The Existential Story

By : Svend Åge Madsen

Being a writer in that year was the most extraordinary experience. Because I had landed in the wrong century.
   It began with my wanting to write a novel about my own town, Århus, in my own time, in the 1970s. I very soon discovered that that was not possible. A person standing in the middle of a tightly packed attic, so crammed with junk, memories, flotsam and jetsam, that he cannot move, cannot look around, is not best placed for describing his surroundings. He can describe how it feels to be hemmed in by things in an attic. But his description of how the space is organised will not be worth much, because he is totally unable to form any kind of overview. And so I found myself, up to the ears in reality, no matter where I looked I came up against it, reality.
   But that was not what I wanted to write about. The kind of reality which had, as luck would have it, piled itself up around me and poked me in the eye. With three unsharpened pencils on my desk and a tree outside which had been blown over by the storm.
   I had to stand back in order to see the connections. And one cannot stand back, no matter whether one crawls up onto the roof or down into a cellar. It spreads everywhere, reality, leaving not a chink from where it can be observed.
   The best way of achieving a suitable distance was to turn my thoughts away from the here and now. I tried to imagine myself as a person living sometime in the future. A man who is perhaps living a hundred years from now. A man who is looking at us, because he has had the notion of writing a historical novel about those exciting days of old, full of colourful characters and strong social contrasts, when great emotions were at stake and dramatic events were the stuff of everyday life. To imagine myself as him, to make myself into him. To give an account of my world and my time through him.
   It took me over a year, while he, dropped in from the next century, went around and seeing how strangely, how wonderfully, how dismally things had been arranged here in Århus, here in the 1970s. (Århus is the second largest town in Denmark with a population of 250,000.) After that, I let him loose with the paper, where he wrote his long, kaleidoscopic story of morals and mores in the past, or "Virtue and Vice in the Middle Time", as he called it.
 
It is a technique I have used in most of what I have written.
   To write from a less usual point of view, or to create a world which is a little distorted in relation to the one we know.
   In fact I am not the only one to use this technique. I believe I can discern a whole movement in Danish literature which gets to grips with the world in this way. A movement which I have called "The existential story."
   There are two features which are characteristic of all the writers who are part of this movement, no matter how different they may otherwise be. On the one side there is a playful delight in storytelling, a subtle, sometimes almost frivolous attitude to storytelling. On the other side a firm conviction that precisely by producing these playful stories the possibility arises of getting to the root of the most profound existential issues. Issues which do not permit themselves to be grasped by other means.
   Seen in that perspective, it perhaps becomes more apparent where it has its beginnings, this existential story. Because it can be traced back to the two most important and dynamic of the classic Danish writers.
   Surely there has never in all the world been a more elegant exponent of this subtle and playful method of storytelling than Hans Christian Andersen.
   And this acknowledgement that existential issues can only be explored by creating subjective stories about individuals, has surely never in all the world had a more profound advocate than Søren Kierkegaard (Danish philosopher 1813-55).
   I have christened this particular Danish genre: the existential story   precisely in order to draw attention to the fusion of these two sources: Andersen´s stories and Kierkegaard´s existentialism.
   Today there are many Danish writers who, each in their own way, have found a balance between these two standpoints. But I will confine myself to choosing one rather earlier example of how the tradition lives on: Karen Blixen (in US better known as Isak Dinesen) who, more than any other writer, was preoccupied with the potential of the story, the story as a tool for making sense of it all.
   What, now, are the characteristics of the existential story?
   First of all there is a belief in the power of the story   in contrast to the standpoint of the realists. In Denmark we have   as in most countries   a powerful realistic tradition. This has as its solid base the understanding that first there is a world, which it is then the task of literature to describe. This can be done with varying objectives, from varying viewpoints and in varying styles but always with the same basic premise: there IS a world, which literature reflects to the best of its ability.
   Because exponents of the existential story conduct themselves differently. There may well be a world, but we are directly bebarred from standing far enough back that we can look at it, obtain an objective view of it. However, we have various means of creating connections and one of the most important of these is language. Through language we have the ability to play our way towards a story of the world, we can invent a connection, create a scheme of things.
   This we know, and have known since Søren Kierkegaard   that only in subjectivity can truth be found. There is no objective truth in this world. There is only the individual´s attempt to make sense of the world.
   But we also know and have known since Hans Christian Andersen, that one of the best ways of finding our story   in other words, of comprehending the world, of bringing some frail connection to bear, obtaining some slight overview   is through the retelling of the world´s.
   Because we receive the world as a stream of stories, which are fed into our consciousness, where they grow together and interweave.
   And we can only perpetuate our world by continuing to tell stories, trying to build upon those stories of which we have only heard a part. We have been assigned to create connections ourselves by inventing linking explanations.
   It can perhaps seem as if everything will become insubstantial and unreal if one maintains such a "fictionalisation": that our world is the same as those stories we tell of it. It might seem that values disappear, all truths become slight and accidental.
   It is correct that the substance of concepts may alter, but they do not lose their meaning.
   "Personality" is no longer to be measured by a psychological yardstick. My identity is determined by whichever stories I draw upon, whichever stories I enter into, whichever stories I chose to take further.
   "Truth" is no longer something handed down to us by the gods, and it is not something which can be arrived at by means of scientific calculation or deduction. "Truth" for me, is determined by those stories for which I can sincerely vouch, those stories which hold meaning for me.

Translated by Barbara Haveland