©Weekendavisen, Denmark,
October 1, 2004
Good Will - Download in PDF
“People with whom we work closely can turn into dead meat for us.” Next
week Christian Jungersen’s second novel will be published – a
story of murder and office harassment among women who work at The
Danish Center for Genocide Information.
by Klaus Wivel
Translated by Tiina Nunally
Christian Jungersen is a meticulous sort of
man. Today he is a full-time author, having devoted the last
fifteen years to his writing. This tall, slender man wearing
wool socks, jeans and a hooded sweatshirt writes six days a week,
morning, noon, and night. He is so diligent that during the past
three years he hasn’t
allowed himself to read any books except those that he could use
for his novel. He lives alone in a two-room apartment in the Nørrebro
district of Copenhagen – it’s rather like a monk’s
cell with Seinfeld videos on the bookshelf and a panoramic view
over the low rooftops on Tagensvej. And he has no distractions
such as children or a job. He is now in his early forties.
You would think
that a man like him would be sending out a flood of books. But no. Not until
next week will he be able to add book number two to his list of published works.
Christian Jungersen takes his time to write good novels.
The Exception is
the title of this book, which is more than 600 pages long. It’s a psychological
thriller with a rare focus: the work environment of a public institution, whose
employees are progressive, idealistic young women who have studied at Denmark’s
liberal Roskilde University and who cultivate journalists at the leftist newspaper
Information, and fall in love with them.
Not exactly the most typical setting
for this type of book, but the result is a fast-paced philosophical drama
with all the trimmings, including threats and murder and a plot
so tightly woven that it’s not until the very last page that
the penny drops (and an entire world-view shatters).
“I’ve always been fascinated to hear people talk about
the conflicts they have at their jobs and the people they work
closely with who seem to transform into horrible monsters – people
who, under other circumstances, are perfectly nice,” says
Christian Jungersen.
“I’ve had my own
experiences of working with certain people who would be very likable if I met
them at a party. But when I worked with them, something happened that changed
them. What causes this? How can it be that the same person who makes great
contributions on behalf of other people, under different circumstances can
behave so terribly?
“The interesting
thing is that it’s not always one group that’s good and one group
that’s evil. So what is it that provokes the good in us, and what provokes
the evil? That’s something I’ve been fascinated with for over ten
years.”
Evil in all its forms is the
subject of Jungersen’s book. And what could be a more fitting setting
for such an examination than a fictitious Danish Center for Genocide Information?
A place where evil is not just the
professional focus of the four female protagonists – it’s also something
that slowly gnaws away at their relationships in the workplace.
It all starts when the two younger employees, Iben and Malene,
each receive an email in English that contains a threat against
her life. Did it come from one of the Yugoslav perpetrators of
genocide that they’ve written about in their articles? Or
did it come from Anne-Lise, in the next office, who clearly despises
them, and whom Iben and Malene very quickly begin to suspect has
a secret drinking problem?
“I’ve deliberately
chosen to describe people who have a thorough intellectual understanding of
evil, but who have no practical experience with it. As the story progresses,
they’re confronted with their own evil and that of others in a way that
they never could have imagined in the beginning.
“Of course I don’t
mean to make light of the enormity of genocide – freezing people out
is not at all the same thing as killing people. But many of the psychological
mechanisms of harassment in a workplace are similar. People with whom we work
closely can turn into bait for us. A type of callousness can arise; we can
even summon it up ourselves, if it’s to our advantage.”
During the past five years since the publication of his first
novel, Thickets, Jungersen has spent his time learning
about the latest research on social psychology and genocide.
“With Thickets I had to immerse myself
in the early 20th century, reading old newspapers and becoming
familiar with the time period. With The Exception I started
going to lots of conferences on genocide. I’ve become a member
of The International Association of Genocide Scholars, and last
year I participated in a week-long genocide conference in Ireland.
I did this, of course, so that the novel’s facts about genocide
would be accurate, but also to plant in my subconscious the same
concerns as those that might be found in the subconscious of the
characters in my book.”
And some very sinister
aspects of the women emerge. Toward the end of the novel Iben, who is the most
prominent of the four female protagonists, says: “We ramble on, with
our big words and idealism, but it’s all just rationalizing after the
fact for our own egoism.” Could this be some sort of motto for the book?
“If a book that’s
over five hundred pages long has a motto, then it’s a bad book. But it
expresses Iben’s very depressed view of the world, and, in part, my own.
Like me, the characters are faced with a world of evil, and they’re trying
to get their bearings in that world, trying to find some light in a place that
turns out to be very dark. I can relate to that struggle.”
Are these people affected by the fact that their work has
to do with genocide?
“Absolutely. But
they try to rise above the evil because, as they say: ‘If we can’t
rise above it, then who can?’ There’s a woman in the office who
thinks she’s being harassed, but the others don’t agree, and so
they use experiences from their world, the council for conflict resolution
and the UN, and apply them to their own situation.
They struggle to be good people.
At the same time, what they’re working with is also depressing,
and it weighs them down.”
You might get the impression that the people who work there
are doing it for career reasons...
“No, they’re
idealists. I decided to focus the novel on four women who work for an idealistic
organization because that presents a more exciting story. Their fall is much
greater. They set greater demands, they have high goals, and at the same time
there is something driving them to try to annihilate one of their own colleagues.
They want her dead. That contradiction is what I’m trying to map out.
From my meetings with genocide scholars, it’s my clear observation that
they are not career people; on the contrary, they’re people who have
been shaken by what they’ve seen in the world and they’ve made
an existential decision about how they want to use their lives.”
The book presents a sinister picture of idealism. Are you
a cynic?
“If the main characters
in the novel didn’t have their idealism, they would have nothing. But
it’s hard to live up to idealism. In the book I draw on new psychological
research on what today is called Dissociative Identity Disorder. It turns out
that the scientific perception is no longer that people are either ‘normal’ with
a fully integrated personality, or they have a radically split personality
that can, for instance, suddenly speak with a child’s voice or understand
foreign languages – everything we’ve seen in Hollywood films. Instead
there is a continuum between these two extremes.
“The less extreme splits are interesting. They’re
what make it possible for us, for example, to have several different
world views at once.
“In the novel Iben and Malene
think that of course they can treat Anne-Lise badly, because she’s so
thick-skinned that she won’t even notice. At the same time, they hold
another view that directly contradicts this: they can treat her badly because
she does notice and it makes her unhappy, but she deserves it because she’s
such a bitch. And then their third contradictory view is that they won’t
tell their friends about what they’re doing at the office. In other words,
they know deep down that it’s wrong.
“We can jump back
and forth between various identities. That’s where self-deception comes
in. Iben and Malene choose not to listen to the voice that tells them occasionally
that they’re heading in the wrong direction.”
Christian Jungersen also describes Gunnar, the hot-blooded journalist
specializing in Africa, who wears a black leather jacket and writes
a regular column for the newspaper Information. In the
past he belonged to the inner circle of the Maoist Communist Workers
Party, and he tells Malene how, back then, for about fifteen minutes
each month he would realize what a terrible regime he was helping
to support.
“On a daily basis Gunnar was able to live with
his communist involvement, feel passionately about it, but each
month there would be fifteen minutes when he would ask himself
what the hell he was doing. As Gunnar says: ‘Evil is when
you ignore those fifteen minutes.’
“Evil isn’t
just the people we see in movies running around with big guns and trying to
shoot everybody. Evil can also occur in people who do the right thing, who
are members of Greenpeace and Amnesty International, who take their empty bottles
down to the recycling containers, but who now and then realize that, in the
long run, the idealism they’ve chosen to pursue is selfish.”
And why does Gunnar ignore those fifteen minutes?
“We all do. We
all know that the money we spend having a good time in town could save the
lives of several people in the Third World. And that thought does occur to
us occasionally, but we shove it back into the shadow world where it leads
its own life. If there are people in the Third World whose children die for
lack of something from our world, it’s easy to understand why they would
hate us and think to themselves: how can anyone be so callous? They would call
that evil.”
Is that what it is?
“Yes, it is. A
callousness that is voluntarily chosen – I would call that evil.”
Jungersen’s clever idea is
to allow the story to unfold among academic idealists, who also
happen to be women.
“I think that type of
environment is not very well represented in literature. The dynamics of a workplace
are even less represented. There are plenty of novels about love, about divorce,
about how a harsh childhood can affect an individual in adulthood, and about
the passage from one generation to another. But why are there so few books
about life in the workplace, which can be just as filled with emotions, drama,
and crucial experiences?
“When you’re
old and look back on your life and try to sum it up, a key factor is whether
you had colleagues who made you feel that you were smart, respected, and well-liked.
Or who made you feel the opposite. Colleagues can totally change your own perception
of yourself. And nobody writes about this.”
And what about the women? What gave you the courage to identify
with four women at one time?
“That was actually
terrifying. I never would have dared, except that in my last book I found that
I actually succeeded in describing the world of an 82-year-old so well that
I’ve received many admiring letters from retirees.”
You’ve written two books, yet you’re
over forty. Why such meticulousness?
“Reluctantly,
dragging my feet, I’ve been forced into writing books that were much
harder to write than I thought I was capable of.”
And that’s what you want to do?
“Now I’m hooked.
You put a lot of emotions into a novel. I think it was Norman Mailer who said
that finishing a novel was like taking your child out into the back yard and
shooting him. That’s not how it is for me. But you can compare finishing
a novel to a child who moves away from home.”
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