Jahn Thon is associate professor at Agder College in southern Norway. He has written several books on literary subjects and is a former editor of the literary magazine Profil.Jahn Thon, "Bjørneboes samfunnskritikk," Sørlandsk Magasin 1996:30-35. ©1996 by Jahn Thon. Used by permission. English translation ©1999 by Esther Greenleaf Mürer.
Jens Bjørneboe was an artist who all his life wrote from a fundamentally adversarial stance. I wish to put forth the hypothesis that problems linked to the opposition between self and environment formed the basis of his whole oeuvre, and also show what kind of social critique Bjørneboe represents.
Many have maintained that Jens Bjørneboe is so original and special that he cannot be placed in relation to schools and to other writers. I believe this is wrong. On the contrary, Bjørneboe is firmly tied to a long, clear and strong tradition: the bohemian. All his apparently self-contradictory literary sidetracks are easier to understand if we view Jens Bjørneboe as a Europeanwriter.
European bohemianism has a long historical tradition behind it. The term comes from France, where it was believed that the Gypsies came from Bohemia. Gypsies occupied a strong place in Romanticism, and it was the Romantics who linked the concept "bohemian" to the sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie. Bohemian culture is a subculture within the bourgeoisie, directed against the bourgeoisie itself. As a literary tradition it goes back at least 200 years, and embraces writers such as Jules Vallès, Honore de Balzac, Hans Jæger, Stanislaw Przybyszewski, August Strindberg, and Henry Miller.
Bohemia as a category also reflects a generally conflicted relationship between art and society in which art is no longer bound to its "taskmasters" (nobility, church, court, university), but becomes an ordinary commodity. Bohemianism is never independent of society's conventions, but presents a caricature of the reigning conventions. The bohemian and the bourgeois are mutually interdependent. Bohemianism exists as shadow, contrast, as protest, aberration, as mockery and irony. But since they are often the most intelligent and sensitive of the bourgeoisie's sons and daughters, and feel the horrors of bourgeois society from the inside and on their bodies, they formulate a very important critique of bourgeois society. Bohemianism developed historically between 1789 and 1914. Regardless of whether bohemia was located in Stockholm, Kristiania or Berlin, it followed an international pattern.
The following values and standpoints are characteristic:
1) A programmatic individualism.
2) Opposition to the money society.
3) Contempt for "father figures." Detaches from society's authoritarian institutions such as school, family, the bourgeois world of work.
4) Cultivates ecstasy and self-assertion, often linked to a heavy consumption of alcohol and drugs.
5) Defends sexual freedom and the cult of a god-given Eros.
6) Strong sympathy with the most wretched, the poorest and the most oppressed.
7) Politically: Strong affinity with anarchism. Loves and idolizes supermen, criminals, terrorists, rejects, the sick, and literary idols.
The sum of all this is ambiguous: The bohemian wants on the one hand to break down, but the bohemian is at the same time also positive to: spiritual-utopian anarcho-communism with humanist-pacifist, Rousseauist and anti-industrial tendencies.
Historically bohemianism is especially linked to the end of the 19th century and literary trends such as naturalism, impressionism, and neoromanticism. In Norway the Christiania-boheme is well known, but much more important was the milieu in Berlin with Strindberg, Munch, Vigeland, Przybyszewski and the Schwartzen Ferkel café.
Bjørneboe has nearly all these international hallmarks.
1) Long after the bohemians have had their historical golden age, he operates as a bohemian—alone, not as part of a movement.
2) The points of pain, the tensions, paradoxes, inconsistencies and unanswered questions found in Bjørneboe's writing go back to the same ambiguities in bohemianism generally.
3) The bohemian position points to two basic problems in Bjørneboe's work:
— The self's relation to the world (outside?
inside?)
— What kind of critique does he present?
To shed light on these two questions I will consider four books: Jonas (1955), Little Boy Blue (Blåmann, 1959), The Dream and the Wheel (Drømmen og Hjulet, 1964), and finally Moment of Freedom (Frihetens Øyeblikk, 1966).
At the beginning of the 1960s a radicalization of the cultural climate takes place in Norway. The culturally conservative hegemony of the fifties is defeated. In the fifties it was the conservative periodicals which dominated—Minervas Kvartalskrift, Spektrum, and Horisont (Anthroposophy), Ordet (the Riksmål movement). These were also Bjørneboe's organs, it was here he wrote.
In the 1960s he followed the mainstream and became radicalized, and he was in a line with other writers in focusing on problems of identity—e.g. Borgen's I (1959), Axel Jensen's Epp (1965), Solstad's and Haavardholm's books about the role-playing self. With an important difference. Where the other writers wrote about characters who did not come in contact with reality because they were placed outside, the problem is reversed in Bjørneboe. His characters are too tightly woven into reality.
But, regardless of the traditions, Zeitgeist and ideological currents which also encompassed Bjørneboe, the exciting thing with him is that there always remains a residue, something which isn't so easy to place, rubricize, categorize and explain. An intensity, a personal engagement and a high temperature.
Jonas is a classical Norwegian "debate novel", but with an original mythic, ideological framework. The outside/inside problem is here tied to the dyslexic Jonas, who is excluded from "the normal." But luckily there is in place a complex group of "bohemians" who create a social safety net under him.
The opposition is between the "salamanders," social-democrat dwarves who speak samnorsk and think in schemes and tables, and "the good guys", who on their side are positive only in the context of "bohemian values", not from the standard of normality. But the universal life myths (the knights of the Grail) underscore that we are dealing with an eternal logos, which fights the bohemians' battle.
The narrator's voice goes independently in and out of all the characters, and excels in narrative patterns of the previous century, such as general author's commentary, direct addresses to the reader, interpolated secondary and epistolatory narratives. According to the usual understanding of the novel it is Bjørneboe's unambiguous voice which sounds loud and clear through the whole narrative. But is it so unambiguous? If you take a closer look there are several subtexts amid the many themes, side narratives, representations and other matters. This multiplicity of meanings collides with a fundamental twofold division. The fact that in Jonas Bjørneboe stands both outside and inside the ranks of the conservatives is in line with the bohemian position. But the novel is also a burlesque, carnival tradition in which bodily exaggerations are used frequently. (Cf. the fairy-tale treatment of the salamander principal Strange's nose.)
In this novel Bjørneboe does not stand wholly outside the society. It can be reformed. It is possible to create "islands" within the existing conditions. Such a line of thought is not so unlike Agnar Mykle's critique of the Norwegian Labor Party and Mykle's utopianism.
Little Boy Blue is a story about how the bourgeois society destroys talents, especially those with artistic ambitions. But the novel also shows how "the real artists" make it through all the same. In reality this is a bohemian novel more than an artist novel. It treats of a group of special individuals, the elect, "those who wade in pain". It is still the case that the narrative is told by "an omniscient I's alter ego," but in this novel Bjørneboe begins to problematize the relationship between the individual and society, even if the outsiders are still idealized.
The novel The Dream and the Wheel is a semidocumentary biographical novel about Ragnhild Jølsen, a gifted turn-of-the-century writer who died of an overdose of pills when she was only 33. She has many of the Bohemian's general hallmarks. She feels "condemned to death", and Eros is perhaps the most important death force. Ragnhild Jølsen came from an old but bankrupt landed family. She meets all the modern age's problems with a bang. The difference between Bjørneboe's novel, Jølsen's own life and her novels is erased. What is common to all is the story of a bohemian's life. Ragnhild Jølsen's life and work (a unity which surely attracted Bjørneboe) demonstrate a view of love which characterized great parts of bohemia around the turn of the century. It is perhaps most clearly defended and formulated by the noted Polish writer and bohemian theoretician Stanislaw Przybyszewski (at that time married to Dagny Juell) in his 1897 book Auf den Weg der Seele, about Gustav Vigeland's art. Woman and man are destined for each other in a danse macabre where love is destructive, and the woman "sucks" the power out of the man. Przybyszewski analyzes Scandinavian artists' view of woman-man relations as determined by an abnormal circling around sin, with attendant anxiety and puritanism. Ragnhild Jølsen's experience, which Bjørneboe identifies with, is that to enter into the society and the modern age — as her father did by building factories, establishing modern health insurance and pursuing progress — leads to ruin, chaos and disintegration. Her own "way into society," through love, has the same result.
When Jens Bjørneboe ceases around 1960 to concentrate on critiques of concrete social problems and increasingly focuses on the opposition between the self and the environment in a more fundamental sense, he chooses artist novels as his port of entry. He picks out bohemian figures and identifies with them and their problems. For Ragnhild Jølsen it is still "life" which gives her material for her artistic achievements, but at the same time life also gives her "a longing for death." The feeling that the individual's contact with the world is destructive becomes steadily stronger in Bjørneboe through the 1960s.
In the novel Moment of Freedom the problem of the relation between the self and the world has become acute. A number of central concepts in Bjørneboe's writings become problematized in this narrative to a degree which almost dissolves them.
After a renewed reading of Bjørneboe's novel in 1995 I no longer believe that Moment of Freedom is about "the problem of Evil", "the possibility and impossibility of Truth", "the meaning of Falsehood", or "the moment of Freedom". These abstract and general terms about Bestiality and Honesty lose much of their loftiness throughout the narrative. They are quite simply not analyzed. The novel discusses neither deviltry in itself nor the reasons for it.
Moment of Freedom is not a realistic psychological debate-novel on a current theme, like Jonas or The Evil Shepherd. Neither is it a novel of "metaphysical" interpretation, even if it may certainly look as if the narrator is trying to establish an eternal metaphysical understanding. When "the great" themes are dissolved, the narrator is left with something which is lesser, to be sure, but which is perhaps just as important: Materiality in the form of geography, food and not least the body, all of which is made holy.
I choose to read Moment of Freedom as a baroque burlesque, an exaggerated black humoresque full of irony—including self-irony. As a cross between the great 16th-century carnivalist Rabelais and Franz Kafka's novel The Trial. In the novel the "I" stages an action (in at least two senses of the word) against himself, which is connected to the collision of the self and its consciousness with the surrounding world.
Bjørneboe's activity up to 1966 had been directed at describing, attacking and analyzing "the external world". His self-consciousness had, as is explained in Moment of Freedom, become more and more compact. The outer world had occupied his interior. "The big holes in his memory" which he keeps coming back to, show that the natural unity between life and consciousness has been lost. The problem consists in reconciling an intense self-awareness with the world and his own experiences. The "I" vacillates between wanting to live in the world and withdrawing into isolation. Both solutions seem impossible. If he goes into the world with all its brutality, he himself becomes complicit. If he withdraws, his insight into evil becomes even clearer. Great parts of this self-reckoning are also a reckoning with the bohemians' general position. The bohemian is fatefully tied to the world of the bourgeoisie. Nothing exists "outside" it.
In Moment of Freedom human beings are called "the little bears," who live in the land of chaos. When the great coherence seems impossible to establish, the hallowing of things becomes important. Certain patterns are continually repeated, the most important being the description of "the sacred meal" consisting of wine, bread, meat and cheese/fruit. The narrator is always talking about the worst sin a human being can commit: the Sin Against the Holy Spirit. And the body is holy. But first and foremost it is geography which is lifted above realism and made into something transcendent. It must not be understood realistically.
The narrator has withdrawn in lofty calm to the Alpine town Heiligenberg, where it is cold and secluded. Here he can remember Germania, the Philistine society, the bourgeois society which has all the hallmarks the European bohemians hate. It is the money-society and the home of greed. In contrast stands Italia, the bohemians' hangout, dirty, corrupt, brutal, but honest and full of laughter.
Amid the contradictions, chaos and ideal "holy places" dwells the Servant of Justice's observant cynicism. That this position is hard-won we understand from his constant circling around a certain deep and permanent humiliation and abasement. Sometime in the past, in Stockholm, he has experienced a fundamental defeat. The experience stands out as an important point in the novel, but one which the narrator consciously mystifies. What it can be, we as readers can only guess.
When he later praises laughter, it is because it too creates distance from the world and makes it possible for him to live with a consciousness of everything, including the all-overshadowing sin. Still it doesn't work, he is forced at the end of the novel back to life.
The last part of the novel stands forth as the antithesis of hope. The question of identity becomes more and more acute. Is there an existence apart from keeping descriptive records of the world's wickedness? The narrator ends up reconciling himself with his isolated position, in step with an increase in the description of violence (war and mass murder). Injected into this narrative of wickedness and violence is presented a lovely utopian dream. The narrator "sees" a harmonious antique landscape by the Mediterranean = a dream of an identity in himself where the castigator, the record-keeper, does not exist. The dream of an existence wholly in itself. But this image is at the same time wholly unreal. Freedom turns into a solidly-frozen idyll, consciousness of identity turns into death-awareness, the longing for solitude or consolation into "the holy simple pleasures." Withdrawal, the way to the self, leads to annihilation.
Whether Bjørneboe in this process believed at all in the idea of whole and harmonious individuals, where the self includes the ego and has complete oversight over its own I, seems more than doubtful.
Can one then say that the outcome of Moment of Freedom is a logical solution of the bohemians' ambiguous starting position? The novel ends with a paradox. The distance abides, nothing is solved. The cleft between the I and the world is just as great. The identity just as "solid" and at the same time "eaten up". And the world is the same.
Doesn't this imply that the novel goes in a circle?
Moment of Freedom is an unfinished novel, and at the same time Jens Bjørneboe's last books in my opinion add nothing fundamentally new in relation to the analysis of 1966.
1) Bjørneboe's writing career is one which destroys its own basic concepts and which never comes to any conclusion. Why?
My thesis is that it hangs together with the bohemian position which makes other solutions impossible. The Left has been skeptical of Bjørneboe from the very beginning, and has seldom tried to understand him. I believe that is a knee-jerk reflex triggered by his bohemian starting point, from which Bjørneboe never managed to distance himself.
2) Even if Bjørneboe at times can seem irritatingly overdramatic, emotional and unobjective and it is therefore easy to dismiss him, there will always be something left which cannot be dismissed: A vibrating string, a strong artistic and ethical imperative.
This may be related to the fact that despite his empirical convictions ("everything must be painfully precise and correct"), Bjørneboe is a visionary writer rather than an analytic one. Also I believe his greatness rests on the fact that so many of us recognize the pains, dilemmas, inconsistencies and defeats from our own lives.
3) The basic bohemian demand: "Write your life, and do it in truth" Bjørneboe was never able to follow on one important point: He never managed to give explicit literary expression to his own biphilia. What did this mean for his destruction as a writer?
Are there other indirect ways in which this problem came out in his narrative structures? Can his gender identity be tied to Bjørneboe's enormous concern with violence, his interest in the macho man, physicality and strength?
4) Or is the focus on violence and bestiality merely yet another expression for the enormous, puritanical, Lutheran obsession with sin in those very circles which believed themselves free of it, as for example the bohemians at the turn of the century? Perhaps much of the explanation of Bjørneboe's circling around sin is to be found here. Perhaps the so-called "liberation" in our century is for many pretty much of an illusion?
5) The "collapse" in Bjørneboe's authorship must by no means be understood negatively and as a defeat. It is rather positive and natural.
Even those who stand far from the bourgeois and the bohemian world have much insight to gain. Few Norwegian writers have given such a pointed and fundamental critique of the "money and commodity society" as Bjørneboe. His hope is our hope.