Brother Henrik

By : Tine Byrckel

Few writers today wrestle with Europe´s destiny with such fervor as novelist Henrik Stangerup. Naturally this can be ascertained by immersing oneself in his books, especially in the trilogy Vejen til Lagoa Santa (The Road to Lagoa Santa), Det er svært at dø i Dieppe (It´s Hard to Die in Dieppe) and Broder Jacob (Brother Jacob). But it can also be ascertained by considering how differently the author is received in the different countries.
    For Stangerup isn´t only known but is also loved elsewhere in the world. Where in Denmark he is known as a bruiser and cantankerous, the choleric opponent of a Protestant welfare society´s sympathetic and suffocating conscience, in France he is simply understood, let in and bidden welcome. To be sure, he is regarded as something typically Danish, but the French have taken him to their hearts.
    Stangerup himself would be the first to know that so close to the heart a viper is often nourished. And in this case the dragon growing in the bosom can in sport be called ´a scoundrelly times´, a concept borrowed for the occasion from Søren Kierkegaard. Perhaps Stangerup is not a wholehearted Kierkegaardian, but he is nonetheless guilty of pursuing the three Kierkegaardian stages in his writing. We find the seducer Møller i Dieppe, the ethicist Lund in Lagoa Santa, and we follow the religious Jacob on his journey of pain through medieval Europa, on his way to a humanistic Brazil.
    Kierkegaard was not only the man to define these three fundamental moral stages, he also foresaw that posterity would regard him with an almost too accepting admiration. And so he dubbed it: "this scoundrelly posterity". Today time passes far more quickly, and knowledge of a body of work doesn´t ride through Europe on horseback and good will. So Stangerup can find his ´scoundrelly posterity´ in France, where it has become a ´scoundrelly times´ which almost seems to understand his oeuvre far too well.
    It is rare to see an authorship be received with such decided affection as what is happening for Stangerup. In Libération´s review of Brother Jacob the fraternalization is total and literate. The headline on the book supplement´s front page is Frère Henrik, and you can practically hum the canon with the gleam of childish exultation there probably is in Stangerup´s eye at the book being called Frère Jacob - that close to the song´s Frère Jacques.
    Jacob is a figure the French can understand. He is a ´good´ Dane because he is a Catholic Christian and not a Protestant Christian. It was in those days, in sixteenth-century Denmark, that the churches were painted white, like the flood of white that plays havoc with Jacob´s dreams. Only the word is permitted to remain, an ungovernable verbal license which chases the Franciscan friar Jacob and his mendicant brothers south. Jacob has chosen religion - as opposed to his brother Christian II, who fratrijectingly has seized the kingdom and the power in the North.
    Jacob flees by way of France and Rabelais, Spain and the Inquisition, to Brazil, where in converting the indians he opposes the state church´s inhuman abuses. Inhuman because the Catholic church has simply decided that the natives are not humans. The author LeClezio, writing for Le nouvel Observateur, says that Jacob´s discussion with the ecclesiastic Juan de Gaona about the ordaining of Indians as priests "displays the horror of the situation with a power comparable to Shakespeare´s dramas". Jacob´s conversion of the natives – and not least their conversion of him – becomes a kind of mystical blend of republican-humanistic evangelizing and Levi-Strauss´s anthropological insight. Naturally they love this at Libération, but afterwards they ask themselves, "does there really exist a Nordic melancholy which can only be cured with Mexican tequila and the singing of Provençal cicadas?".
    France has decidedly done Stangerup good, and the singing of cicadas has penetrated deeply into his language. When he writes in Danish one can feel that he wants it to sing like the French. Reviewer Pierre Lepape at le Monde has an ear for this singing. He writes enthusiastically that required for the story of Brother Jacob was "Stangerup´s concerned and preeminent prose, his distinctive way of fusing narrative and poetics, epos and history, the dialogue´s vitality and the legend´s enchantment, the subtleties of theology and the power of sensibility of nature, the future and the past."
    Brother Henrik´s latest little book about the mother, Datter af, (Mother) the French have also taken to their hearts. With the panegyrical reviews of this book Stangerup is almost no longer introduced. The French are on the verge of annexing him. He has achieved something so Olympian for a Danish author as to become a part of the French literary landscape. In the issuing of la biblioteque ideale from Albin Michel, Stangerup is indeed also among the top twenty-five authors in all of Nordic literature. J.P. Jacobsen, for example, is much further down the list.
    The longing for things French seems to be the family´s lot. Stangerup´s grandfather – the Swedish author Hjalmar Söderberg – in his day moved to Denmark in order to escape the Swedish Germanism and approach the francophile. Stangerup himself completes the same movement by living in France for years on end. Thereby he incarnates with his books the Europe his heart beats so warmly for. As for the French, Stangerup´s figures are understood and admired, precisely because the elements in their rebellion are so French, so lightfootedly aesthetic whether it is a question of the samba or of Møller. But the rebellion is turned, on the other hand, against the Nordic, against the white churches in the darkness. So perhaps a remnant of the Lutheran soul is required to really understand the passion and struggle that characterizes Stangerup´s figures.
    For it is the same with Stangerup as with his figure, that no sooner do you get the better of Protestantism and its unaesthetic asceticism than Catholicism stabs you in the back. Brother Jacob abandons the compulsorily Lutheranized monasteries and the whitewashed churches. But in Spain he encounters the Inquisition´s pitilessness, and in Brazil its dimsightedness.
    When Stangerup learns that the Pope wants to canonize none other than "the Catholic Isabella", who invented European anti-Semitism, he immediately feels like a Protestant again. The viper and the dragon grow, and the lesson is that one must always be on guard. Stangerup is neither Protesant nor Catholic, neither aesthete, ethicist nor religious. He is merely hunting for the European soul, and what he shows his reader is that it must be found and be sung again and again.

Translated by Kenneth Tindall