Liam Sprod is a Sweden-based English-Australian writer whose most recent work, Dead Ice, represents his first foray into the novel form. In Dead Ice, Sprod integrates his deep, abiding passion for and knowledge of philosophy, drawing from figures like Kant, Wittgenstein, Benjamin, and Weil, as he tells a story of abandonment, isolation, and slow descent into insanity. His narrator leads the reader deep into the heart of the Scandinavian forest in the winter, gazes into piles of cut hair in a rubbish heap, and muses about the glacial masses that carved out the landscape when they receded. I sat down with Liam Sprod to discuss his approach to fusing philosophy and literature, his unique approach to narration, as well as his decision to self-publish the novel and distribute it on a person-to-person basis. The following is a transcript of our conversation, edited for clarity.
You’ve written a doctoral thesis on Kant and Meillassoux. Does your background in philosophy inform your work as a novelist? If so, how?
My background in philosophy definitely influences the novel, as hinted at in the two epigraphs from Simone Weil and Walter Benjamin. But then, neither Benjamin nor Weil were professional academic philosophers in the contemporary sense. In The Origin of German Tragic Drama, which I quote from in the epigraph, Benjamin makes the enigmatic claim that “Method is a digression.” It makes more sense in German, “Methode ist Umweg,” an un-way. But of course, “method” comes from the Greek: meta plus hodos, which means road. So already in the word “method” is the idea of a way, and something beyond a way.
There is always a certain porosity between literature and philosophy. During my PhD I attended a higher seminar in Walter Benjamin that was given by some of the giants of Benjamin studies: Samuel Weber, Andrew Benjamin, and Werner Hamacher. That seminar provides a lot of background for the novel. Even in terms of my thesis on Immanuel Kant, one of the last papers I gave was on Kant’s use of gothic metaphors, which is perhaps a bit surprising as he is considered this giant of Enlightenment rationality. But he has all these metaphors of darkness and blindness, specters and ruins of reason that are really fascinating. He’s not a purely logical thinker. There’s this gothic literary element in his philosophy that also plays into the novel.
The porosity of literature and philosophy means that the philosophy I was writing was already somewhat literary. There is, however, also a very distinct genre of academic philosophy in which I have published bits and pieces. But to make a career as an academic philosopher is difficult. Luckily “career” is also a verb, so it could be a digression as well. Probably the main way I came to writing fiction was from writing in art contexts. There’s a part in the novel where the narrator looks into a compost heap and sees their own hair and experiences a metaphysical vertigo. That section developed out of a text I wrote for an exhibition at the Adelaide Central Gallery by the artists Bridget Currie and Bernadette Klavins. The exhibition was called Warm Earth, and involved a lot of compost. That text, in a reformed version, came into the novel. Conversely, much of the theoretical reading I did while writing the novel informed some recent essays I wrote for the MANUAL publishing platform by the artists Johanna Gustafsson Fürst and Asier Mendizabal in association with the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm.
The genesis of this novel came with my move to Sweden in December 2020. I was taken with the snowy landscape and the forests and tall pine trees covered in snow that seem to disappear into textures and indistinct formlessness. At the time, I was taking classes called Swedish for immigrants, which are free to all immigrants. They’re not just language classes, but also a sort of cultural indoctrination. Through them I came to realize, in my own digressive way, that one of the defining features of Swedish culture is its Lutheranism. Although today, the Church of Sweden is very progressive, it wasn’t until 1951 that people were free to leave the Church without converting to another religion, and before 1860 it was actually illegal to leave the Church at all without going into exile, like Queen Christina did in 1654.
Consequently, to understand Swedishness, I read Luther, and Swedes are shocked at that because it’s a very secular country. The influence of Luther actually in a way plays into that secularism. And this connects with Walter Benjamin. The Origin of German Tragic Drama is very much about how thought changed during the Reformation. The plays he’s talking about are written at that time, and in the Baroque when the Counter-Reformation started. It’s a combination of these things that led to this novel. The connection came together when I saw a rubbish heap in the town where I lived on the edge of the forest. The line from Benjamin that I use as an epigraph is, “For those who looked deeper saw the scene of their existence as a rubbish heap of partial, inauthentic actions. Life itself protested against this.” The rubbish heap stands in for an idea of this disenchanted Lutheran world, not just of Sweden, but of Western capitalism in general. It was this, and the contrast with the mysticism of the snowy forest beyond it, that spurred the writing of the novel.
The ice…de-centers human experience—revealing its smallness and transitoriness—by opening up the scales of geological time and the cosmos.
The title of your novel, Dead Ice, might be interpreted as suggesting that some ice is in fact alive. Can you expand on the idea of ice, or glaciers, as sentient?
The term “dead ice” is a technical glaciological term. It means ice that has stopped moving. When it’s no longer connected to a moving glacier, it sits still and behaves in a different way, and is called “dead ice.” I came across the name literally by walking through the forest here, which is all post-glacial landscape, all moraine. You can see how it has been formed. My father, who was a geologist, visited, and he could say the ice was moving in a certain direction because he could read the rocks in the landscape. We came across this little lake that was called a dead ice lake, and the information board there was where I first heard the term. When the ice sits still, it eats into the landscape and collects stones around it. It makes these dips in the landscape that remain once the ice has vanished. These became bogs where people in the Iron Age would find iron. Pre-industrial history here was shaped by the landscape because people could find the iron in the bogs, and trees to burn to forge the iron. It became an industry here before the Industrial Revolution developed machines that could dig up the mountains in the north to get the iron from the ore there.
There’s also a sense that the town in the novel is like the dead ice. It has stopped moving. It is just sitting still and decaying after the industry has moved on and the factory has closed; and the narrator is stuck there as well, no longer moving. I’m not so much interested in the idea of ice that’s alive and sentient or sapient. I’m more interested in the idea of what ice, the dead ice or the ice age as an idea, holds for thought in general. One example would be the character Rainer who talks about the dead ice and the glaciers and the geology. He equates the smoothness of ice with perfect logic, and paraphrases a statement straight out of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations comparing logic to smooth ice where conditions are ideal, but on which you can get no grip to move. Wittgenstein says, “We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground.”
The ice also de-centers human experience—revealing its smallness and transitoriness—by opening up the scales of geological time and the cosmos. It relates to the moment where the narrator looks into the compost and sees their hair lying there, and through that, they see themself as soil. That leaves a disjunction where they’re both there and part of the inorganic soil, but also not there. There’s a deeper connection at work here. The word “human” comes from the Latin word for soil, “humus.” The narrator sees their organic living self as somehow other than the self, the humanness, that they see in the inorganic soil. This prompts a conception of themself as perhaps more than the mere matter that makes up the body. In a way, that inorganic matter is already dead, and there’s a sense of already deadness in us. But there’s also this sense that we are more than human, if the human is just humus, just the earth. If a river or a glacier is a more-than-human entity, we are also more than human, and perhaps our humanness is a small material element within us that draws us downwards into the disenchanted world. And rather than making rivers or glaciers like humans and granting them sentience, or legal rights, or personhood, we need to think of ourselves as more like rivers or glaciers, as also more-than-human, more than earth or dead matter. As the Benjamin epigraph has it, “life itself protested.”
The combined effect of the present tense and the narration of menial tasks contributes to the sense that the plot unfolding in real-time. Can you expand on your decision to write this text in the present tense, and your decision to describe, and in some instances repeat, the tasks that the narrator is performing?
The bathetic or the everyday is a big theme in modernist art. Virginia Woolf and James Joyce often bring everydayness into their work and contrast it with some sense of the sublime. My aim is very much to get a sense of the immediacy of the world in time and space—the particulars of the world. A lot of what my narrator thinks about is the specificity of things, which leads into these digressive thoughts that lead somewhere else, often into quasi-theological musings, but that are ultimately grounded in the idea of the thingliness of the world. This also has a dialectical element insofar as the thingliness of the world is like the rubbish heap. The world is just a rubbish heap of things. Through meditating on them, there can arise an unknowing of things.
One example is where the narrator sits and looks at the animals in the garden, and thinks of the difference between them and their mother who knew about the animals in a more ecological way, and the hunters who know about animals in a very destructive way. The narrator aims to not know about animals in either of these ways, but just to be there with them in the immediacy of them, know their actions here and now. The use of the present tense and the repetition of the menial tasks also hints at a famous story about Heraclitus that is recounted in Aristotle (De partibus animalium, I, 5, 645a 17ff.). Some visitors come to see Heraclitus, and find him engaged in lighting a fire. They’re amazed that the great philosopher is there just doing this menial task, but his response is, “Here too, the gods are present.” It’s that very conjunction of the everyday and the sublime—the profane and the divine are together. The narrator lights a fire several times in the book, and every time the gods are present.
The Priest in this novel is a woman, and the narrator is somewhat ambiguous in terms of gender. Why did you choose to make the Priest a woman?
When I was writing, I was very influenced by a recent trend in Swedish literature that might be called “books about women without a goal.” These really interesting books, Inlands by Elin Willows, Just Now I’m Here by Isabelle Ståhl, which I don’t think is translated, and Violence and Other Conversations by Wera von Essen, which is also untranslated, but the Swedish edition has one of the most beautiful covers I’ve ever seen, with a fragment of a Botticelli painting. They are about these women who are somewhat aimless or desireless, and they’re often tied up with the alienation of late capitalism. But I didn’t want to assume the ability to be able to write a female narrator and portray that experience. So I abstained on making it distinct either way. The priest is a woman, and in part that reflects the simple fact that the majority (55%) of priests here in Sweden are women.
There are two female priests in books that were big influences as well. The Pastor by Hanne Ørstavik, which is an incredible book. It follows a priest up to the far north of Norway where she’s researching a Sami rebellion. The Sami are the indigenous people of the far north of Scandinavia, where they are subject to an ongoing colonial project against them. The problems that afflict indigenous peoples all over the world also are inflicted on the Sami. This priest travels to research a rebellion that took place a hundred and fifty years ago and was a response to a translation of part of the Bible into Sami. Suddenly the Sami people saw themselves as subject to the same divine justice as the colonizing people. It takes the story of the Gospels as an anti-colonial story, which, of course, in a way it is. Ørstavik’s female priest is a long way from the priest in my book. She has doubts and intelligence, whereas mine is largely a representative of a type of Lutheranism.
The second influence is from Melancholy by Jon Fosse. In the final section, there’s an author with a mystical bent, who is considering converting to the Norwegian Church. He goes to visit a priest, and he expects an old man with whom he will have some intense theological debate, but instead encounters a young woman. And she tells him, “I’ve read your books. You’re a mystic. The Norwegian Church doesn’t want mystics.” In her self-awareness, Fosse’s priest is not like the one in Dead Ice, but her friendly demeanor is similar. I didn’t want the priest to be this cliché old man who will have an intense theological discussion. She is much more the face of Lutheran theology in its contemporary guise, its friendliness, the benign face, who nonetheless presents a theological and cultural position.
Confronted with the disenchanted world, his sense of scholastic thought atrophies into a more occultist idea.
Rainer is the character who experiences a descent into insanity due to his lack of purpose and his obsession with transubstantiation.
Insanity is always a tricky word. I think of Ingmar Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly, which is concerned with what is usually seen as the mental breakdown of this young woman, Karin. But at the end of the film, Karin says, “The door opened. But the god that came out was a spider. He came towards me, and I saw his face. … he continued up my chest, up onto my face and on up the wall.” And I always think, is she really insane? If you saw God, and God was a spider, the rational response would be to act the way Karin acts. None of the world makes sense, and you go insane.
The idea of Rainer’s insanity is a mismatch between him and the world in which he finds himself. But in a way he follows the logic—just as Karin follows a logic—that he’s pursuing. It’s an older logic, more like the scholasticism of the Catholicism of the Middle Ages; an Aristotelian-Thomism that draws a direct connection between the world, reason, and scripture. Everything can be known through the logos. He repeats the alchemical phrase, “As above, so below,” which asserts a continuity from below, from the lowest, to the highest. But in his confrontation with the disenchanted world—this very Lutheran, capitalist world of the factory—there’s a mismatch, so he seems insane. He’s obsessed with transmuting metal, the alchemical project, but that is exactly the same logic as the transubstantiation of the Eucharist, that it can become the body of Christ. But this relies on a wider logic of the divine as immanent in the world, and able to be accessed, understood, and manipulated through reason.
Confronted with the disenchanted world, his sense of scholastic thought atrophies into a more occultist idea. There’s this doubling between Rainer and the father of the priest, who is obsessed with the history of the factory and with the heritage of the town and wants to found a museum. He keeps repeating the phrase, “We need the factory because people need to work.” This is pure Protestant work ethic, very strong in here in Sweden. But that is also a mirror of the occultism of Rainer.
Adorno writes in Minima Moralia, in the section “Theses against occultism,” about the connection between occultism and capitalism. He says, “The horoscope corresponds to the official directives on nations. Number mysticism is preparation for administrative statistics and cartel prices.” So for him, a sense of enchantment that has degraded into occultism is at one with the administered world of capitalism, the degradation and instrumentalization of reason. The narrator is attempting to find a way out of the disenchanted world and out of both of those logics that it entails.
I’m not especially religious myself, but, as Benjamin observes, theology is something of the hidden motor of history. With that in mind, there are different senses of God in the novel. The God of the priest, which is the Lutheran God in a divine realm separate from the temporal. “Bread is real bread,” she says, denying transubstantiation with words straight out of Luther. Her father extends this to the Protestant work ethic, which is instrumental in the development of capitalism. There is also the God of the mother of the narrator, which is a pantheistic animism. And the God of Rainer. Although Rainer doesn’t talk about God, he has this alchemical Aristotelian-Thomist scholastic philosophy sense of God—that there is a continuity between the divine and the profane.
Elsewhere, there are hints of negative theology, and the spider god of Bergman appears. There are many influences in there. Such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German priest who was imprisoned and executed for plotting against Hitler, who wrote about the world come of age: what religion means once the metaphysical assumption of God is no longer tenable. And there’s Simone Weil’s mysticism.
Adorno has a conception of inverse theology, which is also important. Inverse theology connects with the idea of the ice as the inverse of the world, the mirror image of the world. The ice investigates every rift and crevice of the world: “entirely from felt contact with its objects” is Adorno’s phrase. And here the inverse theology emerges: not by a positive image of God, and not by a negative, where we say what God is not. Rather, we say what the world is in detail, and that produces or leaves a mirror image. That theology is the inverse image of the world, just as the ice is the inverse image, the negative space, of the earth on which it rests.
Simone Weil essentially starved herself to death, like the narrator by the end of the novel. Is there a space for that kind of asceticism in Lutheranism?
Simone Weil’s life story is incredible. She tragically starved herself to death or was so malnourished that she died. In Gravity and Grace, she does talk about eating in this strange way, as something destructive of the holiness of the world, and the narrator echoes that line. What is it to destroy part of the world to keep myself alive? What does it mean to do that? And if something is so powerful that it can give you life, should it be something we just destroy by eating? And of course, there’s the idea of transubstantiation there. The bread literally turns into our body. Should we do that?
I reread Gravity and Grace recently. The influence from Weil can also be seen in the difference between Rainer and the narrator. Rainer is still trying to live with his older Aristotelian-Thomist metaphysics that is impossible in the disenchanted world of Lutheranism. The narrator is looking for some re-enchantment, but not in that old way. There’s line from Simone Weil where she says, “God can only be present in creation under the form of an absence.” This is a bit like Adorno’s inverse theology, and is more the path the narrator takes. By looking for absences, you will see the presence of God in creation. Or not by looking explicitly for absences, but by paying careful attention to what is there, the absences will emerge in its inverse. And that plays back into the obsession with things and menial tasks and the everydayness of the world. It’s in those things and in the absences that they reveal that the narrator finds some sacredness or enchantment—divineness. Not in the flame of the fire, but in the empty gap between it and the wood. I think my narrator is clearly not as afflicted as Weil was. When you read Weil, she writes about affliction a lot, and also about love. The detachment of my narrator is maybe a cop-out in that sense, not as committed as Weil was to the actual suffering in the world, whether of workers or when she went to fight in the Spanish Civil War. My narrator has the luxury of a more contemplative take on it.
That theology is the inverse image of the world, just as the ice is the inverse image, the negative space, of the earth on which it rests.
Can you expand on your decision to include images in the novel?
Often the writing happened in response to a photograph I had taken, rather than the photograph illustrating the writing. The writing comes afterwards, especially in the case of something like the gray rags. There was a strange piece of machinery that I found on a building site with these incredible gray rags hanging through it, and the abstract photograph I took of it prompted the writing. That section is also very influenced by Georges Bataille and what he writes about the formless and formlessness versus the mathematical straitjacket that philosophy wants to put on the world. The image connected with the idea and then led to the writing.
Lots of the photographs are just from walking through the forest here and seeing the strangeness of the trees under the snow as they dissolve into a formlessness against the regularity of the trees. They’re farmed trees. The forest here is not natural. It’s all cut down regularly and grows back up, and the trees are forced to grow straight and tall. So you have this strange regularity of the trees, and the texture of the snow against them is fantastic.
This is an unpublished manuscript that you’ve been sending to interested readers. Do you have a plan to publish it?
We come back to method is a digression. Is there a plan? There’s a digressive plan. It is an unpublished manuscript that has been printed up in limited editions. I like to make exchanges. I will send it to someone, and they can send me a book or an artwork in response. No money needs to change hands. I want to read their book. Hopefully, they want to read mine. But if someone read it and wanted to publish it, then I would be more than happy for it to take another form, another path. Actually, I put yours in the post just the other day, so it’s on the way. And if people read this and want a copy, they can write to me.
Dead Ice is available from Liam Sprod.
Liam Sprod is a writer and photographer. He holds a PhD in philosophy from Kingston University London, and has lived, worked, and studied in Australia, the UK, and Sweden (where he is currently based). Previous writings—including philosophical, literary, and exhibition catalogue texts—have been published by Zero Books, Mimesis International, Kungliga Konsthögskolan, Lydgalleriet, TACO!, Peter Lang, Adelaide Central Gallery, and 3am Magazine, among others. He can be contacted via Bluesky: @liamsprod.bsky.social
Cristina Politano is a writer from New Jersey. Her essays and fiction appear in Identity Theory, The Dodge, and La Piccioletta Barca, among other places. Twitter/X and Instagram/BlueSky: @monalisavitti.
minor literature[s] 