Truth abour The Liar

Af : Anders Thyrring Andersen

It is fifty years since Martin A. Hansen's novel Løgneren (The Liar) first saw the light of day. Last year its position as a classic literary work was emphasised when critics voted it into third place among Danish fiction of the 20. century.

Martin A. Hansen (1909-55) is one of the great figures of the transitional period in Danish literature. His writings were deeply-rooted in tradition, but were at the same time a significant part of the contemporary situation. Fictional literature capable of combining a Christian outlook and modern idiom, derived as a result of tension between tradition and modernity, older story telling and modern stylistic experiment, belief and doubt. An example of this is his novelette "The Midsummer Party" ("Midsommerfesten") (The Thorn Bush -Tornebusken) that introduced Europe's most radical modernism into Danish prose-writing.

Martin A. Hansen's literary works expressed something central for the time. It is no exaggeration to describe the writer as the most popular intellectual leader in Denmark during the post Second World War decade. Martin A. Hansen is today the latest writer capable of interesting the majority of the reading public - from those in outlying regions to the cultural elite of the capital.

The Liar was Martin A. Hansen's last major work of fiction. It was also his greatest achievement both economically and artistically.

The Liar consists ostensibly of a diary, written by a middle-aged schoolteacher on a small island in the course of a few days in spring. However, the novel does not identify itself with the narrator, Johannes Vig, but lets his own diary reveal him and his problem of life - also in a way that only the reader , and not he, can discover. That is, the narrator is disclosed through the way he tells his story.

The Liar is a modernist novel characterized by all its first-person narrator suggestion of feeling; through which style and content are totally fused. Another modernist characteristic is the frequent references to other literature in the novel. Older texts are constantly referred to and quoted. Furthermore, The Liar is not only the one of Martin A. Hansen's works that most clearly and thoroughly shows Søren Kierkegaard's inspiration on his production, but can simply be considered to be a conversion of Kierkegaard's thinking into fictional form.

The novel is most usually seen as an unhappy love story. It is also this, though in its own special way. Johannes Vig has deliberately arranged the situation he and two of his earlier pupils have found themselves in for years - a hopeless, unalterable, three-cornered relationship.

Johannes Vig relishes keeping people in limbo as unrealised possibilities. They are for him objects of study that he, with his ironic ambiguity, does not involve himself in existentially. He never lives his life spontaneously, but is relentlessly staging his own life and reflecting over it. This unending reflection turns life into a relativity where nothing is true or false. His lies derive, in other words, from this reflection.

Thus Johannes Vig reminds us remarkably of the row of pseudonyms in the writings of Søren Kierkegaard - all of whom are called Johannes. Firstly, the most refined and reflective of all the aestheticists, Johannes the Seducer from "The Seducer's Diary" ("Forførerens Dagbog", Either-Or (Enten-Eller, 1843)).

More than a year later than the related events, Johannes Vig again takes up the pen in the final chapter of The Liar to admit that the diary was a deceit, a lie. Paradoxically, by in this way admitting his mendacity Johannes Vig has become honest, ethically committed, but neither he nor the novel gets any further. Johannes Vig cannot alter, cannot grow in religious belief, cannot believe in the possibility of resurrection.

There is a stage between the ethical and the religious ones in Kierkegaard's thinking - the humorous one. His pseudonymous work Conclusive Unscientific Postscript (Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift (1846)) is published by the reflective humorist Johannes Climacus, and one realises that Johannes Vig is now another kierkegaardian Johannes - the kind who knows what Christianity is, but who dares not call himself a Christian. And who must therefore end in the silence of resignation. Johannes Vig is incapable of reaching beyond reflection, and can only stop the seduction by becoming silent, by ending his diary. As a result, his third and last Kierkegaard-Johannes has to be the publisher of Fear and Trembling (Frygt og Bæven (1843)), Johannes de Silentio, who precisely due to reflection-sickness forbears in silence.

Thus The Liar is not a novel about breaking through the mirrored room of reflection to something real and true, but about a reflection that in order to be true has to be silent. Martin A. Hansen stopped his fictional writing completely in keeping with this novel.

Being one of the central works of Danish twentieth century literature it is natural that The Liar has been translated into numerous languages. But one could wish that readers outside Scandinavia also had the opportunity of getting to know Martin A. Hansen's other major works Fortunate Kristoffer (Lykkelige Kristoffer), "The Midsummer Party" ("Midsommerfesten"), and a number of the shorter stories.)

At the moment Martin A. Hansen is the subject of an unusually large amount of attention, not least due to the three- volume publication of his diaries last year. This publication has helped emphasise how modern a writer Martin A. Hansen was - and still is.

This article first appeared in Danish Literary Magazine 17, 2000