Powderhouse: scientific afterword and last protocolFrom the publisher
From the Norwegian critics
From Keeper of the Protocols by Joe
Martin
Comment by the author
Reviews
Excerpts and related pages on this site
Powderhouse is the second volume in a Trilogy which also includes Moment of Freedom and The Silence.
Published in Norway in 1969 and now available in English for the first time, Jens Bjørneboe's Powderhouse continues to explore the themes set forth in Moment of Freedom, the first novel in his History of Bestiality trilogy: What is the nature of the evil inherent in the human rase and why does man behave so inhumanly to his fellow man.
The story—which is really an anti-story, as this is an anti-novel—is told by Jean, a janitor in a mental hospital in southern France. Just as the narrator in Moment of Freedom did, Jean keeps protocols, keeps for himself a written record of those events occurring around him. Also in the hospital are a strange cast of characters: Dr. Lefèvre, the chief physician and Jean's drinking companion, and his Algerian assistant, al Assadun; Ilya, a Russian nurse and anarchist; a French nurse, Christine, who becomes Jean's lover; Lacroix, a professional executioner who is suicidal; Fontaine, a Belgian sex murderer; Dr. Báthory, a wealthy Hungarian who served with the German SS; an American general who killed his Black maid; and the wife of the Russian Ambassador, who is having an affair with the general and has a habit of howling like a wolf.
The plot, which is akin to a mystery or espionage potboiler, revolves around the execution-like hanging death at the hospital of Dr. Báthory. Any of the characters could have done it.
It's hospital policy that everyone can give a lecture and a large portion of the book is taken up with three lectures: the narrator talks about witch symptomatology; Lacroix offers up a powerful, Foucault-like piece on the history of execution, executioners, and capital punishment; and Dr. Lefèvre discusses heresy and heretics.
Yet, despite its gruesome subject, Powderhouse does not depress, for it is narrated by a man who loves life, with all his senses open to the warmth of a summer night, the tastes of food and wine, the silky skin of his lover. Just like the narrator of Moment of Freedom who strives to live his own moment of truth, whatever brief moments of ecstasy Jean can grasp in this world of pain, suffering, and madness, he grasps with both hands.
Despite all its indisputable documentation, Powderhouse is not an "objective" book.
It is written by a passionate, nerve-racked man on the edge of despair, by a seer whose eyes are
on the verge of exploding from what he sees, by a mind with an unusual capacity for vibration,
with the courage of desperation but at the same time with an unquenchable longing for warmth,
life, abundance of meaning in an apparently absurd, nay utterly insane world. The book is borne
by a passion which transcends the objective, it engages the intellect but at the same time the
emotions, in the writer and thereby in the readers, in a way which bursts boundaries.
—Carl
Fredrik Engelstad in Aftenposten, 1969
Powderhouse has many descriptions of meals and other kinds of sensuality.
Beautiful sex scenes. These are often placed just after descriptions of the worst murders and
executions. And that is precisely the point. Water and wine, sex and joy: the hedgehog's quest
for moisture and human mating cannot and must not be divorced from evil and violence. Both
are part of life. This must be understood as an attempt to be reconciled with the world, accept
the reality so as to be able to live with it, perhaps master it. The narrator from Moment of
Freedom has given up his withdrawal, he no longer tries to forget the wickedness.
Therefore evil and beauty side by side.
—Jahn Thon in
Profil, 1979
From Keeper of the Protocols by Joe Martin:
The boundaries which define our conception of what a novel is are forced to expand or even dissolve under the pressure of texts such as this one, in which so many conflicts in style, form and content are held between two covers.
Lacroix's long lecture...could well be the most potent literary case to be made against capital punishment in any language.
I don't know myself what genre it belongs to.... Strictly speaking, everything I write is both essay and attempt, experiment. I think it has to be that way, so that I don't get into a rut, don't stagnate. At the same time Powder is also decidedly a piece of polemics. Yet it has its very strong, purely poetic element. But there is one thing it is not, namely a psychological novel about the middle class's daily (and nightly) problems.
A wonderfully bizarre cast of characters (including LSD-tripping Dr. Lefèvre) weave in and out of the three "lectures" that vividly express this novel's (and, one infers, the trilogy's) commanding theme: the varieties of man's inhumanity to man throughout the 20th century.... A work of striking originality and integrity. —Kirkus Reviews
The protagonist-narrator of Bjørneboe's book is self-exiled from Norway. He is the garbage collector and the confidant of every staff member and patient at a French asylum for the criminally insane. Maybe he is also an inmate. A little plot stems from two suicide attempts, one unsuccessful (the man's slit throat is patched up in a giddy, William S. Burroughs-like surgery scene) and the other really a murder. So whodunit, and how will the police be bribed to cover it up? Those questions are less important than the book's reflections on humanity's cruelty and destruction in a world of paradisiacal beauty that is, for all we know, the only world there is. Three long lectures—the protagonist's on witch killing, the unsuccessful suicide's on public executions, and the asylum director's on the historic murderousness of the Christian churches—and a Russian character's dissection of homicidal Soviet Communism are the meat of a Dostoevskian book that exudes tolerance, especially of sex, and forgiveness of individual criminal compulsions while it questions the freedom to wreak carnage. —Ray Olson in Booklist
La Poudrière, or the Powderhouse, is an old munitions storehouse in Alsace that has been converted into a private mental hospital. Ivan/Jean/Jochanaan, narrator of this polemical novel (his name varies according to the nationality of the person speaking to him) is, apparently, employed at the hospital as a janitor, on hiatus from a more cosmopolitan world; he may also be a patient. The hospital is run by Doctor Lefèvre, whose methods—he drops acid egrave;with Ivan, for instance—are unorthodox but plausible in the late 1960s. Lefèvre's patients include a Russian diplomat's wife who howls like a wolf; an American general who is a racist and a psychotic killer; and a Belgian executioner, Lacroix. Another patient, a Hungarian mercenary, is found hanging from a tree on the grounds. Though it first it seems he has committed suicide, it later becomes clear that he was murdered, but the murderer's identity is never revealed. Instead of focusing on plot, Bjørneboe structures the book around three lectures. Ivan's lecture is a chapter from his work in progress, The History of Bestiality, which takes witch hunts as examples of the legitimization of atrocities in the modern era, identifying a strain of authoritarianism common to Luther, Calvin and Lenin. More interesting than Ivan's easy nihilism is Lacroix's speech, in which he describes the difficulty of executing humans painlessly. Even the guillotine, according to Lacroix, can't guarantee the immediate cessation of sentience. In the third lecture, Lefèvre examines the nature of heresy. Ivan's dark worldview is lightened, just barely, by his affair with Christine, a nurse. Originally published in Norway in 1969, the novel, the second in a trilogy built loosely around the narrator, exudes the intermittently charming hippie disaffection of the '60s. —Publisher's Weekly
Trilogy |
Moment of Freedom |
The Silence
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