Writing is Interpreting

By : Hanns Grössel

Villy Sørensen made his first appearance as a short story writer. In 1953 he published Sære historier (Strange Tales) and in 1955 Ufarlige historier (Harmless Tales). For the following nine years Sørensen´s work was mainly that of an essayist, but his contribution to imaginative literature was by no means over: in 1964 he published Formynder-fortællinger (Tutelary Tales), thereby choosing a new designation after the tales of the earlier volumes. In later years, too, Villy Sørensen has worked as a story-teller: the volume entitled De mange og De enkelte (Another Metamorphosis and Other Fictions) (1986) contains texts from over thirty years, whereby a period of more than three decades of continuous story-telling is brought to a close.

In Villy Sørensen´s view it is not possible to distinguish between a narrator on the one hand and an essayist (or philosopher) on the other, and any attempt to make such a distinction in his stories, which perhaps could best be described by the French term of conte philosophique, would be completely out of place. When, in 1965, Sørensen was asked where the borderline lay between the potential of essays and that of fiction, he replied: I don´t know whether it is possible to draw any borderline at all. There are different ways of expressing yourself, but the message conveyed is the same. When I began writing in a philosophical vein, it was principally to explain in a different manner what I had already been writing. The lack of understanding on the part of my readers simply forced me to explain what I had hitherto sought to say by means of symbols.

Renunciation of Naturalism
The end of the Second World War made an important turning-point in Danish literature. During the Occupation, which had driven many intellectuals underground or into exile, not only had new forces been awakened, but doubts also arose about traditional literary forms. People were suspicious of what had been written before the war. New experiences had to be formulated, and new ways of validating literature had to be found.

The new direction was reflected in a periodical representing the self-understanding and self-esteem of the first post-war generation of Danish writers. Called Heretica, it was founded in 1948 by Thorkild Bjørnvig, Bjørn Poulsen and Ole Wivel, and continued to appear under different editors until 1955. Hereitica , says Ole Wivel looking back on its achievement, became a periodical for poetry and for a belief in art as a valid form of cognition, and so from the beginning it came into conflict with the rationalist ideologies of the time: Marxism, cultural radicalism, dogmatic Catholicism and protestant rational theology.

Villy Sørensen did not write in Heretica; he went his own way. In so doing, he soon turned his attention to the 19th century and drew inspiration from the writers of that time, in particular Hans Christian Andersen and Søren Kierkegaard. Evidence of this is found not only in his essays (for instance that on Andersen´s novels in the 1961 volume entitled Hverken-Eller (Neither/Nor), but in his general practice of ironical narration. In En glashistorie (A Story of Glass) (from Tutelary Tales) for instance Sørensen writes variations on the opening sentences of Andersen´s fairy tale Snedronningen (The Snow Queen). In conversation he has declared: It is an inverse retelling of Andersen´s story. En glashistorie deals with the same subject as Snedronningen, but from a different angle, and thus it contains both a link with the past and a complete rejection of its view of the world. The authors associated with Heretica had primarily favoured and promoted poetry. When it came to prose, they had turned against the realistic, social critical novel, the naturalistic psychology which they accused of having caused the decline and disintegration of the novel genre. Nor is Villy Sørensen a realist in his stories, though indirectly he is a social critic. The old-fashioned novel... he notes in his diary on the 27 January 1954, insists that the action is the essential element, whereas modern art only sees it as a means of fixing the symbols in an appropriate relationship to each other.

The many and the few
Villy Sørensen´s was, then, a symbolic art, applied to motifs or material already at hand, which Sørensen transforms rather than retells. De mange og De enkelte provides graphic examples of this. Ursula Schmalbruch, who has translated the volume into German, describes it in an afterword as a dual journey through time: through the time taken by the author´s life and production, and through the history and pre-history of our civilization, represented by stories from Christian and pagan antiquity, by allusions to modern material, by the use of elements from folk poetry and the fairy-tale. The stories are reduced to basic existential situations. Places are rarely described, most of the stories are without ambience at the most, the time of the action is suggested by means of sparse hints: modern society is sensed through a war-damaged station, public squares, a cemetery, a factory, a hospital, an administrative office or a condemned cell.

That the stories are stories of disintegrated humanity , as Ursula Schmalbruch observes, derives from the condition of the modern world as Villy Sørensen sees it. Once, everything was orderly, now nothing is as it should be, he writes in the foreword to his volume of essays from 1959 entitled Digtere og dæmoner (Poets and Demons), a foreword to which he gives the title of Filosofisk forudsætning (Philosophical Presupposition). You can best represent the disintegrated character of the modern world by means of irony a didactical irony such as that of Villy Sørensen in the wake of Søren Kierkegaard and their common model Socrates. And it can also be done through humour, which is related to irony. In answer to the question as to why the tone of his work, as of almost all modern literature, is so humorous, Sørensen replies: Because humour is a necessity if you want to hold together what has disintegrated. Moreover, it implies a recognition of the disproportion between one´s ability and the enormously complex world facing one. Humour suggests a certain reservation towards one´s personal conclusions.

The downfall of the gods and other myths
It is not surprising that Villy Sørensen should feel a particular affinity with Thomas Mann: If I have really been influenced by anyone, it must be Thomas Mann. Even though he is not the writer I value the highest. They have in common not only the principle of irony, but also the tendency to re-work already existing material (one thinks of Thoman Mann´s Joseph novels), and it is no accident that a Danish critic has talked of literary archaeology in connection with Villy Sørensen.

In a wider sense this formula can also be applied to Villy Sørensen´s most recent books in which (after a lengthy preoccupation with the Bible) he re-worked first the Nordic, then the Greek heroic legends: Ragnarok (The Downfall of the Gods) and Apollons oprør (The Revolt of Apollo). Many others have done this before him. The particular quality in Villy Sørensen´s books on gods and heroes is that, thanks to meticulous source studies and the most careful consideration of different traditions of the same story, he has discovered gaps or contradictions that have enabled him to formulate new interpretations of his own. One element of this is the realisation that neither the Nordic nor the Greek gods were immortal, but that they only became immortal: The gods were (...) not immortal for in that case they would still have been alive. Sørensen writes in Ragnarok, and in the foreword to Apollons oprør he says: The gods were not immortal from the start. That they became immortal was the great event in their story, and no close examination has ever been made of this.

German influences
Villy Sørensen is an author who only begins to write when he has made a thorough study of his subject and has gathered together all his thoughts on it. This is a virtue not to be taken for granted; it is the result of painstaking work and represents part of the high ethical demands Sørensen places on himself as an author. Only in part can this be ascribed to his academic studies. In the late forties and early fifties, Villy Sørensen studied philology, philosophy and psychology, first at Copenhagen University, and at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau.

In 1957 Villy Sørensen addressed the Gruppe 47 . From 1959 to 1963, during which years together with Klaus Rifbjerg he published the literary periodical Vindrosen, he clearly moved the periodical in the direction of German literature and intellectual life, and he has left plentiful traces in his own work of his predilection for German-language authors: imposing essays on Thomas Mann and Hermann Broch, whose novels Die Schuldlosen and Die Schlafwandler he has translated into Danish. And then there were translations of the stories of Franz Kafka, on whom he published a monograph entitled Kafkas digtning (Kafka´s Art) in 1968, and monographs on Friedrich Nietzsche (1963) and Arthur Schopenhauer (1969).

Jesus and Christ
Villy Sørensen´s latest work, Jesus og Kristus (Jesus and Christ) also reveals an intimate knowledge of German intellectual history. Just as in his books on the Nordic and Greek myths, Sørensen uses the foreword to stress the importance of a critical reading of the extant source materials as the pre-condition for a personal assessment of the subject. In this foreword Sørensen writes quite literally: A (...) personal judgement presupposes a critical reading of the extant source materials. And in a manner similar to that employed in his book on Seneca he develops all his arguments from the texts and other sources, allowing the reader directly to experience the development of his ideas here, too, there is a tutelary element! and although his ultimate aim is not a scholarly work, he nevertheless takes issue with the vast array of related literature when it comes to certain questions of dating and evaluation.

Using Christ against the Christians is an old game, played by many, from Søren Kierkegaard to Hans Kirk, says Thomas Bredsdorff writing on this book in the newspaper Politiken. Villy Sørensen goes a step further and uses Jesus against Christ. That is to say that by means of a patient evaluation of the evidence of witnesses and written documents Villy Sørensen determines what on the one hand the historical Jesus, and on the other hand the mythical Christ was and is. He takes care to distinguish between what is typical of the age and what is an individual characteristic, though he does not do so principally in order to reveal contradictions in tradition (particularly in the Gospels). Rather, like a restorer, he seeks to remove deposited layers that obscure the truth and to lay bare the different pictures from which the story of Jesus is compiled.

Writing is interpretation
To dedicate a comprehensive critical study to Jesus, the founder of Christianity, as Georg Brandes and Vilhelm Grønbech had done before him, is a natural consequence of Villy Sørensen´s efforts to carry out a profound examination of the disintegrated nature of our world. For the sceptical humanist Villy Sørensen, the work of translating, of passing on, of interpreting is the writer´s true rôle his rôle in the sense of a definition as much as of a task. Writing is to interpret existence as experienced by the writer, he argues in the foreword to Kafkas digtning, and this can also be read as a comment on his own position. The process of interpretation, which is what writing is, can lead to happy results in finished works, but it can never be brought to a happy conclusion. (...) The entire corpus of one´s work only comes into its moral right when considered as an entirety, as an unfinished process. An author´s work is different from and more than the sum of the author´s works; it is first and foremost that striving that is expressed through them.


Hans Grössel works as a critic. He publishes and translates Danish literature. He has translated several of Villy Sørensen’s works.

The article was first published in Danish Literary Magazine 4 1993

Translated by W. Glyn Jones