From : The Talk Of The Town

By : Henk van der Liet

In 1993 Peer Hultberg was awarded The Nordic Council Prize for Literature for his novel Byen og verden (The City and the World) an international novel about provincial life.

Peer Hultberg (b. 1935) is without doubt one of the most original and interesting Danish authors of recent years. He made his debut in 1966 with the novel Mytologisk landskab med Daphnes forvandling (Mythological Landscape with the Transformation of Daphne), followed two years later by the experimental novel Desmond!. Then there was a silence of nearly twenty years from Peer Hultberg. This came to an abrupt end in 1985 with the publication of the novel Requiem. Despite its monumental size, around 600 pages, and its unusual form and content, the book was a great success with both critics and the general public. Requiem is now regarded as one of the most important novels of the eighties.

Despite the fact that it is generally not easy for an author to live up to expectations, Hultberg has succeeded time and again. Requiem was followed by Slagne veje (Beaten Tracks, 1988), Præludier (Preludes, 1990), and Byen og verden (1992). In 1995 his latest novel Kronologi (A Chronology) was published. All of Hultberg´s five recent novels are characterized by fragmentary construction and are not easy to summarize. The books have no plot, main character or context in the traditional sense of the word, and are actually made up of a series of relatively independent fragments of text or short stories. Byen og verden - which has been given the subtitle novel of a hundred texts - consists of one hundred numbered chapters, all of which are short life-stories of the citizens of the provincial Jutland town, Viborg. The location is not really important for the content of the book, but is merely a formal framework around the stories which could just as well have occurred somewhere else. Viborg should, therefore, be seen as the physical borders of a collective we-feeling, which also implicitly defines an anonymous outside world. Viborg is not as much a concrete place in the north of Jutland as a Vi-borg, a we-stronghold.
Byen og verden is stylistically characterized by a sentence construction closely related to the spoken language: the text with its long sentences which all run into each other, and its digressions is a highly sofisticated style in guise of a quasi-oral tradition. Each chapter is a monologue about the fortunes of one person or family. The texts in Byen og verden often carry clear signs of the voice reciting them. All the fragments refer to people who (could) have lived in Viborg in this century, and thus the novel covers a period which can literally be described as living memory. But human memory is anything but a reliable historical source, and this becomes even more apparent as the stories overlap each other, and events described earlier are viewed from a different perspective.

In Byen og verden Hultberg returns to the town of his youth, but it has certainly not become a sentimental journey. Just as he has already demonstrated in Præludier, youth is primarily the time when you learn by trial and error about the complicated rules of the adult world which are always governed by time and place. Once you do grow up you discover that this often painful learning process never comes to an end. One of the most important sanctions which is applied to the social intercourse between groups of individuals is isolation: the banning of the individual from social life. Those who do not conform are often silently shot out, they bear their lot with resignation, are crushed by it, or seek refuge elsewhere. In this way the town of Viborg is no more than a symbol, a collective space that is determined and supported by an invisible force of norms and values. Every story in Byen og verden adds another facet to this closeknit and sensitive network of explicit and implicit rules of behaviour.

Hultberg shows us how tenacious middle-class morality is. It is passed on from generation to generation. The major determining factor in it is the fear of being different, of being shut out, the shame of literally and figuratively being the talk of the town, falling prey to the backbiting and prejudice which can take on such a persistent and uncontrollable character. The Viborg in the stories set in the beginning of the century is still completely controlled by the old values based on rank and position. But it soon becomes clear from the lives illustrated that although the power of the patriarchy, the church and society is perhaps less manifest than it was before, it is by no means broken.
   Byen og verden as a result swams with people who are caught up in the social norms and codes in one way or another, or have been completely crushed by them. The reader is manoeuvred into the position of a voyeur and listens over the shoulder of the narrator to all sorts of gossip which usually ends on a moralistic note. This way of relating reminds you of a primitive sort of literary function: the verbal transmission of often dramatic events from the lives of individuals which thereby acquire a sort of exemplary status.

The hundred life-stories which Hultberg in Byen og verden neutrally records and passes on to the readers, all have a more or less hidden motive in common, the desires and anxieties of the inhabitants of the town Viborg, which is so peaceful on the surface, but which can be stripped bare by reading between the lines. The touchstone in all this remains the unwritten laws of propriety which are always tangible but are rarely articulated. In Byen og verden we are confronted with those who preserve these unwritten social conventions as well as with their victims, and often they are one and the same person.
   Requiem and Præludier provided the reader with an insight into the consciousness of the people who were narrating, but in Byen og verden it is more a question of a collective consciousness which is much more difficult to reduce to one common denominator. In Byen og verden the perspective has been given a 180° twist: the interest in the emotions of individuals in the earlier books has made way for the psychology of the social group. The writer merely provides the pieces of a puzzle - or as he himself says: a kind of musical score - which must be brought to life by the reader.
   In Byen og verden Hultberg once again demonstrates his mastery feel for language and form. The conversation-like discourse, which can be called his hallmark, is used to the limits to take the reader subtly into his confidence and the closed world of these lives, all of which are twisted and derailed in one way or another.
The article has previously been published in Scandinavian Newsletter 7