Steen Steensen Blicher
Margaret Drabble on Blicher
By : Margaret Drabble
Steen Steensen Blicher is a writer whose work, although proudly and profoundly Danish in character, was much influenced by English and Scottish literature. He never came to Britain – indeed most of his life was spent in his native Jutland – but his stories reveal strong links with our own literary history. Yet their interest is not antiquarian. They are as lively and accessible today as when they were first published.
Masterly Narrative Skill
Blicher speaks to us with apparent directness, arresting the reader´s attention with an informal tone of personal intimacy and immediacy. His matter and manner seem engagingly simple: one can well understand why in Denmark he remains a classic, popular with readers of all ages. But on closer inspection, or on a second reading, we become aware that his stories work on several levels, and are neither as artless nor as naive as they appear. The short story as a form was young in his hands, when he published his first prose piece in 1824, and he developed it with a masterly narrative skill. He speaks to us, in fact, in many voices, all carefully differentiated. He prefers the first person, but we cannot trust what this first person tells us, for Blicher introduces us to a variety of what are now recognised as "unreliable narrators", and many of the stories serve also as dramatic monologues, unfolding to us the personality, the prejudices, and the limitations of the story teller, as well as events of the tale he tells.
Psychological complexity
We meet here, in these freshly-translated versions, the parish clerk, perhaps Blicher´s most celebrated character study, whose life remorselessly unfolds from the high hopes of youth to tragic stoicism; the child Steen, learning of but not quite comprehending adult passion and sacrifice; the poetic fop boasting of Copenhagen fashions, teased and mocked by the village maiden; the wandering scholar, accidental witness to a tale of violence and derangement; the anguished judge, presiding helplessly over a mystifying miscarriage of justice; and the pastor, unable to give comfort to his closest friend. In each story of this collection (except the last, "The Three Festival Eves", which represents a slightly different folk mode) we are aware of a psychological complexity beyond the immediate grasp of those who act as recorders or participants: Blicher, with remarkable economy, suggests an unexplored hinterland of suffering and longing. His style is lucid, but his characters elude simple moral judgements.
A precursor of Madame Bovary
Perhaps the most enigmatic of his figures is "Mrs L", the anti-heroine of "Tardy Awakening", an intriguing precursor of Flaubert´s Madame Bovary, or of some of Kipling´s frustrated wives on the British Raj. The actions of this seductive small-town beauty are open to many interpretations: both her sexual desires and her calm acceptance of them are utterly convincing yet strangely opaque. She is a startling creation for a Jutland pastor, and we certainly cannot identify the pastor who describes her with the pastor Blicher who created both narrator and unfaithful wife. Scandalous stories were told about Blicher´s own wife, and one feels there may be some autobiographical feeling here, but there is no edge of resentment. He writes neither as sentimentalist nor as satirist.
From the moors of Jutland
Beyond Blicher´s psychological realism lies another hinterland. In the natural world which inspired both his prose and his poetry. His work is a powerful evocation of the Jutland landscape, with its bogs and brown moorland, its skylarks, its vipers, its stags, grouse and bittern, and its scattered population of peasants, farmers, poachers, gypsies, and huntsmen. A keen huntsman himself, Blicher uses many metaphors drawn from the sport, and his description of the duck-shoot in "Alas! How Changed" is a small comic masterpiece. Writing in the Golden Age of Danish romanticism, he embodies the Romantic faith shared by his British and German contemporaries: he believed that we are formed by the landscape we inhabit.
Blicher and Ossian
Yet this landscape too has its paradoxes. Is it eternal, or is it in itself a symbol of change and decay? Blicher, like Walter Scott, whom he greatly admired (though he did not like to be described as his imitator), was keenly aware that country ways of life, in the nineteenth century, were subject to irreversible change, and, like Scott, he was anxious to record them before they vanished, and to stimulate, if possible, a pride that would keep some of them alive. The theme of the passage of time sounds as a constant threnody in his prose, and it is no accident that his first published works were translations of the Poems of Ossian, by the Scottish poet James Macpherson. Ossian was said to be the last of his race, the last of the Gaelic bards of a vanished Scotland, and Blicher at times clearly saw himself as an isolated voice speaking from a remote world: Ossian´s Scotland becomes Blicher´s Jutland.
Creator of the first Danish short stories!
Did Blicher represent an end or a beginning? Like Scott himself, he represented both. Scott loved to dwell on heroic defeat, on the lay of the last minstrel, on the death of the Highlands, yet he created the historical novel as we know it – indeed, it is not too much to say that he helped to create the image of Scotland as we know it. Similarly Blicher, although possessed of a profound melancholy, a deep sense of the futility of human endeavour, and an interest in and sympathy with loss of class and status, was an energetic innovator. He opened the eyes of Denmark to the rugged beauties of one of its apparently less-favoured regions: he created the sensibility which would appreciate and conserve it. It is no surprise to discover that his work is invoked by the Danish Tourist Board.
A Danish Wordsworth
Romanticism, as a movement, looked both ways, to the past and to the future. Its early stirrings, in the late eighteenth century, were more marked by a nostalgic sense of loss than by a revolutionary fervour; Ossian was only one of the "end of the race" figures who attracted literary attention. Goldsmith wrote about the deserted village and the "last and greatest" of the Irish bards, the blind Carolan; William Cowper wrote about lone castaways and blasted oaks and fallen avenues, and was quoted with approval by the anti-romantic Jane Austen. Thomas Gray, in "The Bard", celebrated the last poet of Wales, defeated and forced to suicide by the invading English army under Edward I. A few decades later, Byron saw himself as "the last and youngest of a noble line" ("Elegy on Newstead Abbey"), Southey sang of the "Last of the Goths", and Mary Shelley in 1826 published a novel about the end of the world called The Last Man. One can see links of mood and subject in all these authors, most of whom blended a sense of patriotism with an awareness of inevitable defeat.
We can also see a connection with Walter Scott´s exact contemporary, William Wordsworth. Wordsworth, like Blicher, was a man whose writing sprang from deep roots in place: like Blicher, he chose to wander the countryside, alone and on foot, interesting himself in all conditions of people. He met and cross-questioned shepherds, farmers, gypsies, tinkers, and women driven mad by loss. A character like the Hosier´s Daughter would not be out of place in Wordsworth´s first volume, Lyrical Ballads, and Blicher would, one feels, have recognised the dignity of Wordsworth´s Simon Lee the Huntsman. Both writers sought the company of ordinary, often inarticulate people: indeed, Blicher extended his researches further than Wordsworth, for he is said in later years to have been quite at home drinking in the canal-side taverns of low-life Copenhagen, and unlike Wordsworth, although he became famous, he never became thoroughly respectable.
A conscious artist
There is something poignant about the figure of Steen Steensen Blicher, Denmark´s most celebrated author, shabby, in debt, and given to drink, wandering the countryside like a Wordsworthian beggar, like the ghost of himself. Yet this forlorn and seemingly helpless victim was and remained a highly conscious artist, keenly aware of the aesthetic and technical problems of presenting a world as yet unpainted and unsung. In his work, he was no primitive. Should he, we can see and hear him wonder, opt for a "Scottish realism" of overloaded detail, or for the discursive style of the village storyteller, or for the detached scholarly narrator, or for mock-epic, or for a Netherlandish "low-life" canvas? His varied choices are all deliberate. He may well have learned not only from Scott and Ossian, but also from the innocent first-person tale of Goldsmith´s long-suffering and heartbreakingly optimistic Vicar of Wakefield, whose adventures Blicher also translated. Yet Blicher´s style and his subjects are his own, and they are timeless.
Recording the sound of history
In one of his finest works, "The Diary of a Parish Clerk", through one voice recording one bewildered and disappointed life, Blicher can make us hear the sound of history. Morten Vinge, in his last diary entry, describes himself as "a leafless tree on the moors" and "the last of my family": the phrases have a romantic, Ossianic ring, but Morten and Blicher have outlived Ossian, and they share a stubborn brave resilience. Macpherson´s Ossian was a sentimental forgery: Blicher´s Morten is the real thing.
Margaret Drabble is an English author.
The Article was first published in The Diary of a Parish Clerk, London 1996
|
|
