Movements

I’ve learned that I’m the woman he first meets on page eight. This is the first sentence you read. An unnamed “I” is meeting with a man called Azorno. He tells her that she is the woman who the main character, in the new book by a writer called Sampel, meets on page eight. The unnamed “I” addresses a “you.” Is it you? Someone else? Do you know Azorno? she asks. Have you ever read Sampel? Have you?

After reading the first two pages you read: After reading these two typewritten pages. You are introduced to another “I,” who has just finished reading the same two pages you have. A letter found lying on a desk in the house of a woman named Randi. Asked about the letter Randi explains she did not write it, but that Xenia—presumably the “I” of the first two pages—did, and the reason Randi has invited this new “I” to visit is to ask her to rescue Xenia. Xenia is caught in a daydream, explains Randi, as it is she, Randi, not Xenia, who the main character of the novel first meets on page eight. Sampel, the writer, has told her so himself, and also told her that the main character of the novel is Azorno. Xenia has always been quite quite a liar, says Randi. “I” arrives in Rome and you learn that everything you have read so far is a letter she is writing to a woman named Katarina. “I” finishes her letter stating that probably Xenia’s letter should be called Randi’s letter as it is a little too well-written to have anything to do with truth and Randi has always been quite a liar. She continues: … if the truth is finally to come out, there’s one thing that can’t have two meanings: Yesterday I was with Azorno here in Rome. It was the first Sunday in May, and the noon hour was unbelievably hot.

It was the first Sunday in May and the air was unusually cool. I had just said goodbye to Azorno … starts the next section. Another “I,” who has said goodbye to Azorno, not in Rome, not on a hot day, but on a cool Sunday at Copenhagen’s Central Station. “I” writes this in a letter to Xenia, asking her to meet, so that they can discuss how to rescue Louise, who is, “I” says, caught in a daydream and Louise has of course, always been quite a liar. Making Louise the “I” of the previous section.

Another section, and you are back with the first “I,” Xenia. Dear Bet Sampel: Letting you read through these typewritten letters—well, in my opinion, this typewritten letter, I actually have a strong desire to introduce myself … just call me Xenia! The letter continues: I think I voice the opinion of many readers when I say your husband’s ability to live so beautifully and to have such a beautiful wife as his secretary is of utmost importance to literature … Thousands of readers long to have their impressions confirmed, for example, when they read the description of the woman Azorno meets on page eight in Sampel’s most recent novel, that these very intense impressions correspond to something in reality, that this beauty really exists, that Sampel’s beautiful wife is Sampel’s beautiful secretary who is Sampel’s beautiful mistress (not to mention Azorno’s). Xenia, however, informs Bet Sampel that her husband has been unfaithful to her. I have assumed an intimate relationship between the author and his main character, an extricable relationship infiltrating throughout. The author is not one person and the main character another, she concludes. The next section starts with Sampel. He is getting out of a woman’s bed.

At this point you are 20 pages into Azorno, a short novel by Inger Christensen published in 1967. You see where this is going? On is where it’s going. Each “I”—Xenia, Randi, Louise, Katarina, Bet Sampel, Sampel, Azorno—undermining the claim to truth of the previous one, then circling back again. There are numerous repetitions. In fact you could say the text is composed of them. Repetitions of names, places, dates, objects, actions. Never quite the same. A repetition never is.

There is a point where all the women meet at Sampel’s house, each thinking Sampel invited her alone, but actually having been asked by Bet, his wife, who, without his knowledge, has written them in his name. As the women arrive they realise they are all pregnant by Sampel. He is not there, but when he does show up they collectively kill him in an act of rage. The writer, the man, the father. There is also a dog named Goethe.

Even death is not final. There is always a new story staking its claim over the previous one. The characters are all writing, and they are all being written, negating ideas of a fixed identity, shifting in a wave-like pattern, destabilising any claim to author / ity. The same, yet not quite the same, sentences recur over and over. Claims of truths followed by repeated claims of lying. The text shifts and slides, curls and changes. It moves, defined, if at all, by its refusal of definition, refusal of settling, it unsettles, emphasising openness and interdependence in the destabilising looping repetitions also found in novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet or Michel Butor. Azorno is like a piece of music of gliding and overlapping, non-linear, movements. Variations, themes, displacements, repetitions, loops, samples, never settling into a four to the floor rhythm.

I am reminded of Anti, an EP by Autechre, released in 1994 in response to Criminal Justice And Public Order Act 1994 or the Criminal Justice Bill as it became known.

The bill was an attempt by the ruling Conservative Party to halt a rave culture seen as out of control and as a threat to established society. In this attempt to make illegal specific practices of music—aiming of course through the music at specific practices of social behaviour and specific practices of life—they needed to come up with some creative legal writing. Section 63 gave the police the powers to remove a gathering on land in the open air of 20 or more persons… at which amplified music is played, and then followed a sub-clause clarifying the state’s definition of the music targeted: Sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats.

In response Autechre published the EP Anti consisting of three tracks, two of which were built around repetitive beats and one which wasn’t. It came with an advisory sticker on the cover.

Warning. Lost and Djarum contain repetitive beats. We advise you not to play these tracks if the Criminal Justice Bill becomes law. Flutter has been programmed in such a way that no bars contain identical beats and can therefore be played under the proposed new law. However, we advice DJs to have a lawyer and a musicologist present at all times to confirm the non-repetitive nature of the music in the event of police harassment.

The three tracks are all beautiful, though the beauty of the EP as a whole is the double exposure of the bias (against the repetitive beats of dance music culture) and the futility of the legalisation. Structurally and concretely undermining the bill rather than the traditional way of protest songs with a message primarily carried by lyrics. The point seems further underscored by the fact that Flutter, at least to untrained ears like the ones on this I, still sounds as if based around repetitive movements—and it is certainly danceable—while the two other tracks, Lost and Djarum, based on repetitive beats, floats, shifts and curls just as much. The categorisation into repetitive or non-repetitive is shown as insubstantial. Flutter, reputedly built from a string of 65 distinct drum patterns linked together, moves into ever more complex sequences, very much like Azorno. Anti and Azorno are not only structurally similar. They share an anti-authority stance, that is performed by the work itself rather than simply being expressed as lyrics in a call to arms against the Conservative Party and the institution of British government or the institution of the (genius) (male) writer of the (great) novel.

Autechre and Inger Christensen each went on to further explore this approach in radically generative systems of music and language. Autechre continued down a path of self-generating computer algorithms, getting increasingly closer to the point where it feels like it is the machine or the software that does the composing, while Christensen began her essay The Naive Reader (Den naive læser) by stating that: When I write poetry, I sometimes pretend that it isn’t me, but the language itself that is writing. It seems key to Azorno that the word “or” is prominent. Not “either or” but simply “or.” It adds rather than excludes. For all the shifts in narratives it is not a matter of contradictions (and you might note that the continued claims of lying that run through the book is the definition of fiction itself). It is not excluding one thing over another—

although you certainly need to keep your eye on the ball—but merely positioning something else. A thing very similar has taken place in Autechre’s work which, especially in recent years, has exploded in scale into an enormous body of variations of sounds almost too large to grasp. The pure scale of it is overwhelming (and it has taken me until the writing of this text to finally find a way in), but it is a crucial aspect. Adding, mutating—even more so in their live shows—negating the idea of a finished work, negating the idea of the independent (genius) subject. The two members, the machines and the software cannot be separated. Christensen starts Azorno with a quote by Witold Gombrowicz: Human beings, as I see them, are 1. created by form 2. creators of form, its tireless executors. It is the modus operandi for Christensen, but is equally applicable to Autechre’s computer generated algorithms, developing a complexity of almost impossible structures, seeming to have their own life, and it is incredibly easy to imagine that they, like Christensen, sometimes pretend that it is not them, but the language, of software and hardware, that is writing. It is like a Big Bang of sounds.

It (Det), a book-length poem of poems by Christensen, published in 1969, two years after Azorno, begins like this:

It. That’s it. That started it. It is. Goes on. Moves. Beyond. Becomes. Becomes it and it and it. Goes further than that. Becomes something else. Becomes more. Combines something else to keep becoming something else and more. Goes further than that. Becomes something besides something else and more. Something. Something new. Newer still.

Like the first sentence of Azorno it is an extraordinary opening that sets the course of the book. It is language unfolding. The first part, Prologos, is the world being built from language, as you read, as you become part of it, part of It. You read: It’s come to stay. For as long as it lasts. Has found its final placement. For a while. A universe is coming into being, sun, earth, water … life forms … lifeforms. It’s a matter of movable insertions, occasional parentheses, the exact degree of irritability that can be called life. Plants, animals, humans, and cities grow. The inhabitants slowly move, stand still in parks, squares and malls, or sit on benches, in restaurants, in movie theatres, as if it were a matter of freedom. So it is a matter of freedom. Society and institutions are made for them. They wait in camps for refugees, volunteers, soldiers. Centres for rehabilitation, welfare, culture. In secretariats, administrations, ministries, on committees. In ad agencies. Newspaper syndicates. Social interactions establish themselves. They exist as each other’s fictions, as images heaped up in each other’s illusions, but pretend it’s a matter of logical forms. By the end of Prologos we arrive at people as individuals. Someone needs somebody else enough to be blind. It would be easy to get carried away and quote the whole thing.

Christensen writes the world, not as a finished form, but as a continuous process. Prologos is followed by Logos, further divided into Stage, Action, and Text, before we end with Epilogos. With Logos you come in to the current time. This is 1969. You encounter soldiers, cartels, churches, surplus food, profit, exploitation, napalm, Vietnam, USA, Chile, mafias, marxists with feet of clay, stock markets, religious wars, protest marches, factories, police, hunger strike and people dancing in the streets. You encounter sex and bodies. It is. It becomes. It exists. The relationship between structure and socio-political reality is It, similar to Autechre’s structural approach that is Anti. It and Anti, such very descriptive titles. It’s you It’s me It’s the disagreements between us / This in itself is the image of a political poem, Christensen writes, and in a later essay she elaborates, [how it] becomes necessary to understand, that when a person expresses him—or herself it is also the world that expresses itself … we must know, that we cannot come outside. We can pretend, but the ability to pretend is still a part of the fact that we cannot come outside. We cannot recognise outside recognition. Wars, including ideological wars, are something that can only be practised, because people think it is possible to step outside and demarcate a certain reality. Or as it says in It: I cannot see that you are not me.

In 1970, a year after the publication of It, the composer Else Marie Pade made the piece Face it (Se det i øjnene). Approaching the protest song through concrete elements of language and sound and a significant use of rhythm and overlapping dissolving structures, the work is right at home with that of Christensen and Autechre. (In writing the previous sentences I for the first time realise the coincidence of titles. It (Det) and Face it (Se det i øjnene)). Pade’s work, from the 1950s to early 1970s, used elements of serial music, concrete music and electronic music. Similar to other like-minded composers of the time she worked at a state run radio, making soundtracks for their programs. Similar to many other female composers at the time, such as Delia Derbyshire and Daphne Oram at the BBC, the enormity of her work was only recognised when “re-discovered” in the 2000s and albums were produced from old tapes in archives. Pade was the first to compose concrete music in Denmark and with her work Seven Circles (Syv Cirkler) from 1958 she made the first Danish purely electronic composition. In that year her concrete composition Symphonie magnétophonique was pulled off the air live, midway through a broadcast of the radio program Music in the Atomic Age (Musik i atomalderen). Someone swiftly put on Schubert on instead. Face it is a later work and at first comes across as a quite crude composition. Throughout the eight minutes the sound of marching drums form an unchanging rhythm. On top of this are two other sampled loops expanding and contracting in alternate directions. First a voice declares: We have to face it, Hitler isn’t dead (Vi må se det i øjnene, Hitler er ikke død). As the track develops this chilling statement is gradually cut short, first to Hitler isn’t dead and towards the end simply to Hitler. Meanwhile a different loop develops in the opposite direction, first heard after 15 seconds as what sounds like the tinniest of electronic glitches. As the track develops this sample grows. What seemed like a glitch, a mistake, now sounds like an annoying buzzing mosquito or one of those tiny dogs barking angrily somewhere down by your feet, until, as it continues to grow, it becomes clear that what you are hearing is a recording of Hitler speaking to rapturous crowds. In the end the loops have changed positions. The warning that Hitler isn’t dead has become only a repetitive Hitler, while the glitch, or what seemed like an annoying but insignificant mosquito, has become a fully formed Hitler and the crowds cheering him. The effect is terrifying. A proto-hip-hop beat and a warning not to make the mistake of underestimating what at first seems merely a glitch. Pade was during World War II a member of the Danish resistance. She was captured and sent to prison camp by Gestapo in 1944, so there is plenty of reason to believe that the piece might have functioned as a personal invocation, but this is without reducing it as the contemporary political statement and warning that it was in 1970 and which it is today. Give it some airplay.

Here you might be inclined to return to Christensen and in particular her 1981 poem Alphabet (Alfabet). Structurally built—as you might expect—along the alphabet, but equally along the Fibonacci number sequence. The poem starts from “a” with a verse that is one line, with each of the following verses moving along the alphabet while growing in number of lines according to the Fibonacci sequence. It ultimately abandons those self-imposed systems, and it stops before the growth would have taken the poem to impossible lengths for a writer limited to a lifetime. These are the first two verses:

apricot trees exist, apricot trees exist

bracken exists: and blackberries, blackberries; / bromine exists; and hydrogen, hydrogen

In her essay It is All Words (Det er ord altsammen),

Christensen explains how in the context of the Cold War she was having serious doubts about the point of writing. At a time where it seemed as if humanity was mainly preoccupied with finding ways to exterminate itself, [Alphabet became] a kind of invocation. A prayer that apricots, grapes, melons etc. would continue to exist in the world. And at the same time a prayer that atomic bombs, hydrogen bombs, dioxides etc. would disappear. Combining two systems, the Fibonacci sequence—present throughout in nature—with the man-made sequence of the alphabet, the poem echoes the work of Pade in its overlapping growing and dissolving structures, in its insistence on insisting, resulting in both cases in a form of invocation. Christensen continues: A rose is, when we think about what it is, very complex, yet very simple. “A rose is a rose is a rose,” as Gertrude Stein says, by which she, solely through this insisting repetition points toward the enigma of the existence of the rose as well as of language. The poem Alphabet calls the world into being, and like Autechre’s Big Bang of sounds this is the Big Bang of language.

I picture all of them, Christensen, Pade and Autechre walking together down a road of series, systems, sequences and algorithms. Inger and Else Marie and Sean and Rob. I like this image, it looks a bit like a scene from The Wizard of Oz placed inside a scene from Tron falling apart. I know they would have things in common. For one Pade’s work was deeply embedded in the serial and concrete music of her contemporaries, important among them Olivier Messiaen. Autechre too has often cited Messiaen as a major influence on their work and Letter in April (Brev i April), a 1979 poem by Christensen, was structured on the serial compositions of Olivier Messiaen. At this point British novelist Gabriel Josipovici joins them.

In an interview from 2016 he said: [I realised that] I could do without transitions. I could simply juxtapose fragments of dialogue and build up a rhythm in that way. Repetition was part of that process. As I soon discovered, Stravinsky worked in rather the same way. Instead of the development so central to the Western classical tradition he worked with small cells which he juxtaposed with others or transformed by various processes. And his descendants … Peter Maxwell Davies and Harrison Birtwistle … influenced by Stravinsky as well as by Varèse and Messiaen … [I] discovered Stockhausen, Berio and Ligeti, very different composers, but all rejecting the linear, developmental processes of classical music …

Inger Christensen ends Azorno with a quote by Søren Kierkegaard: When the sea heaves and is rough, the seething waves in their turbulence form pictures resembling creatures; it seems as if it were these creatures that set the waves in motion, and yet it is, conversely, the swelling waves that form them. Thus, Don Juan is a picture that is continually coming into view but does not attain form and consistency, an individual who is continually being formed but is never finished, about whose history one cannot learn except by listening to the noise of the waves. It’s an apt post-script to Azorno. It perfectly describes the ongoing music of Autechre. It is also a very accurate description of Everything Passes, a short novel from 2006 by Josipovici, built on a real-life (and death) experience of Arnold Schönberg.

In 1947 Schönberg suffered a severe heart attack. His heart stopped beating, and he technically died, but was brought back to life. Shortly after he finished his string trio Opus 45.

Schönberg told friends and students that he wrote the piece intending to relate it to this experience. In Josipovici’s Everything Passes the main character is a writer who similarly survives a near fatal heart attack while the structure of the novel itself is based on the structure of Opus 45. As in Christensen’s Letter in April the text’s form is based on a piece of music. As in Azorno, words, sentences, images and themes are repeated as they blend in and out.

A room. / He stands at the window. / And a voice says: Everything passes. The / good and the bad. The joy and the sorrow. / Everything passes. Variations of this description occur over and over. He stands at the window. / Cracked pane. / His face at the window. / Greyness. Silence.

Gradually different elements are introduced. A woman who is no longer there. Another woman, also absent. Memories form non-linear, non-chronological, movements. The man by the window was once married. His worried grown up children come and go. He wants to be left alone. He is a writer. There is a memory of him talking to his wife about writing. His name is Felix. There is another, younger, writer. Someone is leaving. Someone is dead. The novel is so brief, 60 sparsely printed pages, but so condensed that trying to describe what happens will easily end up a longer text than the novel itself, yet it encompasses a life. Prominent empty spaces on the pages form a large part of the reading, I imagine the amount of space it would take to write about the empty spaces alone. There is a memory of Felix talking to his wife about writing, about his obsession, François Rabelais. He calls him the first modern writer.

Rabelais understood what this new miracle of print meant for a writer. It meant you had gained the world and lost your audience. You no longer knew who was reading you or why. You no longer knew who you were writing for or even why you were writing … Rabelais, he says, is the first author in history to find the idea of authority ridiculous … he was the spokesman of no one but himself. And that meant that his role was inherently absurd. No one called him. Not God. Not the Muses. Not the Monarch. Not the local community. He was alone in his room, scribbling away, and then these scribbles were transformed into print and read by thousands of people whom he’d never set eyes on and who had never set eyes on him, people in all walks of life, reading him in the solitude of rooms.

Another memory of Felix talking about writing. Obsessively. He tells a friend: I was exhausted. Triumphant but exhausted. As if I had finally done what I had been put in the world to do … then I opened my eyes and began to look over what I had written … The page was black, he says. It was black with marks. Thick with them. Nothing was legible. And the page underneath was white. With the traces of writing from where I had pressed on the page above. And the pages gradually disappeared as I turned one page after the other, until there was nothing but whiteness. Page after page. I hadn’t turned the page, he says. Not once. All the time I was writing. I hadn’t turned the page. That’s how it all began, he says. The moment of his heart attack.

Within this are elements of The Unknown Masterwork by Honoré de Balzac, at the end of which the old master Frenhofer shows the masterpiece he has been working on for ten years to his proteges, Poussin and Porbus—based on the two real-life artists.

“Aha!” he cried, “you did not expect to see such perfection! … “Do you see anything?” Poussin asked of Porbus. “No… do you?” “I see nothing.” … “I can see nothing there but confused masses of color and a multitude of fantastical lines that go to make a dead wall of paint.” “We are mistaken, look!” said Porbus. In a corner of the canvas, as they came nearer, they distinguished a bare foot emerging from the chaos of color, half-tints and vague shadows that made up a dim, formless fog. … “Nothing! nothing! After ten years of work…” [Frenhofer] sat down and wept. … Porbus, in anxiety, went again on the morrow to see Frenhofer, and learned that he had died in the night after burning his canvases.

The Unknown Masterpiece, written in 1831, is one of the most cited fictional accounts of the emergence of Modernism in art. Frenhofer, c’est moi, said Paul Cézanne.

Through Josipovici, Felix champions Rabelais for being the first modern writer and he then reenacts Frenhofer (including even his death after finishing, or failing to finish, his masterwork), while mirroring the (real) experience of Schönberg within the very structure of Schönberg’s own string trio Opus 45. A string trio described by Michael Cherlin as a work where: Schönberg piles up musical ideas, disrupts their continuity, displaces or disallows musical consequences, and breaks off stabilities of phrase, color, range and rhythm … the Trio “insists on its own imperfection, and therein lies its greatest triumph. Again the disrupted, displaced and unstable that is defining the works of Christensen, Pade, Autechre. The non-hierarchical. The imperfect. That breakdown of the unified work. The foot emerging from the formless fog of Frenhofer’s painting. Josipovici creates a moiré of modernisms. Even the recurring image of the man in the window is based on a photo of the poet Francis Ponge, to add yet another collage element. There is however no mention in Everything Passes of Schönberg’s life or his work, no Opus 45, no Francis Ponge, no Balzac. It is all there, but left for you, to continue that reading, or writing, outside the text itself.

The event, and continued importance, of Modernism is something Josipovici frequently returns to in his novels and in his criticism. In Whatever Happened to Modernism? he argues that, with a few notable exceptions, Modernism never happened in British literature and that tough some writers deal with subjects of Modernism, they themselves are confined to realism. The results are works which are unreflective of themselves, as opposed to a position that Christensen in another essay describes as being; between the impossibility and necessity of a complete message … this insolvable contradiction that is shown and is consistently clarified in the modern story when it in almost every sentence makes you aware that it is in the process of being told. As she puts it: The tale tells about how it is being told.

There are of course notable British exceptions, which Josipovici emphasises, such as Virginia Woolf or Muriel Spark. Spark’s 1957 debut novel The Comforters is essentially a meta-novel about writing that fits Christensen’s description of the modern story. While knowingly using the narrative structure of a crime novel and the style of a comedy it is full of tongue in cheek comments on the acts of writing, reading and being written. The main character is a burgeoning writer, who repeatedly hears someone typing and commenting on her life: It’s exactly as if someone were watching me closely, able to read my thoughts; it’s as if the person was waiting to pounce on some insignificant thought or action, in order to make it signify in a strange distorted way. Is she hearing things? Is she insane? Or is she indeed merely a writer writing the book you are reading? What, if any, is the difference? She visits a friend at his bookstore and he asks her about her writing:

What are you writing on these days? Oh, the same book, but I haven’t done much lately. The work on the 20th Century novel? That’s right. Form in the Modern Novel. How’s it going so far? Not bad. I’m having difficulty with the chapter on realism.

If Josipovici’s Whatever Happened to Modernism? was boiled down to cartoon-form in The New Yorker, it would be an illustration of two people in a bookstore having this exact dialogue. The Modernist position condensed into a perfect punchline, and a good place to stop this text. In another quote from The Comforters, made by the unseen typing commentator, it seems the sort of incident which winds up a plot and brings a book to a close. Indeed, almost there. Just one more book. There always is, and if ever there was a book about there always being another book this must be it. The ultimate meta-novel, written some years further down the line, in 1979, which would carry in it the clear echoes of The Comforters and even more so of Azorno. Moving from the writer and being written in Christensen to the reader and being read, this book mirrors Azorno’s entire structure, it even seems to reference that first line. I’ve learned that I’m the woman he first meets on page eight. You may have guessed. You may also have thought about it when you read that first sentence. A book that like all the works above refuses hierarchies, refuses linear structures, a book that discusses its own readings in a stunningly brilliant ride through literary genres, forms and theories and a book that (almost) refuses endings. Instead it begins.

It. That’s it. That started it. It is. Goes on. Moves. Beyond.

Becomes. Becomes it and it and it. It begins, with you.

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, “If on a winter’s night a traveler.” Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best close the door; the TV is always on in the next room. Tell the others right away, “No, I don’t want watch TV!” Raise your voice—they won’t hear you otherwise—“I’m reading! I don’t want to be disturbed!” Maybe they haven’t heard you, with all that racket; speak louder, yell: “I’m beginning to read Italo Calvino’s new novel!” Or if you prefer, don’t say anything; just hope they’ll leave you alone.

* All quotes from Inger Christensen’s essays are my own translations.