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176 seven From the Personal to the Universal—and Back Carsten Jensen around the World Carsten Jensen is a master at combining the particular with the universal . When he found himself divorced in the mid-1990s, he turned his quest for a new personal identity into a global quest. In nine months he “did” the world, returned home, and wrote Jeg har set verden begynde (I Have Seen the World Begin, 1996/2000), sharing with his readers his newfound understanding of himself and the world in which he lived. Jeg har set verden begynde covers Jensen’s journey from Russia to the Far East. It was quickly followed by a second volume covering his travels through the Pacific Islands and South America and returning back to Denmark over Paris. Jeg har hørt et stjerneskud (I Have Heard a Shooting Star, 1997) also turned into a commercial and literary success, and Jensen by now is one of very few Danish writers who has gained literary status based mainly on his travelogues.1 As the first-person singular pronouns and sensory verbs of Jensen’s titles suggest, the travelogues are subjective, personal, and existential. Jensen the traveler wants to absorb the entire world and cosmos through his senses. He starts out a distant observer, seeing and hearing the world, but the farther he travels, the more intimate and tactile his investigations become. Along the journey, traveling from West to East in Jeg har set verden begynde , Jensen moves from a masculinized, intellectual, lonesome sphere— represented by Russia in particular—to a feminized, bodily, communal world. In Vietnam, this world of liminality culminates with Jensen’s entering into an intimate relationship with Tam. Feeding each other, sleeping together, and touring together, the two are represented as giving in to natural, essential drives—reminiscent of those depicted by Axel Jensen FROM THE PERSONAL TO THE UNIVERSAL 177 in the protagonist’s meeting with Tehi. Yet, just as Axel Jensen’s traveler also experiences the dangerous and painful sides of bodily experiences— through sunburn, cut-up feet, and fatigue, on the one hand, and the threat of a homosexual rape, on the other—Carsten Jensen too experiences sickness and perversity. In Hong Kong he undergoes a hernia operation (not knowing what he is being operated on for) and in Tahiti he falls for Karinna—only to discover she is a he. Jensen discovers the human body—not least his own—in all its pleasure and vulnerability. While both Axel Jensen’s and Carsten Jensen’s journeys are made up of sensual and existential explorations, the narrative form given to their experiences differs. Whereas Axel Jensen opts for a classical myth rendered in the genre of a novel, Carsten Jensen chooses the first-person narrative of a bildungsroman rendered in the travelogue genre. Both strategies can be viewed as signs of their times; the postwar search for common symbols uniting people and their life experiences is replaced in the 1990s by the postmodern search for an autobiographical narrative providing the individual with what Anthony Giddens calls “self-identity.” In Modernity and Self-Identity, Giddens presents the quest for new “narratives of the self” as characteristic of what he calls high modernity, or the late-modern age. As in the texts of Jensen and other (male) travelers ,2 though, Giddens’s point of departure is the trauma of divorce. Citing a study on the impact of marriage breakup, Giddens writes that divorce “is a crisis in individuals’ personal lives, which presents dangers to their security and sense of well-being, yet also offers fresh opportunities for their self-development and future happiness” (10). In Jensen’s case his breakup prompts a journey around the world, the result of which is an affirmation of, and return to, the person he already was: “There was someone I had left before I set out. In this lay the start of my journey. That someone was also the one I loved. In this lay the discovery of my journey.”3 After a ninemonth separation, Jensen returns home to his former wife and they start a family. Thus the title “I Have Seen the World Begin” takes on added meaning. In a brief prologue describing the birth of his daughter, Jensen humbly acknowledges that “all I know about the history of the world is what I have learned from witnessing the birth of a child” (1).4 Jensen thus has also seen the world begin for a newborn child. [18.117...

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