The Cronic Guilt

By : Erik Svendsen

"And then he had run a little, and then thought that he would overcome it, as long as he could forget it, as long as he could forget it for a little while. Then life would begin again, nothing would be like before, but the way he wanted it to be, and then he would be like everybody else, and nobody would know anything about who he had been."

Happiness is being normal. In Denmark. The nameless, young mate protagonist of Jens-Martin Eriksen´s novel shares that dream. To disown his peculiarities, his past, in order to become one of the many, an ordinary family-man: for that the young man would run to the end of the world! What he can´t escape, however, no matter how fast he runs or which route he takes is the history that shaped him. The shadow follows the fugitive and his flight only strengthens the inevitability of what he wants to forget.

A fundamental idea of modern art was to pursue "the new" and give it form, while traditions were renounced. As opposed to this the postmodem demands of more recent times reject modemism´s dream of "the new", arguing that "the new" long since has become tradition and nothing but a watered down, fashionable version at that. Consequently postmodern voices accentuate the break with history, which in turn becomes an interesting museum anyone may freely tap into.

Eriksen´s character might dream about this same looseness. His own destiny, however, contradicts this postmodern need to take history loosely. The writing on the wall in The White Wall is that man wants to grasp life and understand his history. Language is the instrument of cognition, but it is also words, and these make man helpless. Because the painful experiences he is carrying can hardly be contained by language.

Nevertheless it is this feeble language and his desperate thoughts to which the author clings. Externally he is almost silent, internally his world is an ocean of claustrophobically grinding voices of which the larger part are self-reproaching, self-efficing, rooted in a fragile super-ego; there are no complacent words, no selfpraise. The story-teller, with whom Eriksen obviously sympathizes, is a humble, infantile outsider. An ego so fragile that it persistently appears as "he", third person singular. The narrator isn´t capable of naming the world and all personal names are replaced by pronouns. To him the world is a white wall.

Fragments
Even though The White Wall is an interior monologue, a long stream of thoughts gliding through the author as he is lying on a bridge staring into the dark waters, it is to some extent of a polyphonic tale. Its composition is Henrik Ibsen´s drama turned a 180 degrees. Not the catastrophe but what followed it is what is crucial. A life with the indelible marks of catastrophe, a life which constantly attempts to find mean~ ing despite its traumatic history. The chronology is broken and the decisive end-scene lies early in the boy´s life. However, it throws its sinister shadow across the narrator´s life, which slowly and in fragments is revealed through constant shifts in time, a life which is coated with the narrator´s language, concealing and revealing at the same time, streaming and filled with associations. What the reader doesn´t know but vaguely senses, the narrator knows! Conversely the painful and unpleasant knowledge the narrator carries is precisely the history he wants to forget. But this history invariably, pushes itself forward, because without confronting himself with his deepest experiences of death and loss of love the narrator will never reach the declared goal of his dreams: to pass a reality test and become an adult. He will not enter the kingdom of normality until he acknowledges his traumas. But this man, who considers himself an absolute zero, is radical in his search. He walks the plank.

The White Wall ends with the story-teller, as in Luc Bresson´s film The Big Blue, sliding into the world of the ocean to be close to those seals his soul is reflecting itself in, "just to throw himself blindly down into all that darkness and disappear", as the first page of the novel says. Disappear from an earthly life where he has failed as a father not being able to comfort his wife when the couple´s little son dies. The wife whom the narrator refers to symptomatically as "the girl with the red hair" or "the girl with the green eyes" leaves her selfdestructive husband, whose future is the final perdition. The surrounding world is a heap of fragments to the narrator and he can´t see even his beloved in her entirety. Like his life she becomes specific details which prod the man on, but she can´t break through the narrator´s blind defense mechanisms.

His role as fatherly authority he cannot play, just as he doesn´t grasp his surrounding world. He fails fatally, but not, as he thinks ridden with guilt, because he is a bad person or carries "evil" within him. Eventually evil is nothing but the infantile person´s internalization of the horrible experiences of which he is a victim.

Unsuccessful Cognition
His guilt is not greater than the one Oedipus carried, but as opposed to that tragic figure Eriksen´s man is hardly allowed to love his mother devotedly. She died a shadow of a human being when he was a little boy, and his father´s upbringning of him consisted mainly of spitefulness and neglect. His big sister, who left home when she was quite young, functions as a mother-substitute in the narrator´s mind. The boy feels closely tied to his sister - and this then the true horror of the novel: he obviously is tied to her, since she is his mother! Right after his sister´s confirmation the boy´s deathly sick "mother" was taken to the hospital and the father grabbed the chance and raped his daughter. When the boy hears of this, told by his obscenely drunken father, his mouth fill of herring, the lonely 8-year old narrator takes out his father´s gun and blows the brains out of this Satan incarnate. In his imagination the narrator is Gabriel from the Bible saving the world.
Words crumble for the narrator, just the way time flows together. He can´t keep together all the bits and pieces his desperate self consists of. Desire, degradation, remorse and selfhatred become a unity in a discourse which the author Prefers not to make a great to-do about. To others he is silence itself, since a man with a past in a boy´s home - where he is placed after the murder of his father - isn´t worth worrying about. So say others and the narrator agrees in silence. Therefore he attempts to mime words, which of course he isn´t capable of doing. Not that he isn´t sufficiently talented, perhaps he is, but because his life is too great, his destiny too cruel for the logically well-organized language.

There is a paradoxical element in Eriksen´s art - and this is its significance - namely, the co-existence between the breakdown of consciousness and the craving for a cognition, which ends blindly. This is the essence of The White Wall. An essence the reader isn´t served on a silver platter, but may decipher by following the leitmotifs of the text, its repetitions, its omissions, its shifts and strains. By noticing what disappears: the cognition, which it isn´t possible to live with. Thus Jens-Martin Eriksen´s novel about a history which is an impossibility and yet is man´s only ballast - although it isn´t precisely carried by the waves of fashion - places itself beautifully with renewed spirit aniong the good old modernist traditions.

This article first appeared in Danish Literary Magazine nr. 1, 1991.