Throughout his long career as a writer – ever since the publication of his first novel, Signalement (The Description) – Vagn Lundbye’s has been both a dissenting and a challenging voice. By keeping well abreast of the times in which he lives he has succeeded, - in his fiction, his essay writing and his lecturing – in holding the door open to attitudes which modern civilisation tends to suppress or eradicate. Despite the fact that – particularly in the years around 1980 - the politicization front line did their best to classify him as a reactionary social critic, it is quite impossible to tie him down to that almost obsolete conflict between right and left wing. Lundbye’s extensive and dynamic body of work has never ceased to speak for all those things that are stifled by today’s economic rationalism; rebelling against all of the standardization and unimaginative mediocrity that comes under the heading of modern or "contemporary".
"Contemporary" would be a far better term for Vagn Lundbye himself, inasmuch as he has endeavoured, through a host of different voices, to call our day and age to account for all the devastation to which it gives rise. His own mental attitude, one which has grown out of a lifelong relationship with cultures other than the Euro-American, manifests itself in an empathy with the Eskimos, the North American Indians and other peoples of the Third World.
Early on in his career (1974-1976), he produced some anthologies of Indian writings and wrote the travel book Den indianske tanke (The Indian Mind). And yet one of the main sources of inspiration for this identification with the primeval aspect of life on earth was the Danish writer Albert Dam (1880-1972).
The main gist of Lundbye’s indictment of modern civilization is presented in his magnum opus, Anholttrilogien (The Anholt Trilogy) (1978-82), a work of fiction whose seemingly realistic, narrative form is governed by an underlying mythical theme: the Old Testament story of the prophet Jonah. A sense of being godforsaken and left at the mercy of the forces of nature works such a change on the central character, Jonah, that he sets himself certain tasks that can only be carried out in "the big city", Copenhagen - conceived as a modern-day Nineveh.
There is evidence, in all of Vagn Lundbye’s prose, of the way in which he quite deliberately wrote his three earliest novels in the concretist style then in vogue; in so doing he also learned to adopt classical storytelling forms and present them in a variety of modernist guises. This concept of the modern retelling crops up again and again in Lundbye’s many later prose works, which could take their theme from all manner of genres (crime fiction, pulp fiction, myths, fairy tales, Gothic tales, and even riddle solving, as in the novel Palidromos (Palindrom) from 1991). In 1998 he provided the frame story for Septemberfortællingerne (September Tales), an attempt at a modern Decameron in which seven other writers each supplied seven stories for seven thematically linked days. And in his short stories, Lundbye has come up with all sorts of imaginative plots for stringing events together to form unexpected patterns and chain reactions.
The "bird tracks" of cause and effect is how he describes these patterns, this expression being both the title of an extremely funny poem from Poems 1977 and of a story from his recently published collection of "omniscient tales": Syv vidnesbyrd om vor Herre Jesu Kristi latter (Seven Testimonies to the Laughter of Our Lord Jesus Christ) (1999). Inspired by Karen Blixen, Borges and other magic realists, both here and in his first collection, Alvidende fortællere (Omniscient Storytellers) (1986), Lundbye has recycled and retold numinous, mystical experiences that leave the reader feeling, by turns, utterly amazed and somehow privy to these mysteries. Again and again, Lundbye’s storytelling opens the door onto a cosmic, creationist perspective that is being crowded out by Western rationalism; a quality also to be found in his travel writings from Greenland – as, for example, in Omkom 79´ fjorden (... Fjord 79´) from 1984 and another very fine collection, Hjemkomster (Homecomings) (1987).
Lundbye also has his own unique profile as a lyric poet, and much of his prose writing can also be characterised as lyrical. His three key collections of poems are Digte 1977 (Poems 1977), Næsehornsdigte (Rhinoceros Poems) (1990), in which the poet endeavours to perceive the human world through the senses of this powerful, primeval creature, and the light-hearted and moving collection, Lundbyes dyrefabler (Lundbye’s Animal Fables) (1994), a delightful read-aloud book, both sage and childlike, with some of the pieces set to music by Irene Becker. From a body of work notable for its tremendous gravity and indignation, in texts such as these, the humour shines through.
(1999)
