An interview with Solvej Balle

Human Beings are Women as Well

By : Marianne Juhl

Philosophy has made a comeback on many levels. It has become a school subject, and there has been a great deal of interest in books like Tor Nørretranders' Mærk verden (Notice the World) and the Norwegian writer Jostein Gaarder´s Sofies verden (Sophie´s World). Can you suggest any reasons for this "wave"?
I think we are beginning to realise that we must ask ourselves the fundamental questions about the conditions of existence. There is no longer any answer outside ourselves, in the way society is built up, in the great ideologies or on a macro level in general. In the sciences it is a well-known phenomenon that occasionally you can not progress any further in research into a specific problem, and that you suddenly find yourself in a blind alley. And then the research becomes philosophical, and you have to go back and think again about certain fundamental structures. You have to re-examine some regular structures or create some new ones."

- So perhaps this explains why you call your book According to the Law and introduce each story with a "law", either a natural law or a law made by human beings?
You could say that. The stories are about people who in various ways embark on a search. The first is about the biochemist who wants to discover what the material is in the brain that enables human beings to walk upright. Of course, there is no such material. But the same applies to him as to the characters in the other stories. They try to discover the truth by attacking it from the front, but they are caught up with it from behind. All the characters are stretched between mankind´s two poles - our qualities as terribly destructive creatures and at the same time very, very fragile."

- So the phylodoxa-triphosphate, which the biochemist in the first story is looking for, simply doesn´t exist?
No, it is a word I have constructed from the stem phylos meaning family. All the scientific material in the stories is actually invented, although it could have been true. And once I had the story, I was forced to do a great deal of scientific research. The worst thing is to tell a lie without knowing what is true."

- First, you write a novel. Then some very short texts and now four stories which admittedly hang together in various ways. There seems to be a reluctance in your generation to write full-length novels.
When I wrote the short prose pieces in 1990, it was because I felt it necessary for me to penetrate right down into the skeleton of the story, to place the actual action of the story under a microscope. For instance - what happens when we watch a branch floating down a river? The interesting thing is not only what we see, but the fact of its floating on, that there is a continuity external to what we see. It was reflections of that kind about the story and time that I was forced to test before I could go on with a more significant story. It may be that I shall write a novel one day. I don´t have the same feelings as Robbe-Grillet, who thought the novel a slip-up in which you pour greyish cement down into the holes marking the ruins of a foundation. I certainly believe that you can use the structure and the chronology of the classical story. And that is what I have done in these four. But otherwise I have to say to those who want to read novels that world literature is already full of good novels. If you feel - as perhaps I and others do - that a specific form cannot encompass those things that it is important to write, then there is no reason for using that form."

Marianne Juhl is a journalist. The interview was first brought in Weekendavisen 1.10.1993

Translated by W. Glyn Jones