When I wrote Jonas, it was clear to me that the book was going to awaken irritation, and that it would probably provoke a few peevish teachers' contributions to the newspapers. I reckoned that there might be expressions of dementia from school principals, along with the usual assurance that the school system today is practically perfect, and might be left to do, the social democrats will have achieved in a couple of years. I had built the framework of the book's plot, the school story, on material from five or six children, I knew that everything was correct, so that I would be able to document my claims in the event of a court case, but I was not clear to what degree the story of Jonas was representative. What I didn't know about the school system then, I have gotten to know since—in the form of letters and communications from parents who have themselves experienced similar things with their children. The quotations from the school textbooks, as they are given in Jonas, are no more an invention than is the thought that a child whose abilities to read and handle abstraction do not develop normally will easily be regarded as underendowed and will therefore be sent to a school for more seriously handicapped children. The textbook quotations have been imported into Jonas verbatim from Norwegian textbooks.

However, Jonas came to unleash a rage one would not have thought possible in a time which is ravaged by far more dreadful events than Norwegian novels. And it is strange to think that for me the school story, the polemic side of the matter, stood the whole time, and still stands today, as a wholly subordinate side of the book. Neither can I regard the more general cultural-critical attacks in Jonas as central. But I will come back to this later. Meanwhile the violent debate, and the very strong passions it unveiled, probably in reality was due more to this cultural-political significance the book acquired than to the purely pedagogical viewpoints it presented.

In a modern state, with all the will to power which radiates from the state, the school system will very easily be transformed from a part of the intellectual life to a means of power in the political fight. The school system becomes an expression of the ruling circles' cultural policies and view of man. The aim of schooling becomes not the human being, the pupil, but the inculcation of the pupil with the state's ideology. Therefore it the strange thing happened, that the whole Jonas debate, despite of its—even for Norway—extraordinarily low level, at the same time was carried on over the heads of a great part of the participants. These participants thought that it was a pedagogical debate, while it was in fact waged as a political smokescreen-creating war.

Of course it can be a wish-dream for a writer to become the storm center in such a paper hurricane. Particularly because I myself didn't have to lift a finger, but could let it all go by itself, while I continued my own daily work in peace. The violent slander in the press was more than compensated for by the defense the book received.

One of the most moving things I experienced was a strange child's voice which one day showed up on the telephone:

"Is this Bjørneboe?"

"Yes?"

"Jens Bjørneboe?"

"Yes, that's me."

"This is Jonas. Take care!"

It was cheering to the highest degree that a number of critics discovered that the book was actually about something other than what the debate revolved around. This assistance came from university sources: First and foremost through the Danish literary historian Erling Nielsen, and the Norwegian Plato specialist Egil Wyller. Through their discussion of the book the discussion came to take place on several planes at the same time.

The school plot in Jonas is a purely external frame. The course of events could just as well have been set in a newspaper, a hospital, or anywhere. The center of the book is the retelling of the Grail saga, and the preceding description of the high school students. The main theme is set forth in the sentence: "For if the Knights of the Grail forget the Grail, then they kill each other." And: "For Parsifal had not yet learned what was necessary for the one who shall find the Grail; he had not learned to feel others' pain just as strongly as his own. Therefore he had to go out into the world again to learn more and to get more understanding."

A number of critics have complained that these long myths make the book full of digressions; in reality they are themselves the story. If the book was entitled Jonas, that is not because the schoolboy Jonas is the main character, but because he, through his dyslexia, is the "pure fool" which Parsifal is; Jonas is inaccessible to our depravity and even to the abstract-human which lives in our contemporary culture. Parsifal was "like a hart from the wood." And the introduction which describes Jonas's dream life, indicates his special kind, his "race". Through having been isolated and protected in his childhood, as Parsifal was, he shall one day prove to have great reserves as a Knight of the Grail. But this innocence and harmlessness in childhood has brought on him suffering, and this will give him the knowledge which Parsifal needs.

Every single significant person in the book is a variant of the Jonas-race: Jochumsen who dies is Jonas, Werner is the aged Jonas, of a different generation, and made of a material which survives, Marx is Jonas, Jungmannen is Jonas, the priest is Jonas, and not least Bobbi, the German's kid, is Jonas. "Under the wheel, friends, under the wheel, is where such lover-souls dwell!".—The one who kills Bobbi, is not the engineer, he is innocent in the private sense, but he serves the anonymous, mechanistic power, the railroad, the track-laid,—the way the mechanical selection system in the school, the point-and grade system, wants to kill the boy Jonas. It is conceived thus: The Evil One, Satan, in the book is not people, it is the anonymous, faceless, it is "the system"—the great vacuum. This is the demonic of our time: the "human being" without look and features. 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 is a pure symbol for the same power which kills Bobbi by means of the tram, the same demonic quality, without a look, without features. Today we are losing our humanity, we are becoming parts of "the system"—of the great vacuum. Strange is not described as a human being, he has never been a human being. He is Satan in the pastoral play, the modern Herod, the child murderer who has a mouthful of "radical," "humanistic," "progressive" phrases, while he fulfills the schemes which condemn us all to be deprived of vitality....No, 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.

And Jonas has never been, it is not, and it never will be a tendentious novel.

A very different aspect of the book is all that is linked to the name Jonas, the prophet in Leviathan's belly. He went to Nineveh, the great city, which was so large that it took three days to walk through , and where there were tens of thousands who didn't know the difference between right and left, along with many cattle. Cattle being raised for slaughter and voters-as-cattle are well-known words, and it is not I who in my wickedness have gone off and invented them. The parallel between the story of Jonas and the Old Testament myth is strict to the degree that after the sojourn in Leviathan's belly, there followed the rest under the "gourd tree", after the sojourn in the dark inside the lifeboat, follows the feeding with fruit in the sick bay and the meeting with the Apprentice. When Jonas reluctantly returns to the Big City, he is no longer alone. The end of the story of Jonas anybody can find out by reading it in the Old Testament.

It's striking that almost none of the critics have discovered anything further in this connection, despite the fact that the pattern conforms so tightly to the original myth. But of course neither is it my intention that the reader should be conscious of it during the reading; when the myth is drawn in, it is so first and foremost as sounding board, and it is done in the trust that every myth is an "archetype," a kind of primal image which cannot fail to react in the reader's subconscious while the reading goes on. . . .

Far more peculiar is the fact that none of the teachers have noticed it;all the indignation from school sources is due to the fact that they have read the book on the most external, superficial plane. Surely teachers of all people ought to be close to the primary sources in our culture, inter alia the Old Testament in particular.... However, one must be aware that the most violent reactions from the school quarter stem not from true pedagogues, not from female and male teachers, but from principals, half-writers, petty politicians, editors of school organs, etc; that is, from people who hold leading positions, semi-official persons who are actually on the way out of the teaching profession and over into politics, people who are gambling on the socialist school politics and a future within it. Many of the most friendly helping hands I have received during the hullabaloo, both publicly and privately, have come from female and male teachers—especially, of course, from the youngest, who have not been a part of building up the bureaucracy and rule of red tape in the schools.

The things I have mentioned about the inner structure of the novel—while they were clear to me while I was working on it—were only half-consciously present; this applies especially to the details. A book which is properly thought through is like an iceberg, in that only a ninth of it is visible above water. But if the rest, the other eight ninths, weren't there holding it up, nothing would be visible at all. Most of this are things that writers generally keep quiet about, but in this case, where the iceberg was really floating around in a sea of misunderstandings, it must be justified.

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This page added February 2001