Freedom of the Frame

By : Søren Sørensen & Anne-Marie Mai

Klaus Høeck creates a meter on the basis of mathematical and combinatory principles.

Klaus Høeck´s (born 1938) most recent (1992) work of poetry entitled Eventyr (Fairy-Tales) is a modern work heralding a new direction in modern European writing, an innovatory literature experiment with systems and exploring anew the potential of language.

In European literature it was the Romantic writers who transformed the popular tradition into literature, endowed it with the poetical garb of written literature, as did the Grimm brothers, or derived from it their inspiration to create new, modern literary fairy-tales, as did Hans Christian Andersen. The ancient tradition was written down and turned into art, and came to comprise an important element in Romantic literature as it sought a meaning in and interpretation of, existence. Romantic writers saw the fairy-tale as offering a possibility of bringing together and liberating the literary genres in an artistic sense. With the fairy-tale it was possible to break with the strictly defined aesthetics of Classicism and to create an artistic medium in which verse and prose, story and poetry could become one.

It is by the Romantic concept of the fairy-tale as an essential interpretation of existence and as a potential for a closer approximation of literary genres, that the poet Klaus Høeck has been inspired in his volume Eventyr. This voluminous work encompasses poems both narrative and descriptive, philosophical and reflective, concentrated in poetical verse. Thus, the title of the work, Eventyr is not only to be understood against the background of the many references to fairy-tales; the fairy-tales are used as a frame of reference or a paradigm for the poet´s interpretation and examination of existential questions. As in the old popular fairy-tales and in the literary fairy-tale, is concerned with Man´s encounter with the great and decisive forces of existence: love and death.

The forests. The death
In Eventyr the poet faces taking leave if his dying mother, and the period covered by the poems stretches from late summer of 1988 to the winter 1989. The emotionally intense events surrounding the death of the mother are relived in the first part of the work, “Skovene. Døden.” (The Forests. The Death).

The poems are set in the modern world of a hospital at the mother´s sickbed, with its array of overworked docters, drips and advanced diagnoses. But the space and setting pf the poems are also the forests, that old topos of the, in which the principal character has to meet Death face to face and seek to persuade Death not to carry off the mother into his realm. The fairy-tales which the mother told the poet as a boy, form paths and tracks between the inner and outer geographies of the poems. The dying mother´s morphine-induced nightmare about black knights and the little faun she sees in the chestnut tree outside the hospital window become engaged in a hesitant search for a meaningful interpretation, and for a way out of, the trackless forest of death. As in the fairy-tale it is the three little stones representing faith, hope and charity that show the poet the way to the farewell, but also the way back to life.

The heavens. Time
The second part of the work “Himlene. Tiden.” (The Heavens. Time) depicts the time after the death, when sorrow, a sense if loss, and memories materialise along with all the practical matters that need to be attended to by those left behind. The poet must take leave of his childhood home, go through his mother´s possessions and all those things she has saved from his own childhood. The old Copenhagen suburban house with all its familiar trinkets, pictures and furniture represents a tangible and demanding reality, but it also betokens the fairy-tale´s enchanted castle in which the Sleeping Beauty is now awakened. The heavens of art, nature and memory form the backcloth to the poet´s meeting with the power and challenge of time and memory. While the meeting with death is the centre of the first part of the work, the confrontation with remembrance and time is the central feature of this second section.

The beaches. Life
The third and final part of Eventyr, “Strandene. Livet.” (The Beaches. Life), depicts the poet´s life together with his beloved in new surroundings in which everyday life is to be lived. The geographical setting is moved from a Copenhagen suburb to a country district in Fyn. The poetical topos of everyday life is the beaches, in which the perspective is wide and open, and where the lovers can discover the world around them, all those living things by which they are surrounded, without escaping neither the trivialities nor its intense experiences. Everyday life offers indifference, meanness, conventionality and habit, a fruitless search for oneself – these are the dangerous forces against which the poet has to fight. But he also rejects an otherworldly, inspired cult of particular, exalted components in his discovery of the fairy-tale for which all other fairy-tales exist and to which they all point: everyday life in the midst of the totality of existence, which mankind cannot explain or understand.

The paradox.
Eventyr emphasises the fact that man cannot arrive at any exhaustive understanding of the living, concrete totality of existence, however many bits and pieces he finds on which to form his interpretation. Man cannot place the last piece in this jigsaw puzzle and view the whole, for he is himself part of the living totality which he thereby seeks to understand and interpret. Humanity is confronted with the paradoxical situation that we know something which we cannot understand nor explain, but which, in our everyday close and tangible relationships with each other and all living things around us are compelled to live. It is the task of the fairy-tale and poem to demonstrate these conditions, to seek to find the limits and paradoxes of interpretation and cognition. The fairy-tale of art exits in order to do away with itself, to point to the great fairy-tale that is our own life.

The way
Søren Kierkegaard sometimes made reference to the characters of the popular fairy-tale in defining his stages life´s way; conversely, Klaus Høeck makes use of epistemological and philosophical reflection to light his way through the fairy-tales and sp to the here and now of life. Moreover, the dialectical systematism of Kierkegaard´s texts find parallel in Høeck´s work, the poetry of which is based on cybernetics and modern information theory. In an appendix the poet explains the structure of the work as a whole and the principles behind the construction of the individual poems. Each part consists of 256 poems and the collection thus of 768 poems in all.

“Skovene. Døden.” and ”Strandene. Livet.” complement each other, insofar as “Skovene. Døden.” denotes a formal development from freedom to strict verse forms, while “Strandene. Livet.” betokens an opposite movement from strict verse to freedom. Meanwhile, from the point of view of composition, “Himlene. Tiden.” is not bound by a clearly-defined structure, but organised on random principles. The individual poems or strophes are, like each of the sections, based on a strictly observed form, a meter.

Klaus Høeck does not use the old poetic meters with a specific number of feet and syllables, but creates a meter on the basis of mathematical and combinatory principles. The structural and sequential system employed by Høeck for the work is thus morphological, not semantic, in kind. It provides a series of rules for the formal architecture and geography of the work.

Control and freedom
The poet has created a tight framework for the individual parts and the form of the individual poems, and has achieved freedom of poetical expression. And precisely this combination of control and freedom makes the work surprising and poetical sensitive and its geography and landscape fascinating.

From Danish Literary Magazine 5, 1993

Translated by W. Glyn Jones