In most cases the annotations are in the form of pullquotes. Bjørneboe's words usually seemed to convey the essence better than any paraphrase of mine could. —EGM
Alone with the Paper (1961)
"You sit face to face with the white, empty paper, and the blank sheets are your predators and your judges. Every word you write will be used against you. The books you write in this state know more than is in them, more than they can manage to say; they are an exact external replica of your own painful, vulnerable amoeba-state."
Are We Destroying the Theater? Musicalization and cabaretization as ruination of the drama (undated)
"The modern musical theater is a single obscene exposure of the fact that here art is property, bought and paid for — it's at heart a shameless affront to all serious cultural life: a tribute to the power which makes it possible to create such an expensive theater."
The Brother (Short story about the suicide of a teenage boy, 1950)
"Now the jurist was telling what he had replied to the boy; that nobody could do anything about it, and that you had to be able to understand those who were doing it. They too had suffered. In the last analysis you had to tend to your own duties and see to making something out of your own life. There was no use blowing this thing up out of proportion; and he was sorry but he couldn't get involved."
Callot (from Moment of Freedom, 1966)
"Callot, along with Leonardo and Castagno and del Sarto and the heavenly Pisanello, belonged to the usual public at the execution rites of the time; the extraordinary executions took place publicly side by side with the usual, regular executions by hanging. It's impossible for me to say who produced the loveliest drawings of advanced methods of dying."
The Caretaker (from Powderhouse, 1969)
"I have full opportunity to pursue my studies and my research here. It was impossible to continue with The History of Bestiality without taking up the Christian churches' heretic and witch trials. What would the church's power have been without support from the legal profession? Theologians and jurists shrouded themselves in their black robes, in the color of love and justice, and they were victorious in the fight."
The Cockfight (1954)
"I once saw a humiliated rooster. And I will never forget it: The tyrant in his underwear, with a yellow look and sick with self-pity, the life-lie incarnate, the deposed, wounded authoritarian. The blustering, postprandially snoozing, terrible, active vacuum, this absolute nothing under his feathers. At least the hen lays eggs."
Concerning a Norwegian Forest Cat (1964)
"Electra's stages on the way to maturity, from deathly scared kitten and decadent silk-puss, have left no traces. She is a sovereign predator and a passionate mother. She is much too wild to be very cuddly, but she regards us with indulgence and we are allowed to live in her house."
Conference of Professors at Vienna General Hospital (Scene 2 of Semmelweis, 1968)
"PROFESSOR 2: [rising most solemnly] Face to face with the death rate of thirty per cent which is before us, the commission has produced the following report: The high mortality rate among the pregnant women is brought about by the local cosmic-telluric forces, the hygrometric forces, the polar currents, as well as radiation from the constellations. And finally: the wrath of the spirit of the disease."
A Conversation with God (Excerpt from The Silence, 1973)
"How on earth can one imagine a continuation of world history without cruelty, how could one envision the rise of a society without cruelty as its innermost, sustaining principle as society's basic idea? I've talked quite a bit with God about this, and even if he's often evasive, it's still possible to get him into a corner if one is just ruthless enough."Do Jurists have Souls? (1966)
"An impartial judge, that is one who judged objectively, and didn't obey the masters he happened to serve, would immediately be removed from any bench. Legal concepts revolve not around the law, not around The Eternal Law—but around the laws which were made by a random assembly of our grandfathers and fathers, by the society which has paid the judge to judge the way the arbitrary laws tell him to."
The Dutchman (from The Sharks, 1974) Bjørneboe's early experience as a Waldorf teacher carries over into his later work.
"He's one of the ocean's evil spirits. The Flying Dutchman is homelessness and unrest. He bodes misfortune to all who see him. In a sense he's every seaman's fate. It's also bad luck to talk about him. If you speak of him, you risk seeing him, and the sight of his ship of death brings storm and shipwreck."
Ernst Josephson, his Life and Work (1947) This essay on a Swedish painter marks Bjørneboe's debut as a writer.
"His mental illness opened for Josephson a door to another world; here he got the content, and surely also the form, of countless drawings and paintings. In the deepest loneliness and without models, he created an art so new that it anticipated the development a whole generation."
Eugenio Barba and Norway (1970). Eugenio Barba started his internationally known Odin Theater in Oslo, with Bjørneboe's encouragement. Its first production was Ornithofilene, an experimental pilot verison of The Bird Lovers.
" There is no real reason why the Odin Theater couldn't have developed here; Oslo is considerably large and wealthier than the little town of Holstebro in Denmark. And the garbageman from Oslo, Professor Eugenio Barba of the University of Aix, had no desire to leave Norway, where he had invested much work. However, he had no choice: In Holstebro he could continue working. In this country that was impossible."
Ewald (1953) A portrait of a young man with autism in postwar Germany.
"Ewald intuits in his youthful heart that nothing is necessary, and this knowledge has relieved him of the need to go around doing things. The one time he talked, he turned amiably to the public man whose job it is to get Ewald to work, and spoke in a gentle, rather flat voice as follows: 'Well, I've never heard the like!'"
The Fear of America Within Us (1952) Reflections on America's influence on the Norwegian psyche.
"The thing about this paradise is that when you've lived there for a while, the apples and the oranges need makeup in order to be noticeable. Life must be colorized. Add artificial pineapple flavor to the pineapple and smear pink plastic color over it all; for under us, behind us, off the dance floor, outside the neon light, the Meaningless One lies in wait! Death, the only true snake in Eden!"
The Forests behind The Night of the Iguana (1963) On the later works of Tennessee Williams
"Williams' fundamental theme is cruelty in three variants: The cruelty of human beings, the cruelty of nature, and the cruelty of God. Tennessee Williams' own meeting with reality, as seen through his writings, has been one long breakdown. And as reality looks today it is hardly any exaggeration to claim that this breakdown has good reasons. The person who walks around today with good nerves, 'healthy' and positive, suffers not only from a dulled understanding, but from what is worse: a dulled heart."
The Good Pupil (undated) "It is a bad pupil who always remains faithful to his teacher." (Nietzsche)
"It is the bad, the faithful pupils who are always made heirs by their predecessors, because the old sense their fidelity, their intellectual obedience. They feel that these are people to be trusted, people who can carry on an idea without changing it. The good pupils, on the other hand, suck up all that they can use, but they use it themselves, they apply it in another way. They take over their predecessors' knowledge, but not their opinions. In a certain sense they will always stand out as turncoats and transgressors, as traitors."
from Grades or Reports (1954) What happens when education of the whole child comes up against standardized testing?
"You were mistaken when you believed that you were learning for the joy of learning, in order to become even wiser and better — that knowledge and proficiency were worth something for their own sake, or that one should be able to use them to help others. For in reality knowledge is something which is used to grade and classify people, to sow a competitive spirit, egotism, vanity, discord and mistrust."
Hans Jæger (1955) Portrait of the Norwegian bohemian and anarchist (1854-1910), who had a siginificant influence on Bj rneboe.
"With all Knights of the Grail it is the case that when they lose sight of the Grail, they kill each other. All of Arthur's knights must fight for the right cause, or they will end up facing each other with conflicting interests; and when you bear a sword, when you are born to bear a sword, you naturally have your own way of settling things. I know hardly any figure who more movingly realized the fate of the failed Knight of the Grail in his own life than Hans Jæger."
Hemingway and Brecht (1964)
"Literary folk unfortunately seem to be occupied either with Brecht or with Hemingway. This is too bad, because the two of them belong together, and because the work of one can in many ways shed light on that of the other: Hemingway's theme was the individual in relation only to himself, Brecht's theme was the person in relation to society. It is remarkable how few there are who have dealt with both aspects of being human. "
Hemingway and the Beasts (1955)
"It is necessary to state that Hemingway wants to be healthy; and this will to health despite everything must be regarded as the truly moral element in Hemingway's writings. It is in the deepest sense battle literature, where the battle in reality takes place within the hero, and only apparently outside him."
Homage to Cézanne (from Powderhouse, 1969)
"What did his contemporaries achieve in Paris during the Commune? Not a little! Their names live, and we love these names. But who changed the world? The old rentier and petit bourgeois, with his little house and his bank account — he rebuilt the world."
How Professor Arne Næss and I Conquered NATO The history of a Norwegian nonviolent action (1963)
"The sentries were impressed by my military exterior. The gate opened immediately, and Arne Næss and I strode in while the guards saluted. We gave friendly (but distant!) nods, and saluted back. 'The telephone is in the guardroom,' said one of the sentries, and we betook ourselves thither."
“I spent the years in Stockholm drawing & painting” (from Moment of Freedom, 1966)
"Today it's rather remarkable to think that I walked around Stockholm painting flower pots, apples, and landscapes while the whole world was aboil around me: it was revealing itself with terrible clarity as the combination of latrine and torture chamber it is. And my own inner pictures of the world were also an apocalypse; I knew very well that the world was a crematorium. But I didn't dare to say it."
Knut Hamsun's Centennial (1958) Wry reflections on Norway's treatment of its giants (including Hamsun, Ibsen, Wergeland, and Munch) written during Bjørneboe's own period of exile following the publication of Under a Harsher Sky.
"It looks as if the persecution and demolishing of the great souls is truly a kind of higher civic duty, something which in fact has to happen in order to drive the situation and the man to the extreme, to awaken his last reserves of strength, and to leave behind a true image in the world."
Literature and Reality (1971) Seminal essay about literature's paradoxical relation to politics
"The province of literature is neither the interior nor the exterior; its task is to explore the meeting between the two. We live in a world which is characterized not by problems, but by dilemmas — of problems which can't be solved. If literature brings solutions, if it brings answers, then it lies. It can only contribute to posing the questions more sharply and clearly and drastically than before. From my point of view literature is an empirical science."
The Mate (Opening chapter of The Sharks, 1974)
"This voyage began more absurdly, more meaninglessly, than any other journey I know of. It was as if the vessel were soaked through and through with hate — built, welded, rigged, and riveted with hate. It's as if she were possessed by Satan."
On the Art of Making the Earth uninhabitable (Excerpt from The Silence, 1973)
"A European isn't something you are, it's something you become. And you become one only when you settle your account with Europe—with the prejudices and with the terrible burden of guilt which clings to this continent, and which we ourselves participate in right up until we see that this burden of guilt is our own, and that it lies not so much in our actions as in our whole way of thinking, and in our enormous ability to choose wrong."
The Prison Rebellion (from Moment of Freedom, 1966)
"I once had a dream which lived in me for many years, because it had that terrible force which is far, far stronger than the usual reality. I was standing up in the gallery in a prison, on a floor of steel grating, looking down on the prisoners gathered on the cement floor down in the huge prison hall. Everybody inside the prison was yelling.... "
The Righteous and the Innocent (1967) Bjørneboe likens the government bureaucracy to the Bøyg, an enormous, invisible, serpentine monster in Norse mythology.
"A complaint against or a criticism of the prosecuting authority can only be referred to the prosecuting authority itself. The next step consists in the prosecuting authority finding the prosecuting authority free of any blame. It has never made a mistake, it does not make mistakes, it never will make a mistake. The circle is closed, the wall is secure."
Strindberg the Fertile (1963)
"On a purely theatrical plane Strindberg has become an inspiration, whereas Ibsen has become a burden, an immovable gravestone which preserves that form of theater which Ibsen mastered and therefore wished to keep unchanged. In dramatic world literature Strindberg has many descendants, Ibsen none."
The Surgeons Prepare to Stage a Demonstration (from Amputation, 1970)
"Disciplinary surgery—or, if you wish: psycho-surgery—is founded on the principle that man in his present form is of faulty construction—highly subject to subjective patterns of behavior. Now, it goes without saying that all social problems can be solved only to the extent that we can work on non-deviant humans."
The Theater Tomorrow (1963) The fullest statement of Bjørneboe's ideas on dramaturgy.
"Behind the most horrible physical effects humanity has hitherto produced — Hiroshima and Nagasaki — lay the most abstract thinking which has so far been achieved. The most striking thing is thus the degree to which abstract thought has been incarnated in matter. The same must apply to the theater: the philosophical content must be ever more directly incarnated in physical stage processes. A contemporary theater will thus be scientific and philosophical, and circuslike and physical, all at the same time."
The Town Fathers Quell a Revolution (from Winter in Bellapalma, 1958) Compare with the last scene of The Bird Lovers.
In this excerpt from Bjørneboe's early comic novel, the town fathers are attempting to deal with the fishermen's demand that the town treasury be used to build a breakwater (which would destroy the beach and hence the tourist trade). Since custom dictates that the younger men must defer to the octagenarians, the plan they have come up with is half-baked, to say the least.
from The Treatment of Young Lawbreakers (1959)
"You can't drum into a whole generation through film and print that the meaning of life is sex, cars and money — without its having its effects. And you can't solve the problems which have arisen, the problem of rootlessness, nihilism and lack of ideals, by calling the police. You can't solve anything whatsoever with the aid of longer and harsher prison sentences. Least of all can you cure spiritual poverty and desperation by such means."
Two Years in a Rudolf Steiner School, First Grade: Fairy Tales (1953)
"From a bourgeois point of view the fairy tales are just plain amoral. For help always arrives on the other side of the curtain. On this side of the curtain the "lad" is rendered destitute. Then he goes out into the world, and gives away what little he has to someone who needs it even more than he does. When the lad goes on, he falls into privation. And his need sends him through the curtain. On the other side a helping hand reaches out to him, and this help comes from the person he himself had helped."
Two Years in a Rudolf Steiner School, Second Grade: Legends and Animal Fables (1953)
"It's downright refreshing for a teacher to see how the children become wild and unruly when they've heard a sufficient number of pious legends. As saints they become totally unusable. If you want children to be nice and placid, you must resort to the exact opposite of the legends — animal fables. While the legends nourish that which is most highly human in the children, the fables satisfy the natural animal traits, and at the same time bring them into humor's liberating daylight. "
When I wrote Jonas (1956) Bjørneboe emphasizes the mythic dimensions of a novel which was widely understood as an attack on the Norwegian school system.
"It has been objected that 'the salamanders,' Principal Strange etc., are not described according to the rules of art and the 'tendentious novel.' In reality they are described two- dimensionally, not as human beings with good and evil sides, but as cardboard figures. They are presented precisely thus as it has been my aim to show the problem: they are not human beings. Strange was never conceived as a human being; he is something far less and at the same time far stronger than a human being. He is an incorporation of the time's evil spirit. He is the demon of the age. The salamander."
Writing and Criticism: Fight or Flight? (undated)
"Common to [the critics of both left and right] is their hatred of a free literature which goes its own ways, and which takes the unheard-of liberty of being utterly indifferent to 'criteria', clichés and formulas, and which concerns itself instead with the reality of the world around us — more than with party dogmas (which change from day to day), or with aesthetic dogmas (which change from day to day)."
A Bjørneboe Reader: Norwegian Title Index | Systematic Table of Contents
This page last updated February 2005