The Magic Bird

By : Jes Tange Jessen

Løgneren (1950;translated as The Liar, 1954) is a first-person novel, structured as a series of diary entries or letters addressed to a specific person. The diary writer is Johannes Vig, teacher and parish clerk on the little island of Sandø. The intended recipient is a made-up person he has named Natanael, who, in the Gospel according to John, is portrayed as having no guile. [Translator’s note: In Danish the word for guile is "svig;" note the protagonist’s last name.] The twelve entries, each of which comprises a chapter in the book, recount two periods in Johannes’s life. In the first eleven sections he reports almost hour by hour what he is experiencing and thinking on four eventful days and nights during the fortieth year of his life. In the last section, which stems from the following year, he describes what has subsequently happened, comments on the preceding sections -- and reveals that the first eleven entries, except for the introductory pages, were actually written "quite recently," a year after the events under discussion took place.
   Although Johannes is fully aware, while he is writing, what the outcome of these events will be, he charts them as if they were unfolding before him and never lets this knowledge shine through by getting ahead of himself. He is not writing a memoir; rather, he is editing his recollections as material for a novel, and thereby forcing the reader, in spite of everything, to accept the fictional diary as at its word. Only the fact that there is nothing in the account unrelated to the central story might cause the reader to doubt whether the writing was concurrent with the experience. But by means of this artistic economizing with his material Johannes also serves as the author, and the border between the two becomes fluid.
    The events that develop and reach their conclusion during the four days covered by the diary’s main section have their roots several years back in time. Johannes Vig arrived at Sandø six or seven years before the advent of the diary, and at that time then Annemari, the grocer’s daughter who was then sixteen years old, was among his night-school students. Ever since, an important but indeterminate relationship has existed between them, and the movement of the novel begins because Annemari now wants out of this indeterminate state -- something that Johannes is reluctant to accept. He is a complicated person, disinclined to make decisions, and a man of many words. His book consists of these copious words, but on the title page he has written the word "Liar," and thus takes them all back. This is the interpreter’s problem. The diary, with its convoluted fiction and dubious sincerity, is a valid expression of Johannes’s elusive self; the person who takes him at his word may be led into and out of not only his affair with Annemari but the numerous tangled affairs he has with all the island inhabitants, without getting any farther than to the intriguing and vain outer surface of the parish clerk. Johannes himself is aware of this as a diarist; but he also knows that there is a way out for the person who wants to understand without being coaxed:

"I won’t make myself out to be any better than I am, Natanael. Not any better. Maybe a little more interesting. I have no ambitions, my friend, but I’m not without my vanity.
   "Try to see through the vanity, Natanael. If you can’t, then that’s your problem." (52)

Only on the surface is Løgneren bewilderingly convoluted; beneath its tight weave of ambivalent information and misleading comments, there is an orderly and well-substantiated sequence of events. If you follow Johannes’s actions, you will glide from one intention to another, and in this way finally reach the psychological structure from which all the sophistries emanate.
   This is the same path that Johannes Vig himself takes, because the book does not merely depict an ordered sequence of events; the order itself is a reflection of the self-knowledge that Johannes gains from the story. During those four days he comes to a surprising recognition of the innermost passions that define his being, and this is what he, as the author, has then projected outward to the books’ exterior landscape, where it resides in the snipe, the novel’s mythical bird.
   To prepare the way for an interpretation of this symbol, however, it is first necessary to take the indicated road through the epic causal events.

From: Omkring Løgneren, edited by Ole Wivel (Copenhagen: Hans Reitzels Forlag, 1971)

Translated by Tiina Nunally