The Description of the Eye

Af : Erik Svendsen

In a crowded street a man recognises a woman with whom he had once had a short relationship. The two exchange polite pecks on the cheek, whilst the woman´s husband appears to be thinking about something else. A moment later the constellation is broken up and the three of them slip into "the changing, pumping mass of bodies, which merge with the facades, black on black".
   This is the final sentence in Jens Christian Grøndahl´s intense and very beautiful love story Skyggen i dit sted (The Shadow in Your Place)…There is almost no external action in the story, but as an account of the nature of love, it is deeply moving. And it is far more than this. For it also describes an identity which knows no boundaries, for human desires cannot be checked, just as light can never be fixated.
   Jens Christian Grøndahl´s world is very fluid, love, identity, experience, memory, seeing, light and darkness, all intermingling. And this perception of life harmonises with Grøndahl´s dynamically proliferate language. His prose is stimulating and evocative. It makes the reading of literature into what it should be: a new awareness created by the language, which works through and with the body.
   The reader´s senses are transformed; the perceptions become more acute. The author trained as a film producer, and one could thus call his texts photographic novels, visions which depict an endless, ever-changing world, which both revolves around fixations and unlocks frozen situations into continuous flow. Grøndahl is fond of using the present participle (not nearly as much used in Danish as in English) for the author wishes the reader to see the world as something in motion, as something being perpetually created. He also often uses the comparative ´as´, since boundaries for him are fictive.
   The wonderful thing about Grøndahl´s perfectly fluctuating transformations is that they give the world new colours and forms and create a world without end; on the other hand this flitting around without a centre can be disagreeable. There is nothing stable, established and indissoluble to hold on to. It is not by chance that Grøndahl´s stories are peopled by travellers, by modern people without roots.

The dream dissolves
Love as an impossible but inviting necessity of life is a recurring theme in Grøndahl´s novels, as a theme which calls forth unique experiences and also draws on common destinies in basic instincts. Everyone seeks fulfilment in love, and yet the only constant element in the drive is desire in motion. Thus the story of passion twirls like an arabesque, and Grøndahl´s stories are similarly characterised by numerous ramifications. In this the young writer follows a long-established Danish literary tradition which permits the arabesque to dictate the shape of life (as for instance in Hans Christian Andersen and J.P.Jacobsen).
   In Skyggen i dit sted, the leitmotif – the encounter with a former love – appears to constitute an anchorage, even one endowed with a good deal of nostalgia. However the story is not a tale of ´oh how everything has changed´, but rather an abrasive disavowal of the notions associated with the radiant moments of love. The narrator clings to the idea that he knows who he is, and who the woman was, and erotic visions are indelibly imprinted in his mind. Physical proximity and the embrace of love in which one loses oneself are real enough. The memories of passion are elevated above the story. Or are they?
   This is the push and pull of the book. There is a disintegration of the memories of the forbidden voyage with the woman, which had turned into an aimless trip through Southern Spain. Not because the narrator collapses into nostalgia, but because his recollective vision dissolves the dream of the great unity of love in bodies and gazes, a love which could not encompass everything. And as with the past, so the present. When the narrator recognises the woman, he recalls: "You realised that you had forgotten her, and you saw that it was not her, but another who had taken her place to tell you that she no longer existed." Correspondingly, it is not possible to determine who the narrator is. The viewpoint is frequently changed, and a subtle point is made when the narrator also identifies with the woman´s husband, who had once been jealous. For the narrator is written off by the woman just like his rival, and so he has no difficulty in identifying with someone else who has been cast aside.

A voyage without end
If identity is a somewhat dubious factor in Skyggen i dit sted – as is also the case in the writer´s other works – the books are remarkable for their enormously varied and erratic observations. Grøndahl masters visual prose to perfection. Eyes take on independent activity, beyond consciousness or in pre-consciousness. If the writer is seeking to capture a silent, non-verbal reality then he achieves the opposite as his imagery unveils a suggestive, visually satiated reality.
   Before they know what they think, Grøndahl´s characters see, and it is no coincidence that they are often placed in the situation of the voyeur, for the "watching" stories which he recounts again and again are intimately related to voyerism, sometimes even slipping into fetishism. A room, a time, a place is inspected with an open look that wants to see everything. The eyes are inquisitively investigative, able to stir up the traces of memories as well as float along with the external surfaces, forms and colours. The characters want their eyes to tell them more, but it is also by looking that they learn that not everything is revealed in the glare of awareness. Even though they linger over particularly treasured objects, there are limits to what the eye can see. But that does not reduce their desire, for the eyes are never satisfied.
   Love is a voyage without end. Desire is insatiable and its forms are endless. Grøndahl´s characters are at the mercy of their instincts: "When you longed for her body, as one longs to get away, stay away, as the longing for places one does not know", and they never get there, and neither do you or I. But through the both stylised and transparent art of language, Grøndahl makes us understand the impossible dream of the fullness of love: "You cannot see it, it no longer exists. Only here, only here as these words. She no longer sees me, nor do I still exist in her eyes, as she once saw me. You will never know what she saw. I never knew. I can tell you nothing about her. I can only tell of the distance, which I had to cover every moment, each and all of our moments, the distance to her face."
   Skyggen i dit sted is about the fundamental insecurity of life, and is, in more than one sense, a moving tale.

Denne artikel stammer fra Danish Literary Magazine 2, 1992.

Oversat af Vivien Andersen