Life in the Systems

Af : Erik Skyum-Nielsen

In April 1994 the Danish poet Inger Christensen received The Swedish Academy Nordic Authors´ Prize, also known as "the little Nobel Prize". Here the critic Erik Skyum-Nielsen introduces her work.

It is often with somewhat mixed feelings one receives the news that the Swedish Academy has decided to honour a Danish Writer with its Nordic Authors` Prize, often referred to in ordinary parlance as the "Little Nobel Prize". One rejoices on behalf of the recipient and perhaps feels a certain national pride as well; but at the same time it is a little irritating to know` that an obvious candidate for the other Prize, the "real" Prize, is hereby precluded from receiving it. That Henrik Nordbrandt and Inger Christensen as poets have their place among the great is something we have long known here in Denmark, and the fact that this is confirmed from Stockholm really makes little difference.

Although Inger Christensen (b. 1935) has written in many genres: poetry, short stories, novels, essays, drama, any effort to produce a comprehensive overview is bound to lead to the realisation of the determined continuity characteristic of her work as a whole. Ever since she made her first appearance with the volume of poems entitled Lys (1962) (Light), and right up to her latest publication, the sonnest cycle Sommerfugledalen (1991) (The Butterfly Valley), Inger Christensen accomplishes with admirable concentration (and in her own unpredicable rhythm) a quite comprehensive project of poetical epistemology.

Inger Christensen`s prime effort is directed towards what might perhaps be called the life of the structures and our life in the structures - in love, in the entire organisation of society and in the interplay between human beings and nature. On the sovereign terms laid down by art, her poetry investigates the relationship between on the one hand the order of language and on the other the (manifold) order of the world, i.e. the great coherences determined by nature and society, of which Man is part. In construction, therefore, her texts often become systematic in the extreme; the form must itself be able to produce its complex object via thought, the epistemological direction must emerge from the work`s own inner structure. Moreover, by constantly using mathematical and linguistic-formal systems Inger Christensen naturally also expresses the experience which poets always have expressed, but which she always radicalises - that is to say that the structure liberates the inspiration by confronting it with certain conditions.

Thus runs, in its entirety, one of the last poems in Lys, Inger Christensen`s very first book. A love poem. A poem that moves one deeply and which is itself movement - onwards, towards the day, away from the body and yet safely anchored in the senses. A song to the beloved, of passion, og passionate feeling, but also a meta-reflection on the singer`s own passion: the desire to formulate.

This poem reappears in Inger Christensen`s most important work, det (1969) (it), where the structure meanwhile has become even more formalised and systematised, divided up as it now is into a whole eight mornings, when an "I" awakens - and goes forth. For everything in this world (or everything Inger Christensen chooses to write about. and that is quite a lot: revolution, madness, love, nature, art) must in det be multiplied by eight and then again by eight and then by three. The result is a gigantic construction, a "cathedral of words", as the late Danish writer Hans-Jørgen Nielsen once called it, of 239 pages - perhaps the most important work of poetry in modern Danish literature.

Just as formally strict in its composition is alfabet (1981) (alphabet), Inger Christensen`s next major cycle of poems, in which the ecological crisis forms the starting point for a part ecstatic homage to the world and nature, which is spite of everything still is found: partly in the active sense that is "exists", partly in the passive sense that it is descovered and understood - by the poet and by us. Here we clearly sense a religious or at any rate distinctly metaphysical dimension which Inger Christensen had already developed in Evighedsmaskinen (1964) (The Eternity Machine), the novel about Jesus as mankind`s great question mark, and in Azorno (1967) (Azorno) a novel about seduction, constructed like a system of tiny Chinese boxes.

Poem and cycle of poems. Short story and novel. Or drama, for radio and for the stage (collected in En vinteraften i Ufa (1987) (A Winther`s Evening in Ufa) - there are various ways into Inger Christensen`s world. The way that requires the least preparation leads through the compact little suite of poems called Brev i april (1979) (Letter in April), while the quickest way, which is an intellectual short cut, is to choose the first part of the collection of essays Del af labyrinten (1982) (Part of the Labyrinth). But the most enjoyable way will presumably be the one taken in the company of Inger Christensen herself when we settle dowm to listen to her reading aloud. Those who have heard her many times still turn up loyally. Others still have something to look forward to.

The article was first published in Danish Literary Magazine 6 1994