Like Beckett, furthermore, Ulven has a penchant for negatives (it’s no accident that the word “not” occurs in two of his book titles), often characterizing things as much by what they’re not as what they are, part of a negative proof — not of God’s existence, but of reality’s existence. The phrase “it’s not raining,” for example, occurs more than once in Replacement. People are treated in the same way. At this point, it’s difficult not to think of Schopenhauer, who inspired Ulven — he wrote an essay on the philosopher entitled “En form for ubehag” (A Form of Discomfort, 1988) — particularly his thoughts concerning aesthetic distance to the world. “Aesthetic,” in this sense, is understood to mean the state of being intensely present, but also sharply distanced, the individual reduced to a mere observer, so to speak, which for Schopenhauer was the very essence of genius: “the capacity to remain in a state of pure perception, to lose oneself in perception, to remove from the service of the will the knowledge which originally existed only for this service. In other words, genius is the ability to leave entirely out of sight our own interest, our willing, and our aims, and consequently to discard entirely our own personality for a time, in order to remain pure knowing subject, the clear eye of the world.”1 And what was it that Milton said? “They also serve who only stand and wait.” (From the poem “On His Blindness.”) At the same time, Ulven also recognizes that our observations and perceptions of reality are themselves creative, endlessly creative; that our will and representations are endlessly active in the world, a fact that makes the ideal of neutrality, or passivity, impossible.
As opposed to the strong tendency in literary traditions to attribute human qualities to nature, in Ulven’s texts a desouling rather than an ensouling takes place. When he describes a tree, he’s talking about the tree itself, how it’s shaped, how it looks silhouetted against the sky, how it’s perceived by the never resting, never not sensing, never not thinking I. It’s the mystery of the concrete. The tree’s existence is unfathomable enough without piling on a bunch of soulful or symbolic traits to boot! In this sense, there’s something rebellious in Ulven’s work, as when the contemplative stillness that forms his modus operandi suddenly gives way to a bout of anger, when the text abruptly “snaps,” as my daughter would say, and exhibits a biting, snarling fury, for example when one of the protagonists in Replacement vents his contempt for the subservient masses’ blind subsumption into the system, an emotion expressed by the surprisingly conventional image of mice on a wheel, although the very conventionality of the phrase underscores and strengthens the spontaneity of the outburst.
This reification, which is found throughout Ulven’s texts, also extends to people, whose basic existence is described in terms of the organic-mechanical process of which it actually consists. This idea is often expressed in striking aphoristic phrases like “To your / heart // you mean / nothing” (from Etterlatte dikt [Posthumous Poems]). This thought introduces a tragic dimension into our self-perception, revealing a fissure in what we’re used to perceiving as a whole. At the same time, one could almost say there’s something blissful about this idea, something that frees us from our traditional self-image, tears us loose from the stiffened humanistic forms of representation, and gives us a much-needed sense of meaninglessness with almost paradisiacal overtones (Ulven’s volume of selected poetry is called Det verdiløse [The Worthless], a title I read as decidedly positive.)
At this point, we’ve returned to the rebellious, if not to say the most radical, aspect of Ulven’s work. It’s not the absence of meaning that is the problem of Modern Man. The problem is that there’s too much. There’s far too much of it. In Replacement, we encounter a memory in the following way: “he”—who? someone! — sits beside the sea, stares out across the water and suddenly sees an object that he at first thinks is a bottle, or maybe a message in a bottle, then a cigarette case, which the wind blows toward land, until finally it resolves into a wooden board, a sodden, perfectly smooth board, nothing more and nothing less, which comes to rest against the beach, where it beats time to the waves. However, the object’s utter irrelevance — its meaninglessness — isn’t described in terms of disappointment (juxtaposed against the expectation of something exciting or adventurous), but just the opposite: it’s described as a relief, a release. As if it’s a blessing to discover that little piece of nothing drifting along. A board. A stupid piece of wood. A useless piece of driftwood. And that’s it.
No symbols where none intended. In Ulven’s texts, all phenomena, whether dead or alive, have the same meaning, the same weight, if you will. Everything is equally real, equally meaningful, or just the opposite: equally meaningless. It’s Ulven’s strategy for placing himself on the same level as his surroundings. He’s always equally precise, equally accurate, no matter what catches his eye or occupies his thoughts. In short, this linguistic precision represents in itself an embrace of the world. To describe this hand, this heart, this rock, this grass, this leaf in the grass, these dew drops on this leaf in this grass in this garden, to precisely express the existence of it all, is the true literary feat.
It’s not the world in a nutshell, but it’s the world in a backyard garden in Årvoll in Oslo. By placing such stark limitations on his repertoire of motifs, Ulven gives himself access to an enormous range of registers, a huge and richly varied series of approaches to the art of description. Great expansions result from great reductions. And he pushes the limits of both extremes, in terms of what it’s possible to sense (for example, to see), and what it’s possible to think (for example, about what we see) or to imagine (for example, as an extension of what we see). The source of Ulven’s relentless desire to find new and more meticulous ways to describe (the same) things, which forms an immutable constant in his work, the driving force behind everything he writes, is the intensity of the experience of living, that overwhelming, I’m tempted to say sickly presence, every single hour, every single minute of every single day of our lives.
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The protagonist in Replacement, or the first one we meet, anyway, is a ninety-nine year old man. We know this because he’s twice as old as the bullets in the loaded gun he always keeps within reach, there in a bedroom that’s seemingly remained unchanged since his childhood days. The nameless — and “throatless”!—old man seems closely related to the dying old man in Beckett’s Stirrings Still. He begins as a “he,” who eventually becomes a “you,” and then later a “he” again. That is, if it’s the same person. If it’s not really a multitude of hes and yous, whose paths cross at random points in a continuous stream. At any rate, they bleed into one another: past, present, fantasy. An amorous excursion, a lovestruck young man on his way to meet his heart’s desire in the nighttime, while his parents think he’s safe in bed, gives way almost imperceptibly to a night watchman making the rounds in a shabby industrial building, a scene taken from the time the young man — assuming it’s the same man — must’ve worked for a security company. In this way, the text shifts effortlessly between different times, and possibly between different identities.