(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
The second deceased Pål Norheim's (1962 – 2017) second volume updates is now out – the first came in 2014. The releases are based on Norheim's business as a Facebook writer. Norheim was one of the exceptions that raised the level of Facebook (Fb) upwards. Not everything he wrote for that reason had the same quality. This becomes more evident when the posts are collected in book form.
In an interview with Jonas Hansen Meyer in the literature magazine Kamilla in 2016, Norheim said that he "thinks of updates as a kind of fragmentary, potentially endless novel (or rather: with no planned ending or rounding) with Pål Norheim as the protagonist, a novel that incorporates contemporary events, biographical flashbacks and themes and motifs that are twisted and reversed. I hope these structures become much clearer in Updates 2».
Unresolved childhood memories. In this second collection of Norheim's Fb posts, there have been more childhood memories than in the first. Unfortunately, these parties are also the weakest. The comparisons between the childhood home and the current residence at Eidsvågneset, for example, are bland and pointless compared to Norheim's often pernicious aphoristic observations. Norheim spent parts of his upbringing as a missionary child in Ethiopia. He records that what drives him "to cities in the Middle East, North and East Africa […] 'maybe' [...] is a kind of homesickness". But these journeys to the kingdom of childhood remain unresolved: Here is more repetition compulsion than healthy considerations. Sometimes the descriptions of the banal everydayness become as bland as at Knausgård. Missionary child upbringing was therefore first and foremost a condition of essayism, a prerequisite for his observance:
"The idea that I can no longer go away, that I remain mentally in Norway wherever I am, fills me with sadness."
“A pietistic view of life expands the inner space to a degree comparable only to Freud's psychoanalysis or stream of consciousness in the novel […] Even at a very young age, I became aware of how little time passed between each time a sinful thought appeared in my soul – not only because I had learned that man was evil in nature, but because I could constantly observe it introspectively. "
Always at home. Admittedly, the unfulfilled childhood memories are also due to the world's inexorable progress: "You can't go home again," Mykle said with Thomas Wolfe. Like many in his generation, Norheim "grew up with one foot in the world of faith and ancestors and the other in the worldly temptations of modernity". He states that “in the 21st century it is hardly possible to move. Of course, we have become more mobile: Air tickets are cheap, transport is fast over large distances, migration is increasing. But the internet and social media mean that part of the person who has traveled their way, stays at home even when he or she is gone ». "The thought that I can no longer travel away, that I mentally remain in Norway wherever I am, fills me with sadness."
For Norheim, the journey away from Norway was primarily therapy: the movement in the room also stimulated movement in the thought. He could shrink in Norway. “I was my own universe, one I was shrinking in, trying to keep things going. In Cairo, I drown in the multimillion-dollar crowd, at the same time as the self swells: a self-conscious zero that rejoices, eyes and ears directed towards the world, a body that stands out from other bodies in tourist-poor Egypt, an urge to write, without understanding much of what is happening. "
Neo-romantic starting point. Norheim was an up-and-coming political commentator for the past five years, after logging on to Facebook in 2012. Those who have followed the newspapers will remember that he wrote wise words about both Breivik and Trump. Some of the political journalism is included in this year's publication. But that was not how he started. Norheim debuted relatively late as a fiction writer in 1998 with Gottfried von Baader's diary. Both form and content were characterized by Hamsun and Obstfelder. The protagonist was a 97-year-old Austrian emigrant who wandered around Oslo, stealing books and hallucinated letters in different colors with emotional values. The inner and outer world went together, and the subjective feeling and the imaginary world were at the center. Some of Norheim's observations of his own states of consciousness are suspicious of Gottfried von Baader:
"The indeterminate middle state just before the Sleep of the Evening (is it the dream that is thinking, or the thinking that is beginning to dream?) Until I simply fall asleep – or dare with the question, 'What am I thinking about?'"
"Pål has always been a dreamer," said his mother. "Of course she was right. I spent much of my adult life daydreaming about travel and books I wanted to write. Every now and then, I was dreamed up. "
Norheim recounts several dreams he does not get anything out of. Still, he claims to have censored most of it: “Only one-tenth of what I dream and experience in waking state will let into these texts. The dream of the night initially did not have a chance: grotesque, eloquent in the direction of the meaningless, clearly symbolic (I detest clear symbols in the literature). In addition to the feeling of shame, which filters out the private, the embarrassingly intimate or extravagant, there is a literary screening mechanism that follows completely different laws, and which is stricter than any state censorship; it is probably governed by an unformulated poetics. "
The corrective of the dream. One can learn more about the dream interpretation of Artemidoros, Freud and Jung than of Norheim. Only rarely does the retelling of individual dreams cause him to turn to general views. For example, he dreams that the ground is fading under his feet: “Such dreams often have three nearby sources: a book or movie I read or saw the night before, a more or less well-founded anxiety about the individual life situation, or a future anxiety related to conditions outside myself, that is, to society or the "world."
Norheim knew how much irrelevant and stupid was moving in our heads. But dreams also have a collective cleansing function: “We are five million now. Far more people populate our dreams, where we experience the unforeseen every night. The usefulness of this experience cannot be measured, as little as the population explosion of a dreaming nation. But without this nocturnal corrective, without this repeated visit of the unpredictable, society would probably be less equipped to deal with events that mock our plans and expectations. "
Norheim dissolves the stereotypes by being both a yogi and a commissioner to a certain extent.
Self-perpetrators are often political idiots, just as many politically interested people are soulless party members. Norheim resolves the stereotypes by being both a yogi and a commissioner to some extent. He had a well-developed ability to observe both the inner and outer world, but he understood that one could not use his soul life to understand political events.
Facebook criticism. Already in the first volume of updates Norheim had many striking considerations about Facebook. He thought we had not discovered the possibilities that lie in this "semi-oral, semi-written style". He stated that if Socrates had been on Fb, it would not have been long before the majority had blocked and removed him from the list of friends. He likes to get "likes" because he is a "simple soul: related to Skinner's rats, only more vain". Norheim announced logout indefinitely, but is back on Fb after only 14 days. He was skeptical that the digital infrastructure removes "all barriers to announcing the first and best thing that comes to mind" and that Fb is tailored for "hypersensitive sluggers". But it is positive that the threshold is low, you do not need a tie and a nice outfit to participate. Impressively, Norheim firmly nailed Fb in an already canonized formulation: Fb is "the nation's new nervous system", "more Pavlov than Plato, more whisper of blood than Kant and Habermas". Through the allusion to Hamsun's program essay "From the Unconscious Soul Life" Norheim's Facebook engagement also became an extension of the new romance by other means.
In this year's collection of updates, he says that Fb is a nation-building technology with an unpredictable dynamic. Nothing made him more aware of his homeland than Fb, which in addition to being the nation's nervous system is also "polarization arena, cuddle club, reflection medium and social glue". Offline experience is described as abstinence: “When I am without the internet for a few days, my body responds exactly as if I run out of cigarettes or try to quit. But it gets used to this condition faster – after a day or two it feels like a liberation. "
The nation's unconscious soul life. We are doomed to live "our pockets of life," as Tor Wolf said. Norheim had pretty much understood that not all of the pockets are therefore suitable for publication. His Facebook-fragmentary essay writing manages at its best to produce general views on the nation's unconscious soul life. I therefore join the many who miss his voice.
