Speech in honour of Naja Marie Aidt, presenting her with the Danish Critics’ Prize 2006 for the short story collection Bavian [Baboon]

by Lilian Munk Rösing

Last evening I found myself in the middle of a Naja Marie Aidt story. Having convinced myself that it was well-deserved, I had decided to open a bottle of vintage port and was greatly looking forward to enjoying some of its contents. As it turned out, the bottle proved utterly impenetrable. After no uncertain amount of coaxing and hacking with the aid of no less than three different corkscrews, one of which was unfortunate enough not to survive, I was eventually left standing in my little kitchen amid a chaos of cork crumbs and foil remnants, dissolved into tears and with a still unopened bottle of vintage port.

   The singular Aidt-ishness of this situation resides in the initial sense of considering oneself to be a fairly sophisticated late-modern urban individual who has managed to put the children to bed and who now wants to reward herself with a glass of wine – only to find herself standing there the very next instant disintegrating in a primal scream and all because of one stupid, insignificant little dysfunction.

   Several of the stories in Aidt’s collection Bavian are precise demonstrations of how only a thin veneer separates sophisticated, well-adapted urban existence from a chaos of anxiety and frustration, well-articulated speech from primal scream, human from baboon. The title of the collection, Bavian [Baboon], is a reference not only to the monkey face that lies beneath our own, but also to the diametric opposite of the human face: the baboon’s prominent red backside, which in the concluding story afflicts a smart young metro-sexual who, because of a gnat-bite on his buttock, undergoes gradual metamorphosis into a pothead with a beer gut. Which although it sounds funny, actually is not – the atmosphere created here being almost Kafkaesque in the mould of Gregor Samsa’s famous transformation into a monstrous vermin.

   Many of the stories draw out similar transformations in which what initially appears to be a sophisticated metro-sexual existence directly out of the pages of a women’s magazine or an advertisement suddenly disintegrates into pandemonium on account of some otherwise inconsequential detail. A giddily flirtatious young couple enjoying a summer break fall to pieces when a store detective in the local supermarket accuses them of having stolen two bags of sweets, the Spar on the corner turning into something resembling a Stasi interrogation room in an instant. A honeymooning bride finds her new marriage suddenly debauched all because a rebellious Greek quotes her Blake.

   The plot here is one of two models Aidt employs in her stories: the minor detail bringing everything crashing down to reveal the thin veneer between man and baboon. The second is almost the opposite: a scandal or some major incident failing completely to impact at all.

   Goethe defined the axis of the short story in terms of some “unprecedented event”. In Aidt’s stories the unprecedented is either a non-event, the consequence of a seemingly banal occurrence, or it would appear to have no consequences whatsoever. As far as I can see, most of the stories involve some unprecedented event (adultery, illness, divorce, death, assault, child abuse) having no impact at all on anything or anyone.

   Often the stories are built up in such a way that what we believe to be the unprecedented event is overlaid, taken unawares as it were, by another, thereby leaving the reader in doubt: What is the unprecedented event? What does it reveal? What is the scandal?

   In the opening story, the portentously entitled Bulbjerg [Bulbjerg] – it sounds like some fleshy swell of puss issuing from a boil, corresponding as such to the baboon-like boil of the concluding story – a pleasant family outing falls apart when father, mother and child get lost in the dunes of western Jutland and the child falls off his bike. But no sooner do we begin to mentally establish the unprecedented event in terms of these occurrences than we are taken unawares by the father in the midst of all this suddenly coming clean about having an affair with his wife’s sister. None of which prevents family life from going on seemingly as before, the scandal thus failing to impact at all.

   My review of the collection in Information was published under a heading alluding to Aidt’s mischievous approach to gender in several of the stories. This was not my own choice of heading – I’d actually called it “Scandal unforthcoming”, which I still think is a precise abstract of what actually occurs (or does not occur) in the stories. The fact that Aidt does take a rather playful stance as regards gender – in the case of the first-person stories the reader is left guessing for some time as to the gender of the narrative voice; mistaken gender and bisexuality are likewise themes in the book – I see as part of a dynamics designed to leave the reader in doubt as to the actual nature of the scandal or disclosure. We think we’ve identified the turning-point of the story, the element that will satisfy our narrative desires, when the gender issue is resolved, only to find that the true turning-point consists in something quite different.

   The failure to impact of these occurrences would seem to imply a critique of a lifestyle which affords us no time in which to break down, or which dictates that we, rather than ever allowing ourselves to break down, instead will do our utmost to prevent a glossy façade from falling apart. At the same time it appears to me that what we might call Aidt’s disarming of scandal implies a capaciousness or chaos-tolerance which can be seen as a positive reverse-side of an era which would seem to have abolished scandal entirely.

   So it is in my favourite among these stories: Tur i bil [A drive in the car]. This is an immensely annoying story, bombarding us as it does with names which only by severe mental exertion on the part of the reader slot into place as belonging to the children occupying the back seat of the car, one of whom (at least) is the result of a different marriage altogether. The reader’s annoyance, however, perfectly mimics that experienced by the occupants of any family car in any similar situation, and there is a marvellous description of how in the midst of all this chaos the woman in the car manages to go from feelings of desperate anxiety to devouring lust. The story destroys the glossiness of the family outing to reveal a veritable chaos, while showing us this chaos as indeed veritable, a kind of chaos-tolerant capaciousness.

   The dynamics Aidt reveals to us, and which drives her linguistic expression (abrupt, breathless sentences mirroring rather than penetrating the consciousness of her characters) consists on the one hand in the sheer manic nature of late-modern existence (surface haste, stressful energy, frenzied consumption), and on the other in an – if I may be so bold – authentic sexual energy full of release potential. At any rate, a fierce literary energy which I am delighted we are able to honour with this prize today.

Translated by Martin Aitken

Winner of the Nordic Council Literature Prize 2008 »
Bavian [Baboon] »
Read "Bulbjerg" »