges of the world.10 However, in a cultural sense, this position on the periphery was challenged; Saxo’s project negotiated centre and periphery, claiming that the Norse world could match the world that it became part of with Christianization.11 At Saxo’s time, many other European peoples (the English, Normans, etc.) had had their histories written, and consequently, the text was explicitly considered as a monument over Denmark, a monument that showed the present state of power-relations within Denmark, but even more

8

9 10 11

See, for example, Lars Boje Mortensen, ‘Nye læsninger af Saxos danmarkshistorie’, in Saxos Danmarkshistorie, trans. P. Zeeberg (Gylling, GPS Slovenien: Gad, 2015), 877. Friis-Jensen and Fisher, Saxo Grammaticus, 9. Ibid., 9 note 22. Classical models were conspicuously present in Saxo’s text, but also influences from the Christian idea world are present, for instance, in the text’s structure and view of history. For example, it has been argued that the books in Gesta Danorum are organized figuratively and that chronology and dating is done according to Christian universal history, that is the birth of Christ is mentioned in Book 5. Cf. Skovgaard-Petersen, Da tidernes herre var nær.

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so demonstrated to the world around that this country was rooted in an ancient civilization: […] if our neighbours exulted in the records of their past exploits, the reputation of our people should not lie forgotten under ancient mould, but be blest with a literary memorial.12

Saxo used classical writers as the models for his memorial, something which is confirmed by the fact that he chose to write – not in Medieval but – in Classical Latin. A classicizing approach is not unique for ‘History of the Danes’, it is evidenced in literature from especially Northern France but also other parts of Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, making it relevant to consider Saxo as a Danish representative of a cross-cultural literary movement which used Roman authors’ language, style and structures as models in their works, the socalled renaissance of the twelfth century.13

Geography One way that Saxo could impose high status to the Danish royal family was by referring to heroic kings of the past: A glorious past and a long, unbroken line of Danish kings served to legitimize the present. But also geography, that is, Denmark and its surrounding landscape, was evoked when the Danes and the Valdemar dynasty were presented in a glorious light. Saxo worked from the principle that the beauty and the exceptional quality of the physical environments added to the esteem and prominence of people living there. In the Prologue, he described the different parts of Denmark (Jutland, Funen, Zealand, Scania, Halland and Blekinge). From Saxo’s point of view, Zealand, the homestead of Saxo’s sponsors, and presumably of himself as well, was especially lovely, and was presented by him as the centre of Denmark: Eastward again lies Zealand, worthy of praise for its exceptional richness in the resources of life. This island is the most lovely of all our provinces and is

12 13

Friis-Jensen and Fisher, Saxo Grammaticus, 3. See Karsten Friis-Jensen. ‘Saxo Grammaticus’ fortale og Snorre’, in Saxo og Snorre, ed. J.G. Jørgensen, K. Friis-Jensen, and E. Mundal (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2010), 99 and Karsten Friis-Jensen, ‘Introduction’, in Saxo Grammaticus. Gesta Danorum. The History of the Danes, Vol. I–II, ed. and trans. K. Friis-Jensen and P. Fisher (Oxford: Clarendon, 2015), xlvi.

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Danish Literature as World Literature considered to be the centre of Denmark, since the farthest limits of the region’s circumference are equidistant from it.14

It is common for medieval history works to be preoccupied with geography – as such ‘History of the Danes’ is no exception to the rule. Its geographical concern goes beyond an interest in Denmark as other Nordic areas (Sweden, Norway, Iceland) are described as well. Saxo writes from the conviction that Denmark is an integral part of a Nordic region, held together by shared territory and related languages: I shall record, besides the areas and climate of Denmark, those of Sweden and Norway, since the same geographic area embraces them, and because of their kindred languages.15

The different areas in the North are described on a scale ranging from ‘richness of resources’ and ‘highly civilized’ to ‘barren outlands’ and ‘lack of civilization’, which suggests a hierarchical ordering of geographies, landscapes and consequently of people. For instance, Norway is directed to the periphery and is characterized as ‘an unpleasant, craggy terrain’ that ‘reveals nothing but a grim, barren, rock-strewn desert’.16 The description of Iceland is somewhat more nuanced. First, this location lies to the west of the Norwegian ‘desert’, that is, even further on the periphery of the world, and its landscape is described as unwelcoming and inaccessible. But on top of that, the Icelandic landscape and its natural phenomena are characterized by strange and mysterious natural phenomena: It is at one and the same time in a really poor shape and yet filled with miraculous powers. In the case of Iceland, the model that sees an identity between land and people is designed according to Saxo’s purpose: The relatively long description offers an exceptional background for how the reader should understand one of Saxo’s main source groups and informants, the Icelandic skalds and history writers.

Physical and embodied libraries Saxo’s status as a secretary in the archbishopric in Lund, one of the religious centres of the North, makes it relevant to consider him not only as a member of 14 15 16

Friis-Jensen and Fisher, Saxo Grammaticus, 11. Ibid., 13. Ibid.

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a Danish community of powerful secular and ecclesiastical groups but also as a representative of an international elite community. Cloisters and cathedrals offered a connected space within which intellectuals and men of the Church could communicate: it was not least within this network that exchange of ideas and learning across geographical borders in Christian Europe happened. The medium of writing supported and facilitated exchange and communication in this wide-ranging ‘textual community’,17 where Latin book-culture gave the literati access to the literature of the world, that is, literature from the two highcultures of the day: the Christian and the Classical culture, as it was filtered through Christian ideology. The same books could be read by people at different times and places. A relatively high degree of mobility was a reality for this elite community, and – even if only a very little of Saxo’s biography is known for certain – it is very likely that he travelled to central learning environments in Europe, for example, to schools in Reims and Paris.18 Saxo found inspiration for how to model Danish history in books kept in the libraries in his surroundings, obviously in the cathedral in Lund, but also in the cloister library in Sorø and in libraries that he visited abroad.19 Saxo mentions a few of his sources directly, but many of the texts that he knew and which inspired him are not mentioned explicitly by him. Structurally and stylistically he was inspired by Classical historians and poets, for example, Valerius Maximus, Curtius Rufus, Justin, Virgil and Horace,20 and for historical knowledge he consulted and used not only the works of his Danish predecessor in history writing, Sven Aggesen, whom Saxo avoids mentioning directly,21 but English, French and German history writing, such as Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People (ca. 731), Dudo of SaintQuentin’s ‘History of the Normans’ (ca. 1015), Adam of Bremen’s History of the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen (ca. 1075) and Geoffrey of Monmouth’s The History of the Kings of Britain (ca. 1136).22 17

18

19 20 21

22

About ‘textual communities’, see Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy. Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983). For a discussion of Saxo’s background, education, travels, see overviews in H.R. Ellis Davidson, ‘Introduction’, in Saxo Grammaticus. The History of the Danes. Books I–IX, trans. P. Fisher. D.S. Brewer, 1980 and in Friis-Jensen, ‘Introduction’, xxxii–xxxiii. Friis-Jensen, ‘Introduction’, xxvii and xxxii–xxxiii. See Skovgaard-Petersen, Da tidernes herre var nær, 65 and Friis-Jensen, ‘Introduction’, xlvi. Mia Münster-Swendsen, ‘Saxos skygge. Sven, Saxo og meningen med Lex castrensis’, in Saxo og hans samtid, ed. P. Andersen og T. Heebøll-Holm (Aarhus: Aarhus Univeristetsforlag, 2012), 91–112. See Skovgaard-Petersen, Da tidernes herre var nær, 65 and Lars Boje Mortensen, ‘The Status of the “Mythical” Past in Nordic Latin Historiography (c. 1170–1220)’, in Medieval Narratives Between History and Fiction. From the Centre to the Periphery of Europe, c. 1100–1400, ed. P. Agapitos and L. Boje Mortensen (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2012a), 131–133.

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We can assume that Saxo was writing in a context where literacy and bookculture were of major importance. However, it was not only access to physical libraries that facilitated Saxo’s project, so did also what can be called ‘non-tangible libraries’, namely the minds of educated individuals. This situation would explain why he reserved relatively much space in the Prologue to refer to Archbishop Anders Sunesen as one of his sources. Saxo’s main source of inspiration was probably Absalon, an assumption that is supported by Saxo himself,23 and the reference to Absalon’s successor may to some extent be a formality. Still, the way Saxo refers to Sunesen – who is known in Danish literary history as the author of Hexaemeron, a versified theological treatise about creation – reveals important characteristics of the context of learning in which Saxo was situated. Saxo emphasizes that Sunesen had travelled widely, in France, Italy and Britain, where he had ‘gathered a store of learning’,24 which he kept in his mind: I ask you especially, Anders […] to be the guide and inspiration of my theme; I can disappoint the spleen of critics, who jeer at whatever is most remarkable, with your strong protection and advocacy; for men must consider your mind a shrine of heavenly treasures, prolific as it is in knowledge, furnished with a wealth of sacred scholarship.25

When referring to Sunesen’s intellectual resource, the text has the Latin word pectus, which in the quote above is translated to ‘mind’, but which may as well be translated to ‘breast’. It is implied here that the mind, an intellectual resource of thought, memory and imagination, has its dwelling in the breast, that is, in a secure bodily enclosure close to the heart where its contents can be kept safely and in orderly fashion. The mind, or the breast, is further described as a shrine (sacrarium) that contains heavenly treasures and sacred scholarship. Saxo repeats here the much used metaphor of the mind as a storage-space or a container.26 Saxo’s reference to and reflections on the mind demonstrates that being a member of a highly educated group did not merely imply competences in the reading and writing of concrete, physical books and a decoding of external letters on manuscript pages; Authorship also depended on exchange with people who were skilled in memory, thought and imagination, that is, with individuals 23 24 25 26

Friis-Jensen and Fisher, Saxo Grammaticus, 7. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 3. Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory. A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 34–35.

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like Anders Sunesen who carried invaluable and treasured book-knowledge in the portable storage-space of his breast. Thus, in learned culture books (physical libraries) and the minds of educated individuals (embodied libraries) offered two co-existing and interacting archives.

Authorial position What does Saxo say about his authorial position? We learn from Saxo’s own words that he did not consider himself an author who was inventing something new, but as a translator who followed the utterance of antiquity at his disposal. He recognizes that he wrote on top of other texts, something which corresponds to the method of imitation. This method was essentially inherited from Classical authors,27 so also methodologically Saxo found inspiration in Classical texts. Though, the statement is made in a context where he particularly talks about sources from the ancient Norse past, such as poems and songs – and runic inscriptions: I should like it to be known that Danes of an older age, filled with a desire to echo the glory when notable braveries had been performed, alluded in the Roman manner to the splendour of their nobly wrought achievements with choice compositions of poetical nature; not only that, but they saw the letters of their own language were engraved on rocks and stones to retell those feats of their ancestors which had been made popular in the songs of their mother tongue. Adhering to the tracks of these verses, as if to some ancient volumes, and following the sense with the true steps of a translator, I have assiduously rendered one poem by another; my chronicle, relying on these aids, should be recognized not as something freshly compiled but as the utterance of antiquity; this book is thereby guaranteed to give a faithful understanding of the past […] Even when they had no acquaintance with the Roman tongue, they were taken by such an urge to transmit their record to posterity that in the absence of books they resorted to massive boulders and granite for their pages.28

A new layer of meaning is added to the Nordic landscapes, when their concrete shapes, rocks, stones and boulders are presented as surfaces of inscription. 27

28

Edward P.J. Corbett, ‘The Theory and Practice of Imitation in Classical Rhetoric’, College Composition and Communication 22, no. 3 (1971): 243–250. Friis-Jensen and Fisher, Saxo Grammaticus, 5–7.

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It was relevant for Saxo to create a situation that could demonstrate that his sources gave him direct access to the ancient past and thus could guarantee its authenticity. But other points are relevant as well. His translation of runic script and Norse metres into Latin script and classical metres, which meant a transformation of vernacular Norse poems into classical quantitative metres, places him as a mediator between two types of literature, the Norse tradition and the tradition of Latin Europe. This is so, even if his reference to poems written on stones is likely not to be understood literally, but symbolically; one thing is that he does not refer to specific stones and boulders in this context, another is that he exaggerates the amount of written material that he has access to.29 Still, by comparing runic script in stone with Latin script in books, the ancient Danish culture is set forth as comparable to Roman high-culture.30 Here memorystrategies become a relevant context of understanding for Saxo’s text. The reference to the rocks and boulders evokes a dominant metaphor of memory, namely ‘memory as inscription’.31 Saxo emphasizes that the ancient Norsemen did not only remember with the aid of mental techniques, for instance, by attaching images on spatial structures created in the mind, they developed, tested and used external aids to memory as well. Understood that way, runic script incised on granite is to be seen as an aid to memory connected to attempts of people in ancient culture to establish external archives. The runes and the efforts of the Danes of the older age constructs a situation, earlier and less elaborate, but still to be compared to his own: At Saxo’s time the Latin alphabet facilitated the transfer of knowledge from memory to the book, a development that increased seriously during the thirteenth century in Iceland when the vernacular alphabet was used for exactly this purpose.

Oral lore Saxo’s aim might have been to reach out to an international elite-audience and consequently he used a language, chose stylistic ideals and methods that were known to this audience, and it is to a great extent foreign literary and political 29 30

31

Friis-Jensen, ‘Saxo Grammaticus’ fortale og Snorre’. Karsten Friis-Jensen, ‘Adhering to the Footprints of These Men as If to Books from Antiquity’, in Text and Voice: The Rhetoric of Authority in the Middle Ages (Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2004). Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 21–32.

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influences that gave form to and lay behind the text. Nevertheless, Saxo used and was aware of another literary system, one which co-existed with the Latin elite one. In contrast to the canonical literature of Latin Europe, this type of literature was upheld orally in the vernacular language and its dialects, being essentially a type of mouth-to-mouth and ear-to-ear literature told and performed in front of audiences. It could take many different shapes and – as is the case of skaldic poetry – intricate compositional skills were crucial for some of these oral artforms. That Saxo used oral narrative and poetry is obvious from his authorial meta-comment referring to the Icelanders as carriers of oral lore, and especially the legendary part of ‘History of the Danes’ reveals a grand scale use of orally transmitted lore. The Amleth story is one out of many examples of this aspect.32 The incorporation of this type of material in a Latin text that aspired to Classical ideals directly challenges approaches to medieval Latin literature that focus entirely on Classical elements and canonical pre-texts.33 ‘History of the Danes’ demonstrates that Latin texts of the Middle Ages may at one and the same time incorporate extremely local and extremely trans local perspectives. Whereas its context of oral literature may complicate a most basic definition of literature as something written, tangible and present for close inspection,34 it is nevertheless a fact that an understanding of Saxo’s text require consideration – not only of a (primarily foreign) corpus of written texts but also of oral material. From that perspective, it offers a window onto a part of Danish literary history that was not yet entangled with writing. 32

33

34

Apart from Saxo’s elaborate prose version, the Amleth-material (from Latin Amlethus and Old Norse Amlóði) is preserved in Old Icelandic texts such as Snorri Sturluson’s Edda and the (later) Ambales Saga as well as the Old-Swedish rhymed chronicle Erikskrönikan. See Israel Gollancz, Hamlet in Iceland: Being the Icelandic Romantic Ambales Saga with Extracts from Five Ambales Rímur and Other Illustrative Texts. Northern Library, 3 (London: David Nutt, 1898); Ian Felce, ‘In Search of Amlóða saga: The Saga of Hamlet the Icelander’, in Studies in the Transmission and Reception of Old Norse Literature. The Hyperborean Muse in European Culture, ed. J. Quinn and A. Cipolla (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2016) and William F. Hansen, Saxo Grammaticus and the Life of Hamlet: A Translation, History, and Commentary (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983). For a treatment of the earliest history of the Amleth-material in the Germanic North and the migration period, see Kemp Malone, The Literary History of Hamlet. I: The Early Tradition (Heidelberg: Carl Winter’s Universitätsbuchhandlung, 1923). The Amleth story, however, like other material recounted by Saxo, is intertwined with Classical material, for example, Brutus may be a model for some of Amleth’s actions and qualities see H.R. Ellis Davidson, ‘Wit and Eloquence in the Courts of Saxo’s Early Kings’, in Saxo Grammaticus. A Medieval Author Between Norse and Latin Culture, ed. K. Friis-Jensen (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 1981) and Kurt Johannesson, ‘Order in Gesta Danorum and Order in the Creation’, in Saxo Grammaticus. A Medieval Author Between Norse and Latin Culture, ed. K. FriisJensen (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 1981). Inge Skovgaard-Petersen, ‘Amleds rolle i Saxos Danmarkshistorie’, Historisk Tidsskrift 104, no. 1 (2004). See, for example, Peter Widdowson, Literature (New York: Routledge, 1999), 15 and 127.

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As mentioned above, Saxo makes specific reference to the Icelanders; but what does this reference imply? First of all, Saxo’s use of Icelandic material points to the inter-Nordic backdrop of medieval literature; it is a Norse, not a specific Danish literary tradition that served as inspiration to a substantial part of the text.35 This is how the Icelandic informants, whom he claimed to copy, were described: The diligence of the men of Iceland must not be shrouded in silence; since the barrenness of their native soil offers no support for self-indulgence, they practise a steady routine of temperance and devote all their time to improving our knowledge of others’ deeds, compensating for poverty by their intelligence. They regard it a real pleasure to discover and commemorate the achievements of every nation; in their judgement it is just as elevating to discourse on the prowess of others as to display their own. Thus I have scrutinized their packed store of historical treasures and composed a considerable part of this present work by copying their narratives, not scorning, where I recognized such skill in ancient lore, to take these men as witnesses.36

Saxo described the material of the Icelanders as a store of treasures (thesaurus), and once again he invokes the storage-room metaphor in the context of memory.37 Even if, technically speaking, parts of the Icelandic material referred to here could have been in written form, the reference is most likely mainly to oral genres.38 Saxo was bigoted against the people of the desert-island to the west of his own civilized place in the world, claiming that they took care of other people’s history for the reason that they did not have a history themselves. In a context where the possession of an ancient history and a glorious past opens the door to the civilized world of high-cultures, such an utterance is both harsh and degrading. But as mentioned above, Saxo went to some lengths to emphasize the unique character of the Icelandic landscape – and its inhabitants – and thus to legitimize his informants. 35

36 37 38

About the Norse tradition and its influence on Saxo, see, for example, Jon Gunnar Jørgensen, Karsten Friis-Jensen, and Else Mundal, eds., Saxo og Snorre (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2010); Margaret Clunies Ross, ‘Mythic Narrative in Saxo Grammaticus and Snorri Sturluson’, in Saxo Grammaticus. Tra storiografia e letteratura, ed. C. Santini (Rome: Il Calamo, 1992); and Karsten Friis-Jensen, ed., Saxo Grammaticus. A Medieval Author Between Norse and Latin Culture (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 1981). About Icelanders visiting the Cathedral in Lund, see Bjarni Guðnason, ‘Icelandic Sources’, in Saxo Grammaticus. A Medieval Author Between Norse and Latin Culture, ed. K. Friis-Jensen (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 1981). Friis-Jensen and Fisher, Saxo Grammaticus, 7. Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 33–35. Louis Christensen, ‘Echoes of Skaldic Music in Saxo’, Fund og Forskning 38 (1999): 8–64.

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Print and translations The awareness of Denmark in its European-Christian context, and the wish to see Denmark as an actor on the European scene, was an important background for Saxo’s project around 1200. However, it was not until three centuries after Saxo’s lifetime that a version of ‘History of the Danes’ had its European breakthrough; a breakthrough that was facilitated by the technological innovation of print culture.39 Saxo’s text, or more specifically, a later version of ‘History of the Danes’, was first printed in Paris in 1514 with the title ‘The Histories of the Kings and Heroes of the Danes’ (Danorum Regum Heroumque Historia). The printed edition was by the Danish humanist Christiern Pedersen, who was also responsible for the printing of other texts from Denmark, both educational texts and another literary monument of the past, namely ‘Peder Laale’s Proverbs’ (Peder Laales ordsprog). Having only a very few pieces of handwritten, original text from Saxo’s hand extant, the question naturally arises as to how close this printed version is to Saxo’s own text. It seems to have been a difficult task for Pedersen to retrieve Saxo’s original text and some sort of reconstruction from his hand may have been made, even if it is the general opinion that his redaction was relatively close to the original.40 In any case, it is Pedersen’s version that provided the background for the printed text, and which transformed the manuscriptbased ‘History of the Danes’ into a standardized and fixed text. The efforts made to find and to reconstruct Saxo’s text, and to have it printed, which is part of a time-typical interest in the Renaissance to collect bits and pieces of old books, was a task that Pedersen compared to a search for gold, silver and copper in the ashes of burnt cities.41 Pedersen collaborated in this project closely with Jodocus Badius, owner of the Parisian printing house Prelum Ascensianum. In this printing house – besides Saxo’s history work – French and English works of history were printed along with Classical texts (including some of those that had inspired ‘History of the Danes’, such as Valerius Maximus).42 39

40

41 42

See Anders Leegaard Knudsen, ‘Saxo-forskningen gennem 800 år’, in Saxo og hans samtid, ed. P. Andersen og T. Heebøll-Holm (Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag, 2012), 17–21. About the reception of ‘History of the Danes’ in the medieval period, see also Lars Boje Mortensen, ‘A Thirteenth-Century Reader of Saxo’s Gesta Danorum’, in The Creation of Medieval Northern Europe, ed. L. Melve and S. Sønnesyn (Oslo: Dreyer, 2012b), 346–355. See Henrik Horstbøll, Menigmands medie. Det folkelige bogtryk i Danmark 1500–1840 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 1999), 249–250, 255 and note 93 and Knudsen, ‘Saxo-forskningen gennem 800 år’, 20. Horstbøll, Menigmands medie, 252. Ibid., 251–252.

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An important international response to Saxo and his text came from the humanist scholar Erasmus, whose works were also printed by Jodocus Badicus:43 I admire so much his lively and burning genius, his rapid, flowing speech, his wonderful wealth of words, his numerous aphorisms, his wonderful variety of figures, that I cannot wonder enough where a Dane of that age got so great power of eloquence.44

Erasmus recognized the high quality of the text, even if he adhered to the notion of the ‘dark Middle Ages’, and, speaking from the discourse that the Norse world was located on the world-periphery, he wondered how such an eloquent language could derive not only from the distant past but also from such a remote place in the world. ‘History of the Danes’ was printed again in 1534 in another European printing centre, in Basel, where Erasmus lived; the front page of this second edition had a dedication to the Bishop of Basel as well as a reference to Erasmus’ quality statement. The print-versions of Saxo’s text had an impact, not only in learned humanist circles in Europe but in Scandinavia as well. The Danish king Christian II used the printed edition to support his position in times of conflict between Denmark and Sweden, underscoring that a history book documenting an ancient past was believed capable of supporting royal power;45 moreover, the printed versions of Saxo may indirectly have been decisive for the interest in Norway in the sixteenth century in Old Icelandic medieval manuscripts, which were, on the initiative of a humanist group in Bergen, for the first time translated and later printed.46 It was especially the Kings’ sagas (konungasögur), including Snorri Sturluson’s ‘Circle of the Earth’ (Heimskringla), that was looked at with a renewed interest. This implication of the circulation of the printed Saxo-edition in the North is expressed rather dramatically by the philologist Jon Gunnar Jørgensen, who has written that: ‘Most likely without Saxo Snorri still would have been lost in the darkness of oblivion.’47 Along with print culture, translations into vernacular languages, for example, French, and English meant that Saxo’s text was distributed to wider audiences. With regard to the Amleth-story, it is likely that François de Belleforest’s ‘Tragedic histories’ (Histoires tragiques) (ca.

43 44 45

46 47

Ibid., 222. Quote from Ellis Davidson, ‘Introduction’, 3. Jon Gunnar Jørgensen, ‘Saxo og Snorre i Danmark og Norge’, in Saxo og Snorre, ed. J.G. Jørgensen, K. Friis-Jensen, and E. Mundal (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2010), 80. Ibid., 80–82. Ibid., 92.

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1570), which included a French translation of the Amleth-narrative, was decisive for the reception in England and for inspiring Shakespeare’s Hamlet. If so, the Amleth-story’s travel across time and space depended on changing media (oral, manuscript, print), changing languages (Old Norse, Latin, French, English) and changing genres (poetry, prose and drama).

Saxo the Rune Master Saxo handled different media (oral and written) and different forms of libraries (embodied knowledge kept in the minds of individuals and disembodied material consisting of, on one end of the scale, boulders in the landscape and, on the other end, books) and it was on such raw material and from such different archives that ‘History of the Danes’ was shaped and gained its authority. As a representative of the Middle Ages, Saxo used Classical traditions as a reference point and saw the equalization of the Norse and the Classical as a way to expose Denmark at home and abroad. But over time the weight on the importance of the foreign and the local respectively has shifted, a process that went hand in hand with translations of Saxo’s text into Danish. Already Christiern Pedersen worked on a Danish translation – and an expansion of the text to include later periods of the country’s history – but it was the Danish historian Anders Sørensen Vedel, who made what is considered to be the first Danish translation in 1575.48 Vedel’s interests embraced a wide range of different historical and culturalhistorical sources, including ballads and songs, and he was also responsible for the first printed edition of Danish ballads, ‘A Book of Hundred Ballads’ (Hundredvisebogen) from 1591. The title of Vedel’s Saxo-translation reveals that he considered it to be a real improvement of the text: ‘The Danish Chronicle that was Written by Saxo Grammaticus, Now For the First Time from Latin, assiduously Translated and Improved by Anders Sørensen Vedel’ (Den Danske Krønicke som Saxo Grammaticus screff: Nu først aff Latinen udsæt, flittelige offuerseet oc forbedret aff Anders Søffrinssøn Vedel). Vedel made stylistic changes in the text and claimed to have made Saxo’s unfeasible Latin text accessible to all that understood Danish; however, it seems as if his targeted audience was first

48

Allan Karker, Anders Sørensen Vedel og den danske krønike (København: Branner og Korchs Forlag, 1955), 14–16.

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of all the Danish nobility.49 Vedel’s translation paved the way for later periods’ incorporation of Saxo’s Latin literary memorial into Danish contexts. The attempt to ‘improve’ Saxo’s text culminated centuries later with the theologian, historian and poet, N.F.S. Grundtvig’s translation that came out initially in the years 1818–1822 and in a second edition in 1856. His translation was a re-writing from the perspective of national-romantic ideology; it was written to the Danish people (folk), understood both as the Danish nation and as the commoners.50 In dismissing the relevance of the Latin language and style, Grundtvig deemed the death and deafness of Ms Grammatica (Fru Grammatica) and of the Classical father (classiske Papa), an attitude that he confirmed by changing the name of the great history writer of the past from Saxo Grammaticus to Saxo the Rune Master (Saxe Runemester).51 Using a vocabulary deriving from Old Norse myths and legends, Grundtvig emphasized how this name change implied that the giant-strong Roman troll (Romer-Trolden, jættestærk) was now overcome.52 If not before, then with Grundtvig the means by which Saxo inserted Denmark in a wider context (the linguistic and stylistic adherence to Classical tradition) was drastically changed and eroded, and Saxo was inserted in the context of the national. In some respects ‘History of the Danes’ encourages national perspectives on the work and its context; for instance, when Saxo reflects on people (natio) and fatherland (patria), and reveals how, from the perspective of a learned author around 1200, Danes and Denmark at that time could be envisaged as a community.53 Still, as is demonstrated above, it is not sufficient to understand ‘History of the Danes’ from ideas of the national; having travelled to learning centres abroad and being aware of Denmark’s position in Europe, Saxo was orientated towards the world around him. When Saxo has been referred to in Danish literary history, it has often been to serve authors’ understandings

49

50 51

52 53

Karsten Friis-Jensen, Vedels Saxo og den danske adel (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 1993), 11. Horstbøll, Menigmands medie, 179–186. N.F.S. Grundtvig, Saxo Grammaticus. Danmarks Riges Krønike (1856; Haderslev: Lademann, 1985), 13, 14 and 17. Grundtvig, Saxo Grammaticus, 14. On how concepts like, for instance, natio (people) and patria (fatherland) were understood by Saxo and in the medieval period generally, see, for example, Kasper H. Andersen, ‘Fædreland og folk i Gesta Danorum’, in Saxo og hans samtid, ed. P. Andersen and T. Heebøll-Holm (Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag, 2012).

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of their own times, and a reference to one of the most persistent images of Saxo will serve as a conclusion to this article. In the Danish national-romantic poet and play-writer Adam Oehlenschläger’s ‘Midsummer Night’s Play’ (Sanct Hansaften-spil) (1802), Saxo appears in a raree-show (perspektivkasse). In the words of an old man – introducing to his audience the temporal distant but exotic world of the Middle Ages – Saxo is presented as a fictionalized, romantic figure: An Old Man with a Raree-show […] Back in time we go; if you so will some hundred years. There you see a gothic chamber, weak light flames in the night; at the table sits a learned man; with hand under his chin he ponders. Parchments grey of the ages, old shields with letters on, bark with near eroded signs, stones with runes and hieroglyphs, things of more value than you think, are spread all over the big table. […] He looks at nature’s mounds, the noble man with his sharp eye, and stares to the shining top, from where we sank and will come back up. Then he takes the pen in his hand, to inspire in the present the spirit of the past. The various songs he changes; to become a gothic epic, which is alive and functions. Thanks go to the old canon; His name is Saxo Grammaticus.54

54

Prose translation by the author. Danish (poetic) text in Adam Oehlenschläger, Digte 1803. 1802. Forord af Peter Laugesen (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2002), 289–290.

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Bibliography Andersen, Kasper H. ‘Fædreland og folk i Gesta Danorum’. In Saxo og hans samtid, edited by P. Andersen and T. Heebøll-Holm, 215–259. Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag, 2012. Boje Mortensen, Lars. ‘Nye læsninger af Saxos danmarkshistorie’. In Saxos Danmarkshistorie, trans. P. Zeeberg Gylling, 867–881. GPS Slovenien: Gad, 2015. Boje Mortensen, Lars. ‘The Status of the ‘Mythical’ Past in Nordic Latin Historiography (c. 1170–1220)’. In Medieval Narratives Between History and Fiction. From the Centre to the Periphery of Europe, c. 1100–1400, edited by P. Agapitos and L. Boje Mortensen, 103–139. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2012a. Boje Mortensen, Lars. ‘A Thirteenth-Century Reader of Saxo’s Gesta Danorum’. In The Creation of Medieval Northern Europe, edited by L. Melve and S. Sønnesyn, 346–355. Oslo: Dreyer, 2012b. Borsa, Paolo, Christian Høgel, Lars Boje Mortensen, and Elizabeth Tyler. ‘What Is Medieval European Literature?’ Interfaces. A Journal of Medieval European Literatures 1 (2015): 7–24. Carruthers, Mary. The Book of Memory. A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Christensen, Louis. ‘Echoes of Skaldic Music in Saxo’. Fund og Forskning 38 (1999): 8–64. Clunies Ross, Margaret. ‘Mythic Narrative in Saxo Grammaticus and Snorri Sturluson’. In Saxo Grammaticus. Tra storiografia e letteratura, edited by C. Santini, 47–59. Rome: Il Calamo, 1992. Corbett, Edward P.J. ‘The Theory and Practice of Imitation in Classical Rhetoric’. College Composition and Communication 22, no. 3 (1971): 243–250. Curtius, Ernst Robert. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Translated by W.R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952. Damrosch, David. What Is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Davidson, Hilda Ellis. ‘Preface’. In Saxo Grammaticus. The History of the Danes, Books I-IX, trans. P. Fisher, 1-9. Woodbridge, Suffolk: D. S. Brewer 1996. Ellis Davidson, H.R. ‘Wit and Eloquence in the Courts of Saxo’s Early Kings’. In Saxo Grammaticus. A Medieval Author Between Norse and Latin Culture, edited by K. Friis-Jensen, 39–52. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 1981. Felce, Ian. ‘In Search of Amlóða saga: The Saga of Hamlet the Icelander’. In Studies in the Transmission and Reception of Old Norse Literature. The Hyperborean Muse in European Culture, edited by J. Quinn and A. Cipolla, 101–122. Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2016. Friis-Jensen, Karsten. ‘Adhering to the Footprints of These Men as If to Books from Antiquity’. In Text and Voice: The Rhetoric of Authority in the Middle Ages, 121–137. Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2004.

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Friis-Jensen, Karsten. ‘Introduction’. In Saxo Grammaticus. Gesta Danorum. The History of the Danes, Vol. I–II, edited and trans. by K. Friis-Jensen and P. Fisher, xxix–lxii. Oxford: Clarendon, 2015. Friis-Jensen, Karsten, ed. Saxo Grammaticus. A Medieval Author Between Norse and Latin Culture. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 1981. Friis-Jensen, Karsten. ‘Saxo Grammaticus’ fortale og Snorre’. In Saxo og Snorre, edited by J.G. Jørgensen, K. Friis-Jensen, and E. Mundal, 93–111. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2010. Friis-Jensen, Karsten. Vedels Saxo og den danske adel. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 1993. Friis-Jensen, Karsten and Peter Fisher, eds. and trans. Saxo Grammaticus. Gesta Danorum. The History of the Danes, Vol. I–II. Oxford: Clarendon, 2015. Gollancz, Israel. Hamlet in Iceland: Being the Icelandic Romantic Ambales Saga with Extracts from Five Ambales Rímur and Other Illustrative Texts. Northern Library, 3. London: David Nutt, 1898. Grundtvig, N.F.S. Saxo Grammaticus. Danmarks Riges Krønike. 1856. Haderslev: Lademann, 1985. Guðnason, Bjarni. ‘Icelandic Sources’. In Saxo Grammaticus. A Medieval Author Between Norse and Latin Culture, edited by K. Friis-Jensen, 79–93. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 1981. Hansen, William F. Saxo Grammaticus and the Life of Hamlet: A Translation, History, and Commentary. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983. Horstbøll, Henrik. Menigmands medie. Det folkelige bogtryk i Danmark 1500–1840. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 1999. Johannesson, Kurt. ‘Order in Gesta Danorum and Order in the Creation’. In Saxo Grammaticus. A Medieval Author Between Norse and Latin Culture, edited by K. Friis-Jensen, 95–104. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 1981. Jørgensen, Jon Gunnar. ‘Saxo og Snorre i Danmark og Norge’. In Saxo og Snorre, edited by J.G. Jørgensen, K. Friis-Jensen, and E. Mundal, 77–92. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2010. Jørgensen, Jon Gunnar, Karsten Friis-Jensen, and Else Mundal, eds. Saxo og Snorre. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2010. Karker, Allan. Anders Sørensen Vedel og den danske krønike. København: Branner og Korchs Forlag, 1955. Knudsen Leegaard, Anders. ‘Saxo-forskningen gennem 800 år’. In Saxo og hans samtid, edited by P. Andersen og T. Heebøll-Holm, 17–34. Aarhus: Aarhus Univeristetsforlag, 2012. Malone, Kemp. The Literary History of Hamlet. I: The Early Tradition. Heidelberg: Carl Winter’s Universitätsbuchhandlung, 1923. Moretti, Franco. ‘Conjectures on World Literature’. New Left Review 1 (2000): 54–68.

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Münster-Swendsen, Mia. ‘Saxos skygge. Sven, Saxo og meningen med Lex castrensis’. In Saxo og hans samtid, edited by P. Andersen og T. Heebøll-Holm, 91–112. Aarhus: Aarhus Univeristetsforlag, 2012. Oehlenschläger, Adam. Digte 1803. 1802. Forord af Peter Laugesen. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2002. Rosendahl Thomsen, Mads, ed. Verdenslitterær kritik og teori. Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag, 2008. Skovgaard-Petersen, Inge. Da tidernes herre var nær. Studier i Saxos historiesyn. København: Den danske historiske forening, 1987. Skovgaard-Petersen, Inge. ‘Amleds rolle i Saxos Danmarkshistorie’. Historisk Tidsskrift 104, no. 1 (2004): 1–28. Stock, Brian. The Implications of Literacy. Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983. Widdowson, Peter. Literature. New York: Routledge, 1999.

2

Travelling Ballads: The Dissemination of Danish Medieval Ballads in Germany and Britain, 1760s to 1830s Lis Møller

In 1766, the German poet Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg sparked off the ballad revival in Denmark – and he did so by introducing Danish traditional ballads to a German reading public. Born in 1737 in Schleswig to German parents, Gerstenberg studied law at the University of Jena. His main interest, however, was poetry, and in 1759 while he was still a law student he published his first poetical works. In 1765, he took up a military position in Copenhagen, where he soon joined Foreign Minister J.H.E. Bernstorff ’s German circle which also included the Sturm und Drang poet Heinrich Gottlieb Klopstock (in the 1760s Copenhagen’s cultural elite was predominantly German).1 From 1766 to 1768, Gerstenberg edited the literary journal Schleswiger Literaturbriefe to which he himself was the main contributor.2 His literary taste was decidedly Northern European and anti-classical, embracing Shakespeare and Milton as well as Old Norse poetry (besides being bilingual, German and Danish, Gerstenberg had acquired some knowledge of Old Norse). Letter Eight (1766) takes its point of departure in Macpherson’s Ossian poems and moves on to Thomas Percy’s recently published collection of English ballads, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765). Gerstenberg’s real business, however, is to inform his readers that

1

2

On Gerstenberg in Copenhagen, see Karen Klitgaard Povlsen, ‘Travelling Mythologies of the North Around 1760: Molesworth, Mallet, Gerstenberg, and Several Others in Copenhagen’, in Northbound. Travels, Encounters, and Constructions 1700–1830, ed. K. Klitgaard Povlsen (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2007), 129–150. The letters were published under the title Briefe über Merkwürdigkeiten der Litteratur (Stuttgart: G.J. Göschen’sche Verlagshandlung, 1890). Hereafter: Gerstenberg.

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a Danish collection of ancient ballads which may easily rival Percy’s is already at hand: In my opinion no nation in the world can boast a richer treasure of relics of this kind than our Nordic nations, the Danish in particular […]. We have here already a complete collection of ancient lyrical poems under the title KiämpeViiser […]. I am fully prepared to believe that you have never heard of these relics. It would be strange if a German should know anything about a collection, the existence of which is unknown to many Danes […].3

Gerstenberg goes on to quote four specimen pieces in his own German prose translation. In his closing remarks, he confesses his reluctance to break off – ‘My entire soul rejoices when I look back on those glorious centuries of my ancestors’ (62) – and he promises to return to the Danish ballads on a later occasion, if his readers should so desire. Apparently they did: Letter Eleven picks up the thread from Letter Eight by providing an introduction to Kiämpe-Viiser. Kiämpe-Viiser (or Danske Kæmpe-Viser [Danish heroic ballads]) is short for Et hundrede udvalde Danske Viser, om allehaande mærkelige Krigs-Bedrivt og anden selsom Æventyr, som sig her udi Riget ved gamle Kæmper, navnkundige Konger, og ellers fornemme Personer begivet haver, af Arilds Tid til denne nærværende Dag. Forøgede med det andet hundrede Viser om Danske Konger, Kæmper og Andre, samt hosføyede Antegnelser til Lyst og Lærdom [One hundred selected Danish ballads, about all kinds of extraordinary war achievements and other strange adventures, which in this kingdom have been executed by ancient warriors, renowned kings, and other noble persons, from time immemorial to this day. Enlarged with a second one hundred ballads about Danish kings, warriors and others, and with added notes to delight and teach], published by Peder Syv (1631–1702) in 1695.4 Syv’s collection incorporates an even older ballad collection, in fact the first ballad collection of its kind to appear in print:

3

4

Keine Nation in der Welt müsste, meines Trachtens, einen reichern Schatz an Ueberbleibseln dieser Art aufzuweisen haben, als unsre nordische, vornehmlich die Dänische […]. Wir haben schon isst eine ganze Sammlung alter lyrischer Gedichte, unter dem Namen K i ä m p e – V i i s e r […]. Ich glaube gern, dass Sie von diesen Ueberbleibseln nie das geringste gehört haben; es wäre seltsam, wenn ein Deutscher etwas von einer Sammlung wissen sollte, deren Existenz manchem Dänen unbekannt ist […]. Gerstenberg, 58–59. My English translation. All references are to the 1739-reprint of Syv’s collection (Copenhagen: J.J. Høpffner). Hereafter: Syv. The four pieces translated by Gerstenberg are: ‘Bjarkemaal hin Gamle’ (4: I); ‘Elver Høy’ (2: IX); ‘Asbjørn Prudes Vise’ (4: VI); ‘Jomsvikingernes Vise’ (4: VII). References are to part (Arabic numerals) and number (Roman numerals) in Syv.

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Anders Sørensen Vedel’s edition of one hundred Danish ballads.5 Vedel (1542– 1616), a historian of some merit, had for some time been collecting ballads from various manuscript sources, manuscripts compiled by female members of the nobility, in particular, but it was the Danish Queen Sophia who encouraged him to get the ballads into print. Vedel’s collection – colloquially known as Hundrevisebogen (Book of one hundred ballads) – came out in 1591. In addition to the one hundred ballads, it contained a fairly long introduction and, of course, a dedication to Queen Sophia. When Syv edited his collection, he incorporated with minor orthographic changes Vedel’s one hundred ballads and added another one hundred, a large part of which were drawn from manuscripts from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.6 Danske Kæmpe-Viser went through several reprints in the eighteenth century, but at the time when Syv brought out his collection, the interest in the popular ballads was already flagging. It is fair to say that Gerstenberg was instrumental in reviving among Danish people of culture the interest in the medieval ballads, and his importance is duly acknowledged in Knud Lyne Rahbek’s postscript to the first Danish nineteenth-century edition of the ballads, Udvalgte danske Viser fra Middelalderen (Selected Danish ballads from the Middle Ages), edited by W.H.F. Abrahamson, Rasmus Nyerup and Knud Lyne Rahbek (1812–1814).7 However, Gerstenberg was not just crucial to the ballad revival in Denmark; the dissemination of the Danish ballads outside Denmark began with him.8

The German reception: Herder, Goethe, Grimm, Heine Gerstenberg’s instalments in the Schleswiger Literaturbriefe on Syv’s ballad collection made a deep impression on Johann Gottfried Herder, the man who coined the German term Volkslied. Inspired by Percy’s Reliques of Ancient 5

6

7

8

The title of Vedel’s collection has been retained in the first part of Syv’s title: Et hundrede udvalde … til denne nærværende Dag (One hundred selected … to this day). On Vedel’s and Syv’s ballad editions, see Flemming Lundgreen-Nielsen, ‘Anders Sørensen Vedel og Peder Syv – to lærde folkeviseudgivere’, in Svøbt i mår. Dansk folkevisekultur 1550–1700, Vol. 4, eds. Flemming Lundgreen-Nielsen and Hanne Ruus (København: C.A. Reitzel, 2002), 153–373. Udvalgte danske Folkeviser fra Middelalderen, Vol. 5, eds. R. Nyerup and K.L. Rahbek (Copenhagen: Schultz, 1814), 107–109. The dissemination of Danish popular ballads has been mapped with great insight by Carl Roos in his article ‘Die dänische Folkevise in der Weltliteratur’, in Forschungsprobleme der Vergleichenden Literaturgesichte, ed. Kurt Wais (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1951), 79–99. Roos’s main interest is the German reception, but he also touches on the dissemination of Danish ballads in France and England.

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English Poetry, Herder planned to bring out his own collection of ancient folk songs, comprising German popular ballads as well as some English and Nordic pieces in German translation. The collection was to appear in 1774, but was abandoned in order to make room for a much more comprehensive collection, Volkslieder in two volumes (1778–1779), containing specimens of popular balladry from all over Europe, among them four traditional ballads from Denmark. Gerstenberg was Herder’s approach to the Danish ballads. In the opening section of Volkslieder, Herder credits Gerstenberg by quoting a long passage from his Letter on the Danish ballad heritage, and three of the four specimen pieces cited by Gerstenberg are included in Herder’s collection.9 However, only one of the three is strictly speaking a Danish ballad, namely the one entitled (in Herder’s translation) ‘Elvershöh’; the other two, ‘Morgensang im Kriege’ and ‘Lied des gefangenen Asbiorn Prude’, are included as instances of skaldic poetry.10 In addition, Herder’s collection includes three ballads translated from Syv: ‘Nordlands Künste’, ‘Der Wassermann’ and ‘Erlkönigs Tochter’.11 ‘Elvershöh’ – in Danish, ‘Elverhøj’ (Elfin mound) – was one of the one hundred ballads in Vedel’s 1591 collection reprinted by Syv. Combining narrative and lyrical features and employing a meter common to many Danish ballads, a quatrain with alternating four- and three-stress lines and a fifth line (omitted in Gerstenberg’s and Herder’s translations) serving as a refrain, this ballad is in many ways typical of traditional Danish balladry. However, it is comparatively short, only twelve stanzas, and instead of the usual impersonal narrator it features a first-person narrator, a young man who is also the ballad’s protagonist. The narrator begins his retrospective account in medias res: As he lied down on the elfin mound and dozed off, he was accosted by two elf maids who invited him to join in their dance. One elf maid began to sing, and the supernatural beauty of her singing cast a spell over nature. The other elf maid tried to tempt him by promising to teach him to vanquish the bear, the boar and the dragon. As the young man remained silent, she finally threatened to kill him. At that

9

10 11

Johann Gottfried Herder, Volkslieder, Übertragungen, Dichtungen, ed. Ulrich Gaier. Johann Gottfried Herder Werke in 10 Vols., Vol. 3 (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1990), 74. Hereafter: Herder. Herder, 140; 152; 183. Herder, 332–335. The Danish titles in Syv are: ‘Alle Kunster er ikke lovlige’ (4: LXXXIX); ‘Tro, men see hvem’ (4: XCI); ‘Mangen rider rank og rød, Er dog morgen krank og død’ (4: LXXXVII), later entitled ‘Elverskud’.

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moment the cock crowed, and the spell was broken. The ballad concludes with this caution to other young men (in Herder’s translation): Er setze sich nicht auf Elvers Höh, Allda zu schlummern ein. (Never sit down on Elfin Mound / And there fall into a slumber.)12

Gerstenberg’s and Herder’s choice of the ballad ‘Elvershöh’ (‘Elverhøj’) is significant. Together with ‘Erlkönigs Tochter’ (Elf king’s daughter) this ballad belongs to a fairly small group of Danish supernatural ballads dealing with elves.13 Another group of supernatural ballads is the one featuring water spirits such as mermaids, mermen and nixes. ‘Der Wassermann’ (The waterman) belongs to this category. The first Danish ballad editors, Vedel and Syv, did not think highly of these supernatural ballads. In fact, Vedel, in a prefatory note to ‘Elverhøj’, tried to explain away its supernatural content by suggesting that the ballad should be read as a moralizing allegory. Modern readers from Gerstenberg and Herder and onwards, however, took a different view. Thus Gerstenberg calls attention to the ballad’s ‘lyrical sweep’, and Herder writes in his commentary that the ‘magic of the original is untranslatable’.14 In the Danish elf ballads, the elves, nature spirits associated with the woodland, are mostly beautiful young females – seductive yet lethal sirens who seek to entice young men into their power. ‘Erlkönigs Tochter’ – in Danish: ‘Elverskud’ (Elfin Shot) – tells of Sir Oluf who on the night of his wedding day rides into the greenwood and is accosted by the elf king’s daughter. Like the elf maids of ‘Elverhøj’ she invites him to dance with her and offers him rich rewards. Sir Oluf refuses (in Herder’s translation): ‘Ich darf nicht tanzen, nicht tanzen ich mag, Frühmorgen ist mein Hochzeittag.’ (I must not dance, I will not dance / Tomorrow early is my wedding day)15

Enraged by his refusal, the elf king’s daughter casts a curse over him, sets him on his horse and returns him to his home. When the bride and the wedding guests arrive, they find Sir Oluf dead. Romantic-era readers were enthralled by this combination of magic, eroticism and death, and the two elf ballads were among 12 13

14

15

Herder, 142. My English translation. Herder’s translation of the Danish title, ‘Elverhøj’, is somewhat misleading; it should have been ‘Elfenhöh’ (Elfin mound). Similarly, ‘Erlkönig’ should have been ‘Elfkönig’ (Elfking). ‘Lyrischen Swunge’ (Gerstenberg, 59); ‘Der Zauber des Originals ist unübersetzbar’ (Herder, 221). My English translation. Herder, 335. My English translation.

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the ones most frequently reprinted, translated and adapted. One might say that Gerstenberg and Herder prepared the ground for the canonization of these two Danish ballads. Significantly, however, the most famous poetical interpretation of ‘Erlkönigs Tochter’ departs from the theme of fatal eroticism and replaces the lethal encounter of a young man with a seductive elf maid with a young male child assailed by a male elf, the elf king. I am of course referring to Goethe’s celebrated Kunstballade, ‘Der Erlkönig’ (1782). Goethe met Herder in Strasbourg in 1770. The two became close friends, and Herder kindled Goethe’s interest in traditional popular balladry. At Herder’s request Goethe applied himself to collecting traditional German ballads, and one of his findings inspired his famous ballad ‘Der König in Thule’ which was subsequently included in Faust I.16 His best-known ballad imitation, however, was based on the Danish ballad in Herder’s collection. Despite obvious differences between ‘Erlkönigs Tochter’ and ‘Der Erlkönig’, the Danish ballad is generally acknowledged to be the most important intertext of Goethe’s poem.17 In traditional ballads, supernatural creatures and events are treated as matters of fact. As a rule ballads waste little space on the depiction of characters’ moods, feelings and thoughts; the inner life of the characters must be inferred by the reader/auditor. ‘Erlkönigs Tochter’ is no exception to this rule. Still, it is evident that Sir Oluf, riding at night in the greenwood, feels no surprise as he suddenly finds himself in the midst of dancing elves. In Goethe’s poem, however, the elves are ambiguously suspended between the natural and the supernatural. The poem’s storyline is well known: A father rides with his son through the night. The anxious child senses the presence of the Elf King, but the father tries to calm him by offering a naturalistic explanation: what you see and hear are merely a streak of fog and leaves rustling in the wind. As father and child arrive at their destination, the father sees that his son has expired. Does the child’s death indicate that the Elf King did indeed attack him (‘Mein Vater, mein Vater, jetzt fast er mich an!’ [My father, my father, he seizes me now!]), or were the elves merely a phantom produced by the feverish imagination of a dying child? ‘Der Erlkönig’ provides no definite answer, and the ambiguity is one essential feature of Goethe’s ballad. Another is its rising tension – the child’s growing anxiety as the Elf King draws closer and closer, and the father’s growing concern as he 16

17

Steffen Steffensen, ‘“Der König in Thule”. Bemerkungen zu den Elementen des Goetheschen Gedichts’, Orbis Litterarum 15, no. 1 (1960): 36–43. John Hennig, ‘Perception and Deception in Goethe’s “Erlkönig” and Its Sources’, Modern Language Quarterly 17 (1956): 227–235.

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spurs his horse onwards – culminating in the child’s death. The Danish ballad in Syv’s collection has twenty-five stanzas in four-stress rhyming couplets and ends with the deaths of Sir Oluf ’s grieving mother and bride-to-be. Herder enhanced the dramatic effect by omitting the final two stanzas; in his version the ballad concludes with the dead Sir Oluf: Die Braut hob auf den Scharlach rot, Da lag Herr Oluf und er war tot. (The bride lifted the scarlet cover, / There lay Sir Oluf, and he was dead)18

The final line in particular reverberates in Goethe’s ballad which also ends with the word ‘dead’: ‘In seinen Armen das Kind war tot’ (In his arms, the child was dead).19 Herder’s importance to the dissemination of the Danish ballads can hardly be overstated. But his Volkslieder provided only a small selection, and the translations contained several misunderstandings. A much more comprehensive and reliable German translation entitled Altdänische Heldenlieder, Balladen und Märchen appeared in 1811. The translator and editor was one of the Grimm brothers, Wilhelm Carl Grimm. Containing translations of about 130 Danish ballads drawn primarily from Syv’s compilation, notes to individual ballads and a long introductory essay, Altdänische Heldenlieder was a major achievement which prefigured and to a certain extent influenced the first Danish nineteenthcentury edition of the ballads, Udvalgte danske Viser fra Middelalderen.20 Grimm divided the Danish ballads into three (or in fact four) classes which are reflected in his title. ‘Heldenlieder’ is Grimm’s translation of the Danish term ‘kæmpeviser’, meaning ballads on giants or warriors. In the following I shall use the term ‘heroic ballads’. ‘Balladen’ denotes romantic ballads, and ‘Märchen’ in this context means ballads with a supernatural content. A fourth class comprises ballads that draw their subject matter from Danish medieval history. As Grimm saw it, the historical ballads were ones of least interest to a German audience, and he included only a few ballads from this class. 18 19

20

Herder, 336. My English translation. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, ‘Erlkönig’, accessed 6 June 2016, http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/buch/ johann-wolfgang-goethe-gedichte-3670/231. Altdänische Heldenlieder, Balladen und Märchen, ed. Übersetz von Wilhelm Carl Grimm (Heidelberg: Mohr und Zimmer, 1811). Hereafter: Grimm. On Grimm’s influence on the Danish ballad editors, see my article ‘National Literatures and Transnational Scholarship. Wilhelm Carl Grimm’s Altdänische Heldenlieder and Its Reception in Denmark’, in Geographies of Knowledge and Imagination. Philological Research on Northern Europe 1800–1950, eds. Joachim Grage and Thomas Mohnike (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, forthcoming).

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Grimm’s enthusiasm for the traditional Danish ballads radiates from every single page of his book. His special passion, however, was the heroic ballads. Already Vedel had singled out these ballads as a distinct group, and to Grimm they were the oldest of the lot. The dating of the Danish ballads has been much debated, and literary historians have still not reached an agreement. The oldest of the extant manuscripts are from the 1550s, but it is generally acknowledged that the ballads were oral and orally transmitted compositions which had only later been committed to writing. While some believe that the bulk of the Danish ballads came into being not much earlier than the first manuscripts, probably around the time of the Reformation, others have argued that Danish balladry originated in the early thirteenth century.21 Grimm, however, believed that the heroic ballads were of a much earlier date. Though the language of these ballads (as he saw it) was that of the fourteenth century, he was convinced that they were rooted in the age of the great migrations, probably in the fifth or sixth centuries.22 This early dating of the Danish heroic ballads would make them near-contemporaneous with Old Norse poetry. But unlike Gerstenberg and even Herder, Grimm makes a clear distinction between Edda poetry and skaldic poetry on the one hand and heroic balladry on the other: At the time when these ballads were among the people, there also lived the scalds and the songs of the Edda. As regards the species of poetry, one may say that the two stand in contrast to one another. There can be no doubt that the scalds held a particular position and constituted a particular class, and that they had rules for their poetry and practiced an art. These ballads, however, have been preserved with no particular art by the people and have been sung and composed afresh by each poetic disposition.23

As opposed to the skaldic poetry, a species of Kunstpoesie (poetry of art) composed and performed by skilled professionals, heroic balladry according 21

22

23

For an overview of the debate on the dating of the ballads, see Lundgreen-Nielsen, 155–165. See also the chapter on the popular ballads in Pil Dahlerup, Dansk Litteratur. Middelalder, Vol. 2 Verdslig litteratur (København: Gyldendal, 1998), 113–233. Dahlerup argues for an early dating (151f). See letter (17 September 1811) from Grimm to the Danish ballad editor Rasmus Nyerup on this issue. Briefwechsel der Gebrüder Grimm mit nordischen Gelehrten, ed. Ernst Schmidt (Berlin: Ferd. Dümmlers Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1885), 43–44. Zu der Zeit, wo diese Lieder unter dem Volk waren, lebten auch die Scalden und die Gesänge der Edda. Betrachtet man die Art der Dichtung in beiden, so kann man sagen, dass sie sich entgegen standen. Darüber darf kein Zweifel gehegt werden, dass die Scalden, ein besonderes Amt bekleidend, eine besondere Classe bildeten, dass sie Gestetze hatten für ihre Poesie, und eine Kunst übten: diese Lieder aber sind nach mündlichen Überlieferungen ohne eine besondere Kunst vom Volk erhalten und von jedem poetischen Gemüt neu gesungen und gedichtet worden. Grimm, xvi–xvii. My translation.

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to Grimm is Naturpoesie (poetry of nature), anonymous compositions that have lived for centuries in the mouth of the people. Compared with the highly formalized skaldic poems the heroic ballads are artless, rough and unpolished, yet sublime. In the heroic ballads, all is deed and event; these ballads are almost entirely epic and leave out everything that has no immediate bearing on the action. A ballad, writes Grimm, ‘tells no more than what is necessary, what really signifies’.24 ‘Actions stand strictly side by side, like mountains where only the summits are illuminated’.25 Scholarship has long since refuted Grimm’s dating of the heroic ballads, but his distinction between Old Norse skaldic poetry and the Danish ballads and indeed his ballad poetics still stand. Though the heroic ballads are the main concern of Altdänische Heldenlieder, Grimm’s collection also includes a large selection of Danish supernatural ballads – ballads which, according to the translator, may be less sublime than the heroic ballads, but are more poetical, permeated as they are with ‘the magic of light and warm Nordic summer nights’.26 One enthusiastic reader of Grimm’s Altdänische Heldenlieder and his translations of Danish supernatural ballads in particular was Heinrich Heine. Heine adapted several Danish ballads often with an ironical or humorous twist. His ballad ‘Die Nixen’ (The nixes), for instance, reads as an adaptation of ‘Elverhøj’, but the ending is different: Der Ritter ist klug, es fällt ihm nicht ein, Die Augen öffnen zu müssen; Er lässt sich ruhig im Mondenschein Von schönen Nixen küssen. (The knight is smart, it does not occur to him / To have to open his eyes; / In the moonlight he calmly allows himself / To be kissed by beautiful nixes).27

Furthermore, Heine cites or paraphrases different Danish ballads, for instance in his unfinished picaresque novel Aus den Memoiren des Herren von Schnabelewopski (From the Memoires of Herr von Schnabelewopski) (1833) and

24 25

26 27

‘sagt […] nichts, als was nothwendig, was wirklich bezeichnet’. Grimm, xxxi. My translation. ‘die Thaten stehen streng neben einander, wie Berge, deren Gipfel bloss beleuchtet sind’. Grimm, xiv. My translation. ‘die Zauberei hellwarmer nordischer Sommernächte’. Grimm, xxv. My translation. ‘Die Nixen’ is quoted from Project Gutenberg, accessed 25 May 2016, http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/ buch/heinrich-heine-gedichte-389/72. English translation is mine.

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most importantly in his 1837 essay on German and Northern European folklore and superstitions, Elementargeister (Elemental spirits).28 In this essay dedicated to spirits associated with the four elements, Heine offers extensive paraphrases of the elf ballads ‘Elverhøj’ and ‘Elverskud’ (in Altdänische Heldenlieder ‘Elfenhöh’ and ‘Herr Oluf ’) as well as of two Danish ballads on mermen, entitled ‘Marsk Stigs Töchter’ (Marsk Stig’s daughters) and ‘Der Mermann’ (The merman) in Grimm’s translation.29 Finally, Heine includes his own adaptation of a ballad which in Danish is entitled ‘Germand Gladen Svend’ and in Grimm’s translation ‘Die treue Braut’.30 This very long narrative ballad – fifty couplets in the original; forty-nine quatrains in Heine’s adaptation – tells of a young queen whose ship is grounded by a black raven. The raven demands a ransom to bring the ship afloat: The queen must give him that which she is carrying under her belt. Believing that the raven is referring to her keys, she readily agrees. But safely ashore she realizes that she is pregnant, and some months later she gives birth to a son, Germand. Germand grows into a handsome young hero, but the queen, remembering the awful bargain she made with the raven, is sorrowful. One day Germand comes to his mother. He is determined to woe an English princess, and he begs his mother (in Heine’s adaptation): ‘[…] leiht mir Euer Federgewand, Dass ich fliegen kann über dem Meere.’ (… lend me your suit of feathers / That I may fly over the sea)31

As is customary in these supernatural ballads, the fact that the queen possesses a suit of feather elicits no surprise. Flying across the ocean, Germand is accosted by the black raven who demands his prize. The young prince asks permission to continue to his bride in England and promises to meet the raven on his way back. As a pledge the raven pecks out one of Germand’s eyes. Germand’s English bride, too, owns a suit of feathers, and when Germand flies back, determined to fulfil his promise to the raven, she follows him. But she is unable to save him; what is left of Germand is only his severed right hand. Grieving and enraged, 28

29

30 31

The Danish ballad cited in Aus den Memoiren … is one of the heroic ballads, ‘Svend Vonved’. Elementargeister is quoted from Heinrich Heine. Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe der Werke, Vol. 9, ed. Ariane Neuhaus-Koch (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1987), 11–64. Hereafter: Heine. Heine, 18 and 21. The two merman ballads are translated from Syv: ‘Marsk Stigs Døttre’ (2: XXXIII) and ‘den Anden Vise om Rosmer Hafmand’ (2: VII). Syv 2: II; Grimm, 79f, Heine, 26f. Heine, 29. My translation.

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the princess pursues the black raven, and in a final encounter both raven and princess are killed. Introducing this ballad, Heine writes: This ballad is as grim, as horrifying, as gloomy as a Scandinavian night, and yet glows in it a love which in its wild sweetness and burning fervor is unequaled – a love which, its flame steadily increasing, finally flares up as the northern lights and illuminates the entire sky with its beams of passion.32

Elementargeister was originally written with a French readership in mind (Heine had settled in Paris in 1831), and the essay was translated into French and published in France as Part VI of De l’Allemagne (1835) before it appeared in German.33 Via Heine, then, the French became acquainted with Danish balladry.

The British reception: Lewis, Jamieson, Scott, Borrow Meanwhile Danish ballads had made it to Britain. In 1796 appeared a gothic novel, The Monk, which would soon become quite a success de scandale. The author was an English teenager, Matthew Gregory Lewis, who had spent time in Germany and knew German. Lewis was well versed in German Schauerromantik, but he was also familiar with Goethe’s and Gottfried August Bürger’s ballad imitations, and he had certainly read Herder’s Volkslieder. The Monk was interspersed with pieces of poetry, some original, some adaptations from other sources and among the latter was a Danish ballad, ‘The Water-King. A Danish Ballad’, translated from Herder’s collection.34 This traditional ballad is sung by a character in the novel, Theodore, a young servant who, posing as a vagrant minstrel, seeks to charm his way into convent where his master’s fiancée is kept captive. Theodore introduces his song with a long and fantastic tale about the ‘Sorcerers, Witches, and Evil Spirits’ with which Denmark is infested: The Woods are haunted by a malignant power, called ‘the Erl- or Oak-King’: He it is who blights the Trees, spoils the Harvest, and commands the Imps and Goblins […]. His principal amusement is to entice young Children from their 32

33 34

‘Dieses Lied ist so schauerlich, so grauenhaft, so düster, wie eine skandinavische Nacht, und doch glüht darinn eine Liebe, die an wilder Süße und brennender Innigkeit nicht ihres Gleichen hat, eine Liebe, die, immer gewaltiger entlodernd, endlich wie ein Nordlicht emporschießt und mit ihren leidenschaftlichen Stralen den ganzen Himmel überflammt’. Heine, 26. My translation. For an overview of the publication history, see editor’s postscript: Heine, 301f.  Matthew Gregory Lewis, The Monk (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990 [1973]), 289.

42

Danish Literature as World Literature Parents, and as soon as He gets them into his Cave, He tears them in a thousand pieces – The Rivers are governed by another Fiend, called ‘the Water-King:’ His province is to agitate the deep, occasion ship-wrecks, and drag the drowning Sailors beneath the waves: He wears the appearance of a Warrior, and employs himself in luring young Virgins into his snare: What He does with them, when He catches them in the water, Reverend Ladies, I leave for you to imagine – 35

Indeed, the Danish ballad tells the story of a merman who, in the guise of a knight, woes a maid and lures her into the deep. Consisting of seventeen fourstress couplets and a refrain (omitted in Herder’s translation), this is a fairly short ballad, which in Lewis’ adaptation is expanded into twenty quatrains in order to tell a more rounded tale, but also to augment its atmosphere of supernatural horror. In the traditional ballad, the drowning of the hapless girl is recorded in one brief stanza – here in Herder’s translation: Noch lange hörten am Lande sie, Wie das schöne Mädchen im Wasser schrie. (Still for a long time on land they heard / How the beautiful girl in the water shrieked.)36

In Lewis’ adaptation the drowning takes up two whole quatrains: She shrieks, but shrieks in vain; for high The wild winds rising dull the cry; The Fiend exults; The Billows dash, And o’er their hapless Victim wash. Three times while struggling with the stream, The lovely Maid was heard to scream; But when the Tempest’s rage was o’er, The lovely Maid was seen no more.37

This predilection for terror and horror (which of course is in part dictated by the gothic genre) characterizes all of Lewis’ adaptations of Danish ballads. Having adapted ‘The Water-King’, Lewis turned his attention to another Danish supernatural ballad translated by Herder, namely ‘The Erl-Kings Daughter’ which was printed along with Lewis’ translation of Goethe’s poem ‘The Erl35 36 37

Ibid., 288. Herder, 334. My translation. Lewis, The Monk, 291.

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King’ in the October issue of The Monthly Mirror, 1796.38 Finally, in 1801 Lewis published Tales of Wonder, a collection in two volumes of narrative poems of supernatural horror, consisting of original poetry by Lewis and others as well as adaptations and translations of traditional ballads and ballad imitations. In this publication Lewis included two versions of ‘The Water-King’, the adaption written for The Monk and a more faithful translation; ‘The Erl-King’s Daughter’; and a hitherto unpublished adaptation, ‘Elver’s Hoh’, from Volkslieder – all three with prefatory notes stating that ‘The original is in the Kiampe-Viiser’.39 Versions of three of the four Danish supernatural ballads in Herder’s collection were thus available to an English-speaking audience, and more were soon to follow. In 1806, the Scottish antiquarian Robert Jamieson published Popular Ballads and Songs, a collection in two volumes of mainly Scottish and borderland ballads, but interspersed with a few Danish ballads, including the three which Lewis had already adapted and a fourth supernatural ballad, here entitled ‘Rosmer Hafmand’.40 While Lewis had relied on German translations, Jamieson’s familiarity with the Danish language enabled him to go straight to the source, Syv’s KæmpeViser, and unlike his predecessor his ambition was not to embellish, but to provide faithful translations. Convinced of the close relationship between Scottish and Danish balladry, Jamieson translated the four ballads from Syv into a Scottish idiom of sorts which, in his own words, ‘may be nearly as intelligible to a Dane or Swede, as to a Scotsman’ (but which may in fact have been equally puzzling to all parties).41 This, for instance, is his translation of the first stanza of ‘The Mer-Man’: ‘Now rede me, dear mither, a sonsy rede; A sonsy rede swythe rede to me, How Marstig’s daughter I may fa’, My love and lemman gay to be.’

One characteristic feature of the Danish ballads (or of popular balladry as such) is their condensed nature. A very long story must be told in not so many words, 38

39

40

41

Lewis, ‘The Erl-Kings Daughter’ and ‘the Erl-King’, The Monthly Mirror, October 1796, 371–373. ‘The Erl-King’s Daughter’ was subsequently included in the fourth (revised and expurgated) edition of The Monk, published in 1798 under a new title: Ambrosio, or The Monk. Lewis, Tales of Wonder, 2 Vols., ed. Brett Rutherford (Providence: Yogh and Thorn, 2012), Vol. 1, 44–45; 69–71; 72–76. Popular Ballads and Songs, from Tradition, Manuscripts, and Scarce Editions; with Translations of Similar Pieces from the Ancient Danish Language, with a few Originals by the Editor (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable and Co., 1806): ‘The Mer-man’ (Vol. 1, 208f); ‘Sir Oluf and the Elf-King’s Daughter’ (Vol. 1, 219f); ‘Elfer Hill’ (Vol. 1, 225f); and ‘Rosmer Hafmand’ (Vol. 2, 202f). Popular Ballads and Songs, Vol. 1, 210.

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which means that everything superfluous must be left out. Ballads are sparing of descriptions and explanations, and much is left for the auditors/readers to supply. Quite often one brief image conveys a wealth of information. This, of course, poses a challenge to the translator. In Syv’s version of the ‘Mer-Man’ ballad, we come across the following lines: Den havmand gaar ad kirkedørren ind, Alle smaa billeder ventes omkring.42

A literal translation would read as follows: ‘The merman goes in through the church door / All the little pictures turned around’. The ‘little pictures’ in the church are icons, and they turn around because they sense the presence of and react to a heathen spirit – despite the fact that the merman enters in the guise of a young knight. The little pictures in the church, then, are an omen which the young girl, dazzled by the handsome stranger, choses to ignore. Herder, in translating this ballad, got the last line quite wrong: Der Wassermann in die Kirch ging ein, Sie kamen um ihn, groß und klein.43

Relying on Herder’s translation, Lewis perpetuated his misreading: The Waterman enter’d the church; The people thronged about him both great and small.44

Jamieson’s translation, in contrast, captures the meaning of the original: When the Mer-Man entered the kirk-door, Awa the sma’ images turned their e’e.45

Jamieson’s fascination with the Danish ballads was more than a short-lived whim. A few years later he co-edited Illustrations of Northern Antiquities from the Earlier Teutonic and Scandinavian Romances (1814), containing translations by Jamieson of another eighteen Danish ballads as well as a long introduction and meticulous notes to individual ballads. The introduction includes a summary of Syv’s preface to Danske Kæmpe-Viser, telling the story of how Vedel, ‘a very industrious and curious antiquary’, collected and printed the first one hundred 42 43 44 45

Syv 4: XCI (stanza 5), my emphasis. Herder, 333, my emphasis. Lewis, Tales of Wonder, Vol. 1, 75, my emphasis. Popular Ballads and Songs, Vol. 1, 210, my emphasis.

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ballads, and how Syv himself added another one hundred.46 But first of all the introduction stresses ‘the principal object’ of the publication – namely to show the ‘intimate connection’ between not only Danish and Scottish ballads, but ‘the elder Northern and Teutonic Romances, the Danish and Swedish, Scottish and English Popular Ballads, and those which are sung by old women and nurses, and hawked about at fairs, in Germany’.47 With this aim in view, Jamieson offers translations of a wide selection of Danish ballads: heroic, romantic, comic and supernatural. Jamieson was an associate of Walter Scott, a member of Scott’s ballad clan (Scott, of course, was himself an antiquarian and a ballad collector). Incidentally, Scott had also been one of the contributors to Lewis’ Tales of Wonder, contributing translations as well as original poetry. Though Scott himself did not read Danish, he was, via Lewis and Jamieson, acquainted with Danish traditional balladry, and the ballad ‘Alice Brand’ included in his (at that time) vastly popular metrical romance The Lady of the Lake (1810) was inspired by a Danish ballad.48 An elaborate footnote by Scott himself states that this little fairy tale [the ballad ‘Alice Brand’] is founded upon a very curious Danish ballad, which occurs in the Kiempe Viser, a collection of heroic songs, first published in 1591, and re-printed in 1695, inscribed by Anders Sofrensen [sic], the collector and editor, to Sophia Queen of Denmark.49

Adding that he has been ‘favoured with a literal translation of the original, by my learned friend Mr Robert Jamieson’, Scott goes on to quote in full the Danish ballad which is here entitled ‘The Elfin Gray’.50 This rather long (thirtysix quatrains) narrative ballad tells the story of a yeoman who in cutting down trees in the greenwood invokes the wrath of the elves: He’s hew’d the beech, and he’s fell’d the sik, Sae has he the poplar gray: And grim in mood was the growsome elf, That he sae bald he may. (Stanza 3) 46

47 48

49 50

Illustrations of Northern Antiquities, from the Earlier Teutonic and Scandinavian Romances (Edinburgh: James Ballantyne and Co., 1814), 245. Jamieson was aware of the fact that a new Danish edition, ‘undertaken by the learned Professor Nyerup of Copenhagen’ (244), was underway, though he had not seen it in print (in fact, the final volume of Udvalgte danske Folkeviser fra Middelalderen appeared in 1814). Ibid., 245. I am indebted to Jørgen Erik Nielsen’s article ‘Scott’s use of Two Danish Ballads in The Lady of the Lake’, in Scott in Carnival. Selected Papers from the Fourth International Scott Conference Edinburgh, 1991, eds. J.H. Alexander and David Hewitt (Aberdeen: University of Aberdeen, 1993), 89–96 for drawing my attention to Scott’s poem. It is also to this article that I owe the information that Scott did not read Danish (ibid., 91). Walter Scott, The Lady of the Lake; a Poem (Edinburgh: John Ballantyne and Co., 1810), lxxii. Ibid., lxxii; lxxiii–lxxix. The Danish title in Syv is ‘Eline Bondens Hustru af Villenskof ’ (Syv 2: I).

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The enraged elves come to the yeoman’s house, but as he makes the sign of the cross, they all flee – except one elf who shows no fear of the sign of the cross. This elf demands to have the yeoman’s wife, Eline, and he kisses her once and twice. But at the third kiss, she invokes the name of Mary’s Son, and the elf instantaneously changes into a young knight. While still a child he had been committed to the elves, but Eline has lifted the curse, and as a token of gratitude he offers her marriage. Being already married to the yeoman, Eline suggests that he marry their daughter. A happy ending is ensured: Eline stays with her husband, and the daughter is wedded to the knight and becomes queen of England: Now Eline the husband’s huswife has Cour’d a’ her grief and harms; She’s mither to a noble queen That sleeps in a kingis arms. (Stanza 36)

Having quoted this ballad, Scott goes on to cite Jamieson’s translation of another Danish ballad which, unlike the first, has no bearing on ‘Alice Brand’, but (in Scott’s words) ‘contains some passages of great pathos’.51 The ballad in question is entitled (in Jamieson’s translation) ‘The Ghaist’s Warning’ and as this title suggests it is a so-called revenant ballad: Seven little children are being treated cruelly by their stepmother, but their deceased mother returns a ghost from the grave to set things straight.52 Jamieson’s Illustrations featured translations of a handful of the Danish heroic ballads first printed in Vedel’s 1591-collection. The English poet and novelist George Borrow increased this number as he brought out Romantic Ballads, Translated from the Danish (1826). Containing both contemporary poetry and old ballads, Romantic Ballads is something of a mixed bag. Not only German and British poets had drawn inspiration from the Danish ballads; Danish poets, too, had adapted ballads from Syv. The Danish romantic poet Adam Oehlenschläger’s Digte 1803 (Poems 1803) contains several poetic adaptations

51 52

Ibid., lxxxiii–lxxxvii. Syv 4: LXXVIII. Published in 1810, The Lady of the Lake predates Illustrations of Northern Antiquities, the volume that Scott presumably is alluding to when he, in his footnote to ‘Alice Brand’, writes that Jamieson’s ‘deep knowledge of Scandinavian antiquities will, I hope, one day be displayed in illustration of the history of Scottish Ballad and Song, for which no man possesses more ample materials’ (lxxii). Curiously enough, neither of the two ballads quoted by Scott is included among the Danish ballads in this publication. However, in one of his extensive prefatory notes Jamieson refers his readers to the translations in Scott’s work: ‘In the Notes to “the Lady of the Lake” will be found two more, “The Elfin Gray” and the “Ghaist’s Warning”’ (Illustrations, 318).

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of traditional ballads, including ‘Germand Gladen Svend’, the ballad on which Heine would later bestow praise (‘Valravnen’ in Oehlenschläger’s adaptation) and ‘Elverhøj’, adapted as ‘Ellehöien’. Borrow printed translations of both these poems, entitled in his translation ‘The Death-Raven’ and ‘Elvir-Shades’, as well as a few other ballad adaptations and poems by Oehlenschläger and by the Danish late eighteenth-century poet, Johannes Ewald.53 One might think, then, that Borrow included translations of traditional Danish ballads as mere background material, but that was not the case. On the contrary, the original ballads and their (in Borrow’s words) ‘barbaric grandeur’ seem to have been his main concern. In his short preface to the collection, Borrow writes that he expects ‘shortly to lay before the public a complete translation of the KIÆMPE VISER, made by me some years ago; and of which, I hope, the specimens here produced will not give an unfavourable idea’.54 Romantic Ballads, then, was published to arouse interest in a complete translation of Syv’s ballad collection (the translation, however, did not appear in print in Borrow’s lifetime). The book opens with a prefatory verse by the Scottish poet Allan Cunningham, ‘From Allan Cunningham to George Borrow. On his proposing to translate the “Kiæpé Viser”’, which reads as an endorsement of Borrow’s project: […] Sing, sing of earth and ocean’s lords, Their song as conquering as their swords; Strains, steeped in many strange belief, Now stern as steel, now soft as grief – Wild, witching, warlike, brief, sublime, Stamped with the image of their time; When chafed – the call is sharp and high For carnage, as the eagles cry;

53

54

For a reading of Oehlenschläger’s ballad adaptations and a comparison with Lewis’s Tales of Wonder, see my article, ‘“They dance all under the greenwood tree”: British and Danish romantic-period adaptations of two Danish elf ballads’. Romantic Norths: Anglo-Nordic Exchanges, 1700–1850, ed. Cian Duffy (London: Palgrave, forthcoming). George Borrow, Romantic Ballads, Translated from the Danish; and Miscellaneous Pieces (London: John Taylor, 1826), 5, accessed 6 June 2016, http://eremita.di.uminho.pt/gutenberg/2/4/3/2430/2430 -h/2430-h.htm. Hereafter: Borrow. On Borrow and his lifelong occupation with the Danish ballads, see S. Hustvedt, ‘George Borrow and His Danish Ballads’, Journal of English and German Philology, 22 (1923): 262–270. Despite Borrow’s recurrent references to Kæmpe Viser, it is, according to Hustvedt, ‘quite certain that Borrow prepared his Romantic Ballads from the text of Abrahamson, Nyerup, and Rahbek (the 1812–1814 edition of the Danish ballads, LM), no doubt with occasional reference to Grimm’ (265).

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When pleased – the mood is meek, and mild, And gentle, as an unweaned child. Sing, sing of haunted shores and shelves, St. Oluf and his spiteful elves, Of that wise dame, in true love need, Who of the clear stream formed the steed – How youthful Svend, in sorrow sharp, The inspired strings rent from his harp; And Sivard, in his cloak of felt, Danced with the green oak at his belt – Or sing of the Sorceress of the wood, The amorous Merman of the flood – Or elves that, o’er the unfathomed stream, Sport thick as motes in morning beam – […]55

Among the particular ballad characters mentioned in Cunnigham’s poem is Svend Vonved from the ballad bearing his name. First printed as one of the heroic ballads in Vedel’s 1591-collection, this very long ballad (seventy-four quatrains in Syv’s reprint) tells of a young man whose mother sends him out to revenge the death of his father. Possessed by fury or perhaps madness – the ballad provides no insight into his mind – Svend Vonved slays every knight he encounters on his way. Finally he returns to his home, kills his mother and destroys the harp that he once loved to play: His much-lov’d harp he play’d upon Till the strings were broken, every one.56

Grimm, in Altdänische Heldenlieder, had compared Svend Vonved to Hamlet, and Borrow, as a prefatory note, cites Grimm’s interpretation in full: Singular is the song of the hero Vonved. […] This song, more than any of the rest, seems to be composed with a meaning of its own; and shows the melancholy of a ruined, wandering mind, which will have its enigmas cleared up! The anguish of a man is expressed therein, who cannot move freely the wings which he feels; and, who, when his anguish torments him, is forced to deal out destruction against all – even against his best-beloved. Such a character seems quite the property

55 56

Borrow, 5–6. Ibid., 30. Syv 1: XVI.

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of the North. In the strange life of King Sigurd, the wanderer to Jerusalem, and likewise in Shakspeare’s [sic] Hamlet, there is something similar.57

From Borrow’s private correspondence it appears that he (as he himself saw it) was competing with the Scottish antiquarians – the ‘Scotch blackguards’, as he put it – over the ‘ownership’ to the Danish ballads.58 But though his translations were no doubt more readable to an English audience, they are in general inferior to Jamieson’s. Despite his avowed enthusiasm for the ballads’ ‘barbaric grandeur’ and rude sublimity, Borrow could not quite resist the temptation to straighten out and embellish.

Conclusion The fifty-sixty years following the publication of Percy’s Reliques were the heydays of the ballad revival. All over Europe traditional ballads were collected, edited, published, annotated, modernized, translated, imitated and adapted. But even in the light of this craving for popular balladry, the attention which the Danish ballads attracted outside Denmark was significant and quite singular – given the fact that they were composed in a minor European language and had been preserved in an idiom that posed an obstacle even to native speakers. What explains the popularity of Danish balladry? First of all, the recent fascination with the North and everything Nordic, Nordic landscapes, Nordic mythology and ancient Nordic poetry, the Eddas and the sagas: When Grimm, in the commentary quoted above, contends that Svend Vonved ‘seems quite the property of the North’ and that the Danish heroic ballads possess a distinctly Nordic sublimity, or when Jamieson publishes Danish ballads under the title Northern Antiquities, they emphasize this association between the Danish medieval ballads and the North and call attention to their presumed Nordic tonality. In many cases (though not in Grimm’s Altdänische Heldenlieder), Danish ballads are translated and printed alongside Old Norse poetry. Secondly, the fact that so many of the Danish ballads had been committed to print at a fairly early stage seemed to lend to them a certain authenticity which other collections could not rival. Last but not least, the very best of the Danish ballads, the two elf ballads for

57 58

Borrow, 24. Quoted from Hustvedt, 263.

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instance, are indeed of a superior quality, both poetical and tantalizing enigmatic like a dream. By 1830 a substantial part of the Danish ballads had been made available to a non-Danish readership, and thanks to the enormous popularity of the poetic and literary works inspired by Danish ballads  – set to music by Franz Schubert, Goethe’s ‘Erlkönig” became an evergreen, and both The Monk and The Lady of the Lake had large print runs and were translated into numerous languages – they reached an even wider audience. In short: Danish ballads had become world literature.

Bibliography Borrow, George. Romantic Ballads, Translated from the Danish; and Miscellaneous Pieces. London: John Taylor, 1826. Accessed 6 June 2016. http://eremita.di.uminho .pt/gutenberg/2/4/3/2430/2430-h/2430-h.htm. Dahlerup, Pil. Dansk Litteratur. Middelalder, Volume 2 Verdslig litteratur. København: Gyldendal, 1998. Gerstenberg, Heinrich Wilhelm von. Briefe über Merkwürdigkeiten der Litteratur. Stuttgart: G.J. Göschen’sche Verlagshandlung, 1890. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. ‘Erlkönig’. Accessed 6 June 2016. http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/ buch/johann-wolfgang-goethe-gedichte-3670/231. Grimm, Wilhelm Carl. Altdänische Heldenlieder, Balladen und Märchen, Übersetz von Wilhelm Carl Grimm. Heidelberg: Mohr und Zimmer, 1811. Heine, Heinrich. ‘Die Nixen’, quoted from Project Gutenberg. Accessed 25 May 2016. http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/buch/heinrich-heine-gedichte-389/72. Heine, Heinrich. Elementargeister. Heinrich Heine. Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe der Werke. Vol. 9, edited by Ariane Neuhaus-Koch. Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1987. Hennig, John. ‘Perception and Deception in Goethe’s “Erlkönig” and Its Sources’. Modern Language Quarterly 17 (1956): 227–235. Herder, Johann Gottfried. ‘Volkslieder, Übertragungen, Dichtungen’. In Johann Gottfried Herder Werke in 10 Vols., Vol. 3, edited by Ulrich Gaier. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1990. Hustvedt, Sigurd. ‘George Borrow and His Danish Ballads’. Journal of English and German Philology 22 (1923): 262–270. Jamieson, Robert. Illustrations of Northern Antiquities, from the Earlier Teutonic and Scandinavian Romances. Edinburgh: James Ballantyne and Co., 1814. Jamieson, Robert. Popular Ballads and Songs, from Tradition, Manuscripts, and Scarce Editions; with Translations of Similar Pieces from the Ancient Danish Language, with a Few Originals by the Editor. Edinburgh: Archibald Constable and Co., 1806.

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Lewis, Matthew Gregory. The Monk. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990 [1973]. Lewis, Matthew Gregory. Tales of Wonder, 2 Vols., edited by Brett Rutherford. Providence: Yogh and Thorn, 2012. Lundgreen-Nielsen, Flemming. ‘Anders Sørensen Vedel og Peder Syv – to lærde folkeviseudgivere’. In Svøbt i mår. Dansk folkevisekultur 1550–1700, Vol. 4, edited by Flemming Lundgreen-Nielsen and Hanne Ruus, 153–373. Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel, 2002. Møller, Lis. ‘National Literatures and Transnational Scholarship. Wilhelm Carl Grimm’s Altdänische Heldenlieder and Its Reception in Denmark’. In Geographies of Knowledge and Imagination. Philological Research on Northern Europe 1800–1950, edited by Joachim Grage and Thomas Mohnike. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, forthcoming. Møller, Lis. ‘“They dance all under the greenwood tree”: British and Danish Romanticperiod Adaptations of Two Danish Elf Ballads’. In Romantic Norths: Anglo-Nordic Exchanges, 1700–1850, edited by Cian Duffy. London: Palgrave, forthcoming. Nielsen, Jørgen Erik. ‘Scott’s Use of Two Danish Ballads in The Lady of the Lake’. In Scott in Carnival. Selected Papers from the Fourth International Scott Conference Edinburgh, 1991, edited by J.H. Alexander and David Hewitt, 89–96. Aberdeen: University of Aberdeen, 1993. Nyerup, Rasmus and Knud Lyne Rahbek. Udvalgte danske Folkeviser fra Middelalderen, Vol. 5. Copenhagen: Schultz, 1814. Povlsen, Karen Klitgaard. ‘Travelling Mythologies of the North Around 1760: Molesworth, Mallet, Gerstenberg, and Several Others in Copenhagen’. In Northbound. Travels, Encounters, and Constructions 1700–1830, edited by K. Klitgaard Povlsen, 129–150. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2007. Roos, Carl. ‘Die dänische Folkevise in der Weltliteratur’. In Forschungsprobleme der Vergleichenden Literaturgesichte, edited by Kurt Wais, 79–99. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1951. Schmidt, Ernst, ed. Briefwechsel der Gebrüder Grimm mit nordischen Gelehrten. Berlin: Ferd. Dümmlers Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1885. Scott, Walter. The Lady of the Lake; a Poem. Edinburgh: John Ballantyne and Co., 1810. Steffensen, Steffen. ‘“Der König in Thule”. Bemerkungen zu den Elementen des Goetheschen Gedichts’. Orbis Litterarum 15, 1 (1960): 36–43. Syv, Peder. Et hundrede udvalde Danske Viser, om allehaande mærkelige Krigs-Bedrivt og anden selsom Æventyr, som sig her udi Riget ved gamle Kæmper, navnkundige Konger, og ellers fornemme Personer begivet haver, af Arilds Tid til denne nærværende Dag. Forøgede med det andet hundrede Viser om Danske Konger, Kæmper og Andre, samt hosføyede Antegnelser til Lyst og Lærdom. Copenhagen: J.J. Høpffner, 1739.

3

Ludvig Holberg: A Man of Transition in the Eighteenth Century Svend Erik Larsen

From backpacker to baron Had Ludvig Holberg lived in the twenty-first century, he could have been a modern academic with a transnational outlook and reputation based on an interdisciplinary research agenda, only distinguished from others by his academic excellence, his capacity to produce in a host of academic as well as fictional genres, his involvement in public debate and his efficiency in university reforms and management. Even his life as a bachelor is not out of tune with a modern life as a single with a good income and a comfortable urban life. Yet, already in the eighteenth century his achievements were applauded by the British cosmopolitan writer, traveller and urban intellectual Oliver Goldsmith in his An Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe (1759): ‘The history of polite learning in Denmark, may be comprised in the life of one single man; it rose and fell with the late famous baron Holberg. This was, perhaps, one of the most extraordinary personages that has done honour to the present century.’1 Indeed, the ‘comprised’ life of Holberg is extraordinary and exemplary. Born in Bergen in 1684 as an inhabitant of the dual monarchy Denmark-Norway, he graduated from the University of Copenhagen in 1704. Now aged 20, he left for Amsterdam during 1704–1705 on his first trip abroad, ‘excited by an ardent desire to visit foreign countries’.2 He returned home, his head full of

1

2

Oliver Goldsmith, Goldsmith’s Miscellaneous (London: William Smith, 1841), sect. 4, 7, cf. Keith Brown, ‘A Kind of Comradeship. Goldsmith and the Late Famous Baron Holberg’, English Studies 61, no. 1 (1961): 37–46. Ludvig Holberg, Ludvig Holberg’s Memoir: An Eighteenth Century Danish Contribution to International Understanding, ed. Stewart E. Fraser (Leiden: Brill, 1970), 30.

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impressions from the bustling metropolis of commerce and European avantgarde intellectual life, but still a dirt-poor backpacker trying to escape from his hotel bill to fight his way back home. Hardly returned to the Northern outskirts again, he set out for a more serious journey in 1706, enrolled as a kind of postgraduate student in London and Oxford where he remained till 1708, beginning a lifelong preoccupation with critical Enlightenment thinking in contemporary British philosophy and public life, John Locke in particular.3 Later in 1708, his ‘ardent desire’ spurred him again, this time to visit important intellectual centres of Germany in, among other places, Halle, Dresden, Leipzig and Hamburg as the escort of the son of a Danish senior academic, Poul Winding, on his ‘grand tour’. Starting out as a backpacker, then a post-graduate, he was now a hired tutor. Upon his return in 1709, he was ready to embark on an academic career. Between 1709 and 1714, he published his first two books on European history and earned his pay as a teacher and an independent scholar. Not much, though, but enough for him to begin his next big European travel from 1714 to 1716, crossing, many times on foot, via Holland to Paris and Rome and back again via Genoa and Torino, across the Alps to Marseille and Paris and back to Copenhagen to assume his first job as a professor of metaphysics in Copenhagen in 1717 and three years later in Latin Oratory, but always with his head swarming with inspiration of contemporary European culture, everyday life, learning, critical thinking, research and art. The first outpour after this trans-European expedition was a book on natural law from 1716 in the manner of Hugo Grotius, Samuel Pufendorf and Christian Thomasius, actually not only in the manner of the three thinkers but so close to the sources that today he may have been accused of plagiarism. But copy right was not high on the agenda in those days, as was also not desk editing or peer reviewing: The prolific Holberg’s books are mostly bulky volumes, at times in need of some trimming. Now a full professor but with the same ‘ardent desire’ for travelling, he ventured again out into Europe in 1725–1726, and visited once more Hamburg, Amsterdam and Paris, now also adding Brussels and Bremen to his itinerary before he returned to Copenhagen. This time he discussed the important issues on the critical European agenda in science, politics and religion with the foreign intellectuals he encountered as their equal.4 3 4

Jørn Schøsler, ‘Holberg, lecteur de Locke’, Dix-Huitième Siècle 41, no. 1 (2009): 517–535. The best introduction to Holberg in an European perspective and with updated international references is Sven Hakon Rossel, ed. Ludvig Holberg: A European Writer. A Study of Influence and Reception (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994). The references in this article to international publications

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Aged 42 and of a delicate constitution, from 1726 he stayed in Denmark for the rest of his life with the entire literary and philosophical Europe of the Enlightenment on the inside of his head together with a solid classical scholarship, merging in his writings to realize the ambition that came out of his travels: To make a permanent exchange between Europe and Denmark the core of all his writings and other activities. The book on natural law from 1716 was updated and gradually became a standard text book at the faculty of law in Copenhagen,5 thus inculcating two basic Enlightenment, anthropological more than political, principles in the law students: All human beings are equal, meaning that slavery and oppression are against the natural law; women have the same human and intellectual potential as men and only need to be given the chance to prove it, an opinion he also defended in a satirical poem from 1722 through the voice of Zille Hans Dotter, the imagined voice of a blue stocking avant la lettre. From 1730 a professor of history, the appointment he really wanted, Holberg engaged in university reforms and management. In this period he wrote the two books that contributed most to his international fame, both in Latin but widely translated and reprinted in his lifetime: The history textbook Synopsis historiae universalis with a Compendium geographicum in usum studiosae Juventus (1733) (An introduction to universal history and Geographical handbook for young students) and the utopian novel Nicolai Klimii iter subterraneum (1741) (The Journey of Niels Klim to the World Underground). As an intellectual he regarded himself as the peer of any European colleague and acted accordingly on the European scene, and as a citizen the backpacker

5

on Holberg mainly include what has come out after 1994. Editions of collected or selected works are: Ludvig Holberg, Samlede Skrifter, ed. Carl S. Petersen (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1913–1963), 1–18 (facsimile); Ludvig Holberg, Værker i tolv bind, ed. F.J. Billeskov Jansen (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde og Bagger, 1969–1971), 1–12; and Ludvig Holberg, Ludvig Holbergs skrifter, 2015, accessed 31 March 2016, http://holbergsskrifter.dk. A Holberg dictionary is Holbergordbog, eds. Aage Hansen and Svend Eegholm-Pedersen (Copenhagen: Det danske Sprog-og Litteraturselskab, 1981–1988), accessed 31 March 2016, http://holbergordbog.dk/. Other introductions in English are F.J. Billeskov Jansen, Ludvig Holberg (New York: Twaine, 1974) and Sven Hakon Rossel, ‘Ludvig Holberg’, in Danish Writers from the Reformation to Decadence, 1550–1900, ed. Marianne Stecher-Hansen (Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2004), 247–260; less detailed are Lars Roar Langslet, ‘The Nordic Molière’, Scandinavian Review 91, no. 3 (Spring 2004): 19–23 and Benedikt S. Benedikz, ‘Ludvig Holberg: The Man Who Made Scandinavia Literate’, The New York Review of Science Fiction 22, no. 1 (September 2009): 17–22. For a complete list of translations and reprints until 1935, see Holger EhrencronMüller, Forfatterlexikon omfattende Danmark, Norge og Island indtil 1814, 10–12: Bibliografi ovet Holbergs Skrifter (Copenhagen: Aschehoug, 1933–1935). For a complete overview and analysis of translations of Nicolai Klimii iter subterraneum, see Cecilie Flugt, Niels Klims europæiske rejse – en oversættelseshistorisk undersøgelse af Nicolai Klimii iter subterraneum (Unpubl. PhD diss. Aarhus University, 2014). Revisions and reprints in 1728, 1734, 1751 and 1763 (Ehrencron-Müller, Forfatterlexikon).

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became chancellor and treasurer of the university, a wealthy man who eventually acquired an estate with the right to call himself a baron. In line with his profound sense of virtue incorporated in Enlightenment citizenship, he donated his fortune to support higher education, mainly at the small Sorø Academy where teaching followed some of the academic ideas Holberg promoted. From a backpacker born in the remote Norwegian province of the dual monarchy he advanced to a pillar of society at its centre. Goldsmith was right to see Holberg as a comprised life of the century.

Our contemporary? It may seem an inappropriate gesture to cast the short CV of Holberg in the twenty-first century social categories of the life of young academics. However, I do not want, in retrospect, to project some anachronistic concepts onto an important Enlightenment figure to give the illusion that he is our contemporary. My point is different. In a sense we are still living within a post-Enlightenment horizon, in terms of cultural, political and social values in general based on notions like human rights, freedom of speech, secularization, civil rights, gender equality, republicanism, individual responsibility, liberalism, democracy and so on, which are all still in the making, now being transformed and also contested in a globalized world. Holberg contemplated precisely such issues in their early stages. He did so in a number of genres which found their modern form in the same period and are still productive: comedy, satire, essays, historical accounts, jurisprudence, novels and epics, autobiography, all of which for him, as for most of his contemporaries, constituted a continuum of genres without a categorical distinction between them. In his four autobiographical letters, Ad virum perillustrem (1728, 1737, 1743 and 1754) To a very distinguished gentleman,6 Holberg fashions his life as an exemplary Enlightenment character, based on three basic principles.7 First, the human quest for knowledge, fuelled by a fervent curiosity for everything new to be known and reflected upon, whether encountered in real life or in contemporary European writing. Through the four letters, mainly in the first and largest of them, this insatiable lust for knowledge that reduplicated 6

7

The Latin versions came out in Copenhagen and Leipzig, later with translations in German, English, Dutch and Danish (Ehrencron-Müller, Forfatterlexikon). Holberg, Ludvig Holberg’s Memoir.

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Holberg’s ardent desire for travelling is transformed into a keen critical approach to everything dogmatically acknowledged as the established truth, like women’s rights, the status of non-European peoples, axioms of religion, law, government, education and science. Nothing has to be accepted without critical examination and independent observation for which each thinking individual must take responsibility himself or herself. Hence, the formation of a critical individual is the second move of the autobiography: ‘One must first learn to doubt before one can learn to believe’, Holberg states in his essay ‘On Studies’ (1744).8 The general belief in the capacity of humans to take on that role is central to Holberg. This holds for men and women alike: Women should not, from the mere circumstance of their birth, to be excluded from all occupations which demand the exercise of intellect. […] They are deficient in none of the qualifications which are essential to the conduct of public as well as private affairs. […] without regard to distinctions of name and birth, I weigh the pretensions of both sexes in the same balance.9

Before Immanuel Kant in his article ‘Was heist Afklärung?’ (1783) (‘What is Enlightenment?’) summed up what Enlightenment is about, Holberg himself embodied his definition: Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude! ‘Have courage to use your own understanding!’ – that is the motto of enlightenment.10

The third and final principle developed from this own life experience is the obligation of a citizen to participate in public life with critical analyses, also exemplified in his own visibility as a public authority. Thus, it is not without reason that the letters are written in Latin and contains more and more presentations of his writings – self-branding as a critical intellectual for a European audience is a dimension of this obligation, although not deprived of some vanity. 8 9 10

Ludvig Holberg, Moral Reflections & Epistles, ed. P.M. Mitchell (Norwich: Norvik Press, 1991), 14. Holberg, Ludvig Holberg’s Memoir, 202–203. Immanuel Kant, Was heist Auklärung? (1783), accessed 31 March 2016 (English trans. http://www .artoftheory.com/what-is-enlightenment_immanuel-kant/).

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Through Holberg the Enlightenment can be seen as the modern world in the making, a period of transition rather than a period of fixed ideas. It is a period where the Medieval world is finally withering away but still with a presence in contemporary thinking. It is also a period before nation states and democratic constitutions finally came to occupy centre stage but it saw the emergence of these political ideas; it is a period before the idea of human identity as a dynamic lifelong process, Bildung, had finally replaced the traditional view of human identity as bound to variations of fixed social and mental characters. What we today may call transnationalism as a cultural dimension of globalization would in Holberg’s day be called European cosmopolitanism, simply because the nations to transcend were not yet shaped and what was global was unquestionably identified as European and as the European dominance outside the continent. On this background, Holberg’s works call for a world literature approach as a historical dialogue. This is not so only because the first scattered suggestions of ideas of world literature emerged in the eighteenth century with August Wilhelm von Schlözer and Christoph Wieland before Johann Wolfgang von Goethe recoined the term in 1827. More importantly, the Enlightenment was, on the one hand, profoundly preoccupied with the new universal ideas of humankind and their application in a number of cultural and political contexts, most notably the American and French human rights declarations (1776, 1789) and Immanuel Kant’s Zum Ewigen Frieden (Perpetual Peace) (1795). Yet, on the other, the attempts to stimulate local vernaculars to replace Latin in all fundamental social contexts were in full swing: government, law, education, research. This new focus placed the exchange between a local culture and the world at large, although Eurocentric, as the core of creative writing and other discourses. If world literature is about the mutual exchange between a local language and culture and the translocal world and its cultures and languages, then Holberg was already thinking in terms of world literature and practising this thinking in his writings. Yet, Holberg’s keen interest in promoting Danish was not a nationalist project, but an educational project: To make Danish a language in which all essential issues and concepts of a global range could be discussed on the same level as in any other vernacular or in Latin. To him, Danish and the then Danish empire should strive to be a platform from where Danes could contribute to the most advanced thinking of the day and where the local culture, at the same time, could benefit from and develop an independent reflection of the larger cultural context. Therefore, Holberg does not just exemplify how we can use a

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world literature approach to get a new grip of local literatures, old and new. He also invites us to engage in a dialogue with the past as our past, enabling us to see it as a cultural transition which both then and now is driven by an intensified exchange between the local and the global.11 Still, Holberg is not our contemporary, but we can make him an integral part of a contemporary reflection if his difference to us can be formulated in terms which are relevant both for our understanding of eighteenth-century Europe through the lenses of Danish literature and for our understanding of the possibilities of world literature today. In this perspective, five significant differences are important: 1. Holberg was not a pre-national writer. It is common in literary historiography to see important authors mainly as pre-cursors of later historical developments. Since the first histories of Danish literature appeared in the nineteenth century, Holberg has been called the father of Danish literature. This is, however, a retrospective projection of the nationalist thinking of later centuries, inviting us to see Holberg as a pre-nationalist writer. Such writers entered the literary scene only later in the eighteenth century, for example, Johannes Ewald,12 whose plays and poems paved the way for the national ideas of Romanticism, deeply rooted in local essentialism. Holberg could never have written a poem like Ewald’s ‘Ode til Indfødsretten’ (Ode to National Citizenship). For Holberg there was no contradiction in using several languages to raise the international awareness and intellectual level in and about Denmark, Danish being one of them. The first journals in the Spectator tradition published in Denmark in Holberg’s lifetime and shortly after were French (La spectatrice Danoise [The Danish Spectator] 1748–1750) and German (Der nordische Aufseher [The Nordic Spectator] 1758–1761). Only then a journal came out in Danish entitled Den patriotiske Tilskuer (The Patriotic Spectator) (1761–1763). For Holberg, the main goal of reasserting the role of Danish was to enable it to act as the equal of other languages but without replacing them. Holberg participated actively and

11

12

Svend Erik Larsen, ‘From the National to a Transnational Paradigm: Writing Literary Histories Today’, European Review 21, no. 2 (2013): 241–251; Svend Erik Larsen, ‘From Comparatism to Comparativity: Comparative Reasoning Reconsidered’, Interfaces: A Journal of Medieval European Literatures 1, no. 1 (2015): 318–347. See examples of Ewald’s poetry in English translation in Thomas Bredsdorff and Anne-Marie Mai, eds., 100 Danish Poems: From the Medieval Period to the Present Day (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum/Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011).

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directly in the European Enlightenment where local languages and cultures were contextualized by a universal humanism based on a broad notion of reason, rooted in classical stoicism and Renaissance humanism without being mediated by the idea, even less the political, linguistic and cultural reality, of a militant nationalism. 2. Holberg was not a national citizen. Holberg was a loyal subject to the absolute monarch within the double Danish-Norwegian monarchy, however in favour of a permanent process of reforms. As the subject of a minor but still important European empire, he saw a role for himself on the European intellectual scene at large. The overarching European perspective in all the genres and activities he pursued was defined by the aim of educating people to transgress local parochialism in a balance between the use of Danish and Latin, parallel to today’s use of Danish and English among Danish academics across the disciplines. If Holberg can be said to anticipate any cultural trend, it is the new cosmopolitanism and transnationalism as they have re-emerged over the last twenty years.13 The classical cosmopolitanism taking shape during Holberg’s life­ time was the response of the intellectual metropolitan elite of the eighteenth century to a world in transition between the dissolving feudalism and weakened absolute kingdoms and an emerging world based on European expansion abroad and on the promotion of non-hereditary institutions and new universal ideas at home. Often, cosmopolitans were more at home in a socially detached metropolitan life where les salons nurtured universal ideas of humanity than they were in the particular cultural contexts of their favourite urban sites. Cosmopolitanism meant transcending local conditions and traditions leading to a vision of a global community based on universal legal and ethical principles as developed in Kant’s Zum Ewigen Frieden (1795).14

13

14

Nina Glick Schiller and Andrew Irving, eds., Whose Cosmopolitanism? Critical Perspective, Relationalities and Discontents (New York: Berghahn, 2015) (both a historical and contemporary discussion). Ulrich Beck, Cosmopolitan Vision (London: Polity Press, 2006), Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism. Ethics in a World of Strangers (London: Penguin, 2006), Steven Vertovec, Transnationalism (London: Routledge, 2009) and Elisabeth Herrmann, Carrie Smith-Prei, and Stuart Taberner, eds., Transnationalism in Contemporary German-Language Literature (New York: Camden House, 2015). Holberg was deeply sceptical about the viability of this vision. Holberg, Værker i tolv bind 1–12: 140–143.

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Yet, having Denmark and Danish literature and culture as the platform for his cosmopolitanism, Holberg never forgot that active cosmopolitanism is only real when situated in local environments. He was well acquainted with classical thinking and knew of Diogenes who is the origin of the term ‘cosmopolitan’ or ‘citizen of the world’.15 Holberg was not interested in developing universal ideas or principles, but in the conditions of their application in a world of local differences. In his essay ‘On Studies’ what he calls ‘necessary studies’ concern ‘man’s duty toward God and his neighbour, and […] comprise theology and ethics’: Regarding the necessity of these two disciplines, all nations are in agreement, although they differ from one another with respect to manner and practice. Most commit a hysteron proteron in this connection, and begin in theology by impressing upon small children the mysteries and secrets of religion before making them creatures of reason. […] Children must be made into human beings before they become Christians.16

Universal truth – here promoted by religion and ethics – must be established on the basis of the particular and diverse context of human beings and their culture, not the other way round. In the late twentieth century and the twentyfirst century, the new focus on cosmopolitanism and transnationalism addresses the complex cultural world of modern globalization precisely by developing Holberg’s intuition of cosmopolitanism as a situated phenomenon.17 Universal ideas and transcultural connections emerge and unfold in situated encounters between local cultures and their larger context. In a literary perspective the notion of ‘minor transnationalism’ captures this situation.18 The claim substantiating this notion is that all cultures, hegemonic or not, blend in with the movements of the multipolar context of cultures they are part of, and its aim is to study cultural and literary processes from the multidirectional encounters between cultures beyond the hierarchies of dominant world languages and world cultures and beyond a linear sense of historical change.19 Writers from minor languages who, like Holberg, never 15

16 17 18

19

Holberg did not use the term ‘cosmopolitan’, neither in Latin nor in Danish, and offers a few satirical remarks on Diogenes’ alleged social detachment. He was sceptical of the anti-emotional rigidity of the Stoics, although also in favour of the Stoic ideal of temperance and self-control (see Holbergordbog). Holberg, Moral Reflections & Epistles, 13. Schiller and Irving, eds., Whose Cosmopolitanism?. Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, eds., Minor Transnationalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005). Cf. Herrmann et al., Transnationalism in Contemporary German-Language Literature, 5.

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forget that they speak from a local context may have a better grasp of this situation than writers from hegemonic languages with a global outreach that lures them to overlook that they, too, have a local anchoring. 3. Holberg was not a rigid rationalist shunning emotions. First of all, Holberg’s core ambition was of a moral nature, translated into a broad educational programme which only worked through an appeal to all sides of the human mind and life experience. The heart of his programme was to master the art of reasoning which meant, first of all, to establish a balance between, on the one hand, ratio as self-reflexive thinking enabling people to assume responsibility for that thinking and its utterances and, on the other, the emotional and imaginative dimensions of human experience. Balance being the main aim, Holberg recognized that both the excess of reason and of emotion can get out of hand and has to be counterbalanced by each other. Moreover, using himself as an example he realized how closely they are entangled, making the balance of reasoning a lifelong daily project, not a state of mind that can be established once and for all: But innate propensities, however one may attempt to repress them are not to be subdued; and my passion for study, though it received a temporary check, could not be entirely suppressed. There remained under the ashes a few latent sparks which soon kindled a fresh flame; in short I returned to authorship [from administration], which has become necessary to my existence, whether nature or disease of the mind had rendered it so. […] And it is as difficult to get rid of a passion for writing, as to overcome an affection for brandy. I divided my time therefore between the duties of my office as treasurer [of the university], and the indulgence of my ruling passion for literature. […] In fact, occupations which seem to be quite incompatible with literary pursuits are in the end frequently found to be favorable to them.20

No matter how well-controlled outbursts of emotions are, once they have come out they leave their traces and are ready to resurface. Although ‘literature’ here refers to his writings as a whole, Holberg’s passion for reason, as it were, also includes his creative writings. In the preface to his Fire Skiemte-Digte og Zille Hans Dotter’s Gynaicologia (1722) (Four Satires and Zille Hans Daughter’s Gynaicologia), Holberg describes his urge to produce poems and comedies all of which are equally hilarious and educational: ‘I have suddenly been caught

20

Holberg, Moral Reflections & Epistles, 163–164.

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by a poetical rapture which just as suddenly will leave me again’.21 Holberg’s comedies are all about how irresistible and wild human passions are, how they reveal imaginations beyond the well-trodden paths, and also how fragile and precarious the attempts are to fence them in: ‘Whatever philosophers may say to the contrary, such impulses are not under our control’.22 To humans, passions are at the same time unavoidable, necessary and dangerous. The second aim of Holberg’s appeal to sound reasoning was to foster a social commitment in the service of the ongoing project of balanced reasoning, in social terms identified as virtue in the eighteenth-century sense as the exercise of active citizenry (‘On Virtue’ 1744).23 An admirer of the balanced moderation of the Stoics with reservations against their enmity to emotions and their potential fatalism, he could have endorsed the ideas of a contemporary Stoic thinker like Martha Nussbaum,24 who also takes reasoning and emotions to be interdependent and overlapping dimensions of the human mind. 4. Holberg was not a pre-modern poet celebrating individual originality. In spite of Holberg’s acknowledgement of the fundamental reality of passions in general and poetical raptures in particular, he did not forebode the modern notion of the cultivation of the creative and autonomous genius. Quite the contrary. With his vision of the critical individual he subscribed to the antique theory of the four humours where individuality referred to the individual responsibility for establishing, through self-criticism, a balance between the dispositions that nature has laid down in each individual as a blend of humours which forms the stable ground of its character. So, for Holberg, even the most rapturous poet is first of all a craftsman who has to learn his trade, not an individual creator performing the incomparable originality of his or her genius. He is deeply rooted in the age-old poetics of imitation and emulation – imitation meaning the trained use of the traditional genres, forms, plots and characters; emulation the transformation of them to new works and languages competing with and measured against the classical canon in Latin and Greek. Canonical literature of the past was for him contemporary literature, which just happened to have been written in the past but always ready to serve as a model here and now. The mode of existence of literatures is their coexistence in 21 22 23 24

Holberg, Værker i tolv bind 2: 313, my trans. Ibid., 201. Ibid., 45–48. E.g. Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

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a simultaneous network across time, language and space, but not beyond different cultural and linguistic contexts. In contrast to the view of literary studies today, this network is seen from a transhistorical centre in the classical canon. 5. Holberg did not subscribe to the fundamental historicity of human culture. In Holberg’s lifetime, Giambatista Vico launched the idea that human culture was not modelled from nature, but had its own nature, that of historicity based on creative human activity, poiesis, which can only be understood and studied properly by humans themselves. Nature, on the other hand, was guided by divine laws only penetrable by God’s wisdom.25 Holberg was far from the only one who was unaware of Vico’s revolutionary but obscure suggestions. Nevertheless, the notion of the historicity of culture and human life developed throughout the century, also including natural processes, and culminated first in Immanuel Kant’s philosophy and later in the differentiation of the historical disciplines in nineteenth-century Humanities. Holberg’s take on history, also as professor of history, belonged to past thinking, taking history to be a stock house of models and examples with an ethical impact on contemporary life. Like most groundbreaking figures belonging to periods of radical transition, Holberg balanced between a past he could not get out of, paradoxically being imprisoned by his outdated views of his primary field of scholarship, and a future he did not know but reached out to in his creative writing and his long series of critical essays. Isaac Newton was, as we know, an alchemist and not adverse to miracles all along with his reconceptualization of science and nature. Later and in a parallel situation, Honoré de Balzac tried to come to grips with the world of urbanized modernity, knowing it was there to stay with a new social and human agenda, but without knowing precisely what that entailed, forcing him to use an amalgamation of outdated theories and progressive discursive forms. Holberg shares this in-between position with such thinkers and writers, and with his permanent self-criticism and criticism of established truth, he faced the ambiguities that challenge everyone who is part of a historical transition as a process on the move. Regarding Holberg as our partner in a contemporary dialogue implies that we select the texts among his works that enlarge our contemporary sense of the ambiguities of transition.

25

Giambatista Vico, The New Science (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984).

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Struggling with the past Holberg’s first European success was his textbook on history Synopsis historiae universalis with a Compendium geographicum in usum studiosae Juventus (1733). The book was written for his own teaching at University of Copenhagen after he was appointed professor of history in 1731, but with a view also to the high school curriculum. It was disseminated in all of Europe in the Latin version as well as in translations and saw several reprints and augmented versions, also after his death in 1754, with changes and comments from editors and translators. In Holberg’s own lifetime, the book saw eight reprints of the Latin version and four more until 1771, and during the eighteenth century, translations came out posthumously in Danish, Russian, Spanish, German, Dutch and English, some of which went into reprint such as the English translation in 1755, 1758 and 1787.26 Holberg intended his book to be an innovative didactical intervention in higher education. It actually remained so until the end of the century when new ideas gained ground on the historical nature of culture and of nature as well. For a modern reader the book is a late product of an ancient and medieval conception of history, but also showing the ambiguities that follow from the use of old models filtered through the critical and empirical thinking of the Enlightenment. This ambiguity reaches beyond the teaching of an academic discipline and points to the changing ideas of the role and responsibility of human interaction for the development of culture and society. Holberg wants to write no less than a world history, although condensed, and in order to organize the material for the students Holberg has to make two choices. One is to pick a suitable paradigmatic model for a historical process, the other to select the type and number of details to be included in order to present a convincing and understandable argument for the grand historical trajectories. As far as the model is concerned, Holberg relies on the age-old biblical model of the four consecutive monarchies which, in a final break down, open for the return of God. This macro-historical model is derived from Daniel’s dream in The Book of Daniel in The Old Testament and since late antiquity until the Renaissance it was accepted and adapted, most notably by Philippe Melanchton. Actually, Holberg did not have much of a choice. This model was the only game in town, at least in the European town, and world history became for Holberg 26

Ehrencron-Müller, Forfatterlexikon.

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European history. What remained stable in the historiographical tradition over the centuries was the account of Babylon, Persia, Greece and Rome as the four monarchies. Before the first monarchy was the sacred history accounted for by The Old Testament. After the Roman monarchy the European empires until Holberg’s own time were seen as products of the split between the Eastern and Western Roman empires and understood as a late and transitory fragmented history of Rome, called The Great Interregnum. The only reason for Holberg’s choice is didactic and pragmatic, not philosophical or ideological. The theology and teleology of the original model have completely vanished: I was sensible, when I undertook to write an Abridgement of Universal History, that it would be extremely difficult to contrive a method of throwing it into one connected view. […] I judged it most convenient to describe History under Four great Empires, and after the fourth or last Monarchy to treat particularly of the Kingdoms that started up out of their ruins, by which means the whole work is wrought up together like the history of one nation: for it is a known maxim, that the destruction of one empire is the rise of another.27

The priority given to the didactic criterion, focusing on method, is also reflected in the overall goal for his pursuit of historical studies: History is the relation of things past, delivered with this view, that the remembrance of them may be preserved, and that we may be taught by example to be good and happy.28

The simple unifying model is chosen to facilitate the memory of what is essential, namely the moral teaching of the past, but based on the ‘relation of things’ as they are made by humans, not of the trace of God’s finger. This relation requires explanations in terms of causes and consequences which for Holberg implies a new approach to history: […] Annals differ from history as they shew only the facts done in the year as Ephemerides do the occurrences by days. History is more general, and recites only actions, but explains their causes and consequences.29

27

28 29

Ludvig Holberg, An Introduction to Universal History, 3rd ed., ed. Gregory Sharpe and William Radcliffe (London, 1787), vi. Ibid., 1. Ibid., 10.

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In principle, Holberg suggests an explanatory historiography based on evidence and causal explanations, which he, however, in practice is hardly able himself to obtain and check. Yet, for the same reason, certain types of established ways of presenting history must be avoided. They would blur the synthesizing overview and forget about the ‘relation of things’: ‘authors, too anxious to preserve order of time, confounded every ting but chronology, and nothing more than the memory of their readers’.30 Nevertheless, in order not to recourse to the theological origin of the model, Holberg has to define subdivisions of the larger periods in smaller units with precise dates, called areas, also in respect of local differences of time measurement. The English translators and commentators, Gregory Sharpe and William Radcliffe, are of a more traditional disposition and add lengthy footnotes with an overload of dates that for Holberg would have confused the reader and the overall aim of his book: To offer the tools needed by readers to respect evidence, critical skill and the capacity to maintain a focus and select from the past what is relevant in their present situation. This is what he calls moral teaching of being ‘good and happy’ or, in Enlightenment terms, virtuous. This contemporary educational perspective in the use of the past is the common denominator of all his writings, creative and otherwise. Holberg’s selection of material within the model follows from this basic view. In the history of the four monarchies we follow the rulers and the great political twists and turns, with a view to the characters of the rulers and to the institutions of their empires. The closer we come to Holberg’s own time, the more we are informed about political institutions, judiciary systems, education and so on, but still with an eye to the characters of the leaders. Writing on contemporary England, Holberg praised the character of George 1, ruling 1714–1727, as ‘one of the most prudent kings of Britain’31 while he, himself a loyal but critical Protestant, aired his enmity towards Catholicism and characterized James 2, king 1685–1688, as ‘amazingly bigotted to the Romish superstition’.32 Holberg also recognizes the virtues of the British parliament, but not as a democratic institution organizing political differences, only as good instrument for regulating the inclination of the British people to go from one extreme to the other: ‘No country has been more productive of dissention than the British [… with] a multitude of sects and parties’,33 a proliferation of diversity that cultivates 30 31 32 33

Ibid., 1. Ibid., 255. Ibid., 253. Ibid., 257.

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differences not the balance between them. An able ruler may use the parliament to stabilize a balance between sectarian groups to which Holberg also counts the political parties.34 Similarly, writing on the early history of France, Holberg admires the character of the Gauls, ‘one of the bravest people in the world’.35 But internal discord weakened them, allowing a ‘great man’ like Caesar to conquer their territory. Weakness by conflict is a sign of barbarism, balance between opposites a sign of civilization produced by a ruler of a great character. Institutions and laws are important, but character comes first, in the history of modern Britain as well as in early France. In line with the educational aim of history, all of Holberg’s writings are preoccupied with the space between character and social action and institutions with an emphasis on the responsibility, pragmatic skill and critical capacity of the ruler. The significant ambiguity of the book is that the chosen model of the four monarchies reveals his profoundly backward take on the discipline itself, while the structure of his arguments has a strong forward looking potential: Humans are responsible for the course of history. The universal history does not bridge between an outdated macro-historical model and a contemporary moral teaching, but in Holberg’s hands it becomes a critical dialogue with ancient European principles and values turning them into instruments in a contemporary project of embracing his own experience of historical transition, in the book called The Great Interregnum after the fourth monarchy.

Shaping a character Outside his historical writings the axiom that characters come first inspires his creative writings, first of all his thirty-six comedies which I will return to after a closer look at Holberg’s notion of character. His historical writings also includes pure studies of character, male characters in Adskillige store Heltes og berømmelige Mænds, sær Orientalske og Indianske sammenlignede Historier og Bedrifter efter Plutarchi Maade 1–2 (1739)36 (cf. Anz 2007) (The comparative histories and achievements of several great heroes and famous men, particular oriental and 34

35 36

Cf. the essay ‘English Government’, in Ludvig Holberg, Moral Reflections & Epistles, ed. P.M. Mitchell (Norwich: Norvik Press, 1991), 101–104. Holberg, An Introduction to Universal History, 259.  Four Danish reprints appeared before 1800 as well as translations into German (5 reprints), Dutch (2 reprints), Russian and an imitation in Swedish (Ehrencron-Müller, Forfatterlexikon).

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Indian, in the manner of Plutarch) and female ones in Adskillige Heltinders og navnkundige Damers sammenlignede Historier efter Plutarchi Maade 1–2 (1745)37 (cf. Straubhaar 1997) (The comparative histories and achievements of several famous heroines in the manner of Plutarch). Even as a historian Holberg is close to admit that the study of characters is more important than historiography as such. In the preface to the book on great men, his enterprise is characterized as being of ‘utmost importance’: A biographer is bound by the same rules as a historian. The officium of the former is first of all to offer a portrait of his hero, that of the latter is to give words to everything that happened under his rule. A historicus is bound by chronological order, a biographicus does not really care if he commits hysteron proteron, because he lives up to his responsibility when he presents the real character of his hero and includes his failures as well as his virtues. It follows that to write a history may require more work and sense of detail, but more judiciousness to write a biography, and that a biography is a real speculum vitae, and hence a reading of the utmost importance, when it is written in the manner of Plutarch.38

Although deeply inspired by Plutarch’s Parallel Lives (first century CE) and its comparative method, Holberg was also familiar with Theophrastus’ Characters (third century BCE) and Jean de la Bruyère’s Caractères (1688). The comparative method allowed him to work with contrasts across history and beyond Europe and also to integrate despicable characters, all of which served to make the readers think for themselves what was right and wrong in their own situation: In this work, I have found it more relevant to talk about the achievements of oriental and Indian heroes; they are unknown to us and offer a taste of something new. Some of these histories are not less useful and pleasant to read; it is in fact right to say that few European histories will engage the reader more than the histories of Montezuma, Atapaliba, Myrr-Weis and Magmud. Moreover, from the examples of good rulers we are encouraged to be virtuous, but, likewise, by the appalling examples of the evil ones we will refrain from vice. Thus, both types of histories have a scopus.39

37

38

39

Two Danish reprints appeared before 1800 as well as translations into German (3 reprints), Dutch, Russian (2 reprints) and Swedish (2 reprints) (Ehrencron-Müller, Forfatterlexikon). Ludvig Holberg, Adskillige store Heltes og berømmelige Mænds, sær Orientalske og Indianske sammenlignede Historier og Bedrifter efter Plutarchi Maade 1–2 (1739), accessed 31 March 2016, http://holbergsskrifter.dk > Tekster. Ibid., my trans.

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In other words, the study of character opens a universal perspective which history, being place bound, does not, and the use of contrasts amplifies its usefulness by appealing to the readers’ active choice between vice and virtue much more efficiently than a positive model to be followed without critical engagement. In Holberg’s comparison of Cardinal Mazarin and Oliver Cromwell, his educating conclusion is actually based on two persons, each with their own type of vice and no virtues.40 Character studies point to a general human anthropology with an ethical foundation and with an appeal to the critical skills of the readers and their capacity to engage in a self-reflection on moral values and character formation. This also means that character studies may transcend cultural differences and teach us to appreciate human beings in spite of otherwise unbridgeable differences of culture and religion. Although Holberg calls Islam a fanatic religion, he emphasizes the fact that Mohammed seems to be honest in assuming his self-defined role as a false prophet and that he includes in the Qur’an repeated appeals to ethically recommendable social acts.41 The same balanced tolerance is applied when he describes the Inuits, by many regarded as superstitious barbarians on the margins of humanity. Yet, Holberg points out, superstition has been common in great civilizations like the Greek, the Roman and the Chinese and is still alive among educated Europeans. It is more important, then, to acknowledge that the Inuits have great social values and numerous practical skills.42 To Holberg, character studies are an exercise in intercultural tolerance and the application of his belief in universal equality of human beings (cf. Holberg’s essay ‘On the progress of religious tolerance’).43 Self-criticism is important for character studies, and Holberg’s analysis of his own character shows more in detail the features of his notion of character. The first letter in his epistolary autobiography from 1728 ends with a self-portrait shaped as a character study: My mind is differently affected, according to the state of my bodily health; and it is my great object to prevent these mental affections from running into excess. The affections I allude to, are joy, sorrow, fear, courage, torpor, alacrity, enthusiasm, indifference; and these prevail according to the excess of vicious humours in different parts of my body. Thus, when my disease attacked the 40 41 42 43

Holberg, Moral Reflections & Epistles, 152–155. Ibid., 163–165. Holberg, Værker i tolv bind 11: 215–219. Ibid., 83–86.

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region of the heart, I used formerly to be seized with a mania for reform, and inveighed vehemently against the depravity of mankind. As soon as the complaint shifted to another part of the body, no one could be more indulgent to human frailties than myself. Hence, whenever I feel this desire of reforming mankind coming upon me, experience has taught me that I should attack, not mankind, but my own bowels; for my enthusiasm invariably gives way to a few laxative pills; and as soon as these have operated the world appears to me with quite a different aspect.44

Like all his contemporaries, Holberg also subscribed to the ancient doctrine of the four humours. This means that his ideal of a mental equilibrium avoiding excesses of moods is not only established by a balance between reason and emotion, as many modern understandings of the nature of rationalism assume, but involves the body as well, because the four humours blood, lymph, black and yellow bile are bodily components with a direct mental impact. However, in line with other Enlightenment thinkers, Holberg does not buy into all aspects of the classical doctrine on the entanglement of body and mind defining the conditions of human character. According to the complete version of the doctrine, the individual body is seen as part of a greater totality, the cosmos.45 Similar bodybased holistic systems are known across the globe. Since Hippocrates and well into the eighteenth century, the general conception in Europe was that nature is built from four elements, air, water, earth and fire. They correspond to the four humours, which in turn are linked to different moods and to the temperature of the body, its dryness or humidity and its demeanour. Medicine was about translating this connection into the individual body via diets, potions, movements, bloodletting and so on in order to stabilize the vacillations of mind and mood such as melancholy or anger and to ease fever and pain. The body system as a whole is connected to the planets and constellations of stars in a correspondence that generated astrological charts in a comprehensive analogy between the microcosm of the body and divine macrocosmos of the universe. The connection between dryness or humidity of the fours elements also explained differences in characters of entire peoples across the globe in accordance with local climatic conditions. Moreover, society is seen as an analogous level where the individual human is placed under the umbrella of the cosmic order. A community is like a large body, an image that travelled 44 45

Holberg, Ludvig Holberg’s Memoir, 148–149. Raymond Klibanski, ed. Saturn and Melancholy (London: Nelson, 1964).

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from Antiquity and across cultures all over the globe.46 Kings and princes were particularly important in this context. Their individual bodies incorporated the connection between society and cosmos which was celebrated in their anointment and in spectacular paintings, sculptures and ceremonies of the court. This view is reflected in Holberg’s emphasis on the sovereign’s character. However, Holberg and many of his contemporaries dismantled the larger metaphysical scaffolding of the doctrine and kept only the relation between the individual body, the humours and the mental make-up of the individual character in order to understand why moods are as they are and to learn how to redress a balance that might have been lost to the excess of any mood. In any extreme mental or bodily state certain humours are weakened and others unduly enforced. Yet, with the omission of the overall cosmology, also astrology lost its foundation together with the natural and divine foundation of a certain type of social order holding the sovereign to be the embodiment of God’s entire creation. Instead, the humours became a quasi-empirical key to understand the origins of extreme human follies and a help to attain temperance in mind and action. By pushing the cosmic and social analogy aside, a space was opened for critical reflection and reasonable reforms as part of the responsibility of a wellbalanced citizen. Thinking in terms of change and improvement was no longer automatically an act of rebellion against a natural order, but the duty of every enlightened citizen, although only in a balanced state of mind and with the aim of slow and gradual social changes.47 The same goes for reforming one’s character, or rather the capacity to handle any inclination towards extremism one might be born with. As Holberg explains in the above quotation on his own behalf, the character of a human being is a bodily determined proclivity for certain mental tendencies and physical states which form an invariable feature of the individual human being. Therefore, each person is engaged in a life-long project of establishing a mental and bodily balance counterbalancing any destabilizing tendency to indulge in particular excesses of moods, whether too phlegmatically indifferent or too sanguinely enthusiastic. Education is about developing a critical knowledge of oneself in order to avoid the excesses we most easily may fall victim to. Excess, even of a virtue, always turns it into vice: When a virtue goes too far, ‘it is metamorphosed into a vice’.48

46 47 48

Reinhart Koselleck, ‘Organ’, in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe 4 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1984). ‘On Reform’, Holberg 1991: 65–69. Ibid., 68.

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With the cosmological metaphysics out of the picture, destiny was replaced by a responsibility for one’s course of life through self-criticism. Know your character in order to shape your fate, not the other way round, this is the implicit slogan that underpins Holberg’s comedies and other writings and makes education the bread and butter of his work. Not only do we all need it, but we all can and, hence, must educate ourselves to find the tools to shape a proper lifestyle with regard to food, sleep, fresh air, reading, contemplation and so on that eventually leads to a well-balanced life that turns people into virtuous citizens. Each of us has our own battle to fight. Holberg acknowledges that this is a challenge with the constant risk of failing, again with himself as an example: I am subject to impulses of passion, perturbation of mind, and other failings which I have never been able to overcome. I am not ignorant that the pangs of grief, and the shafts of fortune, may be driven away and despised by the aid of philosophy; […] Whatever philosophers may say to the contrary, such impulses are not under our control, and it is idle to talk of eradicating human feelings; for man is not formed by marble or hewn out of oak. I am frequently attacked by sudden fits of passion, grief or fear, which subside as my blood cools, and my spirits are restored to a just equilibrium. Paroxysms of passion cannot be checked by reading Cicero or Seneca; and indeed they are rather to be regarded as salutary outlets for our ill-humours, which are thus prevented from rankling and corrupting the moral system.49

In this reflection on the humours and the mind from a purely individual point of view without any metaphysical superstructure, it transpires that even excesses may be useful as they may help us to recognize our weaknesses. But it also seeps through the lines that excessive passions are irresistible and incurable, something we have to live with, but also charged with fascination and even pleasure. Without them humans would be of marble or oak. Their inbuilt danger is not only their excess but their ambiguous attraction. As Holberg states, this complexity is beyond philosophy, even the famous Stoics he mentions, but not beyond literature and comedy.

49

Holberg, Moral Reflections & Epistles, 201–202.

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Educating the uncontrollable humans Holberg wrote thirty-six comedies.50 The most important are produced in the short but intensive period of his ‘poetical rapture’ in the 1720s into the early 1730s. He provided the first public Danish theatre with original plays when it opened in 1722 and until its closure in 1728 due to censorship and changing tastes.51 It only re-opened as late as 1754. The two French directors, Étienne Capion and René Montaigue ran the theatre, but without Holberg’s comedies the project would have been still-born. It was not in vain, also with regard to theatre, that Holberg had travelled Europe, Paris and Rome in particular. As a narrow theatre enterprise, his comedies were mainly inspired by Molière and his complex characters, but also by the Italian commedia del arte and the Roman comedy, Plautus in particular.52 But the larger inspiration is Holberg’s preoccupation with character and human life across all the genres he used. The comedies show a complex and explorative use of the notion of character as an approach to the contradictions of the human behaviour and identity. All dramatis personae53 are victims of their own lack of capacity to resist extreme passions and remedy the harm they by this state of mind and action inflict on others and the social order. They need education from other more well-balanced people. Yet, as passions are both irresistible and attractive for the persons captured by his or her folly as well as fascinating and seductive for persons around them, education is never straightforward. It has to be mediated by deceit, intrigue, violence, humiliation, mocking and, not least, merciless laughter to redress a lost personal and social balance. Reason alone cannot do the trick. No wonder it is hard to come up with a simple moral lesson: The road to a re-established order is paved with acts that actually break the foundation of that order. More than exemplifying how a threatened balance can be restored, the comedies offer an often disturbing insight into human frailty and stubbornness and leave the audience with a dilemma: Allow the disturbing situation to 50

51

52

53

The number of comedies varies in different references. Thirty-six are included in the latest edition of Holberg’s writings (Holberg, Ludvig Holbergs skrifter). An English monograph is Gerald S. Argetsinger, Ludvig Holberg’s Comedies (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983). Before 1800 collections of Holbergs comedies were translated into German (13 collections or reprints), Dutch (9 collections or reprints), French (2 collections or reprints), Swedish (1 collection). First English translation came out in 1912. Cf. Stefan Scherer, ‘Italienisches und dänisches Theater des 18. Jahrhunderts (Gozzi, Goldoni, Holberg)’, in Ludwig Tieck. Leben – Werk – Wirkung, eds. Claudia Stockinger and Stefan Scherer (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2011). To distinguish persons on stage from character as a notion I call them ‘dramatis personae’.

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continue, or use instruments that challenge the morality to be re-established. The comedies offer a critical education into the limits of education. Here I will only shortly introduce four of Holberg’s comedies, each with a protagonist thrown off balance by his own excessive folly, but also staging a normalizing process that may threaten the sense of justice and even make the audience prefer the disturbed state with all its sparkling fun and human joy. In a scene in Barselsstuen (The lying-in room) (1723),54 Corfitz hides under a table in the room of his wife who had just given birth to a boy. To the despair of her husband, a host of women come to pay visit to her, a display of crazy characters, one more bizarre than the other, but all the women are served coffee way beyond the budget of the rich but stingy Corfitz. Yet, the problem is not money or the master’s loss of control of his household. The crux of the matter is that he is almost 70 and his wife is 17. He is a victim of his own erotic passion that turns everything upside down, not least when he sticks his head out from under the table without being able to leave before the next visitor arrives. What the audience listens to together with Corfitz is that his young wife is calm, talking sense to the ridiculous visitors as well as to her husband. She is the stable centre in a domestic universe spiralling out of control. But the core problem is more serious: Who is the real father? To appease his mind Corfitz has not been able to resist entering the female premises to ask his beloved wife this urgent question. The thing is that the handsome singer, Gotthard, passed by precisely nine months ago. The doubt, the rumours, the jealousy, the humiliation fuelled from the first to the last scene by the repeated innuendos from Corfitz’ witty servant, Troels, drive him more and more mad. His passion for the young wife is brought to an even more radical extreme than even the age difference makes reasonable. By hiding, Corfitz himself adds to the rumours. Some of the visitor has spotted a man under the table and disseminates the rumour that it is the secret lover. His self-inflicted and now also selfperpetuating misery triggered by a passion at odds with his bodily and mental balance makes him a victim where he should be master. The thorny question of fatherhood never gets a final answer in the play. It can only be answered by trusting the words of others, but words, the play shows us to a fault, are most used to cheat, to boast, to pretend or to mock. The audience is left with the same doubts and conjectures as Corfitz. Once the balance of humours has been 54

Before 1800 translated into German (2) and into Dutch (1). First French translation in 1919. No English translation (Ehrencron-Müller, Forfatterlexikon).

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tipped, a redressed balance can never erase traces of the disturbance, here the doubt of fatherhood. Holberg’s Jean de France; eller, Hans Frandsen (1722) (Jean de France or Hans Frandsen) centres on another extreme passion: snobbism.55 The young Hans Frandsen, the son of common people with a very ordinary Danish name, returns from his studies in Paris with all the newest fashion, dances and habits from the French capital and an adapted new name – an icon of snobbism for everybody but his devoted mother, who is completely seduced by his manners and pseudo-French. As in Barselsstuen the protagonist is brought down by the weakness produced by his own folly, his excessive adoration for everything new and foreign. For most people around him, though, Jean is not easy to fight. He emanates an irresistible glee and power. In Barselsstuen, the nagging doubts of Corfitz are enough to bring him down, but here machinations conjured up by the servants are necessary to break the spell of Jean, and their tricks are merciless, bordering on the cruel. Jean makes his clumsy mother dance new French dances on the public square, chatters away in broken French, deceives his fiancée, Elsebet, and forces his solid bourgeois father-in-law and his father to wear their coats backwards as a specimen of the hottest international fashion. To end the madness the clever servants, Marthe and Arv, dress up like a rich and noble French lady, Madame de la Fleche, and her servant, pretending that she is completely infatuated with the distinguished Jean. As in most intrigues, also the duped Jean is wounded with his own weapons. His imagined French superiority turns against itself as self-destructive egotism. Yet, suddenly Madame has disappeared to Hamburg on her way to Paris. Jean rushes after her, leaving Elsebet behind with a new more trustworthy fiancée and his mother, yet now without her joyful but short-lived pride in her son. On the one hand, Jean is thrown, defenceless, into a social and existential void beyond our imagination. On the other hand, he leaves behind memories of fun, generosity, imaginations of a life larger than the quotidian treadmill. The re-established order is not the same as before; its incapacity to embrace follies that transcend it remains. When Jean is exported to an indefinite elsewhere, the home is left smaller than it was before. If Jean is the extreme snob, Erasmus Montanus in the comedy of the same name from 1731 is the academic caught by his unconstraint indulgence in logical 55

Before 1800 translated into German, Dutch, Russian and Swedish.

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argumentation detached from the world of sensual experience.56 Erasmus, too, is brought to his knees by a deceitful intrigue instigated by the flat world of everyday beliefs, leaving us with a troubled questioning of how the gulf between scientific truth and everyday beliefs can be bridged. The comedy does not give an answer, but actually broadens the abyss by letting the man of science and truth down and making the proponents of misconceptions and prejudice come out victorious. Holberg’s didactic project is never about telling people what to think and do, but to force them to critically investigate the dilemmas of deciding what is right and wrong. Before the university made him Erasmus Montanus, he was just plainly Rasmus Berg, a boy from a small village of modest and hardworking peasants. When he returns to see his parents, Jeppe and Nille, and his fiancée, Lisbed, he makes at first a great impression on everyone and spreads happiness in the family for their investment in such a learned scholar. Yet, the local deacon, Per, and Lisbed do not meet him without fears. The deacon’s knowledge of Latin lags behind, although he is admired locally as a very learned man, and the fiancée is not quite sure if Erasmus is still interested in a simple girl. They are not helped by Erasmus’ merciless exposure of the stupidity of the deacon. By logical argumentation he proves Per is a cock and Nille a stone and they begin fearfully to believe him. Nille feels her feet getting cold, until Erasmus to her great relief, and with another piece of fanciful logical argumentation, proves that, after all, she is not a stone. However, Erasmus’ acrobatic use of formal logic also demonstrates, at least to those in the audience who know a bit of logic, that he is just a freshman showcasing his not fully digested academic skills. Erasmus younger brother Jacob, a solid farm boy, is the only one who looks through the arbitrariness of Erasmus’ knowledge and does so independent of logical expertise, only with a sound respect for human experience. When Erasmus advocates that the Earth is round, everybody is struck with disbelief, Jacob in particular. He can see with his own eyes that it is flat, a truth which is confirmed every time he toils the fields. The dilemma is that Erasmus’ statement is actually true, although Erasmus cannot explain why. The village was close to believe that Erasmus could turn the deacon into a cock and Nille into a stone. But to make the Earth round! This is just over the top. 56

Stephanie Buus, ‘A Comedy of Malapropism: Ludvig Holberg’s Erasmus Montanus’, Edda 4 (2000): 334–345.

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Lisbed’s father Jeronimus presents Erasmus with a non-negotiable condition for an alliance with his daughter. Take back the stupid claim and admit that the Earth is flat. Erasmus is almost ready to say no, all while Lisbed is crying her eyes out. But then his own weapon, the logical argument, is turned against him, exactly by one who can see the limitations of its arbitrariness and play with it. A lieutenant comes by to enlist soldiers and lures Erasmus to bet a ducat that the lieutenant can prove that it is the child’s duty to beat the parents. Erasmus takes the bait, proves it is not and receives the ducat. Now the lieutenant wants to prove that Erasmus is a soldier. Erasmus, heated by the disputatio, vehemently and in Latin proves the contrary. However, the fact is that by receiving money from the lieutenant with witnesses present, although by a cunning deceit, he is actually made a soldier no matter his flawless logical argument. Before being taken away to the army, the crying Erasmus is flogged as an introduction to military discipline. As his last chance, he gets the opportunity to deny the round shape of the globe, which he does whimpering and in tears, deeply humiliated and beaten up: ‘The earth is as flat as a pancake!’ Erasmus is forced to lie about the truth in order to gain a social life and his Lisbed. Reason cannot assert itself by reason alone, even when it comes to science. Deceit, mockery, intrigues and even raw violence may be needed. This is the problematic message we have to digest, even while laughing. The lieutenant sums up the problem we are left with: Prior to logic and scientific facts comes the need to know oneself, that is to say one’s character, and to be temperate and prudent when producing and disseminating knowledge. Knowledge without self-criticism and social ethics is worthless, maybe even harmful, no matter its truth-value. But one question is left open: How will it be possible to actually introduce new knowledge after the experience with Erasmus who now is going to reside in the village and remind everybody about the futility of learning? The last comedy on my list is the most complex of Holberg’s plays, Jeppe paa Bierget; eller, Den forvandlede Bonde (1722) (Jeppe of the Hill; or, The Transformed Peasant).57 Jeppe is a poor peasant, prone to drinking in order to forget his misery which, more than his poverty, is caused by his intransigent wife, Nille, who regularly beats him up with her stick, called Master Erik. Although weak, he is also a loving person, fond of his children, and the cruel experience he 57

Before 1800 this comedy was only translated into Russian (Ehrencron-Müller, Forfatterlexikon).

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has in the comedy calls for our empathy and pity. Jeppe may be called a character out of balance, too weak to live up to the standards of moderation and sound reasoning. Yet, his weakness is not caused by some excessive obsession harmful to others as in the case of Corfitz, Jean and Erasmus who therefore need to be brought back in line. Jeppe is a self-reflexive person who is very well aware of his own weakness without being able to do anything about it. So, when Jeppe becomes the victim of an intrigue, set up by the local baron Nilus and his lackeys, he is chosen almost arbitrarily, just because he is an easy target. If the intrigues set in motion in the other comedies are self-inflicted stratagems exacted in the relation to the folly they are meant to fight, here the machination is more an example of abuse of power than a reaction to an extreme state of mind. The whole set-up is constructed by the baron’s lackeys to amuse their patron. They will catch a drunken peasant while asleep, place him in the baron’s bed in the manor house and then treat him like the baron in the morning when he wakes up. Which they do. Sobering up in the bed after a night’s drunken sleep, Jeppe has to pinch his arm to believe he is alive and not in paradise. Mockingly encouraged by the baron’s staff to believe that he was never a poor peasant, Jeppe tries in vain to repress all memories from his former peasanthood. After having enjoyed quite a few glasses of exquisite wine, he begins to take advantage of the people in the manner of a baron, not least after recognizing the cruel overseer whose wife he starts to grope. Moreover, he distributes hard sentences to some of them, the disguised baron included, because he does not like their faces. Finally, the drunken Jeppe is brought to sleep again, is dressed up in his old clothes and brought back from where they abducted him, on the dung heap. Awake, Jeppe fantasizes about having been in paradise, having been dead and now brought back to his miserable life. However, the cynical prank continues. Accusing Jeppe of entering the baron’s house and occupy his bed, a fake judge from the baron’s household sentences Jeppe to be hanged. They hang him in his arms after having given him a drink which he is made to believe is a poison, but is just a potion bringing him to sleep. Waking up he rattles on again about his death and resurrection to the great dismay and disbelief of Nille who routinely beats him up. The fake judge comes back and sentences him back to life. Jeppe walks off, totally confused and spends his last money on liquor at Jacob Shoemaker’s place, only to sneak away sullenly when Jacob tells him how he is made the laughing stock of the village.

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In a carnivalesque logic the change of positions of the baron and Jeppe makes them each other’s mirror, exposing the consequences of the arbitrary exercise of power on both sides. In fact, all dramatis personae are caught by this logic of double positions. Jeppe is being suppressed, but is also ready to turn the tables in avenge as soon as he has the opportunity. Nille is both the tough master of Jeppe and the victim of his drunkenness and weakness. The baron is, of course, the local sovereign, but close to being mishandled by Jeppe when they both play their roles in the bedroom and the game starts to backfire. But more importantly, the cynicism of the baron’s use of power is displayed, turning careless fun into humiliation, an experience that cannot be forgotten when the intrigue has been brought to a conclusion. It is a play about the ambiguities of power brought to the extreme by being used as an arbitrary play, just like Erasmus used knowledge and argumentation as purely formal constructions. In Jeppe’s long monologues Holberg, ironically, uses the subdued but thoughtful peasant to give the most penetrating reflections on the ambiguities and mercilessness of power. The weakest is the wisest. The temptation to abuse power as a self-affirmative instrument appears as the same across differences of character and social position. Hence, the comedy is more about the excess of power beyond the control of anyone on stage, exacerbated by their biased characters, from the desperation of the underdogs to the cynicism of the rest, none of them capable of showing temperance and judiciousness as it was admonished by the lieutenant in Erasmus Montanus. Here as elsewhere, Holberg uses laughter to induce into the audience not only a self-reflexive insight in the complexity of human character, but in Jeppe paa Bierget also a sense of complicity and embarrassment by activating a much broader scale of emotional engagement than in any of his other comedies. Holberg’s comedies are more than hilarious. They are merciless and challenging, ripping up not only any prejudice but also relativizing their own moral teaching – there is more to human character than reason and ethics can handle. The comedies are Holberg’s most lasting legacy. Building on shared European models for the complexity of human character, they have a perspective way beyond a national confinement. With a focus on the limits of these models to explain human identities and actions, they also transcend their time of origin and reach out to the present, open for new reinterpretations of what it means to be human and to live a shared life with others.

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Glancing into the future Holberg’s greatest international success was the utopian novel Nicolai Klimii iter subterraneum (1741), (The Journey of Niels Klim to the World Underground).58, 59 The Norwegian youngster Niels Klim from Bergen tumbles into the interior of the world. As Edmond Halley had suggested fifty years earlier, the Earth turns out to be hollow with various planets and empires. The novel is a travelogue of his visits to a numbers of strange countries and peoples before he comes back to Bergen. The most important are the Potuans, the inhabitants of Potu, a nation of reasonable trees, who shows the most pronounced sense of well-thought and well-practised government, progressive ideas of humans and their equality, balanced sense of scholarship as well sound moral principles. Most importantly, Klim is surprised to learn that women have the same status as men, even higher. As men are physically stronger than women, it follows that they alone should perform the manual jobs while women should assume responsibility for decision-making and governance. The genre of utopian and imaginary travels is known back to Antiquity and flourished in Europe with Thomas More’s Utopia (1415) as the first modern point of reference (cf. McNelis’ preface in Holberg 1960). To envision a happy and forward-looking future society, the novel rehearses in fictional form the many Enlightenment principles that Holberg advocates. Apart from the indirect presentation determined by the fictional framework, the novel is, like allegories and fables, close to a one-to-one translation from fiction to social reality, a slightly veiled philosophical treatise on moral and social philosophy. The novel does not contain the grotesque bodily humour of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726–1735) or of Holberg’s own comedies, which may have lifted the novel beyond an inventive didactic exercise. If the comedies deal with an explosive bunch of uncontrollable individuals demonstrating the difficulty of humans to actually live as humans, the novel is about the potential of balanced reasoning for reforming society in view of a more human future. 58

59

Patricia Fara, ‘Hidden Depths: Halley, Hell and Other People’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 38 (2007): 570–583; Patricia Fara, ‘Educating Mary: Women and Scientific Literature in the Early Nineteenth Century’, in Frankenstein’s Science: Experimentation and Discovery in Romantic Culture, 1780–1830, eds. Christa Knellwolf and Jane Goodall (London: Ashgate, 2008). Before 1800 the Latin version saw a few reprints, but abundant translations, reprints and retranslations: French (5), Dutch (4), German (9), English (3), Swedish (2), Danish (5), and new editions continued with rather small intervals during the nineteenth and twentieth century and into the twenty-first century, also adding a Norwegian translation (Flugt, Niels Klims europæiske rejse – en oversættelseshistorisk undersøgelse af Nicolai Klimii iter subterraneum.).

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The novel is more focused on moral principles and social action than character. No wonder: what would a character of the future look like? More thoughtprovoking approaches to that question can be found in Holberg’s essays60 where he investigates single topics, books or authors. In a review of Julien de La Mettrie’s controversial L’Homme Machine (1748) (Man a machine), Holberg labels it blasphemous and immoral. He strongly refutes the unambiguous materialism and determinism of La Mettrie’s thesis that mental states are completely determined by the body. Indirectly, Holberg refers to the humours when he states that although it is correct that minds are influenced by the bodily liquids, experience also shows that humans are capable of modifying that influence. Hence, he concludes, humans have a free will to shape their character in ways which cannot be explained in materialistic terms alone. Moreover, if we are not able to distinguish between the same crime committed in affect and by free will, all law and morality would be annihilated. Here, Holberg takes issue with the relation between materialism and ethics, a topic that is still on the cultural agenda.61 La Mettrie’s determinism would also make teaching and education irrelevant. Holberg is deeply engaged in university reform in view of future improvements of scholarship.62 Already in Erasmus Montanus it is clear that knowledge, ethics and character must be united for scholarship to progress, both as knowledge acquisition and as application of knowledge. Half a century later German Idealism began to discuss Bildung in a similar perspective. To Holberg’s mind, the university of his day paid too much attention to number of publications, exams, classes and lectures, and too little attention to profound studies, to a proper selection of the best works and to real progress: ‘You may be tired and sweating from intense walking; yet, if one just walks back and forth, the end goal will never be reached, but with such commotion one just remains and will ever remain on the same spot’.63 To avoid publishing for the sake of publishing on the rapidly growing book market, Holberg recommended peer reviewing and discussion in workshops before any manuscript went into print. If science is

60

61 62 63

A selection of the Moral Reflections, published in Danish 1744, and of the Epistles (published in Danish 1748–1754) is Holberg 1991. Before 1800 the Moral Reflections saw Danish reprints (4) and reprinted translations in German (5), Dutch (5) and French (4) as well as one Swedish translation, while the Epistles appeared in one Danish reprint, a reprinted translation in German (3), one Dutch and one Russian translation (Ehrencron-Müller, Forfatterlexikon). Holberg, Værker i tolv bind 11: 249–251. Cf. the essay on the university in Holberg, Værker i tolv bind 10: 227–233. Ibid.,10: 228, my trans.

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not debated and corrected among peers before publication, both with regard to content and form of communication, no progress will be possible. However, this is not to be mistaken for co-authoring which Holberg is not in favour of. At the end, each individual is responsible for his or her own text.64 If mutual responsibility, engagement and recognition of scholars are as necessary for science as innovative ideas, the same principle holds for higher education. Teachers should change their role from being just lecturers, repeating the same lecture over and over again. Instead, they should be respondents to students’ questions, papers and interventions and solve the problems students cannot handle themselves. The positive effects would be that incompetent teachers would not get a job, and the teachers would be forced to constantly renew their knowledge. Teachers and students would be engaged in a process of mutual learning. This vision is still a challenge today in higher education. The third example of Holberg’s engagement with the future is politics. One of his last publications is a small book, Remarques sur quelques positions, qui se trouvent dans L’Esprit des Loix (1753) (Comments on certain opinions in L’Esprit des Loix), containing a revised compilation in French of his Danish essays on Charles-Louis de Montesquieu’s groundbreaking De l’Esprit des Loix (1748) (The spirit of the laws). Holberg firmly rejects Montesquieu’s defence of the climate theory, according to which the mental proclivities towards reason, passion and so on are determined by climatic regions and thus also the capacity for a people to be its own ruler in a democratic government. Also Montesquieu’s view of women as unable to take on tasks of governance and similar tasks is refuted. Against such views, Holberg holds that the capacity to take responsibility is a matter of learning which can reach the same results everywhere and independent of gender. Most important is Holberg’s discussion of democracy in contrast to monarchy, aristocracy and despotism. Not knowing a democracy in practice, least of all in a modern form, the discussion is more philosophical than political. Despotism is rejected because of the arbitrariness of its exercise of power and aristocracy which will satisfy only the interests of limited group. Also democracy is questioned. Monarchy is Holberg’s preference, based on an argument that draws on his predilection for the central function of character: The opinion of philosophers who support the idea that the happiness of a state depends on the wisdom of the person who is in charge of the affairs, seems still

64

Holberg, Moral Reflections & Epistles, 159–160.

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Danish Literature as World Literature to be the most valid opinion. A wise and virtuous ruler who can guide the minds of the people with diligence, can in a short amount of time reshape an entire country.65

When it comes to democracy, things go awry. Virtue as a shared guiding principle, incorporated by the wise ruler, disintegrates and becomes instead everybody’s sense of virtue: Love of the nation is transformed into love of oneself, obedience toward one’s superiors into vain pride and compliance into arrogance. The vilest citizen regards himself as an important person and as a pillar of society and, as everybody will have a part in the government, the population will treat the civil servants and the military generals as clerks and as their own piece of work.66

If a democracy or a republic is created in a people with a high degree of virtue, it may work, but only for a short amount of time because permanent laws that guarantee security and freedom for the people have no permanence. This requires a stable social hierarchy, legitimized by the good character of the king. Virtuous democracies are idealistic constructions without any foundation in the real world, ‘a meteor which appears and disappears in an instant’.67 Holberg’s bleak vision of a democratic future is less a vision of a representative democracy than of an anonymized mass society with no enlightened collective ethics and sense of responsibility.

Conclusion: ‘Denmark should not be the only place condemned to silence’ In the preface to the book on Montesquieu, Holberg gives the reason why his book came out in French. In the European debate on one of the most important books on the continent, ‘Denmark should not be the only place condemned to silence’68 This is the undercurrent running through his entire work: To give Denmark a voice in Europe and Europe a voice in Denmark. It is tempting to see him as ahead of his time, but he is not. He is deeply rooted in the eighteenth 65

66 67 68

Ludvig Holberg, Remarques sur quelques positions, qui se trouvent dans L’Esprit des Loix, 1753, accessed 31 March 2016, http://holbergsskrifter.dk, Tekster. Ibid., my trans. Ibid. Ibid.

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century, but first of all intensely preoccupied, emotionally and rationally, with its ambiguities, the limits of its ideas and concepts, the contradictions of its basic beliefs and with ways to educate people to cope with this situation. He engaged with his contemporary world as a world in transition, from a late Medieval world he is leaving into a modern world to which he has not arrived and which he cannot imagine. His critical and self-critical approach to this life world is an attempt to master cultural transition in all its dimensions. Given his time and place, Holberg’s international outlook could be labelled global, although it is primarily European in place and also in perspective when he transcends the boundaries of the continent to look at characters and peoples from other parts of the world. The core value of Holberg’s universe is the updated notion of character, stripped of its metaphysical garments. He used it to understand the trajectory of history; to criticize his contemporary world, its ethics and institutions and trendy social developments; to analyse himself and take responsibility for his own course in life; to qualify a view of humans in a transnational perspective as universally equal; and, finally, to offer an astoundingly rich and complex series of comedies where we are confronted with the limits of humanity, wrapped in a generous surplus of laughter that still rolls through the theatre almost 300 years later. But first of all, the insistence on character is a prism for a view on the global human community without parochialism and narrow localism before nationalism became a term for this attitude. His British admirer, Oliver Goldsmith, wrote an essay ‘National Prejudices’ (1765). From a table in a tavern he observes how his fellow citizens distance themselves from peoples of other nations. French are sycophants, Germans are drunken sots, Dutch are avaricious wretches, Spaniards proud and so on. Goldsmiths wonders how the other men can do so when they have never, like himself, seen the continent with their own eyes. To their dismay, Goldsmith feels obliged to point out that, excellent as they might be, the English are also rash, headstrong, impetuous and prone to adversity. Why should I love my country less, Goldsmiths asks the reader, because I can see its limitation but do not want to lampoon other nations? – ‘I should prefer the title of the ancient philosopher [= Diogenes], viz. a citizen of the world, to that of an Englishman, a Frenchman, a European, or to any other appellation whatsoever’.69

69

Goldsmith, Goldsmith’s Miscellaneous, sect. 4, 81.

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Holberg also discusses national stereotypes in various places, but still in the manner of character studies that analytically highlight the particularities of nations without disdain. However, he would never transpose himself beyond his local anchoring and claim a passport as a world citizen. He is a citizen of the double Danish monarchy and takes this place and the Danish language to be a platform from where he can engage with the world at large. There is no other way of taking on this necessary engagement; a lofty declaration of world citizenship will not help. He could not have invented a better self-description than the subtitle of the English translation of his memories: ‘An eighteenth century Danish contribution to international understanding’.

Bibliography Ludvig Holberg Collected works, bibliography and dictionary Ehrencron-Müller, Holger. Forfatterlexikon omfattende Danmark, Norge og Island indtil 1814, 10–12: Bibliografi ovet Holbergs Skrifter. Copenhagen: Aschehoug, 1933–1935. Flugt, Cecilie. Niels Klims europæiske rejse – en oversættelseshistorisk undersøgelse af Nicolai Klimii iter subterraneum. Unpublished PhD diss., Aarhus University, 2014. Holberg, Ludvig. Ludvig Holbergs skrifter, 2015. Accessed 31 March 2016. http:// holbergsskrifter.dk. Holberg, Ludvig. Samlede Skrifter, edited by Carl S. Petersen, 1–18 (facsimile). Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1913–1963. Holberg, Ludvig. Værker i tolv bind, edited by F.J. Billeskov Jansen, 1–12. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde og Bagger, 1969–1971. Holbergordbog, edited by Aage Hansen and Svend Eegholm-Pedersen. Copenhagen: Det danske Sprog-og Litteraturselskab, 1981–1988. Accessed 31 March 2016. http:// holbergordbog.dk/.

Individual works Holberg, Ludvig. Adskillige Heltinders og navnkundige Damers sammenlignede Historier efter Plutarchi Maade 1–2, 1745. Accessed 31 March 2016. http://holbergsskrifter.dk > Tekster . Holberg, Ludvig. Adskillige store Heltes og berømmelige Mænds, sær Orientalske og Indianske sammenlignede Historier og Bedrifter efter Plutarchi Maade 1–2, 1739. Accessed 31 March 2016. http://holbergsskrifter.dk > Tekster.

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Holberg, Ludvig. ‘Erasmus Montanus; or, Rasmus Berg (Erasmus Montanus, eller Rasmus Berg)’. In Jeppe of the Hill and Other Comedies by Ludvig Holberg, translated by Gerald S. Argetsinger and Sven H. Rossel, 145–192. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1731/1990. Holberg, Ludvig. An Introduction to Universal History, 3rd ed., edited by Gregory Sharpe and William Radcliffe. London, 1733/1787. Holberg, Ludvig. ‘Jean de France; or, Hans Frandsen (Jean de France, eller Hans Frandsen)’. In Jeppe of the Hill and Other Comedies by Ludvig Holberg, translated by Gerald S. Argetsinger and Sven H. Rossel, 105–143. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1722/1990. Holberg, Ludvig. ‘Jeppe of the Hill; or, The Transformed Peasant (Jeppe på Bjerget, eller Den forvandlede Bonde)’. In Jeppe of the Hill and Other Comedies by Ludvig Holberg, translated by Gerald S. Argetsinger and Sven H. Rossel, 105–143. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1722/1990. Holberg, Ludvig. The Journey of Niels Klim to the World Underground, edited by James I. McNelis. Lincoln: The University of Nebraska Press, 1741/1960. Holberg, Ludvig. ‘La Chambre de l’Accouchée (Barselsstuen)’. In Œuvres Choisies, translated by Jacques de Coussange, 139–218. Paris: La Renaissance du livre, 1723/1919. Holberg, Ludvig. Ludvig Holberg’s Memoirs. An Eighteenth Century Danish Contribution to International Understanding, edited by Stewart E. Fraser. Leiden: Brill, 1728– 1754/1970. Holberg, Ludvig. Moral Reflections & Epistles, edited by P.M. Mitchell. Norwich: Norvik Press, 1744–54/1991. Holberg, Ludvig. Remarques sur quelques positions, qui se trouvent dans L’Esprit des Loix, 1753. Accessed 31 March 2016. http://holbergsskrifter.dk > Tekster.

Other works Anz, Heinrich. ‘Die Vernunft der Alterität. Der Umgang mit dem Fremden in Ludwig Holbergs Heldengeschichten’. In Akten des XI. Internationalen Germanistenkongresses 2005. Germanistik im Konflikt der Kulturen 2, edited by JeanMarie Valentin, 209–218. Bern: Peter Lang, 2007. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism. Ethics in a World of Strangers. London: Penguin, 2006. Argetsinger, Gerald S. Ludvig Holberg’s Comedies. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983. Beck, Ulrich. Cosmopolitan Vision. London: Polity Press, 2006. Benedikz, Benedikt S. ‘Ludvig Holberg: The Man Who Made Scandinavia Literate’. The New York Review of Science Fiction 22, no. 1 (September 2009): 17–22.

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Bredsdorff, Thomas and Anne-Marie Mai, eds. 100 Danish Poems: From the Medieval Period to the Present Day. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum/Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011. Brown, Keith. ‘A Kind of Comradeship. Goldsmith and the Late Famous Baron Holberg’. English Studies 61, no. 1 (1961): 37–46. Buus, Stephanie. ‘A Comedy of Malapropism. Ludvig Holberg’s Erasmus Montanus’. Edda 2000, no. 4 (2000): 334–345. Fara, Patricia. ‘Educating Mary: Women and Scientific Literature in the Early Nineteenth Century’. In Frankenstein’s Science. Experimentation and Discovery in Romantic Culture, 1780–1830, edited by Christa Knellwolf and Jane Goodall, 17–32. London: Ashgate, 2008. Fara, Patricia. ‘Hidden Depths: Halley, Hell and Other People’. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 38 (2007): 570–583. Goldsmith, Oliver. Goldsmith’s Miscellaneous. London: William Smith, 1841. Accessed 5 April 2016. https://archive.org/details/completeworksol00goldgoog. (One volume in four sections with separate titles and page numbers.) Herrmann, Elisabeth, Carrie Smith-Prei, and Stuart Taberner, eds. Transnationalism in Contemporary German-Language Literature. New York: Camden House, 2015. Jansen, F.J. Billeskov. Ludvig Holberg. New York: Twaine, 19740. Klibanski, Raymond, ed. Saturn and Melancholy. London: Nelson, 1964. Kant, Immanuel. Was heist Auklärung?, 1783. English translation. Accessed 31 March 2016. http://www.artoftheory.com/what-is-enlightenment_immanuel-kant/. Kant, Immanuel. Zum ewigen Frieden, 1795. English translation. Accessed 31 March 2016. https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/kant/kant1.htm. Koselleck, Reinhart, ed. ‘Geschichte, Historie’. In Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, 2, 593–717. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1979. Koselleck, Reinhart, ed. ‘Organ’. In Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, 4, 519–622. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1984. Langslet, Lars Roar. ‘The Nordic Molière’. Scandinavian Review 91, no. 3 (Spring 2004): 19–23. Larsen, Svend Erik. ‘From the National to a Transnational Paradigm. Writing Literary Histories Today’. European Review 21, no. 2 (2013): 241–251. Larsen, Svend Erik. ‘From Comparatism to Comparativity. Comparative Reasoning Reconsidered’. Interfaces. A Journal of Medieval European Literatures 1, no. 1 (2015): 318–347. Accessed 31 March 2016. http://riviste.unimi.it/interfaces/index. Lionnet, Françoise and Shu-mei Shih, eds. Minor Transnationalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Nussbaum, Martha. Upheavals of Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Rossel, Sven Hakon. ‘Ludvig Holberg’. In Danish Writers from the Reformation to Decadence, 1550–1900, edited by Marianne Stecher-Hansen, 247–260. Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2004.

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Rossel, Sven Hakon, ed. Ludvig Holberg: A European Writer. A Study of Influence and Reception. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994. Scherer, Stefan. ‘Italienisches und dänisches Theater des 18. Jahrhunderts (Gozzi, Goldoni, Holberg)’. In Ludwig Tieck. Leben – Werk – Wirkung, edited by Claudia Stockinger and Stefan Scherer, 247–260. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2011. Schiller, Nina Glick and Andrew Irving, eds. Whose Cosmopolitanism? Critical Perspective, Relationalities and Discontents. New York: Berghahn, 2015. Schøsler, Jørn. ‘Holberg, lecteur de Locke’. Dix-Huitième Siècle 41, no. 1 (2009): 517–535. Skovgaard-Petersen, Karen. ‘“At tale om fornödne ting, og give nogen idée om historiens hærlighed” – Om Ludvig Holbergs lærebog i verdenshistorie, Synopsis historiæ universalis (1733). (With a summary in English)’. In Fund og Forskning i Det kongelige Biblioteks samlinger 51, 213–231. Copenhagen: Det Kongelige Bibliotek, 2012. Straubhaar, Sandra Ballif. ‘Holberg’s Apology for Zenobia of Palmyra and Catherine I’. Scandinavica 36 (1997): 169–188. Vertovec, Steven. Transnationalism. London: Routledge, 2009. Vico, Giambatista. The New Science. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984/1725.

4

A Man of the World: Hans Christian Andersen Karin Sanders

‘I am doomed to write for a small country’, Hans Christian Andersen (1805– 1875) complained in a letter to a friend, Henriette Wulff, in 1836.1 He saw himself as an ‘orange tree in the swamp’ (258), born in a tiny Northern nation, but impatient to plant his words in a wider world. From the beginning of his authorship he looked eagerly and ambitiously to the works of Europe’s foremost authors in order to find his own voice and aspired to be not only a Danish author.2 Already his 1822 Youth Attempts, published under a nom de plume, illustrates this ambition: ‘I loved William Shakespeare and Walter Scott, and then of course I loved myself, I took my name Christian, and I had the pseudonym: William Christian Walter’.3 To place his own name snugly between two of his literary heroes suggests not only a desired kinship but also a clear goal and strategy: to write for a world larger than the ‘duck yard’ into which he had been born. At the time of Andersen’s debut, the Danish population counted a little over a million and for many of the Danish authors at the time it proved to be an insurmountable barrier to reach a larger world via a language spoken by so relatively few. Not so for Andersen! While Youth Attempts became a failure – Andersen professed that few copies were sold and ultimately the paper on which it was printed was used as wrapping paper – his early poem ‘The Dying Child’ from 1827 was published in German before it appeared in Danish, followed by a translation in 1829 into Greenlandic, French in 1837 and English in 1850. Today Andersen can be read in more than a hundred and fifty languages, far above those of his closest European competitors: the Grimm brothers, Charles Perrault and E.T.A Hoffmann, and he is listed among the ‘ten most widely translated 1 2 3

H.C. Andersen, Breve fra H. C. Andersen (Copenhagen: Aschehoug, 2000), 258. Unless otherwise noted all translations are my own. H.C. Andersen, ‘Mit Livs Eventyr, 1855’, in Andersens samlede værker, Selvbiografier II (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2007), 59. 

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authors in the world, along with Shakespeare and Karl Marx’.4 He is, to name one example, the most translated fiction writer in China (only overtaken by an American self-help book). No other Danish author comes close. The question is: why and how? Andersen almost immediately worked on two central sets of doublearticulations that allowed him to address a diverse audience.5 The first, as mentioned, is aimed at both a local (Danish) and a global (world) readership; the second is his well-known double-articulation in the fairy tales: addressing the child and the adult simultaneously. The two trajectories are not divorced from each other and his novels, travel books, fairy tales and stories (as well as some of his poems and plays), all can be seen as an attempt to navigate across not only language barriers but also cultural and national borders. Andersen published up a storm and became a fervent promoter and agent of his own works, in what we today would see as a perpetual book tour with multiple readings at every stop, on his many travels across Europe.

‘I want to be the best novel writer in Denmark’6 In 1835, he mailed the German translation of his first novel The Improvisatore to Adalbert von Chamisso with the words: ‘Here I send to you my Italian son; he speaks the German language so that your family also can understand him’.7 Andersen hoped that Chamisso would promote the novel, as he had done with his translations of Andersen’s poems, thus clearing the way to the German book market: ‘I hope that the great Germany will give attention to my book’, Andersen notes, ‘and that I will be worthy of their attention’, only to add defensively, ‘I ought not to be blamed for placing such importance on being known outside of small Denmark’ (225). Yet, precisely this kind of unguarded self-promoting often struck a nerve among many of his Danish critics and provoked sharp reactions in the Danish reception of his works. Andersen was seen as unashamedly selfaggrandizing in ways that ran counter to the accepted social norms of the Danes. 4

5

6

7

Maria Tatar, ‘Denmark’s Perfect Wizard. The Wonder of Wonders’, in The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen, ed. Maria Tartar (New York, London: Norton, 2008), xvi. See also Sørens Baggesen, ‘Dobbeltartikulationen i H. C. Andersens eventyr’, in Andersen og Verden (Odense: Odense University Press, 1993), 15–29. Johan de Mylius, H.C. Andersen-liv og værk. En tidstavle 1805–1875 (Copenhagen: Ascheoug, 1993), 50. Andersen, Breve fra H. C. Andersen, 225.

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The main protagonist, a young, poor, soon to be orphaned, but talented boy, Antonio, is taken under the wings of a well-to-do Borghese family and the novel tracks his complex love relations and fervent development into an artist. To many of Andersen’s contemporaries the novel’s characters were too Nordic, however, narrowly mirroring the circles that Andersen patronized in Copenhagen, albeit dressed in Italian garbs and transported to the exotic locations of Rome, Naples and Venice. But the distance to the North, seen from the South, clearly allowed Andersen a way to produce a freer interpretation and criticism of the ‘swamp’ mentality that he suffered under in his home country. As Andersen had hoped, The Improvisatore was a success in Germany, but also gave him a large readership in other parts of the continent and in England and America. His lifelong attachment to Italy is celebrated in the English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem, ‘The North and the South’, written in Italy in 1861 after her meeting with Andersen shortly before her death. Browning proposes that while the North is drawn to the land of sun and carefree art, the South seeks a strong mind, a ‘seer’ with a ‘poet’s tongue of baptismal flame’ to transform the south into words: ‘Now give us men from the sunless plain// Made strong, and brave by familiar pain!’ Andersen must have felt particularly gratified by the concluding, albeit somewhat awkward, lines: ‘The North sent therefore a man of men,/As a grace to the South;/And thus to Rome came Andersen’.8 Browning’s poem does not address Andersen as a novelist, of course, but the point is that the pull between North and South described here is emblematic of Andersen’s need to address a larger world. The Improvisatore was an important step in honing this tactic. In his next novel O.T., published the following year, 1836, he moved the plot to Denmark, but, as can be seen in the details of his homeland’s particular geography, habits and culture (information presumably known to a Danish reader, but strange and unfamiliar to readers outside Denmark), Andersen must have anticipated the novel in translation. The novel’s protagonist, unlike Antonio, seemed far from his own person. But in the minor characters, as he complained in a letter to Henriette Wulff, many in his hometown of Odense

8

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ‘The North and the South’, in Last Poems (London: Chapman & Hall, 1862), 81–82.

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recognized themselves without cause; yet, he adds, precisely this familiarity helped the book sales.9 In his third novel from 1837, Only a Fiddler, Andersen expands his ambitions and casts two main characters, a male Danish and a female Jewish-Norwegian, in a plot that leads the reader not only through problems of class, gender and race but to the dark sides of Copenhagen prostitution, to cross-dressing and artistic identity issues. Søren Kierkegaard famously attacked this novel in his own first publication, arguing that to produce credible novel characters it was essential for an author to annihilate himself. His point is that, as a novelist, Andersen cannot depict a real character, since both he and his characters have no authentic position in life. Without this authentic position, Andersen’s novel character in Only a Fiddler stands in a ‘finite and incidental contact with the author’s flesh and blood’.10 In short, Kierkegaard’s critique, presumably written by an anonymous friend and published under Kierkegaard’s name ‘against his will’, allows for ample distance between author and publisher. Andersen, in contrast, becomes his own novel character and vice versa, inappropriately folding himself into his own fiction. Andersen abandoned novel writing for over a decade and concentrated on his fairy tales and other works, until his fourth novel with the title The Two Baronesses was published in 1848 in English, the year later in Danish. The novel was published without a named translator in order to give the impression that Andersen himself had written it in English. A German review in Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung notes: ‘This is the first work Mr. Andersen, the Danish poet, has put forth in an English dress; and, if written in English by his own unassisted efforts, it shows no mean proficiency in the language of this country. […].’11 Andersen, however, spoke almost no English (he was fluent in German), but the English version was part of a marketing plan to prevent the pirate translations of his works that had become common in both England and America. This novel’s many twists and turns knowingly borrow from Walter Scott’s novels and Andersen was beyond pleased when, during his 1847 visit in Scotland, he is given the moniker the Danish Walter Scott. The novel tells of 9 10

11

Andersen, Breve fra H. C. Andersen, 258. Søren Kierkegaard, ‘Andersen as a Novelist’, in From the Paper of One Still Living. Early Polemical Writings. Kierkegaard’s Writings, I. 1838 (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1990), 81. Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung, No. 341, Mittwoch, 6. December 1848. Here accessed January 2016. http://www.andersen.sdu.dk/vaerk/register/info.html?vid=404.

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two women, each sprung from the lower classes; who found their way into titles as baronesses, consequently changing the corruption of blood nobility to the virtue of the common people. A favourite topic for Andersen! In his review of the novel, the renowned novelist and editor of the satirical Copenhagen journal The Corsair, Meir Goldschmidt, complains however that ‘it is a shame that the book is written with the explicit intention to reach the British audience; for in his generosity, Andersen has anticipated this by offering numerous ethnographic notes and broader descriptions of the Danish condition that is not needed for his Danish readers or readers of aesthetic’.12 Yet while his overt strategy with an eye towards a non-Danish reading audience provoked his Danish critics, it allowed him to tackle the local and the global at one and the same time. It would soon become common to criticize Andersen’s ability as a novelist while praising his genius for storytelling. Goldschmidt, for example, in his critic of The Two Baronesses, argues that the very qualities of the fairy tales, the nervous electricity that makes things come alive, was a detriment to a novelist because a novelist must calmly reflect and produce an organic whole. To Goldschmidt, Andersen violates the formal requirement of the novel by pushing the boundaries between genres, not only the boundaries to the fairy tale but also to biography, autobiography and travel description. Andersen includes too much ‘nonsense’ and frivolous particulars in his novels. The attacks on Andersen as a novelist resonates with terminologies that in Kierkegaard’s case can be said to belittle the author and in Goldschmidt’s, reduce him. The dismissal of Andersen as a novelist, however, has recently been problematized by Paul Binding, who recuperates the importance of his novels for the European scene and places them vis-à-vis not only Scott and Dickens, but other major novelists like Hugo, Stendhal, Balzac and Turgenev.13 Clearly the call for a more objective and cohesive prose and plot echoes the nineteenth-century refinement of the realistic novel, and though Andersen’s pen often ran too freely and imaginatively in ways that would exhaust his readers, he readily acknowledges this tendency already in 1826, in a letter to a close friend, the Danish poet B.S. Ingemann: ‘I do not know how to write according to rules, it would be too tiresome; the pen must run and the heart [must] dictate’.14 From 12

13

14

M.A. Goldschmidt, Anmeldelse af De to Baronesser, in Nord og Syd, Vol. 5, First Quarter (Copenhagen, 1849), 72–92. Here accessed January 2016. http://andersen.sdu.dk/forskning/ anmeldelser/anmeldelse.html?aid=5670. Paul Binding, Hans Christian Andersen. European Witness (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014). Andersen, Breve fra H. C. Andersen.

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this chaos, however, Andersen became a master of the Danish language. And in spite of condemnations, his novels addressed problems of his time. Remarkably, Andersen would use his next novel to place, what Georg Brandes later famously called, problems under debate. The novel, his fifth, with the Shakespearean title To Be or Not to Be from 1857, is now often seen as a forerunner for one of the nineteenth century’s most significant Danish novels, J.P. Jacobsen’s Niels Lyhne, published in 1880, five years after Andersen’s death. In To Be or Not to Be, we find a shift in value systems and attitudes vis-à-vis materialism and metaphysics as Andersen challenges religious or spiritual views of humans and humanity. He was keen to show how material values shifted at a time when industrialization and science questioned religion.15 In Andersen’s novel, we also find an important and long passage in which the protagonist Niels Bryde and his love interest, the Jewish (albeit protestantconverted) Esther, discuss science, faith and aesthetics on the background of a looming cholera epidemic that will soon take Esther’s life and throw Niels into a final struggle with his faith. Quarantined outside of the infected city, Niels and Esther’s conversation is compared directly to Boccaccio’s Decameron, where stories are told on the background of the Black Death. Niels, who subscribes to a new materialism, voices a pessimistic lack of faith in the power of art. ‘Art and beauty had been erased from the world’, he laments; there is but ‘the sludge of suppression, the foul and clammy Lindworm, who has placed itself in our herb garden’.16 Esther, in contrast, serves as a mouthpiece for the author when she offers a more positive integration of science and art. Art is to give life to science and no genre, she says, can do this better than the fairy tale. Esther’s edict is nothing less than a poetics of the fairy tale, ingeniously inserted on the pages of a novel: I find that the fairy tale is poetry’s greatest kingdom; it reaches from the ancient blood-dripping graves to the pious childlike picture book of legends; it absorbs the folktale and the art-tale; it is to me the representative of all poetry [writing] and anyone who has the ability, can add the tragic, the comic and the naïve, 15

16

See also Sophie Wennerscheid’s argument that the novel concerns itself with a political crisis of value in the 1830–1860s, with the push for new agenda in ‘Haben oder Nichthaben. Zur Zirkulation der Werte’, in H.C. Andersens At være eller ikke være (1857) in Wechselkurse des Vertrauens. Zur Konzeptualizering von Ökonomie und Vertrauen im nordischen Idealismus (1800–1870) (Tübingen and Basel: A. Francke Verlag, 2013), 69–86. Hans Christen Andersen, At være eller ikke være in Andersens samlede værker Romaner III, Vol. 6 (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2004), 239.

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irony and humor, and thus has both the lyrical thread and the childlike narrative and the language to depict nature; and if we agree on this, does not the fairy tale, this representative of poetry, have precisely such an Aladdin-nature? (244)

This generous definition of the fairy tale allows for a great deal of flexibility. Accordingly, Andersen, in his last novel Lucky Peer from 1870, makes use both of the ‘Aladdin-nature’ of the artist and the elasticity of the fairy tale to produce a hybrid form, a kind of fairy tale-novel. In this slim volume, the verbosity of his other novels is cut down, and the novel brings into sharp focus not only Andersen’s long-standing grappling with the artistic genius but also his enduring tackling of questions concerning religious tolerance, not least in his Jewish characters. If we count Andersen’s earliest major publication A Journey on Foot from 1829 as a hybrid novel, a work in which Andersen most clearly showcased his mastery of romantic irony and where he used a plethora of tropes and genres favoured by Romanticism’s darker modalities, we can surmise that there is a great deal of cross-pollination from novels to travel descriptions and fairy tales in Andersen’s work.

Navigating a wider world Andersen’s many travels away from Denmark allowed him to escape the cultural conformity of a small nation. Away from Denmark, he saw more clearly what would be muddled up close. But travelling also gave him material for his ongoing fascination with new technologies. In 1830s, the first railroads were built on the European continent and this new transportation technology would become a revolutionary experience for Andersen. From his trip through Europe to the Orient in A Poet’s Bazar (1840) and later in In Spain (1863), we read about mechanisms of trains in great detail, since, as Andersen didactically points out, ‘many of my readers have never seen a railway’.17 Unlike the widespread technology-anxiety harboured by many of his contemporaries (such as Andersen’s description of Spanish travellers who were compelled to make the sign of the cross before entering the train), Andersen worshiped machinery and new technology. In contrast to the stuffiness and pressure of the stagecoach, the railroad spelled freedom. And the powers and velocity of steam engines 17

Hans Christian Andersen, En Digters Bazar in Andersens samlede værker, Rejseskildringer I: 1826– 1842 (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2006), 232.

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did not, he mused excitedly, detract from the poetry of travel, far from it. It added poetry. With wings of steam the traveller could finally free himself from the encumbrances of slow travel and zoom speedily to foreign lands without enduring tedious delays. Andersen caught what he called ‘railway-fever’ from anticipation the first time he boarded a train from Magdeburg to Leipzig and soon found himself transported in both mind and body. The train-wagons were lined up resembling ‘gondolas by a quay’ and ‘magic ribbons’ in a ‘magical cable’ of ‘magic coaches’, which all ‘merged into a magic world’ (233). The operative word here is of course ‘magic’, yet the magic-above-all-magic is the fact that the brilliant new contraptions are not God’s doing, they represent the human mind at work; they are produced by human knowledge. When Andersen writes about technologies, he turns to phrases reminiscent of the fairy tales. Trains, Andersen fantasizes, are ‘wandering chimneys’ and ‘seem to have legs’; (233) and his readers (past and present) are asked to picture anthropomorphized trains running on tracks and perhaps even speaking in ‘locomotive’. But the terminology also belongs to a modern idiom: the train stations are full of ‘steam’, ‘whiz’, ‘stench’, ‘squealing and sniffing’ (233). The image of a hectic, noisy and chaotic modernity has, by way of a fairy tale subtext (the anthropomorphic trains), turned miraculous. Even if the frenzied and fractured modernity at times becomes unpleasant and jarring, like when the sound of the signal whistle resembles ‘the swan song of a pig at the moment the knife cuts its throat’ (233). Andersen’s magical modernity, a kind of anachronistic modernity invoked with uncanny fairy tale sentiment, is then a unique composite, yet one that illustrates his willingness to mix and match across genres. To Andersen, velocity produced optical illusions and transformed the world to a pointillist vision. The speed of the trains, which at the time reached a maximum of 40 kilometres per hour (a snail’s pace by our standards18), makes Andersen feel as if he stood outside the earth and saw it rotate. He revels in how the train’s thrust tricks the eye and distorts normal perspectives: what is up close is blurred, what is far away looks as if it stands still: ‘The ordinary drivers whom one sees on the side streets, seem to stand still. The horses in front of the carriages lift their legs, but they seem to place them again in the same spot, and then we are past them’(234). Even the image of the horses with their legs lifted resembles still-not-invented modern technology such as the famous zoopraxiscope, a pre18

Lars Handesten, ‘Efterskrift’, in H. C. Andersen En Digters Bazar (Copenhagen: Borgen, 2006), 369.

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filmstrip by Eadweard Muybridge of a galloping horse from 1878, only three years after Andersen’s death. Speed, then, is a new (modern) sensation and with it comes a new epistemological reality. In a remarkable homespun version of relativity theory, the material world outside the train compartment is magically truncated by speed. Decades before Albert Einstein, Andersen observed and described the workings of speed and matter seen from a train compartment; how objects and places were traversed in a split second. Interestingly, Einstein, presumably unfamiliar with Andersen’s descriptions of velocity, would in time become fascinated by the Danish author’s imagination. While sailing to America, in a letter to his son on 23 of December 1932, he ponders problems of science and remarks that, among other readings (such as of the life of Spinoza), he had enjoyed the fairy tales of Andersen, particularly ‘The Nightingale’. He notes, that while the tale lacked in grandness and depth, it was built on finesse and imagination.19 Andersen’s visceral fascination with trains would find a decadent intonation in J.K. Huysmans’ novel Against Nature (À Rebours) from 1884, nine years after Andersen’s death. Here we find a related, albeit satiric and erotized description of train anthropomorphizing. The main character Jean des Esseintes, while contemplating the values of artifice over nature, falls into rapture over the ability of man to replicate nature’s most beautiful women and makes use of trains as metaphor: has not man, for his part, made, entirely on his own, an animate yet artificial being that is, from the point of view of plastic beauty, fully her equal? Does there, in this world, exist a being conceived in the joys of fornication and born of the birth pangs of a womb, of which the model and type is more dazzling or splendid than those the two locomotives now in service on the railroad of Northern France?20

He goes on to describe the locomotives ‘shrill voices’, ‘slender body’ and ‘gleaming brass corset’ and how the train ‘stiffening her muscles of steel and breaking into a sweat that streams down her warm flanks’ becomes ‘a living thing’ (21). In spite of the differences between Andersen’s and Huysmans’ ‘living thing’, they clearly share the urge to anthropomorphize visceral experience.

19

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Albert Einstein, letter to Eduard Einstein; here accessed January 2016: http://www.andersen.sdu.dk/ brevbase/brev.html?bid=23430. Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature, trans. Margaret Mauldon (Oxford: World Classics, 2009), 20.

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Transformative fairy tales In spite of the qualities of his travel descriptions and novels, Andersen’s place in and influence on world literature obviously ‘stands and falls’, as Brandes notes, with his fairy tales.21 Fairy tales, of course, have a long history, but the genre was particularly popular during Andersen’s time, partly as part of a plan to recuperate notions of the authentic for the nation, via folktales, such as those collected by the Grimm Brothers. Andersen however would use the genre more radically. As Kathryn Hughes has argued: ‘While the Grimms’ world is elegiac, Andersen’s is fast, loud and crackling with the busyness of now’ (Hughes 2004). Similarly, while Alexander Humboldt and the romantics had already transformed the nature that Andersen walked into – they had constructed a new concept of nature that allowed an emotive approach, rejecting strict Linnaean taxonomies or rational scrutiny – Andersen demonstrated more radically how nature could literally speak to man through animals, trees and so forth. To do so, he invented a new language. As early as 1869, Brandes would be one of the first critics to point to Andersen’s particular talent for breaking the rules of ‘the given’. Andersen knew how to ‘select new materials, form new shapes until [he] found a construction site’ that offered easy and free access to textual building blocks with which to create something extraordinary: his rare brand of fairy tales.22 He knew how to disassemble established grammatical rules and regulations, open the linguistic prison house and allow the vernacular to rule freely – even within the structured forms of written language. Such unbound language speaks to children and adults alike but in different modalities: ‘His fairy tales is the only book we have spelled our way through and that we still read. There are some amongst them in which the letters persistently appear to be larger, the words weightier, than in others, because one originally learned to know them, letter by letter, word for word’ (94). The strength of Andersen’s storytelling, in other words, is indebted not only to Andersen’s mastery of double-articulation but to his readers’ experience of double-temporality: the still-illiterate child sees the letters and words as such,

21

22

Georg Brandes, ‘Romanerne om Geniet (1905 Hundredaarsdagen)’, in Samlede Skrifter, Vol. 18 (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1810), 277. Here accessed January 2016. http://adl.dk/adl_pub/pg/cv/ ShowPgImg.xsql?nnoc=adl_pub&p_udg_id=26&p_sidenr=281. Georg Brandes, ‘H.C. Andersen som Æventyrdigter’, in Samlede Skrifter, Vol. 18 (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1869), 91. Here accessed January 2016. http://adl.dk/adl_pub/pg/cv/ShowPgImg .xsql?nnoc=adl_pub&p_udg_id=10&p_sidenr=91.

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as physical entities, while the adult recalls both the experience of substance and material weightiness of the marks on the pages and at the same time understands their extended and symbolic meaning. For the adult, the two reading experiences overlap so that the written text becomes both a material and a mental property: a thing in itself and a magic door into the imaginary. Brandes’ argument is that the pressure between written and spoken language is overcome because Andersen knows how to ‘speak’ on the printed page and because ‘there is a method in this disorder’, (92) between the written and spoken word, so that the powers bound inside the book’s cover can leap out the minute the volume is opened, and flow freely from the printed page like spoken words. Words, then, are not only ‘said’, but ‘growled, hummed and cried’ so that the emotive modulation and cadence can be heard, as in ‘Tratteratra’ and ‘tromme-romme-rommer’ (93). Hidden in Brandes’s assessment we detect an implied untranslatability fundamental to Andersen unique use of language. In fact, Andersen’s works have frequently been hampered by poor translations that resemble ‘clumsy ventriloquism’,23 so that his unique style, special rhythm and distinctive turn of phrase lose elasticity and punch. This sophisticated use of the fairy tale makes Andersen’s stories literally leap from the pages. However, Walter Benjamin takes a rather more sceptical view of this dynamism in his short essay ‘A Glimpse into the World of Childhood Books’ where he notes: ‘In one of Andersen’s tales, there is a picture-book that cost “half a kingdom.” In it everything is alive [.…] “But when the princess turned the page, they leaped back in again so that there should be no disorder”. Pretty and unfocused, like so much Andersen wrote, this little invention misses the crucial point by a hair’s breath.’24 The problem is, posits Benjamin, that the ‘objects do not come to meet the picturing child from the pages of the book; instead, the gazing child enters into those pages, becoming suffused, like a cloud….’ (434). Unlike Brandes, Benjamin does not address the reading child, but the ‘picturing’ and ‘gazing’ child, and thus he in turn misses Andersen’s world of words by a hair’s breath. Andersen’s fairy-tale strategy is never only about emersion in 23

24

As Kathryn Hughes notes, early translations into English were built on inept German translations: ‘They were, in effect, translating a translation. The result was some truly appalling blunders,…. In fact, it says something about the vitality of Andersen’s voice that he managed to make himself heard through the hissing and popping of so many poor translations to win himself a huge and devoted Anglophone audience. Anyone else would have been muffled into silence’. ‘Twice upon a Time’, in Guardian, 4 December 2004. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/dec/04/featuresreviews .guardianreview17. Walter Benjamin, ‘A Glimpse into the World of Childhood Books’, in Selected Writing. Volume 1. 1913–1926 (London: Harvard University Press, 1996), 435.

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illusion, but always also about pulling his readers, children and adults, out at an arm’s length and forcing them to see the artifice in front of them.25 Resembling Brandes, however, Benjamin saw fairy tales in his seminal essay ‘The Storyteller’ as ‘the first tutor of children because it was once the first tutor of mankind’.26 The fairy tale ‘tells us of the earliest arrangements that mankind made to shake off the nightmare which the myth had placed upon its chest’ (102). Yet, if we see Andersen through this perspective, we could add that many of his fairy tales teach us not only ‘to meet the forces of the mythical world with cunning and with high spirits’, as Benjamin suggested happened in the folktale, but also help us tap into its ‘liberating magic’ and ‘its complicity with liberated man’ (102). The notion of the naïve fairy tale author and the innocent story can be debunked and should be seen instead as part of Andersen’s deliberate and complex strategies. Although Andersen’s ‘pretty and un-focused’ style continues to resonate in its global reception, his aim with the fairy tales was unmistakably more intricate and multifaceted. One strategy, as we saw already in his novels and travel descriptions, was to use science as a kind of poetic magic to penetrate the unseen world poetically in order to expose and unveil hidden, often grim, truths. In ‘A Drop of Water’ from 1847, for example, dedicated to his mentor, the Danish scientist and discoverer of electromagnetism, H.C. Ørsted, Andersen allows us a peek into a hidden and invisible reality, present just under the surface of the visible realm, but seen clearly through the microscope. What the microscope magnifies is a world inside out. Humanoid creatures, naked and shrimp-coloured are visibly inhuman. An old man with the ingenious onomatopoetic name, Krible-Krable, often translated in English to Wiggle-Waggle, bemoans the enlarged sight: ‘This is a hideous!’27 Nevertheless, he wants to see it better and adds a bit of colour to the shrimp-looking imps, ‘a bit of witches’ blood, the very finest kind, two pennies worth’ (432) and the strange creatures became ‘red like roses all over their bodies, and it looked like a whole town full of naked wild men’. (432) The tale is a ‘hermeneutic joke’, Jacob Stougaard-Nielsen proposes, where ‘the witch’s blood brings about a magical transformation of the unfamiliar and invisible world of the water into a familiar, urban world of humans, much in the same way 25

26 27

For another reading of Benjamin’s reception of Andersen, see chapter one in Klaus Müller-Wille’s Sezierte Bücher. Hans Christian Andersens Materialästhetik (München: Fink-Verlag, forthcoming 2016). Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’, in Illuminations (New York: Shocken Books, 1968), 102.  H.C. Andersen, ‘Vanddraaben’, in Andersens samlede værker, Eventyr og historier I: 1830–1850 (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2003), 432.

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a storyteller uses words and rhetorical figures to make an abstract story-world seem eerily familiar and comprehensible to his audience’.28 This ferocious and savage miniature world of ‘wild naked men’ is, I would add, humanity stripped to its bestial core, an allegory over mental cannibalism. While the tale explicitly points to the mentality of nineteenth-century Copenhagen, it easily translates to a more global perspective on the human condition. The fact that the fairy tale was first published in English as part of A Christmas Greeting to My English Friends illustrates that Andersen saw its universal potential. Londoners, no doubt, recognized a similar mentality as the one described here. Andersen did not claim to write reality nor did he use conventional realistic truth claims to produce narratives of ‘how it really happened’. Rather Andersen conveys the real according to what M.H. Abrams would later call the transformative mind in romantic literature.29 To Andersen the real must always be altered to convey the truth. External reality is never submitted to passive recording but always to the making of a reality. Still today, Andersen’s strength as an influential world writer lies in his ability to look where no one else had looked and see what no one else had seen, to paraphrase his rather sinister character, the shadow, in one of his most celebrated tales, ‘The Shadow’ from 1847. Again and again the fairy tales address the nature of humanity by way of that which is not: animals or things. Andersen’s use of animals, his ducklings, storks, parrots, nightingales, dogs, cats and flees, is rather complex and ranges from the mythological, the anthropomorphic, the zoomorphic, the ontological, the mechanical and finally the animal as domestic, pet and companion. Each of these articulate a far more multifarious animal–human relationship than a simple mapping of specific characteristics from one to the other would suggest. Often overlapping with one another (the mechanical may have anthropomorphic traits and so forth), Andersen produces both excitement and anxiety about humanness vis-à-vis animal-ness in his texts. No ‘animal’ in Andersen’s works expresses longing to become human with more passion and with more consequence than the eponymous mermaid from Andersen’s 1837 fairy tale ‘The Little Mermaid’. Mermaids were favoured figures by the romantics and Andersen would have known La Motte Fouqué’s Undine and Johan Wolfgang Goethe’s and Walter Scott’s respective versions of Mélusine. 28

29

Jacob Stougaard-Nielsen, ‘Hans Christian Andersen and the City’, in More Than Just Fairy Tales. Reading Hans Christian Andersen, ed. Julie K. Allen (San Diego, CA: Cognella Press, 2014), 71–70. M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp. Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. London, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1971.

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The premise of Andersen’s story is that the mermaid is already halfway human. Subsequently, we are to believe that her longing to rid herself of her animal-parts (the fishtail) becomes a project to restore herself to her real self. Her sisters, who share the same animal–human body, favour their inner fish, so to speak, and are content to be mortal, not immortal beings. Andersen’s little mermaid is born as an exception, and she knows that to be human means to be more than a bodily being. It means to have a soul. But to gain this soul, the non-human body must be altered, and a connection of love (like when souls meet) must be established. In the human world, however, the mermaid is never really fully human enough. In spite of the sacrifice of tail and tongue, and the endurance of unfathomable pain, she remains a mute thing. Or rather an animal that cannot reveal its/her inner self; she lacks the most human of things, language, that which distinguishes animals from human beings. When the prince is given the difficult task to decode the creature by his side, the one that looks like the ‘girl’ of his dreams, but is unable to announce herself, he can see her, but cannot hear her. What he sees is a purely visual creature trapped in corporeality unable to transcend into voice. Consequently, the very thing that is needed to transform the mermaid into one of his own kind, love, is the one thing that he cannot provide. In the human world, love beyond one-self belongs exclusively to a human–human relationship. Instead he can offer the kind of love one holds for a pet animal. The prince treats the mermaid kindly, but – as a dog: ‘The prince said that she should be with him always, and she was allowed to sleep outside his door on a velvet pillow’.30 While he is tempted to give himself over to the lovely creature, as a way to obey the animal side in himself, he is too rule-bound by social law: ‘my parents demand it’ (171). The human world then is one of deep anxiety for someone only half-human. Fully human the mermaid cannot become, but she can be extra-human. In fact, the mythological animalism that the mermaid implicitly possesses comes to her rescue in a very specific sense. As she is destroyed on the prince’s wedding night, dissolved in bubbles, presumably disappearing into nothingness, she is miraculously resurrected, like Bird Phoenix, given a new chance at immortality, now sans erotic human love, but with the help of human children. If a mermaid cannot be human, can a flea? In ‘The Professor and the Flea’, Andersen’s wonderfully pre-Kafkaesque last tale from 1873, he pronounces this 30

H.C. Andersen, ‘Den lille Havfrue’, in Andersens samlede værker, Eventyr og historier I: 1830–1850 (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2003), 169.

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tiny insect precisely so, a human. The story is about the power of illusion. But it also draws its ‘logic’ from the real world and uses the fact that fleas suck blood of humans to survive. Thus Andersen’s flea quite literally had human blood in it. This, of course, does not a human make. Instead it is by way of one of Andersen’s ingenious speech-acts that the predication occurs. He makes it (becoming human) happen in language. But ultimately to be human is not necessarily a positive quality in Andersen’s fairy tales. Rather, as he shows in many of his tales, ‘being human’ is a fraught enterprise.

Writing things Many of his fairy tales are occupied with the very things that bring them about. Before a manuscript can exist or become a book, we need paper to write on and ink and pen to write with. True to form, in Andersen’s world the pen as well as the ink can say: ‘I do,’ the paper can say: ‘I am,’ and the lines that are drawn can say: ‘I show.’ Yet pens that speak in first person were not Andersen’s invention. A writer who resonates with Andersen, namely Italo Calvino, informs us in his essay ‘The Pen in the First Person’, from 1977, that: ‘The first to consider the instruments and actions of his own work as its true subjects was a thirteenthcentury poet. Guido Cavalcanti wrote a sonnet in which his pens speak in the first person, along with the instruments used for cutting and sharpening them. They introduce themselves in the first lines: “We are the sad, dismayed pens,// The scissors and the sorrowing knife….//” The poet (“the hand that moved us”) is too desperate to do anything but sigh, and his writing tools address the reader directly […].’31 Calvino argues that Cavalcanti opens and closes modern poetry (‘After him, poets prefer to forget that while they write they are writing and not doing something else’) and not until Mallarmé where we are constantly aware that poems happen ‘on the empty paper protected by its whiteness’ and where, as Calvino muses, ‘there is no doubt that written words are written words and that the night’s darkness is simply the black of the inkwell’, do we find a similar awareness expressed (292). Different as he is from Calvino’s rather bold grouping of Cavalcanti and Mallarmé, Andersen seems peculiarly at home in precisely this company. He 31

Italo Calvino, ‘The Pen in the First Person’, in The Uses of Literature (San Diego, New York, London: A Harvest Book, 1982), 291–292.

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too knew how to couch ‘the pen in the first person’, as Calvino titles his essay, allowing instruments of self-expression, pen and ink and paper, to take charge; he knew how to turn the attention to the symbolism of the whiteness of paper; and he knew how to use few lines, visually, to articulate the making and unmaking of persons and things. In ‘The Flax’ from 1849, Andersen offers an imaginative story about the manufacture of paper. The circulatory story of papermaking, the transformation of blue flax flowers sprouting from the earth and the inevitable alteration to invisible airborne ash particles will in due course flutter down to fertilize a new generation of paper on which to write a song that lives on. The material is organic and suggestive of the ‘nature’ of writing. If paper finds its foundation story in ‘The Flax’, the other utensils needed to produce writing find theirs in ‘The Pen and Inkwell’ from 1860. Here the ink boasts: ‘from me springs all the poet’s works’ and the pen counters, ‘the pen is the one that writes’.32 Their mimetic rivalry is articulated as a competition between two different material matters, the black fluid called ink and the sharpened, pointed instrument, known as a quill pen. Ultimately, as was the case with ‘The Flax’, the crux of the tale points to immateriality by way of materiality: the spirit of writing, the spirit of origin of creativity, the author-spirit and the spirit above all, the spirit of God. Andersen’s tales of pens and ink and manuscript and books are not, as we saw, an exclusively nineteenth-century phenomenon. Rather, Andersen continues a discussion that was set in motion centuries prior to his, and germane to, albeit with different inflections, the kind of anxiety of authorship that followed his.33

Pressing reality I have argued that Andersen’s many fairy tales are contingent on the reality he lived in, his time and place not only as a Danish but also as a European author, and as a consequence European conflicts during the nineteenth century directly influenced his writing. A case in point is the fabulous tale ‘The Will O’ the Wisps Are in Town’ published a year after Denmark’s catastrophic war with Prussia and Austria in 1864. Andersen was intensely affected by the wars that Denmark 32

33

H.C. Andersen, ‘Pen og Blækhuus’, in Andersens samlede værker, Eventyr og historier II: 1852–1862 (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2003), 288. This is related less to a Bloomean author-competitive anxiety variant although Andersen was not unmarked by this kind of anxiety, and more to an existential anxiety in facing the act of writing.

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had fought, both the one in 1848 and then in 1864, which ultimately resulted in a massive loss of Danish territory, ‘The Will O’ the Wisps’ allowed Andersen to comment on the brutality of warfare, the dead young men on the battlefield, the horror of the real. In the tale the storyteller is told that during such times frivolous fairy tales no longer have agency. The fairy tale, subsequently, along with other forms of literary fiction, is shelved away in an almost surreal cabinet of wonders, bottled up in a bog woman’s apothecary.34 But the free-flying will o’ the wisps’ are loose, they have not been bottled up and they can take the shape of humans, and create a chaotic world, just like fairy tales. Some fairy tales are more directly aimed at a possible foreign reading public, offering comments on present-day concerns about value. This is seen, for example, in Andersen’s clever tale ‘Luck May Lie in a Pin’ which was published first in English in 1869, aimed towards a presumable industrious and fortune seeking American audience. It is essentially an exposé about the American dream found in ‘a button’. True to his style, Andersen takes a seemingly worthless object, a branch accidentally broken from a fruitless pear tree, and makes it into a value-accumulating commodity. No magic is involved, but wholesome human labour, and, more importantly: creativity and a bit of luck. All humans, the story suggests, are given a ‘lucky gift’ by God, often hidden in places we do not expect. The story tells of a poor man, a turner by trade, who finds himself perpetually unlucky, living from hand to mouth, producing only small gadgets for umbrellas. The turner finds his luck in the barren tree in the form of ‘unseen pears’.35 From the stick he turns ‘for fun’ wooden pears of various sizes and gives them to his children as toys. The invisible pear in the real tree is now visible as representation (a copy of a pear) through manual skilfulness. But soon, like Newton’s luck with the proverbial apple, this pear too becomes more than its essential properties and parts. When a button on an umbrella breaks, the turner replaces it with one of the small wooden pears and it turns out to be a perfect, practical and effective solution. The man sends his new invention to the capital and soon: ‘They were fitted to a few new umbrellas, and put with a thousand others on a ship bound for America. Americans catch on very quickly. They saw that the little pears held better than the other umbrella buttons, and the merchant gave orders that all the umbrellas sent to him henceforth should be fastened with little wooden 34

35

Hans Christian Andersen, ‘“Lygtemændene ere i Byen” sagde Mosekonen’, in Samlede værker, Vol. III (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2003), 59. Hans Christian Andersen, ‘Lykken kan ligge i en Pind’, in Samlede værker, Vol. III (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2003), 251

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pears’.36 The turner makes a fortune (embodying the American dream) and acknowledges, that, indeed, ‘Luck may lie in a Pin’. True to Andersen’s proclivity for meta-narratives, the narrator, here adopting Andersen’s own voice, adjusts such material happiness and fortuity to a more meta-poetic conclusion. In the English version he addresses his American readership directly: And I who tell this story say so too [luck can lie in a pin], for it’s a true proverb in Denmark that if you put a white pin in your mouth you’ll be invisible. But it must be the right sort of pin, a lucky piece from God’s own hand. I have one of them, and whenever I come to America, that new world so far away and yet so near me, I’ll always carry that pin.37

The luck that springs from invisible pears, turned into material existence by way of a paltry stick of infertile wood, becomes, finally, a trope for ‘luck’ of a more poetic variant. We are to assume, of course, that the invisible hand that belongs to the poet, the one that shaped the words that formed the story about a stick and its toy pears, is the truly ‘lucky’ one. Andersen had dreams of travelling to America, but fear of ship fires and drowning after the demise of his close friend Henriette Wulff on the Atlantic Ocean, effectively stopped any such dreams. Instead America often emerges in his works. The new world preoccupied him for decades and California in particular became a metaphor for the future. The gold that was dug out of the soil there in 1849 was connected by Andersen to another kind of gold, poetry, and ‘The Poetry of California’ as he called one tale, first published in his travel book In Sweden, 1851, imagined a future full of new communication possibilities where ‘thin metal threads flew with the speed of light’ brought words ‘to distant cities’.38 These invisible and spiritual ‘thought-threads’, as he named them, remained connected to his persistent fascination with Ørsted’s electromagnetism and is also described in the fairy tale ‘The Great Sea Snake’ from 1872 in which he serenades a giant telegraph cable that in 1865 connected the continents for the first time via the ocean floor. It was now possible to communicate directly between America and Europe, and Andersen rejoiced in the ‘soundless snake

36

37 38

I follow here Jean Hersholdt’s translation, since it tracks the America version more so than the Danish version, accessed January 2016, http://www.andersen.sdu.dk/vaerk/hersholt/LuckMayLieInAPin .html. http://www.andersen.sdu.dk/vaerk/hersholt/LuckMayLieInAPin_e.html. Hans Christian Andersen, ‘I Sverrig’, in Andersens samlede værker, Rejseskildringer II: 1851–1872 (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2006), 132.

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of wisdom’ that spoke in ‘all languages’ and connected distant countries.39 The world’s future’s present, Andersen predicted, was magically close.

Afterlife of an authorship Since his death in 1875, Andersen’s worldwide fame has grown far beyond the already impressive readership he met during his lifetime. In 1882, seven years after Andersen’s death, Vincent van Gogh writes to his brother: ‘Don’t you think that Andersen’s fairy tales are magnificent – I bet he draws as well’. To this, Hans Edvard Nørregaard Nielsen notes: ‘The assumption is interesting, because Andersen’s drawings were often wrung in place on the paper with the same intensity that you find in van Gogh’.40 The credit given to Andersen, by a host of important twentieth-century authors and visual artists, for his ability to ‘wring things in place’ in new and marvellous ways, is substantial. Numerous key world authors and visual artists have allowed Andersen’s world to inspire theirs. On April 2, 1905, for example, at Andersen’s first centennial celebration, the Swedish author August Strindberg, in an interview in the Danish newspaper Politiken, claimed enthusiastically that Andersen was his idol, because he was able to penetrate the deeper layers of existence and alter the world, as we know it, by way of poetical alchemy. Andersen is an Orpheus, Strindberg enthused, who could sing in prose and animate animals, plants and stones, give life to toys and trolls and even: ‘schoolbooks, these horrid things, were poetic…. What a wizard!’ Aspiring to be part of such wizardry, Strindberg signed off, in reverence, as ‘Student of H.C. Andersen’.41 Later, from her farm in Africa, the Danish author Karen Blixen/Isak Dinesen used the same nomenclature, seeing Andersen as a wizard. With Andersen in hand she allowed herself to ‘fly’ in her own brand of the imaginary, but also in reality: ‘There is anyway something absolutely natural and reasonable about it [flying], like a dream come true’ she writes in a letter, ‘I am constantly brought in mind of H.C. Andersen when we are in the air [….]’ It was like the princess’ flight to the troll in ‘The Traveling Companion’ [and] it was like ‘The Wild 39

40 41

Hans Christian Andersen, ‘Den store Søslange’, in Andersens samlede værker, Eventyr og historier III: 1862–1873 (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2003), 295. Hans Edvard Nørregaard Nielsen, Dengang i Italien (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2005), 71. August Strindberg, Politiken 2. April 1905, accessed January 2016, http://www.andersen.sdu.dk/ rundtom/strindberg/.

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Swans’.42 In another letter she notes: ‘I have always thought H.C. Andersen resembled Voltaire, but thought I was alone in this, now I have just read a letter from Andersen in “Tilskueren” in which he says ‘that the big Parisian work, “Dictionnaire des Contemporains,” ends an article about me very flatteringly with the words: avec un esprit qui rappelle celui de M. de Voltaire Andersen a tout le sentiment des peuples du Nord’ (410). In a somewhat different vernacular, the Danish Nobel prize author Johannes V. Jensen recognized in Andersen a writer who knew modernity intimately precisely because of his unfettered and irrepressible imagination that retained elements of the authentic and the primitive, drawn from what Jensen called ‘the formless … chaos’ of the common man. Andersen’s ‘unfathomable Genius’ spawned images of man’s mythical essence, Jensen noted. His imagination was matchless and even modern children [anno 1916] were no longer ‘primitive’, in the same authentic way, but born with ‘closed imagination’. Andersen’s openness and ability to absorb impressions of the new, Jensen suggested, made him both a perpetual child and also a forward-looking and sophisticated adult.43 Popular mass culture has recast, some might say bowdlerized, Andersen’s fairy tales in what we now know as Disneyfication. In consequence, the animated The Little Mermaid film from 1989 with its commodity-consuming heroine has brought Andersen’s name and fame to a new height worldwide. But we also find more thought-provoking avant-garde remediations of Andersen’s fairy tales, starting already with Max Ernst’s 1920 photomontage ‘The Chinese nightingale’, in which Andersen’s fairy tale is interpreted in a way that emphasizes the dark side of his imagination and highlights a subversive potential. The shadowy side of the fairy tale world is also seen in French filmmaker Jean Renoir’s 1928 silent movie built on Andersen’s 1848 fairy tale ‘The Little Match Girl’. Here the match girl is recast as a femme-enfant-fatale, and Andersen’s original myth of childhood and the potentialities of sentimental wonders that helped the girl escape a harsh reality, albeit through death, are turned into a question of survival in and ultimately succumbing to a harsh Parisian 1920s setting. Renoir allows the original tale’s almost pre-cinematic imagination to come to the fore and turns Andersen’s imaginative shadows into cinematic mechanical shadows on the wall. 42 43

Isak Diensen, Letters from Africa 1925–31 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 412. To think of the fairy tale as chaos was not Jensen’s invention, of course, but has origins back to Frederick Schlegel’s 1795 celebration of the fragment as ‘chaos of everything sublime, beautiful and bewitching’. Johannes V. Jensen, ‘Myten som Kunstform’, in Aarbog (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, 1916).

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Renoir shared his infatuation with the Danish author (‘I adore Andersen’ he claimed in an interview about the film44) with a host of other avant-garde artists, who, similarly preoccupied with the marvellous, found in Andersen’s fairy tales the kind of material that could reveal the darker side of the human condition. Salvador Dalí, in his 1966 lithographic interpretations of Andersen’s fairy tales, would agree, emphasizing the uncanny and sinister in tales such as ‘The Red Shoes’ and ‘The Sandman’. The use of Andersen in the visual avant-garde resembles parts of his own visual production, in particular his collages point to ideas similar to those later developed by the avant-garde cubists, Dadaists and surrealists.45 The power of his prose in comparison to that of the Grimm Brothers’ even inspired A.S. Byatt to recently call Andersen a ‘psychological terrorist’.46 In both Danish and international criticisms of his authorship, Andersen’s private person often stands in the way of his works; his many eccentricities and fraught sexuality has drawn much attention. And comments on Andersen’s self-indulgence as a ‘hunter for big names’, as Harold Bloom has called it, are common as well; he ‘went through Europe introducing himself to Heine, Victor Hugo, Lamartine, Vigny, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Dickens, the Brownings and many others’.47 If we look at the work as it stands, Andersen himself can clearly be counted among the ‘big names’ as his work allows us to draw lines back to Dante, Tasso and Sterne and forward to Wilde, Kafka and Borges, and many others.48 Today, along with the mermaid, the duckling, the nightingale, the shadow, the tin soldier, the match-girl and the snow queen, a classical tale like ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ is known across cultures, not least as a proverb used freely to expose vanity, pretence and deceit in any given situation. The way we see reality, Andersen insists, is contingent and must always be understood in confrontation with subjective experience. The artifice of the fairy tale thus becomes an effective 44

45

46 47 48

Jean Renoir, Renoir on Renoir. Interviews, Essays, and Remarks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 65. For a fuller analysis of Renoir’s remediation see Karin Sanders, ‘The Little Match Girl in a Doll’s World. Hand Christian Andersen and Jean Renoir’, in Fudan Journal (Shanghai: Springer, 2016), 1–11. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40647-016-0119-x.  For a fuller description of the use of Andersen in the avant-garde, see Karin Sanders, ‘The Romantic Fairytale and Surrealism’, in Romantik (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2014), 33–49. A.S. Byatt, ‘Introduction’, in The Annotated Brothers Grimm (New York: Norton, 2004), xviii. Harold Bloom, ‘Introduction’, in Hans Christian Andersen (Philadelphia: Chelsea, 2005), x. ‘Kafka’s tales’ in fact, as Maria Tatar notes, ‘have often been framed as modernist anti-fairy tales, driven by the same existential anxieties found in Andersen, but without the overlay of Christian sentiments.’ in ‘Denmark’s Perfect Wizard. The Wonder of Wonders’, in The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen (New York, London: Norton, 2008), 160.

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genre with which to safely shoot sharp at self-important authorities or powerestablishments or persons, strip them to the bare and expose their ‘nudity’. This message seems to travel rather seamlessly across cultural borders. International fame, then, became Andersen’s mistress, as Brandes says it, and ‘she blew his name across the old and the new world, until it resonated everywhere, more often mentioned than any other man that Denmark has spawned’.49 Andersen’s place as a world author, however, was not only contingent on translation, Brandes finally hypothesizes, but contingent on the ‘luck’ of being born into a time that resonated with his particular talent. A H.C. Andersen born in 1705 and not in 1805 ‘would have become an unhappy, a nonentity, perhaps even an insane being’.50 In the fairy tale, a genre favoured in his time, he found the appropriate expression of his particular talent enabling him to create an ‘organic coherent whole’ (118). Without affinity with his age, Brandes gloomily maintained, Andersen’s genius would not have brought him fame or inscribed him in the annals of world literature, but would have brought him to the very ‘insane asylum’, that the author himself both feared and found inspiration in.

Bibliography Abrams, M.H. The Mirror and the Lamp. Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. London, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. Andersen, H.C. Breve fra H.C. Andersen, edited by C.St.A. Bille and Nicolaj Bøgh. Aschehoug: København, 2000. Andersen, H.C. ‘H.C. Andersens samlede værker’. In Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab, Vol. 1–18, edited by Klaus P. Mortensen. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2003–2007. Baggesen, Søren. ‘Dobbeltartikulationen i H. C. Andersens eventyr’. In Andersen og Verden, edited by Johan de Mylius, Aage Jørgensen, and Viggo Hjørnager Pedersen. Odense: Odense University Press, 1993. Benjamin, Walter. ‘A Glimpse into the World of Childhood Books’. In Selected Writing. Volume 1. 1913–1926. London: Harvard University Press, 1996. Benjamin, Walter. ‘The Storyteller’. In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Shocken Books, 1968. 49

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Georg Brandes, ‘Romanerne om Geniet (1905 Hundredaarsdagen)’, Samlede Skrifter, Vol. 18 (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1910), 281. Here accessed January 2016. http://adl.dk/adl_pub/pg/cv/ ShowPgImg.xsql?nnoc=adl_pub&p_udg_id=26&p_sidenr=281. Georg Brandes, ‘H.C. Andersen som Æventyrdigter’, in Samlede Skrifter, Vol. 18 (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1869), 118. Here accessed January 2016. http://adl.dk/adl_pub/pg/cv/ShowPgImg. xsql?nnoc=adl_pub&p_udg_id=10&p_sidenr=118.

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Binding, Paul. Hans Christian Andersen. European Witness. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014. Bloom, Harold. ‘Introduction’. In Hans Christian Andersen. Philadelphia, PA: Chelsea, 2005. Brandes, Georg. ‘H.C. Andersen som Æventyrdigter’. In Samlede Skrifter, Vol. 2. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1869. http://adl.dk/adl_pub/pg/cv/ShowPgImg. xsql?nnoc=adl_pub&p_udg_id=10&p_sidenr=91. Accessed January, 2016. Brandes, Georg. ‘Romanerne om Geniet (1905 Hundredaarsdagen)’. In Samlede Skrifter, Attende Bind. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1910. http://adl.dk/adl_pub/pg/cv/ ShowPgImg.xsql?nnoc=adl_pub&p_udg_id=26&p_sidenr=281. Accessed October 29, 2016. Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. ‘The North and the South’. In Last Poems. London, 1862. Byatt, A. S. ‘Introduction.’ In The Annotated Brothers Grimm, edited by Maria Tartar. New York: Norton, 2004. Calvino, Italo. ‘The Pen in the First Person’. In The Uses of Literature. San Diego, New York, London: A Harvest Book, 1982. Dinesen, Isak. Letters from Africa 1925–31. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Einstein, Albert. ‘Hans Christian Andersen Database’. http://www.andersen.sdu.dk/ brevbase/brev.html?bid=23430. Accessed October 29, 2016. Goldschmidt, Meir A. ‘Anmeldelse af At være eller ikke være’. Nord og Syd 3 (1857): 97–108. Accessed 2 April 2014. http://www.andersen.sdu.dk/forskning/anmeldelser/ anmeldelse.html?aid=5659. Accessed October 29, 2016. Goldschmidt, Meir A. ‘Anmeldelse af De to Baronesser’. Nord og Syd 5, First Quarter (1849): 72–92. Accessed 2 April 2014. http://www.andersen.sdu.dk/forskning/ anmeldelser/anmeldelse.html?aid=5670. Accessed October 29, 2016. Handesten, Lars. ‘Efterskrift’. In En Digters Bazar, edited by H.C. Andersen. Danske Klassikere. Det Danske sprog og Litteraturselsab. Copenhagen: Borgen, 2006. Houe, Poul. ‘Andersen in Time and Place – Time and Place in Andersen’. In Hans Christian Andersen. A Poet in Time, edited by Johan de Mylius, Aage Jørgensen, and Viggo Hjørnager Pedersen. Odense, Denmark: Odense University Press, 1999. Huysmans, Joris-Karl. Against Nature, translated by Margaret Mauldon. Oxford: World Classics, 2009. Jensen, Johannes V. ‘Myten som Kunstform’. In Aarbog. Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, 1916. Kierkegaard, Søren. ‘Andersen as a Novelist’. In From the Paper of One Still Living in Early Polemical Writings. Kierkegaard’s Writings, I, edited and translated by Julia Watkins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990 (1838). Kierkegaard, Søren. ‘Om Andersen som Romandigter.’ In Af en endnu Levendes Papirer. Søren Kierkegards Skrifter, edited by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff, Johnny Kondrup, Alstair McKinnon, and Finn Hauberg Mortensen. Copenhagen: Gads Forlag, 1997 (1838).

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Kofoed, Niels. ‘Hans Christian Andersen and the European Literary Tradition’. In Hans Christian Andersen, edited by Harold Bloom. Philadelphia, PA: Chelsea, 2005. Lange-Fuchs, Hauke. Das hässliche Entlein und andere Film-Geschichten. Hans Christian Andersen im Film. Materialen zur Retrospektive der Nordischen Filmtage Lübeck, Zentrale Vervielfältigungsstelle der Hansestadt Lübeck, 1999. Mylius, Johan de. H.C. Andersen-liv og værk. En tidstavle 1805–1875. Copenhagen: Ascheoug, 1993. Nielsen, Nørregaard. Hans Edvard i Dengang i Italien. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2005. Renoir, Jean. La petite marchande d‘allumettes, 1928. Accessed January 2016. https:// archive.org/details/theLittleMatchGirllaPetiteMarchandeDallumettes1928. Renoir, Jean. Renoir on Renoir. Interviews, Essays, and Remarks, translated by Carol Volk. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Sanders, Karin. ‘Anxious Authors and Uncanny Shadows. H.C. Andersen in Dialogue with Søren Kierkegaard’. In More Than Just Fairy Tales. Reading Hans Christian Andersen, edited by Julie K. Allen. San Diego, CA: Cognella Press, 2014. Sanders, Karin. ‘Let’s Be Human’ – On the Politics of the Inanimate’. In Romantik. Journal for the Studies of Romanticisms, edited by Robert W. Jensen, Lis Møller, Anna Sandberg, and Karina Lykke Grand, 29–47. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2012. Sanders, Karin. ‘The Little Match Girl in a Doll’s World! Hans Christian Andersen and Jean Renoir’. In Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences, 1–11. Springer: Shanghai, China, 2016. Online version: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/ s40647-016-0119-x. Sanders, Karin. ‘The Romantic Fairytale and Surrealism: Marvelous Non-Sense and the Dark Apprehensions’. In Romantik. Journal for the Studies of Romanticisms, edited by Elisabeth Oxfeldt et al., 33–49. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2014. Stougaard-Nielsen, Jacob. ‘Hans Christian Andersen and the City’. In More Than Just Fairy Tales. Reading Hans Christian Andersen, edited by Julie K. Allen. San Diego, CA: Cognella Press, 2014. Strindberg, August. Politiken 2. April 1905. Accessed January 2016. http://www .andersen.sdu.dk/rundtom/strindberg/. Tatar, Maria. ‘Denmark’s Perfect Wizard. The Wonder of Wonders’. In The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen, edited by Maria Tartar. New York, London: Norton, 2008. Wennerscheid, Sophie. ‘Haben oder Nichthaben. Zur Zirkulation der Werte in H.C. Andersens’. In At være eller ikke være (1857). Wechselkurse des Vertrauens. Zur Konzeptualizering von Ökonomie und Vertrauen im nordischen Idealismus (1800– 1870), edited by Klaus Müller-Wille and Joachim Schiedermair. Tübingen and Basel: A. Francke Verlag, 2013.

5

Straight into the Bliss of Knowing: Søren Kierkegaard’s Influence on Franz Kafka Isak Winkel Holm

‘You […] evidently feel as I do that one cannot evade the power of his terminology, of his conceptual discoveries. I think, for instance, of his concept of the dialectical, or his division into “knights of infinity” and “knights of faith”, or even the concept of “movement”. From this concept one can be carried straight into the bliss of knowing, and even a wingstroke further.’ In the winter of 1917– 1918, after having been diagnosed with tuberculosis and having moved to Zürau, a village in the Bohemian countryside, to convalescence from his haemorrhage, Franz Kafka, in his own words, ‘really lost his way in Kierkegaard’.1 In two letters to his friend Max Brod from March 1918, Kafka describes how Kierkegaard’s terminology, and first of all the concept of movement, has carried him straight into the bliss of knowing, ‘and even a wingstroke further’. It is difficult to tell whether this wingstroke further than knowing leads Kafka to believing, to acting or to writing, and whether these differences really matter. More alarmingly, however, it is also difficult to grasp the precise nature of the Glück des Erkennens, the bliss of knowing or, perhaps more precisely, the bliss of discovery into which Kafka is carried by Kierkegaard’s concept of movement. Just as the concepts of the knight of infinity and knight of faith, the concept of movement – Bevægelse in Danish, Bewegung in German, kinesis in its Aristotelian origin – plays a central role in Fear and Trembling, a book that Kafka seems to have just finished reading when he wrote the letters to Brod. Under the pseudonym Johannes de silentio, Kierkegaard polemically opposes

1

Throughout this chapter I quote from Kafka’s two letters to Brod from 5 March and 26 or 27 March 1918 without references (Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family and Editors, trans. Richard Winston and Clara Winston (Richmond: Oneworld Classics, 2011), 199–203; and Briefe 1918–1920, Vol. 4. Kritische-Kafka-Ausgabe, ed. Waltraud John (New York/Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2013), 30–36). I modify the English translation when necessary.

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philosophical mediation and existential movement, first of all the movement of infinity in which the individual resigns and feels the pain of renouncing everything, and the movement of faith in which the individual grasps everything again by virtue of the absurd.2 However, Kafka does not discuss Kierkegaard’s use of the concept of ‘movement’ in Fear and Trembling; neither does he adopt the concept by re-using it in his notebooks and letters. Nothing indicates that Kafka’s use of the German word Bewegung from 1918 and onwards should be influenced by Kierkegaard’s concept. Kafka cannot evade the power of Kierkegaard’s terminology, he confesses in the letters to Brod – but how does this power impact on Kafka’s writing? So much light radiates from Kierkegaard ‘that some of it penetrates even to the deepest abysses’, he adds further down in the same letter – but what does this light enable him to discover? These are not just questions about the relation between Kierkegaard and Kafka, but also questions about the relation between philosophy and literature. Kafka was well read in philosophy, first of all in the works of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, but except for the handful of letters and notes he wrote on Kierkegaard, he never discussed philosophical subjects in writing. Instead, he stylized himself as incapable of philosophical thinking. In a letter to his fiancée Felice Bauer from 15 June 1913, five years earlier than the letters to Brod, he wrote: ‘I am unable to think, in my thinking I constantly come up against borders; certain isolated matters I can grasp in a flash, but I am quite incapable of coherent, consecutive thinking’.3 To make matters worse, Kierkegaard, too, is strangely unphilosophical, according to Kafka. In the letters to Brod, he comments upon the lack of coherence in the works of the Danish philosopher: ‘They are not unambiguous and even when later he develops himself into a kind of unambiguousness, this is also just part of his chaos of spirit, mourning, and faith’. Thus, Kierkegaard’s influence on Kafka is the influence of a work that is chaotic and ambiguous on a mind that is incapable of coherent, consecutive thinking: the bliss of knowing emerges where chaos meets incoherence. In order to grasp the bliss of knowing in Kafka’s encounter with Kierkegaard, I will explore not the abstract philosophical concept of movement but, rather,

2

3

Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans., C. Stephen Evans and Sylvia Walsh (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 34. Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice (New York: Schocken Books, 1973).

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the concrete literary images by which Kierkegaard and Kafka flesh out this concept. In Fear and Trembling, Johannes de silentio focuses on the story about Abraham at Mount Moriah, the so-called Akedah, when discussing the ‘doublemovement’ of giving up Isaac and getting Isaac again by virtue of the absurd. In his notebooks from the winter of 1917–1918, Kafka rewrites the Abraham story, not discussing the abstract concept of movement but describing concrete physical movements such as Abraham emigrating from the transient world with his furniture wagon or Abraham using a springboard to jump back into the world.4 A few years later, Kafka imagines a series of kinetic Abrahams in a letter to his young friend Robert Klopstock: ‘I can imagine another Abraham …’5 However, Kafka’s re-imagining of Kierkegaard’s Abraham story is too complicated to be explored in a single chapter. Instead, I will hone in on the movement of an enchanted castle that wakes up and comes alive. Visibly inspired by the Grimm brothers’ fairy tale ‘The Briar Rose’ (also known as ‘The Sleeping Beauty’), Kierkegaard wrote a journal entry about asleeping castle in his journal in the autumn of 1854, one year before his death. As we shall see, a substantial part of this enchanted castle journal entry is quoted in Kafka’s letters to Brod, and it comes to play an important role for his relation to Kierkegaard’s works in general and to his understanding of the concept of movement in particular.

Semantic preliminaries In Schopenhauers Bedeutung für die moderne Literatur (Schopenhauer’s Significance for Modern Literature, 1998), Professor of German studies David E. Wellbery explores the connection between Schopenhauer’s thinking and modern literature, exemplified by the works of Samuel Beckett and Jorge Louis Borges, but also by Franz Kafka’s unfinished novel The Castle. On the first pages of this slim, perceptive book, Wellbery contends that in order to explore the relation between Schopenhauer’s philosophy and modern literature,

4

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For Abraham’s furniture wagon, see The Blue Octavo Notebooks, trans. Max Brod, Ernst Kaiser, and Eithne Wilkins (Cambridge: Exact Change, 1991), 101. Abraham’s springboard is only mentioned in a sentence that Kafka later deleted, see the notes to the critical edition, Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente, bd. 2. Apparatband. Kritische-Kafka-Ausgabe, ed. Jost Schillemeit (New York/Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1992), 239. Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family and Editors, 285.

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it is not sufficient to point out Schopenhauerian philosophical ideas in the texts. This way of referring literature back to its underlying propositional content is theoretically primitive, and, moreover, it is unable to grasp the secret of Schopenhauer’s literary influence.6

If we want to grasp the secret of Schopenhauer’s literary influence on modern literature, Wellbery adds, it is necessary to view the literary work not as ‘an allegorization of philosophical theses, not as a proposition about the essence of the world wrapped up in fiction’.7 Wellbery’s critique of the allegorization approach to the relation between philosophy and literature could be directed towards a large part of the extensive research on Kafka and Kierkegaard.8 In the afterword to the first edition of The Castle, published posthumously in 1926, Max Brod recalls his friend’s letters from Zürau and mentions Fear and Trembling, a work that ‘Kafka was very fond of, often read, and commented upon profoundly in many letters’.9 According to Brod, Kierkegaard’s conceptualization of the relationship between man and God, ‘the incommensurability of earthly and religious action: this leads directly to the centre of Kafka’s novel’.10 This approach perceives the novel as an allegorization of Kierkegaard’s philosophical ideas; it has a conceptual centre which is merely illustrated in fictional characters and episodes. As a consequence, Brod writes, ‘the seemingly bizarre form of the novel’ makes perfect sense when seen in the light of Kierkegaard’s philosophy.11 Following Brod, the majority of early Kafka researchers studied Kafka’s literary works as if their centre consisted in philosophical terminology. One researcher was even able to identify a Kierkegaardian centre in The Trial, a novel Kafka wrote in 1914, several years before his serious encounter with Kierkegaard’s philosophical works in the winter of 1917–1918.12 6

7 8

9

10 11 12

David E. Wellbery, Schopenhauers Bedeutung für die moderne Literatur (München: Siemens Stiftung, 1998), 14. Ibid., 50. For overviews over the research in Kafka’s encounter with Kierkegaard, see Bert Nagel, Kafka und die Weltliteratur: Zusammenhänge und Wechselwirkungen (München: Winkler, 1983); Leena Eilittaä, Approaches to Personal Identity in Kafka’s Short Fiction: Freud, Darwin, Kierkegaard (Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1999); Helge Miethe, Sören Kierkegaards Wirkung auf Franz Kafka: Motivische und sprachliche Parallelen (Marburg: Tectum Verlag, 2006); and Nicolae Irina, ‘Franz Kafka: Reading Kierkegaard’, in Kierkegaard’s Influence on Literature, Criticism, and Art, Vol. 1, ed. Jon Stewart (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2013). Max Brod, ‘Nachwort’. Franz Kafka, in Das Schloss, ed. Max Brod (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1946), 352. Ibid. Ibid., 353. See John Kelly, ‘Franz Kafka’s Trial and the Theology of Crisis’, The Southern Review 5 (1940): 748– 767.

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A second phase of research stressed Kafka’s critical stance towards Kierkegaard’s philosophy, pointing out that Kafka’s comments on Kierkegaard’s works do not only express his bliss of knowing but also his scepticism towards the Dane’s religious ideas. Methodologically, however, this body of research, too, approached Kierkegaard’s influence on Kafka as a question of adherence or non-adherence to philosophical ideas, as if Kafka were perfectly capable of coherent, consecutive thinking. Only recently researchers have suggested that Kierkegaard’s influence should not be seen as a philosophical discussion, that is that the power of Kierkegaard’s terminology might not only be transmitted through the medium of philosophical concepts.13 Wellbery can help us to understand how. In order to grasp the secret of Schopenhauer’s literary influence, he suggests that we view the philosophical text as a set of ‘semantic preliminaries’ or ‘semantic prototypes’ (semantische Vorleistungen or semantische Vorgaben). By semantic preliminary, he means a configuration of meaning that happens to trigger the literary production of meaning. In Kierkegaard’s case, Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac and the coming alive of the enchanted castle are examples of semantic preliminaries. The point Wellbery stresses is that the Schopenhauerian preliminaries enable a specific kind of thinking in modern literature, namely the literary work’s thinking about its own problems of literary form: Through the different phases of modernity, the potential of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, actualized again and again, can be found in the fact that it contains semantic preliminaries that contribute to the articulation of a formal issue corresponding to the level of reflection of modern art.14

Thus, travelling from Schopenhauer to Beckett, Borges and Kafka, the ‘philosophical theses and insights are transformed into formal problems’.15 In the following, I will apply Wellbery’s approach to the question of Kierkegaard’s influence on Kafka. The point I want to make is that Kierkegaard’s configurations of meaning function as ‘interpretative patterns for the formal problems’ of Kafka’s writing.16

13

14 15 16

See Wolfgang Lange, ‘Über Kafkas Kierkegaard-Lektüre und einige damit zusammenhängende Gegenstände’. Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 60.2 (1986): 286–308, and Leena Eilittä, Approaches to Personal Identity in Kafka’s Short Fiction. Wellbery, Schopenhauers Bedeutung für die moderne Literatur, 15. Ibid., 55. Ibid., 45.

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The research in Kierkegaard’s influence on Kafka tends to conclude that Kafka either misunderstands or criticizes Kierkegaard’s interpretation of Abraham.17 However, to see Kafka’s relation to Kierkegaard as a misunderstanding or a critique is to presuppose that Kafka is talking about the same subject in the same language as Kierkegaard does. As I view it, Kafka does not enter into a philosophical discussion of the Abraham story; rather, Kierkegaard’s version of the Akedah is to be seen as a semantic preliminary that enables Kafka’s literary self-reflection. He redirects the power of Kierkegaard’s terminology so that it points towards his own writing. As we shall see in the following, the same goes for Kierkegaard’s short narrative of the enchanted castle.

From next-door neighbour to some kind of star Kafka’s encounter with Kierkegaard is, in fact, two separate encounters, with the first focussing on the biography of the author and the second on the content of the works. In 1913, Kafka read Buch des Richters. Seine Tagebücher 1833–1855 (Book of the Judge. His diaries 1833–1855), a somewhat chaotic selection of Kierkegaard’s papers and notebooks translated by Hermann Gottsched in 1905. In a diary entry from August 1913, Kafka noted: ‘Today I got Kierkegaard’s Buch des Richters. As I suspected, his case, despite essential differences, is very similar to mine, at least he is on the same side of the world. He bears me out like a friend’.18 Presumably in the same period, Kafka also read another selection of diary entries on Kierkegaard’s relationship with Regine Schlegel named Sören Kierkegaards Verhältnis to zu ‘ihr’ (Søren Kierkegaard’s Relationship with ‘Her’ 1905).19 The summer of 1913 was a particularly troubled phase in Kafka’s

17

18

19

For example: ‘In these often very sarcastic remarks Kafka repeatedly mocks Abraham’s mental faculties and motivations’ (Eilittä, Approaches to Personal Identity in Kafka’s Short Fiction, 156). Or, more recently: ‘what [Kafka] is equipped to do is to show how the interpretation of Abraham does an injustice to Abraham’s experience’ (Paul North, The Yield: Kafka’s Atheological Reformation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), 140). The Diaries of Franz Kafka 1910–23, trans. Joseph Kresh and Martin Greenberg, eds. Max Brod and Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), 298. In fact, Kierkegaard mixes up two similar books about Kierkegaard’s relationship with Regine: Søren Kierkegaard, Sören Kierkegaards Verhältnis to zu ‘ihr’: Aus nachgelassenen Papieren, ed. Raphael Meyer (Stuttgart: Axel Juncker Verlag, 1905), and Søren Kierkegaard, Sören Kierkegaards Verhältnis to zu seiner Braut. Briefe und Aufzeichnungen aus seinem Nachlass, ed. Henriette Lund (Leipzig: Insel, 1905). According to the editors of the critical edition of his works, he presumably read both books, see Kafka, Briefe 1918–1920, 421.

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troubled relationship with Felice Bauer, so the two very similar cases mentioned in the diary entry are, respectively, the case of Kierkegaard’s broken engagement with Regine and the case of Kafka’s soon-to-be broken engagement with Felice. Kierkegaard bears out Kafka like a friend because they are located on the same side of married life. More than four years later, after the diagnosis of tuberculosis and after the end of the relationship with Felice, Kafka re-reads Kierkegaard while living with his favourite sister in Zürau, this time not focussing on Kierkegaard’s biography but, rather, on the content of his works. In November 1917, he starts out reading Either-Or, the first volume of which he confides that he cannot read it ‘without repugnance’. In February 1918, he goes on to read Fear and Trembling, The Repetition and the polemical broadsheet The Moment (or The Instant). In the March 1918 letters to Brod, Kafka takes stock of this second encounter with Kierkegaard: The ‘physical’ similarity to him that I imagined I had after reading that little book Kierkegaard’s Relationship to ‘Her’ […] has by now entirely evaporated. It’s as if a next-door neighbor had turned into some kind of star, in respect both to my admiration and to a certain cooling of my sympathy.

Apparently, Kierkegaard’s transformation from next-door neighbour to some kind of star creates space for critical reflection. Kafka’s critical comments upon Kierkegaard’s works can be found not only in the letters to Brod but also in Kafka’s re-imagining of the Abraham story in nine notebook entries, a small subset of the more than 300 so-called Zürau Aphorisms that Kafka wrote during his sick-leave. At first glance, the tuberculous Kafka reading Kierkegaard in a distant Bohemian village seems to confirm the mythological image of the lonesome Kafka facing the realm of existential truth, but nothing could be less true of Kafka’s encounter with Kierkegaard. In the winter of 1917–1918, the reception of Kierkegaard was a collective endeavour of a small group of Jewish writers and intellectuals – in addition to Kafka and Brod, the group consisted of the novelist Oscar Baum and the philosopher Felix Weltsch – who kept up a lively exchange of letters about Kierkegaard and books by Kierkegaard between Prague and Zürau. The Kierkegaard reception of the so-called ‘Prague Circle,’ again, formed a part of the early wave of Kierkegaard influence in Germanic countries before the First World War. Thanks to a recent series of anthologies, it is now possible to get a panoramic view of Kierkegaard’s influence outside

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Denmark.20 Seen from a high altitude, it is possible to distinguish between three major waves in Kierkegaard’s influence on world literature. The initial wave of influence was Scandinavian. The first book ever to be written on Kierkegaard, Søren Kierkegaard, written by the Danish scholar of comparative literature Georg Brandes and published in 1877, was translated into Swedish in 1877 and German in 1879. In the same years, a number of Danish and other Nordic writers inspired by Kierkegaard found European fame, most prominently the Norwegian Henrik Ibsen, the Swede August Strindberg and the Danish novelists J.P. Jacobsen and Henrik Pontoppidan. Half a century later, Karen Blixen, writing in English under the pseudonym Isak Dinesen, was an avid reader of Kierkegaard and quotes directly from Kierkegaard’s works, especially from Either/Or, in her Seven Gothic Tales, a collection of short stories from 1934. The second wave of Kierkegaard’s influence on world literature was Germanophone. After the translations and introductions by the theologians Hermann Gottsched and the controversial Christoph Schrempf in the last third of the nineteenth century, Kierkegaard came into fashion in the fin de siècle generation of German intellectuals. Surprisingly, the cross-over from protestant theology to modern literature was made by a Catholic essayist and novelist. In the well-written and widely read article ‘Sören Kierkegaard – Aphoristisch’, published in the important literary journal Die neue Rundschau in 1906, Rudolf Kassner gave an enthusiastic account of Kierkegaard and his oeuvre, an impressive introductory work considering the state of Kierkegaard translations and Kierkegaard research available at the time. According to Kassner, Kierkegaard had nearly no terminology but was, in return, ‘definitively the biggest artist among all philosophers’.21 Inspired by Kassner, the young Hungarian literary scholar Georg Lukács wrote an essay on Kierkegaard’s broken engagement in 1909, published in Soul and Form ( Die Seele und die Formen, 1911).22 The poet Rainer Marie Rilke read the German translation of Kierkegaard’s Christian Discourses 20

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22

See Jon Stewart, Kierkegaard’s Influence on Literature, Criticism, and Art, 3 Vols. (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2013); and Jon Stewart, Kierkegaard’s International Reception (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2009). For a recent overview, see Leonardo F. Lisi, ‘Kierkegaard and Modern European Literature’, in The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard, ed. John Lippitt and George Pattison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Rudolf Kassner, ‘Sören Kierkegaard – Aphoristisch’, in Sämtliche Werke, Vol. 2 (Pfullingen: Neske, 1969), 42. For the relation between Kierkegaard, Kassner and Kafka, see Steen Tullberg, ‘A Physiognomical Appropriation’, in Kierkegaard’s Influence on Literature, Criticism, and Art, Vol. 1, ed. Jon Stewart (Farnham, Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2013) and Heiko Schulz, ‘A Modest Head Start: The German Reception of Kierkegaard’, in Kierkegaard’s International Reception, Vol. 1, ed. Jon Stewart (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2009). György Lukács, Soul and Form (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1974).

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in 1901, even before becoming a close friend to Kassner, and, fascinated by Kierkegaard’s unhappy love story, he soon set out to learn Danish in order to be able to read Kierkegaard and the novelist J.P. Jacobsen in the original. While travelling in Denmark and Sweden some years later, Rilke even began translating into German the letters of Kierkegaard. Also Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler and Karl Kraus also contributed to the Germanophone ‘prereception’ of Kierkegaard,23 the intense literary reception leading up to Kierkegaard’s massive influence on twentieth-century philosophy and theology. The third wave of influence was French. Interestingly, the French existentialists after the Second World War became aware of Kierkegaard thanks to the work of Kafka. According to Jean-Paul Sartre, it was ‘through the atmosphere of Kafka that the French got access to Kierkegaard, and after him to Hegel’.24 This wave of influence was driven by the philosophical interest by the existentialist philosophers, but it also spilled over into literature through the literary works of Sartre, Beauvoir and Camus and through the literary criticism of Maurice Blanchot. Apart from these major waves of influence, a large number of smaller and less distinct waves brought Kierkegaard to Anglophone literature (e.g. W.H. Auden), to Spanish language literature (e.g. Miguel de Unamuno), to Portuguese literature (e.g. Fernando Pessoa) and to other literatures. In general, the international reception of Kierkegaard, just like Kafka’s personal reception, seems to move from Kierkegaard as a next-door neighbour to Kierkegaard as some kind of star, starting out with the peculiarities of Kierkegaard’s biography and ending up with the power of Kierkegaard’s terminology. However, by pointing out a general movement from personal conflicts to philosophical content, we have not yet begun to grasp the secret of Kierkegaard’s influence on modern literature. Building on Wellbery, my contention is that modern literature, at least to a great extent, transforms Kierkegaard’s philosophical theses and insights into formal problems. Kassner’s influential essay can serve as an example. In its concluding chapter, ‘Die Form’, Kassner discusses human life as ‘expression and form’. Whereas Pascal found his form in the cloister, Nietzsche in the overman and Plato in the ideas, Kierkegaard found his form in ‘the individual’ (im Einzelnen).25 Through the form of the

23

24 25

Habib C. Malik, Receiving Søren Kierkegaard: The Early Impact and Transmission of His Thought (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1997), 393. Maja Goth, Franz Kafka et les lettres françaises 1928–1955 (Paris: Librairie J. Corti, 1956), 138. Kassner, ‘Sören Kierkegaard – Aphoristisch’, 92.

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single individual, Kassner writes, Kierkegaard was able to give meaning to a lawless and shapeless modern world. Thus, by stressing the concept of form, he turns Kierkegaard’s question of religious existence into a question of aesthetic expression: Kassner the writer uses the concept of the individual as a semantic preliminary with which to articulate the nature of writing. In order to hone in on this kind of self-reflective re-functioning of Kierkegaard’s theses and insights, I will take a closer look at Kafka’s two March 1918 letters to Brod.

A man who brings a primitivity with him In the last letter to Brod from March 1918, Kafka ends the correspondence about Kierkegaard by quoting a journal entry about an enchanted castle that he had read four years earlier in Buch des Richters. In Kierkegaard’s Journalen from the autumn 1854, the enchanted castle journal entry has the proverbial title ‘One Must Take the World as It Is’. Buch des Richters only translates a part of Kierkegaard’s diary entry, and Kafka, again, only quotes a part of the German text: But as soon as a man comes along who brings a primitivity with him, so that he does not say that one takes the world as it is (the sign of passing through freely like a stickleback) but says: Whatever the world may be, I relate to an original principle which I do not intend to change at the world’s discretion – the moment this word is heard, a transformation takes place in the whole of life. Just as in the fairy tale when the word is spoken and the castle which has been under a spell for a hundred years opens up and everything comes alive, just so life becomes sheer awareness. Angels get busy, watch curiously to see what will come of it, for this interests them. On the other hand, the somber, grumbling demons, proper limbs of the devil, who for a long time have been sitting inactive and chewing their fingernails, leap to their feet for here is something to do, they say, and they have waited a long time for that.26

26

I cite Hong and Hong’s translation of Kierkegaard’s journal entry, Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, 7 Vols., trans. Howard V. Hong, Edna H. Hong, and Gregor Malantschuk (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967), 632f, translation modified. For Kierkegaard’s text in Danish, see Søren Kierkegaard, Journalerne. Søren Kierkegaards skrifter, eds. N.J. Cappelørn et al. (København: Søren Kierkegaard Forskningscenteret, Gad, 2009), NB32, 214. Søren Kierkegaard, Buch des Richters: Seine Tagebücher 1833–1855, im Auszug aus dem Dänischen, ed. Hermann Gottsched (Jena und Leipzig: Eugen Diderichs, 1905), 160. For a fine English translation of Kafka’s quotation, see North, The Yield, 143.

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In this quote, movement is imaged as a ‘transformation’ or a ‘metamorphosis’ in the whole of life; Kierkegaard uses the word Forvandling, and Kafka uses the word Verwandlung. In the non-translated part of the journal entry, Kierkegaard actually writes that the arrival of the man who brings a primitivity with him ‘sets both heaven and earth in motion’. Kierkegaard’s own semantic preliminary is the Grimm fairy tale ‘The Briar Rose’ (or ‘The Sleeping Beauty’). When the young prince arrives, the hundred years of enchantment have passed and the sleeping castle is transformed by coming alive: ‘Indeed, the fire flared up and cooked the meat until it began to sizzle again, and the cook gave the kitchen boy a box on the ear, while the maid finished plucking the chicken’.27 In Kierkegaard’s rewriting of the fairy tale: ‘Just as in the fairy tale when the word is spoken and the castle which has been under a spell for a hundred years opens up and everything comes alive, just so life becomes sheer awareness’. This transformation in the whole of life can only be triggered by a man who brings a primitivity with him, not by men who pass freely like sticklebacks. In the first part of the text, untranslated in Buch des Richters, Kierkegaard describes the stickleback-man as the ‘specimen-man’ (Exemplar-Msk; ‘Msk’ is an abbreviation for Menneske, man) who takes the world as it is. According to Kierkegaard, there are millions of these philistine specimen-men who ‘find everything given: concepts, ideas, thoughts, likewise custom and usage, in short, everything is given – the specimen-man brings nothing with him’. These human beings are likened to sticklebacks because they pass freely through the fishing net set for ‘bigger fish’. By the way, the Danish word for stickleback, hundestejle, has a dehumanizing ring to it because it contains the word for dog (hund). On the other hand, the man who brings a primitivity with him does not say: one must take the world as it is. ‘Primitivity’ (Primitivitet), then, is to be understood as some kind of ethical standard with which to correct the ethical and political order of a given community. In the margin, Kierkegaard adds a note: ‘And ethically, as pointed out elsewhere, primitivity means to put everything into it, to risk everything, the kingdom of God first and foremost’. In this note, Kierkegaard refers to an earlier journal entry in Journalen in which primitivity is defined as ‘potential for “spirit”’ (Mulighed af ‘Aand’).28 Apparently, it is the individual’s radical insistence on his religious spirit that triggers the coming alive of the sleeping castle.

27

28

Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 164. Kierkegaard, Journalerne, NB31, 55.

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However, Kierkegaard describes the transformation of the castle not just in religious but also in political terms. In a section of the enchanted castle journal entry translated in Buch des Richters, but not quoted by Kafka, Kierkegaard reuses a formulation from St Paul the Apostle and writes that the man who brings a primitivity with him is not ‘struggling with flesh and blood but with principalities and powers’.29 The stickleback-man finds everything given, ‘likewise custom and usage’ (ligesaa Skik og Brug). In Kierkegaard’s Hegelian terminology, Skik og Brug refers to a people’s Sittlichkeit, most often translated as moral substance. Thus, to take the world as it is is to accept the written and unwritten laws that govern human life. A world in which everything is given is a world devoid of political change. By contrast, the man who does not take the world as it is performs a revolutionary act that contests the given order of things. Kierkegaard wrote the enchanted castle journal entry in late October or early November 1854, that is in the latency period after he had heard his former tutor H.L. Martensen refer to the late Bishop of Zealand J.P. Mynster as a ‘witness to the truth’ at the funeral in February 1854 but before he unleashed his all-out assault on Christendom with the polemical broadsheet The Moment. In other words, Kierkegaard’s reflection upon the man who brings a primitivity with him is a prognosis of his own role in his upcoming attack on established Christendom. This explains the shrillness of the journal entry in which Kierkegaard portraits himself as a ‘bigger fish’ while more or less the rest of humanity is described as shoals of innocuous sticklebacks: ‘one specimen-man and one million have equally little effect on life, which pours out of that kind as from a horn of plenty’.30 Unfortunately, Kafka quotes from Kierkegaard’s journal entry without commenting upon it. Instead, he ends the letter with another short quotation from Buch des Richters (to which I will return) and a handful of remark on practical matters. Hence, it is the task of the interpreter to reconstruct Kafka’s understanding of the enchanted castle journal entry: Why did he choose this little-known text? And what role does it play in the discussion with Brod? The first thing to note is that in March 1918 Kafka was 34 years old. At this late moment, he had already written the bulk of his literary works, and due to the tuberculosis he suspected that his authorship had come to an end. In other words, Kafka’s encounter with Kierkegaard is not at story of a young man who 29 30

Eph. 6.12. After having finished the journal entry, Kierkegaard seems to become aware of its arrogance and adds that he ‘assuredly never was among the arrogant minds that overlooked other human beings’, Kierkegaard, Journalerne, NB26, 216.

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became a Kierkegaardian, un fils spirituel de Kierkegaard, as suggested in the old Kafka research.31 It is, rather, a story of a mature writer who used the power of Kierkegaard’s terminology for his own purposes. More specifically, Kafka had shown a strong interest in movements and transformations even before reading Fear and Trembling. As I have argued elsewhere, Kafka, throughout his entire authorship, circulates around the idea of a political event in which a community discuss and reform the order of things.32 In the autobiographical ‘Researches of a Dog’, a fragment of a story written during a break in the work on The Castle in July 1922, the protagonist, a researcher dog, situates the miraculous political event in early history of the dog people: at that time the true word could still have intervened, determined the construction, changed its tune, changed it at will, turned it into its opposite, and that word was there, or at least was near, hanging on the tip of everyone’s tongue, everyone could receive it; where has it gone today?33

In the terminology of Hannah Arendt, this potential miraculous event is an acting in concert that breaks with a petrified order of things and recreates the foundation for the political community: ‘The miracle [is] the birth of new men and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born’.34 In Kierkegaard’s enchanted castle journal entry, Kafka happens to stumble over a description of a political event of this kind: an image of a transformation in the whole of life. In other words, Kierkegaard’s concept of movement is carrying Kafka into the bliss of knowing because it enables him to approach the question of the relationship between literature and politics, a question with which he has been struggling for years. To reconstruct Kafka’s understanding of the enchanted castle journal entry, then, is to grasp the difference between Kierkegaard’s notion of the miraculous event that transforms the whole of life, and Kafka’s. In order to do so, I will situate the journal entry in two different contexts. First, I will delve into the immediate context, that is the two Kierkegaard letters that Kafka wrote to Brod. Second, in the last section of this chapter, I will suggest interpreting Kafka’s third unfinished 31 32

33

34

See Daniel Rops, ‘L’univers désespéré de Franz Kafka’. Les Cahiers du Sud 192 (1937): 172. See Isak Winkel Holm, Stormløb mod grænsen. Det politiske hos Kafka (København: Gyldendal, 2015). Franz Kafka, Kafka’s Selected Stories: New Translations, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism. A Norton critical edition, ed. Stanley Corngold (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007), 148, translation modified. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 247.

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novel, The Castle, as Kafka’s elaborate response to Kierkegaard’s journal entry. After quoting Kierkegaard’s description of the sleeping castle in March 1918, Kafka starts mentioning castles in his notebooks and diaries, until he finally sets out writing The Castle in January 1922.

The striving man In his letter to Kafka in March 1918, Brod characterizes Kierkegaard’s way to God as ‘negative’ because he obtains certainty about God by afflicting himself with pain. In the first of the two letters to Brod, Kafka corrects his friend’s characterization of Kierkegaard: But he certainly cannot be called merely negative […] In Fear and Trembling, for example (which you ought to read now) his positivity [Positivität] tends towards the monstrous and only stops at the perfectly ordinary taxman [gewöhnlichen Steuereinnehmer]. What I mean is, the positivity becomes objectionable when it reaches too high. He doesn’t see the ordinary man (with whom, on the whole, he knows how to talk remarkably well) and paints this monstrous Abraham in the clouds. But all the same one cannot call him negative on that account […].

In fact, Brod and Kafka are not disagreeing about Kierkegaard’s positivity but are, rather, talking at cross-purposes. Brod uses positivity as a psychological concept, that is as the opposite of ‘negative’ phenomena such as melancholy and selfafflicted pain. A couple of years later, Brod insists on characterizing Kierkegaard as negative because he views Christianity as a religion of Diesseitsverneinung, of negation of the finite world.35 Kafka, on the other hand, uses positivity as an epistemological concept, that is as the opposite of doubt. Kierkegaard’s positivity tends towards the monstrous and ‘only stops at the perfectly ordinary taxman’, Kafka writes, referring to the ‘knight of faith’ described by Johannes de silentio in Fear and Trembling as looking, surprisingly, like a philistine tax collector: ‘Dear me! Is this the person, is it actually him? He looks just like a tax collector.’36 The translator H.C. Ketels translates the Danish word for tax collector, Rodemester, by the German Steuereinnehmer,37 which is also the word Kafka uses in the 35 36 37

Max Brod, Heidentum Christentum Judentum (München: Kurt Wolff Verlag, 1922), 284. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 31–32. Søren Kierkegaard, Furcht und Zittern: Dialektische Lyrik, trans. H.C. Ketels (Erlangen: Verlag von Andreas Deichert, 1882).

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question above. Johannes de silentio acknowledges he has no access to certain knowledge about this tax collector’s relationship to the divine. In Kierkegaardian terminology, de Silentio approaches ‘the paradox of faith’, which is ‘that there is an inwardness that is incommensurable with the outer’.38 After the exclamation ‘Dear me! Is this the person’, de silentio expands upon the incommensurability of the relationship to the divine: Nevertheless it really is him. I draw a little closer to him and pay attention to the slightest movement to see whether a little heterogeneous fraction of a signal from the infinite manifests itself – a glance, an air, a gesture, a sadness, a smile that betrayed the infinite in its heterogeneity with the finite. No! I examine his figure from head to foot to see if there might not be a crack through which the infinite peeped out. No! He is solid through and through.39

According to Kafka, however, Kierkegaard’s monstrous positivity only stops at the perfectly ordinary taxman. Except for this taxman, Kafka suggests, Kierkegaard claims to have positive knowledge about the infinite in its heterogeneity with the finite. To be monstrously positive is to claim to be able to receive some signal from the infinite. This idea of Kierkegaard’s positivity is developed in the second letter to Brod where Kafka addresses the question of religiosity. Brod, enthusiastic as always, has become a follower of Kierkegaard, but Kafka is more reserved: ‘Kierkegaard’s religious situation doesn’t come across to me with the extraordinary clarity it has for you’. Once again, Kafka points out a problem that has to do with the incommensurability of the individual’s relationship to the divine: For the relationship to the divine [das Verhältnis zum Göttlichen] evades any outside judgment, as K[ierkegaard] sees it; perhaps this is so much so that Jesus himself would not be permitted to judge how far a follower of his has come. To K[ierkegaard] it seems to be, so to speak, a question of the Last Judgment, which is to say answerable – insofar as an answer will still be needed – only after the end of this world. Consequently the present external image of the religious relationship has no significance.

So far, Kafka is in accordance with Kierkegaard’s idea of a religious inwardness that is incommensurable with the outer and therefore, like the inwardness of the tax-collector, impossible to judge from the outside, even when it is Jesus who 38 39

Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 60. Ibid., 32.

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judges. In the following sentence, however, Kafka reverses the Kierkegaardian negativity into positivity. There is no positive answer to the question of the individual’s relationship to the divine, but Kierkegaard’s trick is to somehow tilt this negativity into positivity: However, the religious relationship wishes to reveal itself, but cannot do so in this world; therefore striving man must oppose this world in order to save the divine element within himself. Or, what comes to the same thing, the divine sets him against the world in order to save itself. Thus the world must be raped by you as well as by Kierkegaard, in one place more by you, in another place more by him.

Per definition, the incommensurable religious relationship cannot be revealed. Nevertheless, Kafka’s argument is that it still wishes to reveal itself (sich offenbaren), and that it is forced to do so by opposing the world. Seen in this way, striving man is positive because he is polemical; he ‘saves’ his religious relationship by assaulting the world.40 It is highly probable that Kafka found this argument in Rudolf Kassner’s essay on Kierkegaard. The paradox, Kassner writes, is the contradiction between the individual and the surrounding world: ‘the beauty and the goodness of the individual is of its own kind, and therefore he lives against the opinion of the others. The individual is his form, but the form in which the others understand him, is the contradiction, the paradox.’41 In Kassner’s words, Kafka’s argument is that striving man needs to live against the opinion of the others: his wish to reveal himself is forcing him to provoke a contradiction with the surrounding world. Kafka uses a remarkably strong word for this positivity through provocation: striving man is constrained to ‘overpower’ or even ‘rape’ the world in order to save the divine element within himself (so muß die Welt vergewaltigt werden). The monstrous positivity is an abusive positivity because it has to do violence to the world. At the very end of the last letter to Brod, Kafka once more addresses the question of positivity through provocation by quoting another passage from Buch des Richters: 40

41

This logic of turning negativity into positivity is discussed by Paul North who describes Kafka’s critique of Kierkegaard as a critique of a ‘fake withdrawal’: ‘If the withdrawal of meaning can be given meaning, if it is the withdrawal of meaning as a reaction to some human fault, for some divine purpose, in view of a future return, and so on, then meaning has not actually withdrawn’, North, The Yield, 146. Kassner, ‘Sören Kierkegaard – Aphoristisch’, 93.

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I share the assumptions that Christianity makes (suffering in more than the ordinary measure and guilt of a special sort) and I find my refuge in Christianity. But authority [Myndighed] or directly proclaiming it to others – this I cannot properly do, for I cannot provide them with the assumptions.42

This time, the question of positivity is framed as a question of authority, a question that was central to Kierkegaard during his polemical assault on Danish Christendom in 1855. According to Kierkegaard, his role is to proclaim Christianity ‘without authority’, as he states several times. In the German translation Kafka used, Kierkegaard writes that he cannot ‘proclaim it peremptorily’ (gebieterisch … verkündigen). According to Kafka, however, peremptory positivity is not only to be found in the direct proclamation of Christianity but also, indirectly, in Kierkegaard’s provocation of Christendom. Kafka’s quotation from the enchanted castle journal entry is found between the two quotations discussed above, that is between Kafka’s remarks about striving man and the Kierkegaard quote about the lack of authority. As I mentioned earlier, Kafka does not comment upon the enchanted castle journal entry, but it seems obvious that it should be interpreted on the background of the surrounding discussion of positivity. Put into this conceptual context, Kierkegaard’s ‘man who brings a primitivity with him’ equals Kafka’s ‘striving man’. And Kierkegaard’s ‘primitivity’ is more or less synonymous with Kafka’s ‘positivity’. In both cases, a single individual assaults the world on the mandate of some kind of religious truth. Thus, the conceptual context turns the enchanted castle journal entry into a complicated image. In Kafka’s letters, the journal entry reads like a story of a metaphysical drug rape in which an individual at the same time wakes up and rapes a sleeping castle. Disturbingly, the noble young prince of the fairy tale turns out to be a rapist. As far as I can see, there are fundamentally two ways in which to reconstruct Kafka’s understanding of the enchanted castle journal entry. One interpretation would claim that Kafka dismisses the coming alive of the castle altogether. If the transformation in the whole of life needs a striving man who, as Kierkegaard writes, relates to an original principle, then this transformation is an act of violence and should be evaded. Jean Wahl can serve as an example of the depolitization of Kafka’s work. Comparing Kafka and Kierkegaard, Wahl writes: ‘Kafka the lonely man would like to have a place where he could rest his head. In other words,

42

Kierkegaard, Buch des Richters, 114. Kierkegaard, Journalerne, NB32, 23, 272.

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he wants to return from the religious stage where he finds himself by nature to the ethical stage.’43 Several researchers interpret Kafka’s relation to Kierkegaard’s positivity in this way, that is as an expression of scepticism towards the very possibility of a political transformation. The problem is that this interpretation does not fit in with Kafka’s formulation about his being carried straight into the bliss of knowing by the concept of movement. If Kafka is enthusiastic about the concept of movement it is highly improbable that he should quote a lengthy passage from Kierkegaard’s Journal just in order to criticize this very concept. Another interpretation would claim that Kafka does not dismiss the coming alive of the sleeping castle as such. Instead, he is hinting at another notion of coming alive. This alternative transformation in the whole of life would not be triggered by the self-confident positivity of the striving man, as in Kierkegaard, but comes into being in some other way. In order to explore this other kind of movement, I will leave behind Kafka’s letters to Brod and turn to The Castle.

The melancholy resident In the village below the castle in Kafka’s last unfinished novel, The Castle, the villagers take the world as it is. Frieda, the barmaid who quickly becomes the girlfriend of the protagonist, K., has ‘intimate knowledge of local affairs’ in comparison to K., the foreigner.44 The other villagers, too, not least Gardena, the gigantic innkeeper’s wife, keep stressing that to them, the order of things is a matter of course. This taking the world as it is has made the entire village fall asleep like the castle in ‘Briar Rose’. When K. arrives on the first pages of the novel, most villagers are fast asleep, and throughout the entire novel, the bureaucratic authorities have the remarkable habit of lying in bed when they are negotiating with K.45 However, the arrival of K. makes the people aware. At the night of his arrival, K. is awakened by the young Schwarzer, the son of a castle sub steward, who, due to his unpleasant behaviour and his ominous name, is easy to identify as

43

44

45

Jean Wahl, ‘Kierkegaard and Kafka’, in The Kafka Problem, ed. Angel Flores (New York: Gordian Press, 1975), 268. Franz Kafka, The Castle The Castle. A New Translation Based on the Restored Text, trans. Mark Harman (London: Folio Society, 2012), 125. This goes for the village council chairman in chapter 5, for the innkeeper’s wife in chapter 6, and for the castle official Bürgel in chapter 23.

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one of the sombre, grumbling demons of Kierkegaard enchanted castle journal entry. The following day K. encounters the angelic messenger Barnabas who is ‘dressed almost entirely in white’ and is flying at high speed when he walks.46 At the end of the novel, K. inadvertently enters the room of the castle official Bürgel, who, waking up from sleep, immediately sets out to give a detailed account of the bureaucratic procedures of the castle. While K. is falling asleep, Bürgel offers his private version of the enchanted castle journal entry with angels and demons waiting for the striving man. According to Bürgel, the desperate castle official, ‘sits there waiting for the party’s plea, knowing that one must grant it as soon as it is uttered, even if it should, at any rate insofar as one can perceive this oneself, literally tear apart the official system [die Amtsorganisation förmlich zerreißt]’.47 By contrast, K. does not say that one should take the world as it is but keeps asking annoying questions about things that the villagers perceive as matters of course. In the words of the enchanted castle journal entry, and its allusion to St Paul the Apostle, K. is not ‘struggling with flesh and blood but with principalities and powers’. At the night of his arrival, K. affirms that he is the land surveyor sent for by the Count who owns the castle. In this context, it is important to note that land surveying is a politically charged work to the extent that a surveyor does not take the spatial distribution of the world as it is. This political aspect of land surveying becomes clear already at the night of the arrival: ‘He watched the peasants gathering timidly and conferring [sich besprechen], the arrival of a land surveyor was no trifling matter’.48 The arrival of a land surveyor is no trifling matter because it might entail a transformation in the whole of life, as Kierkegaard wrote in the enchanted castle journal entry. As the official Bürgel explained, the individual party’s plea could, if put rightly, ‘literally tear apart the official system’, thereby opening up the castle. It is remarkable, too, that some of the villagers have high hopes for the deeds of the land surveyor. From her tiny, dark chamber the low-ranking barmaid Pepi, for instance, perceives K. as ‘a hero, a rescuer of maidens’.49 K’s power to trigger a transformation in the whole of life is underlined by the fact that the Hebrew word for Messiah, mashiah, is similar to a (not much used) Hebrew word for land surveyor, mashoah.50 46 47 48 49 50

Kafka, The Castle, 22. Ibid., 269. Ibid., 3. Ibid., 290. This relation was pointed out by Evelyn Torton Beck, Kafka and the Yiddish Theater: Its Impact and His Work (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971), 195.

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To be sure, such a transformation of village life does not take place in the novel. K. never gets to do the job as a land surveyor or a rescuer of maidens. Instead, he ends up in a lowly position as a stableman, and according to Brod, Kafka planned that K. should die soon after.51 However, the introductory chapter contains an important scene in which we see actually the castle opening up. After his first night in the village, K. wakes up at the village inn and sets out walking through the deep snow towards the castle. On his way, he stops and sees the castle for the first time, sharply outlined in the clear morning air. As K. continues, he makes a detailed comparison between the church tower in his homeland and the tower of the castle in front of him. These important pages have received much interest in Kafka research, and rightfully so, but in this context, I will have to restrict myself to the concluding description of the castle tower: The tower up here – it was the only one in sight – the tower of a residence, as now became evident, possibly of the main Castle, was a monotonous round building, in part mercifully hidden by ivy, with little windows that glinted in the sun – there was something crazy about this – and ending in a kind of terrace, whose battlements, uncertain, irregular, brittle, as if drawn by the anxious or careless hand of a child, zigzagged into the blue sky. It was as if some melancholy resident, who by rights ought to have kept himself locked up in the most out-ofthe-way room in the house, had broken through the roof and stood up in order to show himself to the world.52

The mysterious description of ‘some melancholy resident’ (irgendein trübseliger Hausbewohner) becomes less mysterious when we take into account Kafka’s inspiration from Kierkegaard’s enchanted castle journal entry. In ‘Briar Rose’, the princess pricks herself on a spindle when visiting an old woman locked away with a key in a little room at the end of a narrow staircase in an old tower. (It is, in fact, an open question whether this old woman is the fairy who was excluded from the feast at the beginning of the tale, and who threw her spell over the new-born baby.) The melancholy resident is kept locked up in an out-of-the-way room similar to that of the old woman. Just like the old woman, but in a different way, the melancholy resident challenges the order of things, in this case the local version of justice that determines where he ‘by rights’ (gerechterweise) should be located in the social order. The melancholy resident stands up in order to show himself to the world, and like the English ‘standing up’, the German sich erheben 51 52

Brod, ‘Nachwort’, 347. Kafka, The Castle, 8.

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not only refers to a physical movement (in latin tollere, according to Deutsche Wörterbuch by the same Grimm brothers) but also to a political movement (surgere), the movement by which a people claims its rights. Thus, both the enchanted castle journal entry and the passage about the melancholy resident describe a transformation in which a castle opens up and comes alive. Whereas the prince breaks through the hedge of thorns, the melancholy resident breaks through the roof of the castle. However, there are some crucial differences between these two movements. In Kierkegaard, the transformation is triggered by the opposition between the single individual and the world. The man who brings a primitivity with him founds his revolutionary mission on an original principle, a primitivity, which he does ‘not intend to change at the world’s discretion’. As Kafka argued, the Kierkegaardian striving man is forced to oppose the world in order to save the divine element within himself. In Kafka’s novel, on the other hand, the transformation of the castle is triggered not by the opposition between individual and world, but by the exposure of the melancholy resident: from the inside of the castle, he breaks through the roof in order to show himself to the world. What we see in the novel is an alternative version of the transformation in the whole of life, a movement that is not founded on any positivity. This political event is not a fight between antagonistic forces but, rather, a falling apart of a given structure, a kind of accelerated crumbling of the castle tower. Some lines above the melancholy resident, it is said that the stone of the tower ‘seemed to be crumbling’, as if K. was watching the castle disintegrate under his very eyes. I suggest interpreting the description of ‘the tower up here’ as a description of modern art and, more specifically, of Kafka’s own writing. Thus, the melancholy resident not only refers to the old woman in ‘Briar Rose’ but also to Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s story ‘The Metamorphosis’. He, too, is by rights kept locked up in an out-of-the-way room so that he does not bother the rest of the Samsa family and their tenants with his disgusting beetle shape. In general, the idea of being locked up in a distant room is prominent in Kafka’s autobiographical and fictional writing.53 The comparison between the two towers is, first of all, a comparison between two kinds of endings, of two different Abschlüsse. The church tower back home was ‘ending by a wide roof with red tiles’ (breitdachig abschließend mit roten Ziegeln); ‘the tower up here’, on the other hand, is ‘ending

53

See Reiner Stach, Kafka: die frühen Jahre (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2014), 75–78.

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in a kind of terrace’ (einem söllerartigen Abschluß). I will argue that this terracelike or balcony-shaped ending of the castle tower is an image of a fractured and fragmentary ending of the work of art. Kafka’s notebooks are full of unfinished and fragmentary fictional stories, and also of poetological reflections upon his own incapacity to finish his stories. Indeed, Kafka’s novel The Castle is, in itself, an unfinished and fragmentary castle tower. When Kafka writes that there is ‘something crazy about’ the castle tower, and that its battlements are ‘uncertain, irregular, brittle, as if drawn by the anxious or careless hand of a child’, he is describing his own work as a writer of modern fiction. The church tower back home had a much more direct movement, it aimed ‘tapering decisively, without hesitation, straightaway toward the top’. As many Kafka researchers have pointed out, this can be seen as a description of the institution of traditional religion, first of all the religion of the Eastern Jews living in the shtetls of Poland, Russia and Hungary, and, among others, described by Martin Buber and Kafka’s friend Jitzhak Löwy.54 One could add that the decisive, straightaway movement of the church tower might also refer to Kierkegaard’s religious situation, based as it is on the positivity of an original principle. By contrast, the castle tower can be seen as an image of the institution of modern literature in its uncertain, irregular and brittle movement. Still, it is important to note that even the crumbling castle tower is moving upwards, although in a much more indirect way. The melancholy resident breaks through the roof and stands up in order to show himself to the world. And the battlements of the tower ‘zigzagged into the blue sky’ (in den blauen Himmel zackten), moving in jags or in notches, but nevertheless moving upwards into the blue sky.

An end or a beginning A week before writing the first Kierkegaard letter to Brod, in a notebook entry dated 25 February 1918, Kafka compares his own literary writing with Kierkegaard’s religious writing: The slight amount of the positive, and also of the extreme negative, which capsizes into the positive, are something in which I have had no hereditary 54

See, among others, Ritchie Robertson, Kafka: Judaism, Politics, and Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 241; and Stephen D. Dowden, Kafka’s Castle and the Critical Imagination (Columbia: Camden House, 1995), 127.

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share. I have not been guided into life by the hand of Christianity – admittedly now slack and failing – as Kierkegaard was, and have not caught the hem of the Jewish prayer shawl – now flying away from us – as the Zionists have. I am an end or a beginning.55

In this chapter, I have explored how Kafka, in his comments upon Kierkegaard, reflects upon the Danish philosopher’s hereditary share of the positive. According to Kafka, Kierkegaard was positive because he was guided by the hand of Christianity, even if it was already slack and failing, just like Kafka’s Zionist friends were positive because they had managed to catch the hem of the Jewish prayer shawl, even if this positivity, too, was already vanishing. As we have seen, Kafka characterizes Kierkegaard’s version of positivity as an extreme negativity that has somehow capsized or tipped over into the positive (zum Positiven umkippenden Negativen): the negativity of the individual’s incommensurable relationship to the divine is tilted into the positivity of certain knowledge. In the metaphorical language of The Castle, discussed in the previous section, Kierkegaard can be likened to the old church tower that was ‘tapering decisively, without hesitation, straightaway toward the top’. Kafka, on the other hand, is ‘uncertain’ (unsicher), his work irregular and brittle because it is not founded on any political or religious positivity. If this is so, one might expect that Kafka would finish the notebook entry by describing himself as a historical endpoint: Ich bin Ende. Emulating the Lord in the Christian Revelation, however, Kafka writes ‘I am an end or a beginning’ – more insecure and ambivalent than the Lord, to be sure, but also more self-confident than we normally imagine him. According to Kafka, modern literature, too, could be a beginning. In Arendt’s words about the political event, he perceives literature as a miraculous action, as ‘the birth of new men and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born’.56 Thus, Kierkegaard’s journal entry offers an opportunity for Kafka to reflect upon the function of modern literature. In contrast to Kierkegaard’s selfconfident view of his mission to transform the whole of life, Kafka perceives his role as a modern writer as creating another kind of transformation, a political event which is not dependent on a single individual who relates to some positive original principle. If Kierkegaard moves towards the top in a decisive, straightaway movement, Kafka tries to imagine a way of zigzagging into the 55 56

Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks, 98–99. Arendt, The Human Condition, 247.

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blue sky – a beautiful description of the precarious transcendence of modern literature. In Wellbery’s words, the enchanted castle journal entry is a semantic preliminary that contributes to the articulation of the very core of Kafka’s literary project.

Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Print. Beck, Evelyn Torton. Kafka and the Yiddish Theater: Its Impact and His Work. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971. Print. Brod, Max. Heidentum Christentum Judentum. München: Kurt Wolff Verlag, 1922. Print. Brod, Max. ‘Nachwort’. Franz Kafka. In Das Schloss, edited by Max Brod. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1946. Print. Dowden, Stephen D. Kafka’s Castle and the Critical Imagination. Columbia: Camden House, 1995. Print. Eilitta, Leena. Approaches to Personal Identity in Kafka’s Short Fiction: Freud, Darwin, Kierkegaard. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1999. Print. Goth, Maja. Franz Kafka et les lettres françaises 1928–1955. Paris: Librairie J. Corti, 1956. Print. Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014. Print. Irina, Nicolae. ‘Franz Kafka: Reading Kierkegaard’. In Kierkegaard’s Influence on Literature, Criticism, and Art, Vol. 1, edited by Jon Stewart. Farnham, Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2013. Print. Kafka, Franz. The Blue Octavo Notebooks, translated by Max Brod, Ernst Kaiser, and Eithne Wilkins. Cambridge: Exact Change, 1991. Print. Kafka, Franz. Briefe 1918–1920, Vol. 4. Kritische-Kafka-Ausgabe, edited by Waltraud John. New York/Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2013. Print. Kafka, Franz. The Castle. A New Translation Based on the Restored Text, translated by Mark Harman. London: Folio Society, 2011. Print. Kafka, Franz. The Castle The Castle. A New Translation Based on the Restored Text, translated by Mark Harman. London: Folio Society, 2012. Kafka, Franz. Das Schloss. Franz Kafka/Gesammelte werke. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1946. Print. Kafka, Franz. The Diaries of Franz Kafka 1910–23, translated by Joseph Kresh and Martin Greenberg, edited by Max Brod and Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1976. Print.

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Kafka, Franz. Kafka’s Selected Stories: New Translations, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism. A Norton critical ed., edited by Stanley Corngold. New York: W.W. Norton, 2007. Print. Kafka, Franz. Letters to Felice. New York: Schocken Books, 1973. Print. Kafka, Franz. Letters to Friends, Family and Editors, translated by Richard Winston and Clara Winston. Richmond: Oneworld Classics, 2011. Print. Kafka, Franz. Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente, bd. 2. Apparatband. KritischeKafka-Ausgabe, edited by Jost Schillemeit. New York/Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1992. Print. Kassner, Rudolf. ‘Sören Kierkegaard – Aphoristisch’. In Sämtliche Werke, 10 Vols. Pfullingen: Neske, 1969. Print. Kelly, John. ‘Franz Kafka’s Trial and the Theology of Crisis’. The Southern Review 5 (1940): 748–767. Print. Kierkegaard, Søren. Buch des Richters: Seine Tagebücher 1833–1855, im Auszug aus dem Dänischen, edited by Hermann Gottsched. Jena und Leipzig: Eugen Diderichs, 1905. Print. Kierkegaard, Søren. Fear and Trembling, translated by, C. Stephen Evans and Sylvia Walsh. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Kierkegaard, Søren. Furcht und Zittern: Dialektische Lyrik, translated by H.C Ketels. Erlangen: Verlag von Andreas Deichert, 1882. Print. Kierkegaard, Søren. Journalerne. Søren Kierkegaards skrifter, edited by N.J. Cappelørn et al. København: Søren Kierkegaard Forskningscenteret, Gad, 2009. Print. Kierkegaard, Søren. Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, translated by Howard V. Hong, Edna H. Hong, and Gregor Malantschuk. 7 Vols. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967. Print. Kierkegaard, Søren. Sören Kierkegaards Verhältnis to zu ‘ihr’. Aus nachgelassenen Papieren, edited by Raphael Meyer. Stuttgart: Axel Juncker Verlag, 1905. Print. Kierkegaard, Søren. Sören Kierkegaards Verhältnis to zu seiner Braut. Briefe und Aufzeichnungen aus seinem Nachlass, edited by Henriette Lund. Leipzig: Insel, 1905. Print. Lange, Wolfgang. ‘Über Kafkas Kierkegaard-Lektüre und einige damit zusammenhängende Gegenstände’. Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft Und Geistesgeschichte 60, no. 2 (1986): 286–308. Print. Lisi, Leonardo F. ‘Kierkegaard and Modern European Literature’. In The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard, edited by John Lippitt and George Pattison. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Print. Lukács, György. Soul and Form. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1974. Print. Malik, Habib C. Receiving Søren Kierkegaard: The Early Impact and Transmission of His Thought. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1997. Print. Miethe, Helge. Sören Kierkegaards Wirkung auf Franz Kafka: Motivische und sprachliche Parallelen. Marburg: Tectum Verlag, 2006. Print.

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Nagel, Bert. Kafka und die Weltliteratur: Zusammenhänge und Wechselwirkungen. München: Winkler, 1983. Print. North, Paul. The Yield: Kafka’s Atheological Reformation. Meridan: Crossing Aesthetics. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015. Print. Robertson, Ritchie. Kafka: Judaism, Politics, and Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985. Print. Rops, Daniel. ‘L’univers désespéré de Franz Kafka’. Les Cahiers du Sud 192 (1937): 172. Print. Schulz, Heiko. ‘A Modest Head Start: The German Reception of Kierkegaard’. In Kierkegaard’s International Reception, Vol. 1, edited by Jon Stewart. Aldershot, Hants, England: Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009. Print. Stach, Reiner. Kafka: die frühen Jahre. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2014. Print. Stewart, Jon. Kierkegaard’s Influence on Literature, Criticism, and Art, 3 Vols. Farnham, Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2013. Print. Stewart, Jon. Kierkegaard’s International Reception. Aldershot, Hants, England: Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009. Print. Tullberg, Steen. ‘A Physiognomical Appropriation’. In Kierkegaard’s Influence on Literature, Criticism, and Art, Vol. 1, edited by Jon Stewart. Farnham, Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2013. Print. Wahl, Jean. ‘Kierkegaard and Kafka’. In The Kafka Problem, edited by Angel Flores. New York: Gordian Press, 1975. Wellbery, David E. Schopenhauers Bedeutung für die moderne Literatur. München: Siemens Stiftung, 1998. Print. Winkel Holm, Isak. Stormløb mod grænsen. Det politiske hos Kafka. København: Gyldendal, 2015. Print.

6

Modern Denmark: Brandes – Jacobsen – Bang Annegret Heitmann

‘In trying to pin Modernism down – tentatively and crudely – in terms of men, books and years, attention is first drawn to Scandinavia’, note Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane in their classic, global study of international modernism (Bradbury/McFarlane Modernism: 37). They illustrate the claim by invoking ‘the publication in 1883 of a series of critical essays by the Danish critic Georg Brandes with the significant title Men of the Modern Breakthrough (Det moderne Gjennembruds Mænd). In no time at all – conceivably by virtue of the stature Brandes had achieved throughout the Germanic world – the epithet “modern” became a rallying slogan of irresistible drawing power’. The international significance of the so-called Brandes generation was long neglected in national histories of Danish literature and Danish literary criticism. Even though it has become a topos in Denmark to link Brandes’ standing to Nietzsche’s, Jacobsen’s to Rilke’s, and Bang’s to Thomas Mann’s and Claude Monet’s, these attempts at emphasizing this generation’s significance really make the three Danish authors appear all the more provincial by contrasting them with supposedly more famous contemporaries. Not only is this personalization of cultural parallels inadequate, it also fails to recognize the far-reaching impact these three Danes had on global literature and culture, as Bradbury and McFarlane noted. Their account contains two significant points. The first is the pivotal bridge-building function fulfilled by the ‘Germanic world’ for all three authors on their way to international acclaim. The second is their emphasis on the epithet ‘modern’ that dominated the late nineteenth century in various ways and also determined the status of Brandes, Bang and Jacobsen. Yet it was not just the slogan’s ‘drawing power’ that distinguished the three Danes and formed the basis of their standing in the business of global literature: it was a very specific aesthetic elaboration of modernity. I would like to thank Dag Heede, René Herring, Henry Heitmann-Gordon og Sergio Ospazi for their kind help and advice.

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In as much as they are narratives, however, literary histories can be told in various ways. It is the Danish national perspective that invites us to link these three names together, highlighting as it does the central importance of Brandes as a critic and his influence over a young generation of authors that included Jacobsen as a friend and confidant and Bang as an antagonist. This national perspective emphasizes the inner workings of this group of writers and its relations with contemporary politics and media in Denmark. Danish literary history categorizes this period either as ‘Modern Breakthrough’, the  – distinctly national – self-description invented by Brandes, or as a form of naturalism.1 Such a periodization tends to limit its ‘modernity’: the European view of the modern considers it a post-naturalist form of cultural criticism that is disconcerted and threatened by the progressive modernization of society. This process of modernization was manifold, including economic, technological, social and discursive components linked to developments such as Darwin’s theory of natural selection, Mill’s utilitarianism or Comte’s positivism. All these changes came together under the banner of rationalization and liberation from traditional constraints, but were at the same time experienced as ambivalent: as a liberation that bred alienation and levelled orders of value. This shift was accompanied by a new perception of reality and a new view of human subjectivity: the individual came to see himself/herself not merely as something changeable but also as anomic and threatened. The power of the Unconscious and the Irrational were acknowledged; the make-up of the psyche became an object of research. Realization of the gap between inner and outer aspects of personhood and of reality led on to scepticism about the very status of language and of communication. The dominant discourses of the time thus reflect the modernization of society – both in their forward-looking optimism and in their sense of intimidation and alienation. In literature, a hopeful awareness of innovation and liberation grapples with a sense of crisis and estrangement. This finds its aesthetic expression in a wide variety of narrative cleavages, ambivalences and anti-mimetic tendencies, as well as in narrative austerity or provocative treatments of tradition. It is in this sense that Bradbury and McFarlane considered this era in Scandinavian literature an early form of modernism. In doing so they opened up a new way of narrating this period of literary history, by portraying the 1

This categorization persists even in the two most recent histories of Danish literature. Hovedsporet adopts ‘Naturalisme 1870–1890’ as its sub-heading and Dansk Litteraturs Historie describes Jens Peter Jacobsen as a naturalist. See Jens Anker Jørgensen and Knud Wentzel, eds., Hovedsporet. Dansk litteraturs historie (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2005). Klaus P. Mortensen and May Schack, eds., Dansk Litteraturs Historie, 5 Vols., Vol. 3 (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2009).

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dominant figure of Brandes not as a Dane but as a Scandinavian. They situated him among a number of other Scandinavians and attributed the key roles to the Norwegian Ibsen and the Swede Strindberg. And indeed, the decades following Brandes’ programmatic shift were distinguished by an exceptional inter-Scandinavian network of intellectuals and artists. This exchange is vividly documented by the eight volumes of letters that passed between Brandes and his Scandinavian colleagues. Their content is by no means limited to personal matters, but includes extensive mutual feedback and controversial debate on aesthetic and political questions, such as the morality debate of the 1880s, none of which were merely national concerns. Rather than being told as an episode of national literary history and inner-Danish debates, the period of the Modern Breakthrough and of early Modernity in Scandinavia should be treated as an episode in a transnational Scandinavian literary history. The following sketch of this period as a phase of global literary history naturally includes its origins in national literature and the Scandinavian perspective on its development. That said, the main focus is on its diffusion, reception and effects in other countries, on connectivity and translation, on influence and trans national trends. The survey takes as its starting point David Damrosch’s concept of world literature, which he describes as ‘circulat[ion] beyond their culture of origin’ (Damrosch What Is World Literature: 4). On the one hand, world literature thus becomes a phenomenon of reception, ‘a mode of circulation and of reading’ (5). Damrosch seeks to trace ‘what is lost’, but mainly ‘what is gained in translation’ (34), as ‘works of literature take on a new life as they move into the world at large’ (24). On the other hand, Damrosch also hints at a dynamic further explored by Pascale Casanova (and others), a dynamic that consists in the ‘fundamentally economic character’ of the network declared as world literature (Casanova World Republic: 3). Already in the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx had emphasized that the emergent phenomenon of world literature was characterized by markets and production dynamics. Giselle Sapiro similarly argued that the range of art can only become global if it has access of global markets (Sapiro ‘Globalization and cultural diversity’: 423). In a much-quoted phrase, Casanova speaks of the ‘unification of literary space through competition’ (Casanova World Republic: 87) and paints the literary field2 as ‘a world of rivalry, struggle, and inequality’ (4), as an arena of violent competition. 2

Throughout, the term ‘field’ is employed in the sense developed by Bourdieu. See Pierre Bourdieu, Les Règles de l’art: genèse et structure du champ littéraire (Paris: Edition du Seuil, 1992).

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If market laws influence the formation and evaluation of art products, the status of their producers changes with them. With art and literature becoming professionalized, the ‘function of authorship’ (Foucault ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?’: 1969) comes to be reconfigured on economic foundations. However, the notion of the artist as an ingenious creator persisted for quite some time as an idealist alternative to the idea of the professionalized writer, compelling artists to locate themselves between these two extremes and destabilizing their social roles and their self-image. As part of this development, we can, from the early nineteenth century onwards, identify the beginnings of a concept of intellectual property and then of copyright (Wegmann ‘Wertpapiere’: 299), which were significant developments especially for authors writing in peripheral languages and will accordingly feature in what follows. This process of professionalization is another facet of the modernization drive that pervades the nineteenth century and boosted the importance of distributors, media and mediators of literature. The following discussion of the Danish authors Brandes, Jacobsen and Bang is accordingly divided into three parts for the purpose of tracing the development of a global literature market as a prerequisite for its internationalization. A biographical section addresses their transnational networks and the ‘economics of authorship’ (Osteen/Woodmansee New Economic Criticism: 4) that locate the authors as agents in the literary field. A second, bibliographical section exemplifies the international diffusion and reception of their works and activities, which around 1900 still focused on the European market. Finally, a poetological part will attempt to identify the role of globality and the reflections of the market in the poetics of the individual authors.

Three authors, three lives – The economics of authorship Georg Brandes lived from 1842 to 1927 and was active as an intellectual and literary critic both in Denmark and abroad; Jens Peter Jacobsen, a friend of Brandes, was five years his junior (born 1847), but died in 1885 after ten years of illness; his œuvre is much slimmer – not only for this reason. Herman Bang was another ten years younger (born 1857) and died in 1912. He mainly wrote novels and stories, but also worked as a journalist and theatre instructor. Broadly speaking, the three thus belong to one generation of authors. The eldest of the three is also clearly the most cosmopolitan. Georg Brandes lived an itinerant intellectual life and spent years in Germany and substantial

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amounts of time in France, visited Great Britain, Italy, Holland, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, while also repeatedly sojourning in the other Scandinavian countries, giving lectures in Hungary, Poland, Russia and the United States, and travelling through Austria and Switzerland, Greece and North Africa. His relentless travelling and lecturing was only made possible by the improved infrastructure developed during his lifetime – and his multiple long-distance journeys every year made near optimal use of it. France and Germany recur with regularity as stop-overs on his many trips, all of which were driven by his work as a critic and intellectual: he wrote tirelessly, gave lectures, made acquaintances, met colleagues, publishers, translators, mediators. His biographer Jørgen Knudsen calculated that in 1912 he gave lectures in forty-two different European cities (Knudsen Brandes, IV/1: 41).3 This seems to have made him the best-connected intellectual of the nineteenth century, especially if one adds his copious international correspondence to the equation. He kept in contact with Hippolyte Taine, Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Paul Bourget, Emil Zola, Paul Heyse and Henry James, with Maxim Kovalevsky and Edmund Gosse, with Arthur Schnitzler, Theodor Herzl and Stefan Zweig – a list that could be extended with ease. These relationships were productive exchanges: he not only promoted young Scandinavian literature abroad but also communicated his impressions of foreign countries to the Danish public – consider, for instance, his book on Berlin (Berlin som tysk Rigshovedstad, 1885) or his works on Poland and Russia, but also his truly transnational web of intellectual activity: he picked up and reflected on impressions gleaned from all European literatures and even took Japan and China into account. Although this highly active and diverse intellectual life is undoubtedly exceptional, it followed a more widespread contemporary pattern in that it strove for international presence and acclaim. In a letter to Brandes, Ibsen made this quite explicit: ‘Come down here! We northerners have to win our battles abroad; a victory in Germany and you will be top dog at home’.4 The aims were not simply idealistic: although they did want their ideas to take effect, earning money was also important. The end of cultural patronage forced this generation of professional authors to earn their living by selling books – their art had to be 3

4

References to Knudsen’s five-volume biography are given using the short title Brandes plus volume and page number. For the volumes’ individual titles see the detailed information in the bibliography. Letter by Henrik Ibsen to Georg Brandes from 23.7.1872. In Georg og Edvard Brandes. Brevveksling med nordiske Forfattere og Videnskabsmænd, 8 Vols., Vol. 4/1, ed. Morten Borup (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1939), 216.

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appreciated as a product (Knudsen Brandes, II: 99). Brandes had to face this harsh reality when he was denied the professorship at the University of Copenhagen he had been coveting (see extensively Knudsen Brandes, II: 140–158). Involuntarily, he thereby became one of the first and most prominent independent intellectuals of the nineteenth century. Although his writings generated a relatively good income, the persistent insecurity of his situation will certainly have contributed to his almost manic productivity, as did his continuous money troubles. Jørgen Knudsen’s many-volume and insightful biography of Brandes is riddled with concerns about money and its lack: ‘His economy has quickly become a real obsession for him’ (Knudsen Brandes, II: 95). It is a standard preoccupation of this generation of authors. Even though Jens Peter Jacobsen did not thematize the issue to the same extent, he also suffered from financial worries. He trained as a biologist and had attracted attention even before his literary debut by translating Darwin. Soon he too lived as a free author, but his life was short and overshadowed by a disease that limited his life expectancy already many years before his death and forced concerns with money somewhat into the background. On the other hand, the fact that he lived in low-cost accommodation and also stayed in his parents’ house for long stretches of his illness sheds some on his limited financial means. Despite these constraints, he too travelled Europe, as was usual at the time, he stated that he ‘needs to get a bit outside of Denmark and get a bit of European air into his lungs’, as he wrote to his mother, adding that he was also in search of cultural inspiration for his writing.5 The letter shows in detail how he planned to finance the trip with his meagre means – so money was definitely an issue. It also makes his indebtedness to his parents clear, as it was they who – reluctantly – supported his travels. His first journey abroad in 1873 took him to Berlin, Dresden, Prague, Vienna, Verona, Bergamo, Milan, Venice and Florence. Later travels, mainly for his health, brought him to Switzerland (1877), France and southern Italy (1878). His intellectual influences were similarly international: he read literary and scientific publications by French (Baudelaire), German (Feuerbach, Heine), English (Swinburne and of course Darwin) and American (Poe) authors. Herman Bang’s life as an author again fits the pattern of a professional plagued by constant money troubles and a desire for international acclaim and presence 5

Letter to his mother from 28.5.1873. In Jens Peter Jacobsen, Samlede Værker, 6 Vols., Vol. 5, ed. Frederik Nielsen (København: Rosenkilde & Bagger, 1973), 92.

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through travel. His biographers link his lack of money partly to his extravagant lifestyle, but be that as it may – it is clear that he, like Brandes and others, had to come to terms with his dependency on the market and live off sales: ‘He needed to write for his living’, writes his biographer Harry Jacobsen (Jacobsen Bang, III: 35).6 His best works were written under pressure from deadlines or even at the kitchen table of a landlady (Jacobsen Bang, II: 139). To make ends meet, he also worked as a journalist as both a full and a free employee of various newspapers and magazines, amassing an extensive oeuvre as a feuilletonist in addition to his novels and stories.7 He too travelled abroad to gain intellectual inspiration, contacts and international success. When he first settled in Berlin in 1885, he wrote to his friend Peter Nansen, telling him that he wished to ‘defeat’ (he used the German word ‘besiegen’) the ‘capital of the world’,8 but his influences were mainly French (Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, but also the Russian Turgenjew), and he promoted French literature at home.9 Bang too travelled substantially, sometimes in flight,10 throughout Scandinavia and Germany, living for a time in Vienna, Prague, Paris and Berlin. It was not only curiosity and a cosmopolitan attitude that caused long periods of exile, bus also his homosexuality, which made him flee the narrow and often hostile circles of his home town. Shortly before his death, he even visited Russia, ultimately dying in the United States on a lecture tour that was intended to span the globe. His death in an American railway carriage perfectly exemplifies the globalization of the literature business at the turn of the twentieth century.11

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References to Harry Jacobsen’s multi-volume biography of Bang are given using the short title Bang plus volume and page number. For details, see the bibliography. Herman Bang, Vekslende Themaer, 4 Vols., ed. Sten Rasmussen (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2006). Letters from 4.12.1885 and 15.1.1886. In Lauritz Nielsen, ed. Herman Bangs Vandreaar. Fortalt i Breve til Peter Nansen (Copenhagen: Henrik Koppels, 1918), 152 and 175. See the comprehensive study by Peer E. Sørensen, Vor tids temperament. Studier i Herman Bangs forfatterskab (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2009), 82–91. The most legendary story concerns Bang’s flight from the Prussian police in Berlin and, a few days later, Meiningen, when he was accused of committing lèse majesté in a Norwegian newspaper. See Harry Jacobsen, Herman Bang, 4 Vols., Vol. II (Copenhagen: Hagerup, 1954–1966), 129–134 [Den unge Herman Bang, Copenhagen: Hagerup, 1954; Herman Bang: Resignationens Digter, Copenhagen: Hagerup, 1957; Aarene der gik tabt: Den miskendte Herman Bang, Copenhagen: Hagerup, 1961; Den tragiske Herman Bang, Copenhagen: Hagerup, 1966]. Especially Bang’s stay in Berlin in 1907–1909 was directly cause by a public affair about homosexuality in which he unwittingly got involved. The German author Klaus Mann wrote an imaginative essay about Bang’s last journey and death, Journey to the end of the night (unpublished manuscript in the Monacensia, Munich). In a world literary context, it is interesting to note that he wrote this piece in English, probably because he wanted to get into the American market. The original is as yet unpublished, but there are German translations and the essay was published in Danish by Dag Heede as Rejse til nattens ende, trans. and ed. Dag Heede (Odense: Syddansk universitetsforlag, 2009).

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Besides working as a journalist, Bang also tried to improve his finances by directing plays (in Paris, for instance)12 and especially by going on reading tours. His appearances as Osvald (from Ibsen’s Ghosts) and his readings from his own works were legendary, but not always profitable.13 The way in which readings couple the author’s personality and work makes very clear how authors now had to stage themselves and how dependent they were on their audience and the market. A remark in Svenska Dagbladet is particularly telling, as the reviewer seems to be describing the modern author as a commodity and as embodied advertizing: to him, Bang’s performance seemed ‘like a work of art in an exhibition, which could be admired from all sides, all the time, just like a recently finished sculpture on a turntable’ (Jacobsen Bang, IV: 204). The metaphor is reminiscent of the peep-show turntable in Ibsen’s final play When We Dead Awaken (1899), which Ibsen uses to express all the things suppressed by the modern art and literature business: all the staging and advertizing, the crushing weight of the market and the venality. The literature of modernity goes hand in hand with these dynamics that have left deep traces on the authorship of the three Danes.

Books abroad Reconstructing the reception of these three authors across the globe is a huge, but as yet untackled research challenge that would require a polyglot and is thus impossible to address here in its entirety. Jacobsen’s and Bang’s novels and short stories were translated into over twenty different languages, including French, Polish, Dutch, Russian, Finnish, Yiddish, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Chinese, Hebrew, Rumanian, Spanish, and of course English and German.14 Germany – in the wake of the Scandinavia-fashion caused by the cruises of Kaiser Wilhelm II15 – was particular fond of the two authors and saw several editions of their

12

13

14

15

See Anna Sandberg, ‘Herman Bangs Transferfunktion im Dreieck Skandinavien – Frankreich – Deutschland um 1900’, in Literarische Transnationalität. Kulturelle Dreiecksbeziehungen zwischen Skandinavien, Deutschland und Frankreich im 19. Jahrhundert, eds. Karin Hoff, Anna Sandberg and Udo Schöning (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2015), 147–172. On his tour of Russia, for instance, he was forced to perform in empty halls. See Jacobsen, Bang, IV, 205. The list is not comprehensive and includes mainly contemporary and older translations. More recently, these authors have been translated into additional languages, such as Latvian and Estonian, not least due to the Danish state’s cultural support of translations. See Birgit Marschall, Reisen und Regieren. Die Nordlandfahrten Kaiser Wilhelms II (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1991).

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collected works. Around 1910, that is at the time of Bang’s visit to Russia, quite a number of his works were published in Russian translation.16 The reception of Brandes is even more difficult to gauge as it is only inadequately described by pointing to book publications in German, Bulgarian, Chinese, French, Hebrew, Dutch, Yiddish, Polish, Russian, Swedish, Czech and Hungarian,17 but would also need to take into account publications in journals that have yet to be bibliographically catalogued. An example is provided by his work for the influential journal Deutsche Rundschau that frequently published substantial contributions by him (on Lasalle, Heyse, Tegner, Disreali, the French novel, and various Danish authors, including J.P. Jacobsen). The intellectual range of this journal far exceeded Germany and even included England, America and Russia.18 The translations of the individual volumes of his magnum opus Hovedstrømninger i den europæiske Litteratur (subsequently referred to as Main Currents) speak even more clearly of his global influence. They were ‘immediately translated into German from 1872, Russian and Polish translations appeared from 1881, translations were published in England and the US from 1901, a Japanese translation followed in 1915, the four volumes were translated into Chinese in 1935–39’ (Madsen ‘World Literature’: 64). Together with Spanish translations and various reprints these bibliographical facts have led Peter Madsen to conclude that ‘[t]he impact of Brandes’s work has been truly global’. (Madsen ‘World Literature’: 64). The news of his death in 1927 appeared on front pages all over the world, from London and New York to Tokyo (Hertel ‘Brandes kulturrevolution’: 82). The impact of the three authors can best be exemplified by their citation by influential readers, which served to inscribe them in the global canon. Think

16

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18

A very valuable, but as yet unpublished, extensive bibliography by René Herring shows that there were several Russian editions of Bang’s stories, for example Странные разсказы (1909, containing ‘Otto Heinrich’, ‘Les quatre Diables’ and ‘Franz Pander’) and Избранныя новеллы (1910, containing six stories fra Udvalgte Fortællinger, 1899). Even more importantly, several of Bang’s novels were translated around that time: in 1908 Det hvide Hus was published as Белый домъ¸ followed in 1909 by Его превосходительство (Det graa Hus). Also Mikaël was translated in 1910 (Михазль. Романъ), and a translation of Stuk followed in 1911 (Погибшія мечты. Романъ) as well a translation of Ludvigsbakke (Романъ сестры милосердія). See the comprehensive bibliography by Per Dahl and John Mott in Hans Hertel and Sven Møller Kristensen, The Activist Critic (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1980), 303–359. In 1880, the journal’s editor, Rodenberg, wrote to Conrad Ferdinand Meyer saying that the journal’s audience consisted of the ‘best of all nations’. See Bengt Algot Sørensen, ‘Georg Brandes als deutscher Schriftsteller’, in eds. Hans Hertel and Sven Møller Kristensen Den politiske Georg Brandes (København: Reitzel, 1973), 127–145. In his contribution, Sørensen shows how the Deutsche Rundschau increasingly developed into a national-liberal upper-class mouthpiece that rejected new developments in literature, such as naturalism.

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only of the well-known occurrence of Jacobsen’s novels Niels Lyhne and Fru Marie Grubbe in Georg Lukác’s Theorie des Romans or of Thomas Mann’s remark that the Main Currents had been the ‘bible of young European intellectuals’ around 1900. One might also mention Nietzsche’s note that Brandes was a ‘great European’19 or Claude Monet’s comment that Bang’s novel Tine was the most impressionist book known to him. Stefan Zweig’s evaluation of Niels Lyhne as ‘the Werther of our generation’ or Hofmannsthal’s enthusiastic reviews of Bang’s stories further emphasize the impact of these three authors.20 Despite these successes, the authors’ struggles on the international book market were evidently very laborious. Their constant battle for market shares was fraught with disappointments. In an undated letter concerning the translation rights for Ludvigsbakke and probably addressed to the translator Marie Franzos, Herman Bang wrote: Übersetzen Sie was Sie wollen. Mich interessiert die Sache gar nicht. Solange meine besten Bücher – Am Wege und Tine – nicht in Deutschland erscheinen können sondern schon seit Jahren in deutscher Übersetzung von Verleger zu Verleger erfolglos gesandt werden müssen, hat meine Stellung der deutschen Lesewelt gegenüber für mich gar keine [sic] Interesse. Man hat in Deutschland meine schlechtesten Sachen verdaut – die Besseren will man nicht haben. (quoted from Jacobsen Bang, IV: 183) Translate what you want. I have no interest in the matter whatsoever. As long as my best books – By the Wayside and Tine – cannot appear in Germany, but have had for years to be shunted in German translation from publisher to publisher, but without success, my position in the world of German literature holds no interest for me. In Germany one has digested my worst things – the better ones are not in demand.

Whereas Bang – and also Jacobsen – attracted more intense attention in Germany and abroad only after his death, Brandes, who was internationally well-known already during his lifetime, had to contend with other problems. Jørgen Knudsen has described his difficulties with publishers and translation 19

20

Bertil Nolin chose this as the title of his important study of Brandes: Bertil Nolin, Den gode europén. Studier i Georg Brandes idéutveckling 1871–1893 (Stockholm: Norstedt, 1965). The book also contains a substantial bibliographical appendix on the translations of Brandes’ works. Peter Madsen, ‘World Literature and World Thoughts: Brandes/Auerbach’, in Debating World Literature, ed. Christopher Prendergast (London/New York: Verso, 2004), 54–75. Antje Wischmann, Ästheten und Décadents (Frankfurt a.M.: Lang, 1991). Bengt Algot Sørensen, Jens Peter Jacobsen (München: Beck, 1990). Harry Jacobsen, Herman Bang: Resignationens Digter (Copenhagen: Hagerup, 1957).

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rights as ‘one of the most annoying chapters in Brandes’ literary life’ (Knudsen Brandes, II: 296). The root of these issues was the lack of a copyright agreement between Denmark and other countries. In 1886, a number of countries had signed the so-called Berne convention intended to safeguard the copyrights of authors abroad. Denmark was not among the signees, probably because far more was translated into Danish than from Danish, rendering the reform financially counterproductive for the country. For authors seeking success abroad, however, the legal situation in Denmark was catastrophic until 1903 when the country finally signed the convention. They were continuously confronted with unauthorized translations that they received no money for. In the context of an increasingly professionalized class of authors this was an untenable situation. In Georg Brandes’ case, for instance, the rights to the German edition of the Main Currents were held by his German publisher (Duncker); when he instigated a new edition with a different publisher (Veit & Co) in 1880, this led to him being accused of plagiarizing his own work: In keeping with his custom of reworking texts for re-edition, he had intended to rewrite all four volumes of the work; since he based this reworking on Strodtmann’s translation, however, this process resulted in a trial and Brandes’ conviction.21 The strong focus of these sections on Germany is due to the great significance of the German market for these three authors. Knudsen writes about Brandes that while his heart belonged to France, ‘Germany was for him still the central country in Europe, the springboard to the others’ (Knudsen Brandes, III/2: 413). The same stretch of time that saw seventy volumes of his works appear in German only saw one in French. In her discussion of the significance of France to world literature, Pascale Casanova mentions the influence France had on Brandes, but neglects the lack of reciprocal reaction from France (Casanova World Republic: 96–99). Similar things can be said of the other two authors. The German reception of both Bang and Jacobsen is a clear case of Damrosch’s argument that literary works gain new meaning and value in countries and languages beyond their region of origin (Damrosch What Is World Literature). As has repeatedly been observed, the reception of Jacobsen’s most important novel Niels Lyhne in Germany and Austria was delayed by about fifteen years and

21

Knudsen (Brandes, III/2, 414–425) and Bjerring-Hansen have worked through the complicated relationships in detail. See Jens Bjerring-Hansen, ‘Brandes, Brentano og Bern-konventionen. Om Georg Brandes revision af Den romantiske skole i Tydskland’. Danske Studier (2008): 150–167.

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caused it to be positioned in the context of Fin de Siècle aesthetics.22 The work of Bengt Algot Sørensen was especially crucial in showing how Jacobsen’s texts were adapted to the various literary movements of the turn of the century in Germany and Austria by the addition of prefaces, paratexts and other editorial means, such as illustrations and cover images (Sørensen Funde und Forschungen). Whereas he attracted relatively little attention in German naturalist circles, Niels Lyhne was hailed with euphoria in the context of neo-romanticism, symbolism, decadence and especially art nouveau. Antje Wischmann argued that the reason for his productive reception lay in his stylistic complexity and variability: ‘In a nutshell, Jacobsen’s Niels Lyhne provides the entire stilistic spectrum of the fin-de-siècle, which turned out to be exceptionally important for its reception beyond Denmark’ (Wischmann Ästheten und Décadents: 135). As the ‘manual of sensitivity’,23 the novel became one of the most influential Scandinavian works in the German-speaking countries.24 It gave rise to a movement that might be aptly described as a Jacobsen-cult, but also earned the author the admiration of colleagues, such as Hofmannsthal, Rilke or Musil. How Germany acted as a stepping stone to international reception is exemplified by Ethel F.L. Robertson’s translation of Niels Lyhne into English. The translator was an Australian writer, who published her own works under the name Henry Handel Richardson. She lived in Leipzig for a time and translated Jacobsen from Marie von Borch’s German edition. She not only produced a stylistically sound and accurate English rendition that was published by Heinemann in London under the title Siren Voices in 1896 but was also deeply influenced by Jacobsen in her own work, so that via Germany and England even the budding literary history of Australia shows traces of his impact. In her Leipzig-novel Maurice Guest (1912), she portrays a dispirited hero, an unsuccessful artist like Niels Lyhne, whose actions express the irrational element

22

23 24

See, for example, Niels Barfoed, ed. Omkring Niels Lyhne (Copenhagen: Reitzel, 1970); Klaus Bohnen, ‘Nachwort. Zur Rezeption des Niels Lyhne im deutschen Sprachraum’, in Jens Peter Jacobsen. Niels Lyhne, ed. Klaus Bohnen (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1984), 256–269. Stefan Grossmann in Tilskueren 1917, quoted from: Barfoed, ed. Omkring Niels Lyhne, 161. The number of editions alone is a good indicator of the novel’s significance in the German-speaking countries. Even today, the most highly regarded translations are the early ones by Mathilde Mann (1888, in Die Grenzboten, Jg. 47) and Marie von Borch (1889, Reclam Leipzig). Since then, a wealth of other translations and editions has appeared: 1895 Mathilde Mann (Albert Langen, Leipzig); 1905 Margarethe Langfeldt (Otto Hendel, Halle); 1910 Ernst Sander (Schreiter, Berlin); 1911 Anke Mann (Taus, Leipzig); 1911 Hans Heinz Ewers (Globus, Berlin); 1911 Henny Bock-Neumann (Knaur, Berlin); 1919 Marie Herzfeld (Eugen Diederichs, Jena); 1924 Julia Koppel (Propyläen, Berlin). On other editions and collected works, see Barfoed, ed. Omkring Niels Lyhne, 310–327.

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of human action in ways familiar from Jacobsen’s work. Although she does not come close to Jacobsen’s stylistic mastery, the novel shows her desire to express sensuality and visual perceptions. One passage in Robertson’s text even directly refers to its model, Niels Lyhne: as was usual at the time, one of the characters considers Jacobsen’s text a ‘bible’ and a ‘morbid death-book’ by a ‘modern Danish poet who died young’ (Richardson Maurice Guest : 638). Bang’s success in Germany was roughly twenty years late, with most of the translations appearing between 1900 and 1910. After Denmark’s ratification of the Berne convention in 1903, the income from the German book market also made a significant contribution to Bang’s finances, especially since the German payments were far higher than the Danish ones (Heitmann/Schröder ‘Geschichte und Perspektiven’: 17). It is also interesting to note the recontextualizations Bang’s work underwent in its reception. Up until the mid-1920s, he was read in the context of the fin-de-siècle as a representative of effeminate decadence, melancholy and nervousness; the author’s homosexuality clearly added to his fame. In a second subsequent wave of reception, which focused mainly on his late works, he was then placed in an expressionist-vitalist context. In that respect, Bang’s works contributed to the success story of the publishing house S. Fischer.25 The rising market was supported by the film versions of Les quatre diables in 1920 and of Mikaël in 1924. It is telling that a new edition of collected works was published in 1926/27 that no longer contained some of his early novels, such as Stuk and Haabløse Slægter, because they were now considered decadent. In this form, Bang’s style was even attractive to the generation of New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) from the mid-1920s onwards (Heitmann/Schröder ‘Geschichte und Perspektiven’: 18–28). These two examples show how texts could acquire new significance by circulating in different contexts (Damrosch What Is World Literature: 4). These meanings are already present in the complex appellative structure of the texts, but become concrete through encounters with certain emphases, which can also be affected by the various strategies of the publishers. The cases of Jacobsen and Bang show that they were sending signals of modernity that went far beyond the social criticism of ‘Modern Breakthrough’, signals that were tied less to content and more to the form of their texts. In the reception process, Niels Lyhne is transformed from a socio-critical atheist novel into an arabesque work 25

See about the history of the publishing firm Peter de Mendelssohn, S. Fischer und sein Verlag (Frankfurt a.M.: S. Fischer, 1970), 251.

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distinguished by its artful language; its lack of content becomes an emblem of incapacitation and loss of vitality. In the novel’s international reception, the text’s interest in the disillusioning downside of freedom becomes its central feature. The various phases of reception that Bang’s novels went through focused on different elements of modernity: melancholy, nervousness, self-alienation or the struggle of life. These various specifications of his novels all hinge on Bang’s aesthetics, his impressionist style and depersonalized narrative form. The most widely received work by Bang is most certainly his novel Tine. It was translated into Bulgarian, German, Finnish, French, Hebrew, Dutch, Swedish, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish and Czech, more recently also into Norwegian, Latvian, English and Greenlandic. Most remarkable is the lack of interest shown in Anglophone countries, which caught up only in the late twentieth century. In writing Tine, Bang was aiming for a breakthrough success in France, but the 1894 translation by the Russian diplomat Count de Prozor with a frontispiece by Frits Thaulow earned him little besides Claude Monet’s praise. Nevertheless, there was a second edition, tellingly published in the ‘Bibliothèque Cosmopolite’ (1895),26 a new translation followed in 1930, another in 1997. The first translator was a cosmopolitan himself: born in Vilnius and married to a Swede, he worked to promote Scandinavian literature abroad and also translated and supported Ibsen. It further seems significant that the dates of many other translations fall between the World Wars,27 suggesting that Tine was read as an anti-war novel, thereby gaining significance far beyond the national and regional border conflict of the 1864-war between Germany and Denmark.

Poetological reflections of globalized arts Some of the pathways taken by global reception exceed the intentions behind the works, but many are rooted in their multiple facets. It now remains to be investigated how the three authors’ reflections on the international reach of the works, the literature market and status of art on the global market found entrance into their works on a poetological level. Whereas this form of reflection 26

27

The title page of the first edition gives 1895 as the date of appearance, even though catalogues list the work under 1894; the edition in the ‘Bibliothèque Cosmopolite’ is undated and could not be verified by the Royal Library in Copenhagen. Bulgarian 1930, Finnish 1919, Hebrew 1927, Dutch (new translation) 1921, Serbo-Croatian 1923 and Czech 1920. German editions appeared in 1900, 1903, 1912, 1926 and 1927.

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will be mainly implicit in the novels by Jacobsen and Bang, it may also have found explicit and programmatic expression in the critical work of Bang and Brandes. Naturally, a summary of his poetological position is complicated by the fact that his aesthetics changed significantly over the course of his long-standing activity as a writer. Initially he gained fame by calling for problem-orientation in modern literature, programmatically encapsulated in his dictum ‘A book is for me an action’. His main work, the Main Currents, critically engages with nineteenth-century European literature, preferring literature pervaded by the libertarian ideas of the French revolution over texts with romantic and religious overtones. The concept of freedom and the dichotomous opposition between emotion and reason provide the central categories of his large-scale and intentionally partisan portrayal of French, English and German literature. In applying these categories, he presupposes an evolutionary trajectory towards greater humanity and freedom of thought that proceeds in an undulating play of actions and reactions. This optimistic attitude is tied to a cosmopolitan ideal, to a belief in a community of free spirits, legitimized by the eternally and universally valid idea of freedom of thought in its enlightenment form (Berthelsen/ Egebjerg ‘Europa i Danmark’: 109). His cosmopolitanism is particularly visible in his book on Ludvig Holberg (Ludvig Holberg. Et Festskrift, 1884): the book’s fundamental premise of Holberg as a cosmopolitan can be read as a self-portrait that propagates generalized enlightenment ideas. Holberg emerges as a genius championing ‘marked individuality’ (Brandes Skrifter, 1: 50). In an ossified ‘time of wigs’ (30), he insisted on freedom and rationality, integrating European thought into the development of a national literature. In the Main Currents he expressly formulates the methodological principles of comparative literary analysis in analogy to cosmopolitanism, thereby taking his place among the important founding figures of trans national literary criticism. As he always understood literature in part as an expression of and contribution to societal developments, which he explicitly understood as European in scope and nature, literary criticism demands a supra national gaze, which he defined as follows: The comparative approach to literature has the dual nature of bringing the foreign closer so we can appropriate it and to distance the familiar so we can survey it […] The academic approach to literature seems to provide you with binoculars whose one end magnifies and whose other end shrinks. It is crucial to use it in a way that we correct the illusions of natural sight. (Brandes Skrifter: 4, 2)

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This formula allowed him to develop a method of reading that constructs a dialectic between the alien and the familiar, allowing him to preserve a national basis without making it absolute. One might even see the binocularmetaphor as an anticipation of the formalists’ concept of defamiliarization or of Stephen Greenblatt’s new historicist dictum of ‘making strange what is familiar’ (Greenblatt Learning to Curse: 8). Brandes’ methodological reflections are therefore a significant contribution to world literature and its analysis. One of his much later articles explicitly addressed the concept of world literature (‘Om Verdenslitteratur’, 1899, Skrifter: 12) in the context of the global market. With reference to Goethe he deliberated on the problems of translation and the difficulties faced by literature in peripheral languages on the global market – in his view, of his fellow Danes only H.C. Andersen had succeeded, but not Holberg nor Kierkegaard. He outlined that the tendency ‘in our time’ to write explicitly for the global market posed a danger. He gives Zola as an example, who wrote ‘as Sarah Bernhardt plays when on stage in Peru or Chicago’ (Brandes ‘Verdenslitteratur’, Skrifter: 12, 28). Abstracting from specific, concrete experiences and the national point of view is branded adaptation to the market: ‘Having one’s eye on global fame and world literature brings about a danger […] What was explicitly written for the world will hardly be a work of art’ (Brandes ‘Verdenslitteratur’, Skrifter: 12, 28). This remark would likewise prove to be farsighted, anticipating trends of a phenomenon we jokingly call ‘airport literature’ today (Damrosch What Is World Literature: 18). Brandes’ innovative methodological insights and his criticism of the market are somewhat at odds with his aesthetics. The latter at first had a normative impact, but then proved sceptical rather than supportive of the European developments leading into modernity. The concept of naturalism Brandes founded his Main Currents was philosophical in nature, grounded in the natural only insofar as it denied the supernatural and spiritual. He was sceptical of Zola’s influential concept of naturalism with its focus on the neutral and detailed description of everyday life. Despite these differences, he nevertheless engages with Zola on numerous occasions, especially since they shared a foundation in Taine’s concept of race, milieu and moment as central determining factors. Brandes admired Zola’s struggle for truth, but simultaneously accused him of denying any form of generalization. His concept of literature focuses not on the observation and representation of reality but on the representative or symbolic generalization of observation (Møller Kristensen ‘To personer, to principper’: 308). In this respect, his ideal also differs from Herman Bang’s impressionist

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aesthetics or Flaubert’s impassibilité (Baumgartner ‘Brandes Zola-Aufsatz’). One of his early articles on Shakespeare (‘Det uendeligt Smaa og det uendeligt Store i Poesien’ 1869) already drafts this fundamental line of thought, which was to remain one of the principles of his poetics: the purpose of detailed observation should be to allow for generalization, evaluation and the pursuit of humanity and truth. The generation of early Modernity largely shunned this aesthetics of representativeness, as it for them became increasingly impossible to discover or acknowledge the absolute values Brandes was striving for. Brandes himself increasingly abandoned literary criticism and history in favour of biography. The final volumes of his Main Currents already emphasize portrayals of important individuals, which was to become his central genre in his later work under the influence of his French teacher Sainte-Beuve. His trust in the victory of humanity now gave way to a belief in the power of great individuals. The range of individuals covered by his substantial, occasionally multi-volume biographies of important poets, intellectuals and politicians (including Shakespeare, Goethe, Voltaire, Caesar, Disraeli, Kierkegaard, Lasalle and many others) once more attests to his cosmopolitan intellectual horizon. In the context of world literature, his work on Friedrich Nietzsche is of exceptional rank. Although also his two-volume work on Shakespeare was the first comprehensive study of the poet’s works, Brandes’ work on Nietzsche was the first ever to take note of the German philosopher. The two began corresponding in 1888, with Brandes announcing that he would make the philosopher famous, while Nietzsche in turn praised Brandes for summarizing his work as ‘aristocratic radicalism’. One must note, however, that Brandes’ reception is selective, concentrating on areas in which he agreed with Nietzsche, especially his criticism of the so-called cultural philistine (‘Bildungsphilister’) and his praise of the aristocracy of spirit, but maintaining concepts of truth and responsibility in opposition to Nietzsche’s radical ‘revaluation of all values’ and his nominalist epistemology. Brandes’ command of European and global developments, intellectual and otherwise, nevertheless allowed him to be the first to draw attention to the philosopher: his Copenhagen lectures on his work in 1888 were published in Tilskueren in 1889, and soon translated into German, appearing in the Deutsche Rundschau in 1890. Translations into English (1909), Yiddish (1918) and Spanish (1927) occurred only after the public had already taken note of Nietzsche’s work. Overall, his fanfare of modernity was immensely influential, even though he did not always support the developments his intellectual programme gave rise

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to. This is true also of the aesthetics of his two Danish contemporaries, Jacobsen and Bang, whom he understood and appreciated only within limits, although both of them offered perfect aesthetic applications of his comparative method of reading, of ‘making strange what is familiar’. Jens Peter Jacobsen’s debut story ‘Mogens’ already provides an exemplum of a new perception of reality that sees man as an integral part of the natural world. The impressionistic prose expresses a concept of nature influenced by Darwin and Haeckel, though the congruence of man and nature in this early story oscillates between a modern, anti-metaphysical faith in the laws of nature and a notion of its ensoulment. With his historical novel Fru Marie Grubbe (1876), Jacobsen gained the enthusiastic support of the Brandes circle and came to be hailed as the prototype of the modern author. The work was praised especially for its descriptive precision and its scientific approach to the portrayal of its protagonists as natural beings. Without idealization, the work traces the development of Marie Grubbe, whose social decline is directly proportional to her attainment of personal and erotic satisfaction, highlighting the irrational aspects of her psyche. Although the novel’s protagonist is a figure of Danish history with hardly any international significance, the book was translated into several European languages. Nevertheless, the impact of Jacobsen’s second novel Niels Lyhne (1882) was significantly greater. Although written in the typical contemporary genre of the udviklingsroman (novel of development) that offers a form capable of treating human changeability and emancipation from traditional norms, this text describes not a development, but rather its failure. Thematically, this portrait of an antihero who dies in the war of 1864 was fully in line with the programme of the Modern Breakthrough in Brandes’ sense: it dealt with determinism, atheism, newness in art and gender relationships. However, its slow, almost lyrical narrative pace distinguishes the text from typical contemporary littérature engagée and its arabesque style compelled even his Danish fellow-countrymen to encounter this hero as an other. Its formal characteristics thus serve to make what is ostensibly a Tendenzroman into a precursor of the self-reflexive modern aesthetics that developed elsewhere only around the turn of the century. The novel opens by portraying the hero’s parents and signals its indebtedness to naturalist discourse in Taine’s or Zola’s sense already in the fifth line by using the word ‘inherit’ in relation to biological characteristics. When the introduction closes by summarizing Niels’ inherited and acquired potential, however, we encounter a significant comment by the narrator: ‘And thus Niels grows up, and all the childhood-influences are shaping the soft clay, everything

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is shaping, everything has a meaning, that which is, and that which is dreamed, that which is known, and that which is guessed’ (Jacobsen Niels Lyhne: 49). Although the clay metaphor recalls the biblical creation myth, which is then dismantled in typical naturalist manner, the shaping forces involved include not only reality and knowledge, but also dreams and intuition, rendering the shaping ‘everything’ identical to its narration. It is the arabesque narration itself that assembles, reinforces, smooths and dampens the lines of his life and the forms of his psyche, such that this passage characterizes not only the hero but also the narrative process itself. The concept of the subject contains elements of the psychological and irrational, thus anticipating a discourse that became virulent only around the turn of the century, which explains the later intensification of the international reception. Within the novel, this plurality of different factors implies a potential for conflict that will ultimately defeat the protagonist. The novel’s atmosphere of disillusionment is due not least to its theme of free-thinking and its reflection of contemporary discourses: for instance, a discussion scene explicitly picks up Feuerbach’s criticism of religion. But the novel’s contemporary reception all too hastily read this as a declaration of an atheist programme. Any programmatic content is however sapped of its vigour by Niels’ self-doubt, expressing selfalienation rather than deliverance. The text’s double theme of the relationship between art and eroticism appears as a critical engagement with idealist traditions, but remains without alternative as it likewise implies a dissociation from the potentiality for development present in reality. Niels falls in love four times, but already his first love for the femme fatale Edele culminates in a decadent tableau evoking a world of forbidden artificiality. Eroticism is an aestheticist project, in some passages marked out by theatrical metaphors as a staged encounter between two players, but as an encounter deeply rooted in power relations. In the end, the protagonist’s loneliness appears insurmountable, causing him to exist without relations or aims in an alien world; the only remaining existential objective is ‘to bear life as it was’ (Jacobsen Niels Lyhne: 172). This poetics of aestheticization and ornamentalization enacts existential alienation and consistently reflects its own strategy of distancing. Niels also fails in his project of implementing ‘newness’ in art. In this artistnovel (Künstlerroman), creating art is not production but projection; there is no message, the programme of ‘newness’ remains unfulfilled. While one episode does reflect on the possibility that art might be an avenue to impact and success, this thought is treated with extreme scepticism. The episode involving Niels’ friend

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and fellow-artist Erik Refstrup thematizes the disquiet this generation of authors experienced regarding their status. When Erik manages to gain fame  – abroad of course – his popularity results in aesthetic stagnation, in the reproduction of uniform paintings without innovation. The novel’s ekphrastic passages reveal Erik’s pictures as pure kitsch. Being tied to the market seems to threaten art’s innovative vigour, causing it to become repetitive and devolve into self-citation. The novel’s aesthetics itself offers an alternative, capable of communicating a world of artifice that reacts to modernity with resignation and passivity. Melancholic heroes can be found also in Bang’s novels and stories. His aesthetics is largely characterized by an impressionist form that he himself formulated in programmatic texts, thereby positioning himself as an adversary of Brandes. His book Realisme og Realister (1879) developed a ground-breaking aesthetic conception that he later supplemented with poetological articles and described as ‘impressionist’ (esp. ‘Impressionisme. En lille Replik’, 1890). Like Brandes, he argued that literature should ‘paint’ and that an author should be ‘a living expression of his time’. Bang further offered assistance as to how one was to approach this by devising a new method that developed its arguments in conspicuous analogy to painting and visuality, while also showing marked parallels to French impressionism. Both painters and authors are interested in a new kind of perception, in communicating the impressions a modern world conveys. This led Bang to radically demand that ‘a cohesive artistic composition and complete unity’ (Bang Realisme: 23) be abandoned – a demand that directly contradicted Brandes’ aesthetics and invalidated all traditional emphasis on harmony.28 To these authors, modernity essentially connoted an experience of increased speed, bustle, anonymity and de-centering. This underpinned Bang’s exhortation to produce ‘the ultimate illusion of life in motion’ (Bang ‘Impressionisme’ 692). The latter should not simply be understood as a realistic portrayal of animation. The point is rather that motion and illusion encapsulate the very form of modern existence and take command of people´s lives. The fleeting nature of the portrayal goes hand in hand with the impenetrability of what is portrayed, thereby reflecting the dissolution of reliable values, also refracted in the shifts of perspective and the flattening that characterize impressionist paintings. Bang describes such lack of perspective and depth in literature as 28

In 1883, the two authors engaged in an explicit written exchange on occasion of a novel by Karl Gjellerup. See Sven Møller Kristensen, ‘To personer, to principper’, in Omkring Stuk. Red., ed. Olaf Harsløv (Copenhagen: Reizel, 1977), 306–316. 

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seeing ‘with Chinese eyes’, causing that ‘every detail is advanced to the same level’ (Bang ‘Impressionisme’: 694). Values, and even the act of seeing itself, can thus be questioned by disconcerting the recipient’s perspective, which in prose results mainly from the narrator’s abstinence: ‘Authors make [characters] speak, rather than speak [themselves]’ (Bang Realisme: 24), they make life itself provide the moral. In describing narratorial objectivity, Bang again draws on an optical simile to support his argument: ‘what is seen depends, as we know, on the eyes doing the seeing’ (Bang Realisme: 24). The relativity of the beholder’s gaze fundamentally informs Bang’s poetics. Impressionist narrative art, he writes, ‘abhors direct depiction and merely shows us human emotion in a variety of mirrors – their actions’ (Bang ‘Impressionisme’: 298). In essence, this is a commitment to indirect communication founded on the abstinence of the narrator and narrative ‘gaps’ (Leerstellen). Stylistically, this narrativization of the experience of modernity is further supplemented by dissolving the logic of causality and giving parataxis a dominant role, signalling disconnectedness. Certain verb forms and indefinite constructions convey passivity; the purely phenomenological appraisal of objects on the surface level, often implemented via metonymy, lets the characters emerge as mere spectators of life.29 Despite being only 22 years old when he outlined the basic ideas of his poetics, Bang identified many crucial concerns of modern narrative texts. His own stories and novels impressively translated his programme into practice. Stories, such as ‘Frøken Caja’, and the short novel Ved Vejen (1886) describe what he called ‘quiet existences’, the mute melancholics who are prevented from realizing their dreams. Their disillusionment is expressed in scenes of everyday banality. Impression replaces description, the reader becomes an observer, and what is observed remains without valuation. In the urban novel Stuk (1887), this technique is mirrored by the text’s themes: while ostensibly discussing the theatre, it highlights the increasing theatricality of life. The narrator’s absence makes the reader ‘see’ and feel the absence of hierarchies and causal relations, the brief, uncommented verbal exchanges communicate unrest and immediacy, the lack of inquit formulae (‘… he said’) deindividualizes the speakers, and a dialogic structure bordering on cacophony mirrors the babble of voices and synchronicity of life. These techniques not only bring out characteristics of modern urban life and modern man but also expose the world of art as commodified. The theatre 29

See the groundbreaking outline of impressionistic prose in Sven Møller Kristensen, Impressionismen i dansk prosa 1870–1900 (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1955).

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is a world of pretence; art is determined by commercial circumstances rooted in fraud. Despite its acute diagnosis of its times, the novel attracted only relatively modest international attention – its avant-garde aesthetics were evidently ahead of its readers: Stuk was translated into German as Zusammenbruch only in 1910, a Russian version followed in 1916. The majority of Bang’s works is characterized by a resigned outlook on life. The war novel Tine (1889) constructs a parallel between a futile love story and the events of the war, which culminated in the defeat of 1864, a brutally destructive present is contrasted with a subjectively idyllic but irretrievable past. Ludvigsbakke (1896) harshly confronts a lost past with the calculating and merciless modern age of money and competition. Although the content of these texts seems to be concerned with a closely delimited and specifically Danish world, their melancholy and formal presentation nevertheless appealed to a transnational audience. Over time, however, Bang increasingly incorporated more cosmopolitan themes, as well as representatives of foreign parts, not least in order to gain a better footing on the European market. Examples are provided by his stories from the cosmopolitan hotel- and circus-world. ‘Fratelli Bedini’, ‘Charlot Dupont’ (1885) and De fire Djævle (1890) show the temptations, promises and cruelties of an internationally oriented world of variété shows and circuses that presented acrobatics and art as commodities. The circus artistes provide particularly impressive portraits of the venal and market-dependent artist. The international composition of the troupes is less a reflection of cosmopolitanism than of market-driven nomadism, a modern form of slavery. In his second to last novel Mikaël, the relationship between art and market finally takes centre stage. This artist-novel was quite successful and translated into Swedish (1904), Dutch (1905), German (1906), Russian (1917), Polish (1928) and Bulgarian (1929), as well as into French and Italian some time later. In 1924, Carl Theodor Dreyer produced a film adaptation of the novel for the UFA, distinguished by its elaborate production design. In Germany and Denmark the film was successful and positively reviewed, whereas in the United States responses were very critical.30 Interpretations often focused on the homoerotic overtones of the relationship between the painter Claude Zoret and his protégé and model Mikaël. The sexual theme is coupled to an economic discourse, their relationship is determined by a conflict of values. The novel is saturated with the tension resulting from the ambivalent position of painting between artistic 30

On the reception, see Lisbeth Richter Larsen: http://www.carlthdreyer.dk/Filmene/Michael/ Modtagelsen.aspx.

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and monetary value. The fact that Mikaël sells a gift, a famous painting by Zoret, for money is pivotal to the conflict between the two. Questions of property, venality and value are linked not only to art but also to the relationship between the two protagonists. A money discourse is ever present in the homoerotic relationship and in the novel as a whole. The master, as Zoret is usually called, lives for his art and finds it ‘bad enough that one has to sell’ (Bang Mikaël: 38). The international art market in particular, ‘Americans [who] come here to buy’, repels him. But he has got to admit: ‘But it is they who let us live – live as we do. It is the buyers. It is the market – over there’ (38). The passage clearly marks out both how unavoidable the market is to the art business and how global its reach. Later, it is even said that the master employs agents on ‘five continents’: ‘After the success in Melbourne there is also Australia’ (155). The audience attracted by the vernissage described in the text is international, ‘all languages mingled together’ (195), with the result ‘that the world has crowned [the painter]’ (201). By using the art world as an example, the novel thus thematizes precisely what was said above about the literature market: the range of art becomes global only when a worldwide market is available (Sapiro ‘Globalization and cultural diversity’: 423). Bang’s artist-novel not only portrays the competitiveness and rivalry this engenders, but especially discusses the reification of personal relations between master and protegé. In a self-reflexive way, the novel engages with the status of art and literature as components of the modern and global world of commodities: success and fame are rendered attractive and despicable in equal measure. In modernity, the status of the author and the distribution of his works across the globe have their price. With this diagnosis, Bang’s novel corroborates a central hypothesis of this chapter, that the beginning of professional authorship went hand in hand with the problematization of its status – the value of literature is measured by a double standard, aesthetic innovation and commercial profit. The three protagonists of this chapter attended to both these registers of value without focusing exclusively on short-term commercial success, thus admitting them to a canon and so to world literature. This status is visible in the periodically recurrent and even ongoing international interest in their works, in new translations and a persistent presence on the book market.31 Bang’s and Jacobsen’s poetics 31

Only to quote some examples: Bang: English: Ida Brandt, 2013; As Trains pass by, 2015. French: Mikael, 2012; Spanish: Mikael, 2011; German: Am Weg, 2006; Das weiße Haus/Das graue Haus, 2007; Tine, 2013; Ludvigshöhe, 2014; Brandes: Chinese: Ni-ts´ai (Nietzsche), 1992; Italian: Friedrich Nietzsche, 1995; Russian: Russkie vpechatleniia, 2002; Jacobsen: German: Niels Lyhne, 2013. In the case of Bang in Germany we can diagnose a veritable renaissance on the book-market.

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contributed important impulses to the aesthetics of early European Modernity, the significance of which is apparent from the multiple waves of reception and the ever-changing readings of their works. They resist being pinned down as apostles of specific’isms, and instead emerge as creative innovators of literary forms around the turn of the century. Georg Brandes’ role is complementary, inasmuch as his widely heard wake-up call emphasized the societal and global relevance of the literature of modernity.

Bibliography Bang, Herman. ‘“Impressionisme”. En lille Replik’. Tilskueren, August 1890: 692–694. Bang, Herman. Realisme og Realister. Kritiske studier og udkast, ed. Sten Rasmussen. Copenhagen: Borgen, 2001. Bang, Herman. Romaner og noveller, ed. Det danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab. 10 vols. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2008–2010. Bang, Herman. Vekslende Temaer, ed. Sten Rasmussen. 4 vols. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2006. Barfoed, Niels, ed. Omkring Niels Lyhne. Copenhagen: Reitzel, 1970. Baumgartner, Walter. ‘Georg Brandes´ Zola-Aufsatz in der Deutschen Rundschau 1888 als Beitrag zur Verkennung und Abwehr des Naturalismus’. In Den politiske Georg Brandes, edited by Hans Hertel, Sven Møller Kristensen, 146–168. Copenhagen: Reitzel, 1973. Berthelsen, Sune and Ditte Marie Egebjerg. ‘Europa i Danmark, Danmark i Europa. Georg Brandes som national kosmopolit’. In Det stadig moderne gennembrud, edited by Hans Hertel, 99–122. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2004. Bjerring-Hansen, Jens. ‘Brandes, Brentano og Bern-konventionen. Om Georg Brandes revision af Den romantiske skole i Tydskland’. Danske Studier (2008): 150–167. Bohnen, Klaus. ‘Nachwort. Zur Rezeption des Niels Lyhne im deutschen Sprachraum’. In Jens Peter Jacobsen, Niels Lyhne, edited by Klaus Bohnen, 256–269. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1984. Bourdieu, Pierre. Les Règles de l’art: genèse et structure du champ littéraire. Paris: Edition du Seuil, 1992. Bradbury, Malcolm and James McFarlane, eds. Modernism 1890–1930. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976. Brandes, Georg. ‘Det uendeligt Smaa og det uendeligt Store i Poesien’. In Kritiker og Portraiter, 279–297. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1870. Brandes, Georg. Hovedstrømninger i det nittende Aarhundredes Litteratur. 6 vols. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1872–1890 [repr. 5th edition Copenhagen: Jespersen & Pio, 1966–67].

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Brandes, Georg. Samlede Skrifter. 18 vols. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1899–1910. Brandes, Georg and Edvard Brandes. Brevveksling med nordiske Forfattere og Videnskabsmænd. 8 vols, ed. Morten Borup. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1939–1942. Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. Harvard: University Press, 2004. Damrosch, David. What is World Literature? Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003. Foucault, Michel. ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?’. Bulletin de la Société française de philosophie, 63e année, no 3 (juillet–septembre 1969): 73–104. Greenblatt, Stephen. Learning to Curse. London/New York: Routledge, 1992. Heitmann, Annegret and Stephan Michael Schröder, eds. ‘Zur Einführung: Geschichte und Perspektiven der deutschen wie internationalen Herman Bang-Rezeption und –Forschung’. In Herman-Bang-Studien. Neue Texte – neue Kontexte, edited by Annegret Heitmann, Stephan Michael Schröder, 9–46. München: Utz, 2008. Hertel, Hans, ed. Det stadig moderne gennembrud. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2004a. Hertel, Hans. ‘Georg Brandes´ kulturrevolution – og kulturkampen omkring Georg Brandes 1871–2004’. In Det stadig moderne gennembrud, edited by Hans Hertel, 51–98. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2004b. Hertel, Hans and Sven Møller Kristensen, eds. The Activist Critic. Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1980. Jacobsen, Harry. Herman Bang, 4 vol., Copenhagen: Hagerup, 1954–1966. [Den unge Herman Bang. Copenhagen: Hagerup, 1954; Herman Bang: Resignationens Digter. Copenhagen: Hagerup, 1957; Aarene der gik tabt: Den miskendte Herman Bang. Copenhagen: Hagerup, 1961; Den tragiske Herman Bang. Copenhagen: Hagerup, 1966] Jacobsen, Jens Peter. Niels Lyhne, ed. Jørn Vosmar (=Danske klassikere). Copenhagen:Gyldendal, 1986 [1880]. Jacobsen, Jens Peter. Samlede Værker, ed. Frederik Nielsen, 6 vols., vol. 5 [Breve]. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde & Bagger, 1973. Jørgensen, Jens Anker and Knud Wentzel, eds. Hovedsporet. Dansk litteraturs historie. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2005. Knudsen, Jørgen. Georg Brandes, 5 vol., Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1985–2004 [Georg Brandes. Frigørelsens vej 1842–77. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1985; Georg Brandes. I modsigelsernes tegn 1877–83. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1988; Georg Brandes. Symbolet og manden 1883–95. 2 vols., Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1994; Georg Brandes. Magt og afmagt 1896–1914. 2 vols., Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1998; Georg Brandes. Uovervindelig taber 1914–1927. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2004.] Larsen, Svend Erik. ‘Georg Brandes. The Telescope of Comparative Literature’. In The Routledge Companion to World Literature, edited by Theo D´haen, David Damrosch, Djelal Kadir, 21–31. London/New York: Routledge, 2012. Madsen, Peter. ‘World Literature and World Thoughts: Brandes/Auerbach’. In Debating WorldLiterature, edited by Christopher Prendergast, 54–75. London/New York: Verso, 2004.

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Mann, Klaus. Rejse til nattens ende, transl. and ed. Dag Heede, Odense: Syddansk universitetsforlag, 2009. Marschall, Birgit. Reisen und Regieren. Die Nordlandfahrten Kaiser Wilhelms II. Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1991. Mendelssohn, Peter de. S. Fischer und sein Verlag. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1970.Møller Kristensen, Sven. Impressionismen i dansk prosa 1870–1900. Copenhagen:Gyldendal, 1955. Møller Kristensen, Sven. ‘To personer, to principper’. In Omkring Niels Lyhne, edited by Niels Barfoed. Copenhagen: Reitzel, 1970. Mortensen, Klaus P. and May Schack, eds. Dansk Litteraturs Historie. 5 vols., Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2006–2009. Nielsen, Lauritz, ed. Herman Bangs Vandreaar. Fortalt i Breve til Peter Nansen. Copenhagen: Henrik Koppels, 1918. Nolin, Bertil. Den gode européen. Studier i Georg Brandes´ idéutveckling 1871–1893. Stockholm: Norstedts, 1965. Osteen, Mark and Martha Woodmansee, eds. The New Economic Criticism. Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics. London/New York: Routledge, 1999. Sandberg, Anna. ‘Herman Bangs Transferfunktion im Dreieck Skandinavien – Frankreich – Deutschland um 1900’. In Literarische Transnationalität. Kulturelle Dreiecksbeziehungen zwischen Skandinavien, Deutschland und Frankreich im 19. Jahrhundert, edited by Karin Hoff, Anna Sandberg and Udo Schöning, 147–172. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2015. Sapiro, Gisèle. ‘Globalization and Cultural Diversity in the Book Market: The Case of Literary Translations in the US and in France’. Poetics 38 (2010): 419–439. Sørensen, Bengt Algot. Funde und Forschungen. Ausgewählte Essays. Odense: University Press, 1997. Sørensen, Bengt Algot. Jens Peter Jacobsen. München: Beck, 1990. Sørensen, Bengt Algot. ‘Georg Brandes als deutscher Schriftsteller’. In Den politiske Georg Brandes, edited by Hans Hertel and Sven Møller Kristensen, 127–145. Copenhagen: Reitzel, 1973. Sørensen, Peer E. Vor tids temperament. Studier i Herman Bangs forfatterskab. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2009. Wegmann, Thomas. ‘Wertpapiere und Zettelwirtschaft: Zur Poesis und Mediologie gehandelter Drucksachen’. In Warenästhetik. Neue Perspektiven auf Konsum, Kultur und Kunst, edited by Heinz Drügh, Christian Metz and Björn Weigand, 296–326. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2011. Wischmann, Antje. Ästheten und Décadents. Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1991

7

Towards a New World: Johannes V. Jensen and Henrik Pontoppidan Jon Helt Haarder

1900: Creating a nice symmetry, Henrik Pontoppidan (1857–1943) pauses midlife in what will be the midst of his ‘Stories about Lucky Per’. Having written and released four ‘informal pamphlets’ – as they were called – about his protagonist, bringing him to the height of happiness, Pontoppidan stops and muses: Hm, what is he to make of this Per? After a two-year break he will begin releasing another four; before rewriting (and rewriting and rewriting) the stories from these pamphlets into a finished, properly bound novel.1 Meanwhile, in another part of town: While Pontoppidan’s protagonist is stuck in a pleasant all-time high, atop a sun-flooded mountain in the Alps with his rich mistress, young Johannes Vilhelm Jensen (1873–1950) releases three short historical novels about a modern anti-hero stumbling through life, in the end inevitably falling, obeying ‘the law of the fall’. They are independent, yet interconnected. Come October 1901 with the release of the third, they will be collected under the title The Fall of the King.2 2000: Lucky Per and The Fall of the King have in the course of the twentieth century been monumentalized as the most important works of their respective 1

2

Flemming Behrendt, ‘Henrik Pontoppidan’, in Danish Writers from the Reformation to Dekadence, 1550–1900, ed. Marianne Stecher Hansen is a good portrait littéraire of both man and work, complete with a list of publications (Dictionary of Literary Biography. Volume Three Hundred. Detroit, MI: Thomson Gale, 2004, 383–395). Apart from the 2010 translation of Lykke-Per, Pontoppidan is not easy to come by in English. The indispensable website www.henrikpontoppidan.dk has an enormous amount of work by and about Pontoppidan in Danish – and a small English version with some articles on Pontoppidan as well as five shorts texts by Pontoppidan: http://www.henrikpontoppidan .dk/text/english/kilder/index.html. Overview in Niels Ingwardsen and Sven Rossel, ‘Johannes V. Jensen’, in A History of Danish Literature, ed. Sven H. Rossel (Lincoln and Nebraska: The University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 301– 310. Johannes V. Jensen, ‘A Wild Incurable Longing…’ Selected Stories, Poems and Myths contains a selection of Jensen’s poems and short prose work in English translation (Wien: Praesens Verlag, 2012). http://johannesvjensen.dk/ hosts a large body of Jensen’s work as well as timelines and other tools for readers and scholars – all in Danish.

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authors’ oeuvres, epitomizing The Great Danish Novel rather than, say, genre-bending and feuilleton-like world literature. At the beginning of a new millennium, Jensen’s originally ill-received and badly selling novel is voted ‘best Danish book of the century’ with Pontoppidan’s taking second place.3 Yet both novels are very much at odds with genre conventions. Several commentators have drawn attention to the irony here, one of them calling the admission of Jensen’s ‘in the best sense indelicate and uneducated book’ into the canon ‘a wonderful scandal’.4 Lucky Per and The Fall of the King are also at odds with their home country. And their two Nobel Prize–winning authors did in fact have a reception outside Denmark in their own time, especially in the Germanspeaking world. Jensen had at least one book out in Germany almost every year between 1907 and 1929, and a regular flow well into the thirties.5 Pontoppidan and Jensen’s success had the general success of Scandinavian naturalism as a prerequisite. Incidentally, Pontoppidan wrote the text for a campaign advertizing Denmark to German tourists – Reisebilder aus Dänemark (1890, Travel pictures from Denmark).6 Scandinavia held an interesting double fascination for the German public. On the one hand, the disillusioned Scandinavian naturalism and early modernism mirrored Germany’s own struggles against backwards provincialism and towards international modernity. On the other hand, Denmark was a destination for the growing tourist industry and seemed like an unspoiled oasis of natural beauty, far and away from capitalism and the rapid industrialization of Germany. One might compare this ambiguity with the similarly ambivalent fascination with Scandinavia in the wake of Nordic Noir’s popularity in England and the United States some hundred years later. 3

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5

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In, 1999 both Politiken and Berlingske Tidende asked their readers to elect ‘The best Danish book of the century’. The Fall of the King was ranked number one on both lists. Lucky Per was number two on Politiken’s list (published 13 May 1999). In Berlingske Tidende (24 April 1999), Syv fantastiske Fortællinger – Isak Dinesen/Karen Blixen’s own translation of Seven Gothic Tales – came in second (third in Politiken). Pontoppidan’ s De Dødes Rige (The Kingdom of the Dead) was number eight here. The lists can be seen at: http://www.litteraturpriser.dk/polaarh.htm. Frits Andersen, ‘Johannes V. Jensen’, in Danske digtere i det 20. århundrede, ed. Anne-Marie Mai (Copenhagen: Gads forlag, 2002), 55. Cf. Lars Handesten, Johannes V. Jensen (København: Gyldendal, 2000), 127ff. If no translator is indicated, translations from Danish are mine. Monica Wenusch, ‘Johannes V. Jensen og Tyskland. Oversættelse og reception, flere brikker til puslespillet’, in På tværs af grænser. Johannes V. Jensen i europæisk og genremæssigt perspektiv, ed. Anders Thyrring Andersen, Per Dahl og Aage Jørgensen (Amsterdam: Scandinavisch Instituut, 2011). Henrik Pontoppidan, ‘Danske Billeder,’ available at http://www.henrikpontoppidan.dk/text/kilder/ boeger/danske%20billeder/danske_billeder.html. This is a copy of Pontoppidan’s Danish original. Pontoppidan was a member of Den Danske Turistforening (The Danish Tourist Association), created in 1889, the impulse coming from, among other things, articles by Herman Bang in Politiken.

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Pontoppidan is undoubtedly one of the greatest chroniclers of his own country. However, the themes and the forms of his work are very much part of more international trends. Working with the irony and the hidden narrators of Gustave Flaubert, and with unreliable narration as in Henry James or Joseph Conrad, Pontoppidan is abreast of the major formal strategies for interpreting the consequences of modernity on offer in European literature.7 Lykke-Per was quickly translated into German as Hans im Glück (1906), alongside many other titles by Pontoppidan.8 Ten years later it turned up in Geörgy Lukács’ seminal Die Theorie des Romans (1916) as an important part of the history of the European novel, a rather singular masterpiece ‘which, of all nineteenth-century novels, comes closest, perhaps, to Flaubert’s great achievement’.9 Lukács corresponded with another Pontoppidan reader and commentator about Hans im Glück, Ernst Bloch, who considered the novel ‘a work that can be counted among the text books of world literature’.10 Thomas Mann was inspired by Pontoppidan and saluted him on his 70th birthday as a ‘full blooded story teller, a critic of life and society of completely European importance’.11 One of the greatest emotional and intellectual challenges around 1900 was the question of religion, in the light of the theory of evolution and other sources of doubt. The writers and artists of Scandinavian naturalism and early modernism renounced religion, but having been brought up with Christianity, they found it hard to find their way in a world that had ‘been abandoned by God’ – as Lukács would put it. Some reconverted, some found substitutes for the grand Christian narrative in the narrative of evolution and the idea of scientific progress, some replaced god with the self, life, nature, the body, woman or art. Once he had achieved it, Jensen never backed down from his optimistic version 7

8

9

10

11

Cf. Naomi Lebowitz, ‘The World’s Pontoppidan and His “Lykke Per”’, Scandinavian Studies 78, no. 1 (Spring 2006). Jørgen Holmegaard, ‘Pontoppidans litterære teknik i en europæisk kontekst’, Nordica 24 (2007): 77–92. Geörgy Lukács, The Theory of The Novel. A Historico-philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature (Manchester: Merlin Press, 1971), 129. Ernst Bloch, ‘Pontoppidans Roman “Hans im Glück”’, in Literarische Aufsätze (Frankfurt aM: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1965), 84. Quoted in Liliane Weissberg, ‘Utopian Visions: Bloch, Lukács, Pontoppidan’, The German Quarterly 67, no. 2 (Spring 1994): 204. Bloch published the piece in Prager Weltbühne in 1937 as premature obituary, having read a mistaken report of Pontoppidan’s death in another Czech newspaper. Letter from Thomas Mann to Politiken published on Pontoppidan’s 70th birthday, 24 July 1927. Quoted from: http://www.henrikpontoppidan.dk/text/seclit/secartikler/mann.html. Jan Hedegaard: ‘Mann lånte fra Pontoppidan’ is an interview with the Danish Germanist Børge Kristiansen, who points to various examples of influence between Pontoppidan and Mann (Berlingske Tidende, 30 November 2002). Quoted from: http://www.henrikpontoppidan.dk/text/seclit/secartikler/ kristiansen/mann.html.

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of Darwinism, though this was increasingly at odds with contemporary science; Jensen loaded the theory of evolution with questions of meaning, not least in the face of death, that science cannot answer. Pontoppidan was more of a pessimist. He knew faith and the church from the inside and was as harshly satirical towards mellow and folksy versions of Christianity as he was sympathetic to more troubled and Kierkegaardian interpretations. They both remained staunch atheists, but perceived modernity as a transitory phase and used literature as a means to point towards a new world, thus inheriting the general narrative bend of nineteenth century worldviews – scientific, philosophical and religious.

Start spreading the news Reviewing a much belated English translation of Lucky Per, Frederic Jameson begins: Once upon a time, when provinces still existed, an ambitious young provincial would now and again attempt to take the capital by storm: Midwesterners arriving in New York; Balzacian youths plotting their onslaught on the metropolis (‘à nous deux, maintenant!’); eloquent Irishmen getting a reputation in London; and Scandinavians – Ibsen, Georg Brandes, Strindberg, Munch – descending on Berlin to find a culture missing in the bigoted countryside. So also Henrik Pontoppidan’s hero, an unhappy clergyman’s son who flees the windswept coasts of Jutland for a capital city which is itself narrow-minded and provincial in comparison with the bustling centres of Europe.

Fredric Jameson, ‘Cosmic Neutrality’ 201112 The ambitious provincial’s quest for success in the capital is one of the most typical motifs of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novels. In a way, everyone was such a provincial arriving in the bustling metropolis of modernity, having left a traditional lifestyle in small town or rural settings, either in spirit, in the flesh, or both. This is August Strindberg striking the pose, descending on Paris in the 1890s, having left not only narrow-minded Stockholm, but also the

12

Fredric Jameson, ‘Cosmic Neutrality’, London Review of Books 33, no. 20 (20 October 2011): 17–18. Quoted from: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n20/fredric-jameson/cosmic-neutrality.

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more up-beat city of Berlin (not to mention a couple of wives, in Sweden and Austria respectively): I come from the mountains and the valleys, from down there by the banks of the blue Danube. I have left behind my cottage by the roadside with the as-yetunharvested grapes, I have left the still-ripening tomatoes and melons, and the roses, which are in bud. For the hundredth time I have strapped on my rucksack and set off to seek work in the great city, the market-place and workshop of embattled minds, Paris!

August Strindberg, ‘Sensations Détraquées’, 189413 Despite being set in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and based on extensive historical studies, The Fall of the King sets off from the same motif. Just like Lucky Per, Mikkel Thøgersen finds himself in the king’s Copenhagen (as the Danish saying goes), far away from the rural conditions in which he grew up and in times of great upheaval concerning science and religion. The insides of these outwardly ambitious young men, so eager to take the capital and modernity by storm, are divided camps. This, rather than ambition in itself, is obviously what interests both author and reader; Freud was a contemporary of Pontoppidan, Jensen and Strindberg, and his work indicates a great deal about the interests of the period in general. Strindberg’s ‘I’ oscillates between lofty self-assurance that he will come, see and conquer the market-place and workshop of embattled minds, and the frightening ‘deranged sensations’ that give the essay its name. Per struggles hard to rid himself of his Christian background and be a manly and materialist conqueror, but Christianity and ‘his father’s shadow’ keep catching up. Mikkel is trapped between egomania and complete paralysis of action due to excessive reflection, a consistent conflict in Jensen’s early work. The figure of the provincial arriving in the capital is more than subject matter, conveniently borrowed from historical circumstance. One might say that literature, not least the genre of the novel, found itself in the same position as these ambitious young men: Just as they sought a psychological means of dealing with surrounding modernity, the novel was seeking a formal one. Lukács in Theory of the Novel thought that Pontoppidan’s Lucky Per provided one of rather few valid responses to just that challenge.

13

August Strindberg, ‘Deranged Sensations’, in August Strindberg. Selected Essays, trans. and ed. Michael Robinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 122.

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Glittering prize Both Johannes Vilhelm Jensen and Henrik Pontoppidan left their parental homes in Jutland for Copenhagen, in order to study medicine and polytechnics, respectively. Neither of them graduated and they both chose the uncertain life of a writer. Rather than engineering the future through science and technology, they wanted to do so through literature. Both authors were inspired by theories of evolution. Lucky Per as well as The Fall of the King contain reflections on the coming community, as it were, as well as the possibility of a new human. Jameson sees Lucky Per as a highly original version of the novel of the artist. It is also a kind of counterfactual autobiography. Like his creator, Peter Andreas Sidenius leaves the school of polytechnics, not because he wants to interpret modernity in literature like Pontoppidan did, but because he finds the teachers and the teaching too old-fashioned for his engineering ambitions. Per does not work with words; he wants to change the Danish part of the face of the earth by way of an enormous canal project. Pausing in his design work, he looks out of the window, down at ‘the raw stuff of Denmark’s future, the dead clay that he, like God, dreamed of creating in his own image, breathing into it the life of his emancipated soul’.14 Jensen devoted a lot of his work to combinations of avant la lettre gonzo journalism, poetic vision and popular science. His grand narrative of the Nordic race as ancestors to Columbus, modern America and industrial modernity as such was articulated early; with delightful futurist gusto in the travel articles Den gotiske Rennaissance (1901, The Gothic Renaissance) as well as two novels set in America; with increasing jingoism in numerous collections of essays as well as a series of novels under the title Den lange Rejse (1908–1922) – ‘Jensen’s sixvolume evolutionary bible recounting “the long journey” of mankind’.15 In The Fall of the King, however, we find a somewhat less optimistic story about a new human, a homunculus with an enormous brain created by a demonic scientist. 14

15

Henrik Pontoppidan, Lucky Per, trans. Naomi Lebowitz (New York: Peter Lang, 2010), 89. The interpretation of post-humanism in this passage stems from Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, The New Human in Literature. Posthuman Visions of Changes in Body, Mind and Society after 1900 (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 89–90. Aage Jørgensen, ‘Johannes V. Jensen (Literature 1944). “… A Good Enough Poet and, nowadays, a Good Enough Human Being…”’, in Neighbouring Nobel. The History of Danish Nobel Prizes, ed. Henry Nielsen and Keld Nielsen (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2001), 215. It is well worth noticing that in spite of the racist, imperialist and sexist elements of his version of evolutionary theory, Jensen was an early and clearheaded opponent of Nazi Germany’s misuse of Nietzsche and Darwin. Indeed, he saw his life’s work as a battle against a Nietzsche-infused ‘bad Darwinism’.

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Both the scientist and the creature are executed in flames, the bodily reality of their extremely painful end described with a mix of scientific calm and colourful expressionism over several pages.16 As a very old man, Pontoppidan wrote of himself: ‘For a number of years I did my duty as a foot soldier in the human spirit’s eternal fight for freedom.’17 As a young man he had indeed been a part of the political and cultural struggle termed ‘The Modern Breakthrough’ by its leading figure, George Brandes, a specifically Danish and Scandinavian mixture of political liberalism, Darwinism, (cautious) literary naturalism and enlightenment philosophy. Pontoppidan’s first wife was a peasant’s daughter, and they lived in the countryside when he debuted in 1881. He was never sentimental about this starting point, and his early prose, mostly in short forms, mercilessly points out the facts of rural life in the second half of the nineteenth century: extreme poverty among farm workers and smallholders concealed by the jovial rhetoric of the highly successful land owning peasants, self-confidently marching towards cultural and political influence. As he gained momentum and scope, writing both small and very large novels, Pontoppidan combined these techniques of social, cultural and political critique with a stronger psychological interest. This is markedly the case with the first two of his so-called Three Great Novels, Det forjættede Land (1891–1895, The Promised Land) and Lucky Per. The last of the three great novels, De Dødes Rige (1917, The Kingdom of the Dead), in one way abandons the young man’s belief in political, scientific and social progress. However, as is the case with earlier writing distancing Pontoppidan from the Modern Breakthrough, this novel of bitter political and psychological disillusion – with an ending that is halfway apocalyptic, halfway pastoral – can at the same time be seen as a scorching critique of the Danes for not being revolutionary enough. The wording of the ‘foot soldier’ quote given above might indicate that Pontoppidan was in fact not only thinking about progress in political, scientific and social terms. There is a Hegelian ring to the term ‘human spirit’, and the influence of German idealism upon nineteenth-century Scandinavia can hardly be overestimated. In reaction to the materialism of The Modern Breakthrough that hit Scandinavia in the 1890s, idealism furnished the raw materials for 16 17

See Thomsen, The New Human in Literature, 49–50. Henrik Pontoppidan, Undervejs til mig selv (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1943), 193–194. Translated in Claus Jensen, ‘Karl Gjellerup and Henrik Pontoppidan (1917). An Odd Couple’, in Neighbouring Nobel, ed. Nielsen and Nielsen, 202.

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decadence and symbolism, and in these particular forms might be another source of Pontoppidan’s phrasing here. Judging by the novel Danskere (1896, Danishmen), his debut as a writer of serious literature – and not just of pulp fiction that paid the bills in his early youth – Johannes V. Jensen’s move to Copenhagen never quite brought him to the metropolis of his dreams, exactly because it was a city made of dreams: As the steamer glided closer and closer to Copenhagen, a city built in Buris’ dreams sank in ruins; a white shinning city of palaces which stretched its steeples up into the clarity of the day, accommodating a distinctive noble human race. Buris had not known of this city of dreams before he saw it fade into the mist, withdrawing like a mirage – now that reality faced him naked and grey.

Johannes V. Jensen: Danskere (1896)18 Jensen’s next novel also uses the motif of a Hamsun-like, hyper sensitive, ever reflecting provincial arriving in Copenhagen. In fact, the title character of Einar Elkjær (1898), like both Knut Hamsun and Jensen himself, also visits the international capital of modernity to be – New York – but disappointment is certain everywhere he goes. After his early expiry, the autopsy seems to show that Einar had been thinking himself to death. The novel famously ends with the laconic statement: ‘The autopsy suggested soft brain.’19 Through his fictional alter ego Buris in Danskere, Jensen links his youthful longings with a general hope for progress just as his elder Pontoppidan would later do, but the protagonists of their grand narratives are different: Pontoppidan’s somewhat idealistic ‘human spirit’ versus Jensen’s more materialist ‘a distinctive noble human race’. Jensen’s hypersensitive and unquenchable longing, delivered in the lyrically compressed prose so typical of symbolism’s rerun of romanticism, seem to be aligned with an idea of evolution beyond the human as we know it now. Jensen spent the rest of his life photo-shopping the symbolist selfie that emerges from his early work, even disowning his first two novels. The picture he wanted to leave behind, by way of a large and enormously varied oeuvre, was that of a manly, optimistic and healthy Darwinist, a resolute lover of facts, a journalist, improvising scientist and chronicler of Himmerland in Jutland where he grew up. It was decidedly not that of an effeminate and hyper sensitive artist. 18 19

Johannes V. Jensen, Danskere (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1972), 28. Johannes V. Jensen, Ejnar Elkjær (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2001), 200.

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With a few outlying exceptions, reception and scholarship has been divided between two positions ever since. Some see Jensen’s life and work as gradually developing a mature relationship with the ever-present and restless longing for an arrival that never takes place. This was the line taken by the Nobel Prize Committee. Others find a modernist pioneer around 1900, a deeply troubled young figure erupting with unprecedented and unrivalled creative energy. And after that? Well, when the devil grows old, he gets himself to a monastery – as the Danish version of an international proverb might be translated with an appropriate ring of Hamlet. Jensen moved ‘from sublime nihilism to positivity of a lower order’, as one of his commentators has it.20 It is easy to ridicule the fact that the 1917 Nobel Literature Prize was awarded to a writer as unimportant as Karl Gjellerup.21 However, giving the award to Gjellerup, a defector from The Modern Breakthrough turned fervent idealist, made it possible for the committee to honour by proxy the only obvious Danish candidate, the ever scandalous Georg Brandes, who for ideological reasons could not be named himself. The proxy was Henrik Pontoppidan, and the Danish prize of 1917 was thus split – rather than just shared – between a great novelist of materialist bend who had just finished another masterpiece (De Dødes Rige) and an inferior but energetically partisan idealist and Pan-Germanist who had not lived in Denmark for over twenty years. The 1917 Nobel Literature Prize was a set assignment, and the setting stemmed not only from the Nobel statutes demanding works of ‘an idealistic tendency’ but also from the realities of the First World War. Giving the prize to a writer from one of the warring nations was out of the question; it had to be a small and neutral one. The Second World War posed comparable problems in terms of both idealism and neutrality. Johannes V. Jensen’s insistent materialism had prevented him from receiving the prize in spite of the fact that he was nominated no less than eighteen times. In the forties, however, the Nietzschean brutality of his youthful futurism could be forgiven in the light of the latter day poetic softening of his Darwinism. He received the prize in 1944 – and this was seen as a discreet encouragement to a Denmark occupied by Nazi Germany.

20

21

Jørgen Elbek, Johannes V. Jensen (Aarhus: Kimære, 1966), 35. Translated in Aage Jørgensen, ‘… A Good Enough Poet and, nowadays, a Good Enough Human Being’, in Neighbouring Nobel, ed. Henry Nielsen and Keld Nielsen, 213. Sven Hakon Rossel states that Jensen reaches a mythic unification of tensions, ‘a sublime synthesis constituting the absolute climax in Jensen’s writing’. Johannes V. Jensen (Boston, MA: Twayne Publishers, 1984), preface. This passage is based on Neighbouring Nobel, 123–243.

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Jensen and Pontoppidan were fundamentally different in almost every way and had very little to do with each other personally. The difference can be seen in a rare moment of overlap. Both men received an honorary doctorate at the University in Lund. The reserved and ageing Pontoppidan accepted the honour but sent his apologies to the awarding ceremony. Jensen, his strained relationship with the academic world and highbrow culture in general notwithstanding, received the laurels at a formal and pompous ritual in 1929.

Stars are stars and they shine so hard The short story ‘Ørneflugt’ (1893, ‘Eagle’s Flight’), is – alongside Lucky Per – the most well-known work by Pontoppidan. It features a satirical and seemingly programmatic rewriting of Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Ugly Duckling’ (1843) that has enabled generations of teachers to set up an instructive antithesis between late romanticist idealism and Scandinavian naturalism. The story is simple: An infant eagle is found by some boys and grows up in the poultry yard of an old parson. The eagle is given the bourgeois name Klaus, he dwells near the pigsty, is lavishly fed with garbage and thrives in the new conditions. Sometimes ‘a vague longing’ overtakes him, but his wings are ‘well clipped,’ and Klaus’ attempts at flying invariably end in a dark corner of the poultry yard. After a couple of years the clipping is neglected and Klaus manages to fly up and away, obeying not only the call of nature in general but also the call of a female eagle. However, the higher spheres are frightening and the physical demands of following the proud female go beyond what the chubby protagonist can muster. He flies home, but alas, a hired man of the farm shoots him, not knowing that what certainly looks like an eagle in fact belongs to the poultry yard. The eagle’s flight ends in the dung heap. Pontoppidan’s text mentions Andersen’s directly in the opening paragraph and concludes with the effective punchline: ‘It avails but little to have come from an eagle’s egg, if one is raised in the poultry yard.’22 The story of the domesticated eagle is an exact, materialist and pessimistic reversal of the idealist conception 22

Pontoppidan revised his texts many times. My reading is based on the 1899 version of ‘Ørneflugt’ available at http://www.henrikpontoppidan.dk/text/kilder/boeger/kroeniker/oerneflugt.html. This and the following quotations are from the English translation of this version published in The American-Scandinavian Review, 1919. Available at http://www.henrikpontoppidan.dk/text/english/ kilder/eagles_flight.html.

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of man in Andersen’s original. To that extent this little text manages satirically to orchestrate for a chamber group, as it were, Georg Brandes large scale criticism of a Danish literature stagnating under a reactionary cultural climate. The paraphrase I have just given does justice to less than half of the short text – and probably also to about half of Andersen’s original which, as is so often the case, contains its own ironic and metafictional hints. To an extent, one might say that Pontoppidan worked in continuation of Andersen, rather than in opposition to him.23 The long middle part of ‘The Eagle’s Flight’, framed by the robust reversal of Andersen’s fairy tale in beginning and end contains a description of Klaus’ ascension. The setting changes from the distinctly Danish parsonage to a high alpine landscape – transposing the register of the text from realism to allegorical symbolism. At first he is overjoyed, in a way that mimics the homecoming of Andersen’s tale, and also of the Bildungsroman more generally: Finding balance between its own identity and its own true element at last, the eagle screams with joy – ‘In a flash it knew what it meant to be an eagle.’ This, however, is the middle of a late nineteenth-century short story, not the end of a Bildungsroman or a fairy tale. Losing sight of any sign of human culture, Klaus is frightened by ‘the empty vastness’ around him. At this point, the she-eagle turns up and invigorates him, and the narrator of the 1899-version intensifies the action by changing to the present tense. She leads him into ever-higher alpine areas of cold and hostile beauty. The air is filled with strange rumbling noises until every sound recedes into great stillness: They have reached a vast stone desert, a chaos of gigantic blocks tumbled upon each other like the ruins of an overthrown tower of Babel. Suddenly the view before them opens. High above the drifting clouds spreads like a vision the unearthly realm of perpetual snow, unsoiled by swarming life, the home of the eagle and the great stillness. The last rays of day seem to be resting in quiet slumber on the white snow. Behind it rises the dark blue sky covered with calm stars.

Henrik Pontoppidan: ‘Ørneflugt’ (1899) This is an unsettling vision of a universe where Earth is not the centre, and human life not a sacred core, but a soiled anomaly in an indifferent and majestic coldness that was there before and will be there after the babbling and ‘swarming 23

Cf. Jakob Bøggild, ‘Pontoppidan’s “Rewritings” of H.C. Andersen’, accessed 19 March 2016, http:// andersen.sdu.dk/forskning/konference/tekst.html?id=10917.

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life’ of humans. The sun is setting, which endows the scenery with a discretely apocalyptic feel. ‘Eagle’s Flight’ is a naturalist frame around a symbolist core, around existential questions raised and left unanswered by God’s death and the new materialist metaphysics. The text even suggests that what we normally think of as reality is a human construction, a veil drawn over a universe man cannot bear to behold.24 Such a worldview certainly breaks with a long Christian tradition, but the break is by no means absolute. The division of the world in two spheres, a dingy netherworld of human activity and an unearthly realm of eternal beauty, is not exactly new.

It’s a man’s man’s world ‘What do men want?’ – Anthony Giddens asked in The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism (1992), and continued: In one sense the answer has been clear and understood by both sexes from the nineteenth century onwards. Men want status among other men, conferred by material rewards and conjoined to rituals of male solidarity. But the male sex here misread a key trend in the trajectory of development of modernity. For men self-identity was sought after in work, and they failed – we always have to add, by and large – to understand that the reflexive project of self involves an emotional reconstruction of the past in order to project a coherent narrative towards the future. Their unconscious emotional reliance upon women was the mystery whose answer they sought in women themselves; and the quest for selfidentity became concealed within this unacknowledged dependence. What men wanted was something which women had in some part already achieved; it is no wonder that male authors, including the narrator of My Secret Life, became obsessed with the secret that only women could reveal, but which the piling up of amorous conquests wholly failed to disclose.

Anthony Giddens: The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism (1992)25

24

25

And yes, Pontoppidan did study Nietzsche as well as Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard, having been introduced to them by, of course, Brandes. See Thomas Wittendorf, ‘Selvforholdet som erstatning for gudsforholdet. Lykke-Per og Nietzsche’, http://www.henrikpontoppidan.dk/text/seclit/secartikler/ wittendorff.html; Lebowitz ‘The World’s Pontoppidan and His “Lykke Per”’. Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism (Oxford: Oxford Polity Press, 1992), 60.

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This quotation points out a vital problem concerning male identity in modern times, not least around 1900. One way of interpreting Lucky Per would be to see it as large-scale demonstration of such a male misreading of modernity. Peter Andreas Sidenius – the rebel son of provincial parson – tries to make it big in a man’s man’s world of struggle and competition. His luck as a womanizer works to the same end: Conquering women gives him status (inwards as well as outwards), and one particularly rich conquest provides him with access to the influence and finances he needs for his great engineering project. Jakobe, however, is more than the daughter of a very wealthy Jewish financier. Per does in fact realize that she is both intelligent and passionate, but – as men in general do, according to Giddens – he misreads her, their relationship, and thereby himself and the inner logic of modernity. Modernity is not only about urbanization, capitalization, atheism and steam engines. The changes in the sphere of intimacy are just as profound as any of these. The new kinds of intimacy, especially the relation between mother and infant in the nuclear family, on the one hand, and the kind of equal relationship between lovers that Giddens terms the pure relationship, on the other, affect the core of subjective identity. For men, however, the ‘unacknowledged dependence’ on women is repressed, and lives its own life, erupting in womanizing, violence, submission and idealization. The complexity of interpersonal connection is reduced, and the pressure vented in the Madonna-whore complex. Per’s women neatly fall in either category. From the ‘black-eyed, dark-haired pauper-girl’ who laughs at him ‘with her large red half-open mouth’ on a wild sleigh ride while the other boys yell in ‘reluctant admiration’, to Inger Blomberg, the parson’s daughter he ends up marrying. In the following passage, Inger is clearly understood as the Madonna type, while Jakobe is stereotyped as the opposite: It occurred to him, then, that it was more by this chaste composure, rather than by any particular outer traits, that she resembled Fransisca in his eyes. That cool modesty, like the scent of wild roses, had hovered around her form. He could remember how the least allusion to love’s mysteries brought the blood to her cheeks, while Jakobe – no, with her, it was otherwise. He couldn’t deny that it had, now and then, struck him there was something unsavory in the reckless passion with which she had lovingly devoted herself to him.

Henrik Pontoppidan, Lykke-Per (1918)26 26

Pontoppidan, Lucky Per, 406.

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The delusional nature of Per’s reasoning is suggested by the clichéd wording – wild roses, the least allusion to love’s mysteries, reckless passion – and by the discretely outrageous interpretation of Jakobe at the end. While still engaged to Jakobe, Per spends several months in a small town in the Alps – financed by his father-in-law to-be – supposedly studying construction work on a huge dam, in reality stuck in thoughts of a more inward and philosophical kind. Reading between the lines of his detached letters, Jakobe understands the scale of his crisis and turns up, self-confidently disregarding the bigoted morals of her time. Though not married, they spend a week together, and this is how it really was for Per (it was after this chapter on the summit of happiness that his author paused and mused in 1900): For Per, these days really signified a new birth and baptism. His life had suddenly come into a charged richness and beauty he had never dreamt of. He went around in an intoxicated state of revelation, as if he had developed new senses. What he had demanded of happiness seemed to him indifferent and insignificant to the degree of joy to be found in merely one kiss. Jakobe was transformed for him. He loved her now as a woman who had given him new life, who had widened the boundaries of his world, and whose embrace had exorcised the threatening shadow of death from his path.

Henrik Pontoppidan, Lykke-Per (1918)27 Per’s later interpretation of Jakobe and their relationship is obviously in the wrong. She is an erotic being, but also psychologically and intellectually Per’s equal, if not superior. Jakobe does not fit into the Madonna-whore complex, but is Pontoppidan’s rather successful attempt at creating a third way.28 Jakobe’s later fate can be seen as a kind of alternative ending of the novel. Abandoned by Per, and after the death of the child he did not know she was expecting, Jakobe uses her means to create an asylum for the neglected children of the metropolis. As always with Pontoppidan, there is a darker side, too. Even if the tale of her asylum provides an alternative, edifying ending to the novel, the stark Nietzschean bend of Jakobe’s thinking can hardly be considered progressive.

27 28

Ibid., 235–236. For a discussion of Pontoppidan’s female figures, among many others, in the general context of vitalism, see Lise Præstgaard, ‘The Advent of the Natural Woman’, in The Spirit of Vitalism. Health, Beauty and Strength in Danish Art, 1890–1940, ed. Gertrud Hvidbjerg-Hansen and Gertrud Olsner (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2008), 198–217.

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By distorting the image of Jakobe, Per also twists his own conception of their relationship. It seems that a modern relationship between them had in fact been possible, a relationship unlike the traditional marriage based on exterior bonds, one grounded solely on the attraction and mutual sympathy between them. In short: Giddens’ pure relationship and its plastic sexuality was already a fact for Jakobe and Per – when he for sinister reasons broke it off and ran for the safety of Christianity and a traditional marriage in fertile surroundings far from bustling Copenhagen.

Heroes Up to this point, the tale of Lucky Per very much runs like the one about Klaus from ‘Eagle’s Flight’, with rich psychological and historical background added – and an ambiguous and highly original ending coming up. Because of his Christian upbringing in general, and his pastor father’s grim piety in particular, happiness is not available for Per, even if he is lucky all the time.29 He is unable to spread his wings and fly with his eagle princess over half the kingdom, his for the taking – but it the end man enough, though, to realize how clipped he is, how unable to be close to other people. Having lived with Inger for some years, he leaves her and the children, having found a suitable estate owner waiting in the wings for her and the little ones. He then turns around and faces the darkness of his psyche, ‘his father’s shadow’. Living alone as an inspector of roads in the most desolate part of Jutland he finds peace – and in the end, death. Is Per a hero, a true eagle after all, maybe even a new human, no longer afraid of the high alpine landscapes of modern existence? In the end he stands his ground as an atheist and realizes the aphorism: know thyself – age-old, but revitalized in post Christian times, as the Death of God releases energy that can be invested elsewhere, in the self. Per leaves behind little notes saying so much: ‘without the strong, even bold courage to will oneself in all our divine nakedness, no one reaches full freedom’.30 And he is kind. He arranges for his to

29

30

The Danish word ‘lykke’ (as well as the German ‘Glück’) contains an ambiguity that English spells out in two different words. ‘Lykke’ means ‘luck’ as well as ‘happiness’. An English translation by Paul Larkin attempts to retain the ambiguity by introducing a third English concept: ‘A Fortunate Man’ is as yet unpublished but parts of it can be seen here: http://www.henrikpontoppidan.dk/text/english/ kilder/lucky_per/lucky_per01.html. Pontoppidan, Lucky Per, 542.

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be ex-wife to lead the happy normal life she wants. He donates his fortune to the asylum Jakobe runs for poor children of the metropolis, in the spirit of a joint endeavour for creating new humans beyond public and private structures as we know them. Frederic Jameson praises Per’s ‘Cosmic neutrality’ and the novel about him for its original version of melancholia. He clearly distinguishes between this concept and ‘older narrative stereotypes’: ‘We must avoid the temptation of a religious or ascetic interpretation, and the accents either of asceticism or of existential pathos and Pascalian “‘misery”. We must resist the temptation to see Per’s final return to Jutland as a withdrawal from the world.’31 What Pontoppidan and his protagonist discovered was the death wish; central to later theories of desire by Freud and Lacan. Jameson does not mention Lukács, but his conclusion seems to draw on him. Lukács sees Pontoppidan’s novel as the only heir to Don Quixote, the epitome of ‘abstract idealism’ – one of two novelistic reactions to the abandonment of the world by God, the other being ‘The romanticism of disillusionment’. Lukács’ point is that most of Lucky Per reads like a typical nineteenth-century novel, focused on psychological dynamics and development, but then that the ending reveals a completely different psychology, which overturns the interpretation of the narrative we have just read: The revealed transcendence of this ending and its evident prestabilised harmony with the soul give an appearance of necessity to all the confusions that preceded it; indeed, seen from the end, the dynamic relationship between the soul and the world is reversed; it looks as though the hero had always remained unchanged, quietly watching the passing events from within himself; as though the entire action consisted merely in removing the veils in which his soul was wrapped. The dynamic nature of psychology is thus shown to be only apparently dynamic, but not until – and this is where Pontoppidan’s great mastery lies – it has rendered possible a journey through a really vital and dynamic life-totality by its semblance of movement.

Geörgy Lukács’ Die Theorie des Romans (1916)32 Jameson, Lukács, Bloch and many other commentators who interpret Per’s retreat in positive, existentialist terms are absolutely right, but tend to underestimate the tension in the text itself between their own reading and the one they 31 32

Jameson, ‘Cosmic Neutrality’. Lukács, The Theory of The Novel, 122.

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denounce under terms such as Jameson’s ‘older narrative stereotypes’ or Lukács’ ‘Romanticism of disillusionment’. Lucky Per is very much about a man who cannot escape the effects of his upbringing, in the poultry yard as it were. His final courage in accepting himself is heroic, but at the same time looks suspiciously like a substitute for religion. The rejection of his own grand project, the women who love him, and desire itself, seems to be an atheist version of the Christian and paternal renunciation of all worldly goods and pleasures. In terms of his love life, it is a reasonable interpretation to see him as a rather special version of a modern man. Per misreads what Giddens termed ‘a key trend in the trajectory of development of modernity’, first by venturing on a quest for ‘status among other men, conferred by material rewards and conjoined to rituals of male solidarity’ and then once all this is within reach, by gradually trading it for splendid isolation, celibacy and self-realisation rather than new and better forms of intimacy. This exchange clarifies the relationship between Per and the protagonist of the fairy tale on which the novel draws. Like Hans in the Grimm brothers’ ‘Hans im Glück’, Per trades things of value for things of less value until he has nothing. Hans is overjoyed at the end, free at last, but what about Per? The novel is as darkly ambiguous here as Hans Christian Andersen’s superb revamping of the same fairy tale – Hvad Fatter gjør, det er altid det Rigtige (1861, ‘What the Old Man Does Is Always Right’) – is jubilant and slippery.33 The formal mastery of Lucky Per lies in the way Pontoppidan writes his protagonist through the dominant novelistic forms of the nineteenth century – the Bildungsroman and the novel of disillusion – and then creates an ending that is neither naively edifying nor cheaply nihilistic. But this is achieved at the cost of an aporia between different psychological conceptions of the protagonist and the storyline, each denouncing the other. The novel is a masterpiece in the history of the European novel not because it is perfect, but because it is flawed in a particularly successful way.34

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Hans Christian Andersen, ‘What the Old Man Does Is Always Right’, trans. Jean Hersholt, accessed 20 March 2016 at http://www.andersen.sdu.dk/vaerk/hersholt/WhatTheOldManDoesIsAlways.html. In fact, the most obvious connection between Pontoppidan and Andersen is the text from which Pontoppidan takes his title, Andersen’s short, fairy-tale-like novel Lykke-Peer (1870) where the young hero dies at the height of happiness. Lucky Peer, trans. Jean Hersholt, accessed 20 March 2016, http:// www.andersen.sdu.dk/vaerk/hersholt/LuckyPeer.html. Adam Oehlenschläger’s comedy Aladdin, eller Den forunderlige Lampe (1805, Aladdin, or the Wonderful Lamp) resonates in both Andersen and Pontoppidan. Lucky Per and its processing of the motif of ‘lykke’ is richly embedded in earlier Danish Literary history, just as its influence on subsequent works is enormous. An excellent example of this influence is Martin Andersen Nexø’s Pelle Erobreren (1906–1910, Pelle the Conqueror). Cf. Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonder (London: Verso, 1988).

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It is no coincidence that one of Per’s written leftovers denounces the essentialist belief in a true self, not by replacing it by another concept of the self, a constructivist one, but by maintaining that he does not know whether we have a core or whether there are ‘as many souls in us as there are cards in the game of “Cuckoo”’ (541). ‘I wonder, I wonder’, the note ends inconclusively. And so, one might say, does the novel.

Changes Reviewing the second version of Lucky Per (1905), the hugely influential Professor of Danish Literature, Vilhelm Andersen, comments on the slightly old-fashioned tone of Pontoppidan’s prose and compares it to Jensen’s: ‘Pontoppidan keeps his style as a pastor’s wife does the floor of her living room. There is no growth in his prose, it does not sprout after him. When Johannes V. Jensen strides through his mother tongue there is always creation in it, his footsteps drip.’35 There is some truth in this, even if is impossible to be as good a story teller as Pontoppidan is without mastery of language. In Pontoppidan, style always serves the epic intentions. His long and detailed descriptions of landscapes, for instance, be they Danish, alpine or even Greenlandish, are invariably carefully embedded in the thematic structure of the text as suggestive descriptions of the protagonist, as is obvious even in a text as short as ‘Eagle’s Flight’; where they help articulate a biological conception of man. Even if Jensen very much shares this materialist anthropology and often sees his characters as emanations of weather and landscapes, the classicism and moderation of Pontoppidan’s storytelling has no parallel in his work, especially early on. He is first and foremost a writer, and the power of his writing – when he is at his best – tears away from generic, intentional, thematic and structural restraints. The following description of the butchery of a horse – one of many descriptions of physical death in The Fall of the King, the culmination being the 1520 Stockholm bloodbath – has become legend: It was so cold that the snow crunched loudly underfoot, and fingers tingled as if touched by dripping acid. But through the frozen death of the meadow crept the brook, black and open and incurably alive. 35

Vilhelm Andersen, ‘Lykke-Per’, Politiken, 26 December 1905, http://www.henrikpontoppidan.dk/ text/seclit/anmeldelser/lp/andersen_vilh_1905.html. The somewhat impertinent tone of Andersen’s phrasing here was part of a dispute between them – later they became lifelong friends, and Andersen wrote a biographical monograph about Pontoppidan’s work as early as 1917.

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The knacker threw Anders Graa’s horse over on its back and began to cut it open. The blood lay in a big brown puddle, melting down into the snow, and the pinkish froth turned quickly to ice. With every stroke of the knife, color welled up out of the steaming carcass, with marvellous shades of blue and read gleaming from the flesh. Shreds were still twitching, jerking, quivering in the frosty air. The severed muscles writhed like worms licked by flames. The long windpipe was laid bare, the back teeth exposed like four rows of mystic characters. A delicate pink membrane appeared, patterned with a myriad of blue veins, like a countryside scored by many rivers and seen from a great height. When the thorax was opened it was like a cave, with great whitish-blue membranes hanging down, brown and black blood coming out of small holes in the veined walls, and yellow fat stretching from top to bottom in elongated, dripping masses. The liver was more vividly brown than any other brown thing in the world. The spleen appeared, blue and dappled like the night and the Milky Way. And there were many other bright colors – entrails of blue and green, bits and pieces that were brick-red and ocher-yellow. All of the luxuriant, garish colors of the east – the gold of the sands of Egypt, the turquoise of the skies over the Tigris and Euphrates – all the rampant colors of India and the Orient blossomed there in the snow under the knacker’s filthy knife.

Johannes V. Jensen: Kongens Fald (1900–1901)36 This is a provocatively realistic description of the material reality of death, and as such an example of young Jensen’s heavy handed anti-idealism. It is embedded in the larger thematic structure of The Fall of the King which is very much a novel about lack of meaning in the face of death’s inevitability – and in the absence of any religious frame of interpretation. The intestines look like a countryside and the Milky Way, and their colours are connected with the origins of European culture. The description thus brutally suggests that the western empires, the larger culture of man, and the universe itself are under the law of the fall. The force of the description, however, lies in the paradoxical life of a death scene. Jensen had learned his trade as a writer of pulp fiction and knew how to play to a modern mass audience’s fascination of death and destruction. The scandalous energy of the description is well beyond what is needed for the plot,

36

Johannes V. Jensen, The Fall of the King, trans. Alan G. Bower (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 35–36.

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and strains both the referential and the symbolic meaning. As is suggested by the similarity of the knacker’s knife to the writer’s pen, the reference of the passage is on closer inspection not only to an external reality and a thematic structure but also to language and the description itself. The phallic knife of destruction is a magic wand and a potent instrument of masculine writerly fertility, breathing life into a spectacle of vivid colours and endless possibilities of meaning, ready to be interpreted in, for instance, psychoanalytical, queer or postcolonial terms. The passage is a materialist prose poem, an allegory for a kind of bad-taste expressionist vitalism, spelling out – in ‘back teeth exposed like four rows of mystic characters’ – the gospel of the carcass with self-consciously paradoxical élan. Later on, in one of many short mythical interludes, even the grim reaper himself seems to die, screaming ‘like a woman in labor.’37 In spite of the fact that The Fall of the King follows the narrative logic that Lukács termed the biographical inner form of the novel – we follow Mikkel through most of his miserable life – it is a string of prose poems rather than a rounded epic. The third-person narrator permanently hovers on the brink of revealing himself as either the lyrical I of poetry or the self-conscious firstperson narrator common in eighteenth-century novels by Diderot or Sterne. Apostrophes and the second-person pronoun, unusual in prose narration but almost obligatory in older poetry, are used frequently, especially in the recurring descriptions of death, destruction and the transitory nature of human life, creating a strong tension between high style and vividly materialistic pictures.38 These formal traits of The Fall of the King are connected both to Jensen’s productive ambivalence towards fine literature and a general sliding between different text types, registers and author functions at a point in time when the advent of modern mass media had upset traditional distinctions. In Jensen’s literary prose, the journalist and the poet are never much separate. And vice versa: Jensen’s newspaper work was continually collected and offered as literature in book format. The big ego of the gonzo journalist is, after all, often on the brink of morphing into the both all-encompassing and anonymous I of poetry. It is a telling fact that Jensen’s perhaps most famous poem, ‘Interference’, with its picture of the sleepless and split modern mind, was first published as a newspaper article in 1901 and then revamped as free verse poetry in Digte (1906, Poems). With broken-up lines, an expanded text and a place within that 37 38

Ibid., 81. Cf. Stefan Iversen, ‘Den manende apostrofe’, in I nuets spejl, ed. Anders Thyrring Andersen, Per Dahl, and Aag Jørgensen (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2008).

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most prestigious of mediums, the book-borne collection of poems, texts like ‘Interference’ acted as an entrance sign to – and cast the journalist and writer of pulp fiction as a hugely influential pioneer of – literary modernism.

Toback to the fromtime39 Bearing in mind Jensen’s ambivalent relationship with the literary field, the explosively creative nature of his writing, his bastardized aesthetics, the idiosyncratic nature of his points of view, his wide-ranging interests and the many different author functions he tried to incarnate, it is no wonder that Jensen had to invent his own genres. No wonder either that what he termed ‘myte’ (myth) was as successful as it is impossible to define. His own best attempt focusses on the transformation of a situation, an object or a personal story into an epiphanic symbol: ‘a leap into a picture’.40 This makes the Jensenian myth more a device or a method than a genre; a device related to the underlying evolutionary interpretation of man. The later Jensen’s lavish use of the term makes one commentator’s dry definition more accurate: ‘anything that can be published as a feature in Politiken’.41 In fact, Jensen wrote 449 features for the newspaper Politiken, and almost everything under the sky was to be found there. Baptizing a feature ‘myth’ and printing it in a book, Jensen transformed it into literature. This dilution notwithstanding, some of Jensen’s most original work is to be found in his collections of myths. ‘The Skeleton Man’ is a frequently anthologized example. Consisting of two prose pieces brought together in the book Myter og Jagter (1907, Myths and hunts) this myth manages to fashion modern life’s irreducible contradictions and modernity’s inescapable ugliness into a startling picture. Both pieces are set in the grimmest of industrial sceneries, the German town of Krefeld and London, described with the same kind of deadpan virtuosity Jensen used for bull fights in Spain or beheadings in The Fall of the King. In both 39

40

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My reader will no doubt have observed that my subheadings are based on song lyrics. This hybrid of Danish and English punning on Back to the Future is an album title stemming from the frisky Danish hip-hop outfit Malk de Kojn (2010). Johannes V. Jensen, ‘Myten som kunstform (The Myth as Art Form)’, in Interferenser (Copenhagen: Gyldendal), 123. Erik C. Christensen, ‘Modernist Self-Management in Johannes V. Jensen’s “Myter”’ discusses the genre problematics of Jensen’s myths and relates them to the myth in international modernism, especially in Joyce, Woolf, and Eliot (Scandinavian Studies 70, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 1–25). Thomas Bredsdorf, ‘Johannes V. Jensen skrev nedrige nekrologer om de levende’, Politiken, 3 April 2014.

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cities, the first-person speaker witnesses the same cabaret act, where an abused young woman sings a strange little song, accompanied by a cruel clown – a duet between modern life and eternal death bringing ‘healing pain’ to the poor and suffering audience. This is a tribute to a bastardized literature, literature unafraid of human suffering, industrial ugliness and crass mass culture, literature able to look the ‘interference’ of modernity in the eye and hold gaze with the timelessness of myth. One must remember the unforgettable words from The Fall of the King: ‘Through the frozen death of the meadow crept the brook, black and open and incurably alive.’ Jensen’s most popular work was in another genre he more or less made up: short stories set exclusively in the landscape where he grew up, at Himmerland. These Stories of Himmerland were part of a general interest in folklore, rural life and regional settings all over Europe and in every art form. They secured him a large audience and a seat in ‘The Rural Rebellion’ where, for the first time, rural life – not least the material reality of poverty and hard manual labour – was described by people who had actually lived such a life rather than by members of the culturally hegemonic bourgeoisie gone radical (such as Pontoppidan, the parson’s son). Jensen’s father was, in fact, not a peasant, but a veterinarian. The family lived among people working the land, but led a life different from theirs. Jensen left for Copenhagen, and from there he travelled extensively throughout the world, driven by alternating impulses of outward, restless appetite for the exotic and the modern and, once he was on the road, inward longing for home. Just as one can question whether he ever arrived anywhere, it is doubtful whether he ever returned. The stories of Himmerland display a highly original processing of these ambiguities. People and landscapes are described with the insider’s knowledge but seen from a distance, noticeable in the language and attitude of the narrator. Very often the protagonists are strange outsiders rather that representatives of a class or a milieu. It is easy to understand why the stories and their author were seen as part of the regionalist trend. Jensen took this view himself, and engaged in merciless fights with his sister, the writer Thit Jensen (1876–1957), over the literary patent on Himmerland. However, both the themes and forms of Jensen’s stories differ fundamentally from comparable contemporaries. One finds no social indignation in Jensen, and though the stories from Himmerland can be nostalgic, it is a cosmic and even futurist nostalgia, rather than a clichéd longing for ways of life eradicated by modernity. Jensen’s vitalism and Darwinism made

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him think of man as an educated animal, and in a way his evolutionary thinking was a narrative and edifying trip back to the future; or rather a step forward to a past where people lived in direct exchange with nature’s both brutal and beautiful cycles. The childhood landscape of Himmerland as a literary and mythical construct was where the grand narrative of evolution led. ‘The natural sciences applied retroactively’ was one of many explanations of his mythical method.42 Read in this way, Jensen’s Himmerland is a myth and a utopian chronotope – a conception of time manifested as a place. In its fusion of progressive and reactionary vectors it is very similar to the sequences which concludes Pontoppidan’s last great novel, the multiprotagonist narrative De Dødes Rige (1917, The Kingdom of the Dead). In the end, all the threads of the novel’s vast tissue of plots come together in a farm collective, where the characters form a secular utopia, a new world beyond the political and technological mirages of modernity. In the last lines, like an inverted story of Cain and Abel, two brothers are reconciled with each other. Poul is an atheist doctor and the informal leader of the rural asylum, and welcomes his hitherto zealous pastor brother, who seems to be worn out by the less than idealistic intrigues of church politics in the capital: ‘Oh, Johannes, you really have come back from the kingdom of the dead!’43 The central motif of the novel is here connected not only to the church but also to the hustle and bustle of Copenhagen. Both the old belief in God and the more modern worship of money and scientific as well as political progress are denounced and bypassed in the mature Pontoppidan’s vision of a new world. As was the case with Lucky Per, though, the ending is ambiguous. For what is the reader to make of the flute notes coming out of a hut in the very last line? Is this a metafictional comment on the scene as a pastoral, or background music to a touching (but even so, reactionary) finale? In the course of the secularization process, nature supplanted God as the ultimate referent throughout the Western world; Jensen’s grand evolutionary myth and Pontoppidan’s great novels gave form to this both retrograde and forward-looking replacement. Well over 100 years later, we are less preoccupied with the death of God; now it is the successor, nature, which seems to be dying. Not only in the physical sense. Maybe nature as a strongly normative metaphysical 42 43

Jensen, ‘Myten som kunstform (The Myth as Art Form)’, 123–124. Henrik Pontoppidan, De dødes rige (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1986), 244.

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concept needs to die – in the same way that God needed to die for Jensen and Pontoppidan: to make way for life and a new world. That is, at least, the claim coming from the dark corners of contemporary eco-criticism, as in Timothy Morton’s Ecology Without Nature. Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (2007). It remains to be seen what literary forms will be relevant in this transition. ‘The novel is the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God,’ Lukács stated. What forms could we use in a world abandoned by nature?

Bibliography Ahnlund, Knut, ed. Omkring Lykke-Per. Købehavn: Hans Reitzels forlag, 1971. Andersen, Frits. ‘Johannes V. Jensen’. In Danske digtere i det 20. århundrede, edited by Anne-Marie Mai, 50–71. Copenhagen: Gads forlag, 2002. Andersen, Hans Christian. Lucky Peer, translated by Jean Hersholt. Accessed online 20 March 2016. http://www.andersen.sdu.dk/vaerk/hersholt/LuckyPeer.html. Andersen, Hans Christian. ‘What the Old Man Does Is Always Right’, translated by Jean Hersholt. Accessed 20 March 2016. http://www.andersen.sdu.dk/vaerk/hersholt/ WhatTheOldManDoesIsAlways.html. Andersen, Vilhelm. ‘Lykke-Per’. Politiken, 26 December 1905. Accessed 19 March 2016. http://www.henrikpontoppidan.dk/text/seclit/anmeldelser/lp/andersen_vilh_1905. html. Behrendt, Flemming. ‘Henrik Pontoppidan’. In Danish Writers from the Reformation to Dekadence. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Volume Three Hundred, 1550–1900, edited by Marianne Stecher-Hansen, 383–395. Detroit, MI: Thomson Gale, 2004. Bloch, Ernst. ‘Pontoppidans Roman “Hans im Glück”’. In Literarische Aufsätze. Frankfurt aM: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1965. Accessed 20 March 2016. http://www .henrikpontoppidan.dk/text/seclit/secartikler/bloch.html. Bøggild, Jakob. ‘Pontoppidan’s “Rewritings” of Andersen’. In Hans Christian Andersen. A Poet in Time, edited by Johan de Mylius, Aage Jørgensen, and Viggo Hjørnager Pedersen. Odense: Odense University Press, 1999. Accessed 19 March 2016. http:// andersen.sdu.dk/forskng/konference/tekst.html?id=10917. Bredsdorf, Thomas. ‘Johannes V. Jensen skrev nedrige nekrologer om de levende’. Politiken, 3 April 2014. Accessed 19 March 2016. http://politiken.dk/kultur/boger/ ECE2251955/johannes-v-jensen-skrev-nedrige-nekrologer-om-de-levende/. Christensen, Erik C. ‘Modernist Self-Management in Johannes V. Jensen’s “Myter”’. Scandinavian Studies 70, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 1–25. Elbek, Jørgen. Johannes V. Jensen. Aarhus: Kimære, 1966. Giddens, Anthony. The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies. Oxford: Oxford Polity Press, 1992.

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Handesten, Lars. Johannes V. Jensen. København: Gyldendal, 2000. Hedegaard, Jan. ‘Mann lånte fra Pontoppidan’. Berlingske Tidende. 30 November 2002. Accessed 19 March 2016. http://www.henrikpontoppidan.dk/text/seclit/secartikler/ kristiansen/mann.html. Ingwardsen, Niels and Sven Rossel. ‘Johannes V. Jensen’. In A History of Danish Literature, edited by Sven H. Rossel, 301–310. Lincoln and Nebraska: The University of Nebraska Press, 1992. Iversen, Stefan. ‘Den manende apostrofe’. In Nuets spejl, edited by Anders Thyrring Andersen, Per Dahl, and Aage Jørgensen, 266–285. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2008. Jameson, Fredric. ‘Cosmic Neutrality’. London Review of Books 33, no. 20 (20 October 2011): 17–18. Accessed 19 March 2016. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n20/fredric -jameson/cosmic-neutrality. Jensen, Claus. ‘Karl Gjellerup and Henrik Pontoppidan (1917). An Odd Couple’. In Neighbouring Nobel. The History of Danish Nobel Prizes, edited by Henry Nielsen and Keld Nielsen, 147–206. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2001. Jensen, Johannes Vilhelm. ‘A Wild Incurable Longing …’ Selected Stories, Poems and Myths, translated by David W. Colbert, edited by Sven Hakon Rossel and Monica Wenusch. Wien: Praesens Verlag, 2012. Jensen, Johannes Vilhelm. Danskere. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1972. Jensen, Johannes Vilhelm. Ejnar Elkjær. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2001. Jensen, Johannes Vilhelm. The Fall of the King, translated by Alan G. Bower. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Jensen, Johannes Vilhelm. ‘Myten som Kunstform’. In Interferenser. Copenhagen: Dansklærerforeningen, 1994. Jensen, Leif. ‘Danske litteraturpriser. Århundredets bog’. Accessed 19 March 2016. http://www.litteraturpriser.dk/polaarh.htm. Jørgensen, Aage. ‘Johannes V. Jensen (Literature 1944). “… A Good Enough Poet and, nowadays, a Good Enough Human Being…”’ In Neighbouring Nobel. The History of Danish Nobel Prizes, edited by Henry Nielsen and Keld Nielsen, 207–243. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2001. Lebowitz, Naomi. ‘The World’s Pontoppidan and His “Lykke Per”’. Scandavian Studies 78, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 43–70. Lukács, Georg. The Theory of the Novel. A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature. Manchester: Merlin Press, 1971. Mann, Thomas. ‘Sehr Geerhrter Herr’ (Letter from Mann to Politiken, published 24 July 1927) Accessed 19 March 2016. http://www.henrikpontoppidan.dk/text/seclit/ secartikler/mann.html. Moretti, Franco. Signs Taken for Wonders. London: Verso, 1988. Pontoppidan, Henrik. ‘A Fortunate Man, 1905’, translated by Paul Larkin. Accessed 19 March 2016. http://www.henrikpontoppidan.dk/text/english/kilder/lucky_per/ lucky_per01.html.

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Pontoppidan, Henrik. ‘Danske Billeder’. 1889. Accessed 19 March 2016. http://www .henrikpontoppidan.dk/text/kilder/boeger/danske%20billeder/danske_billeder.html. Pontoppidan, Henrik. De dødes rige. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1986. Pontoppidan, Henrik. ‘Eagles Flight’. The American-Scandinavian Review (1929): 556–558. Accessed online 19 March 2016. http://www.henrikpontoppidan.dk/text/ english/kilder/eagles_flight.html. Pontoppidan, Henrik. Lucky Per, translated by Naomi Lebowitz. New York: Peter Lang, 2010. Præstgaard, Lise. ‘The Advent of the Natural Woman’. In The Spirit of Vitalism. Health, Beauty and Strength in Danish Art, 1890–1940, edited by Gertrud Hvidbjerg-Hansen and Gertrud Olsner, 198–217. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2008. Rosendahl Thomsen, Mads. The New Human in Literature. Posthuman Visions of Changes in Body, Mind and Society after 1900. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Rossel, Sven Hakon. Johannes V. Jensen. Boston, MA: Twayne Publishers, 1984. Strindberg, August. ‘Deranged Sensations’. In August Strindberg. Selected Essays, translated and edited by Michael Robinson, 122–134. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Vallgårda, Karen. ‘Continual Conversions: Narratives by Henrik Pontoppidan and Johannes Jorgensen’. Scandinavian Studies 78, no. 3 (Fall 2006): 303–332. Weissberg, Liliane. ‘Utopian Visions: Bloch, Lukács, Pontoppidan’. The German Quarterly 67, no. 2 (Spring 1994): 197–210. Wenusch, Monica. ‘Johannes V. Jensen og Tyskland. Oversættelse og reception, flere brikker til puslespillet’. In På tværs af grænser. Johannes V. Jensen i europæisk og genremæssigt perspektiv, edited by Anders Thyrring Andersen and Per Dahl og Aage Jørgensen, 35–68. Amsterdam: Scandinavisch instituut, 2011. Wittendorf, Thomas. ‘Selvforholdet som erstatning for gudsforholdet. Lykke-Per og Nietzsche’. Accessed 19 March 2016. http://www.henrikpontoppidan.dk/text/seclit/ secartikler/wittendorff.html.

8

Out of Africa, into World Literature Lasse Horne Kjældgaard

The location of Karen Blixen In many respects, Karen Blixen is easier to assign to the category of world literature than to any single national literary tradition. In Denmark, she is known as ‘Karen Blixen’, but her literary breakthrough happened in 1934 in the United States under the masculine pen name ‘Isak Dinesen’. Due to the Jewish connotations of the first name, Isak, Blixen’s works were published in Nazi Germany in the 1930s under the name of ‘Tania Blixen’, a name retained until today in German-speaking countries. Later, in 1944, Karen Blixen employed the French-sounding pseudonym ‘Pierre Andrézel’ for her only novel, The Angelic Avengers. All of these appellations carry with them different connotations and national implications and attest to the complexity of Karen Blixen’s publication history. This becomes even more intricate, when one takes into account the very different images of Karen Blixen that one encounters in the history of reception of the authorship. The post-colonial criticism of her and her work has been relentless in recent decades, especially in that region of the world upon which she wrote one of her most famous (and cinematically popularized) works, Out of Africa (1937/38).1 From 1914 to 1931, Karen Blixen ran a coffee farm in what was called ‘British East Africa, when she arrived, and ‘Kenya Colony’, when she left. These seventeen years are a decisive phase of the almost seventy years the country was under British colonial rule and certainly not a closed chapter in the history of Kenya. 1

The most outspoken and influential postcolonial critic of Karen Blixen is the Kenyan-American writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o. See Ngugi wa Thiong’o, ‘A Tremendous Service in Rectifying the Harm Done to Africa. Address [sic] of the Kenyan Writer, Ngugi wa Thiong’o at the Anniversary of the Danish Library Association’, Bogens verden, 1980, 665; Detained. A Writer’s Prison Diary (London: Heinemann, 1981); and the chapter ‘Her Cook, Her Dog: Karen Blixen’s Africa’, in Moving the Centre (London: James Currey, 1993), 132–135.

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Her memoir of these years, Out of Africa, deals with a crucial period bearing great influence on the situation in Kenya today. For that reason, it is tempting to identify the work and its author with the colonial regime, making Blixen share the blame for some of the atrocities that it committed. This conception of Karen Blixen as a controversial icon of colonial history differs considerably from the biographical and literary approaches, which have dominated the Danish reception. Karen Blixen’s canonical status in Danish literature is uncontested, and perhaps even incontestable, notwithstanding the fact that her works do not fit into any of the conventional narratives of Danish literary history. Moreover, her Danish authorship consists, in fact, of derived texts. Karen Blixen wrote all of her major works in English first, later translating them herself into Danish.2 For this reason, she can be counted among that small group of multilingual writers from the twentieth century – Joseph Conrad, Vladimir Nabokov and Samuel Beckett – who have produced literary masterpieces in other languages than their native tongue. Karen Blixen wrote in English with stylistic exuberance and ingenuity and was recognized as a ‘Danish master of English prose’,3 but she also wrote with phrases and syntactic structures that betray her Danish background. When she subsequently translated herself, ample Anglicisms can be detected in her Danish language. For Blixen, there seems to have been no uncontaminated mother tongue, no ‘pure’ language to fall back upon. ‘I take world literature to encompass all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language’, David Damrosch writes in What Is World Literature?4 The circulation of Blixen’s literary works, which have been translated into more than thirty languages, and which are permeated through and through with literary echoes from all over the world, is beyond doubt. But what are, actually, the ‘culture of origin’ and the ‘original language’ in the case of Karen Blixen? Where does she come from? What is her real name? What corpus does her literary works belong to – Danish literature, American literature, British or African colonial literature – or, indeed, world literature? Is it only possible to answer these questions in the plural, not in the 2

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Regarding Karen Blixen’s practices of self-translation, see Ute Klünder, ‘Ich werde ein großes Kunstwerk schaffen …’ Eine Untersuchung zum literarischen Grenzgängertum der zweisprachigen Dichterin Isak Dinesen/Karen Blixen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000). Katherine Woods, ‘Isak Dinesen’s Fine Record of Life on an African Farm’, in New York Review of Books, 6 March 1938. Quoted from Hans Andersen and Frans Lasson, Blixeniana 1984 (Copenhagen: Karen Blixen Selskabet, 1984), 220. David Damrosch, What Is World Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 4.

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singular? Does the multiplicity of masks that Karen Blixen wore make clearcut national identifications impossible? Are we dealing with world literature in a more hybrid and, indeed, more fundamental sense when it comes to her authorship?

Riding the wave of globalization Née Karen Christenze Dinesen, she was born in Denmark in 1885 (d. 1962), into a wealthy and well-connected family, and she travelled extensively during her childhood and adolescence. Both her paternal and maternal families were steeped deeply in Danish history and culture, while acting also on the global scene as merchants, soldiers, aristocrats and entrepreneurs. Nationalism and cosmopolitanism went hand in hand in Karen Blixen’s childhood home. In 1914, she married her Swedish half-cousin, baron and later big game hunter Bror Blixen, but as they could not afford to settle in style in Scandinavia, they had to look elsewhere. A mutual uncle advised the couple to acquire, instead, a farm in British East Africa, which he had just visited on a safari trip. Another of Karen Blixen’s uncles, Aage Westenholz, believed in the economic prospects of the venture and bought the bulk of the shares in the company founded for the purpose, Karen Coffee Company Ltd. He had himself made a fortune on building tramways in Bangkok and was ready to reinvest some of his profits in a plantation that should grow and export coffee to the international market. The financing of Blixen’s farm illustrates how streams of capital flowed across the continents in the age of empire. At the time when Blixen emigrated from Denmark, the world economy was at the crest of a globalization wave that had gained momentum in the middle of the nineteenth century with new distanceshrinking technologies and with the development of modern communication and transport infrastructures.5 Cross-border trade and overseas investments grew rapidly in the decades up to the First World War. The globalization wave began to ebb away with the outbreak of war in 1914, in the same year when Blixen arrived in British East Africa. Broadly speaking, it would have been difficult for her to choose a more unfortunate time to emigrate. In terms of profit, Karen Coffee Company never became a successful enterprise. The destiny of the farm 5

Niall Ferguson has observed that ‘trade, migration and international lending all reached levels [in the pre-1914 decades] in relation to global output not seen again until the 1990s’ (Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: History’s Age of Hatred (London/New York: Allen Lane, 2006), 16).

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was dependent upon the global recession following in the wake of the First World War, and The Great Depression contributed to the ultimate downfall of Karen Coffee Company Ltd. The wave of globalization that Karen Blixen had been riding eventually washed her ashore on the coast that she came from. In September 1931, Karen Blixen came back to live with her mother in her childhood home in Rungsted, a seaside village north of Copenhagen. At the time, she was 46 years old, divorced, in poor health, financially bankrupt and in deep mourning over the loss of her British lover, Denys Finch-Hatton, who had crashed with his aeroplane only ten weeks earlier. For sure, Blixen was a Baroness, she had a title, but she did not, however, have a formal education nor any prospects of a job or a source of income. What could she possibly do? Karen Blixen had asked exactly this question herself in a frustrated but clear-headed letter to her brother Thomas Dinesen four months before her departure from Africa, dated 10 April 1931: Frankly, it is very difficult to see what I could possibly do in the world. I have, as I think I have written, thought, that if I could only learn how to cook in Paris in one or two years, and then perhaps get a job in a restaurant or a hotel. But I do not know at all; in these bad times, there are perhaps not many opportunities. So I have, in these difficult months, done what we siblings do when we do not know what else to do – I started writing a book. I wrote in English, because I thought that it might pay better, but when I became afraid that the language would be too great a difficulty, I sent a part of it to a friend of Mohr, a publisher called Morley, and asked his opinion about it. He expressed himself encouragingly – (the leisurely style and language are exceedingly attractive) – so that I would almost think it might be possible for me to write in English, and by doing that it would not be impossible that I could get into different things, as for instance journalism. But I must of course, in this case, have time to finish my book, and I think, from what I understand about the conditions regarding English publishers, that I might be forced to publish the first book I write – if it may became more than one! – on my own expense.6

The letter was, to be sure, a kind of supplication, discretely asking Thomas Dinesen for financial support for the literary venture Karen Blixen was about to undertake. But it also reveals Karen Blixen’s destituteness and desperation 6

Karen Blixen, Breve fra Afrika, Vol. 2, ed. Frans Lasson (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1978), 224. Where nothing else is noted, translations are my own [lhk].

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right before her upheaval from Africa. Many years later, in Shadows on the Grass from 1960, she revealed to her readers how devastating this experience had been: ‘During my first months after my return to Denmark from Africa, I had great trouble in seeing anything at all as reality. My African existence had sunk below the horizon, the Southern Cross for a short while stood out after it, like a luminous track in the sky, then faded and disappeared’.7 The life that she came back to seemed unreal – like an exile that she had been driven into – whereas what she considered her real life had faded away and vanished. Tellingly, she chose the Latin phrase ‘post res perditas’ as a motto for one of the chapters in her memoir Out of Africa (1937), meaning ‘after everything is lost’. Upon leaving Africa, Karen Blixen did not know if she was going to train as a chef or risk her neck as a writer. There were no easy ways out, even though her deliberations were worldwide. She decided for the latter option and put all her remaining strength into finishing a collection of stories, which she had begun to write during the last years in Kenya. These stories eventually became the Seven Gothic Tales, published by Random in New York three years later, receiving immediate acclaim by critics and reading audience alike. With the publication of Seven Gothic Tales in April 1934, Karen Blixen achieved international literary stardom almost overnight. Out of Africa, she came into world literature.

The making of Seven Gothic Tales as a world literary classic Karen Blixen’s breakthrough in the United States would seem to be a textbook example of an author from the literary periphery succeeding in breaking into the centre, and even, in the case of New York in the 1930s, into what was then the emerging literary centre of the world.8 Nevertheless, a number of circumstances around the event deviate from the standard pattern. First of all, Karen Blixen had no national literary reputation to build upon. She was completely unknown also to the Danish literary audience. Second, the generic format of her first book – a collection of tales set in foreign times and remote places – seemed ill-designed for the pursuit of a commercial success in the United States. She had, in fact, done nothing to conform to the literary fashions of the centre. How, on earth, did she succeed with her endeavour? 7 8

Isak Dinesen, Shadows on the Grass (New York: Random House, 1961), 113. See Pascale Casanova, La République mondiale des lettres (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1999).

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The accomplishment cannot be ascribed to Karen Blixen’s efforts alone but must also be attributed to the international network, which helped her make the publication possible. During the writing, editing and publishing processes, Blixen contacted a number of friends, family and acquaintances around the world, exchanging letters with queries and suggestions between Rungsted and Arlington, Vermont, and further on to Nairobi, London and New York. The making of Seven Gothic Tales was, in actual fact, an intercontinental enterprise. One of the first people that Karen Blixen consulted was the American author Christopher Morley, mentioned in the letter above. Morley was a friend of Karen Blixen’s Norwegian friend in Kenya, Gustav Mohr. He was, in the 1920s and 1930s, a quite known and influential literary figure in the United States and one of the cofounders, in 1926, of the Book-of-the-Month-Club, which would come to serve as an important distribution channel for Blixen’s works in the United States. Later, in the spring of 1932, Karen Blixen wrote to the Australian-British author Bertram Higgins, whose sister she knew from Kenya: You may have heard of me through your sister, Mrs Bruce-Smith, who has been my neighbour and friend in Kenya in many years. She had advised me to write, and she thought that you would not too much mind me bothering you. I have been writing a book of short stories, and would try to get it published. I have no experience in these matters, and should be extremely thankful to you if you would be kind enough to give me your opinion and advice about it. – What I should very much like would be to have one of my stories out in a magazine, but of course I do not know if this would be at all possible.9

Bertram Higgins had, in 1925, helped to launch the literary journal The Calendar of Modern Letters, and he had, in 1933, published a collection of poems, Mordecaius, a major work of early Australian modernism. The same year Higgins returned to London, where Karen Blixen met him in the summer. During this campaign trip, she also met the director of Putnam & Co, Constant Huntington, whom Lady Anne Islington, whose daughter was married to Sir Edward Grigg, the former Governor of Kenya, introduced her to. Although Putnam & Co eventually became Blixen’s British publishing house, Huntington was not even interested in reading her manuscript, at this stage, because he deemed that a collection of short stories by a foreign debutant would be commercially unviable.

9

Letter to Mr Higgins from Karen Blixen, dated 24 April 1932. Karen Blixen Museum, Rungstedlund, Denmark.

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Simultaneously, Karen Blixen explored the possibilities of publishing the book in the United States. In the summer of 1932, she persuaded her brother Thomas Dinesen to write a letter to the American author Dorothy Canfield Fisher, who was a friend, through Unitarian circles, of their aunt, Mary Bess Westenholz. In the United States, Canfield Fisher was known, in particular, for her children’s novel Understood Betsy (1916) and for having introduced Maria Montessori’s children pedagogy. Canfield Fisher immediately gave in to the literary qualities of the tales submitted to her. Her fascination proved instrumental to the publishing of Seven Gothic Tales. Tirelessly, she worked as a kind of literary agent in the service of the book – by introducing Blixen’s manuscript to the publishers, Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, by meticulously opening their eyes (they declined to begin with) to its qualities, by writing a warm and laudatory preface to the book, and by supporting its selection in the Book-of-the-Month-Club, in her capacity as a jury member. Dorothy Canfield Fisher introduced and shaped the image of the totally unknown Isak Dinesen to the American audience. In the preface to Seven Gothic Tales, she presented Isak Dinesen as a ‘Continental European, writing in English although that is not native to his pen, who wishes his-or-her identity not to be known, although between us be it said, it is safe from the setting of the tales to guess that he is not a Sicilian’.10 In line with the masquerading of the book, Isak Dinesen was introduced with no distinct national identity. The first American reviews of the book, however, quickly guessed the author’s affiliation to Denmark (or Yugoslavia!), possibly due to the author’s revealing Danish last name and the high frequency of Danish sites and motifs in the stories. In New York Herald Tribune, Jenny Ballou, for example, noticed that several of the stories were ‘imbued with folklore, history and poetical tradition of Denmark’, and added that ‘Isak Dinesen is the pseudonym of a Continental European whose native land seems to be Denmark’.11 Just over two weeks after the publication, 22nd April, the US publisher released a statement confirming this hypothesis, revealing that Isak Dinesen was a pseudonym for ‘Baroness Blixen, of Rungstedlund Denmark’, whose maiden name was the same as the pseudonymous surname, Dinesen. 10

11

Dorothy Canfield, ‘Introduction’, in Seven Gothic Tales, ed. Isak Dinesen (New York: Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, 1934), vi. Jenny Ballou, ‘These Magic Tales Have an Air of Genius’, in New York Herald Tribune Books, 8 April 1934. Quoted from Hans Andersen and Frans Lasson, eds., Blixeniana 1980 (Copenhagen: Karen Blixen Selskabet, 1980), 88–89.

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These efforts to nationalize Isak Dinesen – to identify the author as a citizen of a particular nation state – opposed the endeavour to give birth to him as a global author. The latter was a deliberate effort undertaken by both her critics and publishers. One week before the publication of Seven Gothic Tales, Robert Haas, her American publisher, wrote to her English publisher Constant Huntington, who had given in by then: ‘I am delighted to know that you are so enthusiastic about “Seven Gothic Tales”. Your enthusiasm, however, cannot exceed our own. We feel that this volume is a really great book, that it will live, and that there is every likelihood of its becoming a classic in the strictest sense of this word’.12 When the British edition of Seven Gothic Tales came out, the critic Howard Spring of The Evening Standard showered it with praise in a review resounding of Matthew Arnold’s cultural ideal, captured in the famous phrase ‘the best which has been thought and said in the world’: I have never recommended a book to the readers of the ‘Evening Standard’ with greater confidence that it is a book which will survive for generations to come. I have not once, till now, in all the time that I have been reviewing books, said, ‘Here is a book that is great not by comparison with its contemporaries, but by any standard that you care to apply. This belongs to the company of the world’s great books.’ Yet that is what I say and feel about Seven Gothic Tales.13

It was in this company of ‘the world’s greatest books’ that several AngloAmerican critics immediately included the Seven Gothic Tales, endorsing it as a timeless and transnational masterpiece. The American publishers swiftly took advantage of this instant global canonization in marketing adds that listed all the world authors, whom Isak Dinesen was compared to in the reviews: William Shakespeare, Giovanni Boccaccio, Henry James, Honoré de Balzac, Max Beerbohm, François Rabelais, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Lord Byron, Baldassare Castiglione, Guy de Maupassant, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Miguel de Cervantes, Robert Louis Stevenson, Anatole France, Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire. In this way, Seven Gothic Tales was born – or constructed – as a world literary classic rather than a work of any national literature.

12

13

Letter from Robert Haas to Constant Huntington, dated 30 March 1934. Quoted from Andersen and Lasson, eds., Blixeniana 1980, 103. Howard Spring, ‘A Danish Genius: She Writes in English’, in Evening Standard, 6 September 1934. Quoted from Andersen and Lasson, eds., Blixeniana 1980, 116–117.

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The imaginations of a Danish emigrant There is no doubt that the fashioning of Isak Dinesen as a world author suited Karen Blixen. It is, indeed, a remarkable fact about Karen Blixen that she explicitly did not intend to become a Danish author. She repeatedly made a point about that. It is true that before the release of Seven Gothic Tales, she had published a few poems and stories in Danish journals, but her first book was, even so, planned to be in English. When asked about this decision in the daily newspaper Politiken in 1934, Blixen replied that ‘My constant notion has been that that book wouldn’t make it in Denmark, otherwise it would, of course, have been easier for me to write it in Danish, although I am able to write in English’.14 She believed that Danish readers of the 1930s were more inclined to social realism than to her extravagant style of writing, whereas the British and the American book markets would have a niche where she would fit in. She was right about the latter and not entirely wrong about the former notion. Only hesitatingly did Karen Blixen agree to have the seven stories published, seventeen months later, as a Danish book with the title Syv fantastiske Fortællinger, rewritten in Danish by herself and published under her own name. ‘The Danish book of world renown’, her Danish publishers, C.A. Reitzel, called it in newspaper ads, although it would have been more suitable to describe it as a kind of international literary work, which was about to embark upon a journey into Danish literature. This time there was no need for an external introduction of the author. Karen Blixen added her own preface to the Danish version, telling her readers that Danish names and place names, as well as accounts of Danish history and quotes by Danish poets have been employed throughout the entire book with much license. A great part of the Seven Gothic Tales has been conceived, and some of it written in Africa, and the places in my book, which are about Denmark, should be perceived as the imaginations of a Danish emigrant upon Danish themes rather as an attempt at depicting reality.15

In these words, Blixen presented the tales to her Danish audience, for whom the book was not intended to begin with. In the preface, she stressed the imaginative

14

15

Johs Jacobsen, ‘Den hemmelighedsfulde Forfatterinde aabner for sin Hemmelighed’, Politiken, 1 May 1934. Karen Blixen, Syv fantastiske Fortællinger. Critical edition by Nicolas Reinicke-Wilkendorff and Lasse Horne Kjældgaard (Copenhagen: Gyldendal/Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab, 2012), 11.

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character of the tales and the outlandish nature of their author, who had not really returned yet. This was the implied significance of the word ‘emigrant’, which was mirrored in the title of one of the chapters of Out of Africa, ‘From an Immigrant’s Notebook’. The word ‘emigrant’ has special connotations in a Danish literary context due to the famous critic and literary scholar Georg Brandes. The first volume of his Main Currents in the Literature of the Nineteenth Century (1872– 1890) was entitled ‘Emigrantlitteraturen’, ‘The Emigrant Literature’, a term used by Brandes about a number of French writers – for example Chateaubriand, Benjamin Constant and Madame de Staël – who was forced into exile in the aftermath of the French Revolution.16 Brandes registered ambivalence among them towards the Enlightenment legacy, created by their conflict-ridden experiences, and conceptualized by him as a ‘double movement’. By labelling herself as an ‘emigrant’, Karen Blixen casts herself as an heir to this current, pointing to the possibility of similar duplicities, ambivalence and ‘double movements’ in her own work.

Global perspectives The vast distance between the author and the settings of the Seven Gothic Tales, underlined in the Danish preface, matches the notable position of the narrator in the work. The patent of nobility in Blixen’s tales is the narrator – an ageless, anonymous, Olympic figure, who always looks back upon the events and maintains great distance to them. What is peculiar about this narrator is that he or she, on the one hand, appears to be very familiar with local historical circumstances, but, on the other hand, communicates this knowledge as if it was something remote and exotic. Take, for instance, the very beginning of Seven Gothic Tales, the first lines of the first tale, ‘The Deluge at Norderney’: During the first quarter of the last century, seaside resorts became the fashion, even in those countries of Northern Europe within the minds of whose people the sea had hitherto held the role of the devil, the cold and voracious hereditary foe of humanity.17

16

17

Georg Brandes, Hovedstrømninger i det 19de Aarhundredes Litteratur. Forelæsninger holdte ved Kjøbenhavns Universitet i Efteraarshalvaaret 1871. Emigrantlitteraturen (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, 1872). Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales (New York: Harrison Smith & Robert Haas, 1934), 1.

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If one heard this sentence out of context and ignored the last poetical clause, it could be mistaken as an introduction to a work in the field of cultural history. It reads as a fragment from a text about the recreative significance that beach life gained among the bourgeoisie in the beginning of the nineteenth century and the new forms of tourism that this development entailed. In Blixen’s tale, this transformation is outlined as an international development, which also took place in Northern Europe. It is, in other words, from a global perspective that the narrator zooms in on the local scene where the narrative is about to unfold, Norderney, an East Frisian Island off the North Sea coast of Germany. Passages like the one just quoted from ‘The Deluge’ are abundant in the Seven Gothic Tales. They serve to lead international readers into the time and age and local space where the tales take place, and they confirm that they were never intended for Danish readers to begin with. That was also what Karen Blixen replied to the recently deceased Danish architect Bent von Platen-Hallermund, who wrote to her in 1956, seeking information about his distant relative, the poet August von Platen-Hallermünde, who appears as a character in ‘The Deluge at Norderney’: ‘Seven Gothic Tales was written, partly in Africa, for publication in the United States by an author who never dreamt that he would some day be translated and held accountable in more neighbouring countries’.18 Neither the scene of writing nor the place of publication corresponded with the context of Bent von Platen-Hallermund or her other Danish readers. More than twenty years earlier, when the Danish version, Syv fantastiske Fortællinger, came out, Blixen had, indeed, been held accountable by her Danish critics. Hans Brix, for instance, remarked upon the alien character of the narrator’s gaze: What is one to say about these pieces of cultural Denmark, put on display in exotic and oriental decorative showcases? It is as if you found an interior from the folk museum in Lyngby thrown into the Versailles. Danish export beer, Denmark, our mother, internationalized. You get into a funny mood by finding these half-remembered Danish antiques that have run astray from home.19

The alien and yet intimate view upon everything Danish that the tales engendered evoke this ‘funny mood’ that the Seven Gothic Tales put the nationalist critic Hans Brix into. Brix reacted to the defamiliarization achieved by the foreign, almost 18 19

Ibid. Hans Brix, ‘Baronesse Blixen-Fineckes “Gothic Tales”’. Quoted from Andersen and Lasson, eds., Blixeniana 1980, 177.

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anthropological look that the Seven Gothic Tales cast upon the country and upon the European culture in which Blixen had been brought up. This way of writing corresponds, to be sure, with the audience to whom Blixen wrote, non-Danish readers with no personal knowledge of these matters. But it also corresponds with the situation in which she began to write the tales, in sub-Saharan Africa. The work was commenced upon so great a distance that Denmark and Europe itself had become exotic phenomena, strange and enchanting, like cultural provinces in a wide and richly varied world. In Seven Gothic Tales, Karen Blixen wrote not about her experiences in Africa, but on the basis of them – as an emigrant being able to perceive Denmark and Europe both from the inside and from the outside. Actually, one can go even further and say, with an expression of Dipesh Chakrabarty, that Karen Blixen is ‘provincializing Europe’ in the tales, considering it as a whole from a point of view outside, as the preface to the Danish version suggests.20 It is, in this respect, founded upon an insight arising upon the demise of colonialism, namely that ‘the West can no longer present itself as unique purveyor of anthropological knowledge about others’, to quote from the American anthropologist James Clifford.21 It is the breaking of this epistemological monopoly that provides the point of departure for Blixen’s tales, which attempt to see Europe through a foreign gaze – thus reversing the exoticism, one could say. The constancy of this perspective in Karen Blixen’s narrative art may be documented by its appearance also in her later tales, as for instance ‘Babette’s Feast’, printed for the first time in the American magazine Ladies Home Journal in 1950, and later published as part of the book Anecdotes of Destiny from 1958. It takes place in Berlevaag, a small town in the northernmost part of Norway, and it opens with an almost aerial depiction of the location: In Norway there is a fjord – a long narrow arm of the sea between tall mountains – named Berlevaag Fjord. At the foot of the mountains the small town of Berlevaag looks like a child’s toy-town of little wooden pieces painted gray, yellow, pink and many other colors. Sixty-five years ago two elderly ladies lived in one of the yellow houses. Other ladies at that time wore a bustle, and the two sisters might have worn it as gracefully as any of them, for they were tall and willowy. But they had never possessed any article of fashion; they had dressed demurely in gray 20

21

Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture. Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 22.

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or black all their lives. They were christened Martine and Philippa, after Martin Luther and his friend Philip Melanchton. Their father had been a Dean and a prophet, the founder of a pious ecclesiastic party or sect, which was known and looked up to in all the country of Norway. Its members renounced the pleasures of this world, for the earth and all that it held to them was but a kind of illusion, and the true reality was the New Jerusalem toward which they were longing.22

The location is established not only from the point of view of global geography, but also from Scandinavian (literary) history. The remote fjord may be regarded as place where the Main Currents of history, in Georg Brandes’ sense, arrives with a delay – measured by Brandes to be about 30–40 years in the case of Scandinavia. Babette, the master chef from Paris and the protagonist of the story, is riding such a current. She is a victim of world history, a revolutionary and a pétroleuse of the 1871 Paris commune, seeking refuge far north, in the outpost of Norway. As a chef, Babette emblematizes the career opportunity, which Karen Blixen had considered before becoming a writer, and her destiny as an exile strongly resembles Blixen’s perception of her own fate. The opening sequence of ‘Babette’s Feast’ reads, indeed, as a visualization of Scandinavia’s place in the European cultural system of the late nineteenth century, including a nod to the Norwegian writer, who had helped to rearrange this place, bringing Scandinavian literature into world literature as a regional category. Henrik Ibsen’s famous play A Doll’s House (1879) can be recognized behind the ‘child’s toy-town of little wooden pieces’, seen from the elevated position of the narrator. Brandes’ drama of literary history – as a dialectic between world and national literature – is vibrant in this opening sequence, which again places Northern Europe in an international context. This was the drama into which Karen Blixen entered, self-consciously, with her global perspectives on Scandinavian culture.

A global literary cuisine The double movement also goes for the patterns of intertextuality that can be found in Karen Blixen’s works, and especially in the Seven Gothic Tales, which contain more than a thousand literary quotations and allusions. In terms of

22

Isak Dinesen, Anecdotes of Destiny (New York: Random House, 1958), 23.

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intertextuality, Blixen’s tales are a global literary cuisine. For a long time, Karen Blixen’s title for the book was Nine Tales of Nozdref ’s Cook. ‘Nozdref ’s Cook’ is the English name of a character in the Russian writer Nikolai Gogol’s satirical novel Dead Souls from 1842. Reference is made to him in Syv fantastiske Fortællinger, but not in Seven Gothic Tales, namely in ‘Den gamle vandrende Ridder’, ‘The Old Chevalier’: ‘It is thus that Nozdref ’s Cook made soup, and came pepper, salt and herbs in it, after what he had at hand – “some taste must come out of it”. ’ 23 The notion is built upon this characterization of Nozdref ’s cook in Gogol’s Dead Souls: It was obvious that the cook was guided more by some sort of inspiration and put in the first thing he laid his hands on: if pepper was standing there, he poured in pepper; if there happened to be cabbage, he stuck in cabbage; he threw in milk, ham, peas – in short, slapdash, as long as it was hot, and some sort of taste was bound to result.24

Nozdref ’s improvisational chef is enrolled in Karen Blixen’s work, partly as yet a subtle reminder of her plan B, the alternative way of life she had considered in connection with her upheaval from Africa, but it also works as an aesthetic self-description. As an author, Karen Blixen worked like a bricoleur, in a manner comparable to Nozdref ’s cook, using all available ingredients. In her tales she mixes quotes, allusions, images and characters sampled from other literature and the arts, but not, of course, with the same casualness as Nozdref ’s cook, who eventually lost his prominent place in the title for the book. Blixen’s tales are like mosaics that put together pieces from classical Danish literature – Hans Christian Andersen, Steen Steensen Blicher and Meïr Aron Goldschmidt, for instance – with fragments from texts that had been established as world literature at the time. Not only the Western tradition but also the Eastern: Homer, Sophocles, The Bible, Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Goethe, Shelley and Heine are juxtaposed with, say, the Arabian Nights and later also the Quran. Her favourite authors of the nineteenth century coincide conspicuously with Georg Brandes’ canon in his Main Currents in the Literature of the Nineteenth Century, which seems to have been an important source to Blixen’s knowledge about literary history. She also recycles characters from the literary tradition, as for instance Nozdref ’s cook, and places imbued with literary significance, as for instance Norderney in ‘The Deluge at Norderney’, known from Heinrich Heine’s 23 24

Blixen, Syv fantastiske Fortællinger, 76. Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls, trans. and annotated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Pantheon Books, 1996), 55.

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poetical cycle ‘Die Nordsee’ (1826–1827), or Ingolstadt in ‘The Old Chevalier’, established as a literary topos in Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1818). The way that Blixen gives these characters and places new life illustrates her organic conception of world literature as a living creature, as a treasure of texts that may always be transformed into new works of literary art.

World literature as oral literature Karen Blixen’s conception of world literature may also be extracted from the stories she conveys about the life of literature in her texts, especially in Out of Africa. A recurring theme of the memoir is the role of oral literature in the lives of her African employees, and the inspiration she draws from it. But there are also a number of memorable scenes in the book where Blixen tells about the effect that certain Western classics had on people with no literary education in the Western sense. One example is her Kikuyu chef, Kamante, who immediately understands his own situation by comparing it with Ulysses; another is the keen comments on William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice delivered by Farah, her Somali butler. The latter situation occurs after Blixen had received a letter from Danish friends telling her about a staging in Copenhagen of The Merchant of Venice. Smitten with enthusiasm, she desires to speak with somebody about the play and the many intriguing questions raised by it. She retells the play to Farah and relates to us what comes out of it. Farah sympathizes completely with Shylock’s demands for a pound of flesh from Antonio, made in the court of the Duke of Venice, and he is revolted when Shylock gives up his legal claim due to Portia’s clever intervention: ‘What?’ said he. ‘Did the Jew give up his claim? He should not have done that. The flesh was due to him, it was little enough for him to get for all that money’. ‘But what else could he do’, I asked, ‘when he must not take one drop of blood?’ ‘Memsahib’, said Farah, ‘he could have used a red-hot knife. That brings out no blood’. ‘But’, I said, ‘he was not allowed to take either more or less than one pound of flesh’. And who’, said Farah, ‘would have been frightened by that, exactly a Jew? He might have taken little bits at a time, with a small scale at hand to weight it on, till he had got just one pound. Had the Jew no friends to give him advice?’25 25

Karen Blixen, Out of Africa (London: Putnam, 1937), 259.

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Farah shows no interest in the cruelty of Shylock’s demands or in the question of their fairness in the light of the anti-Semitic persecutions of him. Instead, he is annoyed with Shylock’s lack of ingenuity in making his demands. If he had only been more cunning, he could have achieved them. Farah’s total immersion in the play is evident from his speculations about what might have happened, almost as if the trial is restaged in the middle of Kenya’s highlands to the eyes of Blixen. Shakespeare is usually recognized as the centre of the Western canon, and The Merchant of Venice is one of his most famous plays. Although I do not know the enormous reception history of The Merchant of Venice through the ages, I dare to doubt that it ever has been read and met with the objections that Farah forward here. According to Blixen’s anecdote, Farah, who is a Moslem, is no stranger to the play but able to enter directly into its world. Wrapped in this episode is, I believe, one of Blixen’s conceptions of world literature, namely stories being able to transcend national and cultural boundaries, making sense also to people without any formal literary background – available to all, also to the understanding of one another. Also in terms of this ideal, Karen Blixen desired – and deserves – to be measured on the scale of world literature.

Bibliography Aiken, Susan Hardy. Isak Dinesen and the Engendering of Narrative. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Brantly, Susan. Understanding Isak Dinesen. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002. Engberg, Charlotte. Billedets ekko. Om Karen Blixens fortællinger. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2000. Glienke, Bernhard. Fatale Präzedenz. Karen Blixens Mythologie. Neumünster: Karl Wachholtz Verlag, 1986. Heede, Dag. Det umenneskelige. Odense: Odense Universitetsforlag, 2001. Kabell, Aage. Karen Blixen debuterer. München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1968. Langbaum, Robert. The Gaiety of Vision. A Study of Isak Dinesen’s Art. London: Chatto & Windus, 1964. Pelensky, Olga Anastasia, ed. Isak Dinesen. Critical Views. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1993. Selboe, Tone. Kunst og erfaring. En studie i Karen Blixens forfatterskap. Odense: Odense universitetsforlag, 1996. Thurman, Judith. Isak Dinesen. The Life of a Storyteller. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1982.

9

Breaking New Ground – Danish Poets in the Intersection Between Modernism and Postmodernism Anne-Marie Mai

The writers Susanne Brøgger and Dan Turèll both visited New York in the 1970s. Dan Turèll was eager to meet the solicitors of the jazz musicians Charlie Parker and Billie Holiday, whereas Susanne Brøgger’s thoughts were focused on her connections with publishers and writing colleagues. Brøgger, whose debut book Fri os fra kærligheden (Deliver Us from Love) had already been translated into English in 1975, asked Dan Turèll why he had not tried to get his books out in the United States. His answer was simple: ‘There are lots like me in America’.1 Like a number of Danish poets of the mid-1960s, Turèll was fascinated by American beat poetry, but he was so humbled by the Americans he admired, particularly Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, that he did not even attempt to have his work translated. Internationally – as was the case for several Nordic writers – Dan Turèll was mainly known as a writer of crime stories. A number of Turèll’s twelve volumes of crime stories, strongly influenced by Raymond Chandler, which appeared between 1981 and 1990 were translated into English, German, French, Italian and other languages. Turèll’s crime stories gained an international book market, but neither he nor international publishers tried to introduce his poems to this market. But in April 2016, more than twenty years after the writer’s death in 1993, a large selection of texts from one of Turèll’s main works is being presented in an American periodical. Twenty pages of Vangede Billeder (Pictures of Vangede)

1

Suzanne Brøgger, ‘My First Meeting with Dan Turèll, Dropped in – Supplement’, to Jyllands-Posten 19, no. 3 (1996): 3.

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from 1975 are to appear in New Letters, translated by Thomas Kennedy, who has explained in an interview that the interest in Turèll’s texts is increasing in the United States. The 1950s environment depicted in Vangede billeder is very similar to that of New York in the same period. Kennedy explains: In actual fact, Vangede is not unlike the place where I grew up in Queens – and just as people in Vangede said to their kids ‘Just say you’re from Gentofte’, we used to say that we were from ‘New York City’. Instead of the marsh, we had Flushing Meadows Swamp, and Queens had more than its share of alcoholics and fights. It was also here, as in Vangede, that the local landfill and ‘loony bin’ were located. At the beginning of the 21st century, these environments have virtually disappeared, and Vangede billeder is a nostalgic experience. For an American, Turèll’s texts exert a both exotic and domestic attraction – and then they also reflect what has been lost. Right now, we are losing the Vesterbro and Vangede we once knew, just as Times Square and Queen’s are undoubtedly sharing the same fate.2

The domestic and the exotic can thus meet in a globalized literary culture, and Dan Turèll’s universe gives American readers a new angle on beat poetry and the New York school, now essential parts of the worldwide canon, as represented in such weighty anthologies as Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (1994). Danish writing absorbs a great diversity of international inspiration during the twentieth century, but communication develops in new directions in the early twenty-first century and is perhaps on its way to becoming bilateral: globalization may allow writing in Danish to command interest in a global literary context, partly because writers to an increasing extent share modern and postmodern life scenarios, events and canons with each other, and partly because globalization promotes an interest in the identities and histories of particular localities.3

2

3

Thomas Kennedy, ‘Dan Turèll’s Account of Vangede Appears in USA’, Politiken, interview by Tine Marie Winther, Bøger 30, no. 11 (2015): 4. Thomas Kennedy has translated a number of Turèll’s poems into English, including the poem ‘Gennem byen sidste gang’, which was privately printed in 2009: Dan Turèll, Gennem byen sidste gang. Last Walk Through the City (Copenhagen: Pavillon Neuf Private Press, 2009). The publication also features a CD with Halfdan E’s and Dan Turèll’s recording of the text. Kennedy has also recorded the CD himself, Thomas Kennedy and E. Halfdan, Dan Turéll + Halfdan E Meets Thomas Kennedy: An Introduction (Copenhagen: PlantSounds via DiGiDi.org, 2013). Jf. Doreen Massey, ‘A Global Sense of Place’, in Reading Human Geography, ed. Trevor Barnes and Derek Gregory (London, New York: John Wiley & Sons Inc., 1997).

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Danish literature of the mid-1960s, which Dan Turèll helps shape, opens the floodgates for an increased artistic exchange and has the artistic potential to reach readers in many countries.

Out of Denmark The beginnings of a global orientation in the Danish literary world became evident after the Second World War, in literary periodicals and in various titles and anthologies from parts of the world beyond Europe. Young writers longed to travel out into the wide world and experience what the war had cut them off from, as well as to enter artistic milieus beyond the familiar Danish ones. ‘Anywhere out into the world! We just wanted to be off!’, the writer Erik Knudsen remarked, dreaming of travelling to France, though initially having to make do with a modest trip to a Finnish writers’ convention.4 The periodicals Heretica and Vindrose released translations and introductions; publishing firms started to offer translated titles in new series, and anthologies appeared of, for example, African literature.5 Completely new publishers with international profiles also saw the light of day: Arena was established in 1953, and Rhodos in 1959. The young modernist Klaus Rifbjerg gained plenty of American inspiration during his study period in the United States immediately after the war. Walt Whitman, Ernest Hemingway and J.D. Salinger became his American heroes, while the leading modernist prose-writer and philosopher Villy Sørensen sought his literary inheritance in German-language philosophy, with Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kafka and Thomas Mann as important sources, as well as in the philosophy of European antiquity – particularly Seneca, whom Sørensen used as a springboard for a classical humanism and a comprehensive critique of modernity. Hardly had modernism had its breakthrough, however, before young writers under the influence of American beat poetry, French structuralism and poststructuralism, Japanese poetry genres and European avant-garde art found completely new approaches to language and writing. In Danish literature, modernism seemed to be a spent force just when it was gaining recognition and 4

5

Cf. Erik Knudsen and Anne-Marie Mai, Virkeligt. Om Erik Knudsens digtning (Copenhagen: Gyldendal/University Press of Southern Denmark, 2006), 44.  Cf. Anne-Marie Mai, Danish Literature of the 20th and Early 21st Century (Odense: Syddansk Universitetsforlag, 2016), 102.

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influence among the literary public. In 1966, Rifbjerg was awarded the prestigious major prize of the Danish Academy, but as early as 1968 the 36-year-old writer stated that the young generation now regarded his contemporaries in the same way as they, in their time, had regarded the late-symbolist writers connected to Heretica: ‘And now here one sits like some old nincompoop. What we crudely remarked about “Heretica” they are now saying about us: poor old fuddyduddies, metaphysicists, narcissists, obscurantists and dead horsemen’.6 Klaus Rifbjerg himself had grown tired of metaphor-saturated modernism, which he had launched in 1960 in his poetry collection Konfrontation (Confrontation), and he was now engaged – the following decades would show – in a large-scale attempt to renew both his poetry and his prose in a cross-connection between a vitalistic, socially critical modernism that gained its energy from the materiality of modernity, the subconscious and physical impulses, and an incomparable media-realism which drew on his many writing experiences as a journalist and debater.7 While Rifbjerg became a one-man army, prominently visible in the media, producing provocative statements and inviting a beating every time Danes questioned the welfare state’s role as a promoter of ground-breaking literature, younger writers were often more focused on the anarchistic-nihilistic writing of Ivan Malinowski, and could also hear – as Peter Laugesen expresses it in a poem – Allen Ginsberg’s howl from America. Rifbjerg was seen as a father figure the young writers had to revolt against, whereas Ivan Malinowski, along with Per Højholt and Inger Christensen and new international sources of inspiration, became models.8 It was in particular Per Højholt’s 1966 publications Min hånd 66 (My hand 66) and Show, along with Inger Christensen’s It, 1969/2006, which were to become benchmarks. The writer and critic Hans Jørgen Nielsen, who made his own debut in 1965 with the concretesque collection of poetry at det at (That it that), was among the new work’s keenest partisans. He reviewed both Højholt’s and Christensen’s works and was generous with superlatives.

6

7

8

Klaus Rifbjerg, ‘As Sweet as in the Old Days’, Politiken 14, no. 4 (1968): 174; Hvordan har vi det så i dag. Kronikker 1957–2006 (Copenhagen: Politikens forlag, 2006), 174. Frits Andersen has used the concept media-realism about Klaus Rifbjerg’s oeuvre in his article about Klaus Rifbjerg in Danske Digtere i det 20. århundrede, Vol. II (Danish Writers in the 20th Century), ed. Anne-Marie Mai (Copenhagen: Gads forlag, 2001), 221–238. Cf. Hans-Jørgen Nielsen and Erik Thygesen, ‘Accolade to Klaus Rifbjerg When He Received the Major Prize of The Danish Academy: “No! No! No! – A declaration of love”’, Ekstra Bladet 27, no. 10 (1966): 10.

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Per Højholt had made his debut in 1949 with the late-symbolist collection of poetry Hesten og solen (The horse and the sun); he was one of the youngest poets to appear in Heretica, and had attempted to arrive at an agreement with the major voices of the periodical,9 but after a longish period with only a few publications, he started in the mid-1960s to base his work on a new poetics, using as his starting point the poetry of the French writer Stéphane Mallarmé. The poet and critic Hans-Jørgen Nielsen noticed the new tendency in Per Højholt, and his review in Ekstra Bladet contended that Højholt’s publications in 1966 were the most significant seen in Danish poetry for a long time. When Inger Christensen’s It was published, Hans-Jørgen Nielsen wrote that if, fifty years later, one were to try and give an impression of the late 1960s, ‘what was actually being thought and felt at the time’, one would refer to It, which by that time would have become a ‘poetry classic’.10 It marked a renewal for Christensen much like Højholt’s. She had made her debut in 1962 with the modernist poetry collection Light, followed in 1963 by the collection Grass, and had also published two novels by the time of her breakthrough with It. My hand 66 and It differ considerably in scope, concept and system; what they share is that they became founding books for postmodern poetry. In their different ways, both raise the issue of the nature of poetry, and the possibilities it offers if it is perceived as an encounter between the poet, the reader and the world.

A hand to the reader Per Højholt’s Min hånd 66 is an explicit reflection on both the writing and the reading of poems.11 In the course of the twenty-one poems of the collection, the poet fights his way out of romantic, symbolist and modernist poetics in turn. The collection is the poet’s attempt to create a ‘hand’ for himself, a way of 9

10

11

Cf. Bruno Svindborg, ‘Per Højholt and Heretica. Letters 1948–53’, in Poetiske forposter, eds. Lotte Thyrring Andersen and Bruno Svindborg (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2008), 159–175. Hans-Jørgen Nielsen’s review of Min hånd 66 was printed in Ekstra Bladet 24, no. 11 (1966): 10, and the review of It, ‘Lovers In and Outside the World’, Information 29, no. 10 (1969) was reprinted in Hans-Jørgen Nielsen, Nye sprog, nye verdener (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2006), 270–274. My reading of the poem is based on my article, ‘A Hand to the Reader. Per Højholt, Min hånd 66, in Læsninger i Dansk Litteratur, 1940–1970, eds. Povl Schmidt et al. (Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2001), 229–247. 

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writing that does not stiffen into essential metaphors or becomes empty gestures towards nothingness. Højholt himself relates how he is taking up the issue of Mallarmé’s poetics: Mallarmé described the linguistic image of things, thereby making the things themselves absent. This absence he makes present to the reader, in the text’s image of presence. Instead, one could attempt to make this absence absent, and this could then be done by shifting the emphasis from the denotative-descriptive quality of language to its quality of being-writing.12

In these reflections on the being-writing quality of language, Højholt’s perspective is similar to Jacques Derrida’s discussion of writing and archiwriting.13 The project of making an absence absent sounds paradoxical, but once the paradox is realized, the reader will discover that one does not have to search in the poem for an overall meaning, but can consider a multiplicity of reading possibilities, and treat the realization of one’s own agency as an important result of the reading of the poem. Højholt chooses to look the philosophical, art-theoretical and craftsmanrelated difficulties of his project straight in the eye. In the five first sections of the collection, he sets the terms by which the work can be understood as a single poem, the ‘Such and such a number of larks’, which is named at the conclusion of section five of the collection. In the first section comes the showdown with a symbolist poetics of presence/ absence, including the conception of man as a meaning-forming, interpreting world-centre. The metaphor-rich version of Klaus Rifbjerg’s modernism also gets its just deserts. In section two and three, the poetic voice considers what measures he can take to pursue his aim. The poet must be concrete and thorough, advance like a craftsman, pay attention to the fact that the poem demarcates a space of time and forms an interval that does not correspond to amount of lifetime the poet has spent on his poem. The poet must also not attempt to use his body or his age as a kind of truth gauge in relation to the poem. The poem must neither

12 13

Per Højholt, The Grimaces of Nothingness (Copenhagen: Schønberg, 1972). Per Højholt mentions Derrida directly in a footnote, also later referring to his oeuvre on several occasions. For a more detailed discussion of the relation between the writing concepts of Derrida and Højholt, see also Carsten Madsen, Poetry, Thought, Nature (Aarhus: Klim, 2004). Derrida’s main work, De la grammatologie, was published in Danish by Forlaget Arena in 1970, with Per Højholt functioning as a consultant.

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mime reality nor lifetime – and absolutely refrain from wallowing in emotions, whining or begging for commiseration from the reader. The poem may rather try to resemble a taciturn cowboy who speaks mainly of the path he has ridden: ‘you cross the river on horseback tell me THAT/you bought 20 Snow Flake and a can of beans say THAT/you passed a tower a water tower a bush and a pile of wet stones I want to hear about THAT […]’ (17). The poem may also be like the toy ‘Pokerface Teddy Bear’, a toddler ‘made in Japan’ that uprights itself when you try and knock it over, and whose movements describe a hemisphere. The poems in section four complete the investigation of the poem’s potential and the conditions of reading, articulating a romantic concept of the poem as a meaningful ‘foundation’, as well as the idea of being able to approach the poem rationally and construct a meaning, and also a biblical motif of the Tower of Babel, which tells the story of a language that everyone understands. After this, it is possible to write poems and, it is to be hoped, also to read them. Section five of the collection contains four poems, all of which have been written on the basis of the results of the experience gained by the poet from the previous four sections. The poems are all nature poems that related to the landscapes of the changing seasons. The four poems are at one and the same time completely sober and bursting with experiences of and a fascination with nature, and they contain references to Danish depictions of nature by the poets St Blicher, B.S. Ingemann and Jeppe Aakjær, while also attempting to find a completely new approach to the natural world, with which Højholt was profoundly preoccupied and at the same time refused to internalize via linguistic symbolism. Particularly in the poem ‘Such and such a number of larks’, this tool is used to deconstruct and reconstruct metaphorics and the understanding of the passing of time in the poem, something that the poet has trained himself and his readers to use through the other poems of the collection. Here is the entire poem: Such and such a number of larks 383 larks have arrived 384 the tops of the birch trees are seething (385) like balloons actually balloons you inflate gas deposits on stalks curtseying like birch trees yes completely like birch trees that are seething 388 larks have arrived and are singing above mole-hills 389 winter’s sleep-paths are being uncovered winter’s sleep-paths lie uncovered and full of water the sun strikes them

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a morris drives up over the hill and down again and rumbles up along the sunken road and approaches splashingly past the pine trees the postman’s morris comes into sight beneath 390 larks.14

The counting of the many larks indicates how nature outpaces language and interpretation. The modernist metaphoric around the birch trees as balloons ends up by contradicting itself, and the many lark-arrivals do not give the poet enough time to develop a symbolist metaphoric about winter’s sleep-paths; it is quite simply overtaken on the inside by the arriving larks and the melting water. The arrival of the postman finally ends the idea of the lone poet immersing himself in nature, the typical move of nature poetry implied until now in the poem. No revelatory vision of nature concludes the poem, only the postman who suddenly appears in the landscape. So the poem deals with its own coming into existence, making its own time concrete, reflecting on its own aesthetic form and involving the reader in this reflection. So doing, it is also able to deal with topical subject of spring, larks and writing poetry and passing time. The sixth and concluding section of the collection shows us the poet fulllength as The Poet H, who has now acquired a new hand, that is a new kind of poetry. The final poems of the collection contain both comedy and tragedy, reminding us how the reader has been drawn into the break with expected genres, has seen how the metaphoric is constructed and deconstructed, and how the poet uses time. Accompanying Min hånd 66 was a gramophone record where Højholt reads the collection aloud. In this way, he underlines that the media of poetry are no longer confined to the printed book but also include the gramophone record or radio recording and the show, with which Højholt experimented for the rest of his life as an author. The book with the inserted gramophone record has become a much-coveted collector’s item, and in a German/Danish version of a selection of Per Højholt’s poems, Der Kopf des Poeten, the reading by the poet has been converted to a CD and a German reading has been added.15 Several of

14

15

Per Højholt, Min hånd 66 (Copenhagen: Det schønbergske Forlag, 1966), 36. Translation by John Irons, in 100 Danish Poems, ed. Anne-Marie Mai and Thomas Bredsdorff (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, Washington University Press, 2011), 283. Per Højholt, Der Kopf des Poeten. Gedichte, essays und eine CD, zweisprachig (Straelen: StraelennerMs-Verlag, neue Folge15, 1998). Read in German by Hans-Erik Hellner and Herbert Zeichner.

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Højholt’s publications have been translated into Swedish. In English there are only translations of isolated poems, and an essay in the small, bilingual avantgarde publication Odense/Denmark, 30. September 1996, 02.00, which was issued in connection with the festival ‘Odense reads’ (1996), when the group of artists E/Rum removed the letter ‘e’ from the city’s public spaces. Per Højholt wrote an essay for this event which directly referred to the French Oulipo group’s experiments, especially to Georges Perec, who in his novel La Disparation (1969) did not use the letter ‘e’ as an expression of the ethnic cleansing and Holocaust theme of the book. Højholt explains the basis for his project: ‘The poem, the linguistic work of art, must, besides being a poem, also be a tool for the reader, a tool for doing, what the reader cannot do himself, break up understandings with new ones, concentrate insights, and all devices are valid, even the most vulgar, as long as the highest things are in place.’16

A poetic genesis Inger Christensen’s It is also an attempt to start from the beginning, to find an opening in poetry where the poet can escape from a modernist position as a poetic I-figure who from his psyche, body, feelings, fragmentation and linguistic skill is expected to create expressive, present images and criticize a modern, alienated world. Inger Christensen was already in the process of abandoning the idea of the interpretative modernist I-figure in the novel Azorno (1967). Here she shows how points of view and I-positions are linguistic possibilities that contradict each other and that cannot claim to create unambiguous representations of an outer world.17 On this same basis, Inger Christensen is able in It to take a new step out of high-modernism, moving towards a poetics where the poem allows language, the natural and physical worlds, and I-figure to merge together, that is to heal a split resulting from an industrial, capitalistic modernity that exploits both language, the human body and nature. The art of words was posited as salvation. If language could be liberated, we might step out of ourselves and reach out into a living cosmos. 16

17

Per Højholt, ‘The Physical Nature of Letters’, Odense/Denmark, 30. September 1996, 02.00 Hours, trans. Peter Shield (Copenhagen: Space Poetry, 1996), 035. Cf. Lis Wedell Pape’s analysis of the change in the authorship and Azorno’s particular importance in the article on Inger Christensen in Danske digtere i det tyvende århundrede, Vol. II, ed. Anne-Marie Mai (Copenhagen: Gads forlag, 2001), 380.

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It is a poem full of hope and utopia, allied with the dreams of the 1968 youth rebellion, its values fellowship, freedom and a new life in the cosmic infinity of which all were thought a part. The poet and the reader arrive at the formulation of the dream by following a creative process in language, beginning with the pronoun det (which can mean both ‘it’ and ‘that’ in Danish), which is suddenly there on the page, a sentence in itself: ‘It. That’s it. That started it. Goes on.’18 The sensitivity to particles in language, which is the point of departure for the poem, must surely have drawn inspiration from Hans-Jørgen Nielsen’s debut collection, At det at (That it that), and Johannes L. Madsen’s A B Se digte (A B see poems), both of which appeared in 1965, are playful rediscoveries of particles, the smallest units of language. The writing becomes a mobile that surprises both the person writing and the person reading. ‘The writing is writing and it writes’ – as it says in At det at.19 The task of the poet is to select material, frameworks and rules and to allow himself to be carried along on the writing current towards new insights, critical contentions and poetic experiences. In It, Inger Christensen works with both a numerical and a grammatical organization. The work is divided into three sections: a ‘Prologos’, which contains 528 lines divided into 8 sections, a ‘Logos’, which consists of 3 sections each comprising 8 poems, and an ‘Epilogos’, which contains 526 lines of verse divided into 8 plus 1 sections. The number 8 can be conceived as a sign of infinity that tallies with the cosmic idea of the work. But the work is also based on the philologist Viggo Brøndal’s eleven types of prepositions, – a number reduced, in the poem itself, to 8. The use of prepositions foregrounds the poem’s investigation of relations between individuals, between the individual and nature and between the individual and language. ‘Prologos’ follows a creative process in language, beginning with the word ‘it’, which reaches out to other words, is included in sentences and sequences, becomes an organism, a creature that tries to forget its fear of dying by killing and building up an urbanity that governs and regulates the lives of its inhabitants. In this creative process rules are introduced that alienate people from each other, making them passive as regards their own lives. It is the fear of death that makes the creature dangerous and destructive.

18 19

Inger Christensen, It, trans. Susanna Nied (New York: New Direction Books, 2006), 3. Hans-Jørgen Nielsen, ‘At det at’, in Nielsen sort på hvidt, u.p., eds. Tanja Ørum and Morten Thing (Copenhagen: Tiderne skifter, 2000).

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Life ends by ‘going into shock’; individuals are isolated from each other and are borne dead from their houses, but the possibility of a change is also present: A society can be so stone-hard That it fuses into a block A people can be so bone-hard That life goes into shock And the heart is all in shadow And the heart has almost stopped Till some begin to build A city as soft as a body20

The Logos section depicts the emergence of modern society and the culture that the Prologos section concludes with. The poet and reader experience institutions, factories, urban life, natural universes and love relationships. The factory and the hospital are the incarnation of the suppression exerted by modern life, but here too the longing grows for an emancipation via human communities. In madness and in love a new poetic voice enters into an agreement with words and biology, and realizes that the poet is not to try to master words, but experience himself as part of a totality of words and nature. It the final poem of Prologos it says: I see the weightless clouds I see the weightless sun I see how easily they trace An endless course As if they trust in me Here on the earth As if they know that I Am their words21

The last section of the work, ‘Epilogos’, continues the creation theme from Prologos. The section deals with inner states, with a fear that is existential, but that is intensified by the loss of meaning in modern life. Here too it is words that offer release. They can become magical attempts that go beyond themselves and transform ‘anxiety into joy’ and bring ‘mercy’.22 It concludes with a hope that if individuals look their fear straight in the eye and admit to each other that ‘we are afraid’, we may perhaps be able to grasp the 20 21 22

Christensen, It, 100. Ibid., 220. Ibid., 233.

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creative potential of words, and gain contact with each other, with the living biology and with a universal rhythm into which, according to Christensen, language leads us. ‘By using a system you are trying to reveal the rhythm of the universe’, she states in an interview.23 While the Prologos creation ends in loneliness and fear of death, because it creates separated individuals, there is in the Epilogos creation a hope of community and understanding between people who admit their fear to each other.24 Inger Christensen’s poem gives voice to the anti-psychiatry of the 1968-youth rebellion and the undogmatic part of the critique of capitalism. In It, Christensen abandons trying to get literature to mime an outer reality or make the inner world-images of the speaker the endpoint of interpretation; instead, Christensen lets the work create multiple relations with the world outside it, and create a linguistic network where multiple connections between language and biology, the text’s key themes, can be found. It became an immediate bestseller, and led many to understand Christensen as a sharp critic of the alienation of the Danish welfare state. She stressed that poetry’s form of cognition ought to have significance for politics – political work ought, quite simply, to be humanized.25 While Per Højholt’s books were only translated into European languages to a limited extent, Inger Christensen’s writing was the subject of increasing international awareness. This applied initially to her later works Alfabet (1981, translated into German in 1988 and into English in 2000, as Alphabet), and Sommerfugledalen (1991, translated into German in 1995 and into English in 2001, as Butterfly Valley). Over the years, however, It has been translated into various languages as well: German in 2001, English in 2006, Swedish in 2009, Slovenian in 2012 and Spanish in 2015. In Germany, Inger Christensen attracted large audiences to her many readings – she was an excellent teacher of German and had full mastery of the language, and her distinctive, slow and chantlike style of reading aloud was met with enthusiasm.26 She received a number 23

24

25

26

Cf. The Nordic Poetry Festival Anthology, eds. Kajsa Leander and Ernst Malmsten (New York: Nordic Poetry Festival, 1993), 22. Cf. also Niels Barfoed’s speech to Inger Christensen when she was awarded the golden laurels in 1970, ‘Revolutionary and Loving. A Speech to Inger Christensen’, Politiken 15, no. 2 (1970): Section 2, 47. Hasse Havgaard, ‘Interview with Inger Christensen. There Is No Reason Why We Are Here on This Earth’, Politiken 2, no. 11 (1969): 45. See also, for example, Wilhelm Trapps, ‘Trunken über Wassertreppen Inger Christensen liest ihre Gedichte auf Deutsch und Dänisch’, review of Inger Christensen: alphabet Kleinheinrich-Verlag, 2 CDs, 83 Min., Das Schmetterlingstal, Hörverlag, 2 CDs, 105 Min., Die Zeit 44, 25 no. 10 (2007): 52.

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of German literature prizes, including the prestigious Siegfried Unseld Prize, awarded by the Suhrkamp publishing firm, which carries some of her books. For a number of years, she was also named as a candidate for the Nobel Prize by Germany, Sweden and Denmark. Per Højholt’s and Inger Christensen’s books of the 1960s were an important influence for the many new Danish poets who emerged in the middle of the decade, such as Hans-Jørgen Nielsen, Dan Turèll, Klaus Høeck, Peter Laugesen, Johannes L. Madsen, Kirsten Thorup and Charlotte Strandgaard. Min hånd 66 and It demonstrated the possibility of paths other than that of modernism with its profusion of metaphors. Writing could be treated in a material and processoriented way; the reader was not just to be presented with perfectly formed results of a creating handling of language, but to have a free view of the work, and become involved through their own reading process. A divided, modernist interpretative I-figure was not necessarily the be-all and end-all of poetry. Poetry could treat language in a concrete, minimalistic way, make use of mathematical and grammatical rules and systematics, and be inspired by discussions within the fields of science and language philosophy. The two books helped to kick-start major breakaways from high-modernism and marked the beginning of a postmodern literature, one in which highmodernism was no longer able to place what Peter Laugesen calls ‘its clammy straitjacket’ on the entire literary culture; instead, high-modernism became one among several trends in multi-stringed literary culture that gained its inspiration from many corners of the world. Peter Laugesen expresses this poetically in the following way: We heard the howl from America and dashed confusedly around in the roads or dug holes in the cheap end of the towns slept in stairways and read Spillane and Rimbaud in cafeterias and coffee bars while Danish high modernism laid its clammy straitjacket down around everything visible above the earth’s surface Art is a pure and utter crap and the grass is sure to come up again sometime […]27

27

Peter Laugesen, The Wind’s Tongue, trans. John Irons (Copenhagen: Borgens forlag, 1986), 13–14.

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A new dynamic between young and older writers also showed itself in the fact that both Per Højholt and Inger Christensen themselves were inspired by the writers who followed them. The then 40-year-old Per Højholt even became one of the representatives of a new young poetry in Hans-Jørgen Nielsen’s generation anthology Examples (1968) along with such writers as the 25-year-old Charlotte Strandgaard, 24-year-old Johannes L. Madsen and 23-year-old Henrik Nordbrandt. Per Højholt started to use cartoon characters and pop culture in his poetry, as did the poet and visual artist Per Kirkeby, and Dan Turèll, who had already announced his interest in the Donald Duck universe in 1976.28 In the first book of the Praksis series, Revolver (1977) Højholt made use, for example, of Disney’s Goofy figure, in what was one of many parallels between Højholt and Turèll. Turèll had known Højholt since his youth, and lived in his home in 1975 while he was writing on Vangede Billede (Pictures of Vangede), and Turèll’s flair for describing the local community of his childhood in the thoughts and ways of speaking of his characters was later to find a parallel in Per Højholt’s Gitte Monologues, which he started to read aloud in the early 1980s and published as a collection in 1984. Højholt experimented with live sound and performance from the mid-1960s onwards, and Dan Turèll also took up the combination of poetry and music, and drew on American spoken word and jazz poetry traditions with the release of an LP with his band the Silver Stars in 1978. Højholt, along with Klaus Høeck, Turèll and Peter Laugesen, referred to rock music and jazz in his poems. Højholt’s homage to Jimi Hendrix, ‘Lament for Jim’, in Smerteskolen og andre digte (School of Pain and other Poems), came out in 1979, a few years after Klaus Høeck’s rock poems Pentagram (1976), which contained the suite ‘Jimi Hendrix Experience’. When Høeck, together with Asger Schnack and F.P. Jac, established their poetry band, Band Zero, in 1980, Per Højholt and Inger Christensen participated as ‘guest stars’ in the release Bandet Nul Live (Band Zero Live) (1981). Peter Laugesen continued to develop his special version of the performance tradition of beat poetry and poetic improvisation together with various bands from the mid-1990s, using both American poets and the work of Højholt and Turèll as sounding boards. Inger Christensen’s poetry also started to show certain similarities with the writing of younger mid-1960s writers. In one of her major works, Alphabet 28

Dan Turèll, ‘$torebror $am’ (Big Brother Sam), feature article in Politiken 5, no. 1 (1976): Section 2, 5–6.

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(1981/2000), Christensen followed Klaus Høeck’s poem cycle Rejse (Journey) (1971–1973), combining sequences of numbers and the alphabet in the reageation of a new poetic language. Christensen also started to use the sonnet genre, which Høeck had been deconstructing since the 1970s, and which Peter Poulsen started to use in the 1980s; her final poetic work, Butterfly Valley (1991/2001) was a classic sequence of sonnets. From the 1970s into the early 1980s, there was a fertile climate for exchanges between authors of various generations within Denmark as well as with international movements. A more open literary landscape took shape, characterized by a contemporaneity between tendencies that had various historical origins and an erasing of the division between high-brow and popular culture. The dominant criticism of the 1970s, however, continued to focus on the older modernists, or on an experience-based ‘knækprosa’ (prose chopped up to look like verse) with links to the feminist and protest movements. So quite a number of the experimental poets did not gain the attention of literary critics until the 1980s, when a young generation of poets made their entrance, drawing their inspiration, as Søren Ulrik Thomsen and Michael Strunge announced, both from Inger Christensen and Per Højholt and from Klaus Høeck, Dan Turèll and Peter Laugesen.29 Hans-Jørgen Nielsen attempted to interpret the breakaway of the mid-1960s as the coming into being of a third phase of modernism,30 while the poet and journalist Erik Thygesen, somewhat by chance, happened to use the term ‘postmodernist’ in the periodical ta’ about the new literature and art. ‘The aim of the periodical is quite simple: through a series of numbers to draw the outline of as richly faceted a “postmodernist” aesthetics as possible.’31 For Thygesen, the term indicated foremost that the artists regarded the history of literature and art as a large collection of material ‘from which one can freely choose the forms one wants to make use of ’.32 The concept did not become at all widespread in Danish literary discussion, however, and only reappeared in the 1980s, when

29

30 31 32

Cf. Søren Ulrik Thomsen, ‘Farvel til det blå rum’ (Goodbye to the Blue Room), Kritik 91/92 (1990): 7–35, and Michael Strunge’s exchange of correspondence with Peter Laugesen, printed in En bog om Michael Strunge, eds. Anne-Marie Mai and Jørgen Aabenhus (Copenhagen: Borgens forlag, 2008), 133–157. Cf. Hans-Jørgen Nielsen, Examples (Copenhagen: Borgens forlag, 1968). Erik Thygesen, ta’, 3.3.1967. up. Erik Thygesen, ‘Back Then There Was Crap and Plaster, Now There Is Gold and Tinsel’, in Nye historier om nordisk kunst og litteratur, eds. Anne-Marie Mai and Anne Borup (Copenhagen: Gads forlag, 1999), 180.

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Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard and Michel Serres were introduced into a Danish context via the series of publications from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. The concept of postmodernism, however, has since become a slightly diffuse term for the period of literature after 1960. One can perhaps claim, along with the American literary critic John McGowan, that the very breadth and vagueness of the concept creates a kind of crisis in the use of period concepts: Totalizing accounts of an era generate scepticism because distinctive features of that era can always be discovered to have existed in other eras, while noncharacteristic features will be found in the era in question. Periodization is a rhetorical creation, a way of constructing a historical ‘other’ that allows us to define a desirable present by contrasting it to an inferior past, or vice versa. In this view, what is distinctive about postmodernism is not something new but our attention to and interest in features of the past that until now were most often ignored. Postmodernism, then, is just part of the very complex rereading of history taking place in the current climate of a critical questioning of the Western tradition.33

Such a postmodern re-reading of literature after 1960 has, in a Danish context, led to the emergence of a multi-stringed conception of the history of literature. Literary criticism has to an increasing extent become aware of the fact that in the post-1965 period there are a number of noticeable tendencies in Danish literature: an internationally inspired beat poetry, system poetry, concretism, minimalism, new realism and situationism.34 In the following, we will take a closer look at texts by Dan Turèll, Peter Laugesen and Klaus Høeck, who spearheaded the poetic renewal. These writers share a systematic and processoriented way of working with the material of language; they reformulate the traditional poetic speaker or I-figure, they engage other artistic genres and the entire register of language, refer to both Western and Eastern philosophy and poetry, and from these sources create a poetry that relates to reality as both a multiplicity and a unity.

33

34

Michael Groden, Martin Kreiswirth, and Imre Szeman, eds., The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism (Baltimore/London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), http://litguide .press.jhu.edu.proxy1-bib.sdu.dk. Cf. Anne-Marie Mai, Danish Literature of the 20th and Early 21st Century (Odense: Syddansk Universitetsforlag, 2016), 161ff.

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To be beat Even though Dan Turèll worried about what he could add in the context of American literature, he did not refrain from making beat poetry a strong feature of Danish poetry, and in the collection 3-D-Digte (3D Poems), 1977, he wrote about his most-loved New York districts in a rapid, improvisational bebop style that was clearly related to Allen Ginsberg, and which also gained inspiration from the roaming and visionary poetry of that grand old man of American poetry, Walt Whitman. Turèll often cultivated long poetic sequences at a rapid tempo, full of repetitions and variations, working with shifts between bebop, cool jazz, meditative touches and Indian raga that could provide a framework for his linguistic register and allow him to go exploring in thought and in the world. An often cited and characteristic poem is ‘To be beat’ from the collection Manuskrifter om hvad som helst (Manuscripts about Anything at All) (1971): ‘To be beat is to stand on a street corner and be stoned out of your mind’ GREGORY CORSO To be beat is to stand on a street corner and be stoned out of your mind To be beat is to sit in a launderette on Gl. Kongevej and suddenly hear Gregory Corso’s voice come out of the spindryer To be beat is to go over to a bookshop to steal a block and a speedmarker to be able to write about this state To be beat is to make a chillum and sit down on the garbage cans in the backyard while the wind blows through the leaves To be beat is to stand in front of the launderette with psychedelic eyes and watch car faces drive past To be beat is to follow your clothes into the revolutions of the spindryer and the drycleaner To be beat is to sit on Spies’ customer-bench and record and have to go to Algiers the next morning but without Spies To be beat is to accept what there is to accept and experience what there is to experience To be beat is to count on one’s fingers probably being one’s only fingers To be beat is to be ready to come right out whenever and never do so before To be beat is anything at all and of course nothing To be beat is without significance if you either are it or are not it To be beat is one of ten thousand possibilities in language To be beat is to fade out over streets and roofs via one’s own dizzy hand To be beat is a spontaneous train of thought started by Gregory Corso a possible

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chain that anyone can add his personal contribution to To be beat is a chance encoding that now sprays out in random spots on the paper To be beat is to be nothing to be willing to be anything including oneself To be beat is to turn outwards without having troubled oneself in advance as to where one might end up 29.4.35

Here, Turèll uses as his starting point a quotation from one of the youngest of the American beat poets, Gregory Corso, making use of him in the repetitive structure of the poem, where the poet and reader, via the sound of Corso’s and Turèll’s voices, move from an everyday situation in a Copenhagen launderette out into a psychedelic experience of the outside world and of language, on into philosophical variations on human life and poetic writing. Paradoxical possibilities open up in the body, the mind and language as the poem expands, whirls further and further away from the centrifuge of the washing machine, and assures the reader that all paths are possible. The bebop language has a narcotic effect that asks the poet and the reader to let go of their worries and abandon themselves to life and the world. The beat poem expresses in a rhythmic form, a solo for poetic voice and speedmarker, the idea of the liberating potential of poetry, a theme Turèll often returns to in long poetic sequences. Examples include his major works, the avant-garde-like Sekvens af Majana (Sequence of Manjana) (1971) and the pop-culture-like Karma Cowboy (1974), which mixes Western and Eastern poetry and philosophy. Dan Turèll’s poetry is a cocktail of parlando, a spoken form approaching song, or a song form approaching speech, often through spoken words which maintain the poet’s distinctive diction and pitch and link the movements of language and thought. The special thing about Dan Turèll was that his normal, everyday language could be tuned to the same pitch he created in poetry, which meant that his speech often sounded like poetry, and his poetry like speech, as one can confirm by listening to the many radio broadcasts in which Turèll participated. He developed an unmistakable and original poetic design that included his poetry, diction, clothing, home interior and public appearance. The design was created out of clichés and quotations from

35

Dan Turèll, ‘At være beat’, in Manuskrifter om hvad som helst (Copenhagen: Borgen, 1971), 227– 228. Translation by John Irons in Anne-Marie Mai and Thomas Bredsdorff, eds., 100 Danish Poems (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, Washington University Press, 2011), 330–331.

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widely differing traditions and cultural contexts, but paradoxically enough it resulted in a highly personal synthesis of the material. He formulated the poetic I-figure as a rhythmic and musical presence in the language, which gave room and sound to the human element, and which became an example of how mass-culture material can serve as part of a distinctive and personal bricolage.

Constructed situations The long strings of language, the movements of word-particles and sentence rhythms that in Dan Turèll enable the poem and the world to be seen from new angles are also to be found in Peter Laugesen’s poetry. His American inspiration, apart from beat poetry, is the early postmodern poet Charles Olson and his concept of ‘projective verse’, that is forward-looking, rhythmic poetry that opens up a field of new linguistic possibilities and voices. At the same time, Laugesen has cultivated Japanese poetic genres and inscribed them into his extended poetic project, where each collection of poems is really sequences of a poetic energy that goes beyond the framework of the book or the time-space of the improvisation. Per Højholt has described Laugesen’s books as ‘The annual letter from Peter’ so as to underline the continuity and the unmistakable poetic voice that characterizes the entire opus. Laugesen’s poetry never stands still; the words reach out after each other and into the next text or book. It is difficult to single out works from Laugesen’s long career, which began with his first volume of poems in 1967. But a good choice might be Konstrueret situation (Constructed situation, 1996), where the writing offers itself as a counteragent to the fossilizing of political thought into justification of power, a space in which puppies, birds, insects and toads tumble around, insisting on the playfulness and light of life. The concept of constructed situation was inspired by discussions of the Situationist International (SI) that the Danish artist Asger Jorn helped to found along with the French philosopher and film-maker Guy Debord. In the SI manifesto, the ‘situation’ is called an invitation to play and an organization of the living moment. Laugesen states that the poem is ‘the trick of realising art’, and his poems can be read as constructed situations. The collection, Konstrueret situation, alternates between small, metaphorical poems and rhetorical, intoned, narrative texts that mention many of Laugesen’s literary

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kindred spirits and feature inserted quotations. Gestures of self-reflection and confession are mixed into the stream of writing as in the following. We’ve screwed around. Not used a rubber. We’ve drunk too much and forgotten where we were. We’ve forgotten to see stars forgotten that the sky stares at us with jazzed eyes at four in the morning on its travels with setting an re-rising while the earth turns. Everything turns and we’re only small in our houses and cardboard boxes. We’re only small when we look at the sky. But in spite of and because of that we mustn’t forget who we are and that we happen here. Those dead from AIDS and war can’t see stars, those dead from doctor’s mistakes, old age, car accidents, drink, overdoses and nothing, just dead from sorrow and tiredness, dead from a lack of life, the dead can’t see stars. And the stars are there, it’s only us who call them stars they simply are there and stay that way till they explode and die, which we can only see when the light of their death reaches us, and before that we see, carried by the light, a long long series of images, states, see what there was and how it changed, seen as a photo album that gapes in the wind, see as ourselves as we see ourselves in ever older photographs, see both ways, see all of it changing suns on forgotten lawns with dead dogs at garden gates that no one remembers, see our mothers and fathers, siblings relatives friends, as on a stage, turning, turning rising and setting, turning on and turning off, continual returning until the image never returns again, and we don’t know that of course, we’re still waiting but it didn’t come on time and time is a lie, The night is red as a goat. The night is ever-roaming just look at the stars dammit. The night is a peevish teenager That says you are pissing senile. The night lives in your mother’s opera glasses.36

36

Peter Laugesen, Konstrueret situation, trans. John Irons (Copenhagen: Borgens forlag, 1996), 12–13.

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The long musical sequence, which Laugesen performs on the CD Apparatets skygge (The shadow of the apparatus) (2005), recorded together with the group Singvogel, circles round a classic poetic set-up of people under a starry sky and a reflection on their relation to the cosmos. This well-known poetic topos, however, is not the point of departure for an unambiguously happy vitalism where man feels himself to be part of a larger life force that reaches out into the eternal. The poem starts with forgetting, mistakes and misuse, inspired by the campaigns then underway for safe sex. People misuse themselves, forget to take care of each other and forget to look at the stars, and forget to be present in their own lives. To take place and to be present are human possibilities, despite death, misuse and forgetting, which whirl around us in photos from old albums. No hope exists that we will be remembered, or that death comes on time or is meaningful. But after the poet has written a comma and paused at his statement about time being a lie, the poem nevertheless opens up in a new direction, with surrealist images of the night that offer a view of all stages of life: childhood, teenage life, old age, and in the adult life of the present, a panorama which becomes possible when people look at the stars. The poem thus becomes an example of the trick of realizing art: it succeeds because the well-known poetic star topos is sent into a rhythmical sequence of sentences and particles that are repeated and turned, finally opening out into surprising comparative images of the night. And the images are held in check by the intimacy and pathos that lurk in every star poem, by a pot of piss and an old pair of opera glasses.

Everything is to be included The sensitivity to language, to the smallest units of writing that Laugesen and Turèll make use of in different ways can also be observed in Klaus Høeck’s poetry. And the three poets share a source of inspiration in Ezra Pound, to whom Høeck pays homage as the man who makes use of all of language and draws on all of reality.37 Pound’s motto for poetry, ‘Make it New’, is interpreted by Turèll, Laugesen and Høeck as an injunction to make the entire poetic tradition new, not to put the old behind oneself. Pound, from this point of view, is not a 37

Cf. Klaus Høeck, ‘Speech for Sissal Kampmann’, 2012, Det Danske Akademi, accessed January 2016, http://www.danskeakademi.dk/priser/visprismodtager.asp?u_id=241&id=18.

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modernist poet of fragmentation but a poet who creates what Dan Turèll has called ‘the meaningless interconnection of everything’.38 Since the mid-1980s, Høeck has mainly published extended books of poems, arising out of radical implementations linguistic premises like the grammar of Viggo Grøndal, cybernetic control and IT programming. Verse forms are often based on the haiku and the sonnet – called a ‘sonku’ by the poet himself. Since the use of linguistic rules and systematics in the early works of Høeck’s oeuvre resulted in a large amount of ‘letter-waste’ when the system did not tally, and letters had to be added to make the systems do this, Høeck has over the years worked to use systems in such a way that spillage and linguistic pollution are avoided: what the poetic system requires in the way of material is never in excess of the design. This poetry is offered as a non-polluting ‘soft machine’ where the linguistic material is treated ecologically and does not need either additives, weeding or the discharge of polluting material. Høeck’s principal ideas, that nothing real or human can be alien to poetry, and that poetry offers a way of expressing the totality of life, which man is unable to comprehend using his reason are already given expression in his first huge work, Hjem (Home, 1985/1998). Home is an encyclopaedia of the material world of Denmark, and the text has quite literally been created out of the formulae for the Danish subsoil. In the distortion of language resulting from the formal system, the three tracks, Nature, Spirit and Culture, weave in and out of each other throughout the composition: Nature is read from left to right, Culture from right to left, and Spirit radially. The work unites prose and poetry in a narrative of the poet’s profound grief at the suicide of his beloved, and his struggles, like those of Orpheus, to bring her back from the realm of the dead. The Nature section features poems about atoms, molecules and elements, geology, oceanology, meteorology, flora and fauna and man; the Culture track comprises everything from language, factories, public institutions, villages and cities to churches, slaughterhouses and landfills. The Spirit track deals with faith, existential beliefs, hope and love, beginning and determination. The complex schematic according to which Home is constructed is described in an appendix to the book, a theoretical poem in itself, which underlines that the poet has chosen to adhere to this rigid system out of an awareness that language is always

38

Dan Turèll, Karma Cowboy (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1974), 191.

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an axiomatic system, and a choice to work consciously with it, rather than let a unrecognized system control his verse. Home includes both advertizing poems for branded goods and what are almost hymns, in which the system distorts language, turning it into an almost incomprehensible glossolalia, as in the following passage from the middle track: our fatheress our lives are as the grass the plants it begins in gleam ingness and in glimm ering but it ends in dis tant and blackenment only in you shall we find up and unceasing ness our fatheress39

Home depicts everyday life, sorrow and love, alternating between seriousness, humour, melancholy and longing. The work places itself in an old renaissance tradition of creational poetry, a tradition famously represented in Denmark by Anders Arreboe’s Hexaëmeron (1661) about the six days of Creation. At the same time, the poem presents itself as cybernetic. The result of its rigorous control, paradoxically enough, is a completely new freedom to pursue subjects and themes and to get language to stretch itself into a totality of meanings and conceptions. Home makes poetry out of a can of pig’s hearts in a creamy sauce, fragrant roses, seasons, Denmark’s lovely bridges, power plants and public offices. The poet draws the reader into a responsive and open intercourse with the outside world, which becomes both fairy tale and present, as in the suite about vegetables, which pays homage to potatoes, carrots, beetroots and alfalfa: If you listen very carefully, you can hear every day at six o’ clock the vegetables suddenly go on the air with their plain message: life is green. You stop short for an instant. You take off your hat and whisper on the same wavelength: green for ever.40 39

40

Klaus Høeck, Home, trans. John Irons, 51, accessed January 2016, http://img.kb.dk/ha/manus/ hoeeck/KHhome.pdf. Ibid., 254.

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Man is thus seen as participating in a totality of nature, culture, language and spirit which he is unable to comprehend and explain with his reason. The poetry asserts, with reference to Søren Kierkegaard’s existential philosophy, the limits of human cognition, pointing to belief as a possible decision. Home deals with a Kierkegaardian leap into beliefs and uncertainties represented as 70,000 fathoms of water, and on the basis of this the poems supply neither imitations nor images of the real, instead offering ways of relating to nature, culture and spirit. The poems do not prove anything, but try instead to show something, as Høeck himself expresses it.41 The poems attempt to draw the reader’s attention to all that exists in the world, but at the same time to the limits of human cognition: man cannot come up with unequivocal explanations or a justification of his being, just as little as reality can explain itself. The poems clarify the relationship between humanity and reality: poetic language that sensitively demonstrates the structures and axioms of language is able to achieve the spread of totality, Høeck claims.42 Home begins a series of large Høeck works that investigate the possibilities of poetry and language, philosophical and cognitive paradoxes, the various periods of past poetry, art, and music, and the conflict-ridden world of the present. The poems are systematically composed, and their humour and ironic self-reflection merge with an unmistakable ability to bring widely different meanings and phenomena into the same poem.43 Everything is really to be included.

Into the world Klaus Høeck’s comprehensive poetical works are all accessible in English at The Danish Royal Library’s websites.44 The translator John Irons, who by chance was commissioned to translate a poem by Klaus Høeck, has continued his work with the poet himself, and gradually all the major works have been completed in English translation, though they have yet to gain a major international reception. This calls for a critical effort that no one has yet been prepared to tackle. But

41

42 43

44

Klaus Høeck, ‘Speech for Karen Marie Edelfeldt’, in Rungstedlundbilleder, Det Danske Akademi, 1988–1995 (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1996), 336. Ibid. Cf. Peter Stein Larsen, Poesiens ekspansion. Om nordisk samtidsdigtning (Copenhagen: Forlaget Spring, 2015), 61–71. Cf. http://www.kb.dk/en/nb/materialer/haandskrifter/HA/e-mss/hoeeck.html.

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the Internet publication by The Royal Danish Library is some recognition of how difficult it is for Danish poetry to be published abroad. Several of Inger Christensen’s works have, as mentioned, been published in translation, but mainly by small publishing firms with a modest range, and Klaus Høeck has also had a collection of poems published in English by a minor, now discontinued American publisher (The Woods, Crane Editions, 1998). Dan Turèll’s and Peter Laugesen’s poems, on the other hand, have only been published in excerpts in periodicals outside Denmark. Although the translation of an extract from Dan Turèll’s Pictures of Vangede is a promising suggestion of interest, and although Peter Laugesen is a regular guest at a number of festivals and reading events in Europe, the Middle East, China and the United States, the potential for contemporary Danish poetry to become known and perceived as a contribution to world literature is limited. As Georg Brandes already observed at the turn of the twentieth century, the authors who write in languages that many people understand have a better chance than others to gain widespread world recognition – something that the authors of the twentieth to twenty-first century have also been forced to recognize.45 At the same time, it is not impossible to create an interest. This was demonstrated during the large Nordic Poetry Festival in New York in 1993, where fifty Nordic poets, headed by the later Nobel prize-winner, the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, and with Inger Christensen as the best-known Danish participant, caused quite a stir.46 The festival, which, characteristically enough, was organized by very young literary enthusiasts was a striking venture, and it has been followed more sporadically by Nordic festivals in China and Estonia. In 2011, Nordic literature was the main subject at the prestigious book fair Salon du Livre in Paris. Since 2010, the North Zealand art museum Louisiana has invited contributors to the international festival Louisiana Literature, which with a host of guests from many countries is making Danish and Nordic literature part of a larger picture. Here, world literature becomes a Danish cultural context. The French literary critic Pascale Casanova, one of the many to discuss the existence of a world literary space, points to the Nobel Prize as an example of an institution that expresses and mediates world literature. The Nobel institution reaches out beyond nations into a global and post national present where literary 45

46

Cf. Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, ‘Between Goethe and Us: Brandes’ World Literature’, Bogens verden 4 (2006): 10. See introductions and contributions by those participating in Nordic Poetry Festival, ed. Kajsa Leander and Ernst Malmsten (New York: Nordic Poetry Festival, 1996).

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renewal, according to Casanova, is often renewed from corners of the world which are thought of as politically and economically marginal, such as Joyce’s and Beckett’s Ireland or Ibsen’s Norway.47 Unfortunately, Inger Christensen’s Denmark cannot be added to Casanova’s list; Christensen’s oeuvre must make do with being a part of a modernist and postmodernist field where poetry in Danish, relatively unnoticed by any except Danish readers, is but one part of the world-literary space. From time to time – and perhaps somewhat by chance – Danish poetry arouses international interest, although there is no lack of literary quality. But artistic quality is not a magic formula that at once opens all the doors of world literature. Even though the conditions for bringing the Danishlanguage poetry into the world market are more than difficult, Danish poetry contributes to changing traditional notions of world literature. The ambitious oeuvre of the mid-1960s generation, has begun to appear in new contexts and will perhaps reach the readers of tomorrow.

Bibliography Andersen, Frits. ‘Klaus Rifbjerg’. In Danske digtere i det 20. århundrede, Vol. II, edited by Anne-Marie Mai, 221–238. Copenhagen: Gads forlag, 2001. Borup, Anne. ‘Dan Turèll’. In Danske digtere i det 20. århundrede, Vol. III, edited by Anne-Marie Mai, 25–38. Copenhagen: Gads forlag, 2000. Casanova, Pascale. ‘Literature as World’. New Left Review 31, January–February (2005): 71–90. Groden, Michael, Martin Kreiswirth, and Imre Szeman, eds. The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism. Baltimore/London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. Accessed January 2016. http://litguide.press.jhu.edu.proxy1-bib.sdu.dk. Hoover, Paul. Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology. London, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1994. Larsen, Peter Stein. Poesiens ekspansion. Om nordisk samtidsdigtning. Copenhagen: Forlaget Spring, 2015. Leander, Kajsa and Ernst Malmsten. Nordic Poetry Festival. New York: Nordic Poetry Festival, 1996. Madsen, Carsten. Poesi, tanke, natur. Aarhus: Klim, 2004. Mai, Anne-Marie. Danish Literature in the 20th and Early 21st Century. Odense: Syddansk Universitetsforlag, 2016. 47

Cf. Pascale Casanova, ‘Literature as World’, in Verdenslitterær kritik og teori, ed. Mads Rosendahl Thomsen (Aarhus: Universitetsforlag, 2008), 27.

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Mai, Anne-Marie. ‘Dreams and Realities. The Nordic Council Literature Prize as a Symbol of the Construction of Nordic Literature’. In Nordic Cooperation. A European Region in Transition, edited by Johan Strange, 69–93. New York: Routledge, 2015. Mai, Anne-Marie and Thomas Bredsdorff. 100 Danish Poems. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, Washington University Press, 2011. Massey, Doreen. ‘A Global Sense of Place’. In Reading Human Geography, edited by Trevor Barnes and Derek Gregory, 315–323. London, New York: John Wiley & Sons Inc., 1997. Nielsen, Hans-Jørgen. Nye sprog, nye verdener. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2006. Pape, Lis Wedell, ed. Sprogskygger. Læsninger i Inger Christensens forfatterskab. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1995. Povlsen, Steen Klitgaard. ‘Danish Modernism’. In Modernism, Vol. 2, edited by Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska, 855–863. Amsterdam, Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2007. Rasmussen, Mikkel Bolt and Jakob Jakobsen, eds. Expect Anything. Fear Nothing. The Situationist Movement in Scandianvia and Elsewhere. Copenhagen: Nebula, 2011. Simonsen, Karen-Margrethe and Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen, eds. World Literature. World Culture: History, Theory, Analysis. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2008. Stjernfelt, Frederik. Admiral. Bitumen. Zodiak. Lille Klaus Høeck encyclopædi. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2008.

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‘A faithful, attentive, tireless following’: Cultural Mobility, Crime Fiction and Television Drama C. Claire Thomson and Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen

And problems without a solution are exactly what we need in a field like ours, where we are used to asking those questions for which we already have an answer.1

Prologue: Voicemail from a journalist ‘Why is Nordic Noir2 so popular in the UK?’ The call comes, typically, in the early afternoon during a lecture, and transfers to voicemail. The journalist is writing a piece with a title like ‘Scandimania’ or ‘Cool Scandinavia’, about the craze for all things Nordic that has possessed the British chattering classes for the last half decade, and wants a few quotes from a specialist in the field. What to say? The question as phrased is unanswerable. Other queries could be addressed with hard statistics, cool facts. ‘How popular is Nordic Noir in the UK?’ would be a cinch, if the enquirer’s deadlines allow for a few hours with the latest book sales and viewing figures. ‘How long will the craze last?’ we can blag with reference to the longevity of previous trends. ‘What gets lost in translation?’ can be illustrated with a few amusing anecdotes. But it is the vexed question of why all things Nordic have transfixed Britain here, now, in the 2010s, that the journalist wants to understand. So do her readers. So do we. The journalist knows as well as we do that the simple answer to what is fuelling Scandimania is media content like the piece she is writing. 1

2

Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (New York: Verso, 2005), 26. It is possible, but not certain, that ‘Nordic Noir’ was coined by Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen when he used the term during his appearance on a BBC television show in 2011 which then adopted Nordic Noir as its title.

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‘Why is Nordic Noir so popular in the UK?’ The very persistence of this question – in media content, at Q&A sessions with authors and actors, in blogs and reviews – is itself worthy of exploration. The question implies an insistence that there must be cultural and affective explanations for a phenomenon that can be tracked in purely quantitative ways: book sales, bestseller lists, blog posts, viewing figures, event attendance. In Graphs, Maps, Trees, Franco Moretti ponders these limits to the usefulness of hard data in the study of literature. Often, he observes, quantitative methods identify a question which can only be tackled, if at all, with some kind of textual engagement: ‘Quantification poses the problem, then, and form offers the solution. But let me add: if you are lucky’.3 In feeling around for interesting and, perhaps, viable explanations for the popularity of Nordic Noir in the United Kingdom, we have tended, as Moretti suggests, to fall back on ‘form’. In this chapter, then, we offer a number of answers, albeit tentative and partial ones, to the journalist’s question, each of which centres on form in some sense. But it is important to emphasize that this means not only narrative form but also the ways in which texts are shaped by (and themselves shape) the material, technological and institutional forms in which they are instantiated; the forms that are the condition of possibility for their mobility. ‘Why is Nordic Noir so popular in the UK?’ Implicit in the question is an alltoo-human longing for authenticity, for the idea that there is some essential and originary Danishness or Nordicness that travels across translations and media markets to seduce the unsuspecting Brits, compelling us to fill our bookshelves, cancel our Saturday night plans and stay home on our IKEA sofas, live-tweeting the latest Danish television drama. In adopting the term ‘mobility’, we are alluding to Stephen Greenblatt’s ‘Mobility Studies Manifesto’, in which he insists that ‘the glacial weight of what appears bounded and static’ in culture is always a tale of movement.4 This mobility must be taken literally: Only when conditions directly related to literal movement are firmly grasped will it be possible fully to understand the metaphorical movements: between center and periphery; faith and skepticism; order and chaos; exteriority and interiority. Almost every one of these metaphorical movements will be understood, on analysis, to involve some kinds of physical movement as well.5 3 4

5

Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees, 26. Stephen Greenblatt, ‘A Mobility Studies Manifesto’, in Cultural Mobility, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 252. Ibid., 250 (emphasis in original).

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With Greenblatt, our aim is to investigate ‘hidden as well as conspicuous movements of peoples, objects, images, texts and ideas’;6 to look for culturally and historically specific zones of contact and the ‘mobilizers’ who facilitate cultural exchanges; and to pay attention to the tension between ‘individual agency and structural constraint’.7 For the purposes of our discussion, these edicts draw our attention to the interplay between Nordic Noir and less obviously popular Danish exports; current technological and institutional parameters for the translation of texts across languages and media; and the roles of actors such as writers, agents, translators, publishers and critics. ‘Why is Nordic Noir so popular in the UK?’ We have a hunch that this question can be explored, if not answered, by taking mobility seriously, that is, paying attention to ‘conditions directly related to literal movement’ in order to grasp at the metaphorical encounter with the Nordic or Danish ‘other’ that consumers experience in the texts they read and view. In this chapter, then, we attempt to track the traffic of contemporary Danish literature across the North Sea in ways that are metaphorical, material and medium-specific. Literature does not travel solo and nor does it travel light; it is carried and accompanied by films, television series, translators, publishers, state subsidies, and all manner of lifestyle goods stamped with Brand Denmark. It travels by interlingual and intermedial translation, by plane, by cargo ship, by word of mouth and by digital download. Our story begins with a well-known Danish traveller.

From Danish fairytales to Nordic Noir In 1869, the Danish cultural critic Georg Brandes wrote an extensive essay on Hans Christian Andersen as a writer of fairytales, declaring that ‘alone of all our writers, Andersen is known throughout Europe, indeed, beyond Europe’.8 Brandes’ explanation for Andersen’s singular fame is that his tales appeal to what people of all lands have had in common: childlike imagination and sensitivity. Andersen’s success cannot, Brandes insists, be attributed to his travelling and self-promotion, as his contemporaries presumed. If travelling was enough, any writer with a grant could achieve fame! No, thinks Brandes, it is not because

6 7 8

Ibid. Ibid., 251. All translations from Danish sources are our own, unless otherwise indicated.

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Andersen wrote in prose and can thus be translated, nor that his writing has the common touch, nor that he is Denmark’s most gifted author. The explanation lies in the elementary simplicity of his work; this is why no other Danish writer at the time could boast ‘such a faithful, attentive, tireless following of readers’.9 The same adjectives – ‘faithful, attentive, tireless’ – could be applied today to the consumers of what has come to be known as Nordic Noir. Even if the responsible adult would hesitate to expose their child, however sensitive and imaginative she might be, to the content of much Scandinavian crime fiction, the genre shares with Andersen’s fairytales an elementary simplicity of form and content. Nordic Noir is framed by internationally recognizable genre conventions and appeals to ‘what people of all lands have in common’, that is, perceived global threats such as organized crime, environmental degradation and transnational trafficking. Moreover, like Andersen in his time, Nordic Noir dominates sales of Danish literature in English translation today, though, crucially, the Danish crime novel as such is a minor part of the Nordic Noir phenomenon. Put differently, whereas Andersen and the characters immortalized in his tales, such as The Little Mermaid, serve (not always in controllable ways) as international brand ambassadors for Denmark,10 the phenomenon of Nordic Noir elides the cultural specificities of the individual Nordic nations in favour of a nebulous notion of ‘cool Scandinavia’. Scandinavian crime fiction is reviewed, consumed and critiqued overwhelmingly as regional, with ‘Scandinavian’ and ‘Nordic’ usually used as synonyms. It is dominated by the police-procedural sub-genre. The novels often articulate social criticism, critiquing national institutions and gender politics in particular. And they are frequently gloomy, pensive and pessimistic in tone. These factors are evident in other crime-fiction traditions, but combined in the Scandinavian crime novel they form a unique constellation.11

The conventional origin-story of Nordic Noir starts with the Swedish writing team Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, who published ten novels about the Stockholm9

10

11

Georg Brandes. ‘H.C. Andersen som Æventyrdigter (1869)’, in Samlede Værker, Vol. II (København: Gyldendal, 1899), 91–132. For an account of the cultural misunderstandings and indeed accidents engendered by the design of the Danish Pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai Expo, see Carina Ren and Szilvia Gyimóthy, ‘Transforming and Contesting Nation Branding Strategies: Denmark at the Expo 2010’, Place Branding and Public Diplomacy 9, no. 1 (2013): 17–29. Paula Arvas and Andrew Nestingen, ‘Introduction: Contemporary Scandinavian Crime Fiction’, in Scandinavian Crime Fiction, eds. Andrew Nestingen and Paula Arvas (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011), 2.

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based Inspector Martin Beck in the period 1965–1975. Arvas and Nestingen, for example, observe that Sjöwall and Wahlöö ‘defined the shape of Scandinavian crime fiction, making it recognizable to readers beyond the Scandinavian countries and creating a set of expectations’.12 Notably, in their adoption of the accessible and compelling American sub-genre of the police procedural, Sjöwall and Wahlöö were motivated by their Marxist-Leninist conviction that the Swedish Welfare State was rotten in its ‘reactionary subservience to capitalism’.13 Social critique is generally acknowledged as the key driver behind more recent Scandinavian crime fiction, too, with the Swedish author and activist Henning Mankell at the forefront of this tendency, along with his compatriot Stieg Larsson. Seen from abroad, Scandinavia melds into one noir-producing region where writers are ‘deeply worried, anxious and conscientious’ and ‘contrive to express this simultaneously social and existential anxiety’ in a way that is ‘selfcritical, self-tormenting even’.14 In delineating the Nordic countries’ respective golden ages of crime fiction prior to Sjöwall and Wahlöö, Arvas and Nestingen seem to struggle to identify the authors of a distinctive Danish crime fiction tradition. Aside from the early twentieth-century writer Palle Rosencrantz, canonical literary authors who dabbled in crime fiction dominate the short list: Johannes V. Jensen, Hans Scherfig, Hans Kirk, even Karen Blixen.15 To this set of moonlighting literati, one could add the author Anders Bodelsen and the poet Dan Turèll (or ‘Uncle Danny’), who published a baker’s dozen of Copenhagen crime novels centring on a nameless detective in the 1980s.16 Bo Tao Michaëlis concurred, writing at the turn of the millennium that ‘Denmark has neither a tradition of police novels, as in Sweden, nor any Norwegian tendency boldly to tackle the more racy elements of the crime novel genre’.17 Less than a decade later, Nestingen was able to list some contemporary Danish writers that were being ‘widely read’ outside Denmark: ‘Leif Davidsen’s political thrillers, Steen Christensen’s police procedurals, and Michael Larsen’s metaphysical detective stories’.18 The year

12 13 14

15 16 17 18

Ibid. Ibid., 3. Bo Tao Michaëlis, Nordisk Litteratur/Nordic Literature 2001 (Copenhagen: Nordic Council of Ministers, 2001), 12–17. Arvas and Nestingen, ‘Introduction’, 4. See Dan Turèll, Murder in the Dark, trans. Mark Mussari (London: Norvik Press, 2013). Michaëlis, ‘Scandinavian Crime Novels’, 16. Andrew Nestingen, Crime and Fantasy in Scandinavia: Fiction, Film and Social Change (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008), 204–205.

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2011 saw a few names added to this list of Danish crime fiction available in English translation: Jussi Adler-Olsen, Sissel-Jo Gazan, and the writing team of Lene Kaaberbøl and Agnete Friis. In terms of UK sales, too, Norwegians and, especially, Swedes dominate the contemporary market for Nordic Noir, just as crime fiction tends to dominate the market for Scandinavian literature generally. Between 2000 and 2007, for example, ‘approximately fifteen crime novels by six Norwegian writers appeared in English, far outstripping the other kinds of Norwegian fiction that were translated’.19 Henning Mankell’s ‘Wallander’ series of novels has sold ‘in the region of forty million copies in forty different languages’,20 with each of the first four novels in the series selling over 100,000 copies each by 2007.21 Stieg Larsson’s posthumous Män som hatar kvinnor (2005; The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, 2008), the first of his Millennium Trilogy, had sold 2,388,467 copies in the United Kingdom between its publication in 2008 and late 2014. In comparison, the most successful Danish author of crime fiction in the United Kingdom since the millennium, Jussi Adler-Olsen, sold 66,422 copies of his novel Kvinden i Buret (2008, released in the United Kingdom initially as Mercy in 2011, and in the United States as The Keeper of Lost Causes) up to late 2014.22 In turn, the unusual scale of such sales figures is thrown into relief by the rule of thumb that ‘for an English translation sales beyond 10,000 copies must in fact be reckoned as astronomical’.23 Insofar as book sales figures themselves are significant – they do not, for example, encompass library lending, and they tell us nothing about how many of the purchased copies have actually been read – Danish crime fiction is not the brightest star in the Nordic Noir firmament. On the other hand, Danish crime fiction can boast one major bestseller of the last quarter century: Peter Høeg’s Frøken Smillas fornemmelse for sne (1992; published in 1993 in the United States as Smilla’s Sense of Snow, and the next year in the United Kingdom as Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow). The British edition of this novel sold over 400,000 copies at a steady rate in the two years after its publication.24 In the United States, the novel quickly broke records for sales 19

20

21 22 23 24

Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2008), 153. Stephanie Craighill, ‘Henning Mankell: European Translation and Success Factors’, Pub Res Q 29 (2013): 201–210, 202–204. Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility, 153. These figures have been sourced by our PhD student Ellen Kythor, courtesy of Nielsen Book Data. Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility, 154. Clive Bloom, Bestsellers: Popular Fiction since 1900, 2nd ed. (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), 99.

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of literature in translation.25 In a plot twist that illustrates how literature’s fate abroad can impact on its reception at home, it was not until Smilla’s Sense of Snow made it big in the United States that sales in Denmark accelerated beyond the modest 10,000 copies bought in the first year of its publication.26 Significantly, at least one recent re-issue of Høeg’s novel, a 2014 e-book issued by Vintage, graphically co-opts the Nordic Noir craze by emblazoning in upper case on its cover: ‘THE ORIGINAL SCANDINAVIAN THRILLER’. This post hoc claim to be the ur-text of today’s Nordic Noir craze is justified in a strictly commercial sense. For example, it was in the wake of the extraordinary international success of Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow that Henning Mankell’s publisher recruited Høeg’s agent, Anneli Høier of the literary agency Leonhardt & Høier, to kick-start Mankell’s international career by placing his work in the same markets as Høeg.27 Forshaw also attributes ‘the geographical relocation of the crime genre northwards’ to the ‘unprecedented success – both critical and commercial – of [this] one book’.28 However, the claim is more problematic when Høeg’s form and style are scrutinized. If we now turn to look more closely at Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow and Adler-Olsen’s Mercy as the two most successful examples to date of Danish Nordic Noir, we find ourselves face to face with two very different books marketed under the overarching genre of crime fiction, each of which offers a different set of clues as to the reasons for its popularity in English. The investigation begins with the act of translation.

Smilla and Mørck: Genre, style and translation By the mid-1990s, the international rights to Høeg’s Frøken Smillas fornemmelse for sne had been sold to thirty-five territories.29 The raw data – how many translations, how many copies sold – belie more revealing flows and reversals

25

26

27 28

29

Hans Henrik Møller, ‘Peter Høeg or the Sense of Writing’, Scandinavian Studies 69, no. 1 (1997): 29–51, 30. Carsten Andersen, ‘En Høeg klar til landing’, Politiken, 3 March 2006, accessed 12 February 2016, http://politiken.dk/kultur/boger/ECE139104/en-hoeeg-klar-til-landing/. Craighill, ‘Henning Mankell’, 205. Barry Forshaw, Death in a Cold Climate: A Guide to Scandinavian Crime Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 5. Eva Hemmungs Wirtén, No Trespassing: Authorship, Intellectual Property Rights, and the Boundaries of Globalization (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 41.

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at the macro- and micro-levels. As Wirtén puts it, ‘translation is an uncanny barometer of changing cultural flows’.30 Study of the formal properties of translated texts can also be revelatory. There were in fact two Smillas in English: the translator of the US edition, Tiina Nunnally, refused to be named in the UK edition, which had been revised by Peter Høeg himself and his editors prior to publication in Britain.31 As Satterlee carefully outlines, the differences between the US and UK translations do not only encompass Americanisms versus Britishisms; the UK translation is closer to the source text in terms of word choice (even the ‘Miss’ in the title), syntax, especially inversion of subject and verb, humour and idioms.32 By pulling the translation back towards the Danish, Satterlee concludes, F. David, the pseudonymous translator of the UK edition (actually Høeg and his editors), produces ‘a false sense of “fidelity”’.33 This to-ing and fro-ing of language between the UK and US markets is not unique: Venuti34 tracks how translations of Mankell’s novels by translator Steven T. Murray were adapted (‘Britishized’) by publisher Christopher Maclehose at Harvill Press, arguing that this is a case of ‘domestication’ or assimilation of the source text to local linguistic and cultural values. The UK version of Smilla, on the other hand, was effectively foreignized (to use another of Venuti’s terms), rendered strange, by the author’s revision of the translation. Moreover, Wirtén uncovers that at least nine translations worldwide were undertaken using one of the English versions as the source text (a not unusual but frowned-upon practice in translation circles), thus further transmitting the vagaries of the ideologically and syntactically inflected anglophone Smilla.35 This contested translation process underlines the writerly qualities of a novel which was lauded as a literary event. The language of this novel is part and parcel of the strategy of pastiche that is at its heart; Smilla adopts a relatively straightforward syntax compared to Høeg’s previous books, which ‘owed a great deal of their impact precisely to [their] syntactical digressions’.36 The genre of this novel and its eponymous main character were exemplars of a postmodern hybridity that was both formal and thematic, and very much of its time. While the object of pastiche in Høeg’s debut novel, Forestilling om det 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

Ibid., 40. Ibid., 47–48. See also Thom Satterlee, ‘A Case for Smilla’, Translation Review 50, no. 1 (1996): 13–17. Satterlee, ‘A Case for Smilla’, 15–17. Ibid., 17. Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility, 157. Wirtén, No Trespassing, 53–54. Møller, ‘Peter Høeg or the Sense of Writing’, 41.

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tyvende århundrede (1988; The History of Danish Dreams, 1997), had been South American magical realism,37 with his second novel,38 Høeg turned his attention to crime fiction, playing with the conventions of the police procedural and the thriller. This established genre, predicated on the interpretation of clues and the resolution of a crime, was an ideal tool for Høeg to advance the wider project of his oeuvre: ‘constructing a more purified realm of signification where the field of investigation is signification itself ’.39 Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow does not, however, restrict itself to one genre. Genre-shifting is built into its structure. The first section of the novel, ‘The City’, maps out an alternative and troubling map of Copenhagen, introducing middleclass Danish readers and international audiences alike to run-down apartment buildings, the Greenlanders’ cemetery, docklands dotted with murderously corrupt cops, and – disorienting for the residents of a predominantly low-rise city – the view from rooftops and tower-block apartments. Smilla’s portrait of her Copenhagen as alternately snow-covered and sweltering is painted with all the ambivalent detail of any noir city. For the international reader, Høeg’s Copenhagen is a hyperlocal iteration of Chandler’s Los Angeles or Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh. ‘Part II: The Sea’ shifts location to the cramped confines of a ship heading for a mysterious site in Greenland, where the existence of a meteorite hosting a virulent parasite holds the promise of profit and glory for a cabal of corrupt scientists, and thus also shifts genre to something akin to a sciencefiction eco-thriller. By the end of its short ‘Part III: The Ice’, the novel is flagging itself as postmodern metafiction, the page and the plot fading to white with Smilla’s final act of resistance against certainty, truth and narrative: ‘Tell us, they’ll come and say to me. So we may understand and close the case. They’re wrong. It’s only what you do not understand that you can come to a conclusion about. There will be no conclusion’.40 The commitment of detective fiction to solving the case makes it the obvious genre for a postmodern demonstration of history and truth as grand narratives: ‘Assuming truth is no longer attainable and can only be suggested in ironic allusions, the detective’s task, just like the

37

38

39 40

C. Claire Thomson, ‘“Vi æder vores eget lort”: Scatology and Eschatology in Peter Høeg’s Forestilling om det tyvende århundrede’, Scandinavica 41, no. 1 (2002): 37–59. A collection of short stories, Fortællinger om natten, or Tales of the Night, had been published in the meantime. Møller, ‘Peter Høeg or the Sense of Writing’, 31. Peter Høeg, Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow, trans. F. David (London: Vintage, [1994] 2005), 408.

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reader’s, is to make sense of the remaining fragments, details, and clues – the left-overs. But the postmodern thriller is not a genuine thriller.’41 Neither is Smilla herself, as heroine and narrator, a convincing detective. Høeg has commented that he regarded her as a ‘linguistic state, like a mask’ and had no sense of how she might look until he saw her on the cover of the published book.42 She slips easily between the roles demanded by the novel’s progression from one genre to the next: from cool and rational investigator, to James Bond-style stunt-woman, to metafictive cipher. She embodies hybridity in such a way as to undermine the notion of ‘fact’: the daughter of a Danish medic and a Greenlandic hunter, she is a gifted, self-destructive geologist whose ‘feeling’ for snow emanates from a blend of scientific and instinctive knowledge, and who shifts uneasily between cultural identities. And she also erodes gender boundaries, in one sex scene expressing her desire for her lover, Peter the Mechanic, by inserting her clitoris into the tip of his penis.43 Arguably, then, it is not unproblematic to regard Smilla as the first in a line of strong, independent and complex women detectives in Danish culture, culminating with the figure of Sarah Lund, to whom we shall return later in this chapter. This dimension of Smilla has been argued by an anonymous American publisher quoted in Nordic Literature magazine to be ‘the real creator of a best-seller in the USA’, given that the majority of her readers were women.44 But the key to her popularity is that she is the ‘progeny’ of the ‘typical Northern cop’.45 Høeg’s eponymous heroine then, both justifies and problematizes the post hoc assimilation of Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow into the Nordic Noir canon as ‘the original Scandinavian thriller’. The ‘typical Northern cop’ described by the same American publisher is ‘an overweight, heavily perspiring and divorced cop, who smokes too many cigarettes and drinks too much coffee as well as alcohol. He is not happy, and all the time his job makes him aware of the fact that something is rotten in your Scandinavian welfare societies.’46 In Mercy, Jussi Adler-Olsen introduces the reader to Carl Mørck, traumatized, ageing and single, straight from the generic mould: Carl took a step towards the mirror and ran one finger along his temple where the bullet had grazed his head. The wound had healed, but the scar was clearly visible under his hair, if anyone cared to look. 41 42 43 44 45 46

Møller, ‘Peter Høeg or the Sense of Writing’, 40. Peter Høeg, ‘The Search for Smilla’, The Sunday Telegraph, 19 October 1997, 7. Høeg, Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow, 169. Michaëlis, ‘Scandinavian Crime Novels’, 12. Ibid., 13. Ibid.

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But who the hell would want to do that? he thought as he studied his face. It was obvious now that he had changed. The furrows around his mouth were deeper, the shadows under his eyes were darker, and his expression showed a profound indifference. Carl Mørck was no longer himself, the experienced criminal detective who lived and breathed for his work. No longer the tall, elegant man from Jutland who caused eyebrows to raise and lips to part … It had been a long time since Vigga moved out. Even though they weren’t yet divorced, it was definitely over. He turned around and set off for Hestestien.47

Mørck will go on to feature as the hero of the ‘Department Q’ series, the conceit of which is that Mørck has been demoted to investigate cold cases filed in the basement of the police station, together with a mysterious deputy, Assad. Our first glimpse of Mørck is followed by a précis of the character of a pretty, plucky female politician (and, the reader soon realises, the victim-to-be): The tabloids loved everything about the Democrats’ vice-chairperson, Merete Lynggaard, and everything she stood for. Her sharp comments at the podium in the Folketing, the Danish parliament. Her lack of respect for the prime minister and his yes-men. Her feminine attributes, mischievous eyes and seductive dimples. They loved her for her youth and success, but above all they loved her for the fodder she gave to speculations about why such a talented and beautiful woman had still not appeared in public with a man.48

The perspectives of these two characters alternate more or less throughout the novel, giving the reader a privileged insight into the abducted woman’s plight, to which the detective is not privy. Notably, the novel opens with a prologue recounting the woman’s first attempts at escape. The trope of oscillation is strengthened by the five years separating the abduction in 2002 and the work on this ‘cold case’ in 2007; the chapters shift between these two years and the perspectives they indicate, headed only by the year in which they take place. This formal strategy, though, underlines the ultimate linearity of the detective work, progressing step-by-step, detail-by-detail towards cracking the case. It will be clear from the passages quoted above that the stylistic complexity that bedevilled translations of Høeg is not an issue in Mercy; language serves as a transparent vehicle for plot and character. Mankell’s English translator

47 48

Jussi Adler-Olsen, Mercy, Kindle edition, trans. Lisa Hartford (London: Penguin, 2011). Ibid.

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Laurie Thompson has remarked that a writer need not be ‘a great stylist’ to be ‘an outstanding storyteller who can recount intricate plots’.49 However, this elides the symbiosis of genre and style. Matthew Reynolds, a judge of the OxfordWeidenfeld Translation Prize, observes that ‘a piece of genre fiction will have to be unusually distinctive [to be nominated for a translation award], not only because genre fiction is by definition generic, but because its standard styles tend not to call forth compelling English from the translator’.50 The translatability of Scandinavian crime fiction is, then, a self-fulfilling prophecy: it is a side effect and a sine qua non of the plain, realist, even transparent language that marks the genre, and is interesting less at the level of textual analysis and more for the quantitative analysis that large numbers of units can facilitate. Nonetheless, there is some scope for an ideological reading of translation patterns. Venuti diagnoses dominant practices in the translation of traditional crime fiction into English, arguing that the translations tend both to exoticize and to flatten the differentness of the source culture. They produce, he says: a translation effect that signifies a superficial cultural difference, usually with reference to specific features of the foreign culture ranging from geography, customs and cuisine to historical figures and events, along with the retention of foreign place names and proper names as well as the odd foreign word. The English translations don’t produce a foreignizing effect because they don’t question or upset values, beliefs, and representations in Anglophone cultures, certainly not the canon of crime fiction.51

In the passages quoted above from Mercy, several of these tendencies can be observed: the explication of the term ‘Folketing’, the retention of foreign proper names, place names and some foreign words. Arguably, the retention of foreign proper names in particular has the effect of heightening and sustaining interest in a character or series; titbits of information, such as the Danish connotations of Carl Mørck’s surname – mørk means ‘dark’ – is fodder for fandom and the stuff of blogs. Nonetheless, if we take Venuti seriously, the stylistic markers of the crime fiction genre would seem to intensify the mechanisms by which translation into English conceals the radical foreignness of the text. We are left,

49 50

51

Craighill, ‘Henning Mankell’, 207.  Matthew Reynolds, ‘On Judging the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize’, Translation and Literature 17, no. 1 (2008): 66.  Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility, 160.

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then, with two bestsellers in translation which sit at opposite ends of the scale of what Venuti calls the ‘invisibility’ of the translator, corresponding to their very different interpretations of the crime genre.

Danish cinema on the move The two decades that separated Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow and Mercy also saw a sea change in the Danish film and television industry. Just as the two novels exemplify different iterations of the same genre, their respective film adaptations allow us to diagnose some of the ways in which Danish literature and visual culture have become entangled over the last twenty-five years, both in institutional and media terms and in the British imagination. ‘I’m not a writer who sees things in pictures’. Peter Høeg’s account of his meetings with Danish director Bille August during the pre-production process reveal a sensitivity to the ways in which film adaptations inevitably betray their source texts. The novel’s ‘very literary’ ending could not be retained; the Danish social realism would have to be toned down; and the costs associated with such an ambitious production could only be raised if the film had an English screenplay and international cast. Høeg agreed to all this, specifying only that August should be inspired by some ‘resonance or quality’ that he found in the novel. And for the author, in the end, the film ‘radiates something that’s both archetypal and contemporary’.52 While the decision to make this German–Danish–Swedish co-production in English was first and foremost a commercial one, the source text’s description of a world in flux full of displaced people – Greenlanders in Copenhagen, the ship’s international, multilingual crew speaking in fragments of languages – could be regarded as an artistic alibi. Smilla’s Feeling for Snow premiered in 1997 and starred, among others, Vanessa Redgrave, Gabriel Byrne and Richard Harris, with Julia Ormond in the title role. Anticipation and some scepticism had simmered in Denmark during the three years of the film’s production, and boiled over into anger and scorn at the premiere. Smilla’s psychologically complex voice as first-person narrator was lost, and the suspense ebbed away in the second half, was the consensus.53 52 53

Høeg, ‘The Search for Smilla’, 7. Agnete Bay Harsberg, ‘Frøken Smillas onde tvilling. Om Bille Augusts filmatisering af Frøken Smillas fornemmelse for sne’, in Abens poetik. Portræt af Peter Høegs forfatterskab, eds. Agnete Bay Harsberg and Lilian Munk Rösing (Copenhagen: Forlaget Spring, 2005), 165.

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Despite, or perhaps because of, the critical uproar, the film performed very respectably at the domestic box office.54 Danish audiences were less sensitive to the film’s cacophony of languages and accents, a feature which exercized British reviewers: August has assembled a bankable international cast, but in the process risks stifling any sense of local identity. Characters speak English in a variety of different accents. Julia Ormond gives Smilla a hint of a Greenlandic intonation while Robert Loggia as her father is American. Gabriel Byrne and Richard Harris both have an Irish burr to their voices, and Mario Adorf as the ship skipper sounds German.55

Macnab diagnoses an irony inherent in international co-productions: by adopting a world language such as English, the screenplay guarantees that some or all of the voices will be accented relative to the setting and/or the spectator. Smilla’s Feeling for Snow was produced at a key moment for the international mobility of Danish cinema. Successive Danish Film Acts of 1989 and 1997 determined that what made a film ‘Danish’ was the domicile of its producer, rather than its use of the Danish language, thus decoupling state film subsidies from national language. If a film did not use Danish dialogue, it could instead employ particular artistic or technical strategies which would advance film art and culture in Denmark, and still be eligible for state support.56 This cleared the way for directors such as Lars von Trier and Bille August to work in English, but, more pertinently for our discussion, it opened up the knotty possibility of works of national literature being adapted to the screen in languages other than Danish. This development must be seen in the broader context of the transformation of Danish film policy and the film industry from the late 1980s onwards. This is

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For comparison, Smilla sold more cinema tickets in Denmark than Steven Spielberg’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park, released the same year, and slightly less than the British hit The Full Monty (directed by Peter Cattaneo and also released 1997). Total box office for the period up to 2014 for these films is recorded as: Smilla: 411,654; The Lost World: 371,684; and The Full Monty: 466,400. For comparison, James Cameron’s Titanic (1998) is the most-seen film in Danish cinemas up to 2014, with 1,428,491 tickets sold. All figures from ‘Antal solgte biografbilletter’, Danish Film Institute 2014. http://www.dfi.dk/Tal-og-fakta/Billetsalg.aspx (accessed 19 February 2016). Geoffrey Macnab, ‘Fräulein Smillas Gespür für Schnee/Smilla’s Feeling for Snow.’ Sight and Sound 7, no. 11 (1997): 52 -53. Filmlov 1989: § 21; Retsinformation, accessed 9 February 2016, https://www.retsinformation.dk/ Forms/R0710.aspx?id=47756#K6. See also Mette Hjort, ‘Denmark’, in The Cinema of Small Nations, eds. Mette Hjort and Duncan Petrie (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 27.

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a period in which the more recent global success of Danish film and television were seeded. With the benefit of a couple of decades’ hindsight, the cumulative effect of developments in the decade from 1988 has been characterized as a second ‘golden age’ of Danish cinema, and as the beginnings of a set of strategies designed to steer a course for the cinema of a small nation in a globalizing world.57 Some aspects of this strategic package are specific to cinema, but other aspects can also be seen to underpin, or at least inform, how Danish culture more broadly conceived moves between markets and cultures. There is absolutely nothing new about the national and international circulation of film adaptations of Danish literature. Since its earliest days, cinema has adapted popular and classic literature alike to the screen and has been a prime mover in expanding the audience for national literatures across borders, facilitating the movement of untranslated literary texts through use of intertitles, dubbing and subtitling.58 Two film adaptations of canonical Danish literature heralded a turning point in the fortunes of the national film industry from the late 1980s. Gabriel Axel won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film for 1987 for Babettes gæstebud (Babette’s Feast), his interpretation of Isak Dinesen’s novella, and Bille August repeated this feat the next year with Pelle Erobreren (Pelle the Conqueror), an adaptation of Martin Andersen Nexø’s epic novel of 1906–1910.59 Film scholar Mette Hjort has described the transformative impact of winning Oscars two years running as ‘the kind of statistically unimaginable and thus quasi-prophetic event that could truly galvanize an entire milieu and make it an irresistible magnet for new talent’.60 Within the next decade, the Danish cinema industry and national film institutions were unrecognizable compared to the sleepy milieu of the 1980s. The Danish Film Institute had

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Mette Hjort, Small Nation, Global Cinema: The New Danish Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). In its first two decades, the Danish film company Nordisk was the first in the world to move to multireel films, facilitating complex storytelling; after a Golden Age dominated by original screenplays, in the early 1920s Danish cinema relied heavily on literary adaptations such as A.W. Sandberg’s productions of Charles Dickens’ stories, and Carl Th. Dreyer’s Michael (Mikaël, 1924), adapted from a Herman Bang novella and filmed in Germany. A very clear example of a symbiotic relationship between popular literature and cinema in Denmark is offered by the baker’s dozen of Morten Korch films directed by Alice O’Fredericks in the period 1950–1967. These were adaptations of the most popular novels of the day by Korch; the films remain among the biggest domestic box office hits in Danish film history (Det Danske Filminstitut, 2014). Again, it is instructive to look at the box office figures for these two Oscar-winning films in their domestic market. While ticket sales in Denmark up to 2014 for Bille August’s earlier literary adaptation of the national classic Pelle the Conqueror outshone his later big-budget production Smilla, at 581,059 tickets, Gabriel Axel’s Babette’s Feast languishes at only 216,251. Hjort, Small Nation, Global Cinema, 5.

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been reorganized and had adopted a fresh set of ambitious goals and strategies, aspiring to consolidate and improve the breadth and quality of national film production and to promote Danish cinema abroad as characterized by artistic merit, innovation and high production values.61 The director Lars von Trier was making his mark internationally and contributing to the consolidation of the industry at home, not least with his innovative Film Town (Filmbyen) in Avedøre which brought practitioners and specialists in a variety of film and new media together under one roof.62 Von Trier was also a founding ‘brother’ of the Dogme 95 project, whose ten ascetic regulations brought Danish film to international attention again in the late 1990s with the distinctive aesthetic of Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen (1998), the first commercial feature film to be shot on handheld digital video.63 Arguably, the first few Dogme 95 productions were instrumental in turning the tide back towards Danish-language filmmaking for international audiences. The first four Dogme 95 films were made in Danish for domestic cinemas and television, but also self-consciously wrote themselves into world cinema history by launching the Manifesto and Vow at the 1995 Paris celebrations of the centenary of cinema, and by critiquing the French New Wave and other aspects of film history and practice.64 In the two decades since the Dogme Manifesto was launched, Danish cinema has consolidated this ambitious approach, and while Lars von Trier has retained his crown as the enfant terrible of Danish cinema, a generation of auteurs such as Susanne Bier, Lone Scherfig and Nicolas Winding Refn have found international success. In 2014, however, Denmark’s top film at the domestic box office was Mikkel Nørgaard’s film adaptation of Adler-Olsen’s first novel about Carl Mørck. Critically acclaimed, and starring Nikolai Lie Kaas, Sonja Richter and Fares Fares, the film had filled just under 700,000 cinema seats by late 2014, making it one of the top fifty most-seen Danish films since the 1970s.65 While it adopted the title of the novel, Kvinden i buret (The Woman in the Cage) for distribution in Denmark, the film circulated in the English-speaking world with the title The Keeper of Lost Causes, in reference to Mørck’s vocation as a specialist in cold cases.

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Hjort, Small Nation, Global Cinema, 5–9. See also C. Claire Thomson, Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen (The Celebration) (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013), 19–20. Hjort, ‘Denmark’, 35–36; Thomson, Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen (The Celebration), 21–23. Thomson, Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen (The Celebration). Ibid., 38–41. ‘Antal solgte biografbilletter’.

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In the United Kingdom, where Adler-Olsen’s novel had initially been launched with the title Mercy, a re-issue by Penguin in conjunction with the film’s international premiere adopted the longer title and the byline ‘now a major motion picture’. An image of the film’s stars also features on the cover. The impact on book sales of movie tie-ins of this kind is extremely unpredictable; some segments of the audience actively avoid buying such editions, so publishers tend to try to keep pre-film and tie-in editions in print; a successful film can bring an older book to attention again.66 The film itself has not made much of a splash on UK screens. One recurring response among critics is striking, and has much to tell us about the reception of other Danish media in the United Kingdom in the age of the television drama: [T]his is a perfectly serviceable slice of Nordic noir, but it’s hard to work out what it is doing on a cinema screen. In spite of the occasional formal flourishes – most notably a slow-motion car crash in the snow that is shot as if it’s a stylised scene in a Lars von Trier movie – the film looks like a glorified TV drama.67

Arguably, Macnab’s gut reaction – that the film resembles a television drama – has little to do with its visual style and everything to do with British expectations about the kind of screen on which they see Danish crime drama. To flesh out this point, we need to return to the late 1980s, when conditions and practices in the Danish television industry began to be reconfigured, laying the foundations for today’s highly exportable television drama series.

‘Double storytelling’ and Danish television drama It was in 1988 that DR (Danmarks Radio, the Danish national broadcasting corporation) lost its monopoly over Danish television screens with the introduction of a commercial broadcaster, TV2. In order to compete, DR experimented with producing classic drama content; Lars von Trier’s 1988 interpretation of Carl Th. Dreyer’s screenplay of the Medea legend is a legacy of this period. From the mid-1990s, a shift from one-off dramas towards longer66 67

John-Michael Maas, ‘Tie-in Trends’, Publishers Weekly 249, no. 50 (2002): 24–25. Macnab, ‘The Keeper of Lost Causes, Film Review: Slice of Nordic Noir Looks like a Glorified TV Drama’, The Independent, 28 August 2014, accessed 11 February 2016, http://www.independent. co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/reviews/the-keeper-of-lost-causes-film-review-sliceof-nordic-noirlooks-like-a-glorified-tv-drama-9698015.html.

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running series typically consisting of ten hour-long episodes is testament to the importance of individual programmes in the ratings wars. Drama production at DR was re-organized at this time to facilitate and emphasize this model, adopting the US mode of production whereby a head writer (or ‘showrunner’) has creative control and oversight of a series, with teams of sub-writers and directors working in ‘relay’ to make blocks of two episodes.68 Thus, whereas the Danish film industry continues to privilege the auteur model, assigning creative control and credit to the director, in television, the emergence of the screenwriter is raising ‘a number of important questions about individual, collective and institutional authorship’.69 It was in 2002, after the Danish crime series Rejseholdet (Unit 1, 2000–2004) won an Emmy for Best International Drama Series, that DR codified the set of fifteen ‘dogmas’ that had emerged and been consolidated since the 1990s. These include the principles that there should be ‘crossover’ between talent in the film and television industries, to the advantage of both; that the producer should be able to select his or her choice of writers, directors and other crew for any given project; and, most famously, that DR dramas should engage in ‘double storytelling’, that is, ‘they should contain a “public service” layer of social and/or ethical connotations as well as an entertaining plot’.70 The commitment to ‘storytelling’ as an art within the television industry must be seen in the wider context of Danish cultural policy and practice, again, from the late 1980s onwards. In 1987, a new institution was established independently of the state. Forfatterskolen, or the School of Authors, was founded by the writers Poul Borum, Per Aage Brandt and Ulla Ryum. The School was granted equivalent status to other Danish Art Schools in 2004, and aims to provide a literary and professional formation for writers across the full range of genres and styles.71 Within the Danish Film School, the Screenwriting programme has hatched a generation of new talent under the leadership of Mogens Rukov. The film director Thomas Vinterberg described

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Ib Bondebjerg and Eva Novrup Redvall, ‘Breaking Borders: The International Success of Danish Television Drama’, in European Cinema and Television: Cultural Policy and Everyday Life, ed. Ib Bondebjerg, Eva Novrup Redvall, and Andrew Higson (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015), 222. See also Eva Novrup Redvall, Writing and Producing Television Drama in Denmark: From The Kingdom to The Killing (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 4. Redvall, Writing and Producing Television Drama in Denmark, 8. Bondebjerg and Redvall, ‘Breaking Borders’, 223; see also Redvall, Writing and Producing Television Drama in Denmark, passim. ‘Historie’, Forfatterskolen 1987–2016, accessed 14 February 2016, http://www.forfatterskolen.dk/ skolen/historie/.

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the transformation of the programme in an interview in 2000, identifying as particularly important the opportunities afforded by the School for ‘telling a wide range of stories’ with a ‘broader appeal’ and ‘focusing intensely on scriptrelated work’.72 With Hjort we can also point to the impact on the screenwriting milieu of more financial and institutional support for script development as an integrated part of initiatives such as New Danish Screen, a collaboration between Danish film and television established in 2003, which mandates lowbudget filmmaking by teams of producers, writers and directors.73 Here we see a concrete expression of the principle of ‘crossover’ between film and television embedded in DR’s drama production: without a dynamic, well-trained network of screenwriting professionals, the crucial role of storytelling in contemporary industry simply could not be actualized. It is equally important to note that the DR dogma of ‘double storytelling’ lays emphasis on television production as ‘public service’, for it reminds us that Danish television dramas, first and foremost, are made for domestic audiences. Research consistently shows that audiences, in the final analysis, prefer local fare: ‘audiences always consider international content through the prism of the local’ and ‘local content is often preferred to imported programmes’.74 Accordingly, ‘the DR series have continuously been targeted at a mainstream domestic audience, while their production teams have differentiated them from the flood of imported product by making them in the national tongue and setting them in a clearly Danish present’.75 Ostensibly, this makes the exportability and international success of Danish television dramas something of a conundrum. The next section examines how the tension between the local and global function in tandem with the professionalization of Danish film and television to make the small nation’s audiovisual content eminently exportable.

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Quoted in Mette Hjort and Ib Bondebjerg, eds., The Danish Directors: Dialogues on a National Cinema (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2000), 277. Hjort, ‘Denmark’, 29–31. Elke Weissmann, ‘Reflection ii: The Format Trade and Transnational Knowledge Cultures’, Critical Studies in Television 8, no. 2 (2013): 73. Bondebjerg and Redvall, ‘Breaking Borders’, 224. This is not to say that the publicly funded broadcaster is required to tackle subjects dictated by the state. On the contrary, the recent political controversy around the historical ‘accuracy’ of Ole Bornedal’s drama series 1864, commissioned to mark the bicentenary of the Dano-Prussian war, have re-awakened debates in Denmark about the so-called ‘arm’s length principle’ (armslængdeprincippet) which routes funding through consultants and committees rather than directly from government to broadcaster (see Erik Hedling, ‘Slaget om Slaget ved Dybbøl – Den danske pressemodtagelse af 1864’. Kosmorama, 2015, 261. http://www .kosmorama.org/Artikler/Slaget-om-Slaget-ved-Dybboel.aspx.).

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Of sweaters and lampshades: Global, local and the ‘other local’ Much has been made of the dizzying number of countries to which certain Danish drama series have been sold. Reportedly, as of 2015, Forbrydelsen (2007–2012, The Killing) had been sold for broadcast in 159 countries, and the political drama Borgen (2010–2013, created by Adam Price) to sixty-seven.76 The viewing figures for such series are also dazzling, at least when compared to the tens of thousands of copies a novelist might aspire to sell on the British market. The Killing started off modestly, attracting in the region of 400,000 viewers per episode when its first season screened in the United Kingdom, and generating more chatter and column inches out of all proportion to its viewership;77 later screenings captured 500,000 to one million viewers when BBC4 screenings were supplemented by access via BBC HD.78 As a proportion of the British public of 65 million, however, this is tiny, especially when considered alongside the audience share in Denmark. There, episodes typically attracted 1.5 million viewers out of a population of 5.5 million, reaching 2 million towards season finales.79 In Denmark, the series was developed and broadcast by the primary national channel DR1 to large mainstream audiences, whereas in the United Kingdom, it constituted ‘exclusive and exotic programming on a niche channel’.80 Thus we see that in its journey across the North Sea, The Killing and other Danish television series shape-shift into products that appeal to a specific segment of the ‘host’ public. In the United Kingdom, that public’s reception of series such as The Killing and Borgen played out in real time on the webpages of the Guardian newspaper. In the first half of 2012, when both series were current on British screens, some 200 articles and comments appeared in the Guardian online.81 The overarching storylines and episode-by-episode events were reviewed, often by journalist Vicky Frost, and viewers discussed characterization, plot lines, and other aspects of the shows. The interaction of DR’s established ten- or twenty-episode structure 76 77

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Bondebjerg and Redvall, ‘Breaking Borders’, 223. Toby Clements, ‘The Killing by David Hewson: Review’, The Telegraph, 5 May 2012, accessed 18 February 2016, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/9243399/The-Killing-by -David-Hewson-review.html; Bondebjerg and Redvall, ‘Breaking Borders’, 231. Redvall, Writing and Producing Television Drama in Denmark, 163; Bondebjerg and Redvall, ‘Breaking Borders’, 231. Wikipedia. ‘The Killing (Danish TV Series)’, 2016, accessed 22 February 2016, https://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/The_Killing_%28Danish_TV_series%29#Episodes_and_ratings. Redvall, Writing and Producing Television Drama in Denmark, 159. Bondebjerg and Redvall, ‘Breaking Borders’, 233.

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with the weekly updates provided a ‘real-time’ perspective on the consumers’ interpretation of the stages of the mystery and their experience of suspense, as well as their understanding of character development. In this sense, the genrespecific construction of a crime narrative was enhanced by the shared experience of consuming and dissecting the series on social networking platforms. Woven into discussion of the developing story were commentaries on the unfamiliar material culture and environment in which the shows were filmed. On the one hand, an expectation emerged of what ‘noir’ as a visual style might mean in a Nordic locale. The combination of Danish light and weather lends itself to a cinematic noir style, such that setting and plot become enmeshed, as in this somewhat unflattering review: But the television series makes Copenhagen seem dreary, despite all the terrific light fittings on show, and it populates the city with unhelpful and slightly ugly men and women (with a few exceptions), most of whom are mildly racist. It usually rains and nor is the plot as tight – or short – as it could be: it is clearly influenced by the Danish love of pickled fish, as red herrings are introduced on the hour, every hour, then dispatched one by one until the remaining suspect turns out – spoiler warning – to be among the least interesting available.82

Artefacts in the mise-en-scène migrate into viewers’ discourse to become allpervasive and durable memes connected to specific series. Some of these, such as detective Sarah Lund’s Faroese sweaters in The Killing, are sufficiently marked in the source culture to be remarked on there and to function as a defining feature of a character. Other artefacts, often aspects of Danish design such as the ‘light fittings’ mentioned above, attain iconic status only when the series travels abroad. One article83 explicitly highlighted how the Poul Henningsen lampshades in the Prime Minister’s office in Borgen served a similar function to Lund’s sweater; readers are advised on how to obtain originals or reproductions of the various classic lamps in the series.84 Such artefacts seem to trigger various affective responses in viewers (at least those who write for, and comment in, the Guardian): aspiration, admiration, desire. They are workaday features of the mise-en-scène for the Danish audience, but function for British viewers as the 82 83

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Clements, ‘The Killing by David Hewson’. Laura Barnett, ‘The Killing Gave Us Jumpers: With Borgen, It’s Lampshades’, The Guardian, 11 January 2012, accessed 20 February 2016, http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/ shortcuts/2012/jan/11/killing-jumpers-borgen-lampshades.. Pei-Sze Chow, ‘“A Symptom of Something Real”: The Øresund Region on Film and Television, 1999– 2014’, PhD diss., UCL, 2015, 260.

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visual equivalents of the exotic names and places they encounter in translated novels. As Bondebjerg and Redvall note, British journalists and bloggers are engaged in a process of imagining Denmark, projecting their fantasies onto the dreary backdrop of crime-ridden Copenhagen and its exotic artefacts.85 In doing so, they are also (re-)imagining their own society, often by identifying what is different and lacking. The heyday of Danish television drama on British screens coincided with the run-up to the 2014 Scottish referendum on independence, and in that context a peculiarly distilled and nebulous version of wider British utopian imaginings about Scandinavia was in evidence: The details however are sketchy, and the motivations range from environmental awareness and education to gender equality and economic success. Whatever the substance, the effect is unambiguous – Scandinavia is there to be copied and admired. … In Scotland’s case brand Scandinavia means reinventing the country as a better version of itself along the lines of an imagined north.86

As with literature in translation, then, we see that it is the balance and tension between local and global, new and familiar, setting and story, that enable Danish drama television to survive and thrive on the British market, but also that such fare can contribute to shaping political discourse and to remaking consumers’ sense of the local and the foreign. Much has been made of the British market’s willingness to accept subtitled dramas, on the evidence of the success of Danish imports. In contrast, The Killing was re-made for the American market in the period 2011–2014 by Fox, latterly in collaboration with NetFlix. Writing about the consumption of foreign television series and their remakes, Weissmann provides us with the useful concept of ‘the other local’.87 Pointing out that savvy audiences sometimes have as much access to international productions as the producers and broadcasters who commission and trade them, Weissmann discusses how discourses of ‘originality’ and ‘authenticity’ are adopted by consumers who wish to ‘establish their own critical credentials and expertise via an ability to make such transnational comparisons’.88 Such discussions turn on elements of the source 85 86 87 88

Bondebjerg and Redvall, ‘Breaking Borders’, 233. Dominic Hinde, A Utopia Like Any Other (Edinburgh: Luath Press, 2016). Weissmann, ‘Reflection ii’, 73–75. Ibid., 73.

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material and adaptation which are perceived to be untranslatable or predicated on aspects of the relevant milieu, for example, the quality of acting in the United Kingdom. Remakes therefore do not replace the original films or series in the minds of many viewers, but supplement them. If we push Weissmann’s idea a little further, another interesting implication is that consumers get to know the foreign as another kind of local, one which is strange to them, but which increasingly swims into focus as they seek out more of the cultural products of the country in question. If we now go on to consider the consumption of Nordic Noir via different media and the circulation of content across different platforms, we should bear in mind that what is being consumed is a vision of Danishness or Nordicness which is understood to be ‘specific, different and, crucially, other to the home culture’: an ‘other local’.89

Content across platforms: Media convergence Large-scale studies would be needed to determine the overlap between readers of Danish fiction in translation and viewers of Danish television shows, but that the latter group is larger by an order of magnitude suggests that television must be regarded as a potential ‘carrier wave’ for any increase in consumption of Danish literature, rather than vice versa. A concrete example of this, and a fascinating coda to The Killing, is the established British author David Hewson’s re-working of the three seasons into novels, sales of which in the United Kingdom compare well to Adler-Olsen in translation.90 Hewson’s website insists that his novels do not merely rehearse the same story as the television series: ‘This is an adaptation – not a novelisation. So if you’ve seen The Killing III on TV expect plenty of surprises, included a changed cast and an entirely different ending’.91 Reviewers concurred that the television series and novel could intersect in the consumer’s imagination in various ways. Toby Clements92 for example, comments: ‘Fans of clever detective fiction who have not seen the series will find this riveting, while those already converted to the television series will be fascinated by the 89 90

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Ibid., 75. 53,906 copies of Hewson’s adaptation of The Killing I had been sold by mid-November 2014, according to Ellen Kythor, ‘Danish Literature in the UK’ (2015). Available online: http://www.tiki -toki.com/timeline/entry/179923/Danish-in-the-UK/. David Hewson, Forbrydelsen. Baseret på tv-serien af Søren Sveistrup, trans. Kim Langer (Copenhagen: Lindhardt & Ringhof, 2012). Toby Clements, ‘The Killing by David Hewson: Review’.

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slow build up and Hewson’s alternative ending.’ In a final plot twist, Hewson’s first Killing novel has been translated into Danish.93 This translated edition renders Søren Sveistrup, the chief writer of the television series, more visible in the project by adding his name to the cover. In both language editions, the acknowledgements thank Sveistrup for giving Hewson his blessing to adapt the series to literature as he saw fit. As previously stated, it is not the case that other media such as film and television suddenly erupt into the history of Danish literature as world literature at the turn of the millennium. The mobility of literature, as text and artefact, has always been predicated on, and entangled with, the networks and practices of other forms of media that obtain in any given period. Or, expressed in more down-to-earth terms by a reviewer of Hewson’s The Killing I: We are more used to films being made from novels, but novelisations of films are not new. They have been knocking around since films were first shown – if the film was taken from an original script – and are easy ways for any producer to make a little extra money. They are usually shoddy knock-off jobs, written by people of whom no one has ever heard, aimed not so much at the discerning public, but at cashing in on the completist tendencies of teenage nerds who want the full set…. Key to it seems to be the existence of an alternative universe in which it is hoped the viewer (or reader) might want to linger just that little bit longer.94

The ‘alternative universe’ of Nordic Noir can be expanded almost indefinitely to track synergies between various texts, artefacts and practices between Denmark and the United Kingdom, including, for example, press and popular interest in television drama from Denmark; consumption of Danish homewares and specialist foodstuffs; sales of Danish crime fiction novels; cheap weekend flights to Copenhagen; guided walking tours around filming locations; Instagram postings of noir-style cityscapes; box office revenue for Danish cinema; commercial events such as the London-based Nordicana festival. As we have been arguing, to understand how Danish literature functions as world literature, we must expand our understanding of ‘literature’; we must see it as a node in a network of other goods, all of them material or digital commodities, artefacts with medium-specific qualities, that are consumed in ways that may or may not involve being ‘read’ in the traditional sense. 93 94

Hewson, Forbrydelsen. Clements, ‘The Killing by David Hewson’.

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What does seem to be novel at this particular moment in history, however, is the phenomenon of ‘media convergence’ fostered by social networking, increased mobility and disposable income among (some sectors of) the population. Convergence is a function of social change as well as technological and industrial change, argues Henry Jenkins, who defines the phenomenon as ‘the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences who will go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they want’.95 The role of consumers is of particular interest. Within the limits set by corporations ‘and even individuals within corporate media’,96 media consumers participate in the production of content, seeking out, synthesizing and sharing information. This cycle of conversation, ‘buzz’ and consumption can be understood as a participatory culture or ‘collective intelligence’.97 Clear instances of media convergence, and its leveraging for commercial gain, can be identified in the context of the current UK craze for all things Scandinavian. We have already discussed the phenomena of Guardian blog discussions and David Hewson’s novel adaptations of The Killing, which entail not just content flowing between media platforms, but actually flag that movement, addressing a consumer who understands book and series to function symbiotically. The third season of Bron/Broen (2011-, The Bridge) tested the potential of its online fanbase by inviting suggestions for content and themes via Facebook. As Chow points out, while this audience engagement can be construed as marketing, it also indicates that the writing team ‘places some emphasis on reflecting a contemporary cultural ethos through themes and events in the plot’ and that the series ‘is a vehicle for the creation of an imagined community that is actively constructing the social life of the region’.98 Meanwhile, the London-based Nordicana festival has run annually since 2013, combining appearances by television writers, actors and critics with meet-the-author events and book-signings, food stalls, pop-up bookshops and exclusive screenings, ‘providing the back-drop for fans to experience their Nordic fascination become a reality’ and ‘immerse [them] selves in the Nordic culture’.99 Our own Nordic Noir Crime Fiction Book Club 95

96 97 98 99

Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York, London: New York University Press, 2006), 2. Ibid., 3. Ibid., 4. Chow, ‘A Symptom of Something Real’, 238. ‘Nordicana: Nordic Noir & Beyond Live 2013–2015’ (n.d.). Nordicnoir.tv, accessed 19 February 2016, http://nordicnoir.tv/events/nordicana-nordic-noir-beyond-live-2013-2015-2/.

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was established in 2011 at UCL not for commercial gain, but with the aim of facilitating public engagement with research. By late 2013, the Book Club’s blog (scancrime.wordpress.com) had attracted some 40,000 page views. Interestingly, it proved to be challenging to encourage and sustain a critical mass of online interaction and comments. Members of the Book Club flocked instead to events focusing on Scandinavian crime fiction and Danish television, where they could meet authors and directors and discuss Scandinavian culture. This is a finding, albeit anecdotal, which points to the accuracy of Jenkins’ emphasis on media convergence as something that takes place ‘in people’s minds’100 and in consort with the mobility of active consumers, rather than exclusively in the technological realm. At the same time, the mobility of content itself is patchy, constrained piecemeal by national and legal frameworks. On the one hand, television consumption remains a ‘national’ event, as evinced by DR’s commitment to established drama ‘slots’ during the week, and by flurries of activity on Twitter and other platforms during screenings of Danish drama in the United Kingdom. On the other hand, the advent of a range of digital platforms for audiovisual content, including film, television and books, are changing consumption habits in ways that are, as yet, little understood. Bondebjerg and Redvall predict that more platforms and easier access will continue to increase demand and consumption.101 DR dramas can generally be watched via the corporation’s website, but this is of little use to any viewers requiring subtitles. BBC iPlayer typically restricts streaming access to one month after first broadcast, and many companies avail themselves of geo-blocking technologies to limit viewing to the national market. Nonetheless, as Weissmann points out, we should not assume that viewers’ consumption is limited to legal platforms or practices,102 and this, we might add, applies to books as well as audio-visual media.

Denmark’s most popular writer? High and low literature Amid the general craze for Nordic Noir and all things Scandinavian, the number of Danish novels translated into English has risen exponentially since 2010 after a

Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 4. Bondebjerg and Redvall, ‘Breaking Borders’, 216. 102 Weissmann, ‘Reflection ii’, 74–75. 100 101

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decline in the late 1990s.103 There is a preponderance of crime fiction, but examples of what the Danes would describe as skønlitteratur (fine or quality literature) are emerging in English translation by writers such as Peter Adolphsen, Kim Leine, Carsten Jensen, Kirsten Thorup and Helle Helle. It would be foolhardy to try to tease out a causal relation in these patterns of translation of ‘high’ and ‘low’ literature in Danish into English with any degree of certainty. However, given the range of small presses that the list of recent translations from Danish encompasses – Quercus, Dedalus, Norvik Press104 – it is certain that the proportion of Danish ‘quality literature’ would be lower were it not for the extensive subsidies provided to foreign publishers by the Danish Arts Foundation. Presses outside Denmark planning to publish Danish literature in translation can apply for support to cover a proportion of a translator’s fee as well as marketing initiatives, literary events and sample translations.105 On rare occasions, this policy facilitates the publication of a future bestseller. Charlotte Barslund’s translation of Carsten Jensen’s 2006 novel Vi, de druknede (We, The Drowned, 2011) was supported by such a grant and has sold 500,000 copies worldwide.106 State support for the translation of quality fiction presupposes that there is inherent value, a public good, in this kind of literature, as well as in the act of making it available to foreign audiences. Venuti states explicitly what he sees as the distinction between ‘elite foreign literature’ versus crime fiction in translation: ‘a more incisive representation of foreign cultures is likely to be found [in quality literature], unconstrained by the generic demands made by crime writing’.107 However, Venuti claims, the ‘popular audience’ is not ‘crossing over’ to the more demanding translated texts.108 On the other hand, one can also argue for a more symbiotic relationship between the two kinds of literature, a relationship which is beneficial for the novel generally. Moretti, for example, speculates that the novel has remained hegemonic for such a long time precisely because it is not a pure-

Kythor, ‘Danish Literature in the UK’. Norvik Press is based in the Department of Scandinavian Studies at UCL. 105 Danish Arts Foundation (n.d.), ‘Translation and Production’, accessed 22 February 2016, http:// www.kunst.dk/english/funding/subsidies/tilskud/translation-fund/. In 2013, Statens Kunstråds Litteraturudvalg, a sub-committee of the Danish Arts Foundation, generously sponsored a PhD studentship at UCL investigating the market for Danish literature in the United Kingdom since the early 1990s. This studentship is held by Ellen Kythor, whose ongoing research has informed much of the discussion in this chapter. 106 ‘Great Expectations of Novel Set in Afghanistan’, Danish Literary Magazine (Copenhagen: Danish Arts Council, 2015), Autumn, 4–5. 107 Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility, 155. 108 Ibid. 103 104

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bred creature of high culture: an ‘oscillation is probably at work between High and Low forms, whose simultaneous existence is a well-known, if often ignored, fact of novelistic history … the strength of the novel is not to be found in one of the two positions, but in the rhythmical oscillation between them’.109 This effect of mutual amplification would certainly seem to be relevant to the current field of literary translation from Danish in the United Kingdom. Aside from subsidizing the movement of words across languages, Danish Arts Foundation funding also contributes to the mobility of translators and, especially, authors. This ensures that authors of ‘quality literature’, whether or not any of their works have previously been translated, are visible on the international Book Fair and Festival circuit, alongside the bigger names (e.g. authors of crime fiction). It is in this context that the British reception of one Danish author, Helle Helle, in the United Kingdom speaks in interesting ways to the transitional moment in which Danish literature currently finds itself in the United Kingdom. A graduate of Forfatterskolen, Helle Helle debuted in 1993, since when she has published nine novels and collections of short stories. She has been translated into eighteen languages, and has been awarded numerous prizes, including Denmark’s Golden Laurel literary prize, the Danish Critics’ Prize, the Danish Academy’s Beatrice Prize, the P.O. Enquist Award and the prestigious Lifetime Award of the Danish Arts Council.110 On the book festival circuit in Edinburgh in 2015, Helle was shortlisted for a prize for debut authors, despite her hefty back catalogue,111 a trenchant example of how the geographical mobility of an oeuvre can entail chronological slippages. More revealingly, when Helle’s novel Dette burde skrives i nutid (This Should Be Written in the Present Tense) was translated into English by Martin Aitken and published in 2014, a review in the newspaper the Guardian112 attracted a chain of twenty-five comments from readers questioning the reviewer’s assertion that Helle Helle was ‘Denmark’s most popular writer’, a statement Self had taken from the book jacket blurb. Did critical acclaim, prizes and a place on the bestseller lists make her the country’s ‘most popular’, the commenters wondered? Or should that accolade go to Jussi Adler-Olsen on the basis of sales figures alone? Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees, 29, n. 17. Helle, Helle. (n.d.), accessed 22 February 2016, hellehelle.net, http://www.hellehelle.net/english/. 111 Dominic Hinde, ‘Helle Helle: Beautiful Tales of Forgotten People’. The Skinny, 9 November 2015. Accessed 11 February 2016. http://www.theskinny.co.uk/books/ features/helle-helle. 112 John Self, ‘This Should Be Written in the Present Tense by Helle Helle. Review – “All the Bigness Hidden Away”’, The Guardian, 1 November 2014, accessed 11 February 2016, http://www .theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/01/this-should-be-written-present-tense-review-helle-helle. 109 110

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Conclusion ‘Why is Nordic Noir so popular in the UK?’ We began by suggesting, in line with Moretti, that although a range of data could be used to establish the popularity of the Nordic Noir phenomenon in the United Kingdom, an excavation of the reasons behind the trend requires attention to textual and material form, and to different forms of mobility. Along the way, we have considered interlingual translation, transmedial adaptation, and the physical and intermedial mobility of authors, consumers and other actors. Two ideas have emerged as red threads running through much of the discussion: on the one hand, storytelling, and on the other, the notion of the ‘other local’. Storytelling is what seems to connect the various instances of bestsellers in literature and media: the lure of a tightly woven whodunnit intrinsic to the crime fiction genre, or the institutionalization of storytelling as a craft resulting in the successful export of television series produced for the local market. Both in the translated literary text and on screen (and the many platforms in between) we have been confronted with the movement of a kind of tamed local, an aspirational Nordic otherness which returns as a utopia in the guise of a dystopia. The hybrid, postcolonial figure of Smilla, the exotic streetnames, the lugubrious Nordic detective, the cool Danish design: each act of translation or intermedial transfer consolidates a foreign and yet familiar ‘other local’ which is often consumed and negotiated by a community of fans online or in person. Particularly striking in the case of Denmark has been the relatively minor contribution made by Danish crime fiction and literature more generally to British Scandimania. In the popular imagination, Danishness is subsumed into an amorphous Nordic mass. Nonetheless, the distinctive strengths of the Danish film and television industries which have been consolidated since the late 1980s ensure that the national art of storytelling continues to meet with a ‘faithful, attentive, tireless following’ in the United Kingdom.

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Helle, Helle. (n.d.). Accessed 22 February 2016. hellehelle.net. http://www.hellehelle .net/english/. Hewson, David. Forbrydelsen. Baseret på tv-serien af Søren Sveistrup, translated by Kim Langer. København: Lindhardt & Ringhof, 2012. Hewson, David. ‘The Killing III’. DavidHewson.com, 2015. Accessed 20 February 2016. http://davidhewson.com/the-killing-2/the-killing-iii-2/. Hinde, Dominic. ‘Helle Helle: Beautiful Tales of Forgotten People’. The Skinny, 9 November 2015. Accessed 11 February 2016. http://www.theskinny.co.uk/books/ features/helle-helle. Hinde, Dominic. A Utopia Like Any Other. Edinburgh: Luath Press, forthcoming. ‘Historie’. Forfatterskolen, 2016. Accessed 14 February 2016. http://www.forfatterskolen .dk/skolen/historie/. Hjort, Mette. ‘Denmark’. In The Cinema of Small Nations, edited by Mette Hjort and Duncan Petrie, 23–42. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. Hjort, Mette. Small Nation, Global Cinema: The New Danish Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Hjort, Mette and Ib Bondebjerg, eds. The Danish Directors: Dialogues on a National Cinema. Bristol: Intellect Books, 2000. Høeg, Peter. Frøken Smillas fornemmelse for sne. København: Rosinante, 1992. Høeg, Peter. Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow. Translated by F. David. London: Vintage, [1994] 2005. Høeg, Peter. ‘The Search for Smilla’. The Sunday Telegraph, 19 October 1997, 7. Høeg, Peter. Smilla’s Sense of Snow, translated by Tiina Nunnally. New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1993. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York, London: New York University Press, 2006. Kythor, Ellen. ‘Danish Literature in the UK’. 2015. http://www.tiki-toki.com/timeline/ entry/179923/Danish-in-the-UK/. Maas, John-Michael. ‘Tie-in Trends’. Publishers Weekly 249, no. 50 (2002): 24–25. Macnab, Geoffrey. ‘Fräulein Smillas Gespür für Schnee/Smilla’s Feeling for Snow.’ Sight and Sound 7, no. 11 (1997): 52–53. Macnab, Geoffrey. ‘The Keeper of Lost Causes, Film Review: Slice of Nordic Noir Looks Like a Glorified TV Drama’. The Independent, 28 August 2014. Accessed 11 February 2016. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/reviews/ the-keeper-of-lost-causes-film-review-slice-of-nordic-noir-looks-like-a-glorified-tv -drama-9698015.html. Michaëlis, Bo Tao. Nordisk Litteratur/Nordic Literature 2001, 12–17. Copenhagen: Nordic Council of Ministers, 2001. Møller, Hans Henrik. ‘Peter Høeg or the Sense of Writing’. Scandinavian Studies 69, no. 1 (1997): 29–51, 30. Moretti, Franco. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History. New York: Verso, 2005.

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Nestingen, Andrew. Crime and Fantasy in Scandinavia: Fiction, Film and Social Change. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008. ‘Nordicana: Nordic Noir & Beyond Live 2013–2015’ (n.d.). Nordicnoir.tv. Accessed 19 February 2016. http://nordicnoir.tv/events/nordicana-nordic-noir-beyond -live-2013-2015-2/. Redvall, Eva Novrup. Writing and Producing Television Drama in Denmark: From the Kingdom to the Killing. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Ren, Carina and Szilvia Gyimóthy. ‘Transforming and Contesting Nation Branding Strategies: Denmark at the Expo 2010’. Place Branding and Public Diplomacy 9, no. 1 (2013): 17–29. Reynolds, Matthew. ‘On Judging the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize’. Translation and Literature 17, no. 1 (2008): 65–69. Satterlee, Thom. ‘A Case for Smilla’. Translation Review 50, no. 1 (1996): 13–17. Doi: 10.1080/07374836.1996.10523677. Self, John. ‘This Should Be Written in the Present Tense by Helle Helle. Review – “All the Bigness Hidden Away”’. The Guardian, 1 November 2014. Accessed 11 February 2016. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/01/this-should-be-written -present-tense-review-helle-helle. Thomson, C. Claire. Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen (The Celebration). Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013. Thomson, C. Claire. ‘“Vi æder vores eget lort”: Scatology and Eschatology in Peter Høeg’s Forestilling om det tyvende århundrede’. Scandinavica 41, no. 1 (2002): 37–59. Turèll, Dan. Murder in the Dark, translated by Mark Mussari. London: Norvik Press, 2013. Venuti, Lawrence. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation, 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2008. Weissmann, Elke. ‘Reflection ii: The Format Trade and Transnational Knowledge Cultures’. Critical Studies in Television 8, no. 2 (2013): 73–75. http://dx.doi.org /10.7227/CST.8.2.7. Wikipedia. ‘The Killing (Danish TV Series)’, 2016. Accessed 22 February 2016. https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Killing_%28Danish_TV_series%29#Episodes_and_ ratings. Wirtén, Eva Hemmungs. No Trespassing: Authorship, Intellectual Property Rights, and the Boundaries of Globalization. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004.

Index Note: Locators with letter ‘n’ refer to notes. Aakjær, Jeppe 215 Abraham and Isaac story 117, 119 Abrahamson, W.H.F. 33, 47 n.54 Abrams, M.H. 103 Absalon, Archbishop 13–14, 18 A B Se digte (A B See poems; Madsen) 218 abstract idealism 182 abstraction 156 absurd 117 Academy Award 6, 251 acrobatics 162 Adam of Bremen 17 adaptations and translations 33–49 adjectives 240 Adler-Olsen, Jussi 242, 243, 246, 252, 253, 259, 264 Adolphsen, Peter 263 Adskillige store Heltes og berømmelige Mænds, sær Orientalske og Indianske sammenlignede Historier og Bedrifter efter Plutarchi Maade (The comparative histories and achievements of several great heroes and famous men, particular oriental and Indian, in the manner of Plutarch; Holberg) 68–9 advertizing 148, 168, 231 Ad virum perillustrem (Holberg) 56 aestheticization 159 aesthetics 4, 8, 95, 96, 124, 141–3, 152, 154–64, 187, 190, 206, 216, 223, 252 Africa 1, 109, 145, 193–208, 211 Against Nature (À Rebours; Huysmans) 99 Aggesen, Sven 17 Aitken, Martin 264 Akedah 117, 120 Åland Islands 5 Alfabet (Alphabet; Christensen) 220, 222–3 alienation 142, 154, 159, 217, 218, 220 allegory 8, 35, 81, 103, 118, 177, 186

allusion 133, 179–80, 205–6, 245–6 Alps 54, 167, 180 Altdänische Heldenlieder (Grimm, Wilhelm) 37, 39–41, 48–9 Amazon Sales Rank 6 Ambales Saga (Sturluson) 21 n.32 American dream 107, 108 Amsterdam 53, 54 anarchism 212 Andersen, Frits 212 n.7 Andersen, Hans Christian 91–112, 206 critique of 94, 95, 100, 111, 239–40 death of 99, 109 fairy tales 100–5, 239–40 influenced by German idealism 4 influenced by present-day concerns 106–9 legacy of 109–12 Pontoppidan’s rewriting of 176–7, 183 in popular culture 110–12 readership and reception 1, 6, 8, 91–2, 95, 102, 109–12, 156 self-promotion 92–7 travels and travelogues 8, 97–9 use of language 100–1 ‘writing things’ 105–6 Andersen, Vilhelm 184 Anecdotes of Destiny (Blixen) 204 Angelic Avengers, The (Blixen) 193 animal–human relationship 103–5 anonymity 39, 160, 186 anthropomorphism 98, 99, 103 anti-classical 31 anti-fairy tales 111 n.48 anti-hero 158 anti-metaphysical 158 anti-mime 142 anti-psychiatry 220 Antiquity 72, 81, 211 late 65

270 antithesis 176 anti-war novel 154 apocalyptic 173, 178 Apparatets skygge (The shadow of the apparatus; Laugesen) 229 Arabian Nights 206 Arendt, Hannah 127, 137 aristocracy 83, 157, 195 Aristotle 115 Arlington 198 Arnold, Matthew 200 Arreboe, Anders 231 art as commodities 161, 162, 163 and eroticism 159 European 54 and gender 158 golden age 4 and literature 144, 148, 163, 206, 223 and market 143–4, 154–64 modern 119, 135–6, 148 ‘newness’ in 158, 159–60, 207 poetry and 9, 38–9, 211, 214, 217, 221, 227, 229, 232 products 144, 145–6, 148 science and 96, 169 of storytelling 254, 265 art engagé 4 art form 188 artist, notion of 144 artist-novel 162, 163, 172 art nouveau 152, 158, 159 Arvas, Paula 241 assimilation 3, 244, 246 astrology 71, 72 At det at (That it that; Nielsen, Hans Jørgen) 212, 218 atheism 153–4, 158, 159, 170, 179, 181, 183, 189 Auden, W.H. 123 audiovisuals 255, 262 August, Bille 249, 250, 251 Aus den Memoiren des Herren von Schnabelewopski (From the memoires of Herr von Schnabelewopski; Heine) 39–40 Australia 152, 163, 198 Austria 106, 145, 151–2, 171 auteur 252, 254

Index authorship economics of 144–8 function of 144 autobiography(ies) 5, 8, 56, 57, 70, 95, 127, 135, 172 avant-garde 3, 9, 110–11, 162, 211, 226 Axel, Gabriel 251 Azorno (Christensen) 217 ‘Babette’s Feast’ (Blixen) 204–5 film adaptation 251 Badius, Jodocus 23, 24 ballads, Danish 4, 7, 25, 31–50 British reception, adaptation and translation of 41–9 German reception, adaptation and translation of 33–41 origins of 38 popular collections 31–4 revival of 31–3 Ballou, Jenny 199 Baltic Sea 4 Balzac, Honoré de 64, 95, 147, 170, 200 Bandet Nul Live (Band Zero Live) 222 Band Zero (band) 222 Bang, Herman 4, 8, 141, 142, 251 n.58 biography 144, 146–8 international reception 148–54 poetics and global market 154–64 barbarism 47, 49, 68, 70 Barselsstuen (The lying-in room; Holberg) 75–6 Barslund, Charlotte 263 Basel 24 Baudelaire, Charles 146, 200 Baudrillard, Jean 224 Bauer, Felice 116, 121 Baum, Oscar 121 BBC4 256 BBC iPlayer 262 beat poetry 209, 210, 211, 222, 224, 225–7 Beatrice Prize 264 Beauvoir, Simone de 123 bebop 225, 226 Beck, Martin 241 Beckett, Samuel 117, 119, 194, 234 Bede 17 Beerbohm, Max 200 ‘being human’ 105

Index Belgium 145 Belleforest, François de 24–5 Bergamo 146 Bergen 7, 24, 53, 81 Berlin 145, 146, 147, 170–1 Berne convention 151, 153 Bernstorff, J.H.E. 31 Bible 206 ‘Bibliothèque Cosmopolite’ 154 Bier, Susanne 252 Bildung 58, 82 Binding, Paul 95 biography(ies) 9, 17, 69, 95, 120, 121, 123, 144–8, 157, 186, 194 Bjerring-Hansen, Jens 151 n.21 Blanchot, Maurice 123 Blicher, Steen Steensen 5, 206, 215 bliss of knowing 115, 116, 119, 127, 132 Blixen, Bror 195 Blixen, Karen (pseud. Isak Dinesen) 1, 6, 109–10, 122 biography 195–7 crime fiction 241 Danish version of Seven Gothic Tales 201–201, 203, 204 emigrant experiences in Out of Africa and Seven Gothic Tales 193–208 global perspectives on Scandinavian culture 202–5 influence on world literature 197–200 inspiration from and conception of world literature 205–8 intertextual patterns in 205–7 multiplicity of authorship 193–5, 199–200 pseudonyms 193, 199 self-translation practices 194 Seven Gothic Tales as world literary classic 197–200 writing in English 194, 196, 201 Bloch, Ernst 169, 182 blogs/bloggers 238, 248, 258, 261, 262 Bloom, Harold 111 Boccaccio, Giovanni 96, 200 Bodelsen, Anders 241 body, the 71, 82, 169, 226 body and mind 71–3, 82, 98 Bondebjerg, Ib 258, 262 Book of Daniel 65

271

‘Book of Hundred Ballads, A’ (Hundrevisebogen; Vedel) 25–6, 33 Borch, Marie von 152 Borgen (TV series) 256, 257 Borges, Jorge Louis 111, 117, 119 Bornedal, Ole 255 n.75 Borrow, George 46–9 Borum, Poul 254 bourgeoisie 1, 76, 176, 188, 203 Bourget, Paul 145 Bradbury, Malcolm 3, 8, 141, 142 Brahe, Tycho 4 Brandes, Georg 6, 96, 141–4 on Andersen 100–1, 112, 239–40 biography 144–6 connotations of ‘emigrant’ 202 Copenhagen lectures 2, 157 ideas of art engagé 4 international reception 148–64 on Kierkegaard 122 poetics and global market 154–64 wave metaphor 2–3 Brandt, Per Aage 254 Bremen 54 Britain 145 colonial rule in Africa 193–4 Danish ballads in 41–9 Danish TV drama and films in 249–59 history of 67–8 Nordic Noir popularity in 168, 237–8, 239, 242 and Sunesen 18 Brix, Hans 203–4 Brod, Max 115–18, 121, 124, 126–30, 132, 134, 136 Brøgger, Susanne 209 Bron/Broen (The Bridge; TV series) 261 Brøndal, Viggo 218 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 93, 111 Browning, Robert 111 Brussels 54 Bruyère, Jean de la 69 Buber, Martin 136 Buch des Richters. Seine Tagebücher 1833–1855 (Book of the Judge. His diaries; Kierkegaard) 120, 124, 125, 126, 130–1 Bürger, Gottfried August 41

272 Burroughs, William 209 Byatt, A.S. 111 Byrne, Gabriel 249, 250 Byron, Lord 200 C.A. Reitzel 201 Cain and Abel story 189 Calendar of Modern Letters, The (journal) 198 Calvino, Italo 105–6 Cameron, James 250 n.54 Camus, Albert 123 Canfield Fisher, Dorothy 199 cannibalism 103 canonical literature 8, 21, 63–4, 194, 241, 251 Canute VI 11 Capion, Étienne 74 capitalism 168, 217, 220, 241 capitalization 179 Caractères (Bruyère) 69 Casanova, Pascale 143, 151, 233–4 Castiglione, Baldassare 200 Castle, The (Kafka) 117, 127, 128, 132–6 Catholicism 67, 122 Cattaneo, Peter 250 n.54 Cavalcanti, Guido 105 censorship 74 Central Europe 2 Cervantes, Miguel de 200, 206 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 204 Chandler, Raymond 209, 245 Characters (Theophrastus) 69 character study 68–73 Chateaubriand 202 China 70, 92, 145, 233 ‘Chinese nightingale, The’ (Ernst) 110 Chow, Pei-Sze 261 Christensen, Inger 212–13, 217–23, 233–4 Christensen, Steen 241 Christian II 24 Christian IV 4 Christian Discourses (Kierkegaard) 122–3 Christianity 17, 128, 131, 137, 169–70, 171, 181 Christianization 14 Christmas Greeting to my English Friends, A (Andersen, Hans Christian) 103

Index chronotope 189 cinema, Danish 249–53 film policy and developments 250–1 international circulation 249–50, 251 popular literature and 249–50, 251–2 and television collaboration 254–5 ‘Circle of the Earth’ (Sturluson) 24 circus 162 civilizations 15, 68, 70 civil rights 56 class 94 classicism 184 Clements, Toby 259–60 cliché 180, 188, 226–7 Clifford, James 204 collective intelligence 261 colonialism/colonial history 1, 4, 5, 193–4, 204 Columbus 172 comedy 56, 62–3, 68, 73–81, 85, 183 n.33, 216 coming alive, notion of 119, 125, 132 commedia del arte 74 commodification 107, 110, 148, 162, 163, 260 communication technologies 108, 195 Communist Manifesto (Marx) 143 comparative literary analysis 69, 155–6 Comte, Auguste 142 concretism 221, 224 Conrad, Joseph 169, 194 Constant, Benjamin 202 Copenhagen 1–2, 4, 8, 31, 54, 55, 65, 93, 94, 95, 103, 157, 171, 172, 174, 181, 188, 189, 196, 207, 226, 241, 245, 249, 257, 258, 260 copyright 54, 144, 151 corporate media 261 Corsair, The (journal) 95 Corso, Gregory 225, 226 cosmology 72, 73 cosmopolitanism 3, 53, 58, 60–1, 144, 147, 154, 155, 157, 162, 195 cosmos 71–2, 217, 229 creation myth 18, 72, 159, 231 creative writing 58, 62, 64, 68 crime fiction, Danish 6, 9–10, 209, 237–65 critical thinking 54 Cromwell, Oliver 70

Index cross-border trade 195 cross-dressing 94 cubism 111 Cunningham, Allan 47–8 Curtius, Ernst Robert 12 Czechoslovakia/Czech 2, 145, 149, 154 Dadaism 111 Dahl, Per 149 n.17 Dalí, Salvador 111 Damrosch, David 2, 143, 151, 153, 156, 194 Danish Academy 212 Danish Art Schools 254 Danish Arts Foundation 263, 264 Danish Critics’ Prize 264 Danish Film Acts 250 Danish Film Institute 251–2, 254 Danish Royal Library 232–3 Danskere (Danishmen; Jensen) 174 Dante 111, 206 Darwin, Charles 142, 146, 158, 172 n.15 Darwinism 170, 172 n.15, 173, 174, 175, 188–9 Davidsen, Leif 241 Dead Souls (Gogol) 206 death ballads featuring 35–7 and destruction 185–6 fear of 218, 220 of God 178, 181, 189 inevitability of 185, 229 life and 185, 188 Debord, Guy 227 decadence 99, 152, 153, 159, 174 de-centering 160 deconstruction 215, 216, 223 De Dødes Rige (The Kingdom of the Dead; Pontoppidan) 173, 175, 189 defamiliarization 9, 156, 203–4 De l’Allemagne (Heine) 41 democracy 56, 58, 67, 83–4 Den Danske Turistforening (The Danish Tourist Association) 168 n.6 Den gotiske Rennaissance (The Gothic Renaissance; Jensen) 172 Den lange Rejse (Jensen) 172 Den patriotiske Tilskuer/The patriotic spectator (journal) 59 depolitization 131–2

273

Der Kopf des Poeten (Højholt) 216 Der nordische Aufseher/The Nordic spectator (journal) 59 Derrida, Jacques 214 despotism 83 de Staël, Madame 202 destiny 5, 73 detective stories 241 determinism 82, 158 Det forjættede Land (The Promised Land; Pontoppidan) 173 Dette burde skrives i nutid (This Should Be Written in the Present Tense; Helle) 264 Deutsche Rundschau (journal) 149, 157 dialectics 3, 115, 156, 205 Dickens, Charles 95, 111, 251 n.58 diction 226 Die neue Rundschau (journal) 122 Digte 1803 (Oehlenschläger) 46–7 Digte 1906 (Jensen) 186 Dinesen, Isak. See Blixen, Karen Dinesen, Thomas 196, 199 disillusionment 154, 159, 161, 168, 173, 182, 183 Disneyfication 110, 222 Disraeli, Benjamin 149 Dogme 95 films 252 Doll’s House, A (Ibsen) 205 Don Quixote (Cervantes) 182 double-articulation 92, 100 ‘double movement’ 202, 205 double storytelling 254, 255 drama 4–5, 7–8, 25, 205, 253–66 dramatis personae 80 DR (Danmarks Radio) 253–6, 262 dreams 50, 65, 159, 163, 172, 218 Dresden 54, 146 Dreyer, Carl Theodor 162, 251 n.58, 253 ‘Drop of Water, A’ (Andersen) 102, 103 dubbing 251 Dudo of Saint-Quentin 17 ‘Dying Child, The’ (Andersen) 91 dystopia 265 e-book 243 Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Bede) 17 eco-criticism 190

274

Index

Ecology without Nature. Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Morton) 190 eco-thriller 245 eddas 4, 38, 49 Edda (Sturluson) 21 n.32 education 8, 23, 57, 58, 62, 67, 68, 72, 74–5, 83, 196, 258 1864 (TV series) 255 n.75 Einar Elkjær (Jensen) 174 Einstein, Albert 99 Either/Or (Kierkegaard) 122 Ekstra Bladet 213 electromagnetism, discovery of 4, 102, 108 Elementargeister (Elemental spirits; Heine) 40–1 elf ballads 35–6, 40 ‘emigrant,’ connotations of 202 Emmy Award 254 emotion 62, 63, 71, 80, 85, 155, 161, 169, 178, 215 ‘Emperor’s New Clothes, The’ (Andersen) 111 emulation 63, 137 enlightenment 1, 4, 8, 54, 55–8, 60, 65, 67, 71, 81, 155, 173, 202 Holberg’s definition 57 Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe, An (Goldsmith) 53 environmental degradation/awareness 240, 258 epics 27, 39, 56, 184, 186, 190, 250 epos 7–8 Erasmus 24 Erasmus Montanus (Holberg) 76–80, 82 Erikskrönikan 21 n.32 ‘Erl-King, The’ (Goethe) 42–3 ‘Erlkönig’ (Goethe) 36–7, 50 Ernst, Max 110 eroticism 35–6, 75, 104, 158, 159, 180 essays 8, 56, 64 essentialism 59, 184 Estonia 233 Eurocentrism 58 European uprisings of 1848 3 Evening Standard, The (newspaper) 200 evolutionary theory 169–70, 172, 174, 187, 189 Ewald, Johannes 5, 47, 59

Examples (Nielsen) 222 existentialism 2, 8, 76, 106 n.33, 111 n.48, 116, 121, 123, 159, 178, 182, 219, 230, 232, 241 exoticism 27, 93, 188, 202–4, 210, 248, 256, 258, 265 Facebook 261 fairy tale 8, 45, 91–112, 117, 124, 125, 131, 177, 183, 231, 239–40 definition of 96–7 Fall of the King, The (Jensen) 9, 167–90 Fares, Fares 252 Faroese islands 1 Faust I (Goethe) 36 Fear and Trembling (Kierkegaard) 115–18, 121, 127–9 feature film 252 feminist movements 223 femme-enfant-fatale 110 femme fatale 159 Ferguson, Niall 195 n.5 Festen (Vinterberg) 252 feudalism 1, 60 Feuerbach, Ludwig 146, 159 film. See cinema Film Town (Filmbyen) 252 Finch-Hatton, Denys 196 fin de siècle 122, 152, 153 Finland 5 Fire Skiemte-Digte og Zille Hans Dotter’s Gynaicologia/Four Satires and Zille Hans Daughter's Gynaicologia (Holberg) 62–3 First World War 121, 154, 175, 195–6 Flaubert, Gustave 147, 157, 169 ‘Flax, The’ (Andersen) 106 Florence 146 folklore 40, 188, 199 folk songs 34 folk tales 4, 100 Forbrydelsen (The Killing; TV series) 256, 258, 259 novel adaptations 259–60, 261 Forestilling om det tyvende århundrede (The History of Danish Dreams; Høeg) 244–5 Forfatterskolen (School of Authors) 254–5, 264

Index form 8, 83, 105, 119, 123–4, 130, 142, 153–5, 220, 226, 238, 240, 243 four elements, of nature 40, 71 four humours 63, 71–3 Fox Television 258 France 145 Danish ballads in 33 n.8, 41 history of 68 human rights declaration 58 influence on writers 151, 211 poststructuralism 211 reception of Danish literature 154 structuralism 211 and Sunesen 18 France, Anatole 200 Frankenstein (Shelley, Mary) 207 Franzos, Marie 150 freedom 14, 155, 173, 218, 231 freedom of speech 56 free-thinking 155, 159 French New Wave 252 French Revolution 3, 155, 202 Friis, Agnete 242 Fri os fra kærligheden (Deliver Us from Love; Brøgger) 209 ‘Frøken Caja’ (Bang) 161 Frøken Smillas fornemmelse for sne (Smilla’s Sense of Snow; Høeg) film adaptation 249–50 genre, style and translations 244–6 international success 242–3 Frost, Vicky 256 Fru Marie Grubbe (Jacobsen, J.P.) 150, 158 Full Monty, The (Cattaneo) 250 n.54 futurism 172, 175, 188 Gauls, the 68 Gazan, Sissel-Jo 242 gender 83, 94, 158 gender equality 56, 246, 258 gender politics 240 generalization 156–7 Genoa 54 genres 2, 7–8, 10, 13, 22, 25, 42, 53, 56, 60, 63, 74, 81, 95, 96, 97, 98, 100 George 1 67 Germany 144–5 Danish ballads in 7, 33–41 history writing 17

275

idealism 82, 173 industrialization 168 inspiration from Danish literature 46 intellectual centres 54 Nazi 175, 193 provincialism 168 reception of Danish literature 92–4, 121–3, 131, 145, 148–55, 162, 168– 9, 193, 209, 211, 220–21, 250 Gerstenberg, Heinrich Wilhelm von 31–6, 38 Ghosts (Ibsen) 148 Ginsberg, Allen 209, 212, 225 Gitte Monologues 222 Gjellerup, Karl 9, 175 ‘Glimpse into the World of Childhood Books, A’ (Benjamin) 101 globalization 12, 56, 58, 61, 143, 147, 154–64, 195–7, 210, 251 global recession 196 global threats 240 glossolalia 231 Goethe, Johan Wolfgang von 7, 33, 36–7, 41–3, 50, 58, 103, 156, 157, 200, 206 Gogol, Nikolai 206 golden age 4, 241, 251 Golden Laurel literary prize, 264 Goldschmidt, Meir Aron 95, 206 Goldsmith, Oliver 53, 56, 85 gonzo journalism 172, 186 Goodreads 6 Google 6 Google Books Ngram Viewer 6 Google Trends 6 Gosse, Edmund 145 gothic genre 27, 41–2 Gottsched, Hermann 120, 122 government 8, 57, 58, 81, 83, 84 Graphs, Maps, Trees (Moretti) 238 Grass (Christensen) 213 Great Depression 196 Great Interregnum, The (Holberg) 66, 68 ‘Great Sea Snake, The’ (Andersen) 108–9 Greece/Greek 63, 66, 70, 145 Greenblatt, Stephen 156, 238–9 Greenland 1, 5, 91, 154, 184, 245, 246, 249, 250 Grigg, Sir Edward 198

276 Grimm, Wilhelm Carl 37–40, 47 n.54, 48–9 Grimm Brothers 91, 100, 111, 117, 125, 135, 183 Grøndal, Viggo 230 Grotius, Hugo 54 Grubbe, Marie 150, 158 Grundtvig, N.F.S. 4, 26 Guardian, The 256, 257, 261, 264 Gulliver's Travels (Swift) 81 Haabløse Slægter (Bang) 153 Haarder, Jon Helt 9, 167–90 Haas, Robert 199, 200 Haeckel, Ernst 158 haiku 230 Halle 54 Hamburg 54, 76 Hamlet (Shakespeare) 7, 11, 25, 49 ‘Hans im Glück’ (Grimm brothers) 169, 183 Harris, Richard 249, 250 Harvill Press 244 Hegel 3, 123, 126, 173 Heine, Heinrich 39–41, 47, 111, 146, 206–7 Heinemann (publisher) 152 Heitmann, Annegret 8–9, 141–64 Helle, Helle 263, 264 Hemingway, Ernest 211 Hendrix, Jimi 222 Herder, Johann Gottfried 33–8, 41–4 Heretica (periodical) 211, 212, 213 Hermann, Pernille 7, 11–27 heroic ballads 32–3, 37–40, 45–6, 48, 49 Herring, René 149 n.16 Herzl, Theodor 145 Hewson, David 259–61 Hexaëmeron (Arreboe) 18, 231 Heyse, Paul 145, 149 Higgins, Bertram 198 high-culture 20, 22, 223, 263–5 Hippocrates 71 historical ballads 37 historicity 64 historiography 59, 66, 67, 69 History of the Archbishops of HamburgBremen (Adam of Bremen) 17

Index History of the Danes (Saxo) 4, 7, 11–27 Amleth story 7, 12, 21, 24–5 authorial position 19–20 geography 15–16 influence on world literature 11–13 inspiration for Shakespeare’s Hamlet 7, 11, 25 libraries 16–19 as literary memorial 13–15 oral lore 20–2 print and translations 23–7 History of the Kings of Britain, The (Geoffrey of Monmouth) 17 ‘History of the Normans’ (Dudo of SaintQuentin) 17 Hjem (Home; Høeck) 230–2 Hjort, Mette 251, 255 Høeck, Klaus 221, 222, 223, 224, 229–33 Hoffmann, E.T.A. 91, 200 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von 123, 150, 152 Høier, Anneli 243 Højholt, Per 212, 213–17, 220–3, 227 Holberg, Ludvig 4–5, 6–8, 53–86 academic life and career 53–6 character studies 68–73 comedies 74–80 engagement with the future/vision 81–4 historical writings 65–8 influence on world literature 58–64 principles 56–7 travels and inspiration 53–4 Holiday, Billie 209 Holland 54, 145 Holm, Isak Winkel 8, 115–38 Holocaust 217 Holy Roman Empire 14 Homer 206 homoeroticism 162, 163 homosexuality 147, 153 Horace 17 Hughes, Kathryn 100, 101 Hugo, Victor 95, 111 humanism 23, 24, 57, 58, 60, 211, 220 human rights 56, 58 Humboldt, Alexander 100 Hungary 122, 136, 145, 148, 149 Huntington, Constant 198, 200

Index Huysmans, J.K. 99 hybridity 97, 187 n.39, 195, 244, 246, 265 Ibsen, Henrik 1, 3–4, 122, 143, 145, 148, 154, 170, 205, 234 Iceland 1, 4, 5, 16, 20–2, 24 idealism 4, 82, 84, 144, 145, 159, 173–7, 182, 185, 189 identity issues 94 idioms 43, 49, 98, 244 I-figure 217, 221, 224, 227 Illustrations of Northern Antiquities from the earlier Teutonic and Scandinavian Romances (Jamieson) 44, 46, 49 imagination 18–19, 36, 63, 76, 99, 110, 201–2, 239, 249, 259, 265 imitation 19, 36, 41, 43, 63, 232 impassibilité 157 impressionism 150, 154, 156–8, 162–3 improvisation 174, 206, 222, 225, 227 Improvisatore, The (Andersen) 92, 93 Index Translationum, UNESCO 6 India/Indian 1, 69, 185 Indian raga 225 individual, concept of the 63, 124, 130, 155 individual responsibility 56, 57, 62, 63, 65, 81, 83, 84, 85, 157 industrialization 1, 96, 168 Ingemann, B.S. 95–6, 215 innovation 23, 142, 162, 165, 252 In Spain (Andersen) 97 In Sweden (Andersen) 108 intellectual property 144 intellectual resource 18–19 internationalism 5 internationalization 7, 144, 203 intertextuality 14, 36, 205–7 intertitles 251 intuition 61, 159 Inuits, the 70 Irons, John 232 irony 39, 80, 97, 168, 169, 177, 232, 245, 250 Irrational, the 142, 152, 158, 159 Islington, Lady Anne 198 It (Christensen) 212, 213, 217–24 Italy/Italian 18, 74, 93, 145, 146, 162, 209

277

Jac, F.P. 222 Jacobsen, Harry 147 Jacobsen, Jens Peter 4, 96, 122 biography 144, 146 international reception 148–54 poetics and global market 154–64 James 2 67 James, Henry 145, 169, 200 James Bond 246 Jameson, Frederic 170, 172, 182–3 Jamieson, Robert 43–6, 49 Japan/Japanese 145, 149, 211, 215, 227 jazz music/poetry 209, 222, 225 Jean de France; eller, Hans Frandsen (Jean de France or Hans Frandsen; Holberg) 76 Jenkins, Henry 261, 262 Jensen, Carsten 263 Jensen, Johannes Vilhelm 9, 110, 167–90 crime fiction 241 and materialism 174, 175, 184 myths 187, 189 reception and scholarship 175 stories of Himmerland 188–9 themes and forms 184–6, 188 Jensen, Thit 188 Jeppe paa Bierget; eller, Den forvandlede Bonde (Jeppe of the Hill; or, The Transformed Peasant; Holberg) 78–80 Jews/Jewish 3, 96, 97, 121, 136, 137, 179, 193, 207 ‘Jimi Hendrix Experience’ (Høeck) 222 jingoism 172 Jørgensen, Jon Gunnar 24 Jorn, Asger 227 Journalen (Kierkegaard) 124, 125, 132 Journey on Foot, A (Andersen) 97 Joyce, James 187 n.40, 234 Justin 17 Jutland 15, 170, 172, 174, 181, 182, 247 Kaaberbøl, Lene 242 Kaas, Nikolai Lie 252 Kafka, Franz 111, 211 Kafka’s encounter with Kierkegaard 8, 115–38 and the bliss of knowing 115, 116, 127

278

Index

and Brod correspondence 8, 115, 116, 117, 118, 124, 128–32 comparisons 136–8 conceptual discoveries 115 on content of Kierkegaard’s works 121 on Kierkegaard’s biography 120–1 the melancholy resident in The Castle 132–6 in movements and transformations 115–17, 124–8 research in 117–20 striving man 128–32 understanding of castle journal entry 124–8 Kaiser Wilhelm II 148–9 Karma Cowboy (Turèll) 226 Kassner, Rudolf 122–4, 130 Keeper of Lost Causes, The (Nørgaard) 242 film adaptation 252 Kennedy, Thomas 210 Kenya, colonial regime 9, 193–4, 197, 198, 208 Kerouac, Jack 209 Ketels, H.C. 128 Kiämpe-Viiser/Danske Kæmpe-Viser 32–3, 37, 43–5, 47 Kierkegaard, Søren 1–2, 4, 156, 157, 170 on Andersen 94, 95 castle journal entry 124–8 concept of movement and transformation 115–17, 124–8 conceptual discoveries 115 existential philosophy 232 influence on Kafka 8, 115–38 influence on world literature 121–4 interpretation of Abraham 117, 119, 120 positivity/negativity 128–30 religious writing 136–8 Killing I, The (Hewson) 259–60 kinesis 115–16 Kirk, Hans 241 Kirkeby, Per 222 Klopstock, Heinrich Gottlieb 31 Klopstock, Robert 117 knight of faith 115, 128–9 knight of infinity 115 knowledge 17, 18, 19, 20, 22, 25, 31, 56–7, 72, 78, 82, 83, 98, 129, 159

Knudsen, Erik 211 Knudsen, Jørgen 145, 146, 150–1 Konfrontation (Confrontation; Rifbjerg) 212 ‘König in Thule’ (Goethe) 36 Konstrueret situation (Constructed situation; Laugesen) 227–9 Kovalevsky, Maxim 145 Kraus, Karl 123 Kundera, Milan 2, 5 Kunstpoesie (poetry of art) 38 Kvinden i Buret (Mercy; Adler-Olsen) 242, 246–7 film adaptation 249, 252–3 genre, style and translations 246–9 Ladies Home Journal 204 La Disparation (Perec) 217 Lady of the Lake, The (Scott) 45–6, 50 Lamartine, Alphonse de 111 ‘Lament for Jim’ (Højholt) 222 La Mettrie, Julien de 82 La Motte Fouqué 103 language barriers 92 being-writing quality 214 creative process in 218 and cultures 59–60 and media 237–65 minor 5, 49, 61–2 poetry and 209–34 science and 220, 221 and style 15, 20, 26, 196 vernacular 8, 11, 20, 21, 24, 58, 60, 100, 110 world 61, 250 written vs. spoken 101 Larsen, Svend Erik 8, 53–86 Larsson, Stieg 241, 242 Lasalle, Ferdinand 149 La spectatrice Danoise/The Danish spectator (journal) 59 Laugesen, Peter 212, 221–4, 227–9, 233 law 8, 54, 55, 57, 58, 82, 167, 185 legends 7, 26, 96, 184, 253 Leine, Kim 263 Leipzig 54, 98, 152 Leonhardt & Høier 243

Index Leskov, Nicolai 5 Les quatre diables (film) 153 Lewis, Matthew Gregory 41–5, 47 L’Homme Machine (Man a machine; La Mettrie) 82 liberalism 3, 56, 173 liberation 142, 197 Lifes and Opinions (Ewald) 5 Lifetime Award of the Danish Arts Council 264 Light (Christensen) 213 literary criticism 2, 7, 123, 141, 144, 155, 157, 223, 224, 233 literary culture 3, 210, 221 literary history 1–7, 9, 11, 18, 21, 26, 38, 59, 142–3, 152, 194, 205, 206, 237 literature, concept of 156–7 ‘Little Match Girl, The’ (Andersen) 110 ‘Little Mermaid, The’ (Andersen) 103, 104, 240 film adaptation 110 Locke, John 54 London 54, 103, 149, 152, 170, 187, 198, 260, 261 loneliness 159, 220 Lost World: Jurassic Park, The (Spielberg) 250 n.54 Louisiana Literature festival 233 Löwy, Jitzhak 136 ‘Luck May Lie in a Pin’ (Andersen) 107–8 Lucky Peer (Andersen) 97 Lucky Per (Pontoppidan) 5, 9, 167–90 Ludvigsbakke (Bang) 150 Lukács, Georg 5, 122, 169, 171, 182–3, 186, 190 Lyotard, Jean-François 224 Maclehose, Christopher 244 Macnab, Geoffrey 250, 253 macrocosmos 71 Madsen, Johannes L. 218, 221, 222 Madsen, Peter 149 magic 35–6, 98, 102 magical realism 245 Mai, Anne-Marie 9, 209–34 Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature (Brandes) 2–3, 149, 150, 151, 155–7, 202, 203, 204

279

male identity 178–9, 183 Malinowski, Ivan 212 Mallarmé, Stéphane 105, 213, 214 man concept of 73, 99, 184, 187, 214 and God 118 modern 164, 183 and nature 158, 184, 230, 232 and primitivity 124–8, 131, 135 striving 128–33, 135 Mankell, Henning 241 Mann, Klaus 147 n.11 Mann, Thomas 141, 150, 169, 211 Män som hatar kvinnor (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; Larsson) 242 Manuskrifter om hvad som helst (Manuscripts about anything at all; Turèll) 225 Markussen, Julie Kjær 6 Marseille 54 Marx, Karl 92, 143 Marxism-Leninism 241 mass culture 110, 188, 227 materialism 82, 96, 171, 173–8, 184, 186 Maupassant, Guy de 200 Maurice Guest (Richardson) 152–3 Maximus, Valerius 17, 23 Mazarin, Cardinal 70 McFarlane, James 3, 8, 141, 142 McGowan, John 224 meaning 8, 19, 37, 44, 48, 55, 63, 101, 119, 124, 130 n.40, 151, 153, 159, 170, 185, 186, 197, 214, 215, 219, 229, 230, 231, 232 Medea (Dreyer) 253 media 6, 25, 142, 144, 186, 212, 216, 237–9, 249, 252, 253, 259–62, 265 media convergence 259–62 media-realism 212 melancholy 48, 71, 128, 132–6, 153, 154, 162, 163, 164, 182, 231 Melanchton, Philippe 65, 205 Memoirs (Brahe) 4 memory and imagination 18–19 national 7 strategies 20, 66, 67 Mendelsohn, Felix 111

280 Men of the Modern Breakthrough (Det moderne Gjennembruds Mænd; Brandes) 141 Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare) 207–8 ‘Metamorphosis, The’ (Kafka) 135 meta-narratives 108 metaphor 2, 3, 18, 20, 22, 99, 108, 137, 148, 156, 159, 212, 214, 215, 216, 221, 227, 238, 239 metaphysics 54, 72–3, 85, 96, 131, 158, 178, 189, 212, 241 metonymy 163 metre 20 Meyer, Conrad Ferdinand 149 n.18 Michaëlis, Bo Tao 241 microcosm 71 Middle Ages 4, 12, 21, 24, 25, 27, 33 Middle East 233 ‘Midsummer Night’s Play’ (Oehlenschläger) 27 Mikaël (Bang) 164–5 film adaptation 153, 164 Milan 2, 146 milieu 156, 188, 211, 251, 255, 259 Mill, John Stuart 142 Milton, John 31 Min hånd 66 (My hand 66; Højholt) 212, 213–17, 221 minimalism 221, 224 mobility. See movement ‘Mobility Studies Manifesto’ (Greenblatt) 238–9 modern art 119, 135, 148 Modern Breakthrough and early Modern literature 3, 4, 141–64. See also individually listed authors during the Modern Breakthrough international reception 148–54 poetological reflections 154–64 transnational networks and economics of authorship 144–8 modernism/modernity 3, 8, 64, 98, 110, 119, 141–64, 167–90, 198, 209–34 ‘Mogens’ (Jacobsen, J.P.) 158 Mohammed, prophet 70 Mohr, Gustav 196, 198 Molière 6, 74 Møller, Lis 7, 31–50

Index moment, concept of 156 Moment, The (broadsheet) 126 monarchy 7, 11, 53, 56, 60, 65, 66, 67, 68, 83, 86 Monet, Claude 141, 150, 154 money 162, 163, 189 Monk, The (Lewis) 41–2, 43, 50 Montaigue, René 74 Monthly Mirror, The 43 mood 36, 45, 48, 71, 72, 203 Mørck, Carl 246–8, 252 Mordecaius (Higgins) 198 More, Thomas 81 Moretti, Franco 2, 4, 238, 263–4, 265 Morley, Christopher 196, 198 Morton, Timothy 190 mosaics 206 motif 170, 171, 174, 183 n.33, 189, 199, 215 Mott, John 149 n.17 movement/mobility, concept of 115–17, 238–9 Murray, Steven T. 244 Musil, Robert 152 Muybridge, Eadweard 99 myth/mythology 4, 26, 49, 102–4, 110, 121, 159, 175 n.20, 186–9 Nabokov, Vladimir 194 Nairobi 198 Nansen, Peter 147 narcissism 212 narrative texts 161, 227 natio (people) 26 nationalism 58, 59, 60, 85, 195, 203 national memory 7 ‘National Prejudices’ (Goldsmith) 85 nation building 4 nation states 11, 58, 200 naturalism 36, 142, 149 n.18, 152, 156, 158, 159, 168, 169, 173, 176, 178 natural law 54, 55 natural selection 142 nature 34, 35, 62, 63, 64, 71, 97, 100, 156, 158, 169, 176, 189–90, 230, 232 nature poems 19, 39, 215–16, 218, 219 negativity 128, 130, 136–7 neo-romanticism 152

Index nervousness 153, 154 Nestingen, Andrew 241 NetFlix 258 New Danish Screen 254–5 New Letters 210 new media 252 New Objectivity 153 new realism 224 Newton, Isaac 64, 107 New York 149, 170, 174, 197, 198, 209, 210, 225, 233 New York Herald Tribune 199 New York school 210 Nexø, Martin Andersen 251 Nicolai Klimii iter subterraneum (The Journey of Niels Klim to the World Underground; Holberg) 55, 81 Niels Lyhne/Siren Voices (Jacobsen, J.P.) 96, 150, 151–4, 158–60 Nielsen, Hans Edvard Nørregaard 109 Nielsen, Hans Jørgen 212, 213, 218, 221, 222, 223 Nietzsche, Friedrich 116, 123, 141, 150, 157, 175, 180, 211 ‘Nightingale, The’ (Andersen) 99 nihilism 175, 183, 212 ‘Die Nixen’ (Heine) 39 Nobel prize 5, 110, 168, 175, 221, 233–4 Nolin, Bertil 150 n.19 nomadism 162 non-tangible libraries 18 Nordbrandt, Henrik 222 Nordicana festival, London 260, 261 Nordic Literature magazine 246 Nordic Noir 168, 237 cinematic style 257 Danish writing 241, 242–3 genre conventions 240 global market 242–3 golden age 241 Norwegian writing 241, 242 origins 240–2 ‘other local’ consumption 259 Swedish writing 240–2 Nordic Noir Crime Fiction Book Club 261–2 Nordic Poetry Festival, New York 233 Nørgaard, Mikkel 252

281

Normans 14, 17 ‘North and the South, The’ (Browning, , Elizabeth Barrett) 93 Northern Europe 31, 40, 202, 203, 205 North Sea 4, 203, 239, 256 North Zealand art museum, Louisiana 233 Norway/Norwegian Blixen’s 204–5 crime fiction 6, 10 Denmark- 1, 53 geography 16, 204 Ibsen’s 234 literary history 1–11 nostalgia 188, 210 nothingness 104, 214 novelization 259–60 novels. See specific entries Nunnally, Tiina 244 Nussbaum, Martha 63 Nyerup, Rasmus 33, 47 n.54 obscurantism 212 Odense/Denmark 217 ‘Ode til Indfødsretten’/Ode to National Citizenship (Ewald) 59 Oehlenschläger, Adam 4, 27, 46–7 oeuvre 122, 144, 147, 168, 174, 212 n.7, 214 n.13, 230, 234, 245, 264 Old Norse literature 4, 19, 20, 22, 24, 25, 31, 38, 39, 49 Old Testament 65, 66 Olson, Charles 227 Only a Fiddler (Andersen) 94 ‘On Studies’ (Holberg) 57, 61 oral literature 21–2, 207–8 oral lore 12, 20–2 oral media 21, 22, 25, 38 organized crime 240 oriental 68–9, 203 Ormond, Julia 249, 250 ornamentalization 159 ‘Ørneflugt’ (Eagle’s Flight; Pontoppidan) 176–7, 184 Ørsted, Hans Christian 4, 102, 108 Oscars 251 Ossian poems (Macpherson) 31 O.T. (Andersen) 93 ‘other local’ 258–9, 265

282

Index

Out of Africa (Blixen) 193, 197, 202, 207–8 overseas investments 195 Oxford University 54 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize 248 painting 72, 160–1, 162–3 Parallel Lives (Plutarch) 69 Paris 17, 23, 41, 54, 74, 76, 110, 147, 148, 170–1, 196, 205, 233, 252 Parker, Charlie 209 parlando 226 particles 218, 227, 229 passivity 160, 161 pastiche 244 pastoral 173, 189 pathos 46, 182, 229 patria (fatherland) 26 ‘Peder Laale’s Proverbs’ 23 Pedersen, Christiern 23, 25 Pelle Erobreren (Pelle the Conqueror; August) 251 ‘Pen in the First Person, The’ (Calvino) 105, 106 Pentagram (Høeck) 222 Percy, Thomas 31–4, 49 Perec, Georges 217 periodization 142–3 Perrault, Charles 91 Pessoa, Fernando 123 philosophy, and literature 117–19, 123 pitch 226 plagiarism 54 Platen-Hallermund, Bent von 203 Platen-Hallermünde, August von 203 Plato 123 Plautus 74 Plutarch 69 P.O. Enquist Award 264 Poe, Edgar Allan 146, 200 poetry, Danish 209–34 experimental 223 influenced by beat poetry 225–7 international reception, challenges and opportunities 232–4 international sources of inspiration 209–13 language and poetic devices 213–27, 229–32 leading poets and major works 213–27

and music 222 postmodern 223–4, 234 stream of writing 227–9 ‘Poetry of California, The’ (Andersen) 108 Poet’s Bazar, A (Andersen) 97 poiesis 64 Poland 136, 145 police procedural 240–51, 245 politics, literature and 126, 127, 137 Politiken (newspaper) 109, 168 n.6, 187, 201 Pontoppidan, Henrik 5, 9, 122, 167–90 female figures 179–81 and idealism 173–4, 176–7 international reception 168 protagonist 181–84 and religion 169–70 rewritings of H.C. Andersen 176–8 themes and forms 169, 184 Popular Ballads and Songs (Jamieson) 43–4 popular culture 110, 223 positivism 142 positivity 128–32, 135–8, 175 postcolonialism 186, 193, 265 post-industrial era 1 Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (Paul) 210 postmodernism 210, 213, 221, 223–4, 227, 234, 244, 244–6 poststructuralism 210 Poulsen, Peter 223 Pound, Ezra 229–30 poverty 22, 78, 173, 188 power relations 14, 159 Prague 121, 146, 147 Prelum Ascensianum 23 prepositions 218 Price, Adam 256 primitivity 124–8, 131, 135 print culture 23–5 ‘Professor and the Flea, The’ (Andersen) 104–5 projective verse 227 prostitution 94 Protestantism 67, 96, 122 provincialism 2, 168 Prozor, Count de 154 Prussia 3, 106, 147 n.10

Index psyche 142, 158, 159, 181, 217 psychoanalysis 186 psychology 128, 159, 171, 173, 180–3, 249 Pufendorf, Samuel 54 pulp fiction 174, 185, 187 Putnam & Co. 198 quality literature 263–5 queer 186 Quran 70, 206 Rabelais, François 200 race 94, 156, 172, 174 radicalism 157 Rahbek, Knud Lyne 33, 47 n.54 raree-show 27 rationalization 142 Realisme og Realister (Bang) 160–1 reality 2, 17, 60, 63, 81, 99, 102–4, 106–11, 142, 146, 156, 158, 159, 173–4, 178, 180, 185, 186, 188, 197, 201, 205, 215, 220, 224, 229, 232, 261 reason 60, 61, 62, 63, 71, 74, 78, 79, 80, 81, 83, 155, 180 Redgrave, Vanessa 249 ‘Red Shoes, The’ (Andersen) 111 Redvall, Eva Novrup 258, 262 Refn, Nicolas Winding 252 Reformation, the 38 Rejse (Journey; Høeck) 223 Rejseholdet (Unit 1, TV series) 254 religion 8, 13, 16, 54, 57, 61, 70, 96, 97, 118–19, 124–6, 128–32, 136–7, 155, 159, 169–71, 182–3, 185, 189–90 Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (Percy) 31, 33–4, 49 Remarques sur quelques positions, qui se trouvent dans L’Esprit des Loix (Comments on certain opinions in L'Esprit des Loix; Holberg) 83–4 Renaissance 4, 7, 11, 15, 23, 60, 65, 231 Renoir, Jean 110–11 repetitions and variations 225 representativeness, aesthetics of 156–7 republicanism 56 research 8, 53, 54, 58, 118–20, 122, 127, 132, 134, 136, 142, 148, 255, 262 ‘Researches of a Dog’(Kafka) 127 Revolver (Højholt) 222

283

Reynolds, Matthew 248 rhythm 101, 220, 226, 227, 229, 264 Richardson, Henry Handel 152, 153 Richter, Sonja 252 Rifbjerg, Klaus 211, 212, 214 Rilke, Rainer Marie 122–3, 141, 152 Ringgaard, Dan 1–10 Robertson, Ethel F.L. 152, 153 rock music/poems 222 Romantic Ballads, Translated from the Danish (Borrow) 46, 47–9 Romanticism/Romantic 3, 4, 7, 8, 26, 27, 35, 37, 45, 46, 59, 97, 100, 103, 155, 174, 176, 182, 183, 213, 215 Rome 54, 66, 73, 74, 93 Roos, Carl 33 n.8 Rosencrantz, Palle 241 Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts 224 Rufus, Curtius 17 Rukov, Mogens 254 Rungsted 196, 198, 199 runic script 19–20 rural life 173, 188 ‘Rural Rebellion, The’ (Jensen) 188 Russia/Russian 3, 65, 136, 145, 147, 148, 149, 154, 162, 206 Ryum, Ulla 254 S. Fischer 153 sagas 4, 24, 49 Sainte-Beuve, Charles-Augustin 145, 157 Salinger, J.D. 211 Salon du Livre, Paris 233 ‘Sandman, The’ (Andersen) 111 Sapiro, Giselle 143, 163 Sartre, Jean-Paul 123 satire 55, 56, 95, 99, 170, 176, 177, 206 Satterlee, Thom 244 Saxo 4, 7, 11–27 scepticism 119, 132, 142, 159, 224, 249 Scherfig, Hans 241 Scherfig, Lone 252 Schlegel, Regine 120–1 Schleswiger Literaturbriefe (journal) 31, 33 Schlözer, August Wilhelm von 58 Schnack, Asger 222 Schnitzler, Arthur 123, 145 Schopenhauer, Arthur 116–19, 211

284 Schopenhauers Bedeutung für die moderne Literatur (Schopenhauer’s Significance for Modern Literature; Wellbery) 117–18 Schrempf, Christoph 122 Schubert, Franz 50 Schumann, Robert 111 science 4, 54, 57, 64, 77, 78, 82–3, 96, 99, 102, 170, 171, 172, 189, 221 science-fiction 245 scientific progress 169, 173 Scott, Sir Walter 7, 45–6, 91, 94–5, 103 Scottish ballads 43, 45, 46 n.52 screenwriting 254–5 Second World War 123, 154, 175, 211 secularization 9, 56, 189 self, the 169, 181, 184 self-alienation 154 self-criticism 63, 64, 70, 73, 78, 85 semantic preliminaries 8, 117–20, 124, 125, 138 Seneca 73, 211 Sequence of Manjana (Turèll) 226 Serres, Michel 224 Seven Gothic Tales (Blixen) 122, 193, 197–208 ‘Shadow, The’ (Andersen) 103 Shadows on the Grass (Blixen) 197 Shakespeare, William 7, 11, 12, 25, 31, 91, 92, 96, 157, 200, 206, 207, 208 Shelley, Mary 207 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 206 Show (Højholt) 212 shtetls 136 Siegfried Unseld Prize 221 silent movie 110 Silver Stars (band) 222 Singvogel 229 situationism 224, 227 Situationist International (SI) 227 Sjöwall, Maj 240–1 skaldic poetry 21, 34, 38–9 ‘Skeleton Man, The’ (Jensen) 187 slavery 55, 162 ‘Sleeping Beauty, The’/‘The Briar Rose’ (Grimm brothers) 117, 125, 132, 134, 135 Slesvig-Holstein 1

Index Smerteskolen og andre digte (School of Pain and other Poems; Højholt) 222 social networking 257, 261 social realism 81, 201, 249 Sommerfugledalen (Butterfly Valley; Christensen) 220, 223 ‘sonku’ 230 sonnet 4, 105, 223, 230 Sophia, Queen 33, 45 Sophocles 206 Søren Kierkegaard (Brandes) 122 ‘Sören Kierkegaard – Aphoristisch’ (Kassner) 120, 122 Sören Kierkegaards Verhältnis to zu ‘ihr’ (Søren Kierkegaard’s Relationship with ‘Her’; Kierkegaard) 120–1 Sørensen, Bengt Algot 152 Sørensen, Villy 211 Sorø Academy 56 Soul and Form (Die Seele und die Formen; Lukács) 122 sovereignty 5 specimen-man 125, 126 speed 99, 160 Spielberg, Steven 250 n.54 Spinoza, Baruch 99 Spring, Howard 200 steam engines 97, 179 Steffens, Heinrich 4 Stendhal 95 Sterne 111 Stevenson, Robert Louis 200 stoicism 60, 61 n.15, 63, 73 storyline 36, 183, 256 ‘Storyteller, The’ (Benjamin) 102 storytelling 95, 100, 184, 251 n.58, 254, 255, 265 Stougaard-Nielsen, Jacob 10, 102–3, 237–65 Strandgaard, Charlotte 221, 222 Strindberg, August 4, 109, 122, 143, 170–1 Strodtmann, Adolf 151 structuralism 211 structure 5, 14 n.11, 15, 20, 68, 100, 135, 153, 161, 184, 185, 186, 194, 226, 232, 245 Strunge, Michael 223 Stuk (Bang) 153, 161–2

Index Sturluson, Snorri 21 n.32, 24 Sturm und Drang (Klopstock) 31 style 2, 9, 15, 26, 101, 102, 107, 153, 154, 158, 184, 186, 196, 201, 220, 225, 243, 246, 248, 253, 254, 257, 260 subtitles 1, 86, 251, 258, 262 Sunesen, Anders, Archbishop 13, 18–19 supernatural ballads 34–7, 39–40, 42–3, 45 superstitions 40, 67, 70 surrealism 107, 111, 229 Svenska Dagbladet (newspaper) 148 Sweden/Swedish 4, 5, 6, 10, 13, 16, 24, 45, 108, 109, 122, 123, 149, 154, 162, 171, 195, 217, 220, 221, 233, 240–1, 249 Swift, Jonathan 6, 81 Swinburne, Algernon Charles 146 Switzerland 145, 146 symbolism 3, 20, 101, 106, 152, 156, 174, 177, 178, 186, 187, 212–16 Synopsis historiae universalis with a Compendium geographicum in usum studiosae Juventus (Holberg) 55, 65 syntax 244 systematics 9, 221, 224, 230 system poetry 224 Syv, Peder 32–5, 37, 43–8 Taine, Hippolyte 145, 156, 158 Tales of Wonder (Lewis) 43, 45 Tasso 111 Tatar, Maria 111 n.48 technology/technological changes 1, 23, 97–9, 108–9, 142, 172, 189, 195, 238, 239, 261, 262 Tegner, Esaias 149 telecommunications 108–9 television, Danish 1, 6, 253–5 national/international reception 256–9 textual community 17 Thaulow, Frits 154 theology 18, 26, 61, 66, 67, 122, 123 Theophrastus 69 Theorie des Romans (Lukács) 150, 169, 182 Theory of the Novel (Lukács) 171 Thomasius, Christian 54 Thompson, Laurie 248 Thomsen, Mads Rosendahl 1–10 Thomsen, Søren Ulrik 223 Thomson, C. Claire 10, 237–65

285

Thorup, Kirsten 221, 263 3-D-Digte (3D poems; Turèll) 225 thrillers 241, 243, 245–6 Thygesen, Erik 223 time 67, 189 and space 25, 64, 85, 106, 203, 214, 227 Tine (Bang) 150, 154, 162 Titanic (Cameron) 250 n.54 ‘To be beat’ (Turèll) 225–7 To Be or Not To Be (Andersen) 96–7 tolerance 70, 97 topoi 12, 13 topos 13, 14, 141, 207, 229 Torino 54 tourism 168, 203 trafficking 240 ‘Tragedic histories’ (Belleforest) 24–5 tragedy 11, 216 trains 97–8, 99 transcendence 138, 182 transculturalism 61 Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, love and Eroticism (Giddens) 178 transnationalism 58, 60, 61 transnational networks 144 transportation 97–8, 195 Tranströmer, Tomas 233 tree metaphor 4 Trial, The (Kafka) 118 Trier, Lars von 250, 252, 253 truth 8, 57, 61, 64, 77, 78, 102, 103, 121, 126, 131, 156–7, 184, 214, 245–6 Turèll, Dan 209–11, 221–7, 229–30, 233, 241 Turgenev, Ivan 95, 147 TV2 253 Two Baronesses, The (Andersen) 94–5 UCL 262, 263 nn.104–5 Udvalgte danske Viser fra Middelalderen(Selected Danish ballads from the Middle Ages) 33, 37 udviklingsroman (novel of development) 158 UFA 162 ‘Ugly Duckling, The’ (Andersen) 176–7 Unamuno, Miguel de 123 Unconscious, the 142, 178 Understood Betsy (Canfield Fisher) 199 Undine (La Motte Fouqué) 103 UNESCO 6

286

Index

United States 145, 147, 162, 193, 197–9, 203, 209–11, 233, 242–3 beat poetry 209, 211, 225–6 Book-of-the-Month-Club 9, 198 Danish TV drama and films in 249–59 human rights declarations 58 literary criticism 224 and modernity 174 Nordic Noir popularity in 168, 242–3, 244, 246 universe 177–8, 185 University of Copenhagen 7, 53, 65, 146 University of Jena 31 urbanization 64, 179 urban life 53, 161–2, 219 utilitarianism 142 utopia 55, 81, 189, 218, 258, 265 Utopia (More) 81 Valdemar I 11 Valdemar II 13, 14, 15 Valdemar dynasty 15 values 56, 68, 70, 96, 99, 157, 160, 161, 162, 218, 244, 248, 252 Vangede Billeder (Pictures of Vangede; Turèll) 209–10, 222 van Gogh, Vincent 109 variété shows 162 Vedel, Anders Sørensen 25–6, 33–5, 38, 44, 46, 48 Ved Vejen (Bang) 161 Venice 93, 146, 207 Venuti, Lawrence 244, 248–9, 263 verb 161, 244 Vermont 198 Verona 146 Vi, de druknede (We, The Drowned; Jensen, Carsten) 263 Vico, Giambatista 64 Vienna 146, 147 Vigny, Alfred de 111 Vilnius 154 Vindrose (periodical) 211 Vintage 243 Vinterberg, Thomas 252, 254–5 Virgil 17 visual culture 249 visuality 160 vitalism 153, 180 n.28, 186, 188–9, 212, 229

voice 9, 55, 104, 108, 214, 219, 220, 226, 227, 249, 250 Volkslied (Herder) 33–7, 41, 43 Voltaire 110, 157 Wahl, Jean 131–2 Wahlöö, Per 240–1 ‘Wallander’ series (Mankell) 242 ‘Was heist Afklärung?’/‘What is Enlightenment?’ (Kant) 57 wave metaphor 2–3 Weissmann, Elke 258–9, 262 ‘Die Weltliteratur’ (Kundera) 2 Weltsch, Felix 121 Westenholz, Aage 195 Westenholz, Mary Bess 199 West Indies 1 What Is World Literature? (Damrosch) 143, 151, 153, 156, 194 ‘What the Old Man Does is Always Right’ (Andersen) 183 When we dead awaken (Ibsen) 148 Whitman, Walt 211, 225 Wieland, Christoph 58 Wilde, Oscar 111 ‘Will O’ the Wisps Are in Town, The’ (Andersen) 106–7 Winding, Poul 54 Wirtén, Eva Hemmungs 244 Wischmann, Antje 152 worldcat.org 6 world history 65–6, 205 worldviews 170, 178 writing and archi-writing, Derrida’s concepts of 214 Wulff, Henriette 91, 93–4, 108 Youth Attempts (Andersen) 91 youth rebellion, 1968 218, 220 Zealand 15–16, 126, 233 Zionism 137 Zola, Emil 145, 147, 156–8 zoopraxiscope 98–9 Zum Ewigen Frieden/Perpetual Peace (Kant) 58, 60 Zürau 115, 118, 121 Zweig, Stefan 145, 150