Shut out - or shut in?

By : Søren Vinterberg

“It’s locked, the lock’s jammed,” exclaims the woman in Stig Dalager’s monologue Jeg tæller timerne (I’m Counting the Hours) (1993). She has just got up from her solitary chair in the enclosed air raid shelter under a block of flats in Sarajevo and tried the door. Now she adds a comment to her listener (or is she only talking to the matchstick man she has drawn on the door herself?): “The lock’s not jammed, is that what you’re saying? It’s all collapsed outside, and I can’t get out. Is that what you’re saying?”
   Considering this woman’s situation in Sarajevo, the lines can and of course must be taken literally: the war is shutting her in, whether by a lock or total collapse. But the implications of this scene can apply to many more of Stig Dalager’s characters, both in the dramas and the novels: They cannot escape from their isolation. Or get into the community.
   Perhaps that fundamental situation - isolation and uncertainty - partly explains why foreign theatres and publishers have more and more had their attention drawn to the work of this Danish author and literary historian, now 44 years of age.
   For in this respect his theme is reminiscent of that in two others of the most sensational - and mutually very different - Danish œuvres, those of Peer Hultberg and Peter Høeg.

Drama in History
Stig Dalager is a versatile author: In addition to four novels and his first publication from 1980, Hærværksforeningen og andre noveller (The Vandal Association and Other Stories), he has produced eight collections of poems, ten plays for stage or radio and in addition written a film script and two television films.
   The works that have most frequently been translated are set in well-defined historical surroundings. Outside Denmark, the monologue Jeg tæller timerne has been performed in countries including the USA and Bosnia and of course is set in the besieged and devastated city of Sarajevo in the 1990s, during the war the Europeans believed could never again occur in our part of the world.
   The drama En aften i Hamborg (An Evening in Hamburg) (1983, also performed on radio and television) is played out between two central figures in Danish literature from the period of transition from Enlightenment to Romanticism. They are the critic P.A. Heiberg and his wife, the author Thomasine Gyllembourg, who were the parents of Romanticism’s all-powerful critic, national dramatist and Director of the Royal Theatre, Johan Ludvig Heiberg. A great contemporary figure in Danish literature, but one who was by temperament the diametrical opposite of the touchy stick-in-the-mud J.L.Heiberg, was the writer of fairy tales Hans Christian Andersen (the two met in the Swedish author P.O. Enquist’s Fra regnormenes liv). Andersen is at the centre of Dalager’s play - subtitled “dream play” - Herre og Skygge (Master and Shadow) (1991).
   As for the present, Dalager himself expressly calls for “... writers who are not afraid to dirty themselves by committing themselves to the drama presented by the present day, a drama at once banal and overwhelming ... An oeuvre that is not narcissistically wrapped up in its own artistic effects, but dares to place them at the disposal of what the Mexican author Octavio Paz unashamedly once called ‘fraternity’. When freedom and equality have been tried, we are left with fraternity as the last anchor.”

History in the Novel
However, his two novels from the 1990s are also anchored very specifically in time and place, in the present or the history of the years immediately preceding: Glemsel og erindring (Oblivion and Memory) (1992) falls into three parts, each centred on a specific year: Århus in Denmark in 1975, Leipzig in the then GDR in 1978 and in New York City, USA in 1985. Meanwhile, the earlier novel Jon (Jon) (1986) had portrayed the same main character during a few earlier periods in Denmark: his childhood in Copenhagen, his grammar school years in the Jutlandic town of Herning, his tough experiences as a cabin boy on a freighter and his first years as a student of literature. In a paperback edition from 1995, the two novels are combined to form a single work, now in all 800 pages, divided into two volumes and encompassing the period from 1952 to 1985. Jon is not shut in like the woman in Sarajevo - but with his taciturn, speculative character he has difficulty in getting out, into the community with friends or with girls, into a natural community with his family, especially a his father who has problems of his own. Both in the first and the second part of the complete novel the occasional frank discussions with his father - the last by the mother’s deathbed - hold the key to a great deal of Jon’s alienation in social life.
   Not that he turns his back on the surrounding world, on the contrary: As a taxi driver in Århus in 1975 he takes care of a totally exhausted young drug- dependent prostitute. His girlfriend, Sine, has difficulty in coping with this, but in general, his unwillingness to compromise, his predilection for isolation and conversely his 100 percent presence at other times are difficult to live with in a relationship based on the principle of not “tying each other down”.
   He actually goes to Leipzig to study Goethe and humanism, but what he actually learns about are the investigation methods of the Stasi. His dream of going to Mexico ends in New York, and perhaps that is also where his life ends.
   “Perhaps”, for among the hints at a continuation of the book, this is one of the possibilities: contrapuntally with the story of Jon there are also extracts from Sine’s diary, and she is carrying their child.

The End of the Story
Whereas Glemsel og erindring is a modern, fragmented version of the classical full-length Bildungsroman, Dalager’s latest prose work is the opposite: Davids Bog (The Book of David) (1995) is played out over the space of a single year in a boy’s life, from February 1942 to the day in July 1943 when the Jews from the Warsaw ghetto are stuffed into goods wagons and taken away to Treblinka or other final destinations. David is one of them, so the book about him can be seen as the novel about a personality that was not allowed to develop.
   Separated from his parents and the village in which he grew up, David has to manage on his own in the cellars and doorways, civic restaurants and emergency hospitals of the ghetto until the game is over for them all. Against his battle with sickness, guile and hunger - but also accompanied by touching glimpses of faith, faint hope and powerless, but vital expressions of tenderness between strangers suffering under the same pressures - there are again contrapuntal passages projecting completely different points of view: Heydreich’s heartless astuteness, Himmler’s sentimentally self-centred nearsightedness, and the Jewish council president, Adam Czerniakow’s  vacillation between principled opposition and a pragmatist’s hope of suffering the least possible damage. In its studied, sober contrast between the executioners’ cynicism and the victims’ struggle for survival, this taut story is of international standing and appeal - and painfully relevant today.
   Just as the 100,000 Jews in Warsaw are enclosed and have nothing but ethnic cleansing to look forward to, so the woman sits in her shelter in Sarajevo 50 years later. And the door is jammed.