A Trip Down neo-Fascist Nordic Lane -- Nobel Laureate Johannes V. Jensen

So, wow. 

Normally, I've never paid much attention to Nobel Prize winners, at least outside the usual Anglo-American canonical figures still taught in university curricula (so: Faulkner and Steinbeck yes, Kipling and Pearl S. Buck no), but I've recently had to read, as research, The Long Journey by Danish Nobel Laureate Johannes V. Jensen. Not sure what I was expecting, but a plotless Darwinian mythologization of the Nordic racial type told in absolutely beautiful prose wasn't exactly it.

None of those elements are an exaggeration, either. The prose is absolutely breath-taking. It almost has to be, since The Long Journey can only loosely be considered a novel. The "plot," so to speak, spans forty thousand years of human history from our primitive origins during the Ice Age, to the Germanic tribe of the Cimbrians and their robust but quasi-primitive beliefs, to the Gothic cathedrals of the Catholic Church, to the "triumphal" west-faring of Christopher Columbus and, eventually, Charles Darwin. 

The book's basic argument is as follows. Cultures that grew up in the ice-bound North, such as the Germanic and Norse tribes, had a greater impetus to develop civilization -- other tribes, however, moved south seeking easier lives. This kind of narrative mythologization requires quite a bit of legerdemain. For instance, it's pretty well known that the northern Cimbrians were wiped out by the southern Romans.  How does Jensen sidestep that particular complication? Well, the Cimbrians made a number of brave decisions that nevertheless were poor tactics -- a sign of virtue run amuck. More revealingly, they were defeated by the Roman consul Marius, a coarse individual whom Jensen firmly distinguishes from the more effete Roman upper classes of the late Republic for whom empire also meant decadence. But the Cimbrians also force the Romans to be more "truly" Roman, while wasting their own virtues through luxuries pillaged during their previous military successes. For instance,

Roman training and technical skill had asserted themselves splendide against the overpowering physical gifts of a primitive people. But had they not been forced by these same people to return to ancient Roman virtues, and had not the vigorous invaders learnt slackness of them, amongst other things? (463)

Even more tellingly, how can Jensen explain away the civilization of Native Americans, who had no Nordic racial blood? Well, no problem -- a Norseman gave them civilization. This is the influence of an immortal Norse journeyer named Norna Gest, a figure from the sagas, who also -- according to Jensen -- originated the myth of Quetzalcoatl the White God:

The first thing [Gest] did for them was to free them from their dependence on the fierce mountain [ie primitives volcano worship]. For they were still no further advanced than the primitive folk they were descended from .... they knew the use of fire but could not themselves produce it..... Norna Gest taught them the holy need-fire, produced by drilling, the Ice Folk's greatest acquisition and possession; nothing of an art when you knew it, but to the poor primitive people of an importance scarcely to be measured. (614)

The novel's introduction, incidentally, firmly states that Jensen has no clear politics -- not left or right. Even if that's true, it's hard to read Jensen's repeated claims of ancestral blood memory in any non-Nazi-like way. Statements like the following are everywhere:

[T]his trial of manhood was an ancient and holy institution, an inherited passion in the blood of every man. (372)

That emphasis on manhood, by the way, is no accidental. Although Jensen's sister was apparently a well-known early Danish feminist, Jensen's own treatment of women, especially in matters of sexual assault, is pretty brutal. One time in an account of the early Cimbrians, Jensen blithely describes a scenario where a young girl, who just got her first menstrual blood, is immediately chased by several grown men and raped by the first one who catches her (245-46). Somehow, this doesn't seem to bother Jensen much, but this type of thing is apparently common to Jensen's whole career. In a review of the English translation for The Fall of the King, a book often considered the greatest Danish novel of the 20th-century, another reviewer vents that "Jensen’s dubious sexual politics [especially about rape] inform some of his worst writing. . . ." Yep.

Given all this, I'm sure you can imagine how Jensen portrays Christopher Columbus -- slavishly. Granted, he describes Columbus in terms familiar to me from my grade school textbooks, but Jensen's blatant hero-worship would make a groupie blush. Columbus is tall; physically imposing; a stern but talented leader; a skilled navigator; a learned man too smart to believe the world flat; and a basically saint-like human being who absolutely DID NOT -- *wink*wink* -- commit any atrocities against indigenous peoples. The following passages say it all:

Columbus did not treat them harshly, even when as Viceroy and Governor he had to keep order in the colonies he founded, no more than the rights of war according to the ideas of the time; but he had not much luck either. He sold the natives into slavery a little -- the morality of the age; and that was not the worst thing, even as certain women prefer rape to missing their destiny.... (624)

It was never the intention of a man like Columbus that the poor creatures [natives] who sat in darkness should be won to grace [i.e. converted to Christianity] by other than gentle means. (627)

Overall, Jensen's Columbus is a bold visionary without a single personal blemish. Nor does Jensen present a more damning account of the conquistadores. On Cortez: "Only the Iliad can be compared with the story of the conquest of Mexico" (628). That's not exactly false, per se, but it certainly takes a light-hearted attitude to mass murder, rape, slavery, and cultural genocide.

I could keep in quoting all day, but you get the idea.

This novel formed a pretty big influence on Poul Anderson, which is why I read it. So many of the themes -- and the blindnesses -- are the precisely same, including the hero-worship of explorers and the respect for civilization, although Anderson doesn't hit the racial-memory thing nearly as hard. Still, most of Anderson's SF is just The Long Journey, which the story of civilization down to present times, extended into space and space exploration. It's hard to deny that Anderson was fundamentally a good and kindly individual, but being a Jensen-lite still makes his legacy more than a little complicated.