From the Mouth of the Whale: Sjón’s Restless World

David Lapadat | Music PhD

3 days ago

7 min read

The creatures inside a sentence

A feather eventually brings the bird into the history of Jónas’s reading. His grandfather uses it to initiate the child into letters; it becomes the pointer that accompanies his progress across the page. The link between bird and writing now has a practical origin. Jónas’s comparisons have grown from things handled, bodies inspected, books concealed and remembered. Even when they become extravagant, they retain the resistance of matter. On his frozen island, recollection can grow almost feverish while the body remains miserably cold.

The comedy works through this physical exactness. In Jónas’s account of Adam, the first man is enormous and still contains traces of his earthly ingredients: gravel in his flesh, roots along his muscles. His reflection appears in sweat collected between his hands. Later, the uneven ground gives his shadow curves that his own body lacks, and he copulates with it, engendering the beings who dwell underground. Each marvel has been made possible by something as palpable as perspiration or a hollow in the sand. The creation story develops with the earnestness of a natural philosopher explaining a difficult specimen, while desire carries its gigantic innocent into an absurdity he cannot foresee. Myth, Christian belief and bodily farce share the same descriptive confidence.

Near the novel’s end, Jónas objects to Snorri Sturluson’s demand that a metaphor retain its original conception. A sword, once imagined as a serpent, should remain consistent with that creature. Jónas wants it to become an adder, a salmon, a birch twig, a sword again, then a tongue. A. S. Byatt’s reading gives this mutable imagery its due; following the opening’s transformations also reveals how much fear and self-defense travel through them. The imagination that enlarges a bird into a fellow creature can turn a critic of Jónas into a monster. Its reach and its partiality develop together.

This makes the novel’s natural-history entries especially mischievous. Their headwords and compact definitions interrupt the speaking voice with the appearance of settled knowledge, then inform us that a bird may hatch from seaweed. An orderly entry can contain a marvel as calmly as Jónas’s monologue. The different forms give us intervals of attention without establishing an uncontaminated place from which to sort the whole book into truth and fantasy.

Verses that strike and accuse

Jónas’s desire for classification becomes urgent when he and his fellow poet Láfi try to exorcise a violent revenant. They need to persuade the corpse where it belongs, placing it among its proper kind so that it can cease tormenting the living. “For when a thing has been classified correctly, it is tamed.” The self-taught natural philosopher and the exorcist inhabit one man: learning promises to put a disordered creature back into its appointed place. Jónas combines something of a biblical visionary with powers we might loosely call shamanic, though his Christian account of spirits remains his own explanation of what he does.

The verse acquires force through the immediate correspondence between utterance and injury. Jónas asks that it strike the ghost’s jaw “like a bloody great clout”; the jaw snaps shut so violently that its teeth crack. As the words grow more apt, the blows become harder to bear. Sjón makes verbal skill bodily effective, with Láfi running alongside to keep the fleeing corpse within earshot. The practical problem is wonderfully ridiculous: poetry can subdue this creature, provided someone can make it stay and listen. The poets’ earlier delight in fitting birds into their meter has prepared a tongue agile enough for the chase.

Later, that same delight in verbal performance acquires a different audience. In the novel’s account of the Basque whalers, Láfi composes a ballad at Sheriff Ari’s instigation and travels through the district reciting its malicious accusations. The capacity to entertain helps poisonous claims circulate among people who have had dealings with the foreigners themselves. Poetry participates in the alteration of those relationships. The exorcism restores a dead boy’s body to his family; the ballad helps prepare hostility toward living men whom Jónas tries to defend.

We have already enjoyed his collaboration with Jónas, and the pleasure remains part of what makes his usefulness to Ari disturbing. In the earlier performance, the language of classification finds the revenant a place among the dead. Among the whalers’ neighbors, a performed accusation encourages people to treat familiar men as dangerous outsiders. Sjón has made us feel the appeal of an agile tongue before confronting us with the uses to which it can be hired.

Jónas’s persecution gains depth within these unstable exchanges of authority. His learning can relieve suffering, feed his vanity, earn recognition or make him suspect, depending on who encounters it and what they stand to gain. His goodness is real enough in his refusal to join the attack on the whalers. So is his susceptibility to the prospect of fame after the exorcism. Sjón lets the inflated self-account and the acts of courage coexist; being foolish about one’s own importance offers no justification for what powerful men do to him.

Sigrídur and the limits of Jónas’s attention

In Sigrídur’s company, the habits of this voice become intimate enough to hurt. She explains an eclipse with pebbles and a stalk of heather while Jónas gradually stops listening and studies the changing shape of her lips. Her model is geocentric, belonging to the same earlier world as his learning, but it gives her a composure he lacks. Sjón lets us hear the explanation and then notice the moment her listener abandons it. The attention that joined the sandpiper’s body to Jónas’s own can follow a woman’s mouth away from what she is saying.

Their affection makes the interruption more delicate. Years later, a remembered caress pauses at her sacrum, where he begins wondering about the possibility of a tail. Sigrídur withdraws his hand and kisses it. The tenderness survives her refusal to be examined, though his thoughts are already moving through creatures said to grow from plants, seaweed and river clay. She has become the occasion for an inquiry that can proceed without her. The scene is painfully exact about a man whose curiosity reaches everywhere and whose closest companion still has to stop his hand.

Its continuation also locates my reservation about the novel’s abundance. After the change from caress to medical probing has become unmistakable, the catalogue of vegetable lambs, barnacle geese and other extraordinary births keeps extending the idea of exchange between species. These examples belong to Jónas’s learning, and the digression faithfully prolongs his absorption. For me, the duration begins to add less to the discovery than the first movement of the hand did. Sjón can prepare an understanding so thoroughly that I feel it has been reached before he is ready to leave it. The force of the characterization survives that impatience.

The critical case for surrendering ordinary timetables to this book’s wandering is persuasive. Much of its pleasure depends on that surrender. The childhood expedition to see the mysterious Peter Lamb, for example, earns its elaborate delay by taking fear, boredom and misunderstanding toward the discovery of a buried Marian image; afterward, every mound in the landscape can seem to contain a hidden wonder. Preparation has changed the world the child inhabits. I wanted that degree of alteration more consistently, while remaining absorbed enough to follow Jónas through the weaker stretches.

The central third-person section, “Kidney Stone,” provides a welcome change in how his life can be followed. Journeys, learned encounters and legal affairs gain a different clarity when he becomes the person being narrated. Even here, a visitor tears out one of his ribs, which Jónas kisses and addresses as Sigrídur, so the change of perspective preserves the marvelous. Its relief comes from loosening the grip of continuous self-explanation. Among the four dated monologues, I would have welcomed another sustained interval at this distance; the architecture is strong enough to make its relative scarcity felt.

Biblical Jonah is close at hand when Jónas faces being cast into the sea, giving persecution the shape of an older ordeal. Other changes are harder to place. Sigrídur can be mourned as dead and later spoken of as living with their son, with the unnerving suggestion that she might be dead again. I remain uncertain how completely such shifts cohere within Jónas’s mythology. The freedom to change an image gives the book enormous expressive range, while the relations between some of its experienced realities remain less persuasive to me.

Sjón can also make this proliferating voice bear a loss with extraordinary economy. Jónas remembers the successive meanings of Sigrídur’s “us”: the couple and four children, then three, then two, then the one child who survives into adulthood. Each recurrence subtracts someone from the same small word. When he mourns Sigrídur, its last meaning is himself alone, and he longs to hear her familiar rebuke again. The household contracts through the pronoun while his wish restores the sound of her voice.

For Sjón working at a more compressed scale, continue with The Blue Fox.