Literature Transcends a Linguistic Prison

A conversation with the author Peter Høeg about genres, archetypes, the process of creation, and about being transparant to oneself

By : Karen Syberg

Peter Høeg says that he doesn´t work fast. He writes a couple of pages a day. Slowly and steadily.
   I´ve never been especially interested in what´s called talent or ability or any other suggestion that writing is an innate gift, he says. The difference between me and people who don´t write for a living is that in some of us the urge to write is so great that we´re prepared to put up with all the difficulties. It´s an absolute necessity for me to write every day.
   Peter Høeg spent four years writing his first novel, Forestilling om det tyvende århundrede (The History of Danish Dreams), published in Denmark in 1988, and translated into German by Monika Wesemann in 1992 (Carl Hanser Verlag). But back then he was also employed full-time as a teacher and physical instructor at the University of Odense.
   His second and third books each took him two years to write. Fortællinger om natten (Tales of the Night), was published in 1990 and will soon appear in Holland from Meulenhoff. His recent novel, Frøken Smillas fornemmelse for sne (Smilla´s Sense of Snow), will appear in English, translated by Tiina Nunnally, early next year from Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the U.S. and from Harvill in England.
   The three books are quite different from one another. The first half of The History of Danish Dreams is reminiscent of the fantastical prose of recent Latin American works; Formally Tales of the Night is something approaching a Karen Blixen pastiche; and Smilla´s Sense of Snow is a thriller with distinct literary qualities and a plot as complicated as any John Le Carre novel.

The internal cliches
Even a few years ago more than one critic might have called Høeg a post-modernist writer: the eclectic author who has the freedom to choose any genre without feeling limited by any historical specific style or other restrictions. But this label would be misplaced. In reality Peter Høeg is primarily a story-teller, something which is an integral part of his view of human beings.
   Peter Høeg: It´s important for me to realize that I´m working with archetypes. I´m convinced that the subconscious works with fundamental patterns. I wouldn´t say that they never change, but they change extremely slowly. When you´re writing a novel like Smilla´s Sense of Snow you should clearly understand that you´re working with archetypes.
   Karen Syberg: Why?
   PH: You have to acknowledge your own internal cliches. If you´re one of those writers who say that it´s no longer possible to have a plot in a book, then I think this will lead to a personal paralysis in the writing process.

   KS: You have to acknowledge that, like everybody else, you are basically ordinary?
   PH: Yes, that´s part of it. Basically, you´re doing what human beings have been doing for the past 2000 years! I read somewhere that a Buddhist Master once wrote that the big problem for new Masters was for them to work their way through the obligatory courses of thought. For example, if you remember your dreams and write them down for a month, you´ll see that they all consist of rudimentary stories. It´s simply one way of operating for the psyche.

We have become transparent
PH: This summer I´ve been thinking about what it means for a writer that, in our time, the possibilities for self-awareness have grown so vast. What happens if you keep on writing?

   KS: You´ll have to explain that a little more!
   PH: To create a plot, for example, requires dividing up the characters into good and bad. Until our time this was done intuitively, but now it has become possible to see through yourself. We´ve become transparent to ourselves. We can see that we´re drawing on archetypes.
   In that situation, some authors of my age turn towards the language and consider it a dead end if they have to combine self-awareness with the creative process.

   KS: I´m not sure that self-awareness is as new a phenomenon as you say it is. In my view, artists, among other things, distinguish themselves from other people because they are able to move around in parts of the psyche where it´s not particularly comfortable.
   PH: But working through things can bring great rewards in terms of an enormous flow of energy, so you don´t have to feel sorry for writers!
   However, there´s one thing that is often missing in the discussions of literature, and that´s the element of play. If you´re a writer, you´re immediately regarded as a serious person, but for me there isn´t really much difference between the five-year-old Peter Høeg and the thirty-five-year-old. I just think that I´ve learned some tricks so I can keep on playing! Even though the process of writing a novel isn´t exactly the same as creating a play world.

Age makes you honest
KS: Your books differ in genre, but also in terms of narrative distance. The narrators of your first two books seem far more distant than the one in Smilla´s Sense of Snow, a novel in which the main character tells the story.
   PH: There are two reasons for that. First, it´s possible to have an emotional involvement in the language in other ways than through the main character. The important thing is whether the book´s prose holds up. Second, one of the hardest things to overcome is your own emotional modesty. It´s not a technical problem, it´s a personal one. But isn´t it a common phenomenon that you grow more honest with age?
   You can think of literature as a ballet. A very young dancer concentrates on technique, but as the years pass, he can let the emotional expression shine through the technique. The same is true of literature and maybe that´s what is happening with me.
   As far as the question of genre is concerned, I on´t sit down and decide on a specific genre. I write the books I feel I have to write anything else you might say would simply be rationalizing after the fact.
   Books are often a reply to their predecessors.
   Maybe, in terms of form, Smilla´s Sense of Snow was a reaction to my previous book, Tales of the Night, which was the most difficult one to write so far because it demanded the greatest amount of planning.
   Telling a tale requires that a change of values occurs; it has to contain some kind of shock. This means that you have to construct most of the story in your mind; you have to know what direction you´re headed, even down to the choice of words. And Tales of the Night contains nine stories of this type. I couldn´t write another book like that for years!

   KS: Another characteristic of your books is that they seem enormously well researched.
   PH: That might be because a writer is an illusionist. It´s a matter of making a rather modest amount of knowledge look like an entire universe! It might also be because I have a college education, after all, and I´ve had practice in doing research, looking things up in databases, etc.

   KS: You don´t do research on location?
   PH: Only if I have to. I hate to travel; I´m a home body who prefers to work in peace and quiet. (Pressed further, Høeg admits that it´s the short trips, aimed at furthering the translation of his books, that he dislikes).
   This also has to do with the fact that I´m at the beginning of my writing career. I would have preferred waiting to have my books translated until my writing had gained a greater momentum. I´ve been caught at a time when I´m still fumbling, when I´m still in the learning phase as an author, and now I have to defend a book that I started ten years ago!

   KS: This problem won´t go away just because you write more books, will it?
   PH: In the beginning you change quickly as a writer, and even after a short interlude you think, No, no, no when you read what you´ve written. Over time you grow more stable and it´s easier to tolerate reading your own words, even after several years. But I´m still searching. I´ve hardly begun to discover yet.

   KS: You write a couple of pages a day. Aren´t you ever seized by enthusiasm so that you have to keep writing until you´ve gotten everything in your head down on paper?
   PH: Enthusiasm isn´t worth much. It´s like straw - it flares up and disappears. A brief fever is of no value. What has value is what lasts.
   I´ve always liked the alchemical image of the quiet, steady flame beneath the flask. Of course there are times when the flame almost goes out. And other times when it´s like a forest fire. But that´s no basis for anything rather, it´s something you have to put up with.

   KS: What importance do you think literature has?
   PH: My spontaneous reaction is that I experience literature as something important for me and for some people.
   It´s important that books are slow. Books are perhaps the slowest medium in existence. Consider a book as an energy phenomenon. Here are two years of intense work packed into a few hundred pages, a small, dense, compact bomb that detonates when it´s read. I like thinking about it that way.
   You might ask: Why should people work with written texts? We all have a tendency to set up boundaries that we stay within, necessitated by self-defense. But everyone has experienced the feeling of physical constraint. It´s liberating to transcend a framework under controlled conditions. If I had it my way, I would require school children to take an hour of drama every day.
   Literature has a similar function. Literature makes it possible to transcend a linguistic prison.

Karen Syberg is an editor at the Danish newspaper Information.
The interview has been published in Danish Literary Magazine 3 1992