In the midst of all the ballyhoo, art - and thus the book - lies hidden like a smoking bomb

By : Klaus Rifbjerg

No one - certainly not I - can be or is opposed to Danish schools opening out to incorporate the study of texts as part of the teaching, texts taken from everything from advertisements to political statements. What beats me and makes me hopping mad is the thought that there is rarely in our intellectual space an opportunity for continuity or reflection and quite literally no room for anything superfluous or lacking a practical application. There is a fantastic quiet in the book and in the way in which you absorb it, a quiet that is full of experience and noise and shouting and din, sighs, passion, love, romantic notions, spiritual expansion, laughter, tears and all the emotions of the heart, and these things cannot be experienced anywhere except where you are your self in the company with the writer´s and your own imagination.

If you view everything as "texts" and puzzle your head about what use they could be put to, you have sinned against one of the most important premises of the book. You could call it its unpredictability, its ability to surprise; indeed, as a writer I will maintain that inspiration itself is the unexpected, the fact that life doesn´t always go all that smoothly and that the possibilities before us are without number, including those of surviving and loving without really knowing why, without claims and without demands, without - in a very instinctive way - knowing what is right and what is wrong.

"Here, the author has meant..." or "By this he is trying to say..." - how many times have excellent expounders of texts and well-intentioned politicians taken refuge in statements of this kind. Of course, no one is talking of abolishing the teaching of literature and shooting all teachers of Danish or professors or ministers of education. On the contrary, they must be kept very much alive. But it they want to contribute to giving books a chance, they must for a time play their part in undermining their
utility value in a banal sense.

One of the things to have made the world look so dreadful as it does at the moment is of course a disrespect for the anarchical element in art and thus in the book. Attempts have been made to train it to serve its purpose, and like any clown, art will fall over its own feet in a clear assumption that there is now an urgent need to get out of the burning theatre. It cannot be fitted into a utility framework - that is impossible; on the other hand, it is perhaps more useful than a hundred-and-one social reformers because constantly and ceaselessly it is concerned with examining the human condition; it shouts and cries out for tolerance, whispers about tenderness, offers dream and reality in a never-ending flow formed where the well-springs of the heart and the mind run together.


First printed in Kultur i en Krisetid, Lass Prudtz (ed.), Fremad 1980.