Demons and Isolation

By : Caterina Testa

The significance of sexuality as an unknown driving force that acquires destructive characteristics is a strong theme in Villy Sørensen’s writing which is also met in "The Enemy" (Harmless Stories).

From the point of view of construction this is a very simple story: a mysterious enemy turns his wrath on every city he comes to, destroys it and slays all the inhabitants. But one day when he is putting a city to fire and the sword, he meets a young woman with a sorrowful, dreamy countenance, and his fury subsides. The enemy falls in love with the girl at first sight, and she returns his feelings, but this momentary distraction costs him dear, as he is killed by the soldiers attempting to protect the city against his attack. The city is rebuilt, and its inhabitants return to a happier life. Only the young woman remains alone.

The reader is again confronted with a personality who is just as clearly split as was the case in the previous story. The mysterious enemy and the sorrowful young woman are also split personalities or symbols of divergent forces which in some strange way attract each other in the desire for fulfilment.

The introductory description of the two characters reveals their actual natures: "No one knew whence he came, whether he was fleeing himself or whether he was pursuing an enemy. Clouds of foam emanated from his horse´s mouth, its hoofs struck sparks from the dust on the road, but mightier sparks flashed from his own flaming eyes; where he glanced, everything burst into flame; he stormed ahead through blackened fields and burning forests."

This destructive, demonic nature, which is close to that of the beast (the horse), reveals in the enemy an instinctive force which turns out to be fateful and disastrous for others. The young woman, on the other hand, is described in this way: "Among the young people there was a girl with brown eyes; the young men liked to look into them, it was as though they hid a golden treasure, but she kept it hidden from them all. She never looked for long at those she was talking to, her eyes merely lighted briefly on them as they moved through the visible world; they rested longest out there in the heavens where visible things face their death."

The most important feature about the young woman is precisely this hidden treasure to which she denies everyone access, and which is hidden in her eyes; she avoids others of her own age, especially those of the opposite sex who would like to share this treasure with her, by averting her eyes from the real world and turning them towards something invisible which is specifically associated with the annihilation of the visible, of reality.

At all events, the young woman and the enemy both appear to have a disharmonious relationship with the surrounding world. One of them is eager to destroy it, the other to avoid it.



The words which the enemy addresses to the young woman: "Had I known I was to meet you here, I would have spared everyone," reveal a striking similarity to the assassin´s words to the bereaved daughter in the medieval ballad "Torben´s Daughter and her Father´s Murderer": "Had I know you were so good, ne´er would I have seen your father´s blood".

In both situations the sentence expresses the understanding which love has brought to the figures, the start of a different relationship to reality. In the ballad, the murderer´s act can be interpreted symbolically. By killing the father he breaks the bonds tying her to her childhood - at the same time destroying the harmony of her childhood, his act hastens the girl´s maturing process. But if this conflict between new and old is not radically resolved, love only reveals itself in its destructive aspect. And by turning towards the heavens and the place where "visible things face their death" the young woman in Villy Sørensen´s story reveals that her romantic dreams of something coming from far away, something that can liberate the treasure she bears within herself, are closely tied to the enemy and his demonic nature. For her, love is tied to something bringing about and implying death because she has not shown herself capable of realising it in harmony with the world around her.

An analysis of these concepts of love is found in an article by Villy Sørensen entitled "Democracy and Ethics". Here, the author distinguishes between two myths in Western literature concerning the split between body and soul - that is to say the myth of Tristan, in which the qualities of spiritual love are praised until death, and that of Don Juan, in which sexuality is separated from every bond of tenderness and is cultivated for its own sake without any consideration for the other person concerned. It has become a force without liberating or positive characteristics, Villy Sørensen writes:

If it were natural to love, as is still not the case, not only with the spirit, but also with the body at the time when it is rather a physical than a spiritual need, the spirit would perhaps not [...] be abjectly tied to puberty, and then the temptation to enter into loveless relationships for the sake of the solitary urge would possibly diminish; then it would perhaps be possible to unite body and spirit in a relationship that could be realised in life and not only in death, which even in the Tristan myth is merely a repetition of the annihilation of the self in puberty.

When we consider that neither the enemy nor the young woman is able to establish a meaningful relationship with the surrounding world, and that this is because neither of them is in possession of anything like a reasonable balance between the emotional (spiritual) and the physical (sexual), we approach the author´s own interpretation of the story:

"[...] perhaps love is the very "enemy" from which he is fleeing or which he is pursuing. [...] it is an inner lack that produces the outer enemy: the young woman says it herself in a way (Have you not come for my sake?), but in the wrong way: it is her fault that the enemy is coming, she would rather believe that he has come out of consideration for her, out of love for her. Similarly, love is ambiguous: it is both what you flee from and what you long for.

The enemy is a projection of the suppressed part of the young woman, the part which she cannot accept in herself, but only love as a demonic enemy. He shows that the sexual side of love, which has not related to the feelings, is transformed into a destructive force. In the way in which both these figures have developed, something has been neglected, and this has resulted in an "enmity towards love". Consequently, they are inevitably drawn to each other, but they meet too late for their union to bear fruit. The demonic is the manifestation of a force that has been suppressed (for moral or psychological reasons), and which finds expression in destructive signs directed towards both the individual himself and others. This experience can lead to isolation or death.

Caterina Testa: Demons and Isolation in NORDICA vol. 13 1996 <>

Translated by W. Glyn Jones