Extract from Aspects of my writing
By : Ib Michael
[...]
I canīt help it, but if someone starts telling me that style should be concise then, in my mindīs eye, I see the teacher stalking the blackboard and my mouth fills with chalk as I try to write. It just wonīt do. Iīd rather listen to the music in the words and the dancing rhythms that emerge along the way. It is a musical enterprise, you can dream of an opening which sets the rest of the language swinging. Observing stylistic rules is like playing scales. With practise, anyone can do it. It just doesnīt add up to music.
But a music teacher can hear if you strike a false note, in this they are sure of their ground. Critics, therefore, are seldom the ones to discover the new accomplishments in art. They simply know their stuff too well. But when this new notion reappears in a different distillation, the scale is familiar, and the style can be "put to the test".
[...]
Each literary genre fills its own space, a category. A both-or person is concerned with getting the categories to break down. In this way, a previously restricted energy is released. I wanted to tell a kind of emperorīs story, the master-sonnets having already been written by others. And in the process, the tale draws up its own agenda: "Make a form in a dream. Knock a hole in the form and you fall out of the dream, born. And donīt even ask who the creator is!"
I had discovered interactive reality. The fiction had its own come-back. Suddenly the door was open to every space across time. Composition selects a structure of order out of each and every chaos. Novels mutate on genes already laid down in the preceding ones, everything proceeds by leaps. Middle Ages, Golden Ages - everything is right there at the moment of writing.
There is no such thing as the historical novel. The plague turns out to be contemporary. A poisoning of the zeitgeist before it becomes post-modern, and we all become echoes of something that was once worthy of having its own name.
In an age when the sense of identity is weak, the Emperor has to have new clothes all the time. The few who are chosen for display are nurtured as giants of the pen. This is a cause for real regret. It diminishes the complexity of literature. There are fewer differences to which one can relate. And in this exotic realm there are glorious books which do not reach all their readers. Too few heads are allowed to rise up above the rest - and anyway they are only allowed up there because they have to be in order to be knocked down again when the time is ripe.
[...]
The midnight soldier has been there throughout. As the gene of the story. When the soldier died under the chestnut tree, he was resurrected once more. Behind all the invention, there is one true story. As the years pass by, the narratorīs masks splinter. Memory and invention draw ever closer to one another and forge new accomplishments. As little as I have subscribed to the classical world picture, I have believed in the psychology of the day. Characters must be as abrupt as a lifetime and just as unpredictable. What more is a human than a quantum leap over black holes.
I wonīt say any more. Every text is The-World-As-If. I have worked to reach a world picture which could be of use to me and which was the watermark of the texts. Absolve me from having to make it of use to everyone - thereīs the gun again, firing backwards. Art is not a doctrine to be obeyed.
[...]
The article was first published in the literary magazine, Spring - No. 5.93
Translated by Gaye Kynoch
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