Atle Evje, quot;Jens Bjørneboe: '...det er jo lyrikker jeg egentlig er.'" From Frihet! Sannhet!, ed. Yngvild Risdal Otnes (Oslo: Pax, 1977), 131-153. ©1977 by Pax Forlag A/S. Used by permission. English translation ©1999 by Esther Greenleaf Mürer
Bjørneboe's tragic understanding of reality and his fascination with the past were interpreted as irreconcilable with socialism's future-oriented objective. Bertolt Brecht, as we know, maintained the opposite from Bjørneboe—i.e. that the tragic picture of reality is false. Brecht's world is precisely a world which can be healed, which can bechanged. As we shall see, in this area too Brecht served as a fruitful corrective to Bjørneboe's onesidedness.
In his poetry from the sixties—chiefly song texts for the musical plays Many Happy Returns and The Bird-Lovers—the social criticism is formulated more directly than before. The high-flown poems of the fifties gradually slide more and more over toward the popular song, characterized by melodrama, comedy, apparently grotesque and naive scenes. Not least Brecht taught Bjørneboe to use poetry as an element in social-critical plays. Bjørneboe's song elements are not actually Verfremdung (distancing) effects in the Brechtian sense. For Brecht the distancing effect was a means to break down the reigning bourgeois ideology, as it found expression in the Aristotelian, Ibsenian theater. The song elements were supposed to arouse the public's critical awareness, thereby jolting the audience out of its emotional involvement. Bjørneboe's song texts are more a general intensifying of the play's message.
The songs are most often used as a contrast to the situation they are placed in. Bjørneboe himself says of them in the program to Many Happy Returns: "They don't carry the action forward, but shed light on it—from a vantage point which is distant from, or even opposed to, the process on the stage." (11) Brecht's model was the popular songs from the marketplaces and the public park theaters in the Augsburg of his childhood. The direct, "naked" language which characterizes Bjørneboe's song texts also came down to him via Brecht. It is in many ways a wholly new poet we are dealing with in the sixties. But as we shall see, he is by no means without ties leading back to the preceding decade.
Bjørneboe, more than anyone else in this country, was the forerunner of the fighting, left-wing radical cabaret. Armed with irony and satire he launched an attack on "the pillars of society". When the prison director in Many Happy Returns sings his song "Respect for the Law", it flays the authoritarian court- and penal system:
Thou shalt not the law defy
Thou shalt love the law's command
Know the law comes from on high
Know the law is in God's hand!Show respect for regulations
All are equal for the law
If God's given you a prisoner
He craves silence evermore.Policemen go in gangs to bludgeon
An eye for an eye the law's demanding
If God's given you a truncheon
He will give you understanding!If God's given you a truncheon
He will give you understanding. (Tr. Janet Garton)
And the class society in Norway! Who has exposed it with greater, more righteous indignation than Jens Bjørneboe? That the power of society's rulers is built on the exploitation of others, he knows. In the song "The Soldier's Lot" we meet the stratified society, the exploiters against the exploited. The song which is put in the mouth of the "criminal" Tonnie, describes the place of the soldier, the thief and the whore in the class society:
We toil until daybreak
from evening's first yellow
in the filth of society's
commercial bordello.While fences and pimps
and bishops go free,
the rest of us end
in the slammer, you see!We sting for the pleasures
the rest of them sneak
in society's great big
sewer-boutique.
In poem after poem he unmasks the class society's self-defense—a defense which is based on such authoritarian power apparatuses as prison, courts, reform schools, the clergy, and for that matter pacifying drugs. Both directly and indirectly the chaplain in the play serves as the disseminator of "the opiate of the people"; his role is both to produce ideology and to dispense tranquilizers. Both functions serve to expose the conflict of interests in the society. In the play the chaplain and Tonnie sing The Psychodorm Song together while continually eating from the chaplain's pillbox:
A gift of God is Psychodorm,
A strength and consolation.
It keeps you in good working form
Whate'er your call or station.
This little pill right here,
Take it against all fear;
It makes your pulse decrease
And brings you inner peace—
It is our strength and solace.
In the Marxist sense the social criticism in The Bird Lovers involves a broadening of perspective compared to the preceding play, Many Happy Returns. This comes out in the song texts as well. Now it is the economic power relations which are exposed. In this musical, former Nazi executioners turn up as bird lovers. With their German marks they now want, twenty years later, to create a vacation paradise out of the Italian village Torre Rosse. How the Nazi past still lives in money-stinking West Germany is shown in the "SS Fight Song". The play's Nazis, Greifenklau and Schulze, still have the song fresh in their memory. As we see, Bjørneboe has not been sparing in the use of macabre effects:
Heil Hitler in our fatherland!
Across all lands and borders!
Women in the prison camps
have breasts as big as mortars!We've mastered just the way to deal
with hateful human races.
Gas is cheap, the soap looks real,
and fire destroys the traces. nbsp; (Tr. Timothy Schiff)
Bjørneboe shows in The Bird Lovers that he has not psychologized to death the understanding of Nazism as a political phenomenon to as great a degree as most Norwegian writers. How Nazism expresses fundamental needs of the capitalist form of production, Bjørneboe has laid bare with a clarity which far surpasses the cognitive frame of writers such as Sigurd Hoel and Kåre Holt. We shall look more closely at other verses of the bird lovers' Hymn to the Fatherland
In fields like iron and pharmacy
we've earned a name for goods of class,
With Krupp's and Bayer's industry,
And crematoria and gas!Our ovens are built with quality:
They'll never leave a trace of meat.
The experts of the world agree:
Our furnaces cannot be beat.(new melody)
It is amazing what our people do:
Obedient, industrious, persistent!
Though Goethe's countrymen have faults, it's true,
the output of our ovens is consistent!
(Tr. Timothy Schiff)
It is ironically enough the big German monopolies to which the patriotic consciousness is tied. In just a few stanzas we have a sketch of a primer on how capitalist Germany used national socialism to further its own interest. Germany's defeat in 1945 hardly stands for Bjørneboe as any change in system. The power relations in the new Germany are not fundamentally different from conditions before the war.
An ahistoric Germany complex in Bjørneboe seems at times to overshadow a more demystified, Marxist understanding. His tendency to regard Germany and the Germans as history's villains out of an almost timeless law of nature, has been regarded by some as racial prejudice. In the poem "The Democrats" (1967) it says:
And since then twenty years have passed
with only democrats:
Now on Germany's ripened fields
a million soldiers stand!For what you sow on well-tilled plains
Always will grow out:
When German farmlands smell of spring,
the bayonets will sprout!
Such a generalization of guilt for the war's horrors, such a derailing of guilt by pointing to indwelling human nature, we find too in several of the song texts in The Bird Lovers. In Mea Maxima Culpa we read of the relation between guilt and responsibility:
Ask me about guilt! A horrible word!
We share guilt in everything, rest assured.
We all must lower our heads in shame:
For the sins of one, we are all to blame.
(Tr. Timothy Schiff)
Nonetheless the play is in the last analysis a teaching piece about economic forces as history's most important driving force. As the priest Piccolino in The Bird-Lovers puts it: "The world is ruled by typewriters, police and money. But the greatest of the three is money, for he who has money, he also has the police. Money can move mountains."
The religious Bjørneboe from the fifties is still just as glowing, even if the poetry's social-critical content has been intensified. If we look at the song texts from the two musicals we have discussed, almost half of the song lyrics express religious attitudes in one sense or another. From Caruso in "The Recognition Song" we come up against the following outburst, after he has recognized the German bird-lovers as former Nazi judges and torturers:
O great God who dwells in heaven!
O Jesus, Mary, Marx and Lenin!
Of course Bjørneboe's leftist-radical engagement on the one hand, and his clearly expressed metaphysical attitude on the other, was bound to provoke puritans in all camps, wherever people want systematic order in the ranks of thought. This applies not least to Marxists, who would prefer to keep their path clear of metaphysical weeds. It is interesting to note that Caruso's outburst was cut in the Polish version of The Bird Lovers. In an article Bjørneboe later wrote about the production of the piece by the Odin Theater, he makes the criticism that one of the central ideas in the musical was deleted "because it offends Lenin's memory to stand in the same verse as Mary and Jesus. On my part the juxtaposition was made consciously. The intervention from outside does violence to the play's idea, to its form of irony, and to its form of ambiguity." (12)
The use of religious/biblical material now occurs often in new and unexpected contexts which are clearly distinct from the religious poetry of the fifties. In the "Baltazaar Song" (Portuguese lullaby, 1967) the story from the book of Daniel about the tyrant Belshazzar, son of Nebuchadnezzar, is linked directly to one of his modern political counterparts: Portugal's dictator Salazar. By tying the Belshazzar legend to Salazar's name, the song acquires a concrete target. Bjørneboe no longer contents himself with merely retelling the biblical legend, but now uses it in connection with a current political situation:
( . . . )Maria, bid our heavenly father
help us in our need!
Work God's miracle with Salazar
and let us see him dead!O virgin mother in the heaven
strengthen us in our faith:
Work God's miracle yet again
And let us see his blood!
The clergy and the institutionalized church naturally get kicked around quite a bit during the two decades. Bjørneboe is absolutely not without ties leading back to the tradition of criticizing church and clergy which the great writers in the 1870s and 1880s and the cultural radicals in our own century stood for. The play Many Happy Returns is particularly rich in clerical comedy, but then of course it was Helge Krog who was midwife to the figure of the chaplain. (13)
Still, the criticism of clergy and church do not hinder Bjørneboe from expressing a religious understanding of reality as a complete matter of course. One of the many poems which give space to such attitudes is Flowers for Genet (Hommage à Jean Genet), from Many Happy Returns. Can one imagine anything more devout—and more lovely—than these stanzas:
Maria, mother of all affliction
Name our names in your benedictions
We're all bearing crowns of thorns
We are, each one, sons of yours.( . . . )
Thieves, whores and Genet
We hanging one side and the other
Of your son on afflictions' tree
Know what the world's savior suffers.Virgin mother, only we
Know what the cup of mercy means:
The coronal thorns turn to roses. nbsp; (Tr. Joe Martin)
In the forward to the collection Ashes, Wind and Earth Bjørneboe expresses the view that there is an inner connection between the poet and the worker in genres like the novel, the essay and the play. In this anthology his poetic works from the fifties and sixties are arranged from a sense of contemporaneity. It was not his intention to show a "steady, logical, peaceful poetic development." Such labeling would in any case be no more than empty literary-critical convention. The most obvious contradiction in what he has written since his debut in 1951 he describes as "the tension between a strongly introverted, decidedly metaphysical leaning on the one hand—and an equally strongly extroverted, polemic and documentary, 'socially engaged' and indeed revolutionary attitude on the other. For me there is no real dichotomy in these two extremes, and I have had no wish to erase the contradiction."
It appears that in his poetry the metaphysician and the social critic Bjørneboe have had a meeting place in both these decades. What is fundamentally new in the poetry from the sixties is in the truest sense neither the linguistic nor the formal reorientation, but the broadening of perspective which the social criticism has received. Now it is no longer enough to point to metaphysics as a problem solver for the growing hegemony of rationalism and economics in postwar Norway. The poetry shows that his aversion to society's reigning ideology has now become a far more concrete and goal-directed rebellion, tied to barrier-breaking political demands. We can think of his attacks on the court and penal system, the attacks on the authorities and financial power and the indirect rebellion which lies in solidarity with the victims of fascism in its various guises.
Social criticism in Bjørneboe is usually more leftist-radical than socialist- and Marxist based. While the Marxist understanding of society can point to strategies for action for how the barrier-breaking demands can be achieved, radicalism is ambiguous. Of course it can raise demands whose fulfillment will threaten the existence of the class state, but it doesn't show how the demands can be fulfilled. Bjørneboe never became socially knowledgeable in that sense. His contribution was not that of the pathfinder. But through his extensive writings—including his poetry—he had a radicalizing, consciousness-raising and formative effect on his environment like no other Norwegian writer since the war. If one were to apply the cliché "barometer of the times" to a writer, it is doubtful whether anyone deserves the title more than Bjørneboe. In an obituary of Bjørneboe Martin Nag wrote: "He was in himself a cultural revolution. With all his inner contradictions he was perhaps the writer from the 1950s to the 1970s who best of all—and with the greatest talent—mirrored late capitalism's crisis in Norway . . . " (14)
It is through his poetry that we get to know the contradiction-filled Bjørneboe best. As a poet he has exposed himself most. Here his contradictions stand out not only most clearly, but also most thrillingly.
This page added May 29, 1999; revised August 1999
11. Reprinted in Jens Bjørneboe. Til lykke med
dagen (Oslo 1965). Back
12. Jens Bjørneboe. "Om Odin-teatrets
adaptasjon av Fugleelskerne." Vi som elsket Amerika (Oslo:
Pax, 1970). Back
13. Information found in the epilogue to Jens
Bjørneboe, Til lykke med dagen (Oslo 1965). Back
14. Martin Nag. "Jens Bjørneboe—den
kontroversielle, Kruttårnet er ikke mer". Universitas no. 9/10, 4
September 1976. Back