1
Antje Rávic Strubel
Opening Lecture University of Helsinki
Building sentences. And doubting. And using doubt to build sentences.
Nothing else to say. Nothing else to know. The process of writing remains a secret. While I’m
writing I’m not there. I’m absent.
Even if I tried to explain how writing works, it would always be fiction. An interpretation. A
mere story I’m making up for the sake of this talk. Let’s say: you think about a beginning and
an end and in-between you’re building sentences. Let’s say: you are planning to write a
German novel and out comes an American one. Or a Finnish one. Or vice versa. Or you don’t
even know what a German or a Finnish novel is supposed to be, so you simply start by
making yourself a huge cappuccino in the morning, and watch Finland or America or
Germany rush past your window. Or let’s say: listen to Samuel Beckett. Samuel Beckett once
said: “Go on and résumé; the fog will remain.”
The fog will remain.
All these things would be said to acknowledge my role as a writer. This role forces you to be
a bit smarter and a bit more colourful than usual. I’m neither smarter nor colourful. But for the
privilege of taking on the role of the writer I would do almost anything, because it makes me
forget the emptiness spreading out under me. Under my thinking. Under every single sentence
I’m about to build. It makes me forget that these sentences are bridges over the abyss. In the
process of building them, I am never sure if I will reach the other side. To take on the role of
the writer gives me the feeling there is another side, one that many have reached before me.
The abyss is still there – insistingly so - this naked-nothing of not knowing, but it is part of
this role. It has been talked about before, and I can slip into some well-worn sentences, into
the old paths: The writer who doesn’t know, yet sees and intuits everything, is one more
stereotype belonging to this role. (As is the writer as society’s conscience or the writer as the
original genius, who draws only on his own creative powers.)
2
Even if I knew how writing works, if I used, for example, one of the oldest models to
describes writing as nothing more than the masterly command of a certain technique, of a
perfect balance between the study of historical sources and compositional talent, I would keep
it to myself. Rejecting all concepts of what writing is supposed to be and refusing to see
myself in the role-of-the-writer, frees me to be where I am, when I write: in another world.
Outside of myself. Inside of language.
Fact is, I wrote a couple of books. These books tell stories. These stories are balanced
between the discontinuity and continuity of the familiar. They reflect the way I perceive
myself and the world. Concept and stories of my books are based on the notion that what we
perceive as reality is mutable, because reality is just an agreement. The stories I write
challenge the status quo. But I won’t talk about these stories here. I will talk about emptyness,
about longing and about an “I” which is destabilized. It is more difficult to perceive reality,
when you don’t have a story or a plot. It is difficult to speak when you don’t know the rules. It
is difficult, but it is also our only escape.
Otherwise our every action, feeling and thought follow certain patterns, which have been
established before us. We repeat them. In order to know who we are, we orientate ourselves to
the people around us. The question ‘Who am I?’ begs the further question ‘how much
freedom is accessible to me in my life?’ The answer to both of these questions depends on
how rigid or fluid the borders are that shape us.
Gender, age and skincolor are widely understood as the basic categories used to identify an
individual. Gender, age and skincolor establish the essential core of something which is
essentially nothing more than a set of attributes. Through them the essence of a person is
reduced to certain schemes of behaviors, actions and knowledge, which we relentlessly
pursue. We praise our individual freedom, but in fact we are caught in endless repetition. We
obediently follow all the directives passed down to us. Let’s take for example the ubiquitous
descriptions and explanations of what men and women supposedly want, what old and young
people want, what blacks and whites, Germans and Turks want, what seniors and children
want. All of these statements are supposed to serve as descriptions of what one gender,
generation or culture thinks of the other. In reality, though, they stipulate how a person of a
certain age, sex, or skin color should act, what they are supposed to want, think and feel, so
that they can be considered a fully functioning and visible member of society.
3
Creating self-identity in opposition to the white hegemony, in order to give a minority the
same rights as the majority of people, might have been once an important political move to
freedom and empowerment, but ends like all else as a strait jacket categorization.
An entire biological apparatus for example has been constructed around the categories of age
and gender. This includes: average lifespan, capability of bearing children, average age for a
heart attack, minimum or maximum heart rate, various cholesterol levels, it would seem our
life has been calculated in advance for us, so we don’t need to live it. I adjusted my heart rate
monitor to the upper norm of my age and sex. While jogging I think about the fact that I am
losing more calories than a man, need more calcium for my bones, but have less muscles
strength and mass, etc. These indexes shape my very Being.
The internet vividly demonstrates how we use language, knowledge and experience to limit
our individuality - all in the name of preserving some arbitrary notion of what we consider to
be our identity. The huge amount of information, the endless supply with new personas gives
us the impression we would have a choice. The internet suggests, we could be more than one
person. It suggests, we have an infinite number of identities at our disposal. But they are
more and more stereotyped. Instead of the alleged freedom that comes as a result of diversity,
we fall victim to the dictates of repetition. All of the unmasking and self-revelation, the entire
mode of confessional and tell-all culture brings with it an even stronger sense of homogenous
stereotyping. The homepage with the greatest amount of visitors determines the size of my
ego. Despite the alleged glut of supply, we follow the most frequently clicked link. The
appearance of diversity is based solely on „engaging period optimism“, which the american
writer Joan Didion talks about, „depending as they do on the Rousseauean premise that most
people, left to their own devices, think not in clichés but with originality and brilliance; that
most individual voices, once heard, turn out to be voices of beauty and wisdom.“ As we
know, that is not the case. We live in a capitalist hyperdemocracy, in which demand reduces
our possibilities and potential, because every demand copies slavishly the demand of the
previous user.
Even art is validated through democratic agreement; nobody has to personally vouch for their
decisions, and should art ever trespass beyond the framework of being a mediocre
commodity, it can easily be removed with a single click. How convenient, and you don’t even
need a dictator to enforce it…
Science is in no way inferior in this regard. Its pragmatic bent and addiction to control and
clarification offers an immediate solution to the very mystery of a person’s identity, it
4
explains and names every aspect of a person’s being down to his or her tiniest gene and cell.
Even the field of psychology shudders at the thought of its own humanistic tendencies. It
endeavors to be a natural science, to deliver predictable results. It is no longer concerned with
how a person thinks or dreams, but rather “what makes a person tick”, as if a person were a
clock or time bomb that could be taken apart and transported somewhere. Functionality, not
being seems to characterize today's consciousness. Words such as intuition, evocation, idea or
discretion are threatened with extinction. Words that had once created free spaces for fantasy
without the need to explain oneself. Today, nobody is spared from having their most personal
details available to the public. There is no room left for uncertainty. At the same time,
however, we suffer from a pervasive uncertainty. Bad news is booming. Whether it has to do
with climate change, the financial markets, Islamist terror, or even a weather report about an
approaching low pressure zone, we are suddenly in the realm of the approaching apocalypse.
There has to be a place where the homelessness of human existence can express itself, when it
is eliminated from people, if we aren’t even able anymore to formulate existential questions
about ourselves, let alone deal with a possible answer.
To write I need not to know. I need to release “me” from myself and all ascriptions. I need to
risk not building a bridge over the abyss. It’s dizzying. It’s a free fall, comparable to the
experience of skysurfing or bungie-jumping. All of these extreme sports are supposed to
trigger a flow, a condition of being in the flow of what you are doing. But actually it is not the
best description of what is happening. Writing allows me a different quality of perception, one
that is not primarily intensified or sharpened through physiological processes, rather it’s just
the reverse: Perception is intensified by a concentrated idea turned physiological – it shoots
into the body and takes possession of it. It is not about a body jolted into a state of shock by a
zero gravity situation in which adrenaline, noradrenaline and cortisol are released - the
ingredients of that flow. Rather it is about the power of imagination that ultimately creates a
zero gravity situation, which produces the impression that the immobile body at the desk is
inundated with endorphins – flows with the language, is created by it and dissolves in it.
The image of a double body comes to mind. On the one hand, I am patiently sitting there, and
on the other, the disembodied body of the author reappears as a flow. This is one reason why
it is utterly irrelevant at what age I write about whichever age, or what gender is writing about
whichever gender, or in what skin about whichever. The author’s body, intoxicated by
language, can move with anything that is being created. In language everything is
5
simultaneously present: time and space, the created and that which will be created, my own
and the other’s own.
Speaking about my writing practice is complicated further by the need to use the word “I”.
As we all know I is the most personal and the most common word in a language. The I covers
my unique being, yet one size does not fit all. I slip into it, I’m transported in it, the I speaks
me, rather than it is me who is speaking. The german writer Ingeborg Bachmann described the
distance between speaker and his or her I as being “as remote as the sky”. The I is my only
possibility to come into being, to have an identity, to speak about myself as I am now. But it
doesn’t cover my whole existence. I’m adapting to an I which was there before me, informed
by the language to which it belongs. No matter if we look at categories of gender, skincolor,
social status or ethnicity, at psychological, genetic or religious categories, and no matter if we
believe in them or not: in social practice all these categories are preclusive. My “I” is not
checkered as is Feirefiz in “Parcifal”. I’m never black and white, I’m not five and fifty, I
won’t ever be man and woman (even a hermaphrodite is not both, it belongs in its own
category). The validity of the constructed I is taken for granted.
When building sentences, I’m able to catapulte myself out of this I. “Only where I’m not”,
says Paul Auster, “is the place where I’m myself.”
So we can be sure of one thing: writing is a blessing. It is a blessing, because being involved
in the process, makes the much talked about I that has so little freedom start to fluctuate. It
appears free from the clutches of an otherwise permanently demanded fitness for reality.
It does not matter anymore. I don’t take on a role anymore. I am of no use. I don’t have to
assert myself any longer.
My skepticism began early. At the age of six – after I had just acknowledged myself in the
mirror, I had understood who I was with the help of that image, I had realized what belonged
to me and what didn’t – I lost sight of me again and with it I lost the conviction that this I
would be the coat I would ever grow into.
At the age of six I traveled to a Christian hotel in a country where religion was taboo. Every
room in this hotel was named after a city outside the closed, non-religious, socialist world I
had been living in. The rooms were called San Francisco, Havana, Singapore, they were
called Paris, Stockholm, Helsinki. Every time we traveled to this hotel, we met two people. I
had no idea, where they came from. I had no idea where they would go after our visit.
6
Whenever we arrived, they were there. They looked amazing in their colorful clothes. Their
joyous laugther made them seem open and free. They didn’t belong to the world my parents
and I belonged to, a world in which people laughed quietly, wore pale colored simple clothes.
Their room was called Paris. Paris had big windows, a luxurious bed, white thin curtains that
blew in the wind. They moved around in it with such ease, as if they owned this room. We
stayed in this hotel two or three days, we didn’t go out much; a walk to the lake, a visit of the
church. These two people were in a glow of a special, almost otherworldy power. I thought
we stayed in this hotel, because here alone could the fascination of the unknown be developed
to its full potential. My parents acted as if this was the most normal thing in the world: this
lack of background, this lack of a story, this lack of a context in which I could have grounded
all my wild assumptions about these two. I couldn’t grasp them. All I knew about this couple
was Paris, the hotel room they inhabited for two or three days. Beyond their appearance, I
knew nothing.
I must have felt it than for the first time at the age of six: the insecurity we feel as soon as we
have no information about a person, no facts, no biographical background, nothing to help us
create a story around him or her, nothing that would give this person a meaning, and – most
important - nothing that would enable us to put ourselves in relation to him or her. I knew,
that they were my aunt and uncle, but the mirror didn’t reflect more than that. That was what
had irritated the six year old. When the person across from us is not clearly visible, our own
position starts to fluctuate.
The only person I can’t truly see, is myself. So if the mirror, which gives me an idealized
image of myself, is blind or the reflection by others is missing, I will disappear.
As a girl I found a way out. I turned the hotel room of their temporary visit into a place where
they belonged with all their past and all their future. To me that hotelroom called Paris,
located in a small East German town, had contained their entire life. And furthermore, my
childlike phantasy turned Paris, the forbidden magic city on the other side of the wall, into
reality. Paris was now accessible; I just had to open the door.
Later, when my parents thought I was old enough, they told me about my West German
relatives. My mother’s brother lived in Bavaria. Officially, he didn’t exist, because my
mother, who worked at the East German airline INTERFLUG, wasn’t allowed to have WestGerman relatives. She would have lost her job, if government officials had found out about
him. On the one hand, I was dis-illusioned by this information. The realm of my aunt and
uncle’s existence was not otherwordly; it was merely foreign. In retrospect what had been
ambiguous, had seemed unambiguously more intense.
7
On the other hand, the exposed secret, made me skeptical towards reality. I began to see to
what extent reality was a matter of language. Language, if it is not seen solely as a tool,
doesn’t simply transport reality, it is reality. We construct reality when we talk. We build our
world by building sentences. And we perceive the world through the sentences we build. “The
name of the hotelroom is Paris” is a sentence. Paris as a hotelroom becomes reality. The
sentence “I don’t have relatives in the west”, became reality. This sentence belonged to the
reality of a world surrounded by a wall. And the question whether something is right or
wrong, a truth or a lie, is always deduced from a given reality.
Skepticism meant to question this given. Since reality is created by what we say and how we
speak, its only proof in the end is its material resistance. But if we bump into something we
can’t decide if it is a tree or a table or a truttitallur, we don’t know, what hit us, until we can
perceive it through a word.
We might not be able to speak about everything, we might not be able to find the right words
for everything, but that is more a question of capability, than of possibility. We are permeated
by language deep into our unconsciousness, which is a benefit and a disadvantage at the same
time. It’s a benefit because theoretically we should be able to draw upon anything that had
ever been thought about, we should be able to connect to everything that had ever been
spoken about, we should be able to conjure up everything that ever had existed. The
disadvantage is that we can’t get outside of what makes us who we are. We are forced to
repeat the texts, that write us. We can’t escape the sentences that have been built before us.
We can’t make language anew. Small moves, shifts and erosions are possible; we can also
alter or expand a meaning. Even so, we can only succeed if the covering of narration, which
we mistake for “nature”, for something natural (as in: the seemingly “natural distinction
between man and woman”) is torn away. If we are able to look not at our knowledge, but at
our thinking, we might be able to experience something, that is not just an imitation of an
experience. In these moments we might be able to gain an existential openness through
language. Or at least we might try. And then fail and fail again and fail better, as Samuel
Beckett once put it. But the act of trying, despite our knowledge we will fail, is what saves us.
Growing up in a rigid society is a reasonable explanation for why I became skeptical. But it is
only one among many. Not only authors who experienced dictatorships search for a language
that can expand the dimension of what we understand as reality. Skepticism towards language
appears also in the literature of more human societies, as soon as a writer strives to chart
8
unknown territory. All of these authors turn towards the same direction: they turn to where
experience is not determined by the horizon of a society’s knowledge.
Herta Müller, Daniil Charms and Imre Kertezs on one side, Joan Didion, Gertrud Stein and
Samuel Beckett on the other side – my main literary influences - are all skeptics. Vladimir
Nabokov doesn’t seem to fit here at first glance, but at a second glance his word acrobatics
seem to camouflage his doubts about the omniscient power of narration.
You could rightly argue, that our knowledge is not as stable and secure, that we still don’t
know enough. Or that we know enough to realize how knowledge constantly changes. You
could argue, that we are fortunate to have at least some tools to navigate through this complex
world. You could argue that we are fortunate to have some answers to the pressing question of
who we are.
Agreed.
And yet.
I’m sitting at my desk, hands on the keyboard, coffee next to me, cheeks burning, yesterday’s
unfinished text in front of me, and it starts. I’m facing the brink and as I’m thinking that I’m
being catapulted into nothing, I’m actually being led into language which makes it impossible
to mirror myself any longer in the things I’m saying for the sake of my hypocritical I. When
language widens, when the things I perceive as the material world disintegrate – desk,
telephone, window – and the linguistic knowledge, which makes this material world visible to
me – desk, telephone, window – disintegrates, then I too start hovering.
I am in a state of bewilderment which resembles the cluelessness of the six year old. I’m
losing focus, I can’t get an idea of the “why”, “where from”, or “where to” I am going or
where I came from. I’m on one of these journeys, where the destination constantly glimmers
at the horizon, but the closer I get, the further away it appears. On this horizon nothing is
designated, nothing is named, nothing matters.
I would call this journey thinking.
I’m on my way from word to word, and the sentences resulting from this movement are the
traces of my thinking. Let me quote Joan Didion again here. She says, the way an author
builds her sentences reveals the way she thinks. She wasn’t talking about the content of the
sentences. She was talking about the form of the sentences. The form is developed out of this
movement from one word to the next. A word always has a meaning, but the meaning of a
9
sentence emerges only with the last word. What matters while I’m on the move is just this
question: What does it mean? But since I can’t define, what „what“ or “it” refer to, this
question generates a longing: To find enough sense in the distance between these two words
„what“ and „it“, to finally be able to exclaim “It means something!” (In German: Was
bedeutet es? is the question. The answer is a turnaround of the same words: Es bedeutet was!)
We have at least a verb in-between. A verb means action. A verb differentiates these two
words „what” and „it“. It separates them by linking them. It refers to something. That’s how
sentences are built. I’m sent from one word to the next, while longing for a connection to
appear between these words. Searching for sense means to be constantly in motion.
Interestingly enough, the word sense descends etymologically from the root sent, which
means to take a direction, to go. So while I’m sent somewhere, connections appear.
About the final meaning of a sentence, I can never be sure. When I write, I’m subject to
language and therefore also unknown to myself. The fluid author corpus, the I that is in the
process of being dissolved, turns into a subject belonging to language. Just as the grammatical
subject of a sentence is determined only by its end (in German), I have disappeared from the
very sentences I am building, before they have reached their final word. So I'm always there
as an afterglow. Writing forces me to keep this writing subject present, while continuing to
undergo new transformations.
You can witness this movement from the simplest sentences. “I am going to sleep.” – “I am
going fast.” – “I am going to have a breakdown.” The I is clearly asserted at the beginning
and the verb carries it onwards, without any idea whether in the end it is sleeping, going fast
or is broken. This makes an enormous difference in terms of its existence. The I gains
meaning only in the moment it no longer is there. The I is nowhere to be seen in the words
"sleep", "fast" or "broken". They don’t contain it, although they seem to determine it. So I’m
sending myself of, whithout knowing where to. All I know is, "I’m on my way". But if I move
forward as simple and slowly as possible, I can go anywhere at any time.
This not-I is called Rávic. When I first began to publish I inserted the name Rávic into my
civil name. Although it is a paradox to name something which is not there, I can say now:
whereever I am not, I’m Rávic.
10
My tongue breaks up and a delicate fire
Runs through my flesh; I see not a thing
With my eyes, and all that I hear
In my ears is a hum.
The sweat runs down, a shuddering takes
Me in every part and pale as the drying
Grasses, then, I think I am near
The moment of dying.
These lines are from Sappho. The Greek poet created the image of someone in a state of
longing. It’s a love poem. The lyrical I longs for a beloved person. The way Sappho describes
the person in a state of longing reminds me of myself when I’m in the flow of language. “I’m
near the moment of dying”? Of course! There is inertia in the one who is longing. Ecstatic
inertia. It resembles my absent presence at my desk. My body is there, but still, pale, blind to
its environment, heated from within, where the actual movement takes place. In the end the
desire uttered in Rávic may not be so different from what Sappho describes. What causes this
longing may be different: the image of a lover or the image of a truer, better, real word. But
the experience is the same since antiquity: to be outside of yourself. In the course of time,
there developed terms for this desire – unio mystica, epiphany, the sublime, dissolution, “the
non-speakable, which shows”, as Ludwig Wittgenstein called it, or “the approach to the inner
shadow” as Natalie Sarrautes imagined it. And even the Bungee-jumper and yoginis, the
Buddhist monks and Catholic nuns might be driven by this force as well. “This desire, the
longing for the Absolute is the true urge of every real traveler”, said the Swiss writer
Annemarie Schwarzenbach in her uniquely dry manner.
Roland Barthes shows that this force can be detected even in the most common and worn
words. In his book “A Lover’s Discours: Fragments” he looks at the phrase “I love you”. Ilove-you opens up a possibility. There is a satisfaction in this utterance, which consists for
Barthes in an affirmation, set against other powers like science, reality or reason, even against
language as long as it makes common sense, as long as there is the linearity of time. After its
first utterance, this sigh of love loses its meaning. Said a second or third time, “I love you”
doesn’t convey any information any more. Only in the moment of utterance, do these words
make sense. Beyond that there is nothing. The “I” and the “you” are simultaneously present in
the moment of utterance (they merge into one). They don’t function as reflecting surfaces for
11
one another anymore. There is no longer an exchange of information. So the common
economics don’t work, no trade, no ownership (my longing can’t be “exchanged” into
something else, it is there unto itself). This synchronicity, says Barthes, stirs up an impulse
which doesn’t belong in the realm of society, it is unknown: I-love-you is an overspending,
which can’t be revoked. It is kept clean of every thought of reserve assets or securities. No
social constraints, no desire for occupation. The desire is savored. What I tenaciously want is
“to get the word”, says Barthes.
The paradox in this utterance I-love-you may be exactly this commonplaceness about the
formula, in which this uncommon being-outside-of-yourself is expressed. While I’m saying it,
the rules dissolve. In this speech-act something revolutionary is happening: I’m transformed.
The beast, touched by the beauty, transforms into another identity.
To get the word. I desire nothing more than that while sitting at my desk. I have to use the
commonplace formulations of language. And at the same time I desire to dive through them
and get into a state of overspending, until these formulations lose their “common sense”. Only
then do I “get the word” which has regained its magical potential to materialize the unknown.
And the words transform me.
As soon as I finish the novel I’m pulled back into the desert of reciprocal dependency, from
the other and from the information saturated environment.
The finished novel, in this regard, may be nothing more than the traces of the dilapidated I. If
the novel is a success or not, doesn’t play a role. What matters is that it opened a door for me
into the realm of language.
And if I’m lucky, the reader of this novel gets transported to the edge of the abyss as well. He
or she finds this same place, where you hear the wind and are left reeling, speechless, where
words feel strange and you become unknown to yourself.
The best literature may sometimes help us, through what we have read, to see our unique
purpose for existence. A purpose not based on the dyadic notion of truth: right or wrong, good
or bad, old or young, hetero or homosexual, normal or abnormal, child or adult, man or
woman, but solely based on intensity.
I suspect we would be happier that way.
12