SOURCE: Mussari, Mark. “H. C. Branner and the Colors of Consciousness.” Scandinavian Studies 71, no. 1 (spring 1999): 41-66.

[In the following essay, Mussari studies H. C. Branner's use of pictorial language in his writings as a means to evoke images underlying human consciousness.]

                                                  Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

T. S. Eliot

Commenting on the power of the image in his essay “Kunst og virkelighed” (1962), H. C. Branner observed that “de store forandringer viser sig altid først i kunsten, hvad der er en simpel følge af at billedet går forud for tanken” (30) [the great changes always appear first in art, a simple result of the fact that pictures precede thoughts]. In expressionistic language, Branner often struggles to capture the pictures of the multivalent dimensions of consciousness and creates antimimetic imagery that, especially in his more elaborate stream-of-consciousness, not only expresses emotions but also stretches temporal and spatial boundaries. Like pictorial expressionists, Branner relies heavily on chromaticism to convey subjective states of being.

Much has been written about H. C. Branner as a humanist or psychoanalytical writer regrettably confining him to the postwar Heretica movement or the more narrow definitions of “Freudian” or “existentialist.” This pigeonholing has deflected attention from Branner's inventive stylistic devices. In Ideologi og æstetik i H. C. Branners sene forfatterskab, Erik Skyum-Nielsen argues cogently that the relationship between Branner's ideas and his prose style was symbiotic and that focusing only on humanist or psychoanalytic ideas is myopic. Branner's notions of humanism and psychoanalysis changed dramatically throughout his career; his visual sense, though, remained strong, manifesting itself in an image-laden prose that frequently portrayed consciousness in pictures, painterly or iconic.¹ As Skyum-Nielsen has noted, all of Branner's writing reveals “en vilje eller hang til at se billeder i alt og metaforisere oplevelsen” (Ideologi 190) [a will or tendency to see pictures in everything and to make metaphors out of experience].

Paralleling the horrors of war that inspired much of the distorted imagery of German expressionism, heightened emotional states serve as the catalyst to the imagery in Branner's literary cosmos. Whether fearing the impending World War ii or suffering from angst over a failing marriage, a dangerous pregnancy, or a terminal illness, Branner's characters are forced onto acute levels of consciousness and are driven to a state in which images take precedence over words which, in fact, become noticeably impotent at these moments.²

In his essay “Humanismens krise” (1950), Branner commented on contemporary changes in the arts:

Maleri og skulptur har sprængt det naturalistiske virkelighedsbillede for at give farver og former frihed til at udtrykke deres egen komplementære sandhed. Prosadigtningen har forladt det naturalistiske handlingsmønster med dets tidsmæssigt fremadskridende forløb og konstante, eentydige menneskeopfattelse og søger nu at ordne dets elementer på en ny måde, som løser det menneskelige bevidsthedsliv fra tidsfølgens sammenhæng og udtrykker det tidløse, relative og mangetydige i dets væsen.

(22-3)

(Painting and sculpture have exploded the naturalistic picture of reality to give colors and forms freedom to express their own complementary truth. Prose writing has abandoned the naturalistic plot structure with its temporally progressive sequence and constant, unambiguous concept of humanity and now seeks to arrange its elements in a new manner, one that releases the life of human consciousness from the context of progressive time and that expresses the timeless, relative, and ambiguous aspects of its nature.)

In his own prose, Branner attempts the same feat with varying degrees of success: his chromatic imagery is important in expressing his view of the atemporal consciousness, which moves from image to image and ranges through past, present, and future in varying patterns. Henri Bergson has observed that the past “nous suit à tout instant: ce que nous avons senti, pensé, voulu depuis notre premiére enfance est là, penché sur le présent qui va s'y joindre, pressant contre la porte de la conscience qui voudrait le laisser dehors” (Œuvres 498) [“follows us at every instant; all that we have felt, thought, and willed from our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is about to join it, pressing against the portals of consciousness that would fain leave it outside” (Creative Evolution 5)].

The most coloristic of all Branner's works, Drømmen om en kvinde, unites strong pictorial imagery with an elaborate stream-of-consciousness structure, both facets reflecting the interior focus driving the novel's linguistic devices.³ Branner, who once claimed that the novel portrayed “følelser” [feelings], not characters, could not have employed a better visual element than color to convey the emotional states of his three main characters: the pregnant Merete Rude, her husband Niels, and her “uncle,” the dying—and aptly named—Knud Mortimer. Their respective and intertwining life stories constitute the novel's central focus, the incestuous relationship between the inescapable forces of life and death.

Despite the novel's myriad time shifts, the nu of the story is 1939, shortly before the outbreak of World War ii. The possibility of war arriving in “store sorte tegn: Krigen!—Krigen et spørgsmaal om timer!—det sidste haab bristet!” (216) [large black characters: War!—War a question of hours!—The last hope shattered!] serves as a dark counterpoint to the various characters' dilemmas and as such is not the main subject of the novel. Unlike Rytteren, Drømmen om en kvinde reveals no formulaic connection between the political and the psychological; as Vosmar suggests, “Forsøget på at gøre en psykologisk sandhed til en politisk sanhed må mislykkes” (168) [The attempt to turn a psychological truth into a political one must fail]. Instead, like Branner's finest short stories, Drømmen om en kvinde centers on the human effort—seen through the eyes of each character's variegated consciousness—to make sense of life by merely living. Inspired by Virginia Woolf's and James Joyce's innovations in narrative structure, Branner arranged the elements of his earlier works—from the collectivist Legetøj (1936) to the Freudian Barnet leger ved stranden (1937)—into a kaleidescopic journey into the non-linear consciousness hiding behind the mask of the public and interpersonal self. Vosmar observes,

I de lange passager, hvor Niels og Merete forsøger at gøre sig hinandens væsen klart, er der endda næppe tale om en udformet tankerække, snarere om en parafrase over de to unges tankebilleder. I disse afsnit har Branner fundet og rendyrket en stil, som helt er hans egen.

(67)

(In the long passages in which Niels and Merete struggle to realize fully each other's nature, it really is not an issue of an elaborate train of thought but of a paraphrase of the two young persons' mental imagery. In these sections Branner has cultivated a style that is totally his own.)

That Branner would settle into a pictorial prose relying heavily on color to convey emotional states points not only to the increasingly visual nature of his writing but also to chromaticism's strong connotative and expressive qualities. This facet allows his color-laden language to function far beyond the level of a mere symbolic code that, once broken, closes the door on the novel's meaning.

Early in the novel, Branner's prose recalls another master's innovative narrative devices: William Faulkner's haunting imagery in Light in August (1926). Discussing the early evening light when a group of friends is playing bridge “sidst i august” [late in August], the narrator of Drømmen om en kvinde describes the light of the still invisible moon: “en lygte som stod derude og lyste op i det tunge, gulgrønne løv” (7) [a light outside that illuminated the heavy, yellow-green leaves]. Like Light in August, Drømmen om en kvinde features a pregnant woman—Lena Grove/Merete Rude—near childbirth who represents the life force but is surrounded by death, particularly in the figure of a misanthropic male character—Joe Christmas/Knud Mortimer. Merete calls Mortimer “onkel,” but he is actually the cousin of her late father. Both women are described in fecund nature images, Lena as a cow and Merete as “en hjortekalv” [a fawn].

Whereas Faulkner's Lena is associated with the color blue—lending a religious, Madonna-like gleam to her character, Branner gives Merete a brown dress—“hjortekalv” is also the name of a soft, orange shade of brown—reinforcing her regenerative connection to nature.

Hun var i en brun kjole der saa ud som den var syet om af et gammelt gardin, rimpet løseligt sammen og hæftet op i den ene side med en sikkerhedsnaal, det tynde stof var flænget ud hvor naalen sad. Det var som hun fandt en hemmelig glæde i at fremhæve sit svære underliv og det store bespændte bryst. …

(8)

(She was in a brown dress that looked as if it was made from an old curtain, tacked loosely together and tucked up on one side with a safety pin. The thin fabric was worn out at the pin. It was as if she found joy in accentuating her swollen belly and her large distended breasts.)

Merete's brown garb also allows Branner to take her representative function a step further. The color of decaying leaves and earth, her brown dress points to the problems in Merete's pregnancy and to Branner's strong conviction that the capacity for childbirth brings women closer not only to the life-giving creative act but also to death.

The possibility of death in Merete's problematic pregnancy manifests itself in a brown portrait of fear. In one of her dreams about her unborn baby, she searches for mushrooms “i det brune solplettede mørke” [in the brown, sun-spotted darkness] of a forest. The branches around her create “et brunligt slør af døde kviste” [a brownish veil of dead twigs]; she enters a forest of brown ferns, and the eyes of a brown frog stare up at her, “et stille bedrøvet vanvid dybt inde under mosset” (130) [a silent, grieving insanity deep down under the moss]. The scene soon melts into a curvilinear, nightmarish brown forest,

hvor ingenting stod oprejst og ingenting var grønt—skurvede og forkrøblede stammer bugtede sig som slanger. … Hendes fødder blev hele tiden hildet i knortede og krogede ting. … Det var som træerne forsøgte at slippe jorden med deres rødder, som om de flygtede i stum og bunden rædsel for en stor fare.

(131)

(where nothing stood upright and nothing was green—scabby and stunted tree trunks meandered like snakes … All the time her feet became enmeshed in gnarled and crooked things … It was as if the trees were trying to escape the ground with their roots, as if they were fleeing in mute and bound fear of a great danger.)

Throughout this Munchesque scene, with its threatening landscape, Merete hears a child crying in the unreachable distance,⁴ but she cannot move amid the brown mass of tangled roots and branches. In Über das Geistige in der Kunst, Kandinsky describes “das stumpfe, harte, wenig zur Bewegung fähige Braun” (101) [the insensible and hard color brown, capable of little movement]. Merete's dream finally dissipates with her first labor pain. Emil Frederiksen lauds this scene as “et af hoved-punkterne i hele H. C. Branners digtning … her giver digteren en af sine bedste, mest karakteristiske natur- og sjælebeskrivelser” (50-1) [one of the high points in all of H. C. Branner's writing … here, the author gives one of his best, most characteristic descriptions of nature and the soul].

At one point in the novel, Niels views his wife's brown dress as “en besværlig las” (146) [an onerous rag] around her; after he leaves her at the hospital, Niels, not knowing the outcome of her difficult childbirth, “stod der og saa stift ned i det brune linoleum som en lille dreng” (153) [stood there and stared hard at the brown linoleum like a little boy]. Branner uses one of his favorite iconic devices—a figure bent forward in a chair⁵—when, at the end of the novel, Niels, waiting for word on Merete's condition, stares again into the brown linoleum and sees “ansigter og dyr og figurer” (231) [faces and animals and figures] in the patterns beneath his feet. Niels's boyish quality is emphasized in his childlike ability, heightened by his angst-ridden state, to find pictures in everything. The nothingness of brown offers all possibilities: “naar man blev træt af at se en bestemt figur behøvede man bare at glippe en gang med øjnene, saa forvandlede den sig straks til noget nyt” (231) [when you became tired of looking at a certain figure, you needed only to blink your eyes once, and it changed immediately into something new]. Through his use of an emotionless brown, Branner reinforces the uncertainty of Merete's predicament. In Colors and Their Character, Benjamin Kouwer observes that brown, despite its relation to most other colors, “shows no definite, clearly indicated relationship with any specific color. This uncertainty and vagueness of affinity is a very important trait” (130).

The logocentric, cancer-ridden Mortimer fears Merete's pregnancy. Like Faulkner's Lena Grove, Merete at first appears slow-witted and removed (“Det er bare synd hun er lidt dum” [It's a shame she's a little dumb], comments Mortimer's wife, Charlotte). Merete seems incapable of following the bridge game that Mortimer all but orchestrates, although Branner makes it clear that she is merely worn out anticipating her husband's return from the shipyard where he works. After her father died, Merete came to live with Mortimer. Even in his memory of Merete when she was an attractive thirteen-year-old, Mortimer sees “en hjortekalv … i en lysning paa lange spinkle ben” (8, 12) [a fawn … in a glade on long slender legs]. In the present, her swollen abdomen and distended breasts constitute an affront to Mortimer reinforced by her association with deer, nature, and the color brown. He is a fading wraith playing cards next to a fecund nature sprite.

Throughout the novel, Mortimer is described as “en skygge” [a shadow] or “en abstrakt skygge” [an abstract shadow] or as being “ind i slagskyggen” [inside the shadow], an association with the color black and its connotations of death. (He eventually leaves the party wearing a long black coat.) A living shade, he is one of Branner's infamous “døde voksner” [dead grown ups]⁶ whose lives consist of a materialist attraction to ting. His attempt to explain the bridge game with numbers and black and white diagrams fails to penetrate Merete's “tomme mørke øjne” [empty dark eyes]—another deer image. Though she can only nod helplessly to his “logiske konstruktion” [logical construction], her gaze makes him feel “latterlig for sig selv, hvad nyttede hans lille matematik overfor et hundyr som skulde føde?” (9) [ridiculous to himself; what was the use of his little mathematics in the face of a female animal about to give birth?]. Kouwer notes that black and white are “‘rational’ colors because they appeal to reason rather than to emotion. They have neither interiority nor exteriority. They do not ‘speak’ but they ‘posit’” (133). Black's association with logic and rationality has been noted by such artists as the painter Odilon Redon, well known for his noirs: “One must respect black. Nothing prostitutes it. It does not please the eye or awaken another sense. It is the agent of the mind even more than the beautiful color of the palette or the prism” (Arnheim 330). Kandinsky, fond of merging colors and sounds, describes black “wie ein Nichts ohne Möglichkeit, wie ein totes Nichts nach dem Erlöschen der Sonne, wie ein ewiges Schweigen ohen Zukunft und Hoffnung klingt innerlich das Schwarz. Es is musikalisch dargestellt wie eine vollständig abschließende Pause, nach welcher eine Fortsetzung kommt wie der Beginn einer andern Welt” (98) [“(as) a totally dead silence … a silence with no possibilities … In music it is represented by one of those profound and final pauses, after which any continuation of the melody seems the dawn of another world” (39)].

The scene in which Niels returns home on his motorcycle and stops outside to peer into the window at his wife and friends playing cards presents some of Branner's most painterly and lovely writing. Branner bathes the “augustskoven med sit hængende løv, stille og træt” (33) [August forest with its hanging leaves, silent and tired] in a dreamy moonlight (“den sejlende hvide maane”) that reinforces the prose's pensive nature. He frequently employs twilight for its spectral effects: “vejen tabte sig mere og mere i et taaget tusmørke” (36) [the road disappeared more and more in a hazy twilight]. The foggy setting, a linguistic pictorial effacement of line, also serves the characters' non-linear mental peregrinations allowing them, in classic stream-of-consciousness form, to shift in and out of various time frames. The chapter's opening description is filled with chiaroscuro: “skovbrynet saa sort paa nattehimlen” [the edge of the woods so black against the night sky] and “i lysets og skyggernes flugt” (32-3) [in the light's and the shadows' flight]. As Niels approaches the house and his wife, “han lod maanen og skoven og skyggerne svinge i en stor dristig bue” (34) [he let the moon and the forest and the shadows swing in a great, bold bow]. A sense of fall permeates the late August scene, evidenced in the harvest colors he sees on the way home: “Og langsmed vejene og inde i skoven hang rønnebærrene røde og de første gule blade sejlede lydløst i mørket” (40) [And along the edge of the roads and deep in the woods the red rowan berries and the first yellow leaves fell silently in the dark]. Branner's prose takes on a tenebrific quality due not only to the night setting but also to the angst brewing inside Niels.

Seeing Mortimer's “mørke og lukkede vogn” [dark and closed car], Niels thinks of a hearse—“den var bygget til at hans høje magre figur skulde ligge ned i den” (35) [it was built so that his (Mortimer's) tall, lean figure could lie down in it]—reinforcing the association of black with Mortimer. Mortimer's presence, particularly at the time of Merete's impending childbirth, represents a threat indicated in shadowy images infringing on Niels's magical moonlight: “Den døende mands nærhed var som en skræk i naturen, en formørkelse der langsomt krøb hen over maanen” (38) [The dying man's closeness was like a fright in nature, an eclipse creeping slowly across the moon]. This threat lingers even after Mortimer has left the scene; later in the novel, Niels, in a state of angst over his wife's condition, still senses Mortimer's presence as a shadow: “Stuen var fuld af en mørk og truende stilhed efter Mortimer. … Han var bange for at miste hende og turde ikke tænke den tanke” (146) [The room was full of a dark and threatening stillness after Mortimer. … He was afraid of losing her and dared not think that thought].

The color green has a particularly negative function in Drømmen om en kvinde, a characteristic it possesses in a number of Branner's works, especially when it appears in a window scene. Branner avoids the positive, nature-oriented connotations of green by never writing of verdant bliss in springtime colors; instead, like a German expressionist, he uses green in a lurid manner. His green is a neon light—artificial, urban, and sickly.⁷ Branner is fond of having characters view each other through windows, and he frequently makes the watched characters appear underwater like fish in an aquarium.⁸ This coloring calls to mind van Gogh's unnerving green effects in Night Café (1888), with its central image—a lurid green billiard table,⁹ or the solitary neon-green light of Edward Hopper's urban diner, Nighthawks (1942).

Staring in the window of his home, Niels sees the following picture:

De sad omkring et grønt bord og spillede kort. Der var tændt en lampe med gul skærm, men alting derinde lyste grønligt som gennem vand—at staa i det abne mørke mellem trærerne og se ind til dem var som at se ind i en grotte under vandet. Spillebordets klæde var giftgrønt som en mospude og fru Fleichers kjole var grøn, og deres ansigter var blege med et grønlight genskær. … Mortimer sad med ryggen mod vinduet, han havde lagt sine kort frem paa en række foran sig og sad langstrakt og ubevægelig over dem, en lurende skygge paa den grønne bund. En abstrakt skygge.

(41)¹⁰

(They sat around a green table and played cards. A light with a yellow shade had been turned on, but everything in the room appeared greenish, as through water—to stand in the open darkness between the trees and look in at them was like seeing an underwater grotto. The card table's cover was poison-green like moss, and Mrs. Fleicher's dress was green, and their faces were pale with a greenish reflection. … Mortimer sat with his back toward the window; he had laid his cards in a row in front of himself and sat, elongated and motionless, over them, a threatening shadow on the green ground. An abstract shadow.)

Branner, à la Fauve, has saturated the scene in green; the reader, too, cannot help but see in green. This poison green light serves two functions simultaneously: it reflects the state of what is happening within the room permeated with Mortimer's sickly presence, and it reflects Niels's perception of what is happening in the room—his sense of Mortimer and his illness as a threat to his child's impending birth. With his back to Niels, the window, and, thus, the reader, Mortimer is reduced once again to a shadow, an “abstract” cut-out presiding over a game of chance played out on a green tablecloth. In his use of the Danish word bund [ground]—in artistic terms denoting the color beneath the predominant color—Branner unites this sickly green with the darkness of Mortimer's presence.

The unnatural green light also reinforces the atmosphere of an aquarium, with characters compared to carp, pike, and other fish in Niels's eyes. At one point, Mortimer is decribed as “skyggen af en gedde paa en grøn søbund” (47) [the shadow of a pike on a green sea bottom]. Merete sits in a “brunlige mørke” [brownish darkness] as Mortimer struggles to pull her into the deadly green light of his card game. Niels fears that “hun var allerede næsten død, næsten udslukt og opløst” (47) [she was already almost dead, almost extinguished and dissolved]. Leaning against a tree, he enters a half-dream state in which he remembers his departure from her that morning, and then, still dreaming, sees the present: an expressionist portrait of “store fjerne træer som tegnede ubevægelige skygger henover jorden” (48) [great distant trees that sketched immovable shadows across the earth]. Finally forcing himself to awaken, the appropriately named Niels Rude bangs on the window pane thus breaking Mortimer's shadowy spell. Inside, he finds that Merete “havde rykket sin stol lidt tilbage og sad indhyllet i sit brunlige mørke” (50) [had drawn her chair back a little and sat ensconced in her brownish darkness]. Despite the threat of Mortimer's green world, Merete finds safety in her brown corner where the possibility of life for her child still exists.

Goethe's discussion in Zur Farbenlehre of the symbolic use of chromaticism raises an important question:

Hiermit ist ein anderer Gebrauch nahe verwandt, den man den allegorischen nennen könnte. Bei diesem ist mehr Zufälliges und Willkürliches, ja man kann sagen, etwas Konventionelles, indem uns erst der Sinn des Zeichens überliefert werden muß, ehe wir wissen, was es bedeuten soll, wie es sich z.B. mit der grünen Farbe verhält, die man der Hoffnung zugeteilt hat.

(520)¹¹

Another application is nearly allied to this; it might be called the allegorical application. In this there is more of accident and caprice, inasmuch as the meaning of the sign must first be communicated to us before we know what it is to signify; what idea, for instance, is attached to the green colour, which has been appropriated to hope?

(351)

Green has a long, positive tradition in the history of chromaticism. Goethe believed that “unser Auge findet in derselben eine reale Befriedigung” (501) [“the eye experiences a distinctly grateful impression from this colour” (316)], and Degas bathed many of his dancers in a luminous green light. Kandinsky claims that “absolutes Grün ist die ruhigste Farbe, die es gibt” (94) [“Green is the most restful colour that exists” (38)] and views it as the link between the earthly yellow and the spiritual blue. Yet Branner seems more inclined to agree with van Gogh, who called green the color of “those terrible things, men's passions.” Even when Merete tries to picture a positive green, her efforts collapse into blackness. Imagining her newborn son taking his first steps,

hun saa hvordan han besværligt fik rejst sig op og gik et lille stykke i græsset. Hun vilde se det klare grønne græs, men hun saa det kun som tusmørke. Nu dumpede han og forsvandt. … Hun laa og ventede paa han skulde komme igen, men han kom ikke igen. Græsset blev sort og opslugte ham helt.

(229)

(she saw how with difficulty he raised himself up and walked a little bit in the grass. She wanted to see the clear green grass, but she could only see it as a twilight. Now he fell and disappeared. … She lay and waited for him to get up again, but he never did. The grass had become black and swallowed him completely.)

In Drømmen om en kvinde, Branner also associates green with Mortimer's illness. When Mortimer has a painful attack and Charlotte attempts to drive him home, he looks out the window at “et gitter af grønligt lysende stammer, striber og pletter af maanelys inde over skovbunden” (139) [a lattice of shining green trunks, stripes and spots of moonlight over the woodland floor]. Clambering out of the car to be sick, Mortimer sits down on a “grøn, frønnet træstub” [green, decaying treestump]. Later, again staring out the window of the car, he sees “hastigt gitter af grønligt glidende stammer, maanelyse trækroner som voksede og forsvandt, voksede og forsvandt” (140) [rapidly passing bars of green tree trunks gliding by, moonlit treetops that rose and disappeared, rose and disappeared]. The reader, though given no modifier for “green,” cannot help but picture the bilious hue suggested by Mortimer's sickly state.

After the pervasive green of the card game, Branner paints the initial scene of the following chapter in red, appealing to the eye's natural desire for each color's complement. The autumnal element hinted at as Niels rides his motorcycle home and passes the rowan berries and the haystacks serves a primary function in Merete's haunting reverie in the beginning of Chapter 3 (Part One). Kierkegaard was especially fond of autumn, a predilection to which he gave voice in his 1846 essay “Lovtale over Eferaaret” (Praise for Autumn). Declaring autumn “farvernes tid” [the time of colors], Kierkegaard contends that “Farve er den synlige Bevægelse og Uro” (388) [color is the visible movement and restlessness]. The passions, Kierkegaard felt, come with autumn: “og med Lidenskaberne Uroen, og med Uroen Farven” (388) [and with the passions, unrest, and with unrest color]. He also saw the “mørkladne Efteraar” [darkened autumn] as “veemodigt” (388) [wistful]. Spring's constant green (“næsten som Grønt man spiser” (339) [almost like the greens one eats]) does not excite Kierkegaard; against the starkness and bareness of autumn, colors stand out. Thus, Kierkegaard calls autumn “erindringens Tid” [memory's time] and “tænkningens Tid” [thinking's time], reinforcing the connection between color and consciousness.

Waiting for Niels to reenter the house, Merete's mind shifts abruptly to a time in her youth when a man had followed her into the forest. “Det var oktober og træerne stod stille og svømmede some røde spejlbilleder i taagen, det dryppede og sivede højt oppe fra, hun vadede til anklerne i det tunge røde løv” (51) [It was October, and the trees stood silent and swam like red reflections in the mist; it dripped and oozed from high above. She waded up to her ankles in the heavy red leaves]. In her memory, Merete searches the leaf-strewn forest floor for chestnuts; the presence of so much red and Merete's bag of chestnuts conjours up fairy-tale images (cf. Little Red Riding Hood) that juxtapose a strong sexual undercurrent also conveyed in the threatening use of red. As the afternoon draws to a close, “de røde træer svømmede langsomt ind i mørkningen” (51) [the red trees swam slowly into the dusk].

Though the reader is given no indication of the identity of the man following Merete in her memory (or what may simply be a reverie illustrating her fear of death), Branner uses certain devices to connect the threatening figure with Mortimer. In the scene in which the shadowy figure grabs her arm and looks her in the eyes, Merete sees that

Hans ansigt var hvidt men ellers var han helt sort og ulden i tusmørket. … Mens de stod saadan begyndte hans pupiller langsomt at glide opefter, der kom en hvid rand frem under dem. Det saa ud som om han døde paa stedet. … Hun mærkede hans greb om sin arm og hans aande, der var sort som tusmørket.

(52)

(His face was white; otherwise he was completely black and unclear in the dusk. … While they stood like that, his pupils began slowly to glide upwards, a white rim appeared under them. It looked as if he was dying on the spot. … She noticed his grasp around her arm and his breath, which was black as the twilight.)

Through the use of black and white imagery, Branner compels the reader to think of Mortimer. Merete knows—senses—that the stranger would have killed her in the forest that day; she becomes “tung og død under tanken” (53) [heavy and dead under the thought]. Colorless, rational black and white, represented in the dark figure pursuing her in the twilight, constitute a threat to the life-giving red of her world.

Curiously, this recollection comes to Merete in the moment before Niels, banging on the window, breaks not only Mortimer's green spell over the other card players but also shatters Merete's deadly daydream. Waiting for him to reenter the house, she slips into another recollection, this time of her first sexual encounter with Niels; she recalls a window scene the following morning bathed in a strong, red light: “Lidt efter kom han frem i sin badekaabe og trak gardinet fra vinduet saa hele østhimlen brød ind som en rød flodbølge. Selv om hun klemte øjnene haardt til spillede det røde lys gennem hendes øjenlaag” (56) [A little while after he came out in his bathrobe and pulled the curtains from the windows, so that all the eastern sky burst in like a red tidal wave. Although she squeezed her eyes shut, the red light appeared through her eyelids]. Merete's mind then shifts to Niels's childhood, which she is capable of “seeing”; she pictures his first nocturnal emission, at the age of fourteen:

Hun tænkte sig han havde drømt om en brændende skov og røde heste paa flugt gennem skoven, paa hestene red kvinder med flyvende haar og hvide bryster som galionsfigurer, en gyngende glidende flod af røde hestekroppe og hvide kvindebryster ud og ind mellem flammerne.

(59-60)

(She imagined he had dreamed of a burning forest and red horses in flight through the woods, on the horses rode women with flying hair and white breasts, like figureheads, a rocking river of red horses' bodies and women's white breasts, gliding in and out among the flames.)

This red sensuality is again identified, as it is for Kierkegaard, with autumn. Merete envisions a young, autoerotic Niels running through the October forest and throwing himself “fladt ned paa maven i det dybe røde løv, han fik hænderne fyldt med det, han borede ansigtet ned i det” (60) [flat down on his stomach in the deep red leaves, he got his hands filled with them, he bore his face down into them]. Kouwer observes that “red as color of life directs itself chiefly at one aspect of life in particular: its animal aspect. Rather than representing life in general, red is seen in connection with emotional life. … This applies still more to sexuality and erotism” (106). Kouwer also takes issue with conventional psychoanalytical readings of red as “masculine”: “red is not as much the masculine per se as the erotic relation between the sexes in general” (107). Branner has, in fact, applied red to the feminine force—Merete—in Drømmen om en kvinde. In Chapter 2 of the second part of the book, as she is speaking to her doctor, Clemens, Merete daydreams of holding her unborn son: “hun sad bag sit vindue i den store stue og saa ud paa en klar oktoberdag, hvor det blæste med røde blade fra skovbrynet” (188) [she sat behind her window in the large room and looked out on a clear October day, where red leaves from the forest's edge blew by].

These window scenes, seamlessly melting into one another, indicate Branner's image-driven kind of stream-of-consciousness, its pictorial quality emphasized by the framing windows.¹² In addition, the scenes reinforce the nonlinear structure of thought: Merete oberves that she “kunde aldrig se hans [Niels] liv i rækkefølge og sammenhæng, kun som løsrevne billeder der blandede og forbyttede sig mens hun saa paa dem” (65) [could never see his life in succession and coherence, only as detached pictures that merged and changed while she looked at them]. The portraits illustrate the Bergsonian notion of durée, the “continuity of a background” on which seemingly discontinuous states of being exist. Bergson comments on the connection between consciousness, color, and our concept of time in Introduction à la metaphysique:

Mais de même qu'une conscience à base de couleur, qui sympathiserait intérieurement avec l'orangé, au lieu de le percevoir extérieurement, se sentirait prise entre du rouge et du jaune, pressentirait même peut-être, audessous de cette dernière couleur, tout un spectre en lequel se prolonge naturellement la continuité qui va du rouge au jaune, ainsi l'intuition de notre durée, bien loin de nous laisser suspendus dans le vide comme ferait la pure analyse, nous met en contact avec toute une continuité de durées que nous devons essayer de suivre soit vers le bas, soit vers le haut.

(Œuvres 419)

But just as a consciousness based on color, which sympathized internally with orange instead of perceiving it externally, would feel itself held between red and yellow, would even perhaps suspect beyond this last color a complete spectrum into which the continuity from red to yellow might expand naturally, so the intuition of our duration, far from leaving us suspended in the void as pure analysis would do, brings us into contact with a whole continuity of durations which we must try to follow, whether downwards or upwards.

(62-3)

Merete's mental pictures, driven by a pictorial sense rather than a temporal one, move both upwards and downwards (i.e., back and forth in time); the scenes are shuffled like cards in her consciousness.

Remembering his “regnebuefarvet” [rainbow-colored] body¹³ standing at the window that first morning, Merete's mind shifts to another window scene in which Niels smokes a pipe and sits in the “blindt genskær” [blind reflection] caused by the snow outside. The ashen-white light on his face reflects Niels's reaction to an accident that day at the shipyard, an explosion in which two men have died. Awakening in the middle of the night, Merete discovers Niels staring out the window: “der var ikke blod tilbage i hans ansigt, det var som en hvid gennemsigtig skal der kunde bryde sammen til støv ved en mindste berøring” (58) [there was no blood left in his face, which was like a white transparent shell that could crumble into dust at the slightest touch].

More importantly, this association of white with angst precedes its appearance as the color of Niels's worries of losing Merete in childbirth. Branner refers to Merete's impending labor as “veernes hvide lys” (145, 146) [the labor pains's white light]. He again employs a window scene, this time in the car as they are driving to the hospital, to paint a silvery portrait of Niels's fear:

Han saa hendes ansigt mod ruden, hendes fortabte barneansigt med den tunge lidende mund, og han vidste saadan var det: de havde altid hørt hinanden til, og han kunde ikke miste hende uden at miste sig selv. Ingenting var mere flygtig end hendes ansigt mod ruden—han saa det gennemsigtig som en spejling af sølvskæret udenfor, og han turde ikke røre sig og næppe trække vejret af frygt for at det skulde forsvinde for øjnene af ham, løbe langt ud over markerne og tabe sig i stjernernes lys, blive eet med vejtræernes kroner som fløj forbi med tynde askehvide blade, angstfuldt jagende som stød af en puls—nu—nu—nu. … Han saa ud gennem ruden. Men ogsaa derude stod angsten i en stor og dødelig stilhed, han saa lige ud i en grænseegn, en sølvegn hvor alting var tyndt og hvidt som aske og kun ventede paa et vindpust.

(147)

(He saw her face against the window, her lost child's face with the heavy suffering mouth, and he knew that so it was: they had always belonged to each other and he could not lose her without losing himself. Nothing was more fleeting than her face against the window pane—he saw it transparent like the reflection of a silvery glow from outside, and he dared not move and could barely breathe from fear that it should disappear before his eyes, run far out over the fields and disappear in the light of the stars, become one with the passing treetops that flew by with thin ash-white leaves, full of angst, pursuing like a throbbing pulse—now—now—now. … He looked out of the window. But his fear was out there too in a great and deadly silence; he stared out on a borderland, a silver meadow where everything was thin and white like ashes and only waited for a breath of air.)

Earlier in the novel, Merete recalls her dead father's many discussions with her about astronomy, uniting them with the pale light of the stars. At one point she observes that Mortimer's eyes possess “det samme fjerne hvide lys” [the same distant white light] as her father's. Her dying father had shown her “alle vinterens klare stjernebilleder … han kendte alle deres billeder” (128-9) [all of winter's clear constellations … he knew all their outlines]. Just as Merete's dead father—a sign for the lost presence of a godhead—is the source of her visual sense, Niels cites Merete as the source of the power of the silvery light that falls on the world. The world around him is created by the light of her eyes and hands. Somewhere in the highly expressionistic “stumme grænseegn” [silent borderland] that appears as they drive by, she is “en hvid sten som fløj og et bladhang som sænkede sig, hendes aande skabte dette angstfulde skær som tonede fra sølv over til hvid aske” (148) [a white stone that flew (by) and foliage that descended, her spirit created the angst-filled glow that shifts tones from silver to white ashes]. Should the dreaded “breath of air” come and scatter the silver-white world Merete's weakening spirit holds in place, Niels's remaining world would become “sort i sort” (148) [black in black], the triumph of Mortimer and death.

Niels's fears have sapped the world of its color, creating an achromatic, ashen landscape. Riding along in the early morning hours, Niels sees a wide, white main road stretch before them; the city reaches out toward them in “et langt tog af biler [som] kom jagende tæt efter hinanden med gule ravøjne” (148) [a long procession of cars (that) came chasing each other closely with yellow amber-eyes]. The street lights fly by, “svævende hvide kugler” [floating white spheres]; above them the stars have gone out and the darkness closes in on both sides “tæt som en mur” [tightly, like a wall]. After leaving Merete with the doctor, Niels arrives home in the early hours of dawn: “Han kunde se langt ud over markerne og skoven, men der var ikke lys og ikke mørke til i verden. Kun et ubevægeligt askegraat skær” (153) [He could see far off over the fields and the woods, but no light or darkness existed in the world. Only an immovable, ash-gray glow]. These gray landscapes recall Fitzgerald's “valley of ashes” in The Great Gatsby, “where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of ash-gray men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air” (23).

An array of gruesome colors greets Niels as he rides his motorcycle toward the long night of waiting. The sun sets in a “gult og svidende lys” (238) [yellow and scorching light] that blinds Niels as he rides toward the horizon. As a yellow haze of burning dust, a “forrykte skær” [demented glow], rises before him, he turns off the main road to avoid the “ulidelige gule lys” [unbearable yellow light]. Moving from warm to cold tones, the yellow light gives way to a flaming red that, after a moment, dissolves into “en dis af violet … en taaget masse” [a haze of violet … a foggy mass]. The darkness that follows rises from the ground, “et ujævnt mørke som af levende sorte myrer” [an uneven darkness as of living black ants]. This living darkness rising from the ground indicates the war's imminence—its shadow reaching up over Denmark from below—but Niels's mind is preoccupied. He fears this night that follows the burning yellow light: “han havde troet den vilde blive værre end noget andet han havde mødt i sit liv” (239) [he believed it would be worse than any other he had encountered in his life]. Even the moonlight's shadows casting their nets along the road seem threatening.

The first sign of hope finally appears: “sølvlyset laa over verden igen” [the silver light lay over the world again]. In a synesthetic moment, that light reminds Niels of Merete's whistling when she rides behind him on the motorcycle; he recalls that whenever she whistles, everything around him, the light and the air, shifts tone. As the colors of the seasons pass through his memory (the blue shadows of spring, the yellow leaves of an “oktobermelodi” [October melody]), he realizes that her presence has colored his ashen world. It is through her mind that Niels's world takes on chromatic possibilities; his own world is the colorlessly white one. After a sleepless night on the beach, Niels feels that “der var ikke lys og ikke mørke, og der var ingen tid til, og stadigvæk ingen sky paa himlen og ingen bevægelse i luften men kun en evig venten paa noget som aldrig skulde komme” (242) [there were no light and no darkness, and no time existed, and still no cloud in the sky and no movement in the air, but only an eternal waiting for something that would never come]. Into this “farveløse gry” [colorless dawn] the silver stripe suddenly appears, separating the sky from the sea and night from day.¹⁴ The return of Merete's silvery light serves as the final sign of hope in the novel: she and her baby will survive.

Drømmen om en kvinde features a notable absence of the color blue, which serves no major function until two parallel scenes leading to Mortimer's death and Merete's childbirth. Though there are many dreams of women in the book—Merete pictures Niels's adolescent dreams of women; Charlotte's lover Bjørndal discusses his pubescent dream of a synderinde; Niels dreams a number of times about Merete—Mortimer's and Merete's simultaneous dream of being in a cathedral leads to a vision of the ultimate woman: the Madonna. Nearing his final stages of consciousness, Mortimer dreams of travelling by train with his mother, as he did as a child. In images of both motion and sight, Branner's prose is oneiric throughout this scene. Outside the window, telephone poles swing up and down in partial view recalling the tree trunks in the sickly green scene following the card game; even when the steam from the train's engine obscures them, “kunde man følge de mørke parallelle linier i deres synken og stigen” (218) [you could follow the dark, parallel lines in their rise and fall]. Once the mathematical telephone poles disappear, Mortimer has nothing to occupy his thoughts until he notices and begins counting the wheels thumping on the rail joints.

He departs at a station and takes out a map with an “x” marking a tourist destination reachable only by way of many meandering streets. He soon comes upon a Gothic cathedral, which he enters: “Han gik gennem portalen og stod under krydshvælvingerne, de graa søjleknipper rejste sig omkring ham som stammer i en forstenet skov” (220) [He went through the portal and stood under the cross-arches; gray rows of columns rose around him like tree trunks in a petrified forest]. Looking up, he notices that everything in the cathedral strives upward toward “det umulige” [the impossible]. A nun moves silently among the people in the pews as she passes around her collection box; Mortimer places a coin in it and avoids her eyes. Statues of saints in “farvet tøj” [colored clothes] stand in “halvmørke nicher” [half-dark niches]. A pregnant woman goes by, and her presence repels him. Even in his dream, Mortimer's rational mind—already shown by his fascination with the black, parallel telephone poles—cannot tolerate “hele den brogede uforstaaelighed” [all the multicolored incomprehensibility] that confronts him in the cathedral everywhere he looks. For Branner, the higher, non-mimetic levels of consciousness are colored.

The particolored scene suddenly melts into a dark, oppressive one; the sounds of an organ fill the gloomy atmosphere. Looking up into the dizzying darkness, Mortimer's eyes search for something to fix on:

De fandt et vindue ud imod vest, et højt spidsbuet vindue hvor himmelmoderen sad med barnet paa sit skød. Hendes kjole stod uhyre stor og blaa mod den sene sol ude bag rummet, og mens han saa op paa den, var det som alting blev blaat for øjnene af ham. Orgelspillet vældede med et blaa tonemørke, og solen fra vest var som en blaa mørkesol.

(221-2)

(They found a window out toward the west, a high, pointed window in which the heavenly mother sat with the child on her lap. Her dress was enormously big and blue, against the late sun out behind the room; and while he looked up at it, everything seemed to become blue before his eyes. Organ music gushed forth with a dark blue tone, and the sun from the west was like a dark blue sun.)

After a lifetime of black-and-white rationalism and a skepticism—we are told he was a “radikal” in his youth—Mortimer, on the threshold of death, faces a multicolored world building to a deep blue vision. He has been forced by his illness to the brink of spirituality, depicted in the very scene he has most dreaded throughout the book: a woman and her child. In the history of chromaticism, Kandinsky has been one of the most eloquent commentators on the power of blue: “Diese Vertiefungsgabe finden wir im blau und ebenso erst theoretisch in ihren physischen Bewegungen 1. vom Menschen weg und 2. zum eigenen Zentrum. … Die Neigung des Blau zur Vertiefung ist so groß, daß es gerade in tieferen Tönen intensiver wird und charakteristischer innerlich wirkt” (92) [“The power of profound meaning is found in blue, and first in its physical movements (1) of retreat from the spectator, (2) of turning in upon its own centre. The inclination of blue to depth is so strong that its inner appeal is stronger when its shade is deeper” (38)]. The organ music underscoring Mortimer's reverie also echoes one of Kandinsky's many observations on the musicality of color: “Musikalisch dargestellt ist helles Blau einer Flöte ähnlich, das dunkle dem Cello, immer tiefer gehend den wunderbaren Klängen der Baßgeige; in tiefer, feierlicher Form ist der Klang des Blau dem der tiefen Orgel vergleichbar” (93) [“In music a light blue is like a flute, a darker blue a cello; a still darker a thunderous double bass; and the darkest blue of all—an organ” (38)].

The spiritual blue, darkening and tightening around Mortimer in his dream, fills him with terror. He suddenly feels he is free-falling and awakens: “han laa i sin seng og den store rædsel kom fra noget blaat han kunde se ude bag vinduet—et stykke dybblaa eftermiddagshimmel højt oppe over hustagene” (222) [he lay in his bed and the great terror came from something blue he could see out past the window—a piece of deep blue afternoon sky high up over the rooftops]. His vision of the Madonna has dissipated into a patch of blue sky. Branner, using the absorbing power of blue, blurs the temporal lines between levels of consciousness. Has the vision merely melted into the blue in the window, or has the patch of blue sky inspired the blue dream within a brief state of half-consciousness?

Fading in and out of consciousness as she waits to give birth, Merete dreams of the same Gothic cathedral. Her reverie is more populated than Mortimer's; outside the cathedral, she is surrounded by an army of children, whose words she understands though they all speak in different languages. A vast flock of doves hovering over her descends in Pentecostal fashion and lights on her head, shoulders, and arms. Still, she feels compelled to leave them and enter the cathedral. Just as every line of Mortimer's cathedral strives upward toward the impossible, Merete's columns reach up “mod det uopnaaelige” [toward the unattainable]. Organ music again fills the vast space. The gray arches appear to lift before her, “som bladtaget over en skov løfter sig umærkeligt fra aar til aar” (227) [as the roof of leaves over a forest rise imperceptibly from year to year]. Her eyes eventually fix on the stained-glass image of the Madonna: “Himmelmoderen sad i det vindue med sit nyfødte barn paa skødet, og vestsolen brød i skraa støtter gennem hendes klædning og gjorde den saa lysende blaa” (227) [The heavenly mother sat in the window with her newborn child on her lap, and the western sun broke in slanting pillars through her clothes and made them so brilliantly blue]. Her increasing labor pains darken Merete's vision finally reducing it to a blue fog: she awakens to the same patch of deep-blue afternoon sky that Mortimer had seen. Though her labor pains parallel his horrible attacks, unlike Mortimer, she does not awaken in horror. The children in her dream point not only to her pregnancy but to a child-like state of receptivity still lacking in Mortimer.

In his discussion of the lost blue of the stained-glass windows in the twelfth-century cathedral at Chartres, Henry Adams describes the child-like mind-set necessary for an appreciation of the effects of the blue glass: “Any one can feel it who will only consent to feel like a child … feel a sense beyond the human ready to reveal a sense divine that would make that world once more intelligible, and would bring the Virgin to life again … any one willing to try could feel it like the child, reading new thought without end into the art he has studied a hundred times” (178). Adams hints at a sense of abandonment, a surrender to the synesthetic power of one color. Although Merete longs to yield to the blue vision, Mortimer cannot.

In both Merete's and Mortimer's descriptions, the Gothic cathedral is compared to a forest. Merete's association with nature, illustrated throughout the book in a number of forest images, is both positive and red, and negative and brown, whereas Mortimer's only scene in the woods occurs on the ghastly green night when he stops and is sick. The cathedral's columns remind both characters, though, of towering trees. In Der Untergang des Abendlandes, Oswald Spengler comments on the sylvan elements of the cathedral in Western culture:

In dem Wälderhaften der Dome, der mächtigen Erhöhung des Mittelschiffs über die Seitenschiffe gegenüber der flachgedeckten Basilika, in der Verwandlung der Säulen, die durch Basis und Kapitäl als abgeschlossene Einzeldinge in den Raum gestellt waren, zu Pfeilern und Pfeilerbündeln, die aus dem Boden wachsen und deren Äste und Linien sich über dem Scheitel im Unendlichen verteilen und verschlingen, während von den Riesenfenstern, welche die Wand aufgelöst haben, ein ungewisses Licht durch den Raum flutet, liegt die architektonische Verwirklichung eines Weltgefühls, das im Hochwald der nordischen Ebenen sein ursprünglichstes Symbol gefunden hatte. Und zwar im Laubwalde mit dem geheimnisvollen Gewirr seiner Äste und dem Raunen der ewig bewegten Blättermassen über dem Haupte des Betrachters, hoch über der Erde, von der die Wipfel durch den Stamm sich zu lösen versuchen.

(512-3)

(The character of the Faustian cathedral is that of the forest. The mighty elevation of the nave above the flanking aisles, in contrast to the flat roof of the basilica; the transformation of the columns, which with base and capital had been set as self-contained individuals in space, into pillars and clustered-pillars that grow up out of the earth and spread on high into an infinite subdivision and interlacing of lines and branches; the giant windows by which the wall is dissolved and the interior filled with mysterious light—these are the architectural actualizing of a world-feeling that had found the first of all its symbols in the high forest of the Northern plains, the deciduous forest with its mysterious tracery, its whispering of ever-mobile foliage over men's heads, its branches straining through the trunks to be free of earth.)

(396)

In the incessant reaching upwards which appears in both Merete's and Mortimer's dreams, Spengler senses a reflection of human longing. Like Kandinsky, he also sees this longing reflected in organ music: “Deshalb wurde die Orgel, deren tiefes und helles Brausen unsere Kirchen füllt, deren Klang … etwas Grenzenloses und Ungemessenes besitzt, das Organ der abendländischen Andacht. Dom und Orgel bilden eine symbolische Einheit wie Tempel und Statue” (513-4) [“And for that reason the organ, that roars deep and high through our churches in tones which … seem to know neither limit nor restraint, is the instrument of instruments in Western devotions. Cathedral and organ form a symbolic unity like temple and statue” (396)].

In his final moments, Mortimer experiences an epiphany. The foolishness of his materialistic logocentricism has finally become clear, because he now faces something greater than himself: death. He accepts the irrational thought that the only life worth living exists outside of the warped image presented in the here and now:

Han vaagnede lidt efter lidt til en ny tanke og en ny tro. Det liv der nu skulde gaa under i døden var ikke hans liv. Det var kun en illusion, et forvrænget spejlbillede, et ynkeligt og forkrøg. Hans virkelige liv levede et helt andet sted, det levede i ufattelig storhed og sandhed i en helt anden tid, paa et helt andet plan. Det var ikke nogen logisk eller rimelig tanke, men sandheden boede i den fordi den var nødvendig. Og nu skulde døden komme og gøre ham til eet med sit liv.

(236)

(He awakened gradually to a new thought and a new belief. The life that would now perish in death was not his life. It was only an illusion, a distorted reflection, a pathetic and stunted attempt. His real life existed in a whole other place; it lived in incomprehensible greatness and truth in a whole other time, on a whole other plane. It was not a logical or rational thought, but the truth lived in it because it was necessary. And now death was coming to make him one with his life.)

Mortimer acquires a new view of death—he finally attains the child-like imagination missing from his adult life. Awakening from the dream of mimetic reality, Mortimer becomes like a child once more: “Døden, tænkte han, og ogsaa den tanke var ny for ham, han kaldte den ved navn som et barn der vaagner af en hæslig drøm kalder paa sin mor” (236) [Death, he thought, and that thought was also new for him; he called it by name, as a child that awakens from a bad dream calls for its mother]. Tying together the novel's myriad window images—the frames around our image-bound consciousness—Mortimer realizes that he “behøvede kun at have set ud ad mit vindue” (236) [needed only to have looked out my window] to have realized the existence of something greater than himself.

.....

In Drømmen om en kvinde Branner uses colorific language to emphasize the various levels of consciousness that comprise life. Just as colors lead Merete and Niels from one memory of each other to another, Branner's stream of consciousness fades in and out of the telling moments in each character's life. Having abandoned the formulaic writing of the collective and the psychoanalytical novel that had defined his earlier works and not yet struggling with the large political issues that propel his later novels, Branner crafts a seamless meld of image and idea in Drømmen om en kvinde. Though the novel is not as strictly Freudian as his previous work, Branner maintains—and continues to maintain throughout his literary career—a multi-layered sense of human consciousness.

In Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul, Jonathan Lear notes: “A battle may be fought over Freud, but the war is over our culture's image of the human soul. Are we to see humans as having depth—as complex psychological organisms who generate layers of meaning which lie beneath the surface of their own understanding? Or are we to take ourselves as transparent to ourselves?” (27). Branner would have surely advocated the former view. His novels and short stories reveal his search, through pictorial language, for the images lurking beneath our own understanding.

Notes

1. With its emphasis on color and light—but not line—Branner's pictorial language falls in the category of the “painterly” as defined by Heinrich Wölfflin.

2. Commenting on stream-of-consciousness in Principles of Psychology, William James has observed that “every definite image in the mind is steeped and dyed in the free water that flows around it” (255).

3. I have used the 1956 edition. Though Emil Frederiksen disapproves of some of Branner's abbreviations in the 1956 edition, I find the prose and the entire novel more taut. Branner also deleted some of the more heavy-handed religious dialogue, thus allowing the imagery to convey the message.

4. Cf. Branner's use of this image in his short story “Et grædende barn.”

5. Cf. the widower Valdemar Skjold-Lassen in the short story “To minutters stilhed” (see Branner, Om lidt).

6. Cf. Gabriel in Ingen Kender Natten.

7. A parallel on canvas can be found in the ghastly green background of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's Five Women in the Street (1913).

8. As early as “Isaksen” (1933), see Branner Om lidt, his third published story and the basis for his first novel Legetøj, Branner introduced his comparison of people to fish: the insidious office manager Feddersen is described as “en lurende gedde” (8) [a threatening pike].

9. In a letter (9 September 1888) to his brother Theo, van Gogh writes: “In my picture of the Night Café, I have tried to express the idea that the café is a place where one can destroy oneself, go mad or commit a crime. In short, I have tried, by contrasting soft pink with blood-red and wine-red, soft Louis xv-green and Veronese green with yellow-green and harsh blue-greens, all this in an atmosphere of an infernal furnace in pale sulphur, to express the powers of darkness in a common tavern” (399).

10. This use of “giftgrøn” [poison-green] is one of the few instances of Branner using a modifier on the color. Recognizing the subjective nature of each person's “view” of any color, he tends simply to write “red” or “green” and to let the context lead the reader toward a more positive or negative hue.

11. One could answer with Matisse's contention in “The Path of Colour” (1947): “It is enough to invent signs. When you have a real feeling for nature, you can create signs which are equivalents to both the artist and the spectator” (178).

12. An excellent example of this device occurs in Branner's short story “Om lidt er vi borte,” in which a young man wandering the Copenhagen streets at night stops at different windows, where the portrait of a life is expressed in one fleeting scene.

13. When Charlotte returns from her tryst with her lover Carl Bjørndal, the dying Mortimer cannot escape the rainbow in his wife's eyes: “Han kunde se det regnbuefarvede lys der flimrer fra et nøgent legeme. … Han vilde ikke se det. Men han maatte. Han kunde ikke slippe det” (224) [He could see the rainbow-colored light that shimmers from a naked body. … He did not want to see it. But he had to. He could not escape it].

14. Branner uses a similar device in his novella Angst: After a horrible night described in the most German expressionist prose of all Branner's works, the narrator finally sees “en Stribe blaagrøn Morgenhimmel” (62) [a streak of blue-green morning sky], a thin slice of hope.

Works Cited

Adams, Henry. Mont Saint Michel and Chartres. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989.

Arnheim, Rudolf. Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye. The New Edition. Berkeley: U California P, 1974.

Bergson, Henri. An Introduction to Metaphysics. Trans. T. E. Hulme. New York and London: Putnam, 1912.

———. Creative Evolution. Trans. Arthur Mitchell. New York: Henry Holt, 1944.

———. Œuvres. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959.

Branner, H. C. Angst. Copenhagen: Boghallen, 1947.

———. Drømmen om en kvinde: Roman. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1956.

———. Drømmeren og andre noveller. Frederiksberg: Fisker Schou, 1997.

———. “Et grædende barn.” Vandring langs Floden. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1956. 47-58.

———. “Humanismens krise.” Mennesket i tiden 1. Copenhagen: Hans Reitzels Forlag, 1950.

———. Ingen kender natten. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1955.

———. Kunstens uafhængighed. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1957.

———. “Kunst og virkelighed.” Louisiana Revy (October 1962): 28-31.

———. Legetøj. Copenhagen: Branner, 1936.

———. Om lidt er vi borte og To minutters stilhed. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1969.

———. Rytteren: Roman. Copenhagen: Branner og Korch, 1949.

Faulkner, William. Light in August. New York: Random House, 1985.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner's, 1953.

Frederiksen, Emil. H. C. Branner: Et kritisk grundrids. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1966.

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Itten, Johannes. Kunst der Farbe: Subjektives Erleben und objektives Erkennen als Wege zur Kunst. Ravensburg: Maier, 1961.

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Kandinsky, Wassily. Über das Geistige in der Kunst. Bern: Benteli, 1973; translated as Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Trans. M. T. H. Sadler. New York: Dover, 1977.

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Kouwer, Benjamin J. Colors and Their Character: A Psychological Study. Trans. H. C. Bosvan Kasteel. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1949.

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Lear, Jonathan. Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998.

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Secher, Claus. “Humanismens sande krise: en analyse af H. C. Branners Rytteren.” Analyser af danske romaner Vol. 3. Ed. Jørgen Holmgaard. Cophenhagen: Borgens, 1977. Pp. 202-34.

Shlain, Leonard. Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time and Light. New York: Morrow, 1991.

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———. “To minutters skønhed, tredive års opbyggelighed.” Læsninger i Dansk Litteratur 4. Eds. Povl Schmidt, Anne-Marie Mai, and Gjesing Knud Bjarne. Odense: Odense Universitetsforlag, 1997. 25-40.

Spengler, Oswald. Der Untergang des Abendlandes: Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte. Vol. 1. Gestalt und Wirklickkeit. München: Beck, 1922-23; translated as The Decline of the West. Vol. 1. Form and Actuality. New York: Knopf, 1926.

Steiner, Wendy. The Colors of Rhetoric: Problems in the Relation between Modern Literature and Painting. Chicago: U Chicago P, 1982.

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Vosmar, Jørn. H. C. Branner. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1959.

Wölfflin, Heinrich. Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Das Problem der Stilentwicklung in der neueren Kunst. München, Bruckmann, 1921.