Secret Channels

By : Merete Reinholdt

    "Supposing a Martian were to come down to Earth and hear the way we string words together when we talk to one another; he would think: God, how do you ever manage to understand one another," says author and poet Katrine Marie Guldager.
    And yet we do - understand one another, that is. Usually, at any rate. Each sentence, each story tends to be peppered with codes – or secret channels, as Guldager calls them – that enable us to understand things that are never put into words.
    "Half of the things we say are said in the assumption that people already know what we’re talking about. The other half is sheer beguilement: saying one thing, and meaning something quite different," she says.
    "Language is, after all, a pretty sensitive business. Try taking away all the standard ploys for leading one another on: all the things we take for granted, all the different messages we send out, and there wouldn’t be much left. And it would take us twice as long to say what we wanted to say."
...
    "That’s what writers do all the time, lead people on. You’re always seducing someone into believing in what you are telling them, even when it is a total fabrication, pure make-believe. Fiction seduces one into believing all sorts of things that are totally crazy and hopelessly and utterly unrealistic. In a way, the whole point of stories is to seduce the reader into imagining something, visualizing something, believing something. To make them think, to grab their attention."
    "It’s the same with everyday speech. And to some extent, making one’s living from language entails accepting that it is so fragile. As a writer, it is one’s job to bring out the nuances in language. In The Green Eye I’ve experimented with ways of doing things, without the reader being aware of it. Like, for instance, how many secret channels can be created, underlying what you are saying, but still getting through to the reader without anything being said in so many words."
...
    "In a way, it doesn’t matter whether the individual story is true or not, because it may be true in a fictional sense. When Liz (one of the characters in the book) keeps asserting that a particular story is true, in our imaginations it is true. In saying this, she is having a little dig at the reader, drawing attention to the fact that basically it makes no difference. We tell each other so many stories that are just not true. But at the end of the day what matters is what we believe. And if you believe something, then in a way it is true. If you have a fantasy and you act upon it, then it becomes true."

    At one point, the central character of Guldager’s novel says that far too many people adopt certain opinions for particular situations, only then to tuck them away like pieces of old jewellery.
    "Is that a dig at all of us?"
    "In a lot of ways she feels – and maybe so do I, although sometimes it can be hard to see where we agree and where we disagree – that the world in which we live is a bit too wishy-washy. Our opinions have become something convenient, to be brought out and aired only when they seem to fit the occasion. The rest of the time we keep them locked up in a safe-deposit box."
    "It’s as if we don’t necessarily have to mean anything by the things we do. And the same goes for art and literature. No one needs to stand by their actions: you can just say "ah yes, but this is art," and then it doesn’t really seem to matter what it is. Art has become a kind of carte blanche for saying any old thing you please."
    "Too few firm beliefs?"
    "I don’t know whether I would make such a generalization. But that is, at any rate, what Hanna reacts against. There’s too much that is gratuitous. These days it costs nothing to create a work that deals with death and violence and disaster, you don’t have to make any comment on it, or have any opinion regarding it. Not that I’m looking for a return to the Seventies’ sort of attitude, where you have to have an opinion on anything and everything."
    "Nonetheless, there are times when one can’t help feeling the lack of an ideal, in the classic sense of the word: an ideal of art, an ideal of life."

This interview was first printed, in its entirety, in Weekendavisen on October 30th 1998

Translated by Barbara Haveland