Stories of Lost Love and New Beginnings

Af : Britta Timm Knudsen

Christina Hesselholdt´s third novel condues the tone and power of her previous works, but it stands apart from the other two in being much more narrative.

The young novelist Christina Hesselholdt (b. 1962) writes minimalist novels; minimalist in the most literal sense of the word in that the books are very thin. Size apart, however, they manage to speak with depth and authority. The size of the books is due to Hesselholdt´s literary intention to condense and "melt down" her text, leaving only what is absolutely necessary. There is nothing superfluous in this at once naked, yet light prose. We are already familiar with the minimalist aesthetic of this century; I refer in particular to Beckett and authors such as Marguerite Duras. Their works are characterised by the sense of space without a centre around which the text continually revolves and which forms its (paradoxical) core.
       In some ways, I do not feel that Hesselholdt conforms to this branch of the modernist avant-garde. Her tone is too light, indefinably ironic and intricate.
   Hesselholdt does not concern herself much with the world outside the body. Both Køkkenet, gravkammeret & landskabet (1991) (The Kitchen, the Burial Chamber and the Landscape) and Det skjulte (1993) (What Lies Hidden) are explorations of psychological emotions, imaginings and fantasies about love. The reader could be forgiven for wondering which space is being described in Det skjulte. On the one side is a room in town, on the other is a chamber of the heart. The text illustrates the intersection between the inner and the outer space.

Imaginings Space
- and spatial categories in general - are important to Hesselholdt who seeks to explore the significance of these concepts in our psychic lives.
   The characters in Det skjulte are known as Greta and Marlon, and their actions are as stereotypical as their names. The people in Eks (1995) (Ex) have been named not after film stars, but after characters in some of the very oldest stories known to man, namely the Testaments: Thomas, Luke, John, Daniel, Judith. Whilst the film stars can be said to represent a modern form of mythology, the biblical characters belong to a more ancient mythical tradition. Hesselholdt uses the symbolism and the myths to tell us something about her characters, who should be seen in relation to these images. The author knows full well that the images are transparent, almost simplistic, and that the use of name symbolism is an old literary trick. So why this added clarity?
   Several possible explanations exist, but two spring immediately to mind. On the one hand, the author uses well-defined symbols to show that the sexes, sexual characters and love (which are the themes in all three books) are a matrix of timeless stereotypes in which we recognise our own images; on the other hand, the clarity of the images helps to reinforce the strongly metafictitious feel which characterises her texts. The writing is very much about itself as a piece of text, something in which she is true to the advanced modernism of the 1960s (Per Højholt, Inger Christensen, etc.). Kirsten Hammann is another author from the 1990s who is in many ways very similar.
   More precisely: if we concede that it is characteristic for the novel genre to thematise itself, as so many novel theorists claim, then that is not what sets Christina Hesselholdt´s writing apart. It is more likely to be a metatextual Orphic consciousness (what is the source of poetry?) that informs the aesthetic.
   Whilst Det skjulte explicitly exploits the relationship between body and text, Eks explores the narrative´s power to work itself into our existence: the seeds of love in the story are sown as the two main characters, Daniel and Judith, talk their way into each other´s lives.

Stories in the conversation
The two main characters meet in a doctor's waiting room and begin telling each other the stories of their failed marriages and their previous love affairs. As they talk themselves out of the past (the life which is narrated), they use their conversation (the story being told) to move towards their possible meeting. We are given pieces of lives which, despite Hesselholdt´s untragic and lightly ironic prose, still manage to convey a sense of sorrow; sorrow for lost love which manifests itself in thoughts of murder and suicide. This is illustrated by Daniel who, in a fit of kamikaze-like bravery brought on by a few mouthfuls of brandy, practises running a red light on his bike.
   Watch in this small excerpt how the author uses simple linguistic tricks to bring a familiar scene of jealousy to life:
   "Mat´s who I meant. I hated. I hated my wife´s hands on his too large body I hated, my hate came on like an earthquake and I was drunk. I wanted him to die, or something. So I smashed my bottle on the edge of the bar, suddenly there was silence all around me, and grabbed the neck. The glass I waved at him looked like petals".
   Antithetical metaphors (the broken glass = petals), sentences without an object (I hated), incomparable comparisons (I wanted him to die, or something), pregnant contractions of the comparisons (earthquake).
   The excerpt also clearly illustrates another of the characteristics of Christina Hesselholdt´s style: it is highly stylised; the tone is that of a true poet.

The tone of the narrative
Hesselholdt is no baroque poet, however. The prose is in no way frilly or overabundant, we are instead much closer to the pure geometry of abstraction, the beauty of form. The reason that Hesselholdt´s universe can seem sparse is perhaps that she seeks to examine the fundamental cognitive states: space, time and the relationship between body and text, identity and narration. And that alone is not something to be ignored, the difference merely lies in the way she achieves her aim.
   When an author like Svend Åge Madsen examines the relationship between identity and narrative it happens in a closed, labyrinthine structure; Hesselholdt´s style is tight and light with small, unexpected quirks in the language. The mysterious and puzzling aspect of her text is not as pronounced in Eks since the novel consists of stories about relationshops and love as opposed to pure imaginings. Elements of real life therefore manage to creep into the myriad images which make up the book.
What is being examined is love´s point of contact in the other´s body, along with the feeling of imminent revenge about to boil over (something which happens quite comically in the case of Daniel who, in addition to the scene cited in the excerpt, gives his ex-wife and her new lover Peter a load of, hopefully, poisonous mushrooms), the sense of emptiness and the tears when love has flown. Nevertheless, Eks still manages to sow the first seeds of love.

Denne artikel har tidligere været trykt i Danish Literary Magazine nr 9, 1996.

Oversat af Malene S. M. Tingley