Juxtaposed in this way, it is easy to think that the latter perspective, the bleakly realistic, is the true perspective, whereas the poetic beautification of the former is the untrue perspective. The color photos are direct, documentary, the black-and-white ones beguiling, ingratiating. In that case Mann’s alluring landscapes would also be deceitful compared to the photographs of Anders Petersen, for instance, or Lars Tunbjörk, both of whom seek out the raw and unbeautiful sides of human life and its reality, and succeed in bringing out the very life force as it reveals itself concretely in the provisional state that is life. But truth, including the truth of the absolute, is relative, determined by perspective: what Mann does in her photographs is lift her gaze, placing herself beyond time by depicting its unchanging nature, which is not the life and death of the individual, but life as it rises and collapses in us all, these washing waves on which we are so helplessly carried, steered by laws and forces we do not know and cannot understand, which we can see only if we position ourselves outside what is ours. Once, that perspective was that of the divine, created one might suspect for that very purpose, and then, when the divine disappeared, it became the perspective of art. Such an understanding of art was what the generation before me broke away from, to them it was the height of ivory tower and art on a pedestal, something that provided a view but which also was isolated, out of context, individualized, right-wing. But death is not conservative, no matter that it is changeless, and beauty is not right-wing, and the warmth and worldliness of the social domain is not the unique preserve of the working class, as the greatest Norwegian writer of that generation, Kjartan Fløgstad, appears to believe in his novel Grense Jakobselv. Remoteness in that novel is not existential, but moral: the baddies, the Nazis, are portrayed from a distance, accorded nothing near or intimate, and are associated with art of the likes of Hölderlin, Wagner, Beethoven, grand and cold, elitist, whereas the goodies, the socialists, laugh and discuss and slap each other’s backs while sharing their meals. And so it may well have been, but certainly not only, for Nazism was a broad and petty bourgeois revolution, anti-intellectual at root, and foregrounded a middle-class view of art – modern, experimental art is fiercely attacked by Hitler in Mein Kampf. The Nazi canon was in part the classics, in part the petty-bourgeois, which is to say naturalistic, figurative depictions inclined toward Heimat or heroic portrayals of people and nature, what we today would call kitsch, which everyone regardless of background and intellectual capacity woud find appealing and easy to grasp. That this was so is another reason for the alluring and the simple becoming discredited in our time. Skepticism toward emotionally laden art is related to this too, I think, for never have allurement and the manipulation of human feelings had such enormous consequences as then. Classic in this respect is Adorno’s confrontation of Heidegger in his book The Jargon of Authenticity. Mythology and the sagas, anything that might be prefixed by “folk,” were also misused and are now similarly discredited.
This kind of suspicion is a part of us, part of our marrow even now. I sense it not only when I am drawn toward Romantic images, or worse, toward National-Romantic images, but also when I read poems or novels whose features might be termed vitalistic, most recently D. H. Lawrence’s novel The Rainbow, in which I found the closeness between people, animals, and the soil to be unpleasant, I did not care for it at all, even if I believe it to be true, not least in a novel such as that, in which our emotional life is understood to be the most important aspect of all in our existence, and any shift in human mood is presented as something monumental. When I experience this, I long to be free, totally free in art, and this to me is to be without politics, without morals – and thereby, the critic’s voice inside me hastens to add, dubious. If we look at a picture of a tree, we are immediately caught in a net of politics and morals, ethics and sociology – for gender and class are also involved – and if I try to wriggle free of this net of distinctions, I simply become more and more entangled.
Such is culture. Presumably that is why I yearn for nature. Presumably, too, it is why I still read and write for, no matter what I read and write, those activities are, in their best moments, selfless, transporting me into that somnambulent, near-unconscious state in which thoughts think themselves, liberated from the self, yet full of emotions, and so, in a negative or perhaps more exactly a passive way, connected with the surrounding world. Occasionally, in what I have read about, but never myself experienced, that feeling of connection is to the universe and is religious ecstacy, the overwhelming sense of the divine, but more usually the connection is to the we, to the other in ourselves, which can come forward only when critical remoteness is lifted. Were it not for this, all novels would be unreadable. And there we are again: the greater degree of critical remoteness, the more exclusive (unreadable) the novel; the closer the we, the closer the culture’s lowest common denominator, that liked by everyone, the crime novel or the light novel, the feel-good novel, the chick-lit novel.
But we are there again only because I am following a few tracks marked out at the beginning of this essay, premises that have governed all that has come after, and if we remove ourselves from them, everything might seem different. The easily accessible, the simple, and the immediately appealing are not necessarily exhausted at first glance, are not necessarily bound up with the formalizations and repetitions of genre, we know this; the histories of art and literature are full of examples of images so simple and basic that anyone, regardless of aesthetic competence, can relate to them. What the novel can do, in its best moments, is to simplify without reduction, by seeking not toward reality, the documentable abundance of people and events, whose totality is unreachable and whose individual parts are not representative, but toward the picture of reality, more exactly that which combines two phenomena, the concrete and the inexhaustible. This, which we perhaps could call inexhaustible precision, is the goal of all art, and its essential legitimacy. Inexhaustible precision is the white whale in Melville’s novel, it is the metamorphosis in Kafka’s novella, the human bear in “White-Bear King Valemon,” the fratricide in the Book of Genesis, the sanatorium in The Magic Mountain, the pretend knight-errant of Cervantes’s novel, in other words that which brings together something big and undefinable, not by pointing to it, but by being it, and at the same time always being something else as well. The inexhaustibly precise is always simple, always without resistance and easily grasped, but always has more to it than what first meets the eye. The myth is the prehistoric form of the inexhaustibly precise, for no matter the shifts of time, no matter the preferences of changing generations, the myth is relevant always, for as long as people exist; it would cease to be relevant only when there are no longer people in the sense we know, but something else instead.
Fate
One morning, almost fifteen years ago, I woke up from a dream that was so vivid and powerful that I knew it must be true. I still remember both what happened in the dream and the feelings it left me with.
Now the fact is that listening to someone else’s dreams is nearly always tiresome, and usually, if it goes on for more than a few seconds, unbearable. Dreams in literature are monstrosities: whenever I come across one, it takes a lot for me not to flip past it or shut the book altogether. It tells me that the writer has failed to understand his responsibility to reality, or else has not understood the role of the imagination in real life.
Why is that? Everyone dreams – it is one of the basic phenomena of being human, something we all share. Not only that: for every one of us dreams are significant, meaningful, relevant to our lives. Then why is sitting across the breakfast table from someone and listening to them tell you about a dream so unbearable? Let’s say the dream is about how the dreamer was going downstairs in a house she had never been in before, dressed in a silvery, sparkling dress. Waiting down below is a group of people she has never seen before, but it seems, she realizes as she walks down the stairs, that they know her; they look at her, some greet her by name
.
If I read a novel or saw a movie that started with a scene like this, say by Arthur Schnitzler or David Lynch, I would be hooked. The mix of strangeness and normality would be irresistible, the mysterious atmosphere beautiful and compelling. What will happen next? Will she pretend she knows them, remembers the house, and understands the situation – will she play herself, as it were, until something comes along that she can place, something she can use as a thread to find her way back to explicable reality? Or will the strangeness intensify, the unknown but familiar faces coming closer and closer, will they confront her with something, so that she runs away, out into the moonlit garden, alone, out of breath, in her shimmering silver dress? But told as a dream, the morning after, across the kitchen table, I squirm and hope it will be over soon. Please, no more details!
The reason, of course, is the dream’s first premise: what happened in the dream did not happen in reality. If it had – if the woman across the table said, Yesterday something strange happened, I was standing on a staircase in a silvery dress in a house I had never been in before, and I didn’t know where I was or how I had got there, but everyone clearly knew me, there were lots of people all dressed up, staring at me – in that case my eyes would have opened wide, my heart would have started pounding, and maybe I would’ve gone to that house with her (if she remembered where it was), to try to find out what had happened. Would it be empty, abandoned, with curtains drawn? Would she look at me with desperate eyes, and say, You have to believe me! It was right here, it was!
Yet the first premise of the dream – that it didn’t really happen – is also the first premise of a novel, a movie. The opening sentence of a novel sets up a pact with the reader: it says that what is about to be described didn’t happen in reality but starting now we will act as if it had. This as if is the decisive premise of fiction. The author’s job – no matter what genre he or she is writing in, whether realistic epistolary novel or science fiction – is to make it credible, make the as if as invisible as possible. Maybe the reason other people’s dreams are felt to be irrelevant is simply that no such as if exists: right from the start, we already put dreams into the category of the not-real, something that did not happen, and even the most mesmerizing or brutal event cannot cross the abyss. It didn’t happen, we can’t ever pretend it did, so I don’t care about it. Would you like a little more coffee, or a roll? Should we go outside and sit in the sun?
When it’s a dream you’ve had yourself, though, its nonreality doesn’t come into play. The as-if abyss doesn’t exist while the dream is happening: we experience dream images as real, we are in them exactly as much as we are in reality, no matter how illogical or impossible they are, and when we wake up, after the first seconds of confusion when our inner life doesn’t match the outer one – like when we are looking through a window and for a moment can’t match the spots in the window with the walls of the houses outside the window, when it is as if two irreconcilable dimensions are being forced together into one, something isn’t right, until the brain solves it, locating the spots on the window and on the houses thirty feet beyond the window, and the world falls into place and makes sense again – after the dream is referred to our interior world in this way and we get up out of bed in the external world, and thus the dream’s as-if status is established and the system of reality restored, what happened in the dream is still interesting, if only for the dreamer him- or herself: because what caused just these images, just this mood, what was it inside me that created just this, and why? The dreamer knows that the inner dream images correspond to outer reality, that the dream is relevant to his or her life, but never, or in any case very rarely, knows exactly how.
Dreams and literature are similar in this way. That is why we so readily accept the as if of literature, because when we read, the words and our images of the words enter into us and, in some cases, take over. We abandon ourselves to another will. Our “I” – that is to say, our self – is nothing but an entity that holds the various different parts of our inner reality together, connecting sense impressions and feelings, memories and thoughts. When we dream, these connections are broken, and it is as if the different parts are separated and scattered, a small detail can become grotesquely large, something that just appears on its own, seemingly unmotivated, and the same is true for feelings: they can be so powerful in a dream that they overshadow everything else, there is only the one feeling – for example, fear. And what does this remind us of? The feelings we had as children, when the self was weak in a similar way; when we were unable to tell the difference between inner feelings and outer impressions; when everything flowed through us and took over. To read is to let go of one’s self, to give up control of one’s thoughts, feelings, memories, and impressions, to a greater or lesser extent of course, but the extent is the same as the quality of the book. When I read Dostoevsky, my self is completely extinguished; when I read a potboiler it isn’t, maybe simply because the distance between my inner world and what is written, or what I experience as what is written, is so visible, so conspicuous, that any coming together is impossible.
Intimacy is the essential thing in literature: reading is something we do alone, and reading has this in common with dreaming. But the differences between the two activities are even more decisive, one might argue. For one thing, a novel has been created by a writer, to whom communication is central; for another thing, a novel is always a completed whole, an object in the culture that anyone has access to and can enter. Not so with dreams, which are neither addressed to nor accessible to anyone else. That is why it is possible to talk about a novel you’ve read without it being unbearable, even though what you are describing is not fixed in reality but exists only in the imagination. The relevance lies in the communication, the address to an always implicit “you” and the sense of community in that relationship – for if you think of a literature without address, without a you-community, it would be incomprehensible to everyone except the writer, full of secret meanings, private codes, cryptic emphases, radical idiosyncrasy. We find such you-less language among schizophrenics or psychotics, and it is meaningless to us because its underlying premises are hidden from us, for the simple reason that “we” – or “you” – do not exist in it. There is no communication. And it’s interesting because what happens with schizophrenics or psychotics is that the self is not whole: there is no place in consciousness over and above its separate currents. If this is so, and I believe it is, then the natural conclusion to draw is that the self – the “I” – is actually nothing but the implicit presence of a “you” – the self is the embodiment of a reaching out to someone else.
I have witnessed psychotic states and seen the whole progression from ordinary, everyday, normal, reasonable behavior to complete disintegration, where there are no boundaries at all because the border guards, the “you” and the “I,” have abdicated – everything is equally possible, everything flows freely, from the deepest, most secret sexual impulses to the fears of childhood, more and more context-free, less and less explained, until this inner chaos is no longer bearable and everything shuts down in catatonia. Afterward, when it was over, I was given the keys to parts of the most inexplicable behavior: a simple idea that had been so urgent that it had determined everything, had been like a dream while awake. The person’s body had been in the same reality I was in, but their consciousness was in a completely different one, forcing their body to follow a logic that to me was totally incomprehensible.
There was still a question of interaction, though, of an exchange between inner and outer that is entirely absent in the case of dreams, when the dreamer lies in total silence, with eyes closed, and everything that happens happens on the inside, absolutely inaccessible to others.
It is not just that language is inadequate to the dream, which is part of the reason why it’s unbearable to listen to other people’s dreams. It may also be true that language itself, in its essence, is the opposite of dreaming, since lan
guage always presupposes and requires there to be another, while the essence of the dream is that it is something you are entirely alone with; it quite simply cannot be put into language without becoming something else. The self is oriented toward the other, and language can make contact with the other since it is oriented in the same direction, but the selfless self – when we are nothing but the self’s separate parts, alone in the most extreme sense of the word, not even present to ourselves – conveys nothing, communicates nothing, although it actually isn’t nothing, it is something that everyone knows.
There are other you-less languages besides the schizophrenic’s or the psychotic’s. I think of speaking in tongues, especially as practiced in Pentecostal churches. In The Names, a novel about, among other things, the connections between a place and a people, language and life, Don DeLillo describes one such scene of speaking in tongues, seen through the eyes of a young boy.
The words echoed in his head. People burst out in sudden streams. They were like long dolerus tales being dold out one by one. Who’s words were they? What did they mean? There was none to tell him in that gloomy place. Something he did not like troubled him. The same haunting feeling that he felt in the darkest nights crept over him like gang green. He felt droplets of clammy sweat form on his forehead. The circuit rider’s firm hand was on his shoulder and then on his youthful head. “White words” his nodding face remarked. “Pure as the drivelin snow.”
The rational excludes the irrational the same way the sacred excludes the nonsacred, Michel Serres writes in Statues, and that is what is at stake in this scene of DeLillo’s novel. It constructs one such space of mutual exclusion, where two parallel worldviews exist and only one is possible. The boy experiences the words as meaningless, irrelevant, mere noise, communicating nothing. For the preacher, on the other hand, the words are meaningful, coming not from the one who utters them but from the Holy Spirit. They are thus the word of God. We are outside the human realm, outside the structures of “I” and “you,” and we are faced with a choice: either we believe that this language is something the sacred is speaking through, that the extrahuman or the beyond is, as it were, showing itself in these otherwise incomprehensible noises, or we don’t. If we are rational, we don’t believe it, and since the rational rules out the irrational, then whatever is irrational is acceptable only if it happens rationally, for example if we say that it is a psychological phenomenon, something to do with an ecstatic state, or in other words a kind of group psychosis. But if we do believe it, if we believe that the Holy Spirit is speaking when someone speaks in tongues, then it is this rational explanation we must reject. Then this you-lessness is perceived not as a lack but as access to something greater; through it, the human being gets free of the human and makes contact with the beyond, by being flooded with its language. Precisely because that language is unfiltered by an “I,” it is not without meaning but, on the contrary, bursting with significance.
In the Land of the Cyclops Page 6