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¶ … Fugitive Crosses His Tracks: The harshness of Jante Law

The 1933 novel a Fugitive Crosses His Tracks by Aksel Sandemose could be understood as a kind of Danish Crime and Punishment. It is the story of an intelligent and sensitive man whose internal moral compass and point-of-view make him very different from the other people of the community where he lives. At the beginning of the novel, the protagonist Espen Arnakke seems like a middle-aged and respectable resident of a small industrial town. However, in his past he has a dark secret: he committed a murder when he was a young sailor: a crime of passion against a good friend. Sandemose takes a slightly different view than the famous Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky's perception of the dangers of wanting to overcome the will of the collective and social morality. For Sandemose, a true modernist, to be truly clear-sighted and moral is to be emotionally estranged from one's community. To try to be unique, or to understand the human condition, is to be censured. This paper will argue that Sandemose's advancement of the concept of what he calls Jante Law is not particular merely to Norway, but is used to exemplify the estrangement of the individual from the larger human community.

The principles of Jante Law suggest that the community can often thwart the individual in a negative fashion. Rather than viewing communal life as supportive and beneficial to the individual, Sandemose sees it as stifling. The Jante Law, as expressed in the novel, is phrased in terms of the collective 'voice' of others: not to think you are anything, or as good, smarter, better, or greater than a nameless 'us.' Thinking that you are 'better' in any way is verboten. To try to be different is to be puffed up with one's ego, and any attempt to change things will end in failure. All of the tools of self-improvement and critical and creative thought, such as aspiring to have a better life than one's ancestors results in the individual being severed from the sustaining connections of community life. Jante Law seems to be the antithesis of the American ideal of the self-made man, pulling himself up by his bootstraps. Needing others and living as one's parents did is part of the creed of Jante. However, the Jante creed follows the protagonist internally, even after he leaves his small town. It is hard-wired into his psyche, not merely an external force.

Some of the unwritten law is self-abasing in the extreme, according to the narrator's choice of wording. "Don't think 'you' are good for anything. Don't laugh at 'us.' Don't think that anyone cares about 'you.' Don't think you can teach 'us' anything." (Sandemose 77-78). Learning, self-esteem, even a sense of humor is prohibited by Jante Law. All creativity and individualism is discouraged: progress is stifled through provincialism and fear of being ostracized. Fear keeps the residents of Jante in line: fear of being fired from their jobs, losing their familial support, even their very identity, if they transgress the unwritten law of behavior and aggravate their neighbors by wishing to know more, and to be more.

The social conventions of Jante are both impersonal and harsh. It pits 'us' the collective against 'you' the individual. Yet 'us' is never represented by a single individual or a group of citizens. 'Us' is a shadowy, nameless horde. 'Us' is not even really, the citizens of Jante. True, in the novel, the informal code of law is named for a fictional Danish town. But the Jante Law of real life is not written down, not in law books -- it is not a law like a constitutional right or prohibition. The Jante Law serves no one in its wording; it is phrased in terms of an impersonal 'we.' It only serves to make individuals -- the 'you' it is directed towards -- miserable and live in fear. According to Sandemose, there is no appeal mechanism for Jante Law, no way to avoid it or run away from it, as one can run away from the authorities. Social conventions are far more inflexible than actual laws and even harder to change because they are invisible and unsaid. Part of the reason that Sandermose lists Jante Law as ten basic tenets or creeds is that he hopes that by putting such words down in writing people will become more self-conscious about their meaning, and hopefully less quick to judge others. Thus the author seeks to do the paradoxical and the impossible -- to set down social mores into words.

Jante Law is parochial, but it is also absolute. And the Law is both particular and universal. On one hand, Jante is a small, backwater town. Yet in the novel, Jante and Espen's plight comes to stand for a larger condition: there are 'Jantes' everywhere, not only in Norway. The effects of social laws upon the minds and fates of a city's or a backwater's inhabitants alike can be just as dangerous as actual, written laws. Sandermose reveals himself to be profoundly suspicious of conventional notions of liberal progressivism which states that people naturally want change, that social change is easy, provided that one reconfigures existing written laws. In fact unwritten laws are even more devastating. Espen avoids being punished for a true crime of murder, but the internal logic of Jante remains within his spirit, as much as he chafes at it.

Espen is an antihero, and as is typical of early 20th century antiheroes, his individual will is pitted against society. Although he is a murderer, the book does not focus upon external mechanisms of the law, but Espen's internal sense of guilt and remorse. The book is told as a retrospective, alternating with Espen's current set of circumstances in the present vs. his life as a young man, whereby the reader learns why Espen is in his current state of despair. The crime Espen committed lies in the past and is slowly revealed, first through foreshadowing, and then a catharsis.

When Espen was a young man, working on the high seas, he killed his friend 'Big John,' because John betrayed Espen by sleeping with his girlfriend. Espen then hid from the law in Canada. He has become a changed man by the time of the novel, and now at age thirty-four he has a sense of propriety and a superego he lacked when he was seventeen. He regrets his actions and muses about the nature of forgiveness and being truly reintegrated into the community after committing a crime. Although he has been re-accepted, Espen feels as if he is living a lie. The external community sees him as respectable because he 'follows the laws' of Jante, but Espen senses the profound disconnection that lies between his projected persona and the truth of his past.

Sandemose asks if Espen alone is responsible for his actions and asks if the community bears some of the blame because of the attitudes Espen was exposed to as a young man, as well as an adult. Clearly, he supports the latter idea. Sandermose paints a picture of an uncomfortable living environment in which everyone knows everyone else's business, and it is impossible to remain anonymous. Under such circumstances, where a citizen is always living in a kind of Foucaultian panopticon of scrutiny, Espen is always in a kind of prison, watching and monitoring his actions. Espen feels so constrained that, even though he is not actually in prison for killing his friend, he feels as if he is in a prison of guilt, and a prison of watchfulness where Jante Law -- us -- is always watching him for signs of revealing his tragic past.

In Jante, there is a surface ideal of respectability, and so long as that is upheld, it does not matter what murderousness lies within. As a boy, Espen quickly learned of the veneer of kindness that existed in Jante Law. But beneath it there is only cruelty. For example, Espen recalls how, when he was a young boy, his mother went to her husband's employer, a well-off factory owner, for assistance. The man kindly gave her a loan, but also just as kindly reduced her husband's wages, until the 'loan' was paid off. There is no way for the poor to 'get ahead.' The appearance of charity in Jante was all that mattered to the factory owner: he profited from his gift by gaining social esteem and got a full return on his value. He also earned a certain amount of added dependence from Espen's family as they were the recipients of his loan.