Life with Its Sorrows and Camping

By : Frederik Stjernfelt

Per Højholt, undoubtedly one of Denmark´s greatest living poets, secretly underwent an extraordinary poetic metamorphosis during the 80s. The "classic" Højholt of the 60s and 70s had existed in roughly two versions: first, the poet who wrote strongly meditative poems acutely aware of language and self with equal amounts of inspiration from the modernist tradition and from the most banal and trivial routines of daily speech; and second, the theoretician who discussed these poems in the volumes of poetics Cézannes Methodology (Cézannes metode, 1967) and The Grimaces of Nothingness (Intethedens grimasser, 1972). Højholt viewed language as a screen capable of creating coherence in an incohecent world of time and coincidence behind the screen - and the potential of the poem, as a pure, functionless bite of language, was to puncture this apparent coherence and draw attention to language as language.

Højholt´s predominant contribution in the 80s, however, has been prose. He gained popular success with a series of monologues parodying a provincial housewife named Gitte, while at the same time continuing his critical examination of the metaphysical aspects of language, particularly, in its most everyday usage. Højholt also published three collections of so-called "blind alleys" - horror stories both parodic and meditative, with homage to Poe, Kafka, Blixen, and Borges. Upon closer examination, however, these three volumes of fantastical stories - The Lightning Museum (Lynmuseet, 1982), The Salamander (Salamanderen, 1986), and The Trickster (Hundekunstneren, 1988) - actually manifest a subtle continuation of the author´s poetic reflection of previous decades. Højholt the poet and Højholt the theoretician (their separation may seem paradoxical in the light of the leading conception of Language versus Nothingness) now meet in the fantastical narrative without difficulty and with spectacular and strange results.

Language - A Process of Nature
First of all, the very form of the blind alley is profoundly at work in the poetic material beneath the limits of the sentence. Although the genre of the stories is the gothic tales with its apparent coherence (made abundantly clear by the omniscient narrator who possesses an encyclopedic overview and is full of persuasive phrases such as "of course", "you know", "certainly", etc.), this narrative surface is constantly undermined by the fact that fragments of the story are mysteriously and inexplicably put together. In the same way, the very unity of the sentence, in the encyclopedic style, with its elaborate couplings of explanatory subordinate clauses and clauses subordinate to the subordinate clauses, perpetually leads the overall narrative into illogical detours and punctures it with linguistic pulls.

Second, this poetic activity takes place in tales which consistently deal with eccentric, marginal characters engaged in a lonely battle with the Totally Other: alchemists, country doctors, adepts, mystics, ethnographers, amateur researchers, dilettante thinkers, madmen of all varieties who are, in short, allegories for the poet and his situation. A good example of this is the title story in The Salamander. A lengthy, parodic, and encyclopedically philosophical foreword treats the need of the poet as the desire to find the one spot on earth where the sun is directly overhead at all times - and where all things are in a sense identical with their own shadows, their own images. Then we are introduced to a Danish maniac who is constructing a house (quite close to Højholt´s own house, by the way) with the intention of observing the sun and allowing its rays to execute alchemical metamorphoses, one of which (it is discovered after his death) has resulted in the creation of a perfect alchemical salamander. The key factor in this fantasy is neither the Todorovian hesitation or whether the reader actually believes in the strange events - the key factor is that the stories themselves, with their flaws, become horrific objects which exhibit poetic short circuits in both the main characters and the narrator.

In this way the "blind alleys" become both unburdened stories and theory at one and the same time. An interesting aspect of this development is that it denotes an important shift in Højholt´s skeptical philosophy of language. For although his skepticism regarding the metaphysical tendencies of language does continue and is even further elaborated upon in the "blind alleys", the narrative itself indicates that one level of reality - the one dealing with the fictional characters and their struggle with language, matter, and nature - suddenly exists, if not totally unproblematical, at least as an irrefutable prerequisite for the convolutions of meaning. This dualism, which previously in an almost existential way forced Humans and Language to remain at a distance from Nothingness, is dissolved here. Language too, with its need for unity and origin and its labyrinths of interpretations, is an indissoluble part of the very nature that it conceals, distorts, and acknowledges. The confusion once subjective, now actually becomes objective! Language too becomes a process of nature: the metaphysical misinterpretations are not merely all too human, but in a sense are part of nature itself! The subject is not merely a category which has to be deconstructed so that a hidden, amorphous nothingness can peer forth; it is an enigmatic condition, as one of the later blind alleys, with Borges as the protagonist, condudes: "I don´t know who is putting out a hand and touching her breast in this silence. I don´t know who is now cupping his hand around this warm, young breast. I don´t know who it is, but it´s me."

Nature and Anti-Nature
At this point the interesting question is of course, what direction will Højholt´s poetry take now? After a ten year poetic hiatus, his latest poetry collection was published in 1989: The Music of the Repeated ("Det gentagnes musik"). Truly significant changes are evident: Nature, the subject, even his beliefs undergo an essential and surprising revival. The word "I" (practically banned by Højholt earlier) appears on page after page, and the recurring setting shows this "I" in a garden in central Jutland, indistinguishable from Højholt´s own, wallowing in lyrical sensations of nature! On the surface this almost resembles a dive back into a time long before modernism and its skepticism, but a closer examination reveals something quite different. Instead reflection, skepticism, and metaphysical criticism are set forth in these concrete settings.
Here the "blind alleys", read as poetics, are actually taken literally. Metaphysics and its complications, are not inserted into the language at a distance from the world, but rather in the concrete, phenomenological, lyrical, even religious encounter with it. Whereas the earlier Højholt might have thundered against metaphors as worn-out metaphysical tropes, here there is an abundance of metaphors, even an excess of metaphors - in fact, such an excess that it clearly demonstrates that it is the interplay between the metaphors which makes perception and revelation possible. One example is the both parodic and beautiful death poem "& Ewald", which presents a truly bizare metaphor (wet stones = angel´s pates) as the basis for the thematization of the death of the "I". In "The person at the Top" we find a direct thematization of tension in contrast to the earlier Højholt and his preferred elements of banality and culture in poetry. In typical Højholt fashion a poem challenges like a highway like a "semi in low gear" "disgracing the yellowhammers" - and in astonishing contrast to this anti-nature, anti-lyrical poetics, the poem ends with the calls of the lark and forest dove. This is no resurrection of beneficent nature behind evil language; rather it is an indication that the world which language attempts to capture will, of course, always stand out as something other than the words with which you seek to grasp it. Even if this is a consciously modernist concept of language, it is the romantic concept of nature that will deny it - just as the opposite is true!

The Blind Eye of Nature
The poem "The Gaze" presents another constellation of nature and language which concludes, along with Saussure, that no "last or innermost" exists, and that the "I" is constantly fighting to free itself in fits and starts from the fundamental metaphysics. The "I" looks up and "recognizes the sparrow hawk´s argument with the wind". Even this perpetual battle with metaphysics mimics a form, and is imagined in a form that exists in nature, which is no longer an undifferentiated nothingness, but rather is full of sparring forms. Although nature, filled with problems, is poignantly and irrefutably present in these poems, it is less unified than ever before. In another poem, when the "I" considers casting itself out into nature´s "universal amniotic fluid", it is struck with hesitation: "In that case, what incredible monstrosity will a nervous, strained, and distant chemistry force prodigal nature to bring into the world?" It´s never clear what specific cycle you are part of when you think you are facing the unity of nature itself.

This lack of knowledge is what places this beautiful and thoughtful poetry collection in a state of constant tension between nature and observer, between God and language. On the one hand the poet asks: "Why sit here staring down matter, glaring nature right in the eye when it is blind?" - an ironic reference to a well-known quotation by the great Danish author Jens Peter Jacobsen ("Why live when we have to die?"). And on the other hand there is the demand of the observer to "be an answer something, there must be a question somewhere that would make me reasonable..." Questions and answers, blind process and ascribed intentions are all present, in a state of tension.

Sorrow and camping
Højholt´s perception of nature in The Music of the Repeated actually focuses on romanticism and dissolves modern skepticism, but it does so by presenting nature, the garden, birds, trees, and insects as an aesthetic experience in a specific sense: as that multifarious matter which involuntarily makes it possible to articulate and meditate on questions that cannot be answered. The border is dissolved between subject and object, between language and the world. And behind this dualism there is neither unity nor nothingness, but a struggling myriad of forms and processes which turns the metaphysical questions and conflicts into something played out within, rather than something external and distant from the world. With this insight Højholt occasionally, borrows themes and powerful prose from his old arch-enemy, Johannes V. Jensen, without assuming Jensen´s pathetic worship of the "I" in the experience.

It is quite in keeping with this new and unbanal "realism" that the innate tendency of nature poetry toward pathos is punctured by Højholt´s typical sense of irony and fits grounding in everyday matters. Extraordinary experiences of nature take place within the repeated framework of supermarkets, high-speed trains, and in literary models and patterns, as well as bold appeals to the reader ("man!"). Life - "with its sorrow and camping" as the poem says - is played out tensed between the music of the repeated and the uniqueness of spontaneous actions, neither of which call conceal the other any longer. Repetition and originality are only visible here as cracks in each other.

This article first appeared in Danish Literary Magazine 1, 1991