There Must Be a Place

Af : Camilla Christensen

The world office is mailing letters/to all the households in its area./I get one too./But it is not until I have peeled off/The paper with a fruit knife,/That I discover the words underneath/lack the mystery of the apple./Do I understand nothing?

This poem focuses on one of the central themes in the work of the forty year-old poet, Marianne Larsen, that is, the juxtaposition of the cold, artificial and linear language of authority against personal visions of an alternative and more organic logic, based on natural humane values.
   The poem ends with a question, which by virtue of the inherent value judgement of the poem, takes on the character of an accusation directed at "the world office", bureaucracy, power, even though it is apparently posed to the poet herself. The question stands as an assertion that it is the authorities which are the bodies with no understanding at all of people´s lives and desires. But the poem also shows that with his fruit knife and apple-logic, the individual is totally impotent when up against the social and all-encompassing so-called reality which is manifested here in the shape of an official letter.
   Marianne Larsen, who comes from a rural environment on Zealand and has studied literature and oriental languages, made her debut as a writer at the age of 20. Her literary production, largely lyrical, has been extensive, and like her now deceased fellow poet Ivan Malinowski, she has almost consistently retained these social contradictions as the primary subject-matter of her work throughout her career. In the 1970s this preoccupation fell in with the social and literary trend of the times; in the 1980s it was pursued in defiance of the prevailing ideologies and literary trends.
   In her anniversary book Fri Stil - Fantomtid (Free Composition - Phantom Time) as well as in her other work, oppression is confronted with Utopia, bureaucracy with brotherly solidarity, the language of power with the common language of humanity. But despite this, Marianne Larsen is not a poet in full mobilisation or at war, though she occasionally has been on the verge of falling into the trap, which could be called the rhetorical trap, and one which is arguably both tempting and almost unavoidable for writers who have placed the revolution high on their personal agendas.
   Marianne Larsen has largely managed to avoid this trap. She is very aware of the fact that if one wishes to confront authoring head-on, it is useless doing just that. Within a social framework, the only result of confronting might with might is that one oppressive and inhumane force is replaced by another, and within the artistic framework there is a tendency to fall back on majestic slogans and virile and expansive gestures, which disregard the very humanity which anti-authoritarianism claims to be fighting for.

The linguistic scalpel
Even if one fundamentally disagrees with the poet´s ideological background, it is not possible to deny her status as one of the most significant contemporary Danish poets. And this is primarily due to her special hallmark, her attentiveness. It is as though the poet were sitting as quiet as a mouse, listening intensely to that which is almost silent, to that which is totally insignificant, to the smallest strains and misgivings in the lives of individual people, and to the linguistic expression of these currents, as they occur within the enormous, deafening grinding machinery of production, consumption and bombardment by the media.
   But the poet does not stop at listening, for then she would not be a poet. She records the bombastic, almost total social "reality", and within this she inscribes the fragile voices, the tiny observations, the smallest hints of a breach in the linguistic and social order, the almost always unnoticed cracks in the smooth surface.
   She unmask the seeming logic of order, and in the process her pen is transformed into a scalpel, dissecting well-established semantic formations, examining the relationship between the feelings of the individual and the demands of society, incorporating the premonitions of the individual into a common experience, and creating correlations - and contrasts - between subjective perception and social reality. In her poetry the oppressed and crippled element in the individual is also the potentially liberating element, and the poems often express this duality of impotence and strength.
   She has commented on this correlation and contrast in an interview: "If the power was total, and the Establishment possessed it all, then it would be impossible to infiltrate and expose certain conditions. But power is not total.... One could say that the language of the Establishment is structured according to a definite logic, which only permits, certain things to be said, or the use of a certain kind of grammar which can only express certain things, if it is not to be self destructive.... I mean, one could imagine another language, with a different structure, which can express other things, which one has to say in order to be free." (Information. 18.9.1980).

The reality of Utopia
This "other language", these "other things" which have to be said in order to be free, have gradually become Marianne Larsen´s own poetic mode. The poet has gradually moved away from a lyrical engagement which particularly in the 1970s lay considerable emphasis on the function of radical social criticism. In the course of the 1980s she has moved towards a linguistic realisation of her ideas of a more humane world, and has worked on actualising her version of Utopia as a poetic reality, in the shape of stronge, more sensual but still incredibly fragile and sensitive images.
   The poem "Fantasi" (Imagination) may be cited as an example of a kind of practical poetics:

"The words are formed if cracks appear in a morning/and the afternoon light penetrates through the chinks.

They are substitute movements for the quiet/ just like the paraffin/ running down the side of an office block.

The words are formed by the wear and tear of wind and weather/ on the beak of a titmouse,/ and that which glitters and starts to drift softly/ every time there is a scratch on a car window".

Marianne Larsen has anchored her Utopian society in the idea of an original and benevolent nature, both in terms of human beings, as well as the world outside our windows; and which Utopian does not do likewise? The idea of the good life is apparently, inextricably bound up with the idea of origin, and this idea of original good is both politically and philosophically problematic, thus rendering any literary Utopia cqually problematic.
   But even though Marianne Larsen has shifted the emphasis in her writing from the dimension of social criticism to that of a Utopia, she has not forgotten that language - not even poetic language - must not be confused with the reality it describes and into which it is registered. And it is her very uncompromising search for these notions of ´the other´ in language, which transforms her poetry into a kind of realised Utopia - not a social, but an artistic reality.


Denne artikel blev første gang bragt i Danish Literary Magazine nr. 2, 1992

Oversat af Vivien Andersen