Folksy in an unfolksy form

Interview with Peter Adolphsen

By : Karen Syberg

Idiosyncratic choices
Peter Adolphsen’s choice of tradition is idiosyncratic, he says. He is not interested in the 19th-century realists. Nor does he read only modern literature. The picaresque tradition of Lawrence Sterne’s Tristam Shandy, Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Pantagruel and Gargantua by Rabelais is also of interest. A modern author such as Georges Pérec, whose Livet - en brugsanvisning (Life: A User’s Guide) was published by Rosinante in 1999, also belongs to these idiosyncratic affinities.
   ”It’s not a novel, either,” he comments.
   How do you define a novel?
   ”As a grand-scale narrative from the 19th century with a protagonist whose fate we are urged to identify with. I am more interested in sabotage missions.”
   Of his work method, Peter Adolphsen says: “My efforts go into the surface. I think about whether it should be a “that” or a “which,” or whether it’s a good story. But you can see if there is a level underneath that is raising a ruckus. Then, it’s a question of giving it room. It’s no good to plan out a specific interpretation.”
   ”For me, what is interesting is to strive for the ideal text. Every time you get stuck, it only means you have to give it another try.”
   One of your stories is actually entitled “The Perfect Text.” But since the text is perfect, no one who starts reading it can stop – so, they die of hunger and thirst, as they go on reading and reading.
”Yes, it ends badly,” smiles Peter Adolphsen. “It was first and foremost a thought experiment: What would happen if...”
   You think a great deal in terms of consequences?
   ”Yes, I present myself with a “what if”? I think that is fun, but in a way it is just a technique for getting to a story to tell. The trick is to present it as a fact.”

Modernism is the future
Do you consider yourself an avant-gardist?
   ”Yes, I do, indeed. With modifications. Avant-garde is really a military expression, and then something that happened at the beginning of the 20th century and again in the 1960s. I see myself as an extension of that tradition.”
   Is it meaningful to consider yourself an avant-gardist?
   ”Very much so! There is a prevailing taste and a prevailing environment that could use a good shove. By prevailing, I am thinking of the psychological, realistic novel. But I am not really that opinionated. I write what I feel like.” What do you think qualifies you as an avant-gardist? “That my primary efforts go to the formal and aesthetic,” replies Peter Adolphsen, making reference to Ortega y Gasset’s treatise on art from 1925, The Dehumanization of Art. “Ortega y Gasset sets up an opposition between Romanticism and avant-gardism, which has cast out the human as an object of art. And here I align myself with Team 2’s side. I am not particularly interested in the people I describe, or whether or not people identify with them.” “Throughout the 20th century, modern art has been reproached, because people could not identify with it. One of Ortega y Gasset’s points is that, when the audience is deprived of identification, they have to find new ways of appreciating art, instead of criticizing it for a lack of something it sees as a superfluity.”
   You see the old opposition between modernism and realism as a relevant, rather than a brand-new form of expression?
   ”Yes, I do. The situation is about the same as it was at the beginning of the 20th century. You can easily do art today with the same indignation as in the 1920s. There is something to what it has been said before – that we have not yet arrived at modernism.”
   Your stories do not seem to me especially off-putting to the public. In fact, I have read several of them aloud to others with great success!
   ”If something is difficult, there has to be a reason. As a rule, I have no reason to make it difficult. My stories are quite readable, I think, I am folksy in an unfolksy form. And they are written in a way to fit into modern everyday life: for a trip to the bathroom or a bus ride.”

This interview was printed in its entirety in the newspaper Information on February 24, 2000

Translated by Russell Dees