‘All my books are essentially about language’
Authenticity and mediation in Tomas Espedal‟s work
By Rozemarijn Vervoort
Master‟s thesis Research MA Literary Studies
Augustus 2014
2
Table of contents
Acknowledgements 3
1 Introduction 4
2 Espedal and the experience of trauma 10
2.1 Identity-formation in relation to trauma 10
2.2 Hardship as a motivation for writing 13
2.3 Isolation of trauma versus the position in a literary context 17
2.4 The effects and expressions of trauma 21
2.5 Repetition: Missed encounters with the real 26
3 Reality hunger, the „middle region‟, and the rendering of the self 30
3.1 The „middle region‟ 30
3.2 Reality hunger 34
3.3 Autofiction and the „middle region‟: The self in the 21st century 38
3.4 „All my books are essentially about language‟: Reception and text-external 44 author poetics
4 The authenticity of process-aesthetics and metadiscursive commentary 55
4.1 Espedal and the failure of the „middle region‟ 55
4.2 Process-aesthetics: Collage and hypermediacy 57
4.3 Self-reflexivity 61
4.4 Metadiscursive commentary 62
5 Conclusion 66
3
Acknowledgements
Firstly, I want to thank my thesis advisor Suze van der Poll, who helped me with enthusiasm and positivity, and who gave great advice when I had trouble finding my focus.
I want to thank SIU (The Norwegian Center for International Cooperation and Education) who granted me a scholarship that allowed me to do part of my research in Oslo.
I also want to thank Elisabeth Oxfeldt, my supervisor in Oslo, who was very enthusiastic about my thesis topic and helped giving direction to my thesis.
I want to thank my parents and sisters for continually supporting me and for offering distraction when I needed it.
And finally, I want to thank Joost for believing in me even when I did not, for giving me inspiration and encouragement when I was stuck, and for being ready to read my drafts any time of day (or night).
4 „The writing lamp and the light from the window; life and the written life, were these two different things?‟ Tomas Espedal, Imot kunsten (notatbøkene) (2009)
„The beauty of reality-based art – art underwritten by reality hunger – is that it‟s perfectly situated between life itself and (unattainable) “life as art. ”‟
David Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (2010)
1 Introduction
One important feature characterizing the 21st century so far is the blurring of the distinction between the private and the public in combination with society‟s hunger for reality. As a result, aspects of the private life have not only become available to the public, but they have also become subject to public discussion and involvement, consequently becoming public property. The trend of making the private public has not only inflected social life and politics, but also contemporary art, and more specifically literature, has also been characterized by the personal dimension it has acquired as a result; the private life in the 21st century has become art. An early and significant example of this focus on the private and the intimate is the work My Bed (1998) by Tracy Emin, who presents as a work of art and an artifact of her life the bed – soiled sheets included – where she spent a period of depression. Not only is such an artwork important in itself, but the public‟s and critics‟ reactions to a work of such personal nature have also become important to the context of an artwork, creating a dialogical space that incorporates both the artist and the audience.
The public‟s interest in the private has led to an increased interest in the concept of the self in the context of 21st century society and culture. Tomas Espedal (born 1961) is seen as one of the central contemporary Norwegian authors who incorporate their personal life in their literature, specifically in fiction. The work of contemporary authors is often characterized by the attempt to unite life and writing – each reinforcing the other – and the search for identity in and through literature, and as a
5 result it exemplifies the discourse of the rendering of the self in the 21st century. The combination of the contemporary search for the self and the „reality hunger‟ of the public has resulted in the
development of a hybrid literature, i.e. combining aspects of reality with the creative project of reworking this reality into art, using combinations of different media and art forms. This hybridity is also characteristic of the work of Tomas Espedal, who for example often refers to visual art in his work.
After his debut in 1988 with En vill flukt av parfymer, Espedal published twelve literary works that all combine autobiographical elements with fiction. The central theme of these books is the death of his mother and, later, of his wife, which both were traumatic experiences that motivated his writing. In his latest book Bergeners (2013), Espedal breaks with the trend of incorporating his personal life in his work. Instead, the book is a declaration to Bergen, his beloved city, and its inhabitants. Biografi
(glemsel) (1999) was the turning point in his career; marking the first attempt at coming to grips with
loss and mourning through literature. The book initiated the search for the „ultimate, impossible book‟,1
just like Karl Ove Knausgård and Dag Solstad claim to do. In the works that followed, Espedal continued this search for the ultimate book by incorporating hybrid forms and different genres, all contributing to an encompassing and always-unfinished work that explores the innumerable aspects of life, identity, and literature. While initially Espedal‟s work was relatively unnoticed in Norway, he became more well-known in the Norwegian literary scene after winning several literary prizes and receiving nominations for the prestigious Nordisk Råds Litteraturpris for Gå eller kunsten å leve et vilt
og poetisk liv (2006) and Imot kunsten (notatbøkene) (2009). He does not, however, take a central
position in the public debate concerning the use of autobiographical content in literature.
As Arne Melberg points out in Selvskrevet. Om selvframstilling i litteraturen (2007), the presence of elements of an author‟s private life in his work is not a recent development in literature at all; there are clear indications that elements of writing the self can already be found in Montaigne‟s work, although not written with the purpose of presenting a view on the self or on his own identity,
1
Morten Auklend, “Drømmen om boken” in Prosopopeia, 2 (2000): 5-8. [drømmen om å skrive den ultimate boken, å utgi en eneste BOK]
Espedal, Against Art (the notebooks), translated by James Anderson (London: Seagull Books, 2011), 44. [He dreamt of the unwritten book. The book that would have everything in it. […] he dreamt of the impossible book]
6 and therefore not classified as autobiography.2 Melberg notes that, where in earlier works containing autobiographical elements it was mainly death that motivated the author, now exile and loss are among the main subjects that incite autobiographical writing.3 This trend is also reflected in Espedal‟s work, where he uses the pivotal point of trauma as a starting point for his literary enterprise.4
Although Espedal has not been on the forefront of the discussion concerning autobiographical
literature in the 21st century, he is considered an important contributor to the autofictional „genre‟ by a number of critics.5 The hybridity of his works and the literary tools like performative biographism and self-reflexivity that he uses to construct a realistic effect are determining elements that place him in the autofictional trend of the 21st century. Since the private becomes public when an autobiographical work is published, a comprehensive image of the author can only be constructed by combining immanent and text-external author poetics, but also by taking into account the reception of the work.
Because Espedal uses literary tools that make self-rendering possible but that simultaneously place a screen between his personal experiences and the reader, his assumed participation in the contemporary autofictional trend is different than might be expected. I think his work does not offer a strictly as authentic representation of reality in the autobiographical elements, but instead creates an authentic effect in its meta-discursive content, which discusses the reality of literature. My goal is not to establish what the biographical elements of the books are and how truthful they are, since this is not only hard to determine but does not give the reader any better insight into the author‟s intentions. Instead, my starting point will be the influence of society‟s reality hunger on contemporary literature, and how the effects of this craving are reflected in Espedal‟s work. While the reception of his work
2 Arne Melberg, Selvskrevet. Om selvframstilling i litteraturen (Oslo: Spartacus Forlag, 2007), 14. 3 The use of these themes is not a new development in literature either, see for example Dante‟s Inferno.
4 Another Norwegian example of an author who incorporates these themes in his work is Per Petterson (1952). In contrast to Espedal, Petterson is an author of greater international renown than Espedal because he has received several prestigious international literary prizes for his novel Ut og stjæle hester (2003).
5 See for example: Kari Løvaas, “Nødvendigheten er en gave” in Morgenbladet 03-10-2003.
Bernhard Ellefsen, “Å tenke med hånden: det er dette som er å skrive” in Vagant 3/2010 (2010), 16-28. Johan Harstad, “Man skriver. Man arbeider” in Klassekampen 18-12-2009.
The question of autobiography as a genre has been debated extensively throughout literary history and the different literary discourses of their time. See for example De Man (1979) and Melberg (2007). I agree with Melberg and De Man that autobiography defies generic definition, but that it can be applied as a characteristic in different genres, lending a text an additional, personal dimension that places the author not only behind the work but also as part of it.
7 mainly lies outside of his control (though not outside his influence, since in interviews he can steer the public‟s view and understanding of his work), he apparently uses his literary work and his appearances in the media as a platform that supports his position in the literary scene as an author who partakes in the hybrid genre – specifically that which experiments with incorporating personal experiences in fiction.
I have chosen to use Imot kunsten (notatbøkene) (2009) as the primary source in my analysis to make clear the relation between Tomas Espedal‟s work and his place in the contemporary debate about the changing boundaries between public and private life and the representation of reality in literature. The book has been translated into eighteen languages, and the English translation, Against
Art (The Notebooks) by James Anderson, came out in 2010.6 Imot kunsten (notatbøkene) is a key work in Espedal‟s trauma-centered writing, which is reflected in the structure of the work. As the subtitle
(The Notebooks) suggests, the book seems to consist of random notes put together, giving it a
fragmentary appearance. Imot kunsten (notatbøkene) is dedicated to Espedal‟s mother but also discusses the death of his wife Agnete, and is divided into two parts, entitled April and September. Each part signifies an important point in Espedal‟s life; his mother died in April, his wife in
September. Imot kunsten (notatbøkene) consists of different narrative threads – the lives of his parents and grandparents, his youth, the sickbed of his mother and the preamble to his wife‟s death, he himself staying behind with his daughter, and ultimately, the writing itself – that are interwoven without clear distinction and written in a mixture of prose and almost lyrical passages. Because Espedal addresses the same topics in several of his books, I will also use Dagbok (epitafer) (2003), which discusses the death of his wife and his mother as well, to highlight the literary tools he implements in his work, to construct a realistic text and in his discussion of realism in literature. Dagbok (epitafer) was first published in 2003, and was republished in a bind-up with Biografi (glemsel) (1999) and Brev (et
forsøk) (2005) in 2010, thus suggesting a coherence between the three. Dagbok (epitafer) is made up
6 All English quotations from Imot kunsten (notatbøkene) come from Against Art (The Notebooks) (2011) and are translated by James Anderson. Unfortunately Dagbok (epitafer) has not been translated into English, so the English quotations are my translation. All the English quotations that originate from Norwegian articles, interviews, and papers are translated by me as well. The interview with Marc-Christoph Wagner for Louisiana
Channel has English subtitles, so I have used those in the quotations taken from that interview. In the case of
8 of an eclectic mix of styles – diary entries, description of photographs, and letters – which lends the text a fragmented character, its coherence found in the overarching themes of loss and writing. The death of his wife and his mother highlight the isolation Espedal experiences afterwards, and these combined events give him the opportunity to present a search for his identity; as they also indicate the inescapable moment of moving on. Espedal relates his narration of loss and moving on in combination with a description of his authorial life; the deaths of his mother and his wife are a pivotal point in both books which is important for the process of self-rendering, yet most important is not the fact that his mother and wife have died, but how their deaths have influenced him and his writing.
In this master‟s thesis I question how Espedal incorporates the blurring boundaries between the private and public sphere. I want to look at the way Espedal presents an image of himself both in his work, by using autobiographical content – specifically trauma –, and in interviews where he comments on his work. Furthermore, I want to examine how this construction of identity positions him in relation to self-rendering in literature in the 21st century and Joshua Meyrowitz‟s concept of the „middle region‟. I postulate that Espedal‟s work also distances him from the cultural tradition of the „middle region‟ because he actually does not divulge as much of his personal life as it may seem and instead addresses the discussion about the possibilities of authenticity in literature.
I first present how Espedal connects his traumatic experience of loss to the process of self-rendering and how he presents the effects trauma has on his. Espedal‟s narration of trauma is an entrance into the subject of representation of reality in literature, and I explain Espedal‟s methods using trauma theory. Then follows the literary context of autobiographical writing in the 21st century, in which the concept of reality hunger motivates the emergence of the „middle region‟ and self-rendering in the 21st century. I present Espedal‟s text-external author poetics expressed in interviews and the reception of his work in the media, showing how he presents himself in relation to his work and giving an overview of how Tomas Espedal and his work are perceived in the media.
I then show how Espedal replaces the personal with the universal to create the possibility of conveying his traumatic experience through remediation, intertextuality, hypermediacy, and process-aesthetics; I also show how they simultaneously distance the reader from Espedal‟s private life. Then I
9 discuss self-reflexivity and the meta-discursive topic of the experience of reality through literature, and how Espedal incorporates this discussion. I consider how the blurring distinction between on-stage and off-stage comes into play in this situation. Finally, I show how Espedal succeeds in creating the illusion of situating his work and his personal life in the „middle region‟, while he actually distances himself from the reader and lifts the reality of the text to the discussion of the possible representations of reality in literature. So while he ultimately does not meet the demands of society‟s reality hunger in offering unhampered access to his private life, he does present the realism of the meta-discursive discussion of literature and reality and allows for a dialogical connection with his readers.
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2 Espedal and the experience of trauma
2.1 Identity-formation in relation to trauma
In Imot kunsten (notatbøkene), the point of departure for Espedal‟s writing is the identity-formation that is necessitated by the traumatic events of losing his mother and his wife. This self-rendering begins with the sense of self that he had before the trauma changed him, starting with the establishing of his name: „My first name was made in a factory, cast in metal, and had a certain permanence‟.7 From this follows the construction of his identity from several angles, notably divided into before and after the deaths. While he used to have an identity that was relatively stable and clear, albeit based on his relation to others, after his experience with loss his identity is exemplified by the trauma it caused and his sense of loss and bewilderment. He mourns not only his loved ones but also the impact that losing them has on his own identity: „My name is spoken, repeatedly, it isn‟t the right name. […] My style will alter as well, gradually, as when we exchange one name for another, one sentence for a new one, that first sentence, it must be soft as wax.‟8
Espedal‟s identity is now determined by the trauma; his identity can now only be constituted on the basis of the continual influence of the traumatic event.
The distinction in Espedal‟s identity-formation is reflected by Frank Ankersmit distinction between two types of trauma that are connected to the demarcation of experiences „before‟ and „after‟: the first type of trauma leaves the identity intact, while the second necessitates the transition into a new identity where the former self is lost forever.9 In Imot kunsten (notatbøkene) the latter of
Ankersmit‟s conceptions of trauma is applied: the former self only remains in the knowledge that it is lost, and could be perceived as the self of someone else entirely. The trauma causes a permanent distortion in Espedal‟s life – he does not know how to navigate his life without his wife, how to measure up to the necessity of taking her place in raising their daughter, living in her house –, but it has also distorted his sense of self.To convey this loss of identity, the novel is structured in accordance with his identity: demarcating a „before‟ and an „after‟. Because the trauma has parted his life into a
7 Espedal (2011), 5. 8 Espedal (2011), 199-200. 9
F.R. Ankersmit, “The Sublime Dissociation of the Past: Or How to Be(come) What One Is No Longer,” in
11 „before‟ and an „after‟, writing can become a platform to „create a self after an original identity has been lost‟.10
And this is also how Espedal divides his self-rendering: his identity before the trauma is constructed from the lives of his parents and grandparents, where the similarities and differences with them created the person Espedal was. After the trauma, however, he can no longer fall back on what used to constitute his identity. Where Cathy Caruth and Shoshanna Felman, leading scholars in the field of trauma studies, focus on how trauma can be conveyed to other people, and what effect this can have on both the victim and the public, Frank Ankersmit remains focused on the nature of trauma and the influence it can have on the victim. Although a traumatic event can only be perceived as something absent in the experience of the victim, it does create a demarcation of „before the event‟ and „after the event‟, splitting the life of the traumatized in two, situated around the schism where the trauma itself has been erased from the consciousness. In Imot kunsten (notatbøkene) Espedal reflects on his former self and simultaneously creates the new identity that is necessitated by the trauma. Espedal describes this as follows:
How the house collapses, falls, the structures fail and the windows shatter, the roof snaps in the middle and plunges towards the floor; an internal avalanche that leaves the facade standing without rooms.11
While it first seems that the facade still stands although everything is radically changed, the facade ultimately has to fall under the force of the change too, making the loss of identity complete: „The facade stands for a few minutes, before disintegrating under the weight of destruction, from the thought that we‟ll be moving out.‟12
This loss is the main theme of Imot kunsten (notatbøkene): the trauma of losing not only someone, but also of losing a sense of self that can never be regained but that he will always long for. The new identity of the narrator Tomas Espedal is constituted by both the longing for what was and by the resignation of knowing that it never again will be restored.
The memory of the trauma is always present and will always remain painful. The distinction between „before‟ and „after‟ is not absolute, but exists only in remembering of what used to be. Even if the new life seems to overshadow the memory of what used to be, the trauma will have a continual influence on the life of the traumatized person. As a result the victim is placed both in and outside the
10 Melberg (2002), 18. 11
Espedal (2011), 137. 12 Espedal (2011), 137.
12 trauma, because he continually remembers the former experience. As a result, he can only relive it by mediating the experience, which consequently places him outside the traumatic event and creates distance. Here, the desire for the (irretrievable) past becomes, and can only be, a desire for knowledge and a motivating power for narration. This is the paradox of the presence of something that will always be absent, and it exemplifies the ambivalence of the need to describe the indescribable. Ankersmit explains the continual influence of trauma and the resulting longing for the experience: „Knowledge can never satisfy the desire for being, though it will naturally have an insatiable want to do so.‟13
The traumatic event can never be assimilated, but its unresolved nature ensures its continual influence. The awareness of this effect of trauma is what Caruth and Felman highlight as crucial in the understanding of trauma and for the survival of its victims:
[Understanding can open up] a perspective on the ways in which trauma can make possible survival, and on the means of engaging this possibility through the different modes of therapeutic, literary, and pedagogical encounter.14
Not only does Espedal relate the attempt to find himself again after the loss, but he also maps out how trauma can influence an individual, finding that living with and writing about trauma has an inherent ambivalence. This makes his narration simultaneously unreliable and at the same time realistic in its description of trauma. The awareness of the unreliability of his narration is also reflected in Espedal‟s description of the lives of his parents and grandparents, which he uses to construct his own identity based on the similarities between them. He situates himself in his family, using the narration of his family tree and the detailed family history as a stable foundation on which he can build his identity. The ambivalence that results from the combination of their lives with his is set off against the certainty of traits he inherits through his family – e.g. his urge to work hard and get completely submerged in his work from his father and grandfather, his love for reading from his mother, his story-telling from his grandmother – they all contribute to the rendering of the person he was, before the trauma changed him. Although cause and effect do not apply in this case, the similarities between his (grand)parents and him are an affirmation of his identity. They seem to confirm his identity in a way that calms his
13 Ankersmit (2001), 305. 14
Cathy Caruth, “Introduction” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, edited by Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 10.
13 uncertainty about his identity after the traumatic events, but his narration of their lives also exemplifies his uncertainty with respect to his identity crisis and identity construction.
However, he simultaneously makes the reader aware of the fictional nature of this narration. According to Ingrid Krogh Nøstdal, who analyzes Espedal‟s use of autobiographical content and fictionalization in her master‟s thesis, Espedal not only constructs an identity through his writing, but he also creates a new dimension of reality by fictionalizing the lives of his family members.15 Their existence is real, but Espedal presents fictionalized snippets of their lives that serve the construction of his own identity in relation to theirs. I find that these fictionalizations contribute to the realistic effect of the text, precisely because he confesses the speculative nature of his narration of the other
character‟s lives; authenticity is found in the confession of their unreliability.16
Espedal expresses both doubt and certainty when he narrates the lives of others, often even in the same sentence:
He fell in love with her; I think he fell in love with her, […]. I‟m certain he tried to stop seeing her, […].17
He likes being alone; I know that he likes being alone, […].18
She was in love; I believe she was in love, she must have fallen in love with him.19 It could have been like that, it must have been like that; I like to sit here at my writing table and think about the first time she invited him home.20
Notably, his expressions of certainty also hint at the speculative nature of these fragments; they suggest that he is not only convincing the reader but also himself by underlining the high probability of his narration, the fact that it „must‟ have happened like this. His confession of doubt gives the text an authentic quality, and the certainty he expresses aids the authentic effect of the text since he can say this with some confidence because it concerns his family. So, paradoxically, the ambiguity of the narration of the lives of his parents and grandparents gives the text a realistic and authentic nature.
15 Ingrid Krogh Nøstdal, “„Den siste man skal stole på, er en forfatter.‟ Performativitet og identitet i Tomas Espedals Imot Kunsten (notatbøkene)” (Oslo: 2011), 33.
16 I initially intended to use the term reality instead of authenticity, but the use of „reality‟ is problematic since it cannot be determined if and how reality is actually present in literature. I therefore have chosen to use
„authenticity‟, because this is a term that indicates an effect that can be perceived by the reader, whereas the successful representation of „reality‟ in literature cannot be determined definitively. David Shields also comments upon this distinction between reality and an impression of reality: „Realness is not reality, something that can be defined or identified. Reality is what is imposed on you; realness is what you impose back. Reality is something you could question; realness is beyond all doubt.‟ (David Shields 2010, 99).
17 Espedal (2011), 37. Emphasis added. 18 Espedal (2011), 65. Emphasis added. 19
Espedal (2011), 96. Emphasis added. 20 Espedal (2011), 98. Emphasis added.
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2.2 Hardship as a motivation for writing
Espedal‟s identification as a writer is the one aspect of his work that is deliberately used as an unchanging, fixed theme, which always supports and defines his portrayal of the development of his identity both before and after the trauma. In Imot kunsten (notatbøkene) he constructs his „before‟-identity from the lives of his grandparents and parents, and lets their lives – literally – interweave with his; with his mother‟s typewriter he inherits his identity as a writer. This writing is what determines him as a person, and already before he has lost his mother and his wife, when a girlfriend leaves him, he notices the fact that it is hardship that facilitates his writing:
[P]erhaps it was this loss, this almost unendurable longing, this terrible hurt, that is now completely vanished and irretrievable, like a wound that heals and turns into a scar that becomes part of the skin, […] it disappears among other wounds and larger scars, but perhaps it was precisely this first wound that enabled me to write a novel at last.21
Throughout the book, he discusses very minutely how his writing style developed, highlighting the acquired insight that he needs bad things, sadness, a lack of comfort, to be able to write: „I move to a place I‟ve never been before. I go home. A new book; a strange place. A new book; a new home, uninhabitable, as always.‟22
He suffers from the inherent contradiction of not liking change but simultaneously needing the difficulty of change to fuel his writing. This understanding, which he acquires through the process of reflecting on his development as an author, is presented as an
elemental part of his identity. Even if the act of writing is not comforting in itself (as Espedal also says in the interview for the Louisiana Channel),23 the knowledge that he is a writer no matter what – even when he has lost everything else that defined him –, gives him faith. Difficulty is a platform that he can use to rebuild his identity, and Imot kunsten (notatbøkene) presents the construction of this new identity with the knowledge that he fundamentally is a writer.
21 Espedal (2011), 191-192. 22 Espedal (2011), 196. 23
Marc-Christoph Wagner, “Tomas Espedal: My books are about language” on YouTube, Louisiana Channel. 21-05-2013.
15 However, the effect of the loss of his wife and mother necessitates a new approach to writing and a new approach to conveying autobiographical experiences, and this dampens his faith in his own ability to write:
He did outlines and experiments, wrote a number of openings and drafts. He gathered them in his notebooks. […] This, that everything, it gets too much for me. I give up. […] today my work ground to a halt, it‟s falling to pieces: me, the book, everything.24
Earlier a painful experience could motivate his writing, while but after losing his mother and his wife the early attempts merely results in failure. However, for Espedal the traumatic experience has a formative aspect as well, which has a positive influence on his writing, and occupies a central place in his work:
I couldn‟t give up writing, it wouldn‟t be stopped, and it continued, against my will, to keep me working after I‟d gone to bed […]. These strings of words, these sentences […] they broke in and glowed as if they were full of meaning, of a deeper meaning, they contained an entire book. I had to write them down.25
The more he writes, though, the harder it is, especially about topics like loss or loneliness, but, it is this interdependency that challenges him as well. In the interview with Siss Vik for NRK TV Kultur og
underholdning,26 but also in Dagbok (epitafer), Espedal explains that he always wants to reach beyond what is easy, to do more and in different ways, than what he already knows. He uses trauma as a motivation for writing, while the difficult nature of trauma simultaneously threatens to cause a writer‟s block. Still, Espedal tries to avoid to be overtaken by his trauma by facing it head on. He describes his relation to the difficulty of writing in Dagbok (epitafer), where writer‟s block is represented by his friend Harold Costello, „the writer that doesn‟t write‟. Whereas Costello is paralyzed by the challenges of writing as a professional author, Espedal finds motivation in difficulty; the process may be hard, but the result is satisfying.27 Costello states that although he has the urge to write, he just cannot seem to do it. He cites Thomas Mann: „A writer […] is a person that finds it harder to write than other people.‟28
Espedal finds he resembles Costello in his pride for all the books that he could have written
24
Espedal (2011), 44. 25 Espedal (2011), 41-42.
26 Siss Vik, “Bokprogrammet: Tomas Espedal” for NRK TV Kultur og underholdning, 05-11-2013. 27
Tomas Espedal, Dagbok (epitafer) (Oslo: Gyldendal, 2010), 198.
16 but has not done: „All the books I could have written with ease, that would have confirmed a talent, a style and way of writing, but that I haven‟t written out of pride.‟29
He recognizes himself in Costello, but he is also different: „He is my image. An example? No. I want to go further, move out of that image, leave it behind.‟30
Where Costello stops because he finds it too hard, Espedal wants to use this challenge to his advantage, and deliberately chooses themes that seem indescribable.
One of the themes that Espedal uses to motivate and challenge him by their difficult nature are the deaths of his mother and his wife. While their deaths did not take place at the same time, to Espedal they are inextricably connected in a single traumatic event. They are perceived as one entity because of the effect they have on him. The main motif of his work is not merely the fact that they died that is important, but rather how this experience has influenced him. Caruth explains: „for those who undergo trauma, it is not only the moment of the event, but of the passing out of it that is traumatic; that survival itself, in other words, can be a crisis.‟31 These events cause a trauma of such magnitude that the majority of Espedal‟s work centers on them, and they shape the way he implements his self-rendering in his work.
Knowledge about the nature of trauma combined with awareness of its continual effect on the victim – „its endless impact on a life‟32 – make, according to Felman and Caruth, an important contribution to the understanding of trauma and its victims and help to incorporate the knowledge of trauma in the public sphere. An example of this are legal cases where the testimony of victims can be taken into account and can ultimately lead to the conviction of, for example, war criminals. While the traumatic experience of the victim is not something that can be conveyed objectively and completely, understanding the nature of trauma can help in validating and using testimonies in relation to topics that are still hard to process in the contemporary legal system.
Espedal repeats this quote almost literally in Imot kunsten (notatbøkene): „[…] each book must be better than the last, it‟s a rule that makes it almost impossible to write; an author, wrote Thomas Mann, is someone who finds it harder to write than anyone else.‟ (Espedal 2011, p. 154.)
29 Espedal (2010), 202. [Alle de bøkene jeg med letthet kunne ha skrevet, som ville bekreftet et talent, en stil og skrivemåte, men som jeg av stolthet ikke har skrevet.]
30 Espedal (2010), 202. [Han er mitt forbilde. Et forbilde? Nei. Jeg vil videre, skal ut av dette bildet, forlate det.] 31 Caruth (1995), 9.
32
Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 7
17 The metaphor of the collapsed house that represents the destruction of Espedal‟s life, also indicates that his own words no longer suffice to describe the experience. He can only express the failure of language to convey how the trauma has affected him. Thus, Espedal has not only lost his former identity, he has also lost the ability to describe his personal experience, which has important implications for his work as an author.
2.3 The isolation of trauma versus the position in a literary context
In several interviews Espedal has expressed that his own traumatic experience offers a good starting point to experiment with the possibilities of language and literature,33 since it requires new ways to describe something that cannot be understood or conveyed. While the trauma of losing both his mother and his wife in a short timespan undoubtedly has influenced his personal life severely, he presents the self-rendering that results from this trauma as the first step in his exploration of the possibilities and boundaries of literature. In these interviews he does not elaborate on how he means to „explore and challenge‟ literature, instead he relates how he was introduced to literature through his mother‟s books, and how this eventually led him to the essential works of Thomas Mann, Marguerite Duras, Marcel Proust and Peter Handke. He claims that every reader eventually ends up with these writers, and that they have been the main inspiration for his own work.34
These intertextual references and the ones he incorporates into his work place him in a literary context and invoke a deliberate interdependency. All his references refer to authors and artists that incorporate themes like loss and a search for identity or present an attempt at self-rendering, just like Espedal uses in his own work. In the interview with Marc-Christoph Wagner for Louisiana Channel,35 Espedal refers to Thomas Mann‟s Buddenbrooks (1901) as an inspiration of both style and subject. In
Imot kunsten (notatbøkene), Espedal reuses the atmosphere of decline that Mann presented in Buddenbrooks; Espedal‟s working-class background comes to an end in his profession as an author,
33 Auklend (2000), 5-8. Vik 05-11-2013. 34 Wagner 21-05-2013. 35 Wagner, 21-05-2013.
18 which places him in the middle class. The working-class‟s decline meant Espedal‟s progress: he made the existential choice to become a writer, to live for his ideals, and still curious where his writing will lead him.
Another important inspiration that Espedal incorporates in his work and that determines the literary context of the work, is Marcel Proust‟s À la recherche du temps perdu (1908-1922). In
multiple interviews Espedal has presented his intention to transfer the feature of Proust‟s language that represents the upper middle-class – „the language of literature‟ – to the working-class environment Espedal grew up in.36 In the interview with Martin Grüner Larsen in Klassekampen, Espedal states that he wanted to move Proust‟s style over to what he, Espedal, was familiar with, namely the working class: „I didn‟t want to write in the working-class language. Literature belongs to the middle class. I wanted to use its language, Proust‟s language, to describe the working-class spaces, try to fill them with the magic Proust fills the aristocracy [sic] with.‟37 For Espedal writing literature for the working-class creates a paradox: „I knew that I couldn‟t write for the working-working-class, because the working-working-class does not read books. Nobody in the Espedal-family does.‟38 Espedal embodies the combination of opposites that his father‟s working-class family and his mother‟s middle-class family represent, which mean the end of the working-class tradition in his family and the introduction of a new era.39 Here Espedal transposes Proust‟s model onto his modern situation: Espedal‟s work represents the hybridity of his position as a writer from a working-class background. His choice to be a writer means a
departure from the Espedal-family‟s traditions, and his trauma-induced loss of identity means a new beginning based on his identity as a writer.
Notably, Espedal‟s use of intertextuality is not always obvious, and in the case of Proust he only implicitly refers to the original author of the passages he re-works into Imot kunsten
(notatbøkene). Examples of this use of allusion are two scenes where the narrator Tomas wakes up
36 Martin Grüner Larsen, “Veien fram. Avslutning: Etter tolv år og seks romaner har Tomas Espedal bestemt seg for å slutte å skrive om seg selv” in Klassekampen 17-09-2011.
Wagner 21-05-2013.
37 Larsen, 17-09-2011. [Men jeg ville ikke skrive på arbeidernes språk. Litterature tilhører middelklassen. Jeg ville bruke dens språk, Prousts språk, og beskrive rommene til arbeiderklassen med det, prøve å fylle dem med den magien Proust fyller aristokratiet med.]
38 Larsen, 17-09-2011. [Men jeg visste at jeg ikke kunne skrive til arbeiderklassen, for arbeiderklassen leser ikke bøker. Ingen i familien Espedal gjør det.]
19 and does not recognize his room: „One morning I awoke and couldn‟t recognize the room I was in; I assumed I was spending the night with a friend, or perhaps in a hotel, the bed was by the open window,‟ and „You shouldn‟t lie like this in the darkness, arms wrapped around yourself. Morning is coming. The names return and the day begins.‟40
This is almost a word-for-word rephrasing of a passage from Proust‟s In search of lost time in which the protagonist Marcel wakes up and does not recognize his room either. Based on the definition of allusion as described in Dictionary of Literary
Terms and Literary Theory, this particular example is an imitative allusion:41 Espedal does mention Proust by name, so that only the reader who has read Proust or who is familiar with his work and its place in literary tradition will recognize this reference. In this case the connotation of the passage is shared between the author and the reader and the distance between the two is diminished by a shared tradition. It invokes a new connection between the author and the reader, creating a mutual
understanding. If the reader does not pick up the reference, however, this passage will have no special connotations for the reader, adding no extra layer of meaning to the text, and leaving the distance between author and reader intact.
Espedal does not only refer to other literary works. Both in his work and in interviews he refers to authors who have inspired him. In the conversation between Bergsvåg and Espedal, it is not so much Espedal‟s work that is discussed, but his thoughts about being a reader.42
They discuss the authors that are his main inspiration (at the end of the interview a convenient reading list with Espedal‟s
recommendations is included), and how he tried to apply their specific style into his own work. He admits that he even travelled literally in the footsteps of the authors he admires; e.g. by following the way Rimbaud travelled on a trip in France and finding it almost painful, albeit educational and interesting. He states that walking is a romantic notion that was introduced by Rousseau, and a lot of poets and philosophers have been influenced by it in their work.43 He explains that he uses the works of other writers (and sometimes even a recreation of their travels and habits) to get a grasp on their language and style, to study their technique. It helps him to understand why a text is good, and how he
40
Espedal (2011), 20, 77.
41 J.A. Cuddon, The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, rev. C.E. Preston (London: Penguin Books, 1999), 27.
42
Henning H. Bergsvåg, “Lesere kan lukte hverandre” in Bok og bibliotek, 7 (2005). 43 Bergsvåg (2005).
20 can use this understanding to his advantage in his own work. He admits that he also has been guilty of “stealing” the work of others.44
In his work, Espedal mentions many authors he knows personally by their first name, making it harder for the reader to understand the reference: „Monica wrote somewhere: to me smoking has always been a movement.‟45
Often this namedropping only consists of a first name and is vague about the source of the quote. He uses snippets of conversation, again using only first names, although sometimes the reader can deduct that he had this conversation with another author: „Henning says: write down everything you understand by writing‟, „Karl Ove once said at a party: you write good.‟46 While Karl Ove is a distinctive name that many readers, especially Norwegian readers, will recognize, Henning is a much more common name, and Espedal does not suggest in any detail to whom he refers.47 The only conclusion that can be drawn might be that Espedal moves in literary circles, and that he often relates to the opinions and words of other authors in vague terms. However, he also openly refers to authors that have inspired him: Thomas Mann, Peter Handke, Ann Jäderlund, Kristian Lundberg, Peter Waterhouse, Klaus Høeck, Geoffroy de la Tour Landry, Leo Tolstoy and Marguerite Duras, but also artists and musicians like Alberto Giacometti, Christian Boltanski, Pierre Bonnard and Maurice Ravel.
Espedal‟s use of intertextuality allows him to use words of others in his own narration to convey what he cannot say in his own words, but his references also deliberately place him and his work in a literary context. The fact that he is well-read justifies his opinions on literature and enhances the impression that he has the right to comment on his own work as well. He underlines his own style by pointing out that he could have imitated others easily in the beginning of his literary career: „I‟d already read quite a number of books, and occasionally, not very often, but now and then, I thought I could have written the book I‟d just read.‟48
As he develops his own style and reiterates this
44 Bergsvåg (2005).
45 Espedal (2010), 130. [Monica skrev et sted: for meg har røyking alltid vært en bevegelse.]
46 Espedal (2010), 127, 128. [Henning sier: skriv ned alt det du forbinder med å skrive.] [Karl Ove sa en gang på en fest: du skriver godt.]
47 Now, after reading and watching interviews with Espedal (Bergsvåg 2005, Vik 2013), I dare to guess he refers to Henning H. Bergsvåg, his colleague and friend, who is also a well-known figure in the literary scene of Bergen.
21 development in Imot kunsten (notatbøkene), he still discloses his sources of inspiration but also weaves their voices into his own style. The polyphony that Espedal incorporates into his work allow him to convey what he cannot voice himself, and they strengthen his content by echoing what he wants to convey, even if this has become difficult as a result of trauma.
2.4 The effects and expressions of trauma
The paradoxical need incited by trauma to reflect upon the indescribable cause of the traumatic experience, is an important theme that Espedal claims to use to exemplify the possibilities of
literature,49 while it at the same time relates the reality of trauma. The subject of trauma gives the text an authentic character and offers the reader a possibly authentic view of the personal life of Tomas Espedal. Furthermore, trauma and loss are subjects that have been used in autobiographical fiction as a motivation for writing, as they offer a premise for remembering but also for new beginnings. The combination of trauma and literature has a double purpose; it can be discussed to explain its effects, but it can also be used therapeutically to overcome a traumatic experience. The loss of his mother and his wife serves the determining autobiographical experience that Tomas Espedal deals with both in
Dagbok (epitafer) and Imot kunsten (notatbøkene). The traumatic experience of loss has influenced his
life as an author by hampering his ability to write and simultaneously offering him a deeply challenging subject that cannot be ignored. The pain and uncertainty that result from a traumatic experience are used by Espedal to create a link between his life and the work; i.e. he uses personal trauma as a starting point that allows him to experiment with the expression of realism in literature. To understand how trauma works in Espedal‟s books, it is important to look at trauma theory in general and its relation to writing and literature.
The theory of trauma has been the subject of many interdisciplinary studies with numerous angles of approach, also in literature and criticism where it is a popular subject. The word trauma derives from the ancient Greek word for „wound‟, describing the psychological injury that leaves victims incapable of functioning to their full capability. The description of trauma as a wound is
22 problematic precisely because trauma can only be perceived in the experience of its absence; it is a wound that cannot be seen either by the victim himself or by other people. The foundation of trauma theory first emerges in the 19th century when the technological development of the steam train led to a number of terrible train accidents that caused inexplicable physical problems – what was then called „railway spine‟ –. The inexplicable occurrence and symptoms of railway spine, in turn, led to an interest in the psychological origins of the physical problems that these victims of the train accidents suffered.50 Around the turn of the 20th century, trauma theory was further developed by Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer as a part of psychoanalysis, and the severe psychological consequences of a difficult, individual experience became acknowledged as post-traumatic stress. Cathy Caruth, one of the leading scholars in the contemporary field of trauma studies, explains the impact of trauma as follows:
The pathology consists […] solely in the structure of its experience or reception: the event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it. To be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or event. […] The traumatized, we might say, carry an impossible history within them, or they become themselves the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely possess.51
The event of trauma cannot be incorporated or assimilated into the victim‟s understanding and is considered to be indescribable, except in the belated experience of it. Espedal incorporates
intertextuality, relying on the words of others, as one of the methods to put into words what he cannot say himself, transposing their original meaning into his own. Espedal tackles the problem of the unrepresentability of trauma by repeating the struggles of his favorite authors, who also dealt with loss and attempted to recreate this in literature:
„Writing hasn‟t helped me,‟ wrote Peter Handke in his book about his mother, A
Sorrow Beyond Dreams. She committed suicide aged fifty-one, the last sentence of the
book reads: „I‟ll write about all this later in more detail.‟ But Peter Handke hasn‟t.52
This quote reflects Espedal‟s, and also Handke‟s, attempt and inability to write about the loss of his mother, but it also shows Espedal‟s recognition of Handke‟s grief. The impossibility of narrating
50 Ralph Harrington, “On the Tracks of Trauma: Railway Spine Reconsidered” in Social History of Medicine, Vol. 16, Nr. 2 (2003), 209-223.
51
Caruth (1995), 4-5. 52 Espedal (2011), 149.
23 trauma is doubly conveyed: firstly in the fact that Espedal defers to the words of someone else to address what he cannot express himself and, secondly, this reference to Handke reflects that Espedal is not the only one who suffers from this symptom of trauma. Handke‟s words create the paradoxical possibility for Espedal to describe the indescribable, or at least they express the struggle that follows from the attempt to describe the trauma, and to feel less alone in this very personal sorrow.
Another example of Espedal‟s use of intertextuality to convey his personal experience of loss can be found in the description of a painting of Pierre Bonnard. In the painting, Espedal recognizes a situation he can relate to and that he can use to narrate his own experiences with the illness and subsequent loss of a loved one. Bonnard, like Espedal, incorporated autobiographical elements in his work; his wife Marthe and their domestic life were the main subjects of his paintings. Espedal describes the painting:
His work was to see. Outside the window, in the garden, Marthe lounges in an easy chair. Hair unkempt, a white dressing gown, it is morning or evening. His work was to observe her, he sketched what she did: how she woke in the morning, how she got up and bathed, ate her breakfast, embroidered a tablecloth, wrote a letter. She sits in the garden, the letter lies on the table on the embroidered tablecloth. The light among the fruit trees, cherries in a basket, we could almost eat them. I sit at my writing table and look out; the fruit trees and garden table, the empty easy chair, it is Saturday or Sunday.53
The reference highlights the similarities between Espedal and Bonnard; Bonnard‟s wife suffered a long sickbed, and his paintings reflect the attempt to preserve her presence in his art. Espedal uses Bonnard‟s painting as a visual example that emphasizes his own situation through the similarities they share, but also by functioning as a contrast; Bonnard painted his wife lounging in the garden chair, in the realization that she had been ill for a long time and still was. Bonnard captures the every-day moments to save the experience of her still being there. Espedal repeats Bonnard‟s image, but, in contrast, he can only describe the empty chair; his wife is gone and he can no longer write as if she is still there.54 „I‟m trying to write, but with no success so am [sic] writing this letter instead: I need
53
Espedal (2011), 12-13.
24 you.‟55
Since he is not capable of writing himself, he falls back on the works of others, in this case Bonnard‟s, to convey his situation. Espedal can only identify what he no longer has, describing it through Bonnard, reiterating what he has lost. Literary theorist Geoffrey Hartman describes this as „making the wound perceivable and the silence audible. […] We are taught to read for what is without words, or as yet beyond reach: for the wound as well as the power of signification that contains or composes it.‟56
Espedal has not assimilated the trauma of loss, and he is only capable of describing his loss as something that is always present by the realization of absence it has left behind:
Even early in the morning, in all that strong light; something or the other black. It doesn‟t disappear. Something bad. Something dark. It becomes visible and then turns invisible again. White. Something or the other black. During the day. […] It‟s nameless and afterwards it gets its name back. […] Everything that doesn‟t materialize, is painful. Everything that doesn‟t materialize. Doesn‟t go away.57
I can still hear her name, even though her name has gone.58
A new age, a new body, but the room is unchanged, the room is the same, it‟s caught up in something that has been, something that ought to have changed, but remains […] it‟s caught up into something that‟s been lost.59
A transparent absence. Something white in all the whiteness. Something painful. Something painful that conceals itself within the visible. It doesn‟t disappear.60
The main consequences of trauma can be memory impairment and dissociation; the victim cannot deal with the event, and as an inherent defense system, memory fails and dissociation occurs.61 Espedal also addresses the inability to assimilate the traumatic experience and the indescribability of trauma in
Imot kunsten (notatbøkene):
I tried to write, but couldn‟t produce anything. I wanted to write about my mother but couldn‟t. I still can‟t. I want to write about my mother‟s death but I can‟t. It‟s the first time I‟ve come up against such an obvious and insurmountable barrier; I‟m unable to cross it, I don‟t want to. I knew nothing of this barrier until I encountered it just now,
55 Espedal (2011), 13.
56 Geoffrey Hartman, “Trauma Within the Limits of Literature,” in European Journal of English Studies, Vol. 7 Nr. 3 (2003), 259. 57 Espedal (2011), 77. 58 Espedal (2011), 78. 59 Espedal (2011), 81. 60 Espedal (2011), 83. 61
Angelica Staniloiu, Hans J. Markowitsch, “Dissociation, Memory and Trauma Narrative,” in Journal of
25 as I wrote the sentence: Soon we‟d have to start nursing her. There it ground to a halt,
the language stopped […].62
Although a traumatic event leaves a hole in the understanding of its victim which makes the event indescribable, it is accompanied by the need to be expressed: „it is always the story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise
available.‟63
Despite the indescribable nature of trauma, the victim‟s need to express a traumatic experience can be very strong, and the attempt at verbalization can still have a therapeutic or cathartic effect. Consequently, society‟s awareness of the nature of trauma can also lead to understanding and support:
[T]he inherent departure, within trauma, from the moment of its first occurrence, is also a means of passing out of the isolation imposed by the event: that the history of trauma, in its inherent belatedness, can only take place through the listening of another.64
So while this understanding of the trauma isolates victims from other people because of the personal nature and unique effect of a traumatic experience, it also allows victims to be better understood by others through the acknowledgement of the indescribable nature of what caused the trauma and meets victims‟ need to be heard. In the understanding that trauma cannot be understood, victims can
reconnect with other people. The belatedness of trauma and the importance of communication about it is also a primary subject of Shoshanna Felman‟s research. She sees testimony and resocialization as important factors in understanding and surviving trauma.65 The narration of trauma in literature leads to a distinct form of testimony that does not address a psychiatrist or a specific person, but instead serves as a means to relate the experience to a wider, unknown audience, which has a distinct influence on the way the trauma is related. The act of testimony places the witness in solitude in the attempt to convey a unique, indescribable experience, but it also makes rehabilitation into society possible. One of the means that can instigate this reconnection of the victim with other people is
62
Espedal (2011), 149. Emphasis added. 63 Caruth (1996), 4.
64 Caruth (1995), 10-11. 65
Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, (New York: Routledge, 1992).
26 literature. Literature can convey the struggle of the traumatized victim and shed light on this ineffable subject by uncovering the effects and machinations of trauma.
2.5 Repetition: Missed encounters with the real
Hal Foster observes a return to the real in neo-avant-garde art, which he sets forth in his book The
Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (1996). He sees avant-garde returning
at different places in time, and each time avant-garde is changed, each time creating another effect. Foster compares the repeated return of the avant-garde in art to trauma. The traumatic event is only retroactively constituted; only by looking back upon it the original event is marked as avant-garde, and following from that regarded as a failure or missed opportunity:
[T]he avant-garde work is never historically effective or fully significant in its initial moments. It cannot be because it is traumatic – a hole in the symbolic order of its time that is not prepared for it, that cannot receive it, at least not immediately, at least not without structural change.66
Foster postulates that avant-garde can only be determined as such after it has been incorporated into the art scene, so only when it is no longer considered avant-garde, when it no longer breaks with the established order but instead represents the new order that is accepted as the norm.
Foster makes note of the tendency in contemporary culture to define experience in terms of trauma. Since trauma itself is not representable – as it can only be perceived in its absence – instead the focus shifts to the traumatic subject. This shift of focus, Foster states, has led to the “rebirth” of the author and combines the return of the real with the return of the referential.67 He separates this return into two varieties: the first, and in this case most relevant, is a return to the physical, presented in abject art – art that deliberately exceeds the boundaries of what is considered comfortable or acceptable in the representation of the physical.68 This results in an inevitable rejection by the
66 Foster (1996), 29. 67
Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1996), 124.
68 The second variety is an ethnographic return to the real, in which the artist fights against a dominant culture and its institutions, on behalf of a cultural minority through the medium of art. However, this ethnographic turn is less relevant in relation to Espedal‟s work, since instead of representing a cultural group, exerting social or
27 audience, but also in the compulsive reliving of the missed meeting with reality. Foster calls this return to the physical real „traumatic realism‟: it is both „referential and simulacral, connected and
disconnected, affective and affectless, critical and complacent‟. 69 This traumatic realism is also prevalent in contemporary autobiographical literature. It is a main characteristic of Espedal‟s work, and can be found in the repeated and fragmented incorporation of the topic of loss.
As Freud and Lacan established in psychoanalysis, the compulsive repetition of relived events related to the traumatic experience is an important symptom of trauma.70 Espedal also keeps returning to the subject of loss; for him it is not only an inevitable expression of the traumatized author, but the repetition can also be used as a tool to make the experience of trauma understandable for his readers. Hal Foster sees the „return to the real‟ reflected in repetition. He signifies repetition not as a repetition of the trauma itself, but instead as a marker of the traumatic effect: the unconscious and continual return of the missed experience is an attempt to assimilate it anyway.71 He exemplifies this statement with Andy Warhol‟s Death in America series (1964): „traumatic repetition is compulsive and not restorative […] The Warhol repetitions […] are not about a mastery of trauma. […] [T]hey suggest an obsessive fixation on the object in melancholy‟.72
Espedal also emphasizes his character in his books as a melancholic figure, by continually revisiting the subject of loss and its influence on him.
Repetition functions as a way to deal with the shocking or disturbing images and messages that the contemporary media offer; repetition can desensitize and therefore distance the observer, and simultaneously create an affective experience for someone who was not initially connected to the traumatic event.73 In Espedal‟s case, his repeated return to the subject of trauma is not only spread out over his oeuvre. Also inside eac single work he repeatedly attempts to incorporate narration of trauma, which he must then abort. Espedal‟s repeated focus on the deaths of his mother and his wife could
political influence, or raising awareness for a societal issue by addressing the public sphere through art, the focus lies on the story of the individual and how it can effectively be related to the public. Espedal‟s work emphasizes that he is an individual characterized by his trauma and highlights the isolation that has resulted from it. 69 Foster (1996), 130.
70 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works
of Sigmund Freud, transl. from the German under the general editorship of James Strachey in collab. with Anna
Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), Vol. 18.
Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, transl. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978).
71 Foster, 134. 72
Foster, 131-132. 73 Foster, 127-168.
28 result in disinterest in the reader (even boredom, maybe?), especially since Espedal does not seem to come to any definitive conclusion about it and is not able to leave the subject alone. Yet, it is precisely the fact that he cannot leave the subject alone that also invokes an affective reaction in the reader. Espedal‟s frustration and desperation generated by his traumatic experience, also resonate in the reader, although here they are provoked by Espedal‟s repeated and failed attempts to relate his experiences and not by the traumatic event itself. The repetition raises a similar frustration, i.e. an affective reaction, in the reader.
Foster points out that while the awareness of the mediation of the experience removes some of its affective influence, it is in fact the mediation itself that becomes a part of the traumatic effect conveyed to the observer:
the punctum in Warhol lies less in details than in this repetitive “popping” of the image. These pops, such as a slipping of register or a washing in color, serve as visual
equivalents of our missed encounters with the real.74
Foster posits that an example of this can be found in Warhol‟s Ambulance Disaster (1963), which shows a repeated image of a woman hanging out of a crashed ambulance. Warhol‟s use of repetition is not specifically intended to copy or mimic the traumatic event of the accident, but instead serves to distance the observer from it – to make it less personal –, and in that way make it possible for outsiders to understand it. While in the first picture the woman‟s face is visible, in the second picture her face is blurred by a flash, the blurring presumably caused by the processing of the image. What is traumatic, according to Foster, is not the woman hanging out of the ambulance, but the blurring caused by the processing of the picture that erases her face – the loss of significant details. The blurring effects caused by the process of repetition remove the traumatic effect from the personal sphere that is represented by the fate of the woman. Instead, the traumatic experience of the blurring effect is situated in process-aesthetics and relates the fact that it is traumatic precisely because it is invisible, because it cannot be understood. This is what happens in Espedal‟s work as well; in the different books that discuss loss, the details of the narration change and become unclear, his language becomes increasingly fragmented:
29 This day: I don‟t know
whether I like it or not, whether so be sad whether to be happy, this ninth of September day It‟s not a day a day like all others without you without you towards the end and me75
Espedal seems to stammer in his writing; interpunction and structure disappear. The unreliability of traumatic memory and the impossibility of traumatic narration is highlighted, and its effects are instead cconveyed through the structure of narration. The affective reaction that is invoked by the traumatic realism of Espedal‟s work opens up a dialogical space between author and reader.
30
3 The ‘middle region’, reality hunger and the rendering of the self
3.1 The ‘middle region’
In her 2011 master‟s thesis, Ingrid Krogh Nøstdal draws attention to the fact that Tomas Espedal plays with the fluctuating distance between the real and the written life – how his private life and his work influence each other in turn –, and concludes that he uses performative biographism to create a strong realistic effect that seemingly reveals himself and his private life.76 Jon Helt Haarder coined the term performative biographism – the contemporary trend of combining fiction (and other art forms) with biographical elements –, and places the origins of performative biographism in the current occupation of the audience with the „middle region‟,77
a term introduced by media-sociologist Joshua Meyrowitz. The „middle region‟ indicates the space where new social patterns emerge from the changing
boundaries between and shifting distinctions of on-stage and off-stage behavior:
Middle region behavior develops when audience members gain a „sidestage‟ view. That is, they see parts of the traditional backstage area along with parts of the traditional onstage area; they see the performer move from backstage to onstage to backstage. To adapt, the competent performer adjusts his or her social role so that it is consistent with the new information available to the audience.78
Meyrowitz considers the culture of the written word to have an on-stage bias: the mediating properties of literature cannot be denied. Personal experience has to be mediated in text to be conveyed through literature, inherently creating a screen between literature and the private experience. An author constructs his work for an audience, and the back region of literature (i.e. the production of the work and the life of the author) is not often part of the performance. However, over the last three decades it has become common practice in contemporary literature to incorporate the private life of the author and his writing process into the work because of society‟s reality hunger. Meyrowitz attributes to literature an inherent on-stage bias because its content is not naturally available but constructed due to
76 She states that he simultaneously hides himself by offeren only selected autobiographical content in the process of shaping his identity, and deliberately neglecting or steering away from other aspects of his personal identity.
77 Jon Helt Haarder, “Performativ biografisme. Litteraturvidenskaben og det intime liv” in Kritik, Vol. 167. (2004), 29. I will go into more detail on performative biographism in chapter 3.3.
78
Joshua Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behaviour (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 47.
