The Silence (1973) is the third volume in Jens Bjørneboe's trilogy of experimental novels known informally as "The History of Bestiality." It follows Moment of Freedom (1966) and Powderhouse (1969).

The trilogy presents the narrator's extended attempt to grapple with the problem of human evil. In Moment of Freedom the narrator was concerned primarily with coming to terms with the atrocities of the twentieth century on a personal level, with trying to achieve a philosophical distance. In Powderhouse he steps back and takes a longer historical view, proposing that "the permanent witch-hunt" is a more or less constant feature of Western civilization, and breaks out whenever our settled world view is threatened by new insights.

In The Silence the narrator is trying to achieve yet other kinds of distance, both geographical and metaphysical. He is now sojourning in an unnamed country in North Africa:

In a sense one has to go outside of oneself in order to meet oneself, and perhaps one must go outside Europe to achieve greater clarity in one's picture of the continental sickness. Just as the personal process occurs in the meeting with the environment, so it's likewise probable that one must follow a culture's meeting with other cultures, a continent's meeting with other continents, to get a clear picture of its psychopathology. [20]

The theme is illuminated in many interwoven elements (all of which are previewed in the densely-textured first chapter). The narrator's cultural assumptions are challenged by conversations with various people he meets—not only contemporaries, but also historical figures such as Columbus—and with God. Interspersed are narratives of the destructive exploits of the conquistadors. He adds a microcosmic personal dimension as well.

Chief among the narrator's conversation partners in the present is Ali, a black revolutionary intellectual, in exile from an unnamed country south of the Sahara. In his biography of Bjørneboe, Fredrik Wandrup states that many of Ali's ideas come from Eldridge Cleaver, whom Bjørneboe interviewed when he visited Algeria in 1971. The published interview does not seem to me to bear this out. However, Cleaver's persona—"he whose dwelling-place nobody knew"—does make a shadowy appearance at the end of the third chapter, when the narrator delivers Ali's briefcase to revolutionary headquarters—the description of which matches that of the Black Panther headquarters in the interview. (1)

Bjørneboe was intensely interested in colonial history at this period. In a 1971 essay, "Literature and Reality," Bjørneboe tells of being powerfully affected by the book Die Weissen kommen (The Whites are Coming)—"the first comprehensive history of colonialism," by the German journalist Gert von Paczensky:

We generally think that we know quite a lot about the whites' advance into other parts of the world, against people of other colors and cultures. We know that the whole thing was one big plundering expedition, one continuous assault and robbery; we know that it involved massacres and mass murders, gold and bloodbaths, rapes, slave-trading and genocide. We know, in short, that it was really, really bad.
        And yet we know nothing. What we picture to ourselves about colonialism isn't even the palest shadow of what colonialism was, or what it to some extent still is. Colonial history is in reality a hundred times worse than what we have been able to imagine ... so terrible that you blanch with shame once you've delved into it. All this has been systematically suppressed, concealed and falsified. (2)

In The Silence Bjørneboe, drawing on his past experience as a teacher in a Waldorf school, recounts the exploits of Cortez and Pizarro in the New World in the style of a epic legend—but with a twist. As Joe Martin puts it, "The recorder of the protocols has not simply recorded, but rather translated history into myth.... Cortes becomes an Agamemnon or a dark Odysseus. Mexico becomes a Troy as if from Virgil's point of view, that is, from the inside." (3)

Is it possible to atone for these wrongs? That problem is embodied in the figure of The Nice American (in Norwegian, "Den Snille Amerikaneren"—a play on the Norwegian title of Graham Greene's novel of Vietnam, The Quiet [stille] American). The Nice American's experiences in Vietnam have led him to make a conscious decision to put his expertise in oil technology at the disposal of a Third World country. Yet this does not suffice to allay his sense of guilt for the atrocities stemming from his own country's cultural sickness. He seeks oblivion in drink, and ultimately courts death at the hands of a band of starving children, in a manner reminiscent of Tennessee Williams' Suddenly Last Summer—a play Bjørneboe considered a "sovereign masterpiece." (In a 1962 essay on Williams, Bjørneboe notes that the half-grown, hungry boys in Williams' play "are killing a whole culture, our Western isolated-intellectual world, in a single refined and decadent representative...The image . . . is enhanced by the fact that he himself collaborates in the murder. . . .") (4)

The narrator's encounter with a child prostitute, one of the band of hungry children, sends him into a drinking-and-sleeping-pill binge similar to those described in Moment of Freedom. Here more than anywhere else in his writings, Bjørneboe—whose alcohol consumption was legendary—makes incisive literary use of his own experience as an alcoholic, in line with the question posed by the narrator at the outset: "Is it possible that by dint of investigating one single person's sickness one can find the diagnosis for the whole culture?" (19) He clearly has Western wealth-addiction in mind as he speaks of his own condition:

I know something about alcohol: Drunkenness is bound up with the structure and form of the entire personality, it's a part of the personality itself. I'm good for only two things: to keep my hellish records and to drink.... If I am to stop drinking, not only must the image of my personality be splintered and destroyed, my personality itself must be crushed, pulverized. This man who can't rest, who knows only hard work or drinking like a madman, he must be annihilated. Then I must build a new personality, starting at the very bottom. Who can do that? (168f)

The necessity for individual transformation, and its difficulty, must be borne in mind when considering the theme of revolution. Bjørneboe insists that transformation must take place within both the individual and society. Otherwise all revolution will merely breed more injustice, more oppression, more violence.

Bjørneboe's view of revolution thus includes a metaphysical dimension. He is fond of quoting a phrase of the Norwegian anarchist Hans Jæger (1854-1910): "Metaphysics or suicide!" From the beginning to the end of his career Bjørneboe maintains that to deny the spiritual side of human nature—as the prevailing forms of both capitalism and socialism are bent on doing—is tantamount to individual and collective suicide. Given the difficulty of discussing spiritual matters in the cultural climate of the time, he tends to approach them obliquely:

Before we know what a human being is, before we have a clear and unambiguous image of man, we cannot have any clear goal for our experiments and our struggles to create the right economic, social, political, and—not least—cultural conditions for human growth and humanity's evolution.
        Until we know what a human is, we won't know what we want.
        But the question of life's meaning and the true human essence is not considered permissible in our cultural circle. It is like saying foul words in polite society. It is like doing one's business on the carpet. We have got used to the fact that our most central, vital question, about "the meaning of life," is almost obscene, an indecent question, which no one in possession of his intellectual virginity will be improper enough to mention. If one asks about meaning and purpose, one is not a serious person. (5)

The Silence is taken out of the naturalistic plane by such devices as the narrator's conversations with God (or is it Satan?), Columbus, and Robespierre; his "memories" from previous incarnations; and examples of synchronicity such as those involving his friends the Alessandros, and the ensuing conversation with Ali (138f).

Regarding the prediction in the book's very first paragraph, "After the Third World War the rest of the globe went communist; the merchants' empire was broken," we must be clear that by "communism" Bjørneboe does not mean Leninist Marxism. In a 1971 essay he says:

All genuine philosophy is occupied with the same problem: living together on earth, "making the earth habitable," as Brecht says. One could say: "politics" means finding a way in which one can stand to live with other people, or reaching an agreement about sharing the earth's riches in a reasonable way, in brotherhood, in freedom and equality.
        In a sense all philosophy of significance is an attempt to find a humane and usable form of communism. But that is by no means to say that this true communism is the same as Marxist-Leninist centralism, with its elitist theory, its worship of the party, and its unfreedom, oppression and police terrorism. Quite the contrary: it looks as if the Leninist version has led to the art of making the earth even more uninhabitable than it was before Marx. (6)

A number of critics have commented on Bjørneboe's seeming obliviousness to the likelihood of a nuclear holocaust. For example, one reviewer wrote, "Any talk of world revolution as a 'solution is simply romantic claptrap, since before that there will inevitably be another world war—which will not leave behind any world to revolutionize." (7)

Bjørneboe does indeed believe that the Great Transformation must be proceeded by a catastrophe which will put an end to the stage we are in now—a stage which Dostoevsky calls "the war of all against all." The catastrophe will entail what Bjørneboe calls—borrowing another phrase from Hans Jæger"humanity's meeting with itself" (the word rendered as "humanity" [mennesket] can also mean "the individual").

The war, the catastrophe, and its aftermath are described allegorically in Bjørneboe's next (and last) novel, The Sharks. He says in a 1973 interview:

"I believe that during the crisis man will experience himself and his being as independent of battles for material goods, he will learn so to speak to rise above that. But I don't believe it's going to happen in the near future. I believe it was Goethe who said that humanity's evolution must be planned over a longer space of time than we are used to reckoning with . . . and I think that is right." (8)

The transformation, the revolution, which Bjørneboe is describing is an evolution in humanity's self-knowledge, a spiritual rebirth on a collective scale. "The revolution must become continuous— eternal—it must be new every single day; the revolution must be permanent," he writes in another essay. "Otherwise the society will degenerate and fossilize into centralism. It will no longer grow." (9)

Bjørneboe's apocalyptic vision was already apparent at the beginning of his career. His first book, published in 1951, ends with a long poem, Before the Solstice: Hans Jæger in Memoriam. Here are the closing stanzas:

All of us feel the fiercest winter's coming,
turn up our collars, duck our heads and shiver.
Now it's November, friends, and we're freezing,
it will be winter before our time is up!

And there will be no spring before all is burnt,
till all is burnt down into black ash
And fulled and purified in winter's cold!
Only then will the fire age and the ice age end.

The conclusion of The Silence is one of the most quoted passages in all of Bjørneboe's works. The narrator ends his labors with "The History of Bestiality" on a note of cautious hope—not optimism, but the hope which lies on the other side of despair:

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. The court sat, the charges were read, the witnesses heard, the evidence presented; humanity was found guilty. I kept the trial records. But I miss one voice in the courtroom: that of the defense.
        His plea will be a song of praise—of man the incomprehensible— endlessly evil, endlessly good—all-renewing, all-destroying.

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Related pages:

The Silence (publisher's information)

The "History of Bestiality" trilogy

Includes photo of original jacket, using Callot's La Roule

Excerpt: On the Art of Making the Earth Uninhabitable

Excerpt: Conversation with God

The Forests behind The Night of the Iguana

Jahn Thon: "Something New Must Be Created"