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Article Excerpt
Straffen er tydelig, at enhver Overveielse, om hvad Virkelighed er, er vanskeliggjort, ja maaskee en tidlang umuliggjort, fordi Ordet forst maa ligesom have Tid til at besinde sig paa sig selv, Tid til at glemme Feiltagelsen.
--Kierkegaard, Begrebet Angest 318 (1)
NIELS BARFOED, in an introductory essay to Villy Sorensen's then barely ten-year-old career, writes that "[s]palming er roden til al konflikt, og Villy Sorensens filosofi, der her skal betragtes for sig, er i bund og grund konflikttaenkning" (445) [a split is the root of all conflict, and Villy Sorensen's philosophy, considered here, is at its center a reflection on conflict]. (2) Barfoed suggests thus that the central feature of Villy Sorensen's oeuvre is conflict and specifically conflict originating from a split, a terra used by Sorensen to indicate the ontological and psychological dehiscence of the modern self. Barfoed then expands his concept of the split to include other sources of conflict central to Sorensen's thinking.
Villy Sorensens ord for den splittede tilstand, som kristendommen kalder syndefaldet og filosofien der absurde, er traumet. Og denne oplevelse af ikke at vore i overenstemmelse med sig selv, ikke at honge sammen, at vore spaltet--det er for Villy Sorensen kunstens foretrukne emne overhovedet, og ikke blot den moderne kunsts. (446) (Villy Sorensen's word for the condition of being split, which Christianity calls the Fall and philosophy the absurd, is trauma. And this experience of not being in harmony with one's self, of not cohering, of being split--this is for Villy Sorensen art's main and preferred theme, and not of modern art alone.)
The importance of this claim about a split is that Barfoed specifies that its sources include the Christian Fall, the philosophically absurd, and psychological trauma. While Barfoed insists on a substantial parallelism of these terms, it is far from clear how parallel they in fact are. The relation among them is, however, not necessarily a problem in Barfoed's formulation, but derives rather from Sorensen himself, who often forces each of these terms into an adjacent position that problematizes the boundaries of each.
What Barfoed's gloss points toward, however, is not only the difficulty in aligning these different discourses, but rather the difficulty of identifying origins and centers in Sorensen's works in the first place. It is problematic to facilely align the split with trauma or with the Fall or with the absurd in that they are not simply interchangeable concepts, bur complexly related to one another in Sorensen's thinking. It is likewise also problematic to cast the split as the central concern of Sorensen's thought. Barfoed's pursuit of the root--the most basic and fundamental element of Sorensen's postition--reveals a series of substitutions that, instead of forming a more coherent conception of the center, compete with one another. While Barfoed insists on the centrality of a split, the umbilicus of Sorensen's works maddeningly appears to shift places and reveal ever-deeper or at least different possibilities. In approaching the root of all conflict in Sorensen's thinking, one finds ever-different aspects of his corpus emerging as if the center were subject to constant deferral. Framed in such a way, one might argue that the pursuit of origins rather than the determination of a center constitutes the central feature of Sorensen's konflikttonkning. In other words, Barfoed's attempt to determine and isolate the center of Sorensen's oeuvre is an exercise in futility, not because of some inherent defect in the methodology, but because the notion of origin, beginning, or center and the problems encountered in addressing them is itself central to Sorensen.
These problems surrounding the foundation of Sorensen's thought are perhaps better clarified by considering Sorensen's view of the origin of modernity, i.e. the Fall. Just as Sorensen has been recognized as Denmark's poet of the split, he has also just as often been identified as Denmark's "poet of the Fall." Sorensen himself ascribes originary significance to the Fall in a prefatory chapter to the largest section of Digtere og domoner. He writes that the Fall is "et 'ontologisk' faktum, der determinerer erfaringens karakter" (39) Jan "ontological" fact that determines the nature of experience]. In this same chapter, he continues arguing that "faldet er forudsaetning for den sande virkeligehedsoplevelse; faldet er selve virkeligheden" (40) [the Fall is a prerequisite of the true experience of reality; the Fall is itself reality] and as for modern reality, "[d]ette 'fald' fra evighed til forelobighed ... er det afgorende skred i europaeisk andshistorie" (176) [this "fall" from eternity to the transitory ... is the decisive step in European history of Spirit (3)].
To transfer Barfoed's claim that a split is the center of Sorensen's works to the Fall is not to assert that the Fall is necessarily the origin of Sorensen's thought, or immune to the problems raised above. Rather to focus on the Fall as the origin of modernity--and as I will argue, the origin of Sorensen's entire oeuvre--acknowledges that this shift is and can only be one more link in a chain of substitutions. The value of such a shift, however, is that it overtly raises questions about origins and centers in productive ways.
To ascribe to the Fall features like "ontological fact" and "reality itself," Sorensen suggests an event that functions as an absolutely central and formative event in human history. Indeed Sorensen is even more comprehensive in his assigning to the Fall features associated with modernity. In his essay "Det faldne Europa" ["Fallen Europe"], the concluding essay of Digtere og domoner, he writes that
faldet betyder bruddet pa folleskabet med Gud og medmennesket, bruddet pa den hidtidige verdensorden (som stadig gentages ifolge arvesyndens princip), klofte mellem for og nu, fordrivelsen fra "paradiset" og den evige stroben efter at genoprette den tabte harmoni, ved hjolp af den viden som det syndens oble abner adgang til og som, i kraft af sin egen logik, fjorner sig Longere og Longere fra den oprindelige harmoni. Psykologisk betyder "faldet" spaltningen mellem folelse og intellekt, den radikale uddifferentiering af sjolekrofterne og mangelen pa evne til at blive "hel" og vore i harmoni med sig selv. (198) (the Fall signifies the break in the partnership with God and with one's fellow man, the break in the previous order of the world [which is continually repeated according to the principle of hereditary sin], the divide between the past and the present, the expulsion from "paradise" and the eternal striving to reestablish the lost harmony, through the help of that knowledge which the apple of sin provided and, through the power of its own logic, removes itself further and further from the original harmony. Psychologically "the Fall" signifies the split between emotion and intellect, the radical differentiating of the powers of the soul and the loss of the ability to become "whole" and be in harmony with one's self.)
This comprehensive and broad assignation of fractured, modern experience in the latter part of the quotation to the Fall and its characteristic features mentioned in the first part are significant not only in terms of locating the Fall as the origin of modernity, but also because it seems like such a striking assertion. If we can agree that these are indeed the features of modern experience, how can these be ascribed to the Fall?
In the context of this quotation, there is a tendency to view Sorensen's Fall as a rather arbitrary and highly idiosyncratic point of departure, an utterly private and imaginative blending of theology, philosophy, and psychology. The difficulties of Sorensen's emphasis on the Fall as the orienting event of modernity and of reality itself only begin there. How can the problems of modernity--the decentering of the modern subject, the conflict between self and collective, the caesura between modernity and the past, the problem of knowledge and science, etc.--be ascribed to an event that cannot with any empirical certainty be said to have happened? How can such an event so profound and definitive according to Sorensen not be known? Numerous other questions are also implied. For example, what exactly does Sorensen mean by the Fall as the decisive step in European history when, even if we were to admit its occurrence, it would have taken place millennia before anything like Europe came into existence? If Sorensen seems to have created an imaginative space for the discussion of modernity, it appears to be extremely confused. But if Sorensen's interest in and use of the Fall is marginalized as only idiosyncratic, it is disengaged from a more complex and provocative problem, one central to the conflict that Barfoed notices: the problem of time and memory in relation to the origins of modernity. Thus the seemingly confused and chaotic view of the Fall may not necessarily be a problem in Sorensen's thinking but an important part of the kind of event Sorensen is pursuing.
The conclusion that Sorensen's Fall is the same as the Genesis account seems prima facie uncharacteristic of Sorensen, who remained unaffiliated with any Christian denomination (although baptized into the Danish State Church) and was skeptical of and often at odds with institutionalized religion. It is, moreover, not possible to ascribe to him any private conviction that would resemble traditional Christianity. In the quotation above, we find the familiar catalogue of trangression of divine mandate: partaking the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and expulsion from the garden, but rarely does Sorensen (even elsewhere) use specific features from the Genesis account. Rarely, if at all, does Sorensen speak of Adam or Eve, and when he does, they are meant in only the most allusive sense. The Fall understood as the traditional Judaeo-Christian origin is almost entirely absent from discussions of the Fall in his works. Instead, and in distinction to the narrative features of the Fall, Sorensen attends to consequences and effects. That is, he engages the aftermath of the Fall and not the Fall as an event in itself.
One already senses the attenuated nature of Sorensen's Fall as a determined and delimited historical event in his use of the verb at betyde, which I have translated above as "signifies." Sorensen, in the two sentences that make up the above quotation, begins each with "The Fall signifies...." The consequences of the Fall, the movement and force of its signification, is at stake here and not the definition or description of the Fall as such. The Fall signifies rather than is something. Sorensen, in freeing the Fall from its narrowly Judaeo-Christian implications and allowing its signification to extend beyond the traditional and ultimately narrow range of meanings, posits the Fall as an over-coded and over-determined signifier whose origin and effects are ultimately untraceable in their extent. His "borrowing" of the Fall from Christianity and aligning it with existential, philosophical, and psychological consequences invoke numerous discourses that serve to overdetermine further the nature of his Fall.
Still, Sorensen appears to privilege one discourse over the others as a way to understand just what is meant by the Fall. In one of his densest formulations, Sorensen explicitly links the Fall to the concept of trauma. He writes,
Psykologisk er det absurde traumet som forhindrer mennesket i ganske at vore sig selv. Nar traumet forst fjornes kan det--med tilbagevirkende kraft--for-tolkes som en tilfoldighed. For en filosofisk forstaelse, der har taget ved lore af dogmatikken, er det absurde en manifestation i det psykologiske af det evige traume: syndefaldet (Digtere 31) (Psychologically the absurd is the trauma that prevents man from being himself. When the trauma is first removed it can--with retroactive power--be interpreted as an accident. For a philosophical understanding, which is lent a hand by dogmatics, the absurd is a manifestation in the psychological of the eternal trauma: the Fall.)
We will have to understand better what Sorensen means by this "tilbagevirkende kraft" found in trauma, but for the moment, it is enough to note that the Fall is described as trauma and as an eternal trauma.
Sorensen's interest in trauma dates back to the early essays that make up Digtere og domoner (1959, Poets and Demons). While the collection at first glance is rather eclectic consisting of literary criticism (on Thomas Mann, Harald Kidde, Hermann Broch, H.C. Andersen, Soren Kierkegaard), philosophical treatises, socio-political commentary, and essays on culture, Sorensen here first employs many of the concepts and ideas for which he is well known: the Fall, repetition, a split in identity, the problem of freedom, and the difference between poetry and philosophy. These concepts and overt preoccupations of Sorensen form not only the more standard aesthetic and philosophical foundation for the essays, but have come to be recognized as distinctively Sorensenesque. It is clear from Sorensen's journal entries, however, that he did not consider Digtere og domoner merely a compendium of what he had recently published. (4) In reference to Gyldendal's offer to publish a collection of essays, Sorensen writes, "[e]n essaysamling matte naturligvis ikke vaere et sammensurium, men en sammenhaeng" (Forlob 147) [a collection of essays need not naturally be a hodgepodge, bur a cohesion]. This entry, dated 31 January 1958, goes on to list a number of essays that might provide the context or connection that Sorensen was after. In a separate entry almost nine months later, Sorensen focuses on a controlling idea for the entire text. In this entry from the 18 October 1958, Sorensen writes that "[f]aellesnaeveren for de stykker som skal eller burde indga i den bog som dog vist ikke bor hedde Digtere og daemoner er (at de alle behandler) forholdet til traumet.... Det nye i synet pa kunsten er jo ogsa at den forstas som fortolkning af traumet--det private, sociale, ontologiske traume" (175) [the common denominator for the pieces that will or should go into the book which certainly will be called Poets and Demons is (which they all treat) the relation to trauma.... The new in the vision of art is also that it should be understood as an interpretation of trauma--the private, social, ontological traumas]. What is more, Sorensen proposes in this same entry a series of works to be completed in the future with trauma as the guiding thread: "om Kierkegaard, om Marx, og maske en traumets filosofi til aflosning af den absurde filosofi" (176) [about Kierkegaard, about Marx, and maybe a philosophy of trauma for the solution of the philosophy of the absurd]. These last ambitions were never carried out. Nevertheless, one may conclude from the foregoing a certain centrality to the concept of trauma, not just for Digtere og domoner, but for Sorensen's work as a whole.
By suggesting trauma as the point of orientation for the volume as well as a more general philosophical and literary program, Sorensen brings into focus his sustained interest in the problems of past and present and more particularly the problem of memory as the way of relating past and present. Insofar as trauma is itself a psychological pathology of memory, Sorensen's modernism...
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