The Fall of the King - the Rise of a Novel
By : Lars Handesten
The Nobel Prizewinner Johannes V. Jensen’s novel Kongens Fald (The Fall of the King) from 1900-1901 has been proclaimed the best Danish novel of the century in the face of intense competition from works by Karen Blixen and Martin Andersen Nexø among others. In a supremely expressive and image-laden style, the novel tells of titanic fantasies and doubting souls and describes both the tenderest of feelings and bestial violence.
In 1900 and 1901, when Johannes V. Jensen published his novel The Fall of the King, there was no one who could or would predict it a future as the best Danish novel of the century. It received very mixed reviews in newspapers and periodicals, and it took over ten years to sell out the first printing of no more than 1250 copies. People could see that its language was original, but they also found it too coarse in tone, too gaudy in its drama and too fragmentary in its composition.
Just under a hundred years after publication, The Fall of the King has now sold in 250,000 copies in Denmark alone, and when, on the threshold of a new millennium, the readers of the major daily newspapers were asked to indicate what they considered the best Danish book of the twentieth century, The Fall of the King came into its own and was honoured with a clear first place. From being severely criticised and overlooked, it has become a national treasure which one year group after another of grammar school pupils read and drink in with their literary mother’s milk.
That The Fall of the King should have achieved this unique position is both simple and quite difficult to explain. It is an elementally exciting historical novel centred on highly dramatic events in Denmark at the time of the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. We follow the fictitious figure of Mikkel Thøgersen from the time when, as a drop-out student of theology, he dreams of love and distinction in Copenhagen until, as an old mercenary soldier, cheated of life and happiness, he becomes the servant of the imprisoned King Christiern II. On his path through life he has raped the girl he loves and murdered his young friend Axel, whose carefree ease he envies and hates. He has offended against the life to which he has never been able unreservedly to surrender himself, and finally does the same in the face of the death which he refuses to face.
Mikkel suffers alternately from megalomania and a sense of inferiority and he finds it impossible to create balance in his life. He is one of the most unlikable main characters of which Danish literature can, and readers need a goodly store of - Danish - flagellatory fascination to be in the company of this callous individual. However, the attractive qualities which Mikkel lacks are possessed in abundance by his antithesis Axel. In his existential lightness of heart, this young soldier of fortune and womaniser is presented in such delightful terms that it hurts us to the bottom of our hearts when Mikkel downs him and he must die. This, then, is the great potential of the novel, that in close proximity to each other it can produce scenes in which it revels in brutality and evil and express the tenderest of feelings.
Everything and everyone must fall and die in this novel; there is no mercy. Every living thing is subject to the law of decline and fall, and the only question is when the fall will come. The king falls when at the height of his power because he doubts his strength and cannot decide in which direction to go politically. Indecisiveness and daydreaming are presented in the shape of the king as national hereditary sins from which none of the characters can free himself because, according to Johannes V. Jensen, these qualities are linked to the change of the seasons and the inconstant Danish weather. Even so, in what naturally must be a paradoxical project, he turns defiantly and in hatred against this Danish quality in an attempt to transform it.
The Fall of the King is a critical picture of the Danish mentality, but it is not reserved only for Danish readers. The novel contains mythical layers reaching deep down into life’s universal conditions of creation and destruction. It is simple in its action and complicated in its composition and the effervescent, indeed revolutionary, quality of the linguistic sensitivity and expressivity. It resembles a novel, but it is almost more correct to talk of a cycle of stories or, something akin to the modern concept of a novel centred on a number of salient happenings. It contains a host of lyrical and mythical digressions from the central action. In the complexity and fragmentary nature it is post-modern in genre, long before the concept was invented. The Fall of the King is a complex work and as such it is remarkable that readers should have chosen just this novel as the best of the century.
But of course, the author of the book is not just any author, and the status of The Fall of the King rose with meteoric speed when Johannes V. Jensen was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1944 for his great and internationally admired oeuvre. He may well have been given the prize for The Fall of the King, but probably mainly for the mighty novel cycle Den Lange Rejse (The Long Journey") (1908-1922), in which he portrays the development of Man and Culture from tropical forests of the tertiary period to the urban jungles of the present time. He translated Darwinist evolutionary theory into graphic images and grand visions and thereby re-interpreted the Old Testament creation myths. While in The Fall of the King he has to allow the destructive forces to conquer the animal spirits, in his later work he allows life to triumph. The law of decline and fall still applies to the individual, but there is something greater than that: nature, the clan, posthumous reputation - and art.
Lars Handesten is a reviewer with the daily newspaper Berlingske Tidende.
Spring 1999 two daily newspapers Politiken and Berlingske Tidende arranged two separate competitions on the best Danish novel of the century. Politiken had the readers vote while the reviewers with Berlingske Tidende voted for the novel of the centry. In both cases Johannes V. Jensen’s Fall of the King was the favorite.
Translated by W. Glyn Jones
|
|
