Autobigraphies

By Arne Melberg

In the autumn of 2004, at least two autobiographical novels were published in Norway: Espen Haavardsholm’s Gutten på passbildet (The Boy in the Passport Photo) and Nikolaj Frobenius’s Teori og praksis (Theory and Practice). There was a Swedish equivalent in Per Hagman’s Att komma hem ska vara en schlager (Coming Home Should Be a Hit), in which a character who calls himself Per unfolds a series of pictures of his life, which seems to have been spent primarily in gloomy bars around the world. All three use the tool that autobiographers have for discovering, describing and arranging their life: their memory.
In Swedish, „memory“ can refer both to something that has actually happened („I have a memory“) and to the activity „I remember“. This ambiguity accentuates the requirements of depicting oneself: splitting the self into a writing self that remembers and writes about the self that has lived and is living. My three autobiographers play on this traffic of memories between Now and Then. Per Hagman stylises his memories in accordance with the ideal he associates with „real style and real class“, and which he thinks has been lost in the „semi-Soviet“ Sweden that is characterised instead by smoking bans, cycling helmets and social-democratic decency. (It doesn’t help that Hagman curses his Sweden: in his fixation with real style and the right brands, he comes across as the Folkhemmet movement’s version of Brett Easton Ellis, with a few dashes of Houellebecq.) Hagman accentuates one possibility that has been latent in the autobiographical tradition ever since Montaigne, but which I associate more with contemporary pictorial artists who represent themselves in pictures: Jeff Koons, Tracey Emin, Sophie Calle. When the Frenchwoman Orlan alters her body and presents it as an artwork, we are reminded moreover of the possibilities that modern genetics seems to open up for „human design“. In Hagman’s work of memory, it’s Now that counts, and the Self that is the subject of the biography appears as the result of, yes, design. Identity is a product that at best can measure itself with branded goods, or which actually consists of them.
Frobenius forms every little excerpt to a complete entity, a memory. Each picture has a kind of intrinsic poetic value, but the pictures are chronologically arranged and thereby build up a tale of development. The word „Theory“ in the book’s title refers to the high ideals that drive „Niko’s“ father when he designs the „satellite village“ where Niko later grows up. „Practice“ is the reality of the satellite village, which is described as a negative development, with his mother’s death as a turning point, his friends’ drug-abuse and Niko’s own hospitalisation as the finale. The sober Now-perspective – a framework within which Frobenius visits the surroundings in which he grew up with overtones of critical discussion – sets up a balance between Now and Then, and assures us that Frobenius has left the psychotic Niko behind. Frobenius gives both expressive pictures of Niko growing up and a sharp critique of the structure and sociology of the satellite village, and he balances the intrinsic poetic value of the pictures with the progression of development. I would call the Self that is the subject of the biography episodic: not designed / stylised like Hagman’s and not completely subordinated to a logic of development, but living and present in the moments that the memories try to fix.
Haavardsholm too maintains a balance between now and then: in the present, it’s the author (using his own name) who philosophises about his work of memory, and wants to give the impression of serving truth because he works himself in behind a facade „built with the three-way support of illusions, lies and self-deception“. He tears down his facades by telling the story of „Nils“, who is 14 years old; it’s 1959, Nils wonders about himself and the many secrets of existence, he races on skates, he courts girls, meets Cultural Personalities, spies on the woman next door, loses his virginity with her assistance in an erotic intrigue. In other words, this is a classical-realistic novel of growing up that contains a large stock of period elements (although when Nils fears that he is a „loser“ with „noia“, he is hardly using the vocabulary of 1959).
Haavardsholm is a searching autobiographer: he regards himself as being „on the trail of what lies behind“: that is, behind the facades of lies and self-deception – in comparison with, for example, Per Hagman, for whom it is instead the facades themselves that determine truth and identity. Haavardsholm’s searching builds up a classically realistic project: what he finds behind the facades is neither myth nor fact, rather an intrigue where „everything“ that is true is connected and culminates in a decisive event – which means that the Self for which Haavardsholm is the biographer is determined by a conspiratorial story. Compared with this Balzac-esque „realism“, Frobenius develops a „critically“ searching-investigative realism, while Hagman – as a good post-modernist – sticks to surface realism.
The realist Haavardsholm writes about himself not as Espen but as „Nils“, while the critic Frobenius remembers himself as „Niko“. It is of course nothing unusual in the tradition of the autobiographical novel: August Strindberg wrote a whole series of autobiographical novels about himself as „Johan“. At the same time, the fact that the name is fictional points out an important strategy of writing about oneself: revealing by concealing. Nietzsche, who is the most autobiographical of all the philosophers, is also the one who puts his finger on this strategy when he asks himself in Beyond Good and Evil (section 289), „Does one not write books in order to conceal that which one is hiding within oneself?“ And he answers: „Every philosophy also conceals a philosophy; every opinion is also a hiding-place, every word also a mask.“
A visual equivalent of the magic of the proper name is the documentary photograph, as it is put into service by my three self-interpreters. Per Hagman’s face fills the book’s cover, Niko is shown at various ages on the front and back of Frobenius’s book, the text of which is broken up by documentary photos. The same applies to Haavardsholm, who in addition has dug out a passport photo of himself as a three-year-old and given the book a corresponding title. I can’t determine whether these pictures are a sudden trend that indicates a new type of „realism“ or that pictorial culture is infiltrating textual culture, or whether my self-interpreters are simply developing the autobiographical possibility of ignoring the boundary between literary fiction and biographical reality: the pictures (like the names) both reveal and conceal, they cross the boundaries – between now and then, me and him – that they simultaneously set up and reinforce. At all events, the pictures raise the suspicion that Nietzsche formulated as „every philosophy also conceals a philosophy“, and which in the forms and strategies of these autobiographical novels must be widened as follows: the possibility that all literature conceals a biography, and that all autobiography remembers or searches for or constructs a Self that has been lost.

Arne Melberg is Professor of General Literature at the University of Oslo.