The Truth-Seeking Dog

By : Poul Erik Tøjner

In recent years criticism has undergone a paradoxical development. On the one hand, the creative mutuality of art and criticism has become less and less as art has assumed an immense array of forms. On the other hand, more and more is written relating to art - be it criticism or not. Literary criticism and art criticism have become specialized and often withdrawn from the perspective favoured by the old classical cultural criticism: the unifying essayistic overview. Carsten Jensen´s book Af en astmatisk kritikers bekendelser (From the Confessions of an Asthmatic Critic) rejects this specialization of literary criticism and the resultant decimation of cultural criticism. Jensen maintains that criticism is the focal point between personality and society. In it is a responsible genre driven by love of truth and longing for the world, being and value. But since none of these elements are static the passion for criticism becomes a challenge to the personality. A double challenge: you are consolidated by criticism - and you consolidate yourself through criticisin - but it also changes you. And the formula for this work is very simple. It is earnestness. And Carsten Jensen understands this. From the Confessions of an Asthmatic Critic is serious, personal and passionate. He doesn´t stand at a distance and swing the whip of polemics, but writes a text which itself is the best proof for his ideas.

The Bildungsroman
The title page says "essay", which is both wise and precise. But the book can almost be read as a novel - not for nothing has Carsten Jetisen previously tried his hand at both genres - both as critic and author. The book can lie read as a Bildungsroman, as may be expected, considering Jensen´s conception of criticism. It begins with the asthmatic Carsten, still afraid of the dark, spending a childhood among books. It ends with Jensen´s Christmas Night in war-torn Croatia, spent among the rubble. And yet it is almost misleading to present the book like this. It is certainly about the creation and refinement of an intellectual, but the process is not a straightforward and classical one from dream and imagination to action. It is coniplicared, accidental, full of dead ends and scruples and mistakes and misunderstandings.

The autobiography
We might also call it an antobiography. Very well - but the term requires a more precise definition. It is an autobiography written by a "self" rather than one about a "self". The "self" is the focal point of the book. It is this "self" that is behind the criticism of the understanding of art and criticism in recent times. It is this "self" that he holds on to as he ponders the many unacceptable answers to the question of why we need art and criticism. Not a stable "self", not a wellbalanced personality, not a narcissistic "me" but the right and the duty to say "I" and the right and the duty to use the word truth: that is the foundation.
On this basis and from this position the faulty conceptions of our time can be pointed out. And Jensen has an eye for them. The hidden afterlife of a unified culture still persisting in the youth culture is a violation of the relationships we sometimes think we only live in but which we in fact also live by. The hidden afterlife of avant-gardism in the combination of art and science forcing art into a linear cognitive perspective, the constraints of which are alien to it. Deconstructionism´s negation of meaning in language, yet effected by means of language. Recent philosophy´s insistence on the disappearance of the subject - but who is insisting? The examples are many and they are not just examples. They are what nowadays constitutes our culture: an unfathomable and often garbled simulation in which the works of art have been overtaken by the artists themselves since the public more easily identifies with the artist than with the art.

The truth
Especially two points of Carsten Jensen´s critique are gratifying. He is not the only one to make them but they cannot be repeated too often. The first is about truth, and here Jensen observes how the all-or-nothing logic is alive and well in many places in the intellectual segment of our culture. If you can´t have the entire truth carved in stone you´d rather do without it entirely and become a nihilist. But the from Delphi also apply in regard to truth: moderation in all things! The other is about the famous subject´s equally famous disappearance. The logic which has expelled it is the same: if you can´t say "I am who I am" with all the weight of the Old Testament then you'd rather do without and cling to a theory that says that in our time the subject has succumbed in the fragmentation and violent merging of time and place of our high tech society. The rebuttal of these two kinds of reasoning - which in practice are unfortunately more than mere reasoning - is precise and to the point.

The point of view
Those two points are not just a butt for Carsten Jensen. They also represent the opposition his text constantly attempts to overcome. It is a very personal text he has written; it seems honest but at the same time neither personality nor honesty are the elements that ultimately guarantee the truth of his text. It is what is actually said about the world that counts. About Octavio Paz and Luc Ferry, about the university as an institution, about Milan Kundera, Tzvetan Todorov and democracy, about Silone, Canetti, Orwell and Karen Blixen - Carsten Jensen´s book is an ideal essay, in which all these names and topics are effortlessly drawn into his search to explain his search. And he does not merely fill his essay with ideas, but he also manages to demonstrate its quality as a genre. The balance between personality and perspective is precisely what allows that even old and well known "truths" about the first and last things to carry weight, although heard and seen many times before. The form allows this repetition and if one wants to take this point to the limit one can say that in fact this is the point in Jensen´s view of culture: the right to rediscovery is the decisive repudiation of the hysterical philosophy of history that seeks to take away the past from us and at the same time to deny meaning to what is to come.

This article first appeared in Danish Literary Magazine nr. 3, Autumm 1992

Translated by Kim Andersen