Fredrik Wandrup, Jens Bjørneboe: Mannen, myten og kunsten, p 66-71. ©1984 by Gyldendal Norsk Forlag A/S. English translation ©1999 by Esther Greenleaf Mürer. Used by permission.
This way of working was made for Jens Bjørneboe. Throughout his own writing he lets myths and symbols play a significant role as an artistic medium, inter alia through the use of a finely-tuned animal symbolism. (1) For Bjørneboe "every animal is a human trait, a condition of soul which has taken on fixed, lasting form". (2) Animals are archetypes of which Bjørneboe believes we have an inborn perception within us. They are a part of what the psychologist C. G. Jung called the collective unconscious. The names, traits and idea of animals awakens a special resonance in us, which "can go straight through a person, sink through all layers of the soul, the way a stone falls down into the earth's interior through a deep, deep shaft."
In Bjørneboe's writing the use of animals as symbols helps to give the message in his books a stamp of universality, in the same way that Ernest Hemingway's use of symbols function, according to Bjørneboe's essay "Hemingway and the beasts":
Every book must be built upon one of the ancient mythic themes which we know from fairy tales, mythology, legends, etc. In literature there is no other possibility than the retelling of myths; the old motifs must rediscovered, the world decoded.
For Bjørneboe the myths give a complete picture of the world, they "form a long, coherent, chronologically well-ordered history. They are a collection of fragments, precisely and carefully fitted together, and then scattered over the world in fury—as if to ensure that no one shall get hold of all the parts of the mosaic at once, no one shall put them together and decipher them." (3)
A substantial part of this mythic world consists of animal symbolism. Who are the animals? What do they mean? asks Bjørneboe and answers: "In the animals we meet our own past. The animals are the history of the world."
In different ways Bjørneboe uses this understanding in his writing. Read the delicate, warm poem "The Sparrow." The everyday Norwegian hobo-bird, the tragicomic knight of the bird-feeder becomes a tender symbol of the small, the defenseless and weak. Of childhood perhaps? Or the vignette "The horse on the mountain," where the wild untamed force from the deep finds expression in the figure of the horse.
Symbols and myths stream through Bjørneboe's work like a network of braided streams in a vast delta. In Ere the Cock Crows Bjørneboe uses a biblical myth in the title, as he so often does in his poems. Here it is Peter's denial at cockcrow which strikes up the theme in the book. In the introduction to the same novel there is a gruesome episode of a rat eating another rat, the latter half-dead and helplessly caught in a rat trap. The description captures the tone in the rest of the story, the hideous callousness which characterizes the action.
Jonas is a modern version of the ancient resurrection myth of Jonah in the belly of the whale. Here we meet once again the bird symbolism of "The Sparrow." Moreover, unsympathetic persons in the book are known as "salamanders" or "the Crow." And Jonas's nightmare manifests itself in the terrifying vision of a snapping and snarling yellow dog. The dog also appears later in Bjørneboe as the symbol of evil power, of the authorities.
In Little Boy Blue the tender time of adolescence is compared with the lobster's defenseless existence in the soft-shell stage. The Evil Shepherd (again inspired by a biblical myth) is introduced by a description of a cat's coolly calculated play with a mouse. This too is an image which prefigures the whole theme of the novel. In Bjørneboe's last novel, The Sharks, the predatory fish is itself the archetype of humanity's insatiable lust for money and power, of our incomprehensible ability to hunt each other to the death.
The three books about the history of bestiality are one big web of symbolic threads, in which animal associations play on small role. Human beings are called "the little bears," their holy animal is the pig. Dogs presage fright, and attacks of depression are compared to a leopard which flays the skin off the body of the protagonist.
No one who has read these books will ever forget the age-old ape from Moment of Freedom or the rustling, patient hedgehog from Powderhouse. The animals blend naturally into a whole, a vision of the world as a coherent network of lives and ideas. The animal who is perhaps described in the strongest and most contradictory way by Bjørneboe is the cat. For the sanguine Bjørneboe the cat descriptions are full of bubbling joie de vivre, of solidarity with the miraculous in all that lives. When he himself is broken, his picture of the world also changes, the cat becomes the outer picture of his own breakdown.
Humor-filled and glittering descriptions of cats are found above all in the essays "Concerning a Cat from Naples" and "On a Norwegian Alley Cat." Here the cat is vitality and independence itself.
The Italian cat "was the most feminine I've ever seen, with respect both to soul and to body. She was light and slender as a young, young dancer, shy and sensitive, bashful, anxious. She was a woman from her whiskers to the tip of her tail, affectionate and elusive, demanding and uncommitted." (4)
The Norwegian alley cat is "the most beautiful and wildest she-animal one could imagine. She became a leopard, a panther. Mother and hunter in the world."
In The Dream and the Wheel the cats mean everything to little Ragnhild, they are her first contact with the world. The cats, "with silky-soft fur, green eye slits, stealthy paws and lightning-fast claws, as sharp as the devil." The imaginative child has no difficulty teaching them to speak and read. She is fascinated with their unpredictability, their will to come and go as they wish.
In light of these descriptions of the cat as resilient grace, savagery and strength Bjørneboe's descriptions of the cat in the history of bestiality are all the more powerful. The image of the cat lands brutally and effectively on the reader.
In Moment of Freedom the cat becomes a symbol of Bjørneboe's own stark dread, his endless pain over the world's wickedness. He meets it in a lonely medieval town with naked streets. It is obviously sick, has lost a lot of its fur and walks stiffly and mechanically. At every step it meows plaintively, tormented by a pain it doesn't understand anything of: "It is as if it's walking on shards of glass. It lives in a world where all is pain." Its suffering bites like glowing iron into the reader.
The Servant of Justice in Moment of Freedom is at once deeply moved by the suffering cat. What shall he do with it? Give it food and prolong its suffering? Or shoot it? But perhaps someone owns it? Besides, he doesn't have a gun on hand.
He shoves the problem aside. When he meets the cat again, he tries to run away from it. But he feels as if the cat is peering at him with its shining, coal-black eyes. It has gotten sicker since the last time and meows after the narrator in its panicky despair. Thus the cat becomes an eerie and burning image of the protagonist's colossal feeling of depression and dread. How shall he put a stop to it? Shall he bear with it and go slowly and painfully under? Or take his own life? He doesn't get anywhere, can't make up his mind. The dread paralyzes him.
The last time he meets the cat, it is just a concentrated bundle of pain and torment. It can hardly walk, slime hangs from its mouth and its intestines are oozing out behind. It hasn't eaten for weeks and is almost unseeing. Yet it lives—as a mirror of the Servant's tortured soul and humanity's endless suffering.
In the sequel to Moment of Freedom, Powderhouse, we also hear about a cat. But since the protagonist is now considerably less depressed and anxious, the cat descriptions have also become lighter. Not only is the cat discriminating enough to do its duty on portraits of noted politicians in the newspaper; when it has kittens, they are vital enough to crawl large as life out of the grave after an attempt to drown them.
In the third volume of the history of bestiality, The Silence, the record-keeper is back in his appalling depressions. He meets a cat in the gutter of a street in the North African town where he is staying. The cat has been run over, its belly ruptured. Its intestines lie exposed. Some small boys are throwing stones at the sick animal, trying to hit the intestines. The cat is so weak that it can hardly manage to express its pain; it merely gasps pitifully in its world of boundless agony.
This time he phones for an animal ambulance, which comes after an hour and a half, during which the cat shows its gaping mute sign of suffering. He pays the "shamelessly high fee" to the ambulance people, who drive the cat away to a death without pain. The protagonist stays behind. He asks himself:
When you come right down to it: doesn't this cat's death contain the whole history of bestiality? Isn't all the suffering to which we creatures are subject already incorporated in this animal? . . . The episode of the cat ruined not just the day for me, but several days; almost the whole week I had the cat on my mind. It was once again a reminder of the pain which is not my own.
When did I become like this?
The cat and the protagonist blend into each other, like two drops in an ocean of the world's pain.
In his vision of the leopard we find the same interplay. When Bjørneboe is on top psychologically, as in 1955 when he wrote the essay "The Myth and the Bird," it looks like this:
The leopard, soft and purring like a kitty in the bed, playful and cuddly, wise and tame, happy with a bit of paper on a string—but the only one of the carnivores who can stroll into a village and eat himself an Englishman in broad daylight. It is the most beautiful of all nature's splendid predators.
But during the depressions in Moment of Freedom he meets the beast from a darker side:
Such a state is like meeting something from outside, a carnivore, a wild beast which tears the flesh from your bones. Dante's image—the leopard—is wholly exact and true.
Beauty and cruelty in the same form. Such is the incomprehensible reality.
Not only the animals acquire an extended significance for the writer Jens Bjørneboe. People, things, traits, situations, landscapes are interpreted as signs.
Man and woman are generally presented as sharp opposites, with very different characteristics. The man is energetic, but often destructive, marked by dread and disquiet, attracted by catastrophes, battlefields and death. He has a penchant for subjugating himself to high ideals and is the cause of most of the world's suffering because he lives by the political maxim that "the end justifies the means."
The woman is the image of the earthbound and practical, the self-sacrificing, peaceloving and motherly. She bears constructive powers within herself, but throughout history has had too little chance to use them. At the end of his life Bjørneboe lamented that his own "feminine sides" had found so little expression.
This way of looking at the sexes often seems static in Bjørneboe's books.
When he interprets the meaning in things and situations, on the other hand, his writing acquires life and dimension. He has an exceptional eye for analyzing symbols and the mythical character in everything from motorcycles to noted works of art, from court cases to bullfighting, from knives to protocols, a room, a meal, a sexual relationship or a landscape.
It is precisely the sense of a deeper, mythic significance which gives Bjørneboe's writing an underlying volcanic power of lasting relevance—when he is at his best. His way of interpreting the world creates it anew in images which make it clear for the reader, as if seen through an enormous, shining crystal ball.
1 Johanna Schwarz has written a thorough analysis of Bjørneboe's use of animals as symbols, "Jens Bjørneboes dyrerike" (JB's animal kingdom) in Syn og Segn, 1967, reprinted in the anthology Frihet! Sannhet! (Oslo: PAX, 1977). Back
2 From "Myten og fuglen" (The myth and the bird), Ny Skole, 1955, reprinted in Under en Mykere Himmel (Oslo: Gyldendal, 1976). Back
3 ibid. Back
4 The caption to a photograph on p. 73, showing Bjørneboe with this cat: "He was originally christened Antoinette, but had his name changed to Antonius after they discovered that he was a tomcat. He was smuggled across all the borders in Europe and into Norway, where he enjoyed himself very much and became the father of many young.". Back
