Aesthetically ethical

By Kristin Ørjasæter

Parts of the modern literary scene are currently bearing witness to the traumatic events of our age. Bearing witness provides confirmation of some occurrence. In addition, however, to bear witness means to speak on behalf of others, the silent others, those unable to render their own account. To give testimony is to assume responsibility for the truth. It is more than simply the telling of a story, it is to accept accountability for the truth and the implications of one’s report. Literature in these terms comprehends ethical accountability.
Considerations of the relation of ethics to aesthetics stretch far back into history. In Norwegian literature, Johan Sebastian Welhaven believed (echoing Kant, Schiller og J.L. Heiberg) that the new literature, whose aim was the moral improvement and enlightenment of a democratic nation, should pay equal attention to ethics and aesthetics. Schiller’s reading of Kant provides the philosophical justification for coupling ethics and aesthetics. Ethics and aesthetics, writes Schiller, have one essential thing in common: they originate from and pertain to the same sphere of human life. What good morals are and what good art is, are decided by consensus.
As realism took hold in the Nordic countries, literature was assumed to offer a particularly useful vehicle for political debate. It did not diminish the question of ethics’ relation to aesthetics, but realism has never enjoyed sole jurisdiction over debates on ethics.
Trask. Forflytninger i tidas skitne fylde („Trudge. Movements Across Time’s Corrupt Plenitude“ – 2003) by Inger Elisabeth Hansen, is a substantial modernistic road-poem. The poetical first person is fixed in place, but possesses a fluid imagination, which takes the narrator on journeys all over the world, comes back to the point of departure, then sets off on a new trip. The poem alternates between confinement and motion, between the solid and the fluid. Difference, in the author’s own words, is put on a state of heightened readiness.
What impresses me most as a reader of Trask is that this all-embracing poetical sense is as firmly anchored in the tangible reality of war and chaos conveyed by the media, as in the great achievements of the history of art, and the local setting. This is all facilitated by metaphorical association. All places, all times and forms, through the interrelationships of the images, are assimilated into this awareness. The poem is shaped by images leading to fresh images, which allows it retain an awareness of war while espousing an idea of limitless universe.
Inger Elisabeth Hansen, as a poet, relates actively to language as a medium and what it means to be a poet. She wants her writing to make a difference. In a 2003 collection of essays, Blindsoner („Blind Spots“), she holds that literature must have relevance. What she means is that literary work must be taken seriously as a work of language. Literature is language, and the thing with language is that it has meaning. The artwork of words must be important both in terms of linguistic performance and substance.
Hansen lets art bear witness in Trask. That is, lets art relate truthfully and seriously. At the same time, she uses poetry to sharpen the reader’s ability to perceive and grasp the diversity. Trask testifies to a reality of differences on many different levels simultaneously. The ethical criteria to remain conscious of the differences and violence is enormously effective because it does not come cost-free to the reader, but emerges from a work to interpret the text.
Selma Lønning Aarø’s Vill ni åka mera? („D’you Want to Go On?“ – 2003) could also be seen as bearing witness. The novel shows how the extermination of the Jews during the Second World War still affects survivors though an almost realistic staging of the testimonial situation. The narrator is a second-generation survivor. When he speaks of himself he speaks of his father’s traumas sustained in the war and his mother’s betrayal. David is a typical survivor in the sense that he both bears witness to his father’s past while giving vent to his own sense of guilt towards him. It is a take on the classical guilt of the survivor, but given substance in this context because when David tells his father that his mother is having an affair, it kills him. We could say that the novel deals with what survival does to others: the mother who had to bear the guilt of her betrayal; David, who has to bear the guilt of his father’s death. What it concerns then is the effect of trauma on the person who suffers it, and on people in the vicinity, i.e., David and his mother. But it may not end there either.
Vill ni åka mera? espouses a commonly held notion that narrative constitutes identity. But Vill ni åka mera? asks indirectly whether it matters if identity is constructed though one’s story of oneself, or by somebody else’s story of ourselves. David not only relates his own story, he relates the story of his listeners to her. She says nothing. We feel he is talking himself into existence, not her, but at her cost. People without their own voice are eradicated, annihilated, unless they are told by others. We perceive his monologue as a violation. Vill ni åka mera? therefore poses an ethical question, it discusses not only the cost of survival but the cost of bearing witness.
Trask opens the reader’s mind by linking metaphors. Its modernist idiom makes us co-receptive to the world and reality, time, history and war. In Vill ni åka mera? the reader’s mind is accessed through the familiar chord struck by the story. Both novels attempt to make the reader aware of our significance to our surroundings. This is their ethical address to the reader. In an interview with Paal Bjelke Andersen, Inger Elisabeth Hansen says it is about showing what our culture is made of, to sharpen our awareness of our involvement in it (www.nypoesi.net). This ethical call is independent of any aesthetical style.

Kristin Ørjasæter teaches Norwegian language, literature and culture at the University of Aarhus