Tage Skou-Hansenīs (1925-) first novel, De nøgne træer (The Naked Trees, 1957), set during the 1940-45 occupation of Denmark, achieved an international breakthrough for its author and was published in many countries in both East and West. At the same time it laid the foundations for an oeuvre which - predominantly based on two novel cycles, one told by Holger Mikkelsen and published between 1957 and 1996, and one consisting of the stories from the round table from 1986 to 1991 - portray the transition of Danish society through the second half of the 20th century, with a message for a new millennium.
As is indicated in the titles of his two collections of essays, Det midlertidige fællesskab (Temporary Fellowship, 1972) and Den forbandede utopi (That Confounded Utopia, 1995), both edited and published by Hans Hertel, it is the relationship between individual and fellowship, the universal and the historical, the body and the consciousness that are the focal points in Tage Skou-Hansenīs struggle with modernity. Life is ambiguous. Poetry, love, the resistance struggle and various types of popular associations open up existence to the dream of "an essential life", but this dream must be handled with care, as it can lead to both liberation and destruction.
In the stories told by Holger Mikkelsen, we witness the final convulsions of the great utopias of the 19th and 20th centuries. The resistance struggle during the occupation testified to its still being possible to revive the dream of an essential life despite the dominance of narrow, commercial selfish interests, but like De nøgne træerīs love story concerning the resistance fighter Holger and Gerda, the wife of the group leader Christian, the dream remained illegitimate. It was - in Gerdaīs words of farewell to Holger - their bodies that knew it all.
Civilisation demanded an indulgence, and indeed Holger attempts to remain on the sidelines as the narrator of the other novels in the series, Tredje Halvleg (Third Half, 1971), Medløberen (The Fellow Traveller, 1973), Den hårde frugt (The Hard Fruit, 1977), Over stregen (Over the Top, 1980) and På sidelinien (On the Sideline, 1996). Holger has resigned, but insofar as he is constantly driven by whatever new possibilities for living fellowships history throws in his path. This happens in his meeting with the somewhat younger figure of 1968, Bente, who together with her fatherless son Bruno moves in with Holger. What at first is a practical arrangement develops into a love affair which is sealed when as a kind of subtle trap for himself Holger has attempted throughout most of the football novel Medløberen to show how real meetings or dialogues develop, not among the ranks of spectators but in the real game on the ground. Life takes by surprise those who invest themselves in it, whether they let the game lead them to score a goal, or whether like Holger trying to express his love by seeking to give the woman he desires to another who is younger. "Youīre a difficult seducer", says Bente when lying naked in bed she receives Holger, who is seeking to get round it.
The generation of 68 lit the hope of a renewal of life in society characterised by greater authenticity and depth, but their rebellion died out in the same way as Bente gradually transforms her commitment to a mannerism and "acid-washed" staging. It is the meeting with Gerdaīs daughter, Eva, that produces renewed commitment on the part of Holger. As a lawyer, he has to defend her after she has tried together with a group of others to blow up the offices of the newspaper Jyllands-Posten, and Holger is quickly caught by the unfathomable depths in her urge to rebel, encapsulated as they nevertheless remain like the flesh in a hard fruit.
Eva is an early representative of the autonomous young people of the 1980s and 1990s, who feel the need for rebellion without at the same time being able to set it in motion. Mads is consistent enough; he is the last in the series and appeals to the suppressed resonances i Holger, depicted as the late modern rebel who does not turn against society, but turns his back on it, though this leads to his death. He nevertheless shows a way forward in relation to the transformation of the cultural progress brought about by late modernity, and this constitutes the focal point for the stories from the round table: Springet (The Leap, 1986), Krukken og stenen (The Jar and the Stone, 1987), Det andet slag (The Second Blow, 1989) and Sidste sommer (Last Summer, 1991). In these stories, the fruitless struggle is replaced by the urge of the confounded utopias to realise the essence of life, and they are written with a new light touch providing brief glimpses of what is impossible to realise in utopian terms but is nevertheless crucial: a kind of metaphysics of the present, in which the surfeit of existence is entwined in its limitations.
The stories from the round table are retrospective, circling on the mystery of how to understand why the gifted student friend from the round table, Aksel, decided to join the German forces, losing his life in the Allied invasion of France after a period at the Eastern front. Aksel sought purification in destruction, something that his friend Sigurd in Det andet slag meanwhile does not accept as a convincing solution. Nevertheless, the reading of Akselīs letters from the front to Tove, a common friend from their youth, makes him realise that as an aged and somewhat rigid radical, he lacks the "second beat"
of his life, the rhythm of the heart which he also feels in his son Anders, who otherwise in a love-hate attitude reproaches his parentsī generation for having exercised a deadly tutelage in their eagerness to do everything so absolutely right.
In other novels, plays, radio and television productions, Tage Skou Hansen has examined aspects of the main themes which as a modern writer of chronicles he pores over in his two major sequences of novels. Throughout his work there is a sense that history only reluctantly lets itself to reveal its motivations and secret plays, that we have to remain abreast of it in order to let it speak. It requires sensitivity, but it also requires perseverance and determined effort.
Jørgen Gleerup is a lecturer in the University of Southern Denmark.
(1999)
