All my thoughts and dreams about Nature are most probably based on impressions drawn from poetry and art - Doctor Glas, beauty, and purity

I ended yesterday with a quotation in which Doctor Glas describes his disgust with the sexual act, wishing rather that copulation were so pure and elegant that it could be performed in church (Glas is not a church-goer), “[o]r in a temple of roses, in the eye of the sun, to the chanting of choirs and a dance of wedding guests.”  I know this is an important passage because it contains two of the major structural themes of the novel, roses and the sun.  Söderberg does not manage to work in his butterflies, another key theme, but that could be overdoing it.

The novel is about an obsessed man trying to justify an act of murder.  The content of Doctor Glas’s diary is mostly his resentments, his theories, and how cyanide pills work, ugly stuff, yet the diary is also full of attempts to describe beauty.  He calls a former patient and her husband “scum” for “scolding a waiter,” but follows this with a landscape description as if from a genre painting.  “The canal mirrored the greenery on its banks and the blue of the sky,” “bicyclists spun over the bridge,” and so on “[w]hile over my table fluttered two yellow butterflies” (57).

It is useful to remember that Glas is not describing the scene as he sees it, but rather as he remembers or imagines it hours later, late at night, sitting at his writing desk.  The day’s entry even ends with an explicit reminder of the fact, that he is “writing this by a flickering candle” (60).  What did he really experience; why the curious appearance of the butterflies?  “All my thoughts and dreams about Nature are most probably based on impressions drawn from poetry and art” (58).

The butterflies and their cousins recur.  A “little fragile grey night-moth” (97) is killed by the flame of his lamp on the night Glas concludes that he might – not will, but might – murder his hated rival Gregorius.  In the earlier passage, Glas specifies that he is writing by candlelight because “I detest touching oil-lamps,” while in the later scene, Glas touches the oil-lamp “automatically, almost without being aware of it”, a sign of his moral and mental degradation.

The book is quite rich with connective imagery like this, most of it again being related to the sun and clouds and weather, an elaborate expression of the pathetic fallacy where nothing Glas actually describes can really be trusted because what he is actually describing is his own state of mind, at least until this storm near the end of the novel:

The clouds took on the shapes of dirty red devils blowing horns and whistling and screeching in wild pursuit as they whipped the rags off each other’s bodies in all sorts of whoredom.  And as I sat there I suddenly burst out laughing: I laughed at the storm...  I was thinking of myself and my affairs; therefore I fancied the storm did the same.  (126)

A reminder of the scene with the moth appears on the next page.  Also some roses.  Also a peculiar passage about his mother, the part of the novel that most puzzles me.  But at this point Glas has perhaps freed himself from his need to search for correspondences  between himself and the external world.  He has made the world more pure, more beautiful.  He has prepared himself for his own death.

Whatever I was expecting based on all the reviews of Doctor Glas that I had read, it was not an argument about the nature and possibility of beauty.  I was not expecting so much about aesthetics.

An action that could be carried out in church, or in a temple of roses - Hjalmar Söderberg’s Doctor Glas

I’ve never known such a summer.  A sultry heat-wave since mid-May.  All day a thick cloud of dust hangs unmoving over streets and market-places.  (13)

More heat and dust, this time from Hjalmar Söderberg’s Doctor Glas (1905), from Stockholm during the summer.  I invite readers from most of the rest of the world to use their favorite search engine to see for themselves  what a Stockholm summer heat-wave looks like.  Quite pleasant.  Depends on what you’re used to.

More to the point, the narrator of Doctor Glas is a sociopath, not that I could tell from that opening.  Hints of Glas’s mental illness only begin to appear in the second paragraph, when “the heat-wave lifts and drifting slowly off turns to a long veil of red,” and the doctor runs into Reverend Gregorius, who he so loathes that he imagines “thumping him over the head with his stick” as Schopenhauer once did to an enemy.  “Well, I’m not Schopenhauer.”

Don’t sell yourself short, doctor.  The great question for much of the rest of the short novel, entirely told in the form of Glas’s increasingly crazed diary entries, is to what extent he is Schopenhauer, or Nietzsche, or Raskolnikov – exactly what the nature of his mental illness is and to what extreme of behavior it might take him.

The mention of Raskolnikov is a bit deceptive, which is why the unreliable narrator specifically mentions him (“I’ve read Raskolnikov, I’ve read Thérèse Raquin,” 100), as a trick, since, as you just astutely observed, one cannot read Raskolnikov but rather Crime and Punishment or Dostoevsky.  Glas is actually more attuned to Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground.  Imagine an Underground Man who has read Freud, Nietzsche, and Dostoevsky.  Especially Freud.

The humor in the mention of Zola’s noir heroine is that in Thérèse Raquin, Thérèse and her boyfriend bump off her idiot husband in order to freely enjoy his money and bed only to be prevented from ever having sex by the husband’s squishy, disgusting ghost, while Doctor Glas is already neurotically disgusted by and presumably incapable of any sexual activity because of some unspoken trauma in his childhood.  The direct evidence suggests his father is to blame; some curious repressed clues make me wonder about his mother.

Why must the life of our species be preserved and our longing stilled by means of an organ we use several times a day as a drain for impurities; why couldn’t it be done by means of some act composed of dignity and beauty, as well as of the highest voluptuousness?  An action that could be carried out in church, before the eyes of all, just as well as in darkness and solitude?  Or in a temple of roses, in the eye of the sun, to the chanting of choirs and a dance of wedding guests?  (21)

The character writing this is, remember, a physician.  He is disgusted by sex, by pregnancy, by childbirth (“that terrible symphony of screams and filth and blood”).  Freud is useful here because the author, Sjöderberg, has read Freud and is pouring unadulterated Freud into his novel.  Thus the Oedipal plot, where the Doctor considers murdering the ogreish father-figure Reverend Gregorius in order to free his beautiful wife from his disgusting sexual attention.  Glas is of course in love with the wife, who is a highly sexualized mother-figure.

One more post on Doctor Glas, since I’ve set up so many nice details here.

I wonder how many blog posts I have read about this novel.  Just recent ones that I remembered: Novel Readings, Pechorin’s Journal, Beauty Is a Sleeping Cat, all with good points and good quotations.

The translator is Paul Britten Austin.  Page numbers refer to the 2002 Anchor Books paperback.

Denmark, Sweden, Norway - more Scandinavian books - I can't read all this

More Scandinavian literature, this time from Denmark, Norway, and Sweden.  I won’t read it all, I am no kind of expert, I am stuck with English, etc.  But it is easy to get me excited about literature, so suggestions are most welcome.  And if anything looks appealing, perhaps we can read it together.

Denmark

At the forefront are Hans Christian Andersen and Søren Kierkegaard.  The former I read in some quantity just before I started Wuthering Expectations, which was a while ago, I admit, but close enough that I doubt I will revisit him now.  The latter is, I fear, a philosopher, and thus spinach.  In real life, I like spinach, so that is just a metaphor.

More to the point are two short books by Jens Peter Jacobsen, the 1880 novel Niels Lyhne and the 1882 collection Mogens and Other Stories.  Jacobsen has had a strange career in English, kept alive by the glowing testimony of Rainer Maria Rilke in Letters to a Young Poet, where Rilke seems to rank Jacobsen with the Bible.  I should see for myself.

Another novel, Pelle the Conqueror (1910) by Martin Andersen Nexø, I have meant to read for twenty-five years since I saw the magnificent 1987 Bille August film adaptation.  The novel will unfortunately not feature Max von Sydow, but it likely has other virtues.  It is long – the film only covered a fraction of the book – and grim.  I have no idea how it is written.

Isak Dinesen’s work is from the 1930s and later, but so many of her stories are set in Denmark’s past that she would fit well with the older writers.   I am thinking of Seven Gothic Tales (1934) and Winter’s Tales (1942) in particular.

By chance, unconnected to this project, I began reading the contemporary conceptual poet Inger Christensen, and I would like to continue my study of her work.  And I mean study – anyone want to help me work on her cosmic long 1969 poem it?  It (it) features elaborate mathematical patterns – tempting, yes?

Sweden

Even poking around, I still know nothing about Swedish literature.  August Strindberg obviously tops the list, and I hope to read a number of his plays, ranging from the 1888 Miss Julie to the strange 1907 Ghost Sonata.  But there are also novels, stories, essays, some freshly translated.  Please, I beg you, recommendations, guidance.

The Queen’s Diadem (1834) by Carl Jonas Love Almqvist is a novel I encountered a year ago in this post by seraillon.  It is either deeply original, or a knockoff of E. T. A. Hoffmann, or something in between.  The Hoffmann connection by itself would give me something to write about.

Hjalmar Söderberg is another novelist I met through book blogs.  I have read a number of convincing posts about his short, intense 1905 novel Doctor Glas.  If I like it, there are a couple of other Söderberg books in English.

Norway

Henrik Ibsen, of course.  I have read six Ibsen plays, I realize, yet I still feel at sea.  I want to read or re-read a good chunk of them, although I will likely follow conventional opinion and ignore his early phase.  Critics are always dividing Ibsen’s work into phases.  Expect lots of Ibsen.

Knut Hamsun had a long, complicated career, but I know him from his early novels Hunger (1890) and Pan (1894).  Talk about intense.  I would like to revisit those and also read another from the same run, Mysteries (1892).  Then – then I don’t know.  Hunger would likely make my Top 50 Novels of the 19th Century list, if I were to make such a thing.

Off the track – far, far off – is Farthest North (1897) by Fridtjof Nansen, a favorite of min kone, the account of his insane attempt to reach the North Pole by freezing his ship in the winter ice.  Eventually, he just decided to walk.  Utterly nuts.  Sounds wonderful.

Now, some trouble.  Henrik Pontoppidan, Karl Gjellerup, Selma Lagerlöf, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Erik Axel Karlfeldt, Verner von Heidenstam, Frans Eemil Sillanpää – the early Scandinavian Nobelists, the ones who, unlike Hamsun or Sigrid Undset lost their place in English, or never had one.  I gaze upon these names in ignorant awe.

I have often thought that it would be a great book blog project to sort through these and other old prize winners.  I do not believe it is my project.  Yet already comments in the previous post have me warily eying a long, recently translated Pontoppidan novel, the 1904 Lucky Per, which sounds either like a standard attempt to move Naturalism into Danish, or else something much stranger.  Hmm hmm hmm.

Please feel free to correct my errors and recommend more books.