If it’s not imagination itself that is the actual protagonist here — the ghost in the reality machine, responsible for organizing and archiving this immense store of memories, belonging to who knows how many people: a consciousness that reveals itself through explicit reflections concerning the pressing task of processing the whole. The novel is filled with such small, corrective insertions: “if something asphalted can be called a ‘floor,’” or: “let us say,” or: “so to speak,” or: “in other words,” or: “if truth be told,” or “one might say,” as if it’s really the writing process, or the emergence of the thought process itself that we’re witnessing, not the events recounted. Language creates what it describes. In this way, a veil is drawn over events, the veil of observation and consciousness, which on one hand separates the people in the novel — and us as readers — from direct contact with experience, but on the other side enables a renewed contact with that same experience through Ulven’s linguistic precision: dark, vague occurrences become distinct objects of perception in the here and now. Immediacy disappears, precision remains.
Replacement abounds with the quotidian, the everyday, a lowest existential multiple, as it were, constructed through a series of ordinary tableaus showing people slogging their way through minor events, routines, trivialities, the day’s store of mundane activities: an evening stroll past a racetrack or a walk to and from the store; deliberations as to whether or not it’s worth the effort to stretch out an arm and turn off — or on — the light; a quilt sliding off the bed and lying like a shapeless deadweight on the floor; the urge to piss, which sneaks up gradually and then mercilessly takes priority over every other desire. Everything is anchored in this type of trivia. He (the nameless protagonist) needs a cigarette and hunts through his pockets and drawers for a pack, and then proceeds to hunt through his pockets and drawers for a lighter. Or he searches (just as feverishly) through the fridge for a beer, touchingly optimistic regarding the possibility of uncovering a surprise stash somewhere in the back, somewhere in the depths, somewhere down below. Or he lies in bed (as an old man) and studies a fly’s Sisyphean path around the inside of the ceiling light. Or (as a boy) he trembles in fear of the monster lurking beneath (the same?) bed and fantasizes, as if in a fever dream, of building a machine that’s capable of literally sweeping the monster away. Trifles are seen as the great battles of life. Elementary things are represented in visionary terms.
And then, what seems to be a story within the story: the intense fantasies and/or memories, it’s unclear which, about an unhappy, that is to say, an unfulfilled saga of love. Every now and then, the protagonist’s thoughts return to a woman he was once in love with (as a young man) and perhaps even lived with (as an adult), until she finally disappeared (committed suicide, most likely). Or are there two women? Perhaps it’s the other (the same?) woman, whom he (the same man?) met with in secret, a secret rendezvous characterized by a halfhearted attempt to reach out to one other, both of them struggling to connect, like two badly tuned radios, and to cool his blood, his mistress, if that’s what she is, cruelly asks, or even worse, asks because she perceives that his blood doesn’t need cooling, what he thinks his wife would say if she could see them like this.
Or is “she” merely a substitute for she, the italicized one, the one, that is, who got away, the one he couldn’t have, or else perhaps the italicized, the idolized her whom he couldn’t have, because she doesn’t exist, because she’s nothing more than the notion of what she might’ve been, if she’d really existed. He thinks about the things he could’ve said to her, which he can’t say to her, because “she” occupies the thankless role of the real woman, doomed to always lose out to the dream women.
Every now and then, however, a trace of tenderness rears its head in these moments, for example, in the painful scenes of the first stages of love, before the heart’s desires are realized, before dreams become reality; indeed, before one can even say they know the person whom they, for reasons yet unknown, are dying to be with, lose themselves in, become one with; painful, because one can’t avoid the foreknowledge of where it will all lead: “like when you’re standing outside a large amusement park in silence (and you can hear nothing but the distant sound of an orchestra tuning their instruments from somewhere beyond the trees), and you close your eyes and sigh in expectation, standing there before the main gate, where lightbulbs gleam brightly against the dark, before you go inside, where the few attractions will just become noisier and noisier, more and more vulgar, as the jostling crowd grows ever larger, the hawkers bolder, the entertainment simpler, the colors gaudier, the make-up shoddier,” and so forth.
Wreakage of a different kind, a different and thinner-skinned sensitivity, in the river of ruminations and memories. Whoever they are, however, these longed-for women also include the one the protagonist (or a protagonist) seemingly lives with, or at the very least who helps him, who takes care of the necessities, deals with practical matters, as they say, and who only produces irritation, if not to say disgust, if not to say hatred in him, emotions that presuppose a long mutual existence that’s spurred them to such heights (or depths). Or perhaps we’re just talking about the maid? At the same time, she’s an absent presence, she’s never there, it’s like she doesn’t exist, like she’s just made up of all the traces she leaves behind, the things she tidies up and purchases, the small changes she makes to the environment, like a chair that’s out of place, something that, once again, only serves to strengthen and deepen the helpless old man’s feelings of irritation, of disgust, of hatred.
That is, of course, if the entire novel isn’t simply a series of imaginary events, vague possibilities, an endless procession of could-have-beens, both poignant and angst-ridden, a series of possible milestones in the fictional unfolding of an unlived life placed under a microscope — or under operating-theater lights, ready for dissection — or under the dim glow of a ceiling lamp that’s flecked with the shadows of all the dead flies that have met their end there.
And yet, another woman — but is it her? or simply her? or neither of them? a third? — whom he, forty years after they met for the last time, considers contacting when he finds out that her husband has died. In this way, one person’s death flows into another person’s life and vice versa, all is connected, or: all is replaced, like threads on a loom, threads that, taken together, offer a certain view of life, of existence’s awesome underpinnings, its blind forward thrust, its unbroken flow, its ruthless, mechanical continuity. The boundary separating consciousnesses disappears. People leave the individual behind and enter a collection of damned souls, caught up in the rushing flood of thought. This is precisely what transforms Replacement into a great poetic work within the framework of a short novel. It’s the overwhelmingly large in the almost humbly small drama of existence personified by a hungover old man who, at this very moment, is rummaging through a chaos of expired groceries in search of a cold beer.