(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Erland Kiøsterud: Hender's work. October, 2015
In Erland Kiøsterud's novel Hender's work the book's narrator, a pensioner on the Oslo Fjord, lives his life in and around the boarding house he runs with his wife. The story begins in the middle of the day with a special feeling creeping in and enveloping him: “For a long time I tried to hold on to the green foliage while concentrating on the columns of the newly painted storefront with the window displays on the other side of the street. But then I had to let go of it too, or: It didn't. Like when the mooring on the plastic dinghy loosens, or the umbilical cord is cut. I stood motionless under the wooden crowns. A lightness fell over me. Then what happens is so difficult to relate to: There is no distance between me and the world out there. The houses are open rooms, the trees part of me. What is inside me is out there. The silence the passers-by are also my silence. It's not that we could have swapped places. That's not necessary. We are the same. In the same. As if we were already without stories. ”
It is not a passing feeling, but a sight or astonishment at something that sends life itself to count. The story is a fictitious diary where the protagonist explains the feeling of the power of silence that grabs him as he experiences that things, nature, people, not least family members and guests of the boarding house, all seem to be affected and live a life that evades their will . Come to think of Lars Norén's play style Heden. Here, the silence is associated with night and chaos, but also with a sense of existence. More love, more understanding, more reconciliation.
Longing for reality. Kiøsterud's silence, on the other hand, transcends the interpersonal and acts globally. On several levels: The narrator's half-brother Karl has always worked hard to handle the relationships with the world and people, but never finds himself right. Brother Caro, the performer, finds it impossible to act as an artist in a world that has lost its sense of beauty. As if his operation is too great for him to live a dignified life. Hedda grows up in the narrator's family without her mother dying early. She educates herself as a brain surgeon, but her great vulnerability makes her in a way untouchable, as the author writes. Next, we hear about the guests at the guest house, a mix of housewives and refugees. But these, including the African Idi, who not long ago swam ashore on the island of Lampedusa, experience, according to the narrator, the silence different from the Northern European, than the Norse. And it more than hints that the vulnerable, fragile refugee is closer to life than the latter. That our – the Northern European's – life is poorer. There is a nagging feeling that the safe welfare man in the north is on the verge of falling out of it all, of the community, the economy, the community. Hender's work describes a world that consumes consciousness while at the same time longing to come into contact with reality.
Thus, for Kiøsterud, silence also belongs to the fact that man is trapped in, and inhabits, a whole world of emotions and influences that lives on Udenfor nature's blunt and distant, incomprehensible spaces.
Political nature. The strength of this small but condensed book is its courage in a fundamental wonder of life and the foundation of an existential experience that comes from meeting with the completely alien. Weakness tends to make silence a totalizing force where it becomes difficult to "see" the nuances and states of tension that linguistic sensory work should preferably succeed in making visible. Kiøsterud shifts between focus on details; on patterns, the oak, the water, the air, on the meaningless and unique of people, and reflective sentences. He deftly avoids moral imperatives, but with the story of the grief of the fallen oak and the unique community, the novel tends to fall into the gap of natural glorification. It is as if nature offers itself as an imagination that allows us as humans to participate in something greater. The guesthouse as an ecological community site is similar to Kiøsterud's hunt for an authentic event. But it is the silence that "saves" him from simply writing yet another fall story that we must bring nature into politics and spot the sacred otherness. The silence I read in this place as his attempt to politicizing nature. For the silence is in our midst as a grief, a common deprivation, that life grows out of pain and violence. That something has run out, something opaque, something animal. A covering of the true that man himself shares. Just as Marx's ever-present product analysis initially demonstrated a mystification of human relations, thus assuming the nature of relations between things, the mystification of natural dominance seems far more traumatic and extensive at Kiøsterud. The mystification of silence covers that nature is in fact everywhere in the life-world, in our language, thinking, emotional life and movement. And not just when we mean to keep an eye on nature. And maybe the nature is what the narrator sees when he describes Idi as an extremely vulnerable human being who lives almost outside the story? Or the guesthouse as a place that helps bring life to lost existence? Or through the story of Hedda, who was the most vulnerable in the family, but also the only one who really turned into something? Thus, for Kiøsterud, silence also belongs to the fact that man is trapped in, and inhabits, a whole world of emotions and influences that lives on Udenfor nature's blunt and distant, incomprehensible spaces. Maybe people's desires, fantasies, dreams, clues, longings, anger, envy, joy and love are in themselves a kind of ecology without nature? Perhaps silence is the first step towards a new ethics of ecology? The silence has always been there, says the narrator. But we have not understood what it does to us and what should protect us.
To be seen. So there is something threatening about this silence, which has created a feeling that something is terribly wrong, something disturbing about the contemporary political order of society. But at the same time, there is something in the silence that should bring us to life. In the beginning, the author suggests what it might be: "Who can live without being seen?" Near the end of the book, the narrator says, "We know everything about life on earth, about the world." Kiøsterud returns here Hender's work back to the theme he has discussed in the previous books The meal in Bocca og María, but also in the latest essay collection Silence and storytelling. Common is an exploration of the need to be seen. But by whom, and how? He explains it with an inviolability, a comfort, something to navigate. Once upon a time, it was the icons and the virgin, the ancient gods and tales. A tenderness, an inviolability, something to navigate further? But it has become more difficult. The old tales have long been running.
"There is no way back to the past, to the ancient gods or the former religious communities. Everyone knows it: Literature, art, like religion, no longer speaks to us. ” […] The people around us are staring into a seemingly completely comprehensible world in which they are mastering, and a future in which they have gained deep insights, and yet they understand and we do not understand much of it. We are missing a picture of ourselves. Like anything else. ”
The total exploration of reason in the world has taken something from us. The stranger? Something different from ourselves. The basic wonder. Feeling our mortality and fragility?
"How can we again open ourselves to the craziest thing in creation? What are the language and thoughts that will make us believe in something other than our own success? ”
Couldn't you see Caro, Karl, Hedda, Idi and the other distressed creatures as small studies in learning processes to love, to get closer to reality?
The guest house is a picture not only of the outcast, but of the fact that we ourselves have lost our protection of the inviolable. That we all “live very uncertainly. We are all support ”. Volunteering projects for refugees around Denmark and Norway exhibit an unpleasant powerlessness and mental fatigue in the political system. Kiøsterud's guesthouse may offer the narrator small glimpses of the inviolable, but it is on the back of the powerlessness and grief of political paralysis. It is important that Kiøsterud here allows images for this humility to be closely associated with characters who participate in the folly of ordinary life, the infamy, the embarrassed, the unheroic. But is it the beauty that should save us, as Kiøsterud suggests with artist brother Caro? Or is it maybe the love?
Kærlighed. In his essay «In the beginning was beauty» (Ny Tid, August 2015), Kiøsterud writes: «Most of our tasks have the experience of beauty in one form or another as its goal; in the midst of pain and torment, beauty makes the hard life worth living. The beauty is life purpose. " And he adds: “We modern people invest insane amounts to get in touch with beauty, but it's as if the inner effect fails. What happened?"
He asks if we have seen the enchantment, whether we are victims of the blind need for the masses of utility and the parable of commodity culture. But can beauty be isolated? A common feature of Kiøsterud's description is that beauty precisely creates images that connect us to something greater than ourselves. From the cave of Chinese, Hindus and Jews, man has used narratives, poetry, music and dance to "restore contact with the life-giving cosmos". Beauty conjures up images in which man shares a common pain and humanity. But who or what is looking at me? Maybe beauty is a form of love? For Iris Murdoch, the goal of art was a recognition of the reality of fellow human beings. But before we approach the goal, there is a learning process where we move from illusion to reality. She distinguished between imagination and imagination. The realization of beauty is nourished by the immediate selfish feelings of the imagination, while the art aims at an elimination of one's self in the work of art. Imagination is, contrary to imagination, an ability to see others, see things, see the world. But rather than seeing beauty as a (indifferent) fusion with nature and the whole, she emphasizes the learning process from fantasy to reality. Beauty is a matter of attention to the existence of another, an experience not of imagination, but of reality, in a more illusionless version with all that it entails of something at once fiery and sorrowful (Baudelaire), or at once self sufficient and self-effacing. From that experience, Murdoch declared that art and ethics, with few exceptions, are one, since they share the same essence: love. «Love is the sensory discovery that others exist, the incredibly difficult realization that something other than one self exists, that another exists. Love, and therefore art and morality, is the discovery of reality. ” An experience that is more about learning and receptivity than about beauty sublime experiences. Maybe there have never existed images of beauty that can guard us? For what does it mean to be seen, to reflect in something? Is the mirror in the picture without the learning process, without the ability to be receptive? The sorrow of living a life of "eternal exposure" (Kiøsterud) to the essential things (beauty), and never being really satisfied, has, I believe, more to do with the inability to undergo a learning process to love reality , and get closer to it. Also, the loss can be a gain for a learning. Couldn't you see Caro, Karl, Hedda, Idi and the other distressed creatures as small studies in learning processes to love, to get closer to reality?
The repetition. What is the lost paradise, if not the imitation paradise? Not "In the beginning was the beauty" but "In the beginning was the repetition." Repetition is the fallible, the trying, the learning process, the receptivity, the love.
Beauty is not a proportionate sense of harmony, as Erland Kiøsterud more than suggests. Rather, I should say that beauty is caused by a concern that something is wrong (a lot of modern literature, good documentaries). Not a joyous state you dwell in, but a frustrated process you struggle with. The whole of twentieth-century modernism has been about making an object foreign and yet attractive. It is a notion that destruction is constructive. “The grip of art,” writes Viktor Sjklovsky, “is to give us back the sense of life so that we can feel things again. But not to reproduce things, but to give a new view. Alienating things increases or complicates the length of the perception process. " The grip of art is a kind of leg tension that prevents the routine experience of things. Art's destructive structure restores our relationship to the world, not as a quick and superficial recognition, but as an actual sense of it.
I suspect that it is not enough to express the great beauty. That there is something wrong with the non-aesthetic experience of the world and things. That daily habits cause us to interact with things carelessly, inattentively and automated. Maybe that important beauty has always been associated with a learning process or pilgrimage where we move from illusion to reality – a journey where, along the way, we have to destroy in order to build up?
Carnera is a writer and essayist.
acmpp@cbs.dk
