A literary portrait of Merete Pryds Helle (b. 1965) can suitably begin with two
broad generalisations concerning the decade in which she emerged as a writer –
for she is both typical of her age and something quite unique. The
period between 1990 and 2000 in Danish writing is especially characterised by
1) the emergence of 6-8 young, important female writers who combine a
sensorily-concrete, phenomenological style of writing with an investigation of
existence and reality at all levels, and 2) a minimalist tendency, since most
younger writers normally work inquisitively at the lower level of the novel and
the novella. There is, however, a striking exception to this rule – and her
name is Merete Pryds Helle. In
2001, she admittedly published a typically 90s-style fragmentary and
mini-novel, Solsiden (The Sunny Side), about a girl’s and
subsequently woman’s development and life-account, but, in its existentialist
project, this beautiful book’s depiction of its main character, Gedske, was
anything but minimalist – on the contrary, it was more maximalist, total, by
virtue of an ambitious conversation before the Gate of the Dead with the
Egyptian god Osiris. And when Merete Pryds Helle achieved her breakthrough as
an author in 2000, it was with the very large – positively colossal – novel
Fiske i livets flod (Fishing in the River of Life).
Fishing
in the River of Life takes the form of an attempt to embrace several times and
cultures. Three ages are studied, three types of society are analysed, but
cutting across these eras of history the author finds to a great extent the
same fateful patterns. At
the lowest archaeological stratum of the chronology, the story is told of how
the art of writing emerges in Ur, close to present-day Baghdad, more than 5000
years ago. A potter, Enksilub, who from his daily work is used to sending quick
messages in the form of small clay figures on pots, one day gets the bright
idea that there must be an easier way. This leads to his inventing the pictography
that will subsequently form the basis of an alphabet. At
the middle layer of the eras is the account of a medieval Carthusian monastery
in Denmark. We now find ourselves in anno
domini 1169, at a point when a static, religiously based culture is
eroding, because people have acquired confidence in their own ability to create
and think for themselves. Lastly,
the action takes place in our own age in the first and fourth parts of the book
– in the 1990s, in a family of Danish researchers and intellectuals, with the
archaeologist Peter at the centre. His top-position as a scholar is being
threatened by a younger contender, who has miraculously constructed his
completely own three-dimensional scanner, with the aid of which he is able to
bring to life the environment of man-made sounds which, for example, surrounded
a clay pot in a Sumerian pottery workshop. The
novel creates an enigmatic, labyrinthine impression. Stylistically, its
ambition is to combine writing that is lyrical, hymnal and magical with a
research-based historical realism. By its patterns of repetition it claims, on
the one hand, that human life constantly develops the same conflicts, yet, on
the other hand, by juxtaposing and contrasting mutually distant cultures, it
makes everything relative – both historically and culturally. The
reader finds the same double-thinking going on in Merete Pryds Helle’s two
novels Vandpest (Water Thyme) and Men Jorden står til evig tid
(But the Earth will stand for ever), from 1993 and 1996
respectively. In the former, the story is of a young couple who, during a
balloon journey unwittingly end up in a natural environment that has run riot
and no longer observes scientific models. In the latter, a grim story is told
of a daughter’s emancipation from her mother. In both instances, the individual
and the specific are registered in a space of collective figures and
thought-patterns: in ‘Water Thyme’ via a dialogue with scientific literature,
in the following book by the action being broken up by a theological track,
with angels that perhaps intervene and govern the course of events.
There
are authors who pursue one and only one artistic project and who, in book after
book, are basically writing the same work. Others surf between many genres and
types of aesthetics. Merete Pryds Helle, on the other hand, seeks in every book
she writes to come up with another suggestion for literature than readers have
previously seen. This one, as one likes, can refer to as following a single
intention or as putting several to the test. What is special about what she
does lies in the double principle of the individual book as a declaration of
principle and active creation. She is typical of Danish writing in the 1990s,
though, in her basic-research interest for the plurality and contemporaneity of
life’s dimensions – exemplified in the above works by the existential, the
religious, the biological, the psychological and the social – as well as by
history and art. But Merete Pryds Helle is her very own in, from one book to
the next, conceiving literature in depth – an endeavour that is already visible
in her first two books, the debut novellas Imod
en anden ro (Towards another
tranquillity) and the novel Bogen
(The Book), both of which
appeared in 1990. The latter actually achieves the feat of making the reader an
accessory to a murder!
Merete
Pryds Helle, who has lived in Italy for the past few years, is, apart from her
writing, actively involved in the development of new forms of literary
communication and dissemination, including a computer game and periodicals on
CD-ROM.
