The Bone Clocks

“THE NAME OF my lecture is On Never Not Thinking About Iceland.” It’s a decent turnout at the House of Literature, but half of the two hundred attendees are here because the Bonny Prince Billy concert was sold out, and a portion of the silver-haired contingent showed up because they love Dad’s films. The only faces I know are Holly’s, Aoife’s, and Aoife’s boyfriend Цrvar’s, sending me friendly vibes from the front row. “This car crash of a title,” I continue, “is derived from an apocryphal remark of W. H. Auden’s, spoken here in Reykjavik, for all I know on this very podium, to your parents or grandparents. Auden said that while he hadn’t lived his life thinking about Iceland hourly or even daily, ‘There was never a time when I wasn’tthinking about Iceland.’ What a delicious, cryptic statement. ‘Never not thinking about Iceland’? Why not just say, ‘Always thinking about Iceland’? Because, of course, double negatives are truth smugglers, are censor outwitters. This evening I’d like to hold Auden’s double negative”—I raise my left hand, palm up—“alongside this double-headed fact about writing,” right hand, palm up. “Namely, that in order to write, you need a pen and a place, or a study and a typewriter, or a laptop and a Starbucks—it doesn’t matter, because the pen and the place are symbols. Symbols for means and tradition. A poet uses a pen to write but, of course, the poet doesn’t makethe pen. He or she buys, borrows, inherits, steals, or otherwise acquires the pen from elsewhere. Similarly, a poet inhabits a poetic tradition to write within, but no poet can single-handedly create that tradition. Even if a poet sets out to invent a new poetics, he or she can only react against what’s already there. There’s no Johnny Rotten without the Bee Gees.” Not a flicker from my Icelandic audience; maybe the Sex Pistols never made it this far north. Holly smiles for me, and I worry at how thin and drawn she’s looking. “Returning to Auden,” I continue, “and his ‘never not.’ What I take from his remark is this: If you’re writing fiction or poetry in a European language, that pen in your hand was, once upon a time, a goose quill held by an Icelander. Like it or not, know it or not, it doesn’t matter. If you seek to represent the beauty, truth, and pain of the world in prose, if you seek to deepen character via dialogue and action, if you seek to unite the personal, the past, and the political in fiction, then you’re in pursuit of the same aims sought by the authors of the Icelandic sagas, right here, seven, eight, nine hundred years ago. I assert that the author of Njal’s Sagadeploys the very same narrative tricks used later by Dante and Chaucer, Shakespeare and Moliиre, Victor Hugo and Dickens, Halldуr Laxness and Virginia Woolf, Alice Munro and Ewan Rice. What tricks? Psychological complexity, character development, the killer line to end a scene, villains blotched with virtue, heroic characters speckled with villainy, foreshadow and backflash, artful misdirection. Now, I’m not saying that writers in antiquity were ignorant of all of these tricks but,” here I put my balls and Auden’s on the block, “in the sagas of Iceland, for the first time in Western culture, we find proto-novelists at work. Half a millennium avant le parole, the sagas are the world’s first novels.”

Either the audience is listening, or else they’re merely snoozing with eyes open. I turn over my notes.

“So much for the pen. Now for the place. From the vantage point of continental Europeans, Iceland is, of course, a mostly treeless, mostly cold oval rock where a third of a million souls eke out a living. Within my own lifetime Iceland has made the front pages exactly four times: the Cod Wars of the 1970s; the setting for Reagan’s and Gorbachev’s arms-control talks; an early casualty of the 2008 crash; and as the source of a volcanic ash cloud that disabled European aviation in 2010. Blocs, however, whether geometric or political, are defined by their outer edges. Just as Orientalism seduces the imagination of a certain type of Westerner, to a certain type of southerner, Iceland exerts a gravitational force far in excess of its landmass and cultural import. Pytheas, the Greek cartographer who lived around 300 B.C. in a sunbaked land on the far side of the ancient world, he felt this gravity, and put you on his map: Ultima Thule. The Irish Christian hermits who cast themselves onto the sea in coracles, they felt this pull. Tenth-century refugees from the civil war in Norway, they felt it too. It was their grandsons who wrote the sagas. Sir Joseph Banks, enough Victorian scholars to sink a longship, Jules Verne, even Hermann Gцring’s brother, who was spotted by Auden and MacNeice here in 1937, they all felt the pull of the north, of your north, and all of them, Ibelieve, like Auden—were never not thinking about Iceland.”

The UFO-shaped lights of the House of Literature blink on.