With Realism as a Signpost

By Robert Åsbacka

1
When I was growing up in Finland, in Österbotten, there was an expression that we used to use when someone tried to show off but didn’t quite succeed. We would say that he – because as far as I remember, it was mostly men who did that kind of thing – had „drowned in his art“.
For example, perhaps somebody was good at climbing ladders, and knew it. And knew that other people knew it. Maybe then it was no longer good enough just to climb nimbly up to a gutter, with a few nails in his pocket and his hammer shoved in his belt. Perhaps he decided to take the saw and the spirit level up at the same time, as he was going up anyway, and there wasn’t any real need to do it twice.
Later when people were talking about how he fell, they would probably say exactly that, that he had drowned in his art.
This is something that, as an author, I have since had cause to think about. Because we do seem to find ourselves, more often than other people, in the actual danger-zone. Of course, that’s exactly where we should be: we should tell our stories as artfully as possible, and at the same time use only those arts that are essential.
That is a fine balance to achieve. Writing a novel is not exactly the same thing as replacing a gutter, and the difference is primarily that when one is replacing a gutter one knows, all being well, how to go about the work and above all what the result should look like.
One never knows that with a novel. Every novel has to be one that hasn’t been written before.
A great number of novels have been written, so even if the objective is well defined the result is difficult to achieve. In that situation, it can easily happen that one starts to show off with one’s tools instead of telling the story one should be telling, as effectively as possible.

2
It’s difficult to take an inventor who complains that everything has already been invented seriously. And the same should reasonably apply to authors who maintain that all the stories have already been told. They haven’t, of course – it’s just that the stories that haven’t been told are difficult to catch sight of. Just as difficult as to see one’s own culture’s taboos, or to see something that is always behind one’s back.
Even so, that’s exactly what we must try to do the whole time: say what has not already been said, find the blind spot, the empty spaces, the gap in reality. And it’s only when we have found, started to sense – for in this occupation one seldom knows anything – that it is time to think about how we should set about things, how we should chisel out, how to develop, how with the aid of the written language to think a little further. And not least, how to do this together with a reader.
For one of my dreams, one of the more important ones, is to write books for everybody. It’s not a question of large sales figures, even if I would not have any major objections to either distribution or income, but rather of a book that is so simple and so intricate that it can cope with both a quick read-through and being reread in detail ten times.
And here one can make great use of realism as a signpost. At the same time one should remember that the tale sometimes demands an approach that drives us a long way out into the outer reaches of realism, and it can even happen that sometimes we must breach the borders.
I have in mind a story that sets out into a terrain that is initially easily covered, but subsequently becomes more and more difficult. The narrator must constantly turn round, and make sure that as many people as possible keep up; and if one comes across a watercourse, and discovers that several of the followers don’t have the boots that one has oneself, then it’s a question of taking a different route, of using one’s creativity to the full and looking for a bridge, stepping stones, or some other way of getting across without too great a loss of numbers.
One can of course plough on, alone in one’s literary sea-boots, while the masses stand on the other side and watch one disappear towards a distant and unknown goal.
These are risk-filled journeys that, in the worst case, can lead to us drowning in our art and the reader leaving us half way through.
These things happen, and are bound to happen. But they should be regarded as an accident.

3
In Finland-Swedish literature, the working class seldom finds a voice. This is generally known and not a subject to dwell upon here. One could say that Finland-Swedish working-class literature is characterised by the fact that it doesn’t exist.
It does exist of course, but to a very small extent. We have Anita Wikman, and a few others. Good authors, predominantly women, but few in percentage terms.
A strict definition of working-class literature is that it is written about, by and for the working class.
The first element, about, is relatively easy to achieve. The second, by, is immediately rather more difficult. But it’s only when we come to the last element, for, that the real difficulties appear.
Because how should one set about writing a book for people who generally don’t read books?
Now of course there are many, very many people in the working class who read. But now let’s look at the person who hasn’t voluntarily picked up a book since schooldays, and isn’t inclined to start now, in mid-life. How does one reach a person like that?
There is a widespread notion that one can understand art and literature, even poetry, if one just relaxes, lets the work talk, doesn’t go in with preconceived opinions, opens up.
This is nonsense of course, and everybody knows it. Reading is something one learns, starting in infant school with „the cat sat on the mat“ – and at the same time having the basic gender roles laid down – right up to high school and university days, and James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.
In the late eighties and early nineties, I read a great deal by the Russian theoretician Mikhail Bakhtin. One of his more interesting essays is entitled, in English translation, „The Problem of Speech Genres“, and deals with how we talk, express ourselves, in a kind of pre-packaged formulae. The listener or reader who knows the genre realises from the first few words roughly where the whole thing is heading, what one can expect, and thus has a much greater opportunity to understand.
I believe that this is important. Because by choosing how we speak, we also choose who we are speaking to.
On the other hand, I don’t believe that we can choose our readers; we would like to, and should perhaps also try to do so rather more often than we do. But however hard we try, we seldom succeed.
It’s much easier to choose the readers we don’t want by the way we speak, by choosing a genre that shuts out certain groups. And these groups are not shut out because they have been granted a lower intelligence or an inability to think in depth. It’s simply a question of habit: whether or not you have come across the genre before.
The genre that the most people have come across is the one we use when we explain to our neighbour why the car didn’t pass its inspection, or about when our latest child was about to be born and the taxi-driver got stuck in a snow-drift while the contractions got closer and closer together.
One lands in what’s called realism. If one is interested in what society does with the individual, and the individual does with society, perhaps one even lands in social realism. A concept that in the Swedish language has very negative connotations, often associated with „boring“ and „grey“.
These are the lands in which I as an author reside. But realism, whatever that is, is fortunately an unfinished project. And it won’t be abandoned until all possibilities have been exhausted.

Robert Åsbacka, author, doctoral student in Literary Science, Stockholm University. [Most recently published books: Case Study: a Tale of Material Acquisition (novel, Schildts, 2004); Döbelns gränd (Döbeln’s Alley, Schildts 2000).]

Translated by Roy Hodson