Sun Economy: A Conversation with Jonas Eika
Jonas Eika photographed by Aphinya Jatuparisakul
Rosie Ellison-Balaam caught up with Jonas Eika to talk about his multi-award-winning After the Sun, which is published today in Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg’s translation. Eika tells us about how he started writing the book from a state of deep political exhaustion, and how it took shape through a desire for releasing our imagination and feelings about the future from the grip of neoliberal structures. By writing in a way that dissolves hierarchies, makes economic systems almost painfully visible, and brings the otherwise peripheral into the centre, After the Sun unbolts the door to a new way of being in the world: one which is open to the indefinite in all things, and thereby might allow for more tenderness and genuine intimacy. Where do we sign up?
After the Sun is in many ways a truly global work, set in different places across the world. How did you come to write the book?
I started writing these stories from a state of exhaustion. It was both a very everyday exhaustion – from work, working night jobs, finding it hard to have the energy for writing, missing a lot of sleep – and a kind of political exhaustion, from having taken part in different grassroots movements, but not experiencing any victories. Which reflected an overall feeling that I think many of us have today: That the way we imagine the future is mostly just a continuation of what there is today. The future, as a potential for change and a source of political energy, seems to be missing. It’s a kind of temporality of depression.
So these stories started from that feeling of exhaustion. And what was most important for me was to write from a place where I hadn’t decided on the genre, on the plot, on the narrative, but instead just starting from a single sentence and seeing where that took me. I would have a sentence in mind that seemed to carry a special energy, a temper, or the seed of a fictional world that seemed exciting, and then try to go with it, from sentence to sentence. I attempted to write about nine or ten stories, and in the end five of them came out well, which I think was because I had to do it in this improvisational way, in order to be able to surprise myself from sentence to sentence, from scene to scene. The mix or interminability of genre comes from that, and it’s also connected to the feeling that neoliberal politics has taken over how we imagine the future. I was trying, on a formal level, to keep things open.
You said in your interview with Cressida Leyshon in The New Yorker that the first sentence of “Alvin” captures the general atmosphere of the story – do you think this sweaty, fictional, and half out-of-yourself feeling encapsulates the rest of the book too?
I guess for all the characters there is this feeling that they are being pushed around by forces outside of themselves, or that they are not fully in themselves, or maybe that the different systems they are living in are not only determining what they can do, but also affecting the way they think about themselves, the way they relate to others, and to the world around them. There is this sensation of either being out of yourself, or of some foreign system entering the body and demanding certain ways to act, certain ways to speak and perform, which also affects intimate relationships.
And about the sweatiness, yes, there is at the same time something very sensual or corporeal about the stories, I think. I’m trying to write in a way that makes these economic systems and systems of power visible as fictions, in the sense that they are essentially held up by a belief. And by power, of course. And at the same time, they are very concrete, they have an immediate, nauseating corporeal reality for the people who experience them most directly, which is what many of my characters do.
Although divided into four distinct stories, each has a similar thread. Do you view After the Sun as a collection of stories or a novel, and did this matter to you when the book was starting to take shape?
I didn’t start out thinking about it as a book. I was just writing these stories, one by one, when I had some extra time. And then when I had written three of them that were good, I could see that it could become a book, because even though they take place in very different spaces and are not narratively connected in any way, they all share the same feeling or atmosphere. When I started thinking about it like that, I wanted to put it together in a way that would make it something else than a collection; because as much as I enjoy reading short stories, I can get exhausted, no matter how good the stories – you get into a fiction, a universe, an atmosphere or a tone of voice, and then you have to get out of it and start over again, to get into a new one. I wanted to put it together in a way that would make it one work.
I do think of it as having some of the same characteristics as a novel, but what I wanted to do was to push the limits of the short story. To explore how much I could put into one story, or how many characters or digressions there could be; how many switches in narrative, switches in genre. But I hope that the reader can sense a movement or progression throughout the book.
The second “Bad Mexican Dog” story was the most difficult to write, because I knew that it was going to end the book, and so it had to reflect the overall arch of it. It starts from a place where there is a strong longing for transcendence, both concretely and metaphysically, an impulse to get out of the miserable situation that you are in, which is also about getting out of the body. But along the way, most of the characters find that there is no easy or direct way out, no sacred or untouched place that they can step into to view their situations from the outside. So instead, they have to stay and experience it, to understand their situation in depth, before they can maybe find a way out through the cracks and through their own subjectivity. To put it shortly and more generally, I wanted the book to move slowly from a longing for transcendence to immanence.
Alienation runs through the entire book, in characters that exist in the shadowy margins of the world. They are disillusioned with the structures and transactions of late capitalism. Why did you want to capture the synthetic and choreographed relationships that have come to form society?
Overall, I had become interested in how alienation in this time doesn’t always come from separation, but from being too enmeshed and immersed in the world; there is something very intrusive about the technologies and the types of work that structure our world. Perhaps that’s what binds these very different characters together. There is not an easily accessible place outside of the exploitative and oppressive systems that they are in. There’s just the constant work of trying to dig out small pockets of intimacy, to create spaces, relationships and communities that makes it possible to imagine and practice a life that is not totally structured by wage-work and productivity. That’s how I experience it too, so I guess that’s why I wanted to write about it.
That being said, most of these characters are structurally quite far from me, from my own life and experience. I tried to write with an awareness of that distance, and at the same time locating feelings and experiences within myself to connect from. I guess I’m torn on this question: I don’t believe that fiction can transcend all human barriers and differences. I don’t believe in total empathy, because it often puts the self in the place of the other, thereby erasing the other. At the same time, I want to insist that people don’t conform or correspond to their predicates and identities, that there is always something else, something inexhaustible.
A few of the characters are actually also attempts to rewrite William Burroughs characters. I have always been very intrigued by Burroughs’s writing, but at the same time I have an ambivalent relationship to it. It is so brutal, there is so little emotion in it, it’s like all the emotional energy was put into the visual and symbolic aspects of the writing. That can be powerful, beautiful sometimes, but he really doesn’t allow his characters much tenderness or connection, even though that’s what much of his writing circles around. Especially in the early stuff. Later, even though it’s about intergalactic war or time-travelling pirates or whatever, the writing often searches for these small, intimate breaks where two people can, just for a moment, step into a room and connect with each other. Often in a sexual way, sometimes a bit mechanically, but very often playfully, too. Some of the characters in my book are to some degree based on his. They have some of the same masculine difficulties of connecting, there is some of the same strangeness, almost inhumanness, in them – but I wanted to give them more space for intimacy and tenderness. And that’s a stylistic attempt too, to switch between short, hard, instrumental sentences and longer, affectionate or tender ones.
Still from La Jetée (1962)
Another common thread between the stories is the horizon, an image which is alluded to in the title, and which reappears throughout the book. That makes me wonder: what role did you want the sun to play?
I guess you could say that there is a transformation of the sun in the book. It starts out being very far away, obviously, very distant, and it ignites this longing for transcendence. And then, slowly, it’s transformed, it’s integrated into the body, or contained within the asshole, to be more specific. The place where to sun doesn’t shine. There’s a horizon there, too. Which requires a loss of self, both pleasurable and painful. That also has to do with the fact that for many of these characters, the body is the only material they have to work with.
In the “Bad Mexican Dog” stories specifically, the sun plays a very ambivalent role. It gives life, it warms the body, and at the same time it’s the organising principle in the economy of the beach club. During the stories, the boys start to realise, to theorise, in their own non-academic way, the beach club as an ‘economy of the sun’. A sun economy, in the sense that all of the services they provide, all the objects that make up the beach club, are derived from the sun, they get their value from the sun. So, in these stories the sun is also symbolically a patriarch that they have to obey.
Characters’ engagement with imagery varies throughout, from dreamed scenes of Las Vegas and jackrabbits, to posing for a camera in the sea with a beachball. What do you think is offered in the meeting of writing and images, and was your writing influenced by visuals?
The only specific visual influence is Chris Marker’s 1962 film La Jetée, from which I stole a few images and put in my book. La Jetée is a beautiful example of how to make sci-fi with very few means, and an interesting way of using the classical sci-fi-trope of time travel. Despite the hopes of the scientist conducting the experiments, time travel doesn’t offer a way out, but only a return to the present, an even deeper immersion in it. And I think good sci-fi does this too; it embeds us even more in our own time, while simultaneously making it strange.
La Jetée is also a testament to the power of images, to the idea that images can be small capsules of time, allowing for jumps that are not logical or chronological. Underneath it, there’s the old, almost pre-modern idea of photographs as a technology that essentially captures and contains its subjects. This is a notion that I also used to some extent in the “Bad Mexican Dog” stories. Even though the main character is acting in the films that are being made of him, the process still takes a hold of him, possesses him. Because the films are shot in this exploitative way, it stays with him afterwards, like a second skin or another person that has crept into him. And this is mirrored by the other person in one of the films, in the parts of the story told from the point of view of the Danish tourist. Even though she is in a more powerful position, she also feels captured by the images. It’s quite far away now, but I remember being very intrigued by the idea that the photons or atoms, the impressions of light, that images are made from – that they are a form of memory. I like it when there is a very material, almost scientific aspect of the metaphorical. In this case it supports the feeling that images hold power; the images that have been made of you, and the ideas people have about you, also affect how you can exist in the world, obviously. The “Bad Mexican Dog” stories are essentially about people who are trying to create some space for autonomy and intimacy in a situation where they have to constantly mirror the instrumentalising gazes of others.
In your speech at the 2019 Nordic Council for Literature Prize ceremony – when you were awarded the prize for After the Sun – you stated, ‘in literature there’s a dream of a language that doesn’t require forgetting in order to mean something, a language that’s on par with the world, in all its oppression and despair, but simultaneously open to the indefinite, the inexpressible which exists in all things’. Could you talk about how After the Sun traverses this line of realism and surrealism?
Of course I’m not in any way sure that my writing manages to do what I said in that speech that literature can do. But anyway, when working with this book I found a lot of inspiration in sci-fi, which for me is a genre that can be able to grasp the horrors of this world, and at the same time make them strange, make them visible as contingent and essentially historical. I wanted to use that to build fictions that are realist and placed in our world and time, but at the same time slightly off from what we know. I hope this creates a kind of dissonance, a mixture of recognition and estrangement. Placing different genres closely besides each other is for me not about saying ‘this is real and this is not’ or ‘this is just in the mind of the character’, but about expanding the space for sensations, feelings and thought. It’s all there, it all happens. What I want to do is to dissolve hierarchies between action and thought, inner and outer imagery, as well as between human and non-human life, concrete reality and metaphor.
Still from La Jetée (1962).
You play with form throughout the book. Placing single-perspective passages in your unusual and rhythmic sentences alongside more direct narrative voices of the tourists in “Bad Mexican Dog”, and the historical biography of Karen Ruthio in “Rachel, Nevada”. Could you tell me more about this choice of departure from the traditional form of a novel, or short story for that matter?
The Karen Ruthio biography was about allowing a minor character to step into the centre. There is just a few sentences about Ruthio throughout the story, but then when I was approaching the end, I could feel that she was so interesting, that she was calling for more attention. That’s often an impulse for me: to take something that is pushed to the periphery, and make it move into the centre.
This is also related to the formal expectations that often come with writing short stories – perhaps especially in a Scandinavian context, where there is a very strong minimalist realist tradition. That might create an inherent expectation about what you can spend time on in a story; that everything has to be picked out cautiously and with a strong awareness of the overall economy of the text. That’s a term I’ve heard at some creative writing courses – and while I see how it might useful, I’m really against this way of thinking about writing. That you have to be cautious or be a good accountant or something, I wanted to be a bad accountant, I guess. I wanted to allow myself some excessiveness. And that goes back to what we talked about in the beginning, about writing from a place of exhaustion. It’s about finding a way to make space, narratively and syntactically, for desire.
A Danish reviewer once wrote that the way in which you recount intimate relationships between your characters is, at one and the same time, not sexual, so much more than sexual, and nothing but sexual. In a similar way, there is something both arousing and deadly clinical about data-driven stock trading and its dizzying systems. What role does sex, gender, and power play in your work and the hypercommodified culture it encircles?
That’s a big question. Of course, there is a lot of sex or erotics in the book, though I didn’t think about it that consciously. Maybe it’s a way of exploring how oppression and inequality conditions my characters, how it enters their lives and their bodies, so that even intimacy is not always a safe place to be. It might be pleasurable, but at the same time, the roughness or determinacy of it doesn’t always make them feel seen. There is an ambivalence about intimacy for many of the characters, which is rooted in their given situations, in the fact that they are being exploited in such a bodily way. It becomes difficult to maintain caring, intimate relationships with other people. There is playfulness, tenderness and pleasure, yet the oppression still creeps in, through a from of masculinity that suddenly asserts itself and pushes the other away, in order to drive out all vulnerability.
I guess that when you are in a situation where you constantly have to mirror the gazes of others, live up to the expectations of others, that the immediate reaction would be to try to assert your autonomy, and to establish a place to act from. But even with empowerment, there is still the need to give your self to others, to give in to others, and, in some sense, to become an object. Willingly, and on your own terms of course. But the self can never be fully intact. I think that’s a precondition for all kinds of love. Asserting autonomy is an important step to liberation, but it’s not the ultimate goal.
And are you working on anything at the moment?
I’m working on a historical novel, which takes place in the 13th century in Belgium, of all places, because that’s where a religious women’s movement called the Beguines started. The problem with it is that when you look it up, you only find the established history about them, or the history that is written from the perspective of the church, which sees them as a monastic movement, an order of nuns, though they weren’t really. In the beginning they were much more autonomous and an anti-institutional movement. Women deciding to live neither in marriage nor in monastic orders, and establishing small collectives. I am trying to write a novel based on that movement. It comes from a long interest in Christian mysticism, among other things.