Barbara
By : William Heinesen
Jørgen-Frantz Jacobsen took the motif for this novel from a Faroese popular
legend. This legend, which stems from the 18th century, tells of the
beautiful Beinta, the wife of a clergyman, a woman who brings about the
death of her two first husbands and drives the third into wretchedness and
disintegration. This “evil Beinta”, as she is called, is presented in the
sombre legend as a seductive but odious woman who takes pleasure in causing
harm to her fellow human beings. Not only is she unreasonably jealous and
domineering towards her husbands; she is also harsh and merciless towards her
servants, arrogant, malicious and intriguing, indeed even thievish. And in
addition she is experienced in base witchcraft.
This straightforward medieval witch, whom the legend portrays without the
slightest touch of sympathy and in a manner entirely devoid of the subtle
humour that characterises many other Faroese legends, has little in common with
the fair and vivacious rococo woman we meet as the main character in
Jørgen-Frantz Jacobsen’s novel. Yet Beinta and Barbara do nevertheless have
some essential features in common: they are both beautiful, seductive and
ruthless, and from each of these women there emanates a sense of discord,
resentment and sorrow.
In the case of Barbara, we naturally also - and especially - find sweetness.
On this point the grim legend is sparing and lacking in charm. In Jacobsen’s
version, it has become the cardinal point. And at the same time the sombre and
harsh, partly incomprehensible figure of the legend been given human
characteristics and brought to life. A smile has appeared on her lips and in
her eyes. We hear her laughter - “a tiny laugh, that at the same time was a
sigh, rising in her throat”. We feel we understand her. Barbara is Beinta,
illuminated from countless angles, brought out into the light of day. But yet
still enigmatic and anything but harmless.
She has universally human qualities and is especially feminine. However, life
has denied her the conditions for developing certain kinds of female
attributes. One is the quality that is perhaps the most fundamental in a woman:
motherliness. Barbara - like Beinta - is childless. Barbara is one thing only:
the seductress - or, as it is called in the film jargon of our time: a sex
bomb. In this she is a natural force scorning all bourgeois convention and
purely and simply following the whims of her irrepressible heart. She is not
faithless and ungrateful, but reckless and fickle. She is self-centred and
coquettish, but not in any craftily calculating manner; she harms herself just
as much as she harms others. In short, she is not immoral, but amoral - a bit
of untamed nature at once unreflecting, unprincipled and innocent as an animal.
It is on this that the demonic element in her is based. “It is an essential
part of the nature of the demonic that it cannot help being demonic and is not
even aware that it is so,” writes Tom Kristensen somewhere with reference to
Barbara: “Had she been gifted, she would have been satanic”.
But ultimately, although Barbara is alive enough, she
is more a symbol than an individuality. In Jørgen-Frantz Jacobsen’s book she
symbolises life, generous but unpredictable, the life to the unconcerned whims
and fancies of which we are all subject, life that disappoints so many and renders
them disheartened or desperate, but which the writer of Barbara never ceased to
love and worship. He wrote his book in order to have the occasion to express
poetically his gratitude and delight at the gift of life and his melancholy at
the thought of soon being obliged to bid farewell to this rich and wondrous,
though often also bitterly paradoxical world. For a time, he had also thought
of giving his novel the title of “Fare, World, Farewell” after Kingo’s famous
and magnificent hymn, from which the book produces several quotations, but he
nevertheless found this title too presumptuous, too “languorous”. He harboured
a deep-seated diffidence at, not to say loathing for, sentimentality in any
form, not least that which appears under the cloak of compassion and self-pity.
From:
Danske digtere i det 20. århundrede
Translated by W. Glyn Jones
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