Nominated for the Nordic Council’s Literature Award 2003

Prolific project of many a long (y)ear

BY JOHN MOGENSEN

Per Højholt
Auricula
Gyldendal. DK

I have followed Per Højholt’s stimulating if exclusive literary production for many years now. I’ve reviewed him, written articles about him, edited literary journals with him, and taught his work at school. Not to put too fine a point on it, Højholt stands out – whether in terms of Danish or international literature – as one of those giants, one of those authors whom posterity will remember as a glorious landmark, a milestone, in literary history.
I am, of course, perfectly aware that Højholt has never received any widespread recognition, apart from the popular shows deriving from his Gitte Monologues in the ‘seventies. He is no selling-point for book-clubs, and he doesn’t feature on the hit-lists of any bookshops. He is caviare to the generals who really appreciate literature, who want something more than the dominating “isms” of the day, and mainstream opinions. With his characteristic physiognomy – intentionally conveying the impression of a bizarre mixture of poetic boffin and subtle, poker-faced buffoon – he has clearly earned the title of the most highly-gifted jester at the court of the literati ever since his début in the legendary days of the avant-garde literary journal, Heretica, back in the 1940s.
He has indeed won honour and prizes, and his work has been translated into foreign tongues, but even so one can’t help wondering why he has not been even further canonised, both in Denmark and abroad.

Auricula – a novel achievement
Last year (2001) saw the publication of nothing less than a masterpiece of Danish literature. Hardly one of those masterpieces that get into the bookstores of sixth form colleges or teachers’ training colleges, nor even perhaps into its readers’ hearts, but definitely into the qualitative shrines of literary classics. It has taken Højholt more than twenty years to write Auricula, his fabulous monster of a book. And all the while we have had to lend him our ears – we have had to aurally absorb his orally enthusiastic stream of advance publicity ever since the protracted birth of his problem child began, towards the end of the ‘seventies.
Not that Højholt, whose distinguished task has been to cultivate and enhance the spiritual life of the barren moorlands of Jutland, has been unproductive all these years. On the contrary, he has continuously expanded his great series of writings known as Praxis. But the book – his great, epoch-making novel – has taken its time to ripen. Godot might not come, but we knew all the time that Højholt’s book would finally appear – for its author constantly swore that it was “in the pipeline”! And now, at last, here it is – a literary monument, one of the “rare treasures” of Danish literature, if Kingo’s formulation can be accepted!
Kingo? – Bingo!

Don’t follow your intellect, just follow Højholt’s ears
Højholt is not just a writer per se. He is a linguistic philosopher, an æsthete, and a cultural historian obsessed by fables. And Auricula is earmarked by them all! With the Latin word for the (outer) ear, Højholt has selected for the novel one of the most bizarre sets of main characters ever to be found in world literature. For obvious anatomical reasons, they don’t have any legs to stand on – but these ears still seem to get around much more than any freebooter or footloose and fancy-free explorer.
The novel, which really ought to be called a mythomaniacal mastodon, or a thoroughgoing archaeological dig into the depths of our culture, itself constitutes a mind-boggling tour de force in the evolution of European culture in the twentieth century. Mein Jahrhundert was what Günter Grass called his epoch-making book from 1999, in which, year by year, he portrayed our own age – a work, incidentally, which did much to secure him his Nobel Prize in Literature, which he received the same year.
Going through things “year by year” is, of course, not exactly Højholt’s style – nor is it the logic behind the structure of Auricula. It does indeed consist of five sharply defined parts, or main sections: Quietude 1915, The Museum of Coincidence, The Protagonist, The Biology and Psychology of the Ears, and finally, The Danish Ears, with its thinly veiled punning allusion in the Danish language to the title of Achton Friis’ De danske øer (The Danish Islands). But there is still no firm structure nor recognisable contours to be found that can guide the reader through Højholt’s literary landscape. And even though he starts out in apparently very concrete terms in the first sentence of the novel: “The quietude of 1915 arrived on September 7th and covered Western Europe…”, it is impossible, even with the best will in the world, to make a summary of the story – or indeed history – which the book contains. Auricula is neither more nor less than its own ears, which, quite by chance but highly attentively, find themselves on the scent of key events in European history and art – if the anatomically mixed metaphor may be allowed to pass!
A mere glance at the densely written pages of the novel reveals a kind of stream-of-consciousness technique reminiscent of James Joyce’s in Finnegan’s Wake. Some of the episodes are so grotesque as to be nothing less than Rabelaisian, and there are digressions and labyrinths recalling Borges – together with lightning visits to the archives and blind alleys of Højholt’s own poetics. One can find one’s way into the universe of Auricula, because the language by itself creates the linear and associative paths which help us to read on, however difficult that task may seem. But there is no way in which one can find out – neither in the sense of finding out what it is about, nor in the sense of being able to stop reading! Reason, at any rate, is absolutely no help to us at all in Højholt’s universe, for Auricula is neither a detective novel nor a scientific one, however erudite it may appear to be. It is Art with a capital A – even though spelling things out in capital letters is a far cry from Højholt’s style! It’s a wild and rollicking tale which compresses things of infinite magnitude into the infinitesimally small; it wallows in obscenities, humour and anecdotes; it is continually and often simultaneously full of empathy, crudity and profundity; it is at once surprising and predictable. Above all, it is a Wittgensteinian jeu de mots and jeu d’esprit of the most wonderful variety.
Hardly any stone in the labyrinth of Western Culture is left unturned, and there are warm greetings to all and sundry. Poets, painters, philosophers and scientists, irrespective of their political affiliations – the ears are ready to take off their hats to them all. In fact it is precisely these cultural personalities, those representatives of the avant-garde, who have lent their ears to Auricula – and it is they whose echoes are heard in the ears, thanks to a little manual dexterity from the author.
Which might tend to make the novel into primarily a novel dealing with artists: though not with artists among revolutionaries, as Poul Martin Møller would claim, but rather a novel dealing with revolutionaries among artists. For art, in Højholt’s opinion, can never be a way to discover ultimate truths. The latter simply don’t exist. Language, which is the true basis of literary art, is always only a mask – something which, as he puts it in Turbo, is an effort to transcend the holes of nothingness – or, as he put it in more theoretical terms in a later work, language is only Intethedens grimasser (The Grimaces of the Void).
Højholt is, of course, iconoclastic – he likes to tear off masks – but he knows that there are only other masks underneath the masks he tears off. Which, after all, may be the reason why Auricula had to be an unfinished work (it lacks a projected sixth chapter, and the chapter on the Danish ears is shorter than originally planned). If it is to be true to itself, the novel can’t reach some inevitable conclusion – it can’t neatly present us with some ultimate truth, or with some Olympically omniscient perspective on our existences, or on its own existence, or on the existence of art – if such truths are by definition inscrutable.
This disturbing non-novel concludes with a brief reference to the tragic and uncompromisingly subjective, silent and static world of Hammershøi, the late 19th C. Danish Symbolist painter, whose psychologically avant-garde portrait of his sister was rejected for the Neuhausen Prize in 1888, and who therefore became one of the pioneers of the Free Exhibition, which started three years later, and whose strict æsthetic principles have so far remained a mystery to us: “Throughout the whole course of his life this spokesman of silence had to carry around with him his unusually clamorous surname, Hammershøi – a hullabaloo which he applied to his quietly breathing canvasses only under compulsion”.
Højholt’s description of Hammershøi’s dilemma – and his reflections on quietude and the void – together constitute a telling metaphor for Auricula and indeed for the whole of Højholt’s production. Storm and style are what we encounter in the face of the still life of life.

Translated by Jacob Thomas Edmonds