Fra modernisme til nymarxistisk kritik

Resumé

Fra modernisme til ny-marxistisk kritik. Ed. by Oluf Bohn.

Reviewed by William Michelsen

The bulk of this booklet is made up of four interpretations of Grundtvig’s poem ‘De Levendes Land’ and of a poem by Klaus Rifbjerg. The authors are or have been lecturers at the University of Aarhus, and, in different ways, two of them adhere to a Marxist position. No matter how much the four critics disagree, they all seem to regard the view of life expressed in Grundtvig’s poem as a piece of idealist ideology irretrievably belonging to the past. In the concluding symposium Niels Egebak (whose interpretation appeared in the last volume of Grundtvig-Studier) asserts that ‘Grundtvig can fight the romantic ideology only by means of a new ideology which has to accept the premises of the ideology it is militating against, making use of its concepts, and inserting them in a new context. This is what he is doing in ‘De Levendes Land’.’ (p. 140.) If Egebak was right about this, no settlement with the dialectics of romantic ideology would ever be possible.

But in the final words of the poem, this is precisely what Grundtvig achieves. Life is not limited to an airy millenium; it is here and now, but only where love is. Love creates life, and love is understood not only in an immaterial sense, but also in a material, physical sense. It is at once earthly and heavenly, human and Divine, creative. Grundtvig’s Christian realism goes beyond all ideologies, idealist as well as materialist.

Grundtvig denounced the dialectic between body and sould that prevailed in his age. The view of life advocated by him was different from the platonic view. Obviously, as can be seen from his political activities, this was bound to influence his attitude to social life. However, a great part of his cultural programme has not been effected.