This page added January 2003
"Power, which is the sole existing principle, means only one thing: the opportunity to cause others pain." Is Bjørneboe's theme pass‚ in today's Norway—a country which is so democratized and humanized in school as well as in politics, the judicial system and other social institutions?
"The problem of evil" was for Bjørneboe "the authoritarian problem", as it finds expression in historical, political and pesonal form in the three novels Moment of Freedom, Powderhouse and The Silence. This theme can be summarized briefly in the following sentence: "Power, which is the sole existing principle, means only one thing: the opportunity to cause others pain." (Moment of Freedom)
In Norway's world of work the authoritarian problem has ostensibly broken down. Today no CEOs or directors can regulate their workers in detail. The organizations are represented at the boss's table, and words such as "the stipulated framework" and "rules of the game" seem soft and non-authoritarian. At the same time we know that the cult of leaders from the 1980s continues in the best of health. In addition money, efficiency and profitability have achieved a paramount position to which all other values must quietly submit. Today the people have truly become Homo consumens, as Bjørneboe describes them in Moment of Freedom.
That the police and the judicial system are far from being humanized to the degree that we sometimes imagine, may be confirmed by brutal facts. As for example when provfessor Anders Bratholm in his article in Aftenposten (July 2, 2002) about the so-called boomerang case in Bergen relates that a trusted researcher of Amnesty International has in 20 years "never experienced the like of police harrassment, not even in dictatorships and in other countries with a weak rule of law." Therefore we can safely say that Jens Bjørneboe will continue to be just as relevant a writer as he was 30-40 years ago, so long as decisions are made in society that other people must abide by, or subordinate themselves to.
In the "History of Bestiality" trilogy he takes up that part of world history which, while it hasn't been hidden, is commonly treated under such general phrases as "conflicts," "wars," "massacres," and "pogroms." Here Bjørneboe describes the history of bestiality as an endless series of acts of tyrany toward human beings, torture, abuse, executions and genocide. Bjørneboe presses the following perception of world history on his readers: Life on earth could have been a paradise, but humans have made it into a slaughterhouse. It is the individual's helplessness and lack of rights vis- …-vis power which is Bjørneboe's theme. "His collected writings can be read as one long defense of the individual with a corresponding attack on all forms of authoritarian activity," writes professor øystein Rottem in Norway's Literary History. Bjørneboe himself expressed it thus in his last interview with H†kon Ringnes in the spring of 1976: "More important than the attack on the authoritarians' docile conventional thinking is the defense of the individual—but these go hand in hand." In much of his writing Bjørneboe gives us a feeling that people need a "defense" against themselves and against other people. This finds its strongest expression in the poem "Mea maxima culpa" from 1966:
Ask me about "guilt"! It is a gruesome word.
Each is guilty of all that happens on earth!
In shame you needs must turn away your face:
The sins of one are those of the human race.
But man knows that he is doing wrong:
It is within our hearts that the law is stored,
And every tittle must be upheld by force.
What abides are evil figments from a carouse;
Of our planet we have made a slaughterhouse.
The most important driving forces behind the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by the United Nations in 1948, were a feeling of a common guilt along with a desire to avoid a repetition of World War II. The declaration had a difficult birth; only in the 1990s did the awareness of human rights become a reality. Among the concrete results have been war criminal courts in connection with the acts of tyranny and the extermination of peoples in Rwanda and Yugoslavia.
We are wont to say that significant writers are ahead of their time. It is therefore interesting to register that in Jens Bjørneboe's writings there is hardly a word to be found about human rights, while at the same time we can summarize the nucleus of his oeuvre in the first article of the 30 in the Declaration of Human Rights: "All people are born free and with the same human worth and human rights. They are equipped with reason and conscience and must treat each other in a brotherly spirit."
Today we find Bjørneboe's engaged face on the cover of Norwegian textbooks in high school, and inside the books the pupils meet his defiant essay, "On the Guardian Type." Even today some people--both youngsters and adults--will find his five commandments "against the guardian type's terror of independent thought" rather strong:
1. Always think for yourself.
2. Never believe what older people tell you, for they always have something to hide.
3. Be disobedient! You learn nothing by being obedient.
4. Question!
5 Be suspicious!
Jens Bjørneboe died in 1976, at the age of only 55. The writer Kaj Skagen has emphasized how important it is, when we evaluate Bjørneboe's writings, to be clear that we are looking at half an authorship. Bjørneboe himself indicated in several interviews that he was only halfway with his work: "The History of Freedom" was yet to be written after he had spent 25 years on "The History of Bestiality." He considered his play Semmelweis as a beginning of "The History of Freedom," and on the last page of The Silence we read the following: "On a planet where human beings have freely chosen to let themselves be burned aloive for the sake of truth, the good must have great possibilities."
Where a continued authorship might have led is of course useless to speculate. But we may surely suppose that we would have met a greater concern for responsibilities/obligations and a possible readjustment of the boundaries for individual development. Whether Bjørneboe would have succeeded in solving the dilemmas which inhere in an anarchist attitude to life is indeed uncertain. Jens Bjørneboe was—and is—a controversial writer, and that is just what he wanted to be. First and foremost he was a rebel: crass, precise, consistent and concrete— both in theory and in practice. His "Be disobedient!" bursts boundaries — and will remain as the most radical expression to be put on paper in this country, because it goes to the root of evil: our bent for obedience and parroting and our fear of independent thinking.
It is relatively rare for literary hisorians to issue "testimonials" about a writer's basic ideas, that is, whether a writer's opinions and perceptions are objectively right or wrong. It is difficult to understand Øystein Rottem to be doing anything else when he writes of Bjørneboe's work in Dialog 3 (1999): "Some think that it weakens the critique in Bjørneboe's later work that he regards authority, power and control as something ineradicable. So far it looks as if history supports Bjørneboe and not his critics."
And hereby Bjørneboe is nominated as Norway's most quotable writer. The title is meant as a mark of respect! He is without competiton, and it is easy to predict that in the future his writings will inspire and be just as much used as they have been in the past 30 years
This page added January 2003