An Element of Crime

- on The Crime of Jonatan Svidt

By : Erik Svendsen

One of the recurrent assumptions relating to narrative art is rooted in unadulterated optimism. For put in simple terms, the moral is that it is beneficial to narrate a story. By narrating, we find our way through the impossible, we process difficult experiences, we see pain transformed into understanding. There are many appellations for this notion, catharsis being the classic one, claiming, as is well known, that the reader or observer obtains release by following the story. Correspondingly, in the theory of the novella we operate with the idea that the classic narrative has a moment of insight, some point in the story when a sudden realisation springs forth in the main character – a realisation which it is intended the reader should understand.
   Towards the end of Jens Martin Eriksen’s long title story, “The Crime of Jonatan Svidt”, the following is said of the main character, who has just given an account of the traumatic experiences in his life: “And could we attribute to our assumptions something as simple and profound as being in love, something to which we had dreamt our hypocritical way in our attempt to escape from that fucking early youth of ours? Even so, it was completely devastating to realise that Jonatan, who had told me the story, had not himself understood it. He sat before me that night, looking at me with those strangely lucid eyes of his and telling his story towards morning, as though he were enveloped in a mystery of some kind. As though there were already something or other he had overlooked, some detail he had simply not included - something that would help him to solve the entire enigma of why he had run into this labyrinth in his life. Then, if he finally found a solution, or if I were able to help him, everything would be resolved of its own accord.”. But understanding simply fails to materialise. Jonatan has not become the least bit wiser from his account; he has at most managed to re-tell the complicated story; he has repeated his mental fixations. Resolution does not arrive – nor does it in the reader. At least not with any particular clarity.
   This is typical of Jens-Martin Eriksen’s work. He simply excels in depicting people talking and talking about unpleasant experiences, incantating dementedly, imploringly, aggressively – and it is indeed questionable whether these questing individuals achieve any insight that can lead to a resolution. An ambiguous sequence of events is revealed, and facts are exhibited. But the awareness that reconciles and explains has enormous difficulty in breaking through.
   The same is true of the little group of middle-aged and absolutely well-educated people who, exceptionally, are depicted in the third story in The Crime of Jonatan Svidt, entitled “Who was Anette Støvring?” – exceptionally because Jens-Martin Eriksen has otherwise limited himself to people who are at the bottom of the social scale and who have great difficulty in putting into words the enormities with which they are burdened – complicated incestuous relationships, murder, mutilation and calamitous acts of war as in the earlier novel Vinter ved daggry, which has been translated as Winter at Dawn. When he is confronted with a female beauty of an unusual kind, a woman who is unusually receptive, things start moving in the respectable doctor and the high-ranking official. Everything else is set aside so they can come close to the beautiful woman. But the doctor’s wife refuses to be jettisoned, and this results in trouble. The men cannot recognise themselves. They are suddenly staring into another world, and they are transformed beyond recognition. Into something better in their own eyes, into something worse in those of their wives: “Who does he really think he is? A ridiculous randy bastard who has lost all respectability. She can’t conceive how she can put up with him”. Does the wife become any the wiser? She certainly sees through her husband’s delayed and despairing desire – but she does not understand herself. Although the story is played out in surroundings in which the urge to (self)-reflection typical of modern culture is plainly to be seen, it is not so plainly seen what it looks like inside these people who on the surface appear quite serene. Awareness hangs on a fine, thin thread.
   The first story in Jonatan Svidt’s crime turns the cheerful exposition of the mentally restricted middle classes on its head. The story is played out in a provincial town in Jutland, and this time the stranger making his appearance is a man – also charming and provocative. But if you are a man, it is easier to run off with a provocative woman than for a slip of a kid to catch the parson’s daughter, producing a sentimental reaction in the pub regulars. This dramatic story, which incidentally has been turned into a film, makes a thing out of false solidarity with the far too down-to-earth workers who watch in open-mouthed fascination as this man Seth – the name is no coincidence – creates a stir simply by opening up for life-affirming forces. But then he is also a stranger, and there is no room for strangers in the provinces.
   The flight from the provinces, the constricting milieu, is what ultimately drives Jonatan. With Kira he has a relationship with erotic overtones, but she is married to an affluent local man by the name of Evan Munk. The young man dreams of a free, untrammelled life with Kira – a banal juvenile dream of freedom in stark contrast to the fear he feels when confronted by Munk. The two men meet, and things do not work out as Jonatan had imagined. They are much worse. Though they have no special effect on Jonatan. At all events, the laconic narrator, who has shared his youth with this vulnerable creature, can recognise something crucial in Jonatan’s fate: “As we lay there that spring evening, in some oblique, unconscious manner, either during the pauses in our conversation or while simply not listening to all his nonsense, I had toyed with the banal and pointless idea that he reminded me of someone in myself whose potential existence I had almost forgotten”.
   Jens-Martin Eriksen’s novel is borne on almost inarticulate fates, lives on the fringe containing elements that are disastrously recognisable yet normal. Seth’s first sentence runs: “What we know about this is limited”. The story acknowledges the narrator to be right. But the reader can scarcely do so. And this despite the fact that the book is so unadorned, laconic, reticent in interpretation. The reader can think for himself. Jens-Martin Eriksen loves the monological; his books are dialogical, and that is a pretty beneficial change.

This article first appeared in Danish Literary Magazine 19

Translated by W. Glyn Jones