Inge S. Kristiansen is the author of Jens Bjørneboe og Antroposofien (Jens Bjørneboe and Anthroposophy), a chapter from which is included in Degrees of Freedom.Inge S. Kristiansen, "Mot de siste tider", Dagbladet (Oslo), June 25, 1995. ©1995 by Inge S. Kristiansen. Used by permission. English translation ©1999 by Esther Greenleaf Mürer.
He writes about this in his novels, first and foremost in the trilogy about the History of Bestiality (Moment of Freedom, Powderhouse and The Silence) and in The Sharks; but the apocalyptic vision is clearly expressed in other parts of his oeuvre as well.
Strangely enough, however, nobody is interested in this, nobody speaks of these ominous prophecies. No literary history mentions the sensational eschatological theme in his writings—despite the fact that Bjørneboe is very concrete and direct in his mention of The Great Revolution which is coming "before our time is past".
In December 1973 Verdens Gang published an interview of Bjørneboe with the headline "The catastrophe is coming in the 1980s." Here the writer tells about a sea novel he is writing; it came out the following year under the title The Sharks. It won't be amusing reading, he assures us, since the ship he tells about is the symbol of our own earth, and the action a picture of what will come to pass. What happens in the novel, as we know, is a dramatic shipwreck, and the description of the survivors' life in a sort of paradisiacal, classless society on a "cannibal island". The interviewer poses the following question: "What happens on the cannibal island, is that the Thousand-Year Reign?" "Yes," replies Bjørneboe, "in Christian usage that's what it's called." But he qualifies this a bit and states that in the future too we will have problems and difficulties. His main point, though, is that what will befall us is a dramatic turning point. What will happen is that the phase we are in now—"the war of all against all"—will be succeeded by a catastrophe: "On the way to this catastrophe will happen what Hans Jæger called humanity's meeting with itself. For that matter the meeting has already begun."
Now the interviewer from Verdens Gang understandably thinks that this sounds gloomy. On his side Bjørneboe declares that on the contrary the new book marks the beginning of an upturn in his work—"a brighter line," as he says. In The Sharks this finds expression in the main character's thoughts about coming through the hurricane and into the cyclone's eye: "that is the individual's meeting with himself—with his innermost spiritual Self". As second mate Jensen on the bark Neptune meets his spiritual Self, so shall humankind also soon meet itself and its spiritual Self, according to Bjørneboe. An unambiguously spiritualistic and eschatological understanding of reality underlies the last novels of his oeuvre. It is a new golden age, a new sun-time, which the writer glimpses behind the millennial horizon, after the catastrophe.
Bjørneboe's novel from 1974, when it came out, was mainly reviewed as a sea novel. But it is really about much more than a shipwreck: It's about rebirth, about humanity's painful birth into the new spiritual age where the Moment of Freedom succeeds the History of Bestiality. Viewed in this way The Sharks is about precisely the same thing as Moment of Freedom from 1966. This novel, which initially can seem chaotic and unstructured, is in fact very tightly woven -- if one reads it correctly: i.e. as a narrative of initiation and rebirth, as a journey from chaos to cosmos, from bestiality to humanity. This journey goes inward into the mind, in to the point where the Self is formed, in to what is called "The center of all centers, the core of cores" (Rilke). This journey finds is densest expression in the Servant of Justice's dream about the tunnel through the mountain. He relates that he is moving inward in a tunnel, which gets narrower and narrower until he lies pressed together inside the mountain. Then all at once the mountain opens, and he sees a strong blinding light. Of course we have here an archetypical expression of a birth: the fetus's way through the birth canal and out into the new life. The dream is the turning point of individuation and fulfillment, as the Servant of Justice interprets it—it has its clear analog in the cyclone image from The Sharks. Likewise in the other two novels in the trilogy it comes forth clearly that a similar birth will soon befall the whole world; it is said very directly that "the world is like a woman in travail," and that only under the greatest pains can "the new, higher human being be born."
This historical turning point, the movement from chaos to cosmos, not only touches the individual but concerns all of humanity, as Bjørneboe expresses it in the interview with Verdens Gang. This view can be explained by a somewhat distinctive perception which permeates the whole oeuvre: Bjørneboe thought that the individual life is a recapitulation of the whole of human history, that each person bears within himself the history of the whole human race. The special thing about Bjørneboe's view of history is his understanding that the connection between individual and collective history applies to both the past and the future part of history. Therefore the spiritual birth of the narrator in the trilogy and of second mate Jensen in The Sharks is indissolubly tied to humanity's imminent meeting with itself.
The vision of the approaching world catastrophe is very directly expressed in The Sharks, but it is evoked throughout the whole trilogy. The time for the end of the world revolution is quite precisely given in The Silence: Here it is said that it will probably be over "after the middle of the twenty-first century."
But these appalling omens are not things that pop up toward the end of his authorship. The apocalyptic vision of humanity's meeting with itself inaugurates and concludes Bjørneboe's artistic production. In the poem Before the Solstice (1951) the theme is the coming winter and the imminent solstice. In the poem we meet the [Norwegian] anarchist Hans Jæger [1854-1910], who sees that "a sun-time is dawning for Europe"; but first humanity must experience a catastrophe, a world conflagration which will burn everything down "to black ash". The dating is frightening: "In our time it will come, the great want." In the poem we learn that it will all be over when the new sun-time dawns "behind the millennial horizon"—that is, in the 21st century. This is in complete agreement with the dating in The Silence and in the interview in Verdens Gang. This, says Jæger in the poem, will be "Humanity's Meeting with Itself" (an expression which is in fact Jæger's own, from The Bible of Anarchism [1906]).
In Moment of Freedom Bjørneboe makes use of a somewhat esoteric, but nonetheless identifiable motif to make the end-time theme clear: the Michael motif. As we know from the book of Daniel, in the last days the archangel Michael shall appear in the arena and fight against Satan—and there will come a time of tribulation of which there hasn't been the like since the nations arose on the Earth. This can be seen in the light of anthroposophical interpretations: In our time, according to Rudolf Steiner, we are living at the beginning of the Michael epoch. However, the Michael motif can also be linked to Novalis, a writer Bjørneboe was very taken with. The Servant of Justice in Moment of Freedom always has Novalis with him in his traveling library. In the trilogy there is a reference to Novalis' essay Die Christenheit oder Europa (Christendom or Europe), which treats precisely of the new golden age, the new humanity which Novalis sees coming. Among other things this vision of the future links Novalis to the archangel: he perceives, he says, the mighty wing beats of an angel flying past. Bjørneboe too perceived the archangel's presence: Not for nothing does the Servant of Justice report that he is subordinate to a prince, "Il principe Michael," whose castle lies on the mountain Daiblshorn. But the strange thing is, says the Servant, that the mountain is really named Heiligenberg—the holy mountain. Of course the Servant of Justice lives at the foot of the Michael-mountain (Mont St. Michel). And through the mountain's two names is revealed the battle motif—the end time's battle in which the dragon will be driven out, and the beast in the human interior shall writhe in pain when Michael's sword strikes it.
Whether one regards these prophecies literally as soothsaying, or whether one sees them as literary expressions of a breakdown in Bjørneboe's personality, as a reader one must not overlook them. In any case they give us reason to ask the question: What was it which caused Bjørneboe for more than twenty years to lift such an apocalyptic vision up for his readers? It is evident from Moment of Freedom that the visions of chaos and end-time are probably the deepest and most original source of his oeuvre. Here the Servant of Justice tells how as a child he already had horrifying dreams of rebellion, tumult and chaos, something which inspired in him a terrible dread. During his wanderings in the land of Chaos Jens Bjørneboe has borne this dread with him. The pain he felt in life speaks from nearly every sentence he wrote. But he always saw a light at the end of the tunnel: There dawns a sun-time for Europe.