....Powderhouse has many descriptions of meals and other kinds of sensuality.
Beautiful sex scenes. These are often placed just after descriptions of the worst murders and
executions. And that is precisely the point. Water and wine, sex and joy: the hedgehog's quest
for moisture and the human's mating cannot and must not be divorced from evil and violence.
Both are part of life. This must be understood as an attempt to be reconciled with the world,
accept the reality so as to be able to live with it, perhaps master it. The narrator from
Moment of Freedom has given up his withdrawal, he no longer tries to forget the
wickedness. Therefore evil and beauty side by side.
It is certainly possible to understand Powderhouse as an answer to 1968 anarchist
ideas about opening and fantasy, while Moment of Freedom is linked to the
Scandinavian pessimism of the 1960s.
The answer which Powderhouse gives only reaches part of the way, for acceptance
of existence doesn't change the world. In the last book of the trilogy Bjørneboe tries to
combine two sets of problems: the question of ego is developed further; he also discusses
evolution external to the ego, concrete historical development and revolution.
What makes The Silence a non-novel also makes it an open book. In contrast to the
two preceding works the narrator is in the background. He is anonymous, but at the same time
full of consciousness and memory. "I have no other substance, no other existence, than
these pictures I carry inside me." (132) And when the I is withdrawn, other
figures acquire a more prominent place. The book is built up as a series of conversations, with a
fictional African history professor, Ali; with Columbus, with God, and not least, with
Robespierre (a possible stand-in for Lenin). The Silence is not allegorical like
Moment of Freedom and Powderhouse, but suprahistorical. The meetings with
Columbus and Robespierre are meetings with historical attitudes.
The Silence is not a depressing book, but amusing and ironic. The author jokes with
himself as well, plays with the concept of incarnation. It is written with ironic distance.
Columbus is the one who goes farthest in the joke. He is always giving arguments against his
own role in history. He attacks imperialism, and when he turns to dust in the book, it must be
understood as an image of the collapse of European colonialism.
The Silence gives no convincing historical documentation, but it is nonetheless built
up in a field of tension between concrete political analyses and a metaphysical interpretation of
existence. The history professor Ali is reliable, he must come from Angola, the land of silence
and revolution. He has a profound understanding of revolution's conditions and dynamic.
The Silence takes a positive view of Mao and China, and rejects the way of Eastern
Europe. There is also a suggestion in the book that the revolution in the third world must go
through two phases—the first neodemocratic, the next socialist. The Silence thus
has concrete political moorings, but much of the documentation is easy to refute. Europe is
described as a unit, Bjørneboe does not distinguish between colonialism and imperialism,
the author romanticizes the cultures in South America before the whites came. The political
material has its greatest interest as signals, as signs of what historical forces the author feels
drawn by.
So a concrete, political revolution is necessary, but then follows the next question (which for
Bjørneboe is perhaps understood metaphysically): Will the overturning of society be able
to rid the world of evil? It's one thing for the revolution to solve the Africans' problems, but does
it solve the narrator's dilemma? The protagonist has given up his withdrawal from the world, and
precisely then it becomes of vital importance to gain an overview of the course of
history. The narrator colliedes directly with history. "What it revolves around, of course,
is how my little excrement of a life relates to world history—in other words, around a
relation: Does an individual existence function within the contemporary part of
history?" (41). When the narrator accepts being a part of history, he simultaneously
becomes guilty of the Europeans' misdeeds both past and future. For the narrator a reckoning
with Europe is likewise a reckoning with himself. He is ambivalent toward a revolution with its
origin in the third world. The narrator has gotten into another bind, caught in a vise between
loyalty to European culture and the insight that a wave of revolution (which is necessary) will
flood over Europe. This painful contradiction probably strikes at the center of what is most
combustible and tender for the writer Bjørneboe. The conflict expresses
Bj&slash;rneboe's understanding that the revolution is necessary, at the same time that he fears
that people with his ideas and attitudes to life will be physically liquidated during the
upheaval.
The question of revolution and violence is raised in a conversation at the end of the book
with Robespierre. Since the chapter is introduced with a quote from Lenin (which may or may
not be genuine), and the narrator's voice keeps underlining that Lenin is Robespierre's spiritual
heir, it is reasonable to interpret Robespierre's persona as a paraphrase of Lenin. Lenin, who
through Bj&slash;rneboe's whole career has been a thorn in the writer's flesh like the devil
himself. There is a tone of admiration and sympathy for Robespierre in the description. An
obvious interpretation is that Bjørneboe has become reconciled to the fact that
revolutionary violence is necessary, that a social upheaval sets its own conditions and uses its
own means. Robespierre is esteemed not least because he died gladly. An attitude which is
related to the death-awareness which permeates the whole trilogy.
The novel ends in the courtroom, where the whole trilogy started, among the humiliated and
powerless. The narrator has arrived at a somewhat clearer perception, which is quite different
from the ideas he was struggling with in Moment of Freedom. The highest meaning in
the judicial process is not to condemn the world and humanity, but "that injustice can be
turned into justice. When the time of upheaval comes." (199). The violent process which
can recreate the world, only the revolution can achieve.
"I don't believe that humanity is evil or 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." (200). Bjørneboe thus ends the whole trilogy in an
optimistic and dialectical view of the world, something which becomes a violent self-reckoning
for a writer who has hitherto evaluated the world chiefly with absolute concepts, with purely
black-and-white thinking.
The same conclusion is presented symbolically in a mystical legend full of biblical allusions.
It tells of a youth who went out into the world to see all evil and unrighteousness, but who at last
found something which was not guilt-ridden: running water and the green plant.
All the narrator's culture, with legends and historical persons such as Columbus and
Robespierre in key roles, gives us a clear sign that this is not a contemporary novel in the usual
sense. The descriptions of the present continually play a subordinate role, the past and the future
are more important. The Silence can best be characterized as a utopian prose fable. Lars
Gustafsson, in a penetrating essay about utopias ("Utopier och andre essäer om 'dikt'
och 'liv'," 1969), has discussed the relation between utopia and revolution. He maintains
that there is no necessary connection between these two concepts. Revolutions are oriented
toward concrete objects and well-defined goals. Utopias, on the other hand, Gustafsson sees as
counterfictions created out of a need to be able to depict social conditions which stand in
contrast to the prevailing social mythology. A mythology which purports to justify the power of
some while claiming that society's development is good for all.
If we apply Gustafsson's distinction to Bjørneboe, we see that he mixes the concepts
of revolution and utopia together. For Bjørneboe the revolution becomes both a historic
force creating a new society, and the utopia itself. The revolution is not something concrete
which is carried out by living human beings, but an abstract force which comes of itself.
According to Bjørneboe history can't really be explained. It just happens. To be sure,
history is presented in certain passages as a chain of causal connections. There is a natural and
even development from Columbus's voyage to America to the Americans' war in Vietnam, and
power-hunger and greed have been the most important driving forces in history. But two other
views of history are more fundamental. From one angle the evolution of society is static in
Bjørneboe. Bestiality and violence have existed since time immemorial in human life
and among animals. From another angle, the trilogy ends in the dream of a qualitative leap in
history which can make a utopian social state a reality. Now human beings are living in
the silence. Before us lies a society of a character we can but dimly intuit.
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- Related pages:
- Jahn Thon: Bjørneboe's Social Critique
- Esther Greenleaf Mürer: Translator's Introduction to
The Silence
- The Silence (Publisher's information and reviews)
- The Silence (Excerpts)
- Related topics in Theme index:
- Apocalypse, End Times, Revolution
- European Culture, Western Civilization
- Globalization, Imperialism, Wealth Addiction
This page added November 2000
