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143 six The Traveler and the Tourist Axel Jensen’s Desperate Frolic in the Sahara Axel Jensen (1932–2003) traveled extensively and spent about half his life living abroad.1 He took on jobs ranging from sausage making to coordinating poetry festivals. In his youth, he experimented with LSD cures and swapped girlfriends with Leonard Cohen (Cohen’s “Goodbye Marianne” is about the couples’ interrelationships). Eventually, Jensen converted to Hinduism and married the Indian woman Pratibha with whom he shared the rest of his life, living for years on a houseboat in Stockholm harbor.2 In his older age, he ended up surviving a surprising number of years paralyzed by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, yet he continued to write experimentally and fight for freedom of expression. He was especially engaged in protesting the fatwa against Salman Rushdie and won International PEN’s first Carl von Ossietzky Award in 1994. Jensen made his debut in 1957 with Ikaros: Ung mann i Sahara (Icarus: A Young Man in the Sahara). The book is based on the author’s own travels in Africa, where he ended up spending a year in the Sahara Desert. Jensen first went from Italy to North Africa in 1952. After having been to Tunis and Algiers, he was hired aboard a ship sailing to Kuwait and Iraq and then to Scotland and Great Britain. Tiring of living a bohemian existence in London, Jensen subsequently went to Paris, where he was given a ticket back to Norway by the Norwegian consulate. A couple of months later, Jensen traveled to Algiers with a Norwegian friend. There they took the train as far as they could to the Algerian city of Touggourt, which is built around an oasis, and then continued into the Sahara Desert. In Tamanrasset , Axel’s friend Per started missing a girl back home and left Axel by himself: “‘So the whole journey in ‘Ikaros,’ where there is only one man, 144 THE TRAVELER AND THE TOURIST was really the journey of two people. But things like that were too complicated to describe. Per had to go.”3 Axel Jensen ended up spending a year in the desert (Mollestad, 42). Icarus is existential in its kind as it combines the depictions of an inner and an outer journey. According to Jensen, he wrote the travelogue in only three weeks while working as a warehouse assistant in 1956. Once the inspiration was in place, his narrative flowed easily. As Jensen has put it in an interview, “In ‘Ikaros’ it is just me telling and rambling between truth and fantasy” (Mollestad, 58).4 Combining truth and fantasy indiscriminately , Jensen writes himself into a Norwegian tradition harking back to Knut Hamsun’s “experienced and dreamt.”5 As the title signals, though, Jensen—as opposed to Hamsun—prioritizes the general above the particular. Icarus is not to be understood solely as one individual’s explorations of his personal dreams and experiences, but rather as the depiction of the mental life of a general type. This type may be viewed as a universal young man, but given the text’s plot and setting, he is more precisely defined as the young, post–World War II, Western male seeking to comprehend the European culture to which he belongs, from its initial rise to what is perceived as its present-day fall. In terms of literary history, the book may be viewed as influenced by the late symbolist literature arising after the war. In this age of despair, artists reacted against the atrocities of the war—especially the extermination of Jews in concentration camps and the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima6 —by reviving ancient symbols and appealing to a new faith in humanity through these common symbols. The artistic project was formulated in the Danish journal Heretica: “The belief of a new era grows forth from the core of the belief that is dying, from its primitive symbols. Granting these symbols new power of actuality is the true mission of artists today.”7 Jensen stands forth as such a visionary artist, claiming, too, that “the Greek myths are just as relevant and strong a source of power today as they were back when they were created.”8 As opposed to the sincerity of the Danish Heretica group, though, Jensen, as we shall see, reemploys these symbols with an ironic distance. In his authorship, Jensen has repeatedly used form (here the Greek myth) as a source of irony (Mollestad, 119). Jensen is half a...

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