Style in Pontoppidan - comparing translations, complaining about clichés, constructing the comic novel it almost is

I thought Henrik Pontoppidan, in Lykke-Per, was an excellent writer in passages.  Other times, he was not so good: flat and clichéd.

First, though, what is going on in the translations – what a luxury, to have two translations!  In this scene, the sister of the heroine, rich cutie Nanny, is flirting, by means of radishes, with her no-good journalist boyfriend.

Here’s Paul Larkin, the translator I read:

“She told us that you were, ahm, entertaining; so we asked her to show us into this room.  My my Dyrhing, you do have a better class of radish.”

Nanny judiciously picked out a new victim from the plate, dipped it into the salt bowl, and snapped her shining white teeth into it.  (Ch. 8, p. 199)

The whole scene approaches camp.  This is Naomi Lebowitz:

“She told us there was someone with you and showed us in here.  These are really good radishes!”  She selected a new one carefully from the plate, dipped it in the saltcellar, and sank her shining white teeth into it.  (p. 162)

Those are different.  “Snapped” versus “sank” perfectly represents the two translations, every passage I checked.  The translators are working on different editions of the novel, how different I do not know, but my guess is that Larkin thought Lebowitz was too flat, too toneless, so he fixed that, did he ever.

So, discussing the style of Lykke-Per, I have to keep in mind that I am reading the punchy, perhaps even, “ahm,” creative, translation.

Positive Pontoppidan: the parallels in the arc structure; the fairy tale and especially the troll motifs.  Thickly descriptive introductions, to places and people.  Pontoppidan does not describe minor characters as part of scenes, but rather provides an entire “portrait” upon introduction.  The gradual scenic method is more artful, but many of the portraits are outstanding, full of little insightful details.  Places get similar treatment.  Per’s college landlords and their home, at the beginning of Chapter 2, is a descendant of Balzac’s boarding house passage that opens Père Goriot.  The landlords have a series of annual parties, including parties for the canary, commemorating the loss of the husband’s big toe (!), and for the wife’s annual blood-letting, which “was always initiated with a substantial lunch with a chocolate theme.”

And that’s the last we ever hear of that.

The beginning of Chapter 19, a description of a Jutland landscape begins with geology and turns into social history, pushing pirates, Vikings, eel-catchers, “haughty country squires” on “flatulent shire horses,” and Per’s Lutheran minister ancestors across the scenery, finishing with a brand-new character who will at least feature in the novel.

Negative: The clichés really wore me out in places.  Received ideas, received imagery.  “Her heart was in her mouth,” that kind of thing.  But I don’t want to catalogue them.  It is too boring.  Here is a more original image:

Fully lit by the setting sun, the old windmill stood by the ruins of the city ramparts at the end of the square.  As if welcoming the sun’s demise with open arms.  (Ch. 18)

My favorite troll description:

… the mountain trolls who could not face the sun without sneezing, the shadow beings that only really came alive as twilight descended and they could sit on their little hillock playing their fiddle or dainty little glockenspiel.  (Ch. 20)

Were you expecting the troll to have a glockenspiel?  Oh you were.  Fine.  Were you expecting the glockenspiel to be dainty?

Pontoppidan often seemed to be on the edge on turning Lykke-Per into a black comic novel.  It never happens.  He means it, whatever “it” is.  Too bad.

Thanks to Dorian Stuber and everyone else reading along.  I have to get the book back to the library, so I am way ahead of most readalongists, who are all, I believe reading Lebowitz.  Please fill me in on the Nietzsche-Kierkegaard synthesis, which I did not really understand.  Frederic Jameson’s 2011 piece on Lykke-Per is the best thing I have read on the novel, for what that is worth.  Good luck.

happiness lay in, what else, a renunciation of this world - trying to take the ideas seriously in Lucky Per

I think or fear that the psychology of Lykke-Per is driven by philosophy, and not vice versa, meaning that Henrik Pontoppidan expects you, the reader, to work through Lucky Per’s successive stages of development at a pretty abstract, philosophical level, just like Per does.  Maybe just like Pontoppidan does.

But the more he read, the more confused he became.  Throughout his steadfast search for the touchstone of that final and incontrovertible phrase or word that for all time would banish every superstitious belief in the existence of ‘the other side,’ he staggered around as if in some mental game of blind man’s bluff played in the dark of his own confusion…  With the implicit faith in books, which every autodidact develops…  (Ch. 13)

I had better stop there.  Too painful for this autodidact to continue.  I hope that Pontoppidan means that “faith in books” stuff ironically.  This whole passage has to be ironic, right?  But this is where the most Nietzschean section of the book launches, so I am not sure.

Pontoppidan scholar Flemming Behrendt, in the Afterword of the Paul Larkin translation, writes that Pontoppidan had a crisis midway through Lykke-Per, which is why there is no publication during 1900.  He spent the time reading Friedrich Nietzsche, which cured his writer’s block, not only allowing him to continue the novel but inspiring him to begin rewriting earlier parts to include more Nietzsche.

Thus the amazing climax of Chapter 13, in which Per shoots, with a revolver, a Tyrolean statue of Jesus, a truly peak moment of Zarathustranism, is not in the early 1899 version of the chapter but was added later.  Per is hiking with his Jewish girlfriend Jakobe, who herself is awfully Zarathustran.  It is at times like reading an Ayn Rand novel, with Per’s ludicrous harbor plans in place of Roark’s awful buildings.  Are the blasphemers punished, by the way?

And on they went, slowly downwards, embracing the glorious sunshine that bathed the valley as they went, overwhelmed by the heady scents of spring.  (end of Ch. 13)

Since this is just the middle of the novel, there is a lot of development still to come, including a temporary return to Lutheranism, albeit a sunnier version that that of his childhood, and a passage through what I think is a set of ideas drawn from Kierkegaard.  Per succumbs to the Sickness Unto Death, and has what people will later call an existential crisis – “[n]ow that he fully appreciated and understood his aloofness and dread of life” (Ch. 26), that sort of thing.

What I think is going on at the end of the novel is, over the course of several chapters, a synthesis of ideas.  Christianity, the slave religion, is rejected in all forms, and Nietzsche’s excesses are rescued by Kierkegaard (or is it the other way?).  The ultimate answer turns out to be the usual one of the German Bildungsroman:

Right down through the history of mankind the same command: the denial of the self, the expunging of the I – because happiness lay in a renunciation of this world.  (Ch. 25)

“Renunciation,” that’s Goethe’s word, his answer, although in practice it does not look like Per’s.  One must “either pledge oneself to the cross or the champagne glass,” Per fears, but he still has several chapters to find another way.

Maybe some or all of this is meant ironically.  Jakobe, the heroine, takes her Nietzschean ideas down a different path, but of course she does not have to struggle out from under the weight of Danish Lutheranism.  Maybe she is a step or two ahead of Per.

Maybe Pontoppidan means every word.  Maybe I have trouble taking Novels of Ideas seriously.  Tomorrow, let’s at least glance at Pontoppidan’s art.  Aesthetics, Per tries and rejects that early in the novel.

He had never felt so depressingly empty - Lykke-Per's psychology

He had never felt so depressingly empty, never more abandoned by all the forces for good in the world, than right at that very moment.  (Ch. 23, last line)

Poor Per.  Getting near the end of the book.  What has he done?  He has essentially surrendered to his older brother, for money, and to a cute blonde pastor’s daughter, for love, and to Christianity, for solace.  Look at the result.

Per is the misfit son of a Lutheran pastor.  Lykke-Per can be read as Per’s lifelong struggle with his background, his religion, and especially his father.  Much of the philosophical content of the novel can be taken psychologically, thank goodness.  Tomorrow I will try to take the philosophy seriously on its own terms – I mean, not seriously seriously – but it can all be shifted into psychology pretty easily.  It’s all part of the fight against the father.

The death of Per’s father in Chapter 12 – precisely paralleled by the death of his mother in Chapter 18, exactly opposite on the parabola – sets off a crisis of meaning.  No, it changes the direction of Per’s ongoing crisis.  He travels to the mountains, so out of Denmark, obviously, he reads a lot of philosophy – “[b]ut the more he read the more confused he became” (Ch. 13) – he shoots Jesus Christ with his revolver.  A statue.  “[S]hards and splinters of wood were thrown up in the air from one side of the cross.”  There  may be some kind of symbolic meaning there.

Going back a step, the previous chapter, with the death, may be my favorite in the novel.  It is more concrete and in-the-moment, the kind of thing I always praise.  The passages in Per’s head are more about memories than moods:

There he was releasing his giant dragon-kite ‘Hero’ into the sky, and then attaching the cord to a toy wagon loaded with stones – his shriek of delight when Hero began to pull it down the meadow with the ease of a god at play.  (Ch. 12)

Per spends a good part of the novel joining alternative “families.”  There are his Copenhagen landlords in Chapter 2, and then the wealthy Salomons, Jewish but in part attractive because they appear to have no religion whatsoever and are truly modern Danes free from all of the burdens of Danishness (see Ch. 16 for an explicit statement of this), and so on, until Per renounces them all.

I wonder about Jakobe, the novel’s heroine, the Salomon daughter who becomes engaged to Per.  She has a struggle, too, which I find a little harder to define.  The great event of her life before Per was an encounter with a group of refugees, something like an encounter with real Judaism.  She is a bit of a Goth, always described as “dark,” and saying or writing wild things like:

Perhaps there was no escaping the need for a terrible rending asunder of the criminal and hypocritical society in which they lived, a vengeful apocalypse that would purge the world in fire and blood.  (Ch. 8)

Her search for purpose, her struggle and escape from her family, is something like a move from ideas to works, while Per moves towards abstraction.  It is like a Catholic novel.  Saint Per goes into a hermitage, while Sister Jakobe helps the poor.  But strip out anything Catholic, or for that matter Lutheran or Jewish.  The ideas behind the characters are philosophical.  There is no escape from it.  Oh well.

Lykke-Per as a Danish novel, or how the Danes found hygge

My supplemental reading for Pontoppidan’s The Fortunate Man was Michael Booth’s The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia (2014), an amusing and sociologically sharp look at Scandinavian cultures.  Booth, a magazine writer, is married to a Dane and lives in Denmark, and the book was inspired by the routine appearances of Denmark at or near the top of various surveys of happiness.  “What,” he thought, “these people! Happy!”  I am paraphrasing; see p. 1.  “’Well, they are doing an awfully good job of hiding it.’”

Booth hits a range of topics central to, or at least brushed against, in Lucky Per.  It was surprising to read about the Danes’ love for and constant display of their flag, the Dannebrog, which other Scandinavians find a little weird, and then come across this in Pontoppidan:

… [Per] was momentarily overcome with an actual feeling of bourgeois contentment.  So much so that when he saw the red and white of the Danish flag catching what little wind there was above one of the villa gardens, he was quite moved.

‘My God, Jakobe – our good Dannebrog!’ he cried.  (Ch. 16)

The flag stuff is in Chapter 12 of Booth, a chapter titled and about hygge, which at its best means something like “relaxed coziness.”  At some point I realized that one of restless Per’s problems was that he lacked hygge.  In Chapter 25, Pontoppidan directly told me that I was right.

That basic lack of either a need, or desire, in his character to create his own comfortable space around himself… was once again starkly exhibited here.

Den Mangel paa Evne til at skabe Hygge om sig, der var ham egen… mærkedes ogsaa her.

Here we see, by the way, translator Paul Larkin’s habit of refusing to pick a single word but rather including several (“need, or desire” for “Evne”), to catch the nuances, I guess.  Kinda wordy.

So one thing that Lykke-Per is for Danes is a part of the historical argument about how they got from there to here.  How they changed from grim, pious Lutherans to happy, atheist Lutherans.  How they found their hygge.

Per’s father is a Lutheran minister of the grimmest type.  Early in the novel, Per thinks of his family, and most Danes, as “a grotesque kingdom of humpbacked underground trolls who shunned the bright light of life” and Denmark as “an upside down land where small things were deemed to be big and the crooked declared straight.”  (Ch. 6)  Later, he realizes that he, too, is a troll.  Scott Bailey has a post describing a number of the novel’s trolls.  But even if Per is a troll, he is different.  This is Booth again:

As The Economist put it in their Nordic special edition, Scandinavia is a great place to be born… but only if you are average.  If you are averagely talented, have average ambitions, average dreams, then you’ll do just fine, but if you are extraordinary, if you have big dreams, great visions, or are just a bit different, you will be crushed, if you do not emigrate first.  (Ch. 14, pp. 111-2, ellipses in original)

That’s our hero Per, who literally wants to dig up and remake Denmark.  Maybe he is crushed; maybe not.

One way to read the novel is as a book about Denmark, about Danishness.  Who cares, the non-Dane might ask.  A good question.  Tomorrow I will try an approach that is less specifically Danish.

Pontoppidan's Lykke-Per - the views people published in books were rarely meant to frighten or provoke real thought

The Happiest People in the World, the Danes, had a terrible idea in 2004.  They assembled committees and created an official Danish Culture Canon, with each art represented by, for some mystical reason, exactly twelve works.  One of the canonical books is Henrik Pontoppidan’s Lykke-Per (1898-1904), a major novel by a Nobel Prize-winner that for some reason never made it into English until 2010, and was again translated in 2018, so now we have two of them.  Odd.  Bille August made a film version, that’s the reason for the duplication.

I read the British-English – or Irish-English – version titled A Fortunate Man, translated by Paul Larkin, while the American-English title is Lucky Per.  Both titles hide an ambiguity.  In Danish as in German, “lucky” can also mean “happy.”  Our hero Per is certainly lucky sometimes, but is he happy?  That’s the 700-page question.

Unluckily for me, Lykke-Per is a Novel of Ideas, and I am bad with those.  It is a Bildungsroman in which the hero works through a series of competing philosophies or at least stances towards life.  My impression is that Pontoppidan would like readers to engage seriously and thoughtfully with these competing ideas, reaching a synthesis, a conclusion.

Books could be a great diversion.  But the views people published in books were rarely meant to frighten or provoke real thought.  (Ch. 25)

But not this one.  Luckily for me, Lykke-Per is a Novel of Ideas, presenting a useful and necessary challenge to my usual standards.

The ethos of the novel is resolutely atheist and anti-Christian in the Nietzschean sense.  The novel is structured like a parabola, with some parallel scenes on each side of the arc, and a peak, or a pit, depending on which way you think the parabola is going, which includes a hilarious culminating moment of extreme Zarathustrianness and a sojourn in Rome.  Lykke-Per is a real descendant of Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1796), so it is will be no surprise to readers of Wuthering Expectations that the center of the novel is in Rome.  Experienced readers of Goethe et. al. will also guess where the story ends up.

Per’s story, the hero’s story, that is.  Many others are right now busily reading Lucky Per because Dorian Stuber suggested a readalong.  He was intrigued by the novel’s depiction of Jewish life in Copenhagen, and particularly the Jewish heroine, Jakobe.  She is an unusual creation, perhaps even something new in fiction, and her story goes in some directions that I don’t remember seeing in earlier fiction.  Per’s story has some resemblance to, oh, the city-conquering Rastignac in Père Goriot or the willful Julien Sorel in Red and Black, as well as the protagonists of earlier Bildungsroman like Gottfried Keller’s Green Henry.  But Jakobe’s story is something else, something not found in Daniel Deronda or Sholem Aleichem.

Lykke-Per was originally published in eight volumes from 1898 to 1904.  It is really as much a roman fleuve as a Bildungsroman.  I have dropped in some of the original covers, borrowed from a superb Danish Pontoppidan site, which has the searchable texts we will all need as we work on the novel together.  We live in an age of miracles.  One of the covers, the one that could almost show Rastignac at the end of Père Goriot, is from a 1959 edition.  The one with the moon is from the 1903 seventh volume, Lykke-Per, his Journey to America.  Per never goes to America!  That title is ironic.

For the rest of the week, I guess I will get to work on this novel.