Time is a landslide; a black, all-consuming hole

On Vibeke Grønfeldt's novel The Right Thing

By : Henk van der Liet

Vibeke Grønfeldt (b. 1947) first won wide popular acclaim, in 1998, with the novel I dag (Today) and was recently awarded the Danish Critics’ Award for her latest novel, Det rigtige (The Right Thing) (1999). Grønfeldt’s writing tends, for the most part, to take its outset in provincial life, presenting rural society in a modern-day light – without, that is, ever slipping into the mould of parochial literature. Again, in The Right Thing, she focuses on lives that are affected only indirectly by the realities of modern, high-tech society.
   The Right Thing centres primarily on the tragic fate of eccentric Ena Jakobsen: a middle-aged woman, a rather freakish character, living in a village that is slowly dying. Coolly and dispassionately - in passing, almost - Grønfeldt touches on the inevitable demise of village life: the young people forsake the country districts for the towns and more and more houses stand empty, while ”Somewhere to the south of the shuttered and barred grocer’s shop, nails are hammered in. Slowly and steadily.” (p. 94). The sound of the hammer blows stands as a symbolic forewarning of the village’s insidious decay.
   Ena Jakobsen has also been touched, in another, more personal fashion, by the village’s demise, having grown up in the shadow of her own family’s financial ruin. Her grandfather fulfilled his dream of social advancement by building up a large, modern market-gardening concern, complete with a shop and all that that entails. But the family business was not equipped to deal with today’s free market; the dream was shattered and the market garden went under. The Right Thing depicts Ena, living with her mother on the old business premises and being confronted, day in, day out, with the concrete remains of the family’s wrecked dream and the shame attached to its downfall. With a tenacity verging on the masochistic, Ena hangs on to the business, refusing to admit that the market garden is a dead loss. Nothing daunted, she toils on, struggling to keep alive the dream and the illusion on which she appears to have pinned all her hopes.
   After the market garden is declared bankrupt, she works for a time doing deliveries for the local laundrette, a job which she regards as a comedown. The money she earns goes toward keeping the market garden going. She checks the creeping disintegration of equipment and buildings, and fosters the dream of financial independence and an honest-to-goodness life, lived in harmony with the elemental forces of nature.
   In other words, Ena Jakobsen is a dreamer, a leftover from a time – and a culture – that is gradually disappearing. She sees herself as the rural society’s last bastion against a new age spearheaded by the market economy. Ena – as her Christian name also implies – is a ”loner”, a one-woman front line, battling against the advancing decay. Thanks to her fanatical zeal for renovation, the market garden does better than ever before, coming to look as good as new. Thus, Ena Jakobsen singlehandedly stops the march of time and erases the traces of age and the shame of bankruptcy. To complete the illusion, she also manages to get round the tax laws that led to the collapse of the market garden, by giving away her crops to the other residents of the village.
   But Ena is neither a philanthropist nor an idealist, far from it. In fact, she keeps the market garden going in order to have her revenge on those people who had once been so jealous of the enterprising market-gardeners. Revenge and anger are her prime incentives, making her a strange, divided individual. Now and again she flies completely off the handle, becoming downright aggressive. Ena is something of an oddball, a kind of soothsayer and a sorceress who has a tendency to go berserk when people run her down. When that happens, carried away by pent-up rage and her lust for revenge, she subjects others to torrents of abuse, raining down curses on their heads. In an effort to check these furious outbursts she finds it necessary to resort to alcohol and sleeping pills. With the result that Ena Jakobsen seems a tragic, rather than an heroic figure: Dr. Jekyll. Mr. Hyde and Don Quixote all rolled into one.
   Ena Jakobsen is, of course, a caricature of herself and of the society she represents. Ena’s ambivalent nature epitomizes the inner dissolution of provincial life, inasmuch as she is as incapable as the way of life she champions of coping with the unbridled development of the Progress does not merely entail the building of factories, the advent of leisure complexes, discothéques and rubbish tips, and the conversion of farmhouses into holiday homes; it also spells the death of the corner shop, depopulation and a diminished cultural awareness in rural areas. Stubbornly, Ena fights back; she hits a mental block or – as Grønfeldt puts it – she tries to ”cheat time”, hanging on desperately to the market garden.
   Ena Jakobsen is a custodian of sorts – reminiscent of Verner, the chronicler in Today – in a museum filled with plants, vegetables and fruit, and their colours, tastes and scents, which she struggles to preserve. Her adversaries are the new bio-industrial foodstuffs on the supermarket shelves which, unlike her crops, lack freshness, flavour and succulence. Grønfeldt conjures up these simple products and qualities in an exceptionally sensuous and lyrical fashion.
   Ena Jakobsen wishes to remember, preserve, freeze time; to wipe out the twentieth century, the age which saw the devaluation of the agrarian society and the demise of one of the central landmarks in Danish culture: the peasant society. This period constitutes the novel’s fundamental landslide.
   In The Right Thing, the changes undergone by the rural society are neither sentimentalized nor idealized; the provinces is not some twee preservation area where the laws of the surrounding society do not apply. On the contrary. The modern world has permeated every corner of it, every aspect of life, and Grønfeldt’s characters find themselves caught between two ways of life – between two ages, each with its own tempo.(In this sense, The Right Thing also offers some insight into the effect on minority cultures of the so-called multi-cultural society.)Above all, it is the modern-day cult of hedonism and economic status that Ena Jakobsen curses and threatens with hellfire and damnation: ”Someday you’ll realize that the global market is a mass grave. (...) Avarice and pleasure-seeking are a mass grave.” (p. 160)
   In the end, when Ena is forced to leave the market garden and move in to a sterile, modern flat with every imaginable modern convenience, the new age does, at long last, get the better of her. In the novel’s last act, Ena – now a hopeless alcoholic – is plagued by delusions and visions of the happiness and love that were never granted her. Towards the end of the novel, the sentences grow shorter, acquire a breathless, staccato character. Desperation grows, to the point where it seems that all she has left is the solace of death.
   In The Right Thing, Vibeke Grønfeldt has once more turned her attention to a provincial community; a small, overlooked corner on the fringes of the global village. She elects to recount one of this microcosm’s many little stories; one which, in the most subtle manner, reaches far beyond the narrow confines of village life, intimating at universal associations. Or, as the novel’s narrator puts it: ”(...) little tales. One very much like the next. And several of them reminiscent of the great tales of all time.” (p. 69)
   Although country life forms the focus for Vibeke Grønfeldt’s writing, she is not what one could call a parochial writer. The Right Thing should more rightly be considered as part of a long and honourable Danish tradition for literature dealing with the lot of country folk, often based on the theme of nature’s round. Grønfeldt makes no bones about this affinity with nature, and her descriptions of the countryside, in particular, are masterly. The Right Thing is a profound, sensitive and, at times, a gruelling novel, in which its author firmly puts paid to a number of myths about country life. Vibeke Grønfeldt is not only a wizard when it comes to drawing the reader into the convoluted inner being of the central character, she also displays rare literary prowess in her depictions of the outward reality. In Grønfeldt’s distinct and subtle prose, weather, flowers and fruits are imbued with a power and grace so mysterious that they are rendered immediate, momentous – and, indeed, absolutely ”right”.

This article first appeared in Danish Literary Magazine 17, 2000.