Another photograph from the same year, Untitled #250, is if anything even more repulsive. It shows a body consisting of five parts, barely put together, more properly placed alongside each other as if merely to indicate a relation. At the bottom of the picture, female genitals made of plastic, no thighs, labia bright red and grotesquely swollen, with a surrounding mat of pubic hair. Above, a female belly and breasts in one piece, a fake chest of plastic that could be put on and worn. Projecting from the upper torso at either side, at what would be shoulder height, are two arms, also made of plastic, perhaps from a dummy of the kind used for first-aid demonstrations. Above the torso a hideous doll’s head of an old person, skin wrinkled, irises brown, orbs chalk white. It’s hard to tell whether the head is meant to be a man or a woman. These parts are arranged on a bed of what appear to be wigs. That’s all. Or rather, no. Protruding from the vagina is an articulated string of brown plastic sausages, three in all, impossible not to associate with feces.
In themselves, none of these elements is particularly unsettling, repulsive, or foul. A doll’s head, two doll’s arms, a fake chest, and a model of the female genitals perhaps normally used for instructional purposes. Nor can what they represent be said to be especially disconcerting either – old people, breasts, genitals. And considered in isolation, the brown sausages are just sausages. When brought together with a body, however, they are transformed, they “become” feces, even more so when emerging from an opening in the body. All the more grotesque when that opening is the wrong opening, the vagina instead of the anus. It’s an impossible confusion, a contamination, and we react strongly, pushing it away from us, not wanting to know, even though we are perfectly aware that they’re just sausages, plastic sausages at that, the vagina likewise an imitation.
There’s a very direct route between the foul and repulsive and our senses of smell and taste, we smell bad meat and feel sick, we eat bad meat and throw it up again in a powerful physical reflex. The eye is different, bad meat can look the same as good meat, and good meat can look like bad. To the eye, the foul and repulsive are representations of something taken to be the case prior to the sensory impression, and as such they are preconceptions, yet perceived to be quite as real as the directly repulsive smell, and this is because what we perceive to be transgressive, what makes us feel sick, involves forms relating to our understanding of the world rather than the world itself, the material reality by which we are surrounded. We are hugely sensitive in this respect when it comes to the openings of the body, which is where the material world enters us and is expelled from us, through the mouth, the nose, the ears, the anus, the genitals. These orifices are where the boundaries of the body are transgressed, and nowhere is the question of identity more fundamental and acute than in that area, and nowhere is it more general, more universal in its nature, something Cindy Sherman’s photographs make clear to us, for the body parts we see are not simply anonymous and devoid of identity, belonging to anybody, they are also artificial and mass produced, and so they go a step further, from anybody to nobody, or nothing, and where does that put us?
It puts us at a place where boundaries are drawn, and boundaries create differences, as differences create meaning. To see this place where meaning is created, we must be put outside it, as strangers we must stand before it, and this we do when we look at Sherman’s pictures.
But what do we see?
The place where differences are created is itself without difference, and to a human the undifferentiated is the biggest threat of all: in that space, the human is obliterated. It is to that place those lifeless body parts point, but they do so in a photograph, which, once our disgust and nausea have passed, becomes but one among the myriad of images that make up the sky above our selves.
Inexhaustible Precision
Whenever I see a new picture I immediately seem to like and find aesthetically pleasing, I am suspicious. This cannot possibly be good, I think to myself. This cannot possibly be art. It feels like the spontaneous pleasure, the immediate sense of aesthetic satisfaction I derive in such instances is too easy and too shallow to be called a true artistic experience. From this can be inferred that the quality and value of art for me is associated with some degree of resistance. Certain criteria have to be met, obviously, but why resistance? It feels like an inner requirement, from some part of me that is critical of simple pleasures, a critic’s voice within, whose point of departure is that art is something other and more profound than that which provides uncomplicated pleasure and is simply appealing in itself. So when I stand and look at a picture I find pleasing at first sight, it feels like I become the scene of a battle between two quite disparate opinions about art. One, the most immediate, has to do with what has always been immediate about me, my sensitive emotions, now usually kept in check, but which once, when I was a child, steered everything, freely and unexactingly bringing forth whatever they commanded at any given time to cope with the impressions of the world. The other, the less immediate, sees no value in the unexacting, but rejects it as superficial, illusory, manipulative. Good is only that which does not open itself immediately, but requires lengthy effort on the part of the beholder in order to fully reveal itself – or rather no, that’s not the word at all, because a true work of art never fully reveals itself, holds no one answer, but must forever remain beholder-resistant.
This take on art is clearly Protestant, since a genuinely Protestant person such as myself, for whom Protestantism is part of the marrow, can appreciate only what has come of hard work, only this has value, and holds nothing but disdain for what is given or easily taken, which is associated with sloth, idleness, indolence. Elsewhere, in an essay about Cindy Sherman, without thinking of this aspect at all, I wrote that entertainment is “nothing but a space in which we can allow ourselves to feel the strongest emotions without obligation”: this is the Protestant speaking, art requires, art costs, art is obligation.
But the requirement of resistance is more than just a thinly veiled requirement to invest effort, there are more reasons than just one for the inner voice I hear rejecting the work of art that appeals at first sight. Another and perhaps quite as important reason has to do with a certain mode of relating to reality which I and everyone else in my generation have been brought up to apply, which is to think critically. Objects and phenomena are never as they appear, something always lies hidden beneath the surface, and that something, which is their real truth, can be arrived at only by critical address. At school we learn to be critical of advertising, analyzing its examples to lay bare their true values, the same applying to political rhetoric, and of all journalists the critical journalist is the one held in the greatest esteem, for it is he or she who reveals the truth, the way things are in essence. Literary criticism bears the same hallmark, it must indeed be critical and reveal any instance of literary weakness, often synonymous with the mirage-like easy gain, literary quality being something much deeper and more essential.
In this, the critical approach to art, lies another decisive accentuation, likewise to do with resistance versus lack of resistance, and consisting in the social distinctions that are established by art. What is easily accessible is for the many, for everyman, the mass, whereas what is accessible only by effort and with difficulty is for the few, the elite. To appropriate and appreciate a sophisticated and ostensibly inaccessible work of art is always at the same time to be in select company.
All of this rings in the voice I hear inside when I look at a work of art that appeals to me at first sight. Against it speaks another and presumably far older voice that tells me art is a place of abundance and that the work of art is created effortlessly by genius, the crux of this voice being lack of resistance. It would not be unreasonable to assume that extravagance and lack of resistance are held high in societies in which people must toil to survive, whereas resistance is similarly held high in societies in which everything is easily had. In any circumstance, it is only when photography bec
omes available to the many as a means of depicting the world that art turns away from the immediately representative. The same goes for the novel, which right from the beginning was a mass medium employing classical narrative structures. It is only when the majority starts to read that the sophisticated, narrativeless, or narratively experimental literature arises. Dickens, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy saw no reason to experiment with form, Woolf, Joyce, and Broch did.
This kind of explanatory model makes the critical voice inside rear up in horror. Wait, it says, this isn’t about sociology or history, it’s about quality. How can you write such a thing, are you trying to get rid of me? Don’t you know how dangerous that is? Do you want to give yourself up to the babbling child, at the expense of me and all that I know about the world and about art?
No, dear voice of criticism, I will not abandon you. You are the king of thoughts, without you and your whip they lead nowhere. But there is more to art than thoughts.
“Is there? You’re thinking of feelings, I take it?”
“Yes.”
“But what are feelings? Where do they take you?”
“To pleasure.”
“But what do you get from pleasure? It makes you feel good, and then it goes away again, and that’s that. What do you learn from that?”
“Nothing.”
“Exactly. Did you gain any insight from that pleasure?”
“Nothing more than what concerns the nature of pleasure.”
“There you have it. You find pleasure in watching a football match, don’t you?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Then what do you need art for, if football does the same job? You get pleasure from driving as well, don’t you? Or from listening to some stupid pop song?”
“Yes.”
“In that case, I suggest you watch football, drive your car, listen to stupid pop songs, and leave art and literature well alone.”
“But there’s a difference.”
“Go on.”
“Rilke writes somewhere that music lifts him up.”
“Good for him.”
“No, no, there’s more. He writes that music lifts him up and puts him down again somewhere else. It’s this, putting you down again somewhere else, that art does, as opposed to all the other examples you mention.”
“Okay. So what does that mean exactly, somewhere else? And where’s the value in it? Can you put it into words?”
“No.”
“All right. But when you drive your car, the car leaves you somewhere else too.”
Although in recent years I have increasingly sided with the child when it comes to such matters and have developed something of distaste for academic presentations of art and literature, I always come out the loser in these inner discussions, probably because deep down, ultimately, I believe that quality in art is something absolute, or near absolute: a crime novel is without value, whereas a novel by D. H. Lawrence, say, is full of value. The idea that the new television dramas everyone watches and talks about these days are the new novel, as is so often suggested, is to my mind idiotic. But why do I think that? If I watch one of them, I get sucked in and am filled with feelings at what I see. If I read Lawrence, in principle exactly the same thing happens, I get sucked in and am filled with feelings. Do I discriminate between my feelings, as my friend Geir often accuses me of doing? Are the feelings awakened in me by a television series worthless and vulgar, while those awakened in me by a good novel are replete with value and so much loftier in nature? Or is there a qualitative difference between the two media? If so, in what does it consist? And does it even matter? Is there anything wrong with just liking what we like, and leaving it at that?
Another Lawrence, with the surname Durrell, wrote somewhere in his Alexandria Quartet that creating a work of art is setting oneself a goal and walking there in your sleep. Writing a novel is exactly like that, at least it has been for me, using the formula that the deeper the sleep, the better the novel. Thoughts, reflection, and criticism are not simply overestimated, for the creative processes they are decidedly destructive. This is an absolute fact, without exception.
When I was in my midtwenties, paralyzed by an overly developed critical sense, I considered in my despair going to a hypnotist so that I could be hypnotized into writing. At the time, I found the idea hysterical and ridiculous, now I think it might not have been that stupid: sleep, unconsciousness, and emptiness are all a necessary part of the creative processes, sometimes even their precondition. And if that is so, which I am quite certain about, that writing is related to sleeping and dreaming, then the concept of quality falls away on its own: when did you last hear someone complain about the quality of their dreams?
But there are different kinds of unconsciousness; the main thing is what you are unconscious of. When I started writing, at the age of eighteen, I quickly arrived at the place where all sense of self dissolved, where not thoughts, but something else prevailed, something emotional and dreamlike. I knew that place, it was where I used to go when I read. But what I wrote was marked by platitudes, banalities, stereotypes, and clichés. A year spent at the Writing Academy in Bergen made me distressfully aware of this, the teaching there being based mainly on giving critique, and from that, which was merciless, I did not escape unscathed: in the ten years that followed, I produced nothing, even though I wanted to and tried. What I did do in those ten years was read a lot, studied at university, and wrote literary criticism. When unconsciousness once more descended, when I was twenty-seven, I wrote my second novel, published as my debut in 1998. By that time I had become differently unconscious, on some higher plane, and the novel wasn’t as banal.
Out of the World, as it was called, received a mix of good and bad reviews, all long since forgotten, apart from one that was so odd that I still think about it sometimes. What was particular about it was that it was literally a double review: first they published a very positive review, the critic making it clear that he really liked the novel. Then, and this is the odd part, that review was withdrawn the week after, the same critic now stating that he had been wrong, the book was not nearly as good as he had originally made out, in fact it was rather poor. It was as if he had felt himself caught out, that the book in some way had tricked him into thinking it was good when in fact it was not. In other words, he had been manipulated, duped by his first, superficial impression, his critical senses had been incapacitated, after which he must have realized, gradually or all at once, that there was nothing beneath the surface, certainly nothing as forceful as his first impressions had led him to believe.
I know the feeling. I get it every time I get sucked in by a well-turned crime novel, film, or TV series, and afterward I always feel the same kind of emptiness, which comes of my degree of involvement, that part of me I have surrendered as a reader or viewer, being far greater than what I have got from it, which is nothing.
Inception is that kind of film, everything about it is impressive, and in the hours after watching it all I could think about was writing a novel of the same kind, or a novel that had the same kind of effect, whereas when I watched it again a few days later it all fell to earth: there was nothing in it but alluring images and a compelling narrative. Lovely wrapping paper, no present.
I think this critic’s feeling of being duped by Out of the World comes down to the same thing. In a novel, the narrative is seductive, and the author can, if they so wish, work themselves into the reader’s favor and make him or her read on, almost regardless. This is what a novel marketed as mainstream does, and what the great modernist novels do not. That I, who wrote Out of the World in a state of near-unconsciousness, exploited the mechanics of the narrative is not strange, but inextricably a part of that state of unconsciousness, because when you refrain from thinking, you take what you have, whatever is inside you, and if there is something inside me after insatiably devouring, in my childhood and youth, all manner of crime n
ovels, thrillers, cowboy pulp, spy fiction, and comic books, then it uses the structure and mechanics of those narratives. Sending your main character to the fridge to see if there is any milk is no different structurally than sending a pirate to an island to see if there is a treasure buried there, the reader reads on to see what happens, in principle indefinitely, for the pattern of one crime novel is the same as all the others, in this they are all alike.
Reading and writing is losing oneself, and what remains when the self is lost is the collective. I think that the self, the I, is nothing more than a certain way of organizing all the collective currents by which an individual is permeated, not unlike the way in which an author stands out in a text, which is made up of elements familiar to everyone and belonging to no one, whose individual voice, which may be stronger or weaker, is a matter of the bringing together of those same elements. In fairy tales, the quintessential form of the collective, the narratives have been shaped through generations, the individual is as good as absent, they are told by a we to a we, and the language of this we is permeated by a kind of lowest common denominator of the culture: formulas, clichés, stereotypes, so simple that even a small child can be mesmerized by them, without what the fairy tale is about necessarily becoming childish. The fairy tale is absolutely without resistance and absolutely selflessly told, much like the saga, the myth, and many of our religious texts, such as those in the Book of Genesis, but also much like contemporary genre literature and nearly all films that are made, which likewise are permeated by the lowest common denominator of the culture, in order to reach as many as possible with their stories.
In the Land of the Cyclops Page 4