Jens Bjørneboe, "NYTT, STORT ARBEIDE", ©1977 by Gyldendal Norsk Forlag A/S. Commentary and translations ©2000 by Esther Greenleaf Mürer.

The second and third novels which make up Jens Bjørneboe's trilogy "The History of Bestiality," Powderhouse and The Silence, are usually discussed in conjunction with the first, Moment of Freedom. In this context they have been treated at length by Janet Garton, Joe Martin, and Bjørneboe's biographer, Fredrik Wandrup. But in searching the literature I have found very little about either as a novel in its own right.

There is evidence, however, that Powderhouse went through a long period of independent gestation. The year after Bjørneboe's death Gyldendals Aktuelle Magasin, a magazine put out by the publisher of the trilogy, printed the text of a handwritten note found among Bjørneboe's papers. It is undated, but internal evidence suggests that it was written in 1959, toward the end of a lengthy sojourn in sourthern Europe. Bjørneboe had left Norway in 1957 following a multipronged crisis: the breakup of his marriage; leaving his job as a teacher at the Rudolf Steiner School; the public storm over his 1957 novel, Under a Sterner Heaven, which brought threats against his life; and a pending jail sentence for drunk driving. In the note Bjørneboe sketched his ideas for a "NEW, MAJOR WORK" which would "collect the whole content and aim" of his previous novels of social criticism in one big book, "the Book about Our Time." The work envisioned bears a clear resemblance to Powderhouse, with noteworthy differences. In the novel as we have it, he has moved much further away from the Anthroposophy in which he had been steeped prior to 1957, and the anarchist strain—likewise present in his work from the beginning—is much more pronounced.

Here is the text of the note, translated from Fredrik Wandrup's Jens Bjørneboe: mannen, myten og kunsten (Oslo: Gyldendal, 1984), 273f. I have added commentary in the form of endnotes pointing up similarities and differences between the work envisioned and the novel as we have it, elucidated with references to Bjørneboe's writings and other sources

.

NEW, MAJOR WORK (On the Mystery of Evil. The Evil Shepherd)

The thought is to collect the whole content and aim of Ere the Cock Crows, Jonas and Under a Sterner Heaven in one big book, in a play or a novel—the book which summarizes our whole time, the Book about Our Time. It must contain among other things documentation of all the atrocities which have been happening continuously from 1914 to 1959— including persecutions of Negroes, persecutions of Jews, political burnings at the stake, the Algeria tragedy, postwar justice, in short all the wickedness, misery and suffering which has manifested itself and stamped the times. The suffering of the innocent. (1)

It is possible that the action can play itself out in a sanatorium in the Alps— with a doctor—The Great Doctor—as central figure. Here at the sanatorium are gathered representatives from all the calamaties, the victims—but also the guilty! Here there is given a look back on history, all the way back to the inquisition, the heretic burnings and witch trials, a comprehensive, large-scale treatment of the history of atrocity.

This sanatorium is actually a state after death, and the whole book must be written in a certain Kafka-atmosphere. (2) The characters must have names which express something. The Great Doctor must be called Hubertus or something like that. (3) The sanatorium is a clinic for healing the aftereffects of the meeting with Evil. One of the first scenes is Dr. Hubertus's lecture about the inquisition. Later the main character (or the narrator) learns that in this sanatorium there are only people who have been by their fates bound to The Evil Things which have happened, and he gets to read the case histories, and meet the people.

The book begins with the main person not knowing how or why he has come to the sanatorium. (4) The stay in the Sanatorium has its meaning in a redeeming and cognitive confrontation with Evil, and with its world-historic task; to free mankind from God, to create freedom. It is the dark figures in history who drive the development further— it is not Joseph, not Abel—but Cain and Judah, Cain, where is your brother! So Evil as both effect and cause in relation to freedom. (5)

In this sanatorium there is a series of doctors, Dr. Hubertus—who perhaps has a number of Dr. König's traits. And Dr. Abel and others. (6) But the head doctor, who is always being asked for, there is obviously nobody who gets to see him. The main character always gets the answer that he will still get to meet The Great One, and that The Great One always keeps an eye on him, always follows him. Only at the very end, when the main character has gotten well, does he meet amid great ceremonies with the head doctor, and recognizes in him the sanatorium's gardener, the little, humble, pious gardener, who all the patients have spoken with daily during the whole stay, but whom nobody sees through before the time for consecration is at hand. This gardener is a jack-of-all-trades, chauffeur, porter, blood giver, etc. (7)

At the sanatorium sits the patient Maria—the victim of a terrible crime—along with one of the greatest sinners who has lived. (The idea of the "gardener" is stolen from Hesse's Morgenlandsfahrt [Journey to the East] and must therefore be made the most of.) The whole thing includes elements from Strindberg, Kafka, Mann and Hesse. (8)

1. According to Fredrik Wandrup, "Bjørneboe thought in 1966 that he had written this note in Basel, ten years earlier." However, the reference to atrocities happening "from 1914 to 1959" would seem to date it later. There is the witness of Bjørneboe's 1961 essay Alone with the paper , which describes the writing of his prison novel, The Evil Shepherd:

...when I began the first chapter, the concept, the synopsis, had approached a size comparable to a small novel....The material had been gathered in Oslo beginning on September 1 of the preceding year, and I spent the fall and part of the winter trying to order it, get hold of it, find a meaning and a form in it. But it was vast. The central subject was something as abstract as "juvenile crime," but it had aspects which encompassed the whole of society and human life; everything I had seen and experienced in nine and thirty years could without difficulty go into it. In short, the material encompassed everything human which was accessible to me; it reflected the World in its totality. And you can't write a book about Everything. I had maybe a thousand pages, just of raw material; and done as an ordinary descriptive, classical novel it would have had to be at least a three-volume work.....

With a couple kilos of paper in my luggage I then went abroad in February... The crisis arrived after a couple of months, in the delightful little medieval city of Lüneburg, where I finally decided to let the colossus remain unwritten.... The next morning ... the novel's form stood clear and distinct before me, written according to a wholly new concept. I simply drew one single thread out of the carefully planned, massive plot, and knew that this one thread contained everything which was in the thousand pages of material; it had lain with the other threads for a long time, and had sucked up all the power and flavor. After two or three days I was launched on a synopsis of the book itself. This was completed in Paris, and when I came to Ischia it was just a matter of getting down to the final execution.

2. "This sanatorium is actually a state after death, and the whole book must be written in a certain Kafka-atmosphere.. .. The sanatorium is a clinic for healing the aftereffects of the meeting with Evil."

The above quote would suggest that, if the trilogy bears comparison with Dante's Divine Comedy, Powderhouse is—as one would expect—the Purgatorio. Joe Martin, while noting that such a comparison is almost a cliché with trilogies, tries it on for size in Keeper of the Protocols (82-84). See note 8 below.

However, in a 1974 correspondence with Bjørneboe I argued that Powderhouse is the Paradiso of the trilogy. At this distance it doesn't seem to me that I had a broad enough knowledge of literary paradisos and utopias to be justified in such a conclusion, but I offer it for what it's worth.

Bjørneboe had asked me what was wrong with the book. I responded that I'd felt from the beginning that compared to Moment of Freedom it was "positively idyllic, in spite of all the gore and grue;" at the same time it was static, talky, solpcistic, the characters wooden. But, I went on,

These so-called "flaws" and the thing about the book's being an idyll go together; the "flaws" give a clue to identifying the genre, because they're typical of the Paradiso/Utopia—and conversely if one regards the book as a Paradiso/Utopia, then the "flaws" are necessary ones. For me this is not a criticism but a discovery, and furthermore one which ties the whole trilogy together.

Certainly my identification of the genre doesn't prevent its also being all the other things you say it is. It has strong polemic and lyrical elements, but the matrix, the overall framework, is that of a fantasy.

And this fantastic framework is another thing that points to the Paradiso genre. And now I can explain its place in the progression, between Inferno and Purgatorio, a little more clearly: in this case Paradiso is a way station on the way out of Hell, where one can, in the contemporary American phrase, "get one's head together" before going on to the serious business of atonement. A place of relative peace and security, where the input from the environment is restricted to manageable proportions. I think it's a very realistic this-worldly use of the Paradiso—for to my mind the best we can hope for is to turn hell-on-earth into purgatory-on-earth, and even that can never be achieved once and for all. (EM to JB, 8/7/74)

3. "The characters must have names which express something. The Great Doctor must be called Hubertus or something like that." "Hubertus" means "spiritually wise." In the novel as we have it the head doctor is called Lefèvre = "Maker" (God figure). The assistant head doctor, al Assadun="Lion" (title given to son of the Prophet in Islam). Christine = Christ figure, Lacroix="Cross," Jean/Ivan/Jochannan=John the Revelator.

Bathory is the name of a family of Hungarian (Transylvanian) princes, of which two 16th-century members, Gabor and Elizabeth, were noted for their extreme cruelty.

Fontaine="source". (Jahn Thon comments that Bjørneboe "never managed to give explicit literary expression to his own biphilia." He comes closest in Powderhouse. The name "Fontaine" for the young gay sex murderer who finds it easier to talk about his murders than about his sexual experiences might suggest that Bjørneboe felt his biphilia as a driving force behind his writing, a source of creative energy.)    [Back]

4. "The book begins with the main person not knowing how or why he has come to the sanatorium." How the narrator came to be there is not explained, but neither does the question arise. In Moment of Freedom, however, the narrator twice states that he doesn't know how he came to Heiligenberg:

Now if only I could remember my name! Then I could find out who I was, who I am. Maybe remember how I happened to become a Servant of Justice in this Alpine valley. (58)

How I came to the city up in the mountains, to the principality where I'm a Servant of Justice, I don't know. I don't even remember how it began.
     Day by day, perhaps over a period of weeks, I became conscious of myself and understood that I had my daily, regular job in Heiligenberg, and that I'd come there without realizing it. Someone must have brought me there.
    But since then everything has become clearer, up to my present identity and existence. Aside from these fragments of the past, I know only that I am here, that I do exist. But where I came from . . . who I am . . . ? (174)    [Back]

5. "It is the dark figures in history who drive the development further— it is not Joseph, not Abel—but Cain and Judah, Cain, where is your brother!" This theme had been previously developed in an essay from Bjørneboe's Steiner School period, "The Old Testament and the Individual Child" (1953):

The whole Old Testament is one continuous story of apostasy and inadequacy. And you can say that in its human essence it's as good a world history as any. It is in the deepest sense a wandering in the desert.

It is wholly and utterly marked by sin. Sin is the basic motif. It provides the thread and the coherence. It provides the mood and the color. Everything deals with this one fact, everything revolves around the eternal: sin.

And it is only against this background that the individual figures can stand forth, so bright and so eternally human. What would Abel be without Cain's sin? What was Joseph without his brothers' sin? What was Moses without the Pharaoh's sin, and without the people's dance around the golden calf? And so like a half-invisible golden thread behind the dark pictures lies the fantastic thought: it is precisely through the most sinful that evolution takes place. Abel, Joseph, and the other pure, blameless ones they are all aberrations, people who have their significance in the moment, not in the future. It is Cain who makes tools and stringed instruments. It is the sons of Cain who conquer the earth. Abel merely was, and disappeared again. There is no petty or sentimental moral hidden in the Bible story. It is a dark and sinister drama, but it ends in a thought so grand, so surprising that you gasp for air: The chosen, they are the most sinful. Through them it will happen.

This thought can be pursued point by point, and it reaches its outrageous climax in the list of names which Matthew adduces as Jesus's "pedigree". The line does not go through the "bright" figures. And afterwards, when the gospel is to be taken further, who are its principal carriers? Not Stephen, who let himself be stoned for the cause, but Peter who denied it and Paul who took part in the stoning.   ["Den GamleTestament og den enkelte barn," in Under en Mykere Himmel (Oslo: Gyldendal, 1976)]

As for the "world-historic task, to free mankind from God, to create freedom": The attitude toward God, and toward Christianity, in Bjørneboe's books is complex, and appears in a constantly shifting light. In The Silence the narrator invites God to lunch, then concludes that he has really been lunching with Satan. The narrator of The Sharks tells the fanatical first mate, "I believe in God, Mr.Cox but possibly not the same god you believe in." (105)

But Bjørneboe's attitude toward orthodox, dogmatic Christianity, toward the institutional Church, is negative from beginning to end, from the poem Summa Theologia in his debut collection of poetry to. the figure of the boatswain in his last novel, The Sharks— who appears to embody what attracted the young Bjørneboe to Anthroposophy:

Hellmuth was one of the few people I have met whom I should truly call a Christian. But he was neither Catholic nor Protestant; he belonged to what he called "the third confession"—a tradition which descends from the old German mystics: [Paracelsus, Meister Eckhart, Jakob Boehme]...

... He saw the Roman Church's centralism and greed for power as an affront to human dignity and to that feeedom which was the first prerequisite for approaching God. The idea that man is sinful and evil by nature was, to the boatswain, blasphemy. Even more false, perhaps, did he find the Lutheran doctrine of the unbridgeable abyss between God and man: that man is, as it were, the antithesis of God—that God and man are enemies.

Here Hellmuth built rather on a teaching which is the opposite of the churches', namely the Gospel which proclaims: "I have said, ye are gods!" [John 10:34, quoting Ps.82:6]

From one of my conversations with our boatswain I remember his saying that God and existence, or God and Being, are one and the same thing; all reality, including God, consists of evil and good. In this eternal struggle between the forces of light and darkness man can be redeemed through Christ, the perfect realization of the divine-human unity. Man must thus renounce everything, forsake himself—he must give away all, desiring nothing in return—simply in order to become God.

...We had no trouble understanding one another, even though he was a Christian and I a heathen. (192f)    [Back]

6. "In this sanatorium there is a series of doctors, Dr. Hubertus—who perhaps has a number of Dr. König's traits. And Dr. Abel and others." According to Wandrup (152), the novel's external circumstances were "inspired by a stay Bjørneboe had in a nerve clinic in Germany in the 1950s," where he "became a good friend of the head doctor at the hospital, until he ran off with a young nurse."

The reference to "Dr. Abel" may hark back to his 1955 essay Hans Jæger, where he discusses two basic reactions to times of "atmospheric disturbance" in the social climate, two basic temperaments among those who feel at odds with society the "choleric" (activist) and the "melancholic" (contemplative). Bjørneboe is clearly more interested in the former, but acknowledges the importance of the latter:

Practically speaking we are confronted with two versions of the spiritually motivated segment of humanity: The Knight of the Grail, and the Monk.

Legend tells that Parsifal was the son of Cain. The others, the monks, descend from his mild and pale dead brother. The sons of Abel have another mission to pursue, with its own tasks and its own dangers, and hereby make their exit from this saga.    [Back]

7. "This gardener is a jack-of-all-trades, chauffeur, porter, blood giver, etc." In Powderhouse the idea of the head doctor as gardener survives in vestigial form. The narrator, who in Moment of Freedom was a rettstjener (courthouse factotum/Servant of Justice) here describes himself as a renovasjonsarbeider ("renovation worker"), a Norwegian euphemism for garbage collector. (The dual meaning is underscored when the American general "emptied his whole rotting garbage-pail of an American conscience all over me" at the beginning of chapter 2.) The pun indicates the ambiguity of the narrator's position; he says that Dr. Lefèvre calls him "combination caretaker and physician-in-chief", meaning "chief ideologist and father-confessor to nearly everybody." Given the free-wheeling nature of Lefèvre's therapeutic methods, however, the narrator may well be a patient (the "main character" of the note).    [Back]

8. Joe Martin provides much useful information about Bjørneboe's affinity with Strindberg in Keeper of the Protocols—most of it relating to the plays. Martin prefaces his chapter on "The History of Bestiality" with a quote from Strindberg's A Dream Play: "...look at these papers where I write the histories of injustice..." Later he notes:

The trilogy does not move on an upward incline, as does Dante's Commedia. Its motion is lateral, it moves over the surface of the earth geographically. Even so, it moves towards a sort of illumination. In this way, it bears a resemblance to that other great trilogy of a pilgrimage towards enlightenment in which the protagonist is a writer often confused with his author: Strindberg's To Damascus....   Powderhouse finds the narrator living in a mental hospital, in a kind of convalescence. Strindberg, too, places a madhouse scene—set in a cloister where "The Stranger" is convalescing—precisely in the middle of To Damascus, Part I. (83f)

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Related pages:

Joe Martin: Bjørneboe and the Death Penalty

Powderhouse (about)

The "History of Bestiality" Trilogy (about)

The Caretaker (Excerpt from Powderhouse)

Homage to Cezanne (Excerpt from Powderhouse)

Related topics in Theme index:

Apocalypse, End Times, Revolution

Christianity and the Church

Literature: the Writer's Craft and Mission