Mogens and Other Stories

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Readers of Kathleen Barber’s Are You Sleeping and fans of Ruth Ware will enjoy this slim but compelling novel’ Booklist Again I wish I was someone who could describe prose. If it is poetry to describe the world as if you could really live it. Intimate without suffocating. Gentle and harsh like a full body scrub from a mother you want to have outgrown. There was just something I really liked about these stories. It reminds me of my more fullfilling life moments of feeling like I actually get anything out of seeing people around me. That's what I like. And there's no way I can tell you about what it looked like and the smile on their face and the reflection it made on the other person who saw it and the walking after... Sighs. Sure wish I could. JPJ wrote it in this way that it was as easy as an unbidden expression. Yep, that's what I've got. This was the period when Jens Peter Jacobsen began to write, but he stood aside from the conflict, content to be merely artist, a creator of beauty and a seeker after truth, eager to bring into the realm of literature “the eternal laws of nature, its glories, its riddles, its miracles,” as he once put it. That is why his work has retained its living colors until to-day, without the least trace of fading. The councilor was a friend of nature, nature was something quite special, nature was one of the finest ornaments of existence. The councilor patronized nature, he defended it against the artificial; gardens were nothing but nature spoiled; but gardens laid out in elaborate style were nature turned crazy. There was no style in nature, providence had wisely made nature natural, nothing but natural. Nature was that which was unrestrained, that which was unspoiled. But with the fall of man civilization had come upon mankind; now civilization had become a necessity; but it would have been better, if it had not been thus. The state of nature was something quite different, quite different. The councilor himself would have had no objection to maintaining himself by going about in a coat of lamb-skin and shooting hares and snipes and golden plovers and grouse and haunches of venison and wild boars. No, the state of nature really was like a gem, a perfect gem. Thora is unable to understand how someone can love nature without imagining a supernatural element behind it:

Friedrich Nietzsche, "The Gay Science: Book V, Section 343," in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), 447-48.

INTRODUCTION

During his lifetime, Jacobsen was, like Charles Darwin and Friedrich Nietzsche, a figure that inspired new ways of thinking about what it means to be human. He began as a botanist who was the first person to translate Darwin's works into Danish and, through a series of articles, illuminated Darwin's ideas to a budding Scandinavian generation. Conflicted between science and poetry, he eventually published his short story "Mogens" in a literary journal, taking Denmark—and later Europe—by storm with his pioneering of a new style of natural realism and the confrontation with what it means to be modern.

She did not feel herself younger, but it seemed to her as if a fountain of tears that had been obstructed and dammed had burst open again and begun to flow. There was great happiness and relief in crying, and these tears gave her a feeling of richness; it was as if she had become more precious, and everything had become more precious to her—in short it was a feeling of youth after all. I appreciate a kind of unassuming influence like sitting in someone's presence and being influenced by their experiences. If it's a new world to feel as they feel... And also when it feels bad to do it. I can relate to this Jens Peter Jacobsen.Morten Høi Jensen, in his masterful biography of Jacobsen—the only full English-language study of Jacobsen to date—goes a step further than Gustafson saying that it would be "misguided" to state Jacobsen's objection of the subjective over the objective view of nature too rigidly.[5] In reality, Jacobsen's work portrays an inner conflict between the rational realism gained by an objective view of the world and the story-driven subjective beliefs that society carries. He shows that, despite scientific advancements and the development of new theoretical systems, coming to terms with the emotional and existential repercussions of the shattering of old beliefs can have profound effects upon one's physical and emotional well-being. It is a sentiment My Love encapsulates, as it considers the contrasting difficulty of ageing alongside the beauty of time spent in an eternal partnership. It isn’t all despair. The historical novel Fru Marie Grubbe (1876, Eng. transl.: Marie Grubbe: A Lady of the Seventeenth Century 1917) is the first Danish treatment of a woman as a sexual creature. Based upon the life of a 17th-century Danish noblewoman, it charts her downfall from a member of the royal family to the wife of a ferryman, as a result of her desire for an independent and satisfying erotic life. In many ways the book anticipates the themes of D. H. Lawrence. Mogens" was [Jacobsen's] first attempt to show the lived experience of this disorientation on the small scale of a single human life.[9]

The weight of his influence was felt even in his own lifetime but took on a greater wave for the generations immediately following his death. Thomas Mann claimed that Jacobsen had the greatest effect on his early style and Jacobsen's works were praised by James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Robert Musil, Stephan Zweig, Hermann Hesse, Sigmund Freud, and Franz Kafka among many others. Perhaps the strongest influence was made upon Rainer Maria Rilke who found Jacobsen's works to be "indispensable" in shaping his life:[2] Then you really mean, that the whole affair is not so bad, that there is something bold in it, something in a sense eminently plebeian, which pleases your liking for democracy.” All text from the above passages of "Mogens" are taken from Anna Grabow's 1921 translation of Jacobsen's short stories: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/6765/6765-h/6765-h.htm Jacobsen is more than a mere stylist. The art of writers who are too consciously that is a sort of decorative representation of life, a formal composition, not a plastic composition. One element particularly characteristic of Jacobsen is his accuracy of observation and minuteness of detail welded with a deep and intimate understanding of the human heart. His characters are not studied tissue by tissue as under a scientist’s microscope, rather they are built up living cell by living cell out of the author’s experience and imagination. He shows how they are conditioned and modified by their physical being, their inheritance and environment, Through each of his senses he lets impressions from without pour into him. He harmonizes them with a passionate desire for beauty into marvelously plastic figures and moods. A style which grows thus organically from within is style out of richness; the other is style out of poverty. Beautifully written, smart, compassionate – and scary as hell. Matt Wesolowski is one of the most exciting and original voices in crime fiction’ Alex NorthJacobsen's study of botany gave him a unique view of the world around him. During his childhood and time at the University, Jacobsen spent hours observing plants, wading in bogs to study algae, or cataloging new species of newly discovered plant life. For Jacobsen, there was a mystery simply in the natural world itself without the need for allegory or the supernatural elements often imposed during the Romantic period. Nature itself, observed fully and without recourse to embellishment, was sufficient as Alrik Gustafson writes of "Mogens:"

What Goes without Saying: Collected Stories of Josephine Jacobsen, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. No, he had never had any special feeling for places and countries; he thought it was only his daily work which he missed. One character, an uneducated man, talks of his upper class girlfriend’s acquaintances: “There’s not a thing between heaven and earth that they can’t finish off with a wave of the hand: this is base and that is noble; this is the stupidest thing since the creation of the world, and that is the cleverest; one thing is so ugly…They all know the same things and talk the same way, they all have the same words and the same opinions.” And now I will quote from Rainer Maria Rilke's "Letters to a Young Poet": "Get hold of the little volume, "Six Stories," and in the first little volume begin the first story which is called "Mogens". A world will come over you, a happiness, a wealth, a world of inconceivable greatness. Live for awhile in these books, learn from them what seems to you worth learning, but above all, love them. This love will be repaid a thousandfold, and, whatever may become of your life will, I am convinced of it, run through the fabric of your being as one of the most important among all the threads of your experiences, disappointments and joys." A Difficult Death: The Life and Work of Jens Peter Jacobsen by Morten Høi Jensen, 2017, Yale University Press (978-0300218930)

Table of Contents

Director Carolina Sá observed a similar dynamic when following Nicinha and Jurema in Brazil. “They, the generation of Nicinha and Jurema and especially in their relationship, they have this patience with one another. I don’t think we have this any more. We’re losing this.” In those days both soon noticed that however much they might have changed during the course of the years, their hearts had forgotten nothing. Jacobsen is also highly respected for her short fiction, which is collected in four volumes, including A Walk with Raschid and Other Stories(1978) and Adios, Mr. Moxley(1986). Set in such diverse locales as Baltimore, the Caribbean islands, Mexico, and Morocco, these books feature powerful examinations of loneliness, betrayal, oppression, illness, and dishonesty. Jacobsen’s stories often end unresolved, leaving the reader to speculate about the future of her characters. Critics attribute the impact of Jacobsen’s short fiction to her skillful characterization and evocative prose. A Walk with Raschidwas deemed “first rate” by a Choicecritic who also wrote, “the stories, conventional in form, emphasize plot and character. They are both moving and disturbing; their impact is wonderful.” In a review of Adios, Mr. Moxley, Stephen Goodwin wrote that Jacobsen is certain of “what is and is not important, and why. These stories, consequently, have a bracing rigor about them, a keen independence, and the clean ring of truth.” Around this time, the discoveries of Charles Darwin began to fascinate him. Realizing that the work of Darwin was not well known in Denmark, he translated The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man into Danish. Standing, looking at Thora sleeping, "the last shadow of his past" disappears. The story ends with the two happy lovers disappearing into a field of grain, laughing with each other. Jacobsen vividly inserts us into this final scene through his powerful sense of natural imagery: