lønningspils

By Timothy Berge.

Through The Night by Stig Sæterbakken.
Trans. Sean Kinsella.

90/100.
Dalkey Archive Press.

****

As a young boy in Norway Stig Sæterbakken’s world was divided in two: inside and outside. He writes in Autobiographical Notes:

“The world was split in two. And I didn’t thrive in either, not in the world outside, with the others, where the only thing I could think of was all that I would miss out on—everything I should have done, the figures I should have painted, the fortresses I should have finished, the armies I should have amassed, the battles I should have fought—and not in my inner world, with myself, clouded as it was by my awareness of everything I didn’t participate in, everything I was not a part of, the whole of humanity from which I shut myself away.”

Throughout his abbreviated career Sæterbakken created dichotomies, or as Audun Lindholm notes, “opposing principles in conflict: good and evil, subtlety and vulgarity, rage and resignation.” Sæterbakken does not, however, merely pit opposites against one another. Instead, he found the ways opposing forces are connected. Literary critic Veronica Esposito suggests that Sæterbakken always considered the good and the bad. For him, they were inseparable, “You cannot glory in light without withstanding the dark. This is what you see in Sæterbakken’s literature. The two are bound together inseparably, and the honest literature all but tears itself apart with their tidal forces” Not only do dark and light exist, but there is very little separating them. Sæterbakken’s penchant for dividing the world in two, struggling to belong in either world, and showing how the two sides are at the same time alike and unlike is exemplified in Sæterbakken’s final novel Through the Night.

The novel opens with a split. Karl Meyer is a dentist. Husband. Father of two. His wife is Eva. His son is Ole-Jakob. His daughter is Stine. The book begins shortly after Ole-Jakob kills himself. Karl spends his time mindlessly watching TV until one night Eva has had enough. She gets an axe out of the garage and puts it through the television. The TV splits.

Karl’s world divided before the TV, before Ole-Jakob’s death. It begins when Karl has an affair. One night at a party Karl meets Mona. They start to see each other more and more until they cross a line and Karl decides to leave his family. He and Eva divorce. The first split. It doesn’t take long for the “fairytale affair” to sour. Turns out Karl doesn’t like being with a younger woman. He finds her annoying, grating. Karl leaves Mona. The second split. He returns to his family and while they let him stay in the house he is not reintegrated. Eva and Ole-Jakob resent him. His daughter, Stine, is more ambivalent. Like the world of Sæterbakken’s youth Karl’s world is divided in two and he belongs in neither.

Sæterbakken creates dichotomies, presents them as opposites, and then shows how they are the same. A paradox. Opposites are bound together and their binding makes them the same. This manifests in Through the Night as differing outcomes from the same action or the same outcome from differing actions. This construction is demonstrated in two separate discussions of marriage and divorce. First, when courting and falling in love with Eva, Karl thinks about his friends who had already married, divorced, and remarried, “They sought out marriage in order to realize their dreams, and they broke out of marriage in order to realize their dreams—which is to say, they married and divorced for the same reason.” (pg. 45). Opposite actions precipitated by the same desire.

Second, while going through the banal procedures of divorce a mediator asks Karl and Eva if they are certain they would like to split. They look at each other and simultaneously say, “Yes.” In that moment Karl thinks, “This is the second time Eva and I are saying yes to each other.” (pg. 79). The first was their wedding. The same action—saying yes—precipitates opposite outcomes, marriage and divorce.

It isn’t all separation and misery though. Just as there is darkness, there is also light. At times Karl is able to connect with others and escape himself. Through love, through connection, the world expands and he is temporarily able to integrate inside and outside. When Ole-Jakob is born Karl thinks, “I was a part of something bigger, infinitely big, something I couldn’t compare myself to, something a hundred times more important than Karl Christian Andreas Meyer.” (pg. 33). For the first time he isn’t only concerned with himself. There is someone else, who is a part of him. Fatherhood and love for his child reconciles inside and outside.

Karl sees a desire to make existence bigger than oneself in other people. After Ole-Jakob’s death family and friends offer help because they wanted, “to feel that they were taking part in something larger than themselves.” (pg. 122). At one of his lowest moments Karl meets a man in a bar and they have a long, unexpected conversation. When it ends Karl is saddened because the man was “expansive, more than he needed to be.” He asks Karl questions about his life. He shows genuine interest and concern. There is a desire to exist both inside and outside. A desire to navigate between opposing forces.

Things like love, family, connection, and helping others can expand life into something unimaginable. It transports someone out of individuality and into something larger, undefined, and beautiful. Instances of an expansive beautiful world are fleeting, yet undeniable. But Sæterbakken loves opposites. If love takes Karl outside of himself, losing love, leaving, and disconnecting can reduce someone to unbearable alienation and loneliness, which is ultimately Karl’s fate.

Leaving, disconnecting, and being reduced to one’s mere self is central to Through the Night. The novel opens with a reflection on grief, where Karl notices how his experience of Ole-Jakob’s suicide is different and distant from others’. People move on quicker than he does. They behave in a way that suggests the world is functioning normally, but that is not how Karl is experiencing the world. He will never go back to normal because his son will always be absent. He is alone in his grief.

Through the Night provides glimpses of how Karl’s life could have been different. If he didn’t go to the party where he met Mona maybe he would never have left. Once he left, there is no returning. He just keeps leaving. First he leaves his wife. Then he leaves Mona. After Ole-Jakob’s death he leaves his family again. Deletes every number from his phone except for Stine and Ole-Jakobs. He leaves Norway and goes to Germany. He makes a friend in Germany, Caroline, but just as they begin to get close he leaves again.

Caroline is an opportunity for Karl to connect. To once again expand his life. They met one day when Karl walks across a bridge and sees a woman standing on the edge. He is certain she is going to jump off and end her life. Without much thought Karl grabs her and pulls her from the ledge. He saves her because he couldn’t save Ole-Jakob.

Karl misunderstood the situation. Caroline was not planning to jump off the bridge. She is a photographer trying to take a picture of the water beneath the bridge. When Karl intervened she dropped her camera into the water. He buys her a new one. They become friends. They see each other regularly. Without any notice Karl leaves. Caroline tries to get in touch, but Karl ignores her phone calls.

Earlier in the novel a friend told Karl about a house in Slovakia. To find the house one must go to Bratislava. Once in Bratislava one must enter a bar named Neusohl. In the bar one must order a specific drink and tell the bartender it’s time to see the place “where hope turns to dust.” A man named Zagreb will appear. After paying a hefty fee he’ll provide a day, a time, and an address. Everyone who enters the house is confronted with their deepest fear. Some people enter the house and lose their minds. Others leave quietly and don’t feel the unsettling effects until long afterward. Others claim as long as you don’t fall asleep nothing terrible will happen. Everyone experiences it uniquely and alone. Karl goes to Bratislava.

He visits the bar, buys the drink, says the phrase, meets Zagreb, pays the fee, and visits the house. Before entering Karl sees a couple walking down the street. Physically they are mismatched, but they have adapted their ways of being to suit one another. For Karl they are “tangible evidence of the possibility of a perfect union between two mismatched individual’s characteristics, two of a kind made into one, two people who by virtue of their mutual dissimilarity it was now inconceivable should ever part.” Opposites work together and connect. Opposites reconcile and unite into a new whole. A larger, grander whole. Love, connection, and an expansive existence are possible. Karl can see it, but he doesn’t experience it. He enters the house knowing he will never see anyone again. Another split. Inside is the house. Outside is the rest of the world.

Inside the house is both unnerving and unremarkable. There are signs that people have been there such as a bathrobe hanging on the door. Karl keeps thinking he hears people in the house, but as he wanders through down the halls and into the rooms everything is empty.

As promised Karl sees his greatest fear. It’s him:

“There’s nothing here. Apart from me. Everything is dead. Everything I’ve believed in and taken part in, they’ve only been my own illusions, created to conceal the emptiness I’ve lived with, in which there’s nothing to be found, in which there’s never been anything to be found other than what I’ve been forced to imagine in order to endure it. Ghosts, all those gruesome stories, which could have been exchanged for other ghosts, other stories, it wouldn’t have made any difference, I wouldn’t have noticed anything at all. My thoughts are free, I myself can choose how the world will be. But that’s about it. It remains in me. Everything remains in me. The world is in me. It lives and dies with me. As it lives and dies in others, without it ever connecting, mine to theirs, what’s in me and what’s in them. We live apart. We convince ourselves that we share our life with someone, but we don’t, we live alone, surrounded by others, who also live alone. None of what’s inside me will ever be a part of them. What they have will never be mine. Eva, Ole-Jakob, Stine, I never reached them, they never reached me, we were just pictures in one another’s dreams about how we wanted life to be.

I shuffled, turned halfway round, as much as the shaft of a room allowed. The only thing they’d found, and which made them lose their minds, the ones who’d been in the house before me, was themselves, their own spooky emptiness, I thought, overwhelmed, suddenly, by a despair so intense that I couldn’t manage to restrain a scream, drawn-out and as unfamiliar to me as the voice of another man.” (pg. 237)

Karl’s fear is that no matter what he does he will always be alone. He has made it a self-fulfilling prophecy. Throughout the book his isolation is never inevitable. It comes from a series of decisions. He says himself that he can choose how the world will be. He is in control of his own isolation. As the birth of his son, the conversation at the bar, and the couple walking down the street demonstrate, there exist ways to connect. Not all roads lead to a haunted house in Slovakia.

After his realization he hits his head against the wall in despair and falls asleep. Here the narrative pivots from realism into surrealism. Again, two opposites are connected. The dissolution of Karl’s family is firmly grounded in a world recognizable to our own. The last section of the novel is a repeating nightmare. It’s always December. Always just before Christmas. Again and again and again. There is a family sitting at the dinner table charred from a fire. Karl insists he didn’t start the fire. What Karl experiences in the closing pages of the novel are difficult to square with everything that came before. Logic and linearity dissipate. Emotion takes control where the unfolding events don’t necessarily make sense but they feel true to Karl and the narrative albeit confusing, uncanny, and unnerving.

Through the Night was the last book Sæterbakken wrote before ending his own life. Over a decade earlier he wrote Siamese, a short novel about an elderly couple, Edwin and Erna, who live in a small apartment. They are painfully codependent and undeniably miserable. In some ways it is the opposite of Through the Night. Siamese is an early book. Through the Night is his final book. One is about a long lasting marriage while the other is about a divorce. One takes place almost entirely in an apartment while the other moves from Norway, to Germany, to Slovakia, and outside time or space. Edwin is constantly chewing gum while Karl never chews gum. Siamese and Through the Night are two poles of Sæterbakken’s work. Consistent with other Sæterbakken dichotomies they are opposites, connected, and the same. One where staying causes suffering; one where leaving causes suffering. Suffering, living in a bleak reality is the same regardless of leaving or staying, marriage or divorce. The only reprieve, albeit momentary, is through connection, love, finding ways outside of yourself, adjusting your way of waking to suit another.

****

FFO: Thomas Bernhard, Tove Ditlevsen, Tor Ulven, David Lynch, Fernanda Melchor.

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