A Masculine Winter's Tale

Rifbjerg’s latest book is about the two great Norwegian Arctic explorers Fridtjof Nansen and Hjalmar Johansen. It is a sympathetic portrait of a man's world and a thought-provoking challenge to general conceptions of the historical novel as a genre.

By : May Schack

Initially Nansen og Johansen – Et vintereventyr (Nansen and Johnsen – A Winter’s Tale) adheres closely to the facts with a description of Hjalmar’s childhood, how he grew up on a little farm and learnt to ski and read. He goes to the gymnasium, which is unusual for his background, and subsequently he is promoted during his military service.

He is driven to go on to greater things; he has a sense that the world is opening up and that he can be at the hub of the action. Fridtjof Nansen, the great Norwegian polar explorer, is the man to give shape to these vague dreams. And by putting himself at the service of an established authority the young man can harmonise the several conflicting currents of energy inside himself. We experience typical masculine conflict on the theme of "the world expects", between power and submission, and between the intense desire to gain maturity and his fears. In the novel Nansen og Johansen (Nansen and Johansen) Klaus Rifbjerg’s prose is both light and probing as he tries to describe the inner state of the young man struggling to come to terms with becoming a man.

The novel is based on the fact that Hjalmar Johansen (1867-1913) sailed on the Fram with Fridtjof Nansen (1861-1930) and the polar expedition of 1893-96. Johansen was taken on as a stoker, after dogged insistence. When the ship, stuck in in frozen ice floes, was moving too slowly northwards, Nansen decided in March of 1895 to head for the North Pole on skis with sledges and dogs. He chose Johansen as his only companion on this bold venture. The two of them failed to reach the North Pole, but they succeeded in penetrating further than anyone before and provided scientific observations of enormous importance. Back in Norway in September 1896, they were given heroes’ welcomes. However, Klaus Rifbjerg is not interested in advances in science or even the hardship they had to go through to survive in extreme polar conditions. What he is interested in is what happened between the two men during the almost six-month long journey.

It is an exclusively masculine universe in this novel: men having to cope with skis, guns, the ship and all the technical devices on it, and men’s attitudes to power, a hierarchy and their position in it. A sexual relationship develops between Nansen and Johansen, indeed more than that, a passionate love affair. Over the many winter months Johansen -- we see everything from his view point -- experiences all the phases of love with his gaze constantly directed towards his seducer, the much-admired Nansen. He is, by turns, happy and unbearably conscious of the dynamics and difference of rank between them.

The essence and achievement of the novel lie in the delineation of the young man's thoughts and feelings, and the way he copes in masculine worlds - in the military, on the ship and finally alone with Nansen. The enormous natural forces that are predominantly involved are inner forces. As Nansen says about himself: "Maybe in reality he went so far out on a limb in order to come closer to home, and it became quite clear to him that there is more than one kind of reality and that the reality we carry within us, as a dream and a deeper consciousness, is perhaps the strongest."

Possibly, but this admission doesn't carry much weight back home in Norway where Nansen is a person of authority, a cherished husband and a family man. Nansen can distinguish between these two realities. Johansen cannot make this shift between a life outside and a life inside the real world with its narrow rules. He is enticed way beyond his own limits and he goes to pieces as a result. The intimacy and the adventure are over when they return to civilisation. In Rifbjerg’s interpretation, Johansen's fate is determined by Eros and by Nansen. However, that is the novel; the world of reality is something quite different. The novel is a sensitive portrait of relationships between men, permeated with Rifbjerg’s linguistic nerve in an area which is, to some extent, taboo. The novel also raises pressing questions about how far one can get into the skin of real historical people.

Fridtjof Nansen is undoubtedly one of Norway's greatest heroes. He was a scientist, a courageous leader of expeditions and a great humanist who was later to receive the Nobel Peace prize for his diplomatic achievements and his full involvement in international relief work. Hjalmar Johansen is also one of Norway's greatest sons and took part in many extensive polar expeditions at the beginning of the 20th century, culminating in Amundsen's expedition to the South Pole from 1910-1912.

At the end of the novel Johansen shoots himself; he cannot accept the loss of Nansen, he worries about his domineering behaviour as a captain and bought love doesn't relieve his depression. At the time the suicide takes place in the novel, however, the real Johansen has years ahead of him on large expeditions! If one didn't know anything about Johansen's later life, one could put away the book without a thought. The fiction is consistent in itself; it just isn't consistent with reality. And thus the novel poses the reader all sorts of questions. What right has the writer to use his imagination or to what extent is the writer obliged to adhere to historical facts? We know all too well that it is not historically correct information that makes for a good story. And one has a sneaking suspicion that Rifbjerg is wryly intimating that historical fiction, with or without documented evidence, is pure humbug.

The novel makes the reader examine the boundaries between fiction and reality in some depth. The whole genre of the historical novel is up for grabs, and that is one of the many stimulating aspects of this book.

May Schack is an editor of the Danish Encyclopedia and a literary reviewer on daily newspaper Politiken

This article first appeared in Danish Literary Magazine 22, 2002

Translated by Don Bartlett