A Quiet World. Short stories and poetry – (Kyrrlátur heimur. Örsögur og ljóð eftir Sigurð Gylfa Magnússon og Pétur Bjarna Einarsson. Nafnlausa ritröðin (Reykjavík: Miðstöð einsögurannsókna, 2015)).
This is a love story, but also part of a research project that requires some explanation since it was suppose to provide an unusual opportunity to analyze the interlinking of events, narratives, analysis, and new events. What I intended to consider was a couple of book projects that I produced and that may be viewed as “academic happenings”. The events date back to December 2006. On Gay Pride Day 2006, I met a woman which whom I developed a close relationship. This relationship was from the very beginning extremely intense, as manifested in a constant flow of letters and emails, text messages, long entries in my diary about the affair and the woman who occupied my thoughts, countless phone calls and hours together. As things worked out, before long I set about writing a book that I published at Christmas 2006, a book project that was produced just like any other book, of 166 pages, but printed in only two copies, under the title Næturnar hafa augu eins og þú: Saga úr Vesturbæ [The Nights Have Eyes Like You: A West-Side Story], Nafnlausa ritröðin (Reykjavík, 2006). Though the work was intended first and foremost as an expression on my mind, an attempt to explain my deepest emotions to a woman who had come into my life, while also being a somewhat ingenuous declaration of love, I swiftly realized that what I had in my hands was something that was in many respects unusual, in that I had myself been part of a creation process in the events, narrative, analysis and so new events that occurred as our lives moved forward. It dawned on me that what had been created here was an opportunity for an innovative analysis of how a “text” comes into being and what effect it has on the “course of events” that the narrative is supposed to describe – and vice versa, how the events can come to influence the text. The following schematic diagram is drawn up based on what happened and to illustrate the situation created in this case by the interplay of text and events/situation:
Through writing books a way opens up to study the process outlined above and orient oneself to how important the narrative could be for the individual’s (my own) perception and emotional involvement in what was happening – in fact, in the whole unfolding of the relationship. Though I may have started out from the events surrounding the way we were drawn together and what led up to it, it was in the narrative that they took on the significance that turned them into something that seemed of high importance. The experience was, that is to say, dressed up in a particular clothing by the text and this came to have by far the greatest significance within the narrative in which this significance arose. Thus: The narrative is in this sense the key to the past on its own terms. This at least is the hypothesis I am starting from in this research.
Immediately after the book project Næturnar hafa augu eins of þú came out in 2006, I started work on a sequel, but now with my eyes open to the multifaceted relationship between events, narrative, analysis and new events. The writing was completed in December 2007 and the book came out under the title Andardráttur þinn er tungumálið mitt: Ástarsaga úr Vesturbæ [Your Breath is My Language: A Love Story from the West End], Nafnlausa ritröðin (Reykjavík, 2007). This was a work of 309 pages and contained a detailed account of the relationship as it had developed, with its high points and low points – a description of how two people succeeded in fashioning their lives in such a way that their minds were constantly oriented in the same direction. In it, blended in with a conventional narrative, I included some “micro-stories” dealing with individual aspects of our relationship.
I view the two books described above, which were produced like any other books – written, proofed, printed, bound in hard covers and covered in a traditional jacket –, as a declaration of a situation or “research” into a process that is synonymous with “the textual environment”. It may be said, however, that in reality these are “book projects” that lack the links that conventional books have with their readers. These book projects were in fact seen by only two pairs of eyes, only two copies were ever printed. No one else got the read them except the two of us.
The book project ended as a trilogy with the publication of Spánar kóngurinn: Ástarsaga [The King of Spain: A Love Story], Nafnlausa ritröðin (Reykjavík, 2009), a work of 149 pages which, unlike its predecessors, was issued for general readership in September 2009. Here I go the whole way and describe both how the relationship has reference to the pasts of the two lovers and how it has been shaped in a “text” that came into existence simultaneously with the events and moved forward in the present. The earlier two books, which will never come before the eyes of anyone but the two of us who are their main characters, form a point of reference in all discussion of the third in the series, Spánar kóngurinn, which again opens new opportunities to investigate the interplay of events, narrative, analysis and the new events that arise from the now public nature of the expression.
It is against the background of these three works that I proposed to investigate more closely the interrelationship between the four factors outlined above: events, narrative, analysis, and new events. It is clear to me that the complexity level of each factor can increase sharply as new information enters the scheme (as, for example, with the publication of Spánar kóngurinn), since new events and new situations can have a major impact on the individual factors within the model. The processing itself ends in a new narrative, which again calls for a new analysis which affects events going forward into the future. This intricate and many-sided course of events will be one of the main subjects for this research.
The woman who seized my heart and soul as described above in the autumn of 2006 is named Tinna Laufey Ásgeirsdóttir; she is now my wife. In 2015 she celebrated her 40th birthday, and my son Pétur Bjarni (then 13) and I decided to mark the occasion by making a fourth book. He made the drawings and I wrote the text of the book, which was about our life together, with the title Kyrrlátur heimur. Örsögur og ljóð (A Quiet World. Microstories and Poetry) (Reykjavík, 2015). The book, which is 105 pages long, was completed and presented to the “birthday girl” at a party held to celebrate the occasion; it took her quite by surprise. We had been secretly working on it for eight months. Copies were presented to everyone at the party, and the book is also available in bookshops in Iceland. The book was the finishing touch to all the experiments with text and life – and at the same time the desire to step forward and put down on paper material that related to me personally, and to experience for myself the feelings that many authors of egodocuments experience when their writings are made public to readers who are unknown to them.
We have here moved a long way from conventional notions of the connections between events, narrative and “the reality” that is supposed to lie within the narrative. Through the creation of these two book projects and the more traditional third book, ways open up to explore in depth the interplay of different aspects of manuscripts and how “the textual environment” shapes its individual elements. The fact that I was a central participant at all stages of the process provides an unusual opportunity to study the making of texts and how they originate. This experience I then propose to carry across to a manuscript world of former times that I have got to know in detail from many years’ manuscript research and apply the same research model to conditions in which I was not personally involved except to a very minor extent.
I must mention that in 2009 I made a weighty application to the Icelandic Research Fund, proposing that the Fund provide a grant for my study of the place of the author in the text and how a source comes into existence, based on my own experience.
The responses of the three external reviewers were most interesting, especially when they discussed my approach as a scientist in the study. With reference to Originality of the project, one of the reviewers stated: “The originality of the project is beyond doubt. The project is described by the applicant as an experiment. And so it is. Therefore, the evaluation of the scientific value of the project has to take this into account. Taken on its own conditions, the scientific value of the experiment could be high. From a more traditional viewpoint one might have some reservations about the value of a project so closely linked to the scholar doing the project and his personal life. This is both the strength and the weakness of the project as a scholarly enterprise.” The reviewer’s friendly response to the project, which (by the way) was not granted funding by the Research Fund, is illustrative of the attitude of the majority of scholars in the humanities and social sciences to such experiments, in which the author makes him/herself the subject of the study or utilizes the personal testimony of other individuals. The project for which I requested funding was the one I discussed above.
After many years’ experience of the use of life writing or egodocuments in academic research, covering all types of historical sources as well as other related manuscripts, I wanted to explore their actual significance and meaning for scholarship in greater depth. In fact, I wanted to examine the interplay between the sources and the individuals to whom they relate, directly or indirectly. To be able to pursue the previously-mentioned approach, I became fully aware of the fact that I had to step forward in person into the research arena as an active participant, the person who records the narrative, analyzes it and lives and moves within the events associated with it. In fact, I wished to make an attempt to adopt positions both in “the past” and in “the history,” so to speak – to assess my own actions in a historical text and investigate how “the narrative” has influenced my experience of “what happened.” In this way I wanted to create an opportunity to compare and analyze problems that one generally faces with sources from past times, and address the question of how best to work with such material in academic research. I was aware, however, that it could prove very difficult to gain such an opportunity – that such circumstances would not often arise in the life of one person.
And yet, out of the blue, I found myself in the situation of sitting at every place at the table: being part of the past, and the one who studied it, wrote about its context, and experienced in real time all that the process offered. In other words I was given the opportunity to test my own ideas, in my own personal life. This approach of mine requires some explanation, since it provided me with an unusual opportunity to analyze the interlinking of events, narratives, analysis, and new events. And here is the story which I both used in my scientific application and wrote about in What is Microhistory?