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<\/a><\/p>\nby Henrik Pontoppidan (Trans. by Paul Larkin)<\/p>\n
NYRB Classics
168p $17<\/p>\n
\u201cI swear,\u201d he laments, \u201cyou can walk through a hundred galleries down here without seeing a single reference to ordinary life and the struggles of the common people.\u201d Then comes the hedged corrective: \u201cOnly a few of the very oldest Christian painters, albeit in their stilted depiction of Christ\u2019s persecution, have expressed a genuine indignation at the evisceration of truth and justice here on earth.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hallager is a committed revolutionary, and his insight offers a window onto the perpetual power of the crucifixion as a sociopolitical image: a man silenced in death by the machinations of empire. It also illustrates the distance between what the translator, Paul Larkin, calls in his afterword the \u201cdemagoguery\u201d and \u201cmonomania\u201d of Hallager\u2019s politics and the Christian vision of a social contract as drafted in the Beatitudes and ratified on the cross.<\/p>\n
Pontoppidan was born in Denmark in 1857 to a family of Lutheran vicars, so it is no surprise that his work would probe the relationship between the spiritual and material. He received the Nobel Prize in 1917, yet he remains less well known in the United States than Thomas Mann and other European writers who praised him during his lifetime.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Rearguard is paired here with another novella in Larkin\u2019s translation, The White Bear, published by the thoughtfully curated New York Review Books Classics series. The two novellas work in conversation with each other. Both feature burly, uncouth protagonists who endure episodes of childhood trauma and develop a fiercely independent way of engaging with the world.\u00a0<\/p>\n
For Thorkild M\u00fcller of The White Bear, this trauma takes the form of the early death of his father and the condescending attitudes of his surviving family. \u201cThe perennial calm he displayed in the face of all his humiliations was more in the nature of an innate grimace, behind which he had hidden since childhood,\u201d Pontoppidan plangently writes. \u201cA screen for the sorrow and shame of being born such a wretched and useless human being.\u201d<\/p>\n
There is one way for M\u00fcller to improve his lot in the small provincial town where he is raised. By a government decree, theology students who commit to later serving as priests for \u201can unspecified period of time\u201d in the Danish colony of Greenland can receive an annual stipend to fund their studies. It is a \u201ccharitable provision,\u201d but one that scares off many would-be applicants with its open-ended return date.<\/p>\n
With options limited, M\u00fcller enrolls in the seminary program. He is a desultory student who \u201cscarcely open[s] a book\u201d and strays into the lecture hall but a handful of times. When he is brought before the faculty for his final examination, he attempts to sabotage the assessment\u2014and with it the prospect of a mission to Greenland\u2014by refusing to answer any of the questions. The government ministry intervenes, however, and forces the faculty to send him \u201cto the most northerly priestly vocation that existed anywhere in the whole world.\u201d<\/p>\n
The image of M\u00fcller silent before this tribunal recalls Christ\u2019s reticence before Pilate, a comparison that grows more pronounced as we proceed through the novella and watch him transform into a true pastor. The turning point comes after he endures his first winter in the northern reaches\u2019 \u201cdesolate crucible of stone.\u201d He tries to study texts on evangelization in the log cabin that serves as his rectory but finds the words don\u2019t land; he turns his attention to the outdoors, to the rocks and ice and fauna, and spends a summer in the mountains above the fjords with an Inuit elder, Ephraim, and his family.<\/p>\n
Though we don\u2019t witness this episode, Pontoppidan narrates it after the fact. We learn how M\u00fcller \u201cwas a man born anew\u2026a rejuvenated soul\u201d upon his return from the wilderness, where he has immersed himself in the rituals and subsistence practices of his circle of adopted kin. It is a relationship that changes him physically (\u201chis eyes had come alive and his cheeks were flushed with color\u201d) but also spiritually and emotionally.<\/p>\n
Pontoppidan here has given us a sketch of the \u201cinculturation\u201d of faith that Pope Francis repeatedly called for<\/a>, and that his successor, Pope Leo XIV, exemplified<\/a> during his time in Peru. By accompanying his flock to the furthest reaches of their territory, the marginal lands of an already marginalized group, M\u00fcller wins not only respect but initiation into the community: \u201c[O]nce these indigenous people fully realized the true cut of their new priest, it was not long before they regarded him as one of their own.\u201d This \u201cministry of presence\u201d inverts the typical path of evangelization: \u201cRather than converting and edifying heathens, they had converted him.\u201d<\/p>\n The rest of the novella moves rather crisply. M\u00fcller marries Ephraim\u2019s daughter, Seqineq, and enters a period of gratitude and happiness so encompassing that time seems suspended: \u201cThe days and weeks passed. Years vanished and he would not know exactly how many, if asked.\u201d Yet beneath this, barely detectable even to himself, hums a longing for his homeland that takes Seqineq\u2019s sudden death for him to act upon. He petitions the Danish government for return. The request is granted, and the priest, coarsened by years of Arctic living, resumes his role as a shepherd \u201cwith the smell of the sheep\u201d in the parish of S\u00f8by and Sorvad:<\/p>\n Pastor M\u00fcller\u2019s parishioners had come to love him dearly. For, once their initial fright had passed, they saw that, behind his outlandish appearance and startling way of being in the world, here was a man who understood them in a way that they were not usually understood by priests\u2014a man who was clearly no stranger to any of the problems and feelings they themselves experienced, and to whom they could turn with their own travails\u2014be they petty worries or great sorrows.<\/p>\n His popularity threatens the local clerical class, led by one conniving deacon with \u201ca face that smacked of a flat, newly licked greasy plate\u201d who covets M\u00fcller\u2019s post as a steppingstone to the episcopate. When the priest introduces a new initiative that is a bit too progressive for his parishioners, the bishops move in to oust him, leading to a dramatic conclusion that gives M\u00fcller the final word.<\/p>\n Read in tandem with The White Bear, The Rearguard\u2019s focus on class politics and the lyrical versus the didactic purposes of art stand out in even sharper relief. One could imagine the two stories taking place at the same time on different continents, their main characters grappling with the advent of modernity in different ways.\u00a0<\/p>\n In The Rearguard, this involves Hallager\u2019s distrust of the past, his break from the \u201cblind idolatry\u201d of artistic beauty and belief in \u201cthe revenge of calm, cool reality\u201d where society is rebuilt without obfuscating myths. His convictions might be the mirror image of that of a Christian. Yet in the novella\u2019s final pages, when he finds himself adrift after his hoped-for revolutionary movement fails to come to pass, a neighbor makes an unintentionally perceptive observation: \u201cA body would nearly think you had studied for the priesthood.\u201d<\/p>\n