In the Heart of the Pig

By : Henrik Wivel

The new novel by Vagn Lundbye is an impressively written moral fable about the white man's burden.

Vagn Lundbye is no Bret Easton Ellis, and the Asiatic jungle is not a New Yorker yuppie´s designer loft. But the similarity is there, all the same. Vagn Lundbye doesn´t pull his punches in this new novel, as far as nauseating calamities are concerned. Palindromos - eller Colombos sidste rejse (Palindromos - or Colombo´s Last Voyage) is undoubtedly his most gruesome book to date, but for that very reason, paradoxically, also his best. Vagn Lundbye has written a severe and harsh moral fable about Nature´s revenge on the white man and his dreams of ruling the entire world. The year before the world runs amok celebrating Christopher Columbus´ discovery of America 500 years ago, Vagn Lundbye stands history on its head, so to speak. He turns so-called primitive peoples into masters and the Western colonisers into slaves. In this poignant and macabre way he reflects the last few centuries of Western colonisation and reveals what would happen if primitives were to dominate the world with the same radical cruelty displayed by white men.

A hostage to savages
Colombo´s Last Journey is a story in reverse, written with consistency and the courage to explore extremes inherent in Lundbye´s talent. This means mostly that his sometimes rather vapid metaphysics and literary allusions are kept to an acceptable minimum - though not entirely absent. Vagn Lundbye lets his modern American Columbus of 1992 embark on a last voyage which, via a distant missionary station in an unspecified Asiatic jungle, lands him in a tribe of natives who take him hostage.
   As in Joseph Conrad´s classic The Heart of Darkness (1900), Colombo finds himself taken along a river, destined to confront the truth about himself and his race. In a distant jungle village, which is as much a symbol of a spiritual state as a realistic portrayal, he is kept prisoner in a colony of lost men from the Western world, all of them driven by the very best of intentions. Yet, slowly realizing that there is a different sort of truth, they are locked up and humiliated by the natives whose lives, from their customary superior vantage point, they have been trying to improve. But here, in the very heart of the pig, their ideals and secret dreams are put to the test by a culture which appears to be radically different from their own.

Under the skin
This story may not be entirely new, but it has never been told the way Vagn Lundbye tells it. He displays an undeniable talent for making events convincing and for presenting them to his readers´ senses in such graphical and sensual terms as to make them almost unbearable. The way in which his western civilization suffers defeat in the confrontation with a different world is unparalleled, closely observed as it is. An intimate, groping claustrophobia is created in the reader as the natives and the Jungle with its wild animals and its terrors quite literally get under their skin. They are intimidating and, to Western eyes, appallingly lacking in moral standards, decency and cleanliness.
   Vagn Lundbye depicts this cultural dehydration as a castration, in both a literal and a metaphorical sense. The actual scene defies description in its bodily mixture of eroticism and defecation, blood and steaming animal secretions. The French psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva, the author of a book called The Power of the Disgusting. An Essay on The Odious (1980), claimed that the truth about our origins is to be sought in our relationship with objects of disgust, our body´s abominable appetite for utter degradation. It is this, the very essence of odiousness, that Vagn Lundbye throws at his readers. The reverse side of civilization, a different world which we refuse to acknowledge and should have left alone.
   A world apart, essentially different from ours. If one is to remain within Vagn Lundbye´s own metaphorical idiom there is no other way of putting it except to say that this is a bloody marvellous piece of writing. It is at one and the same time carefully controlled and grossly overdone, but everywhere rich in effects and engaging because he enters his story around the basic drives of flesh and body. That is, the erotic drive that carries the dreams of the stony male voices and which, ever since the days of Columbus and his fellows, has dictated to the world its fantasies of potency. Here, this erotic element is subjected to the dictates of a different culture, and the graphic presentation implications of this process emits a stench of sweat and sucks its way like a leech into your skin.

This review first appeared in Berlingske Tidende, 12 October 1991

Translated by Claus Bech