Tuesday, March 25, 2014

So enormously mild were his judgments - Jens Peter Jaobsen's Niels Lyhne

The back cover of the paperback translation of Jens Peter Jacobsen’s novel Niels Lyhne (1880) has testimonials from Rainer Maria Rilke, Sigmund Freud, Thomas Mann, Herman Hesse, and Henrik Ibsen.  Jacobsen is Danish, while four of those five fellows are German and Austrian.  Jacobsen’s novel is itself quite Germanic, another descendant of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister.  The path of influence or transmission or simply translating and publishing, maybe that is all I mean, went from Scandinavian to German and back.  Thus books that are obscure in English are well known in German.  What percentage of the English-language readers of Niels Lyhne have come to it because Rilke, in the Letters to a Young Poet, writes about it so enthusiastically?  Very close to one hundred, is my guess.

Lord, what nonsense Rilke writes.  “[T]he more often you read it, the more everything seems to be contained within it, from life’s most imperceptible fragrances to the intense, full taste of its heaviest fruits.”  Who can argue otherwise?

Niels Lyhne has just recently been described accurately by litlove when she invokes two of the blurbers:

Hesse, like Rilke, is one of those writers who seems to write about the things I am properly interested in. He writes about how to live, when you do not feel like you fit with the ‘normal’ run of humanity, when you are miserable in ways others say you should not be, or when you simply want to live a good life and do not know how that can be achieved. His characters are always searching for a cure for living, and the answers they come up with – art, love, transcendent wisdom, acceptance with humour – feel like they might just work.

Jacobsen’s novel is one of those, right in that tradition.  Unfortunately for me, these are exactly the things I am not so interested in, because I do not really trust fiction to do them well, so I continually felt like I was reading the novel badly.  There is, after all, really only one cure for living, and by the end of the novel the title character is healed (by a Prussian bullet).

And then finally he died the death – the difficult death. (205)

This is from the 1990 Tiina Nunnally translation.  Whatever whining I might do about the novel, I always appreciated Nunnally’s struggle with it. 

The novel is an episodic parents-to-deathbed story about a sensitive Danish Romantic who flounders about with his vocation (can he be a poet?) and with women.  Sometimes the novel is comic, sometimes not so much; sometimes ironic, all too often sincere; sometimes sharply written, sometimes disastrously gooey. 

He had never known the intensity and vastness of this kind of feeling before [Niels is having an affair with a married woman], and there were moments when he felt himself a titan, much more than a human being; he sensed such an inexhaustibility within him, such a wingspan of tenderness swelled from his heart, so wide was his vision, so enormously mild were his judgments.  (166)

The whole page is like that.  “They were currents in the great ocean of love, single reflections of its full light, splinters of love, just as meteors that race through the air are splinters of a planet, because that’s what love was” etc. and so on.  Then two pages later begins one of the sharpest, most precise scenes in the book.  It has been a while since I read a book with such wild swings in rhetorical mode, and in quality.

But perhaps the result is more aesthetically coherent than I realize.  I will write about the book for another day or two, mostly the good parts, I hope.

11 comments:

  1. You're right: you can draw a line from this book to (or through, maybe) Lucky Per, which was also praised by Mann and other German writers. Per lacks the wingspans of tenderness, but fills that gap with heaps of irony. Maybe Niels Lyhn is ironic, too?

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  2. The same line goes to Pelle the Conqueror. Is that all Danes knew how to write, Bildungsromans?

    I will try to write about the irony. The passages I quote above are not ironic in a sense that I recognize. I had trouble finding Jacobsen's distance. But other parts certainly are ironic.

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    1. I have another Pontoppidan on the way. I think it will be less like a Bildungsroman and more like Gogol. Or maybe like Tolstoy, since it's about the freeing of serfs. We'll see.

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  3. “They were currents in the great ocean of love, single reflections of its full light, splinters of love, just as meteors that race through the air are splinters of a planet, because that’s what love was," she thought wildly, madly. Suddenly, Niels enfolded her in his powerful, muscular arms and crushed his hot body against her heaving bosom.

    You mean these aren't the good parts?

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    1. He's trying hard to hit the high standards of McKittrick Ros but I'm afraid his articulate fluency is letting him down.

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    2. I now have a theory that passages like these are the character's godawful poetry, otherwise never seen, leaking into the text.

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  4. Turgenev, it's Turgenev who freed the serfs.

    All right, this has to be ironic, just open mockery by the narrator of a bunch of young artists, including poet Niels:

    "There was a stormy rejoicing in these young souls, and there was faith in the starry light of great thoughts, and there was hope just as there are seas; enthusiasm bore them on the wings of eagles, and their hearts swelled with courage a thousandfold." (63)

    The eagles and so on - bad writing or acid parody? I don't know.

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    1. That's right; Tolstoy's serfs didn't trust him enough to believe in freedom.

      It's hard to tell, 134 years later, if someone's poking fun. I'm reading Augustine right now, and he and I are laughing at different parts of his narrative.

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    2. The writer of the afterword seems to think Jacobsen is sincere. Or at least that his readers thought so - "reflecting as it clearly did the vital concerns of a generation of sensitive spirits who shared the hero's feelings of living in an age of transition" (210) etc., but as I type that out I wonder if the editor is drily skewering those readers. You can't say "generation of sensitive spirits" without a smirk, right? Dang Millenials.

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  5. This has been under my radar since I discovered Raul Brandão's Húmus was apparently based on Rilkes' Notebooks, which in turn was apparently inspired by this novel.

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  6. Miguel, the book was easily worth reading, whatever my frustrations with certain - many - passages. The good was awfully good. I will have to find out what Rilke did with it. And by then maybe someone will translate Brandão' for me.

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