New Ears for the Century

On Auricula

By : Lars Bukdal

Per Højholt’s monumental novel about the behavior of certain ears--yes, ears!--among the avant-garde and other good citizens during World War I makes for wise and zany world literature.

“Nothing odd will last,” Dr. Johnson once observed about Laurence Sterne’s meandering novel Tristam Shandy, but literary history has proven him wrong.
   In its own time James Joyce’s all too bizarre Finnegans Wake was also foolishly dismissed as the work of a madman. Still, as time has shown us, the fantastic and genuinely singular cannot be held down. In fact, Tristam Shandy serves as an acknowledged model for Per Højholt’s gigantic new novel Auricula (Latin for “ear”), in which James Joyce actually appears as his own tall, visually impaired self. When it comes to eccentricity, Højholt bows to neither of his predecessors.
   Typical for a novel of such epic proportions, Auricula is strange in a completely commanding and original way. The writing style’s thrilling detail is clearly related to Tristam Shandy, just as the use of nonsensical inventiveness owes much to Finnegans Wake. Højholt’s intense employment of consistently dizzying fantasy also recalls Kafka, another of the book’s obvious influences.
   The entire enormous novel rests on an anecdotal idea which first struck the author back in 1978. Since then the novel has been slowly taking form--and all the while a great number of us have been waiting and waiting and waiting.
   Here’s the premise: On September 7, 1917, for one moment, there was complete silence in Western Europe. The children who were conceived at that moment had company in the womb: a separate and independent outer ear, auricula singularis, which--nine months later and with varied success--was also “born.” The novel’s first three sections relate fragments of the history of these ears. In the first section we wander around with a group of ears in Sweden, Norway and Spain. In the second section a group of ears hangs out with a string of avant-garde bigwigs: in addition to Joyce and Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Eric Satie, Virginia Woolf and Ezra Pound, all of whose works, it turns out, deal with or have been influenced by the ears. The third section focuses on a single member of the avant-garde--the illustrious Marcel Duchamp and his (and his art’s) lifelong involvement with a group of ears.
   The fourth section offers a detailed treatment of “The Biology and Psychology of the Ears” (for example, the ears turn out to be highly sexual beings who become excited at the slightest provocation and who exhibit a special weakness for typography). They deny any experiences and are, of course, not equipped with any subconscious mind; the reason that they move in groups is that circling alone will never get them anywhere.
   The fifth section, which is supposed to deal with “Danish Ears,” ends abruptly before it actually gets started, thus underscoring the work’s principle of openness and ongoingness. Dear reader--there could well be an aging ear sitting behind you right now!
   As one can readily discern, this is no typical novel. As with Tristam and Finnegan the reader is either intrigued forever or--like Dr. Johnson--shaking his head all the way out of the library. The novel is also a witty, loving catalogue of the avant-garde, not to mention a brilliant monograph on Marcel Duchamp’s preposterous work, from the great glass over the ready-mades to that provocative peephole in the closed door at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
   What is truly fantastic and disturbing, however, is that the ears always seem to be meddling--and that they are fundamentally incomprehensible. Basically, they defy interpretation. They are the evocation of the avant-garde dream of nothingness (of course the ears cannot actually hear anything!), the very incarnation of Roland Barthes’ “Pleasure of reading”--just before they roll themselves up like small peculiar, completely autonomous inventions that are just as infuriatingly ridiculous as they are cunningly touching. Not to mention frighteningly convincing.
   You can make the sign of the cross seven times, but they are still there. You see them now, don’t you dear reader? There--just behind your chair.
   There are many Per Højholts. There is the sensitive, late-symbolist newcomer in the beginning of the fifties; the strong and wildly experimental author of the sixties and the seventies; the folksy entertainer of the eighties; the snappy, postmodernist story-teller and poet in the eighties and nineties. Højholt number two and four have been especially influential on a number of contentious and ambitious Danish authors. Echoes of all Højholt’s earlier incarnations appear in the great Auricula, but its author is--yet once more--totally new and different. Because the book is something totally new and different. We have simply never seen anything like it.
   While the ears unfold inside the book and inside your head (and right there behind your back!), you cannot believe your own eyes. And to your own ears the novel whispers promisingly, the echo of a wilder and wiser and happier literature from somewhere in the future.

Lars Bukdahl is an author and a reviewer for Weekendavisen. This article first appeared in Danish Literary Magazine 20, Autumn 2001.

Translated by Mark Mussari