In the End was the Word

By : Marianne Ping Huang

Jens-Martin Eriksen´s novel De uforsonlige (The Relentless Ones) makes bodies and language leap forward to the beginning of a story

"You understand: one is. One gets up in the morning, and looks into that mirror, and then one can ask oneself, who are you, and you are you, and there is no one to reply, and in a way I don´t know what a story is supposed to be, not any really, which couldn´t be different."

This is what Alex says to Monika Foss in Jens-Martin Eriksen´s novel, De uforsonlige (Per Kofod 1991) (The Relentless Ones). Alex and Monika have just met each other for the first time. Quite by chance they were walking toward each other on the street, and now they have to play out the age-old story. The novel takes place in the course of a single night; an amorous encounter that is raw wicked, and wonderful - and that turns into more than a mere one-night stand. What exactly it leads to is left ambiguous: the novel concludes with the beginning of a story. For it is not the objective of The Relentless Ones to relate what happened later and how they lived, but to present a devastating epiphany, in which the two of them start to become human beings, in which the passage of time and the cessation of time invade the body, losing itself in this meeting with another body and another person´s words - and past. So that ultimately speech is possible and one´s life can be told in more than anecdotes.

In the dark
In The Relentless Ones, as in Jens-Martin Eriksens´s other novels, the intention is to reveal a story or a life story, to transmute the in tolerable painful moments (especially of childhood) into words that will last, to render countless scenes into words. Then, it is hinted, one can set off and live for a while. One might think that Eriksen´s novels are cut from old cloth, that they are about development, crisis, choices, love...

In the beginning of The Renlentless Ones we are in a linquistic space where the stories are all too familiar and yet have never really got started, where the same thing is related in one long endless series of fragments and details, the stories of Alex and Monika from their respective familial hells of loss, betrayal, twisted love, and violence. These stories and the terrible urge toward repetition contained within them as long as they grind away in loneliness and monologue, are familiar from Eriksen's other novels, where the common theme is the impossibility of putting the intolerable images into words, which at times flow disjointedly, then at times cling together all too well in vitally false projections.
"And so the words flow, when you have locked yourself inside your lousy, nicely furmished, shitty little loneliness, don´t they, Monika, then it seems to come all on its own, then it's so easy to be released from all your guilt there in the dark, isn´t it."

Time to love, time to talk
Unlike the preceding novels, in The Relentless Ones (which is supposed to be the start of a new direction in Eriksen´s work) there are two protagonists, two voices, who not only have to come to terms with themselves but also with each other, in a corporeal and linguistic "acting out" - wheezing, screaming, whispering, and copulating - and potential stories are tossed out until they reach a point where they can speak, as Alex says, "in the old language," in which the body´s profane entrances and exits are connected to an almost divine language, and words like "guilt" and "suffering" bear the weight of a real story.

The Relentless Ones tells its story through its style; the language is more active than descriptive. All the old stories are literally torn apart, turned upside-down and inside-out, played out and played through between two bodies and the speech of two people. Fragmented dreams, memories, and projections course through chains of metaphors and deceptions into one another - first Monika is Alex´s mother, then his sister, then he is her father. While Alex and Monika move around in the city and circle around each other's bodies, they enter each other´s memory and self-interpretation, and the novel´s rhythm becomes more and more ferociously erotic, jolting through "the Darkness", "the shit", "the gold in your ass".

The Relentless Ones has more atonement in it than Eriksen´s other novels do. The verbal violence typical of his writing seems to break through here, to find a response to its courage to mutilate. The dark loneliness cannot be opened up quietly, it must be flayed open, and this takes place in the act of love in The Relentless Ones. In his earlier works love was presented as so distorted and in every case so lost. In this novel love is no less wicked, but more possible; it is the true atonement in the demand for the courage to lose oneself and speak.

"But if one wants to love, if one is lost, the one also loses oneself in the other as one loves, and then one becomes another, and then comes another life, and another story after this one. Father, father and mother, mother - they lie dead in their graves, and we have only ourselves, we are no one else."

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