The Whispering of Gender and Language. On Inger Christensen

By : Lis Wendell Pape

Art and Existence
Although Inger Christensen is primarily a lyric poet, her oeuvre also includes a number of prose texts. The most outstanding of these is the major story Det malede værelse from 1976, which explores the themes found in the poet´s the systemic works: the relationship between Man, language and the universe.

Det malede værelse takes its title from La camera dipinta, a room in the palace of the Duke of Mantua, which the painter Andrea Mantegna decorated at the end of the 15th century. It is an interpretative reading of Mantegna´s Renaissance figures in which they are incorporated into a modernist context. The work consists of three stories, each in its own genre: a series of diary notes by a male narrator, a fantastic story in which the narrator is a woman, and an essay told by a child. The three stories interact, partly on account of the related characters in them. They supplement, revitalise and deny each other´s accounts in a complicated network. Most clearly, the second story with its chronological leaps forwards and backwards demonstrates the labyrinthine aspect of the structure, but the entire work can be read as a labyrinth. The labyrinth becomes an overall metaphor, not only for the story, but also for the view of life unfolded in it.

Det malede værelse is art written about art and is about art´s relationship with reality and power and its significance for understanding and existence. Thanks to its variety of registers it reaches out into the mystical in a philosophical reflection on the fundamental questions of existence. It moreover contains a discussion of the mighty but apprehensive figure of power who in order not to lose his accustomed contours decrees that everything shall be subjected to his order, and the curtailment such a demand for uniformity implies. This is confronted with three different utopian visions, each belonging to its own story: the barrier-breaking potential of art, the labyrinthine ambiguity of woman, and the child´s openness to the manifold range of the possible.

Throughout her oeuvre, Inger Christensen is preoccupied with the same fundamental questions: existence, sex, the body and the organic relationship between the consciousness and nature and the Cosmos - and, by dint of language, mankind´s special status in relation to this. Art is not only the place where these relationships are discussed and described – as in early modernism. To Inger Christensen, art is at the same time also the place where existence, sex, the body and consciousness can be put on the line, examined and tested, because they are the basis of poetical articulation.


Lis Wedel Pape in Elisabeth Møller Jensen (ed.): "På Jorden 1960-1990" - Nordisk Kvindelitteraturhistorie, Rosinante 1997.

Translated by W. Glyn Jones