Leif Longum was professor of Norwegian studies at the University of Bergen. He had a special interest in the Norwegian radical tradition in literature. The following is a late chapter in his book A Mirror for Ourselves: View of Man and Understanding of Reality in Postwar Norwegian Prose (1968). Earlier in the book Longum has discussed Bjørneboe's early novels Ere the Cock Crows (1952) and The Evil Shepherd (1960).Leif Longum, "Frihetens Øyeblikk". From his Et speil for oss sev: Menneskesyn og virkelighetsoppfatning i norsk etterkrigsprosa (Oslo: Aschehoug, 1968), 231-238. ©1968 by Aschehoug Forlag A/S. Used by permission. English translation ©1999 by Esther Greenleaf Mürer.The page references are to the 1999 edition of the English translation, published by Dufour Editions and Norvik Press. —Tr.
Now, 31 years later, we meet him again, as a nameless Servant of Justice in a village in the Alps, Heiligenberg. Here he has settled down—"sailor and wanderer, singer, apocalyptist and troubadour"—after long years of travel in what he calls "the land of Chaos". He doesn't remember very much from these years, there are as it were big open holes in his memory, or sores which hurt if he merely comes near them. But he has brought something with him: the fourteen "protocols" he has published and which all form parts of a single comprehensive, as yet unfinished work about the problem of evil, "The History of Bestiality."
The first one concerned the doctors' trials in Germany right after the war, and we know its name without his needing to name it: Ere the Cock Crows.
I studied the Doctors' Trials and the medical documents during this time, and little by little I understood that the eclipse of the sun had come. The birds stopped singing, the grass turned gray where it wasn't bloody, and the rivers overflowed with excrement, rotting entrails, and severed limbs, just as in the sewers under the social camps in Mozart's land. (202f)
The whole time, while he was writing protocol after protocol, he found himself in the land of Chaos, and only now has he escaped from it because he has finally accepted the meaninglessness of existence and human evil. Therefore he can watch the drama of the daily injustice which unfolds before him in the courtroom—and which in concentrated lucidity mirrors the grotesque drama of all existence—with the spectator's cool calm. Nothing affects him any longer. He has put the past behind him, and he has found peace.
Or so he believes. But one day he comes across some photographs which the judge has hidden between the pages of the court protocols, pornographic pictures with the town's foremost citizens as participants, and so swinish "that even an old brothel-owner from Buenos Aires would have blushed and turned away." (46) When he walks through the empty town streets in the evening, he feels disquieted, something has broken into his everyday balance.
I walked rapidly, with the pack of photographs under my arm, and little by little the heavens again began to bleed. Blood collected in the vault of the sky and ran down toward the horizon in all directions . . .
I thought about how I'd staked everything on achieving one single thing: to be at peace with the world! Through many years I'd sought out injustice in order to inure myself to it. That was the whole secret in my plan: to tolerate unfreedom and injustice. My calm is destroyed, and the sky bleeds. (57)
It continues after he comes home to his room. "The walls are bleeding slightly; here and there, drop by drop . . . " And when he sees himself in the mirror, he sees a strange face in there. "Now if I could only remember my name! Then I could find out who I was, who I am." (58) For "without memory there's no continuity, no reality, no perspective on my life, no I am." (37) But how is he to be able to reconstruct the past and thereby find his lost identity, when his memory "is like a spoiled, torn-up fishnet—as if the net had caught too big a fish"? (80) In just one way: by writing down everything which pops up from the past, however fragmentary and haphazard it may seem, and hope that these fragments will gradually arrange themselves in a pattern. As readers we are thus drawn into a process of which neither he nor we know the outcome, and which is both a search for understanding and a self-reckoning: a writer's judgment day on himself. To be sure he calls himself a Servant of Justice, but that is merely the simplest circumlocution for what he really is: a writer. And the external fiction—that he earns his bread as a petty functionary in the courtroom in Heiligenberg—functions as an easily transparent allegory: all the external data in his life correspond to Jens Bjørneboe's own, the fourteen protocols to the fourteen books Jens Bjørneboe has published. But the past he is trying to recover has also been a journey, and the invisible companion who continually lurks in the background, Dante, tells of the stages of the journey: from the land of Chaos, through Hell and Purgatory until he can now breathe freely in the cool air of the Alpine town: Heiligenberg.
How did he come into the land of Chaos? In some way it is tied to the memory of Stockholm, where he went as a refugee during the war. It "must have been a degradation, some unheard-of humiliation", but if he merely tries to think about it, there is something in him which protests. (73) "To talk about Stockholm is like digging with a fork in a wound; all that exists of flesh and nerves protests against it." (75) So he talks about other things, about people he met, places where he lived, but all the while it is the empty spaces, the open holes in his memory, which draw him, because the solution to the mystery must be found there. If he only had some clues! But the many years between the Stockholm period and Heiligenberg lie in near-absolute darkness. He has one single witness: The Praiano Papers, which he wrote down in a little medieval town ten years earlier and has now found again. At that time he had—like Dante—arrived at the middle of his life's road—"nel mezzo del camin' di nostra vita"—and discovered that he was in San Praiano—and in hell.
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. (99)
For thirty-six years he has lived with a stranger, collected impressions so that he now sits there "with thousands of pictures inside him, from the Arctic Ocean and Brooklyn and Africa", and what he remembers is hardly anything but "murder, war, concentration camps, torture, slavery, executions, bombed-out cities, and the half-burned bodies of children" (23), until now "I walk in blood to over my ankles, I wade in blood" (98), and melancholy lies like sticky stuff over everything and everybody. Still he is shut up in a darkness, which only now and then is illumined by sudden glimpse from the past, from childhood, from the Stockholm period and from journeys in the South.
When he now—ten years later—reads through the Praiano Papers, he sees that a turning point occurred back then, there began a gradual awakening which finally led him to Heiligenberg. But how and when it happened, he still doesn't know.
So he toes back once again to the painful holes in his memory ad the humiliation and unheard-of indignity he vaguely associates with the Stockholm period. He remembers an episode from his time as a pupil in the studio of the painter Isaac Grünewald. Grünewald had pointed to a weakness in the picture he was working on, and he replied: "I was going to fix it tomorrow." Grünewald stood still for a moment: "But suppose you died tonight? Then what would people think of you?" (178)
Why did he feel dread? Was it dread of freedom more than a dread of death? "To finish painting the picture—here and now—that would have meant painting my own picture." Only many years later did he understand it: "Freedom always means a choice here and now—and without advice and help." Back then he didn't dare to paint the world as he himself saw it, and thereby committed a sin for which there is no forgiveness: the Sin against the Holy Spirit, which is to "sacrifice one's own personal intellectual life to live another's, or the others' life instead." (75) The lack of courage and independence which caused him to say that "The world is right: I am mad" (144) even though he knew that it was the world which was mad, led him into the sickness, into the land of Chaos, where falsehood and unfreedom reigned, until one day he experienced the moment of truth, which arrives in a bullfight "when the fun is over, the game is ended, the man takes off his mask and the bull shall die: the truth is revealed." (20). Face to face with death everything is stripped—lies, pretenses, flight—and freedom made manifest, freedom which consists in "not having any standard outside one's own consciousness, but bearing all responsibility one- self. Freedom means that one can never again receive help." (141)
It was this freedom he always had shied away from, because it filled him with dread. He was like the unknown man from whom he has received a letter. "I have never lived my life, only the others'," this man writes. "I have filled the role which others expected or demanded of me." Only now, when he knows that he will soon die, has the truth become plain to him: "The vision of death makes all standards and norms ridiculous, and in the face of these last days there's only one thing that counts: what I myself am. I have one last chance to get to know myself, to know who I was . . . " (179)
This is what the Servant himself—like all the rest of humanity's little bears—lacked: the awareness of death. Without it there is no freedom and therefore no true existence, but a life of falsehood, of what Sartre calls "mauvaise foi", bad faith, self-deception.
But Moment of Freedom describes something more than an individual process of liberation and awakening. It is also a European novel, and in a far deeper meaning than that the action takes place in our time's Europe or that quotations and references to European literature and art are woven into the text.
In one of the dreams the Servant of Justice relates, he was closed into a mountain cave, surrounded with darkness. Suddenly the stone wall slid aside, deep beneath him lay a fertile landscape bathed in sunlight, and a glittering blue sea. "It was the Mediterranean, I knew, which was down there: the Mediterranean of Antiquity." (177) Now—from Heiligenberg—he can see that "the dream of coming through the mountain was an exact prophecy of the unbelievable significance the Mediterranean has had in my life. It is two things: the red town and Tuscany on the one hand—the catacombs and Antiquity on the other." (180) But another land has had just as decisive a significance for him: Germania. "That's the thorn in my flesh; Germania is the cross I'm nailed to." (175)
His whole life now receives a meaning in light of the contrast between the Germania he has been bound to and the South which freed him. He once loved Germania, but the love has gone over to hate, because it became the image of atrocity hidden behind a façade of lies. Germania which created Verdun and Dachau, which rose again as the German miracle, with money as the only standard of value.
When he one day walked across the border into East Berlin, he knew at once that he was home again. "All these ruins, all this grayness, all this emptiness, all this poverty. . . . Yes, that's the way we are: this is our world." (208) For the first time in many years he felt freedom—because this world of grayness was without falsehood.
But the South gave liberation: the catacombs, Antiquity, Tuscany. The catacombs, which he learned his way around during the long journey in the land of Chaos, gave him the experience of the past, "a feeling of having a home and an origin. There was something which came together in me." (186) And the meeting with Renaissance Tuscany, and a culture which was bloody and cruel and harsh but without falsehood, healed something which had gone to pieces. "Those who founded this culture, that of the Renaissance, were all men who laughed at atrocities." (112) This laughter gave them the distance which is necessary if one is not to go mad.
The whole art of learning to live means holding fast to laughter; without laughter the world is a torture chamber, a dark place where dark things will happen to us, a horror show filled with bloody deeds of violence. (113)
He finds this laughter again in Dante, in Leonardo and the French artist Callot, who made himself into a Tuscan. Their art can teach us that "every period has been about the same: the total picture is a bloody operating room of an executioner's workshop." (158) Here—"on that creative and renewing, blood-soaked earth which we call Tuscany, and which is the world" (155)—lies Europe's heart.
Here they painted the most beautiful madonnas, here they cut up and dissected the first corpses, they broke with theology and angelology and wrote down the first observations which were subsequently to lead us out into great, empty freedom. (119)
Thus does the meting with the Renaissance become a help in seeing a pattern, which makes it possible for him to live with a reality which has threatened to overwhelm him. "Without the Florentine laughter one goes mad." (121)
This recalls the Polish professor Jan Kott's analysis of the Renaissance's great poet, "Shakespeare—our contemporary." He too sees the parallel between the Renaissance and our world. "When established values have been toppled, and it doesn't help to call to God, Nature or History from the depths of the torments a cruel world overwhelms you with, the fool becomes the central figure in the theater." Or in the Servant of Justice's words: "Without laughter you sit fast in the pool of excrement, and you will slowly go into decomposition, into autolysis." (121)
If Moment of Freedom seems so strong, it is because Jens Bjørneboe here has been equal to the technical problem which he had been confronted with earlier as well: how to express a new reality for which the old words, the old forms, no longer suffice? In Ere the Cock Crows and The Evil Shepherd he tried to blow life into worn-out, conventional forms. Now he himself passes sentence on his earlier writing. —It reflects the lies he was living in: he didn't dare to be himself, but depended on others' models. The process of liberation the book tells about is confirmed by what it is: it tells of a will to give a personal vision of the truth, here and now, existentially.
That doesn't mean that one need accept Bjørneboe's vision as the only and final truth about humanity. "The History of Bestiality," which the Servant of Justice wants to present, could stand to be supplemented by a "History of Goodness, Generosity and Love." And his experience of freedom in complete isolation and loneliness, above life's grotesque drama, may find a necessary corrective in Tarjei Vesaas' equally hard-won vision of the fellow human being as the way to true freedom.
But doesn't a frightening cynicism lie in Bjørneboe's description of the world as one big crematorium, "this latrine of a planet" (69)? Several critics have maintained that. I do not agree with this criticism. To be sure, I can see that Bjørneboe's Servant of Justice has never had any close relationship to other people, he has lived shut up in himself. But he has done that because the experience of suffering and meaninglessness has been so strong that he has had enough to do with the struggle not to succumb to it.
Some years ago Bjørneboe wrote in response to a query in Vinduet that the writer's foremost quality is called com-passion. He himself possesses this quality to an extraordinary degree, but his identification with the suffering has previously been so without reservation as to result in a black and white picture of the world, unbalanced, almost hysterical. In Moment of Freedom there is greater distance: he can demonstrate cool detachment in writing of how the world wars' mass murders have fertilized the earth in Alsace. But as with his model Jonathan Swift, despair lies always just below the surface, and affects me all the more strongly because it is now kept under control. His calm is hard-won, and always threatened. The sight of some pornographic pictures belonging to the representative of righteousness is enough to make the sky bleed again.
The weakness of Moment of Freedom lies for me in Bjørneboe's attitude to Teutonia—Germany. By making Germany and Germans into symbols for life's atrocity and falsehood, he ends up in an abstraction which denies the vision that sustains the book.