Media-isation prepares the way for investigative fiction
The Return of the Total Novel

By Oscar Hemer

Literature’s relationship to (social) reality fluctuates with the political and economic situations. The left-wing movements of the 1960’s transformed authors into reporters, journeying out into the world or to milieux that were nearer to hand but still unknown, such as Norrbotten during the miners’ strikes. Many of these literary reportages are considerably better than the tarnished reputations they acquired, and in most cases superior to the journalism of the time, but they are also so saturated with the ideological spirit of the day that nowadays they stand out as period documents rather than as living embodiments of a reality in metamorphosis. Today’s travellers to Iran probably recognise themselves more in Willy Kyrklund’s To Tabbas from 1959 than in Sven Delblanc’s Zahak from the early seventies.
The take-off of post-modernism in the 1980’s signified a reaction to programmatic politicisation that was both inevitable and badly needed. It was perhaps no coincidence that this aesthetic take-off occurred at the same time as the global advance of new liberalism, but to brand post-modernism as politically right-wing would be misleading. The literary current of the eighties, which in the Nordic countries found its most powerful expression in Danish poetry, was a reaction against politicisation as such, against its totalitarian demands, and a reassertion of the autonomy of art and literature. It harked back to the aesthetic radicalism of the early sixties, but without its political connotations. The radicalism of the eighties turned inwards, into language, in towards the individual body.
The pendulum swings, to put it simply, between extroversion and introversion. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that we can now expect a new wave of politically and socially engaged literature. We are more likely to find commitment to the burning questions of the day in the visual arts, film and plastic art. Books are being sold like never before, but literature as an art-form seems marginalised and unsure of its role in a changed world.

Media-isation has, for good or ill, broken down the old barriers between exclusive elite culture and commercial popular culture. This new cultural situation has seen a new kind of streamlined, optimal culture flourish – what the American journalist John Seabrook has ingeniously called nobrow – that is, neither highbrow nor lowbrow. For literature, this has meant a conscious or unconscious adaptation to the market. Literary success is measured at least as much in quantity as in quality; popularity is almost demanded.
But if literature at the end of the sixties had a tendency to be transformed into travel or social reportage, then today’s media publication is characterised instead by the fictionalisation of journalism. It is thus not just the boundary between „high“ and „low“ that has been erased, but also the until recently much sharper dividing line between fiction and „reality“, between the virtual and real worlds.
In this state of confusion of concepts and genres, a number of in part contradictory tendencies can be seen. Journalism’s undermined pretensions to objectivity have created the space for art to explore and depict a hidden or forgotten reality. At the same time, a growing distrust of fiction as such can be detected. Hence the renaissance of documentary works. Many visual artists nowadays use documentary film as their medium.
Within literature too there is a noticeable tendency to at least imitate documentary characterisation, in order to create illusory or real „authenticity“. But a literature that merely strives to recreate reality will inevitably come up short in comparison with film and other visual art-forms. The strength of literature lies in the fact that fiction has no limits, and in its cannibalistic ability to encompass other art-forms and genres.
The book format does admittedly set defined limits, and textuality is of course also imperative. If we disregard hypertext’s added dimension, literature can only be read in one way, from left to right – or vice versa – and from start to finish. But in contrast to pictorial art, which finds its personal interpretation in the meeting between the work and the viewer, the literary work creates its own universe, in which readers from widely different starting points can meet and communicate.

The post-modern death of the big stories has not reduced literature’s totalising demands in the slightest. Paradoxically enough, the reverse seems to be the case. Two of the most ambitious novels of recent years support my observation: the Englishman David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2003) and the Chilean Roberto Bolaño’s 1200-page 2666 (2004), diametrically opposed but united in their astonishing and apparently anachronistic ambitions. Cloud Atlas spans a period from the 18th century to a distant future, after the collapse of civilisation, and gives a fascinating double reflection of the present day’s globalised corporate culture. Bolaño’s posthumously published magnum opus is at least three novels in one, with layer upon layer, like Chinese boxes, and unites all genres imaginable – thriller, science fiction, reportage, philosophical essay – in its investigation of the mystery of the bygone 20th century.
Neither of these novels would be called realistic in the accepted meaning of the term. But they say more about the present-day global reality than all the keenly observant everyday-realistic contemporary novels put together – because they let us sense a different world from the one we encounter every day in the media.
In the Nordic countries, Jan Kjærstad’s trilogy about Jonas Wergeland is probably the closest we have come to the „total novel“. But the format is, in spite of the intricate cyclical structure of the narrative, a fairly traditional epic. Not one big story but many small ones, woven together into a larger whole. And there is never any doubt about the fictional nature of the work. In, for example, Lars Jacobson’s work one finds a more unsettling drifting between fact and fiction in a format that is not infrequently mock documentary. Fiction appears in Jacobson’s work as a tool for investigating parts of the world that journalism and science can’t reach. It is something different from – in fact the opposite of – fictionalised journalism. The author departs consciously and demonstratively from the demands of objectivity, for the purposes of getting closer to the truth.

Fiction can of course also be the only way to get close to a contemporary or historical truth. Argentinean-born Swedish resident Julio Millares’s novel El Cielo No Puede Esperar (Heaven Can’t Wait, translated into Swedish by Gunnel Isaksson and published by Tranan in 2004 as Himlen kan inte vänta) is a brilliant portrayal of the Argentinean military’s „dirty war“ against real and imaginary leftist sympathisers during the latter part of the seventies. Millares chooses to represent this black-as-night chapter in Latin-American history, when tens of thousands were tortured and murdered, and just as many forced into exile, from the perspective of the perpetrators.
The dictator novel is a sub-genre of its own within Latin-American prose, with Vargas Llosa’s portrait of the Dominican Republic’s tyrant, Trujillo, as the latest contribution. In all their admirable insight, these studies of corrupting power always touch on grotesque caricature. Elements of that are certainly also to be found in Millares’s description from within of „the school“, ESMA – the torture centre that is going to be preserved as a museum of the Argentinean military junta’s reign of terror. However, it is not the generals who are at the centre of his interest but the junior officers, the foot-soldiers, the executors of routine evil, those who obey orders, sometimes willingly but just as often in fear and confusion, and with gnawing pangs of conscience.
The fragmentary format creates confusion, an almost claustrophobic feeling of being present, and the style is characterised by restrained terseness. It is irrelevant whether the characters are modelled on real people or not. They are utterly believable – true in the essential meaning of the word – because Millares speaks both with the moral authority of one who has survived, and through his supreme command of the literary means of expression.

The Norwegian-American John Erik Riley’s „collection of novellas“ Mølleland (Mill Country) doesn’t convey the same kind of authority, but is a no less interesting attempt to approach and represent a complex reality from the inside, in this case war-torn Bosnia. The pieces are like fragments of interviews conducted immediately after the Dayton Agreement, when hordes of journalists, aid-workers and „peace tourists“ invaded the country with microphones and notepads to find out what had happened. The questions have been omitted, but they can easily be reconstructed. And the answers give rise, at the second level of the narrative, to new and unsettling questions: What is it that is being reported? What does the world actually want to know? How can we even try to understand?
On that level, Mølleland functions as a sophisticated form of media criticism – with the help of fiction, the fundamentally fictional nature of media reporting is revealed. Whether it can also be called realistic is perhaps irrelevant – Riley has in any event very little in common with the social realism of the seventies that was strongest in his own Norway.
Significantly enough, new generations of authors also seem to be seeking their dramatic material outside the Nordic countries. Not that there is a lack of explosive material at closer quarters. In Denmark, which was in the vanguard of the post-modern take-off of the eighties, race laws have now come into force that are driving Danish citizens into exile in Sweden. This is greeted with political consensus and media silence on the other side of the Sound.
That could be a formidable project for a contemporary novel, realistic or not.

Translated by Roy Hodson