As the Flight of Clouds
- Interview
By : Erik Skyum-Nielsen
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"Actually, I only wrote what I felt like writing, what I thought was fun. I thought, if there is a situation somewhere, if there is poetry somewhere, somewhere with spiritual depth, then go for it and to hell with the rest! I learnt to operate with gaps, with omissions, and it has been very strange because I was not sure that it would work, I just did it.
But I have found out what it is possibly like. If I know what I jump over - it can be a detail, but it can also be five or ten pages - I do not have to worry, I do not have to write it because the reader discovers it and does not consider it lacking. The reader becomes active and can personally conclude things, "Oh, like that." But if I do not know, it could for example be a detail I do not know anything about or something I am confused by, then it does not work. Then the reader suspects mischief and senses that the writer does not know what he or she is writing about and will lie his or her way out of it.
I thought this was strange. One can evidently rely on a silent agreement or a common knowledge between reader and writer. This is something one can rely on as though them were a reality behind the language that has no words, that is silent, but where one can consequently expect to find the reader somewhere. When I am here then he or she is also there, and I can jump with assurance. I do not even have to say it, I can just do it"
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"The fact that one as a prose writer does not spread out and use the material one has, but makes do with that which contains intensity and quality is sheer extravagance. But I thought that perhaps here there might be a new way of operating with the reader, by not completing the tale but instead allowing things to be presented without the intermediary transition: so far with this, stop, now we begin at another point and continue there, oops, now we go back. The important thing is not to act as an intermediary but to present it in blocks without arguing for it, and without explaining it. This is very satisfying."
If we move from composition and the technique of story-telling to the aspect of style, it appears striking that you write in a more lapidary way in the four novels from the round table than when you used Mikkelsen as the first-person story-teller. There are lots of new elements of style: short sentences, sentences without verbs, sentence subjects, sometimes also referential sentences which do not in fact refer to the preceding sentence but to the sentence prior to that or to the sentence before that again, in such a way that the writer can play on "I wonder where the reader is?" and a number of stages can be omitted. You even make use of word inversion, an old-fashioned "oral" narrative feature: "Friends they had not become" is said about Sivert and Aksel in Springet (The Leap). You write, "Surplus they had, nevertheless" about Akselīs parents. It is almost as though we are hearing Herman Bang in Ved Vejen (By The Road), "Children they did not have" - A terse way of forming introductions. Can one describe the change in your art of story-telling as a shift from having Henrik Pontoppidan to having Herman Bang as your model?
"It was most definitely an ambition to write in another way. And certainly, a weariness of the style of reasoning and an annoyance at Pontoppidanīs amazing explicitness was a part of it. He is said to be ambivalent, and he is, but sometimes he is also so explicit that one says, "This is too much of a good thing, we have got the message."
I have not re-read Bang, because I have always thought that I could never be so good, so artistic as him. But there is another writer who has helped me a great deal, also concerning gaps, and that is Milan Kundera, especially his early works, for example Laughter and Oblivion. That book had a density and ruthlessness in the manner in which it broke things off and re-started them."
This interview was first presented unabridged in Bogens Verden (Book World) I993 volume 75, number 2
Translated by Ian Lukins
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