The Culture of the Periphery

By : Peter Q. Rannes

Knud Sørensen is proud to write from, and about, the geographical and cultural extremities of Denmark.

In the title piece of Knud Sørensen’s latest book, the collection of essays entitled Hvor bor kulturen? (1994) (Where Do We find Culture?), the author asks what culture is and where it “lives”. Knud Sørensen defines culture as shared experiences, emphasizing that this applies in particular to experiences from daily life. Once the individual realizes that his own familiar experiences, and the everyday culture of which they are part, form an individual culture, this in turn can form the basis for both artistic and literary creativity.

This applies to the Danish rural culture as to all other cultures. The latest collection also contains an essay entitled “Der dukker af disen” (Out of the Mist) which deals with a number of poets from the area around the Limfjord in Jutland, including Johannes V. Jensen, Jeppe Aakjær and Johan Skjoldborg. With reference to this essay, the author points out that the cultural awakening which these writers experienced at the turn of the century allowed them to write on the basis of their own farming culture, and not in spite of it. They realised that culture was not something to be discovered elsewhere, in the towns, but that it could also be found on their own doorstep.

It will come as no surprise to Knud Sørensen’s readers that the culture which provides the inspiration for books does not exist solely in cities, but also in the countryside. His extensive writings, which cover a period of more than 30 years, are ample proof of this.

The revolution in Tøving
Knud Sørensen is the exponent of the farming community and country life in comtemporary Danish literature. At a time when agriculture was in decline, in literature as well as in reality, he picked up where Steen Steensen Blicher and the Limfjord poets had left off, once again using country living as a poetical theme in the collection known as Revolutionen I Tøving (1972) (The Revolution in Tøving). Knud Sørensen’s early collection of poems uses a tender, simple language to describe the great changes which took place in the agricultural community. On the basis of hard facts, documents, statistics and figures, he effortlessly conjures up living poetry using a style which has become the trademark for Knud Sørensen, the poet:

“From the roof of the village hall
 you cannot see the seagulls
sitting on the roof of the schoolhouse.
Tøving School, built in 1954,
closed down in 1975,
for not even in Tøving
do tractors have children who go to school”
(from Tøving I dag (Tøving today))

Knud Sørensen uses his poems to show that poetry can be found in the harsh reality of life in the Danish countryside. His writings describe the demise of the rural culture, the depopulation of the countryside, the expropriation of valuable arable land, distressing visits from bailiffs, the closing down of farms and the appearance of weekend farmers who turn their pigsties into guest houses, all of which serves to highlight the poetry which pervades all change, all movement and all life.

The countryside described by Knud Sørensen bears no trace of the romanticism of Rousseau. Despite the sense of despair which runs through the rural poetry, the compositions still exhibit a strange sense of calm. This may be due to the serenity which characterizes life out in the country, but it could also be the poet’s faith in his own culture, its strength and its ability to pull through in the face of adversity.

A shift in perspective
Revolutionen i Tøving was followed by other poetry collections including Fodtur til det nordlige Mors (1976) (On Foot to the Northern Parts of Mors), Bondeslutspil (1980) (The Farmer’s End Game), Pletter på kortet (1982) (Blots on the Map), Hvad skal vi med solnedgangen? (1987) (What Good is the Sunset?) and Sandemoses ryg (1992) (Sandemose's Back) , as well as the anthologies entitled Beretninger fra en dansk udkant (1978) (Tales from the Edge of Denmark) and Samhørighed (1994) (Mutual Connection). Life in the country remains the central theme throughout the years, but a gradual shift in perspective becomes apparent from one collection to the next: from the matter-of-fact poetical descriptions of the material and cultural changes taking place in Danish agriculture in the 1960s and 1970s, to the often geographical and historical descriptions of country life in the 1980s and 1990s, out of which has emerged a cohesive and independent culture which has managed to survive despite all the many upheavals it has had to face.

The coutryside as method
Accompanying the marked shift in perspective in the poetry, Knud Sørensen also turned to prose. His collections of short stories, such as Slutseddel (1977) (Completion Document), Marginaljord (1987) (Marginal Land), Naboskab (1991) (Neighbourhood) and Rundt omkring (1993) (Round and About), and the short novel entitled En landsbyhistorie (1986)all bear a thematic resemblance to his poetry. His prose uses the gentle tones of poetry, but is closer to the reality of life in the farming culture which it describes. Life in the countryside is not just the object and the subject of Knud Sørensen’s prose but the very method. The narrator always appears to resemble the characters that are described; it may, at times, be an assimilated outsider, an academic amongst the locals – like Sørensen himself, who was born in Hjørring in the north of Jutland, and who spent three decades as a chartered surveyor on Mors in Jutland. The characters are often indirectly described in the dialogue, but the narrator’s descriptions of them always correspond to the type of portrayal that one would expect from a neighbour. Thy are typically described in terms of family relations, the type of car they drive, the food they eat and the quantities consumed, the houses in which they live.

The gentle rhythm of country life is mirrored in the inner structure of the stories. The focus is on the episode itself, not on the individual points making it up. In fact, the event is often pointless, or it may form the point of the story in itself. Similarly, time in these stories is not marked out by the chain of events. Instead, it is merely something which happens alongside the action. A broader sense of time, however, becomes apparent from the relationship between an individual episode and others that took place in the past, outside the main action.

Culture of the periphery
Knud Sørensen’s prose closely resembles the culture it set out to describe. This is one of its chief merits, and a strong argument for the author’s persistent claim that the rural culture can, and still does, form a cultural basis for artistic creation.

This assertion is central to Knud Sørensen, and he uses Hvor bor kulturen? To argue that a rural culture still exists in Denmark in the 1990s, even though only a small percentage of the population is directly involved with agriculture. This so-called “culture of the periphery”, as Sørensen has chosen to call it, exists side by side with the universal big city culture which dominates the media.

In Hvor bor kulturen?, Knud Sørensen describes his own cross-border experience with another culture of the periphery. While on a visit to Nicaragua in Central America, he found that he could “converse” with a local farmer with neither man understanding a word of  the other’s language: “We communicated via some tacit common understanding, via a mutual feeling for all the things which form the basis of life in a rural community”. He has experiences the same sense of cultural affinity when reading descriptions of French mountain farmers and of the farming community in Siberia, and also when watching the Chinese film “The Story of Qiu-Ju” by Zhang Yimou.

These experiences have proven to Knud Sørensen that, from a European perspective at least, there is a cultural divide between the universal big city culture and the “culture of the periphery” which Denmark’s rural culture is just one example. And it is probably even more significant that “It is in this tacit common understanding that real culture resides”

The conclusion, which Sørensen’s followers and critics alike will have seen coming for some time, is within reach: the farming culture is in many ways superior to the internationalized city culture, partly because of a commonalty of experience which has little to do with national characteristics.

This article first appeared in Danish Literary Magazine 8, 1995

Translated by Malene S. Madsen