SOURCE: Möller, Hans Henrik. “Peter Høeg or the Sense of Writing.” Scandinavian Studies 69, no. 1 (winter 1997): 29–51.

The word “Pastiche” is derived from the Italian “pasticcio,” meaning “pie” made originally of the left-overs from the day before. In a culinary as well as a literary context, pastiche is a radical illustration of the precept that there is nothing new under the sun. Pastiche is the postmodern reflection of lost aspirations for originality—the vanishing savor of what was served for dinner last night. Pastiche and copy have become emblems of a truth no longer visible which they have replaced. They tell the story of this truth, but only its absence.

Pastiche binds Peter Høeg's writing to the literary past: his books and stories are replete with traces of Karen Blixen, Joseph Conrad, and other great and well known authors. It links his growing oeuvre to postmodern écriture: in the absence of major tales, fragments of truth situated in the microcosmic ruins of the fallen empire of modernity are the only hope.¹ Pastiche is, moreover, an exploration of time and the act of storytelling, of refinding and renewal. The first is linear, ongoing, and finite with death and desire as its final and formal points of orientation.² The second is stationary and characterized by the attempt to hold back time, to turn it into a space of signification and continuing desire (for desire can only exist as long as it is not fulfilled).³ The third dimension, however, is circular: at one and the same time, it is the unification of the previous two and yet something altogether new. This dimension of time constitutes the locus for reading and experiencing as well as for writing: the reader can go forward, go back, linger, or rush over it but, can never leave it.

Ever since his sensational debut in 1988, critics have—almost unanimously—praised Peter Høeg for his ability to create convincingly new and engaging fictional reality which is nonetheless a continuation of an older tradition of storytelling minimal in its outline and characterization but expansive in its commitment to tales for their own sake and their link to history. Peter Høeg has become a best-selling author to such a degree that glowing appraisals of his books are no longer needed in advertising. The cover of his most recent volume, Kvinden og aben [The Woman and the Ape], is virginally free of the usual effusive praise that publishers use to promote sales. The name of the author is enough. So runs the verdict:

I minefeltet mellem karlighed og ensomhed, hvor så mange skader sker, folder Høegs forfatterskab sig ud som ét af de kunstnerisk mest strålende, eksistentielt mest vasentlige forfatterskaber i denne ende af det tyvende århundrede.

(Vinterberg, Spring 1994)

In the minefields between love and loneliness, where so much damage is done, Peter Høeg's authorship unfolds as one of the artistically most brilliant, existentially most essential authorships at this end of the twentieth century.

The entire oeuvre consists, so far, of five books: Forestilling om det tyvende århundrede, 1988 [The History of Danish Dreams], Fortœllinger om natten, 1990 [Tales of the Night], Frøken Smillas fornemmelse for sne, 1992 [Smilla's Sense of Snow],⁴De måske egnede, 1993 [Borderliners] and Kvinden og aben, 1996 [The Woman and the Ape.⁵ Peter Høeg's books have been translated into numerous languages. The story about Miss Smilla, for example, is available in thirty-three countries and is the most widely sold novel by a non-English speaking author in the United States. All the attendant publicity and hype, though, have been a challenge to the author's natural shyness. He only reluctantly gives interviews and finds it terrifying to have become a literary superstar whose address must be kept secret (Sessler). On the rare occasions that he gives an interview, he stresses the importance of having a break, of contemplating time by stepping outside of it: “Bogen er jo et langsomt fænomen, at standse op og bruge to år af sit liv på at skrive en bog, det er jo at være meget, meget langsom i forhold til samfundets øvrige hastighed” (Ninka) [“The book is a slow phenomenon, to stop and spend two years of one's life on writing a book is to be very, very slow in relation to the speed of the rest of society”]. Writing is based on pausing, meditating, and realizing the ego is the only possibility for transforming something external to and greater than itself.

This view would seem an utterly romantic attitude, if it were not for the self-consciousness with which it is formulated. Peter Høeg's themes are never simply innocent, romantic (or realist) topics which can only be seen by mere mortals by means of the author's God-like stroke of genius. On the contrary, the author is only the apostle of a truth which he himself has not mastered anymore than his readers. If romantic attitudes are to be found in his writing, they are mere attitudes—signs and gestures in a style—which have repudiated any truth other than simply telling the story.

His themes are not simply evoked for their own sake, but are rather vehicles for experiencing fiction. They could be understood as aspects of the Danish debate concerning modernity and civilization and challenging the Danish welfare system by portraying the conditions of children in orphanages and asylums. His accurate compilation of facts and details would qualify Peter Høeg for the army of realists whose agenda is to describe reality-as-it-is in order to transform it into reality-as-it-should-be. And even when fragments of this strategy are found, they are never the whole truth. Høeg's themes are only the tools, chosen more or less at random, for constructing a more purified realm of signification where the field of investigation is signification itself. What do abundance and digression mean? What is the significance of loitering as a semiotic sign, as a state of mind? Phenomena like fullness and emptiness have their own epistemological value, as Milan Kundera has shown, but in order to examine these phenomena, one must accord them a realistic, referential foundation, but this foundation must at the same time remain transparent.

Peter Høeg's writing is grounded in dialectical relationships, in tensions between permutations of outer and inner, action and digression, and description and thought. Seen as a whole, this grounding links Peter Høeg with contemporary Scandinavian authors like Kjartan Fløgstad, Lars Gustafsson, and Svend Åge Madsen as well as with digressive, China-box-like tendencies of nineteenth-century romanticism (Janson 138).⁶ And yet Peter Høeg adds something new to this double tradition: the suspense of a thriller and the depiction of time as a fiction.⁷

FORESTILLING OM DET TYVENDE åRHUNDREDE

Somewhere in Denmark, on the island of Langeland, time has been stopped by an old count. As a result of the visit of the mystic Paracelsus during the sixteenth century and his proclamation that the center of the earth might be found on the estate, the old count searched the grounds for it. During the eighteenth century, however, he was visited by the well-known Danish geographer and astronomer Ole Rømer who told him that the earth has its center everywhere. Disappointed by this fact—by the impossibility of renewing the semiotics of medieval cosmology—the count withdraws to his laboratory, leaving the supervision of the estate and its employees to his inspector who becomes the foster-father of the orphaned Carl Laurids. For almost four hundred years, the old count vigorously fights time trying to reestablish the lost epicenter and to prevent the decay of manners and of time itself. But his attempt is doomed since truth always takes the form of yet another question (20). Even though he has ordered all the clocks in the mansion stopped and has denounced time and its historical reckoning as a modern and bourgeois invention not worthy of a nobleman, his own withdrawal from the world has opened the gateway to this new and modern concept of time, the time of supervision, of management, and of calculation?

The old count finally surrenders to time having lost all hope of finding the center, the final referent of any semiotic endeavor, that would make all the referring make sense. The text itself, however, never loses its own center, its central and classical perspective; the storyteller may linger, he may go wild with digressions, but is never completely lost. The act of writing displaces the world on the edge of chaos.

And so the old count lies on his death bed as in great nineteenth-century novels.⁸ Carl Laurids has been reading the chronicles of the estate and has found the first traces of time and of the perishable in these books. The nineteenth-century death-bed scene has undergone a minor displacement, in which the act of reading finally brings an end to the life of the old count as well as to the story in which he appears:

Da Grevens øjne sløredes og begyndte at glide i, vendte Carl Laurids foliobindets sidste blad og leste om denne nytårsnat og om hvem der var tilstede og om hvad der var blevet serveret ved bordet.

(Forestilling 27)

As the Count's eyes veiled over and began to roll back, Carl Laurids turned the last page of the folio and read about this New Year's Eve and who was present and what had been served for dinner.

(History of Danish Dreams 25)

The chronicle and the storytelling itself are magical: they contain what should not be there and bestow on things past a veritable presence.

As stated in the preface, Høeg's intention in writing Forestilling om det tyvende århundrede was to portray all the fears and hopes of this century. The individual stories are the distillation of a whole century; they are not realistic or mimetic but “representative.” Although they represent to the reader certain historical events or the fact-like dynamics of Danish history—industrialization or urbanization for instance—they never do so in order simply to rearticulate a fact. Even when dealing with historical figures like Ole Rømer, the stories only make use of history in order to create their own fictional space. History and time are overcome by means of fiction; they proceed and are constantly moving on and effecting change, but they are only able to proceed within the limits of the already given. And these limits are fictional (or narratological) by nature. Time is only apprehendable in so far as it can be told; time does not exist outside its contemplation or imagination.⁹

Almost every character in the book is obsessed with time including the storyteller in “Amalie Teander.” He longs to escape from the relentless linearity of time and dreams of a chaos that would postpone any sort of ending and transform time into a space in which to dwell (56). Sometimes this chaos can be found in the almost pedantic rattling off of details, insignificant to the plot and the development of the story, but inversely significant to the writing of it, to the écriture. The single stories have their own logic, forming minor circles in that great puzzle which, perhaps, is Danish history; they are linked by a common perspective, but only loosely, like a web with no center and no spider. So even if this book could be understood as yet another attempt to rewrite one of the major European tales, the attempt lays bare the hidden self-contradiction of any tale: the rehearsal of details—the wish for an accurate enclosure of even the smallest diversity—automatically replaces any given meaning with yet another significance, a general view with digressions. And each and every digression involves fragments of new stories to be told. Houses and their interiors are emblematic of rearing children (237) and are metaphors for a state of mind or for consciousness as such; they portray people related to one another, thus, in turn establishing an intratextuality among the stories, perhaps even the draft of a major tale to come.¹⁰ But even so, every single one of the stories fails to achieve the rounding out of the classical novel or short story. Their endings are “open” as described by Umberto Eco as the trademark of (post)modern écriture. They do not possess their own finality and do not encompass their own meaningfulness. The stories simply fade out demonstrating the futility of the major tale and transforming their project, the description of the Danish history, into a never-ending chain of sentences.

The stories follow their own paths; time is the ultimate condition to which they must submit and is at one and the same time the precondition of their hopes and desires and the borderline of their being present. The revivalism of the beginning of the century is the theme of “Anna Bank.” Close to the estate of the old count, a priest succeeds in convincing the sinners of his village that the end of time is near. Holiness influences and takes over even everyday conversation. The priest himself believes his daughter to be the mother who will give birth to the new Messiah. Although she performs several miracles—she is able to walk across the waters, for one thing—she remains generally unaware of her paternally ordained vocation and almost reluctant to fulfill it. When she finally becomes pregnant—with the assistance of a no-good actor—and has her child, it turns out to be a girl. “—Vor Frelser er en pige, sagde han” (Forestilling 77) [“‘Our Savior is a girl,’ he said” (The History of Danish Dreams 89)]. Anna disappears from the story together with her child leaving the priest behind disappointed and bewildered. There must have been a mistake somewhere, but where?

The story concludes in an open ending avoiding any hint of self explanation. Time is its subject, but time is not just a linear dimension and a metaphor for desire and death (or for vanishing, disappearing) but is ultimately circular. In the form of a fiction and in the storyteller's own obsession with language, time is turned into a space, orgiastic and ecstatic in its digressions and in its syntax. Time is defeated by the means of time itself by postponing any sort of closure and enclosing infinity as yet another story to be told:

Imens, i teatret, markede hun bølgedrengens narhed og hans duft af nybagt brød og hun så op i det blå klade som blev sanket over dem som en stjernehimmel, og Thorvald Bak talte i samme øjeblik om dødens forløsning, så alle i kirken hørte klokkeklangen og ligtalen ved deres egen begravelse, og da han fortalte dem om muligheden for allerede på denne side af døden at vende sig mod lives og frelsen og udbrede troen til andre, da havde Anna lart sig at lade sin krop gennemløbe de graciøse bølgebevagelser som skabte det utrolige indtryk af et oprørt hav. …

(Forestilling 76)

Meanwhile, at the theater, Anna was aware of the wave boy's closeness and how he smelled of fresh-baked bread. She looked up at the blue sheeting as it was lowered over them like a starry sky, and at that moment Thorvald Bak was speaking of the liberation of death, in such a way that everyone heard the tolling bell and the oration from his or her own funeral. By the time he was telling them how it was possible, while still on this side of death, to face up to life and salvation and carry the faith to others, Anna had learned how to let the graceful undulations ripple across her body; undulations that created the amazing impression of the stormy sea. …

(The History of Danish Dreams 87)

FORTœLLINGER OM NATTEN

The overall tendency in Høeg's earliest books is digressive and metonymic in which the act of telling creates an intimacy between the reader and the teller. If metonymy in narrative tends toward metaphor—the quest to evolve into meaningfulness and the fulfillment of desire—the resulting metaphor cannot be found outside language itself since language has become the substitute for meaning and the metaphor for the replacement for signification (Brooks 250). Narration then is a transactional phenomenon, rather than simply a laying bare of what is already waiting to be told, a seduction, but a seduction that has no goals or aims beyond itself. “When we are seduced, are we not always seduced into conforming ourselves with an image: the simulacrum of one whom we can believe can be loved?” (Chambers 15).

Ross Chambers emphasizes that the narrative situation is one of the most important features in literary seduction suggesting that the act of telling is always a dialogue trying to unify the “I” with a “you.” In Peter Høeg's Fortœllinger om natten, the setting of the stories is initially striking. Telling is a way of passing time, and what is told as well as the narrative situations are powerfully united. “Disse ni fortællinger er fælles om en dato og et motiv. De handler alle om kærligheden. Kærligheden og dens betingelser, om natten den 19. marts 1929” (Fortœllinger 6) [“These nine stories share a date and a motive. They all deal with love. Love and its conditions, on the night of March 19, 1929”]. From the preface on, the focus is on complexity and diversity. Though fragmented, these stories are permeated by the thought of simultaneity and the possibility of representing the idea of wholeness in a world and in a narrative which are both characterized by metonymic sliding.

In “Rejse ind i et mørkt hjerte” [“Travel into a Heart of Darkness”], the young Danish mathematician David Rehn has been consumed by a passionate desire for the purified science of algebra, but after having met Kurt Gödel in Vienna is disillusioned. He has left mathematics to become an engineer in the Congo where the Belgian king believes he has fulfilled the aspirations of antiquity by building a railroad halfway across the continent. But the Africans are not so pleased with the achievement: as the result of the loss of many black lives, a rebellion has broken out in opposition to Belgian colonialism generally. David Rehn took part in the construction of the railroad and is rewarded with, among other things, a ticket for the maiden journey which provides the formal reason for his being on the train. The deeper, narratological reason is that the trip creates a situation in which time is deferred and externalized in an illusion of motionlessness: it is the landscape moving, not the train. The trip also assumes symbolic significance in its movement toward the characters’ heightened comprehension: it is a journey into the mind, travel through the dark parts of western civilization, and a story about narrative and its necessary conditions.

David Rehn is not alone in his compartment. His fellow travelers are the former German General Lettow-Voerbeck, the author Joseph K., who only briefly maintains this Kafka-like anonymity. His real name is Korzeniowski, better known as Joseph Conrad and apparently resurrected from the dead for the sake of the story. While the train is on its way into the heart of darkness and darkness is literally descending upon them and figuratively represented in their compartment by a black servant, the three travelers tell their stories: Lettow-Voerbeck about colonialism and the German emancipation of the world and Joseph K. about his writing and his everlasting fascination by maps. “Som dreng så jeg på landkort, jeg var … besat af landkort, men mest af de hvide områder. Det er de steder man ikke kender, det er de mørke steder i universet, hvorfra der udgår en … dyrisk tiltrækning” (Fortœllinger 36) [“As a boy I studied maps, I was … obsessed with maps, but most of all with the white areas. These are the places you do not know, they are the dark places of the universe, from which an … animal attraction radiates”]. David Rehn tells about Gödel, unpredictability as the radically disturbing element in any calculation, and the latent threat details pose to any representation of the whole.

Then, suddenly, the black servant takes over and reveals that she is not only female but also the leader of the rebellion. The three white travelers seem doomed but manage an escape from the train just before it begins crossing a bridge that will result in a fall of 700 feet. For some unexplained reason, the black leader remains with them. The train continues its fatal course into the heart of darkness, Joseph K. and Lettow-Voerbeck vanish in the darkness, and David Rehn remains behind. The ending is left open. How does one escape a jungle of seemingly insignificant (or, perhaps, all too significant) details? How does one get back to the purified home of innocence and mathematics?

Many of the nine stories of the night elaborate this pattern of frame narratives and the motives of travel and love in the form of complex pastiches.¹¹ Often the motives are combined with a metapoetic self-reference underlining the impression of intimacy between reader and storyteller, the reader narratively represented by the listener to the tale.

In “Forsøg med kærlighedens varighed” [“Experiment with the Duration of Love”], the situation is similar to that set in Africa. Charlotte Gabel is also a scientist obsessed with the idea of purity (and, for a long time, of chastity) in experimental physics as well as her own person. But in contrast to the story in Africa, “Forsøg” strictly emphasizes love as the central theme and introduces an explicit storyteller at the very beginning. He, too, is a physicist haunted by his hopeless love for a woman.

Kun ét andet elsker jeg så højt som hende: Sproget. … Med sproget kan jeg sige: “Hertil og ikke langere går min verden”—og når denne såtning er sagt, befinder jeg mig i et landskab, hvis eksistens jeg end ikke havde anelse om. Måske skal jeg møde hende dér.”

(Fortœllinger 117)

Only one thing I love as much as her: Language. … With language I can say: “To this point and no further is the extent of my world”—and when this sentence is uttered, I find myself in a landscape of which I did not even have an intimation. Perhaps I shall meet her there.

This woman remains obscure. She is replaced by the story about Charlotte Gabel who finally finds her love, but is eventually lost in the wilderness of time and the end of narration.

Language is a magical tool, a performative containing its own referent as a part of speech. (If I say “I love you,” this love is already present, the purpose achieved, once it is pronounced.) But language is also a reinstallment of that distance which is to be overcome. Love can only be professed in the form of a would-be or as-if, that is in the form of fiction and metonymic sliding.

As a child, Charlotte Gabel had a moment of epiphanal insight: love is subject to the law of entropy, to the continued expansion of the universe, and therefore impossible to withhold. Once she has written her doctoral dissertation, “On the Notion of ‘Past’ in Quantum-Mechanical Experiments,” she leaves Copenhagen for Paris in order to reconstruct the past. With the assistance of a German psychoanalyst and of Pierre—the boy of her childhood epiphany who lost his memory after shooting himself in the head because of his hopeless love for Charlotte¹²—she sets up her laboratory in a mansion once visited by Jean-Luc Torreau, an eighteenth-century poet. Surrounded by thunder and lightning, the experiment is carried out by candle light. Charlotte meets her love incarnated in the figure of the poet Torrerau, who is brought back to life by the deepness of her feelings. The law of entropy does not apply to love.

Language is both the tool for and object of investigation. Its dual role is suggested by the ambiguity of the title: Fortœllinger om natten could be tales told at night as well as tales about the night.¹³ Language and love have in common a dialogic nature; they are defined by boundaries and the necessity of overcoming them¹⁴ yet they are only possible within these boundaries. Is there any such thing as genuine love, purified of ulterior motives, altruistic and innocent, apart from the tale about it?

FRøKEN SMILLAS FORNEMMELSE FOR SNE

His name was Isaiah like the Old Testament prophet, and he is dead; without any apparent reason, he has fallen from the roof of a building somewhere in Copenhagen. Isaiah was from Greenland, just like his adult friend Smilla Qaavigaaq Jaspersen. All he left behind was a small box containing a knife, a tape, and other items valuable to a boy and footprints in the snow strangely moving along the edge of the roof. The prophet has died, and with his death love and meaningfulness have withdrawn from Smilla's world. All that remains for her is the attempt to understand, to read the signs left behind, to solve the riddle as in a detective story.

Frøken Smilla, thus, marks a turning point in Peter Høeg's career in its use of the generic convention of the detective story, notably syntax that is more traditional and less digressive. The thriller appears frequently in postmodern écriture.¹⁵ Assuming truth is no longer attainable and can only be suggested in ironic allusions, the detective's task, just like the reader's, is to make sense of the remaining fragments, details, and clues—the left-overs. But the postmodern thriller is not a genuine thriller: it has no specific plot which can be solved, it has no simple whodunit as the final answer to the initial murder. The postmodern thriller is a pastiche. Although Smilla knows all the Inuit terms for snow, just as Sherlock Holmes knew ninety-seven scents of perfume, and her capability to act makes her an androgynous mixture of Hamlet and Modesty Blaise (Jansson 139), she never quite succeeds in finding the murderer, in combining all the threads into a single pattern and thereby providing a sense of closure. According to Bo G. Jansson, this avoidance of closure explains why so many readers and critics have been mistaken about Frøken Smillas fornemmelse for sne. They have read it as a traditional and logocentric thriller (the detective can be trusted to solve the riddle), not as a postmodern and metapoetic statement about the inaccessibility of reality (only the reader can be trusted). Whereas the classical detective story has a retrospective orientation in its attempt to reconstruct a fatal event which has already occurred, the postmodern version is oriented toward the future transforming the detective story into science fiction.¹⁶ It moves from “reality” to “virtual reality,” from the possibility of determining the cause of one single death to the impossibility of comprehending the consequences of a meteor threatening the entire world, from fiction to metafiction: “Snarere er det en metafiktiv fortælling om forholdet mellem virkeligheden og fiktionen, og om den moderne virkeligheds successive forsvinden i det nutidige postmoderne samfund” (Jansson 145) [“Rather it is a metafictional narrative about the relationship between reality and fiction and about the subsequent disappearance of modern reality in present-day postmodern society”]. In the movement from Copenhagen to Greenland—from metropolis to nature—lies the formal course of the action as well as the psychological complexity of Smilla's quest for clarification. By means of numerous flashbacks throughout the book, Smilla establishes the Arctic world of her childhood as the general frame of reference for her current detective work. Whenever in doubt, whenever in need of a comparison, Smilla recedes into this vast land without visible boundaries, the land of innumerable types of snow which nonetheless can be numbered, named, and catalogued given the requisite knowledge and language. And Smilla has the knowledge. Like so many of Høeg's other characters, she is a scientist trained and educated in glacial morphology, statistics, and mathematics (97). This prior knowledge, more or less synonymous with her own background, enables her to function as a detective. Regardless of the latent idealization of any pre-condition—be it childhood, Greenland, or originality as such—Greenland remains a phantasm powerless in itself and exposed to the invasion of man. Nature may be infinite, a virgin-like field for exploration, but cities and their buildings are profoundly overcrowded. Consequently the metropolis overshadows nature in the book; the metropolis establishes the paradigm for detection (the need to detect and to read signs only arises when reality-as-such has become an impossible task). Metropolis is synonymous with labyrinth, a state of mind and the precondition for any semiotic endeavor.

The novel consists of three major parts, “Byen” [“The City”], “Havet” [“The Ocean”], and “Isen” [“The Ice”] and takes the reader through a staggering array of clues and characters. The syntax has become less complex than in the previous books, which owed a great deal of their impact precisely to the syntactical digressions. But the research and the accuracy of details have remained the same. When Smilla is on board a ship, she is able to mention each and every instrument by name, sometimes even indicating where it was made. When she dresses, she does so with a tender attention to even the smallest aspect of her clothing: “Jeg har et par langskaftede støvler på, rød rullekravesweater, sælskindspels fra Groenlandia, og kiltnederdel fra Scotch Corner” (Frøken Smilla 78) [“I'm wearing a pair of high boots, a red turtleneck sweater, sealskin coat from Groenlandia and a skirt from Scotch Corner” (Smilla's Sense of Snow 78)].

Smilla's vigorous efforts put her on the track of two expeditions to Greenland—one in 1966 and the other in 1991—and some odd Nazi research during the Second World War. Smilla is assisted in her efforts by her Danish father, a professor of medicine, a coroner, a former bookkeeper at the “Kryolitselskabet” (The Cryolite Company), and a mechanic named Peter Føjl (perhaps an illusion to Peter Freuchen, the Danish adventurer and author of many tall tales). A succession of villains is revealed little by little: those implicated in 1966 and 1991 have been replaced by others, but the purpose of their expeditions has remained the same. They all want to find a meteor somewhere in Greenland and bring it back to civilization to exploit its hidden jewels and alien materials no matter what the consequences. And the consequences are indeed severe: several people have died during the previous attempts to liberate the meteor from its tomb of ice, but not merely by accident; the meteor produces a warmth that has brought a deadly worm to life, a worm whose attack on the entrails and the brain is always fatal.

After many mysterious attacks by the villains, Smilla manages to get onboard the ship Kronos (from χρóυος = time) hired for the third expedition. The story then moves from “Byen” to “Havet,” but while at sea, time itself seems to have stopped, and Smilla is frightened of the ocean: “En af grundene til at jeg holder af isen, er at den dækker vandet og gør det fast, sikkert, farbart, overskueligt” (Frøken Smilla 251) [“One of the reasons I'm fond of ice is that it covers the water and makes it solid, safe, negotiable, manageable” (Smilla's Sense of Snow 255–6)]. While at sea Smilla's sense of snow and of direction (of semiosis) is overwhelmed by the senselessness of what is amorphous and without purpose or predictability. This sense of the senseless structures the remaining parts of the book. Together with the villains, Smilla visits the meteor (which is left where it was found); the mechanic (who, in the meanwhile, has become her lover) is shown to have collaborated with the villains; but the answer as to who is responsible for driving Isaiah to his death, remains unsolved—and, somehow, without significance. Perhaps due to her lingering feelings for the mechanic, Smilla chooses to believe that he is not responsible, but rather the leader of the expedition, Tørk. The novel ends with Smilla chasing Tørk away from the meteor's cave out onto ice too thin to carry the weight of a man—“hikuliaq.”

Bag os er stadig stenen, dens gåde, de spørgsmål den har rejst. Og mekanikeren.

Et sted foran mig bliver den løbende skikkelse langsomt mørkere.

Fortal os, vil de komme og sige til mig. Så vi forstår og kan afslutte. De tager fejl. Det er kun det man ikke forstår, man kan afslutte. Det kommer ikke til nogen afgørelse.

(Frøken Smilla 435)

Behind us the stone is still there, with its mystery and the questions it has raised. And the mechanic.

Somewhere ahead of me the running figure slowly grows darker.

Tell us, they'll say to me. So we will understand and be able to resolve things. They'll be mistaken. It's only the things you don't understand that you can resolve. There will be no resolution.

(Smilla's Sense of Snow 453)

Desire has its object, be it clarity or love, but it can only lead to a heightened desire that is ultimately aimless and futile. If there is a meaning, it is obscure and rests in its cave in Greenland.

DE MåSKE EGNEDE

When De måske egnede [Borderliners] was published in the autumn of 1993, the greatest literary controversy in decades arose. The reviews themselves were more than positive, but in January 1994 Erik Skyum-Nielsen spoke his mind. Without beating around the bush, he declared De måske egnede the most overrated book of the season. If the previous books had their sources of inspiration in García Márquez and Blixen, this one seemed to follow the path of Enid Blyton.

I mine øjne er romanen fejllast og overvurderet. Målt med almindelig dansk standard må den kaldes velskreven, og som laseroplevelse føles den vedkommende på et elementart menneskeligt plan. Men så heller ikke mere: astetisk er varket ufuldbårent, og menneskeligt, psykologisk, stikker det til halsen i uforløste konflikter.

(Skyum-Nielsen 1994)

In my opinion the book is misread and overrated. Compared to the general Danish standard, it is well written, and as a reading experience, it is appropriate at the elementary, human level. But that is all: aesthetically the work is embryonic, and humanly, psychologically, it sticks in the throat with unresolved conflicts.

According to Skyum-Nielsen, the book offers no catharsis to the reader; stylistically it is pompous, ethically it is dubious: How can one defend the adult storyteller's open projection of his own fear and anxiety onto his child?

Skyum-Nielsen's remarks were met by a fierce opposition. Søren Vinterberg argued that Skyum-Nielsen seemed to have forgotten one of the prime rules of literary analysis, i.e. to distinguish between storyteller and author (Vinterberg 1994 and Schou). To Høeg's Norwegian translator, the book is an investigation of rationality rather than ethics.¹⁷ One of the combatants even wondered, with quiet irony, whether De måske egnede should be read as an autobiography of the storyteller and his final adoption by Peter Høeg's parents (Jensen).

The debate gradually faded away. Some talked about the Jantelov still being present in Denmark, some about the necessity of not simply obeying the already sanctioned rules. The debate as a whole seems ill advised, yet it raised some questions as how to read books. Is it possible to liberate the reading of fiction from any moral or ethical implications? Is catharsis still the primary goal of the reader, the foundation of any normative assessment, as Skyum-Nielsen would have it?

De måske egnede is the story about a school for outcast children—orphans and the socially dysfunctional alike—and about repression in the name of education, about giving everybody a second chance, and about time. The main themes are time—as an abstract and philosophical issue, as a specific means of socialization, as the field of becoming for the individual—the attitude that perpetuates the child's fragmented almost claustrophobic conception of the world, and the idea of a hidden scheme deriving from the child's still disjointed and unsynthesized understanding. Although the novel is initially divided into two separate situations (cf. Chambers)—(I) what is told in the present about (2) what took place in the past—they are gradually interwoven (3) making time the general metaphor for concern and introducing a fourth, ethical dimension to the previous three. The storyteller is reflecting upon his past as a means of coping with his present embodied in his concern for his child. Heidegger called this aspect of time “Sorge”—concern or care—and the polyvalence of this Sorge is consistent with the narratological complexity and density of the book (Heidegger 301–33).

The protagonist, Peter, who long remains anonymous has lived all his life in asylums when at the age of thirteen he arrives at Biehl's Boarding School. The description of the school and of his previous experiences constitutes a general criticism not only of the Danish educational system, but of western civilization as such (Vinterberg “Medlidenhed” 88). Darkened by the shadows of a fallen empire, the apparent underlying idea of the school parallels the Danish welfare tradition and Enlightenment thinking. Biehl has even written a book on Grundtvig, but in reality, the principles of social Darwinism govern the school. Only those who fit, only those who can adjust, may cross the borderline and re-enter society.

With the aid of the girl Katarina and two boys—one of whom is already dead at the beginning of the story—Peter manages to get a glimpse of the hidden agenda, the idea of universal adjustment by means of selection: “Den skjulte darwinisme. Planen bag tiden var udvælgelse. Tiden var et redskab der valgte ud.” (De måske egnede 41) [“The covert Darwinism. The plan behind time was selection. Time was a tool that made the selection” (Borderliners 37)]. Only by stepping outside of time, by stopping all the school's clocks, can the children finally manage to get away. Peter and Katarina are caught and separated never to see each other again, but Peter's insight has given him the strength to carry on and, more specifically, to blackmail Biehl into allowing him to be adopted by Peter Høeg's own parents.

As a thriller, the story takes a predictable course toward its happy ending, but the psychological outline remains complex. If time is the subject of Peter and Katarina's investigations, if time is what they study in their “laboratory,”¹⁸ time emerges as the main problem which is never solved, neither in the story told nor in the telling.

Time is the instrument of education, of repression disguised as care (Sorge). Bichl notes, “Når jeg taler, så skal i først og fremmest lytte til de ophold jeg gør. De siger mere end mine ord” (De måske egnede 7) [“‘When I speak, you should listen, first and foremost, to my pauses. They speak louder than my words’” (Borderliners 3)]. In the midst of time lies nothingness, a moment which could be romantic and euphoric but which is here, educationally, turned into fear and anxiety. How can one hope to understand what is not there? Time as repression sounds like an allusion to the Frankfurt theory of socialization from the ’60s and ’70s¹⁹ but also may be understood as a reference to Hans Scherfig,²⁰ just as the prominence of questions and answers, the syntactical dwellings on prepositions, and the conspicuous search for the right words recalls Per Olov Enquist.²¹ That time is necessary to deal with time, to write is the essential issue of fiction, a precept that renders the book postmodern rather than modern: it becomes an allegory of its own reading as Paul de Man would have it. The novel proposes no final answers to all the questions that might be asked (as Skyum-Nielsen would prefer it): its purpose is the deconstruction rather than the reconstruction of the great tale of education, enlightenment, and the childhood of man.

And so the story runs, toward the end: time is linear and the metaphor of change, it bears the mark of death and of repression, of examination and final oblivion; when was the battle at Poitiers? But linearity is not the only aspect of time.

Bevidstheden husker også felter, flydende overgange, sammenhange der forbinder det, der engang skete med det, der sker nu, uden hensyn til tidens gang. Og langst bagude husker bevidstheden en slette uden tid.

(De måske egnede 258)

The mind also remembers stretches, fluid passages, connections between what has once happened and what is happening now, regardless of the passage of time. And furthest back, the mind remembers a timeless plain.

(Borderliners 258–9)

Being is also becoming, but becoming has no end or purpose in itself. It simply constitutes yet another present. There are no final borderlines to the expansion of the universe or of the mind.

KVINDEN OG ABEN

An ape is approaching London onboard a ship in the company of a man. So is the beginning of Høeg's most recent book, Kvinden og aben (1996) [The Woman and the Ape (1996)]. Surprisingly abrupt, it leaves doubt as to who the protagonist is and what the theme might be. The ape manages to escape from the ship and disappears into the jungle of the city setting the scene for further bewilderment. Madelene Burden, Danish born but now English, is married to Adam. Madelene is an alcoholic but well behaved, the wife of the future manager of the London Zoo, and a narcissist for whom time has been suspended. She spends her life in front of a mirror trying to powder away the reminders of yesterdays’ hangovers and to replace them with the perfect image of eternal youth, with eyebrows fixated in the state of a never-ending wonder (25). The description of Madelene is consistent with the stylistic tenor of the first third of the book: fragmented but with attention to details. As Madelene changes from housewife to detective and lover, the narrative strategy becomes more traditional.

Erasmus, as the ape is called by Adam and his assistants, is believed to be humanoid and the tool for Adam's own success. He is not the missing link finally found but a species altogether new and closer to man than to animal; Adam plans to call it “Homina Londiniensis” (178). But the ape refuses to be the object of scientific investigations and to give away his secret. Adam gets impatient.

Perhaps it is true as Milan Kundera once suggested that man is afraid to look an animal in the eye because of the fear that it might look back. If recognized by an animal, really seen by it, is not human superiority—indeed fundamental humaness—compromised?

Madelene feels sorry for the ape but not simply in the way old ladies may feel sorry for abandoned cats. The ape's entry into her life awakens in her an idea which must be realized and, in many respects, is an overarching plan for civilization. Madelene gives up drinking to become a detective, disguises herself, and takes the subway into the dark continent of London: “Nu mødte hun, i undergrundsbanen, Londons brutalitet, som en dame der kaster sig ud af den lukkede jeep midt i et vildtreservat og fortsætter alene og til fods” (Kvinden og aben 47) [“Now, in the underground, she was brought face to face with the brutality of London, like a woman throwing herself out of a locked jeep in the middle of a game reserve to carry on alone and on foot” (The Woman and the Ape 47–8)]. Madelene has been stubborn as a donkey, and Adam is a lion, but these metaphors only achieve their full significance after the arrival of the ape. With the ape as the catalyst, these metaphors gradually transform London into an organism that daily devours 20,500 chickens, 5,800 pigs, 1520 oxen, 6000 sheep (69), and has its own immune system—police, firemen, soldiers—on the lookout for enemies. It is a global village where the only hope of escape is on the “inside”:

—Der er ikke mere noget der hedder udenfor, sagde hun.

—Hvis der findes nogen frihed, så må den findes indenfor.

(Kvinden og aben 77)

“There's no such thing as outside now,” she said. “If there's any freedom to be found it'll have to be on the inside.”

(83)

Freedom is not accessible on the outside—it is not an Eden which can be inhabited—but Madelene and the ape make the attempt. After seven days of travel, they reach the wildlife reserve, an Eden refound, closed to the public because of its original lack of humanity but ideally suited for their love and growing understanding of the invention of language.

Hvad der skete for Erasmus og Madelene var det der sker for alle dem der med vilje eller ved et tilsyneladende tilfalde passerer gennem Paradiset: Karligheden overtog dem og gjorde med dem hvad den ville.

(Kvinden og aben 161)

What happened to Erasmus and Madelene was what happens to all of those who pass through Paradise, either of their own free will or ostensibly by chance: love took possession of them and did with them as it pleased.

(182)

But even love and their common language (a mixture of Danish and English) cannot alleviate the main problem of paradise: it has no time, no development. Therefore, paradise is not inhabitable in the exterior. Only by transforming paradise into yet another metaphor, a genuine symbol, can it be accommodated. And the novel accordingly transforms a thriller and a love story into allegorical science fiction.²²

Madelene and Erasmus return to London just as Adam is about to declare the new London Zoo open. Erasmus has had a haircut and has dressed as a man. The final section is grotesque as well as overwhelmingly surprising: suddenly a number of the celebrity guests reveal themselves to be apes. Erasmus gives a speech explaining he chose to be caught because he had hoped to able to help mankind.

—Når vi er vak, sagde han,—så vil I glemme os. Indtil vi kommer igen. Der er kun én ting vi vil bede Jer om at huske indtil da. Det er hvor svart det er at vide hvor, i enhver af os, det I kalder mennesket holder op, og det I kalder dyret begynder.

(Kvinden og aben 213–4)

“When we are gone,” he said “you will forget us. Until we come again. Till then there is only one thing I would ask you to remember. And that is how hard it is to tell, in each one of us, where the part that you call human ends and the part you call animal begins.”

(245)

The job of the ape is to portray boundaries of the human condition and of human consciousness while transforming science fiction into a fable with a moral which reinstalls fiction and the good story as the prime field of reading.

After the revelation of the apes, the entire nation is caught up in anxiety and chaos; rumors have it that half the government is apes and that even the queen has her hidden secret. But chaos is only the omen of something to come, not the ending but perhaps another beginning. Madelene is pregnant with an angel, and together with Erasmus she sets sails for the future.

—Hvad er en engel, spurgte aben.

Madelene rystede på hovedet.

—Det har jeg aldrig helt forstået, sagde hun.—Men måske er det en tredjedel gud, en tredjedel dyr, og en tredjedel menneske.

(Kvinden og aben 225)

“What is an angel,” asked the ape.

Madelene shook her head.

“That's I have never quite understood,” she said. “But for all we know, it's one third god, one third animal, and one third human.”

(261)

THE SENSE OF WRITING

The critics were a bit reserved in their reviews of Kvinden og aben perhaps due to was what called “the Skyum-effect.” As observed by Bo Bjørnvig, they could agree that it was a depiction of contemporary life with the potential for becoming yet another best-seller. Skyum-Nielsen himself was offended by the political correctness of the book: an anthropological counter-myth, an ecological version of King Kong, it was almost impossible to review in terms of fiction since the sales’ profits are entirely destined for support of women and children in the Third World. And as for the work itself, it is neither ingenious as a plot nor as a linguistic performance but is well suited for its purpose. Thomas Thurah, on the other hand, was captured by the constant oscillation between detail and wholeness that constitutes the formal conditions of a critical survey of our culture. Simplified in the psychological portrayal of its characters—good or bad—the book still offers the opportunity for a reading which finds its pleasure in the dramatic events as well as in the ethical perspective.

The Skyum-effect among the critics, the precaution not to be too laudatory, is not the only effect worth mentioning however. Tine Smedegaard Andersen, the new manager of The Danish Literature Information Centre, talks about a certain Peter Høeg-effect which has made it easier to sell Danish books abroad, not least in the USA. As for the author himself, he tries to remain calm and relaxed: the book was not planned, and it was not intended to be a defense of threatened animals (26 March 1996). The critical approach to civilization was however: the more that is scientifically understood, the more that is destroyed. The precept applies to books as well. They are not just to be understood with the head: “For meget i hovedet opløser det fænomen, man forsøger at beskrive” (26 March 1996) [“Too much in the head dissolves the phenomenon one is trying to describe”].

Peter Høeg's writing is an experiment in time and with time. The desk is his laboratory where the mind is set free to experience abundance, loitering, and details creeping in everywhere constantly threatening digression into yet another story. This digressivity is the third dimension of time, not the linear and not the stationary but the circular, the fiction of time. Time is the controlling metaphor of Høeg's criticism of contemporary, western culture, the overt, existential theme for dealing with his characters, and the formal principle of his narratological innovations. This sense of writing is consistent with the idea of creating something new out of the left-overs from yesterday. In the in-between of realization and anticipation, Høeg is a postmodern romantic well aware of his own attitude of being unaware.

Back in the kitchen, Peter Høeg is not interested in pies or pasticcio, but in bread, leavened bread and the art of making it (Interview on the Danish TV 2, April 1996). It takes time to make perfect bread (which, perhaps, remains unachievable, a mere phantasm) just as it does to write a book: “Bogens væsen er surdejs-agtig” (Interview on the Danish TV 2, April 1996) [“The nature of the book is leaven-like”]. The comparison suggests the word “fornemmelse” (feeling, sense), so common in his books. To write is not the job of the conscious mind alone; once the ball is in play, juggling is only possible by feeling devoted.

Notes

1. Cf. Jean-François Lyotard. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.

2. From a narratological point of view this has been elaborated by Peter Brooks in his Reading for the Plot.

3. This secondary dimension of time is often characterizable as a romantic momentum, a standstill, cf. Hans Henrik Møller, Erindringens form.

4. In Great Britain, however, Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow.

5. Tales of the Night and The Woman and the Ape are only the working titles (June 1996).

6. As, for instance, in Jean Potocki's The Manuscript from Zaragoza, first published in Paris 1813; here digression forms the very principle of storytelling.

7. According to Bo G. Jansson, “Og det er også den der er årsagen til Peter Høegs hastige verdensberømmelse” (“Undergangsvision” 139).

8. See Brooks 250.

9. The English translation falls a bit short, it seems, as far as the ambiguity of the title is concerned; Forestilling om det tyvende århundrede is “contemplation” or “imagination” rather than “History”—and perhaps even includes “show.”

10. This is the case, at least, in the later works of Svend Åge Madsen; in the lack of continuity and wholeness, it becomes the task of writing to put some sense into the world. For further elaboration on this point, see my Erindringens form.

11. “Medlidenhed med børnene i Vaden By” [“Pity for The Children of Vaden City”] bears a resemblance to Blixen's “Syndfloden over Norderney” [“The Flood over Norderney”], “Hommage à Bournonville” to Blixen's “Drømmerne” [“The Dreamers”]; “En historie kan være usand. Men historien og dens fortæller er altid tilsammen sande” (Fortœllinger, 74) [“A story can be untrue. But the story and the storyteller put together are always true”].

12. This experiment with time and love and the conditions involved is the theme as well Svend Åge Madsen's Lad tiden gå [Let Time Pass] from 1986.

13. Lilian Munk Dahlgreen “Klumpfodens visdom: Belysninger af Peter Høegs Fortœllinger om natten.”

14. To Lilian Munk Dahlgreen, this installs a genuinely romantic poetics in the book, and as far as the philosophy of language is concerned, her guess about Høeg's source of inspiration is Schlegel. No matter how likely this may be, Dahlgreen's arguments seem to suffer from a lack of consequence: romantic—perhaps, but only in allusion, paraphrase, or pastiche.

15. On Scandinavian grounds, see for instance Svend Åge Madsen Af sporet er du kommet [From the Track You Are Derived] and Kjartan Fløgstad Forføreren [The Seducer] or Homo Falsus.

16. The book, Jansson adds, was published in 1992, but the action takes place in 1993 (144).

17. Knut Johansen wrote in Information, 21 January 1994, “romanen har ingen etik, den er en fri fugl” [“the novel has no ethics, it is as free as a bird”].

18. “Laboratory” is also the term used by the storyteller to characterize his present situation; the term marks an intratextual relationship to the previously mentioned “Forsøg med kærlighedens varighed” and designates their common, “scientific” attempt: to find the essential, to distill truth in its pure form without any digression or doubt—an attempt which, of course, is compromised by the very fictional form in which it is described.

19. Thomas Ziehe, Oskar Negt, Alexander Kluge—and even Herbert Marcuse, “One-Dimensional Man” from 1964, for instance.

20. Det forsømte forår (The Neglected Spring), 1940; in so far as Scherfig's actual (or biographical) reference was to the Metropolitan-skolen, Søren Vinterberg suggests (“Medlidenhed med børnene i Vaden By”) that Høeg's reference could be Bordings Friskole.

21. De måske egnede 22 or 140; for a comparison, see Enquist's Musikanternes uttåg (1978) [The March of the Musicians (1985)] or Nedstörtad ängel [Downfall (1990)].

22. As previously suggested by Bo G. Jansson in his reading of Frøken Smilla (143).

Works Cited

Andersen, Tine Smedegaard. Information 30–1 March 1996.

Bjørnvig, Bo. Weekend-avisen 6–7 April 1996.

Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1984.

Chambers, Ross. Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and The Power of Fiction. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1984.

Dahlgreen, Lilian Munk. “Klumpfodens visdom: Belysninger af Peter Høegs Fortœllinger om natten” Spring 3 (1992).

Eco, Umberto. The Role of the Reader: Exploration in the Semiotics of Texts. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1979.

Heidegger, Martin. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1979.

Høeg, Peter. Borderliners. Trans. Barbara Haveland. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994.

———. De måske egnede. København: Munksgaard/Rosinante, 1993.

———. Forestilling om det tyvende århundrede. København: Munksgaard/Rosinante, 1988.

———. Frøken Smillas fornemmelse for sne. København: Munksgaard/Rosinante, 1992.

———. Fortœllinger om natten. København: Munksgaard/Rosinante, 1990.

———. The History of Danish Dreams. New York: Farrar. Straus and Giroux, 1995.

———. Interview with Ninka, Politiken 16/9 (1990), republished in Emborg and Sørensen (ed.) “Skumhedens tid—90’ernes eksistentielle fortælling,” Dansklarerforeningen 1994.

———. Information 26 March 1996.

———. Kvinden og aben. København: Munksgaard/Rosinante, 1996.

———. Smilla's Sense of Snow. Trans. Tiina Nunnaly. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993.

———. The Woman and the Ape. Trans. Barbara Haveland. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giraux, 1996.

Jansson, Bo G. “En postmoderne undergangsvision.” Spring 7 (1994) 136–47.

Jensen, Rolf Højmark. Information March 1994.

Johansen, Knut. Information 21 January 1994.

Lyotard, Jean-François. La Condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savior. Paris: Minuit, 1979; The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Theory and History of Literature 10. Eds. Wlad Godzich and Jochen Schulte-Sasse. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1984.

Møller, Hans Henrik. Erindringens form. København: Akademisk Forlag, 1994.

Skyum-Nielsen, Erik. Information 19 January 1994.

———. Information 29 March 1996.

Schou, Søren. Information 21 January 1994.

Sessler, Niklas. Interview with Peter Høeg. Damernes Verden 5 (1995).

Thurah, Thomas. Weekend-avisen 29 March 1996.

Vinterberg, Søren. “Medlidenhed med børnene i Vaden By—og andre bøm i Peter Høegs forfatterskab,” Spring 7 (1994).

———. Politiken 6 February 1994.