What if we got rid of cars? No harmful emissions, no deaths in traffic.
What if we got rid of our huge meat-producing facilities and started treating the animals that give us food in a more dignified way, at the same time returning their lives to them?
What if we got rid of television? The Internet? It would give us back our sense of place, but also our pain, and for that reason it’s a nonstarter, absence of pain being what we strive for and have always striven for, this is the essence of modern life. It’s why we live in the image of the world rather than in the world itself.
The figure who embodies this the most, flanking together with Hamlet the entrance gate of our time, standing at its threshold yet nevertheless representing it, is Don Quixote. Don Quixote rides around in an image of the world, a place governed by ideals, inhabited by noble knights and filled with romance, and it is when this inner world collides with the outer world, and is punctured by it, that the comedy arises. For reality is unsophisticated, a place of petty criminals and drunken rogues, where all manner of things may trip a man and make him fall, and reality hurts. We laugh when Don Quixote’s inflated world of chivalry, abstract and ethereal, is punctured time and again by the kicks and blows of concrete and material reality, resulting in a quite different kind of pain to the idealized sufferings of valor and heroism. In Cervantes’s world there is one Don Quixote, in our world we are all of us Don Quixote, riding around in our image of reality, some more obviously than others: one of Werner Herzog’s documentary films tells the story of a young American who travels to Alaska every summer to spend time with wild grizzly bears, to his mind they’re warm, kindhearted, and cuddly, he films them at alarmingly close quarters over several summers and they leave him alone, until one summer he stays too long and now hungry they attack him and eat him. Similarly, in Jon Krakauer’s documentary book Into the Wild we meet another young American with a fatally cozified picture of the wilderness: he goes out into the wild alone and dies there.
Sloterdijk’s point is that we are not in touch with the real world, that being human is to form interpersonal spheres through which the world reveals itself. To step outside such a sphere, which begins with the relationship between mother and child, followed by those between child and family, child and society – we live “as intertwined beings, in the land of We,” as he puts it – is impossible, to do so would be to step outside what is human. Poets, storytellers, priests have throughout history assigned names to that which exists outside, thereby pulling it into the realm of the human, recasting it as a representation, a category, a concept, a word. To the question “Where are we if we are in the world?” Sloterdijk replies, “We are in an outside that carries inner worlds.”
This is how it has always been, man’s existence in the world, what has changed over the past generations is that our nearness to this outside has been all but eliminated. The virtual is the prerequisite of art; through art, places and ages remote from our own have been brought into our here and now, and through art, that which was alien to us has been mastered by its designation. But now, with the alien mastered to the full, and the whole world having become a kind of artwork, art must depart from art, for art is art no longer. I think this explains the longing for reality that has come to the fore in literature over the past couple of decades, formulated by David Shields in his book Reality Hunger, and which I recognize. I want real and authentic, I want the world back, but I can’t have it back, because, as we know, the original is only a notion, no more real than the dream of the indivisible point, the unmoved mover.
Sloterdijk: “As long as intelligence is sealed up by banality, people are not interested in their place, which seems given: they fix their imaginations on the ghost lights that appear to them in the form of names, identities, and business.”
People, the philosopher says rather arrogantly. But who are people? People are you and me.
So what can we do?
I can’t speak for you, only for myself, I can’t change the world, only the way I perceive it, so the only thing I can do is relocalize myself. Being a writer, that means questioning my place, to not look away but write about what’s here, and also to look up, toward the light of the universe, amid the faint rushing of the waves, the cessation of my crunching footsteps in the snow a tiny shock of silence – to sense myself tremble. That tremble is the soul’s reply to a question it is unaccustomed to addressing. Where am I now?
Here I am.
In the Land of the Cyclops
It’s spring in the land of the cyclops. The apple trees are in blossom and stand like white sails in a sea of green. The sky is blue, and above the sea, only a few kilometers from where I sit, clouds hang motionless. It’s so beautiful it hurts. And so peaceful. The land is prosperous, the shops are well stocked, everyone’s got what they need and more. But the cyclopes aren’t happy. Many are angry, and brimming with hatred. And many are afraid. I’ve lived here for thirteen years and I’ve yet to understand why there’s so much hatred and fear. I look around me and see practically nothing to hate, and practically nothing to be afraid of.
The reason there’s so much hatred among the cyclopes, and so much fear, is simple, I think. The cyclopes don’t want to know about areas of reality that aren’t as they think they should be. Not long ago, the cyclopes’ prime minister referred to a legitimate political party elected to the country’s parliament as Nazis. Everyone knows it’s not true, but that doesn’t matter: the party thinks differently on a sensitive issue, and so they’re Nazis. In any other country there’d have been an outcry. But in the land of the cyclops it was a reasonable thing to say. The odd thing is that they think it’s the same everywhere, in every other country, and nothing can convince them otherwise. The cyclopes think their view of reality should be shared by everyone, and when they discover this isn’t the case, they become angry, the way they’re often angry with their neighbors the Danes, for instance.
The cyclopes can’t handle ambiguity. They don’t understand anything that isn’t either good or bad, and that makes them angry. That’s why they don’t like literature. They say they like literature, but the only literature they like is the kind that accords with their view of good and bad, and that isn’t literature at all, but something that purports to be literature. Literature is by nature ambiguous, but the cyclopes don’t know that.
I’m a writer, and many of the cyclopes have read my books. Some have got very angry indeed. One cyclops, writing in their biggest newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, compared me with Anders Behring Breivik. Anders Behring Breivik murdered seventy-seven people, of whom sixty-nine were gunned down one by one, most of them hardly more than children. One of those he murdered, a girl, had been shot in the mouth, but her lips were intact, meaning she must have been shot at point-blank range as she screamed for help or mercy. The cyclops believed I could be compared with the man who did that because of the books I’d written. Another cyclops wrote that I was a Nazi. The Nazis tried to exterminate an entire people. They burned millions of Jews in incinerators. Many cyclopes have publicly contended that I’m a misogynist, that I hate women. And now, only last week, another cyclops writing in Dagens Nyheter has claimed that I’m a literary pedophile who has abused young girls. She writes too that I’m pursuing a clandestine homosexual relationship with my best friend, behind my wife’s back. It’s a piece that’s full of hatred and disdain, and its aim is to say that there’s something dubious about me, something unpleasant, alarming, abnormal, sick. To call it slanderous would be an understatement. It makes me out to be a criminal.
So what was my crime?
I wrote a novel.
This is how the days pass in the land of the cyclops. The cyclopes get angry and hurl rocks at those who say something they don’t like or don’t understand. This makes other cyclopes afraid, because they know that if they say something the angry cyclopes don’t like or don’t understand, the angry cyclopes will start hurling rocks at them too
. Cyclopes are for this reason either angry or silent.
The thing that most bothers the cyclops is identity. The relationship between women and men confounds them because it isn’t unambiguous. And the relationship between people of their own culture and those of other cultures, which isn’t unambiguous either, confounds them too.
For that reason the cyclopes are never so angry as when they’re talking about gender or immigration. These aren’t things you can be for or against, yet that’s exactly what they demand. So everything that exists between those categories, everything that exists in the margins, isn’t seen, isn’t talked about. But it still exists. The cyclopes realize this, but they’re unable to understand it, and so they become even angrier, or even more silent.
In the mountainous country I come from, it’ll soon be our national day. Everyone puts on their finest clothes and goes out into the streets to wave flags, to watch the children’s parades and shout hurrah. Many cyclopes are angry about this: they say it’s Nazism. I’ve tried to explain that we’re just happy about our country. But look at those flags, the cyclopes say. That’s nationalism. And nationalism is Nazism.
In fact, to the cyclopes rather a lot of things are evil. Once, at a dinner party, I got into trouble for saying I believed my wife had a different kind of attachment to our child than I had, seeing as how she’d carried the child inside her own body, given birth to it in pain, and was now feeding her from her breast. The cyclopes said that was a misogynist viewpoint.
I’ve lived here for so long now that I sometimes find myself wondering if the cyclopes are right and that there’s something wrong with me.
That I actually am a literary pedophile, a mass murderer, or a Nazi.
Why else would they say I was?
The first novel I wrote, which is soon to be published in the land of the cyclops, in the cyclopes’ own language, is about a twenty-six-year-old teacher who becomes infatuated with a thirteen-year-old pupil of his. He becomes involved with her, they have sex, and he takes flight.
Why did I write it? Didn’t I know that having sex with a minor is against the law, abhorrent and despicable? Didn’t I know it was immoral?
Yes, of course I did.
Why then did I write about such a thing if I knew it was immoral, if I knew it was wrong?
This is the question the cyclopes ask.
Their own answer is that I did so because I’m a man, a misogynist, and a literary pedophile.
The immorality confounds them. And the lust confounds them, because lust in this case isn’t the way lust should be. So they get angry and hurl rocks. And the few writers in the land of the cyclops who know what literature is become afraid. They haven’t the courage to stand up for the novel, because that would make them pedophiles themselves, it would make them oppressors of women. In other words, it would make them bad human beings. So nearly all writers in the land of the cyclops are silent.
I understand them not wanting to be seen as bad human beings. I don’t hold it against them. But I know, and I think they know too, deep down, that by not taking a stand they become worse writers.
All my books have been written with a good heart. Including the one in which a young man has sex with a child. All my books are genuine attempts to understand what it means to be human in the here and now, in our society and in our time. By genuine I mean that they don’t ignore the sides of us that are bad and deserving of criticism: all the weaknesses, the flaws and shortcomings, all the envy, all the self-assertion, all the ambition, all the hatred and contempt, including self-hatred and self-contempt, and all the lust, even the lust that’s directed toward the forbidden. And yes, I’m a man, so that’s my perspective.
At the center of these books stands the issue of identity. What is it that forms us, what is it that makes us become the people we become, makes us think what we think, feel what we feel, do what we do? The books explore the influence of our parents, the influence of the kids next door, schoolmates and the local environment, the influence of our wider society and culture. The roles we’re designated and the ways in which they alter: being a parent was one thing for our grandparents, another for our parents, and is something else for us. Being a man or a woman was one thing for our grandparents, another for our parents, and is something else for us. When I was a boy I was fond of flowers, fond of the color red, fond of reading, and I used to cry a lot – all of which was considered wrong, and I was told so. When I reached puberty they called me femi, meaning that I was girlish, feminine, and in adolescence I did everything I could to play down this side of me, everything I could to come across as masculine. I felt so immensely vulnerable, and perhaps because of the relationship I had with my father – he was an unstable figure whose ways were unpredictable – I recall myself aching for a simpler reality, and indeed there’s always been a regressive element of my personality that yearns all the way back to childhood, when others were responsible for my life.
A yearning for simplicity, a yearning for the unambiguous, the clear-cut and the tangible, is something one finds in all totalitarian movements – it’s what they appeal to. In my case, this yearning came together with a yearning for innocence, for the presexual, the preadult, and the world of the child, perhaps because my own sexuality then, and I’m talking about my teenage years, appeared to me to be so unmanageable – the only thing I wanted, which was to have sex with someone, seemed so utterly impossible to me: I didn’t even know how to go about it.
Oh, the loneliness!
In that first novel of mine I wrote about all these feelings. The main character was twenty-six years old, as immature as he was narcissistic, but it didn’t matter how much I wrote about him, I couldn’t get a hold on it, couldn’t make it work. Then I put him in a classroom – I’d been there myself when I was eighteen, teaching thirteen-year-olds – and all these feelings, this entire spectrum of regression and progression, passivity and lust, fear of authority and yearning for authority, found their shape: my character became infatuated with a thirteen-year-old girl. I knew what I was doing. For two weeks I suffered all the torments of hell. Could I write about this? Wasn’t it speculative? Wasn’t it taboo? Wouldn’t everyone think it was something I approved of? That was the risk, but at the same time everything hinged on it, and in that story all the subjects I wanted to explore could take shape.
Writing a novel about something that happens isn’t the same as condoning it. Whatever the circumstance, the material is chosen because something meaningful can be expressed by it, something that doesn’t exist before that circumstance brings it to light. That’s what literature does. Surely no one thinks crime writers condone murder just because they write about it? I exploited a thirteen-year-old girl by using her in a novel, but she exists only in the novel, so of what exactly does the exploitation consist? And where’s the danger?
In that most recent newspaper piece, the cyclops highlights Monika Fagerholm’s Diva as an example of a novel in which a thirteen-year-old girl is given her own voice, her own life, her own dignity. In contrast to my own novel, in which she’s merely exploited and consistently seen through the eyes of a man. I read Fagerholm’s novel when I was writing my own, and I loved it. It brims with the only thing that really matters when it comes to literature: freedom. Later, I wrote a book focusing on a thirteen-year-old boy, in which everything is seen from his perspective, and in writing it I was trying to do the same thing as Fagerholm does in her book: to depict a human life the way it was at a certain time, to uncover its dignity, its language, and to be honest toward it. I failed. The book I wrote wasn’t great, but it does possess freedom, and that freedom is the reason I write, and the reason literature exists.
What is literary freedom?
Or, more interestingly, what is its opposite?
Its opposite is to say how literature must be. It is to say how literature must think. It is to say, These thoughts are amiss, they’re wrong, this isn’t the wa
y we want things. You can’t do this. You can’t say this.
You can’t say this.
This is the literature of the cyclopes.
The book in which I describe a young man’s infatuation with a thirteen-year-old girl is a novel about a violation, but it’s also a novel about regression and immaturity. What made me write about that? Immaturity is all around us. We live in a culture that cultivates youth, cultivates simplicity, cultivates the puerile: switch on the TV any evening you like and you’ll see an example. A novel is the opposite: it seeks complexity, it seeks diversity of meaning, it seeks truth in places apart from where truth is sloganized or kept in a frame where it’s held firm and unable to move, rigid and immutable. Even a novel that deals with simplicity and regression is complex and expansive, and this is so by virtue of it being a novel – otherwise it’s something else. I depicted an immature young man who pursues a child, a wrongdoer who pursues an innocent, and although the novel is realistic in nature and deals with that relationship specifically, its metaphor extends into society and into its time. Is it a valid metaphor? I don’t know, and there’s no way I can be sure, but what I do as a writer is to write about my own feelings, fascinations, thoughts, and insights, in the belief that I’m but one of many and that this inner validity is matched by an outer validity. This is always an unknown when you’re writing, and the uncertainty of it represents a huge risk. It’s a risk that’s never run by critics or literary scholars, and my experience is that practically none of them is even aware it exists. That doesn’t mean I’m taking anything away from their role – someone has to read the work and put into context what it’s trying to do, or say that what it’s trying to do is not achieved. But what literary criticism must never say is that what the work is trying to do must not be done. If a novel wants to look at beauty in Nazism, the critic can contend that there is no beauty in Nazism, but not that the novel shouldn’t be looking at it if it’s there.
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