The Grotesque and the Phenomenal - physical readings in Kirsten Hammann and Solvej Balle

By : Michael Nielsen

The dramaturgy of the strip cartoon

Day 1 - 18 June
Vera winkelwir. She is here when she speaks. She is not here when she is not speaking. This does not mean she is dead, it is rather worse than death. It means that she is uninvented. (p.10)
   It is vera´s first day - the name is consistently written with a small initial letter, cf. Latin verus meaning true - her coming into being is purely linguistic, signalled by a here, which can only refer to the novel as locus. The problem of coming into being in this way is repeated time after time: "There is someone who has invented her, but she must work out the rest for herself". It resembles some kind of "problem of the centre" - vera is a textual subject, suddenly created, with no story either behind or ahead of her.
   With vera we are already lured into the centre, lured into the vertigo of the text, which binds what Peter Brooks calls the craving for reading, - the craving for the end and the retrospective overview of what has been read. That craving is satisfied by the classical Bildungsroman, which is written retrospectively, from the overall viewpoint to which the reader is led by pursuing all the author´s tracks. But Vera Winkelvir is not written with retrospective clarity about a life from cradle to grave. It is rather that life and text become one in the ever-changing web at the centre of the work, which is a constant linguistic formation, a process of blowing life into speech balloons.
   In Vera Winkelwir, the essence of the novel is replaced by the dramaturg. of the strip cartoon; vera is like a figure in one of the newspaper cartoon series. The story begins each day afresh but is recognisable thanks to the well-known emblems of the genre: signs in the novel - and codes in the cartoon series, as for instance vera´s punch line: "Good day, my name is vera winkelvir. There is someone who has invented me." These are short, grotesque tales structured with the help of diary time: each day a hilarious clash with the surrounding world, abruptly putting an end to the tale.
   In more literary terms we could with Mikhail Bakhtin call it carnevalism or grotesque realism. In Rabelais and His World (1965) Bakhtin writes of the carnival´s unification of heterogeneous elements: "These celebrations became a reservoir into which obsolete genres were emptied". If we look at the Bildungsroman as such an obsolete genre, we can say that it is among the things emptied into the text along with a host of sub-genres when vera appears as a serial killer, a fly person or a cyberwoman by carrying a common metaphor ad absurdum.
   It is not something vera experiences, it is just language´s incredibly primitive way of dodging around the truth. (p. 47)
   The diary form exposes the first person to a story in which the self is both subject and object. But the diary´s quality of intimate verisimilitude is not for vera; language and truth do not go together. For vera is also here when she is telling a lie - or perhaps precisely when she is telling a lie! In her speech, vera supersedes the cohesion of language, which instead is parodied in broken sentences which are not subject to critical examination or reflection. The fragmented syntax is part of the "dramaturgy of the strip cartoon", in that the cohesion (life) is reduced to single images full of devil-may-care invention.
   When a quiet, insignificant everyday life is more than willing to allow itself to be parodied - which is very definitely what is going on when identity/ home is turned into a question of post, telephone and the hair stylist Miss Lizette - it is difficult, in the words of the text, "to make up the rest yourself". Vera´s story is not a story from cradle to grave, but a constant process of self-invalidation, in that a customary metaphor or notion of what it is to be human is being undermined by means of irony.
   Vera deforms the spoken language, so as in a suggestive language to allow meanings of its own to come into being. We can talk of a grotesque realism rejecting the belief in an initial reality behind the words. The grotesque realism in Vera Winkelvir is in harmony with Merleau Ponty´s phenomenological view of art in which the work does not come into being on the basis of a pre-existing thought or experience of the world, but as a physically based gesture - like speech - in which the meanings are in a constant process of creation. That is to say that sensing and the linguistic presentation of reality are seen as an interacting, variable relationship between the body and the world.

The article was first published in the periodical Kritik 121, 1996

Translated by W. Glyn Jones