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Peter Hoeg’s short story “Portrait of the Avant-Garde” is a compelling work of post-modern magical realism conveyed through cool, detached prose. Utilizing elements of folklore, the paranormal, and movements such as futurism, Hoeg masterfully crafts a cautionary allegory warning against the spiritual dislocation instilled in man by the artistic glorification of the rampant proliferation of technology and those who advocate its supremacy over history.

The protagonist of the story, Simon Bering, a successful painter and a stirring speechmaker, believes himself to belong “to a generation and a race healthier than any before them had ever been” (Hoeg 316). This innate feeling of superiority suffuses his work and his outlook on the present with pompous grandeur. With his art, which “opened up like gateways into the future” (Hoeg 316), and his words, used to “speed the truths contained in his paintings” (Hoeg 317) Simon proselytizes on behalf of progress, the “one God” (Hoeg 317). As a “young prophet of a new age and a new truth” (Hoeg 317), he must spread his futurist gospel “as some fiery natural phenomenon, as an uninterrupted volcanic eruption, setting light to everything around it without itself ever being touched by its surroundings” (Hoeg 320).

Simon’s preferred method of exposing the masses to his divine luminescence is through the visceral, incendiary nature of his art. According to Hoeg, Simon’s canvases provoke a reaction akin to that from an act of physical violence, leaving the viewer shaken from a “a sound beating” (Hoeg 319), or jarred from “a slap in the face” (Hoeg 318).

Upon viewing his first exhibition, the public was made to “catch their breath the way one does when stepping out into the cold” (Hoeg 316), gasping for air. Clearly, Simon’s technique and the content of his paintings conspire with his “faith in the future” (Hoeg 317) to de-sensitize the populace to “the unrelenting cavalcade of machines and horses and military detachments and forest fires” (Hoeg 316) that serve as harbingers of war and advancement. By doing so, he deliberately orchestrates the eradication of any continued resistance to the onset of technology through the numbing of the populace at large with an arsenal of “art that can cut to the quick of our souls” (Hoeg 317).

The danger inherent in such a pursuit is the overwhelming desire to discard the achievements, whether they be social, cultural, artistic, intellectual, or even corporeal, that preceded in past societies. This is a supremely selfish indulgence, and one not bereft of dire consequences. Perhaps the most horrifying instance of this practice would be the Holocaust, in which an entire race of people was targeted for extermination on the basis of their collective history. Hoeg even goes so far as to note the parallels between Simon and Hitler. Simon “succeeded in giving clear and crystallized expression to ideas that at the time were still vague and diffuse,” (317) going so far as to assure his listeners at the opening of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin “that the young artists of Europe were right behind Germany’s new leader and chancellor” (317). However, whereas Hitler’s brutal genocide was physically enacted on the Jews, Simon’s violence is perpetrated on the mind. Possessing the opinion that “all ancient rituals were absurd” (Hoeg 317), Simon considers it his duty to exterminate everything antique and anachronistic, seeing as they are deserving casualties of the grand war of progress.

His ideology is put to the test when he ventures to the remote island of Christianso, “an island that, as far as the map of Denmark is concerned, is near enough the end of the world” (Hoeg 318), where the inhabitants seem to blend in seamlessly with their surroundings. His rebuttal of the simple, timeless ways of the people of Christianso and their own indigenous philosophies pertaining to dreams and time leads him to embark on his greatest artistic endeavor yet, “a painting depicting the history of man as a frenzy of longing; a painting containing the hiss of steam, the pounding of pistons and rifle shots; and finally, right in the foreground, with a flash of all-consuming white fire, a painting that reaches out and grabs the public by the throat. It will hurl them into the future and inject a substance into their veins, forcing them to run away, forcing them to pour across the bridge and run away. It will be, he thought to himself, the ultimate painting, a work of art capable of depopulating an island” (Hoeg 322).

However, Simon fails to comprehend the forces that he unknowingly provokes with his ill-advised endeavor. Despite the warnings communicated to him by his companion Nina about the potency of the dream as a weapon to be feared, which Simon disregards as so much unscientific, archaic nonsense, it takes a unique encounter with a certain deaf fisherman to illuminate the futility of Simon’s efforts and deter him from future meddling. Frustrated by the unresponsiveness of his audience, he decides that he has finally been confronted by “the war that he had advocated so fervently and had in a sense played out in his paintings.” He finds himself “standing on the battlefield himself” with a knife in his hand, ready to strike and kill the unsuspecting fisherman, thus creating “the ultimate painting” (Hoeg 329) on a canvas of flesh and blood.

Having come to grips with the distinctly modern condition of utter loneliness, which breeds “no regard for the world inside our heads, for what is known as our conscience,” Simon has achieved what he likens to be utter and total freedom from the moral constraints of society. He has allowed himself to be carved out by violence and progress to feel no remorse, a victim of acute spiritual dislocation engendered by his embrace of the war and technology that he has designated as his livelihood. However, Simon falters in his assassination attempt when he realizes there are witnesses to his crime. He has been defeated and crushed by the weight of failure, “the giddy sensation of an unfamiliar impotence” (Hoeg 330).

Only gradually does it occur to Simon that all of his experiences over the course of the evening have been the constructs of a single dream. Only then does the meaning of Christianso become clear to him, that the unique relationship that all of inhabitants of the island share transcends future, time, and space. In the context of the island, his beliefs have lost all relevance, and have been subjugated by traditions that have endured for eons and will continue to do so for much longer to come. He has been vanquished by the past, which can only bode well for his future.