Despair of Self: Strategies of Seeing and Becoming in Linn Ullmann's De urolige

Abstract

In 2015, Linn Ullmann published her autobiographical novel De urolige (2015; Unquiet [2019]). The novel deals with the relationship between parents and children. The main characters are simply referred to as the mother, the father, and the girl. Although they appear nameless, Ullmann's parents are easily identifiable as the Swedish director, author, and producer Ingmar Bergman, and the Norwegian actress, author, and director Liv Ullmann. The novel alternates between a third-person perspective and a first-person narrative written from the girl's point of view as she grows into adulthood. The mother, the father, and the girl do not constitute a family in the ordinary sense: “Jeg var hans barn og hennes barn, men ikke deres barn, det var aldri oss tre” (Ullmann 2015, 10) [“I was his child and her child, but not their child, it was never us three” (Ullmann 2019, 4)]. The girl suffers from the way things are: “Egentlig tror jeg at jeg har sørget over foreldrene mine hele livet” (2015, 74) [“To be honest, I think I have mourned my parents all my life” (2019, 68)].In focusing on the relationship between parents and children, De urolige resembles other autobiographical novels recently published in Norway: Knausgård (2009), Wassmo (2013), Hjorth (2016), to mention only a few. But unlike the parents depicted in these novels, Ullmann's parents are dedicated artists in their own right. De urolige mentions, mirrors, paraphrases, and alludes to their work in a complex interplay of references, some of which will be considered in this paper. Ullmann picks up where Bergman left off. In his biographical novel Den goda viljan (1991; The Best Intentions [2018]), the relationship of Bergman's parents to that of his grandparents is a driving force of the plot (Perregaard 2019). Den goda viljan ends in 1918 when Bergman's mother is pregnant with him. The yet unborn son of Den goda viljan becomes the dying father of De urolige. In a number of other books, manuscripts, and films, including his 1987 autobiographical work, Laterna Magica (2018; The Magic Lantern [1988]), Bergman directly and indirectly portrays his relationship to his mother and father. In addition to Den goda viljan and Laterna Magica, particular aspects of Bergman's two films Persona (1966) and Saraband (2003) become part of the composition and thematic unfolding of De urolige. Persona and Saraband mark the first and last of Bergman's films in which Liv Ullmann plays a leading role. In different ways and to different degrees, these two films also revolve around the relationship of parents and children. Ullmann's references to the work of her parents, I argue, are indications that the three main characters share the urge to emotionally and artistically express their struggles and relations. Each of them is ambitious, vulnerable, and wistful. They engage in separate quests for self-knowledge and self-identity. The creative play with the forces of particular works of art (e.g., Den goda viljan, Laterna Magica, Persona, Saraband) in De urolige points to the inevitable entanglement of these quests.An autobiographical novel is a work of fiction that draws its material from the episodes and events of the author's own life. In its enunciation, the novel often creates an illusion of a unison voice with which the author, teller, and main character speak(s). The creation and also the critique of such novels raise some of the most profound questions of narrativity and self. How and from whose perspective can such a life story be told, and what kind of ontological status and epistemic authority does the author's self have in the narrating? What is the nature of a self? Does a unified self prompt narration, and, if so, to what extent does it overlap with the experience of having an embodied center of orientation as one's own zero point of reference? (Husserl 1999). How does the temporal organization of experience relate to the temporal flow of what is experienced? (Phillips 2014). And what about memory? Can we trust the autobiographical self in the act of remembering (Neisser and Fivush 1994), and how could we possibly trust an author in imaginatively re-creating real life events when the resulting transformations first and foremost create and serve a plot? Is it at all possible to logically (rather than creatively) link lived experiences with the motives and actions of linguistically constructed characters? Novelists as well as critics grapple with these questions.Put crudely, critics of autobiographical novels tend to either focus on the representations of historically real persons and true events and point to fact and fiction, similarities and dissimilarities between the novels under study and the photographs and documents surrounding them, such as interviews, essays, letters, diaries, journals—or they tend to focus on the construction and performative qualities of the self (or multiple selves) in the composition and narration of the novels in question. As Charles Berryman demonstrates in an early but still acutely relevant essay, there are historical and disciplinary reasons for this division of labor that “mirror the practice and theory of larger critical trends—from the philosophy of language to the politics of cultural identity” (1999, 71). To the former group of critics, the ideas of historical truth, evidence, and objectivity are foundational to research (Lejeune 1989). To the latter group of critics, which may be said to encompass deconstructionists (Derrida 1976), social constructionists (Gergen 2011), as well as the more recent posthumanists (Braidotti 2016), scientific inquiry itself constitutes a set of questionable practices. From the point of view of this (diverse) group of radical skeptics, the self is not just an unstable, unreliable, or unsubstantiated phenomenon of the world, but an entirely fictional entity that is historically, socially, discursively, ideologically, politically, and institutionally produced. As pointed out by Berryman, however, both groups of critics rely on particular conceptions of language in making their arguments. Whereas the first group depends on commonly accepted meanings of signs, the second group calls into question the referential power of these signs and focuses instead on partiality, provisionality, and processes of differentiation.The scientific and the skeptical approaches to the world, narrativity, and self share the assumption that language is the starting and end point of any critical study of autobiographical novels. In this article, I put the discussion of language on hold in favor of a phenomenological approach that distinguishes instead between the experiential and interpretational dimensions of the self. Authors often presuppose a self as a dynamic force when they (re)present consciousness (Cohn 1978). The implicit understanding of a dynamic, reflexive self is an undercurrent in literary writing as well as in narrative research.In arguing for the relevance of including the different dimensions of the self in the critical analysis of autobiographical fiction, I draw from Søren Kierkegaard's philosophy of the self and from his writings about anxiety, despair, love, and longing. I do not focus on the narrative configuration of De urolige as a whole, nor on the linguistic construction of the fragmented selves of the father, the mother, and the girl. In my reading of the novel, I focus instead on the dynamics that tie the main characters to unbroken lines of experienced events. Some of the most crucial scenes in the novel warrant the relevance of this approach in that they deal with the girl's despair when she momentarily realizes and violently responds to the existential fact that she cannot, however much she tries, get rid of herself. She is forever, inherently and inescapably, stuck with herself. One of the symptoms of the girl's despair is that she wants to grow up as quickly as possible. She does not want to be a child. She wants to have the kind of autonomy, energetic drive, and liberty of action that she attributes to adults. This contrasts with both of her parents, who want to be children: “De ville være barn. De snakket om frihet og kunst, men kom løpende tilbake til tryggheten hver gang det ukjente ble for mye. De var barn af den lille verden” (Ullmann 2015, 307) [“They yearned to be children. They talked about freedom and art, but came running back to safety whenever the unknown proved to be too much. They were children of the little world” (Ullmann 2019, 290)]. In becoming themselves, the mother, the father, and the girl have to work against their own inclinations, understandings, and anxieties. Arne Grøn proposes that, from a Kierkegaardian perspective, “how we are selves is a matter of what we can do to ourselves. The critical insight is that one only preserves one's soul against oneself” (2019, 174). The three main characters in De urolige are deeply engaged in the struggle of preserving their souls against the unquiet of their own ambitions and inner longings. The novel describes what the characters do to themselves so that we get to see how they are selves in their everyday lives as family members and practicing artists.In what follows, I demonstrate that the dynamic of the self in a Kierkegaardian sense—the idea that the self is a relation that relates itself to itself—ensues from the way that the interpretational dimension of the self depends on, is tied to, and gets its fuel from the experiential dimension. In three sections, I then focus on three interrelated themes of De urolige: (1) anxiety as a state of mind that enables and brings forth the experience of oneself as a distinctive self; (2) love and creativity as intertwined in the need to be seen and affirmed by others and in the ability to see oneself as an artist sees; and (3) longing as an existential condition that involves a sense of or an intuition about God. Each of these themes is linked to the main character's persistent quest for understanding the circumstances guiding her choices and decisions and for becoming herself. Throughout this quest, she performs desperate and fruitless attempts to conquer particular aspects of time and space.The idea of the self and the related concepts of voice, character, role, persona, and identity has preoccupied philosophers since antiquity, and psychologists since the early beginnings of psychology as a scientific discipline (Gallagher 2011). But there is no agreement or consensus as to what a self is. Is it an essence comparable to a pre-modern conceptualization of the soul? (Ferguson 2000). Is it a social construction interactionally and linguistically produced, negotiated, and performed for particular purposes? (Goffman 1959; Gergen 2011). Or is it an illusion—a product of processes in the brain that make us postulate a kind of centeredness and continuity when there is, in fact, none? (Dennett 1992). A dynamic and relational approach to the self offers an alternative to each of these understandings and makes it possible to integrate the experiential and interpretational dimensions of the self for the purposes of narrative analysis and critique (Perregaard 2018). Traditionally, phenomenology has dealt with the experiential dimension, whereas hermeneutics has dealt with the interpretational dimension. To some, narrative is primary to the understanding of what a self is (Taylor 1989; Bruner 1990; Ricoeur 1992). It takes a close phenomenological analysis to demonstrate why that is not true (Zahavi 2005). The idea of an interpretational, narrative self relies implicitly on the experiential reality of the first-person perspective of the bodily subject.This perspective entails a sense of “what it is like” for us to experience (Nagel 1974). It feels a certain way to perform a particular action or to be subjected to somebody else's action, and the way it feels becomes part of the experience itself. Eventually we may forget, regret, or ignore what happened, or change our understanding of it, but we cannot undo what we did or what somebody else did, or neutralize the fact that it felt a particular way to be part of the temporal flow and the spatial organization of the actions involved. A characteristic feature of autobiography, as a genre, has to do with the indissolubility of the act itself and what it was like to perform it or undergo its consequences. In remembering and writing about particular episodes, the autobiographer reflectively frames, organizes, and expresses them in ways that have to do with the interpretational dimension of the self, but the episodes are still tied to the autobiographer's pre-reflective stream of lived experience. If they were not, the events depicted would become entirely fictional rather than predominantly autobiographical. Furthermore, since the world is already given to each and every experience, something happens to and for the subject before it can constitute itself as an active, narrative writing self. In other words, a narrative self is always already an embodied, experiential self. Without the inclusion of the experiential dimension, there simply is no foundation on which to build an understanding of a remembering, performative, interpretive, or reflecting self (Zahavi 2005, 114). It is for this reason that a phenomenologist in the Husserlian tradition would not hold language responsible for the world. While narrativity, of course, involves social, cultural, and linguistic practices, neither the world nor the experiential dimension of the self is the product of language.One of the most interesting philosophers of the self is Søren Kierkegaard. Long before phenomenology was formally established as an approach to the investigation of the structures of consciousness, Kierkegaard understood and articulated the interrelations of the experiential and interpretational dimensions of the self. Kierkegaard's perspective differs from the scientific as well as the skeptical approaches to the self in that he insists that the self is spirit. The self is not an entity or an essence. But nor is the self a construction, fiction, or an illusion. From an existential philosophical perspective, a self, instead, is a relation that relates itself to itself and “the self's being is in its becoming” (Welz 2011, 157). In reflectively relating to what was pre-reflectively experienced, the self is continuously under way to itself. In the very first and very complicated paragraph of Part 1 of Sygdommen til Døden (The Sickness unto Death), Kierkegaard synthesizes what it means to possess the possibility of a self: “Mennesket er Aand. Men hvad er Aand? Aand er Selvet. Men hvad er Selvet? Selvet er et Forhold, der forholder sig til sig selv, eller er det i Forholdet, at Forholdet forholder sig til sig selv; Selvet er ikke Forholdet, men at Forholdet forholder sig til sig selv. Mennesket er en Synthese af Uendelighed og Endelighed, af det Timelige og det Evige, af Frihed og Nødvendighed” (Kierkegaard 2006, 129) [“The human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation which relates to itself, or that in the relation which is its relating to itself. The self is not the relation but the relation's relating to itself. A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity” (Kierkegaard 2004b, 43)].In investigating the phenomenon of despair in The Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard's pseudonymous author, Anti-Climacus, describes the manifestation of despair as a conflict of the self. In my interpretation and analysis of De urolige, I focus on the way that features of despair pervade the girl's experiences of relating to each of her parents. In reflecting upon their mutual relationship, she becomes, in the novel, “a relation which relates to itself.” The way that the girl relates to them and to herself changes significantly as she grows older and becomes conscious of the psychological patterns that govern their bonds. In narrating the story, the autobiographical self has to make a stand against the philosophical challenges involved in understanding and overcoming the implications of these patterns.Kierkegaard's insights are valuable to the study of literature in that they point not only to representations and projections of the self in works of art, but to the kind of existential struggle involved in holding together the experiential and interpretational dimensions of the self. An honest attempt to write autobiographically entails an investigation of the way that our experiences are related to our deeply entrenched understandings. It is to insist that the self as a relation that relates itself to itself involves structures and movements of consciousness and not only constructions and practices of language. This dynamic cannot be reduced to an issue of language, although we are, of course, condemned to study the implications of it through the analytical and reflexive means that language provides.Ullmann's novel warrants extensive theoretical discussion because it provides an excellent illustration of what is at stake in autobiographical writing. De urolige is concerned with the self as existentially abandoned to itself, with the embodied self as situated in time and space among other selves, and with the unfolding, compelling sense that the losing of oneself, in fact, provides the only passable path into becoming oneself. There is no reference to Kierkegaard's philosophy in Ullmann's novel. I include it here because Kierkegaard's concepts of anxiety, despair, love, and longing capture the underlying dynamic of the relations between the mother, the father, and the girl, and between the grown woman and her dying father. These relations are carefully orchestrated in the novel's different layers of time and space. As human beings, we have to endure what happens to us, and we have to live with our own and other people's actions. To write autobiographically is to retrospectively examine, spatially and temporally organize what was once experienced, and to consider and express the implications of the narrated events.The purpose of pointing to the philosophical aspects of the self in autobiographical writing is to insist that they are taken as seriously in literary criticism as they demonstrably are in novels like De urolige. Ullmann's novel certainly deserves different analyses (Mai 2017; Behrendt 2019), but in this article, I particularly focus on the potentialities of imaginatively expressing the self from the perspective of one's own lived experience. Furthermore, since the novel is also about art, I focus on the urge that the main characters have to artistically mold and release their anxiety, despair, love, and longing.De urolige spans the 1960s to the 2000s, from when the girl is born until she, a grown woman with children of her own, reflects upon six conversations that she tape-recorded with her father during the final year of his life. She provides the unnamed Bergman with a voice through the transcription of the tapes. The conversations were meant to be part of a book on old age that her father originally wanted to write himself. Eventually, this idea turns into a common book project for him and his daughter. The novel includes his daughter's conflicting reactions to the conversations in the years following his death, but it ends with the planning and execution of her father's funeral in the Summer of 2007. Instead of the carefully planned book on old age, we get De urolige, a work of love and remembrance, despair and anxiety, creative power and urge.In the mid-1960s, the girl's parents fall in love. The young actress of Persona becomes pregnant with the older director's child, and the girl is born. During the 1970s and early 1980s, the girl spends every summer with her father at Hammars on the island of Fårö, Sweden, and the rest of the year with her mother in Oslo and, for longer periods of time, in Los Angeles and New York. The girl looks forward to spending time with her father, but she also dreads to be separated from her mother. She is afraid that her mother is going to die and that she, herself, will die as well: “Hun klamret seg til moren. Tanken på ikke å se hende igjen var uutholdelig. Hun fantaserte om forskjellige måter å dø på. Morens død, først og fremst. Og sin egen død som en naturlig følge av morens” (Ullmann 2015, 28) [“She clung to the mother. The thought of never seeing her again was unbearable. She fantasized about different ways of dying. The mother's death, above all. And her own death as a natural consequence of the mother's” (Ullmann 2019, 21)].The girl's attachment to her nervous, restless, and traveling mother is intense: “Det var som om jenta ville inn i henne igjen” (Ullmann 2015, 29) [“It felt as if the girl wanted to crawl back inside her” (Ullmann 2019, 22)]. In Laterna Magica, Bergman describes a similar, unbearable yearning for his mother's affection. His devotion is disabling. It is described by others as unhealthy: “Hon skickade ofta bort mig med kyligt ironiska tonfall. Jag grät av raseri och besvikelse” (Bergman 2018b, 13) [“She often sent me away with cool ironic words and I wept with rage and disappointment” (Bergman 1988, 3)]. Bergman describes how he hardens himself and pretends not to care, how he engages in a bizarre play of “arrogans och kylig vänlighet” (2018b, 13) [“arrogance and a cool friendliness” (1988, 4)]. His psychological attachment to his mother causes physical reactions in his body. Similarly, the girl at Hammers responds physically to her emotional distress. She is quite literally a trembling self, small and skinny. Her lips turn blue from the cold water in her father's swimming pool, and his drying closet becomes her hiding place, a surrogate for her mother's womb. During her first summers at Fårö, “likte jenta seg best inni tørkeskapet på vaskerommet. Der var det varmt og tett, og på gulvet under spillene var det et lite område der hun kunne krølle seg sammen” (Ullmann 2015, 33) [“the girl's favorite place was the electrically heated narrow closet in the wash house, where clothes were hung to dry. The drying closet was hot and sultry, and on the bottom beneath the hanging rods there was just enough space for her to curl up” (Ullmann 2019, 27)]. It is dangerous, however, to hide in the drying closet, and she is forbidden to do so. It is the only house rule that she continually breaks until her father puts up a note of warning on the door of the closet: “VARNING! FÖRBJUDET FÖR BADANDE BARN ATT VISTAS I TORKSKÅPET!” (2015, 36) [“WARNING! IT IS STRICTLY FORBIDDEN FOR SWIMMING CHILDREN TO FREQUENT THE DRYING CLOSET!” (2019, 29)].Time and space, the measurement of time and the demarcation of space, become crucial factors for the girl's ability—and inability—to navigate in her world. The way her parents organize time and space influences her possibilities for action and constrains her activities in particular ways. In the drying cabinet, space becomes manageable, but in the girl's dreams, space provides an endless potential for her mother's disappearance: “Jeg pleide å drømme om henne. Det var altid en variant av samme drøm, som sluttet med at vi skrek så høyt til hverandre at hun løste seg opp og ble borte. I drømmen begynner jeg å lete etter henne. Det er en febrilsk leting i hyller og skap, under sofaen eller i badekaret, har hun gjemt seg bak gardinene, kanskje de burgunderrøde, i mormors gamle syskrin, eller mellom gaflene og knivene i kjøkkenskuffen” (Ullmann 2015, 188) [“I used to dream about her. It was always a variation of the same dream, which ended with us yelling at each other in such a way that she dissolved and disappeared. In the dream, I would start looking for her. A frantic search through shelves and cupboards, underneath sofas and in the bathtub, is she hiding behind the curtains, maybe, the vermilion ones, or in Nanna's sewing box, or among the forks and knives in the kitchen drawer?” (Ullmann 2019, 177)].Conversely, space also frames the girl's mother in sceneries where she cannot be reached. Absence and distance threaten life and offer images, instead, of motionless beauty. The girl's maternal grandmother has a reproduction of an Edvard Munch painting hanging on the wall: År etter år henger kvinnen med det lyse håret på mormors vegg og skuer utover havet uten en eneste gang å snu seg og vise ansiktet sitt, skuer og lengter og venter. Jeg vet at bildet forestiller moren min.Nei, det er ikke henne, sier mormor.—Munch døde da mamma bare var en liten pike.Jeg trekker på skuldrene, jeg vet det jeg vet. (Ullmann 2015, 159)Year after year, the woman with the fair hair hangs on Nanna's wall and gazes out across the ocean without turning even once to show her face, gazing and longing and waiting. I know that the woman in the painting is my mother.No, it's not her, says Nanna. Your Mamma was just a little girl when Munch died.I shrug my shoulders, I know what I know. (Ullmann 2019, 151)In her relationship with her mother, time and space work against her. From the girl's perspective, the mother is unpredictable. She takes away the precision of time and the proportion of space. Because she cannot be trusted, time itself has to be endured, and space has to be overcome. Therefore, the girl puts an enormous amount of emotional energy into the observation of time and space. Her fear and longing culminate in a scene when she, in Oslo, expects a phone call from her mother who is filming in the United States. Her mother fails to call her daughter at the agreed-upon time, bringing the girl into what her grandmother characterizes as a state of hysteria. The girl desperately does not want to be herself, trying instead to escape herself by being constantly engaged in screaming and walking. Her grandmother, unable to calm her down, calls a doctor who provides the girl with tranquilizers: Nå er det en time etter avtalt tidspunkt, og jeg går fra rom til rom i mammas store leilighet. Jeg vil ikke slutte å gå, jeg vil ikke slutte å hyle. Jeg har gått sånn i hundra tusen år og kan gå i hundra tusen år til. Man trenger ikke konsonanter for å sørge. Bare vokaler. Bare denne ene lyden. Jeg skal perforere himmelen med lyd. Det er en magisk kraft i dette, i gåingen og hylingen, men bare så lenge jeg ikke gir meg (Ullmann 2015, 171)Now it's one hour past the agreed-upon time, and I walk from room to room in Mamma's big flat. I don't want to stop walking, I don't want to stop crying. I have walked like this for a hundred thousand years and can walk for another hundred thousand. You don't need consonants to mourn. Only vowels. Only this one single sound. I'll pierce the sky with sound. There is magic in this, in walking and crying, but only as long as I don't stop. (Ullmann 2019, 160)It is, however, also a scene that becomes transformative for the girl's quest. The girl realizes that she is, in fact, on her own, that she cannot escape herself or the necessity of her own circumstances. In seeking to disappear, to dissolve her own zero point in time and space through the constant screaming and walking, she comes, instead, to appear to herself: She is the one who screams and walks. And she will not give in. The anguish or anxiety that she experiences allows her to not only realize what it is like to be left behind, but it also provides an opening to the possibility of becoming. The girl's anxiety reveals herself to herself. To Kierkegaard, anxiety in childhood is necessary because it provides the child with an initial idea of a self, of what it takes to reach for the possibility of a self: “Hvilket er da Menneskets Forhold til denne tvetydige Magt [Aanden], hvorledes forholder Aanden sig til sig selv og til sin Betingelse? Den forholder sig som Angest” (Kierkegaard 1997, 4:349) [“What, then, is man's relation to this ambiguous power? How does spirit relate itself to itself and to its conditionality? It relates itself as anxiety” (Kierkegaard 1981, 315)].The challenge for all autobiographical writers is that they have to relate to their own history while it is still unfolding. According to Kierkegaard, however, this is not just a challenge to writers but an existential condition. We are all subjected to our own situational circumstances, and from an unstable position in time and space, we have to reflectively and narratively conceive and commit to our own history if we are not to sink into despair. To courageously and truthfully engage with one's own history in the autobiographical form is in itself a matter of committing to oneself in becoming oneself. The investigation, linguistic description, and expression of what happened before become the means by which the writer moves and manages what is yet to come. In imaginatively creating a scene from the events of her own history, the writer—in the act of writing—expresses an emotion in language. The struggle of writing is a struggle “to do something definite” (Collingwood 1958, 280). The writer may succeed or fail in expressing an emotion but in writing autobiographically, this success or failure is tied to the way that the reflective movements of the mind are converted into the linguistic expressions of emotion. The girl's concern with time and space as she moves between and tries to integrate the different worlds of her mother and father reflects the challenge that existence itself poses to the self. The girl's anxiety is expressed in an immediate refusal to accept that challenge (the screaming and walking). As her life unfolds, however, so does her realization of having to deal with herself within the constraints of her own situational circumstances. In the long run, the girl does not choose the tranquilizers. Instead of becoming the victim of what she perceives to be her mother's unpredictability, the girl tries to conquer and take possession of time and space in her own way. This way has to do with her father's life at