The clay jar, the cranium and the novel.

- on Fishing In The River Of Life

By : Marianne Ping Huang

The prose fragment ‘Ur-Geräusch’ (1919), by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, contains the following reflection: What sound would resulting from applying a gramophone needle to the joints of the skull? Rilke’s reflection is embedded in Merete Pryds Helle’s novel Fiske i livets flod (Fishing In The River Of Life). A cranium from Asserbo cemetery, at one of the oldest monasteries in Denmark, is played back digitally – enabling a series of sound pictures to reach us from the Middle Ages. Pictures of man and beast and conceptual baggage<. Of everyday life with lenten fare and pig-tending. A soldier sets out from home already thinking of his arrival back home. A one-legged leather worker thinks about changing times while on the privy: ‘May the harp sound from the tower, and song, which can break out at any moment. May the organ, the drums, the short and long horns sound and not lie in pieces on wet grass, useless, silent. May that which we know continue to exist.’The sounds belong to life and ‘the river of life’, which is a changing medium that is constantly flowing in new directions, backwards and forwards through history.
   The outstanding feature of Fishing in the river of life is the idea that the transitory and irrevocable – sound, which is suddenly there, insistent, and suddenly gone – can be recalled; that there are vessels in which transitoriness can be stored and where it is only waiting to be released, so that what has fallen silent may once more stir and history flow. The cranium in the 3D scanner is one example. A second is the clay jar from Ur which, in the novel’s big scene, releases the voice of the potter Enksilub from the depths of history along with ‘the murmuring, gurgling water. The fat squelching of wet clay, the slapping noise of hands, the singing pressure of fingers on the wet substance.’ Everything is borne by sounds – that of the voice, song, water, hands, clay – which is also a poetic primeval sound of form and matter, jar and voice, medium and language.
   With the cranium and the clay jar, the idea of the return of sounds becomes clear in the bizarrely active image – but the idea is not more strange than the analogue or digital storage of sounds that has inspired both Rilke and Pryds Helle; in the conception of the novel it simply reaches beyond audio-technology, thereby focusing on the medium of writing and the handling of language.
   Fishing In The River Of Life is a rare occurrence in contemporary Danish literature. Merete Pryds, who is already known for her novels Vandpest (Water Thyme, 1993) and Men jorden står til evig tid (But The Earth Will Stand For Ever, 1996) as being a stylist and innovative crafter of the novel, combines in this new novel her precise, often lyrical style with an ambitiously dimensioned story about the passing of time and human existence, about the ways of humanity and of the handing-down of tradition and poetry. Divided into four books, Fishing In The River Of Life is a story of history in three ages: that of Sumerian antiquity, the Middle Ages and the present. The novel is also a story about the history of writing, about media and the tale itself – but in particular the novel contains three stories of people and their ordinary and difficult lives.
   In the first and third books, we meet the archaeologist Peter and his family: Martha, Adam and Nanna – his three grown-up children – and his sister-in-law Kamma. For better or worse, the family has been shaped by Peter’s great passion – Sumerian cuneiform writing – and his theory that this writing is the invention of one man. The children have grown up on archaeological digs in the Middle-eastern, with the eldest daughter following in the footsteps of her father and doing research on the ziggurats – the Sumerian temple towers, and with the youngest daughter, Nanna, having been named after the Sumerian bull god. We meet the family on Capri, in the midst of the Roman culture that Peter despises, and exiled by the present, as Peter has not been able since the Gulf War to get near historical Sumeria in present-day Iraq. Peter’s disciple and student, Petrus, has, however, managed to do so. By playing back a jar from Ur he seeks to disprove his mentor’s theory concerning the origin of writing.
   With dramatic irony, we join Petrus, Martha and Peter in listening to the sound of Ur in Enksilub’s chanting voice and his skill with the wet clay. We know from the second book of the novel and its story of the Sumerian prophetic priest Adaám and his family, that Adaám’s son-in-law Enksilub is the one man who invented writing. While Peter is successful in robbing Petrus of his discovery and of subsequently deciphering Enksilub’s song of praise, he does not interpret the link to his own theory: something is capable of being permanently handed down, of being excavated by the archaeologist and of individual sounds and written characters being correlated by the philologist, while other material is passed on in literature, in sound or in writing, but always through language – e.g. the novel’s story of the potter and his wife’s flight from the first bloody destruction of Ur and Ur’s reconstruction on the fired bricks with cuneiform writing.
   In the same way, the fourth book of Fishing In The River Of Life, with its story of life passing in silence, worship and everyday life in the monastic community near Arresø lake, represent another stage in the itinerant history of writing. A new arrival, Brother Word, presents the Danish monks with a different sort of book that the holy, canonical – in his travelling chest he has an autobiography, a sort of early travel novel. Rather the style of Umberto Eco, this heretical book breaks the order of silence and leads to the ruin of the small community – or its transition to new times. Once again, writing and the medium shows its two sides: the holy, canonical for preservers; the novel for the handing-down and the flow of history.
Fishing In The River Of Life is an ambitiously dimensioned, broadly narrative and thoughtful book about the whirling nature of the handing down of traditions and of history – and about the poetical as that which flows between people and the world, and which can be released from the most unlikely vessels – a clay jar, a cranium, a novel.

This article first appeared in Danish Literary Magazine 19.

Translated by John Irons