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Herta Müller says that while growing up in the Romanian countryside she used to eat the leaves and flowers from her area. Not because he was curious to know how they knew, but because he wanted to share his life knowledge. The green valley in which the family’s cows grazed was inhospitable and terrifying. Here it was the plants that knew how to live, not her. The same happened with literature. The secret police chased and harassed her. She realized that she could be killed at any moment and she lived in constant fear. “Writing words with fear was”, says Müller, “like eating plants, it was a word hunger”. The writing tried to “reinvent real life, but unreal, not one by one but much more precise.”
I’ll think about Müller’s plant food and this idea of literary precision when I read Katarina Frostenson’s “F”. Isn’t that what the distinction between “aesthetics” and “morality” that has been repeated in so many critiques is really about?
While Malin Ullgren draws attention (DN 11/11), Frostenson mentions Müller. It is at the beginning. Frostenson has just visited the institution where her husband is serving his sentence when she, at a nearby bus stop, sees “a white clover carpet.” He is associated with the white clover crown he received from Müller ten years earlier and later states: “Accusations, false and insidious, he probably has his own experiences through his upbringing under the authoritarian regime. Should?
Herta Müller.
Photo: Karl Henrik Edlund
Of course, Frostenson is fully aware of the significance of Müller’s persecution, but here it is not the detail that matters. Over and over again, “F” performs the same movement: from the sensually concrete and ambiguous to the abstract, without ambiguities and rough comparison (“argumentative images” is Ullgren’s proper expression). On the one hand, the book talks sensitively about a man visiting his anxious and imprisoned life partner; about the white plastic cups of the institution and that “the white light of November can remember the light of April”; on the other hand, as in his own mouth, about the “campaign of the crusaders” and that “there is money available to make a rape report.”
Carl-Johan Malmberg claims that all of Frostenson’s writing was an “exercise” (SvD 11/18) of what happens in “F”. It seems humiliating for her to hear and sound to my ears primarily as a provocation, but she has a point: the existential pettiness that Frostenson was after is sometimes sharpened in a new way in “F”. It’s probably because life in prison is so horrible and life as a relative of someone who is locked up as desperate as the book tries to clarify this Now and takes refuge in imprecise comparisons and abstractions.
In the latter case, it is not a “personal voice” that speaks, but a deeply impersonal one. It doesn’t say: my husband, this real person, has been subjected to collectively sanctioned anti-Semitism and the clues are x, y, and z. But: Alfred Dreyfus existed, Osip Mandelstam existed, Paul Celan existed and my husband listens, who knows? – to his persecuted crowd. Nothing testifies so strongly that it doesn’t like the fact that Frostenson never goes beyond stating very imprecisely that it is.
All this moral problem is aesthetic
According to Victor Malm gives clues like these, along with more tangible commitments about Arnault’s innocence, “F” to an “evil” book (Expressen 11/19). On the contrary, I think it makes it “good”. It may be true that “the public has judged” Frostenson’s opinion on the matter, but through her vague comparisons with persecuted people in history – “streaks of similarity,” as Frostenson calls them – she seems self-righteous, convinced of their own inviolability, the next stage is also moralizing and critical.
There is no trace of the evil of the literature that Georges Bataille described as “hypermoral” precisely because it does not judge or may be the starting point for self-assertion in Frostenson’s comparisons. Perhaps they, as Birgitta Holm (DN 28/11) seems to want to say, expose “the space of tradition.” However, if Frostenson had had a real sensitivity to the darkness of this space, he would have refrained from seeking his own reflection in it.
All this moral problem is aesthetic. It is only moral because it is aesthetic. Aesthetics means: sensitivity, sensitivity, sensuality. And the moral problem is the numbing of sensibility, sensitivity and sensuality. Don’t you have the right to defend yourself? Yes, but to seek the support of people from the past whose accidents have very little to do with their own, or to speak with contempt of a woman who in a court explains that she has been raped, not being able to think for a moment that even she suffered and suffers (but comments in his “rigid eyes”) is not to defend himself. It is affirming your resentment.
When literature is at its weakest, it does not reinvent real life
When literature is like does more strongly what Herta Müller says. Re-invent real life, but unreal. Not one by one, but much more precisely. Then it becomes, as it were, to consume, to eat plants, beyond good and evil. Perhaps it also spits out life like “a carpet of white clover.”
When literature is at its weakest, it does not reinvent real life. Then you don’t even look at it, you don’t feel it. Then it becomes inaccurate and a moral disaster.
Read more:
Review. Katarina Frostenson puts women to shame
Malin Ullgren: Carl-Johan Malmberg makes it easy for him in the debate on Katarina Frostenson’s book
Birgitta Holm: Katarina Frostenson’s “F” is a mirror of our time
