Georg Brandes - Restless Spirit

By Sindre Hovdenakk

Almost eight decades after his death Georg Brandes’s presence in Danish literature is more palpable
than for a long time. Among other places, he puts in a thinly disguised showing as a minor character in two new novels. On this occasion, however, the roles have suddenly been reversed. The great emancipator is now the great tyrant. And the modern breakthrough is no longer a source of pride.
Jette A. Kaarsbøl’s novel Den lukkede bok [The Closed Book] was something of an „instant success“ on its autumn 2003 release (Norwegian edition, 2004). The story of the young Frederikke who breaks off an unhappy engagement and sets off to find personal and social freedom in 1870s modernist circles – only to find that hypocrisy and mendacity flourish as well among writers as clerics – offers relatively tasteless caricatures of Realism’s leading figures. Not least Georg Brandes himself, the man who seduced female admirers with the one hand while translating John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women with the other.
Kaarsbøl is clearly fired by an ambition to discover the extent to which the modern breakthrough created failures or losers, not least among already marginalised groups like women and ordinary workers. And that personal liberty by no means guarantees personal happiness. It is to elucidate these points she installs a Brandes-like character in the literary setting. The author’s almost schoolmarmish pedantry is blown up into something resembling urgent cultural criticism, with both a myopic and reductive approach to what cultural radicalism in all its variants actually entailed. That a ladies’ novel of such pomposity can win round wide swathes of the reading public says a great deal about both the literary and political climate in Denmark in the early 2000s.
In the autumn of 2004 Michael Larsen jumped on the anti-modernist bandwagon with Den store tid – Aftenlandet [The Great Era – Twilight Land], the first of two volumes of what the publishers call a „serialised novel“ about the life and fortunes of Lars Mikkelsen. The young Lars also turns his back on family and upbringing to find himself as an artist and man in 1870s Copenhagen. And he too soon learns to hate Georg Brandes and his brother Edvard – who for the occasion bear the family name of Adler. Lars Mikkelsen’s first outing as a novelist in the Romantic style is ridiculed mercilessly by the arrogant critic Brandes/Adler. But we assume revenge will be sweet by the time volume II comes round.
Where Den lukkede bok is primarily a melodramatic novel about love’s betrayal and ill-fated women, Den store tid – Aftenlandet is a typical Bildungsroman and artist-comes-of-age novel, in which the young male protagonist steadily fills out his character as he slowly but surely surmounts trials and setbacks on his journey to a settled personality. Both books exhibit all the hallmarks of the light novel, but Larsen has a head start over Kaarsbøl insofar as he actually writes well. What’s more, he intelligently lets a crime story unfold alongside the main story, something that doubtless will serve to keep readers awake through the second and final volume too.
Despite their lightness and digestibility: a rather unpleasant, sultry undercurrent of aggressive anti-radicalism flows through both novels. If we are to take the books seriously as cultural thermometers – and that is what we are supposed to do – it looks as if reactionary Denmark is about to avenge a century after the event radicalism’s destruction of the stultifying bourgeoisie’s false facades. As a literary phenomenon, it is at best intriguing. As an indicator of cultural politics it is at worst alarming. But Denmark wouldn’t have been Denmark if the leading representatives of cultural radicalism failed to demonstrate that Brandes’s legacy is by no means a spent thing. An almost monumental expression of this is Jørgen Knudsen’s now complete biography of Georg Brandes. In 2004, the final double volume of eight was published: 2756 pages all told. The author needed precisely twenty years to finish this project, and the result is not only a biographical exercise, impressive in its descriptive power and exhaustive in its minutiae. It is also a unique source of information on one of the most interesting periods in Scandinavian history, and from first to last an unavoidable reminder of how utterly decisive cultural radicalism was in Nordic literature and society from the 1870s to the present day. Georg Brandes in most circumstances, including biographical ones, remains more imposing a figure than his enemies.
That Brandes and his comrades-in-arms initiated a cultural struggle which is still not over is also reflected in the title of a 2004 collection of essays: Det stadig moderne gennembrud [The Still Unfolding Modern Breakthrough]. Under the editorial leadership of Hans Hertel, eight scholars examine the period between 1870 and 1900, showing from different angles that cultural radicalism’s ideas of personal and artistic liberation still carry a provocative sting. While the modern by no means has won the fight for the mind of man, it is in any event clearly here to stay.
Hans Hertel received in the spring of 2005 the Danish publicists’ prize for his extensive contribution as professor of literature, writer and critic. It is safe to say that the prize is in Brandes’s spirit in every way, and Hertel does it proud moreover with the chapter he wrote for Det stadig moderne gennembrud.
Here he commandeers a far-sighted view of contemporary ideas, insisting that it is impossible to divorce the literary Left from the political Left, not least in view of the renewed relevance to the current cultural struggle of the profound split in the Danish Left – between Grundtvigianism and Brandesianism (rural and urban radicalism).
But Hans Hertel is by no means uncritical towards what he calls Brandesian dogmatics. Among other things, he takes issue with uncritical belief in progress and notions of progress as a non-stopping express train: „a monster, a never resting, unending Train, Humanity’s eternal Longing for lasting ideals embracing the Triumphal Procession of Freedom, Civilisation and Progress“, as Brandes himself put it in one of his more pontifical moments.
After a century in which modernity quickly became associated with political dictatorships and human destructivity, there is compelling reason to warn against what Hertel calls the modernist fallacy: that art and culture are progressing, and that everything of the past is therefore worth less than today’s modes of expression. Indeed, the reason the cultural standoff between the elite and ordinary people still seems so deep can be found in this type of avant-garde thinking. And why the cultural landscape is open to every sort of populism.
Georg Brandes was above all the man who opened Denmark – and the rest of Scandinavia – up to outside perspectives, created new patterns of thought and encouraged aspirations of personal freedom. Exploring the darker sides of the great man’s personality is doubtless both intriguing and challenging, and it is clearly tempting to adopt him as a sort of literary Mephistopheles. All idols, including worldly idols, need to be challenged.
Nevertheless, we let Hans Hertel have the last word: “Brandes’s breakthrough was not simply a literary revolt. It was a cultural struggle. We are now in the midst of a similar struggle over ideals, and a suitable maxim could be Kant and Brandes’s old slogan: sapere aude – dare to know! The courage should include the courage to know what Brandes really stood for, in contrast to the hate campaign fuelled by prejudice and ignorance which he and his tradition have faced so often before and are facing again.”