Comparing great novels with great films in this way always feels like something of a disservice to the films, for they fall short. But this has nothing to do with their makers, film is simply the lesser medium.
There’s no reason we can’t be honest about that.
Or am I the only one more receptive to literature’s internalization of reality than to film’s externalization of our internal lives?
Whatever, it wasn’t until I read The Best Intentions that a work of Ingmar Bergman moved me. More than that, The Best Intentions changed the way I understood myself and my own family, in particular my father. And it became important to my own writing. So important in fact that I named the main character in my first novel Henrik and included, following the pattern of Bergman’s book, two hundred pages about how his parents had met.
Since then I’ve read The Best Intentions and its successor Private Confessions several times, most recently only a few weeks ago, and I have to say that no literary work of that time outshines them.
Why are they so good?
What’s striking about them is the emotional precision Bergman achieves, not only in each of his characters but also in the interactions between them, where so many conflicting forces collide, unrelentingly propelling the story forward. Bergman’s masterly skill lies in his ability to bring out every perspective, imbuing in the reader the sense that each character is as important as the next, at the same time making it plain that the sum of these perspectives can have but one inevitable conclusion. Both books are fictionalized accounts of the lives of his parents – The Best Intentions deals with their first encounter, their falling in love and embarking upon a life together, while Private Confessions depicts the way that life fell apart, viewed through the story of his mother’s infidelity. The maternal grandmother sees from the start which way things are heading and tries to intervene, though unsuccessfully. Henrik, the father, is a fantastic literary character, racked with feelings of inferiority, shame, ambition, and confusion, at the same time as he is pure of heart and guileless. The grandmother likes him, but understands the threat he poses, though her insight is to no avail: what has to happen, happens. This determinism is of course far from absolute; the father and the mother are free individuals, the decisions they make are by no means inevitable, and surely they would have chosen differently if only they’d known better, and yet they act as they do. Nor does the determinist element here come across as formulaic, the way it does in crime novels for instance, where a standard pattern begets standard events, which in turn substantiate the pattern. In Bergman’s two books the opposite is true: the event implies the pattern, meaning that the pattern in a way comes toward us, as if for the first time, with the particular force perception lends to insight. Yes, life is determined! Yes, our character predestines what will happen to us! It’s true.
The truth of the two books, the truth of the mother, the father, and the things that happened between and beyond them, has nothing to do with whether the mother and the father were like that in real life, or whether the events depicted actually took place in that way. Truth is based on experience and exists within us, founded on something so imprecise and vague as feelings. Thus, the portrait of Bergman’s father, Henrik, could just as well be a portrait of my own father – or rather, the portrait of Bergman’s father gave me insight into my own father, who was also alive on that January day in 1978, a thirty-four-year-old teacher who probably didn’t relate that closely to Bergman, but still knew who he was, of course, not least after having watched the TV series Scenes from a Marriage with my mother a few years before.
As I read The Best Intentions again, it’s not so much my father as myself I see, if not in the details, then in the way the unperceived impacts on the perceived, working away at our blind spots, the areas inside us that we can’t see. These are the remnants of the child, relics of our childhood world, lingering in the adult, for the child does not know itself from the outside, only from the inside, and for Bergman, who in everything, absolutely everything he wrote, was looking for relationships, art was the place where the child’s one-to-one relationship with the world could be both reestablished and brought into view. This is the dynamic of Persona, of Fanny and Alexander, of The Best Intentions. And in the workbooks his game is always: I see a pair of hands, I see a face, and when I say they exist, they exist. That truth was what allowed Bergman to begin his autobiography, The Magic Lantern, with a sentence that was factually incorrect. The lack of any essential difference between what happened and what could have happened is another form of boundlessness that characterized Bergman, nowhere more visible than in the workbooks, the ladder he climbed and descended almost every day, which ran from his life to his art.
Idiots of the Cosmos
It’s completely dark outside. It’s cold too, perhaps ten below freezing, and the snow crunches underfoot. You taste the salt in the air, and hear the steady, never-resting rush of the sea. That apart, everything around you is still. In the sky above the fells, light suddenly appears, a pale and ghostly light; like something in a spirit séance it shimmers, semitransparent in the darkness. You stop and look up, for unlike the sky’s other phenomena, the light of the stars or the moon, or the clouds that come drifting in every day from the sea, this is impossible not to notice. It’s hypnotic. Pale and ghostly it shimmers in the darkness, intensifying then in a tremendous surge, flaring up into a flickering wall of light in the sky. Yellow, green. But although in form it may be reminiscent of flames as it shifts this way and that, it has none of the substance of fire, this light is electric, it comes not from matter, but from the ether. And while all other light has a source, an identifiable place from which it emanates, whether a lamp, the sun, or a fire, this light is as if unbound, and as it travels back and forth across the sky it therefore seems to be almost alive, possessed of its own will, and this lends it a sinister aspect. Perhaps the strangest thing about it is the complete and utter silence. That for all its intensity this colossal play of light occurs without a sound.
Slowly it disappears, and you continue on your way, surrounded by darkness and stillness, the tremendous discharges of light a memory that fades as quickly as a dream, for the northern lights are indeed dreamlike, as if released from some other reality than the one we normally inhabit.
The first time I saw the northern lights was in the late 1980s, I was eighteen years old and had moved to an island in the far north of Norway to teach at a school in one of the small communities there. The village lay tucked beneath a chain of sheer, barren mountains, and faced out to the north Atlantic. About three hundred people lived there, most of whom worked in the fishing industry, either out at sea in small fishing boats or in the processing facility on land. The elements were harsh, one night the wind ripped off a roof and overturned a caravan; some of the buildings were secured to the ground by wires. Everything came from the sea: the wind, the clouds, the rain, the waves, the fish around which life there revolved. Hardly any of the houses had gardens, there was no buffer between civilization and nature; stepping out the door meant stepping directly into nature, that’s what it felt like, and this shaped the people who lived there. Social interaction was different from what I was used to, rawer and a lot more direct, but also warmer and more inclusive. Maybe it was because there was nothing there other than those few houses clustered before the sea, and because those who lived there were dependent on one another.
Ten years later I wrote a novel set in that environment, and what was still so very clear to me then – besides the strange social reality of the place, in which, after only a few days, I found myself inescapably enmeshed – what lay sedimented inside me in memory was the light. Oh, that Arctic light, how sharply it outlines the world, how unprecedentedly clear it makes everything appear, the jagged mountains against the bright blue sky, the green of the slopes, the small boats chugging in and out of the harbor, the fat codfish they brought up from the depths of the sea, their gray-white skin
and yellow eyes that stared so emptily, the wooden racks on which they were hung out to dry by the thousands, later to be shipped to more southern lands. Everything was as sharp as a knife. And then came the darkness, as if from both sides, closing in on the day, which grew shorter and shorter, soon only a few brief hours, as if it were trapped between two great walls of darkness moving gradually closer together until finally everything was night. It was dark around the clock then, and living and working in such endless night does something to the way people relate to reality, life becomes dreamlike and shadowy, as if the world is at an end. This is when the northern lights appear, these great veils of light drawn across the sky, and although we know what the phenomenon is and why it occurs, it remains the most mysterious sight, so immensely alien: the first time I saw it, I was in a car with one of the other new teachers, we stopped and got out in the middle of nowhere, stood and stared, transfixed like animals caught in a spotlight.
The northern lights compel the eye to look up, they are impossible to ignore, and while the phenomeon is simple, rays striking the atmosphere, no more mysterious than torchlight, it brings with it something more than its physics, namely the feeling of finding oneself at the very edge of the world, staring out into the infinite, empty, meaningless universe through which we hurtle.
The northern lights are by no means invigorating, in the sense of giving life, like other forms of light, but are more an illusion, a trick, and for all their spectacular nature they never seemed to be the subject of any special interest in the community where I lived, nobody talked about them, there was no coming together outside the houses to stare up at the sky, because for the people who lived there they were part of everday life. The sun was different. After months of total darkness, the mood at the sun’s reappearance was almost reverential, and in spring and summer, when all semblance of darkness was gone and the sun shone from the sky both night and day, at times as red as blood, the mood in the little community was buoyant, people went out to small islands in the night, stayed awake and drank. It was fantastic, and yet it felt troubling too, for the divide between night and day is a boundary, perhaps the most fundamental we have, and there in the far north that boundary was erased, first in eternal night, then in eternal day. But I wouldn’t have missed the experience, because what happens when you live in a strange place and encounter phenomena you’ve never known before is that everything becomes strange to you. The miracle of fire. The enigma of clouds. The mysteriousness of memory – for what else are thoughts but tiny sparks of light in the darkness of our brains?
In his In Search of Lost Time, Proust writes about the way thoughts and ideas he entertained as a young man became legitimate to him only when he later encountered them in literature. His own thoughts had no value until he discovered that a writer he admired had had the same idea. I suppose all of us have had much the same experience at some point in our lives. When I was living in northern Norway and the veil of northern lights in the sky gave me the feeling of standing at the edge of the world, staring out into space, its milky ways and pathways of stars a physical reality rather than a mere metaphysical abstraction, as tangible as the mountains and the snow at my feet, I remembered what I’d often think to myself on starry nights in my childhood, which was that the entire universe was perhaps contained within an atom in another universe, which in turn was perhaps contained within an atom in another universe, and so on into infinity. Maybe it was something I’d got from a laundry detergent box which had on it a picture of a laundry detergent box, which in turn had on it a picture of a laundry detergent box, and so on. Or maybe it was the question of what might exist beyond our known universe, often discussed by the kids in the neighborhood, that had made me think of it. That winter I spent up north, I thought it might actually be true. The universe may be vast, but we don’t know what vast is.
Perhaps it is true, but at the time the idea still felt infantile to me, and I would never have dreamed of mentioning it to anyone. That Douglas Adams, who I read at about the same time, exploited this relativity of vastness in a scene in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – an enormous interstellar fleet of warships is on its way through space to wipe out our solar system, only they get the dimensions wrong, and when eventually they sweep down to earth they’re eaten by a dog – did not in any way legitimize the thought, but merely reinforced its infantile nature.
Some years later I was reading Pascal, the seventeenth-century mathematician and religious fanatic – his book Pensées. How surprised I was to stumble upon the same idea there! He refers to the universe as a little cell in which man finds himself lodged, and invites the reader to imagine the smallest thing he can think of – a mite, for instance. Its parts are incomparably more minute than the whole, it has limbs, and in the limbs are veins, in the veins are blood, in the blood are humors, in the humors are drops, in the drops are vapors, until we arrive at the very last, the smallest and most indivisible part:
Perhaps he will think that here is the smallest point in nature. I will let him see therein a new abyss. I will paint for him not only the visible universe, but all that he can conceive of nature’s immensity in the womb of this abridged atom. Let him see therein an infinity of universes, each of which has its firmaments, its planets, its earth, in the same proportion as in the visible world; in each earth animals, and in the last mites, in which he will find again all that the first had, finding still in these others the same thing without end and without cessation.
Pascal’s task here is not scientific but the opposite, what he wants is to evoke infinity, so as to make plain the vanity and hubris of science, indeed he wants to shame its agents and turn its thirst for knowledge into marvel. Once man realizes he exists between two abysses, of the infinite and nothing, he will tremble at the sight of these marvels, Pascal writes, and “will be more disposed to contemplate them in silence than to examine them with presumption.”
We’re used to thinking about infinity stretching outward from us, and capitulate to the notion even as children. Infinity is unfathomable, yet a simple matter of fact. What Pascal does is open our minds to the idea of infinity stretching inward too, toward the smallest entities, also without end, so it feels like the world opens up beneath our feet.
For it is clear that those premises which are put forward as ultimate are not self-supporting, but are based on others which, again having others for their support, do not permit of finality. But we represent some as ultimate for reason, in the same way as in regard to material objects we call that an indivisible point beyond which our senses can no longer perceive anything, although by its nature it is infinitely divisible.
In the world that Pascal describes, no point is fixed; neither on the way outward nor on the way inward, everything is in flux, and our understanding of this is constrained by our senses, which are capable only of registering that tiny fraction of the world that falls within their scope. We know nothing for sure, but nor are we completely ignorant.
We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end. When we think to attach ourselves to any point and to fasten to it, it wavers and leaves us; and if we follow it, it eludes our grasp, slips past us, and vanishes forever. Nothing stays for us. This is our natural condition, and yet most contrary to our inclination.
The reasoning ends in a reflection concerning the relationship between the soul and the body. What excludes us from understanding the material world, Pascal writes, is that it is simple, whereas man is complex, “composed of two opposite natures, different in kind, soul and body.” If we are only corporeal, as most people today imagine, then we are even further excluded from understanding the world around us, Pascal contends:
Nothing is so inconceivable as to say that matter knows itself. It is impossible to imagine how it should know itself. So if we are simply material, we can know nothing at all; and if we are composed of mind and matter, we cannot know perfectly things which are simpl
e, whether spiritual or corporeal.
Four hundred years have passed since those words were written, during which time science has progressed so radically that in one sense we inhabit an entirely different reality from Pascal’s. The evocation of infinity, the coldness by which man, naked and alone in the universe, is surrounded, is therefore in a way oddly far-seeing, almost prophetic, because what all scientific developments, all new insights, have done in the intervening centuries is essentially to push the boundaries of what we can know inward – still tinier particles have been identified since the breakthrough of nuclear physics at the beginning of the last century – as well as outward, to the point where we can now glimpse the perimeters of our universe, its very oldest parts. Space has in other words expanded vastly since the age of Pascal, and with it the empty void, and the firm foothold, the indivisible, the fixed point, continues to elude us. But it is not only our knowledge of the universe that is expanding, the universe itself is too, everything, from its smallest identifiable particles to its largest entities and systems, is in flux, and everything is thereby relative.
In Bubbles, the first book of his Spheres Trilogy, Peter Sloterdijk construes the modern age as “the breakthrough of the intellect from the caves of human illusion into the nonhuman world outside,” asserting that it “marks the start of the newer history of knowledge and disappointment.” Since the beginning of that age, which is to say since the age of Pascal, “the human world has constantly – every century, every decade, every year, and every day – had to learn to accept and integrate new truths about an outside not related to humans,” Sloterdijk writes, referring to man as “the idiot of the cosmos.” “Research and the raising of consciousness have turned man into the idiot of the cosmos; he has sent himself into exile and expatriated himself from his immemorial security in self-blown bubbles of illusions into a senseless, unrelated realm that functions on its own.”
In the Land of the Cyclops Page 20