The Sharp Wings of the Angel

By : Marianne Ping Huang

Naja Marie Aidt (b. 1963) made her first appearance in 1991 with a volume of poems Så længe jeg er ung (As Long as I am Young). In 1992 followed another volume of poems Et vanskeligt møde (A Difficult Meeting), and then in late 1993 came the first book of prose, the short-story collection Vandmærket (The Watermark).
   In a review of Et vanskeligt møde it was mentioned that Naja Marie Aidt´s poetry strikes a prose chord. Her prose corresponds to this by being poetic. Which is not to say that the nine short stories in Vandmærket are only lyrical in their formal disposition and mood; but the poet´s hand is felt in a taut arraying of things like the symbolicity of factual details and colors. In other words, the poetic knack underpins the assuredness with which Naja Marie Aidt makes her prose debut.
   This assuredness can be read alone in the fact that when the frontispiece says "Short Stories" it means short stories: psychologically compressed narratives having a well-turned point. On the other hand, the collection in its entirety is also able to be read as the torso of a romantic novel: about the carrying of a potential for dreaming, a poetic disposition, which turns into madness or is already aborted in the all too commonplace. The motto, too, for Vandmærket points in that direction, where the angel appears who, in Gunnar Ekelöf´s words, both martyrs, annihilates, but also carries the stories´ characters beyond themselves: "Separate me from the angel and I shall be well/ Separate the angel from me and I become sick / Easy and hard is my life with him." This angel encapsulates the collection of short stories as opening and reappearance, as novelistic.
   The angel is already found in the title of Vandmærket´s opening story "Like Angels Fly", the longest in the collection, which in addition bears Vandmærket´s duality of transformed angelic forces and reality´s vapid resignation. In the story two voices are speaking, Sisse´s and her big sister´s. While Sisse speaks in an inner space of dreams of flying and from a life on the margin of everything, the big sister talks about Sisse, about her barely tolerable existence in banality´s midst as a dentist´s receptionist and about the general familial moras. Sisse´s voice in its loving unappreciativeness states the reason that Sisse, in a bad existential trip, practically consents to being put an end to during the shooting of a snuff film in the Mexican desert.
   In "Like Angels Fly" one naturally fastens on the description of a catastrophic fleeing over the edge, which from the story´s beginning is inscribed in its white dreams of flying. The clique Sisse belongs to frequents the "synthetic paradises" with a furious - and undoubtedly self-destructive - desperation. Endless tracks are snorted in a trash-aesthetic soundstage: music, yawps and the winter night light echo through the empty house and the "snow" tears them up from both within and without: "And we wanted so badly to fly. The wings practically grew out on our backs when teeth and sharp little knives marked us for each other. Let us feel [ …] The winter had certainly been long, we were so ragged from all that cold."
   The story´s powerful theme is sustained by Naja Marie Aidt´s work with the angel image, and especially with the metaphories of color and light: Predominant is black for the darkness of the soul and the winter, for the shadows which are cast on the empty walls: red for sores, scratches and bloodstains, which anticipate Sisse´s end; and naturally white for the drugs and "the light which always follows after," for the angel´s presence as it appears in this story. The ending of "Like Angels Fly" is quite ambiguous and partly opposes the story´s title, which with its comparative indicates a surrogate. Certainly Sisse dies a repulsive and miserable death, but in so doing she is in an absolute time: "Soon everything became completely light and fantastic, and here I am now, and it has been like this for a long time." Naturally it can be read as a facile way out of a short and dirty life: it mustn´t be overlooked, however, that this "now" is actually the time from which Sisse is telling the story.
   When a great deal of space must be given to "Like Angels Fly" it is because, as mentioned, it has in it the collection´s basic problem, the relation between a short circuiting brightness and a protracted, humdrum graying actually it isn´t until the end of Vandmærket that the ending of Sisse´s story is questioned: the central part of the collection makes its theme the resignation in Sisse´s big sister´s concluding line: "But you so often get lonely."
   This central section consists of seven stories, which tell about loneliness from within a dream or nightmare state ("A Love Story", "Little Lardy Ear") and from without, from a general resignation at all human relations being only imaginary. Of the first mentioned the best is "A Love Story" - about a narcissistic running amock, in which the story´s top-form factual universe ensures a crawling recognizability. The latter are perhaps the collection´s watermark in the sense of stamp or quality; Naja Marie Aidt´s writing elicits with discreet realism what, with the Austrian author Arthur Schnitzier, one could call commonplace pathologies, small sick stories from everyday infernos - the creeping birth psychosis in "Is the World Small," where the boundary between giving in and convulsive hanging on is inscribed on every side in everyday details, and the appallingly calm account of social ligature in "Ache in My Meat"".
   "But you so often get lonely" - Naja Marie Aidt doesn´t reciprocate resignation, she portrays it, and whether despair or rage it is always mute. In another sense than the ineffable, which Sisse incarnates in her skinny and all-consuming angel, here the mute adheres to a social claustrophobia which doesn´t get anywhere near the demonology of angels.
   In the final story in Vandmærket, "Three Days in Prague", the angel motif returns - this time in connection with a love tryst, but in a composition where details and lines from "Like Angels Fly" are reiterated, though as something else: It snows here, too; the epiphany glows, but add to that a full belly "For the Always Hungry"".
   After having in the preceding seven central stories mostly shown the fateful in the angel´s absence, Naja Marie Aidt strikes home with a pondering over the romantic - here in the moment of Kierkegaard´s Repetition: "there is the language which infatuates and pushes away, words which beg for mercy, stipulate themselves, regret and forgive, push aside and infatuate again . . . So they met here at last, God would have sworn it off after all that time."
   The angel has no everyday time: it can exist in absolute time like Sisse, but also in a moment where there is at once a writing off and again. The last words in Vandmærket in their form reciprocate the comparative in "Like Angels Fly" with a dialectical logical inference: the angel is momentary, but exists.
   "He thinks: She´s right. Perfect love can´t exist among the imperfect ... He thinks: So we must be angels."

This article first appeared in Danish Literary Magazine 6, 1994