From : Afterword to Tine
By : Villy Sørensen
4. Realism and Impressionism
The new literature of the 1870s and 80s had the portrayal of reality as its programme, and this implied the portrayal of aspects of reality which the older - late Romantic - generation of writers had found unworthy of literary treatment. Realistic literature was seen by many as an attack on morals and was the cause of offence among the bourgeoisie.
Before his first appearance as a novelist, Herman Bang was a warm advocate of realism, even in the conservative newspaper Nationaltidende. He collected his first literary articles in his book Realisme og Realister (Realism and Realists), 1879. Here, he argued that realism was a form, an artistic method and not a programme of tendentious writing, not the expression of one specific view of life. Among modern authors there were certainly both political conservatives (like Vilhelm Topsøe) and political radicals (like the followers of Georg and Ernst Brandes), and Bang did not feel at home in either political camp. Nevertheless, it is difficult to ignore the fact that there was a common tendency among realist writers; in placing such emphasis on realismīs only being a form, Bang was engaging in polemics with the conservative literary critics who made no distinction between morals (radical tendentious writings) and aesthetics (form): if a work of art was distasteful to them on account of its contents, it was on moral grounds rejected as bad art. As an oft-quoted example has it::
"The public, the offended public, is right. It is not confronted here with a new artistic form, but clearly with a new spirit, that of raw materialism, which by means of the photographic recreation of the phenomena of life in both literature and art believes it is serving the truth - let us assume with the best of intentions! - but which, if it succeeds, will finally break down intellectual life, destroy idealism, and eradicate a sense of propriety. For whither, otherwise, should such a striving lead which ... "only narrates and allows life itself to moralise?" For it introduces into literature those odious aspects of life from which poetry should raise us up."
These were not the words of a nobody, but were written by Carl Ploug in the newspaper Fædrelandet, the leading National Liberal organ, of which he was editor for almost the whole of the newspaperīs existence, from 1839 to 1882. And they was directly aimed at Bang, who in Realisme og Realister (2nd ed. 1966, p.16) had attempted to explain the "apparent lack of moral sense in modern literature." - "Its authors allow life to moralise; for them morals are to be derived as a result of the human life they have observed, and they leave it to us to derive this result for ourselves; they do so quite simply because they believe that the facts of life are more
convincing than their private pronouncements and the expression of their private opinions."
What Bang adopted a critical attitude to was not actually the moral implication of a work of art, but the fact that art was subordinated to this implication, that a work was reduced to the status of an expression of opinion. He stressed both artīs independence from current opinions and its dependence on the age in which it was produced; art was not, as in the aesthetics of Romanticism, "a realm alone": it should not raise itself and its readers above the problems of the age but rather confront them; in this, Bang was in complete agreement with Georg Brandes.
It is scarcely a coincidence that Carl Ploug, this passionate advocate of an unrealistic political programme, was a passionate opponent of realism in art; the conflict here was not only between opposing aesthetic views. Realism was part of the movement which Nietzsche had called "the revaluation of all values", it attacked the "idealism" that considered ideas and values to be timeless and was preoccupied with their material foundation. - Ploug was thus not wrong in discovering materialism in it, but rather in his moral condemnation of it.
In his article, Bang compared the modern novelist with the scientist: he must tell anything without false modesty, but candidly and with scientific thoroughness. "Science has taught this age that psychology and physiology are closely related sciences and has soberly linked the so-called spiritual to the physical" (ibid. p. 17). This relationship between the internal and the external could justify an author in not recounting what was taking place within his characters, but showing it through their actions and utterances, especially as it is difficult if not impossible to know what is taking place at the deepest level, even in oneself. Like Sigmund Freud, of whom he was a contemporary, Bang knew the significance of the subconscious, but he saw no way of portraying it directly. He showed strikingly little interest in dreams and fantasies, which he considered - not only in politicians - to be fateful and superfluous; the portrayal of reality was based on observation and memory, or rather observation on the basis of memory (cf. the foreword to Tine (Tina), p. 13f.) - and not at all on a
photographic reproduction of phenomena, as Ploug believed.
During the course of the 80s, Bang became more radical in his realistic "form", which became less epic and more dramatic. We see the difference if we compare the beginning of Haabløse Slægter (Generations without Hope) ("It was an old family, very old, grey with its age in the country") with the start to Tine. With his great overview and understanding of his character, the narrator makes way for the observer, who probably "knows" more than he "sees", but only passes on his knowledge by relating it to the way in which his characters behave ("He was a Grundtvigian and croaked like a frog", p. 46), and who moreover is far from being impartial or unsympathetic; he is far more present than the omniscient narrator.
Although Bang wrote about realism before he made his appearance as a realistic novelist, he did not arrive at his literary form as the result of theoretical considerations - "It is literature that writes aesthetics and not vice versa" (Realisme og Realister, p. 71) - he gradually discovered the style that was his and his to such an extent that it could never be the style of anyone else. On his way he praised and defended other authors in whom he found something of what he sought - and was himself criticised for. Complaints had been made of "the intolerable restlessness of the presentation" (p.13) in Stuk (Stucco); in a review of Jonas Lie"s Majsa Jons (Majsa Jons) (1888), Bang praised the Norwegian novelist for showing his characters in this novel in the constant motion which is lifeīs own motion. On several occasions he praised Jonas Lie as the pioneer of a new - "impressionistic" - form of the novel, and he dedicated his collection of short stories Under Aaget (Under the Yoke) (1880) to him with the famous words, "You never tell us anything about anything. You show us everything."
When, in his review of Under Aaget, the novelist Erik Skram had complained that its author failed to provide his readers with "full and clear information" about his characters, Bang for once wrote in his own defence, justifying his "impressionism" in "a short reply" published in the periodical Tilskueren 1890. The impressionist refuses to provide complete information because he does not consider this to be possible. As long as psychological knowledge is so incomplete (this was before psychoanalysis), "psychological art will be no more than the dilettante imaginings of a virtuoso". Impressionistic art "avoids all direct explanation and only shows us people"s feelings through a series of looking glasses - their actions." But the impressionist includes "only the essential actions, that is to say a series of actions in which each minute act is a tiny peephole into the mental life of the individual portrayed..."
Impressionism took its name from a painting by Claude Monet, Impression, Soleil Levant from 1872, and was the term used to denote the trend in painting that sought to reproduce phenomena as they are experienced and notas they are understood. That very Claude Monet, who had read Tine in a French translation (from 1895), told Bang that it was the only impressionist novel he knew. To Bang this was the greatest compliment hehad ever received.
Extract from Villy Sørensen's Afterword to Herman Bang's Tine in the series
Danske Klassikere, Det danske Sprog- og litteraturselskab / Borgen 1986.
Translated by W. Glyn Jones
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