A Hole in Language

By : Erik Skyum-Nielsen

Peter Adolphsen (b. 1972) strives to get down to the bare minimum. His excellent first book, Små historier (Brief Tales) (Samlerens Forlag) excited interest, and justifiably so, quite simply because both linguistically and artistically he is so versatile. Among his 30 prose pieces one finds some texts reminiscent of legends and parables, while others have the character of essays and others again have borrowed their language style from such quasi-literary forms as the journal and the scientific treatise. Most interesting of all perhaps are the terse philosophical texts in which Adolphsen toys with the idea of a natural world that has given up adhering to the usual laws of physics. Thus one of his stories depicts a city made of paper, another investigates the possible consequences of the notion that the Earth might one day leave its orbit to go spinning off helter-skelter through the solar system.

Behind such a vision there undoubtedly lies an acknowledgement of the fact that language and reality are no longer behaving as they used to do in the good old days. The relationship between whole and part seems to have been reversed in such a way that local factors may look to be greater than global factors, and the very logic of representation may appear to have been abolished, with the result that no given thread in language - that of realism, for instance - can automatically be ascribed any greater truth-value than any other. The world has become open to all sorts of interpretations, it is as if an irreparable hole has appeared in language. And rather than nostalgically patching up this new state of cognition a writer of Peter Adolphson's stamp is prepared to take the full artistic consequence of said state.

This article was first published in Danish Literary Magazine no. 11, 1997

Translated by Barbara Haveland