Contemporary Novels about Times Past

Tage Skou-Hansen focuses best on a varied present by directing his gaze on the past.

By : Ejgil Søholm

Sidste sommer. (Last Summer) is a good title. The present time in this novel is 1990 - so last summer is 1989, when the walls in eastern Europe came tumbling down and the postwar era finally came to all end. It was from these ´ post-war years the novel´s main character, Herman, fled when forty years ago he emigrated to Argentina in order to minister to a small Danish community, indulging in nostalgic worship of things Danish around the parish coffee table. Like all Tage Skou-Hansen´s fictional characters, Herman, too, has his roots in the stirring times of the resistance movement, wherein lay that brief glimpse of a self-sustaining existence, which none of those involved could ever forget, but which they could not found their more humdrum post-war lives on or find an identity in. This problem is central to all Skou-Hansen´s work, which started with a "classic", De nøgne træer, 1957 (The Naked Trees), a novel so full of elemental power -of bothwar and love - that 35 years later it was possible to make a film directly from it, not merely a story with just a whiff of the original, as so often is the case with cinema based on literature.

   With that film in mind we can better understand why it should have taken Tage Skou-Hansen 50 years to extricate himself from those days. The five volumes in which Holger Mikkelsen constantly reappears as the central character were brought to a conclusion with Over stregen (A bit too far, 1980). They must surely form the most thoughtful piece of Danish literary soul-searching to come out of the war. With that series of novels the author lives up to the defence of prose with which lie caused a stir as early as 1950 in the Danish penodical Heretica where poets were writing emotional poems bemoaning the crisis in culture. Using Martin A. Hansen´s Løgneren (The Liar, 1950 published by Quartet Books, 1986 ) as his example he argued that it could be wholesome to leave a conflict unresolved. His essay ends with something akin to an action programme for prose rather like that in which Holger Mikkelsen found himself living: "Let us listen to the narrator, concentrating on a human figure and gradually letting him take part in events together with other characters."

Sidste sommer is the last part of a quartet of novels under the general label of Tales of the Round Table (1986-91), which, with a completely new authorial attitude and looking at the old material in a new light stands so far as the culmination of one of the most important literary achievements of the post-war period. When, at the end of the 70s, Tage Skou-Hansen pensioned off his longstanding spokesman Mikkelsen, he did so because - despite all loyalty and critical reflection - he could not use him in the process of renewal that he simply had to embark on, both in order to delve deeper and to be able to write more easily and freely. He wanted to rid his novels of their affinity with the chronicle and essay, those features which on the one hand were the strength of the latest Mikkelsen books and the picture of Denmark contained in them, but which on the other tied hand him down - because there were limits to what the sluggish Holger could he related to within the framework of a realistic novel.

   With the tales from the round table something changed. Firstly, the language is different, but there is also a greater flexibility. With a whole team of characters to replace Mikkelsen the author can view things from different angles, not only in the banal sense of being able to "see things from more than one point of view", but by allowing both himself and his reader to be confronted intcliectually and emotionally with life´s extremes - the extremes of passion and indifference.

   The four short novels are built around a group of students in the Danish provincial capital, Arhus, in 1942. The celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of their matriculation is the splashing stone that causes the rings of their stories to broaden out in flashbacks and reflections. The start -the first sentences in Springet (The Leap) - made Tage Skou-Hansen´s readers rub their eyes and open their cars; so simple, so straightforward, so much the spoken language: "This is the start of a story about a man called Sivert. He thought he was dead, and so he almost was, too, but then, you know, he came to and found a new meaning in his life."

All four novels centre on the essential question of the meaning to everything. Is it possible to live with the world "as it is, instead of seeing through it or wishing it were different or trying to change it"? Sidste sommer can be seen as a kind of national endgame. Both during the war and subsequently as a civil servant, Herman has fought for the national idea. He has known that his battle was in vain, "but he had enjoyed it. It was the very impossibility that had given his life a content. A meaningless longing, not for actuality but for unreality."

   The patriotic sense of Danishness that he has purveyed as an exiled preacher acquires an unpleasant after-taste in the months after he has seen on television the changes taking place in eastern Europe. There is nothing to suggest that the Danes - those at home -undergo any national awakening as a result of these events. In the EC it is the "age of the Market", not "the age of the homeland". When Herman nevertheless returns home it is down by the stream in his childhood´s west Jutland that he experiences that moment that knows no limits, the happy void - the unreality for which he had been longing. Now he knows what it was he loved. "It was not his native land. It was a meadow and that river. That was all."

   This conclusion might at first sight look like a betrayal of the creed proponded by the youthful apologist that conflict should be left unresolved. Nevertheless, there are plenty og disturbing scratches on the surface of this apparently smooth picture of his birthplace. Here, too, he is confronted with memories of Aksel - Aksel who spurned a life without significance and therefore joined the ranks of Hitler´s supporters and died the hero´s death he sought. In all the tales of the round table he is the the source of the qualms from which they cannot escape.

   Aksel was born in the same area as Herman, but his parents had him adopted as a child. Perhaps the point here is that he had no home and so had to fight for other people´s. Blut ohne Boden? Another ambiguity about Herman´s mystical experience of the place is that the religious overtones merge into a binge he has had together with Helge - the EC bureaucrat, the Social Democrat, who once believed in something, but now wants to buy a place where he can be left in peace. That this place happens to be the farm on which Herman was born can perhaps be called a somewhat romantic coincidence. But it is a subtle trait in the final scene to let the perspective be seen through the eyes of the cattle in the field: "They did not look at the two drunken men, but kept their heads turned towards the expected light."

Can one live in the world as it is? Judging by the characters in these four novels the answer must be that that is exactly what they did, but the result was as might have been expected. It is not only in the East that conditions have not been in accordance with the ideal. The mechanics of capitalism in the first place and then the developemental necessity of technology have been the decisive factors - not humane, democratic or Christian criteria on morals and welfare. Pretty well all "respectable" western countries have - it turns out - sold their diabolical atomic secrets to Iran for the sake of filthy lucre. The opacity of the economic sphere with its gigantic mergers and cartels, the shift of power from parliaments to stock exchanges, have made a crisis of identity the norm for thinking citizens. And that is what we are now exporting to the eastern countries, where a sense of kinship and regional loyalties and national fanaticism still strike warlike sparks.

   All this is implicit in Tage Skou-Hansen´s novels - and paradoxically, there is a more powerful sense of the present in the new novels about the past than in Mikkelsen´s glossed chronicle, for all its verisimilitude and precision. The turmoil in eastern Europe seems to have been the decisive political inspiration behind the early stages of Skou-Hansen´s work on Sidste sommer. In that case it is symptomatic that it should end on an existential note. In this it became more relevant - in terms of the immediate situation -than so many others of the more straightforward portraits of Denmark in the realist tradition.

   It we cannot be true, at least we can be precise -that was a reasonable slogan at that time. From the individual´s point of view, the world today is perhaps so opaque and immune to influence that even realist observers are obliged to replace the category of precision with the aim of honesty. This might sound like a move away from the objective middle course in the directioti of a subjective outside position; it is only a formal view, of course, but it can be applied to Tage Skou-Hansen´s epic renunciation of his former representative, Mikkelsen, in favour of a variety of personal viewpoints. Taken individually the characters of the round table represent confusion and problems of identity, which taken together look like a bit of Danish mental history. The only one who succeeded in living a full life and holding his banner raised was Aksel. But it was the wrong banner, and it led to his death. The absorbed attention paid to him by the others is symptomatic of something lacking. It is meaning that is lacking. As it was in the post-war era. As it still is. We must now content ourselves to suffice with meanings.

Translated by W. Glyn Jones