Goodbye everyday life - Hello reality

By Kjetil Strømme

In recent years a new awareness-raising force has been in evidence, a more or less material critique of contemporary society by authors who do not immediately seem to have much in common. It further seems to be the case that the writers who launch the fiercest attack on the realistic-psychological novel are the most intriguing. Abo Rasul and Thure Erik Lund may not enjoy the widest readership, but they are absolutely two of the most interesting Norwegian writers in the millennium’s first decade. What is it they accomplish, in their various ways, by challenging the established, realistic novel? And can novels which only marginally unfold in recognisable everyday settings be politically explosive?
Macht und Rebel was published in 2002 as an independent sequel to Abu Rasul’s first novel The Cocka Hola Company (2001). The protagonist, Rebel, is a world-weary member of a subculture so subversive and demonstrative, it has started to bite its own tail. In the name of anti-corporatism, the activists manufacture PUSH commodities and carry out actions to undermine multinationals’ original brands. What they generally succeed in accomplishing is only to confirm the system they want to overthrow. In the case of Rebel, the outcome is almost total misanthropy. „I hate almost every person I meet. I hate bloody everybody. I’ve started hating things too. And sounds. There’s not one sound that doesn’t irritate me. Everything is ugly“ (Macht und Rebel, p. 8).
Rebel is numb, a sense of resignation shapes whatever he does, thinks and says. Nothing transcends anything any more. Rebel hitches up with Macht, a bright, streetwise individual, who knows how subversive underground groups (like the one Rebel belongs to) work, and nimbly transfers his knowledge to hypercapitalistic – plausibly enough for young people with money to burn – fashion brands and companies. Combining their assets the two youths initiate a hard-hitting rebellion which puts the frights up everything and revolves around a basic mixture of paedophile sex, violence and fascist symbolism.
In a literary universe so comprehensively caricatured that realism fails to do justice as a description, Abo Rasul succeeds in saying something worth hearing, for instance, when he questions the naivety of the political left and Scandinavian apathy. Worth hearing that is, if, unlike Øystein Rottem, one resists the temptation to approach Rasul’s style in terms of imminent realism. „The problem with books like Macht und Rebel is that they so easily end up in a hole intended by author for others, or in other words: they become themselves symptomatic of whatever it is they oppose. It is such a lewd, repulsive and shameless pornographic novel that it defies criticism,“ writes Rottem in his review of Macht und Rebel in Dagbladet.
Dagblad’s rival Verdens Gang lets Susanne Hedemann Hiorth express a more sympathetic understanding of the author’s relationship to reality: „Abo Rasul stretches his literary universe far enough to depict a sick, sick world. These characters’ views about women, paedophile preferences and cucumbers rammed up certain places are über-over-the-top. Nevertheless, the novel is uncommonly funny because its take on the absurdity of contemporary life is so incredibly spot on.“
In a lecture on political literature at the University of Oslo in March this year, Kjartan Fløgstad suggested that the best way of determining literature’s effect on society is to look at polemics and non-fiction, or in other words the amount of noise in the media about this type of literature. Which does not mean necessarily that non-fiction has pushed fiction off the political stage entirely, just that it has been nudged from the most conspicuous and reported areas. In a modern society governed by scripts, the government is compelled to use language to regenerate its authority. Changes in the way literature uses language could therefore impact on one of the most important elements of authority’s self-propagation, at least in the longer term.
It is in this sense a writer like Thure Erik Lund becomes a seriously interesting proposition. One thing is his account of the nature/culture and individual/collective split, which can be read more or less literally as social critique and dystopia, but when Lund mixes language and matter, and then sabotages and innovates language, the text obtains a new, wider political dimension. A dimension difficult to measure, perhaps, but which nevertheless appears more revolutionary and risky. As Lund put it himself in Compromateria (2002): „I want to break the mould. I wanted to give the world-machine something gravely, rickety, abstract to swallow, which it couldn’t comprehend, but which would change it, incomprehensibly, because it would be an image of itself“ (Compromateria, p. 62).
„An image of itself“, writes Lund, then. Nevertheless, his dystopia, where a bizarre writer-like character is sucked into a future technocracy full of neologisms, is about as far from conventional realism as it is possible to get. Karl Ove Knausgård writes sensibly about Compromateria in his review in Klassekampen. Lund’s use of language, he says, is not simply a way of approaching the world, it is a phenomenon in the world, „like an independent, active organic agency, beyond our control.“ We can therefore say that Compromateria is actually realistic, in the sense that it affects language – and it follows realty – in which we are immersed.
But Lund is not only abstraction and complicated construction. There’s space for political satire, easier to digest from the point of view of current Norwegian politics: „Compromateria makes it abundantly clear that, to paraphrase, „ordinary people“ don’t exist, since the cerebral massives believe every creature is unique and distinct, there’s nothing left for the phrase „ordinary people“ to refer to. It’s a deliberate manoeuvre, because if such a thing was ever devised, certain marginal groups could start referring it, purely abstractly, to score cheap political points“ (Compromateria, p. 158).
The novels of Lund and Rasul challenge our conception of reality, and our notion of where that something called „realism“ in literature starts and stops. While Rasul’s challenge at least comes within spitting distance of the world as we know it, and in that sense is more evolutionary, a prodder of boundaries, Lund’s linguistic and literary project approaches revolutionary status, the stormer of barriers. In the final instance, Lund’s novels could initiate the self-destruction of conventional literary realism.

Kjetil Strømme works as a publishing editor and freelance literature critic