The Danish novel that’s exactly like the Tree of… | Little White Lies

Long Read

The Dan­ish nov­el that’s exact­ly like the Tree of Life

01 May 2016

Words by Mark Asch

A young man in a suit looking pensive while using a mobile device.
A young man in a suit looking pensive while using a mobile device.
Every­thing is con­nect­ed – includ­ing Peter Adolphsen’s Machine’ and Ter­rence Malick’s 2011 film.

We begin in Austin, Texas in the sec­ond half of the 20th cen­tu­ry, before flash­ing back to a time when all mat­ter in the uni­verse explod­ed out­ward in a radi­ance of cre­ation, form­ing the earth and all liv­ing things, includ­ing a con­fused pre­his­toric ani­mal, who injures its leg by a riv­er. We move for­ward again, the earth takes a more famil­iar shape; we’re in the deserts of the Amer­i­can West, and even­tu­al­ly back to Austin, where our nar­ra­tor mourns a pre­ma­ture death with mixed empa­thy and sur­vivor guilt in a pro­found dis­play of interconnectivity.

Only this isn’t a brief sum­ma­ry of Ter­rence Malick’s The Tree of Life, but Dan­ish author Peter Adolphsen’s 2006 short nov­el Machine’. An Eng­lish-lan­guage ver­sion of Machine’ was pub­lished in 2007, around the time my girl­friend was indulging her wan­der­lust by read­ing all the trans­lat­ed Scan­di­na­vian lit­er­a­ture she could get her hands on. I was inter­est­ed by her descrip­tion of Machine’: the book is one of those sto­ries that fol­lows a par­tic­u­lar object through space and time as it inter­acts with dif­fer­ent objects and peo­ple, each open­ing up into its own dis­tinct, digres­sive world, and I prob­a­bly thought it was a neat, famil­iar metaphor for the web of life.

I had seen The Tree of Life when it came out in 2011, and when I picked up Machine’ two years lat­er I had a vague inkling that the nov­el and movie had a sim­i­lar hook: the ancient past and famil­iar present, togeth­er in a chain of causal­i­ty. But my pulse quick­ened as I began to read. Like many small-press authors, Peter Adolph­sen main­tains a very active social media pres­ence, and had friend­ed my girl­friend on Face­book after she reviewed Machine’, though they’d nev­er actu­al­ly spo­ken. I sent him a mes­sage to ask if he’d ever seen The Tree of Life. He hadn’t.

Over email, Adolph­sen describes Machine’ as in the genre of ting­sev­en­tyr (fairy tales about objects).” After a brief over­ture, the nov­el, which you can read in about an hour, starts at the very begin­ning: the Big Bang – the expan­sion of time and space out­wards from a sin­gle point, and the for­ma­tion of the ele­ments and every­thing else, from amino acids to galaxy clus­ters.” The same quan­ti­ty of mat­ter has always exist­ed, writes Adolph­sen, in var­i­ous recom­bin­ing forms, and it is one par­tic­u­lar piece of mat­ter that Machine’ follows.

A pre­his­toric horse (a mam­mal from the Eocene peri­od, not a dinosaur), spooks at a water­ing hole, runs away, falls off a cliff, and dies. Cel­lu­lar decom­po­si­tion, putre­fac­tion and the heat of the earth take their course – over sev­er­al mil­lion years and a cou­ple of pages – and the mat­ter that had once com­posed the animal’s heart becomes a sin­gle droplet of oil, which is extract­ed in the 1970s from the Utah oil­field where an Azer­bai­jani immi­grant named Jim­my Nash works. It is even­tu­al­ly pumped into the gas tank of a Ford Pin­to, turns to engine exhaust, and is inhaled by the car’s own­er, who, some decades lat­er, shows up on the narrator’s doorstep cough­ing up blood – dying of can­cer spread by that very par­ti­cle that was once some­thing else’s heart.

- YouTube

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

www.youtube.com

Adolph­sen tells me that though he’s eager to see The Tree of Life, he was pre­vi­ous­ly unaware of its sim­i­lar­i­ties with his book. I have not reached out to Ter­rence Mal­ick to ask if he’s read Machine’, but it’s wide­ly report­ed that he had been devel­op­ing a project about the ori­gins of life since the late 1970s. By 2007 the idea has tak­en shape in a script incor­po­rat­ing ele­ments inspired by Malick’s child­hood in Austin – where he grew up as the oil-rich grand­son of Syr­i­an and Lebanese Chris­t­ian immi­grants – and the lin­ger­ing emo­tion­al wound left by the sui­cide of his younger broth­er in 1968. This per­son­al tragedy informs the world-weari­ness of Sean Penn’s char­ac­ter in the present-day scenes that book­end The Tree of Life, as well as that of Chris­t­ian Bale’s pro­tag­o­nist in Malick’s lat­est, Knight of Cups.

I guess it’s a coin­ci­dence, a nice lit­tle one,” Adoph­sen says. I think that many more than just Mr Mal­ick and myself have done the Big Bang thing in some form or anoth­er; we’re not the first, won’t be the last. The birth of the uni­verse is nat­u­ral­ly a recur­rent theme. It’s the end sta­tion for the train of where-do-we-come-from questions.”

In Machine’, Adolph­sen writes that, every sin­gle one of the count­less events in the uni­verse orig­i­nates from the very first coin­ci­dence, which ripped the noth­ing­ness pri­or to the Big Bang out of its orig­i­nal sta­bil­i­ty. Why is there now some­thing rather than noth­ing? Sci­ence says: because of an impu­ri­ty in the noth­ing­ness – a trace ele­ment, a rip­ple – a sub­mi­cro­scop­ic spot appeared in infin­i­ty.” Of trace ele­ments, rip­ples of some­thing radi­at­ing through time and space, Mal­ick has some­thing to say as well. In his 2007 draft of The Tree of Life script, Mal­ick describes the film’s famous dinosaur sequence, in which the his­to­ry of time lead­ing from the for­ma­tion of Earth up to a 50s Texas child­hood paus­es as a car­niv­o­rous dinosaur approach­es a wound­ed her­bi­vore where it lays by the water:

Rep­tiles emerge from the amphib­ians, and dinosaurs in turn from the rep­tiles. Among the dinosaurs we dis­cov­er the first signs of mater­nal love, as the crea­tures learn to care for each other.

Is not love, too, a work of the cre­ation? What should we have been with­out it? How had things been then?

Silent as a shad­ow, con­scious­ness has slipped into the world.

Both Machine’ and The Tree of Life link the life and death of a pre­his­toric crea­ture to a life and death in 21st cen­tu­ry Texas via the unbro­ken thread which runs through all things. It sounds loopy, but the coin­ci­dence reminds us that Mal­ick does not come by his loop­i­ness idly – and when rub­bish­ing his movies it’s worth remem­ber­ing that they’re part of a dis­tinct, artic­u­late tra­di­tion of thought.

With Knight of Cups set for the­atri­cal release in the UK on 6 May, you may be aware of the crit­i­cisms that have been lev­elled at the film, and at Mal­ick in gen­er­al. Implic­it in many com­plaints about Malick’s films is the idea that one blade of grass blow­ing in the wind, or aching­ly plan­gent sen­ti­ment, is just like anoth­er. That his famous­ly open-end­ed, explorato­ry film­ing style has failed to ade­quate­ly define its search para­me­ters, and there is after all no rea­son why any­thing in a Mal­ick film must nec­es­sar­i­ly be this and not that. That he is a seek­er for he knows not what,” as the dour Nathaniel Hawthorne described his neigh­bour, the Amer­i­can Tran­scen­den­tal­ist Ralph Wal­do Emerson.

In fact, Emer­son knew what he was seek­ing: every­thing. In his essay, Nature’, Emer­son asks, Who looks upon a riv­er in a med­i­ta­tive hour, and is not remind­ed of the flux of all things? Man is con­scious of a uni­ver­sal soul with­in or behind his indi­vid­ual life.” For Emer­son nature is, as Jes­si­ca Chas­tain says in The Tree of Life, where God lives” – all the grass and trees and birds and insects reflect with­out arti­fice the divin­i­ty that cours­es equal­ly through all mat­ter. The Some­thing that is not Noth­ing is present in Every­thing – even in you and I, though urban life and com­mer­cial pur­suits, like in the Los Ange­les of Knight of Cups, might dis­tract us from notic­ing it.

In the essay’s most famous pas­sage, Emer­son describes the tran­scen­dence of a con­scious­ness open to nature, uplift­ed into infi­nite space – all mean ego­tism van­ish­es. I become a trans­par­ent eye-ball; I am noth­ing; I see all; the cur­rents of the Uni­ver­sal Being cir­cu­late through me; I am part or par­ti­cle of God.” For Emer­son, art serves to offer us this bliss­ful com­mu­nion with the infinite:

A work of art is an abstract or epit­o­me of the world. It is the result or expres­sion of nature, in minia­ture. For, although the works of nature are innu­mer­able and all dif­fer­ent, the result or the expres­sion of them all is sim­i­lar and sin­gle. Nature is a sea of forms rad­i­cal­ly alike and even unique. A leaf, a sun-beam, a land­scape, the ocean, make an anal­o­gous impres­sion on the mind. What is com­mon to them all – that per­fect­ness and har­mo­ny – is beau­ty. The stan­dard of beau­ty is the entire cir­cuit of nat­ur­al forms – the total­i­ty of nature […] Noth­ing is quite beau­ti­ful alone: noth­ing but is beau­ti­ful in the whole. A sin­gle object is only so far beau­ti­ful as it sug­gests this uni­ver­sal grace.

This is a bit trip­py. Indeed, Machine’, which in its sci­en­tif­ic way express­es some Emer­son-like sen­ti­ments about the com­mon life-force dif­fused across all things, devotes five of its 85 pages to a sin­gle sen­tence describ­ing an acid trip, in all its time-dilat­ing inten­si­ty. No book in the world is big enough to con­tain all the thoughts you can think in that peri­od of time,” writes Adolph­sen in anoth­er pas­sage towards the end of the book, as his nar­ra­tor sits for 45 min­utes in a sweat lodge. My brain explod­ed with images, feel­ings and words, mix­ing them all up as it vis­it­ed an infi­nite num­ber of nooks and cran­nies from my past, my present and my notions of the future,” he writes, before he is vis­it­ed by an appari­tion of the pre­his­toric horse from the begin­ning of the nov­el. It speaks to him in one mod­u­lat­ed sound with myr­i­ad mean­ings, asso­ci­a­tions and over­lap­ping images,” and tells him what hap­pened to its heart. The book we have just fin­ished read­ing is the narrator’s attempt to record for us the essence of this vision – or, as Emer­son describes the work of the artist, to con­cen­trate this radi­ance of the world on one point.”

Many of us have watched as Malick’s cam­era caress­es faces, or cranes upward to see the sun shine through the leaves, and won­dered, Why this, now? What pur­pose does this beau­ty serve?’ What The Tree of Life and Machine’ both pro­claim is that these are the wrong ques­tions to ask. Both works argue that there is noth­ing sop­py or ran­dom about them. Not when a pre­his­toric ani­mal can be a death in Texas that we feel as our own; or when a descrip­tion of a Hol­ly­wood movie can be a descrip­tion of a Dan­ish novella.

Sci­ence tells us the weird­est shit,” Adolph­sen remarks over email. Like noth­ing can ever dis­ap­pear. All mat­ter per­sists and has been there since the Big Bang.” You may choose to dis­miss the hip­pie obses­sion with nature,” as one char­ac­ter in Machine’ does, but you are nev­er­the­less lit­er­al­ly made of star­dust. The ancient Greeks called the world Kos­mos, beau­ty,” writes Emer­son. The cos­mos may be an impos­si­bly grand sub­ject, but in Malick’s films, it is con­scious­ly con­cen­trat­ed in choice, and it’s on those terms that we must take him or leave him. Noth­ing is mere­ly” beau­ti­ful, because noth­ing can be any­thing else, and every­thing belongs. View­ers look­ing for a through-line in his films may as well trace one across the vault of the sky, a con­stel­la­tion spread­ing in light years across the sprawl of the universe.

You might like