Out of the Darkness

By : Anne Borup

Sneglehuset (The Snail Shell) is the realistic story of the author’s maternal family from around 1850 up to the 1950s. With a astute attention to the small dramas of everyday life, the author describes the peasant women, wives, mothers and daughters in a sensuous episodical tale that has its roots in popular realism and the great family sagas, including Marie Bregendahl’s Billeder af Sødalsfolkenes Liv 1914-23 (The life of the people of Sødal 1914–23).
   In her earlier works, Ejrnæs examined the breakdown of the traditional family and the conventional way of life, experiments with other life forms and the relationship between mothers and daughters seen in the light of the experiences and reflections drawn from the sexual politics of the 1970s. She subsequently examined the problems of identity by drawing on her personal experiences under the guise of biographical-historical fiction.
   The Snail Shell reemploys earlier themes and styles found in the author’s previous work. The novel depicts the relationship between a modern woman and her grandmother’s generation, but it is also a self-examination in that the narrator takes stock of her own life. It is a modern-day crisis novel, in which the tension is created by the dual relationship with the written word and the oral tale, by the narrator’s speculation about the written project as therapy and cognitive process. […]

A small universe in a large world
Anne Marie Ejrnæs approaches her subject by "letting reality come to the fore". Using specific, often surprising details, she creates a tangible reality as in this description of the evening temperature: "It was not cold for the time of year. The women kept saying this, and admittedly Marie was not cold, but there was plenty of room in her ears and the space within her breast was tall and arched and pure as a church," (page 16). By examining her characters through a physiological magnifying glass, she manages to capture their personality from the inside, grasping what is felt by the body through her use of the language. The sensuous perception stands as security for the fictitious representation of the given universe and weighs up modernity’s absence of a single truth.
   The description of the characters may be rambling and chaotic in order to describe an inner sense of crisis; alternatively, it may be ordered perspectively as a shift from the immediate reality of a person’s life and surroundings to the outermost limits of the events and forces that affect our primary existence. Socio-economic and national events, the relationship between the person and the family, between owner-farmers and smallholders, between Danes and Germans in the border region all come to affect the life choices made by the individual. The cooperative movement and the folk high schools, the modern breakthrough, the fall of the Parisian commune and the missions in Africa put the immediate, small world into perspective, although these major events are not actually described. The consequences they have for the daily lives of the characters create a link between the larger universe and their smaller world. Marie (i.e. the narrator’s maternal grandmother as a child), for example, is introduced using a simple image that shifts the perspective, and the centre of the world, firmly to the 2–3 year-old Marie:

Marie sat on the cobbled stones in the yard in the middle of the world. Her feet were bare in her clogs, and she wriggled them from side to side and knocked the toes together. She spread her legs, and a piece of grass and round stones appeared between them when she pulled up her dress. All that grass. (page 14, my emphasis).

Slowly, the space around Marie expands along with her horizon: Her mother is busy doing the milking. Marie would like to help her by pulling up weeds to make her happy, but something blocks out the sun. She looks up, and "daddy was the face of the sun". With dampness on his cheeks and tears in his voice he initiates a game. Suddenly, she is gripped by firm hands that take her away from her father and carry her into the dark living room, "but the sun still fluttered for a while in the darkness". This image allows the sun to symbolise something human, the light side or the joy of life, that is shared by the father and Marie. She quickly learns that light and darkness alternate, that other forces affect our existence, but the impressionistic description of events and places explains no more than it reveals. Only later in the book do we learn the facts behind the mother’s silent rejection of wife and children, and the father’s expression of feelings for the child: that Katrine’s first husband died of consumption, and that she was forced to marry the man’s brother because a married man provides free labour, and because the running of the farm comes before love. Also revealed is the tragic substory about Marie’s half sister Thea, who was sent away when the mother married for the second time because she reminded her too much about the dead man. What this loss means for Marie’s father, Katrine’s second husband, remains an unexpressed source of agony throughout the course of the novel.
   The story creates a web of links and events around a large number of characters who all have their own story, but the action is never explored in full. Deep into the story, the reader has to piece together the truth from different events, bits of conversation, partial observations, allusions, gestures and expressions.


From Anne Marie Mai (ed.) Prosa fra 80'erne til 90'erne, Borgens Forlag, 1994

Translated by Malene S. M. Tingley