Stig Sæterbakken, Through the Night, Trans. by Seán Kinsella. 2013.
Virginia Woolf once compared reading Tolstoy to being set atop a mountain with a telescope. Reading Stig Sæterbakken, the Norwegian novelist who took his own life in January 2012, is like being squeezed into a shower stall with a madman. His novels, with their drowning interiority and derivative freight (sometimes, one feels, the examples of Beckett and Bernhard are not so much influences as references) are nasty little dramas of stasis and entrapment.
In Siamese, a gum-chewing retiree is reduced to an infantilizing state of confinement in his bathroom, paradoxically feeling “like God” while shouting and arguing with his wife on whom he is nevertheless hopelessly dependent. Andreas Feldt, the narrator of Self-Control, embarks on a kind of private war against social norms when, during lunch with his estranged daughter, he spontaneously and falsely tells her that he and her mother are getting a divorce. The moment unfolds with a touch of the Sæterbakkian absurd: as Andreas breaks the news to his daughter, he struggles to contain a fart: “I had to use all my strength to tame the demon that was wreaking havoc down in my rear end, a loud piercing fart cracked against the seat before I managed to gag it, but she was, fortunately too beside herself to notice.” In the end, indifference prevails: neither the false news of the divorce nor the loud, piercing fart register on the Richter scale. Andreas’s private war remains a fantasy—a fantasy like the one he entertains while eavesdropping on a woman in a café:
I thought that if I’d been given the opportunity of falling in love with her, the understanding one, then I could tell her everything about myself from the start, everything over again, while emphasizing the parts that weighed in my favor, and I could have left out those things which, even to this day, I’m ashamed to remember. It would be like a release, I thought, like being set free after a lifetime of captivity. It would be a release from everything that torments you, I thought, everything that usually lies there eating away at your memory. It would be like dying in the world you know and then being reborn in another, where there’s nothing written about you yet, where everything is still ahead of you, untouched, unsullied.
Sæterbakken’s characters often rail like this against their confinement within themselves, entertaining thoughts of birth, death and rebirth, before they come bouncing off the walls to find that there is no escape, no respite from themselves. In Through the Night, his final and most ambitious novel, Sæterbakken dramatizes this struggle with far greater poignancy than before: Karl Meyer, a dentist whose son has killed himself, embarks on a journey to a mysterious house in Slovakia in order to escape his grief, his sorrow, and guilt (shortly before his son’s suicide, Karl briefly left his wife for a younger woman). He dreams, quite explicitly, about being born anew: “drop everything, go away, become someone else, start afresh, put it all behind you, start over again, without encumbrance, without one single connection to what once was. Not to disappear without a trace, but arrive without a trace.”
Born in Lillehammer in 1966, Sæterbakken made his literary debut as a poet when he was still in high school. He was part of Oslo’s underground music scene in the eighties and played in various avant-garde bands. (Sæterbakken’s last published book was a biography of the Norwegian new wave punk band De Press.) In 1991 he published his first novel, Incubus, followed three years later by the highly intertextual Det nye testamentet (The New Testament), in which a photographer-pornographer obsessively roams across Europe in search of Hitler’s secret diaries. Though critics largely dismissed the novel—Karl Ove Knausgård panned it in Morgenbladet—its impetus to demolish prevailing myths about good and evil remained at the forefront of Sæterbakken’s literary endeavors until the very end.
“Our image of Hitler,” Knausgård wrote in his review, “is just that—an image, a surface. Hitler exists only as a shape. The image is impenetrable, there is nothing behind it, just the face, the gestures, the speeches, the uniform.” Sæterbakken wanted to penetrate that image, to break through it and reveal the most disturbing fact of all about Hitler: that he was human. (I remember an overwhelming feeling of complicity in the audience when I first saw Oliver Hirschbiegel’s film Der Untergang, in which Hitler is brilliantly portrayed by the actor Bruno Ganz.) In an essay on Europe, Sætterbakken wrote that
a novel—a good novel that is—can make the thoughts, the moral and emotional universe of, say, a pedophile or a Nazi understandable, can make it possible for us to identify ourselves with it, bring us to the point of recognizing this as an option in ourselves as well. Because we are human. And being human means containing this too as an option. The question, Who are we? is rejected in favor of the question, What is it possible for us to become?
I wonder if it isn’t more accurate to say that a novel can make the moral or emotional universe of a pedophile or Nazi recognizable to us as opposed to “understandable.” For some reason “understandable” strikes me as a touch presumptuous. I’m not sure, for instance, whether I fully understand Humbert Humbert’s emotional and moral universe, though I certainly recognize it and inhabit it. Still, Sæterbakken was right to call attention to the fact that the greatest power of fiction is its ability to bring us closer to an understanding of other people—even if it means inhabiting the mind of a pedophile or mass murderer. It is a moral imperative of the novel to try and understand even someone whom society has deemed a monster. This surely was what Knausgård was alluding to when, after Sæterbakken’s death, he praised his compatriot’s “boundless curiosity about the human condition [and] tremendous faith in literature and its power.”
Through the Night opens in a sink of grief. Karl Meyer’s teenage son, Ole-Jakob, has killed himself, leaving his recently divorced parents and his younger sister reeling with grief, loss, anger, and uncertainty. “A thousand times a day I forget that Ole-Jakob was dead,” Karl tells us. “A thousand times a day I remembered it again. Both were unbearable.” He compares it to facing away from the ocean: “Ice-cold ankles every time a wave came in. Then it receded. Then it came in.”
Karl recounts the events preceding his son’s death: meeting and falling in love with his wife, having children, falling a little out of love, until finally he meets an attractive young student, Mona, whose attention flatters him, seduces him, and finally overpowers him. An affair ensues and soon after Karl divorces his wife.
This is the weakest and most familiar part of the novel. Naturally, Karl cannot fathom why a beautiful young woman in her twenties would take an interest in a middle-aged schmuck like him. Naturally, Karl Meyer takes a boyish delight in his reckless behavior: “I took such delight in seeing it like that, asunder, so to speak, out of order, fallen out of orbit, that I felt relief even in the midst of his exhaustion.” And naturally, as Mona’s immaturity and lagging affection grates on him, and Karl’s yearned-for new existence begins to lose its appeal: “And the old thought came to mind, the old dream, the impossible dream: drop everything, go away, become someone else, start afresh,” and so forth.
But instead of starting afresh, Karl returns to his old life. His wife lets him back into their house and family, at which point tragedy strikes.
Ole-Jakob, who had been sinking into depression, swipes a bottle of liquor and drives into an oncoming truck, dying instantly. Karl insists on seeing his son’s cadaver: “I was allowed into the morgue, where after a lot of back and forth they unveiled an object that was so far removed from anything I’d ever seen that when I did throw up, it wasn’t because I could identify it with Ole-Jakob, but simply because of the sight of it—nothing more.”
Sæterbakken’s prose, stark and unfussy, works best at these moments of high intensity. But compared to the tight crevices of Siamese and Self-Control, Through the Night is a promenade of a novel, and for every taut, arresting passage there is a sagging one. Some of this, unfortunately, appears to be a joint effort by the translator, Seán Kinsella, and the editors. “As I couldn’t help call that that place,” “as I allowed myself be absorbed into the throng,” and “The worst thing about is” can probably be attributed to editorial neglect—but what about “I’d begin the hunt for something whatever little thing wasn’t quite right about this place” and “Despite all the years of his life when I’d known everything there was about him”? It’s disheartening to come across such egregious errors, and it detracts from the overall reading experience—like spotting a microphone boom bobbing at the top of a screen in the middle of a movie.
In the wake of Ole-Jakob’s death Karl’s writer-friend Boris tells him about an abandoned house in Slovakia where he can stay and be confronted by his greatest, deepest fears. Some guests, Boris tells Karl, emerge relieved and elated, while others are confined to retirement homes because they can no longer control their bowels.
There were those, according to Boris, who claimed that they’d been there, seen what there was to see and had come out again with a lighter heart, relieved of everything that had been weighing on them, joyful and in high spirits, without a trace of fear left in their bodies. They’d seen the worst things imaginable, after which nothing could threaten them anymore. Others, Boris reported, had returned with hideous, contorted faces, so that even some of their closest family and friends had trouble recognizing them. One such individual’s skin had turned completely gray, after his visit, and his nose had been moved to his cheek, he never said another word to anyone, locked himself into a room in his apartment and stayed there until he died . . .
Karl’s journey to this mysterious house—a journey that is equal parts Kafka and Tarkovsky—fills the remaining half of the novel, effectively slicing Through the Night down the middle to separate this surreal, dreamlike second half from the first. Karl reaches Slovakia via idyllic Redenburg, Germany, and meets the elusive Zagreb—the man with the key to the house—at a dingy nightclub. Karl, skeptical, interrogates Zagreb about the house to no avail. The Slovakian merely responds by saying that it exists, in effect, because people are as obsessed with pursuing pain as they are with pursuing happiness, and that Karl should think of the house as “your own private miniature Holocaust!”
Zagreb’s invocation of the Holocaust—and the gulags, AIDS, Hiroshima, and hurricanes, not to mention his odd reading of Kierkegaard—feels like thematic overkill. Lumping together these horrors only negates the terror they are meant to evoke. (The Holocaust is not the same as AIDS or Hiroshima, so Zagreb’s claim that the house is like all of them becomes a way of saying that it isn’t like any of them.)
But the exquisite, laborious description of Karl arriving at and walking through the house, room by room, is easily the finest section of the novel; Sæterbakken’s prose becomes concentrated and taut, steeling itself in anticipation of what lies ahead:
The bucket was half full of water; a thick gelatinous membrane had formed on top. Some large grayish-brown marks stained the carpet and walls, their color the same as on the ceiling of the bathroom at the Hotel Lucia. Someone had used considerable force attempting to wash them off; in a few places there were holes in the wallpaper and the paneling was visible. There were no windows in the room, no vents either, the air was stuffy, with the smell of dusty carpets and unwashed bed linen. On the way out someone grabbed hold of me and held me back. I just managed to envision the brawny arm of an angry assailant before I realized it was the strap on my bag that had snagged on the inside door handle.
This writing, extending over ten or so pages, is remarkably effective, even if its techniques—as the narrative misdirection above illustrates—are on loan from a different, well-trodden genre. But it is distinguished by its being a kind of double misdirection: Karl has been manipulated into thinking he has walked onto the set of The Shining, and his anticipation in turn manipulates the reader. Both parties, in the end, are fooled:
No madman had ever lived in the house. No bodies lay under the concrete floor of the cellar. No lunatic had run from room to room screaming in mortal terror with a cage strapped to his chest. Nothing terrible had taken place here; no, it was merely the insuperable aggregate of simple human tasks, the interminable succession of departed daily occurrences.
The terror, in other words, is human, all too human, and therefore so much more terrifying. Karl, who has travelled a long way in order to escape his singular human existence, and all the sorrow and pain it has been burdened with, is thrown cruelly back upon himself: “Nothing, I thought. There’s nothing here. Apart from me.”
If Through the Night had ended with Karl standing alone in the abandoned house, facing up to his inescapable self, it might have been a better novel. Regrettably, there follows a sentimental dreamlike sequence that concludes, in the novel’s final two sentences, with a plot revelation so unnecessary, and so cheaply withheld, that it reads like a reproach to the arresting, chilling passages that precede it. These sections are so strikingly at odds with each other that it sometimes seems inexplicable that they should be contained within the same novel.
Sæterbakken has indulged this habit of last-minute plot twists before, notably in Self-Control, and one wonders what it is about them that attracted him. It is odd that this otherwise bleak and comfortless writer should be prone to tricks of plot that so easily spill into sentimentalism. It is almost as if he wasn’t quite able to square his novels with the ideas he explored in his essays. “We’re all bastards, when it comes right down to it,” he wrote in Det onde øye (The Evil Eye). “Under certain circumstances, every single person is capable of torturing another human being. It’s a reality we can’t ignore.”
This view (the Norwegian philosopher Lars Svendsen quibbles with it in his Philosophy of Evil) may explain Sæterbakken’s sentimental lapses. There’s a tough-guy posturing in that “We’re all bastards” bit that reminded me of Hemingway or Raymond Carver or Norman Mailer at their worst (the tougher they tried to be, the more sodden their pages became). Crucially, it is also at odds with Sæterbakken’s own suggestion, quoted earlier in this same essay, that we abandon the question of what are we in favor of what is it possible for us to become. Obviously we are not all torturers, even if we are capable of torture. As Svendsen points out, “the problem we face is that our actions, at the critical moment, are as-yet undetermined. We can’t know what we would do in a given situation—that is, before we actually do it.” For while it is important to accept that Hitler was human, it is equally important to recognize that not all of humanity is like Hitler. To claim otherwise is to negate one’s moral imagination—which, for a novelist, is a negation of one’s art.
It is almost as if Sæterbakken was capable of being overwhelmed by thoughts of evil—so overwhelmed that, in his fiction, he escaped it or neutralized it by inadvertent, sentimental exits. Curiously, he sometimes seems to have embarked on a journey similar to Karl’s in Through the Night: looking for annihilation and self-reckoning but finding only “the insuperable aggregate of simple human tasks.” To follow Sæterbakken’s attempt to resolve this conflict, which makes his last novel so problematic and yet so haunting, would have made for a thrilling literary journey. The fact that we will never embark on it is surely a great loss. - Morten Høi Jensen
An uncertain menace skirts the surface of much recent Norwegian literature. In Self-Control, the narrator confides in us a list of hopes he had once entertained for his grown-up daughter. The last of these—that she would not ‘have the wool pulled over her eyes by anyone’—seems to me most immediately and eventually significant. For if it is unlikely that it remains true of Self-Control’s narrator, it is still more unlikely of its author. Stig Sæterbakken, who died by suicide in 2012, was a writer every bit as receptive to bleakness (and to joy) as his fellow Norwegian, Karl Ove Knausgaard. Where his work might be said to differ is in the way his narratives choose to withhold information. Sæterbakken was a master of misdirection. There is wool all over his work.
Self-Control is a slim, teasing novel told by a rather dull, middle-aged man called Andreas Felt. There isn’t much in the way of plot or pacing here. It’s mostly just work, dinner with friends, sleep. Felt does normal things and he thinks normal thoughts—except when he doesn’t. Between complaints about cinema prices and contemporary tipping etiquette, Felt’s calm narrative tone breaks out into a rhetoric loaded with irate and violent imagery. He fantasises about giving his boss ‘a good beating [ … ] leaving him lying battered and bruised in the pitch-darkness’. He meets two girls in a bar ‘with mouths like bleeding wounds’. He even imagines his oldest friend Hans-Jacob’s wife, Elise, being sexually assaulted and ‘Hans-Jacob lying in a pool of blood on the ground beside her’.
Situated in the context of the text’s archly suggestive comments on other narratives (‘a sudden twist, and a little surprise at the end?’), these violent imaginings lure all but the least attentive of readers into the expectation that Felt has committed, or is going to commit, some great and grievous crime. Sæterbakken flatters our intelligence to insinuate that the two-faced twisted psychopath Felt claims to have worried about will in fact turn out to be Felt himself. As it happens, he is nothing of the sort. He is a man not remembering, is all. The novel’s ending comes unexpectedly, but it does not come out of nowhere. A second reading reveals a discreet network of signals working beneath a shallower subtext to ‘correct’ its extravagant omens.
The suggestion of misdirection is planted early on, for instance, when Felt tells his daughter that he and her mother are getting divorced. But in the narration, Felt immediately acknowledges this statement as false. ‘It was as unexpected for her as it was for me,’ he admits. ‘We both sat there, shocked by what we had heard.’ As the novel advances, it becomes clear that for Felt such fictions provide a way for him to evade a more painful truth. Yet these are not fictions imposed upon this unwanted truth; instead, they are psychological spaces located away from it. In announcing his divorce, Felt is not so much misdirecting his daughter as redirecting himself. The same goes for the speculations he and his wife make about their friends’ marriage problems, and for the stories he invents about fellow passengers on the bus, and even for the ‘the first chapter of a thriller that never gets any further’ that Felt imagines every night before falling asleep. This is an outwardly plotless novel, but in each of its little fictions we are following Felt on the run.
Critics have compared the irate passages in Self-Control to the work of Thomas Bernhard. To me this seems misjudged. What defines Bernhard’s writing is not so much its pitch as the persistence of its pitch. The outbursts in Self-Control, by contrast, feel altogether too sporadic. They gesture towards the Bernhardian; but listen back and these gestures start to ring false, too. ‘It made me furious now that I thought about it. This anaemic huckster, this pallid character who had brownnosed his way to the top and hadn’t lifted a finger since, just sat idly for hours on end in an overheated office in front of a computer he barely knew how to turn on and off … What real power did he have over me, when it came down to it?’ It is as if Felt is declaiming from an autocue, momentarily losing his place where the ellipsis falls. Rather than revealing to us what has been repressed, the tone of these outbursts is actually working to distract Felt’s attention away from it.
Montaigne claimed lies are difficult to remember since truth will naturally ‘dislodge the falsehoods’. But for Felt it is falsehoods, all manner of falsehoods, that serve to dislodge truths—and even truth itself. Turning the light off at night, he notes that: ‘the silence and the darkness around me and the cool wind from the gap in the curtains were utterly ruthless in forcing me to surrender myself, offering me no opportunity to discount them as fiction.’ It is here, in darkness, that Felt comes closest to recognising what he has repressed. He even admits that at one time he was unable to sleep unless he had his hand on his wife’s hip. He writes: ‘it was as if I clung on tight so as not to disappear completely.’
*
In Norwegian literature, darkness is a substance that reduces the self to passivity, shedding light upon liminal realms. The narrator of Self-Control clings to his wife and does not ‘disappear completely’, but the unnamed narrator of Knut Hamsun’s Hunger (1890) is not so fortunate. When he spends the night in the ‘fathomless black eternity’ of a prison cell, a future whose inevitability he had repressed is forcibly revealed to him. Narrated by Karl Meyer, a philandering father who learns of his son’s suicide early in the text, Sæterbakken’s Through the Night seems to consciously evoke this prison scene in Hunger. Like Felt before him, Meyer unconsciously misdirects the reader, repressing an important piece of information until, in the novel’s closing pages, he enters a room which ‘someone had taken great pains making as impersonal as a prison cell’. Here, as ‘the blackness of the eternal night’ closes in around him, Meyer starts to ‘sink’ further and further into the sofa, out of himself. He smashes his head against a wall. Feeling only numbness, he continues: ‘I brought my head back and struck the rugged wall once more, and now it was like something loosened in my brain, an egg which until now had lain there intact but had finally cracked, and what had been inside it ran out and streamed down into my eyes and nose and mouth along with the tears and blood.’
Here, five pages before the truth is revealed to us, Meyer finally recognises what happened in the hours before he set out on his journey to Weinachtstadt, a small German town ‘lying illuminated and isolated, crowded with small, yellow houses, like scenery in a Christmas card of film’. This is not an imagined destination for Meyer—he really does arrive there. But in its landscape and topography, Weinachtstadt resembles a fairytale. The town borrows from fiction, which Meyer will use to escape the unwanted truth. As in Self-Control, fiction is a psychological space located not upon the truth, but away from it. Here, though, fiction is also a geographical space. To get to Weinachtstadt, Meyer must leave Norway. He must wait for trains and he must carry a suitcase. He must walk his way into forgetting. In Through the Night, it not implausible that being on the run would make your feet grow sore.
Meyer leaves Weinachtstadt when his fledgling relationship with a photographer and her son starts to feel too real (‘What was I actually about to get into here?’). He travels to Bratislava in search of a mysterious house where, according to legend, if you entered at exactly the right time, you ‘would be confronted with your greatest fears’. According to the Stalker-like figure Meyer pays to arrange his stay there, the man who built the house killed his wife and two children, ‘put their bodies in the cellar, and poured the concrete floor over them.’ Later, ‘he put a starved rat in a cage, and then fixed it to his chest in such a way that it would line up with his head.’ The man was apparently found dead with the rat lodged in his throat, and the house has been haunted since. Not even the Stalker-figure profiting from the legend believes it (‘It sounds like a bad horror film to me’). The house is an interior fictional space; its four thick walls certain to keep truth out. What Meyer’s unconscious mind hasn’t reckoned with, though, is that four such walls will also keep out light. Hamsun’s fathomless black eternity returns, and all the fictions dissolve. ‘No madman had ever lived in this house,’ Meyer finally realises. ‘No bodies lay under the concrete floor of the cellar. Nothing terrible had taken place here.’ At once all truths close in.
In the lead-up to the dissolution of the novel’s internal fictions, Meyer notes that ‘everything I’ve ever believed in and taken part in, they’ve only been illusions.’ He speaks of living with an emptiness ‘in which there’s never been anything to be found other than what I’ve been forced to imagine in order to endure it.’ It is here, more than anywhere, that Sæterbakken steps outside of the strict parameters of the work—of the fiction—to comment on the role of fiction in his own life. He wrote ten novels before he died. Each one must be considered to represent a personal effort to endure life's emptiness, to move away from its unwanted truth. Sæterbakken wrote not to learn how to die, but to keep himself alive. He is in this sense guilty of inverting Montaigne again, but his novels are no less ‘attempts’ for having done so. The internal fictions of Through the Night are constructed with such richness and complexity that it is hard to think of it as anything other than a final attempt. It didn’t work. Nowhere in Sæterbakken do the internal fictions collapse more catastrophically than in Through the Night, and nowhere does the narrator exit the external fiction so clearly as in its closing pages. This is a final attempt that knows its fate before it’s finished. At last, Through the Night is a suicide note. - Kevin Breathnach
Stig Sæterbakken, Self-Control, Trans. by Seán Kinsella. Dalkey Archive Press, 2012.
The second volume in Stig Sæterbakken’s loosely connected “S
Trilogy,” Self-Control moves
from the dark portrait of codependent marriage featured in the acclaimed Siamese to a
world of solitary loneliness and repression. A middle-aged man, Andreas Feldt,
feeling that he is unable to communicate with his adult daughter over the
course of a friendly lunch, announces on an inexplicable whim that he is going
to get a divorce. Though his daughter is initially shocked, she quickly
assimilates this information and all returns to normal. Faced with this virtual
invisibility—for no matter what actions he takes, the world seems to take no
notice—Andreas is cut adrift from the certainties of his life and forced to
navigate through a society where it seems virtually everyone is only one loss
of self-control away from an explosion of dissatisfaction and rage.
In response to the question how can we enjoy something sad, Stig Sæterbakken writes in a short essay titled “Why I Always Listen to Such Sad Music”:
I believe disharmony and asymmetry correspond to a disharmony and an asymmetry within us, because we ourselves are not whole, or complete. Because we are never fully and completely ourselves. Because our lacks, our weaknesses, and our fears make up an essential dimension within us. Because our wounds are meant not only for healing, but also the opposite, to be kept open, as part of our receptivity to that which is around us and within us. And because there is also relief in this, not to be healed, not to be cured, melancholia satisfies us by preventing us from reaching satisfaction, it clams us by keeping our anxiety alive, it gives us peace by prolonging the state of emergency, the state of emergency that answers to the name of Humankind.[1]
Self-Control is a disquieting novel of Beckettian stasis that simmers in that prolonged “state of emergency that answers to the name of Humankind.” Its narrator, inexplicably possessed by sadistic thoughts, off-putting desires, and weaknesses, lives in a constant state of dissatisfaction in a world that seems to take little notice of him. He is man intoxicated by his own pain, an agony that has dulled him to the point of despair, and throughout the novel we witness his (initial?) efforts to confront his reality only to have them thwarted either by those closest to him or by his own self-control.
Influenced by writers such as Poe, Celine, and Georges Bataille, Stig Sæterbakken doesn’t write pretty books nor does he write novels that close with an upstroke of sweetness. Instead, his novels remind us that there are fates worst than death, namely life—long, horrifically normal life, in which people do not know you and you do not know yourself. Life in which we cannot find congruence with one another, even though that is what we yearn for the most.
Before he took his own life in 2012, Stig Sæterbakken was renown as one of Norway’s best living novelists—as well as one of its most infamous. As a writer, Sæterbakken insisted “that literature [be] a free zone, a place where prevailing social morals should not apply…[that] literature exists in a space beyond good and evil where the farthest boundaries of human experience can be explored.” His novels investigate much of what is unflattering about human behavior—evil, which he called “the most human condition of all.” [2]
This exploration of evil bled over into his professional life as the Content Director of the Norwegian Festival of Literature in 2008, when he invited the controversial author and Holocaust denier David Irving to be the keynote speaker for the 2009 festival. The Norwegian press demanded Sæterbakken disinvite Irving and even Norway’s free speech organization Fritt Ord asked that their logo be removed from all of the festival’s publicity. Sæterbakken refused. He called his colleagues “damned cowards.” Although reviled by some as a stunt, the David Irving invitation has been seen by others as within keeping with Sæterbakken’s examination of evil.[3]
For all this talk of evil, however, Self-Control is not an evil novel—or I do not perceive it to be—but it does delve into unattractive human behavior, specifically our indifference to the pain of others. Self-Control is the second novel in Sæterbakken’s S-trilogy, so called because the title of each book starts with an “S”. The trilogy starts with Siamese, which Dalkey Archive Press published the first English translation of in 2010, and concludes with Sauermugg (not yet available in English). The S-trilogy novels are linked by their exploration of male identity problems, and a “disgusting descent into the hell of human flesh”[4]
Outraged by the complete indifference and self-centered behavior of the people around him, Andreas Felt, the narrator of Self-Control, begins a series of deliberate actions to defy the social norms he sees as the barriers between us. His rampage (of sorts) starts with a lie he tells his daughter that he and her mother are divorcing, a lie that is spontaneous, meant to puncture the “cool…arrogant attitude” his daughter has adopted. Only briefly does his daughter seem touched by this news.
During the second scene of the book, Andreas carries his rampage into his boss’s office. His boss is a man “five to ten years” his junior, and Andreas thinks to himself that their whole relationship is built upon formalities: “we only need to leave the premises and go to another place…in order to see how ludicrous…how implausible” it all is. He walks into the office and without provocation calls the man a “little shit” and a “miserable bastard.” He tells him that he is “one of the worst imaginable types of creeps that crawls on the surface of the earth,” reminds him that he got his job through fraud, and that he “probably couldn’t put two words together if someone came up and asked what it is we actually do here.”
Andreas expects dismissal or some sort of reproach. Instead his boss says simply: “My wife is very ill.” His boss wants to discuss his wife’s illness, not Andreas’s tantrum. As with his daughter, Andreas’s expectations are rebuffed, this time by an exchanged of one outpouring of pain for another. A quick search through this slim novel (154 pages) reveals that the word “expect” shows up fourteen times, and its close cousins “usual” and “usually” appear fourteen times and sixteen times respectively. Self-Control is a novel that shows how our lives are ruled by the “familiar” (a word that appears eleven times), by “habit” (a word that appears eight times), by route and routine (a variation that appears six times). Granted it is a translated text—but this is a novel of spurned expectations.
What Andreas wants is for our usual, familiar, habitual behavior to go away—a full extirpation of all our hideous decorum. Of a houseguest, Andreas says: “His discretion has always irritated me.” He imagines leaping upon this man and biting his nose; this thought he says, “cheered me up.” As Georges Bataille writes: “Society is governed by its will to survive…and based on the calculations of interest… it requires [savages] to comply with…reasonable adult conventions which are advantageous to the community.” [5] In Self-Control, characters are govern by social norms, and will not tolerate Andreas. Where he breaks with custom, others rebuke with conventionality.
Reappearing like a compass heading throughout the novel is the disappearance of a sixteen year-old girl. The girl goes missing on the same day as the novel begins and lends a sense of imminent tragedy to the narrative. But the presiding sense of doom in the novel also manifests in Andreas’s almost worshipful attitude toward disaster and catastrophe. When observing his colleague Jens-Olav, who has lost his wife and house and most of his possessions in a recent fire, Andreas thinks: “I didn’t know if it was compassion or envy I felt most. Grief like that…I couldn’t imagine to think of it as anything other than liberation, liberations from all the trivial things that otherwise have such power over you.” At other times, he lies in bed fantasizing about living through war. He also desires misfortune on others: “I thought that if I could only mange to find out who [carved an obscene word into the lavatory wall at work] then that person would undergo a transformation, right before my eyes, and it would be a lasting change.” But his obsession with tragedy is part and parcel with his desire for change. Late in the novel while watching a movie in a theatre for the first time in years, he thinks:
I didn’t want it to end. I wanted a new beginning. Everything over again…fresh and unfamiliar…without any clues as to how it was going to go…what was going to happen…no end. Only beginnings. One after the other. That was the way I wanted it. To know that everything was in front of me. That nothing was decided.
Andreas covets his own sovereignty, but he is fearful of taking real action toward obtaining it. Instead he longingly looks upon tragedy as a source of freedom—”It was as though I was close to exploding with joy over something that in reality was dreadfully sad.” This promise of tragedy invades his decision making as he put faith into chance occurrences: “if [the traffic light] changes to green while I can still see it then a disaster is going to take place” (page 12); “if a taxi drives by the department store next…then I’ll call [home]” (page 86); “if the next person who goes by the window has a hat on I’ll make the call” (page 90); “if a female newsreader comes on the radio at the top of hour I’ll leave [my wife]” (page 153). When he finally sees someone who has what he wants it is a bum seated a few table over from him, farting:
[T]he power in the eyes of a man who has given up on everything…at least that was what I thought I’d seen in them…one who has nothing left to lose…who has no interest in the workings of the world…and so take people for what they are, not for what he wants them to be… a look so pure and hard and clear that I felt it in the pit of my stomach. Inferior, I felt completely inferior… I felt like a fool, like someone whose development has been at a standstill since his youth and has never been corrected, who’s never been made aware of the grotesque disparity between reality and his perception of reality.
For all his desire to “freshen” life, to be “transformed,” to change the “usual” course of things, Andreas is a man boxed in by self-control, too. If the reader stops listening to Andreas’s flat, rather monotone torrent of thought for a moment, and thinks about his actions, what we discover is that he is really very similar to those around him. After he rants to his boss, his boss confesses that his wife is ill. Andreas can’t show any compassion toward the man, who so clearly desires it, but he does asks “politely” what’s wrong with her, and many of the other “usual” questions one perfunctorily asks when told such news. During a diner party, Andreas’s guest so plainly wants to enliven the mood. Andreas refuses to play along. After a meal in a restaurant, where Andreas over tips the waitress, the waitress begins to go on and on about how hard her work is, and she wants to show Andreas the kitchen, which is a terribly confined space, where a sick person, wrapped up like a larva, lingers in a corner. Again, the social norms are tested—what he seems to want—but our flummoxed narrator retreats.
I’m resisting the urge to spoil Self-Control, because there is a profound silence in it—an important character who doesn’t speak. What I will say is that the final sentence of this novel reveals that one of the worst tragedies that can befall a person has already happened to Andreas, and the end of Self-Control blossoms with complexity only suggested on the previous pages. It is a line that attacks and shakes you from compliancy in Andreas’s nightmare. It is testament of Sæterbakken’s great skill as a writer, too, that he manages to withhold its information for so long and uses it to obliterate our perception of his narrator, to show how insidious Andreas’s stasis is and perhaps how impossible to overcome. —Jason DeYoung
In Self-Control, a novel by the Norwegian writer Stig Sæterbakken, an aging creature of habit named Andreas Felt goes on a rampage. At least he thinks its a rampage. To others, his behavior amounts to a number of small if calculated attacks on social politesse. Vying for the attention of his daughter Marit over the course of a lunch date, Andreas casually (and untruthfully) mentions his impending divorce from her mother. Returning to work, he vehemently upbraids the head of the company. Later, he humiliates a boorish family friend named Hans-Jacob over dinner and grossly over-tips a waitress.
From the "crimes" in question, you can probably gather that Self-Control isn't the newest addition to the voguish genre of Nordic thrillers. No one here takes Andreas's infractions against decorum very seriously: Marit shrugs off her father's lie, his boss is too preoccupied to take much notice, and Hans-Jacob gamely segues into an inane conversation about the Swiss. Still, for Andreas, his defiance of social norms unearths a kind of hell.
Self-Control is the second volume of the so-called S-trilogy to be translated into English (both by Dalkey Archive) and the first of Stig Sæterbakken's works to be released in the U.S. since the author's suicide in January 2012. Self-Control's predecessor, Siamese, also boasts an enfeebled hero, the blind and distinctly Beckettian Edwin Mortens, whose marriage has, by the time we meet him, reduced him to crouching in his bathroom and shouting demands at his wife. If Siamese is about the infantilizing horror of family, Self-Control is about the giddy terror of contemplating any alternative. Taken with an "understanding" young woman upon whom he eavesdrops in a café, Andreas imagines that falling in love with her, and deserting his wife, "would be like dying in the world you know and then being reborn in another:"
It was hard to get away from the fact that there was something enticing about it, losing your wife and everything you owned in a flash, no matter how dreadful it was . . . to be visited by some great sorrow on which to concentrate your emotions instead of continuing to torment yourself with thousands of small ones. Scorched from the surface of the earth as if they'd never been.
But the disaster never arrives—not, at least, as anything more than a fantasy. And despite Andreas's best efforts to offend, he is powerless to provoke society into punishing him or destroying the life that he loathes.
This is how Self-Control achieves its sense of tension and slow-burn intrigue—via Andreas's failure to communicate his displeasure with language, and his failure to make anyone care. It appears to be a novel of unbearable stasis, one suggesting that life is incomplete without an appropriate means to summon outrage. Words here accomplish little, and for all Andreas's aggressive talk, Self-Control is most impressive for its silence, which reminds us that what cannot be expressed is often the only thing worth talking about.
And, as language fails Andreas, Sæterbakken uses environment to substantiate and confound his interiority. When a waitress at the pub Andreas frequents discovers him to be her benefactor, she leads him on a tour of the dilapidated kitchen. It's as literal a crossing-over to the other side of life as anything this side of A Doll's House.
All of which would make for an unusually perceptive social novel, one where words are too feeble to penetrate the usual suburban frustrations. But Andreas's paralyzed cast of mind, riddled with escapist fancy and frequent ellipses conceal a much more ambitious scheme. Lulled into the comfortable assumption that rebellions of language will come to naught, we never realize that the reader is the real target. Much less that we are being lied to. Coterminous with our narrator's deviousness about his divorce is a much more significant deception that flies just under the prose until the novel's final line.
When we finally do grasp the charade (and our unsuspecting complicity in this more-than-twist ending), everything is radically upended, not least our sense of Andreas, who changes in an instant from a whimsical trickster vainly testing the fabric of his comfortable life to a desperately deluded man enacting a violent assault that demonstrates the sway language can exert over an imaginary world. That Sæterbakken is able to keep this secret for so long amounts to a powerful feat of self-control indeed. - JW McCormack
S tig Sæterbakken, who committed suicide earlier this year, gained a reputation as a provocateur through his ill-fated appointment as director of the Norwegian Festival of Literature in 2009, to which he invited the Holocaust denier David Irving to present a lecture on the subject of “truth”. Caught in a storm of negative publicity, the festival’s board withdrew the invitation, prompting Sæterbakken to resign and launch a withering attack on the moral and intellectual “cowardice” of those who pay lip service to free expression but are not prepared to recognize the ugliness of what might be expressed.
The books offer unflattering portraits of human behaviour Self-Control is the second in a trilogy of novels by the Norwegian author to be translated into English, this time by Seán Kinsella. The books offer unflattering portraits of human behaviour characterized by Sæterbakken’s disdain for easy sentiment. The tone of Self-Control is set by an opening passage in which our narrator, Andreas Feldt, has lunch with one of his two estranged daughters, Marit. The reason for their estrangement is not made explicit, but their emotional detachment is exemplified by his decision not to hug her for fear that “she would have to twist herself free from the embrace . . . as from an assault”. Chastened by what he perceives as her scorn for the dull predictability of his life, Andreas surprises himself by telling her that he is to divorce her mother. He had never previously entertained the thought.
The narrative is organized into a series of conversations with friends, family, colleagues and strangers. In each of these encounters Andreas struggles to maintain the appearance of normality against a surge of feeling for which he struggles to find expression. In one thrilling exchange Andreas spontaneously confronts his boss, who is renowned for his officiousness and petty cruelty. After a brief exchange of abuse, the supervisor suddenly confides quietly and with relief that “my wife is very ill”. Andreas can find no words of consolation and relations between the two men return to normal.
Connection is both yearned for and guarded against Connection is here something both yearned for and guarded against. Andreas is endlessly anxious that others will somehow connect with him against his will, that the self-control by which he maintains his dignified isolation from the world might lapse. Talking to a girl in a bar, he is “terrified” of her “suddenly seeing me for what I was”. In a restaurant he panics when another customer looks “right through me”, while also feeling that a sympathetic-seeming waitress is “able to interpret my every little nuance”. He goes to see a film, and finds himself reacting hysterically to its unsubtle prompts: “It was as if the film had cunningly found the key and thrown my door wide open”. He suffers because he is unable to express his feelings, yet goes to great lengths to conceal them, even from himself. To let down his guard strikes him as hypocritical, a betrayal of the resolutely normal (male) identity he has created for himself. Musing on how people behave in the privacy of their own homes, he considers that “there’s something undignified about it . . . how they cast all considerations overboard, relinquish their dignity, put aside everything for which you once liked them, as if they were unhooking the face they show to the world”.
Self-Control benefits from more light and shade than its unrelentingly bleak predecessor Siamese, in which a decrepit old man channels his rage against the dying of the light into the psychological abuse of his wife, on occasion descending into diatribe. There are darkly humorous moments in Self-Control, but the invective is rarely counterpointed by the glimmerings of flawed divinity that are evident in the treatment of man’s absurdity by, say, Samuel Beckett or Franz Kafka. This might be seen as a final effort to expunge the last vestiges of sentimental humanism from the tradition for which those writers bear the standard, or it might more reasonably be taken as evidence that Sæterbakken lacks the delicacy and sensitivity of his greatest influences. Yet, just as one is preparing to condemn Sæterbakken for his narrow register, the book’s surprising and (to my mind) ambiguous ending complicates and deepens the reader’s understanding of everything that has preceded it.
- Benjamin Eastham
Stig Sæterbakken, Siamese, Trans. by Stokes Schwartz. Dalkey Archive Press, 2009.
read it at Google Books
Edwin Mortens is almost blind, but has good hearing; his wife Erna is hard of hearing, but has excellent eyes. Paralyzed from the waist down, Edwin sits locked in his bathroom all day, every day, trying to liberate his mind from his body. The experiment is going relatively well: nearly all his bodily functions have ceased, his limbs are in a state of decay, and his digestive system is in the process of breaking down. "This body," he says, "is a sewer."To pass the time, Edwin dedicates his days to chewing gum and screaming at his wife, on whom he is, nonetheless, entirely dependent; while Erna's life, despite Edwin's constant abuse, revolves around her hideous husband. Edwin and Erna live in a state of perfect equilibrium -- fueled by habit, cruelty, humiliation, and quite possibly love -- until a young maintenance man is called to replace a lightbulb in Edwin's bathroom, and the "Siamese twins" find themselves embroiled in a new and vicious struggle for power.
““Siamese is a difficult and brilliant book, like one of those skulls inscribed ‘As I am now, so shall you be’ that a death-besotted Romantic might have kept by his bedside. The Siamese pairs here are not only Edwin and Sweetie, Edwin and the reader, life and death, but the reader’s own present and his or her future.”” - New York Times
““One of the most interesting contemporary authors in Europe: always controversial and never uncomplicated, he forces the reader to confront the less flattering sides of both self and society.”” Eurozine
All that man is,
All mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins
—W.B. Yeats, “Byzantium”
Stillness, silence, is art taken to its most extreme consequence.Definitive readings tend to gather around great artists’ work in the form of a common language widely used to describe their life and their art. This is mainly a result of laziness, a matter of convenience, and it comes with troubling consequences. When we limit the language we use to discuss art, we stifle our ability to more deeply appreciate that art. In Norway, a certain set of words outline the legacy of Stig Sæterbakken (he was a “provocateur” and a “transgressor”) as well as his literary works (they are “strange,” “dark,” “grotesque,” and “controversial”) and now, as his literature finds its way into English, we already see these same words appearing in English criticism—along with, inevitably, “Norwegian,” a particularly troublesome descriptive, since Sæterbakken did not identify himself or his writing with his home country.
—Stig Sæterbakken, “Why I always listen to such sad music” (trans. Stokes Schwartz)
“Norwegian” aside for a moment, Sæterbakken’s work could indeed be described as all of the above. These terms, in a way, are all perfectly apt: Sæterbakken is transgressive. He does provoke. And his writing is uniquely strange and grotesque. But Sæterbakken is these things because he and his writing challenges, out of curiosity, rage, and love, our individual and collective sensibilities and assumptions. Thus, there is a sensational dimension to these words that is false and that threatens to obscure the artistic merit and complexity of his work. It is necessary to begin assembling a more complete understanding of him in order to discover an effective way of reading his literature.
Alienation
Siamese, Sæterbakken’s third novel and first to appear in English, records the final days of Edwin Mortens, a near-blind retiree who has confined himself to a rocking chair in his bathroom, willfully resigning his body to rapid decomposition as part of an effort to achieve intellectual purity before death. His attempt to liberate mind from body begins to falter when his building’s super arrives to change a lightbulb in his bathroom. Two things happen during this visit: Edwin asks the super to kill him, and he begins to believe that his wife, Erna, who is almost deaf, harbors feelings for the “horny fucker.” His assisted suicide request is denied and, carefully nursing his outrage and paranoia, Edwin initiates a vicious exchange between husband and wife in which the depth of suffering and loneliness in each is brought, little by little, into stark relief.
Siamese is narrated alternatively by Edwin and Erna—the “twins.” Edwin, though aware that he is completely dependent upon Erna for food, drink, and aid with his catheter, seems to hold absolute power in the relationship, though it is Erna who faces the choice of whether to keep her abusive husband alive, terribly aware of the isolation that awaits her after his death. Erna thinks:
He’s a monster. That’s what he is, a monster. You can see it in the things he enjoys. Like an animal. Like a beast of prey. Torturing its kill before devouring it. A cunning and dangerous creature. He enjoys making me suffer, making me unsure of how to deal with him. He knows that once I start worrying about him, he never leaves my thoughts. My fear grows out of my conscience. And Edwin wants all of me.
The novel’s intensely graphic, tactile language keeps the reader highly attuned to momentary shifts in the apartment’s stifled atmosphere. The focus here is microscopic. Sæterbakken refuses to summarize; the twins’ mental workings, as well as their bodily movements, their physical and emotional anguish, are set before us in grimly obsessive fullness. The power of Sæterbakken writings comes in part from the totality of his attentiveness. His precise orchestration of a torrent of details allows the reader to experience the novel in a sort of neurotic frenzy, in which every footstep, fart, and verbal utterance is a personal affront, saturated with meaning and contempt. Even the absence of noise and motion bears this frightful weight. Indeed, the novel sinks deeper into oppressive silence as it progresses. “Silence is Sweetie’s revenge,” Edwin muses, “she can dump me into it whenever she likes, it’s like being under a surgeon’s lamp, it makes it impossible for me to avoid hearing my own thoughts . . .”
We come to understand Edwin and Erna’s marriage as a sort of natural phenomenon. Fostering a centripetal force not so alien to relationships in our own lives, their private despondence maintains the bond between them even as resentment and fear of one another grow. Their lives spiral ever-inward, at once into deeper depths of alienation and, paradoxically, into a more desperate need of the another. This is the form love has taken for the twins, and Sæterbakken does not allow us to dismiss it as extreme or unbelievable. In fact, it is terribly familiar.
Self-Control, Sæterbakken’s follow-up to Siamese, centers around Andreas Feldt, a middle-aged man who, filled with an intense and unknowable sense of desperation, is driven to test the validity of his existence and its influence on others around him. The novel opens with Feldt sharing a meal with one of his two estranged daughters. During this encounter, without “the slightest notion of an appropriate thing to say,” Feldt inexplicably claims that he is divorcing his wife. This lie seemingly has no effect upon the daughter, but it has a profound impact on Andreas. Confused and disoriented by his own lie, as well as by his daughter’s indifference to the news, Feldt wanders back out into the world, engaging in a series of encounters with acquaintances, family members, and strangers in which he aggressively tries to exercise influence, if not control, over the lives of others—and over his own life.
At the heart of Self-Control is Feldt’s pervasive repression. We never learn precisely what he is repressing, but its traumatic nature is betrayed by his preoccupation with a missing girl whose disappearance is continually mentioned in the headlines. Feldt clearly identifies with her disappearance—perhaps with her invisibility, perhaps merely with the tragedy of her likely fate—and in fact it is the only conduit through which he seems able to experience his world. Toward everything else he is stubbornly reticent.
Feldt’s outbursts, then, are unpredictable, violent and ultimately impotent, serving only to make him increasingly aware of his own powerlessness. There are only two options Feldt seems to recognize: he can either fully identify with intolerable despair, the cause of which he refuses to locate, or he can resign himself to invisibility. The novel’s big reveal—the only piece of information that matters, in a way, to the novel and its narrator—is withheld until its final words, but the revelation does not provide clarity or resolution; quite to the contrary, the book’s ending complicates Feldt’s choice, along with all that we have come to understand about him.
In stylistic counterpoint to Siamese, the prose in Self-Control is intentionally flat, featureless. The novel is essentially unquotable, its slow narrative an often painfully meticulous depiction of the very smallest operations of Feldt’s consciousness, most of which he’s unwilling to acknowledge, and of the suffering he experiences in avoiding pain. Like a Cassavetes film, Self-Control unfolds scene by scene with characters trying desperately to express forces inside them that they cannot account for, or, in Feldt’s case, even acknowledge. Sæterbakken’s ambiguous characters change with every page; they refuse easy patterns of behavior that would make them too recognizable, too untrue. They are often repugnant, but Sæterbakken saw such honesty as part of the duty of art and literature. In one of his remarkably incisive essays, he writes:
A novel—a good novel that is—can make the thoughts, the moral and emotional universe of, say, a pædophile or a Nazi understandable, can make it possible for us to identify ourselves with it, bring us to a point of recognizing this as an option in ourselves as well. Because we are human. And being human means containing this too as an option. The question, Who are we? is rejected in favour of the question, What is it possible for us to become?[1]
Sæterbakken believes in literature as a destructive force, one that is inextricably tied to identity and should be used by both author and reader for private self-reflection and renovation. Uninterested in impressing his personal opinions and morality on his audience, Sæterbakken refuses to judge his characters, choosing instead to force the reader to suspend his own sense of self and fully identify, even if for only a moment, with the distasteful or otherwise upsetting nature of what is being depicted. While under Sæterbakken’s influence, the reader becomes, in the Rimbaudian sense, another.
In another essay, Sæterbakken writes, “We are never fully and completely ourselves because our lacks, our weaknesses, and our fears make up an essential dimension within us.”[2] As evidenced in Andreas Feldt, Sæterbakken believes that our wounds are essential to who we are, as individuals and as a collective, and should not be avoided, or even healed; in fact, they are often meant to stay open so we can remain sensitive to our surroundings. “Melancholia satisfies us by preventing us from reaching satisfaction,” he writes, “it calms us by keeping our anxiety alive, it gives us peace by prolonging the state of emergency that answers to the name Humankind.” For Sæterbakken, even art cannot offer salvation or fulfillment. On the contrary, it reminds us “of the nothingness we know awaits us,” but in this reminder of absolute denial of life we find confirmation of our existence. If we cannot experience the silence of death, which is without music, literature, or sensation, in life, then we must seek out and experience art which draws attention to the paradox of existing as a being incapable of becoming fully aware of itself and its potential. This is the art Sæterbakken offers us.
Anxiety and influence
Stig Sæterbakken received international attention in 2008 while serving as the Artistic Director of the Norwegian Festival of Literature after he invited David Irving, a revisionist historian and Holocaust denier, to speak at the 2009 Festival. The invitation ignited an immediate firestorm and aligned the Norwegian literary establishment—and the general public—against Sæterbakken, who resigned his position in disgust, calling the Norwegian literati “fucking cowards” for their hypocrisy in claiming to uphold above all else free and open expression while being unwilling to acknowledge certain unfavorable opinions.
The Irving invitation was largely seen as a stunt meant to inflame and aggravate. Indeed, in the obituaries published in Norway, Sæterbakken’s life and writing was often neatly reported to be an attempt to counter contemporary conformity, to merely provoke the culture from its homogeny. The Irving event continues to be sensationalized, when in fact it was an act completely in keeping with what Sæterbakken saw as the radical responsibility of art.
In his second novel, The New Testament, which is not yet available in English, Sæterbakken’s narrator is obsessed with discovering Hitler’s diaries. His purpose in writing the novel was to draw attention to the Western historical interpretation of the Holocaust, to point out the arrogant moral superiority inherent in our interpretation of Nazism as “pure evil.” Sæterbakken insisted that we summon the courage to refrain from moralizing when studying history and instead explore the past with curiosity and humility. But he understood that this is not possible, that collectively “we cannot see evil because the day we do, we will have blood on our hands.” The New Testament was largely panned by Norwegian critics, its merits largely obscured by the notion that it was a novel contrived merely to be shocking and sensational.
Identity
Sæterbakken did not fully identify himself as a Norwegian—not as an individual nor as a writer. “My forefathers are Kafka, Beckett, and Céline,” he writes. “I like my European identity, because it takes away some of my Norwegian identity and replaces it with nothing. Because Europe is, strictly speaking, nothing. Europe is a fiction. Europe is a literary construct, held together by novels and poems, more than by nations and governments.” For Sæterbakken, “nothingness” is an essential aspect of identity, since nothing is a radical element, subject to be replaced by anything, by the possibility of anything, at any time. This idea of remaining forever incomplete and never quite knowable is the spring from which Sæterbakken’s art emerges and it is what permitted him to write without restraint, without so much as an acknowledgement of exterior codes or morality.
Sæterbakken indeed shares a good deal of Céline’s genetic code, so to speak. Like Céline, Sæterbakken takes it as axiomatic that life, taken as a whole, is, in Andreas Feldt’s words, “only terrible facts—terrible, because they are so haphazard,” that not only is one’s life just a false step away from careening into utter obscurity or invisibility, but that this fate may be unavoidable. Yet, for all of its grim depiction of the unfavorable aspects of love and life, Sæterbakken demands that we apply his radical approach of free expression to his literature and allow ourselves to remain open to the discomfort and alienation his writing may inspire—and open to the pleasure of self-discovery, even if it is an unfavorable discovery. That is, he demands a humanistic reading, since by setting before us the “dark,” the “grotesque,” the “strange,” and a graphic experience of these unavoidable aspects of existence, his literature helps us acquire an acceptance of life, such as it is. As Robert Faurisson writes of great literature—and of Céline’s work in particular—“it should not appeal only to man’s heart, intelligence, love of truth, but to the whole man.”
Sæterbakken strives to depict the totality of identity, of all the possibilities of self and of what we might become, free of imposed boundaries and artificial limitations. If we approach his literature with this in mind, he can no longer be so easily categorized as a “transgressor,” since there are no lines for him to cross. If we recognize his commitment to challenging his own beliefs as intensely as he challenges our collective beliefs, his work discredits the popular critical consensus of him as a provocateur. And if we accept the virtues of free expression without reservation, controversy ceases to be an option and the complexities of living humanely appear.
To our great benefit, it appears that Anglophone readers have yet to experience the best of Sæterbakken’s work. Through the Night, his last and “most sinister and also perhaps his most beautiful novel,” according to his Swedish publisher, Carl-Michæl Edenborg, is set for release in English in 2013. -
Stig Sæterbakken - Between Good and Evil An essay by Gabriella Håkansson
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