The theme of love

in Henrik Pontoppidan's Night Watch and other long-short stories.

By Judy Gammelgaard

Abstract

The subject of love may not seem an appropriate study for a scientific discourse. We rather turn to poetry when searching for anything meaningful of love. This being the case we nonetheless find three writings about the subject in Freud's work all underlining an internal division in love. He talked about the contrast between the affectionate and sensual aspects of love, while Lacanian writers have supplemented this, pointing to the division between pleasure and desire.
The author has taken up these ideas illustrating them with cases taken from the Danish author Henrik Pontoppidan.
Henrik Pontoppidan is one of the most prominent Danish writers from around 1900. He is well-known for his novels and for his so-called long-short stories. Night Watch from 1894 is one of these stories, which through the years following the first edition, has been read by critics as a marital conflict between the brutal painter Jørgen Hallager and his fragile wife Ursula Branth, who succumbs to the brutality of her husband.
The author has wanted to supplement this simple version of the story with aspects made visible through the idea of an internal division in sexuality, which it took Freud twenty year from his first suggestion to elaborate into his theory of Eros and death.
Pontoppidans writings on the theme of love offers on the other hand a welcome inspiration for working with what Freud and his successors have meant to be an contribution to the complicated question of love and sexual life.
By way of introduction a few words is said about Pontoppidan, focusing on the theme of love dating from his long-short stories. Following this is a brief summery of the plot in Night Watch. A more detailed reading of the dialogue between the two protagonists Jørgen and Ursula opens the way for a psychoanalytic interpretation of the tragic outcome of their love.

Key words: applied analysis, love, drive, desire and art.

About Pontoppidan and the theme of love

Henrik Pontoppidan was born in 1857 into a clerical family of long tradition and died in 1943, thus sharing lifespan with Freud. We do not find any references to Freud and psychoanalysis in Pontoppidan's writings, but we do find cognate ideas and themes as expression of the social and cultural conditions of their life. Together with Ibsen, Brandes and other radical writers from around 1900, Freud and Pontoppidan belonged to what we term "the modern breakthrough".

The question of subjectivity in all it's aspects and not least the inner division of subjectivity itself was of main considerations to all these radical thinkers and artists.

Although he was awarded the Nobel Prize of literature in 1917 sharing it with Karl Gjellerup, a contemporary fellow writer, Pontoppidan's writings have never been translated, and he is probably little known outside Denmark. It is this author's hope to present and make visible an eminent story teller, who deserves attention to psychoanalysts outside his native country because of a daring and penetrating insight into the conditions of life at a time, when society became modern. This year being the 150th since Pontoppidan's birth only enhance the opportunity.

Pontoppidan is to posterity the most authoritative literary observer of the time-span between 1870 and 1920. From him we know how democracy was born in Denmark, and what became of it. His literary work covers a broad spectre of social, political, ideological, aesthetic and existential themes written by an author, who always placed himself at a distance while being deeply engaged in what he observed.

Having a keen eye to the political and social conditions of life in the small Danish villages around 1880, he wrote with social indignation and deeply felt empathy of the life he saw around him, taking part as if it was a matter of his own life. The copping stone of his critique of social poverty in the village life is the collection of short stories: From the cottages (1887).

Like many of his contemporary writers his clerical background meant both a strong fixation and the point of departure for his rebellion and uproar, a conflict which in Pontoppidan's life was especially intense and painful. He wrestled throughout his writings with the question of freedom, identity and faith, and he never let his doubt and insecurity come up with simple solution. His most well-known novel Lykke-Per (Lucky Per) written between 1898 and 1904 is the culmination of this wish to integrate personal experiences into a broad description of the industrial and urban development in Denmark at the time. (For a brilliant reading, see Kristiansen, 2007)

The year of 1879, was the year Pontoppidan decided to become a writer. It was as well the year, when the new radical literature became a central topic in public life not least because of it's atheism and erotic liberalism. The so called "moral feud" was a Scandinavian movement insisting on taking up for discussion in public and in literature questions of sexuality, gender and marriage. The novel Mimosas (1886; English translation 1890.) was Pontoppidan's explicit contribution to the feud. It tells the story of two daughters brought up in an atmosphere of refined and sublimated affections, profiled against their father's nature worship which has aspects of both passion and control. The daughters are portrayed as romantic mimosas not being able to live up to a masculine demand of a free erotic life.

Pontoppidan took upon himself the obligation Georg Brandes has put on his contemporary writers of "bringing things up for discussions", mentioning among other themes marital life and religion.

He developed the special genre of the long-short story, in which he outlined the split of modern life. The composition is centred on a plot of very concentrated duration, while the theme is broad-spectred and visionary. These stories are formed as historical and literary comments to that age, looked at from an observer, who does not take side, but tries to expose different views on conflicting themes. Contrary to his former writings of social and political conditions of humble life, the long-short stories written around the turn of the century penetrate into the heartstrings of bourgeoisie living.

The fight appearing in Pontoppidan's "scenes from a marriage" will often come out with a deadly end, and in most cases it is the woman who dies. In no other literary work do we meet with so many soul-murders and suicides coursed by man's blindness towards his inner motives. With his uncompromising penetration into the depth of human destructiveness, Pontoppidan reminds us of an idea, Freud wrestled with throughout his work culminating in the concept of the death drive. I shall have more to say about this later.

The ideal home from 1900 is a radical showdown of the patriarchal nuclear family. The author plays with the idea of family life based on a matriarchy. However, contrary to many other stories, this is not seen in the light of the effect the patriarchal fathers had on their sons and consequently on the married couple. Put into the mouth of the main character in the novel, the young inexperienced scientist Adam Malling, marriage is looked upon with puritan disgust because of the intimate bringing together of two people completely different and strange to each other. In accordance with his ideology young Malling leaves the woman he has made pregnant, making up his mind to live together with his mother, his divorced sister and her children, whom he for certain will do no harm.

As with the protagonist from Night Watch it would be too simplistic to identify the idea of this novel as the author's. It must be read as the artist's obligation to visualise and work out the contours of a potential ideal. The voices in Pontopidan's writings are always polyphone.

Although most relations between man and woman have been portrayed through male narcissistic and tyrannical dominance and the woman, portrayed as the representative and guard of true love, it is not unambiguous that way. The most exemplary of the contrary is probably Thora van Deken (1900), who like the male protagonists embitters her own life and that of her surroundings with hate, being the result of insults and humiliations directed to a narcissistic cathected self.

In the story of Burgomaster Hoeck and His Wife (1905; English translation 1999) we find one of the most cruel and destructive descriptions of marital life. This story also ends with the tragic death of the wife as a result of a husband, who envies the life affirming charm of his wife, because it is not under his control and more important not accessible to him, echoing the theory of envy elaborated by Klein and her successors.

We do find realised in Pontoppidan's writings the idea of utopian love. In A love adventure (1918, 1930) Mrs. Ingrid has left her husband and two children to live with the man, she loves. In her portrait, Pontoppidan has painted the most pure and probably the most idealised picture of femininity.

As was his custom, Pontoppidan rewrote this novel and gave it a rather surprising new ending. In the first edition the author let Ingrid's former husband die and Ingrid have her children back. Together with her lover she returns to Denmark where the couple settled for a happy life. When he rewrote the novel in 1930, Pontoppidan let Ingrid die in guilt and sorrow for having lost and betrayed her children. Why did he choose this radical transformation in ending the story?

We might look to Pontoppidan's personal life and the loss of his beloved wife (Rosdahl, 2002). But we might as well search for a reason being both psychological and aesthetic which may be of the same kind as the one we may read into the characters from Night Watch. What we are looking for is the deeper meaning of the struggle and unhappiness in love life which is so dramatic exposed through the love between Jørgen Hallager and Ursula Branth, the main characters of Pontoppidan's story from 1895, reworked in 1905.

The story here chosen may not, literary seen, be one of Pontoppidan's best. Anyway, it illustrates his humour, his critical and sarcastic stile and the thematic form, he chose in many of his stories. Like his contemporary writer, Henrik Ibsen, he composed a drama here as elsewhere populated with "ghosts", arranging the plot around an unmasking of a person's identity, pointing to traumas of the past as determinants of present behaviour. It is this combination of the struggle between erotic attraction and love and a retrospective explanation of the tragedy which make Night Watch obvious for a psychoanalytical reading.

The plot

On the first pages of the novel we are presented to the two protagonists Jørgen and Ursula, who are celebrating their wedding in Rome. Jørgen Hallager has just arrived, while Ursula and her father have been there for a while joining the Scandinavian Colony of artists. Among these is Thorkild Drehling, a good friend and former devoted pupil of Hallager. We are not far into the story, when it becomes clear that the relation between Jørgen and Ursula is far from equal. He is rebellious and egocentric, demanding total loyalty from his friends and absolutely ignoring to other peoples standpoints. Jørgen harbours the same insistent absolutism concerning his artistic obligations. In the opening pages we get a glimpse of an uncompromised hatred toward the bourgeois society ventured on his father in law the Councillor of State.

Ursula on the contrary is portrayed as a timid and dreaming child, having great expectancies to her husband, whom she dreams of seeing as a great artist – although of the romantic kind.

The beginning of the story consists in depicting the disharmony and misunderstandings of the newly married couple, and the reader is left with the question of why on earth they have chosen each other.

Working itself up to the peripety or middle of the story, Thorkild Drehling enters the scene, revealing a dialogue which has been going on between him and Ursula prior to Jørgen's arrival. Drehling has been deeply in love with Ursula, but realises that she is dreaming of being Jørgen's guardian angel, concerning both his person and his art. Sad and disillusioned Drehling gives up any hope of reaching Ursula, while at the same time he turns his back to the social and realistic art of his former teacher.

The tension between Jørgen and Ursula reaches a climax, when Jørgen at a dinner party with the Scandinavian Colony gives free vein to his contempt towards the gathering, wile paying tribute to revolution and anarchy.

Ursula first tries a rebellion on a small scale but soon succumbs into a hysteric identification with Jørgen, terminating in a stroke, from which she dies. In this last dialogue between Jørgen and Ursula, Jørgen reveals the trauma of his childhood, which the narrator presents as an explanation of Jørgen's rebelliousness both as artist and person. Ursula on her part reacts to his telling with a mad identification, paving the way for the stroke that hits her soon after.

Shortly before the dying scene, Jørgen has visited Drehlings studio and realised that he has been betrayed by his former disciple who has turned towards romanticism, and it comes to a reckoning between the former friends.

The end of the story takes place in Copenhagen a few years later. We are told that the long constitutional struggle has ended and people are celebrating the golden wedding of the old royal couple.

In a shoddy pub we are presented to Hallager and the very few of what was his former group of like-minded. The narrator makes it clear that time and the public opinion has surpassed Jørgen's revolutionary ideas of art, and that he himself has come-down as both person and artist spending his life with a former friend, a woman of the people and their small son.

Now, let us go into some details of the dialogue between the two protagonists in order to figure out, why it turns out so badly with love – and maybe with art.

The reader will excuse if there is some repetition from the short summery of the novel.

Jørgen and Ursula

The novel opens with a presentation of Jørgen, "the red painter", who on a bright Sunday morning is on his way back to his new home in Via Tritone in Rome. It is said about him "that he has arrived there in order to celebrate his wedding with the beautiful Ursula Branth, only child of the Councillor of State, Branth the famous art-lover and confident advisor of the ministry concerning matters of theatre, literature and fine arts"(ibid. p.109).

"Scoundral!" mutters Jørgen regularly when he happens to think of his father in law. Now, the tune has been set, and at the same moment we get a hint of a misalliance. Returning home Jørgen's indecent manners are underlined by the way he treats the young maiden Annunciata. Shortly after, we are presented to Ursula, who timid and fearful still hides in the bedroom. While Jørgen is addressing her from the dining room in a rebellious tone and with a completely egocentric perspective so characteristic to his person, he reveals at the same time another side of his personality in a small sequence of action. Pontoppidan has incisively framed Jørgen's hidden side in the following parapraxis.

Jørgen has bought some small tee-pretzels to give to Ursula as a surprise. "He walks to a small table, removes a bunch of flowers and pours out his half crumbled purchase in the middle of the table cloth. Then he crumples the empty bag in the form of a globular and threw it in accordance with an old bachelor habit towards the fireplace" (ibid. p.112).

Around the story there are a few other examples of Jørgen`s double nature. When Ursula dies, his mind gets blank and he understands nothing. "Confused and stunned he tried in vain to solve the riddle which everything seemed to be to him" (ibid. p. 175-176).

Jørgen is an uncompromising rebel and provocateur in a way, which both pretends and testifies to the naive conviction that nothing else is trustworthy. Hidden in this naivety is blindness towards forces in him self, pointing towards a great deal of the motivational foundation of his rebelliousness, rendering it suspicious and problematic.

As Hertel has pointed out, "Jørgen Hallager "is caught up in a permanent puberty rebellion, which poisons the life of his surroundings" (Hertel, op.cit. p.263).

While this may be a poignant observation, there is more to be said about Pontoppidan`s rebel.

In a conversation with his friend and former follower concerning art, Thorkild Drehling, Jørgen exclaims in despair of Ursula's treachery (her alliance with Drehling): "Should also this hope come to an end? Should really this little glimpse of the sun be put out… the first, the only one that fell on the road of his life"… (ibid.p.163). When Jørgen after the death of Ursula returned to Copenhagen, he took up contact with a simple needlewoman, a former love. One evening on their way home he saw a young couple and from the way the young girl put her cheek to her lover's shoulder, he visualised Ursula, who would stand in the same way when looking at something beautiful. For a while he kept his thoughts wandering in a poetic dreaming of Ursula, imagining how she sleeps "the eternal sleep down there among the tall dark cypresses underneath the long straight row of marble stones"… He then pulled himself together, changing the tone. "Rubbish! Who, two years ago was buried in the churchyard in Rome and now rot away in a coffin at 275 Francs" (ibid. p.179).

Ursula is from the beginning presented as both scared and exalted and as the exact contrast to Jørgen – at least it seems so at first glance. Her state of mind may be described as exalted expectancy, she is hoping for something extraordinary connected to this strange, frightening and fascinating man. However, her dream and hopefulness regarding her husband is no less unambiguous than his to her. But she is the weak part as are most of Pontoppidan's female protagonists, whose frail protests end in a pathetic and reality denying fanaticism.

The author has arranged the material so, that the reader immediately recognises Ursula as the weak part of the couple. She thus presents herself again and again as submissive and fearful towards her husband, and we soon learn to understand this weakness in the light of her early relation to the father. The narrative perspective is masculine throughout. The misery has its roots in a father fixation, which has generated Jørgen's hatred as well as Ursula's submissiveness. He will in blind rage direct his hatred towards her father "the scoundrel" as the representative of the humiliating and despised social class. In this game among men, Ursula is only a pawn, an object, "the other sex". Ursula on the other hand tries in vain to escape the law of the father.

We must not neglect this other side of Ursula's character, which explains her choice of Jørgen and her wish to break with her upbringing and social class, admitting that the author does not leave much hope for female emancipation.

Ursula as well as Jørgen is dreaming of a rebellion, which he is supposed to help her realise. Accordingly, it is possible to interpret their common destiny as a result of the double messages they communicate to each other, which means, that they misunderstand each other, and instead of releasing the dream of the other, they end up destroying it. While Jørgen defends his longing behind his brusque and aggressive manners, Ursula defends her longing by turning the aggression towards herself. In this way their forces are united in the destruction of their relation.

When Ursula first addresses Jørgen, the reader guesses the expectant hope and understands why it has to be crushed. "So – you really like our apartment, she said smiling with tears in her big dark eyes. You think you may like it…Yes?" (ibid. p. 112) When Jørgen confirms but in quite another sense and with quite different feelings invested, Ursula become more daring and wants to show him the best – the view from the balcony.

He approves of the extraordinary view, and she takes this as an approval of their relation – which it is not. "Yes, yes! Is`nt it true, Ursula shouted with joy, while she suddenly – like being released from great anxiety – threw herself around his neck" (ibid. p. 113).

However, this is only one side of Ursula's longing and expectations considering her husband. There is another one. She reveals this in glimpses in her small protests against Jørgen's wilful rebellion. But first of all she reveals it in a conversation with Drehling, who takes the role of speaking for the reader, when he takes it upon himself, to rescue her from the power of her brutal husband. However, he realises – and so does the reader, that Ursula does not want to be rescued. This conversation takes place, before Jørgen arrives in Rome, and after we have been informed that Drehling, long time before Jørgen proposed to Ursula, has been in love with her – and that she is the precise reason, why he has distanced himself from his former friend and from the obligations, Jørgen demands of his friends concerning his artistic ideals.

Ursula asks in confidence Drehling, what he thinks of her relation to Jørgen Hallager. "Do you on the whole find it was a strange match she said, with a certain passion and knocked the tip of her foot against the floor" (ibid. p. 129). When Drehling cautiously answers her, that good people (including not least himself) may have wondered, why she did not choose a life companion from the known circle, Ursula responds with a conviction, she very seldom displays. "But mighty God! Should I have married H.P. Holst or old professor Hagen or dear painter Karsten with the wooden leg"… (ibid. p. 129). an exclamation which shows, that Ursula with part of herself has chosen Jørgen to free herself from her own background. As the conversation continues it becomes clear, that she cannot manage the emancipation. When all is said and done, she wants Jørgen to change. "Although he often is inconsiderate and rushes forward,… he is wilful and maybe arrogant because of his talents…that is how his nature is…but when I think of all he went through from his earliest childhood of all kinds of humiliations both poverty and privations, indeed even starvation, then I understand that he has got this dark and embittered view of life, which people always reproach him" (ibid. p. 130). Perhaps, she does understand, but this does not mean, that she accepts it. "However, it does not follow, that he will stay like that forever" (ibid. p. 131).

In other words, Ursula identifies with the story about Jørgen's miserable childhood, as she understands it, but not with the story, Jørgen has made part of his own identity. Drehling on his part understands, that "this was the dream, love had inspired in her, and which had given this young delicate female blood that wonderful courage to defy the judgement of the whole world. She dreamt of being Jørgen's redeeming angel, his Beatrice, his Laura!" (ibid. p. 131).

Shortly following this conversation concerning Ursula's reason for choosing Jørgen, we get another example of the fantasy about Jørgen, which nourishes Ursula's desire for Jørgen. The illusory character of this fantasy is revealed to the reader as we recognise how far away it is from Jørgen's character.

Ursula's father has come to visit his daughter. The Councillor of State is deeply worried about Ursula. He has had his own dreams concerning his daughter's happiness, and is for the same reason not without blame in her destiny. Ursula was somehow upset by the questions her father asked about her happiness. Was she really happy? When the father has left and she is waiting for Jørgen to return – he went out to start painting – at least that is what she believes – she abandons herself to daydreaming. In her dreams she pictures all the great things, Jørgen is going to accomplish, but her dreams are visions taken from Drehling. She imagines Jørgen wandering around in "the waste remnants of God's workshop"…, from where he will get inspiration to something extraordinary, "which it had to be in order to please him, who himself was so great and extraordinary in everything, so mighty in all his passions" (ibid. p. 140).

Like a corrective from the reality-principle she interrupts herself in her reverie and remembers the worried voice of her father.

"Was she really happy? The father had seemed so curious! Could something really bee seen on her?" (ibid. p. 140). But then again she fell into defensive denial and excuses her state of mind talking to her self of the "never ending rain and fog that has made everything so sad and cloudy." Once more she allows the longings and dreaming to win. "She threw away her work and got herself up. She was unable to sit still because of longing and exaltation. After all, Jørgen must soon be on his way. The sun has set…and Look! Over the Campagna the moon was slowly rising" (ibid. p. 140).

Showing fine intuition, Pontoppidan has portrayed the agony of mind when rationality and insight are fighting against the pleasurable tendency towards denying reality.

Jørgen has been attracted to Ursula because she represents part of him self. The part containing romance, "the glimpse of the sun", which he resolutely dismisses, when it threatens to become manifest either as fantasies about Ursula or in open protest against Drehling and his artistic romanticism. At manifest level Jørgen attacks Drehling for what he takes as treachery of their artistic ideals but behind is hidden a more personal motivation, which has to be concealed.

While Jørgen is convinced in his self-delusional omnipotence that he is going to rescue Ursula from herself, Ursula on her part is charmed by Jørgen and blind to her own inner contradictions. She contains the germ of rebellion, but like him she cannot run away from her roots, and is ultimately unable to find an alliance with him in his rebellion, unless she denies her own reality.

Therefore, it is obvious, that the two of them talk at cross-purposes. But things get even worse. The double messages of their communication cross each other because on the manifest as well as on the latent level of secret longings they speak in obvious contradiction to each other. He wants the glimpse of sun, but denies it. She wants the rebellion but shrinks away from it.

Love, desire and drive

What Pontoppidan points to in this and other stories of love is an internal division in love itself. Both Jørgen and Ursula desire something they do not want. We are used to think of desire as something straightforward and at most inhibited by external forces. And we think of psychoanalysis as the theory which most poignant has demonstrated this. In his early writings Freud (1908) did use this argument most explicit outlined in Civilised sexual morality and modern nervous illness. However, Freud soon took advantage of an idea formulated in one of his letters to Fliess, that there was "an independent source for the release of unpleasure in sexual life", (Freud, 1896 p.220) an idea standing in direct contrast to the one formulated in the aforementioned work on modern nervous illness. It took Freud twenty years to work out this idea culminating in his theory of the death drive.

This internal division is not immediately visible because people usually succeed with splitting, projection, and other defences to ward off the one side of what is thus internal divided. Thus, Jørgen fell in love with Ursula because of his desire to have a "glimpse of the sun" but he again and again convinces himself that what he wants is to set Ursula free, releasing her from the bonds of her social class. Even this wanting has a deeper, and to Jørgen's conscious thought, concealed truth. He desires Ursula to be the mirror of his own identity thus nullifying any difference between them, making her part of him self. Ursula on the other hand wants to take part of Jørgen's rebellion but in her romantic longings is hidden a desire contradicting this.

Although Freud did not coin the term desire he formulated the conflict inherent in love in his Three essays on sexuality (1905) as contrast of the affectionate and sensual aspects of normal sexual life using the metaphor of "a tunnel that has been driven through a hill from both directions" (Freud, 1905, p. 207). Continuing Freud's metaphor it seems that in many cases the tunnel does not succeed in reaching it's goal. The two ends will not meet.

Freud elaborated the idea of a division between love and drive in two papers on love-life: A special type of choice of object made by men (1910) and On the universal tendency to debasement in the sphere of love (1912), both dealing with the division in sexuality but from an exclusively masculine perspective. Pointing to the familiar distinction between an elevated Madonna-like object and a lowlife whore, we find men like the young Adam Malling from Pontoppidan's Ideal home, who respects the women so much, that they cannot approach them sexually. Malling took the flight in order not to harm the idealised object, blind to the fact that the mother with whom he found refuge was the shadow thrown on any female object. It is also in this context we come across the typical male fantasy of saving a woman illustrated with Pontoppidan's hero as the wish to restore the original object-relation making mother and sister the wife-mother relations.

In Some character-types met with in psychoanalytic work (1916), Freud gives both clinical and literary examples of people, who at the moment when their long-standing wishes seem to be within reach is overwhelmed by anxiety and consequently abstain from these wishes. One prominent case from this work is Rebecca West taken from Ibsens drama Rosmersholm (1886). Rebecca has been living together with Johannes Rosmer since the death of his wife. When Rosmer at last proposes to her, she refuses because of some deep hidden guilt, according to the Freudian argument. The forces that make Rebecca retreat are so strong that she succeeds in persuading Rosmer to follow her in death, taking the same way as his former wife. What Freud demonstrates in these works is a contradiction in what immediately should be the pure pleasure of sexual life. The clinical and literary examples all point to a conflict between the aim of the drive and the object of love and wishes, concluding with Hyldgaard, that "the aims of the drive and the object of wishes are not identical" (Hyldgaard, 2001, p.67).

While Freud talked only of drives and wishes we owe it to Lacan (1973) to have introduced the term desire, thus making possible a distinction between drive and desire. Although drive and desire are two sides of the same thing, the distinction between them helps clearing up the contradictions in sexual life, Freud noticed from the beginning.

I cannot go into details with of Lacanian differentiations between drive and desire. Suffice in this context is to say with Verhaeghe (1998) that the drive is always independent of its object, is always partial and for the most part auto-erotic. Of course the partial drives are in course of development brought together under the genital primacy, but the important thing is, that the object of the drives does not smoothly follow the object of love. The drives, we may say will always reach it's aim, but not necessarily it's object. To be sure the aim of the drive is satisfaction but this is not identical with the obtainment of the object of the wishes. Contrary to the drive, the desire is always social, being rooted in the early relation between mother and child. From Freud to Winnicott and others, we have learned that the prototypic love relation is not that of man and woman but that of mother child.

Desire is born not in this relation but as a result of losing it, meaning that desire for ever centres around the question of the separated other. Desire, as Lacan points out is always the desire of the Other. What does the other want from me, and what does the other desire, are questions always being met with anxiety because they can never be answered, and because they remind us of the forever lost union with the mother, the prototype of all succeeding love-relations. The pleasure of this forever lost union the Lacan called jouissance a pleasure reaching beyond separation and subjectivity. Now, this implies that there are two sorts of love from the beginning. "A first all-embracing love that failed, is replaced by a second, far less satisfactory love. The first pre-Oedipal form resembles jouissance, the second, Oedipal version is characterised by the less satisfactory dimension of desire". (Verhaeghe, op.cit. p. 50)

We might with these ideas be better able to understand the double aims of desires and wishes crossing each other in the conversation between Ursula and Jørgen. With the concept of desire we learn that in love life we have to do not only with conscious and unconscious wishes. Wishes may in one way or the other be satisfied, desires not, even though the keep motivating us. The great challenge in love is that desire, being always social, is directed to the question of what kind of object I, as subject is to the other. When we dare not confront this question, Lacan speaks of "giving ground relative to one's desire. (Lacan, 1986)

Jørgen demonstrates this when he vehemently protests against Ursula as representative of deep affectionate union. In other words, Jørgen dares not ask himself the question of what Ursula desires, but tries again and again to persuade himself that her desire is identical to his wishes, which they are not. Ursula on her side tries in vain to persuade herself, that the desire of freedom may be realised with the rebellious and strong man, she has chosen, thus blinding herself to the fact that this does not correspond to Jørgens's desire for her. She likewise closes her eyes to the contradiction enclosed in her dreams of freedom. On the one hand she plays with the idea of emancipating herself, but as her dreams reveal they are clothed in the garment of the tradition, she was born into. To both the possibility of not giving ground relative to their desire is frightening, even though both of them make attempts.

The conflict between Ursula and Jørgen is not equal. The reader is left with no doubt, that it is Jørgen who has the main responsibility for the tragic outcome of their mutual relation. The central question therefore to be asked is: what is the driving force in Jørgen's desire, a desire so strong that he must give ground to it, protecting himself with the bravura of his masculinity and the dogma of his aesthetics.

Let us return to the story trying to find an answer to this question.

The childhood trauma

As the story unfolds the conflict between Ursula and Jørgen escalates. Ursula has ventured a small rebellion and it comes to a confrontation. Jørgen leaves the apartment, furious that she defies him.

Returning home he finds the friend, Thorkild Drehling, and it seems obvious that this meeting has been arranged as a solemn farewell comedy.

Jørgen had just been to see Drehling's studio, seen the pictures and convinced himself, that Drehling is an apostate, that he has turned his back to the naturalistic and realistic art and made common cause with the new Romantic Movement.

During the confrontation between Drehling and Hallager the self-delusion of the last mentioned is revealed once again. With great passion Jørgen asserts his belief, that man does owe nothing but his instinct of self-preservation. "Self-preservation…that is the primary fantasy, that is the spinal marrow of the soul, that, and only that is what life and death depend on." (ibid. p. 168)

What we witness is of course the defence of Jørgen's uncompromising view of art's aim and function. However, after Drehling has left the apartment disenchanted by realising that Ursula is completely under Jørgen's thumb, we as readers become familiar with the childhood trauma, which has nourished Jørgen's hatred and probably dictated his uncompromising attitude towards art. Further, we understand what Jørgen so desperately is fighting for and what motivates his plea for the self-preservation of human being.

When Jørgen's father was accused of embezzlement and was fetched by the police and the mother had a stroke, from which she never really recovered, Jørgen made a vow, which he had kept ever since. Jørgen's whole life has centred on revenging the wrong done to the father. It is the sad story about humiliation of the father and the whole family as well as all those small and powerless people in society, to which the narrator ascribes Jørgen 's rebellion towards the well established and better off. The same story figures as background for Jørgen's uncompromising realism and naturalism in art.

However, this vow also blinds him. It makes him blind to Ursula's promptings, to her background and to the fact, that art can never be realised on such a blind impulse. Personal motivated revenge and hatred does not create revolutionary art and, what is more, it closes itself off from the love given by another human being. At least, this is one way of reading the story about Jørgen's childhood trauma and the place the author gives it in order to explain the rebellion and uncompromising character of his protagonist. Referring back to the concept of desire, we may say, that Jørgen's gives ground relative to his desire. In other words he does not allow himself the question of what Ursula desires of him. Hatred and revenge has blocked the way for the dimension of desire. In his narcissistic omnipotent retreat only the drive repeats itself in a never ending search for satisfaction. To pick up once more Freud's metaphor of the tunnel, Jørgen forces his way through the hill, in complete oblivion to the track coming to meet him. The route seems fatal.

When Jørgen in his dialogue with Drehling angrily argues, "that the instinct of self-preservation is the primary feeling of human being"… and "that this and only this is what life and death depend on" (ibid. p. 168) this must be understood, according to the narrator, as a reference to the vow, Jørgen has made. He is going to stand night watch against the injustice done to the father and he must know when the day has come to pay back the insult. He is convinced, that his hatred in this way both do justice to and necessitates itself. "No, common hatred! That welds together." (ibid. p. 163) However, this remark remains ambiguous because it is proclaimed at a time, when his longing for "the glimpse of sun" overwhelms him. The ambiguity is most distinct in the final scene and leaves the reader with doubt as to how the author, as opposed to his narrator, views and explains the main character of the story.

In spite of being disillusioned and resigned Jørgen is still hopeful regarding the future, tying this hope to his little son. "This little Niels Peter… might be his successor when he is old and drunken, the way he himself succeeded his father at this sentry of the holy fire of truth, and like Niels Peter hopefully some day will find his successor in another little recruit, and this once more in a new one and so until the morning dawns again."(ibid. p. 181) Jørgen Hallager imagines this morning to be like the discovery of "a new America in man, like an uncivilised place without a past, without memory, without any renaissance or anything left behind from times past, where the dry rot can be nourished and thrive." (ibid. p. 180)

This is indeed a paradoxical perspective, demonstrating that Jørgen on the one hand imagines himself free from the past and on the other hand imagines the same past unfolding eternally. Psychoanalytically seen the utopia of Jørgen's imagery is both interesting and conflicting. What is outlined is a human being without consciousness of his past, a man without memory, driven only by his own hatred interpreted as an uncivilised primary force. At least, this is an interpretation brought forth in the famous ending speech, which Jørgen addresses to the quite unsympathetic Madame Hansen, who has been baby-sitting to the small Niles Peter. "Good night Madame Hansen! … and let the gall keep flowing." (ibid. 182) The irony is ambiguous. The sympathy for the mad painter does exist side by side with the recognition of his self-inflicted artistic collapse and the distanced indulgence towards the slightly veiled defence.

As reader, you wander what kind of man, Pontoppidan is portraying, when he let his hero dream about a new human being. The story is here coming close to the absurd. Such a man, being the incarnation of pure and plain hatred is at best impossible, and at the worst expression of the death drive, according to psychoanalytical thinking.

One manifestation of the death drive is the compulsion to repeat, revealing itself in actions repeated in a stereotypic and invariant way. The aim is no longer pleasure but satisfaction in shortest possible time with both the reality principle and the pleasure principle being nullified.

This, Freud (1920) remarks in Beyond the pleasure principle is what gives a human being a demonic trait. We can make the same observation in non-neurotics. "The impression they give is of being pursued by a malignant fate or possessed by some "daemonic" power, but psychoanalysis has always taken the view, that their fate is for the most part arranged by early infantile influences." (Freud, 1920 p. 21)

We do find such daemonic traits with many of Pontoppidan's characters, and in most cases we are offered explanations that tie these traits to the phenomenon of repetition linked to a person's life. Thus Jørgen 's daemonic traits are bound to the vow of revenging the father. The hatred that masks this vow seems to be the deepest motive of the plot. It lies behind and motivates his project for Ursula as well as his showdown with Drehling.

My reading of Pontopidan's Night Watch has come to en end. As I have read the story its absolute focus is Jørgen's implacable hatred, born by the vow he has given himself and by the fixation to a past resulting in eternal repetition.

What is left is to summon up the theory of the division between drive and desire with the introduction of the Freud's last version of his theory of the drive, which we needed to interpret the destiny of Jørgen's personal and artistic life.

What with Freud started as an observation that sexuality itself contained a source of unpleasure was later framed within his second theory of drives in terms life drive and death drive, paving the way for much discussion often resulting in the rejection of the idea of a drive towards death. The most fruitful way out of this dilemma seems to me, to be the proposal made by Laplanche (1970, 1999) and Green (2001) differentiating between a bound and unbound form of sexuality and linking this to the narcissism of the ego. However, in this context I shall point to the proposal put forward by Verhaeghe (op.cit.), who prefer the concepts of Eros and Thanatos to those of life drive and death drive. This does not contradict Freud, who points to Eros as the tendency in life to fusion, amalgamation and so forth, while Thanathos working in opposite direction is fragmentation, explosion in which the accumulated force and tension are released. Freud (1930) even recognises that the two forces are both part of life.

However, Verhaeghe goes at little further. "Thanathos is the death of Eros… Eros the death of Thanathos" (op.cit. p. 195), meaning that two drives keep each other going in an eternal alternating circle. Being more specific we may conclude that Eros and Thanatos are not two separate drives, as Freud also suggested. They indicate opposing directions for the course of life.

Now, concerning the distinction in the sphere of love between drive and desire we may with Verhaeghe say, that in relation between man and woman we recognise these opposing directions "from man to woman or the other way round away from woman. Eros is the name for the first direction Thanatos for the second direction (ibid. p.197). Each direction has its own sex, its own pleasure and its own affect. To woman is ascribed jouissance and anxiety as part of Eros to man, phallic pleasure and sadness as part of Thanathos.

This is not the place for further discussion of this interpretation of Freud's second theory of the drives. It does give us the possibility of qualifying what Hertel has said about Pontoppidan's hero. "What makes Hallager callous as a human being and as an artist is his lack of a sense of femininity." (op.cit. p.263)

Jørgen Hallager dares not appreciate the gift Ursula offers him. The Thanatos side of his drive being so strong that the anxiety of what is offered him as the desire of the Other makes him take flight into the contrary of Eros into the rhetoric of power.

The hero's fare-well salute "keep the gall flowing" is ambiguous. Jørgen insists on being driven by the poison that destroys everything. In other words, Hallager is caught in the paradoxical possibility of creative sublimation caused by the drive's relative independency of it's object. This makes ground for displacement in any directions. However, without being bound to the work of Eros the choice seems fatal.

References