This essay appears in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s new collection, In the Land of the Cyclops, translated from Norwegian by Martin Aitken—out now from Archipelago Books.

Whenever I see a new picture I immediately seem to like and find aesthetically pleasing, I am suspicious. This cannot possibly be good, I think to myself. This cannot possibly be art. It feels like the spontaneous pleasure, the immediate sense of aesthetic satisfaction I derive in such instances is too easy and too shallow to be called a true artistic experience. From this can be inferred that the quality and value of art for me is associated with some degree of resistance. Certain criteria have to be met, obviously, but why resistance? It feels like an inner requirement, from some part of me that is critical of simple pleasures, a critic’s voice within, whose point of departure is that art is something other and more profound than that which provides uncomplicated pleasure and is simply appealing in itself. So when I stand and look at a picture I find pleasing at first sight, it feels like I become the scene of a battle between two quite disparate opinions about art. One, the most immediate, has to do with what has always been immediate about me, my sensitive emotions, now usually kept in check, but which once, when I was a child, steered everything, freely and unexactingly bringing forth whatever they commanded at any given time to cope with the impressions of the world. The other, the less immediate, sees no value in the unexacting, but rejects it as superficial, illusory, manipulative. Good is only that which does not open itself immediately, but requires lengthy effort on the part of the beholder in order to fully reveal itself—or rather no, that’s not the word at all, because a true work of art never fully reveals itself, holds no one answer, but must forever remain beholder-resistant.

This take on art is clearly Protestant, since a genuinely Protestant person such as myself, for whom Protestantism is part of the marrow, can appreciate only what has come of hard work, only this has value, and holds nothing but disdain for what is given or easily taken, which is associated with sloth, idleness, indolence. Elsewhere, in an essay about Cindy Sherman, without thinking of this aspect at all, I wrote that entertainment is “nothing but a space in which we can allow ourselves to feel the strongest emotions without obligation”: this is the Protestant speaking, art requires, art costs, art is obligation.

But the requirement of resistance is more than just a thinly veiled requirement to invest effort; there are more reasons than just one for the inner voice I hear rejecting the work of art that appeals at first sight. Another and perhaps quite as important reason has to do with a certain mode of relating to reality which I and everyone else in my generation have been brought up to apply, which is to think critically. Objects and phenomena are never as they appear, something always lies hidden beneath the surface, and that something, which is their real truth, can be arrived at only by critical address. At school we learn to be critical of advertising, analyzing its examples to lay bare their true values, the same applying to political rhetoric, and of all journalists the critical journalist is the one held in the greatest esteem, for it is he or she who reveals the truth, the way things are in essence. Literary criticism bears the same hallmark, it must indeed be critical and reveal any instance of literary weakness, often synonymous with the mirage-like easy gain, literary quality being something much deeper and more essential.

In this, the critical approach to art, lies another decisive accentuation, likewise to do with resistance versus lack of resistance, and consisting in the social distinctions that are established by art. What is easily accessible is for the many, for everyman, the mass, whereas what is accessible only by effort and with difficulty is for the few, the elite. To appropriate and appreciate a sophisticated and ostensibly inaccessible work of art is always at the same time to be in select company.

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All of this rings in the voice I hear inside when I look at a work of art that appeals to me at first sight. Against it speaks another and presumably far older voice that tells me art is a place of abundance and that the work of art is created effortlessly by genius, the crux of this voice being lack of resistance. It would not be unreasonable to assume that extravagance and lack of resistance are held high in societies in which people must toil to survive, whereas resistance is similarly held high in societies in which everything is easily had. In any circumstance, it is only when photography becomes available to the many as a means of depicting the world that art turns away from the immediately representative. The same goes for the novel, which right from the beginning was a mass medium employing classical narrative structures. It is only when the majority starts to read that the sophisticated, narrativeless or narratively experimental literature arises. Dickens, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy saw no reason to experiment with form; Woolf, Joyce and Broch did.

This kind of explanatory model makes the critical voice inside rear up in horror. Wait, it says, this isn’t about sociology or history, it’s about quality. How can you write such a thing, are you trying to get rid of me? Don’t you know how dangerous that is? Do you want to give yourself up to the babbling child, at the expense of me and all that I know about the world and about art?

No, dear voice of criticism, I will not abandon you. You are the king of thoughts, without you and your whip they lead nowhere. But there is more to art than thoughts.

“Is there? You’re thinking of feelings, I take it?”

“Yes.”

“But what are feelings? Where do they take you?”

“To pleasure.”

“But what do you get from pleasure? It makes you feel good, and then it goes away again, and that’s that. What do you learn from that?”

“Nothing.”

“Exactly. Did you gain any insight from that pleasure?”

“Nothing more than what concerns the nature of pleasure.”

“There you have it. You find pleasure in watching a football match, don’t you?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Then what do you need art for, if football does the same job? You get pleasure from driving as well, don’t you? Or from listening to some stupid pop song?”

“Yes.”

“In that case, I suggest you watch football, drive your car, listen to stupid pop songs, and leave art and literature well alone.”

“But there’s a difference.”

“Go on.”

“Rilke writes somewhere that music lifts him up.”

“Good for him.”

“No, no, there’s more. He writes that music lifts him up and puts him down again somewhere else. It’s this, putting you down again somewhere else, that art does, as opposed to all the other examples you mention.”

“Okay. So what does that mean exactly, somewhere else? And where’s the value in it? Can you put it into words?”

“No.”

“All right. But when you drive your car, the car leaves you somewhere else too.”

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Although in recent years I have increasingly sided with the child when it comes to such matters and have developed something of distaste for academic presentations of art and literature, I always come out the loser in these inner discussions, probably because deep down, ultimately, I believe that quality in art is something absolute, or near absolute: a crime novel is without value, whereas a novel by D. H. Lawrence, say, is full of value. The idea that the new television dramas everyone watches and talks about these days are the new novel, as is so often suggested, is to my mind idiotic. But why do I think that? If I watch one of them, I get sucked in and am filled with feelings at what I see. If I read Lawrence, in principle exactly the same thing happens, I get sucked in and am filled with feelings. Do I discriminate between my feelings, as my friend Geir often accuses me of doing? Are the feelings awakened in me by a television series worthless and vulgar, while those awakened in me by a good novel are replete with value and so much loftier in nature? Or is there a qualitative difference between the two media? If so, in what does it consist? And does it even matter? Is there anything wrong with just liking what we like, and leaving it at that?

Another Lawrence, with the surname Durrell, wrote somewhere in his Alexandria Quartet that creating a work of art is setting oneself a goal and walking there in your sleep. Writing a novel is exactly like that, at least it has been for me, using the formula that the deeper the sleep, the better the novel. Thoughts, reflection and criticism are not simply overestimated, for the creative processes they are decidedly destructive. This is an absolute fact, without exception.

When I was in my mid-twenties, paralyzed by an overly developed critical sense, I considered in my despair going to a hypnotist so that I could be hypnotized into writing. At the time, I found the idea hysterical and ridiculous, now I think it might not have been that stupid: sleep, unconsciousness and emptiness are all a necessary part of the creative processes, sometimes even their precondition. And if that is so, which I am quite certain about, that writing is related to sleeping and dreaming, then the concept of quality falls away on its own: when did you last hear someone complain about the quality of their dreams?

But there are different kinds of unconsciousness; the main thing is what you are unconscious of. When I started writing, at the age of eighteen, I quickly arrived at the place where all sense of self dissolved, where not thoughts, but something else prevailed, something emotional and dreamlike. I knew that place, it was where I used to go when I read. But what I wrote was marked by platitudes, banalities, stereotypes and clichés. A year spent at the Writing Academy in Bergen made me distressfully aware of this, the teaching there being based mainly on giving critique, and from that, which was merciless, I did not escape unscathed: in the ten years that followed, I produced nothing, even though I wanted to and tried. What I did do in those ten years was read a lot, studied at university, and wrote literary criticism. When unconsciousness once more descended, when I was 27, I wrote my second novel, published as my debut in 1998. By that time I had become differently unconscious, on some higher plane, and the novel wasn’t as banal.

Out of the World, as it was called, received a mix of good and bad reviews, all long since forgotten, apart from one that was so odd that I still think about it sometimes. What was particular about it was that it was literally a double review: first they published a very positive review, the critic making it clear that he really liked the novel. Then, and this is the odd part, that review was withdrawn the week after, the same critic now stating that he had been wrong, the book was not nearly as good as he had originally made out, in fact it was rather poor. It was as if he had felt himself caught out, that the book in some way had tricked him into thinking it was good when in fact it was not. In other words, he had been manipulated, duped by his first, superficial impression, his critical senses had been incapacitated, after which he must have realized, gradually or all at once, that there was nothing beneath the surface, certainly nothing as forceful as his first impressions had led him to believe.

I know the feeling. I get it every time I get sucked in by a well-turned crime novel, film or TV series, and afterward I always feel the same kind of emptiness, which comes of my degree of involvement, that part of me I have surrendered as a reader or viewer, being far greater than what I have got from it, which is nothing.

Inception is that kind of film, everything about it is impressive, and in the hours after watching it all I could think about was writing a novel of the same kind, or a novel that had the same kind of effect, whereas when I watched it again a few days later it all fell to earth: there was nothing in it but alluring images and a compelling narrative. Lovely wrapping paper, no present.

I think this critic’s feeling of being duped by Out of the World comes down to the same thing. In a novel, the narrative is seductive, and the author can, if they so wish, work themselves into the reader’s favor and make him or her read on, almost regardless. This is what a novel marketed as mainstream does, and what the great modernist novels do not. That I, who wrote Out of the World in a state of near-unconsciousness, exploited the mechanics of the narrative is not strange, but inextricably a part of that state of unconsciousness, because when you refrain from thinking, you take what you have, whatever is inside you, and if there is something inside me after insatiably devouring, in my childhood and youth, all manner of crime novels, thrillers, cowboy pulp, spy fiction and comic books, then it uses the structure and mechanics of those narratives. Sending your main character to the fridge to see if there is any milk is no different structurally than sending a pirate to an island to see if there is a treasure buried there, the reader reads on to see what happens, in principle indefinitely, for the pattern of one crime novel is the same as all the others, in this they are all alike.

Reading and writing is losing oneself, and what remains when the self is lost is the collective. I think that the self, the I, is nothing more than a certain way of organizing all the collective currents by which an individual is permeated, not unlike the way in which an author stands out in a text, which is made up of elements familiar to everyone and belonging to no one, whose individual voice, which may be stronger or weaker, is a matter of the bringing together of those same elements. In fairy tales, the quintessential form of the collective, the narratives have been shaped through generations, the individual is as good as absent, they are told by a we to a we, and the language of this we is permeated by a kind of lowest common denominator of the culture: formulas, clichés, stereotypes, so simple that even a small child can be mesmerized by them, without what the fairy tale is about necessarily becoming childish. The fairy tale is absolutely without resistance and absolutely selflessly told, much like the saga, the myth and many of our religious texts, such as those in the Book of Genesis, but also much like contemporary genre literature and nearly all films that are made, which likewise are permeated by the lowest common denominator of the culture, in order to reach as many as possible with their stories.

The question therefore is why a novel or a film or a work of art that strives to reach everyone, in itself a laudable aim, is found to be unworthy of liking and indulging in, whereas in the case of the fairy tale, the saga, the myth and the religious text the opposite is taken to hold? It is hard indeed to think of any Hebrew two and a half thousand years ago removing themselves from the Book of Genesis for being too mainstream and pandering to the wants of its audience, or a seventeenth-century inhabitant of the Setesdal dismissing the Draumkvedet (Ballad of the Dream) as being too full of clichés and platitudes.

Can it have something to do with the legitimacy of the we, that in our day and age it is something authors invoke, speaking with the voice of the we, whereas in those days it was a genuine, collective we speaking, and which perhaps also, quite probably in fact, was the very formative force of that we? Or is the we of today radically different, after the coming of the scientific age, after industrialization, after globalization? Has our almost insanely ballooning population over the past hundreds of years, and the mass production of all things, made the we into its opposite, something in which we no longer find our identity, but in which our identity vanishes, the we having transformed from comfort into threat? I think so, though not without reservation, for we are nothing without the other, and so it will always be, but in our time we may be no one together with the others, and quite without resistance, and this no one, with no personal responsibility, can, as we know from the two great wars of the past century, be a dangerous creature indeed. Resistance, criticism, idiosyncrasy are not merely matters of aesthetics, but also of ethics.

Literature, however, knew this long ago; sameness was a threat as early as the Romantic period, in its conception of the genius, who personifies un-sameness, and its cultivation of the horror tale, for what were they afraid of in those tales? E. T. A. Hoffmann, who sensed more clearly than most the depths of the collective nightmare, wrote about automata so human in their appearance one could fall in love with them, and moreover about doppelgängers; Bram Stoker wrote about a person unable to die; Mary Shelley wrote about a scientist who created a human.

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This is where we are now: the more people who like a work of art at first sight, the more people who read a novel, the poorer the work of art, the poorer the novel. But also: the better the work of art or the novel, the more it is permeated by resistance, and since that resistance can be surmounted only by means of some large measure of intellectual effort, feelings are all but eliminated. Feelings come cheap in our culture, pervading our TV channels—which are without reflection, our cinemas, and best-selling books. Are these phenomena mutually exclusive? Reaching all, addressing all, is the highest to which any writer or artist aspires, because literature and art are not about books and paintings, but about people—and human life is for all, not for the few. And at the center of our human existence are our human feelings, we meet the world with our feelings, not with our thoughts, which are our means of understanding the world, and, as all of us know, understanding is relative, which is to say it might be valid now, in the time to which it belongs, but not in a hundred years, and never fully for everyone, which would be a meaningless thing to postulate about feelings—that joy, for instance, or anger or love or hatred, did not exist for as long as people existed, or only existed for some, or were only partly true.

And yet: the shame I feel when I look at a picture that fills me with emotion, the thought that it cannot possibly be a good picture, cannot possibly be art. When I look at paintings from other periods, the Romantic age, say, or the Baroque, the fact that they are simple and figurative and pervaded by feeling is not nearly as shameful, they possess a historical value, they express their time. That I find them more valuable and relevant than most paintings from our own day and age is something I tend to keep to myself, since it alters the person I am, the preference transforming me into something Nerdrum-like, quasi-fascistic even, a tone in my identity almost screaming out whenever I feel drawn toward pictures of that kind from our own time—what sound is that, why this alarm, what is it warning against? The picture shows a tree in a flat landscape, what can be wrong with that?

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One artist who explores this borderland is the American photographer Sally Mann. Her pictures are simple, naturalistic and immensely alluring. What rescues her as an artist, and what makes it possible to rate her artistic practice so highly, and moreover in public, without losing esteem or revealing oneself to be unsophisticated, is the controversy surrounding the series of photographs she took of her own children, published in her book Immediate Family. These were photographs activating provocative issues associated with private life and the sexuality of children, and by taking and publishing them she involved herself in a very contemporary problem, whereby paradoxically it became legitimate to like and approve of her work.

Personally I love her photographs, especially the landscapes in her book Deep South. In contrast to two other well-known women photographers of the same generation, Francesca Woodman and Cindy Sherman, the appeal of Mann’s photographs is immediate. They are beautiful in a profoundly romantic way, the landscapes very often mistily bathed in soft, dreamy light and devoid of anything that might connect them with our time: no cars, no gas stations, no playgrounds, no hay bales wrapped in plastic. Not a person anywhere in sight. Only trees, grass, vegetation, rivers, skies, sun and the occasional ruin, a broken-down wall or building.

And is that not essentially a lie? A nostalgic dream of a world instead of the world, an escape from our own? Such places, untouched by modernity, still exist of course, but they are no longer representative.

Indeed, but I don’t think those pictures are meant to represent the places in them, but the way we relate to them. We live in a world that is in constant flux, and these are pictures of things seemingly immune to change, that have looked the same for thousands of years, and their elegiac aspect, the sense of grief and darkness to which they give rise, has partly to do with all the generations that have come and gone there, among those trees, lost to us as we once will be lost to those who come, I think to myself—and this is a Romantic perspective, which led to the development in the Romantic Age of the notion of the sublime—but also with the fact that the time these pictures display to us, which is time beyond us, nonhuman time, is in the process of being lost too.

This play with time is made all the more intricate by Mann having taken these pictures using old-fashioned equipment and techniques employed in the first landscape photographs of the last decades of the nineteenth century, and the same nineteenth-century patina, from the time of Nadar, Flaubert and Balzac, radiates from them all. They are magical. Together with antique photography came industrialism, which resonates too throughout these landscapes; what captures the nonhuman dimension of time is what humanized it and made it vanish. The irony is almost Orphic: he has her, but if he looks at her she vanishes. At the same time, this time too has vanished. This is what we see in Mann’s photographs. And we know that they are taken in our own time, which has left its own traces: the old technique is imperfect, large areas of light and shadow have leaked into the images, stemming from the moment the pictures were taken, belonging to the accident of that time, yet emanating something ruin-like, something of the past, as if there was an antique quality about even the moment.

The picture I like best in Deep South seems near defaced by the technical imperfections of the apparatus. It shows a hillside, almost completely dark, etched with murky, mineral-like markings here and there, which belong not to the landscape, but to the light, and halfway above the sharply defined horizon, where the dark landscape becomes dismal gray-black sky, hangs a dark semicircle, an inky sun shining over an inky world.

The sequence to which this picture belongs is entitled Last Measure, and the landscapes in it are all battlefields of the American Civil War. One of the best-known photographs of the nineteenth century, by Timothy H. O’Sullivan, is of such a battlefield, strewn with corpses, and this image is present in all of Mann’s battlefield images, which are quite without the innocence of her other landscapes, for although they too are about death, in the shape of decay and loss, death in this instance is concrete, physical, of the body—which moreover is absent and so in a certain sense dead too.

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Nothing of what I have written here, apart from the concrete description of the dark landscape, is found in these pictures. They evade meaning, the way the world evades meaning, being simply what it is. The photographer’s interpretations of it emerge in the picture, but in the form only of the picture itself, intuitively understood by the beholder in the emotions, feelings, moods the picture awakens. The fact that they do not speak, wordless and yet expressive, is what makes them so powerfully alluring. When I look at a tree in one of these photos, it is as if it holds a secret, as if it contains something unfamiliar to me, standing there draped in its dense cloak of foliage, shimmering almost, weightless and yet heavy, and in this light almost submarine, as if it were the sea and not the wind that washed among its branches. The tree is a living organism, alive through perhaps four hundred years or more. It is a simpler organism than us, and we know everything about what it comprises, what happens inside it and why, and still it bears a secret, is a part of something of whose nature we are ignorant, for the only thing we can see is surface; even when we examine its constituent parts, they become but surface. Oh, what do we need with knowledge? Cells and mitochondria, atoms and electrons, galaxies at the farthest perimeters of space, what does knowledge give us when the secret, which only art can express, the voice of the trees and the song of the soil, the very mystery itself, is indivisible?

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This latter point may seem hysterical, and many people will perhaps read into it some kind of disturbed religiosity, but why write, why paint, why photograph, or why read, why visit galleries and museums, if not to probe into the essence, where the utmost issues, those from beyond our human sphere, are accentuated—death, life, the red blood in the green grass?

Sally Mann’s photographs in Deep South are definitely not hysterical, they rest in their own particular calm, yet in this they are definitely veiled in mystery. They are nostalgic, too, and seek the identity and peculiarity of a certain place, values no longer cultivated where meaning is shaped. That their form and symbolism belongs to the standard repertoire of the Romantic Age makes them teeter perilously close to what we call kitsch, which empties content from forms by reproducing them without consideration for the surroundings they once were from or incorporating them in the new, which is what infuses any work of art with life. This is not the case with Mann’s photographs, where the past and what belongs to it is a theme in and for the present, which, as its light falls on the glass plate, is also past.

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When I look at Sally Mann’s breakout photographs, those of her children, I cannot help but see the same forces at work in them. Nearly all are taken outdoors, either on the porch, which is neither outside nor inside, neither nature nor culture, but somewhere in between, on the lawn outside the house, or at the river below. A striking number of them show her children, the youngest girl in particular, asleep, which is to say contained within themselves, where what is left for us to see is the body, its powerful yet blind presence. Other pictures capture the children in situations in which they appear not to be aware of themselves or the photographer. These photographs seem to me to have something in common with Per Maning’s photographs of animals, which capture the presence of another creature and its distinct nature without any semblance of awareness as to that nature being visible in its eyes or body. As if to reinforce this similarity, or perhaps to establish a difference within it, Mann’s photographs also include a number of images of children together with animals—one of the girls posing in a dress next to a dead deer hanging out of the trunk of a car, the boy asleep on the ground next to a dog, which is also asleep, the children playing with a dog, the boy posing with two skinned squirrels, holding them out in front of him, the girl doing the same with a stoat in another picture. Sleep and the somnolent, the absence of attention from the surrounding world, becomes a kind of vanishing act, the subjects drift from the world and at the same time come closer to it, this near-vegetative or biological-bestial state that connects the children with the animals and the trees comes to the fore only then. Against this tendency stands another, far more evident and direct, consisting in the many portraits of children looking extremely self-assured, their individuality gleaming in their eyes, or posing almost in the way of actors or models. The posing is interesting, they enter into a role, most often with something adult and thereby also sexual about it, in stark contrast to the otherwise dominant innocence of the child, but also to the aforementioned naturalness: these children’s frames, as children’s frames have looked through perhaps a hundred thousand years, perhaps more, and which in that sense are timeless, step in these photographed moments into the contemporary age, imitating its poses, which are a kind of cultural language of the body.

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My favorite pictures of Mann’s children are however not in Immediate Family, but in another book entitled The Flesh and the Spirit, and in contrast to the former, which are better known, they are in color. Photographs in black and white are always more stylized, for the world is in color, and when we remove the color we heighten the solidity of the motif, making it more concentrated, a tree, for instance, being drawn that little bit more toward the idea of a tree, which is to say away from its physical, concrete and material reality in which ideas are nonexistent. In a certain sense, transferring this to literature, all novels are written in black and white, details being strictly regulated, never allowed to flood freely, because if they did the novel would be unreadable, as formless as the world it seeks to describe or capture.

In Sally Mann’s imagery, so strictly centered around constant phenomena, body, culture, quasi-nature, nature, color brings with it a kind of interpretive freedom, the child sleeping in black and white is so obviously a child in a work of art, whereas the child sleeping in color is sleeping in reality, on which a door has suddenly been opened, and what is striking about sleep and the child becomes less striking, as if set free in the world.

One of these pictures in particular finds its force in its colors, it shows a boy, perhaps twelve years old, shirtless, in shorts or long trousers, it’s hard to tell, for the image has been cropped, his eyes also invisible to us. He is standing against a background of foliage and his nose is bleeding. His arms and hands are covered in blood, and he holds them awkwardly apart in front of him, the way a child with a nosebleed does, for the blood is sticky and strange, and moreover his chest and stomach are smeared with it, chin and nostrils too. His mouth is open, but it is impossible to tell if this is in excitement at all the blood or simply horror. The boy’s nonsymbolic, unposingly realistic and therefore trivial presence stands against the green of the foliage. The red of the blood so bright in color, seems to say: blood is not “blood,” but blood, a red fluid that flows in all living animals and humans, neither more nor less.

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The same relationship between color and black and white applies to another of Mann’s well-known series, in which corpses have been photographed during all stages of decomposition, from the relatively fresh body with its faintly discolored skin to the gaping, almost clean-picked skull. Mann photographed these images at the Tennessee Forensic Anthropology Center, where donated corpses are placed out in the woods so that researchers can study the processes of decomposition, primarily for use in police investigations. Some of these corpses are dressed, others naked, some have been buried, others left under bushes or in open land, some have been wrapped in plastic, others placed in shallow ponds, as John B. Ravenal describes in his text accompanying The Flesh and the Spirit. Mann’s corpse images were first published in her book What Remains, in which she is concerned with exactly what the title says, what remains when the human being or animal has died, which is to say the physical body and what happens to it. They are pictures more alluring than disconcerting, possessing the same aura of elegy, the same grief, darkness and beauty as her landscapes, death revealing itself to be the reconciliation of man with the soil, for this is what happens, and what Mann shows us, the way the bodies gradually sink into the earth, becoming a part of the landscape, for in these pictures there is no difference between branches and skeletal limbs, both are matter, or between skin and leaves, hair and grass. When the skull seems to scream from where it lies on the ground, it is the ground that screams. Time in these pictures is that of eternity, the perspective that of the immutable, the mood that of harmony. In the color photographs from this place, which has been given the alarmingly prosaic name the Body Farm, quite different things are going on. One of the images shows a man lying on his back in a shocking red jogging suit with a white logo across the chest, he is wearing socks, gray as his hair, and he seems to have been placed out in the open very recently, only a slight yellowing of the skin indicating that he is dead. The ground on which he lies is covered in gravel and leaves, a bit farther away, perhaps ten meters or so, is a wooden fence, some leafless trees cut back below the crown are growing there, and behind them lampposts line a road. A wintery morning light with glinting sun above the road makes everything sharp and concrete. This is a picture of our modern death, a body laid out in the woods of a research center, and the very realism of the present erases any sense of harmony, any sense of beauty, any feeling of reconciliation of man and soil, culture and nature: this is a collision. The head with its dark ear above the purple neck, under a thin branch with green leaves, gives no sense of any unity between human being and the vegetation that surrounds it: never can the void between them be shown to be greater. And another image, of a puce-colored head with white hair, the facial features eaten away, obliterated by hundreds of fat, white maggots, likewise contains no tone of the elegiac.

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Juxtaposed in this way, it is easy to think that the latter perspective, the bleakly realistic, is the true perspective, whereas the poetic beautification of the former is the untrue perspective. The color photos are direct, documentary, the black-and-white ones beguiling, ingratiating. In that case Mann’s alluring landscapes would also be deceitful compared to the photographs of Anders Petersen, for instance, or Lars Tunbjörk, both of whom seek out the raw and unbeautiful sides of human life and its reality, and succeed in bringing out the very life force as it reveals itself concretely in the provisional state that is life. But truth, including the truth of the absolute, is relative, determined by perspective: what Mann does in her photographs is lift her gaze, placing herself beyond time by depicting its unchanging nature, which is not the life and death of the individual, but life as it rises and collapses in us all, these washing waves on which we are so helplessly carried, steered by laws and forces we do not know and cannot understand, which we can see only if we position ourselves outside what is ours. Once, that perspective was that of the divine, created one might suspect for that very purpose, and then, when the divine disappeared, it became the perspective of art. Such an understanding of art was what the generation before me broke away from, to them it was the height of ivory tower and art on a pedestal, something that provided a view but which also was isolated, out of context, individualized, right-wing. But death is not conservative, no matter that it is changeless, and beauty is not right-wing, and the warmth and worldliness of the social domain is not the unique preserve of the working class, as the greatest Norwegian writer of that generation, Kjartan Fløgstad, appears to believe in his novel Grense Jakobselv. Remoteness in that novel is not existential, but moral: the baddies, the Nazis, are portrayed from a distance, accorded nothing near or intimate, and are associated with art of the likes of Hölderlin, Wagner, Beethoven, grand and cold, elitist, whereas the goodies, the socialists, laugh and discuss and slap each other’s backs while sharing their meals. And so it may well have been, but certainly not only, for Nazism was a broad and petty bourgeois revolution, anti-intellectual at root, and foregrounded a middle-class view of art—modern, experimental art is fiercely attacked by Hitler in Mein Kampf. The Nazi canon was in part the classics, in part the petty-bourgeois, which is to say naturalistic, figurative depictions inclined toward Heimat or heroic portrayals of people and nature, what we today would call kitsch, which everyone regardless of background and intellectual capacity would find appealing and easy to grasp. That this was so is another reason for the alluring and the simple becoming discredited in our time. Skepticism toward emotionally laden art is related to this too, I think, for never have allurement and the manipulation of human feelings had such enormous consequences as then. Classic in this respect is Adorno’s confrontation of Heidegger in his book The Jargon of Authenticity. Mythology and the sagas, anything that might be prefixed by “folk,” were also misused and are now similarly discredited.

This kind of suspicion is a part of us, part of our marrow even now. I sense it not only when I am drawn toward Romantic images, or worse, toward National-Romantic images, but also when I read poems or novels whose features might be termed vitalistic, most recently D. H. Lawrence’s novel The Rainbow, in which I found the closeness between people, animals and the soil to be unpleasant, I did not care for it at all, even if I believe it to be true, not least in a novel such as that, in which our emotional life is understood to be the most important aspect of all in our existence, and any shift in human mood is presented as something monumental. When I experience this, I long to be free, totally free in art, and this to me is to be without politics, without morals—and thereby, the critic’s voice inside me hastens to add, dubious. If we look at a picture of a tree, we are immediately caught in a net of politics and morals, ethics and sociology—for gender and class are also involved—and if I try to wriggle free of this net of distinctions, I simply become more and more entangled.

Such is culture. Presumably that is why I yearn for nature. Presumably, too, it is why I still read and write for, no matter what I read and write, those activities are, in their best moments, selfless, transporting me into that somnambulant, near-unconscious state in which thoughts think themselves, liberated from the self, yet full of emotions, and so, in a negative or perhaps more exactly a passive way, connected with the surrounding world. Occasionally, in what I have read about, but never myself experienced, that feeling of connection is to the universe and is religious ecstasy, the overwhelming sense of the divine, but more usually the connection is to the we, to the other in ourselves, which can come forward only when critical remoteness is lifted. Were it not for this, all novels would be unreadable. And there we are again: the greater degree of critical remoteness, the more exclusive (unreadable) the novel; the closer the we, the closer the culture’s lowest common denominator, that liked by everyone, the crime novel or the light novel, the feel-good novel, the chick-lit novel.

But we are there again only because I am following a few tracks marked out at the beginning of this essay, premises that have governed all that has come after, and if we remove ourselves from them, everything might seem different. The easily accessible, the simple and the immediately appealing are not necessarily exhausted at first glance, are not necessarily bound up with the formalizations and repetitions of genre, we know this; the histories of art and literature are full of examples of images so simple and basic that anyone, regardless of aesthetic competence, can relate to them. What the novel can do, in its best moments, is to simplify without reduction, by seeking not toward reality, the documentable abundance of people and events, whose totality is unreachable and whose individual parts are not representative, but toward the picture of reality, more exactly that which combines two phenomena, the concrete and the inexhaustible. This, which we perhaps could call inexhaustible precision, is the goal of all art, and its essential legitimacy. Inexhaustible precision is the white whale in Melville’s novel, it is the metamorphosis in Kafka’s novella, the human bear in “White-Bear King Valemon,” the fratricide in the Book of Genesis, the sanatorium in The Magic Mountain, the pretend knight-errant of Cervantes’s novel, in other words that which brings together something big and undefinable, not by pointing to it, but by being it, and at the same time always being something else as well. The inexhaustibly precise is always simple, always without resistance and easily grasped, but always has more to it than what first meets the eye. The myth is the prehistoric form of the inexhaustibly precise, for no matter the shifts of time, no matter the preferences of changing generations, the myth is relevant always, for as long as people exist; it would cease to be relevant only when there are no longer people in the sense we know, but something else instead.

Cover image: Luca Vanzella, Camera Museum of Photography, Turin (CC BY / Flickr).

All other images by Sally Mann. © Sally Mann. Courtesy Gagosian.