Are the Times' Sicknesses the Times' Soul?

One of Bjørneboe's poems can illustrate the main lines in what follows:

The Doctor's Song

Our world it doesn't smell so very good—
Strictly between you and me
Our life is mean, dirty and banal
      and sick and raw
      and brutal as can be.
Of course what ails our society
Is moral VD and sclerosis,
And terminal senile decay.
Here is my doctor's prognosis:
      That blood transfusions
      And hormone solutions
      And all the profusion
      of antibiotics
      and vitamin shots
Are medicine thrown away.

        (From Many Happy Returns, 1965)

Here sickness is used as a picture of the world's wickedness—which the writer is always describing and trying to understand, and which it will take more than our usual medicines to cure. Again and again Bjørneboe comes back to sickness as earthly suffering and metaphysical problem. Sickness as an inescapable and perhaps indispensable part of life, a part of the suffering which he internalized and of which he could give graphic medical pictures. As in this handwritten note found after his death:

I feel like a surgeon who has cut open his own belly to dissect himself—but has not managed to sew the wound up again. [Gyldendals Aktuelle Magasin, 1977]

Bjørneboe lived with this open wound until he chose silence at his own hand at the age of 56 in 1976. For over 20 years then he had chosen to let the wound remain open while he recorded the History of Bestiality—the sickness of world history itself. Where did he get the strength for this? He suggests an answer in his next to the last novel, The Silence:

How did I get this way? Was it the meeting with the world, which I may have perceived with bloodier nerves than most people? Is it sickness, or is it health? I have decided that it is health. It is I who am well, the others are sick. [N85]

On top of that comes the distance which only humor can give, expressed thus in Moment of Freedom:

...where laughter is absent, madness begins. Every time I've had a chance to observe an outbreak of psychosis or a first-rate clinical anxiety neurosis the signal has been given in the absence of humor—the moment one takes the world with complete seriousness one is potentially insane. The whole art of learning to live means holding fast to laughter; without laughter the world is a torture chamber....[113, N117]

And we find a splendid example of burlesque medical humor in the same book:

One of my friends, who runs a charming little madhouse in Switzerland, says that if one manages to get through it by oneself it will "lead to a significant increase in one's depth of experiencing." That sounds delicious. It reminds me of a dream I had recently: I was lying on an operating table, and the neurosurgeon was bending over me with an electric scalpel, while he described the imminent operation to the students: The top of the skull would be opened, and a square of about four by four inches would be removed, something like the top of a coconut—"so that it will be possible for the patient to breathe that way too." [116, N120]

Undeniably an original treatment of breathing difficulties, but perhaps actually sprung out of the dream of being able to breathe freely vis-à-vis this world's criminal asylum and slaughterhouse which is stifling him.

Incomparable too is the narrative "As a patient in Leningrad"—where he was hospitalized after a serious hemorrhage. On being asked whether he was perhaps a bleeder he opened his "eyes wide and stared at him, a wild, Russian, gloomy stare: ‘All we Romanovs,’ I said, ‘nearly all we Romanovs have had that morbid trait, it's a family thing....’" [Powderhouse 33, N30]

It is unnecessary to add that the assembled Soviet personnel broke up in laughter.

Like all great artists, Bjørneboe takes up into himself a range of the time's contradictions and transcends ideological cubicles: Anthroposophist and anarchist, astrologer and apocalyptist, sublime love poet and convicted pornographer; equally a virtuoso at insults and often unobjective in his attack on all kinds of authority; as sensually intoxicating in his description of erotic power as in that of the bouquet of wine and oysters. But never dumb like the latter in the face of society's injustices.

Sickness and doctors engaged him from his first novel—Ere the Cock Crows, in which he turns the spotlight on our time's most important medical/historical questions: Nazi doctors' bestial experiments with living human beings, the prelude to the Holocaust. The novel is dedicated to "the victims of the blindness of heart and coldness of spirit which has long characterized modern science." We can also mention here the problematics of dyslexia in Jonas and the countless contributions to the debate about the treatment of alcoholics (e.g. "Is Illness Punishable?").

Medical history takes a more traditional form in his account of the human tragedies linked to the discovery of anesthesia by ether and chloroform in the undated essay "Morton: a Glimpse from the History of Medicine" (in Police and Anarchy). His gratitude for this revolutionary invention which made operations pain-free is expressed in The Dream and the Wheel, which also elucidates the analgesic properties of opium extracts and the diagnostic revolution wrought by Roentgen rays.

In 1968 came the play about Semmelweis. From the standpoint of medical history it seems to be in essence correct, and the combater of puerperal fever is used here as a sling against "the authorities' senile and dictatorial resistance to new ideas"—or as the author writes in the foreword: "The point is not to ridicule a painful chapter from the history of medicine, but to bring to life a coming stage in the development of the human spirit: that of freedom." (Samlede Skuespill 1973, 155) One citation from the authority, professor Klein, we can imprint in our hearts:

Why should we be doing experiments when we can look up the answers in the textbooks? [77, N201 (Sc 14)]

Related to Semmelweis—less well known, but more burlesque—is the theater piece Amputation, which came two years later. It gives a chilling and coarsely etched perspective on a future in which the duel over the right amputation—lobotomy or glands—is fought out between the rival authorities: the Supreme Court surgeon and the social surgeon. Disciplinary surgery, social- and penal law surgery is used in wholesale normalizing amputations of all who might think differently or even dare to sleep on their stomachs. And the life of the soul is reduced to a purely neuro-anatomical problem.

Thoroughly appalling neurophysiological questions are raised in Powderhouse, where the various methods of execution are analyzed. For me they are weighty contributions to the campaign against the death penalty and at the same time give ghastly answers to the question Dostoevsky posed in The Idiot: How long does the guillotined head remain conscious that it is severed from its body?

Bjørneboe uses all these medical observations as examples of the importance and rightness of his own fundamental antiauthoritarian stance. It was this basic attitude which brought medical progress—and it is also the only thing which can hinder Ragnarok.

Whether sickness can be a culture-creating factor or the reverse—whether culture spawns sickness—is one of the main themes in Bjørneboe's most important novels: the trilogy about "The History of Bestiality"—Moment of Freedom, Powderhouse, and The Silence. In the last-named the book's narrator philosophizes with Columbus, risen for the occasion, about the probable American origin of syphilis and its singular significance for Europe's culture. Columbus is informed that Norsemen were the first Europeans in America, and replies:

"Had I known that," he said, "had I known that...then others could have taken care of the syphilis."

"Don't worry about it," I said; "syphilis made itself useful in Europe. It became our communal disease, and acquired—like every beloved child—many names. Syphilis became the soul of our people....Haven't you heard how many prominent men died of lues? They were really the best of us. They were poets, prophets, artists and philosophers, inventors, scientists...the whole intelligentsia—but naturally also a number of lesser lights: kings, statesmen, generals—and in addition, of course, great numbers of rank-and-file soldiers and seamen. The latter especially saw to the geographical spread of the disease...."

"That must have been after my time," replied Columbus.

"Many scholars are of the opinion that for some individuals syphilis can entail a brief but enormous increase in their intellectual and creative powers. As examples I need only name Nietzsche and Hugo Wolf or Maupassant, Heine and Baudelaire, Beethoven and...."

"Who the hell are they?" he said, looking at me in confusion. [N47]

Yes, what the devil did Bjørneboe mean by this? In Moment of Freedom the same theme is treated:

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 camps in both Germany and Russia. [40, N37]

This is not romanticizing about sickness or about "the sick genius;" Bjørneboe was well aware of the ravages of syphilis and tuberculosis in all strata of society. In an interview (Raundalen, 1967) he even specifies: "It turns out that syphilis isn't enough. In any case it's sinister that our society considers it shameful to be a sexual deviant, have alcohol problems or be mentally ill, when you know what ‘healthy’ people have done and are doing!" In this connection the theory of Lenin's syphilis should also be mentioned. We quote:

[Ilya said,] "‘'Marxism-Leninism’ is an idiotic concept which can only be used by idiots."

"There's an excuse for Lenin too," I said...."I mean, of course, his celebrated syphilis. It isn't discussed in Soviet textbooks, and it isn't included in the study of Leninism—despite the fact that it's the only thing which makes Leninism comprehensible. As you know, Lenin didn't die of a gunshot wound or of a cerebral hemorrhage either, but purely and simply of his good old faithful syphilis—in a blossoming paralysis. And as you also know, syphilis has a remarkable ability to break down all moral inhibitions once it has reached its final paralytic stage....Only by beginning with syphilis can one understand Leninism and evaluate it correctly. It isn't Lenin's fault that his terrorist theology has been accepted by the rest of us, who don't carry around an equally advanced syph." [Powderhouse 187f, N201f]

Now it is seldom easy to find the truth behind macropolitics, but according to commonly accessible literature Lenin's two-year illness and death are also explained as an ordinary arteriosclerotic brain disease with dextral hemiplegia and aphasia; which, moreover, explains communism's sorry development just as well as the syphilis theory. The world might have looked different without Lenin's illness.

However, in this connection it is uninteresting whether the cited diagnoses are correct. The pathographic literature in this area is complex, but the diagnosis of syphilis has been seriously discussed for all the above-mentioned geniuses.

But then what did Bjørneboe intend by all his images of disease? I think that in the first place they underscore anew his basic anti-authoritarian attitude, in that he wants to establish that the geniuses were deviants, heretics whose lives were often linked with diseases which were not comme il faut. This did not diminish their work, but gave it a special character. Dostoevesky would not have been the same without his epilepsy, nor Wergeland without his tuberculosis. In the second place these examples are consciously used artistically as a parallel to our European culture's greatness and its underlying pathological character, thereby achieving a metaphysical subtext as well. In The Silence we read:

The sickness goes back more than two millennia. Suppose we look at Alexander the "Great"—the ruler who had the doctor crucified when his own darling little boy died of fever despite that same doctor's treatment. The deification of such a figure as Alexander already shows what was sick in Europe; and with this philosophy of shit we've spoon-fed the innocent on our continent through the centuries, generation after generation... [N40f]

Herein lies Europe's sickness, Europe who has always cried "Give us Barrabas!"—and whose authorities have built on falsehood. "There is no doubt that lying is the deepest pathogenic force," as it says in Moment of Freedom [74, N74].

We have answered yes to the question whether sickness can yield cultural impulses, but we can also turn the question around: what about culture as responsible for sickness?

As Carl Hambro writes in his "literary profile" of Bjørneboe (1978): "He is not concerned merely with bestiality and his own depression and alcoholism, but to just as great a degree with the ethical and metaphysical aspects of falsehood/truth, life/death, sickness/health." [119] This main theme may be illustrated with a long quotation from The Silence:

Maybe I get along so well with doctors (especially psychiatrists) because I know that the world is a hospital, populated with patients....The whole world could be mapped as regions of geographical psychoses—let's call it "colonial psychiatry"—and we could establish that an Eskimo becomes schizophrenic in a different way from a Hindu, a Moslem becomes a screaming paranoid in a different way from a Prot- estant....What we all have in common, though, is that we go crazy gradually, little by little, after life sets its madness on us. So it must be assumed that it's life itself which is pathogenic....So there's simply something about life which we can't stand.[N8f]

We can't get around the fact that life and culture are pathogenic. And in one example of his colonial psychiatry Bjørneboe again makes use of humor in his description of the French poet Nerval's well-known promenade with his lobster on a leash. To the question of why, the mad poet replies: A) It doesn't bark, which characterizes him as a poet and sensitive to sound. B) It knows the mysteries of the deep. Nerval is placed as a mystic. C) It tastes delicious. So he was a Frenchman! [N9]

But in his most powerful descriptions of sickness it was his own bloody experience Bjørneboe used. We know that he regarded himself as manic-depressive—and his alcohol consumption was legendary! In world literature I, at least, have not come across anything which surpasses the following passage about dread and depression in Moment of Freedom:

The condition can't be described. I walk in blood to over my ankles, I wade in blood....The light is turned off....I even know both the popular and the professional medical designations for it—a man of my experience andmy reading! ...It's one thing to live in a world where blood runs off the windowsills, from the mountains and the clouds—it's another to pin a little Latin name to it. In a world of pure pain, where all impressions from outside are like being touched on a part of your body where the skin is peeled off. It's a state of absolute, pitch-black darkness and pain—where one is confined under a dome which makes it impossible to perceive any other living being in the world but oneself. Nothing exists outside me—which is hell. [98f, N101f]

I have read this to suicidal melancholiacs whose comments have simply been: Yes, that's how it is!

Is there any hope? We read later in the same book:

I'm fully aware that I shouldn't be at large, but safely stashed away in an institution. On the other hand I have the strange certainty that if only I manage to live through this alone, it will turn to blessings and health....I also know that he who hasn't experienced a full depression alone and over a long period of time—he is a child. Such a state is like meeting something from outside, a carnivore, a wild beast which tears the flesh from your bones. Dante's imagethe leopard—is wholly exact and true; I suspect that he met it here in Florence, a city which is excellently suited for lasting depressions. And the same goes for all old cities where one can be completely alone. Naples, Marseilles, and Paris are also splendid cities for this purpose. [111, N114f]

Here again we find the parallel between sickness and culture, and humor used as a weapon—even the suicidal can break into a smile here. And the alcoholic must smile at the following, even if the recommended treatment is hardly as successful for all who have it like Jeppe:

Here in Florence my alcoholism has sprung out in full bloom. I obviously suffer from every known form of alcohol neurosis; I'm both a false and a true dipsomaniac, I drink periodically and every day, I'm a mealtime drinker, habitual drinker, and closet drinker, and in addition an occasional drinker and a social drinker, but I also like to drink alone. It's especially when the darkness appears at full strength that I drink in this manner—around the clock and everything I have on hand....However, I know very well that depression and alcohol mutually aggravate each other, and...when hell has broken loose in earnest, then I stop drinking, or almost. Instead I go to the farmacia and buy sedatives; you can get lovely cheap sleeping pills and tranquilizers here in this country, and without a prescription....I usually wake myself up by crying, and then I take a handful of pills and belt the whole thing down with a glass or two of red wine. After a few days like this it seems as if the depression has "burnt itself out." I feel like a human being again, and go out and eat well and drink wine with the meal. [110f, N114]

And what alcoholism could lead to in the manic phase is suggested too:

The intensity and suddenness of the manic attacks always takes me by surprise. And to bring alcohol into contact with a manic is like squirting gasoline on a burning house. [Gyldendals Aktuelle Magasin 1977]

These words are given to pen of the doctor in The Dream and the Wheel (1964, p93), and refer to the 19th century's tuberculosis, syphilis and hysteria.

We cannot embark on a discussion here about the main sicknesses of our time and culture, but we can assert that among these are found anxiety, depression and the abuse of tranquillizers—and that the suicide rate is not decreasing.

This was suffered through and the beaker drained to the bottom by Jens Bjørneboe, and in describing his own experience of the time's sicknesses he gave us a picture of its soul.

For himself he did not find the way to healing, but to the self-chosen silence to he hinted at already in 1966:

Ten more years—and my knowledge of the world will be so appalling that it can only destroy. [181, N189]

In the conclusion to The Silence he talks about a coming universal revolution and perhaps yet indicates a way:

I write this during the great silence, the silence before the hurricane.

One of the wrongly convicted lately said to me: "Now think no more about injustice and evil, but create a new world where all shall love each other."

I don't believe that humanity is evil, nor that humanity is good—I believe that a human being is partly evil and partly good. Which side shall be permitted to grow and develop depends on ourselves. On a planet where people have freely chosen to let themselves be burned alive for the sake of truth, the good must have great possibilities. [N199f]

A person who concludes his protocols about the history of bestiality like that was not sick. The world is sick, and its evil, our evil and the individual's sickness are sides of the same thing. Hope must lie in our taking upon us com-passion, responsibility for the diseases, and also com-passion and a feeling of guilt for the evil. Then we would perhaps be more genuine doctors, truer human beings, and the world could become healthier. Bjørneboe's strongest poem, "Mea Maxima Culpa," expresses something of this:

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]

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