Blogdahl

I recently noticed that Lars Bukdahl's blog has moved to a new home on Blogger. Bukdahl is presently in Shanghai, China, where he is taking part in the Literary Festival together with colleagues Sjón, Riitta Jalonen and Åsne Seierstad.

Lost and found

In Hufvudstadsbladet's Plock & Fynd, Annika Hällsten considers the slightly uusual friendship between the Swedish feminist Ellen Key and the Swedish author Astrid Lindgren, and Pia Ingström reflects on some meaningful remarks cast in her direction by two literary men at the recent award ceremony for the Finlandia Prize (won this year by Antti Hyry). There is also a discussion of Slow Reading in Finland...

The Cities Inside Hall

Michel Ekman, reviewing Johannes Anyuru's Städerna inuti Hall (The Cities Inside Hall) in Hbl (excerpt, my tr.):

...The Cities Inside Hall is a daydream, or rather, given its grim tone, a waking night dream. At the beginning we meet the poetic “I” on a park bench. To be on the safe side, the bench is left empty, so all one has to do is sit down in the author's position. Then we set off on a journey, an inner journey, but still in a largely recognizable world, with concrete features (troubles) to make up our minds about. The distinguishing characteristic of this world is described in the title. Hall is a Swedish prison: the whole world is locked up in it.

The poetic “I” is suffused by a never-ending flood of pain and discomfort. Prison scenes, riots in Paris and Copenhagen, flashbacks to the war in Algeria, expressions of alienation and suffering in modern society fill the poems like short, specific scenes of violence. On a more abstract level Anyuru chooses – with a shade too much didacticism – the lock as a symbol of oppression. Detailed descriptions of various locking mechanisms pop up repeatedly. Another motif – the law – appears with lesser frequency, becoming lost in airy ambiguity.

There is obviously something impressive about a poetry collection that runs to 358 pages, and one feels that the sheer mass of print would be enough to knock the critics on their backs. For myself, however, I think that The Cities Inside Hall suffers from monotony and lack of conceptual focus. The poems seem to constantly generate new poems because they find it difficult to stand on their own. It is, after all, impossible to read a colossus like this as carefully and with the same attention to the whole that one would devote to an ordinary collection of poems. The question then becomes: what is the poetry form really being used for?

That question is reinforced by the fact that the form itself is also problematic. The staccato idiom employed by Anyuru often does not work particularly well in print. Presumably, it was originally conceived for reading aloud, but in contrast to two of his obvious models, Göran Sonnevi and Bruno K. Öijer, Anyuru finds it hard to create a style that also works in print. He falls short of his predecessors on another point, too. This has to do with the poetry’s political potential. Anyuru has been hailed as a renewer of the political poem, but I find neither the political acumen of a Sonnevi nor the provocative anti-politics of an Öijer in his work. Anyuru ends up in a tepid middle ground where much centres on the idea that policemen are not nice people.

The Cities Inside Hall strikes me as a book that is only half-finished, written by an author who is feeling the heavy hand of expectation on him. That doesn’t alter the picture of Johannes Anyuru as one of the most promising voices in Swedish poetry.

Life is short

by Michel Ekman

I imagine a place of permanent, unspecific existence, a time without time, a limbo, a death without death’s finality and sharpness of definition, where the souls are stored away in an incomplete state of being that has no aim or meaning. It may be a veranda, but outside the windows no lilac bushes are visible, just an unbroken grey darkness.

And what do they do there, the souls? Well, they do crosswords, they play patience, they read detective novels. The boxes are constantly filled with words, the cards finally end up in four piles of equal size, the detective concludes by revealing to the surprised and slightly disappointed reader that it was actually the person who was murdered who committed the murder, even though everyone went on thinking the opposite for as long as possible.

Life is short and full of suffering, our bodies weigh us down to the earth, our routines clog our senses. The pull to escape from it all is almost irresistible. The crosswords, the games of patience and detective novels are of course very blameless and old-fashioned ways of doing so.

They stand vividly before me, a middle-aged man, because I remember an older generation which doggedly waited for death while occupied with these pastimes. But in them dwells the seed which – via the infinite number of television channels, computer games and the commercial music industry – has, in the wake of increased leisure time, turned the whole of life into a waiting for death. We have come many steps closer to what Elmer Diktonius put into words in one of  his aphorisms: “If the purpose of art were to anaesthetize, to make us forget life, then a hammer-blow to the skull would be the simplest art, and the best” – though perhaps not quite in the way that Diktonius meant.

But why do I dwell on detective novels in particular? Perhaps because texts are such a large part of my life, literary scholar that I am. Ever since I developed grown-up reading habits some thirty years ago, I have been sceptical about the plot, that two-stroke engine that will helpfully chop any mass of text at all into little pieces. True, there are also books that make even me turn the pages nervously and skip to the end. Joseph Skvorecky’s The Engineer of Human Souls was one such book, for example.

But on the whole it seems to me as though the plot, when it isn’t in the hands of the greatest masters, is a way of leading the reader past the text’s weaknesses, past the thin, in human terms uninteresting, linguistically mediocre by holding out the prospect of something more, something that will come later as long as one follows the sequence of events without stopping to think about that it is one’s reading right now. Rarely, rarely are those promises fulfilled – and even if they were to be fulfilled it would not be worth picking one’s way through the stereotyped masses of text just in order to be finally rewarded with a stereotyped surprise: the novel’s dénouement .

And what literary genre is more slavishly bound by the compulsion of plot than the detective story and the thriller? And as a result, more stereotyped in its particulars and its structure. The opera, of course – and one can only imagine the joy of seeing Tosca without music.

translated from Finland-Swedish by David McDuff

The missing midfield

Writing in Sydsvenska Dagbladet (thanks for the link, SCF), journalist and author Per Svensson claims to see a major difference between the literary scenes in Sweden and Denmark respectively. In the preamble to an interesting but somewhat inconclusive interview with Danish poet and literary critic Lars Bukdahl, Svensson says that literature in Denmark plays a more central role than it does in Sweden. Presenting Bukdahl as "one of Denmark's most powerful and controversial literary critics", he styles this description as "an expression of differences between the Danish literary landscape and the Swedish one":

In Sweden, there is hardly a literary critic who could claim to be either influential or controversial... It's often said that soccer matches are decided in midfield. In Sweden, the literary midfield has gradually grown weaker and weaker. Audience-centred quality literature has been forced back. Instead we have a polarization - with on the one flank, an ever more dominant and confident bestseller culture, and on the other a marginalized, closed-off and self-sufficient avant-garde literature.

Both get along very well without the literary reviewers of the daily newspapers.

In Denmark, things appear to be different. There the expansive novel with artistic ambitions is still perceived as so important that it can spark magnificent quarrels.

To back up his assertion, Svensson points to a poll that was organized last autumn by Denmark's Jyllands-Posten newspaper. In this, readers were asked to name "the Danish novel of our time" and a panel of experts chose its favourite novels of the past 25 years. The book that came top of the readers' list was Carsten Jensen's We, the Drowned (Vi, de druknede, a book about seafarers, variously described as an "ocean adventure", a "family saga", and "a chronicle about the birth of modern Denmark").

While one might reasonably question the "novel of our time" label, at least Jensen's book is a genuine historical novel, which doesn't rely on a crime plot or the devices of an entertainment genre for its success. In some ways it can be compared to another Nordic historical prose work which was mentioned here in an earlier post. Svensson's characterization of the Swedish literary scene as one in which bestsellerdom has taken over to the point where it's now probably more or less out of control is a though-provoking one. Together with his reflections on the absence of a "middle ground", it adds a further dimension to our ongoing discussion about the decline of mainstream quality writing in Sweden (as evidenced by the "crime wave"), and the negative effect this is having on the general availability in the English-speaking world of new, non-bestseller translated titles by Scandinavian authors in general.

Detective Story - 2

Some more reflections on the vexed issue of Scandinavian crime novels (See Crime Does Pay, At Least for Nordic Authors, Detective Story ):

At Three Percent, Chad Post recently published a useful roundup of attitudes to the genre found among fiction critics in the U.S. online media. In particular, he highlighted the interesting debate between novelist Nathaniel Rich (writing in Slate) and Larissa Kyzer (in L Magazine), which exposed the author-reader dynamic that underlies the whole question. Wondering about the reasons for the extensive adoption of the crime genre by contemporary Nordic writers, Rich saw some fairly predictable factors at work:

the best explanation is the most mundane: Crime novels sell. Most of the Scandinavian crime novelists began their careers in other genres. Mankell, for instance, wrote seven well-received but unlucrative novels, and more than a dozen plays, before turning to a life of crime; Karin Fossum was a prize-winning poet; Maj Sjöwall was an editor and translator. Before the current explosion of crime novels, the only contemporary Scandinavian novelist to enjoy major international success was Peter Høeg. Høeg may be a "literary" novelist, but his breakout Smilla's Sense of Snow is about the investigation of a suspected homicide. The lesson is clear: If you want your novel to be read abroad, particularly in the English-speaking world, you'd better include a murder. Even if you've never heard of a murder actually being committed in your country.

Wondering again why readers across the world have found the Scandinavian books written in this genre so compelling - they are not particularly innovative, after all, and are for the most part "straightforward whodunnits"- Rich suggested that

What distinguishes these books is not some element of Nordic grimness but their evocation of an almost sublime tranquility. When a crime occurs, it is shocking exactly because it disrupts a world that, at least to an American reader, seems utopian in its peacefulness, happiness, and orderliness. There is a good reason why Mankell's corpses tend to turn up in serene, bucolic settings—on a country farm, on a bobbing raft, in a secluded meadow, or in the middle of a snow-covered field: A dark bloodstain in a field of pure, white snow is far creepier than a body ditched in a trash-littered alley.

Kyzer challenged this view, seeing it as patronizing and playing to stereotypes:

One need only skim recent headlines from mainland Scandinavia (Denmark, Norway, and Sweden) to ascertain that the famed tranquility of the Nordic welfare state has begun to face some dramatic challenges. For instance: each of these countries has seen a marked increase in immigration in the last few decades, an influx which has challenged the homogeneity of the local populations, and more often than not, created quite an existential crisis for societies which have for so long been able to claim a fundamental sameness in traditions, language, and cultural outlook.

The most striking feature of the whole debate, however, is that it reveals an essential characteristic of the kind of writing that's involved: ultimately the main concern of the Nordic authors who produce these books is not with writing itself, with the creation of literary art, but is focused instead on a form of fictionalized sociology. It's really a continuation of the "radical" movement that produced the socially-committed novels and poetry of the 1970s, and it shows that this tendency has not died out in Nordic fiction, but is being reinforced and re-tuned to suit the trends and exigencies of the new century.

This is a pity, for it seemed for a time during the 1980s and 1990s that writers in Scandinavia were once again, as they did in the 1940s and early 1950s, beginning to question the society-based values and assumptions that had dominated fiction during the two earlier decades, and were finding their way towards a renewal of the universalist, formally innovative and metaphysical tradition that had characterized the writing of the immediate post-war period, with its roots in the writing of authors like Joyce, Kafka, Borges and Camus, the long legacy of Kierkegaard and the myth-oriented humanism of Karen Blixen. While authors and critics like Jan Kjærstad and Mikael Enckell continued in their different ways to uphold those values, and Inger Christensen, Tomas Tranströmer and Pia Tafdrup wrote their poems in a conscious emergence from the traditions of pre-and postwar modernism, there was a sense that in the Nordic literary world as a whole another kind of value was gaining ascendancy, in just the way that Nathaniel Rich describes above, and for the same translation-related "reasons".

I see the increasing dominance of crime fiction and its related genres in Scandinavian writing today as a problem that has the potential to become a tragedy whose consequences it will take several generations to overcome. For some of the best Nordic writing talent is being diverted into these sub- and semi-literary channels, from which it may never return.

Note: although this and other related posts are now being discussed on FriendFeed and elsewhere, I'd like to repeat my invitation to those who want to debate the issue to come here and write in the comments boxes. David McDuff.

See also: Detective Story

Detective Story - 3

The missing midfield

The meaning of modern poetry

Although it's not quite complete, and presented in "Limited Preview" format, the digitized text of Steffen Hejlskov Larsen's Betydningsstrømme i nyere dansk poesi is available online as a Google Book. Larsen (b, 1931), whose studies and analyses of (mainly) Danish poetry first drew attention in 1965 with the seminal Om at læse moderne poesi, is one of the central voices in 20th century literary criticism as a whole, and his contribution to the understanding and development of modern literary aesthetics can be compared with that of figures like T.S. Eliot, Archibald MacLeish and Jean Paulhan.

In Betydningsstrømme, Larsen follows the same channels of inquiry that run through his earlier work, with the emphasis on language and the "breaks" in language that characterize the articulation of modern poetry. The book is divided into parts - a theoretical one, in which the tension between "normal" and "broken" discourse is explored in terms of metaphor, symbol, "planes" and structures, and a practical one, with critical studies of actual works, including examples from collections by Ivan Malinowski, Klaus Rifbjerg, Jess Ørnsbo, Jørgen Gustava Brandt, Inger Christensen and Dan Turèll. There is a particularly illuminating section on the Danish poets of the 1980s who like Pia Tafdrup, Michael Strunge and Søren Ulrik Thomsen reacted against the politicized poetry of the 1970s and once again wrote "poems about love, death and life in general" - "POETRY could again be written in capital letters."

This is a book which deserves to be translated into English, for even though many of the examples Larsen discusses might be unfamiliar to a non-Danish reader, the critical direction of his thought is universal, carrying it far beyond the narrow interpretations of conventional academic study and literary-theoretical fashion.