On the experience of loss in Birgitta Trotzig’s prose poems

By Carin Franzen

One main aspect of the modern epoch can be understood as an ambivalent reaction to a fundamental loss. One need not go as far as Walter Benjamin when he claims that what modern man has been deprived of is exactly his experience.¹ The ambivalence of the experience of modernity consists in the way man reacts to identity crises and the disintegration of ancient values, of order and harmony. One can, as Freud indicates in Mourning and Melancholia, engage in a “work of mourning”, that is “a withdrawal of the libido from [the lost object] and a displacement of it on to a new one”.² This is what ordinarily happens when we say “yes” to the new or as Baudelaire formulates it: “Plonger au fond du gouffre, Enfer ou Ciel, qu’importe? Au fond de l’inconnu pour trouver du nouveau!”³

Acceptance of the new and nostalgia of what is lost can be found in one and the same author’s writings, as in Baudelaire’s for instance. If one is prepared to schematise, one could say that the entire modern tradition can be divided into two mainstreams, one affirmative and one negative or melancholic.

If this is true the Swedish author Birgitta Trotzig (1929) belongs no doubt to the later group. She describes the source of her writings with the same word Nietzsche used when he declared the dead of God – nihilism.⁴ However, Trotzig’s poetry is not nihilistic. It can on the contrary, as Anders Olsson suggests, be regarded as a solution to an epochal nihilism by Christian mysticism.⁵ In the following I would nevertheless like to examine some of the poetical strategies Trotzig develops to deal with what she in her first collections of prose poems Bilder (1954) calls “the growing silence”.⁶ Indeed, Trotzig doesn’t talk so much about mourning or melancholia but more precisely about loss of communication, and contact with the other, and the world. If one were to diagnose the author or her texts one would perhaps talk about autism instead of melancholia, a word she uses herself in her last book of prose poems – Sammanhang, material (1996). I will return to that term and its relation to the motif of the voice as one of the strategies Trotzig uses in an attempt to recreate the bonds to the other and the world.

Before that I want however to mention another way of remedying the experience of loss of communication and loss of correspondence that can be found in Trotzig’s poetry, namely the motif of the gaze. But I want to underline that these strategies don’t offer any easy solution to melancholia. They are above all ways of confronting that experience. Trotzig wants to communicate suffering and loss because the radical evil for her is indifference. Love, happiness, euphoria – these are sentiments that very seldom appear in her texts. When they do they are the other side of hate, suffering and pain, and can’t be separated from this negativity. This ambivalence or simultaneousness is one of the main themes or insights that can be found in her texts, but it is also the scandal of existence that she tries to handle through her writing.

The experience of loss appears more precisely a loss of the means of communicating and symbolizing that scandal. As Trotzig points out, secularisation also means a deprivation of the “great languages of experience” which function as ways of expressing the fundamental ambivalence of life.⁷ To put it in another way, if we can’t represent the suffering, we can’t express euphoria either.

In Trotzig’s third collection of prose poems, Anima (1982), one central theme is the upheaval of the traditional dualism between death and life, but also between body and soul, nature and culture. Instead of dualism the poems stage a kind of reversibility between these opposites, but they are far from constituting any harmony or unity. The figure they use and explore is the oxymoron. I will now try to demonstrate how Trotzig uses that trope through the motif of the gaze.

One critic has argued that seeing characterises all that Trotzig writes.⁸ I agree with that. But I want to demonstrate that the irreconcilable is the main characteristic of Trotzig’s gaze.

The gaze relates the “I” with the world, but it also contains the narcissistic structure of the subject as an obstacle for this correlation, as can be seen in the first poem in the book:

jag ser in i det gröna, yta i oändlighet, viskande oänd-

lighet, viskningarnas kropp, tungor, det gröna är tungor och ögon,

reflexer och rörlighet, fuktighet, ljusgnistor – på vad sätt är jag

skild från det, jag är inte skild från det, jag är till i ett öga, allt är

speglingar och viskningar, ljus i en mörk spegel vandrar längre

och längre in i den speglade skogen⁹

The poem recalls Baudelaire’s “Correspondances” where the man wander through “des forêts de symboles / Qui l’observe avec des regards familiers”.¹⁰ But Baudelaire’s observing forest is in Trotzig’s poem a reflected forest, a “dark mirror”. Its relation to the world is not of communication or correspondence but of a pure projection of the subjects’ gaze. That’s why, in the third poem the gaze is called “eyes of ice”: “Yet the eyes of ice grow out of the deep cold the stone in the shadow never turned never seen” (“Hur växer ändå isögonen fram den djupa kylan stenen i skuggan aldrig vänd aldrig sedd”, p. 7). In the poem “i Nya Världen” “the eyes of ice” becomes the expression of the subject’s incapacity to receive the suffering of the other: “I cold with eyes of ice […] I’m geting petrified, mirrors, only mirrors, mirrors, mirrors” (“jag kalla med isögonen […] jag stelnar jag blir speglar bara speglar speglar speglar”, p. 37).

The “eyes of ice” in Anima represent what Trotzig in another context call, with a reference to Freud the death drive, which for her means the death of feelings and reactions:¹¹ that is, indifference resulting from narcissistic defence. Another obstacle to communication and correspondence is desire to appropriate the other, as in the following line: “She has seeing eyes. She has fingers to murder” (“Hon har seende ögon. Hon har mördarfingrar”, p. 17). The “She” in this poem ‘min syster livet’, is said to be the alter ego of the “I”. The continuation of the poem can be read us an attempt to counteract the effects of these “seeing eyes”.

In the following passage the I is found “on the back in the grass […] intertwined in the grass in the warm scent of humid grass” (“på rygg i gräset […] inflätad i gräset djupt ner i det heta doftande fuktiga gräset”), and the world appears to the I as a living face, who’s “roots growing everywhere, invisible, everything is roots, connection, circulation of blood” (“rötter växer överallt, synliga, osynliga, allt är rötter, förbindelser, blodomlopp”, p. 17). It is as if the lower position, on the back in the grass, made it possible to extend seeing to include a kind of living and sensitive contact with being. The visible and invisible correspondences of the living face recalls what the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty has named the flesh of the world (la chair du monde): that is, the “reversibility of the seeing and the visible, of the touching and the touched”.¹² The poem’s third and centrally placed stanza can be understood as a kind of primal scene of that kind of total correspondence:

Detta barn föddes i ett grönt rum […]

ännu inte avskuren från helheten såg hon med strå-

lande svartblå ögon rakt ut ur naturens mittpunkt och medel-

punkt, blodet slog i vågslag på vågslag genom henne och blev

seende, strålande. (p. 17)

The new-born child, not yet separated from wholeness is an image of a being before the division into subject and object, or rephrasing this in Lacan’s terms, before the split between the eye and the gaze. The non-interrupted line between the eyes of the new-born and the umbilical cord is also what Lacan would call a phantasm against “the constitutive lack of the anguish of castration” (“le manque constitutif de l’angoisse de la castration”).¹³ The phenomenological reversibility of the seeing and the visible proceeds in the final analysis, if we follow Lacan, from “a gaze that I imagine is the field of the Other” (“un regard par moi imaginé au champ de l’Autre”).¹⁴

If the constitutive lack in the subject’s relation to the world and to the other is missing in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, it appears nevertheless in Trotzig’s ambiguous gaze. Even though she doesn’t speak about the subject of psychoanalysis, she points out that the field of the Other as the impossibility we call death: “Seen from one way everything is growing, life. From another way everything is eating, death” (“Från ett håll sett är allting växande, liv. Från ett annat håll är allting ätande, död”, p. 18) In the poem that follows just after “min syster livet”, the new-born child and the death look into one anothers eyes: “Det nyfödda barnet och döden ser varandra klart in i ögonen.”

The quest for means of restoring “roots, connections, circulation of blood” in a fragmented world without a stable centre of value or meaning, seems to me to be the motive force of Anima. A new coherence can nevertheless not be find, only the request to see the world as it is: “The state of the world: simultaneousness” (“Världens tillstånd: samtidigheten”, p. 19). The difficulty or even the impossibility of that project finds its expression in the theme of autism in Trotzigs poetry.

Trotzig seeks to give a voice to the experience of loss in modernity and to restore the correspondences of existence. The difficulty of this project is expressed by the theme of the limits of communication, but also of the limits of literature in the face of the suffering and the violence of the world, as in “världen med sina slagfält” in Sammanhang, material:

(”Vukovar”) Den svartklädda tunga höga kvinnan i portgången

var ordlös, hennes mun och tunga kunde inte få fram vad det var

hon i verkligheten hade sett, alltjämt såg. Det blinda oavlåtliga

seendet,

går inte att säga ¹⁵

To this concrete and historical violence corresponds, in Trotzig’s poetry, an inner experience of death and muteness, which cuts off contact with the other. In Sammanhang, material this inner limit of communication and contact is named autism: “autistic climate, repugnant cold as a dead carcass” (“autistiskt klimat, motbjudande kall som en död djurkropp”, p. 79). The “autistic climate” – the existential and psychological state of the loss of contact – is described as something that happens with language:

Om hur det kan bli med språket. Om hur det kan inträda i en

årstid om vilken man inte kan säga mycket, nej, ingenting alls, ett

dödsrike, en dödstid, nu inträder också orden ett efter ett i den

stora förändringen, i förvandlingstiden, tappar sina betydelser,

död tuggröt, tomma ljud letar efter sina ansikten – vad är ansikte-

na, var är träden och djuren, hur nå språket inne i språket? (p. 163)

The question of reaching “the language in the language” presupposes the existence of (or the beliefe in) a primarily language. In another context Trotzig, divides language into a normal language and a language of experience.¹⁶ This is, of course, another way of indicating the difference between poetry and ordinary discourse. With Merleau-Ponty, one could say that the quest for “the language in the language” is the quest for the experience of name-giving, as we find it “in the child when it learns to speak, or in the author when he formulates something for the first time, shortly speaking, in everyone who is transforming a certain silence into words.”¹⁷

In Sammanhang, material one can discern a will to restore that gesture in order to remedy autism and melancholia. In the poem that opens the book we also find the formula that points out where and how this gesture can be realised:

Gränsen, tröskelns hemlighet. Vad är ute, vad är inne, vad är

utanför mig, vad är inuti mig?

På tröskeln. Inte hitom, inte bortom.

Just i rörelsen över tröskeln. Brister skenhinnan, det förfalskade

seendet ”jag”. Då blir världen naken. Ljus talar, stenar andas.

Ögat blir en svart planet, världen är nu seende. […]

Allt talar till allt. I rymdljuset, i mörkerljuset. Meddelandet

uppenbarar sig. (p. 7)

The infringing movement described here can open up the autistic climate. The language that appears on “the threshold”, or as we read one line before – in “the imaginary room ” – doesn’t , however, convey an upheaval of what the author called the death drive. Open communication – “ Everything speaks to everything ” – is also the communication of death: “Now dead and life speaks to each other, on the boundary between the lips and the words” (“Död och liv talar nu till varandra, det är på gränsen, det är gränsen mellan läpparna och orden”, p. 133) This “speech-in-between” is also named a voice. Actually, the voice is the central motif of Sammanhang, material; it is “the language in language” which transforms a certain silence:

Rösten bryter tystnaden, en gräns uppstår, en åtskillnad

Men på samma gång ett oupplösligt samliv. Rösten förhåller

sig till tystnaden och kan inte skiljas från den. Röstens gränsdrag-

ning tecknar tystnaden i negativ. En kartbild över en ny sorts till-

varo, nya arkitekturer stiger upp (p. 147)

In the section “rösten”, the reader can follow the transformation of the subjective voice into the poetic voice, but also into the voice of the other. That voice comes out of silence and of the lack of a subjective voice, or more fundamentally, of the loss of unity that the poem formulates as a question within parenthesis

([…] fanns det en gång

en gränslöshet, en enhet mellan varelsen och elementen, en enhet

så fullkomlig att inget uttryck, inget meddelande behövdes, allt

var ändå en enda röst eller icke-röst?) (p. 146)

I want to suggest that this question can be understood as the expression of what the loss really is about – “the unity between the being and the elements” – the unity before language, or before the split of the subject and the object, or the eye and the gaze. This experience of loss is reinforced by the violence of history. And by the loss of a stable centre of value or meaning, generally named nihilism.

Freud characterizes the longing for the kind of oceanic unity expressed in Trotzig’s question as a regressive and narcissistic desire, and Lacan continues this analysis by saying that the psychoanalytic experience ought to reduce this aspiration to a phantasm.¹⁸ Nevertheless the poetical strategies and the motifs developed in Trotzig’s prose poems – especially through the oxymoron – convey a transformation of the melancholic and narcissistic subject into the voice of the poem, which is open to the other and the world:

Rösten är det som kommer från någon annan än man själv, en

främling ropar ur mörkret för att signalera att här är gränsen, här

börjar det, här börjar det andras verklighet. Rösten kontra jaget –

verklighetens röst som kan träda fram först när allt annat tystats,

mörklagts. (p. 147)

“The voice contra the I” distinguishes not only Trotzig’s poetical project but is the formula for its ethical dimension. It shows us above all the difficulty involved in opening up the autistic or defensive “I” to the “voice of reality”. It is a difficulty that, in the process of writing, makes of the imaginary something different than a residue of narcissistic phantasms. It becomes the open room where the narcissistic borders can be experienced and transgressed so that a new symbolic correlation to reality can be heard.