Novelist in the Grand Style

By : Niels Kofoed

Of all Danish novelists, Nobel Prize winner Henrik Pontoppidan is the one who has made the deepest impression on his own and later times in his country. When he shared the Nobel Prize with Karl Gjellerup in 1917 he was admitted to the unofficial list of the chosen men and women of world literature.

The position occupied by Henrik Pontoppidan in the history of Danish and Scandinavian literature can be compared with that of Thomas Mann in German cultural life in the inter-war years. It is the artist seen as a product of degenerating bourgeois society – the sensitive loner in his modern isolation on his way to demise. In 1927, when Pontoppidan reached the age of 70, Mann wrote the following words to a Danish newspaper: “The writer of Lykke Per is a born epic poet and a critic of life and society fully equal to any in Europe. As a true conservative in a breathless age, he preserves the grand style of the narrative. As a true revolutionary, he sees prose first and foremost as a judicial power.”

Henrik Pontoppidan’s oeuvre is marked by a constant series of new departures, and the accompanying sense of homelessness made him seem able to cross all political boundaries. This was likewise one of the preconditions for his ability to portray all social classes and environments. But behind his social criticism and moralising we find an unyielding craving for freedom that is related to his sympathy for anarchism as a political theory.

His first publication came in 1881 with the collection of short stories Stækkede Vinger (Clipped Wings), after which he published two further volumes along with the first short novel Sandinge Menighed (The Parish of Sandinge). These books form the nucleus of his indignant portrayal of the conditions of the rural proletariat that constitutes the first phase of his oeuvre. He had started by portraying a neglected and despised social class. After this, he gradually extended the range of his motifs to an ever-expanding analysis of the interplay between human beings, social classes, politics and religion. The result of this was the first of his major novels, Det forjættede Land (The Promised Land) (1891-1895).

The most important work is the novel Lykke Per (Lucky Per>, 1898-1904), which was published in several parts and constitutes a complete picture of Denmark replete with material that is both authentic and autobiographical. This novel about the fortune-hunter endowed with an urge to live life, but who comes to grief on life’s outer surface in the struggle for money, woman and prestige, has been seen as the novel about the typical Dane, a figure unable to act decisively, a daydreamer burdened by the inheritance from his parents, a man hindering his own progress because of some inner mental schism.

It was followed by a period of angst from 1905 to 1927, during which time the fate of Denmark and the tense European political situation in the period leading to the First World War produced a vast apocalyptic vision in the third major novel, De Dødes Rige (The Realm of the Dead, 1912-1916). This can certainly be classed as a realistic novel because, starting out in the contemporary situation, it portrays a conceivable reality, and because some of the characters in it borrow features from well-known historical figures. It tells of a series of events and portrays the lives of a group of people secured in time and place. And yet events, characters and the environment are all modified in parallel with an underlying pattern allowing the work’s realism to be infused with a symbolism redolent of dream and depth psychology. Reality is seen through the feverish eyes of a sick man. It is the fable of democracy’s crisis, the fall of the class of aristocratic officials, the dissolution of the class-based society and the revolt of the masses that is reflected in the grandiosely orchestrated legend of the deluge and the resultant collapse of European culture.

The pattern adopted in the three great epic works, The Promised Land, Lucky Per and The Realm of the Dead reveals a remarkable similarity with regard to the fates of the main characters. The development of personality is the supreme value in the author’s universe. Everything else is of secondary importance, and so the essence of the oeuvre as a whole is of a moral and religious nature. Throughout its further development there was a shift from a historically recognisable picture of the age towards spiritual realities.

To Pontoppidan, as to all the great 19^th-century European novelists after Walter Scott and Honoré de Balzac, the novel is a perfect structure defining the religious faith, historical traditions, cosmological speculations and political expectations of a society and an age. Authors are always preoccupied from the start with the essential social and political questions of their age, but this is against a background that allows the major problems of humanity concerning the origins and fate of culture to be brought out. So in the case of Pontoppidan it leads to a paradoxical tension between realism and myth creation. The more he attempts to be a realistic chronicler of his time, the more powerfully does the underlying, symbolical pattern emerge with all the attendant curtailments and simplifications. The literary form does not stem from life but from literary tradition. It incorporates the social debate and the ideological views into an overarching epic structure that at its best has a clear antiphonal character. In the two novels dealing with artists, Nattevagt (Night Watch, 1894) and Hans Kvast og Melusine (Hans Kvast and Melusine, 1907), Pontoppidan has himself indirectly portrayed the musical and polyphonic principles fundamental to his artistic aims, and he constantly reminds his reader not to concentrate on a single statement in the works, but to relate to the essential mood and the work as a whole.

There is a clear line in the development of his ideas that draws a cultural axis with Rousseau’s Switzerland as an image of the home of the heart and freedom on the one hand and France as the fountainhead of revolutionary and political thinking on the other; but the American writer Henry George’s book Progress and Poverty (1879) also played a significant role. Throughout the 1880s, Pontoppidan saw his crusade against the power of the landed gentry as a clear parallel to the Russian authors’ battle against the despotism of the Czar. So the most obvious lines in his formation go from Rousseau via the Russian anarchists Bakunin and Kropotkin, to Gogol, Lermontov, Saltykov-Schedrin, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Pontoppidan was able to position himself in the field of tension between Russian realism and French naturalism and was closely related to the great Russian novelists who just at that time during the 1880s were being translated into Danish. In his criticism of society he was close to Tolstoy’s view of his role in contemporary society especially in relation to the Russian’s conversion to the cause of people, his opposition to the academic environment, his anticlericalism, his puritanism and his belief in the importance of the individual life. Pontoppidan found the darker side in Saltykov-Schedrin, whose social pathos, determination to reveal social disparity and whose idea of the rights of passion in private life find resonance both in the short stories and the novellas that the Dane wrote as a kind of preparatory studies for the major ones. Popular writers like the Mecklenburger Fritz Reuter, the Swiss Gottfried Keller, and the Norwegian Alexander Kielland were also of great immediate significance.

If we look at the oeuvre as a whole, three main trends appear right from the beginning. First, the social realism and tendency to social criticism in the novellas. Second a romantic, fairy-tale like element in the longer stories and short novels. And third, the satirical and parodical slant. The fairy-tale world is interwoven with the realistic social portrayal in constantly fresh forms and is filled with matter relating to myth and depth psychology. In the course of the 1880s, Pontoppidan thus recreates the myth, the legend and the fairy tale within the framework of the realistic novel, and the general development of the oeuvre consists artistically speaking of a constant expansion of this trend. The interplay between romanticism and realism pervades the entire oeuvre and stylistically speaking denotes a development from a predominantly popular realism in the 1880s via symbolism in the 1890s to a mixture of late romanticism and incipient expressionism after the turn of the century.

Pontoppidan was of an extraordinarily receptive disposition. During the 1890s, through his reading of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, he acquired a profounder view of the significance of the religious life as the breath of mankind, and he contrasted Nietzsche’s powerful love of life with Schopenhauer’s life-denying cultural pessimism. By thus allowing contrasts and contradictions to find expression in his work, Pontoppidan to some extent undermined the view of art and literature as tools in the political struggle. On the other hand he became able as an artist to recreate and interpret life in a profounder dialectical and poetical relationship. He believed not only in “the clarity of thought and the masculine balance of the mind”, but also in the rights of passion, the labyrinth of the heart and the cultural and social balance between man and woman. He was greater as a literary artist than as a debater and journalist, and it is in his quality of a great narrator and researcher into the labyrinth of the human mind that he will have the potential for forming part of the cycle of global culture.

The article was first published in Danish literary Magazine 20, autumn 2001.