But in Njal’s Saga, fate is not solely a matter of unchecked human forces: there is also a kind of supernatural factor, the idea that everything in this world is entirely determined in another world, which those who have the gift – the soothsayers, prophets, and oracles – can see into. Njal is one such seer. He has dreams that come true and can also read the dreams of others. While Hallgerd is unequivocally evil, and unequivocally female, and Gunnar is unequivocally good and unequivocally male, Njal is a much more ambiguous figure. He is beardless, and mocked for it – it is unmanly. Nor does he fight: he never reaches for the sword, that is what his sons do. He is wise, always looking for ways out of a situation and trying to keep the ways open, until they eventually close. He is the only one in the saga who knows what is going to happen. He dreams it, and he sees it. He knows that Gunnar will die, and how; he knows that he will be burned alive with his family.
That he nonetheless gives advice and tries to put events on another track can only mean that what he sees, these images of the future, are not final and conclusive – the determinism is not total. There is room for choice, for individual free will. On one occasion, when he foresees Gunnar’s death, he tells Gunnar that he should attack only one branch of the family, not the other. If Gunnar had done that, he would not have met his death the way he did. When Njal gives him this advice, Gunnar knows that it’s true; the fact that he nonetheless refuses to take it means that honor is more important than death, that to lose honor is a greater loss than to lose one’s life. This is what will be his fate.
This narrative pattern – where someone sees or knows what is going to happen and warns someone else about the consequences of their actions but they ignore the warnings because they are driven by something else, something stronger, and thus fall – forms not only the basis for tragedy but also for many novels, obviously because it is a pattern that appears in real life.
In another masterpiece from this part of the world, Ingmar Bergman’s novel The Best Intentions – a fictionalized retelling of his parents’ lives in which Bergman uses all of his insight and experience to create something as simple and precise as it is unfathomable – it is his mother’s mother who sees what is going to happen and his father and mother who are blind to it. They see only each other and defy all warnings for love’s sake, which turns out to be a disaster for them both. Bergman’s mastery lies in the way he manages to present every perspective so that we understand that they are all valid, even while the combination of them all can lead only to one possible result.
Henrik, as his father is called in the novel, is a terrific literary character, so full of feelings of inferiority and shame and ambition and confusion and at the same time so innocent and pure of heart. His future mother-in-law likes him but also understands how dangerous he is, without being able to do anything about it – what has to happen, happens. The determinism is of course not absolute, both the father and the mother have free will and could choose differently if they wanted to, and would have done so if they had seen and known what would happen, but they don’t, and that is why the Greeks realized that character is fate, leading to the equally famous inscription at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi: Know thyself. Implying: Control your own fate.
The Oracle of Delphi’s predictions, which came in the form of speaking in tongues, interpreted by the priests, were no more absolute than Njal’s: they left just as much room for free will, so that the question of fate was inextricably bound up with the question of freedom – not freedom from higher powers but from one’s own blindness. And maybe it is in this way that dreams are true, because they are not controlled by the self, and therefore they are not blind; instead they are an expression of what the body has taken in through the senses but which has never reached consciousness, where the self prevails. It comes to light only now, when the self is not controlling anything, in the form of images that tell a completely different truth and produce completely different feelings than the ones we perceive when we are awake.
When I go up the hill from Kåseberga to the plateau where the boat of stones is standing, as it has stood for one and a half thousand years, I come no closer to that era or to the people who lived and acted in it, however much I want to. I see stones arranged in an ellipse, no more, no less. The distance is too great, the tracks too faint. It is possible to relate to a museum with objects from the eighteenth century, to feel the shock of insight that a Chinese vase in a room in southern Norway can give, for example, or a Dutch washbasin, where these shadowy people you’ve read about, who belong to one era or another, suddenly become firmly grounded in a concrete reality existing at the same time as your own, and you understand that they actually were here, they were once as physically present as that overweight museum guard on a chair in the corner. Iron Age people are not brought back to reality this way when we look at the circle of stones on the plateau above the sea.
They come much closer – it is amazing how much closer – when we read about them, because even if their identity, their behavior, their society, their laws and regulations differ radically from ours, they saw the same, felt the same, ate and drank the same, and when it comes to what they believed in, there are still remnants of that in the culture, because signs and warnings, visions and dreams live on in many people, even in our rationalist era ruled by reason. My mother, who is one of the most rational and reasonable people I know, once told me that she was sitting in the living room with my father and they heard me open the front door downstairs, take off my shoes, and hang up my jacket. When I didn’t come upstairs, she went down to see what I was doing. But there was no one there. The hall was empty, there were no shoes next to the wall, no jacket on the pegs. She went back upstairs. A few minutes later, they heard the same sounds. This time I had come in. When my mother later told her father what had happened, he had not a moment’s doubt. It was my guardian angel, and it meant, he said, that I would live to be a hundred. So that was already decided. He said it with a twinkle in his eye, but he was also someone who believed in signs and omens of that kind.
I believe he was right. I believe I will live to be a hundred. Because a dream of mine came true once. I dreamed about a bull that was buried in the sand but that got loose and was able to come after me, even without its head, which I had chopped off, and when I woke up I was sure that something was going to happen, a danger was on its way toward me. And I was right. After a morning full of speculations, the sense of unease from the dream lost its grip on me. I worked a little, now and then looking out the window at the road and the houses and commercial buildings outside, and the thin covering of snow glittered in the bright sunshine in places where it wasn’t discolored from exhaust. The woman I was married to came home from work, we had dinner, washed up, she sat down to watch TV and I went into the office to read for a bit while listening to music. Late at night, long after the hour when people stop calling each other, I heard the telephone ring inside. I was scared. Now it’s happening, I thought. It took a little while, then she came in and said it was for me. I asked who it was and she said she didn’t know, but it was someone joking around, and maybe a little drunk. I felt a chill in my chest as I left the room and went down the hall and into the living room, where I picked up the phone.
“Hello?” I said.
“Is this Karl Ove Knausgaard, the rapist?” said a voice I had never heard before.
Translated by Damion Searls
Welcome to Reality
The first time I saw Francesca Woodman’s pictures was in a random photo book I picked up without knowing anything about her. The cover showed a young woman crouching down at the edge of the picture, chin resting in her hand, staring straight at me. The wall against which she was leaning was white but in a state of disrepair, stained and cracked, and the wooden floor, which was rough and uneven, was strewn with bits of plaster, dust, flakes of paint. The woman’s eyes seemed partly to be posing a question, partly providing an answer. So, you’re looking at me? Sh
e was wearing a plain-colored dress splashed with black dots, some large, some small. Or perhaps it was more like, Go on, look at me. Whatever it was, there was a strong sense of self-awareness in the way she looked out at the beholder, and a receptiveness that the inquiring aspect of her gaze held.
I opened the book and began to flick through. The first image was of a naked woman seated on a shabby chair with her legs apart and a plate of glass pressed to her stomach and her hairy crotch, head tilted forward, veiled by her long hair. I skimmed on and saw a woman wearing only socks and sandals, sitting with her legs apart next to a plant, breasts jutting, stomach pudgy and pale, face turned toward the trumpet-like flower, nose inside it, eyes closed. At the right-hand edge of the picture, next to a chipped mirror, hung the dress from the cover photograph. At the left-hand edge there was a damp-stained door, dark at the foot as if rot had set in. I turned the page to another photograph, in which a blurred figure cowered under what looked like a piece of furniture in a derelict room where tattered wallpaper was peeling from the walls. That was enough, more than enough, I felt, and closed the book in annoyance, putting it down with something akin to disgust. Women’s stuff shoved in your face, I couldn’t be bothered.
The second time I saw Francesca Woodman’s pictures was in New York on the first of May this year. I had long since forgotten her name and the photographs in the book, so nothing clicked when Asbjørn suggested we go to a photo exhibition at the Guggenheim. Asbjørn knows about everything there is to know about art and literature, so his recommendation alone meant it was worth the effort for me. On the way there, he told me Woodman had committed suicide at the age of twenty-two. I imagined a Sara Kane kind of universe, dark, chaotic, and ugly, and part of my interest evaporated. But I went along anyway. Jill, my American publisher, came with us – she said a friend of hers had known Woodman – and so it was infused with their assumptions about the quality and significance of the photos that I went from wall to wall and considered them. A continual clash of space and body. Seemingly long-abandoned rooms, and in them a figure standing, sitting, lying, crawling, or hanging, often naked, often faceless, in variously twisted poses, often strikingly theatrical. They yielded little. Suspended silently in front of me, they were simply what they were, but I said I liked them nonetheless, and did my best to be carried along by the enthusiasm of the others when they talked about them afterward. In the museum shop I bought the exhibition catalogue. Only when I got back to the hotel and started flipping through it did I realize I had seen some of the photographs before.
Two days later I went back to the museum on my own and looked at the pictures again. Afterward, I went down to the permanent exhibition on the ground floor, which comprised paintings from the beginning of the twentieth century, classics all, Pissarro, Picasso, Manet, Monet, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, and these paintings, so sparkling with color, abruptly paled like something from a bygone age that was quite without relevance to what existed now and was going on inside and around me. They were museum pieces, that was the feeling they gave me. It was a powerful feeling, and it was new, for the paintings of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists have always spoken to me, not only as a high point in the history of painting, quivering with tension in the space between the old and the new, replete with life, but also in a way I felt concerned me personally, in the sense of them constantly being connected to the way I felt, coloring my existence with theirs. Now they were dead. Even Monet’s paintings, which despite their high kitsch factor on account of all the posters and other reproductions have always been so near to the moment, to the light in that instant of time, for example on a summer afternoon on the coast of Normandy, that they have always seemed to transcend the stretch of time between the moment of the painting and the moment of the beholder’s gaze, for all of us are familiar with the light above the sea on a summer afternoon, it is our light too, and may rise up in us at any moment to connect the past – our own as well as the historical past – with the present, through feelings, which are the source of our most profound experiences of the world. We were, we are, and we shall become, these are the feelings Monet’s paintings have stirred in me. Yet not unreservedly so, for in registering the light and color of the moment there is always some element of distance too, a sense of the world as somehow detached from us, something remote and impersonal with which we cannot connect, neither in the moment itself nor in art’s reproduction of it, and the great merit of Impressionism was that, perhaps unwittingly, it revealed to us this abyss, not in the darkness, the way the paintings of the Baroque for instance had done, but in the light. Death in the light, death in the green foliage, death in the blue firmament. This was the relevance of Monet and his contemporaries: in encircling the moment, they connected us with it, allowing us to see its beauty and filling us with the sense of what it means to be alive, but also the sense of what it means not to be alive.
That relevance is universal, it has nothing to do with whatever might occur in our social or political spheres; the reflections of light on the surface of a pond glitter independently of whether we preserve our food with salt or keep it in the fridge, of whether we are social democrats or neoconservatives, ride a horse or drive a car, send letters or text messages. That was what I thought. But that afternoon at the Guggenheim in New York, the relevance had gone.
I left the museum and walked down Fifth Avenue along Central Park, continuing on between the big skyscrapers, which were so dreamlike in their indifference, my mind turning over what I had just experienced: Why did I find Francesca Woodman’s photographs, youthful as they were in all their simplicity, so relevant now, while those great paintings of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries suddenly and completely seemed to have lost their relevance to me? Had Woodman’s pictures drawn my attention to something not present in the work of Monet or Van Gogh, something which in that case had to belong only to us, to this world of yellow taxicabs with TV screens in the seats, whirling helicopters, and throngs of people, eyes fixed on their cell phones, through which I hurried on this afternoon in May as the sun slowly descended in the sky, soon to vanish from sight behind the skyscrapers? Or was it the case that the idea of universality is bound up with what is already established, petrifies with it, and must therefore constantly be rewon in order to remain valid, constantly conquer new ground to move us with all its living force?
The image of a slender figure in a speckled dress, bare arms hanging at her sides, in one hand a cylindrical object that on closer inspection appears to be a birch log of approximately the same diameter and length as her forearm. The figure has been cropped at the shoulders and calves so that neither face nor feet are visible. The face is our means of identifying people, without it the body becomes any body, and the face is moreover our means of reading people. Whenever we see a face, we try to connect with it. This photograph shuns that connection, forcing the eye of the beholder to search for other forms of identification. We want to know who she is, and then, with no face to go on, what she is. Or rather, what it is. There is a torso, an item of clothing, two bare arms, a birch log. The pattern of the bark resembles that of the dress. The connection is as irresistible as it is simple: the body is a tree.
The picture, taken in 1980 at MacDowell Colony, New Hampshire, is one of a series all exploring the same theme: body and tree. Eight juxtaposed photographs presenting a row of gray-white birch trunks against a background of darkly foreboding forest. In one, a figure reaching, out of focus, arms held aloft, direct extensions of the tree trunks. In another, an arm swathed in birch bark held up against a tree trunk. In another, dim and barely lit, a figure stands undressed, back to the camera, arms likewise aloft and clad in bark, in such a way that at first sight the figure’s arms and the trunks of the trees appear indistinguishable. And then a final variation: as if to crown the work, Francesca Woodman herself, eyes closed, head tilted to one side, photographed against a wall in a room, bark wrapped around her arms, which are held out in front of
her.
How are we to understand these pictures?
They are playful and infused with youth. I can hardly imagine a more experienced artist would have had the courage to explore such straightforward metonymic displacement, but Woodman was only twenty-one, with little to lose in the way of prestige, basically free. She was interested in materiality, dresses are one of her recurring themes, and perhaps she was merely taken by the patterns of the bark and the slenderness of the trees. But her name, Woodman, embraces both wood, the material as well as its collective instantiation: the forest, and man, the human being, and the exploration of the self seems to be so essential to her work that this must surely have been in her mind when she wrapped her arms in bark and held them up in the air among the trees. Moreover, the motif bristles with art history; the forest of romanticism, which as a place where people disappear may be a metaphor for death or the universe (Friedrich), the romantic tree an image of life, endurance, the power of nature (J. C. Dahl), or the mysterious other (Hertervig). What Woodman does is concretize the symbolic connection between tree and man, thereby making it material, which is to say insuperable. A striking number of her photographs lean in this direction, toward the insuperable boundary between the material and the nonmaterial. Picture after picture seeks similarity – one depicts two legs spread out in front of a chair, mirrored by a similar pattern formed by two cracks in the cement floor; another shows Woodman herself in a full-length portrait, sitting naked on a chair, the image recurring in a shadowy, body-like stain on the floor; a third shows a faceless woman in a white dress next to a large white bird, they are in darkness and she is holding one arm at her side, hand angled to look like a beak, her other hand held over the head of the bird – but although these correspondences, which exist at all levels of the pictures, in some instances playful and ironic, elsewhere laden with desperation, clearly hark back to romanticism, the longing they express is never quite relieved, never quite appeased in any form of kinship or reconciliation; on the contrary, much of the power of these photographs issues from separation, the disparity between the order of things and the order of man. The singular power of the objects they depict is so great that no human gaze, no human will can encompass them.
In the Land of the Cyclops Page 9