Of course, that kind of literary experience was what my childhood reading was all about, and this is why the step from reading to writing was such a short one when I turned eighteen: I wanted to be there, in that state of utter absorption where everything else vanished and you were, in a sense, out of the world. To read is to be the citizen of another country, in a parallel realm which every book is a door to. Feelings were generally a problem for me, I felt too easily and too much, and reading somehow provided relief from that, at the same time that it generated new and unfamiliar emotions. In my reading I was in a sense exploring and charting the boundless inner world that Tolstoy had written about. All of it fit within me, and my inner world expanded radically, while the world I was in remained unchanged.
Up until the age of nineteen, this is how I read, driven by the same motive: all I wanted was to be in that other world, on the other side. It didn’t matter whether it was MacLean or Stendhal who took me there, Baroness Orczy or Ernest Hemingway. When I entered the creative writing program and later pursued literary studies at the university, this changed, for there I encountered a very different understanding of what literature was and what it could do. This was in the late 1980s and early nineties, in the heyday of poststructuralism and deconstruction, when language and signs, signifier and signified dominated academic discourse. The belief that language transparently conveys the real was considered naïve, any intention the author may have had was irrelevant, and what kind of emotions, if any, literary texts evoked was not a matter of interest to anyone. Implicit in this view of literature was a literary hierarchy of value, at the apex of which stood short nonnarrative forms such as the poem, and within the art of poetry, ascendancy belonged to those who brought the poem closest to the dissolution of meaning. The poems of Hölderlin met this requirement, Goethe’s poems did not. As for novelists, within this scheme Faulkner held a position considerably higher than Hemingway, for example. The work of Paul Celan represented the ideal. Narration was ranked lower than nonnarration in terms of quality, so if we were to visualize a quality scale based on this view of literature, at one end, to the far left, we would place the novel narrated in such a way that it offers not the slightest hint of resistance, so that the reader glides through it like a hot knife through butter, what was once known as pulp fiction but is now sold in bookstores in hardcover editions, books in which everything is familiar, nothing is worth stopping to consider, nothing has value in itself. Moving toward the middle, we find what in Norway used to be called the “book club novel,” it too with a broad appeal, containing few potentially exclusionary elements and plenty of recycled scenes and images, on to the acceptable novel, where cliché and crowd-pleasing have been excised but the underlying appeal to the reader is relatively intact, which brings us to other end of the scale, where resistance intensifies and narration, understood as those elements that serve to create an illusion of reality, diminishes, where the writing itself, how something is written, is given as much or more weight than what it describes, until we reach those books in which communication, the text’s address to the reader, breaks down, in the kinds of extreme texts that were popular with poststructuralist literary critics, such as Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and the poems of Mallarmé, perhaps because the “I” of these texts so manifestly doesn’t control them, approaching the unconscious or perhaps the nonconscious, texts in which language seems to come close to the edge and perhaps even to cross it, into that which lies beyond language.
Presented like this, schematically and mechanistically, the quality scale seems rather ridiculous, and if there should be some truth in it anyway, quite revealing, for what is literature about if not the universally human, that which we all have in common, and what sustains this if not the act of addressing others?
But this is the value system I assimilated when I was at my most impressionable, in my early twenties, and it made a deep mark, so deep that I still, if driven into a corner, hold that the concept of literary quality denotes something that really exists, and that this is more or less what it looks like. The works of Celan and Mallarmé represent the pinnacle of literary expression. As a writer, on the other hand, I aspire to a different ideal: to one day be able to write something so essential and important that it speaks to all people, since it is true or relevant for everyone, irrespective of gender, class, or culture. These two ideals are diametrically opposed, it would seem that literary quality excludes reader address—why, how?
Once I watched a few episodes of Game of Thrones, it had been highly recommended to me, this was a time when people generally spoke very enthusiastically about HBO TV series, supposedly they were almost like novels. And the episodes I watched were good, the scenarios were believable, the actors highly skilled, the action grabbed your attention—as soon as one episode ended, I moved on to the next, I wanted to find out what happened, it was almost as if the plot hypnotized me, or like I was dreaming, for time passed imperceptibly and suddenly it was one o’clock in the morning. The whole time I watched I was full of emotion in response to what was happening on the screen. Joy, sorrow, excitement, fear—it all flowed through me. When I finally went to bed, however, I felt empty, in an unpleasant way, similar to how I felt after playing video games for hours on end in earlier years.
Why?
I think the reason is simple. What we seek in art is meaning. The meaningful carries an obligation. With obligation come consequences. If a child falls from a high tower, as happens in Game of Thrones, you might feel shock and a pang of something that resembles sorrow, which dissolves in the next instant, for the plot moves on and that the story is captivating is in fact the whole point. The child is forgotten. The feeling carries no obligation.
If a small child falls from a window and dies because its parents, who were having sex, weren’t paying attention, as happens in Lars von Trier’s film Antichrist, as a viewer you feel dread, horror at a fundamental level that won’t let go of you, because the film doesn’t let go of it, but instead examines the consequences in such a way that the woman’s guilt activates your own sense of guilt, wrenches up something which until now had lain quietly within you, and if what is happening on the screen couldn’t have happened in your own daily life, it can still happen in your emotional life, which the film constantly confronts and harries, so that it feels as if its archetypical or foreign images open up vast spaces within you, and in this way, for a time—the time it takes to watch the movie and perhaps for a few more days beyond that, and sometimes they can reopen years later, if something reminds you of the film’s atmosphere or images—make you feel that your own person, your own life, is meaningful and important, connected with all that is important in life, and not only do you see it, at times you even reaffirm your commitment to it. That is what art does, it is essential. But it is still just an illusion, your emotions are engaged by a product of the imagination, the obligation isn’t real, it is metaphorical.
If your own child dies, the feelings of grief and guilt are so powerful that they will always be there, there is no escaping them, you are bound to them and to what happened for the rest of your life. That feeling is impossible to convey to anyone else, it cannot be transmitted, cannot be sold, it addresses no one, it is yours alone until you die. That is what Mallarmé’s long poem A Tomb for Anatole is about. It contains no sequence of events and hardly any address or communication, for grief is mute, turned toward darkness and emptiness, and so is the language of this poem. Reading it, there is no sense of drama, no burst of sorrow or sudden shock, the poem doesn’t convey emotions, it is the emotion itself, its rending apart of meaning, coherence, language.
So at that time, you might say I was caught between two diametrically opposed experiences of what literature is and what it should do, one of which was based on empathy and identification, emotionally oriented and naïve, the other more cerebral, language-oriented, and sophisticated, though I never thought about it in these terms. All I knew was that the texts I wrote had no relevance. What I read did ha
ve relevance, but that seemed to occur in a different circuit, somehow, independently of what I wrote.
I read the prose poems of Francis Ponge, which had recently been translated from French into Norwegian. They dealt with objects, there were no people in them, it was as if the mute material world was given a voice, Ponge’s prose did something I hadn’t known literature could do, and I underlined almost every sentence.
I read The Order of Things by Michel Foucault, which is not so much about things in themselves as it is about that which connects things with one another, the system in which they appear, which does not itself have any language or form of expression, but nevertheless plays a determining role in shaping the world as it appears to us. This system changes from epoch to epoch, it functioned in one way during the Middle Ages, in another during the Enlightenment, it differs from culture to culture, and the insight which a twenty-something-year-old student who wanted to write took away from that was that the reality we live in, which seems so final and so solid, is actually arbitrary: the world could just as easily have been entirely different.
In other words, what Foucault drew attention to was the “inside” in which we find ourselves, which is so familiar and so taken for granted that we can’t see it. Culture is a space where the world appears in ways that everyone who belongs within it agrees on. We agree that time is measured in years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, and seconds. We agree that weight is measured in kilograms and grams, we agree that distance is measured in kilometers, meters, and centimeters. We agree that all things are made up of something we call atoms, each of which in turn consists of a nucleus containing protons and neutrons orbited by electrons. We agree that all animals and plants belong to particular species, which in turn belong to particular genera, and that life arose in the ocean and then emerged onto land, and that the universe originated in a single point of unimaginable density which then expanded in what we call the big bang. This division of the external world seems so obvious to us that we think of it as reality itself, not just as ways we have of seeing and talking about reality or a conceptual framework through which the world appears.
Jorge Luis Borges is an author whose work operates in the to us invisible space between the world and its representation. He was obsessed with encyclopedias, which of course are alphabetical inventories of facts about reality. In his short story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” one evening the protagonist, who is Borges himself, is sitting with his friend Adolfo Bioy Casares, also a real person, discussing literature. They talk about how one might write a novel in the first person and omit or distort facts, which would allow a few readers to sense a sinister or banal reality lying, as it were, behind the story. In the course of the conversation Bioy Casares refers to a country Borges has never heard of, namely Uqbar. Bioy Casares has read an article about Uqbar in an edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but when they look it up in an edition kept in the house where they are staying, they find no mention of Uqbar. Later Borges comes across a volume of an encyclopedia that describes not only an unknown country but an unknown world: Tlön. It turns out that a secret society of scientists and academics, working across several generations and centuries, have described a fictitious planet down to the smallest detail, from its geography, biology, and history to its philosophy, religion, and psychology, from its architecture, art, and linguistics to its mythology and literature. Tlön’s most salient feature is that the laws governing it are understood differently than are ours; the concept of causality, for instance, so central to our understanding of the world, is unknown there—“The perception of a cloud of smoke on the horizon and then of the burning field and then of the half-extinguished cigarette that produced the blaze is considered an example of association of ideas,” Borges writes. Tlön’s worldview is idealistic, and its inhabitants are incapable of understanding materialism, which is considered heretical. Borges frolics about among the more deviant ideas and notions of the world found in the history of philosophy, and I find myself wanting to quote his fantastic short story in its entirety, since it creates a reality that is completely different from our own and yet, up to a certain point, not impossible, since it deals, to a large extent, with differences in perception and not in physical reality, although the former gradually begins to affect the latter, and by the end, in the postscript to the short story, has also intervened in the reality in which Borges is writing at his desk: following the discovery of the literature about Tlön, its insights have slowly made their way into our world, both the language and the history of Tlön begin to replace language and history here, and objects from Tlön mysteriously appear, exhibiting properties that run counter to the laws of nature hitherto in force. “Almost immediately, reality yielded on more than one account,” Borges writes. “The truth is that it longed to yield. Ten years ago any symmetry with a semblance of order—dialectical materialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism—was sufficient to entrance the minds of men. How could one do other than submit to Tlön, to the minute and vast evidence of an orderly planet?”
“Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” is a good short story not only because it opens reality to other ways of perceiving it but also because it provides an outside view of the way we see it now: the notion that we are living in a reality whose fundamental premises have been laid down by a secret society through its descriptions of the world is not as far-fetched as it seems at first glance. For what are Isaac Newton, Carl von Linné, Immanuel Kant, Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel, Marie Curie, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Albert Einstein, and Simone de Beauvoir if not a society whose writings not only influence but perhaps even constitute our way of perceiving and understanding reality? If we were to remove from our culture the insights that Newton, von Linné, Kant, Darwin, Mendel, Curie, Freud, Marx, Einstein, de Beauvoir, and other hegemonic writers have put forth in the past centuries, not only would our thinking change, so would reality itself: it would come to resemble the world as it appeared during the sixteenth century, interpreted in light of the Bible and its teachings, with a history dating back only a few thousand years, where the forces to which human beings were subjected belonged in the realm of the divine. The people who lived during that era also inhabited a space in which the world appeared in ways agreed on by all, and the question is whether their world was any less true than ours.
We believe in science, and our lives are dominated by its conception of the world, but even though the tenets of this faith, its descriptions of the principles of operation of physical reality, from the circulation of blood through our bodies to the disc-shaped and slowly dispersing galaxies, from the clouds of electrons circling atomic nuclei with unpredictable movements to the tiny mutations and displacements in biological matter which constitute our genes, can be measured and observed and placed within a larger, coherent, and logical system, and thus meet our requirements of truth, science provides no answers to ultimate questions, those we begin to ask ourselves as children, and which we perhaps seek to avoid in our daily lives but which are always there below the surface of our lives, and which occasionally, perhaps on a cold and clear autumn evening as you get out of your car and head up to the house and look up at the multitude of stars, you cannot stop yourself from formulating: What is the world? Where does it come from? What is the meaning of life? Where does this meaning come from? Who am I?
These questions, which are more important than all the rest, no one knows the answers to. That truth is beyond reach of the insights of science, whose movements in this respect perhaps most of all resemble those of a clown who as he bends down to pick up his hat ends up kicking it even farther away.
Both Borges and Foucault were interested in the space reality unfolds in, how it changes depending on our gaze upon it, and their efforts can be likened to a kind of fictional groundwork, since fiction too seeks to establish spaces in which the world comes into view. The implicit notion that literature might actually change the world, or our way of perceiving it, since to this way of thinking the world too is a fiction of s
orts, was not something I thought about when I read either Borges or Foucault, and the insights they gave rise to were wholly absent from my writings from that time, they belonged to another circuit and soon sank in the mire of my subconscious. Nothing of what I read or experienced was I able to convert into literature, I was twenty-five years old and I wanted more than anything to be a writer, but I couldn’t write. So I gave up. I had been working for a few years at an institution for the mentally impaired to earn money so I could write, now I realized that I couldn’t do it anymore, and I went back to university, this time to study the history of art, and I gave it my all, I envisioned an academic career, perhaps in the end I could become a professor.
I made a new friend who also wrote, he too wanted to become a writer, and he too had had a manuscript accepted for publication when he was a mere stripling. His name was Tore Renberg, and I remember the day he told me that his book was coming out, it was spring, we were walking through the streets of Bergen below the university, and it felt like he was punching me in the stomach. For a few minutes everything went black, I was wild with envy and despair, I felt convinced that in some way or other this had sealed my fate; that I would never be able to write, never publish anything, now became an established fact.
That summer I began reading Marcel Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time. It had been translated into Norwegian for the first time a few years before, and when all the volumes had been published it was put on sale, so I could afford to buy the complete set. Every day I sat reading at an outdoor café in Bergen, and I was engrossed in it in the same way as when I read books as a child. The novel was like a place, and every morning I longed to be back in it. I didn’t reflect on how it was written, I didn’t consider the writer’s intention, I just read and read and read.
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