The Poet as Novelist as Poet

By : Poul Borum

Juliane Preisler’s books offer new and startling confrontations between two necessities, lonesomeness and love.

Critics always find it important to “place” a writer, and especially a new writer. Two of the most important boxes are called “poet” and “novelist”. First the reviewers and later the writers of literary history prefer their authors to be either-or. Of course lots of novelists started in their innocent youth as poets before they thought better of it, and of course lots of poets feel inspired – or obliged by their publishers, the myth has it – to write one or two novels, though nothing serious.

But then there are those few Doppelbegabungen who write equally well and equally much of both sorts – where do we “put” them? The critics often call their prose “lyrical”, which at most times is not meant as a compliment but is a discreet way of indicating that they don’t have the narrative drive and the psychological empathy of “real” novelists (poets are such egotists, you know). And not quite so often their poetry is called “prosaic”. So where are they?

Obstinate originality
Juliane Preisler is an excellent example. She published her first book of poetry in 1983 when she was twentyfour, and her tenth book came out last autumn – altogether five collections of poetry and five volumes of fiction (a bunch of short stories followed by four novels). And the interaction between these ten books is so unusual that it really becomes meaningless to call Preisler either a poet who writes novels or a novelist who writes poetry.

Fist of all the thematic material of the books interacts. Like every writers she writes from her own experience, but whether she describes little girls or young girls or women in love or old women, you feel that she is writing about what she knows – and she knows a lot about boys and men, too. Come to that, she doesn’t seem to believe in any very big difference, though of course she writes a lot about the famous “little difference”. But she is definitely not a confessional writer. A very important part of her art is her almost obstinate insistence on keeping secret what must be kept secret. She fictionalizes and “objectifies” her poems by calling their protagonists “she” and “he”! rather than “I” and “you”, and this is not just at trick, it is a method.

The “she” and the “he” in each poem varies. The poems are often in prose, and they often feel like fragmentary stories. Likewise it would be possible to extract lots of pieces from the fictional books and print them separately as prose poems.

Not because she is a “lyrical” novelist. Or because she is an “epic” poet either. But because she writes fiction.

And for her poetry is fiction too. While the novels have all the concentration and intensity of good poetry without stopping every moment to look into the narcissistic mirror of the archetypal “poet”.

But her fiction in both poems and novels is postmodern in the elementary sense of this fashionable word. She does not believe in the “great stories” and she deconstructs the “subject” of Romanticism and Modernism. She does it in a style that must be called original. She is equally hard to “place” among her Danish co-writers of the Eighties. But behind her obstinate originality I don’ think it is wrong to feel some connection with French writers like George Bataille and Maurice Blanchot, and maybe especially Marguerite Duras, whom she has translated. But I am not speaking of “influence”, rather of common field of erotic language.

Love and sex – a frail equality
Erotic language in this “French” sense means a sensuality of description and narration that is not limited to the erotic scenes and sexual themes. Though of course these scenes and themes dominate both in the poems and the novels. Here Preisler does have something in common with other female writers of her generation – the generation after the “Women’s Revolution” of the Sixties and Seventies. In many countries – in Denmark the poet Pia Tafdrup is the most obvious example – These new female writers have made a real revolution in literature. They write about man and woman as equals! For two thousand years male writers have dominated the poetry of love – like almost everything else! So it was natural that the first revolutionary generation of female writers in the Sixties and Seventies tried to reverse the situation and let the woman play the main role. But already now, with writers like Preisler and Tafdrup and their coevals in many countries, love and sex can be rendered as an equality – frail and constantly to be watched and renewed, but real.

Let me illustrate this with half a page from Preisler’s first novel, I en anden (In Another) from 1986:

“He was unbelievably beautiful, sitting there beside her. Perhaps he was looking forward and back. Perhaps he was seeing and thinking nothing, as you think nothing when you reach a goal. You just reach it.

She lay there motionless, feeling him, because she wanted to know how he moved. If he could find her path, if he could move in and out of the woods without thinking of the direction. If he knew her, or if she were something foreign, a change of weather reaching him from the outside. But then she saw that he too was resting, that he too was perfectly calm – she who had seen so many others cower when she leapt. Now lying with her head leaned against him, letting him hold it.

He was not afraid – he knew that she needed to be stretched out and immovable in order to feel for something. Slowly she loosened up completely.

His kisses still lacked self-assurance and a sense of familiarity. When he kissed her she felt it was a matter of his life as well as hers. A drowning man who cannot swim but does so without the slightest hesitation. He wanted to be with her, however unfamiliar the grips were.

She loved him for those barred kisses – the way their mouths opened each other, almost brutally, as if that were the only place air could be got. As if they wanted to inhabit each other and would never leave, once they had entered”.

Between lonesomeness and love.
In Juliane Preislers’ next but last book of poems, Ønskeøjne (Wish-eyes) from 1988 there is a series of texts, typographically distinguished throughout the book, concerning some actors in a vague fin-de-siècle, milieu. Typically enough, this was the beginning of her lates and most accomplished novel Silke (Silk) from 1991 – a Gothic story about an ingénue and an old roué, a young actress and an older male actor. It is the old war of love between the virgin and the monster, and in its demonic nakedness it is a dangerous book, which makes you doubt more and more who is the hunter and who is the prey. Love for these two people is a battle of life and death which purports to give being to the other by loving with all the means at their disposal. Not the least important thing about Preisler’s books is their new and often startling confrontation between two necessities, lonesomeness and love.


From Danish Literary Magazine 3.

Translated by The Author