The Great Sphinx: Pontoppidan’s "Lucky Per"
Many readers will know the story. David Foster Wallace recounts it as a Chinese parable in his essay collection Both Flesh and Not, but we find stories with similar themes in many cultures. I paraphrase it as follows. An elderly farmer with a single son has just bought a brand new, beautiful horse for a remarkable bargain at the market. “What good luck,” his neighbors murmur jealously. “Good luck? Bad luck? Who knows?” responds the farmer. A week later, the son, riding the horse in an attempt to tame it, falls off and breaks his leg. “What terrible luck,” say the neighbors. “Bad luck? Good luck? Who knows?” the farmer ripostes. (You can begin to see where this is going.) While the son lies in bed recuperating, an emissary of the imperial army comes around to demand that all young, able-bodied men join the Emperor in resisting his enemies to the west. The son, because of his injury, is not conscripted. Once more, the neighbors go to congratulate (or console) the farmer on his fortune. But you and I already know what answer he will give them.
Naturally, readers in the present day will have different conceptions than the farmer of what might constitute human flourishing, and thus what counts as “luck.” Our different ideas of luck and happiness trace back in turn to competing genealogies of the self. From one vantage, the presence of the neighbors (and the army) in the story mark the farmer and his son as “porous” selves—those whose lives are easily permeable by the pressing demands of family, community, and government, as well as by incursions of transcendent spiritual value. The opposite pole of this kind of porous self, according to Charles Taylor’s now-classic taxonomy of selfhood, is the “buffered” self: an autonomous majority of one, burdened with both individual duties and individual rights, defined in its freedom by the boundaries it sets and the limits it imposes, above all having few or no unchosen obligations—even to the Divine.
To this binary taxonomy, historian Christopher Lasch implicitly adds the “minimal” self, which he claims is characteristic of globalizing values in the second half of the twentieth century. No longer an “imperial” law unto itself, the minimal self seeks no ends beyond bare psychological and practical survival against various dehumanizing and demoralizing currents of modernity. The minimal self can be stripped of anything and everything—affections, loyalties, social ties, expectations, resources (or, in the case of our farmer, horses and limbs)—and yet continue persistently to reinvent and revive.
We might complete the quartet by positing a fourth conception to oppose the minimal self. For this we turn to Josef Pieper’s beloved treatise on human life and his notion of the “contemplative” self—one whose purpose and fulfillment, whose inner joy, cannot be found without also finding a vision of the truth; a self whose nature and whose direction are defined above all by the transcendent; whose obligations, connections, and duties all reflect an overflow of superabundant life given from above. In this context, the farmer’s “Who knows?” is not a bathetic joke, but a serious metaphysical question.
I open with this traditional tale and these four types of self (porous, buffered, minimal, and contemplative) because they help us begin to think about the question of what counts as “luck” or “happiness”—the very question undertaken, with greater depth and scope, in Danish author Henrik Pontoppidan’s 1904 novel Lucky Per. Pontoppidan’s novel follows Peter Andreas Sidenius, or Per, a character much like the “clever Hans” of so many traditional stories. Throughout his multifarious adventures, Per seeks to unravel the nature of the human person. But ultimately, he only ever heightens the mystery of it all—“the great Sphinx, whose riddle we try to solve.” At the heart of this mystery of luck lies the nature of human happiness (a relationship hinted in the very title, Lykke-Per, where the Danish “lykke” has the double sense of “happy” as well as “fortunate”). As is proper to the art of fiction, Pontoppidan wonders after but does not settle upon easy solutions to this mystery.
Frederik Sødring’sView of Bregentved Forest, Sjaeeland, mid 1830s
In the novel, the porous, buffered, minimal, and contemplative selves are not divided and distributed into discrete characters and circumstances in clear or obvious ways. Instead they are presented as compelling aspects of one and the same frustrating, sympathetic, and ultimately elusive soul—Per—who fancies to himself that he has as many facets “as there are cards in the game of Cuckoo. Every time you shuffle the deck a new face appears.” These “faces” encompass all the selves we have discussed. Lasch might be writing of Pontoppidan’s eponymous hero when he describes the minimal self as “uncertain of its own outlines, longing either to remake the world in its own image or to merge into its environment in blissful union.” So too with Pieper and the contemplative self when he observes that “however the human craving for happiness may time and again be distracted by a thousand small gratifications, it remains directed unwaveringly toward one ultimate satisfaction which is in truth its aim.”
This tension between conceptions of the self drives the action of the story. The struggle in Per Sidenius’s soul between “Peter Andreas Sidenius,” the preacher’s child destined for a life of thrift, sacrifice, reflection, and self-effacement; and “Per,” the educated, privileged, but interiorly cold scion of scientific and economic progress—that is, the struggle between buffered and minimal, porous and contemplative selves—occupies the entirety of Pontoppidan’s plot. It is the submerged conflict underlying all of the novel’s other conflicts. In the particular, there dwells the universal: Per is representative of humanity at the outset of the twentieth century. In being merely himself, he is simultaneously the entire human condition. And nearly all of the classic novelistic conflicts—between rival characters, between individual and society, between individual and nature, between individual and an insufficient concept of God—are folded into Pontoppidan’s grand vision of a single life, which we may imagine as “lucky”—happy—or not.
Pontoppidan’s pioneering of literary modernism is worth spending some time to trace. The unwinding thread of Per’s destiny appears at first not to differ significantly from much of the Western novelistic tradition of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We pick up echoes of Tom Jones–style picaresque, of Flaubertian “sentimental education,” of the fairy tale, even of a pioneer spirit that seems to owe more to the American than to the European novel. But whereas the nineteenth century novel tends toward a tidy resolution of conflict, Pontoppidan’s work is a precursor to a twentieth century literary modernism that tends towards ambiguous, unresolved, or dissonant endings, and where characters typically act, not according to deontological (duty-bound) or eudaimonistic (happiness-seeking) formulations of self-knowledge and propriety, but according to irresistible forces brought to bear by others’ minds, by market forces, or by their own genes. Pontoppidan’s novel partly participates in this mold and partly breaks it.
The literal and figurative middle child among an austere Protestant family of eleven, Per fulfills his early determination to escape his bleak house. Drawn to women, Per, once he overcomes an early shyness, is startlingly unscrupulous about the consequences of his connections, or perhaps just less emotionally invested in them. Handsome, athletic, and energetic, Per appears to embody robust health, though the reader receives hints that Per may suffer from some obscure underlying pathology that is not immediately obvious from his looks. As with his body, so with his soul: Per is blessed by nature with a clear, creative, productive intellect and a disposition toward cheerfulness. Yet his high spirits, too, are prone to sudden, inexplicable bleaknesses and reversals, which the narrative presents rather than explains.
It is, perhaps, these vicissitudes of mood that cause Per to pass through multiple cycles of what we could easily label self-destruction. Time and again, the self-made Per sets up a brilliant life for himself, wins friends, attracts a lover, secures resources, hails within striking distance of his goals—and then throws everything over for what appear to be incommensurate reasons. Often, these reasons are connected with some reminder or recursion of his family of origin, which, it is implied, could be functioning as psychological superego and/or false Puritan God: either way forbidding him to enjoy any worldly fulfillment. Or do Per’s reactions to his family instead represent stifled wishes, unacknowledged and unacknowledgeable desires—for reunion, reconciliation (though not on their terms), a nostalgic longing for a return to a past that is unfulfilled and unfulfillable?
The positioning and framing of an early conversation with a friend, Neergaard, who leaves Per his first fortune in his will, might tend to suggest need and dependence as a suppressed shadow-force in Per’s character, one that will emerge (luckily? unluckily?) if not paid proper attention:
Especially the lucky are the most unlucky, and this can well be a man’s lot particularly in our day. . . . We lack the capacity to make good use of luck so that it becomes more gain than loss. . . . We feel, at the table of luck, like a peasant at a king’s banquet. When it comes to it, we all prefer our old home’s porridge and our mother’s pancakes to the splendor of the land of milk and honey.
You know, probably, the story of the young swineherd who wins the princess and half the kingdom. It’s after the ending that interest precisely begins, I think, at least for grown-ups. We would see the peasant boy in velvet and brocade walk around pale and thin from sheer luck. We would see him lie in the princess’s silk bed and blubber from longing for the milkmaid Maren’s arms, thick as thighs. Because there’s no doubt he will do that. He will not have a happy day before he wears again his wooden clogs and exchanges his crown and scepter for his father’s dung fork.
Over the course of the novel, Per makes several exchanges that echo just this pattern of choice. Even his period of total self-isolation shows itself forth as a characteristically communal act by virtue of the impact it has on others. Per cannot make himself an island, however he may try. Among the things he leaves behind him—a surprising legacy of word and gift—Per even communicates that he may have realized this: his conclusion offers reason to speculate that Per’s purpose for isolating his self was for the good of the world.
As readers, we discover only the subtlest cues to how Pontoppidan expects us to receive Per’s final act. Is it self-emptying, a kenosis, or is it a sort of living suicide? Pontoppidan seems to foreclose on the latter possibility by explicitly informing the reader that Per has considered suicide and opted against it. Yet our reading even of this decision is necessarily complicated by the litter of former selves, former lives, that Per leaves behind him like leafmold on a forest floor. Is their shedding a destruction, a creation, or both? Per questions himself about this very matter and cannot arrive at a conclusion.
Though to all appearance he is “free as a bird,” with “something of the fairytale” clinging to him, Per’s freedom in act is evidently limited by something within himself, some factor that the novel never directly describes, and for which Per himself cannot account. Is this inner limitation a perversity or a providence? Is it reducible to psychological forces, or does it reflect that which is in one sense or another superhuman? We are never told, and we are only partially shown. Per’s story concludes in a sui generis manner, yet one that is peculiarly typological of the modern self. He chooses a type of secular self-enclosure that partakes in characteristics both pagan and Christian, trollish and monkish, stoic and saintly: a synthesis, yet one that registers as curiously incomplete.
Johan Christian Dahl’s View from Vaekero near Christiania, 1827
By the end of the novel Per appears neither porous nor buffered but rather either minimal or contemplative, or possibly both. His life has been winnowed down to the goal of bare survival, on both literal and psychic levels. Yet by his own confession, that survival extends to, and depends upon, “belief, the right belief, the belief in nature, rich, wise, and merciful, who has lessons for all of us and who generously substitutes other limbs for the ones we have lost.” For Pieper, such a minimal self can never find total fulfillment as long as its minimalism extends to the bracketing of a transcendent God, who alone can fulfill the nature He created. Yet any transcendent faith Per had seems to have been filed away with the lost illusions and lost possessions his minimal self has sold off in its final divestment. The witness Per leaves behind appears to stand in tension with itself even as it refuses to offer a conclusive embrace of any one single vision other than its own. It is left open for readers to imagine Per happy—or not—as we please.
Katy Carl is the editor in chief of Dappled Things, a quarterly journal of ideas, art, and Catholic faith. She is the author of As Earth without Water and Praying the Great O Antiphons: My Soul Magnifies the Lord