Conference turris::scandia

474.0. "Jante Law, in a book by Axel Sandemose" by TLE::SAVAGE () Mon Jun 24 1991 10:02

    From: [email protected] (Espen H. Koht)
    Newsgroups: soc.culture.nordic
    Subject: Re: Jantelagen
    Date: 23 Jun 91 19:18:10 GMT
    Sender: [email protected] (The News Manager)
    Organization: Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH
 
    Ok.  Here are the Jante Law's Ten Commandments:
 
    1.  Thou shalt not believe thou ART someting.
    2.  Thou shalt not believe thou art as good as WE.
    3.  Thou shalt not believe thou art more wise than WE.
    4.  Thou shalt not fancy yourself better than WE.
    5.  Thou shalt not believe thou knowst more than WE.
    6.  Thou shalt not believe art any greater than WE.
    7.  Thou shalt not believe THOU amounts to anything.
    8.  Thou shalt not laugh at US.
    9.  Thou shalt not believe that anyone is concerned with THEE.
    10. Thou shalt not believe thou can teach us anything.
 
 
    These can be found in the book 'A fugitive crosses his tracks' by Axel
    Sandemose.  For those who might be interested this is what Sigrid Unset
    wrote as an introduction to the book:
 
    A NOTE BY S I G R I D   U N D S E T
 
    Seventeen years ago Espen Arnakke killed John Wakefield in Misery
    Harbor on Newfoundland. Ever since he has been a fugitive from his
    deed. In the soliloquy of this strange book he retraces his steps all
    the way from Jante, the small Danish town of his childhood, to Misery
    Harbor.
 
    He killed John Wakefield because the elder man had taken his girl from
    Espen, who was a mere lad at that time. But the real reason behind that
    reason? In a fury of seeking Espen is digging for the roots of his own
    being, to lay bare the forces in himself and in the world that shut him
    in--that he hurt himself against and reacted to in fear and frenzy,
    submitting to it, revolting against it. The working people's world of
    Jante, with its petrified humanity and iron laws. Suppression of
    anybody that would be otherwise than everybody else, sneers for anybody
    who imagined himself to be something, a religion of fear and
    suppression, the grrown-up's revenge upon children for their own
    frustrated childhood--they were Jante laws. The children's ambitions
    got killed, the children were horrorstricken at the sight of the
    deformed and miserable who had not conformed to Jante, the sexual
    impulse from the beginning was entangled with notions of fear and
    inferiority. Roaming through time and space, Espen tries to unravel in
    a passion of research the web of his own life.
 
    For he finds Jante everywhere--on the prairies of Canada, in the United
    States, in Jutland and the Norwegian countryside. Through shifting
    pictures of his ups and downs, as a sailor, watchman in a museum,
    lumberjack, farmhand, and what not, he finds Jante everywhere, where
    the fairy-tale of youth as a time of happiness is discovered to be a
    lie by sensitive minds.
 
    There might be other aspects of Jante.--Espen Arnakke also remembers
    that mountain in Newfoundland which he traveled round on a hunting
    trip. " It was curious to observe how entirely different such a
    mountain could be each time I had walked on a little way and turned to
    look at it again. A thousand diffe'rent descrip tions of Halfway
    Mountain may be presented to you, and all will be equally accurate . .
    . but the one who lay in chains on the ground saw Halfway Mountain only
    from the spot where he lay."
 
    A Danish psychiatrist defines a normal child--that is, a child with
    sufficient mental health to adapt itself successfully to adult life--as
    a child who out of its childhood memorieg will retain about seventy per
    cent pleasurably accented. To judge from the latest literary memory of
    childhood, it would seem that normal children should be scarce today.
    However, I have scarcely read one that is written with the genius and
    weird power of Aksel Sandemose. The tale of Espen Arnakke and Adamsen's
    barn, which for him stood for the garden of childhood, goes a long way
    to suggest what is perhaps the ultimate root of our impotency to master
    the troubles of our own times.
 
   __________________________________________________________________________
   Espen H. Koht
   [email protected]
   'All my opinions are shareware, so if you like them, please send me $10'

    From: [email protected] (Peter Sestoft)
    Newsgroups: soc.culture.nordic
    Subject: Re: Jantelagen
    Date: 24 Jun 91 11:38:43 GMT
    Sender: [email protected]
    Organization: Department of Computer Science, U of Copenhagen
 
    [email protected] (I) wrote:
 
    >Janteloven               
    >originates in the novel called "En flygtning krydser sit spor",
    >written in Danish by the Danish/Norwegian author Aksel Sandemose.
    >"Jante" is the name of a fictitious town in the book (usually assumed
    >to be modelled on the Danish provincial town of Nykoebing Mors).
 
    Correction: The novel was written in Norwegian, not Danish.  
 
    Thus the original Jantelov was written in Norwegian (but is supposed to
    deal with Danish mentality).  Its author Sandemose grew up in Nykoebing
    Mors in Denmark and moved to Norway only later, and most of his books
    were written in Norwegian.
 
 -- 
 Peter Sestoft  *  [email protected]   *   DIKU,  Department of Computer Science
 University of Copenhagen, Universitetsparken 1, DK-2100 Copenhagen O, Denmark
 Tel: +45 31 39 64 66  *  Direct: +45 31 39 33 11/406  *  Fax: +45 31 39 02 21