Both go back to the late sixties.

Two of my friends were wandering around Oslo at night, one with [Bjørneboe's essay collection] Norway, My Norway in his hand. Somewhere in the center of the city they passed a parked police car with live contents; at this time that in itself could be a spur to revolutionary heroism, which in this case expressed itself as follows: The nocturnal wanderer with Norway, My Norway in his hand sprang like a tiger at the Symbol of the State, the parked police car, and slapped Norway, My Norway, and therewith Jens Bjørneboe's blue portrait as well, against the windshield in front of the uniformed personnel. In this way he was able to perform a sorely needed protest action, express his loathing for all centralized government, and undergo instant martyrdom in the arms of the State power, which of course deposited him forthwith behind the police car's grated back window.

Thereupon they drove him to the nearest police station and put him in a cell.

His companion on the nocturnal wanderings -- who despite his youthful age and his utter lack of social standing was endowed with a particularly well-groomed beard and a prominent, balding crown, which together gave him an urbane and dignified air -- raced after the police car. After a relatively short run he arrived at the nearest police station -- he knew the neighborhood -- and presented himself to the officer on duty.

"My name is Lund," he said. "Professor Lund."

The officer nodded respectfully.

"I am a neighbor of yours," explained the professor. "And I have just learned from one of my students that another of my students has been brought to this station."

Professor Lund named the name, and the officer confirmed the lamentable fact. "Now it's like this," continued the professor. "The student who has been brought in is no ordinary student. He is my best student! He is expected to have an extraordinary scientific career. But like all geniuses, he has a somewhat difficult temperament. At bottom he's a good and law-abiding person. And I can guarantee by my title that this will never happen again. Officer, I shall personally take charge of him at this point. Wouldn't it be embarrassing for a man with such a bright future before him to bear the stigma of a police record?"

And a few minutes later Professor Lund and his best student were able to resume their peregrinations through Oslo's nighttime streets. But the police had confiscated the student's copy of Norway, My Norway.

When I heard about the night's little adventure the next day, I went to the nearest bookstore and stole a copy of Norway, My Norway.

A book people could be arrested for owning was a book I wanted to have.

That was the first thing I read by Jens Bjørneboe. Later I read everything. I found Moment of Freedom and read it at one sitting; it took a night. This book was the first novel I had ever read since teenage suspense stories and the school days' forced feeding with, and interpretive murder of, abridged classics. Moment of Freedom brought me to the utterly decisive discovery that a novel could have meaning for one's life. For a long time I considered it an important mental health precaution to read Moment of Freedom at least once a year -- one of the few such rules that I observed for many years.

Gradually I forgot what I had read in Norway, My Norway; after all, it's only unsuccessful teachers who can remember the content of books forever. But something remained. Something from Norway, My Norway wouldn't, couldn't disappear.

It was Bjørneboe's retelling of the myth of Eros and Psyche in "Speech to the graduating class."

These few pages had left behind wholly concrete, inwardly visible images in me. They were present like a stored dream, whose image-world I could take out whenever I wished and look at in a waking state. The pictures had color; it was the color of intensified sunlight in the morning, before the city awakens; they were painted with living gold.

Some years later I took Norway, My Norway out of the bookcase again. Because of the persistent golden memory I wanted to read the speech to the graduating class again.

But the astonishing thing was that the myth's pictorial character, as it lived in my memory, in fact wasn't present in Bjørneboe's talk, even if it was that which had occasioned the memory. The retelling of the myth of Eros and Psyche, as I read it now, was altogether matter-of-fact, dry and prosaic compared to the shining pictures I associated with the myth.

It was not Bjørneboe, but the content of Greek mythology, which possessed such a numinous character. It was this content in its capacity of artistic reality -- mediated by Bjørneboe, but by virtue of itself -- which in my (sub)conscious had taken the form of concrete pictures which were not present in the original, actual text I had read.

When the dynamic character of that mythic world opened to me in this way, I went to the nearest bookstore and stole a copy of a Greek mythology.

All this is in the best accord with the very heart of Bjørneboe's life and work: The attempt to overcome the opposition between politics and metaphysics by realizing a social individualism. In his writings the connection between "outer" and "inner", between society and individual, between social change and the lonely journey toward understanding, are so intimately thought and so passionately pursued that this center in his biography conforms the outside world to its pattern.

One can see this as an accident, or one can see it as logical necessity; the only thing one cannot do is to avoid seeing it.

In any case, it seems to me that the idiom of my own meeting with Jens Bjørneboe's writings says something essential about his work. Furthermore it also says something essential about the cultural situation in which his authorship occurs. For through the meeting with Bjørneboe my awareness was awakened of at least two decisive things: The existence of modern cultural criticism, and the existence of a forgotten European cultural tradition. I had gone through a higher education without coming in contact with either of these.

We thought that we had learned about our own time and our own history, but in reality we hadn't learned anything. We had quite simply been brought up as people without bearings, by people without bearings. The conscious or unconscious goal was that we should serve the State and create profits for Industry.

Anyone who in such a cultural situation becomes himself, on his own explores European culture's double nature of atrocity and light, of collective power and lonely opposition, and himself chooses the goal and direction for his own life on earth, will become through this selfsame engaged individualism an enemy of authoritarian systems and ways of thinking. He will find himself in opposition to both the existing economic orientation which regards and treats human beings as fodder for industry, and the authoritarian variants of socialism which regard and treat human beings as means for the achievement of an abstract utopia.

The wandering away from political and historical reality, the withdrawal into one's own, circumscribed and hardened ego, is a form of individualism which has a destructive effect on those parts of the human self which seek to open themselves to -- and live on -- connection with the world.

It is not this kind of individualism we meet in Jens Bjørneboe.

We meet an individualism which fights one of its hardest and most difficult battles against precisely that self-centered ego in us, and for the bringing to consciousness of a Self which knows that it owes its physical existence to the mercy of the globe and the labor of others, and that its spiritual life has the existence and contributions of others as an absolute precondition. It is this individualism which I call social individualism; an experience of Self which is an experience of wholeness, and consequently sees social reality as an immediate personal concern.

But at the same time such a Self-perception is also an experience of spiritual reality in oneself. To be asked to confine this spiritual reality to one's own skin would be ridiculous; the experience of Self leads almost immediately to the experience of the world's spiritual aspect.

For many, whose literary orientation is limited to what the newspaper journalists consider sufficiently sensational to merit a couple of front-page columns, Jens Bjørneboe is first and foremost the pornographer, the man who was convicted for having written Without a Stitch. For others he is the political rabble-rouser, the man with the wild ideas, who spent sixteen years of his life attacking the Norwegian judicial system and who as punishment for this ended his days as a rampant alcoholic and contributor to [the pulp magazine] Kriminal Journalen. For those who read what he wrote, he was either "the country's bad conscience" -- a stereotype meant as praise -- or an ahistoric individualist with no sense for the simplest and most obvious Marxist truths -- also a stereotype, but not quite so laudatory as the first.

And in and of himself he was all this. He was a pornographer. He attacked the prison- and court system. He was an alcoholic. He made the long journey from the shipowner's milieu in Kristiansand to the columns of Kriminal Journalen. He was this country's bad conscience. He didn't have much sense for Marxist truths.

But in the first place he was all these things at once. And in the second place they were all in a certain sense secondary features of his life and work; the primary hallmark lay elsewhere. The main thing -- both in his life and in his writing -- was to become himself and find existential, philosophical and artistic expression for this individuation's technique and reality, and not least for its connections with spiritual experience on the one hand and social change on the other.

It is this which is the heart of Jens Bjørneboe's work, it is this which is Bjørneboe. Everything he did and wrote springs out of this core, is the consequence of it, a fight with, for, and against it. Even the thing which literature's professional observers, the critics and literary pundits, have made the main thing par excellence in Bjørneboe's work -- namely the cliché about "the problem of evil" -- is actually of secondary significance in this work. The problem of evil is of course a prominent theme in many of Bjørneboe's novels, but in his work's unbroken totality the reality of evil appears primarily as a necessary confrontation on the way to individuation.

Jens Bjørneboe is a philosopher of the Self, both theoretically and practically, in both life and work.

Therefore he will continue for a long time to be what he perhaps most of all was and wanted to be: One of the most important sources of inspiration for those who in generation after generation fall outside the established dogmatics, whether it appears in conservative or radical guise.

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Related topics in Theme index:

Literature: the Writer's Craft and Mission

Mythology

Youth