The I of literature resembles the I of reality in the way the uniqueness of the individual may be expressed only through what is common to all, which in the case of literature is the language. All I’s of literature make use of the same words, the only difference, that which separates one literary I from another, is the way in which those words are ordered, and the fact that it is possible, in that nonuniform distribution, so very marginal when seen from afar, for an I as vital and significant as Emily Dickinson’s to emerge, is remarkable indeed. And it becomes no less remarkable when we consider that practically no one read her poems while she was alive. The overwhelming loneliness and longing she apparently felt is long since dead and buried as we read them now, all that remains is their articulation, which we awaken the very moment we allow our gaze to fall upon the words she wrote such a long time ago, and succumb to them. From that moment she sings within us. But what did she get from it, one might wonder, given that she never could have predicted that her poems would find readers throughout the world, be considered among the very best of the period to which she belonged, and be read long after people would normally have forgotten all about her and her life, though presumably they were written without thought of any reader at all? Why articulate what it feels like to be alive, rather than simply feel and think?
Why write?
I am alone as I write this. It’s the twelfth of June, 2011, the time is 6:17 a.m., in the room above me the children are asleep, at the other end of the house Linda is asleep, outside the window, some meters into the garden, the early sun of dawn is slanting down on an apple tree. The leaves are mottled with light and shade. A short while ago a small bird sat in the fork of the tree, in its beak was something that looked like a worm or a grub, it paused there for a moment, throwing its head back as it tried to swallow. It’s gone now. Behind that same fork in the tree where it sat the girls’ bathing suits have been hung out to dry; all day yesterday they were in the wading pool a bit farther down the garden, half hidden by a willow. The grass outside, which is mostly in shade, is still wet with dew. The air is filled with the twitter and song of birds. Six months ago I sat in exactly the same place, in the early mornings, the children sleeping above me, Linda at the other end of the house. There was a fire in the stove then, and outside it was pitch dark, the air filled with whirling snow. For more than three years I have spent my mornings in the same way, sitting here or at home in the apartment in Malmö, bent over the keyboard, writing this novel, which is now drawing to a close. I have done so alone, in empty rooms, and as I have worked, my publishers have published what I have written, five volumes so far, about which I know there has been a lot of talk, much written and said in newspapers and blogs, on the radio, in journals and magazines. I’ve had no interest in that discourse and have kept out of it as much as possible, there’s nothing there for me. Everything is here, in what I am doing now. But what is that, exactly?
What does it mean to write?
First of all it is to lose oneself, or one’s self. In that it resembles reading, but while the loss of the self in reading is to the alien I, which, by virtue of being so obviously apart from the reader’s own singular I, does not seriously threaten its integrity, the loss of the self in writing is in a different way complete, as when snow vanishes into snow, one might think, or any other monochromism with no privileged point, no foreground or background, no top or bottom, only sameness everywhere. Such is the nature of the written self. But what is this sameness of which it is comprised and within which it exists? It is the singular language of the self. The I comes into being in the language, and is the language. But the language is not the property of the I, it belongs to all. The identity of the literary I resides in the choice of one word rather than another, but how poorly held together and centered that identity is. In a way it resembles the one we have in dreams, where the conscious self distinguishes just as little between us and what constitutes our surroundings and experiences, and our I is in effect deposited inside a room in which the green bench to our left is quite as central to who we are as the wriggling fish to our right, or the Neptune-like figure rising out of the water that at that same moment floods the floor beneath the sky across which a red biplane passes. The difference between dreaming and writing must surely be that the former occurs without our control, in one of the body’s unconscious modes, and is without purpose, whereas the latter is controlled and goal-oriented. This is true and yet not, for the crux of the similarity has to do with the absence of any localization of the I, the fact of it being dislocated and no longer centered, and the question that is thereby raised, for is it not the property of being centered that in actual fact makes up the I? The very act of holding together? Yes. But the truth of the I is not the truth of one’s own particular being. What rises between all the various fragments, far out in the realm of all that is not held together, is also the hum of the own, the peculiar timbre of the self that resonates throughout our lives, that part of us to which we wake up in the mornings, beyond any thought we might happen to think, any feeling that situation might give rise to within us, and which is the last part of us we release before succumbing to sleep. And is it not this hum of the own, this distant reverberation of the self, that pervades all music, all art, all literature, and moreover all that is alive and able to sense? It has nothing to do with the I, even less with the we, only with our very being in the world. When I look at the little sparrow outside, the way it perches on the branch in the sun and throws back its head to swallow the worm or the grub, I cannot imagine that it should be completely without awareness of its own being. Perhaps that awareness is even stronger than ours, since it cannot possibly be overshadowed by any thought. The thoughts that hold together the I can be dissolved in the acts of reading and writing, though in two different ways, in the first instance by entering that which is alien and comes from without, and in the second instance by entering that which is alien and within us, which is the language at our own disposal, in other words the language in which we say I. In writing we lose control of that I, it becomes incalculable, and the question is whether the uncontrollable and incalculable properties of the singular I in actual fact are a representation of its true state, or at least the closest we can get to any representation of the actual self.
What do we say when we say I?
A famous diary from 1953 begins as follows:
Monday
Me.
Tuesday
Me.
Wednesday
Me.
Thursday
Me.
To me, this is a lesson in literature. The I behind this “me,” on its own and uncommented upon, may refer to anyone at all, such an I is without identity and open. The issue of who the writer is, when the reader has nothing more to relate to, cannot be resolved. It may be your downstairs neighbor, the man from the kiosk on the square, your child, August Strindberg, Sølvi Wang, or Niki Lauda, to mention just a few of the names that for some reason spring to mind at this moment. The I is absolutely anonymous, in the sense of being nameless. But a nameless I may nevertheless, by virtue of the words surrounding it, convey a clear sense of a certain character, a kind of I-mood that prompts us to relate to it as if to a real person of flesh and blood, even in fact allowing us to come closer to it than to any real person, because the language of the literary I is explicitly tied to inner thoughts and feelings, the I when the I is alone, a dimension that vanishes in the physical encounter, where the body’s frame is a barrier, not hostile or protective, but simply as it is, possessing its own language, besides the encounter between I and you also establishing a we, with its own particular rules and regulations, a social world, which only the intense infatuation of love can dissolve, though never completely, the social attaching also to that connection; no couple in love behaves uniquely. Against this can be said that the literary I, no matter how naked or how intimately it presents itself, is social too, by virtue of the expectation of a you that any I contains, and therefore is always
already a we. Indeed, this lies in the very nature of the I, which is an appeal – we have no need to utter I in the presence only of ourselves – and in that appeal there is always another, and thereby a we. This applies too to the I of this diary. An I, or me, on its own is anonymous, neutral, and without character, but precisely by playing on the you, in this case the expectations we have of any I in a text, this particular I is able to infuse itself with meaning and say something about what an I is, without stating anything beyond “me.” What happens when it is repeated four times? In a sentence, together with all sorts of other words, we wouldn’t notice, but unencumbered, naked and accorded a line all to itself, the utterance becomes preposterous. Me, me, me, me: I, I, I, I. It expresses narcissism. But at the same time, by its nakedness it is as if that narcissism is being exhibited, and in this lies a conscious mind, someone saying, I know what I’m doing. What is the nature of that knowledge? I know it’s narcissistic, but I’m doing it anyway. That is, I am not hiding myself. I’m telling it like it is. I am at root narcissistic. But who am I? As of yet, the I is all of us. That is, every me is narcissistic, but this it admits, and in this admission lies a duality: narcissism is a weakness, something unwanted; if it were not, then we would not attempt to hide it, so the fact that narcissism is being exhibited here is an admission of weakness, at the same time that admission also lifts up the I and distinguishes it, because it is candid, and candid narcissism stands in opposition to hidden narcissism in that the former aspires to truth, whereas the latter seeks to conceal the truth.
There is also something aggressive and hostile in the repetition of this “me.” Fuck you, it says. You can believe what you want. Here, I, and only I, prevail.
“Me” completely on its own is anonymous, neutral, and without character. Repeated four times it becomes a literary and social program, since after having read the first four diary entries, one understands that this is a me in opposition to the social world, which it considers to be hypocritical and insincere, unlike its writing, which aspires toward that which is true and sincere by sticking to its own, which is to say the me that opens out toward us by putting itself on display, at first anonymous, neutral and without character, and which by virtue of the repetition then sheds the neutral and the characterless, and in its fourth instance stands trembling, truth-thirsty, reality-craving, superior.
And then it is literature.
But if I had begun this novel in exactly the same way it would not have been literature. Although the pronoun “me” does not in any way belong to Witold Gombrowicz, the author of that diary, and he likewise has no right of property to the repetition of that pronoun four times, meaning that legally or morally there would not have been anything in the way of my making use of that exact same opening, this would not have been the case with regard to literature, since the entire value of that opening lies in its uniqueness and its expression of uniqueness. If I had used the same words, Witold Gombrowicz’s me would have superimposed itself onto my own, and my “me” would thereby have become a parody, expressing lack of originality where Gombrowicz expresses the opposite, originality, and thereby I would have undermined what the utterance is saying, that truth lies in the unique I, and only there, since the I that would have been saying this would not have been unique and primary, but Gombrowiczized, socialized, plagiarized.
My literary I was most likely Gombrowiczized, because his diaries had such a great influence on the way I thought about identity, sociality, and literature, but it was also Larssonized, Proustized, and Célinized, if not to say quite Sandemosial and thoroughly Hamsunified, and if I were to attach an image to those influences it would perhaps involve a boy, let’s say he’s fourteen years old, living next to a river, with a section of rapids about three kilometers down from the house, and the rock over which the water rushes, swollen and shiny as steel, is smoothly eroded and covered with algae, meaning that a person can swim out above the rapids and allow themselves to be swept along by the current, something he often does, this boy, together with his best friend and all the others who congregate there in the summer evenings, there being hardly a better feeling in life than this, to sense the might of the river, the increasing velocity, the surge of descent as he is swept away and slung into the depths downstream, plunged into the turmoil of tiny bubbles, allowing himself, if he wishes, to be carried into more gentle waters, there to clamber up onto the land again, or else swim back upstream as far as he is able, until the current becomes too strong and he is brought to a standstill, unable to progress any farther no matter how hard he struggles, eventually to be swept away downstream again. To sail down those rapids is like writing, carried from one point to another by forces beyond your control, but what you experience on your way is experienced by you alone, since I cannot imagine the other kids could have seen or felt the same as he, and if those evenings, with their setting suns and as yet warm rocks through swiftly cooling air, where great swarms of insects hung suspended in pockets of light, the resounding rush of the river and the joyful shrieks of boys and girls, the almost electrically illuminated trees, behind which an old-fashioned gravel track led to a manor farm presumably built in the nineteenth century in connection with the sawmill at the falls, and beyond the manor farm the sunlit, tree-covered slopes above which the sky slowly dimmed, eventually, towards midnight, opening to the light of the few stars bright enough to pierce the pale night of summer – if those evenings, with the slant of farther slopes on the other side of the river, dark and shadowy at the bottom, shimmering orange at the top as if ablaze, and an asphalt road with a bit more traffic along whose straights and bends the kids who lived there would cycle or race their mopeds to call on each other – if all this remained in their memories it would be in ways completely different to the way it did in his, this fourteen- or fifteen-year-old boy with no greater joy in life than this, to be within this space that resounded with the clamor of its thunderous waters and the exuberant voices of young humans, lit by the sun or dimmed by its absence, so strangely desirable that the very thought of it fills him with joy even now, twenty-eight years later. The feelings that come to him on this reflection may be no less intense than those of the others who were there, this is certainly possible, since different things will attach themselves to us, and his experience is by no means more significant to him than to the others, it is simply different. It is unique. And a starting point for a hundred novels at least. Boy at river below sawmill one evening in summer. A writer of Sandemose’s ilk would most probably have zoomed in on the girl in the red bikini both he and his friend desire, then followed the three of them through life, since here we have a very fundamental psychological as well as social structure, two on one, and archaic in nature, the taboos surrounding it are basic. A Proustian writer would probably have ignored the physical-concrete aspect of the situation and emphasized its reminiscence in memory, which by virtue of being a representation is connected with all other representations, which is to say that it shares the characteristics of the work of art, the reproduction of something no longer here but which nevertheless remains within us, in the almost dreamlike haze that is such an important element of our reality, where the girl in the red bikini, dipping her toe in the river in the shade of the trees, perhaps resembles one of Rembrandt’s young Dutch women of the seventeenth century, Susanna, for instance, or that of one of the figures seated or standing on the smooth rocks, dressing or undressing, are fleetingly reminiscent of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes’s paintings from the latter half of the nineteenth century in which the human has a near-sculptural quality, certainly not psychological, and where the various poses, which lead the mind back to the high classical phase of Greek Antiquity, four and three hundred years before Christ, when the self did not turn inward to seek harmony there, but outward, might claim this to be a constant quality of the human, rather than something cultural or relative, which would also be the case here with these youthful Scandinavian figures on the rocks by the river. A Hamsunite, where would he or she have
gone with this? To the drone of the moped as it rounds the bend beneath the fell? To the rush of the river, the sudden bashfulness in the eye of a girl as she glances down? Or to the house of the fat mini-mart owner on the new estate from the sixties and his efforts to make a living independently of the supermarket chains? The tattered remnants of aristocracy in the family who perhaps own, perhaps no longer own, the manor farm by the river? Or perhaps to the self, the self observing itself, suspiciously monitoring, cracking down at the slightest hint of pretense, in that impossible desire for authenticity that once led Nagel to suicide in a town thirty kilometers from this place in distance, ninety years in time. Oh, here were already priests and the daughters of priests, lensmenn and their sons, blood that rushed in the veins, hearts that pounded in the chest, here were the most refined and the coarsest of emotions, all a writer would have to do would be to start.
My Struggle, Book 6 Page 27