Copenhagen Trilogy

Heather Dornan Wilson, An Honest Hesitation, 2016
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By ANOUCH KURKDJIAN*

Considerations on Tove Ditlevsen's book

Originally written in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the three volumes that make up the Copenhagen Trilogy, by Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen, were published in 2019 in the United States and gained worldwide repercussion from then on, having been published in Brazil at the end of 2023.

Although throughout her life the author wrote more than 20 books, including poetry, novels, short stories and essays, it was with this memoir trilogy that she was rediscovered by the publishing market at the beginning of the XNUMXst century and announced as a predecessor in the lineage of contemporary writers of great resonance such as Elena Ferrante and Annie Ernaux.

These are authors who adopt very distinct literary forms – while Tove Ditlevsen’s work in question is a relatively traditional memoir, Elena Ferrante opts for the canonical form of the realist novel for her Neapolitan tetralogy, while Annie Ernaux reconstructs her personal memories in close connection with social history and guided by an effort of objectification informed by Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of classes – but whose common narrative subject revolves around the trajectory of women from the working class who seek to enter the literary or intellectual universe, traditionally closed to them because it is predominantly male and bourgeois.

Tove Ditlevsen's memoir trilogy stands out for the beauty and lyricism of its narrative, especially in the first two parts: “Childhood” and “Youth”. The last one, “Dependence”, darker due to the extreme events in which the author finds herself involved, is paradoxically the part in which the author's writing seems to have less strength, as if the literary elaboration took a back seat to the facts themselves (which is perhaps understandable, after all).

Before that, it is beautiful to see the desire to write, so strong that one could even call it a necessity, manifesting itself in Tove Ditlevsen from a very early age – several times throughout the book she recalls how since she was little, “long and bizarre words” sprouted in her head all the time and were like a “protective membrane for the soul”; “luminous waves”, the words were a breath of fresh air, a protection against family conflicts or in the work environment, a support to endure the alienation she felt in her own world of origin.

Formulating sentences mentally, writing them in a diary or on a typewriter, reading, were activities that organized her subjectively and, later, would be the path through which she would find a place in the world: “Everyone likes my brother, and I often think that his childhood suits him better than mine suits me. He has a tailor-made childhood, which expands harmoniously with his growth, while mine was made for an entirely different girl, for whom it would be suited. When I have these thoughts, my mask becomes even more foolish, because it is impossible to talk about this kind of thing with anyone – and I always dream of finding a mysterious person, who listens to me and understands me. I know from books that this kind of person exists, but there are none on the street of childhood.”

The dignity that Tove Ditlevsen's writing gives to the smallest details of everyday life, small fleeting impressions and seemingly mundane events, using unusual metaphors and adjectives, this attentive, frank and insightful look, endowed with a freshness typical of childhood and youth (and here it is impossible not to remember Marcel Proust and his incessant search to see things as if for the first time, to escape the prison of habit and its subjective counterpart, the dulling of sensitivity and intelligence) has the effect of making us pay more attention to the details and dignity of our own lives and is the mark of the author's literary and more specifically poetic vocation – although she wrote novels, short stories and essays, Tove Ditlevsen began her literary life writing poetry, a genre that would accompany her throughout her life.

Thus, at first glance, although it is memoiristic and non-fictional, the book can be read as a novel about the formation of an artist [Artist's Rogue], with the specificity of the artist in question being a woman – something still unusual in Denmark in the first half of the 20th century (and not only there) – and, even rarer, a woman from the working class, with all the social barriers that these two affiliations, gender and class, presuppose: difficulties that we learn about throughout the book and that affect material survival, social inclusion, access to education and culture, in addition to the most underhanded gender oppressions. However, none of this is addressed in a pamphlet-like manner in the book, but rather appears vividly, as part of the author's formative experience.

All these obstacles, which Tove Ditlevsen apparently manages to overcome in her youth and in the first half of her adult life, when she establishes herself as a writer, seem to return in the last part of the trilogy, as if condensed in her dependence on painkillers and also in a certain trait of recurring dependence in her romantic relationships – not surprisingly, it is within a literally “toxic” relationship (to use a fashionable term) that her addiction to medication begins – in fact, the word “Gift“, in Danish, is used both to refer to someone who is married and to refer to poison.

It is also curious that the most turbulent phase of her personal life occurs when she finally establishes herself as an artist and begins to live a typically bourgeois life – she buys a house in the suburbs, where she lives with her partner and children, moves away from her more bohemian friends, has money to spare and a maid, among other social markers of ascension.

In this sense, the tragic tone of the end of her trajectory seems to indicate the somewhat precarious nature of her social ascension and the limits of a woman's individual emancipation in a society that is still sexist in its structure. What we see at the end of the narrative is how Tove Ditlevsen's deepest desires, apparently fulfilled in a successful literary career, are at least temporarily crushed by the social world – in the manner of the type of novel that György Lukács called the novel of disillusionment – ​​resulting in great subjective suffering.

This is evident in certain conflicts faced by Tove Ditlevsen and exacerbated at this stage of her life, such as the difficulty in balancing family life and literary activity, the need to always be married or in a loving relationship, without which her life seemed to be impossible, both in material and emotional terms, in addition to the constant and pervasive presence of a deep feeling of inadequacy. As I anticipated, perhaps the lack of expression in the prose in the last part of the book has its literary justification, therefore.

In any case, more than simply exposing the difficulties that Tove Ditlevsen had to face throughout her journey to finally become a writer, the strength of the book seems to reside in the voltage, made palpable by the author's literary ability, between her sensitive, genuine, intimate and necessary relationship with words (between her desire to be a writer, after all) and the obstacles to realizing this vocation in a world hostile to her gender and her class.

Thus, even though politics and history are not explicit themes in the novel – since elements such as the relevance and contradictions of social democracy in Denmark, the rise of Hitler in Germany, the Nazi occupation of Copenhagen and gender-based violence appear in a seemingly episodic manner, more as components of the daily experience of a young writer than as objects of analysis or methodical reflection – reading the work cannot help but evoke the politically relevant feeling that although many things have changed since the time the book was written, many others are still awaiting a more radical transformation.

*Anouch Kurkdjian She holds a PhD in sociology from USP.

Reference


Tove Ditlevsen. Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood, Youth and Addiction. Translation: Heloisa Jahn and Kristin Lie Garrubo. New York, New York, 2003, 392 pages. [https://amzn.to/4gQ73qi]


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