The Soul Between Text and Reality

Not long ago, someone asked me how much of myself is in my prose. Whether I write “about myself” or whether I simply make everything up. The question has stayed with me ever since, because it sounds so simple and yet opens onto a space that is hard to grasp.

Of course there are things in my stories that come straight out of my life. There really was a dog like Maja, even though she had a different name. There is the friend, and his mother was indeed an artist. There was an opening, there were paintings, there was a studio. But the dog never damaged a painting. That scene is invented. It grows along the outline of a real person, then veers away and becomes something of its own.

Much the same is true of “House in Winter Light”. We do spend Christmas with a large circle of friends, we decorate the tree together, we eat chicken, and yes, I am the smallest in the group. But the blue bauble that is hung up again every year, even though it no longer matches the chosen colours, does not exist. It is a distillation, an image that has grown out of many small memories and has drawn itself together into a symbol.

So the author always enters her own work to some extent. Sometimes it is obvious, sometimes hardly visible at all. Many fictional figures are built on people one has met. You lend them postures, gestures, a way of keeping quiet or of laughing. You give them character traits from A, the smile of B and the profession of C. Their appearance may be invented, or it may belong to someone you only ever see from a distance. On the page, all of this becomes a figure that has never existed in reality, and yet in a strange sense feels “true”.

Literary studies has found terms for this. It speaks, for instance, of autofiction when a character clearly resembles the author and real experiences are woven in, yet the story is still clearly marked as fiction. A figure called “I” does not have to be identical with the person sitting at the desk. She is a version, a possibility, a mask. Between autobiographical writing and free invention there is a space that cannot be cleanly divided. That is where much of what we write moves.

At the same time, theory has given us the famous phrase about the “death of the author”. Roland Barthes suggested that the author should step back as the source of meaning, so that the text can stand on its own and the reader can find meanings of their own. What someone “meant” then becomes less important than what arises in reading. I notice that this thought both calms and challenges me. It calms me because I do not have to explain every detail of my life. It challenges me because I have to let go of what my sentences turn into inside other people.

To me, it feels as if there were a space between myself and my texts that experiences, images and memories have to pass through before they come to rest on the page. In that space they are altered. The dog becomes Maja, although that was never her name. The artist is given a scene that never took place, but suits her. The circle of friends is given a blue bauble so that everything we have built up over the years can be seen at a single glance. The chicken, however, remains unchanged.

Perhaps this is the “soul” that lives between author and work. It is made up of fragments of one’s own life, of people one has loved or barely known, of places one has visited and places one has only ever dreamed. It draws on books we have read, on films, songs and conversations. And when we write, it pulls threads between reality and text, until in the end it is no longer clear where one ends and the other begins.

Some writers go very far in this direction. There are novels in which the figures are based almost one‑to‑one on real people, their paths, their names, their wounds. Others let go almost entirely of their own biography and work instead with language, forms, voices. Most move somewhere in between. In my own case, some scenes lie closer to my life than I would readily admit, and others are further away than many would think.

So when someone asks me, “Is that you?”, I could really only answer, “A part of me, yes. But not only.” There is a splinter of me in every story, but never the whole. And in every text there is a piece of reality, but it is filtered through a fine layer of fiction that both protects it and, at times, makes it visible in the first place.

Perhaps one could say that reality is the material, but the text is the place where the author’s soul turns into something that is both greater than a single life and smaller at the same time. Greater, because many of one’s own voices can sound within it. Smaller, because in the end it is only a fragment, a moment, a concentrated spark.