Øyvind Gulliksen is professor of American studies at Telemark College in Norway.Øyvind Gulliksen, "Bjørneboe og Amerika." Norsk Litterær Årbok 1976, ed. Leif Mæhle (Oslo: Det Norske Samlaget, 1976): 157-170. ©1976 by Det Norske Samlaget. Used by permission. English translation ©1999 by Esther Greenleaf Mürer.For a brief account of Bjørneboe's role in changing Norwegian attitudes toward America in the 1960s, see the excerpt from the author's article Tunnel of Love: American Influences on Norwegian Culture on this site.
Jens Bjørneboe belongs to those Norwegian writers who, since the end of the Second World War, have been trying to sort out their own relationship to America. The reckoning builds on a feeling that America has become a part of our own everyday life, and that we are no longer tied to America merely by memories of emigration and the war against the Nazis. For Bjørneboe, America is a part of our own wavering souls, a power we regard with both hope and horror, a dreamland and a nightmare.
America therefore plays a central role in Bjørneboe's books. The following is an attempt to clarify the fluctuations and the constants in Bjørneboe's conception of America, and what they mean for his art. The central idea of freedom in Bjørneboe becomes even clearer if one views it in connection with the image he seems to have of America. Even if none of his novels takes place in America, he uses the novels, and even more often his essay collections, to set forth his views on America. An account of how he uses America or American material in his books will make it easier to interpret his writings.
In this country Bjørneboe has taken part in mediating the critique of recent American policy ever since the early 1960s. It is clear that his pen becomes sharper as the war in Southeast Asia escalates, but the reckoning with America is not easy for Bjørneboe. It is certainly no fashionable programmatic agitation, but a state of love which is abruptly and tragically shattered. The break is made all the more difficult, and his disappointment over developments all the greater, by the fact that he once loved the country so much. "I myself am one of those who have really loved America, and I know how it feels." (1) These thoughts are expressed most clearly in the article "We who loved America" (1966), which was later reprinted in the book of the same name. When an author chooses to use the title of an article as the name of a whole book, that choice is not purely accidental. In the first place, Bjørneboe is convinced that it is not only he who has acquired a different view of America. Secondly, the essay sets the tone for all the articles in the collection, even if they do not deal with America directly.
Bjørneboe's love for America was—as is true of other Norwegians—based on contact with relatives and a belief in the ideal of freedom and liberal traditions. America was in a way the nearest and most important foreign country. The Servant of Justice in Moment of Freedom has been to America, a visit which is one of his to his fondest memories—and of those, truth to tell, he doesn't have very many. Right up to the Second World War, America still stood for Bjørneboe as "a kind of symbol of all that guaranteed the human freedoms which make life worth living" [V 22]. And this bright tone is never quite abandoned, even if in his discussion of modern America—judging from Powderhouse—he turns more and more bitter, more ironically cold and hopeless. Bjørneboe remains convinced that under Nazism and Stalinism America was "the bright point in the world, seemingly the land of the normal—corrupt and criminalized, to be sure, but big and open and broad-minded, the land of freedom and future." [V22] It is the Americans who arrived at the end of Ere the Cock Crows, the first book Bjørneboe wrote, to put a stop to the Nazi experiments with people or to the inhuman forces on the whole. But later this changes, and in Powderhouse there has been a switch in roles. Here the American is the half-mad villain who has had to be removed from society and put in the madhouse. When Bjørneboe republishes his debut book in 1967, he believes that by then the political conditions have become such that it is the Americans' fault that Ere the Cock Crows is still relevant! (2)
Of himself Bjørneboe says that it must have been some time in the fifties that his love for America was extinguished.
A love can begin suddenly and violently, but it dies slowly, little by little. I can't say for sure when it was, but one day it was clear to me that I no longer loved the United States. [V22]
He embarks on a serious reflection about how the inhumane use of violence, camouflaged with idealism, is becoming an American problem. It appears with full strength later, when the last vestiges of his dream of an American paradise collapse with the Vietnam War, for it was above all Vietnam which caused us to lose "our illusions about American ideals" [V21].
It is primarily the political circumstances which cause Bjørneboe to stand forth as a prophet of doom. From being the symbol of freedom, America suddenly turns into a triggering factor in the writer's distinctive apocalyptic. "America had become dangerous, frightening, sinister." [V22] It cannot be denied that Bjørneboe becomes harsh and categorical in his critique of America. In his reckoning he chooses what he wants to say, what he thinks has the strongest effect, and uses it mercilessly.
As is well known, Bjørneboe has written much on what he thinks about Europe and European history. It is our own part of the world, and how people have lived with, tortured, plagued and killed each other here, which has chiefly occupied his imagination in recent years. But such a focus is not without its effect on his view of America. In an earlier essay ["The Fear of America Within Us," 1952] Bjørneboe had compared the Christian idea of brotherhood in Europe with the American ideal of freedom, and was bold enough to express a wish for a synthesis, in which Europe acquires the ideal of freedom from America. [N221] Only later did the dream of the Christian Europe begin to fade for him. European history seemed to be one long series of murders, destruction, and persecution of those who should have been our brothers. Compared with such a Europe, America looked better; for ideally America did not share such a tradition. America was originally a hope for something better, a dream of an end to all repression.
The writer thus has great difficulty letting go of the thought of America's original innocence, despite having to such a great degree turned away from America as he experiences it in his own time. He gets around this difficulty by saying that at bottom the modern America cannot be said to be "America" in the positive meaning of the word. There is the official present-day America which is guilty of un-American activities: It was the "militarists who were un-American. It was the FBI which was un-American. It was the Pentagon which was un-American. It was a series of presidents who acted un-American." [P238] Neither do conditions in Vietnam reflect that which one really calls American. Since the early America can best be viewed as a break with Europe, Bjørneboe now sets up a link between the new fallen America and the terrifying old Europe which he has dragged out of the dark. In The Silence, accordingly, the biggest sections concern Cortez in Mexico, Pizarro in Peru, and the Green Berets in Vietnam.
Thus America has betrayed itself and become comparable to a sick Europe. Modern American politics are absolutely not "American," in Bjørneboe's opinion, "but merely a continuation of the rawest, most stupid and most dangerous European politics of violence and power from time immemorial" [P 238]. For this side of his critique of America he has taken much material from the historian David Horowitz. (3)
Yet behind his critique lies a striking ambivalence toward America—an uncertainty, a love-hate attitude which becomes clearer if one sets it in a historic framework, moving from America as ideal to America as praxis. The America which carried through its revolutionary battle against the English colonial masters in the 1770s still gets positive mention in The Silence [S 42]. It is simply an irony of history that the United States will now, according to Bjørneboe, fight a desperate battle to the death when the revolution comes [S 5].
The changes in Bjørneboe's view of America are thus grounded in what he believes are changes in American society. But Bjørneboe's wavering attitude to America has yet another reason besides the purely historical. Later in this presentation I shall discuss why I believe this ambiguity is related to the central concepts of freedom to which Bjørneboe continually returned. First it must be said that not only is Bjørneboe categorically negative to modern American politics, but that he also to a great degree blames America for the whole frightening picture he presents of modern mercantile and synthetic culture.
In the essay collection Norway, My Norway Bjørneboe finds it appropriate to call the fourth section "America." So now America requires its own place in a book about Norway and Norwegian problems. The reason is that America—or "Americanism"—has for good or ill become a part of ourselves, a great and amorphous part which we can no longer grasp. It is this phenomenon which he calls, in one of his essays, "the fear of America within us." It is not just an outer quality, but also a kind of inner neurotic state, an anxiety which belongs to the everyday, but at bottom lies in the unconscious. America has now become a part of our identity, and the fear of America is a fear of ourselves.
Bjørneboe thinks that the fear of dying, the attempt to gloss over death, is a modern American phenomenon. To the American citizen death is meaningless:
Death is an uninvited guest, whose arrival can be prevented with the aid of refrigerators and illustrated magazines ... The fear of death is the great night overshadowing the American paradise. [N 213f]
If we can't see that we shall die, then neither are we free. The dead are beautified and injected with fragrant perfume and thus conducted into a sugar-sweet heaven. But—Bjørneboe adds ironically—if the American neglects death, at least he knows what life is: "it is canned pineapple." Life is a can of pineapple and death doesn't exist. They put a layer of
pink plastic color over it all; for under us, behind us, off the dance floor, outside the neon light, the Meaningless One lies in wait! Death, the only true snake in the paradise. [N 215]Rightly or wrongly, Bjørneboe blames the Americans for the commercialization of all movements within the the arts. The Art Center at Høvikodden is a good example of how money buys the jester or the artist, confirms his function, and sets its price on him. For Bjørneboe the Art Center is not only the incarnation of meaningless and expensive American indolence, but an example of how capitalism lays bare its economic exploitation through an artificial and secondary art industry. [V 178]
Since Bjørneboe believes that life can never be measured by technical progress, modern space travel becomes the fatally perfect example of a witless belief in technique. Like Marcuse, Bjørneboe is afraid that technology will create humanity in its own image, and that, in a highly developed and irrational—that means inhumane—industrial society, people will no longer be free; and, like Marcuse, Bjørneboe most often uses examples from America when pointing to such a danger. (4)
The American has a need to subdue space, to conquer the forces of nature; but underneath lies the fear of the endless cosmos, of space which has no boundary, of a "frontier" no one can control. When one realizes how anonymous one's position is in such a universe, says Bjørneboe, one experiences a "metaphysical shock [which] is itself the mark of this generation." [N 126]
But life on the earth's crust can be just as insane. It is worth noting here that Bjørneboe forms his thoughts about life and culture in America in a way which strongly recalls Henry Miller. In Miller's book The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (1945), we find almost the same criticism: Neither art nor artists can thrive and succeed in America, where everything revolves in ever widening circles around the golden calf. Money corrupts, technology does not create better human beings, the machine culture and the military arms buildup are destroying the individual and society, and there is no dearth of criminals among the upholders of law and order. But Miller's critique, like Bjørneboe's, actually contains more sorrow than hatred. For what could America not have become if the country had developed in positive directions! (5)
In the novel Powderhouse, Bjørneboe writes about the use of violence in America from approximately the same perspective as Miller. When the caretaker in the madhouse hears about America, gruesome pictures of the execution of criminals are what stick in his mind. He is witness to an intentionally factual and documentary, but nonetheless gruesome, account of the penal system in America, of the electric chair as symbol of "a culture which is, above all, hygienic." (K 167). It is clear that the discussion of America has changed since Ere the Cock Crows: Now it is suddenly the ideal which, by reducing a human being to a case, commits a crime against him.
In Powderhouse the lunatic asylum becomes a symbol of our modern world. An American is one of the most prominent patients. He comes from "Coca-Cola Land" and is not meant to be refreshing. He is an American officer, "idiotically" close-cropped and correspondingly short on brains. To be sure, he has been hauled off to the madhouse for the murder of an Asian domestic, but he is clearly to be taken as a representative of the destructive forces in America generally.
The caretaker, or gardener—who is Bjørneboe's own persona in the book—cannot stand the American. But then the officer is an easy target; above all he has no sense of proportion. He scatters around him a baseless, childish faith which keeps growing stronger. He's always whining about his bad conscience, but his penitential exercises have no concrete consequences. The American is pesky and pushes himself forward everywhere. One day he "emptied his whole rotten garbage can of an American conscience over me!" complains the narrator [K 37]. The satire becomes so sharp because, once again, the ideal is so far from the praxis.
One critic has written about how Bjørneboe uses animal symbols to bring out purely human qualities. (6) In Moment of Freedom the Americans belong to the bear family. The Servant of Justice believes that human beings are bears, but the Americans are not of the kindly sort. They are the little bears who killed "Japanese little bears with females and young and unborn." (F 161) Later the Americans are compared with the wolf, a cowardly and bloodthirsty animal. Bjørneboe speaks of this species as an especially dangerous "Homo lupus americanus." [K 95] It is the wolf nature which characterizes America now, and not the free-flying eagle. And lupus americanus is an ugly predator in idealism's white dress.
The Americans are not by nature any more lupine than others. The tragic thing is just that, right now, it is the American officer in Powderhouse who best shows who the wolf is. We must make an accounting with the wolf nature in the American general's interior if we want to escape from the madness, Bjørneboe says. [K 104] He wants to hinder the spread of the wolf nature, for if the wolf becomes the essence of the human in us, how will it go then?
When America believes that the country has a God-given function, this doesn't mean that they can do whatever they like in defense of that belief. Here Bjørneboe points to the sin among human beings which prevents us from living peacefully together. He ironically alters a verse about sin in the epistle to the Romans to read: "Before God we are all Americans." [K 189] They have sinned, and all of us are sinners.
Bjørneboe is convinced that America has hypertrophied and developed an elephantiasis of weapons technology. In a sense it is just as much a result of the contemporary cold war as of anything specifically American. America is merely an example of how creative energy can get too big and turn destructive. Pax Americana is predicated on safeguarding the individual by threatening to destroy him totally.
But in The Silence Bjørneboe draws a picture of "The Nice American." If Powderhouse shows the American who is to blame for Vietnam, in The Silence we meet the American who suffered so much during the conflict that he finally dies as a sacrifice, as an image of the earlier America which Bjørneboe felt tied to from the very beginning and which he does not want to break with. This American also has his weaknesses; like earlier American bohemians, he is in Europe to break taboos he wouldn't dare touch in America. But he is a good person at bottom. With an open hand he doles out money and food to the hungry youngsters in the small African coastal town where he has settled down. Unfortunately he takes to lavishing his gifts when it is too late. The children exploit him, run after him, demand more and more, until finally they kill him. The allegory is clear enough.
The Nice American has been in Vietnam, but he has escaped and without incurring damage to his soul. So he is not a Homo lupus americanus, but has taken leave of modern America by using the American citizen's right to rebel when the system infringes on human rights.
When Bjørneboe writes finis to his three-volume saga, he knows that humanity is both good and evil—there are both good and ugly Americans, good and evil human beings. The American tragedy, as Bjørneboe sees it, is above all that those who "regard themselves as the born leaders and self-appointed guardians of humanity—these same people once lived precisely for freedom." [N 107]
On the whole, for Bjørneboe it is with America and the Americanism as with Jesus' life and teachings and the saga of the Western Church. The later development of both these institutions is for Bjørneboe a fall from a starting point which was essentially good. And because both America and the Church could have been otherwise, Bjørneboe never tires of his critique and of pointing to the original. Since Bjørneboe's critique of America often seems to be of an idealistic model, little is said about the fact that North American society from the very beginning was a continuance of Western European expansion.
In The Silence Bjørneboe breaks chronological realism and speaks intimately with both God and Columbus, both of whom are depressed and not very happy with developments. First the narrator imagines himself as one of Columbus's men in 1492. Then he converses with a wiser Columbus in the 1970s, and neither of them knows what to think. Columbus laments and says that he shouldn't have discovered America at all.
I should never have gone .... The voyage brought only misfortune and misery in its train. I should never have gone out—but I was young and didn't know what it would lead to. America should never have been discovered. [S 46]
This recalls what Mark Twain wrote in Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar on Columbus Day, October 12: "It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it."
That is how Bjørneboe discusses the condition of America in his books. He alternates between criticism, love, hope and despair. America is for Bjørneboe a symbol of our own situation, a symbol which must be seen in connection with the most important item on his program: freedom.
Bjørneboe sets freedom highest of the human rights, freedom from authority and the pressure of opinion. Therefore he cannot give up America altogether. The difficulty lies in his having once prized America as the very incarnation of the idea of freedom; he was later to reject America, but hold fast to the right to freedom. Here the thought is hidden that freedom can be both wishful dream and nightmare.
The claim to freedom from old authorities and the desire for the right to form one's own life stood high on the list of those who took part in the American experiment. But the various religious sects were often just as intolerant of each other as they were firm in demanding their own freedom, and they slide nicely into place in the bizarre church saga of Bjørneboe. When the Vietnam War is waged on the pretext of defending freedom in the West, freedom is defined by those who have the power and want to ensure that the system doesn't collapse. They are afraid of true freedom. It is this terror of freedom that Bjørneboe calls "The Great Dread," and such a fear is, ironically enough, great in the land which itself holds freedom up as a lofty symbol to those who come in. In Powderhouse Bjørneboe wrote that the fear of freedom came to America in the forties, and that there "the Great Dread became stronger than in any other country." [K 95]
It isn't made entirely clear in his books how Bjørneboe distinguishes between individualism and freedom, but he obviously knows that the thought of freedom can be used as a camouflage by those with the financial power. The doctrine of freedom can in its turn be exploited by big capital, and then freedom becomes a travesty. Then the American dream of liberation from all authority can come to justify wrong, even if, as Bjørneboe indicates, the dream of freedom was the driving force behind the American revolution.
Perhaps it is the economic misuse of the claim to freedom which makes Bjørneboe say that in the last analysis there are only degrees of freedom, and that it is only freedom of expression which brooks no abridgment. Bjørneboe accords America—albeit with misgivings—a place among the nations which permit at least a degree of freedom to speak and think as one will. Writers, judging from Baldwin and Wright, are permitted to criticize to a degree which is not the case in many socialist countries. [V 44]
On the whole it is difficult to say whether the idea of freedom, as Bjørneboe uses it, is of a radical/social or a liberal/individualist character. On the one hand he writes about a broad political liberation, on the other hand about the liberation of the individual from all authority. (7) In his choice of American writers his focus is on the latter theme. Hemingway and Henry Miller can be said to be anarchists, but only on a purely personal plane and without any active social-theoretical program. For Bjørneboe only Thomas Wolfe can compare with these two, in that he too feels that the American appetite for life has one single enemy: death. [ N 214]
Bjørneboe says himself that he has long been and still is an eager reader of American literature. "I read American literature unto swooning." [V 22] American national literature is profitable for Bjørneboe because it is critical toward the society it grows out of.
The earthly America [in contrast to the "heavenly" America, America as ideal?] is a place where thinking and feeling human beings have it worse than anywhere else in the world. One does not need to be a specialist in American literature to arrive at that thought. [N 215]
It is interesting to see that Bjørneboe acknowledges that he is occupied with Hermann Melville and has benefited from him in his work on The Sharks. (8) But there are also many similarities between Moby-Dick and, for example, Moment of Freedom, with regard to both technique and characterization—even if Bjørneboe's book is more episodic and too much of a tract, and the forces of chaos are more politically defined than in Melville.
The narrator of Moment of Freedom, who undertakes to reveal the unpleasant stage setting of the world saga, himself occupies a small and rather anonymous place in the play, in that he isn't even sure of his name. He is both seaman and apolcalypticist. He fantasizes about an strange contrast and unity between angels and whores, and has little that's pretty to say about the missionaries. He himself has seen much of the world's evil on his journey through the land of Chaos, where people have yielded to its power. Still, the land of Chaos is "indescribably lovely." And as he looks back, wiser and more lonely, he cannot always take the world so seriously. Such a type reminds one a great deal of the sailor Ishmael in Moby-Dick. He is fatherless in approximately the same broad perspective as Bjørneboe's thought that "humanity is purely and simply fatherless." (9) That means that he must live in the world without the hope or certainty that a loving God exists.
The Sharks has been linked with Melville several times, by both Bjørneboe himself and the critics. The narrator of The Sharks is, like Ishmael, alone in the world, and both of them feel a dread of, and a pull to, the sea. With a crew from all corners of the earth Melville—and Bjørneboe—sail into a vast universe, with humanity on a small piece of flotsam between the shark-forces beneath them and the starry heaven above. The youngest boy on the Neptune, Pat, experiences this situation in body and soul as he sits alone high on the mast. He cannot stand such loneliness. Like Pip in Moby-Dick, who is for a long time deathly alone on the vast sea, Pat becomes "unclear in the head," and never gets over his dread of death. And under everything swims "the great white shark, which"—like Moby-Dick, the white whale—"looks as if it had been created by Satan himself," while at the same time there is something incredibly beautiful about it [H 62]. The dualism penetrates into the core of existence, even though at one point the narrator speaks of "the same endless, cosmic, spiritual force which lives in the Milky Way ... which is also my own, central self." A transcendental superstructure is something Ishmael failed to achieve.
When Bjørneboe writes in one place that he wishes that someday he may succeed in "writing one single pure and honest and true sentence," (V 158), it is as if cut out of the aesthetic program of Hemingway. Yet it is surely Hemingway's romantic need for freedom which interests Bjørneboe most. His esteem for Hemingway becomes easier to understand if we view the latter in connection with the various meanings in which Bjørneboe uses the concept of freedom. In his praises of Hemingway—and other writers—it is surely as much an inner freedom—freedom as "first and foremost an inner phenomenon" or freedom from the "collective opinion" [N 108] which Bjørneboe prizes. (10) When Hemingway stands out as a rebel against America, Bjørneboe considers that too a hallmark of the quality of his writings. "Lynching of Negroes, violence and murder are Hemingway's picture of America. He hates his homeland more ardently than any other American writer. Only the woods and Black River are different." [P 195] But Hemingway's revolt is not of a political nature, and his heroes who are fighting in Europe aren't sure why they are there or whether they are on the right side. Still, Bjørneboe feels an affinity with Hemingway and Miller, and their apolitical attitude is a dilemma which Bjørneboe does not go into. It is above all their private moral rebellion, their behavioral anarchism, which Bjørneboe finds striking. For Hemingway freedom means primarily artistic individualism; for Miller it means sexual liberation, la vie bohˆme, and the pursuit of happiness.
In his essay "Hemingway and the Beasts," Bjørneboe interprets the hunt motif—or the fight between animal and hunter—in Hemingway as an inner tension between something which hunts and is hunted within the individual. (11) From The Old Man and the Sea Bjørneboe concludes that Hemingway is the writer who has gone farthest out—metaphysically, that is, in his realization of freedom vis-…-vis death and the colossal universe. Bjørneboe's Servant of Justice views every court case, and hence life in general, as a war in which "the last phase is of necessity death." [F 18] How is one to live with such knowledge? That was a question which Hemingway too was forced to ask. However much he hated and defied death, he could never escape it, nor did he deny that the enemy would win at the end. It was just a matter of meeting death according to a definite pattern. And it is above all in the bullfight that Hemingway finds such a ritual. When the fight is nearing the end, it becomes pure death-mysticism, in which for a while we are unable to tell the bull and the matador apart. Bjørneboe's Servant of Justice has been to Spain, where he "was occupied with the bullfight's fine symbolism and sacred mysteries." [F 14] From here, of course, it is not far to Hemingway. The Servant is taken up with the actual moment when the bull must die. It is here he finds the truth or "the moment of freedom." Then he senses "the smell of death which is connected with all truth" [F 11]. The knowledge of death liberates, therefore the knowledge of the enemy-- death -- is "the moment of freedom."
A great liberation results when one learns to come to terms with death. Miller in particular came to the conclusion that mindfulness of death makes it foolish to put limits on the unfolding of life. Bjørneboe cannot let go of Miller's philosophy either. In Powderhouse he goes into what he means by his "crust" philosophy: Humanity lives with insane irrationality on the surface of a globe which is hot as death within and colder than death outside. In an interview Bjørneboe says:
I've developed a kind of crust-mania. Everybody knows that it is deathly cold outside the thin layer of air which surrounds our globe. Everybody knows that it is infinitely hot just under our feet. But nobody comprehends it. The image is purely and simply intolerable. (12)
In an attempt to get out of an impasse one can emulate Miller, and at times Bjørneboe writes as if salvation from metaphysical terror is hidden partly in the sex organs. In Powderhouse he seems almost to conjecture that the cold in the cosmos must be conquered in the sexual act; thus sexual liberation becomes at least as important as libertation in the political and metaphysical spheres. (13) The ideal is found in the hedgehog who rustles around in the garden looking for a mate.
The parallel with Henry Miller was used several times in the case of Without a Stitch, both by those who wanted Bjørneboe convicted and by the author himself. Miller is a type of rebel Bjørneboe is happy to be compared with. He is, says Bjørneboe, a "deeply serious writer." [U 35] That Bjørneboe likes Miller indicates that so long as the desire for freedom ends in song, wine, love, praying to the stars and Dionysus, all is well and good. And Miller's demand for freedom—if Bjørneboe wants to identify with it—is, despite all, very innocent. But what if the "bestial"—which Bjørneboe struggles against—often has its basis in a pure claim to freedom, so that freedom viewed thus may finally become a threat and not a gift?
I will not go so far as to point to a direct contradiction between political and individual freedom here. All the same, Bjørneboe wants to cover his back. He admits that it is easy for the critics to find examples of how he contradicts himself: "Who else should I take the time to contradict?" (14) Political freedom Bjørneboe finds expressed in the American revolution and later in the anarchist movement in America. [P 45] The five anarchists who were executed in the Haymarket case in Chicago toward the end of the last century, and Sacco and Vanzetti in the 1930s, stand for Bjørneboe as the true bearers of the dream of political freedom in America. Hemingway and Miller, on the other hand, are models for individual and artistic freedom. They show how one can get free of the modern American society which misinterprets freedom. That Bjørneboe has changed his view of America is connected with the fact that he has gradually become critical of the liberalism he himself was part of in the fifties; but the way he criticizes America culturally and politically, and the examples he takes from American literature, show that he is at least partly still in line with a liberal cultural tradition.
1. Vi som elsket Amerika (Oslo: Pax, 1970), 22. Back
2. See the afterword to the new edition of Før hanen galer (Ere the cock crows), 1967. Back
3. See David Horowitz, Den kalde krigen (The Cold War) (Oslo: 1964) and USA og den tredje verden, Søkelys på Amerikansk utenrikspolitikk II (The US and the Third World: Spotlight on American Foreign Policy II), 2d. ed (Oslo: 1971), where Bjørneboe has written a very favorable comment on the back cover. Back
4. See Herbert Marcuse, (Det en-dimensjonale menneske. Studier i det avanserte industrielle samfunns ideologi) One-Dimensional Man (1964; Oslo 1968) 22-27. Back
5. See Henry Miller, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (New York: 1945). Back
6. Johanna Schwartz, "Jens Bjørneboes dyrerike", Syn og Segn (1967): 291-310. Reprinted in Frihet! Sannhet! ed. Y. R. Otnes (Oslo: Pax, 1977), 156-177. Back
7. See the conversation with Bjørneboe, "Frihets-forfatteren", Bindestrekken, 12 (March 1972):4-7. In his article on Bjørneboe Mjøset lays great emphasis on the individual liberation. Lars Mjøset, "Frihet! Sannhet! Om Jens Bjørneboes forfatterskap", Vinduet, nr. 4 (1973): 40-49. Reprinted in Frihet! Sannhet! (1977), 50-70. Back
8. "...but I have been particularly occupied with Joseph Conrad and Herman Melville." From a conversation with Bjørneboe in Dagbladet, 14 Jan 1974. He says the same thing to Dagbladet, 21 Oct 1974. [Reprinted in Samtaler med Jens Bjørneboe, ed. Håvard Rem (Oslo: Dreyer, 1987), 193] There he also mentions Jack London. Back
9. For these references see Frihetens øyeblikk 80, 113, 117, 168; and Stillheten, 8. Back
10. He himself modifies his standpoint a bit, and points out how difficult the idea of freedom is: "For the inner freedom cannot be conceived without respect for the other's freedom, my own inner freedom is possible only if I am in a condition to tolerate my neighbor's freedom." (N107) ["Tale til årets russ"] Back
11. See "Hemingway og dyrene" (Hemingway and the Beasts), Politi og Anarki, 194. Back
12. Conversation with Bjørneboe in Nationen, 2 May 1972. Back
13. It points in the same direction when Bjørneboe says he had to write Uten en tråd first before he could get a grip on Moment of Freedom (U34). Back
14. See the foreword to Aske, vind og jord (Oslo: 1968), 5. Back
This article was delivered to the printer before Jens Bjørneboe died.