On According to the Law

How something in the nature of a novel is unfolded from the account on objectivity and chance in Solvej Balle's According to the Law

By : Marianne Ping Huang

According to the Lawis about balance and weighting. The law that is sought in both the individual story and the overall narrative project of the stories is meanwhile unknown. That is to say that balance and weighing are not aimed at for the sake of the axiomatic and precise formulation of a legal text; on the other hand precision is a precondition for any approach to the law; it is methodical, the basis in an examination.

If we consider the four stories individually, we can talk of an examination of relatively different circumstances relating to mankind. In §1, a biochemical substance, phylodoxa-tri-phosphate, which enables human beings as vertical, articulated structures to remain upright while moving over long distances. In §2 pain and suffering are examined as specifically human factors which have the opposite effect of phylodoxa-tri-phosphate by affecting human beings´ ability to remain upright and making them collapse. The possibility of reducing the frequency of human action frequency to something near a mathematical zero, which would guarantee minimum pain and suffering, is examined in §3, and in §4 a method is considered for steering Man simply and undramatically from life and movement to the immovable and optimal balance of the world of the inanimate object.

So there are thematic links between the individual projects and the distinctive factors in the four accounts. Meanwhile, the accounts are developed less in relation to these links (which can almost be described as reactions between otherwise discrete substances) than within a complex arrangement of mutually interacting laws. While especially the optic through which all is viewed itself institutes an examination aimed especially at charting bodies in motion, a "tone" makes itself heard throughout this overriding project by letting "something" not forming part of any examination interact and dynamise the accounts: unforeseen laws and events on various levels which manifest themselves in a way resembling pure coincidence acquire the sudden, almost epiphanic character of coincidence. On the other hand, the registration of the epiphanic must be ascribed to human sensitivity or aesthesia, which is an extremely effective side-effect of the concentration or idiosyncrasy of monomania.

While the ground plan for both the individual account and the overall narrative project is an exact isolation and analysis of one force in humanity, the very exactitude and not least the concentration on it seem to develop excesses and unforeseen secondary circumstances pointing to some complex organisation outside the individual and monomaniacal. The coincidences in the four accounts and the overall narrative project in According to the Law should not necessarily be seen as a critical commentary on or a parable of the way in which a reductive rationality rebounds on itself. There can also be a question of felicitous increases in kinetic energy and patterns of movement - and the felicitousness is then determined less on the basis of the individual and how far this individual is successful than on the basis of a substratum of "felicitousness" as optimised energy.

The narrative unity in According to the Law is the account, which is a short, matter-of-fact and logical presentation of a series of events, devoid of decorative conceits and interpretative reflections, that is to say a sequence of statements constituting a story. Solvej Balle has given an interview in which she describes the epic or narrative quality in the stories in According to the Law in this way:

Even a tall story is epic. An ultra short story is epic. The epic is not necessarily defined by a context, such as for instance a psychological course of development, but only by linked events. [...] in According to the Law there is one specific kind of coherence - or significance if you like: the coherence of the project. It is the characters´ project that dictates their actions, it is their inner urge for the redemption of the project that impels them.

So at the heart of the account there is the individual project, or rather the unfolding of the project as an expression of a principle of human self-propulsion. The great achievement in According to the Law is both to embed the monomaniacal effort in the precise form of the account and at the same time to organise it in such a way as to endow it with the character of insight.

To Solvej Balle the story is not factual like, for instance, the "travel account" genre; the precision is primarily to be found in the matter-of-factness and succinctness of her prose style and composition, which are not far from fading out the narrative, if by narrative one understands a dynamic, dramatically developed course of action. The prose rhythm in According to the Law is exact, succinct and uniform for long stretches, in places merely based on factual main clauses. It is a co-ordinating prose that notes and refrains from comment.

The article is published in Perspektiver på nyere dansk litteratur (Perspectives on Contemporary Danish Literature), Forlaget Spring, 1997.

Translated by W. Glyn Jones