ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter, I closely read the opening to Tarjei Vesaas’ The Birds ([1957]2016). I tried to show that Vesaas has created not so much a rendering of reality as a rendering of a philosophy, and a fine and rigorous one at that. 1 The passage is as good as a philosophy, which is a sure indication that we should not think of literature as holding a mirror up to the world but as creating a World, one that lives out a philosophy and abides by the rules that apply to that World. This is one reason why there is no need for a fictional character to resemble the people of our world in order to be “believable”; a character only needs to be a creation from which can be inferred his position within a philosophy—a governing set of rules and order—that is true within the world of the work itself. What does Mattis look like, or Hege? What do they smell like, what clothes do they wear, how far from each other do they sit? Does loose change jingle in their pockets when they walk? We don’t know, because knowing these things is superfluous to the function of the book’s opening scene, which is to bring into being a World from which the rules of this particular World can be divined and considered. If Mattis and Hege were like people you or I might run into, we would have to know more about them to be convinced by them. We do not need more convincing. Mattis and Hege are ideas being lived out (rounded out uncontrollably by the uncontrollable complexity of Vesaas’ World), not people we know from our senses. “Truth is the most satisfying relations of the intelligible. Beauty is beheld by the imagination which is appeased by the most satisfying relations of the intelligible” (1922, p. 243), writes James Joyce. The order and sophistication, and obvious beauty, of the rules of thinking that govern the opening to The Birds support Joyce’s supposition.
