Juliane Preisler

Juliane Preisler spans many media in her work: she first appeared in 1983 with the collection of poems entitled Uden: digte (Without: Poems) and she has since written short stories and plays for radio, novels and dramas. On the other hand, irrespective of the medium, she pursues the same range of themes. Incessantly, stubbornly the oeuvre keeps returning to the metaphysical longing for union with the other: a longing that is a constituent in our love for others and at the same time a longing that is doomed everlastingly to fail in its endeavours. Preisler examines the space between people – especially couples either on their way into love or on their way out of it. The idiom is often a psychological realism with the addition of more than a touch of abstract modernism, but it has gradually evolved, and it is with works such as Dyr (Animals, 1992), Kysse-Marie: en historie om Marie Grubbe (Kissing-Mad Marie. A Story about Marie Grubbe, 1994) and Glas (Glass, 1998) that the author reaches a wider circle of readers, because these texts draw on other genres which are more familiar to many people.

Juliane Preisler belongs to the generation of poets writing in Denmark in the 1980s, poets for whom the body is of striking interest. The body as the membrane that registers minimal shifts in feelings in relation to the other and for whom these shifts are the whole world:

So fair the world never was
As when we believed in it
We could glide through it
With our hands linked together
And still see and see ourselves…

These are the opening lines of a poem in Nord (North). One senses a certain similarity with Pia Tafdrup, but also with more distant literary relations like the new French novel and its research into the phenomenological link between body and world. There are especially reminiscences of Marguerite Duras and Nathalie Sarraute who – though stylistically different – were throughout their entire oeuvre concerned with the psychoanalytical 100 dollar question: what am I to the other? - and with the currents at play in the wordless space between people. This interest in the space in between is reflected even in the choice of adverbs and pronouns in some of the titles of her works: Uden (Without), Ind (In), (poems, 1984), I en anden (In Another), (novel, 1986). It is an archetypal female universe in which Preisler finds herself most of the time. Recognisable in the incessant registrations and as enormously brittle as glass because the longing is so great and impossible.

The novels I en anden and Eventyr (1997), which were separated by 11 years, are structurally parallel; both are – like all Preisler’s works – fundamentally lyrical in tone, and both make use of archetypal figures (the Magician and the lion Léon) to express the fictional characters’ boundless longing to drown and “be lost” in love. In basic terms we can see that we have the configuration: He, She and Love. Paradoxically enough, it is the longing to be swallowed up or disappear that prevents the concrete love between two persons Anna and Rune from arising. Léon is an image, a concept, an ideal state, which you burn up by being in.

Although Preisler remains faithful to her project, a good deal nevertheless takes place in her work during the 90s. Silke (Silk), Dyr, <>Kysse-Marie have already won a wider public than the other works and I believe Glas will have a similar appeal. Other elements than the pure registration of feelings worm their way in: Dyr, filmed by Susanne Bier, becomes a disturbing psychological thriller; Kysse-Marie borrows meaning from the historical setting, and Glas is an effective novel version of Alfred Hitchcock’s voyeur film Rear Window. As in Eventyr, we have a first person narrator who refers to herself as “she” but who perceives the world through her feelings. Recently divorced, she has just moved into a block of flats, where she has an unimpeded view of the flats opposite: of the young lovers who are slipping away from each other, of the aging couple where the husband is an invalid and the wife lives the life of a slave, and in which set-up our narrator suspects a crime has been committed, and of the lonely old man (the narrator’s alter ego). Repeated telephone calls (which are alternately yearning and threatening) remind us that the Peeping Tom is visible from outside, and this aesthetic device – which shows us ourselves in our mental glass houses – has a disturbing horror effect.

In the works from the 90s, a good deal of mysticism is added to the suggestive magic of feelings, as for instance in Preisler’s latest play Forår (Spring), performed in Folketeatret 2000. This addition often tips the text over into the thriller genre and stimulates – without ever entirely satisfying – the reader’s hunger for a meaningful resolution.