From Genre at the Crossroads: The Challenge of Fantasy, essays edited by George Slusser and Jean-Pierre Barricelli (Riverside, CA: Xenos Books, 2003). © 2003 by George Slusser. Used by permission.
Gary Kern is best known for work in Russian literature and history, which includes a critical collection of essays on Yevgeny Zamyatin and a translation of The Second Invasion from Mars by the Strugatsky brothers.
Sometimes a piece of writing has a choice:
to become a work of the author or a work of art.
— Stanislaw Lec, Unkempt Thoughts
Jens Bjørneboe is the greatest failed novelist of the twentieth century. His masterwork is considered the trilogy roughly called "the History of Bestiality" — roughly, because the title actually belongs to a twelve-volume project of his autobiographical narrator, which is unfinished. The three novels of Bjørneboe therefore do not present such a history themselves, but rather the experiences of that profoundly disturbed character, along with his morbid reflections, painful memories and terrible dreams, plus recitations of horrible happenings drawn from his grisly research. Not one of the novels is without serious flaws, but each communicates a rage against cruelty and brutality with a force that is rare in fictional literature. To find something similar one would have to turn to urgent appeals on behalf of victims of war, or to reports of emergency relief agencies working in areas of disaster, or to angry political pamphlets protesting the condition of the insulted and the injured. Or perhaps, best of all, to letters from someone who finds himself in a terrible place and cannot believe that it really exists, like a sane man locked up in an insane asylum, or a healthy man in the midst of a plague. However, they are none of theses things, but rather passionately conceived crossbreeds of fictional invention and historical fact, novel and essay, fantasy and confession, which by breaking the rules and crossing over borders convey more passion and force of personality than whole schools of neat and proper writers, whole literary traditions perhaps.
And why are they flawed? Because Bjørneboe the author cannot remain aloof, above his work, as its shaper and maker, and so violates the demands of his form. Like Rousseau, who begins The Social Contract (1761) with the proposition that "man is born free, and is everywhere in chains," so Bjørneboe begins his trilogy two centuries later with the awareness that earth is a paradise and has been ruined. "For what reason," he writes in one essay, "do we turn this paradise into a hell? For that is precisely what we have done. How is it that we have come to live in this ghastly mixture of madhouse, hospital and hell? This is the central theme which runs through my writings... It is the problem of evil." [1]
The problem first struck him at the age of fifteen when he happened to read an account of the Nazi concentration camp at Oranienberg written by a prisoner who had escaped. Ten years before the Nazi camps became known to the general public, Bjørneboe was informed. The experience shocked him, transformed him and marked him for life as a seeker and outsider, unable to carry on with a normal career while so much was wrong with the world. He recalled the experience repeatedly in his works, as with the autobiographical hero of his first published novel, Before the Cock Crows (1952):
The sun stood almost still in the sky. As I read, it turned grey... the things which stood there I would never again be able to forget. And what was happening to me as I sat there and read through those still, sunny afternoon hours, was something of which I would never be free again. But throughout the whole summer the others went around believing that the sunshine and the sea and the wind, all these things, were all the same as before. I was the only one who knew better.[2]
For others, the world was basically orderly and good, with occasional lapses into chaos, barbarism and madness. For Bjørneboe, it had originally been orderly and good, but now was overrun with horrors that were tolerated and even incorporated into the social system, and the first step to restoring the world-paradise was ceasing to accept them, reminding people that they were not tolerable. He was possessed of the need to unmask institutional injustices, reveal individual cruelties, remember historical atrocities, and as a writer became impatient with traditional forms and generic conventions, literary devices that might work for fine esthetic effects, but possibly soften the message he wanted to impart the shock and outrage of living in a wrong world. Yet he wanted to capture not only the reader's rational mind and moral judgement, but also the imagination, fantasy, and so he needed fiction.
This tension produced the three different novels of his History of Bestiality, each with an unprecedented form, each blurring the distinctions between fact and fiction, author and narrator, real event and imagined; and each achieving at its best moments the immediacy of personal testimony, but also at its worst the boredom of a tiresome harangue. Above all, each disappoints reader expectations, for the middle and last chapters fail to realize the potential of the first, precisely because they run counter to traditional literary development and thus violate literary form. So that whether we call them fantastic novels, autobiographical novels or novels of fact, anti-novels, mixed genres or sui generis, these three things, undoubtedly works of genius, must ultimately be considered failures as fully realized and coherent compositions.
(Whether this matters or not, when the non-fictional material is so pressing, may be the basis for another discussion; but if one assumes that no petition or tract in itself can change the world, and that fictional forms have a right to exist even or especially in a wrong world, and moreover satisfy a need of the thinking and feeling mind, then it does matter.)
[There follows a detailed discussion of the three novels Moment of Freedom, Powderhouse, and The Silence. Here the first two are excerpted and the third given in full. EGM]
Moment of Freedom: The Heiligenberg Manuscript (1966) is the first of the trilogy and like the others takes the form of a first-person confessional address to the reader. It was written about thirty years after Bjørneboe's transformative moment, so that he has had time to absorb the experience of World War II, the Cold War and various other conflicts, as well as the growing complacency of "first-world" societies in Europe and North America enjoying consumer goods and mass-media entertainments in the midst of "third-world" poverty, hunger and disease. Much like Dostoyevsky in his late novels, Bjørneboe decided to throw everything into his work: personal experiences, travelogues, historical events, real and imagined characters, philosophical arguments, savage diatribes, nasty and ironic anecdotes, satire, allegory, dream sequences, black humor, and so on, but unlike the Russian master did not keep all the heterogeneous elements in exquisite balance, did not develop characters in depth and did not propel the narrative with a tightly wound plot or frenzied psychological conflict. On the contrary, he abandoned all precedents, disregarded artistic symmetries and frustrated reader expectations in order to give the sensation of moving into unchartered territory and making fresh observations, perhaps also to mirror the chaotic element of the world. And it works: to read Moment of Freedom in the magnificent English translation of Esther Greenleaf Mürer is to experience astonishment at every turn, but also the tedium of slogging for stretches through a desert, much like the passage through the sprawling First Symphony of the Danish composer Poul Ruders, "Himmelhoch jauchzend — zum Tode betrübt" (1989)....
The hero, or anti-hero, but certainly the voice of conscience in the work, is the nameless narrator who calls himself a Servant of Justice. After a lifetime of knocking about the world as a "sailor and wanderer, singer, apocalyptist and troubadour," he has for several years served as a court attendant or bailiff in the Alpine town of Heiligenberg, performing his duties so unobtrusively as not to give any indication of his presence, almost as not to be said to exist....
Unbeknown to his colleagues at the court and the good citizens of Heiligenberg (a fictional town), he goes home after work to write the "protocols" of The History of Bestiality, inking the condemnatory records into a thick book by hand, just as it is done in the courthouse....His personal experiences are also recorded. "From my life," he explains, "I can hardly remember anything but murder, war, concentration camps, torture, slavery, executions, bombed-out cities and the half-burned bodies of children." The abuse of children particularly affects him:
I remember the bodies of German children after the fire bombs. The remains of walls, like pieces of a stage set; the children ranged on the sidewalks between. The same thing happened in Leningrad and London and many other places, but nowhere were dead children collected with such diligence and thought and such a pious sense of order. (23)
The project is so oppressive that he cannot pursue it every day and often seeks relief in "glasses of oblivion" at an inn called "Zum Henker" — literally, "To the Hangman"; colloquially, "Go to Hell." There he has philosophical debates with a fellow eschatologist and apocalyptist, the bell ringer from St. Anne's church. Once a Marxist partisan in the Spanish Civil War, the bespectacled Christian is a worthy drinking companion. Over Italian red wine or kirsch they question the existence of God, the origin of consciousness and the nature of sin, but also the bizarre behavior of the townsfolk, permitting the Servant to unload his burdensome thoughts and to present, perhaps drunkenly, his antithesis to the little bears. He tells the bell ringer:
What on earth would our beloved, stinking, beautiful Europe have become without our dope fiends, drunkards, homosexuals, consumptives, madmen, syphilitics, bed-wetters, criminals and epileptics? Our whole culture was created by invalids, lunatics and felons. There isn't one normal person who has done a useful or lasting thing: it was the normal ones who built the slave labor camps in both Germany and Russia. (40)
This wild thought echoes Yevgeny Zamyatin's famous literary credo of 1921: "The point is that there can be a true literature only where it is made not by efficient and trustworthy clerks, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, skeptics." Both writers identified with the loner, the original thinker, the individual with the courage to question routine, dogma and inflexible rules. Such an individual may challenge society, but also prove its salvation. Zamyatin characterized him as "a sailor sent up the mast, from which he can see shipwrecks, icebergs and maelstroms still undetectable from the deck." But he also recognized that the rebel, if he succeeds, may become an oppressor, the scholastic who designs the labor camps for the little bears to run, and who therefore must be overthrown in turn. Bjørneboe knew it too, but rarely acknowledged it, preferring more often to imagine that the protestor remains ever pure. Not believing in revolution, he consigns the free and untainted spirit to the lonely road of the outcast, the Eternal Jew [3] .....
So, then, the novel consist of one character, the Servant of Justice, and the story of his humble work and his horrible discovery in Heiligenberg (two chapters); then five chapters, one very long, of his reminiscences and diaries, having no plot and no forward movement (pages 59-209 in the translation); then a short final chapter returning to Heiligenberg, but not advancing the story of the discovery.... the middle chapters neither move nor explain. Rather, they read like dreams and hallucinations, shadowy and timeless as the unconscious.
Which is not to say that they are dispensable (though they are, as regards plot). Their nebulosity is justified (to a degree) by the Servant's search for his real name and identity, which he has lost in his wanderings, a search that gives rise to the appearance of doubles — a deformed face looking out of a mirror, a chimp looking out of a cage. All the while the narrator remains a wounded conscience, denouncing the monsters of the earth, most often the "Teutons" and "Germania," yet sometimes the Russians and Bolsheviks as well, and in one instance showing how a person can be both a Nazi and Bolshevik at the same time. Meditating on Verdun after a visit to the now green battlefield, he mimics Nazi mathematics as he calculates the relative values of the WWI combatants as compost for the forest to be — the diets and nutrient values of the "Germano-Teutons, the Anglo-Celts, or the Gauls"; the mineral salts of the young enlisted men vs. the fats of the older officer corps; and then the total mixture:
If one reckons the average enlisted man's weight at 69 kg, a million defunct combatants would then yield 69,000 metric tons of high-grade compost, while a corresponding million generals would furnish fully 82,000 tons of manure — to be sure, not of quite the same quality, but by no means second- rate either. To this must be added rotting footgear, belts and feces already excreted from living participants, which indeed amounted to no little in the course of the months the Verdun battles themselves were going on: in particular because of the widespread diarrhea among officers as well as enlisted men. The production of raw manure must have come to a total of around 1500 tons a day — the greater part on the side of the Allies, which had both more men and more food.
In the course of the total period of combat this would yield ca. 450,000 tons of feces together with about 120,000 tons of cadavers. Altogether one gets a sum of not less than 570,000 tons of corpses and excrement, in other words high-grade sewage and raw manure. (167-168)
This meditation deserves to be placed next to Johnathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" (1729) and Fyodor Dostoyevsky's "The Paradoxist" (in A Writer's Diary, April 1876) as a classic of mordant satire. (Swift proposes that poor children be eaten to alleviate poverty; Dostoyevsky — that war is the source of all progress; Bjørneboe — that the victims of war nourish beautiful trees.) Yet compositionally it develops neither plot nor character; it is a self-sufficient piece which could come anywhere in the novel.
The Servant's memoir of Praiano is pure nightmare, recalling his stay in a red-brick town, where he sees the sky bleed, the walls leak blood, and wades ankle-deep in blood, and where he repeatedly encounters a sick, puking cat. As before, he records numerous acts of cruelty toward children and reflects on freedom and grace. This memoir, and others on Stockholm, Brooklyn and Rome, are fascinating and written with great verve, yet the inner chapters remain static, extended only by the author's desire to write them, not by any internal dynamic. The narrator does not discover his true name, and nothing is resolved.
As a result, the novel fails to shape itself into any perceptible form. The reader who perseveres to the end can go back and make sense of it, but then only by picking out, rearranging and comparing its scattered statements, as if fitting together not a puzzle, which would be artful, but a meaningful pattern out of an amorphous spill. Bjørneboe broke up the genre of the novel in order to intensify his personal plea, but wound up losing control, like someone so badly shaken by a disaster as to have trouble putting his story together. Urgent as the message may be, one has to get a grip on it in order to communicate it to others. This means that one has to get a grip on the form, the convention, the genre. Great as Moment of Freedom may be, it could have been an unqualified masterpiece.
Powderhouse: Scientific Postscript and Last Protocol (1969) is the second installment of the History, also beautifully translated by Mürer, who tells in a preface that it was her introduction to the author and inspired her to translate not only it, but the other two novels of the trilogy, plus other of his works as well. The subtitle indicates that Bjørneboe decided to continue in the same vein as before, but only with one more novel; he did not originally plan a trilogy. The phrase "Scientific Postscript" alludes wittily to Søren Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), written as an addendum to his Philosophical Fragments (1844), but also emphasizes that the horrors about to be related are not invented, but "scientific."....
So once again the author will fill the novel with discussions of real events, with "scientific" data, this time in the form of "poetic naturalism." The combination would seem to portend an unusual variety of "science fiction." But of course the phrase "poetic naturalism" designates not a genre, but a style, and indeed the setting is charmingly natural and poetic. The narrator, called the equivalent of Jens — Jean, Giovanni, Ivan — by his international friends, has found occupation as a "renovation worker" — i.e., "sanitation engineer" — at an asylum for the well-to-do criminally insane in the south of France. The institution occupies the buildings of La Poudrière, a former munitions depot with a stone tower (the powderhouse), which is surrounded by a large park; the renovation worker occupies one of the outlying peasant cottages, with a high fence enclosing a little sunlit paradise of leafy trees, grapevines, tomato plants, a lawn and a cool brook. Here he rests from his daily chores, eating simple but satisfying meals, drinking a variety of wines, entertaining guests, sometimes smoking hashish, sometimes taking a hit of LSD, sometimes enjoying the embraces of a little brown nurse and every night feeding a friendly hedgehog. His chief occupation after collecting the garbage, cleaning the grounds and trimming the hedges is writing The History of Bestiality, and his discussions with visitors deal either with this theme or with the doings of madmen, yet the halcyon air of the garden lends a pastoral atmosphere to the proceedings, an idyllic enchantment to recitations of the most maniacal campaigns of carnage in history. Thus paradise, realized here and now, is contrasted with the hell that has become the wide earth, and the reading is oddly both horrifying and delightful at the same time.
The narrator, incidentally, makes no reference to his previous life as a Servant of Justice, his journey to the land of Chaos or his search for a name in a red city. He says simply: "My interests are the same as before, even though I've acquired an ice-cold scientific attitude to reality." (22) In manner he seems not to be the same man, for although all his personal features are taken from the author, as in the previous instance, he is less driven and depressed than the Servant, better balanced, more resigned to man's unregenerate degradation, or at least to the impossibility of his moral improvement anytime soon. He is, in fact, a separate incarnation of the author — rosier and mellower than his predecessor; he even seems younger, though his beard is getting grey. The device is unexpected and ingenious, for in a stroke it demonstrates the creative variability of fiction and the permanence of hard and disagreeable fact. Aside from the title of the narrator's composition, there is no reference at all in this novel to the previous one; the terms "little bears," "scholastics" and "lemurs" are dropped. A new term arises: Homo lupus — man as wolf. The book is therefore not so much a postscript to Moment of Freedom as a fresh variation on the same theme....
Critics of the novel pointed out that the three lectures, pounding the same hammer over the same head, dull the senses, the vibrant reaction to horror, so that readers do not become more sensitive to the sufferings of mankind, but rather more inured. Thus as a protest the book contradicts itself. But they failed to notice that it teaches another lesson as well: how to survive as a human being in a vicious, wrong world. Bjørneboe does not give the solution to the problem of evil; in fact, he makes an emotional hash of it. But his reader cannot fail to be a lot more distrustful of authority, a lot more skeptical of do-gooders and a lot more critical of everything. Which is good. [4]
The novel ends poetically in the renovation worker's garden with a bottle of wine, a conversation with the doctor, the rustle of the hedgehog and Jean's pleasant bisexual dreams. In Lefèvre's assertion that reason and sense cannot be eradicated, and in Jean's simple garden delights, a piece of paradise is restored and an emotion akin to hope — embattled hope — is evoked in this wonderful, unclassifiable, failed novel.
The last of the trilogy, The Silence: An Anti-Novel and Absolutely the Very Last Protocol (1973), translated by Mürer in 2000, fails from the very start. Here everything has narrowed and hardened. The rosy mood of The Powderhouse is gone. After three more years of Vietnam, the author is angry beyond all endurance. He has lost his last shred of patience for the ruined world and for standard novelistic devices. His work becomes mostly lecture, himself to reader, with fictional elements thrown in. The author can be separated from the autobiographical lecturer only in that the latter finds himself — or the former imagines himself — in northern Africa, conversing mainly with Ali, an incarnation of al Assadun (or possibly Frantz Fanon). From this remote station his eyes peer at Europe, the colonializer and source of misery for the Third World, the place from which all evil flows. Germania no longer stands out. As Ali instructs him, the perspective inside Europe is all wrong, for it holds up Hitler as a moral monster, an exception to the rule; whereas, seen through the eyes of the colonialized, he is the rule: the colonial rulers were as ruthless as Hitler, killed more than the Nazis and lasted longer than the Third Reich. Perhaps Hitlerism is "just an extension of ourselves," the narrator ponders; perhaps Hitler is "Europe's soul." [4]
Consequently, with this perspective, the keeper of the protocols — the historical record — now catalogs the crimes of the first conquering Europeans, the Conquistadores: Cortez over the Aztecs in Mexico and Pizarro over the Incas in Peru. Incredible scenes of carnage roll across the pages with the same remorseless attention to gory detail and the same sour sarcasm as before, but with even greater urgency and rage. However, the account has become one-sided: the insatiable blood-lust of the pre-Columbian Indians, their festive sacrifices of horrified, screaming children and their pleasure in wearing human pelts replete with face and scalp until they rotted and fell away are minimized and excused by the rapacious gold-lust and unchecked brutality of the detestable foreigners, a class to which the author himself happens to belong.
Thus Bjørneboe arrives at a position anticipating the leftist platforms in America and Europe that dominated the last three decades of the twentieth century: selective Multiculturalism and Political Correctness. All history is reinterpreted to the detriment of the First World and to the credit of the Third. All filth and evil come from the former; all goodness and hope come from the latter; and the speaker, who belongs to the former, is absolved of his sins by promoting the latter. It is a sham doctrine, the same as Leninism, from which it derives — the intellectual vanguard speaking for the proletariat. Yet unlike the high priests of PC, Bjørneboe is not interested in changing university curricula, dominating the scholarly press or dictating hiring practices, meanwhile winning a cushy spot for himself in academe while stabbing non-conformist scholars in the back, but rather he retains the old fire of the sixties and finally, at long last, puts his faith in revolution. The subject peoples of the world, he asserts, the insulted and the injured, the wretched and the ragged, the downtrodden and the disadvantaged, will one day rise up to claim their freedom, their rightful portion of the Earth's bounty and their sunny place in history. The present moment is but the still — Stillheten, The Silence — before the storm. [5]
Of course, a spontaneous uprising of Third World rabble to redress wrongs and take what they believe they deserve, to "expropriate the expropriators" (in Lenin's phrase), or to wage a jihad against "the Great Satan" (in Osama Bin Laden's), has no chance whatsoever of producing anything sufferable or livable for the supposed beneficiaries, and every chance of perpetuating the horrors that Bjørneboe condemns, with new Mau-Maus, Hutus and Tutsis, Idi Amins, Mengistu Mariams and Charles Taylors, plus new Khmer Rouges and Red Guards, hacking their way with machetes through bodies mile after mile and year after year. Bjørneboe needed finally to believe in something, to manufacture a simulacrum of faith for himself. In his drunkenness and despair, in which he wrote whole pages and chapters unconsciously and without memory, he simply could not stand the truth: there is no one country and no one people better than another. The Third World is every bit as bad as the First, Second and Fourth, but simply lacks the technology to skin and scalp everyone alive. And in his better moments, he knew it. [6]
But all is not a mere lecture. Into the realistically drawn North African landscape Bjørneboe throws a series of fantastic scenes: meetings with the dead and the holy. The author thus runs together a string of differently colored beads: lectures to the reader, meditations to himself, imaginary conversations with Ali, fantastic conversations with the departed, inserted historical materials (the History) and narrative links between the one and the other. Read as a novel or even as an anti-novel, it is a failure, without plot or internal motivation, nothing more than an arbitrary sequence, but read as something else, the crystallization of a form that Bjørneboe has been seeking all along and which might be called "fantastic autobiography," or, even better, "diary of a fantast," it is an amazing composition. The reader who, after two volumes of the trilogy, has developed an interest in the author and his ideas in themselves, over and against any novelistic development, will not be disappointed.
The first otherworldly figure the narrator meets in the street is Christopher Columbus, still in his fifteenth-century garb, but old, tired and worn-out, regretful that he and his gang of thieves ravaged the New World Indians and spread syphilis back in Europe. "America should never have been discovered," he declares, and "mea culpa, mea maxima culpa." (51, 150) Columbus has become politically correct before the advent of PC.
In Rome the narrator runs into God, who looks like a shabby old street vendor, only without a cart. Over a repast of fish, lemons, oil and wine, he confesses to poor digestion, which he attributes to not being at home in the world. God objects:
"Can't you have done with he History of Bestiality? That's what's ruining your appetite and your digestion. If you're going to sit thinking of newly-scalded children every time you eat a crayfish tail, no good can come of it. Have done with the misery!"
"I'll never stop!" I said. "You won't get off so easily!" (92)
God then makes a proposition. No longer looking like a street vendor, but rather like a "strong, robust and athletic old man," He offers the author good digestion, good health and a "salaried position with UNESCO" if he would bring an end to his criticisms and fall on his knees and worship. The author recoils:
"You aren't God," I said. "You have a tail."
"Only one is almighty. I lay the world at your feet."
"I shit on the world. Get thee behind me, Satan." (92)
The parody mocks not only Satan's temptation of Christ (Matthew 4:1-11), but also Dostoyevsky's treatment of it in the "Legend of the Grand Inquisitor" (The Brothers Karamazov). Here those temptations make no sense, because Good God and Evil God are one. Now, for the first time in the trilogy, Bjørneboe closes in on the source of world misery. He describes a scene of boys throwing stones at a cat in the gutter that has been run over by a car, a scene that has particular relevance for the present writer, because I witnessed such a scene as a boy, and it was my cat. It convinced me that some people are born lower than animals and can never be redeemed. The hero of Bjørneboe's work, who chases off the boys and stays with the cat until an animal ambulance arrives with merciful euthanasia, reflects that the tortured beast incorporates all of his history, all of the essence of cruelty, and he falls into a dark mood, questioning himself. Why does he behave differently from the boys? Why must he store up all the "undeserved suffering" experienced since the dawn of creation? He wants a revolution, a revolution not just against the evildoers, the colonializers and the exploiters, but against the basic order of things: "My revolution encompasses the universe. Something is wrong at the very bottom. There lies the root of evil." (128-129)
Indeed, it does. The universe has produced a conscious creature — a man — who objects to the entity that has produced him. He stands opposed to dog-eat-dog, survival of the fittest, pain, injustice and death. He perceives the world as wrong and will not accommodate himself to it, as others will. He is an anomaly, a misfit, a mystery. From this disjunction comes all of human culture — the need to make sense out of chaos, to find order in physical processes, to see beauty in inanimate objects, to keep records against the obliteration of time, to make laws against the whims of the mighty and the many, to improve upon nature with science and technology, to remember the dead and to stop cruelty. It is in this area that Bjørneboe might have found an answer, or at least a philosophy, but he does not explore it.
Instead, he ends his fantastic diary by describing a meeting with Maximilien Robespierre and quoting the remarkable words from his speeches, which propose the abolition of the death penalty, absolute freedom of the press, and universal civil and political rights for both whites and blacks. Why Robespierre became the chief executioner of the French Revolution is left an unexplained irony. The last chapter bids farewell to The History of Bestiality (despite the hero's retort to God) and reaches a dismal climax. A fable is told in Biblical style of a youth who sought out the truth of the world's evil and pain. At the end of the long road, he discovers:
"There is no God, and all this pain is without meaning. Never will the lamentations of humanity reach the ear of any god. Everything under the sky is meaningless, and the new being will never arise." (198)
Yet the author, clearly speaking for himself, nurtures a flicker of hope. He has presented the evidence, he states, and mankind has been found guilty. But, like Lefèvre, he recalls the heretics who died for the truth. Man, he concludes, is incomprehensible: "endlessly evil, endlessly good — all-renewing, all-destroying." And so, hope against hope, he awaits the coming "hurricane." (200-201)
Bjørneboe's failure, both as novelist and thinker, points to a passion that is exceptional in world literature and in its way a spiritual peak for mankind. It reminds me of the best performance I ever heard of Sergei Rachmaninoff's Third Piano Concerto. The pianist, a little- known musician broadcast over the radio in live concert, reached beyond all his predecessors, beyond even the great and inimitable Horowitz, in a transport of unstoppable delirium. Like the mythical firebird, he flew into a region never before entered, shimmering, blazing, taking the audience away from its familiarity with the well-trodden path and the oft-heard melodies, and leading it onto a new path where everything was dangerous and alive, startling the senses and confounding expectations, then hit a half-dozen clinkers as he tripped and tumbled knuckles over elbows to a crashing conclusion. The audience, carried along by the momentum, went out of its mind and cheered wildly before it realized what had happened, how the performance had fallen to pieces. What that pianist tried to do was impossible, but he dared to try it. He dared to reach and to fall. So with Bjørneboe.
NOTES1..Quoted by Janet Garton, Jens Bjørneboe: Prophet Without Honor (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), 88. Back
2.Quoted here and immediately below by Garton, 5. Back
3. The Zamyatin quotations (my translations) come from his articles "I Am Afraid" (1921) and "On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and so on" (1923). The complete essays can be read in A Soviet Heretic: Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin, edited and translated by Mirra Ginsburg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). Back
4..For the critics of Powderhouse, see Garton, 97-98. Back
5. Bjørneboe in his own way drew on the wave of anti- Westernism and Third-Worldism that swelled up in Europe in the 1960s and led to intellectual, moral and emotional bankruptcy, neatly diagnosed by Pascal Bruckner, The Tears of the White Man: Compassion As Contempt (New York: Free Press, 1986). Back
6.Bjørneboe, who died by his own hand in 1976, did not live to witness the bloodbath that took place in newly independent Algeria, the apparent locale of his novel, where conflict between secular and fundamentalist elements in society led to guerrilla warfare, death squads and terrorism marked by mass executions, throat-cuttings and rapes claiming 60,000 victims between 1982 and 1997. See Walter Laqueur, The New Terrorism: Fanaticism and the Arms of Mass Destruction (Oxford University Press, 1999), 130- 133. Back