Entering into existence

An Interview

By : Erik Skyum-Nielsen

The writing of Henrik Bjelke has often been described by critics with words like ‘singular’, ‘peculiar’ and ‘strange’. This is undoubtedly connected with the fact that in his books there is a literary exploitation of the unconscious, which is related to surrealism and several of the great solitaries of modernism – Joyce, Beckett, Eliot and Pound, writers whom Bjelke includes in what he himself calls an ‘internationale of ideas’, a solidarity that is open to those to whom all other solidarity has been denied. And writers who, like him, write about the absence of the ‘I’ as a characteristic of civilisation. With Henrik Bjelke the experience of not being able to be anything in one’s conscious life, apart from roles, leads to the question of whether one can penetrate down into the unconscious and be something on the basis of it.

‘If one sets to work on that set of problems, an absence based on the subject’s lack of an object, a ‘you’, and tries to solve it in writing, one must penetrate down into the unconscious. For if one is not a small, private individual, one is none the less a member of the great unconscious. If one is lucky enough to make it into the ‘you’ and articulate the unconscious into language, one may attain a sense of presence. And thereby one is perhaps doing others a service – language, common humanity, becomes a way of obtaining a ‘you’ in speech.

‘But what is articulated is often of a pathological kind. It consists of nightmares and dreams, of irrational elements. In the context I can use an image which the semiologist Harly Sonne has quoted from a French psychoanalyst, Guy Etienne: ‘The work of art relates to the unconscious like the wreck on the shore of the great pathological ship out on the water.’ If artworks of the kind we are talking about here do not have a hold on the pathological, they do not have a hold on the unconscious either. And if they must not have it, it is prohibition, linguistic oppression, existential oppression.

‘A text that works up resistance to this oppression is the truly political text. For it  wants to survive, it wants to save, it wants life and growth in one form or another.  But it does not want to die, not right away.’


If your central theme is a lack of ability to enter into existence, connected with the absence of a ‘you’, have you not also put writing in a place close to what is called schizophrenia?

‘Yes. For the modern big city dweller the consequences of that absence become precisely things like schizophrenia, narcissism and homosexuality. Those are words which are supposed to belong in separate pigeonholes, but in reality they merely constitute a psychological environment, for it is the lack of a ‘you’ that is the important thing in all three cases.

‘It is a striving to attain the body one should have had oneself – for the homosexual. It is a striving to attain existence by constructing in its absence a template of it which one calls by one’s own name – that is called narcissism. And to be schizophrenic is in the last analysis a striving to attain existence.  Schizophrenia is not, in one of its forms at any rate, an illness inside the person, but a social illness that lies on the border between the ‘I’ and the ‘you’. What were the archetypal androgynous gods but human-created images of a universally human trait, which in the – quite erroneous – language of our time is called ‘deep schizophrenia’.

‘The lack of an I/you relation is a basic feature of the civilization in which we live. People can live their lives and have nothing to do with one another. We sit alone in front of the screen as though we were sitting in rows with our gaze turned towards a stage. Nothing happens in there, it is an enormous isolation that makes people fall back into a strange intermediate space that is called the subjective. But what is it? It is nothing.

From the newspaper Information, 1984