Juliane Preisler
On Silk
By : Knud Bjarne Gjesing
Silk is a melodrama set in the light of the gas-lamps at
the end of the 19th century. The atmosphere is one of fin de siècle
- sweet depravity, elegance and delicacy, intrigue and dissolute refinement
with a piquant tendency towards the sado-masochistic. Regitze enters this
depraved atmosphere when young and innocent she comes to the big city to seek her fortune in the theatre. Here she
is given the artist's alias and nickname "Silk" by the theatre's aging
leading actor. This leading actor must be almost the most wicked seducer to
have sauntered across the pages of a book since Søren Kierkegaard made his
Johannes the Seducer send demonic side-glances to the young ladies of
Copenhagen. Her is mysterious, ironical, cynical and unpredictable, by turns blasé and passionate, and around
his thin lips plays a mocking smile that suggests infinite spleen and
inexpressible desire.
In accesses of 'greedy ennui' he ensnares both sexes. Wrapped in a cloud
of powder he performs his arts of seduction in the theatre's dim passageways,
and in its wings rattles the skeleton of an actress who under his influence has
left the stage of life with a broken heart. In his vicinity the theatre's
actresses, like Piil and Lind, continue to become as pliable as the branches of
the trees whose names they bear. From their whispered confidences we understand
that He - with a large H - has been imprinted on their souls and bodies: 'He
always has to have someone, I know that about Him, it's like a kind of boredom.
He has to have someone to enchant... someone to destroy... He feels like a
corpse... this is what makes Him come alive, destroying.
Above all, the seducer's power is associated with his remarkable eyes. He has
'strangely dead, dark eyes that never had any real expression - 'black and
dark, bottomlessly dark, as though they had a mirror on top of them, so one
couldn't even sense a gaze.' Futhermore, he bears the name Mørk (Dark). But it
is precisely these unfathomable eyes that like the black holes in the universe
suck everything into them. Regitze too is seized by desire to see life flame up
in the bottomless depths of those eyes and see herself reflected in them. In
the end her longing is stilled, but at the same time the figure of the seducer
dissolves like an illusion, and he is exposed as a decrepit old man.
Knud
Bjarne Gjesing in Danish Writers of the 20th Century (Danske
digtere i det 20. århundrede, bd. 3, Gads Forlag, 2000).
Translated by David McDuff
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