There is also something aggressive and hostile in the repetition of this “me.” Screw you, it says. You can believe what you want. Here I and only I prevail.
An I completely on its own is anonymous, neutral and without character. Repeated four times it becomes a literary and social program, because after having read the first four diary entries, one understands that this is an I in opposition to the social world, which it considers to be hypocritical and insincere, unlike its writing, which aspires towards that which is true and sincere, which is to say the I that opens towards us by putting itself on display, at first anonymous, neutral and without character, and which by virtue of the repetition then sheds the neutral and the characterless, and in its fourth instance stands trembling, truth-thirsty, reality-craving, superior.
And then it is literature.
But if I had begun this novel in exactly the same way it would not have been literature. Although the pronoun “me” does not in any way belong to the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz, the author of that diary, and he likewise has no right of property to the repetition of that pronoun four times, meaning that legally or morally there would not have been anything in the way of me making use of that exact same opening, this would not have been the case with regard to literature, because the entire value of that opening lies in its uniqueness and its expression of uniqueness. If I had used the same words, Witold Gombrowicz’s I would have superimposed itself onto my own, and my “me” would thereby have become a parody, expressing lack of originality where Gombrowicz expresses the opposite, and thereby I would have undermined what the utterance is saying — that truth lies in the unique I, and only there — because the I that would have been saying this would not have been unique and primary, but Gombrowiczized, socialized, plagiarized.
My literary I was most likely Gombrowiczized in any case, because his diaries had such a great influence on the way I thought about identity, sociality and literature, but it was also Larssonized, Proustized and Célinized — if not to say quite Sandemosial and thoroughly Hamsunified — and if I were to attach an image to those influences it would perhaps involve a boy, let’s say he’s 14 years old, living next to a river, with a section of rapids about two miles down from the house, and the rock over which the water rushes, swollen and shiny as steel, is smoothly eroded and covered with algae, so that a person can swim out above the rapids and allow himself to be swept along by the current, something he often does, this boy, together with his best friend and all the others who congregate there in the summer evenings, there being hardly a better feeling in life than this, to sense the might of the river, the increasing velocity, the surge of descent as he is swept away and slung into the depths further down, plunged into an effervescence of tiny bubbles, tumultuous chaos, allowing himself, if he wishes, to be carried into more gentle waters, there to clamber up onto the land again, or else swim back upstream as far as he is able, until the current becomes too strong and he is brought to a standstill, unable to progress any farther no matter how hard he struggles, eventually to be swept away downstream again. To sail down those rapids is like writing, carried from one point to another by forces beyond your control, but what you experience on your way is experienced by you alone, because I cannot imagine the other kids could have seen or felt the same as he, and if those evenings, with their setting suns and still-warm rocks in the swiftly cooling air, where great swarms of insects hung suspended in pockets of light, the resounding rush of the river and the joyful shrieks of boys and girls, the almost electrically illuminated trees, behind which an old-fashioned gravel road led to a manor farm presumably built in the 19th century in connection with the sawmill at the falls, and beyond the manor farm the sunlit tree-covered slopes above which the sky slowly dimmed, eventually, towards midnight, opening to the light of the few stars bright enough to pierce the pale night of summer — if those evenings, with the slant of further slopes on the other side of the river, dark and shadowy at the bottom, shimmering orange at the top as if ablaze, and an asphalt road with considerably more traffic along whose straights and bends the kids who lived there would cycle or race their mopeds to call on each other — if all this remained in their memories it would be in ways completely different than the way it did in his, this 14- or 15-year-old boy with no greater joy in life than this, to be within this space that resounded with the clamor of its thunderous waters and the exuberant voices of young humans, lit by the sun or dimmed by its absence, so strangely desirable that the very thought of it fills him with joy even now, 28 years later. The feelings that come to him on this reflection may be no less intense than those of the others who were there, though this is certainly possible, because different things will attach themselves to us, and his recollection is by no means more significant to him than to the others, it is simply different. It is unique. And a starting point for a hundred novels at least. A thousand even, on that basis alone. Boy at river below sawmill one evening in summer. A writer of Aksel Sandemose’s ilk most probably would have zoomed in on the girl in the red bikini both he and his friend desire, then followed the three of them through life, because here we have a very fundamental psychological as well as social structure, two on one, and archaic in nature, the taboos surrounding it are basic. A Proustian writer probably would have ignored the physical-concrete aspect of the situation and emphasized its place in memory, which by virtue of being a representation is connected with all other representations, which is to say that it shares the characteristics of the work of art, the reproduction of something no longer here but which nevertheless remains within us, in the almost dreamlike haze that is such an important element of our reality, where the girl in the red bikini, testingly dipping her toe in the river in the shade of the trees, perhaps resembles one of Rembrandt’s young Dutch women of the 17th century, Susanna, for instance, or the figures seated or standing on the smooth rocks, dressing or undressing, fleetingly remind one of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes’s paintings from the latter half of the 19th century, in which the human figures possess a near-sculptural quality, certainly not psychological, and the various poses lead the mind back to the high classical period of Greek antiquity, 400 years before Christ, when the self did not turn inward to seek harmony, but outward, in the belief that harmony is a constant quality of the human, not something cultural or relative, a belief that was perhaps shared by these youthful Scandinavian figures on the rocks by the river. A follower of Knut Hamsun, where would he or she have gone with this? To the drone of the moped as it rounds the bend beneath the fell? To the rush of the river, the sudden bashfulness in the eye of a girl as she glances down? Or to the house of the fat minimart owner on the new estate from the ’60s and his endeavors to make a living independently of the supermarket chains? The tattered remnants of aristocracy in the family who perhaps owned, perhaps no longer own, the manor farm by the river? Or perhaps to the self, the self as it watched itself, suspiciously monitoring, cracking down at the slightest hint of pretense, in that impossible desire for authenticity that once led the hero of Hamsun’s novel “Mysteries” to suicide in a town 20 miles from this place in distance, 90 years in time. Oh, here were as yet priests and the daughters of priests, lensmenn and their sons, blood that rushed in the veins, hearts that pounded in the chest, here were the most refined and the coarsest of emotions, all a writer would have to do would be to start.
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