In the afterword to the Portuguese edition of Niels Lyhne, Claudio Magris draws a parallel between Niels’s melancholy and Oblomov’s ennui. ‘Both novels are born of the perception of exile from true life, of the awareness that it lies elsewhere, beyond the reach of the individual who ought to live it.’ That exile exists in Niels. From early on, there is a disjunction between the life he senses and the life he can actually live, and the distance between the two grows as time passes.
There is a deep melancholy in Niels Lyhne, but no nihilism. God gradually disappears from belief, yet the world does not empty with him. Beauty remains, love retains its force, and nature is still capable of provoking an experience close to revelation. Even when life moves away from the form he had imagined for it, something resists disenchantment.
Niels inherits from his mother the sense that reality can hardly attain the beauty the imagination has been able to foresee. Before loving an actual woman, he loves an idea of love. Before experience occurs, he has already anticipated it and given it form. For this reason, at one of the decisive moments in the novel, he rebels against his own tendency to ‘compose poems about life instead of living it’. He wants life to fall upon him so completely that he ceases to make poetry out of it and life itself begins to make poetry out of him.
Nature offers him glimpses of that possibility. In a spring landscape, he feels the profusion of the world as though everything were seeking to ‘merge mystically into a single cry’. The word matters. Mystically. In a novel traversed by the loss of faith, experience preserves the structure of a revelation. The sacred emerges from things themselves. For an instant, matter seems to exceed its ordinary state.
To let life make poetry out of us means accepting it within time. Whatever we allow ourselves to live, we must also allow to die. Jacobsen dwells on what changes, light, water, melting ice, the seasons, clouds, shadows. Beauty does not exist in spite of that transformation. It exists within it. An instant can be complete without being eternal.
This is why Niels’s atheism seems to me less simple than an intellectual rejection of God. Its origin lies in a wound. As a child, faced with Edele’s illness, he prays with the violence of someone who believes faith can compel God to answer. When she dies, Niels rebels. God failed him at the moment when he needed him most.
Later, that rebellion becomes conviction. Niels imagines a world in which strength, love and hope, for centuries diverted towards God, might return to earth. Yet he ceases to believe religiously without losing a religious way of seeing. He retains his sense of wonder before beauty, the need to venerate, the capacity to surrender himself to what he recognises as extraordinary.
This is where the novel interests me most. The sacred does not disappear with God. It changes place. It no longer depends on an entity outside the world and can instead emerge from the very matter of life, from a landscape, a body, love, a change in the light, even the smell of a house.
The death of God does, however, remove an essential guarantee. There is no longer a place outside time where what disappears might be preserved. The dead may not be encountered again, love carries no promise of eternity, and no higher order ensures that suffering has meaning. Niels has freed himself from belief, but not from the hunger that transcendence once fed.
That is his deepest drama. He longs for permanence in a world subject to transformation, for unity within a consciousness in motion, and for fullness in an existence that cannot be wrested from time.
Near the end, already wounded, he tells Hjerrild that ‘this was not at all how we dreamed of attaining fullness’. The dream failed, but it was not disproved. Fullness remained the measure. Beauty did not become an illusion because it was transient. Love was not worth less because it ended.
After God, poetry remains to give form to what time condemns to disappear. A remarkable book, profoundly contemporary, almost a century and a half after its publication.
