Abstract
Niels Klim’s Underground Travels (1741) was the European breakthrough for the Norwegian Enlightenment polymath Ludvig Holberg. The emerging novel format inspired Holberg to trust his readers to use their own rationality to decide on the contentious issues of their era. The intellectual contrarian had always been sceptical of his contemporaries’ ability to reason, but he died content that his writings had made a positive impact. Over two centuries later, a Danish TV adaptation of Niels Klim casts a more misanthropic verdict. The mini-series concludes that humanity lacks reason and is an environmentally disastrous mistake. This article compares narrative and thematic argument in these two works to explore the evolution of Western views on rationality, nationality, gender, and environmentalism. If it is the case that, as the TV adaptation and many modern critics suggest, human reason is unlikely to solve the twenty-first-century’s existential threats, what is the alternative for humanity?
Ludvig Holberg (1684–1754) regarded his life’s mission as bringing the ideas of the Enlightenment to his northern European outpost. His comedies were enormously successful and have continued to be so ever since. With those widely accessible works, Holberg popularized complex philosophical and political concepts for a largely illiterate and pietistic population. His ground-breaking scholarship on law, history and language also contributes to his position as one of the region’s most historically influential minds. Holberg is celebrated as the father of Danish–Norwegian literature and Scandinavian drama, and it has also been suggested that he was the region’s first feminist, economist and a range of other terms that add to the impression of someone far ahead of his time. In terms of Enlightenment, not only did Holberg lead the way by example, but he dedicated his life to inspiring and empowering his countrymen and -women to also use reason, hoping that this could help liberate them from superstition and folly.
Holberg’s traits and accomplishments make him an optimal stalwart for the hopes of the Enlightenment. Yet the younger Holberg in particular was sceptical as to whether his project, and that of the movement itself, could succeed (Langslet, 2001; Rossel, 1994). In spite of his own considerable doubts, Holberg kept searching for ways to help people reason more clearly so that they could be empowered to find their own truths. Such humanistic generosity in terms of trusting the cognitive capacity of his fellow humans expresses itself most clearly, although still with reservation, in his 1741 novel Niels Klim’s Underground Travels, which was first published abroad, in Latin, as Nicolai Klimii iter subterraneum.
Holberg’s only novel takes readers on a journey inside a hollow Earth to lands where talking trees, monkeys and other creatures live in societies dramatically different from those of eighteenth-century Europe. In the empire of Potu (utopia), the protagonist, Niels Klim, encounters what appears to be Holberg’s vision for a utopian society based on reason, moderation and tolerance. But as Klim embarks on a further journey through more than two dozen provinces, it becomes not at all clear how a good society should be organized. The story is instead, in Holberg’s own words, ‘a vehicle for moral precepts and reflections’, which leaves readers to draw their own conclusions (1970: 168). Niels Klim’s smorgasbord of political and cultural differences is further complicated by three levels of unreliable narration (Velle, 2018). To further unsettle readers, the story also ends in the way typical for the emerging novel format, by not returning to the social and psychological harmony of the novel’s beginning, which was what stories had typically done in the more static, premodern world (Kraft, 1980). Holberg holds up his fantastical underground world as a mirror to contemporary Europeans, to show the randomness and shortcomings of what Europeans took for granted but without offering interpretation or prescription for betterment: It is only toward the end of his career that [Holberg] finds a way of writing that invites an eclectic reading method and performs the dialogical method with which the student-reader should be able to find truth, and ultimately faith . . . The moral system should not survive its inventor, but be renegotiated by every individual reader. (Velle, 2018: 207)
Holberg thus demonstrates an admirably modern attitude. At the time of publication, however, his intellectual generosity did not extend all the way to the masses. The infamously cantankerous author was in no hurry to have his novel translated from its original Latin into Danish. Holberg wrote that only those Danes who mastered one of the great European languages that Niels Klim was immediately translated into were likely to have the cognitive maturity to interpret his moral system (Holberg, 1743). When his novel was published in Danish, its controversial promotion of cultural tolerance and religious relativity nearly resulted in confiscation. Yet Niels Klim was as commercially embraced in his home country as it had been across Europe. It was the international breakthrough Holberg had worked for all his life: he became the first Nordic author to publish successfully in Europe, and more cause for optimism followed. By the end of the 1740s, Denmark’s pietistic rules on church attendance and thespian entertainment were lifted. When those restrictions had been introduced, they had ended Holberg’s creative burst of 28 plays of remarkable quality and variety in the period 1722–8. The more enlightened climate that emerged inspired Holberg to write six more plays before his death in 1754. As he felt his life wane, the notoriously curmudgeonly loner proudly concluded that he had indeed succeeded in having ‘recast these countries’ commoners as if into another mould, and taught them to reason about virtues and vices, of which many previously only had slight notions’ (Holberg, 2018 [1744–54]).
The eighteenth century continued with the American and French revolutions, the nineteenth with democratic reform across Europe, and the twentieth with further progress along liberal-humanist lines. It seemed as if Holberg’s notions of rationality, individual empowerment and even gender were part of a universal truth that was unstoppable, even undeniable, as it spread throughout humanity to unite everyone in a Kantian ascent toward enlightenment and ‘Perpetual Peace’. At least, such were the aspirations among hegemonic Western elites. If this vision had, in fact, become reality, Danish TV’s tercentennial celebration of Holberg’s birth would probably have engendered a very different adaptation of his novel with Niels Klims underjordiske rejse (1984b). Instead, the costly three-part TV production declares that humanity lacks reason and that our species is a mistake that will lead to planetary destruction.
Although the adaptation’s director, Kaspar Rostrup, was later Oscar-nominated for Waltzing Regitze (1989), Rostrup lacks authority to cast any final judgement on the Enlightenment. However, the eco-criticism of his 1980s mini-series illuminates how the Counter-Enlightenment discourse that captured academia in the 1970s has played out in wider popular culture, with new strains of this intellectual tradition wreaking havoc across Western cultures at the present day. The unsettling of the Western worldview that culminated in violent riots and statue-toppling in 2020 builds on the failure of, or the end of, the Enlightenment argument of which Rostrup’s Niels Klims underjordiske rejse was an early manifestation. This Counter-Enlightenment tradition goes back to the eighteenth century with Johann Herder and Giambattista Vico (Berlin, 1980). It was furthered in our present era by scholars like James Schmidt and Graeme Garrard, and dramatized in European literature most infamously by Michel Houellebecq. The fundamental criticism of Enlightenment propositions that had largely been an academic exercise within the critical humanities manifested itself in the cultural-political mainstream in the 2010s, most spectacularly through Brexit, Trump and a series of populist election victories. Clearly, Enlightenment rationality and liberal visions for the future have lost their allure for wide and varied segments of the population (Harari, 2016). Our present era’s intellectual pessimism is one of the few perspectives that still bring people together across group divides. No universal truth, or Kantian peace, seems within reach. At a minimum, we can conclude that Holberg and the vision of the philosophes for the ennobling and unifying potential of rationality – although scepticism abound even then – was overly optimistic.
In the following, I will investigate narrative strategy and thematic argument in Holberg’s novel and Rostrup’s TV adaptation. Using a very similar story, Holberg’s early eighteenth-century Enlightenment perspective is replaced by Rostrup’s Counter-Enlightenment position, which is informed by the twentieth century’s two world wars and environmental deterioration. Few, but consequential, changes make Niels Klim relevant within a dramatically different cultural-political context. I will contrast Holberg’s position on four topics with how Rostrup argues with respect to the same issues in 1984, and also with how they are viewed today, in the early 2020s. The topics are (1) rationality, (2) nationality, (3) gender and (4) environmentalism, which are chosen for their prominence in the adaptation and for their relevance in our present discourse. How Western views have evolved on these topics informs my argument with respect to the threats that our global community faces in the twenty-first century. What emerges begs the question: if Enlightenment values and practices are unlikely to unite us behind rational solutions for tomorrow’s existential challenges – such as climate change, nuclear proliferation and the Fourth Industrial Revolution’s myriad technological disruptions – what is humanity’s alternative?
Rationality’s hall of mirrors
The Niels Klim we meet in the novel’s first chapter has much in common with Ludvig Holberg. Through first-person narration, Klim tells us that he returned home to Bergen in Norway after graduating from the University of Copenhagen. Holberg, who came from a good Bergen family but was orphaned, also returned home after having passed his exams in what was then the Danish–Norwegian capital. Although both men were penniless, job-seeking academics, we have little reason to believe that the intellectually confident Holberg saw much of himself in his pompous, morally challenged protagonist. Velle (2018) reads Klim to personify the faults Holberg saw in his contemporaries. He is a caricature of the European intellectual who, when faced with the diversity of human experience, insists on the superiority of his own ways.
Eager to make a name for himself as an explorer of the unknown, Klim climbs down into a local cave where he is pulled into the hollow interior of the Earth (see Figure 1). After falling and falling, he finds himself in the Potuan Empire of wise, slow-moving trees. From Klim’s experiences in this country, which take up the first third of the novel, the reader gets the impression that Holberg is sharing his blueprint for the perfect rational state, his version of Plato’s Republic (c. 380 BCE). The vision he presents seems to suggest how Europe can improve so that the region’s culture and politics can live up to the aspirations of the Enlightenment. Yet Holberg also appears to undermine many of the values that continental thinkers upheld. How Potu’s tree-creatures apply reason does not mirror what Klim knows from European scholars. In this purported utopia, no one is impressed by the protagonist’s dissertations on slipper usage in antiquity. Scholarly argument is viewed as suitable only for staging cockfight-like entertainment. Furthermore, laws are rarely changed, and only very carefully when they are. In this society of reason, the highest levels of status are not afforded to conquerors and destroyers like Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great, but to those who beget the most children. Nobility is done away with, yet hereditary monarchy is kept as a rational compromise because popular emotion requires the illusion of illustrious descent. And although all citizens are free to believe what they please, people may not argue for their own religious beliefs against those of others.
Niels Klim falls into a hollow Earth, becoming one of the first protagonists in literary history to explore such a fantasy world. Engraved illustration by Johan Frederik Clemens (The Royal Danish Library).
Such ponderings continue chapter after chapter. We can easily imagine the erudite and gruff Holberg enjoying himself putting on paper how the folly of his contemporaries could be corrected if only he were in charge. In the Potuan Empire, rulers are given 20 maxims to govern by, and they are listed in detail (2004: 66–70). In line with what Holberg voiced support for in Denmark – despite his own vehement opposition to literary censorship based on controversial content – there are Potuan ‘Professors of Taste’ who free youth from ‘trivial and vulgar writings’ (2004: 77). The final two-thirds of the novel make clear that Potu is not, in fact, Holberg’s attempt at prescribing a cure for universal implementation, although in the first third one gets the impression that rationality has the potential to remedy all social ills. Yet, importantly, this is not the type of reason that coldly weighs only theoretical merit. Holberg promotes an approach that considers the totality of human nature. Such a view of rationality was, arguably, the core tenet of the Enlightenment. As Europe evolved from its Age of Faith to the Age of Reason, great promise was seen in unleashing human rationality, although naturally the content and specific potential of this faculty was also intensely debated at the time (Pagden, 2013).
Over the next few dozen pages, on a voyage around the planet Nazar, Klim experiences many societies with extreme political, cultural and biological diversity, a heterogeneity that also relates to the rational. In the Philosophical Region, everything is nasty and savage, as men are only interested in intellectual discovery. The region’s violently nymphomaniac women force Klim to flee. Their visitor’s humanity is disregarded by the region’s absent-minded thinkers: for them, Klim’s greatest value would be as an anatomical object for dissection. Neither in the Land of Reason does the protagonist find the harmony and happiness he seeks. There all is dull and without diversity because they ‘languished for want of fools’. Thus, Holberg makes his customary case for moderation. This land’s ‘race of reasoners’ argues that ‘in a well-constituted society, it is necessary that at least half the members should be fools’. To remedy their nation’s intellectual disequilibrium, the local Senate decrees that half of the population will change places with cognitively disadvantaged people from neighbouring nations (2004: 99–101).
By first setting up a Potuan utopia of rationality and then comparing it to its fantastical and absurdly diverse neighbours, Holberg seems to make a case for reason as a means and not a cure-all. But he still offers reason as the key faculty for individual emancipation and human betterment. Holberg does not present any guarantees of the outcome of a more rationally oriented society, and certainly no utopia will come from it. But since Holberg sees reason as humanity’s most effective tool, he argues that we should stake our future on it.
By contrast, the much later TV adaptation of Niels Klim vehemently rejects the potential of rationality. Rostrup attacks Holberg’s optimism, which he sees as part of what the director terms ‘the European disease’. Admittedly, Rostrup is polite enough not to use Holberg’s name as the direct target of his criticism, but in his writings Rostrup makes abundantly clear what his position is: he is no Holbergian in his views on reason. Precisely what Holberg’s aspirations for rationality were can also be questioned. His views seem to have changed as he aged. At the time of the publication of his novel, it was common for readers to demand an authorial interpretational key that would explain what a certain story was about. At least 215 imaginary voyages were published in the eighteenth century (Gove, 1941). Many were written by Enlightenment thinkers trying to make readers draw their own conclusions, similar to what Holberg does. Despite such often clearly stated pedagogical aspirations, novels like Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), which probably inspired Holberg to write Niels Klim, were met by immediate demands for interpretational keys that could tell readers what a novel really meant. Sometimes Holberg could not help but publicly criticize what he considered to be hopeless readings of Niels Klim. Yet he still withstood the pressure to offer his own authorial interpretation, as his position was that such intellectual guidance would undermine his novel’s didactical purpose. Velle suggests that if Holberg had given in, the consequence would have been to limit the possibility of other readers to construct their personal moral system . . . Holberg does not intend to provide his readership with multiple keys to multiple doors, nor a key to one. He deliberately gives one key to a hall of mirrors, with multiple exits of which some are wide-open and others blocked. (2018: 216)
Instead of establishing a single truth, Niels Klim’s moral–philosophical journey dramatizes the opposition between moral and scientific truth. Readers who believe that their rationality has let them find the one correct understanding of this opposition have not found the key that explains everything, argues Samuel Galson (2013), but have instead turned themselves into the novel’s satirical target. The potential of the emerging novel for this type of self-reflection made it the hegemonic format for fiction when modernity pushed people to reconsider themselves and their role within a rapidly changing world. Velle uses the ‘hall of mirrors’ concept to illustrate how Holberg encourages readers to explore their own potential for reasoning. Rostrup’s TV version also uses a hall of mirrors, although not to illustrate human potential. The director lets Klim stumble around inside a mirrored hall as a symbol of human foolishness. But before we move on to the adaptation, let us explore our three remaining topics within the novel.
Toward our shared utopian future
Discussing nationality in a 1740s context, almost a century before the modern theory of nationality emerged, is challenging. It is, however, interesting to note how Holberg seems to diverge from the later Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant in terms of the future of nation-states. In ‘Perpetual Peace’ (1795), Kant can be interpreted as viewing rationality as a faculty that, if universally cultivated, will let humanity transcend nationality. According to Kant (1970 [1795]), such a process should lead to a global federation of peaceful states under the banner of Enlightenment ideals, and in a longer perspective perhaps even to a global state.
Little of this Eurocentric universalism is found in Niels Klim. The diversity in custom and law that the protagonist encounters is not meant to be overcome. Such diversity is instead, writes Arild Linneberg, ‘described in accordance with the fundamentals of natural law, such as changing laws according to the differences and changes in climate and race and nature’ (2013: 81). We should not over-interpret Kant’s insistence on the uniformity of human essence, but Kant’s writings clearly aspire to a rationally driven nationality transcending global unity. Such a political convergence, had it ever come about, could conceivably have facilitated global environmental cooperation with the potential to curb the Anthropocene Acceleration after World War II. In the last third of Niels Klim, such imperialistic aspirations for the coming together of all the world’s peoples are portrayed less optimistically. The novel’s protagonist gains tyrannical power after introducing primitive humans to gunpowder, then involves his new empire in a military campaign for planetary domination (see Figure 2). The folly of Klim’s aspirations is strongly satirized, and he is severely punished.
The Norwegian academic becomes a tyrannical ruler for primitive humans living inside a hollow Earth. This frontispiece, which portrays Niels Klim as an emperor, is from the novel’s original 1741 Latin edition (publisher Jacob Preuss).
The limits to rationality that Holberg lays out early in the novel are mirrored in his lack of utopian ambition for the unity of humankind, represented by his hollow Earth’s diversity of unique nations. For Holberg, his cosmopolitanism appears to be in the personal philosophical strain that originated with Diogenes the Cynic in Greece in the fourth century BCE. Clearly Holberg does not support the imperial cosmopolitanism that promoted a world federation or state professed by Roman Stoics, Kant and many modern liberalists (Chin, 2016). Holberg travelled extensively in his youth, and this informed his opposition to local provincialism and narrow-mindedness. Yet, despite identifying himself as a European man of letters, he suggests no road map for overcoming the national, nor does he advocate the political convergence of Europe, much less the whole of humanity. As a supporter of local religion and absolute monarchy, Holberg seemed content with the principles of the post-Westphalian rule of his era (Rossel, 1994).
Remarkably, Holberg was well ahead of his time concerning what over a century later would be hotly disputed among wide segments of the population as ‘the woman question’. I offer no opinion on whether it makes sense to grant Holberg the title of being Scandinavia’s first feminist, but the childless loner was undoubtedly a strong supporter of women’s rights in both his life and literature. In the Potuan Empire, women are not discriminated against in education or office but are given opportunities based on talent and merit. Even powerful women breastfeed. In his circumnavigation of Nazar, Klim encounters female rapists, male prostitutes and a queen’s harem of 300 studs. In the kingdom of Quamboia, hot young men marry old ladies who duel and commit suicide for love. In Cocklecu, Holberg stages another interesting gender inversion. Males are still physically stronger than females, yet in this province, instead of giving men power, their strength justifies the fact that ‘males alone perform the drudgery of the kitchen, and every such ignoble labour’. Men also constitute the soldiering class but under female officers. Women hold leadership positions throughout society, not despite their nature but because nature ‘had furnished the males with greater strength of body, her intention in that could only be to destine them to the more laborious and servile duties of life’. The business of males is ‘to spin, to weave, to clean the house, and upon occasion take a beating from their wives’ (2004: 88–92).
For Holberg, always eager to apply rationality to ill-founded tradition, the woman question seems to have been a straightforward issue of efficacy. Whether women have some talent, the same talent, or more talent than men, society would be foolish not to take advantage of these talents. Such thoughts had been touched upon in recent European literature, such as Pierre Desfontaines’ Nouveau Gulliver (1730), yet women’s rights were discussed only circumspectly (Grieder, 1990). For most of Holberg’s Nordic contemporaries, greater gender equality was not even worth contemplating. In the eighteenth century, opportunities for female public participation were instead restricted (Flugt, 2015). Tellingly, Niels Klim enraged Holberg’s pietistic countrymen for its promotion of cultural tolerance and religious relativism. Yet few took Holberg’s feminism seriously. Without the author’s interpretational key, Danes and Norwegians probably assumed that those wild gender distortions were part of the novel’s fantastical exaggerations, merely included for comedic effect (Langslet, 2001: 309).
For our fourth and final topic, environmentalism, Holberg – in pre-industrial Europe – was naturally unable to show the same prescience as with gender. In the eighteenth century, nature was not something one would want to protect. Nature was something to protect oneself from: it was the frightening unknown where catastrophe awaited. Part of the Enlightenment project concerned how rationality and civilization should conquer, or tame, nature. Only with Romanticism did Europeans begin to cultivate a love of, and an identification with, the great outdoors. Prior to the nineteenth century, thought of conservation did exist but primarily as an agricultural–economic issue. Eco-critics will therefore look in vain for Holbergian environmentalism in Niels Klim. But the tyrannical Klim’s destructive application of gunpowder towards the end of the novel does suggest that human nature has not evolved enough to apply rationality and moderation when our societies are empowered by innovation.
The industrial revolutions that developed alongside and after the Enlightenment brought issues of smoke and waste to the public discourse. Much later, ecosystem threats became a concern. Yet it was not before the 1970s that the Great Acceleration of the Anthropocene become so obvious that environmentalism gained global traction as part of the counterculture movement (McNeill, 2016). This new eco-perspective informs the agonistic misanthropy of Danish TV’s Niels Klims underjordiske rejse. The agenda for Rostrup’s mini-series is in direct opposition to that of Holberg’s humanistic and individualistically empowering novel.
The European disease
Danish state TV began planning in good time in order to offer viewers something unique for the 300th anniversary of the birth of their beloved Enlightenment dramatist. Already in 1980, the head of their TV drama department ordered scripts to be written, promising generous budgets. He did not, however, commission a new version of one of Holberg’s beloved plays, which have been performed nearly non-stop since the author’s death. Money was set aside to adapt what is, arguably, the greatest anomaly of Holberg’s authorship. After Niels Klim’s first remarkable commercial success across Europe, the novel, for the most part, slid into the footnotes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Imaginary journeys lost their popularity, as did the novel’s conte philosophique form, marked by sarcastic, nonchalant plots ‘designed to frustrate narrative interest, which it thoroughly subordinates to philosophical abstraction’ (Moretti, 2013: 21). Compared to Holberg’s aesthetically masterful plays, the overly intellectualizing novel became seen being poorly crafted and lacking purpose post-Enlightenment. With the novel’s dozens of worlds and sci-fi-like imagination, the narrative’s visuals also lent themselves poorly to both stage and screen in an era before digital special effects. Rostrup, however, had staged Niels Klim as theatre in 1973, and quite successfully, so he was handed the task of re-adapting the story for the small screen (Nørregaard, 1984).
For viewers unaccustomed to the format of Nordic TV drama, the three one-hour-plus episodes are likely to underwhelm and bewilder. Staging drama so that it can be filmed and displayed on the small screen combines three media while removing their strengths. Audiences do not benefit from the physical presence of theatre, the story is not set in the realistic surroundings that TV can offer, and viewers do not benefit from the immersion of a large cinema screen. Yet, for decades, public broadcasters fulfilled their artistic obligations at a reasonable price. Newspaper coverage shows that Niels Klims underjordiske rejse was well received. The series was also praised for its contemporary relevance. This timeliness, though, was not achieved through satirizing human folly with Holbergian nuance and abundant opportunity for interpretation. Instead, Rostrup goes straight for the European jugular, insisting that it is ‘the European disease’ Holberg deals with in Niels Klim. That is also what throughout has been the main purpose of [the playwright] and me: to satirize the need to improve; the unwavering certainty of knowing what others are served best by, even when they themselves cannot see it. (Rostrup, 1984a, author’s translation)
With Rostrup’s TV protagonist as representative of the modern European, episode 1 begins by introducing us to an overtly obnoxious and needlessly destructive Klim (Fritz Helmuth). The director has him bring a bomb to blow a hole in the mountain that he wants to explore. In the novel, Klim may seem self-centred and hasty, but in Rostrup’s adaptation he is outright moronic. Little is done to find TV-specific ways to communicate the nuance and intellectual capacity that both the novel’s narrative and first-person narration convey (see Figure 3). Instead, Rostrup portrays Klim, through Klim’s own statements and those of other characters, as the modern stereotype of the imperialist. He is too dumb, too proud and too insecure to see the wickedness of his own ways (Skovgaard-Petersen, 2017). As in the novel, Klim’s fast but shallow thinking makes the slow, wise trees appoint him to be a messenger for the royals due to his ‘swiftness of foot’. Klim protests, referring to his above-ground university degrees in both the novel and the adaptation. But TV-Klim adds, ‘Earth belongs to the humans. It is we who farm it, and master it. Europeans, who are my race, are the strongest and bravest of all. Our war capability, for instance, triumphs as something uniquely brilliant’ (Rostrup, 1984b: m. 33; author’s translation).
Niels Klim dresses the part and applies his intellect to impress his arboreal hosts with his European manners. Yet, they find that he and his civilization fall woefully short compared to their own rule of reason. Illustration from an American 1845 edition (publisher Saxton & Miles).
This dialogue caricatures the originators of the Enlightenment, and by extension its descendants, as a destructive and self-serving force. Unlike in the novel, a racial dimension is included. The TV incarnation of Klim refuses to continue as foot messenger, stating that ‘I am a European, a white human’ (1984b: m. 52). Yet what Klim views as his own European rationality, the trees condemn as pathology. ‘Humans are not creatures of reason’, one tree concludes. Another concurs, ‘No, there is nothing positive about him’ (1984b: m. 25). Due to such judgements, Klim is banished from the land of trees at the end of the first episode. In response to the accusations, he pleads culturally, ‘I have been stupid, I admit it, but it’s a national fault.’ The trees’ leader casts a verdict that goes deeper than mere culture: ‘You were a mistake, human’ (1984b: m. 63). To underline this misanthropic message, the exchange is repeated in the recap at the beginning of episodes 2 and 3. Rostrup ensures that not even the most casual viewer can miss what he terms ‘the European disease’.
Humanity versus nature
Rostrup’s Niels Klim thus discredits the types of reason that were promoted by Holberg and the European Enlightenment. In addition, the adaptation changes how rationality relates to nationality, or primary group identity. Many of the novel’s regions, while inhabited by all kinds of creatures, are widely read as representing different nations. However, with Rostrup’s 1980s eco-criticism, lines are drawn not between English, French and African peoples but between humans and nature. The overt message is that nature represents wisdom and viability, while humans are destined for destruction. Towards the end of episode 3, the tyrannical Klim asks a captured general for last-minute advice. The general, a tiger-creature, tells Klim that humans are too primitive for there to be any hope, as all you humans do is in excess. You transform all that exists to satisfy your desires. Your nature is to act, and your desire springs from inadequacy . . . You will always desire more, but feel poorer . . . I am a tiger. I cannot understand your way of thinking, because I stop before it is too late.
Wearing an imperial-gold spandex suit and a red cape, Klim admits that stopping now would go ‘against all human reason’. That gives the tiger a chance to repeat the series’ mantra: ‘Humans are not creatures of reason’ (1984b: m. 52). Considering what emerged in the 1980s in respect of human influence on biodiversity and climate, not to mention our reluctance to change course, the tiger’s critique was timely. What in nature has deteriorated over centuries finds its conclusion in the final 20 minutes of the series. In a Star Wars-inspired deviation from the novel, Klim blows up the planet Nazar with a Death Star-like cannon (1984b: m. 69). Suddenly, Klim finds himself alone, as if the entire narrative had been a psychological journey. Klim runs away, falls through a hole, and emerges back home in Bergen. His adventure had been real, though, for the big gold ring he earned as tyrant is still on his finger. As in the novel, Klim cannot share his journey with the public. He lives out his days as the city’s dissatisfied sexton, ringing church bells that toll – at least in the TV version – as a reminder of the impending doom. Rostrup writes that: just like Niels Klim, modern civilization inflicts violence on the order of nature and transforms the planet into a monument of its own folly. And like Niels Klim we risk destroying ourselves. And there will not even be any survivors to remember us. That is the absurd conclusion. (Rostrup, 1984a)
Holberg’s novel offered reason as the key faculty for promoting human betterment – what Francis Bacon referred to as the ‘relief of man’s estate’ (1960 [1620]: xxvii). With over two centuries’ hindsight, Rostrup’s TV adaptation rejects this position outright. The mini-series portrays rationality-driven progress as a transgressive force that humans have proved incapable of balancing. Crucially, it is concluded that the moderation that Holberg always promoted is not within human reach. Rational science with its industrial revolutions has therefore granted far too much power to a species incapable of managing the planet holistically. Today, the primary division is thus not between nations, although Rostrup clearly blames Europeans, but between humans and the fauna and flora with which we share the Earth. Holberg put tree-creatures in his novel mostly to avoid the conflict and censorship that more overt national comparisons could have led to. Rostrup infuses his flora with speciesism. Thus the humanism of Holberg’s original is replaced by bleak anti-humanism that gives primacy to nature’s wisdom over Enlightenment rationality.
These are large and obvious changes to the theme of reason. By contrast, it is intriguing to see how little the adaptation alters in respect to gender, even after first- and second-wave feminisms. The case for equal opportunity that Holberg makes in the novel is merely repeated in the TV series by trees who make a case for not wasting talent. TV-Klim does, however, play out like an overt chauvinist. He pleads that he ‘cannot have a female judge’, and that women ‘should be silent in assembly’ (Rostrup, 1984b: episode 1, m. 16). Yet the series attempts neither to masculinize human folly nor to connect human females to natural wisdom. If made 15 years later, perhaps Klim, influenced by third-wave feminism, could have become more of an expressly male culprit. But in Rostrup’s adaptation, humanity is on trial, not the patriarchy, and women appear to be equally doomed co-defendants.
From humanism to dataism
In respect to gender, the similarity between the novel and its adaptation gives the impression that Holberg was so far ahead of his time that even progressive Scandinavians needed over two centuries to surpass him on the woman question. In relation to the potential of rational Enlightenment, the scepticism of the younger Holberg aligns him with many critics of our own era. The older Holberg’s optimism, with which he consoled himself as he came near death, finds no resonance with Rostrup in the 1980s. In our twenty-first-century discourse, too, the belief that human rationality will let us solve tomorrow’s challenges appears significantly weakened.
Naturally, my adaptation study does not offer any final verdict on the Enlightenment. I only seek to illuminate the pop-culture origins of the movement that currently expresses itself as right- and left-wing populism. Our present era’s gloomy outlook has caused some to declare the death of the Enlightenment, with a variety of justifications and questions. In a post-truth world, what role does rationality play? When populism irresistibly arouses emotion, how can reason compete? This confusion is seen by historian and philosopher Yuval Harari (2016) less as a failure of the Enlightenment than a result of the movement having played itself out. That the Enlightenment and the ensuing industrial revolutions have been extraordinarily successful across a variety of human concerns is indisputable. Extreme poverty is nearly eradicated. We live longer and healthier lives. Democracy – while not thriving at the moment – has empowered people across the planet (Pinker, 2018). Harari suggests that the humanistic story that became hegemonic as part of this movement no longer provides answers for many of today’s – and certainly not tomorrow’s – challenges. Humanism’s fascist version bankrupted itself in Auschwitz in 1945. Socialist humanism lost its appeal after Berlin in 1989. Liberal humanism remained a bit longer but never recovered as a convincing vision for our future after its crash on Wall Street in 2008.
So what happens if such a socially influential story is over? What allowed humanism to overtake theism was technological innovation that empowered the individual. Harari argues that disruptions from the present era’s Fourth Industrial Revolution will require another, also very drastic, narrative adaptation. If biotech can enhance human biology, and artificial intelligence can surpass that of humans, then the primacy humanism grants individual rationality will no longer be the most effective adaptation to the reality of our environment. Harari is unable to predict the specifics of such a post-humanist master-narrative. But as a likely successor he expects some form of dataist narrative, perhaps with information flow as its supreme value. Interestingly, Rostrup infuses his TV version of Niels Klim with similar concerns.
Episode 2 ends with a surreal sequence. After crossing through a cello case that for unexplained reasons is a magical portal, Klim finds himself trapped by inquisitive robots. Naturally, these digital creatures did not exist in Holberg’s original. The robots demand national identification papers, then chew through Klim’s university diploma, which triggers a journey of images through Nordic civilization’s history and atrocities. ‘Missing Information’ (‘Manglende Oplysninger’) a screen warns, as if the free flow of information were the robots’ supreme value. A robot’s digital screen produces data that defines the human in front of them. The information that essentializes Klim is printed out and filed inside one of the robots, which then asks aggressively if Klim believes in the power of the rectangle, which seems to underpin the robots’ master-narrative. The story that the robots profess is unintelligible to Klim, but he has no choice but to play along. They prod his body and demand that he transforms the cross on his necklace back into its original rectangular shape. Clearly, Klim’s human identity and beliefs are irrelevant. What matters is that he swears allegiance to the robots’ new logic, no matter how nonsensical to human rationality their rectangle beliefs appear. The robots bring Klim along to witness the torture that they inflict upon heretics, then lead him through a hall of mirrors to meet their sovereign. This supreme entity appears to be a computer server from which Klim barely succeeds in escaping (1984b: m. 57).
There is a lot to untangle here, even without mentioning the monkeys dressed in rococo style and sabre-wielding apes that chase Klim and break the robots’ hall of mirrors. Whichever pessimism humanity engenders in Rostrup, the director seems to find even less cause for optimism with a dataist turn. However, the ambiguity of this robot sequence finally opens Rostrup’s adaptation up to the type of intellectually interesting interpretation that was so fundamental to Holberg’s novel. Although Rostrup, or at least his narrative, seems entirely convinced of the failure of human rationality, the consequences of what comes next appears a lot less certain. And after establishing his digital dystopia, Rostrup immediately sends Klim to continue his journey elsewhere. The director seems to sense a future dataist turn but only briefly allows his adaptation to explore this vision, unfortunately without developing a cogent argument for viewers to consider. The most obvious interpretation is that Rostrup’s violent, universalizing robots represent the poetic revenge that awaits Europeans once their final creation takes charge.
Techno utopia or game over
I have shown how in Holberg’s novel, (1) rationality, along with its chaperone moderation, is imbued with significant hope in respect to its potential for bettering the human condition. Niels Klim’s Underground Travels deals with (2) nationality, or nations, as static entities within which peoples made different by habitat should strive to develop societies optimally suited to their inhabitants’ uniqueness (see Figure 4). Other Enlightenment philosophers, such as Kant, placed greater emphasis on global convergence. In respect to (3) gender, Holberg was far ahead of his time. Both in his life and literature, Holberg strongly supported women’s rights. He was such an anomaly, at least in a Nordic context, that his novel’s prescient views on gender triggered no public controversy, as they were likely assumed to be meant as mere comedy. With our study’s final topic, (4) environmentalism, Holberg – like his contemporaries – was unable to predict the devastation that would be inflicted by the technological progress that rational science unleashed. Niels Klim touches, tangentially, on psychological aspects of this issue by emphasizing how its protagonist and his human underlings are incapable of showing moderation when empowered by gunpowder.
Niels Klim kneels for the Prince of Potu. The empire had experimented with non-royal rule, but their unique history made its imperial subjects prefer monarchy. Illustration from a 1789 edition, engraved by Johan Frederik Clemens after a drawing by Nicolai Abraham Abildgaard (publisher Johan Frederik Schultz).
Rostrup adapts Holberg’s story for much bleaker motifs. The obvious interpretation, which is supported by Rostrup’s own writing, is that (1) rationality has failed as a strategy for viable progress. That is because humanity’s capacity for moderation is limited to an existentially threatening degree. Europeans, as culprits of the Enlightenment, are primarily to blame, but any distinction based on (2) nationality, is no longer relevant. The primary opposition is now between humanity and nature. Within Rostrup’s 1980s eco-criticism, (3) gender is of no importance. Men and women are equally guilty in respect to humanity’s sins against the planet. In terms of equality between the sexes as its own issue, little separates the adaptation from its original. It is clearly with (4) environmentalism that the TV drama version constructs its most pressing theme. In its TV incarnation, Holberg’s moral–philosophical journey for individualistically empowering self-reflection becomes a collectivist condemnation of Anthropocene self-destruction.
These elements add up to a dramatic difference between the early Enlightenment novel and its 1980s counter-culture TV adaptation. In these two versions, Niels Klim thus becomes a work that can be seen to bookend the Enlightenment itself. But, if the epoch that resulted from the Enlightenment is indeed ending, does the adaptation deliver a just verdict? Or from what perspective would it be most relevant to try to assess this enormously consequential movement? From the Enlightenment’s own perspective, humanism, the movement appears to be a clear success, at least up until now. The progress that followed the eighteenth century has lifted billions of humans out of poverty and starvation, diseases have been cured and lives prolonged, just to mention a few triumphs that have benefitted humanity, if we accept a humanist perspective. For an environmentalist, a gorilla, or an industrial cow, the progress of recent centuries takes on a different aspect. Perhaps a more productive question would be: if this movement has now run its course, what comes next?
Human reason and innovation are giving rise to a different form of reason with the potential to far surpass our own. The hard-to-imagine consequences of artificial superintelligence have been explored by scholars such as Ray Kurzweil and Nick Bostrom. Recently, the topic has also spawned more mainstream concern, and not only from Silicon Valley millennial types. Henry Kissinger writes in The Atlantic (2018), ‘How the Enlightenment ends. Philosophically, intellectually – in every way – human society is unprepared for the rise of artificial intelligence.’ Kurzweil suggests that human intelligence could be surpassed by the end of the 2020s, but most experts add a decade or two to that estimate (Müller and Bostrom, 2016). Harari warns against a scenario in which most, or even all, humans as we know ourselves today, could become irrelevant and perhaps even discarded. Others are less perturbed, such as techno-utopian George Gilder who is convinced that even the most powerful computers will forever remain subservient to human consciousness.
Holberg had faith in human rationality, but admittedly his faith was quite frail. Perhaps the thought of handing the baton of progress over to more mathematical minds could have soothed Holberg’s concerns. The Fourth Industrial Revolution is about to grant us what Harari refers to as god-like powers. If we are indeed so inclined to transgress, as Rostrup’s tiger claims, maybe we should welcome no longer being in charge. If our final creation is able to look after the planet and all its inhabitants more sustainably and equitably than we seem to be able to do ourselves, then certainly the Enlightenment could be deemed a success. But there is also the risk that our digital successors will find no purpose, or place, for the human folly Niels Klim was meant to satirize. If that becomes our destiny, then perhaps the last humans will curse those men like Holberg who convinced us to stake our future on the promise of reason.
Footnotes
Author biography
Mads Larsen is a PhD student at UCLA’s Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies. His dissertation, Evolution Toward Social Democracy in a Millennium of Nordic Fiction, explains the origins of Scandinavian egalitarianism and shows the mechanisms through which fiction can help humanity adapt to disruptions from the Fourth Industrial Revolution. His articles have been accepted for publication in the journals World Futures, Literature/Film Quarterly and Journal of English and Germanic Philology.