Two years later, I was able to write. Tore was editing an anthology of new writers and asked me to contribute to it. I gave him a short story I had lying around. His editor, Geir Gulliksen, read it and invited me to his office, where he asked me whether I had written anything else. I hadn’t, but the mere fact that he was interested was reason enough for me to stake everything on one card, quit my studies, move to Kristiansand, the town in southern Norway where I had lived as a teenager, and begin writing. I didn’t know what I was going to write about, I had no idea for a book, I went to the local library and sat there, overheard a conversation, wrote it down and then let my protagonist come to Kristiansand and overhear the same conversation. I made his diction more conservative than my own, not unlike the faintly French-accented, bookish language of the Norwegian Proust translation, and the distance this created, between him and me, or between the text and me, had the effect that my thoughts took on a slightly different hue when I wrote them down, and this slight foreignness imperceptibly altered what followed, which suddenly seemed unfamiliar to me and beyond my control, at the same time that it was mine and came from me. It was just like reading, the feeling was exactly the same, I lost sight of myself and entered something at once unknown and familiar.
This was what I had been longing for. This was writing. To lose sight of yourself, and yet to use yourself, or that part of yourself that was beyond the control of your ego. And then to see something foreign appear on the page in front of you. Thoughts you had never had before, images you had never seen. It was the form that created them, for if what I put into the writing was my own and familiar to me, the form changed it, and that change demanded that I put something else into it, which in turn was transformed, so that even without moving I was moving away from myself. And that is exactly how it is to read, isn’t it? Certainly, we open ourselves to another voice, which we turn into ourself, for when we read, what we feel are our own feelings, our own fear and enthusiasm, sorrow and joy, and when we reflect the reflections are our own, performed by our own self, but only as apprehended by the other, annexed by the other. Yes, I sometimes think, isn’t it true that our self consists of what is foreign, of the other—for the language we think in isn’t ours, it comes from outside us, it was there before we were born and will be there after we die, and the categories we think in are not ours, nor the conceptions nor the worldviews. All of this comes from the outside, and I think what happens when one writes is that the “I,” which is really only a means to get a handle on things, a way of arranging everything one experiences, lets go so that the foreign and the others move closer to their own form, as represented by literature—as the system for transporting culture, thoughts, insights, feelings, images, notions from one person to the other—so that writing is as much about losing and giving back as it is about creating and taking.
Not that I was thinking of this as I sat there writing. It was like an avalanche, I wrote and wrote; when I went to sleep, I looked forward to waking up and continuing. It felt as if there were no boundaries in what I was writing, the text could go wherever it wanted, all I had to do was to follow its lead.
It led to a story about an infatuation and a relationship between the protagonist, who was twenty-six, and his thirteen-year-old pupil. It was a story about being shut up in one’s own self and its endlessness, and it was about trying to break free from it, and about emotional immaturity and infantility, but also about innocence and purity, and the darkness that comes with the longing for innocence. And it was about the fear of authority.
That the novel I was writing had anything to do with Proust was completely lost on me. Now I can see that Proust’s way of integrating action and reflection; his conception of metaphor, in which metaphor opens up parallel spaces in the text and creates a whole world around the protagonist; his nostalgia and his understanding of what memory is—all these were elements I used, believing them to be my own, and it was due to them that it became possible to write the novel.
Why had I written it?
I didn’t know. Perhaps simply because I could.
When it was finished, I sent it to my brother. He read it, and the first thing he said when I spoke to him on the phone was, “Dad is going to sue you.”
Then, one morning a few weeks later, when I had just received the proofs from the publisher in the mail and was about to go through them, the phone rang. It was my brother, he told me that Dad had died.
We traveled together to the house where he had died. I brought the manuscript with me in my suitcase, thinking I could go through the proofs in the evenings. But it was impossible, I just cried and cried, it felt like the bottom had been knocked out of me. The hatred I felt against my father, which was almost as old as myself, had vanished. I cried and cried, over him, over myself, over us. And my novel didn’t mean a thing anymore. I suddenly understood that I had written it for him, for Dad. I had wanted him to see me. He never had. And now it was too late. He never got to read the novel, and he never knew that I had become a writer.
What happened in that house during that week changed me. And I knew I had to write about it. My first novel was published, it was a success, but when I set out to write a sequel, I could no longer write. I wanted to write about the death of a father and his son’s relationship to him, but it was impossible. I wrote every day for four years, but it didn’t work, nothing came, I was completely stuck. I had eight hundred pages of beginnings, none of them even came close to conveying what I had experienced, neither the personal things that had to do with Dad and me, nor what radiated from it, which had to do with the effect death has on our view of life. For after seeing my father lying there on the metal table in the chapel, I became aware of the world’s materiality, the physical and material aspect of all things, including the people around me, who now emerged into view as bodies, physiology, biology, and that view has never left me, it is always there, just beneath social existence.
I tried to write short texts about things in the material world, strongly inspired by Francis Ponge, with the difference that among the real animals, objects, and people there would gradually appear things and people who didn’t exist, slowly and imperceptibly another reality would impose itself, until it had taken over everything and everything belonged to it.
I wrote down several hundred words which I was fascinated by, including many denoting body parts, such as lungs, but when I sat there staring at the word and tried to write about it, nothing came, I had nothing to say about it, and I ended up abandoning that project too.
In those years I had a poster on the wall in front of me, from an exhibition by the film director Peter Greenaway—it showed an image of an angel, birds’ wings, a pilot—and one day I began to write about a father and two sons who go fishing for crabs in a boat, on an islet they find a dead seagull, the father picks it up and, shining his flashlight on it, shows the son that something resembling thin, frail arms lies beneath its wings. And suddenly I could write again, in the same way, writing was just like reading, and I wrote a novel about the physical, bodily existence of angels in the world. It didn’t occur to me that this might have anything to do with the sight of my father’s dead body.
When the novel was finished, I was once again unable to write. Four more years followed in which I labored without result. I wanted to write the story of my father’s death, but I didn’t believe in it, and I didn’t have the strength to suspend my disbelief.
To create a fictional space requires either great strength or great ignorance. To understand what a fictional space is, one might for example turn to Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace. I have read it twice, and both times I have been sucked into it, as happens only with the greatest of novels, when you invest more and deeper emotions into what you are reading than you do in your own life, and at times may find yourself yearning for the spaces opened up by the novel, even longing for its characters. The many moves, from country estates to towns, from society balls to battlefields, and the shifts between the various characte
rs, who develop in accordance with their individual experiences and are therefore continually meeting in new ways, intertwining with and disengaging from one another, without ever standing alone, but also without ever realizing that this is so, since only we, the author and the reader, have access to every character’s perspective. Turgenev’s Sketches from a Hunter’s Album, which sprang from the same time and culture, has almost nothing of what makes War and Peace a great novel. No action, no intrigue, no plot, no great scenes, nothing which taken as a whole develops and rises and falls, and no central characters. Sketches from a Hunter’s Album is just a collection of sketches, loose and anecdotal, centered on the experiences and encounters of a hunter in the area where he lives. But as soon as I began reading them, I had a powerful sense of Russia as it really was in the 1840s, that these landscapes and these people were real landscapes and real people, that this is how it was. As if Turgenev’s prose ripped through a plastic covering, and that the world emerged from behind it in its true colors, revealing people and all their foibles. What it is that causes this feeling of authenticity, of the world’s presence, I don’t know, only that it is rare, and that it has nothing to do with the fact that the characters Turgenev wrote about actually existed while Tolstoy’s characters did not, or that Tolstoy made his story up while Turgenev didn’t. But it is probably significant that Turgenev’s characters and descriptions don’t lead to anything beyond themselves, they are not part of a larger chain of events, and they stand open to everything—except the moment and the place. And that moment and place are the locus of our experience of the world. This ultimate authenticity, this presence in and of the world, is partially sacrificed by the novel in favor of form, which makes it possible to convey crucial insights into relationships in particular, but also into courses of events, psychological patterns, and social structures. That must be why it felt almost like a shock to read Turgenev after Tolstoy, it brought you so much closer to the landscape, the people, the culture, because that’s where you were going and nowhere else: to that particular barn on that particular evening, for instance, and that must also be why I didn’t believe in what I was writing when I tried to tell what happened in the form of a novel. I didn’t want to write about the relationship between a father and a son, I wanted to write about Dad and me. I didn’t want to write about a house where a grown man lived with his mother, like a variation on a theme from Ibsen’s Ghosts, I wanted to write about that very house, and about the concrete reality within it.
I didn’t know this during all those years I sat there trying, for me all writing is blind and intuitive, it either works or it doesn’t, and any explanation of why a novel turned out the way it did will always be an ex post facto rationalization. Whatever works will force its way out in the end, as if by itself. So when, after ten years of trying and failing, I one day wrote a few pages about something that had happened to me, and which I felt so ashamed about that I had never told it to a single person, and did so in my own name, I didn’t know why I was doing it, and I didn’t at first see any connection with the novel I was trying to write, it was just something I did. I sent it to my editor, he called it “manically confessional,” and I got the impression that he was taken aback, for it was pretty intense, and in literary terms rather poor. But it had something, both he and I could see that.
What was it?
First and foremost, freedom. For if I took this path, if I just wrote things down exactly the way I had experienced them, in my own name, it was as if all my worries about style, form, literary means, characterization, tone of voice, distance, all this vanished at a stroke, as if the literary side of it suddenly became mere make-believe, and superfluous: I could simply write. But it wasn’t just this sudden freedom which lent it force, it was also that there was something unheard-of about it, that it was in a sense forbidden.
I was a novelist, I wrote novels, and if I used something from my own life, it had to be camouflaged, a part of the fiction. To renounce this was not among the possibilities open to me as a writer. For then it would no longer be literature.
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