One of the recurrent complex themes in Peter Seeberg´s writing could quite reasonably be called: the dilemma of realism. All his work deals with the question of reality, what kind of creature are we contending with and what are the possibilities when approaching it in terms of literature. This complex of problems is both a philosophical dilemma and an aesthetic and literary challenge. Seen in this light, genre development in Seeberg´s work emerges as a logical and aesthetic consequence of constant reflection on the dilemma of realism.
His early works centre on the philosophical aspect of the question of reality. Influenced by French existentialism, Seeberg´s first novels and short stories consider the extent to which we can be said to have any kind of relationship at all to our surrounding reality, and does the human of modern reality have a handle on itself. In a sense the characters in his work stand on the sidelines as indifferent observers to a reality which is just a passing parade. Communication between them is reduced to purely surface contact and they become spies in one another´s lives: it is impossible to establish contact across the different perceptions of reality from which the various people take their bearings. This also explains the tone of the language: the impossibility of entering into someone else´s perception of reality also applies to the narrator of the novels and short stories, who therefore, objectively and without evaluation or elaboration, records everyday language in an unpretentious and unadorned style. To the reader, this gives an experience of a universe in which various perceptions of reality play off each other.
This style shifts in his later works, and his writing increasingly poses an aesthetic dilemma. From The Late Afternoon of the Dinosaur (Dinosaurusens sene eftermiddag) onwards, Seeberg experiments with literary idioms in which the capacity of language to create real life becomes distinct and plain to see. Even though the books are categorised as short stories, they are actually texts which do not fit into any genre classification; a form which Seeberg himself has designated "lists". So we find texts composed like obituaries, loud-speaker announcements at a railway station, recipes or fax printouts, where not even a narrator´s voice is in evidence. In a compact form, it becomes apparent how a revised linguistic gesture always provokes a new image of an entire universe. Every single little piece of text generates its own time and its own space.
Realism is here taken to its ultimate consequence where, remarkably, it gives rise to an idiom which, in many respects, overrides even the most highly evolved modernism.
(1998)
