Response:


Some short stories by Martin A. Hansen "Gartneren, Dyret og Barnet" (Hansen 1965; "The Gardener, the Beast, and the Child") and "Soldaten og Pigen" (Hansen 1972; "The Soldier and the Girl") exemplify this Nordic response to the war. Both the eponymous gardener and the soldier are deep in an existential crisis: The gardener because he no longer wants the responsibility of being a gardener and a father, and the soldier because of what he has done in the war. Both characters move from a space of structure and order to a place of chaos, a trash lot inhabited by strange beasts and a marl pit strewn with refuse, respectively. Despite his wish to leave his ordinary life, the gardener chooses to continue to call out for his son, knowing that he will have to take responsibility for having robbed his own child of innocence when he stepped aside. The soldier's choice is more ambiguous: Either he comes to terms with his deeds after speaking to a dead girl and will leave the place or he chooses to remain at the pit, a piece of society's refuse, and commit suicide. Pär Lagerkvist's *Dvärgen* (Lagerkvist 1973; *The Dwarf*) engages the idea of human evil as a universal element throughout time, ye<sup>t</sup> shows the reader that there is a choice to be made: Do we keep the dwarf in the dungeon, or release him? This is a step away from the despair depicted in the final moments of *The Secret of Heaven*, when the Young Man jumps off the planet and plunges into a bottomless abyss. Such modernist despair leaves the door open for tyrants, like Hitler, to take over. This section is rounded off with Ingmar Bergman's *Smultronstället* (Bergman 1957; *Wild Strawberries*), which is undeniably a masterpiece,

<sup>8</sup> Let me acknowledge that Cora Sandel is often seen as an early Norwegian modernist, but that is not evident in these two short stories.

<sup>9</sup> Although some have tried to make Dinesen into a modernist or even a throwback to romanticism, my personal view is that she has more in common with postmodernism. The stories we read are "The Roads Round Pisa" and "The Dreamers" from *Seven Gothic Tales* (Dinesen 1991).

though it is more literary than it is literature. It is a work easily read through the lens of existentialism and, at this point in the semester, students are grateful for the rather uplifting message that it is never too late to make new choices.
