The Search for the Riddle of Nature

Jens Peter Jacobsen's

By : Erik Østerud

Scarcely any prose text in Danish literature has a more famous opening line: "Summer it was; in the middle of the day; in a corner of the hedge". The time is precisely defined, as is the spot, but it is not placed either historically or geographically. With respect to time, the information contained is related to nature´s own rhythm and with respect to space to the contrasting concepts of nature and culture.
   The introductory description of nature falls into two sharply distinct parts. The contrast is brought about by the author in fact presenting the same landscape twice, but from opposite standpoints.
   The first viewpoint is situated "outside the hedge", that is to say outside nature itself, or more precisely in culture. The observer is not named. It can be anyone who comes "along the path in the field outside the hedge there". However, the observations cannot be made without the possession of a solid cultural ballast. It is necessary to know what "old Gothic arabesques" look like and to have a sense for aesthetic proportions in order to adopt an attitude to the appearance of the tree trunks if they are to give the impression of "harmony". In general, the description here betokens a notably aesthetical way of looking at things. It is as if the observer has placed an imaginary frame around what he is viewing, so that nature becomes a landscape, an aesthetical object. The motif emerging from being framed in such a way in the imagination is compared with the rules for reproducing nature which the observer knows from painting and sculpture. This way of viewing things brings out "faults" and "lacks" in the chosen motif. Nature is not so much presented mimetically as evaluated aesthetically and reflected in the light of cultural history. It is seen through the spectacles stemming from the culture of the Danish Golden Age. It is not only on this description that the aesthetical judgement of cultured circles makes its mark. It is felt, too, in syntax and the choice of words. The syntax is complicated (hypotaxis) and metaphor is frequent and complex. The entire description is imbued with Romanticism´s animistic interpretation of nature.
   The description is arranged spatially so that we move from the near to the distant: from the plants in the immediate vicinity of the observer in the civilised garden to the phenomena of uncultivated nature on the periphery of the place occupied by the main character. The further in the uncultivated area the observer attempts to reach with his eyes, the more nature seems to close itself to him and become unapproachable and opaque. The place where the scrub is thick and luxuriant  and "the sycamore became forest" and the birds fly in and out "like elfin creatures from a grassy mound", is simply impenetrable to his gaze.
     But it is at this very place Jacobsen introduces his other observation point. The other observer does not approach nature from some "cultural" point outside it, but he is lying with his back to a tree trunk in such a way that he himself becomes part of it. He is physically embedded in it. This observer has his eyes turned in the opposite direction. From the horizontal position here in the "elfin mound" - in the depths of nature itself - his eyes first catch sign of parts of his own body, then grass and nettles in the immediate vicinity, then the hawthorn hedge with the great white convolvulus a little further away, then the rye field outside the hedge, and then the Counsellor´s flagpole on the hill, and finally the sky.
   In this presentation of nature there are no comparisons or evaluations, but apparently merely a plain registration of phenomena such as they immediately appear to the eye. The syntax is predominantly paratactic. Just as the sentences are co-ordinate, so the observations seem to be permitted to stand beside each other without elucidation. The observer appears not to wish to interpret nature or to understand it. He is merely concerned with sensing it.  There are no references here to culture, to knowledge achieved. Everything seems to rest on the present moment of observation, on the sensing gathered in the body which at this very moment has taken up a position in nature´s own depths. His eyes cut as sharp as a knife into a field so that the elements falling within it are separated from the organic whole in which they belong. On the other hand, these fragments appear in a compositional whole, in a new context, to which I shall return later. It is a compositional principle which is also a characteristic of Impressionism in painting.
   The contrapunctal arrangement of the description of nature in the opening scene is essential for the overall composition of the novella. The dual presentation of the natural phenomena expresses a dialogic compositional principle that can be observed throughout the novella. Rather than being organised on the basis of a temporal narrative, it is structured contrapunctally, with Jacobsen projecting his own view of nature and life in a polemical game with a romantic nature discourse which he deconstructs by means of parody and satire. This centres the theme around a single problem: the question of what nature really is. There may well be an answer to the riddle, but the old answers are here presented as untrue. Jacobsen wants to provide new ones. The old ones are those of the Bible and the writings of the Golden Age. Jacobsen wants to reject them on the basis of Darwin and the new science.
   The riddle examined by the text is not only out there, but also in here - in Man himself, in Mogens, Kamilla and Thora. So the hunt for the riddle of Nature also becomes an attempt to determine who or what Man is behind his mask of civilisation, and behind the interpretations in which history has hidden it throughout the ages.

Erik Østerud: "Jakten på naturens gåte. J.P. Jacobsens Mogens" i brytningsfeltet mellom religion og naturvitenskap" in: Ny Poetik 6, Odense 1996

Translated by W. Glyn Jones