The Omniscient Avant-gardist

By : Lars Bukdahl

Last summer Vagn Lundbye published a wonderful collection of omniscient stories

There is a coincidence in Vagn Lundbye's collection of "omniscient stories", Syv vidnesbyrd om vor Herre Jesu Kristi latter (Seven Testimonies to the Laughter of Our Lord Jesus Christ), which I didn't notice on first reading. In the story "Årsagers fuglestier" (Reasons' Bird Tracks), the holidaying couple Jonas and Emilie are invited home by an elderly Romanian couple. At the end of the visit and when they have waved goodbye to the kindly folk, Jonas sighs that he could never live in a place like that:
   "Why not?" asked Emilie.
   The whole house smelt like a burial vault. And did you notice the spider sitting on the bed cover in the bedroom?"
   "I didn't see it."
   "You can be grateful for that. It was as big as a bird spider."
   Quite a lot later, we find a text belonging to the book's other principal genre, "Forvandlinger" (Transformations) - i.e. the more uninhibited and frivolous, experimental and problematical types of text (although some of those setting out as more ordinary and old-fashioned fantastic "stories" are indeed also curiously constructed). "Hovedstolen eller den sidste aprilsnar i det 20. århundrede" (The Principal or the Last April Fool in the 20th Century) contains another bird spider, or more correctly yet another spider that "resembles" a bird spider. All fiction is experimentally put aside in the three-page-long "transformation": The mature poet is sitting in his home on the island of Langeland thinking about love; it evolves into a tender childhood memory and a little philosophical dialogue before his wife and their small child return from their walk in the woods:
   "Look what I've found," sings Sune Oliver, holding out something resembling a bird spider.
   "Don't worry," smiles Gabriele. "It's made of plastic."
The spider, which is perhaps a bird spider in the story of Jonas and Emilie, is not only real and really unpleasant, but it is also a real and really unpleasant omen, one of several in the story. However, we never get to know exactly what the portents are foreshadowing; Emilie only knows that they should and must go back to Denmark. The plastic spider, on the other hand, is a thorough-going mischievous participant, a playful portent, about the mischievousness and playfulness of portents. And so Vagn Lundbye's omniscient stories, whether they call themselves stories or transformations, really are about relationships, exactly like older writers' omniscient stories, but these are some relationships that go off the rails and hide, joke away and remain hermetically mysterious. "Årsagers fuglestier" (the secret title of which could be "Bird Spider Paths") shares its title with a poem from Lundbye's collection "Digte 1977" (Poems 1977), establishing a magical, unexplained relationship between various everyday, individual events which on the surface are in no way inter-related. I will quote the first two verses:

"Claus Hare the shoemaker moved in 1641/ from Rudkøbing to Tranekær/ One summer 9 years later Jens Rasmussen let/ his horse graze over on Siø/ 43 years later a  woman called Line Marie/ Henriksdatter reached the age of 76// In 1796 Maren Svartar the midwife borrowed some fat from her neighbour/ One evening 5 years later Kirsten the goose girl / was reconciled with the boy in Stoense/ 44 years elapsed before Kjærby laid/ cleft cobbles in Brogade".

The miraculous quality about Vagn Lundbye is his happy duality as an author. He is at one and the same time a careful, traditional, often even a specifically didactic and moral, narrator of the old school and an uncompromising and playful avantgardist; he is at once shameless in his pathos and quirky in his humour, and what is even more awe-inspiring, he is often - and preferably - all of them at the same time. Let us look at another two relationship-creating texts which could not be further from each other in form, but which are both quintessential Lundbye; again they are about a story and a transformation respectively (I am deliberately avoiding the most ponderous moralisms and didacticisms): In "Dødeordet" (Death Word), he tells of a secret word, "hami", which is uttered as a conjuration by and against death in three instances over an entire century. The first case, witnessed by Kathrine Erenborg's grandfather, is of a woman who has been condemned to death and on the scaffold utters the death word; the second is a little girl, perhaps a ghost, who utters the death word to make the grown-up Katrine go with her immediately to her dying mother, who turns out to be an old school friend; and the third case is Kathrine's grandchild Alexander, who during a NATO exercise is awakened by the death word and discovers that because of a storm he and his platoon are in mortal danger in their trench. It must be said this is a mysterious relationship that is really quite palpable for both the reader and the author. In "En dyrefabel" (An Animal Fable), a number of formula for the situation are established: Cat chases mouse which tries to escape to safety under a pile of firewood. All possibilities are examined, and the mathematical madness, or precisely the fancy, culminates in a couple of quite impossible fantastic transformations:

"Operation K(M'8) 0 M'4 on the other hand means that the cat is able to do something with the dead mouse so it comes back to life and tries to reach a safe place. The situation is manifestly different if K(M'9)= M'11./ The cat runs as fast as it can across to its hole in the wood pile."

The older writers would scarcely have put it in this way, but Vagn Lundbye quite happily formulates it thus. His bird tracks are precisely bird spider tracks, a chaotic and elastic, cruel and merry spider's web that he leaps high up! from.

Translated by W. Glyn Jones