Pelle the Conqueror

- a classic malgre soi?

By : Frits Andersen

The Danish writer Martin Andersen Nexø is best known for his novels Ditte Menneskebarn (Ditte, Child of Man) and, more especially, Pelle Erobreren (Pelle the Conqueror) - a book which won international recognition and, outside of Scandinavia, comes second only to the works of Hans Christian Andersen as the most widely read work by a Danish author.

A conquering hero -
The publication, between 1906 and 1910, of Pelle the Conqueror, was to become a fantastic tale of conquest upon conquest: the central character´s conquest of history, the novel´s conquest of the reader and Nexø´s conquest of a place in international literature.
   Right from the outset, the book´s undisputed hero, Pelle is on the conquering trail. From the moment when he, an eight-year-old working-class boy, and (Lassefar) come to the island of Bornholm, seeking their fortune, until he finds a harmonious balance in the final volume, in the idyllic golden dawn, he is making his way towards new battles and new adventures, making his way towards the promised land - which also stands as a symbol of the labour movement´s conquest of power.
   Nexø´s novel was every bit as successful in conquering its readers. Initially, Gyldendal´s publishing house had been somewhat sceptical of his manuscript. "A book about a working-class hero, and in four volumes at that - one cannot possibly present the public with such a thing!", as publishing director Peter Nansen wrote to Nexø in 1905. But, as it happened, things turned out rather differently. Pelle the Conqueror has been translated into 21 languages and, in the former Soviet countries and Eastern Europe in particular, has been accorded a place of honour as the first and the finest working-class novel ever written. Thus, Nexø´s novel has surpassed other Danish works of fiction in becoming the greatest conqueror of the world to date - as was confirmed most recently with Bille August´s Oscar-winning film Pelle the Conqueror, in which cinema-goers throughout the world had the opportunity of following the hair-raising, but triumphant progress of little Pelle.

- at odds with itself
Today Pelle the Conqueror is acknowledged to be a novel of tremendous historical significance and, as such, most definitely deserves to be categorized as great literature. But is it a classic? In the future, is it likely to be listed among the cream of immortal Danish literature? There are many who would say "no" to such a question. Pelle the working-class hero is a long-extinct dinosaur, and one which has already been more than adequately described and documented. Nexø´s language and his aesthetic seem insipid and naïve when set alongside those of Johannes V. Jensen or Sophus Claussen, and his political vision a forgivable, but historically serious mistake. The passage of time has, it will be said, eroded the value of these works. But the question is whether such an assessment is not, in itself, guilty of simplistic, one-sidedness and only a half-hearted reading of the text.
   Granted, Nexø did all he could to present his hero, Pelle, and the account of his own life, as a "solid" and straightforward epic tale that allowed no room for ambiguity. As a result, much of the contemporary and subsequent criticism of the work has, in turn, adopted a cut-and-dried approach to the simplified "conquest" framework, and one which focussed merely on the inconsistency between Nexø´s political and his artistic achievements. But the simple structure of this heroic text, with its clear-cut winners and losers, is just one approach to an understanding of both Pelle, the novel and Nexø:
   Pelle is a working-class hero who wins a vital battle in the class struggle. As a reward for this, however, he finds himself in prison, accused of forgery. The socialist Utopia which Pelle formulates in the last section of the novel is extremely ambiguous - a far cry from the strategies of social-democracy, Communism or anarchy.
   The poetic expression of the novel is not confined to social realism; it also contains elements from the medieval romances, from fairy tales and - closer to our own time - the Bildungsroman. One could be forgiven for thinking that, through Nexø´s triumphant reworking of these models from other genres, his novel would win through to self-recognition - and win home, by means of a natural and logical progression from beginning to end. But here, too, this work seems to be more at odds with itself than its epic structure would have it. It may well be that the inner dynamic of the text is determined by the logic not only of victory, but also of defeat, and by the rhetorical irony inherent in this paradox.

The triumph of defeat
In Pelle the Conqueror the socialist struggle is portrayed against a background created from one of the original departures from Darwinism, which struck out in the direction of Grundtvigianism and Nietzscheism. A background which involves only a handful of Marxist elements. From the first formative stages of his career, Pelle´s battle with life becomes a complex crusade against the ambiguity and ironic nature of language; a battle which, in the immutable harmony of the novel´s ending, he only appears to have won.
   The Bildungsroman image of the individual´s eventful progress towards the serene concept of his "home" can, it is true, be discerned in Pelle the Conqueror, but it is also contradicted by the novel´s rhetorical pattern, in which cyclic repetition prevails over progressive development. It is as if, at every crucial point in the story, the hero harks back to his boyhood days as a cowherd, without his ever being credited with any crucial new insight. Rather than painting a picture of the grown man´s new and hard-won identity, the ending seems to be no more than a rhetorical repetition of that country childhood spent tending the cattle.
   The emotional and linguistic crises encountered along the path to maturity and enlightenment, which would normally span a lifetime, are all crammed into the space of a few years in the hero´s youth. And in some strange way, Pelle has a stronger, more coherent and complex identity at the beginning of the book than he does in its later stages. Unlike the boy with a man´s head on his shoulders whom we met at the start, the Pelle we are faced with at the end seems more like a man with a boy´s head on his shoulders. Likewise, the final recital of the young cowherd´s life sounds far more pastoral and arcadian than the first descriptions, which are more "adult", naturalistic and Nietzschean. Thus, in the yearning that he feels at the beginning, out in the fields with the cattle at twilight, Pelle is striving to get to where he already is, while the homely atmosphere at the end derives from a rhetorical set-up that renders Pelle more homeless than ever.
   As a rule, the temporal structure of the Bildungsroman leads to insight in the shape of the hero´s homecoming, that same hero´s realization that such a homecoming is impossible, or the novel´s reflection on the ironic schism between the process of the formative process and the capricious nature of language and life. In Pelle the Conqueror this temporal flow runs in the opposite direction, thus turning the novel into a provocative rewriting of the education/formation theme; a rewriting which is the source of the novel´s irony and of the energy that drives Pelle - not towards, but away from his "home".

The fear of influence
Time and again Martin Andersen Nexø was to assert his belief that the significance of literary models on a writer´s work was greatly exaggerated, almost to the point of actual intellectual prejudice. For his own part, he claimed to draw only from "The source of all good literature - life itself", and rejected his critics assertions as to his having been influenced by Zola, Gorky, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky and the like. He maintained that he was not well-read and that he would rather lay out gardens than write or read. Here, as elsewhere, this "fear of influence" ought, however, to be seen as part of his struggle for originality.
   It is a fact that Nexø works his way through and draws on the literary legacy of such genres as Symbolism, Impressionism and Naturalism; of school readers, travel biographies, folk tales and political manifestos; comedies of manners, satire and social critiques. His years in the Danish Folk High School system read, in fact, like a classic literary education; one in which he was introduced both to contemporary literature and to such high points from literary history as Cervantes´s Don Quixote. Nor were the years before the Folk High School devoid of books, as Nexø likes to make out. Rather, they were devoted to the reading of novelettes, adventure and travel stories such as James Fennimore Cooper´s Red Indian tales and the works of Karl May, Captain Marryat and Jules Verne.
   Nexø´s literary education is far more comprehensive than the writer himself would have us believe with his picture of the working-class writer who, like Pelle, is brought to light naked and unprepared. The narrative, on the other hand, appears to contain parallels with the novel´s ambivalent and contradictory view of literature. On the one hand, Nexø accuses serious literature of distorting the truth, of being fallacious, while himself having a preference for reading popular literature. On the other, he resorts to all manner of genres in his endeavour to carve out a literary career for himself - and, to this end, writes bourgeois "novels of education" that run the gamut from Turgenev to Dostoyevsky.
   Remarkably, in Pelle Erobreren Nexø manages to come up with a blend of Jules Verne´s Extraordinary Voyages and Dostoyevsky´s Rodion Raskolnikov and, in so doing, contrives his own literary breakthrough. The tremendous, and unforeseen, success of the novel among the working-class public worldwide makes it necessary for Nexø to cover up these somewhat dubious tracks and, instead, propagate the myth of the working-class writer who, by some great blessing has, like Pelle, been called up out of the darkness with "simple armour", "a cowlick on his brow" and "bearing a caul".

Utopian as the reading itself
Martin Andersen Nexø ranks among the "greats" of international literature, and Pelle Erobreren counts as one of the great classics, which there is good reason to read every now and again - though not for the "conquering hero" aspects of it. In fact, more than anything else, it was the very success of the novel and of its author which threatened to condemn it to oblivion. Critics of the work tend to repudiate its literary or political worth on the grounds of its simplistic conquest theme. In making such an assessment, they are, however, working from a false premise. Any reading which allies the novel´s complex rhetoric with its political message will show that, here, the forces of both rhetoric and history are united in a process of constant interaction, as dazzlingly Utopian as the reading itself. Nexø´s literary and political dream of doing away with literature and bringing history to a standstill in a Socialist Utopia may have miscarried on all counts, and been exposed as merely an illusion, but - and precisely because of the quashing of the epic theme - the energy of that dream lives on in the scintillating magic of the text.
   In Martin Andersen Nexø´s work, literature and history seem - when all is said and done - to rise from the same depths and reach upwards towards the same sun, albeit in the still undecided battle between light and dark which makes this book a classic.

This article first appeared in Danish Literary Magazine 14, 1998

Translated by Barbara Haveland