Johannes Vilhelm Jensen (1873-1950) was a veterinary surgeon’s son from the village of Farsø in Jutland. When, in 1893, after graduating from high school, he left for Copenhagen to study medicine, he was also moving from a rural community steeped in tradition to an industrial, urban society where tradition had no place. This cultural clash was to prove crucial to his writing. In the prose poem "Interferens" (Interference) the "I" of the poem says of himself: "When the image of the greatest wonders of the world meets the belief in the transience of all things, then I live". Just as there is no longer one clearly defined set of social values, so, too, the personality is divided. The self is not a constant entity, but labile – an interface where diametrically opposed motivations and attitudes to life cross – causing interference.
It is the awareness of such interference that provides the focus for Jensen’s early works, those produced in the years prior to 1906. His first two novels, Danskere (Danes) (1896) and Einar Elkær (1898) both take a provincial student as their central character. Alongside these, Jensen was also writing the first volume of his Himmerlandshistorier (Himmerland Tales) (Himmerlandsfolk (Himmerland Folk) (1898) ), in which life in the old world is viewed from the oblique perspective of modern life, and his first Myths (first volume: Myter og Jagter (Myths and Pursuits), 1907) ) – a genre which endeavours to bridge the gap between the two worlds by dint of one simple image – that of a myth. In fact this might better be described as a unique form of artistic perception which cuts across the genres: a notable feature of both Jensen’s poems and his prose. By the same token, the novel Kongens Fald (The Fall of the King) (1900-1901) could be regarded as one long and intricate web of myth and fable. In The Fall of the King he sets out to propound a national and historical view of the psychological schism, while in Den gotisk Renaissance (The Gothic Renaissance), a collection of essays adapted from articles written in Spain in 1898 and at the World Exhibition in Paris in 1900, he conducts a Nietzschean-style critical analysis of contemporary society and presents an alternative to the spiritual erosion entailed in having been brought up in a Christian culture while having to live in the modern world. Towards the end of this work Jensen puts forward a modern, anti-metaphysical alternative to the decadent Christian civilisation, in a declaration of faith in science, technology, imperialism and the Gothic race: the main representatives of this last being the Anglo-Saxons – and the Jutlanders. The two novels Madame D’Ora (1904) and Hjulet (The Wheel) (1905) are both set in the USA; both develop the theme of modernity and address the problem of identity, delving deep into the question of where, in the male character, the line is drawn between the female and the male sides. In a brilliant short novel, or novella, entitled Skovene (The Forests) (1904), Jensen depicts, with scathing self-irony, how the writer persona sets off into the jungle in search of the primitive – which, in essence, is to say the primeval female – spirit. This undertaking proves, however, so dangerous that the male hero wastes no time in fleeing from "Paradise Valley" back to civilisation’s "thundering forests of stone and steel" – on a bicycle. To put it another way: the whole of modern society is built on the male suppression of a menacing feminine streak which refuses to be civilised.
In his writing, Jensen worked his way through and beyond his own faith in modern society: in the possibility of living in the here and now, oblivious to all else, intent on remaining down to earth. His major work, Digte (Poems) (1906), which includes a masterly translation of Walt Whitman, constitutes a turning point. Here, Jensen sums up his restless, critical search, in a poem cycle which he later described as the journey around the world. The turning point is encapsulated in the sixth and last poem in the cycle, "Hverdagene" (Workdays). He sees his search as running in a circle; a flight that brings him back to the thing from which he fled: "the great Whiteness" - death. But instead of circling the world, Jensen chooses to stay where he is - i.e. where he comes from – and travel, as it were, vertically, by making himself and the line from which he is descended the subject of a kind of archaeological journey back in time. From a scientific, evolutionistic and socio-historical standpoint, he has written a six-volume fictional work entitled Den Lange Rejse (The Long Journey), in which he describes the development of the human race from pre-Ice Age to the time of the great explorer, Christopher Columbus. In this way, working from scientific premisses (particularly those of Darwin and Spencer), Jensen harks back to the body of tradition that lies behind Christianity and attempts to solve the problem of interference by slotting the contradictory facets of the complex, modern psyche into some sort of psycho-archaeological system. At the same time the question of sexual identity is resolved, with the genders falling into the old, familiar pattern of smart-witted men of action and sweet, voluptuous and, above all, unthreatening women.
But notions of an evolutionary theory do also serve, in a broader sense, as metaphors for a theory of human evolution, deeply rooted in the Romantic idea of cultivation. Parallel to his main body of work, Jensen also produced several collections of essays, primarily of a popular scientific and philosophical nature and tangential to the realms of fiction. In 1944 Johannes V. Jensen was awarded the Noble Prize for Literature.
