Denmark in the 90s

Af : Michael Bo

It´s remarkable that she is never absent from the minds of avid readers or that of the general Danish public even though there are long intervals between her publications. When Kirsten Thorup does bring out a new book our first reaction is recognition and welcome familiarity.

Seven years after the publication of Kirsten Thorup´s last novel, Den yderste grænse (1987) (The Furthest Limit), she is in the news again with an enormous work of fiction, Elskede Ukendte, which has taken her all of four years to complete. The lengthy waiting times are a Thorup speciality and well suited to setting the quality and power of her writing in reliefs as well as stimulating the reader´s appetite for more.

Elskede Ukendte is structurally clear. Part One is a description of the young and dutiful Rene; after his father dies he fails to pass his university entrance examinations with his usual brilliance. Then he commits his first offence and alters his marks, so that he can get into the university.

Rene is found out, dismissed from the university and given a conditional sentence by the court. Now the first offender feels outlawed and actually freed from responsibility for the rest of his life. After a period of prostitution he ends up on the street - where, at the end of this part of the book, he meets a man, who lifts his clenched fist threateningly against the town hall tower: Carl.

"When I began to think about the book back in 1985-86, Carl was the starting point," Kirsten Thorup tells Danish Literary Magazine, "I´m always inspired to write by people I´ve met, and I did meet Carl - although in a less fanatical version. And when I had established Carl as a character I had to find a Rene whom I could place, in the course of the narrative, in a position that would provoke Carl´s urge to convert. For the sake of the content it would not have been enough to make Rene an anonymous person from the gutter."

Knocked off course
"The novel can be seen through Rene´s eyes as involving a young man who has to learn to grow up, and Carl comes to function as the dark tunnel Rene must go through to emerge on the other side transformed. The meeting of Carl and Rene has such a violent impact that they are both shaken out of the courses of their lives, and both must fight for selfpreservation in a relationship in which they identify more and more with each other.

The identification between Carl and Rene incites the violent dash at the end of the novel, and the death fixation and urge for self-destruction are prerequisites for the savage single combat with its Old Testament overtones.

The project was to describe a person who desires to convert others; not in the specifically religious but the more general sense. The characters in my book are all passionate absolutes in themselves - partly because this is inherent in them but also because circumstances force them to be more extreme than the average person. And also I wanted to characterise a culture pattern that courts the absolute in every way, and which in fact is Christian in its basic views. The figure of Jesus is deeply imbedded in us and with it the urge for salvation and the connection of guilt with punishment."

Error and fanaticism
The narrative follows the fortunes of Carl, from his adoption as an orphaned institutionalised child by a wealthy business family who immediately change his name from the socially loaded "Ronnie" to "Carl" after his adoptive father´s own father. Carl´s new mother, Lili, deserts him for five years while she indulges her artistic ambitions in Paris. Their relationship is never natural and Carl reacts to his mother´s desertion by touring the bars and discos of central Copenhagen with well-heeled youngsters of his own age.

One day Carl meets Connie, a fisherman´s daughter from the provinces, whose religious anchorage in the Pentecostal Church is to be decisive to Carl´s new life. After thirteen years of marriage Carl has a breakdown; he abruptly winds up his ailing adoptive father´s lifelong business, the old family firm importing wine, and leaves his wife in order to fish for human souls on the street. One day he makes eye contact with a tramp.

The last section of the book is devoted to the confrontation between the two men over life and death, love and hate, power and submission. Carl´s yacht is the stage for a gruelling struggle, on the one hand underplaying suspense and on the other being enacted with excessive violence - which seems made for filming.

Monomanic reflections
"It was important to me not to show the Carl-Rene relationship as yet another executioner-victim syndrome, so current in our culture," emphasises Kirsten Thorup. "The uncomplicated structure and the symmetry in the story illustrate the likeness between the two characters, who reflect each other in every essential. Rene is as monomanic as Carl, and their megalomania, demonstrated in their alternating in the mutual assumption of the role of saviour, is an image of our central placing of the individual in western culture."

Kirsten Thorup hopes Ukendte elskede will not be interpreted as a card-carrying plea in a current debate on faith and lack of faith, on religion and atheism. She has a different and more comprehensive aim. The manifestation of extremism is what drew her to the figures in her book, and religion is merely one of many examples of the characters´ predilection for the furthest limits.

"In the present phase of my writing it seems natural to allow situations and characters to develop in this extreme direction," says Kirsten Thorup.

"I am not looking for patterns, but in the rear mirror I can see that I unconsciously choose them because they exist in reality. The aim of an author with each new book is to show what it means to be a human being. It is a natural outcome of the patterns I describe that Carl´s original name is Ronnie, socially the most loaded name in Danish. It is equally natural for me to personify the unremitting nagging conscience of working women concerning their children - in this case by making Lili purely geographically and particularly heavy-handedly distance herself from her son by going to Paris and fulfilling herself for a period of years."

The costs of a life
"The conflicts are pushed to extremes, and each character in the book fights for his life. The only one who is totally annihilated is Carl´s father, when his life´s work, the import firm, is closed down by his son. The father is the only one who loses everything. It is possible that the other characters lose for a time where their aims are concerned, but they live on after the book ends. And they do achieve something. At least it cannot be said of them that they haven´t lived. But, as happens outside the world of the book as well, living does not come free. All the epoch-making things you have done in your life come back. It is a mechanism I recognise in my own fife."

Less of a Christian
When she started working on Elskede ukendte Kirsten Thorup carried out extensive research on the religious themes in the book. She herself was not brought up in a religious environment, and what she herself may have felt about the attraction of fundamental religious absolutes was completely worked out of her system before the book was finished - "Writing it has probably made me even less of a Christian."

"Although religion is not the specific subject of the book or its project, I have never consistently concentrated on it before," she says. "But it is a problem for us all today that Nietzsche and others with him declared God to be dead in the 19th century, for what are we to do now? When we have once agreed that God is dead we cannot just resurrect him when we find ourselves in need of some guiding power to believe in. It is not enough to repress religion - we must take up a stance on it. In Elskede ukendte the characters, in particular, of course, Carl and Rene, relate unremittingly to a mythology that has been abandoned.

Originally both Carl and Rene´s need is for the simplest thing of all. The dream of the nuclear family makes itself present to them both at an early stage, but in reality that dream is yet another absolute which the pattern of culture holds up to us as the ideal. In our society it is naturally inherent for us to want to belong to a nuclear family - whether we can, is another matter. All those who are deprived of a nuclear family are pushed into repression. And then you can seriously, from a personal viewpoint, come to feel that the nuclear family does not have much bearing on the reality that surrounds us."

Kirsten Thorup, who presents Elskede ukendte to her Danish readers this spring, anticipates that it will be a year or two before she starts to write again.

Denne artikel stammer fra Danish Literary Magazine nr. 6, 1994