Seeking out the soul in the body

By : Gert Emborg og Ivan Z. Sørensen

Christina Hesselholdt has published two novels: Køkkenet, gravkammeret & landskabet (Kitchen, Burial Champer and Landscape) from 1991, and Det skjulte (What Lies Hidden) from 1993. The second of these deals in part with Marlon, who meets Greta, whom he eventually kills and dismembers.

Both of your novels have been described as minimalist. Could you possibly define what that means, and how you feel about such a label?
   It came as something of a surprise to me. Minimalism, to me, is a term from the art world, where minimalism, as it manifested itself in the Sixties, represented an attempt to create a non-hierarchical system within works of art, where all of the different elements carried equal weight. An attempt to reduce the emotionalist aspect to the minimum. Ideally, it should then be impossible to construe the work of art in emotional terms.
   But I feel that my writing has a very different, expressive power, and that alone ought to disassociate it from minimalism. Nor do I have any desire to create a non-hierarchical system. As far as I’m concerned, some things are more important than others. So I don’t really understand why my books should have been given this label. I suppose it has to do with the fact that my books are short, so it seemed easiest to call them minimalist.

The scenic novel
As opposed to the traditional style of novel, with its "old-fashioned" narrative line, your books tend to be split up into a series of short narratives. Why is this?
   I think in terms of short scenes, short sequences. It’s something that I’ve gradually become aware of. Piecing together a narrative out of short scenes is what comes naturally to me. I suppose I would call my books scenic novels.
   Does inspiration drawn from other media play any part in this?
   I see a lot of films, and I’m pretty certain that my writing style has been influenced by the way in which a film is cut. I find it fascinating to see how much time can be cut out, while still managing to construct a coherent storyline. How much time can be dispensed with, without the thread being lost.
   I don’t describe how a character walks from one room to another. I just cut to the next room.
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   Your cutting technique, and the concept of the scenic novel as a genre – are these an expression of some sort of cognitive process?
   Right now, I’m giving a lot of thought to the extent to which I am capable of perceiving my own past as a continuum. As I see it, I only have a handful of images and scenes to go by. It would be interesting to know how other people feel about this – whether it really is the times in which we live that give rise to this mind-set or whether it is something more general, something that is just as true of other ages; I can’t say. But where self-knowledge is concerned it poses a crucial problem.
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Gender and time.
The trend seems to be for this pared-down, or cutting-room, style to be favoured mainly by young women writers.
   Yes, in Denmark certainly. But not, for example, in Norway, where you have writers like Tor Ulven and Paal-Helge Haugen - to name just a couple – as male exponents of a similar style. And I can´t really see any closer link between gender and style. Although there is possibly a time factor. All of the experimental forms of prose writing flourished in the Sixties, along with a spate of experimentation in the visual arts and in the cinema. Possibly because at that time – with the growth of capitalism – there was this sense of time being compressed, a feeling that everything was happening very fast, and new forms had to be found to fit this state of mind. And maybe it was there, in the Sixties, that people began to see just how short time was. And to some degree, artistic expression became more fragmented or disjointed in form.
   And now the same thing is happening again, with the Nineties picking up, as it were, some of the threads from the Sixties.

Behind the episodic and understated style of What Lies Hidden there lurks tremendous drama. After I was finished that novel I thought a lot about the murder scene and about the actual act of dismemberment. First of all, it stands as a metaphor of my chosen form: a body consists of individual elements, my novel consists of individual elements. If you imagine that, at one level, every work of art makes some commentary on its form, then this dismemberment could be viewed as just such a commentary. The murder is committed by cutting in to the bone, and this is a metaphor for my style, my pragmatism; that’s what I’m trying to do, to get at the essence of things.
   At the same time, in thematic terms, I see the murder scene as a symbol of the central character’s longing to look on the soul of the woman he loves. A symbol of love, of what happens to people when they fall in love: how much they want to really see the other person. What I’ve done here is to crystallize this desire in a rather gruesome fashion.

Seeking out the soul
Seeking out the soul in the body – can this also be read as a general cognitive process?
   At one point, Marlon says of Greta that she is the closest he can come to himself; as if he has no concept of his own identity. And again, this can perhaps be related back to the time factor: if one is incapable of experiencing the past as a continuum then, one way or another, the question of identity will always arise.

Translated by Barbara Haveland