For 25 years Jens Bjørneboe was a center of unrest in Norwegian cultural life: Passionately concerned with contemporary problems in nearly all their aspects, controversial and with the courage to be so, with a conscious will to carry things to extremes. He was not to be pigeonholed. He dropped in on many philosophical and political movements, but couldn't settle down in any of them. He was a wanderer, always traveling on in search of what was for him the truth -- and he was a free man, in that he always ruthlessly followed his innermost intentions. Perhaps he could say, like Kierkegaard, that "subjectivity is truth," for he knew no other guide than his personal conviction and his own impulses -- but he related not merely to himself; his deepest concern was society and the person in society. His subjective grasp always involved the totality.
Jens Bjørneboe made his debut as a poet (1951), and from the very first moment showed himself a mature and confident artist. But the lyric form soon became too narrow for him, the problems of contemporary life were pressing and demanded greater elbow room than poetry could give him. And it was as a novelist that he gradually came to have his most marked influence. He wrote some 15 novels, every one an attack on central problems. His first novel, Ere the Cock Crows, was a description of the "scientific" experiments which German doctors performed on prisoners in the concentration camps; his second novel, Jonas, was a bitter and merciless indictment of the Norwegian school system. Later he took up the Quisling trials (Under a Sterner Heaven) and the prison system (The Evil Shepherd), to name just some of the problem areas he went into. But his most significant influence as a novelist came with his trilogy about "the history of bestiality" -- Moment of Freedom, Powderhouse, and The Silence -- and with his last novel, The Sharks, one of the most important novels of recent years. In addition Jens Bjørneboe gradually became an exciting dramatist, whose plays The Bird-Lovers and Semmelweis attracted attention abroad as well. His plays too expressed his passionate engagement; the same applies to his essay collections. It is an almost rabidly tireless production which now is ended.
One of the most distinctive things about Jens Bjørneboe's literary career -- it applies to nearly everything he wrote -- was his enormous knowledge both of the contemporary situation and of history. In his historical outlook he was from the first moment a "European", with a breadth and a perspective which are rare among us hillbillies. He had the ability to see the great lines in intellectual history; I daresay both this and his pedagogical insight and thinking he owed first and foremost to his long association with Steiner and anthroposophy, which also sharpened his eye for human worth and potential. His unrest and his will to truth drove him to a break here, a break which in the eyes of many made of him another person.
But I believe there was a clear logic in his development. His view of the human creature and its worth he preserved, and it is that which forms the basic pattern in everything he wrote. But the hard realities of the war and the postwar era forced his perception of reality to break out of a too pale and narrow idealism. He saw ever more clearly how the forces within the individual and in society continually debased human worth in the cruelest fashion; and this recognition gradually left its mark not only on his political vision, but also on his view of history.
Some have reproached him because in his trilogy he positively gorged on the history of human cruelty, simply collecting and cataloguing bestialities. Not only are such critics hiding from the fact that it is reality he writes about; they overlook the deep, nerve-racking, apocalyptic despair which lay at the bottom. For these books, like the rest of Bjørneboe's work, are in fact a desperate protest against the way people in their blind terror destroy each other -- and his despair grew all the greater because he saw how little it availed to protest, it seemed to him as if humankind was stubbornly preparing its own destruction. And the deep seriousness and the somber vision which characterize so much of what he wrote are due to the fact that he couldn't refrain from staring into these spectacles of humankind's stupid unsuspecting self-abasement.
In Moment of Freedom he formulated a sentence which could stand as a motto over most of his work: "Of course there's only one thing which counts when it comes to books -- and that is, whether they're written on the island of Patmos." On that island where John wrote his apocalypse about this confused human world's destruction -- but where there also shimmers a vision of "a new heaven and a new earth, where righteousness dwelleth".
This double vision drove the unquiet heart which now is stilled.
©1976 by Carl Fredrik Engelstad. Used by permission of Vibeke Engelstad. English translation ©1997 by Esther Greenleaf Mürer