Herman Bang's fragments and similes - like the stabs of a knife

Yesterday I emphasized interesting and rare subject of Herman Bang’s 1889 Tina; today I want to look at unusual prose.

Bang had been keeping up on his French writers.  Flaubert, Maupassant, the Goncourts.  That is clear enough.  “Realism” and “objectivity.”  The former meaning, if it means anything here, a focus on material surfaces, the latter, if it means anything here, a near-complete absence of narrator identifiable as a character.  Thus the metaphor of the camera, with the author as cameraman.  In a film we never see the camera even though we both know it is there and know that someone is operating it.  The personality of the operator is expressed through the choice of exactly what to film and the way the pieces are edited together.

But of course the author is not operating a camera.  If he were, we could in some sense see everything within the frame, no matter how trivial, while a fiction writer works with fragments.  Bang’s fragments are especially fragmented in a way that puts me in mind of certain 20th century authors, and no one at all from Bang’s time or earlier.  Short sentences, short paragraphs, short divisions within short chapters.

“Puff – Christmas is over,” he said proudly as he blew out each candle, as if he was grandly closing the door on Christmas; the others stood watching attentively while candle after candle was blown out.

“The last one,” cried Mrs Berg.  “The last one.”

The last candle was out, and the room was in darkness when Berg put Herluf down on the floor.  Mrs Berg took her husband’s arm, and they all left the room in silence.  (39)

I have quoted two other passages from Tina, the sudden beginning of the novel and a bit about refugees from the artillery bombardment, noisy and active scenes compared to Christmas winding down.  I did not mention that each one managed to slip in some metaphorical language.  A carriage, as it rolls away in the dark, is “likea great shadow,” and a man welcomes refugees into a house “like an officiousundertaker at a funeral,” which is excellent, if almost too portentous for those poor refugees.  Bang works in similes.  We cannot actually see what the imaginary camera sees, so we are given a little help seeing it.  It is like a shadow, he is like an undertaker, the boy’s movement is like – well that’s a funny one, isn’t it, because the simile does not appear to be visual at all, yet now I imaginatively give the boy some dramatic flourishes.

Through the storm and the pounding of the guns, which made the square tremble, came the screams of the wounded like the stabs of a knife, whenever the congestion on the road halted the strawless wagons into which they had been thrown, without compassion, by worn-out ambulance men at the end of their tether because of all the misery around them.  (118)

Now I am making Bang’s similes seem more common than they really are.  but I like the way he sneaks them in when he wants just a little bit more precision.

It did get worse - Herman Bang's Tina, a Danish behind-the-lines war novel and vaguely Hardyish love story

I’ve got to stop reading these old Danish novels.  There is no end to the good ones.  There must be an end; the number of old Danish novels available in English must be small.  My revised assumption, after reading Herman Bang’s Tina (1889) is that they are all worth reading, by someone, not necessarily me.  I am glad I read this one. 

The fact remains, as this first translation in English makes clear, that Tina is one of the great nineteenth-century European novels, and the mystery is that the English-speaking world should have had to wait for only a few years short of a century for an opportunity of reading it.  (ix)

This is from the foreword, by Walter Allen, to the 1984 Paul Christophersen translation of Tina.  Do you like the optimism of “first”?  Using certain definitions of “great,” in terms of ambition or international significance or place in non-Danish literary history, that word is close to preposterous, although I note that a glance at German and French Amazon shows numerous translations in print, so I do not mean to take my own ignorance as the measure of greatness.

Regardless, Tina is certainly a finely made novel.

The novel’s subject is unusual and the book is deeply interesting for that reason alone.  It is a sad love story set just behind friendly lines during the 1864 Dano-Prussian War, a war that the Danes unfortunately lost badly, although the novel ends before the war does so the characters do not know that.  The front line parks itself just a short distance from the home of the young, large, generous, insufficiently appreciated and loved heroine, Tina.  Ordinary life is suddenly disrupted by bivouacking soldiers, mud, the incessant noise of artillery fire, and, soon enough, the wounded and the dead.

“And it’s for ever getting worse,” she said, shaking her head.

It did get worse.  Like the sound of rising waters at a spring tide, the thunder of the guns rolled over the house.

A new stream of refugees began knocking at their doors, and the Baron let them all in.  He stood at the drawing-room door like an officious undertaker at a funeral, and got an entrance ticket out of everyone in the form of an account of the horrors of the bombardment.  (111)

The emotional intensity and temporarily modified moral standards also lead to sex.  There is some amusing stuff with some of the servants who are more adaptable to the change (“’We’ve got to give the boys some fun this evening’”) in contrast with poor Tina.  She may not be everyone’s ideal of a Strong Female Character, since she is weak in some interesting and ultimately tragic ways.  Walter Allen notes a strong resemblance to Thomas Hardy, which I also felt, “but Hardy never had to show us the Valley of the Great Dairies under the onslaught of war.”  Are you like me, are you thinking “I want to read that variant of Tess of the d’Urbervilles,” maybe more than I want to read the real thing.

A novel about a young woman coping with the nearby war would have been interesting by itself, but the love affair leads to some artful emotional effects, and it certainly keeps the stakes high for Tina.

The style of the book is as original as the subject.  That sounds like a topic for tomorrow.

Another opening of another Danish novel - Herman Bang won't tell me anything

All right, I was wrong, I am not going to write about the characters in Pelle the Conqueror quite yet.  I want to write about the opening of another Danish novel.  Compare and contrast, as they say.

The novel is Herman Bang’s 1889 Tina.  I have just read the long first chapter, and have little idea about what the novel is about except for two things, 1) it is “about” or at least set during the 1864 Dano-Prussian War, which ought to be interesting, and 2) it does appear to be “about” the title character, who is female, a schoolmaster’s daughter heading towards old maid-dom.  The latter point is only of interest because after reading Niels Lyhne, Pelle the Conqueror, and reading about Henrik Pontoppidan’s Lucky Per through Scott Bailey’s many posts, I began to suspect that all classic Danish novels were Bildungsroman about young men.  Whatever Tina might be, is definitely not one of those.

But I just want to look at the beginning, since the beginning of Pelle the Conqueror is fresh in my mind.  Nexø begins with pure description, slowly introducing any people at all and only slowly moving to his main characters.  This is how Bang starts:

Tina,

The first word is the novel’s title.

Tina, in tears, continued to run beside the carriage, while Mrs Berg shouted her last words into the darkness and the wind.

“You’ll make up the bed then – in the Blue Room – tonight – from tonight, don’t forget.”

“Yes – yes,” answered Tina, unable to speak for tears.

“And remember me – remember me to everybody,” sobbed Mrs Berg.  The wind carried her words away.  One last time Tina ran up and tried to grasp her outstretched hand, but she could no longer reach it.  She stopped, and the carriage, like a great shadow, vanished into the darkness.  Soon the sound of its wheel could be heard no more.

Splash, right into the middle.  This may not be so obvious to you folks who spend your time with new-fangled novels, but for a 19th century novel this opening is radical.  Who is Tina?  Who is Mrs. Berg?  Who knows?  What relationship do they have with each other – is Tina Mrs Berg’s servant, or daughter?  Why the tears?

Perhaps this will all be cleared up in the next paragraph, but it is not.  A new character is mentioned, Herluf.  He is absent, but he has toys, so he is a child, or else a pet.  Next paragraph: Lars, probably a servant, since he is in the “servants’ hall.”  Next: Maren, also a servant.  no, I was wrong, a crofter.  Then “Sophie the housemaid.”  Finally Bang violates the purity of his system a bit.  But the narrator never stops to explain.  He has moved close to the idea of narrator as movie camera.  He can read thoughts, so a telepathic movie camera.  I see what it sees and hear what it hears and have to piece the rest together as information gradually, naturally reveals itself.

No, not a camera, since it sees so selectively.  What does Tina look like, for example?  Madame Bovary begins with a description of Charles Bovary, his height and hair and boots and hat.  Tina refuses to simply tell me that, or anything.  I really have to pay attention and piece it all together as I go along.

How fun.  Bang is writing, in this sense, like William Faulkner, or like Eudora Welty in Delta Wedding (1946), which I think of a particularly artful examples of this kind of technique with its huge extended family and complicated history, although as I look at it I see that the first paragraph is close to what is now called an “infodump.”  Laura is nine years old, she is going to her cousin’s wedding, her mother is dead, etc.  In a few pages Laura will be plopped into the middle of her extended family where she and I are both disoriented by all of the uncles and aunts and cousins, although I will be able to piece the family tree together eventually if I pay attention.

Maybe I should dump everything else for Delta Wedding.  No, no, Bang and Pelle are good, too.

Paul Christophersen is Bang’s translator.