(Un)homely landscape at the center of the world

On the 1936 novel En Gård midt i Verden by Jørgen Nielsen

Abstract

The article features the literary landscape of Danish author Jørgen Nielsen’s early novel En Gård midt i Verden (1936), about a rural location at the center of its world. In the wake of the popular breakthrough in early 20th century Danish literature, Nielsen channeled urban landscapes into a more utilitarian, rural realism. The change proved far from colorless and prosaic and rather animating, as in his later Figurer i et Landskab (1944), whose characters are linked to such an enlivened environment. Yet, critics have argued that Nielsen’s main characters are far from normal, or, if not abnormal, at least too common to be common. By my account, they challenge their normal human boundaries in the same way the literary landscape impacts their mindset. As the 1936 novel unfolds, it voids both its title’s and its female protagonist’s centripetal point – as do location and landscape in much of Nielsen’s oeuvre as it addresses the mental geography of the rural Jutland movement within Danish literature (which I have discussed in my 2022 book Jyske bevægelser about five authors testing the boundaries of their Jutland locales). Nielsen especially turned this landscape into a troubled, ‘unhomely’ fiction (as Homi Bhabha might say).