When Bluebells Ring so Loud That They Rust

Om Vandpest

Af : Marianne Ping Huang

Merete Pryds Helle has written a remarkable experimental novel on the theories of David Hume

Merete Pryds Helle is one of an entirely new generation of Danish prose writers of whose narrative and stylistic makeup we can still only have an incomplete impression. She made her first appearance in 1990 with a collection of short stories entitled Imod en anden ro (Towards a Different Calm), and that same year she followed it up with Bogen (The Book), a genreexperimental study in the detective story. The novel Vandpest (1993) (Water Thyme) denotes the author’s breakthrough, a linguistic and compositional masterpiece deriving from that philosophical skepticism that always brings disturbance in its wake, and on this basis it opens up the perspective of the transformational potential of the reality and the story.

Linguistic innovation
Vandpest is narrated by a woman called Beatrice. She has once studied philosophy and in particular David Hume’s skepticism, not least latching on the induction problem – that the persistent repetition of a phenomenon does not demonstrate that this repetition results from some inflexible law of inevitability: the fact that the sun rose this morning and last year contains no guarantee that it will do so tomorrow. This philosophical reference actually provides a formulation for the conditions governing modern life, which in fact provide the novel’s basic dynamism and essential problem. Meanwhile, Vandpest is not narrated in the form of an essayistic novel – the idea determining the novel’s form is the creation of literal, tangible expression for the induction problem, and it is not least in this field that we find its linguistic innovation and mastery.

A journey by balloon
Beatrice has had a suspicion bordering on certainty that the world is unstable in the sense that its forms are volatile. Consequently, she has lived her life cautiously and kept well away from elements and situations that might lead to a proof of her suspicion. The action of the novel is set in motion when together with her friend Malcolm, she reluctantly embarks on a journey by balloon – ostensibly up to achieve a great overview – and they come down in a landscape in a process of constant flux, an embryonic march or landscape-creating substance, where you see a beech forest, in the morning and an ocean in the afternoon.

Flight from a landscape
In this landscape, which is illuminated by a red planet, Beatrice and Malcolm meet Michael, Agnes and their daughter Kate – and suspense in the novel is generated from the convergence of the two couples’ stories and their flight from this landscape which, in the midst of this boundless changeability is also claustrophobic and terrifying.

The terror is sublime – the material instability of reality does not correspond to mankind’s ability to imagine or describe it, and the nightmare of this sublimity is the fulfillment of the expectation of future catastrophe which Beatrice has borne with her since her youth, and which has cut her off from reality and isolated her in language. The novel is narrated retrospectively, from Beatrice’s world outside this changing landscape, but with an awareness that the process of change can strike again in any time and in any place, an awareness that now cuts her off from language rather than from reality. In Beatrice’s story, as in the novel’s composition, the landscape is the chiastic cross filed between reality and language – the catastrophic literalism of an inhuman power of transformation in both the phenomenology of reality and the materiality of language.

The description of the landscape
The description of the landscape is not merely the novel’s fulcrum and the realization of the drastically distorting consequences in terms of space and time pf skepticism, but also the novel’s supreme narrative achievement. The landscape is not described, it is brought out in the writing in a linguistic process in which the individual elements of the transformation can be followed in Pryds Helle’s infinitely painstaking work with the linguistic image. An example is the transformation of the bluebells back to their primeval soup – the transformation having its premise in the name of the flower, bell, and then metonymically in the mechanics of bell ringing. We are led into the contrast between the delicate botanical and the metallic mechanical connotations. We do not only find here a surrealistic consistency of image, but we are also introduced to its narrative potential:

“The cogwheel pulls up and down the rope from the belle stalks of the bluebells, and the flowers ring out for hours until the low-hanging clouds are refracted in the dew point, fall as dewdrops on the blue flowers; and the cogwheels, which have become entangled in each others teeth, rust up. The bluebells are growing on a dyke separating the house from a motionless, ominous green sea. The rust spreads from the bell rope cogwheels of the bluebells to the small driving sharfts in buttercups and thistles. The rust bubbles up; streams of the lava emerge from the bubbles; the hot lava flows under the dyke, which begins to slip into the sea”.

The marginal notes
The scenic and thus mostly linguistic metamorphoses are accompanied by marginalia – fragments of text taken from older scientific and philosophical reflections on and descriptions of natural phenomena. From the armour and optical functions of insects through the empiricism of mirage to the concept of elements put forward by the Greek philosophers of nature. The apparently precise linguistic tone of these marginal notes actually supplements the novel’s central treatment of imprecision and flux – the precision of the brief scientific extracts gives way to indeterminateness when we become aware of the metaphor used in the scientific texts (as when the sun is measured out in so and so many “earth skins” that would cover in “like a glover’s ball”), while on the other hand made even more keenly aware of the precise treatment Merete Pryds Helle’s accords the linguistic flux in her description of landscape.

The literary Urstoff
Vandpest is a novel about human and philosophical doubt – the human dimension, however, is overshadowed by the inhuman power of the language, which in the cracks between image and description dispatches the reader on a disturbing journey into the literary Urstoff.

Denne artikel blev første gang bragt i Danish Literary Magazine 7.

Oversat af W. Glyn Jones