In a Choked State of Mind: A Conversation with Ursula Scavenius

Ursula Scavenius, photo by Tobias Scavenius.

To mark the publication of Ursula Scavenius’s The Dolls, translated from the Danish by Jennifer Russell and released today, Rosie Ellison-Balaam spoke to Scavenius about how she came to write her compulsive and vigorously inventive stories that search deep into Europe’s haunted past, present and future. She speaks about how she found the language to reflect current crises, from the local effects of climate change to the ominous situations so many displaced families are finding themselves in every day. But hers is also a fiction that cracks open all the windows and draws aside the blinds so that the light can flood in – and so that we might better see. Welcome to The Dolls.

How did you come to write The Dolls?

I was writing the The Dolls out of grief and the desperation that followed. Severe sickness had hit my family. My mother died quite young, within nine months of falling ill. She wasn’t there when I had my second son. When you suffer, I think, you are more open to who else suffers in the world, and you become more direct than before. In The Dolls, most people in the stories are siblings trying to connect with each other in grief. But neither my first book Feathers nor The Dolls are directly based on autobiographical material. Where a climate apocalypse is part of my first book, the dark history of fascism runs through the veins of The Dolls, both because of my interest in Western xenophobia and the holocaust, but also because I felt desperate about the Danish government’s hardline stance on refugees and immigrants. When deportations of children without their parents started to take place, I and many other Danes became desperate, and yet at the same time the government was saying that everything was going great. Something was indeed rotten in the state of Denmark.

But it was not easy to write about the treatment of refugees. I felt I had to ‘reinvent’ a form of language that I could ‘exist in’ and perceive in, because our usual language about xenophobic feelings and ‘foreigners’ had been recently used by politicians to create black-and-white associations. So protest literature had, for me, to be subversive and in a paradox-borne language. I was imagining possible future scenarios, closely connected to the contemporary atmosphere, and wanted to write from inside a family where the parents support the extreme right in a small town, and the children are raised in an unspoken xenophobia.

The music in the story was inspired by a Mongolian band. It was stunningly beautiful, unfamiliar and frightening, but at the same like something you have heard a long time ago, an echo of something you have longed for, like a former life. I loved it. But someone passed on the street and just said: What is that noise? The experience with the music made me wonder how we think we know in what form things should be, whether it is people music, beauty, justice… And that sometimes things come in a form that the senses are closed to, because of old habits and convention.

The world within The Dolls is one of darkness, roamed by plagued and displaced families. Yet alongside the war and floods, we are presented with the domestic, the everyday. What do you think this encounter between the commonplace and the disastrous offers?

I always keep a level of something normal from everyday life beside the strange, so that the unfamiliar or absurd grows out of the familiar. The absurd is part of reality, not divided from it.

Although horrible things are going on both inside and outside the houses in the stories, I always try to stay in the presence of the character’s mind in each moment. People tend to create a normal space within the chaotic. Focusing on order and rationality. Kafka expresses how close the feeling of chaos and order are to each other, and that inspired me. He presents the hidden images of fear, but also the destructive parts of a society.

When I write, I start with a visual inner picture and don’t think about structure, genre, style or reader expectations. I only keep searching for a certain tone in the sentences between the real and unreal, in order to create the atmosphere in each story. The theme and tone of the character affects the style and language: so I insist on an unfolding, via repetitions and a circular structure. I focus on a visual detail until it mutates and gives me something more, something unexpected. A reviewer once called my style one of ‘limit elimination’.

Loss and grief may be the main themes in all of my writing, but the tragicomic nature of humankind is perhaps the angle. Sometimes the people in the stories are desperate due to crisis or catastrophe affecting them from the outside, other times they are privileged but in a choked state of mind. In The Dolls, nobody asks the family to self-isolate, but their fear of things outside makes them do it, and in “Notpla’s House” the fear of infection and rumours about brutal groups of people outside make them remain indoors. It has traits of surrealism, but it is really about our contemporary life. I try to stretch out a realistic everyday moment, something that normally is unseen and fleeting, and therefore that moment can come to feel claustrophobic or unpleasant.

Sensory and bodily experience is so central throughout The Dolls. Why did you choose to ground the narratives in this physical way?

I felt I had to represent rather than describe the feelings of the characters. Agnes in the wheelchair, for instance, never rests. I wanted to let the reader feel her restlessness and pain, and ground it in her physical being; her body, the rooms, the food, her handicap, and she becomes hyperalert. All is told as physically as possible in order to make it feel as real as possible.

Bernardino Sahagún’s monumental and encyclopedic study of native life in Mexico at the time of the Spanish Conquest, *The Conquest of Mexico*, written between 1540 and 1585.

An author once said that my writing style reminded him of the novel The Conquest of Mexico. The narrator, Sahagún, keeps retelling the traumatic story of the Spanish conquest of native Mexico in variations like musical themes, and all the time new events or perspectives of the events arise, because the narrator is not looking at their story from above, but is telling it while it emerges, with an intuitive tone. It’s not a totalitarian way of representation, and the refusal of the total is in itself a manifest. The narration has a physicality that naturalism doesn’t.

In my story “Compartment”, I was interested in Russian deportation of Hungarians, but it is as much a story about how sisters and brothers remember the past in totally different ways. I wanted to represent the feeling of being stuck together as intensely as possible, so I placed them in a compartment with the coffin. The relation between the compartment, the bodies inside it, and sometimes the legs on the coffin, the landscape outside, the movement of the train, all this is very physical, but it’s also a vehicle for the inner state of mind.

The natural and unnatural battle throughout the stories, with hybrid vegetables that are killing birds, birds slamming into windows breaking their necks, and boils and birthmarks that pock the characters’ skin. What effect did you want this distorted nature to have on the reader? Is it a potential look at our future?

The Dolls is an investigation into loss of control, and an imagination of how changes in the future could effect our world collectively and existentially. In “Notpla’s House”, there has been an epidemic that has left people afraid of each other. They fear that others are sick, they use disinfectant all the time, and they isolate, that provides the background. There is also a vague remembrance of a massacre in the woods (maybe the same as the one which took place in the first story). Everything in the book was written out of an interest in the dark areas of history and how this might affect the present and future. Strangely, Covid-19 broke out just a month after the book was published in Danish!

The Dolls is not a difficult read if you approach it like a painting, where more than one thing goes on at the same time. A friend told me that after she’d read the book. I’m inspired by Bosch the painter, who uses a paradoxical art language. It is not at all an escape into daydreaming, but another way of communicating strong messages, often several at a time, about dark times in history and glimpses of the same in the present. But also what the future could look like, if the indifference continued. All my stories are inspired by that kind of hybrid structure. Multilayered truths seen from many angles, as we are used to in painting or drawing.

Francisco Goya, ‘The Men in Sacks’, ca. 1816.

Shedding light on distorted images, or creating disorientation, is not about letting the reader drown in darkness and fear about the future, but rather communicating our need for thinking and acting. I try to maintain a balance between the rational and the irrational.

After seeing Paul Klee’s way of excising all the wonder and wildness into something completely raw, beautiful and horrifyingly simple, something changed in me. I search for something simple to repeat, a noise, a picture, in the attempt to penetrate the unsaid in the story. I eliminate a lot to try and get into a feeling of forgetfulness, a kind of white space. This method is inspired by a drawing, ‘Forgetful Angel’, that a professor, Uffe Hansen, once showed me in his class. It’s about how people in the present are forgetting their dark history, and therefore it ends up repeating itself. It’s about the grief of forgetfulness.

The disasters that shape the stories are elusive, perhaps most prominently so in “Notpla’s House” where the protagonist cannot remember farther back than two weeks ago. The world is to both reader and character unknown. Could you discuss the use of memories in the novel, and the role you think these gaps in narrative play?

First of all I’m interested in collective narratives and how they affect our ability to be human. In “Towards Russia”, I present a wave in history I read about. Some Danes felt at that time that they belonged to the great motherland Russia and longed for it like a utopia. In “Compartment”, on the other hand, there is the directly opposite perspective on Russia. I present diverse perspectives in the same work to investigate narratives that are always connected to memory. I’m interested in how change happens, how we frame the world by the amount of memory we have. Families talk together and imitate each other’s stories – and therefore neglect the same stories. I felt an urge to investigate how evil thereby emerges. What frightened me about my actual culture was the lack of language for pain, loss, sorrow, and the horrors of the past. Our access to our cultural collective memory was suffering.

The stories show other perspectives on estrangement and violence, but also remembrance of things past. The main character in “Notpla’s House” has been through a traumatising experience that affects her memory of certain things, as trauma does. She suffers a sort of Stockholm syndrome, but it is only at the end of the story that she finds out that it is in fact Notpla, with whom she has been seeking shelter, is the person she has been hurt by before.

I’m interested in how remembering itself is a kind of fiction. Part of becoming ourselves is to narrate ourselves and sensing what we are going through. Remembering the past through the unconscious layers that are passed down to us from our parents and grandparents. So in reality, quite a lot is unknown to an individual. I try to foreground what we are and what we are able to be, and that we can never control it, even if we try to. It’s about the estrangement of the ‘I’.

The reality of being a person, in time and space, conditioned by lack of control, and a mind that is affected by sleep, lack of sleep, sickness et cetera. The ‘I’ in time and space, between night and day, dreaming and being awake, is not linear or rational all the time. Proust showed the way with his revolutionary fiction, by writing about seconds of time across hundreds of pages – he’s also the master of penetrating the feeling of being half asleep. His was a phenomenological style of writing, that made it possible for modern and postmodern fiction to explode.

I work with confusion as an aesthetic principle and use confined spaces as the setting. It’s a way of writing cubism: everything is seen, even the things you don’t see, like that which you dream about. But I don’t distinguish between what is visible and what is invisible in reality. I have constrained myself to write from inside each story’s own dynamic, rhythm, style, and in the tone of the characters.

Some characters actively remove themselves away from the events of the world. Both physically, with Ella confining herself to a basement, and Niels Madsen dreaming of fleeing to Russia, or mentally, with Agnes’s acknowledgement of the radio propaganda when the refugee centre is burning: ‘There’s no way to prove whether the screams are real, someone on the radio says’. Do you think this isolation or inaction presents similar ideas?

I’m interested in how the human mind reacts to disasters. In the first story, people hear screaming, but when the massacre goes on, they doubt if it’s real. They choose to not react or intervene, and instead close the windows and draw the blinds on the outside horrors.

And the point is, don’t we all do that? So yes, isolation and inaction can be interconnected, and I try to drag the reader into the complexity of understanding our own contemporary time, and how closing our eyes and maintaining the welfare state’s order can be cruel and tragic. Until the point where people can’t even feel anything anymore because of a paralysing inner confusion: they have now become dolls. To what extent are we complicit, when we don’t react and just allow things to happen? Are we also guilty of the crimes being done to our fellow human beings? Or are we ourselves also victims? The point in The Dolls is not just that the politicians fail, but the lack of reactions to the sufferings of others. Why don’t we act more, when others suffer?

I try to say in my writing that real life is to cope with all elements of our society and not close our eyes. Just because something seems surreal to you, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t real to the people who suffer. The inaction of the privileged winds up in new sufferings.

Paul Klee, ‘Forgetful Angel (Vergesslicher Engel)’, 1940.

I read that the plays of Strindberg and Kafka have been influential to your writing. There is a theatrical nature to the novel, and in its staging. “The Dolls”, “Notpla’s House” and “Compartment” all have the feeling of sets. Where there are trapdoors with characters beneath, windows that frame hushed conversations, or a confined space which facilities a whole story. I think also of the emphasis placed on sound, the violins of “The Dolls”, to the silence and imagined birdsong of “Notpla’s House”. Did theatre influence The Dolls?

Dreamplay by Strindberg has influenced my style of writing. It released something for me. His setting of the family, always with the smell of steamed cabbage, and the way he uses repeated details, create a sense of claustrophobia. It feels like surrealism, even though the scenes are very everyday. It points at how a little change in the convention of representing the real can question the reader’s expectations. Michael Riffaterre speaks about what he calls radical reference power, where the writer eliminates some of the elements from how fiction and theatre usually works. But in doing that, the writer is able to go move more directly towards the real. In Dreamplay, Strindberg insists on staying in the same setting with the same elements, until it gets disgusting. My stories are also somehow staged in settings like that.

I have also been interested in a Japanese movie by Hiroshi Teshigahara, called Woman of the Dunes, a story of despair and an almost violent relationship between a man and a woman which plays out entirely in dunes of sand. They try to dig a house free from the sand over and over again. The man fell into the hole and now he has to work for the woman, digging the sand away from the house, and sometimes he works all night. I’m inspired by certain directors, like Béla Tarr, and the way he works with stillness and an explosive atmosphere underneath monotonous actions.

I also see myself as belonging to the tradition of writers like Herta Müller, Samantha Schweblin, Christa Wolf and Clarice Lispector. They all have their own approach to writing and are idols for me. I can read Herta Müllers masterpiece The Passport over and over, but I’m glad I hadn’t read it until after I wrote my two books, because it’s so similar to the effect I was searching for myself. I’m inspired too, by modern Russian writers; Mikhail Sjisjkin, Andrei Platonov, and Vladimir Makanin, and the Hungarian Imre Kertecz and Icelandic Jon Kalman Stefansson. A direct influence on The Dolls was David Lynch’s debut movie Eraserhead – the atmosphere in the movie stayed with me when I started writing. I was amazed that it was actually possible to share dreamlike states of mind like that, from the time of life when you have a baby and you’re completely exhausted and you’re not getting enough sleep.

As for Kafka, I could write a long book about my inspiration. Here, I just want to say that I didn’t like Kafka when I first read him in 2000, but later, when finding out how he worked with various culture codes, I started becoming a Kafka fanatic and writing my final thesis at university about the semantic structure of The Castle. I also found out that he admired Strindberg so much that he visualised himself sitting in the palm of Strindberg’s hand, because he insisted on seeing himself as so small compared to Strindberg. That lead me, in a new way, back to Strindberg, to his Inferno and Dreamplay.

In Kafka’s The Castle, a couple sleeps in a tiny room behind a homemade wall inside a school that is also their workplace. They try to have some intimacy, before all the noisy school children come into the room where they sleep. They try to comfort themselves a little with a cup of coffee behind the wall, but the woman drops the cup and everything is hopeless again. The scene is hyperrealist. Earlier I didn’t realise it, but it’s also very humorous. Sad, disturbing, and deeply satirical. Many people tend to read my tales as dark and unpleasant about horrific periods in our history and about hopeless worlds. But I have also experienced many reactions from readers who found my writing to be darkly funny. I suppose there is a paradoxical, grotesque humour to my stories, and to the characters that inhabit them. It’s a certain kind of dark humour.

The Dolls by Ursula Scavenius, tr. Jennifer Russell, is out today.