Dan Turčll’s oeuvre is a meticulously organised explosion of writing. He only lived to the age of 47, and it is as though he knew he must hurry. His oeuvre amounts to (at least) 90 pieces, of which 30 were created between 1969 and 1974, when the author was in the grip of a veritable frenzy of creativity, fully on a level with the legendary one for which Holberg is famous.
We find great leaps and great continuity in the development of Turčll’s work, absolutely conscious leaps and absolutely conscious continuity. The usual overall version, which was very largely fostered by Turčll himself, is that at first he was a hangdog member of the avantgarde and then turned into a happy populist, and of course there is just an element of truth in this, though not really very much more.
The first phase of his work is hardly distinguishable from that of his blood brother Peter Laugesen: side by side, small, rapidly experimental underground books appeared alongside weighty overground books of various kinds. At first, the underground books were pretty way-out, while the overground books were quite strictly organised in sections of fragmented short texts, long (very readable and Turčll-like) prose poems and good-humoured experiments (primarily cut-ups, i.e. edited clips) as demonstrated in the trilogy Områder af skiftende tæthed og tomhed (Areas of Alternating Density and Void), 1970, Bevægelser formålsløst cirklende (Pointlessly Moving Circles), 1971, and Manuskrifter om hvad som helst (Manuscrifts on All and Sundry), 1971. At this time there is present a pathetic, moving insistance on the Wild, Profound Rebellion of Writing, against which musicality and stylistic consciousness fight a brave fight. The 400-page-long Sidste forestilling bevidstløse trancebilleder af eksploderende spejltricks igennem flyvende tidsmaskine af smeltende elektriske glasfotos (The Last performance of Unconscious Trance Images of Exploding Mirrors via Flying Time Machines of Melting Electric Glass Photos), 1972, is a completely impossible book written in a radically fragmented, pseudo cut, almost abstract science fiction style, an ultimative experiment, an unreadable major work.
Around 1972, the underground booklets split up into several proper series of works: the first three are the Feuilleton/Serial Series, a partly collective rag-bag, the Rim og remser/Rhymes and Jingles Series, a typical title being Onkel Danny’s drivende dansende dirrende dinglende daskende dryppende danske dåsedigte (Uncle Danny’s Driving Dancing Dithering Dangling Dashing Dripping Dried Danish Dittywriting), 1974 and the Space Canto series, cut-ups mainly from Dracula strip cartoons. The Rhymes and Jingles series makes for charming, amusing reading, but readers should certainly not be scared off by the other "difficult" avantgarde qualities of the first books; these can (and should) be read simply for the sake of the voice and the dynamics. The great final full stop to the experiment is the partly (and beautifully) handwritten hunk of diary sekvens af Manjana den endeløse sang flimrende igennem hudens pupiller (Sequence of Mańana, the Endless Song Flickering through the Pupils of the Skin), 1973, a chaotic delight of waffle about writing and singing about the world.
1974 saw the publication of Manjana’s equally massive light-hearted twin, Karma Cowboy (Karma Cowboy), to many people their favourite Turčll, a well-arranged bouquet of stylised voices of the most varied kind, rhymes and ditties, embracing the world, evergreen translations, original songs and anecdotal open verse. Among the latter there are a couple of poems about the author’s native heath of Vangede, and the 1975 saw the appearance of what is probably Turčll’s best-known work, Vangede billeder (Images of Vangede), a remarkable mixture of spell-binding anecdotal memories with no narrator at the centre and a humoristic encyclopaedia of the area (containing the most curious facts about Vangede, Vangede songs, the Vangede coat of arms). At the same time a new group of series replaced the old one, and in 1976-77 there were three collections of poems, Drive-in-digte (Drive-in Poems), 3-D-digte (3-D poems) and Storby-blues (City Blues), cool, distinctive improvised poems on which Turčll played on further in his legendary virtuoso reading shows. Two long-lived work series were "media montages" -journalism and articles on literary and musical idols and bigwigs - and Uncle Danny’s story books consisting of high-spirited and more or less veracious tall stories from the lives of the writer himself and others; as in the case of the rhymes and ditties, this is a genre which has received less than its full recognition as literature, a genre which Turčll makes his own with his now completely unmistakable, assured voice.
This operation is repeated in the two major series from the eighties, the detective novels and the I byen (In town) cartoons from the newspaper Politiken, which were published in book form every third year. The detective stories are a continuation of the dark Manjana type, with hopelessly complicated plots and a nameless journalist narrator who is forever lost in his own thoughts on the gory absurdity of the world, while the I byen cartoons continue the light Karma Cowboy line, good-humoured tales and opinions on anything and everything in the concrete everyday life between the Copenhagen districts of Vesterbro and Frederiksberg. The work descends into a lower unity in the last three collections of poems, Himalaya Hilton (Himalaya Hilton), 1991, Gud & Gokke (God and Gokke), 1992 and Tja-a Cha-Cha (Cha-a Cha-Cha), 1993, frivolously experimental short texts with meticulous rhythm on light and especially darkness, pure, precise nonsense about important things.
All Dan Turčll’s stylish and stubborn transformations are governed by a search for a mobile and in the best sense popular, perfect and personal expression of clarity that can express the great void and the near surrounding world, the happy and accursed meaninglessness of life.
(1999)
