With a Bang

By : Marie-Louise Kjølbye

Turning-point
Dorrit Willumsen received the Danish Academy Major Award for Literature in 1981, but the turning-point in her career, both in terms of popular and international recognition, was her novel Marie (Marie 1983) - a wonderful, thrilling novel written with linguistic mastery and sensual abundance.
  Like Bang (Bang), Marie is a novel in which the main currents of Willumsen´s work converge.  Marie, surname Tussaud, leaves France in 1792, after the Revolution.  She establishes the famous waxworks in London and leaves her husband and children behind in France.  She sees her children again, never her husband.  The objects of her artistic endeavours are, among others, the heads of baby-beautiful, strangely innocent nobles who she has known in life, but now renders in the soft substance of wax.  Death becomes the door to immortality - also, ironically, for the murderers of the Revolution who, like Marat in his bathtub and his murderer, Charlotte Corday, follow the same route, through wax to evolution, artistic evolution.
  "Do you think we always get the face we deserve?" Marie asks the painter David when they are both immortalizing this very motif, the murder of Marat.  This is perhaps the one specific question which runs through Willumsen´s writing, also in Clothed in Purple (Klædt i purpur 1990) - and exactly as formulated in another enticing Willumsen title If It Really Was a Film (Hvis det virkelig var en film), the question about the peculiar unreality of life, about the artist who, at one and the same time, is insider as well as outsider, with free hands and under endless obligations to the people she both loves and objectifies.
 
Seeking out the Person
  It is not surprising that the legendary anecdote about Herman Bang unwittingly and deeply wounding the living original of his landlady in  Summer Pleasures (Sommerglæder) should also be so poignantly told in Bang:  "She who had believed herself to be the close friend of the poet, was just his model, a clumsy little domestic with the washing-up in an awful mess all over the kitchen floor."  And it is too late to do anything about it now - except to pick a dead person next time.
  But it is principally the very essence of the matter that Bang and Willumsen have in common.  In their own particular ways, they write some of the most beautiful prose it is possible to savour in Danish.  And - precisely because they often seek out the person, the labyrinth of soul and body - they both succeed in placing themselves unequivocally in their own era and among the great names of Danish literature.

Marie-Louise Kjølbye has an M.A. in Nordic Literature, is debate editor on the daily newspaper Information.The article was published in Information, 28 January 1997

Translated by W. Glyn Jones