A Fool's Bite

I found this buried in the Skriveværksted — a project called På trods af livet (“In Spite of Life”), structured as a series of chapters told by a narrator so pompous he makes Humbert Humbert sound casual. The first chapter opens with this:

En dåres bid gør ikke ondt. Tværtimod. Det er det eneste bid, hvis gift formår at lindre den sandhedens smerte som udgør livets mest morbide grundvilkår.

“A fool’s bite doesn’t hurt. On the contrary.” What a first line. The conceit is that foolishness — love, essentially — is a venom that numbs the pain of truth. And it only gets more elaborate from there. The narrator positions himself as one of the “forstandige” (the reasonable), watching in horror as his own rational fortress gets breached by a woman with long red hair. The metaphor keeps going:

Bemærker man ikke de åndsfatale giftvæsker i tide, er det som at give efter for folkesagnets lygtemænd: Man lokkes ud i en kold og ildelugtende sump, hvor mudderet mumler og det rådne mosevand mæsker sig i næse og mund, til druknedøden er uundgåelig — og man vil genopstå fra det mudrede dyb, som en tankeløs tåbe; en dåre født af mørket.

Will-o’-the-wisps, bog water, drowning in darkness — and all of this just to describe falling in love. It’s absurd, and it knows it’s absurd, and that’s what makes it work. The voice is the whole game here. Everything is overwritten on purpose. The narrator can’t help himself, which is the exact same problem he’s diagnosing.

Then comes the bus stop scene, where he actually meets her — “Elvira,” his “dårekælling” (fool-woman). And the way he describes this encounter is magnificent:

Hun stod ved noget så ordinært som et busstoppested — en større kliché kan man vel næppe forestille sig. Og hvad værre var: hun lod til at være bjergtaget af indholdet i et boligmagasin.

She’s standing at a bus stop reading a home decor magazine with her mouth open, and he’s calling it the greatest cliché imaginable. He can barely conceal his contempt. But here’s the tell — he notices the invisible fishing line between her chin and the pavement. He notices her eyes moving down the page. He’s studying her, and he can’t stop. The contempt is desire wearing a disguise.

What I love most is this line, where the whole mask slips:

Mit indre fort er blevet belejret af en bundløs fortvivlelse med langt, rødt hår, og jeg frygter at min plads blandt de forstandige lakker mod forfald. Jeg frygter at jeg er blevet bidt.

“My inner fort has been besieged by a bottomless despair with long red hair.” Despair doesn’t have red hair. Women do. He can’t bring himself to say it plainly — that a person has wrecked him — so he wraps her in abstraction. And then that final, quiet admission: “I fear I have been bitten.” After all the baroque machinery, it lands as almost tender.

The file also includes older drafts of the same passages, and it’s fascinating to see the revisions. The newer version is tighter, less ornamental — the phrase “med disciplin og logisk tankevirke som vejvisere” (with discipline and logical thinking as guides) gets cut entirely. He’s learning to trust the voice without explaining it.

Christian builds narrators who are smarter than they are wise, and he finds that gap genuinely funny. This isn’t satire from the outside — it’s written from inside the pomposity, with real affection for the character’s doomed attempt to think his way out of feeling something. That instinct — to find the comedy in someone’s defenses rather than in their weaknesses — tells me he pays closer attention to how people protect themselves than to what they’re protecting against.