All my Wishes Turn to Images
By : Erik Svendsen
I donīt aim at achieving a final result. Iīm fascinated by connections we donīt understand, just as Iīm fascinated by hidden knowledge, said Ib Michael (b. 1945) in an interview on the publication of Brev til månen (Letter to the Moon). This novel is the conclusion to the colourful family story, told by an unnamed man who grows up in Roskilde and in certain respects seems to be reminiscent of the author himself. Reminiscent is the very word, for the three novels are more than anything else coquettish in the way in which they play about with autobiography. Autobiographical accounts often contain a suggestion of piquant revelation, but this is not so in the case of Ib Michael, because the autobiographical element is shot through with pastiche.
The artistic intention is obvious; the author uses a literary form for purposes of his own, enticing the inquisitive reader by unveiling profound secrets. But the veils do not drop, or they drop somewhere else, in some unexpected place unrelated to autobiography. The text is masked, and it leaps with supreme ease back and forth between forms which it defines itself. Consequently, the books seem alluringly incomplete; they have their gaps, which it is up to the readerīs imagination to fill.
Ib Michael thinks in leaps, in surprising connections, which is the same as saying that he works with magical combinations and images that establish unseen constellations. Everything can be made to hang together by means of analogies and comparisons; everything can be imagined, and everything can be broken down. It is so to speak natural for the novel that the text should be based on metonyms; the characteristic thing about Ib Michael is that he respects this law and observes it in his writing, but his hallmark is the formation of magical images that couple opposites together and often resolve them. The essence of Ib Michaelīs oeuvre is a versatile use of the leap - or perhaps it should rather be called hidden knowledge. Relationships are suggested but not developed.
In the novel Kilroy, Kilroy (1989) , which marked the authorīs commercial breakthrough, we can see the principle revealed in the bookīs highly dramatic search for an identity. During the Second World War, an American pilot loses his memory after being shot down. He starts his life so to speak all over again on a Pacific island, and his adult body feels its linguistic way forward like a child.
He adopts the name of Kilroy and spends many years discovering who he really is and what story he unconsciously and onrecognised bears within him. Just as he is about to reach the end of his road, things go wrong after all: among all the other thing it is.
Kilroy, Kilroy is a story of almost and just on the point of. The truth about Kilroy is lost in the mists. Gaps persist in the manīs story; constitutionally, Kilroy is the imperfect human being.
This does not make him into an extraordinary figure; in his hectic search for the past, Kilroy rather lives through a number of stages and life styles that turn him into a genuine representative of the years after the Second World War. The fighter pilot is not the exception to the rule, even if he might seem to be. On the contrary, he is the rule, though highlighted in a stylised story with entertaining leaps and bounds. Kilroy`s lack of identity is a condition that resembles a modern fate.
Analogously, the author allows his trilogy to ebb out with a gap in the story that is pretty noticeable. Just before the reader thinks he has got a grip on the narratorīs story, this same narrator is sent off to the Pacific and like another Kilroy comes down in his plane. There we leave him in splendid isolation on an island, and we have no idea how he has managed to come back to the present time and his fatherīs funeral. It doesnīt quite add up, and that is the very point: in Ib Michaelīs work there are always bits left over and leaps calling on the readerīs imagination, and at the same time these black holes are symbols denoting that there are limits to how far rational knowledge can take us.
My overall plan is simply concerned with expansion instead of stagnation, said Ib Michael in the interview quoted above. This assertion naturally relates to the poetics of hidden knowledge; in general it is typical of the author that boundaries exist to be broken through. Paradoxically, this artistic policy actually required the establishment of a framework that could be transcended. For instance, the trilogy is a family story that simply delves much further back into previous generations than is normally the case; the boy from Roskilde is put into contact with Mexican Indian forebears. Denmark is an integral part of the world at large, and that is how things are with Ib Michael. In a similar way, the trilogy is a developmental novel, but certainly not one that provides the reader with explanations for everything. Genres and forms exist to be expanded on the textīs and the authorīs own premises.
The expansive principle establishes itself in every respect, in both the composition and the author`s (leaping) style. This, for instance, is particularly obvious in the poetical affinities. Ib Michael enjoys large sales in his native land and has been translated into German, Swedish, French, Spanish and English, largely thanks to his suggestive expansive prose, but the paradox is that one of the great rejuvenators of modern Danish prose is at heart a lyric poet simply writing in a different medium.
A poet thinks mainly in metaphors, and writes with the explosive force of the metaphor. In the same way, Ib Michael declares himself to be the author of the leap. A traditional prose writer would say that the bursting buds of the metonym were the means, but with Ib Michael the leap is both the means and the end: "I know. All my wishes turn into images," says not Ib Michael, but his alter ego in Brev til månen. Images are poetical paraphrases, fantasies that change what is at hand, fantastic visions that can be linked with reality, but which often use it as a springboard, a take-off for something else.
The philosophy of the leap and the resulting incomplete connections form the basic structure in Ib Michael`s work. From this we can also divine the books` clear transcendence: the longing for the authentic and the culturally immaculate. In Brev til månen, the author reveals his desire for the exotic, in this case in concrete terms in his wish to find a far-off desert island. He puts it thus: "But it was also the dream of the immaculate place, where no one had been before you, the dream of paradise, that drove the soldier on, now towards new continents, now to the end of the world". In his first travel accounts, which were also curious mixtures of fiction and documentarism, there was a noticeable longing for cultures based on values that had little to do with western values. For instance, Ib Michael`s interest in Indian cultures was an extension of the criticism of society on which the 1968 revolt was based. The external journey demonstrated that there were other ways of understanding history and Man than those prescribed by positivist materialism. The genealogist in the trilogy Vanillepigen (1991) (The Vanilla Girl), Den tolvte rytter (1993) (The Midnight Soldier) and Brev til månen has, as the above quotation suggests, the same flair for the unadulterated; the decisive difference between him and the author`s earlier itinerant cultural critics is that the "paradisiac" now scarely constitutes an alternative. The dream of the averted face of culture is still there, and it bears witness to the need and desire to escape the burdens of culture. But if the archaic utopia was an open question in the earlier work, in the later books it is evident that the paradisiac is also a cultural construct, an expression for want.
The author has taken stock of modernity and of the history and culture from which he hails. The trilogy is thus less a journey out into the outwardly exotic than a journey down into a Danish past, including its more exotic outcasts, and as has already been said, it is a journey dowm into a family history that includes an inner journey through consciousness: the man who traces his ancestors achieves some sense of what he stems from. This story, however, is not so predicable and redolent of a peaceful Denmark as one might expect.
Vanillepigen and Den tolvte rytter demonstrate with all possible clarity that the drama and exoticism which the author earlier introduced into his work by searching in alien worlds is equally to be found by digging deep into the Danish soil and into a child`s encounter with the awesome world of the adult.
Many masks fall in the three novels, and there is more than one expression for the same idea: the narratorīs family is anything but Danish through and through, and a good thing that is, too. Had it not been for the fascinating, vigorous outsiders, the narrator, coming from an apparently ordinary family in the provincial city of Roskilde, would never have become the person into whom he turns himself partly as a result of his detailed search through the family ramifications.
Gomez, the Spanish soldier in Den tolvte rytter, an outsider in the Biedermeier Denmark of the time, finds it necessary to hide behind a mask - and what a mask! The landscape in which he moves is, however, also a mask, for a literary function if for nothing else. The village with the storksī nests and a mother with her spirited son - it can scarcely be more idyllic and sweetly Danish. As Gomez turns into a grotesque figure along with his outfit, Ib Michaelīs story of this midnight horseman similarly turns into a process of unmasking a gilded Danish history. There was much to confront in the Golden Age: "He wants to escape from the Bedermeier rooms. He wants to be free of debts like Faubst and to pay everything back to Satan himself when the time comes. He wants to see places that make the music race along with his soul, he wants women, colour and festivity, firework displays to behold and the smell of gunpowder in his nose if need be. He wants to drink rum in Jamaica and inhale the vanilla fragrance creole women. The world is open to him.
So great are the demands in Den tolvte rytter, and the same vitalismis found in Brev til månen, where the narrator reaches the years of discretion and finally lays bare his father`s hollow power. In keeping with its time, musically staged by means of the jazz and rock frivolities of the 60s, the narrator extends his world and his horizon, not only by experiencing a Parisian love that is almost as strong as his love for his younger sister Lulu, and not only by sailing around in Venice, but also by using euphoriants. Like a real rich man`s son, the narrator starts by being good at riding, and he ends by being pretty good at jumping on the girls and sensing magical powers. A woman, sister Kate, has it all: seductive eroticism and shady spirituality. No, it is scarcely a coincidence that this demonic and beautiful woman is referred to as sister. In Vanillepigen Lulu survived polio by the skin of her teeth, while sister Kate on the other hand takes her own life. She wanted more from life than it wanted from her. But Kate`s existence sweeps the narrator into an adult life that cannot derive from the problems of childhood and his father`s betrayal.
The narrator comes into the picture in Brev til månen. In Vanillepigen (The Vanilla Girl) he kept his sister going by telling her spine-chilling good-night stories; in the final part of the trilogy he is his own central feature. He creates his own place in the story, takes part in it and is chilled. In this way the author makes plain how his story goes in circles, like variations on a theme, and yet each time something positively new occurs. Ib Michaelīs leaps mean a conscious play on repetition, parallelism and their antithesis - stark contrast.
Somewhere in Brev til månen it is said of the painter Hieronymus Boschīs triptych: The garden of lust in the middle. In the lateral compartments, which reflect each other, heaven and hell. The description covers Ib Michaelīs own word painting, although the three novels cannot be divided up as literally as the quotation suggests. Lust, heaven and hell all appear in each of them. In vibrant prose about life.
Erik Svendsen is a critic and a lecturer working at the University of Roskilde. The article was first published i Danish literary Magazin 9 1996
Translated by W. Glyn Jones
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