Riverbed and Pedlar's Box

Finn Stein Larsen on Seeberg

By : Finn Stein Larsen

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Up until Dinosaurens sene eftermiddag (The Late Afternoon of the Dinosaur) (or Slaraffenland - Land of Milk and Honey) Peter Seeberg´s writing tirelessly mapped out psychological-existential microstructures.
    Seeberg decisively breaks this mould in almost every conceivable aspect in his next two books, The Late Afternoon of the Dinosaur and Argumenter for benådning (The Case for Mercy). A tremendous longing for freedom and radical change infuses these prose works. They deal with the substance of things and regulations, of behavioural- and emotional-clich‚s by which we can be shackled and with the cost and gratification in casting them off.
    The rituals and customs of law and order may be all very well in themselves, but they can bedevil and plague their victim and the texts deal predominantly with the possibility of existence on the other side of the collapse of norms, indeed The Case for Mercy definitively states this theme. It is when the hideous crime has momentarily demolished law and order that the indestructible insistence on giving credit for the sake of the individual surfaces. ´The music is greater than the crime,´ write Johan Peter G.´s fellow townspeople in their petition for mercy, even though Johan has murdered and robbed; they write it because he has such a fine bass singing voice. The books are cheerful and defiant challenges to surrender unconditionally to risk. Genre boundaries also give way, presenting us with strange and unaccustomed forms of communication: obituaries, letters, genealogies, wills, legal petitions, cunning recipes, simple yet ambiguous lyric exclamations (I´m coming/ah, you came), myths and extracts from the guest books of provincial hotels.
    Even the normal conception of time is left behind in his analogous accounts of the dinosaur and the lizard. An elegant arch is built between the respective environments of the dinosaur and the lizard: the eroded and silty prehistoric riverbed and Seeberg´s familiar Lourmarin in Provence. This lizard is a somewhat smaller distant descendant of the dinosaur which, over the course of time, became far too big. With a gesture like a calving iceberg, it lays its little head in a dry riverbed. It keels over and drowns, not merely does it die, it dies out, compliant with an unknown law of evolution. A dysfunctional species degenerates and disappears. But millions of years later a regeneration takes place for the dinosaur´s little cousin in Lourmarin. It escapes a lethal blow, scurries with lightning speed into its cave, but it has lost its tail. After a while, ´that was as long as fear itself´, it ventures out, but lacking control it falls over. Soon, however, it learns to use its falls (compare with the dinosaur´s final, heavy and irreversible fall) in order to propel itself forward. The tail regenerates and can control movement. And life can continue, as the story began, with the lizard´s blissful sun-sleep in profound interaction and integration with its surroundings: ´The rocks were warm - its heart was warm -´, ´Everything was fine. Amor fati´.

Finn Stein Larsen: Flodseng og kramkiste in Mytesyn< (On Myth), Iben Holk (ed.), Centrum 1985