The Globe Novel

Svend Åge Madsen's new novel Syv aldres galskab 1994 (Seven Age Madness), about Hans Skonning of Århus, is a grandiose experiment with genres and realities.

By : Ejgil Søholm

Svend Åge Madsen´s work is one vast, complex novel constantly in the process of being narrated. It is Svend Åge Madsen´s aim to eliminate himself as the author. To let us tell each other, to let the world come into being without a creator, this is the "Darwinist" counter-myth to the religious concept of God hovering above the waters, which Madsen believes it is time also to introduce into literature. One of the aims with (also) his last book was to "tidy up" in this fictional universe, to tie up loose ends, and so on. But at the same time, new loose ends emerge in the process, that is to say threads of action that are crying out to be woven or tied into new stories.
   This might sound like the freestyle coursing of a fantastic mind above the realities of our so-called real world. But in fact, behind the oblique angles and the paradoxical inventions Svend Åge Madsen´s novel is very realistic. The times and the place - the Århus of 350 years ago and today - are described with great authenticity, so much so that we are not in fact far from local history. And the main character, Hans Skonning, is a historical personage, a printer, author and sexton in Århus, where he worked from c. 1615 to his death as a result of a fall from the cathedral tower in 1651. Some of his writings and publications are still existant. However, there is a great deal we do not know about him, for instance the fact that in 1643 he received some momentous visions and revelations; at least, we did not know this before reading Madsen´s latest novel!
 
Hans Skonning
Skonning has just been dismissed from his post as sexton, and his misanthropy is at its height when (as he believes) he suddenly has a vision of Paradise: a clean and easy place in which to live, in contrast to the filthy place that was Århus in AD 1643. Skonning has looked 350 years into the future, and he passes on this blasphemical vision of things to come to his sole confidant, the grammar school pupil Bertel. The time in which they live is the novel´s specifically historical basis; the rest is played out within the framework of Skonning´s vision.
   In this vision the central figures are also an old man Styge and a young one Tobias. And here, too, the older man is telling a story to the younger; Styge´s genealogical accounts represent the madness of vanished ages, and Tobias´ task, set him by Styge, of trying to be good for a year creates the setting, the challenge of which (as in the picaresque novel) demontrates the madness(es) of our age.
 
The historical Skonning
Svend Åge Madsen has long been interested in the figure of Hans Skonning, who is thought to have been implicated as a (false) witness in the herostratically famous affair that absorbed Århus 350 years ago: A pastor named Kristen Bonde, married to the beautiful Eline   was found guilty of "consorting unnaturally" with his mother-in-law, Kirsten Doctors, whose husband was the bishop. Only after the war against Sweden did she have the case reviewed, and they were acquitted. The buried body of a child or an embryo played a dramatic part in the case, and Erik Grubbe, the Lord Lieutenant   according to tradition seeking revenge as the rejected lover of both Eline and the bishop´s wife   is named as the source of the rumour campaign about the bishop´s household. Hans Skonning, perhaps Grubbe´s co-conspirator, also had a motive, having been dismissed from his post as sexton by the bishop   apparently because of the alleged theft of metal from the church loft. All in all this is the stuff of historical thrillers. And thrillers have been written, and Madsen has read them all: Frederik Sneedorff Birch´s romantic historical story from 1832, incorporating wraiths, diableries and every trick of the trade; Knud Skytte´s fanciful cock-and-bull story The Evil Lord Lieutenant (1911), Nicoline Kierkegaard´s no less colourful The Bishop´s Wife from Aars (1918), in which the buried child´s body turns out to be that of a dead monkey (that had belonged to Skonning!); and finally Johan H. Baunvig´s The Evil Seed (1949), which could equally well have been called The Evil Lord Lieutenant if that title had not already been used by Knud Skytte.
   Old Styge has the whole of this assortment of historical light reading on his table when Tobias visits him for the first time. One thing all these novels have in common is the rigid conception of the characters, with the genre´s clear division into scoundrels and heroes. Hans Skonning belongs to the miscreants in all of them. This description of him is taken from Nicoline Kierkegaard´s novel: "A spirit of darkness, an owl in the night whose hoarse cries fill the sleeping city with fear   thus is the loathsome spirit ensconced in the tower, fixing his evil eye on life in the bishop´s palace, and with his ominous cries telling the entire city both what he has seen and what, with open eyes, he has dreamt."
   Whatever unseemly things he has seen or not seen in the garden of the bishop´s palace are nothing compared to the visions Madsen makes him see in Syv aldres galskab. However, even before this   as early as 1978   the author had made use of this old eccentric in his colourful drama Narrespillet om Magister Bonde og Eline Mortensdatter (The Comedy of Master Bonde and Eline Mortensdatter), which was produced by the Mariateater in Århus. Here, Skonning and his contemporaries are characters in a play within the play, set "in a few years   after the great crisis". According to the stage directions the author attaches great importance to "establishing a sense of timeless applicability". What he then attempted on the level stage, he now achieves in a vertical novel structure.
   Madsen has talked in an interview of his preoccupation with the historical Skonning: "He is a fascinating person, in the sense that he is many-facetted, rather difficult to get hold of and occasionally somewhat hypocritical, and at the same time a satyr who must have been difficult company, probably because he had a barbed tongue and a sharp pen. As a person he is pretty difficult to pin down. And that was one of the things that exasperated or provoked me. It is the complex personalities driven by an array of different forces who are fun to write about." In his attempt to delve deep into the ideas and personality of Skonning, his surroundings and the condition of life, Svend Åge Madsen has not only exhausted all the local historical and literary sources from Skonning´s day and later ages, but he has also attempted to imagine what "myths" were of significance to his thought, and what in addition to the Bible provided his spiritual ballast and frame of reference. And in Madsen´s fictional world we are gradually at home in streets and alleyways and passageways in the 17th-century Århus, going in and out of its gates on our way, for instance, to Grubbe´s Havreballegaard or Skonning´s paper mill. The frame surrounding the great visions is the confined world of the small town; and that is realistically recreated down to the least detail.
 
Goodness as an experiment
Tobias, the young man in the 1993 story, has no moral sense at all, breaking into old Styge´s house in the knowledge that Styge is tied to his wheelchair and thus an easy prey. Meanwhile, the surprising outcome is that Tobias   who otherwise believes that "goodness is simply overrated shit"!   allows himself to be "bought" for a charitable project lasting a year. While carrying out his work of charity, Tobias discovers goodness only survives with difficulty in the various sectors of society in the seventh age of the madness. Among parasites and swindlers in business life goodness is an alien concept, for instance in Poul Dupér´s Permafrost Company (the s and the p should be pronounced without a break!), which delivers un-ordered freezers to perfectly healthy widows made unstable by their sorrow. And the most surprising experiences of all to which Tobias is exposed are among the theologians at the University, the experts in goodness in the Department of Unrequited Ethics. Here, for instance, there is one who subscribes to the doctrine that "human beings are created to show each other the shortest way to the post office", while another theologian´s matchless invention in all its radical simplicity is a hoarding completely blocking the view of the world outside and thus eliminating all that nonsense about one´s neighbour. The task allocated to Tobias in the Facuty of Theology is concerned with a secret pact between gods and humans; it is impossible to condense this episode into a few words, but the task leads him on to the psychiatrist Dr. Monikke   an old acquaintance of Madsen readers   the man who lets his clients tell their stories until they fit. The psychiatrist has problems with one who claims to be mad, and another who actually goes mad because she is incapable of sinning and thus glorifying God through her human frailty. Madness all along the line, and in the cellar Dr. Monikke preserves enough mad brains to provide material for several novels. Tobias has sniffed at one of the flasks and thereby got to know the entire story of the secret pact. Styge dislikes the method   even if it is reminiscent of Ariosto´s in Orlando Furioso: "The whole idea of inhaling people´s fates through flasks. It seems like an easy way out. Something to which an inept author has to resort in order to rid himself of stories with which he would otherwise be lumbered"...
 
Styge´s genealogy
The third level in the novel, the third thread in the tapestry, consists of the stories about the Skonning family which Styge relates to Tobias. Here, Svend Åge Madsen tidies up his universe and establishes the link down to the "ages" which old Skonning missed. And yet it must nevertheless be emphasised that Styge also forms part of the mad sexton´s vision, as, consequently, do all the fantastic family stories. But what a family of significant extremes: Ditlev, who was to die when his work was completed and therefore found a method of composition that allowed him to grow old; Gustav who was a young man decided to commit suicide, but nevertheless managed to write his novella in seven different versions; Isak, who painted with both hands   doodles with the left so that the right could create masterpieces, on the basis of the view that the sum of beauty in existence is constant! Then there is Roland Enevold who produced his Critique of Eternity based on the logical argument that "the eternal is nowhere to be found", and his father, Erland, who delved more deeply into prime numbers than any other mathematician (except perhaps a certain Madsen from Århus!); and so on. The most fantastic story is that of René Dietrich Skonning. His life follows the usual pattern until his 23rd year, but then the chronology goes wrong, so that every morning he has to rush across to the mirror to see whether he is old or young! While in a trance in the company of the mystic Swedenborg in Århus he has written down a blasphemous "revelatory story about God´s sons, which he found by his side when he recovered consciousness sixteen years older than when he succumbed". Styge has gained possession of René´s diary entries and notes that if this lively forefather of his "looked on his existence as a living game of bingo, then February 1755 would be the month in which he first got a full house, every date filled in"! At one juncture in the diary, the 8th November 1754 follows the 7th November 1754, resulting in the following comment: "Today is the day after yesterday! It makes me feel dizzy. It all goes on as though it were one long day, with no break. Without change. Is this the way in which others experience the whole life? Could I manage that? Would not everything soon drown in predictability and end in a daily routine? (...) Twice running, the same day! It´s more than I can stand if tomorrow is already going to come   tomorrow!" René occasionally philosophises on his chaotic fate. One of the explanations might be that his father and mother, "being receiving the blessing of God the Father, in frenzied and sinful lust were united on a couch on which the parts of a dismantled clock still lay unrepaired on the straw. And for that reason I was conceived at a time of disturbance." It is more "probable" that his fate might be intended as God´s punishment for René´s revelation: the theory that the Virgin Mary had twins   founded on two texts that unfortunately were left out even of the older versions of the gospels ... In this way God was able   partly   to suppress the truth about Jesus´ twin brother K; but on some of the numerous pictures portraying the visit of the Wise Men to the stable in Bethlehem "you see a large bump in the straw, hiding K. Indeed on Giotto´s portrayal of the adoration of the Wise Men you can in fact just discern a leg sticking out"! This theory explains several miracles. But first and foremost it is miraculously amusing. Madsen´s aetiological tall stories and myth-destroying explanations are part of his human and humanist attempt to change the order of priorities in the literary picture of the world. But they are divine in their humour.
 
Text, numbers and title
As for original ideas, the Madsen mind is obviously inexhaustible. Syv aldres galskab (Seven Age Masness) is in itself a unique creation within the literary tradition. A series of italicised passages which have something of the reader´s guide about them provide an explanation of the novel´s anatomy   or its spatial geometry: We are concerned with a globe novel!   a medium invented for the purpose, which is nevertheless given up for reasons of space, although it had great advantages over a "flat" presentation. The "ordinary" globe novel, the kind that can be inflated and the type fitted with zip fastener and several epic layers as coating, has gone out of fashion, while the madness of the ages was being written. So what we have before us is text projected from the spherical form on to ordinary paper   a kind of map of the globe novel. It is in the resultant cracks that Madsen himself expresses his thoughts in modest italics, in between Skonning´s visions. Svend Åge Madsen knows his history   both Bible history and profane history   and in the history of literature he is so well read that one has to be very much on the qui vive to follow his "intertextuality" in all the subtleties that by means of competent timing he is able to make resemble fate. For of course it does not happen by chance   the sexton himself knows that Skonning´s human visions start seven times seven times seven years after Dante wrote his Divine Comedy.
   Seven ages are seven times fifty years   the period from 1643 to 1993. And fifty years are the zenith in the traditional representations of the steps of life. Seven is the most magic number in all popular tradition; you can be in the seventh heaven or commit the seven deadly sins; there are seven seas, and there were seven sages representing all the world´s knowledge in ancient Greece. So of course Madsen, that master of numbers, had to call his novel the madness of seven ages   that looks like the correct treatment of numbers.   And yet it is almost the opposite   with letters ... The following quotation from an eleven-year-old novel from the same Århus workshop tells of an earlier modernist author who has sold his indentity:
   "Occasionally during the night I feel that I am about to disappear from myself. I have to lie and whisper ... not a name ... I no longer have one, but some words, some ridiculous spelling mistakes that have been fixed to me in the course of time. Seven Age Madness I whisper, again and again, to keep a grip on myself". Seven Age Madness   Svend Åge Madsen. He smiled to himself when he recently confided to an interviewer that "for once the title was one of the first things I had to hand"! It only needed to be translated into Danish. It will be more difficult the other way round when yet another universal Århus story is to appear on the market   with a title in correct English. This bit of fun came through the letterbox   in three goes. But thank heaven it did not fall on stony ground in the entrance. In this way three words can turn into five hundred pages. And what pages. Pure euphoria. Satisfiction!
 
The article was published in Danish Literary Magazine 8, 1995<

Translated by W. Glyn Jones