Jens Bjørneboe, "Litteratur og virkelighet." Politi og Anarki (Oslo: Pax Forlag, 1972)..  .  ©1972 by Jens Bjørneboe.  English translation ©2000 by Esther Greenleaf Mürer

Tradition makes a sharp distinction between belles-lettres and the other forms of the written word—whatever you want to call them: nonfiction, secondary literature, documentary literature and journalism. To be sure, there is a certain custom by which history and sometimes journalism are partly regarded as belles-lettres, but that's in exceptional cases.

I myself have gradually come to look at this differently; I no longer feel any wall between belles-lettres and the other genres. All serious literary endeavors have one essential in common: to capture reality, whether this is an objective, so-called "outer" reality, or a subjective, "inner" world of feelings, thoughts, images and experiences. The attempt to describe and convey reality is the central thing in every writer's craft. It follows from this—for me in any case—that strictly speaking I judge a book by what it brings me of a new reality which has hitherto been unknown, or partially unknown, to me. To put it even more simply: I am inclined to judge books from what I learn from them. If I am to be completely satisfied, I must know that the reading has in some way renewed me, that on some point or other I have become wiser while reading, that I know more about the world or about people or about myself than I knew before I opened the book.

These may seem primitive criteria, but I'm sure that they are fruitful. They have led, however, to my gradually becoming a rather ungrateful reader of belles-lettres; but at the same time they've led me to a steadily growing appetite for, e.g., history—political history, revolutionary history, colonial history and especially church history. To a certain degree I read all this more or less as the devil reads the Bible; I draw my own conclusions from it and use it in my own way, but at the same time I notice very clearly that this reading keeps me intellectually alive. One can't always say that about belles-lettres —and Lord knows there isn't much documentary literature one can say it about either.

Now what does it mean to convey reality?

Within belles-lettres it sometimes looks as if the different writers have been assigned each his portion of reality, each and every one has his own piece of reality to work with. One can say that one has a dominant theme, a basic motif which one struggles with all one's life. And I have the impression that in that part of literature which we call belles-lettres, subjective honesty is wholly central; that is, one gives one's very inmost without reservation. Only thus can you tell about the one part of the truth which only you yourself, of all people on earth, know about. Only when this requirement is met does a purely belletristic writer make himself useful; by telling his own innermost truth. Then he can convey a truth which tells others something new, something they didn't know about before.

But the strange thing is, that this complete surrender of particular and subjective truth, providing it is conveyed with sufficient honesty, is suddenly transformed into an objective truth. It can be shared by other people.

A very large part of reality can be conveyed only through literature. There is no other way.

Science or historiography can describe and present certain things; all areas of human reality have their media and their methods. And they can only be perceived and captured through these media.

And thus in the human conscious and unconscious there is an area of reality which can only be captured, described and comprehended by literature. Therefore I regard literature as an instrument of cognition, as a wholly sovereign and independent sphere within human cognitive life.

There is no doubt that this will be regarded by many contemporary critics as gross heresy, as romanticism and indefensible glossolalia, but fortunately the criteria and dogmas of criticism are constantly being metamorphosed, and one fashion will be superseded by another. If the pendulum has swung strongly to one side, then the next time around it will swing just as strongly over to the other.

By literature as a form of cognition I mean first and foremost that it deals with phenomena which aren't accessible to other activities—a part of the human interior which can't be grasped by psychology or psychiatry, but solely by literature. I've never found any rational psychological or psychiatric expression of, for example, a state of being wildly in love; of this singular madness which can possess a human being completely, transform a person's character unto unrecognizability, drive him to crime or to the most incredible deeds of heroism, and in the worst case ruin a person's whole life. French folk tradition has always regarded being in love as a kind of liver ailment, something which can practically change an otherwise reasonable person into a mental patient. The attack can be so violent that when the patient eventually comes to himself again, i.e. when the patient is cured, then the convalescent won't even remember any longer how the sickness felt. But there are some who remember it, and who can deliver a precise report of how it feels when one has the madness in one's blood.

It is enough to mention one single name: Knut Hamsun.

Hamsun remembered afterwards how it was, he's able to relive the whole thing, and to manage in the midst of the madness to write it down in cold blood. Hamsun remembered it, and almost all others forget it automatically when the abnormal state is past.

I mention this not because I think that belles-lettres must necessarily be concerned with problems of love. But the thing is that being in love is a completely incomprehensible phenomenon; we simply don't know what it is. Science has no explanation whatever for it. We know a lot about distant planets and fixed stars, but to date we have no useful ideas about what calls forth this feverish state. Love is a closed area for psychiatric research.

But it isn't alone in this. Large parts of our interior are just as inaccessible to logical understanding. Being in love is only one example, but because of the great intensity of the experience it's a good example. No one knows what being in love is, for as an experience it is just as transitory as it is violent....

Naturally there are other human experiences which are both more powerful and more subtle than that of being in love. There are things which are such that one would think them impossible to capture in words.... The experience of eternity and of endlessness, [for example,] can't be expressed or captured in any other medium than literature. [Olaf Bull's image of] the stone eternally falling and falling—inside the human soul and within our hearts...that is a reality one can never escape from, once one has seen it.

Now I want to say at once that nothing would be more wrong than to maintain that literature should keep to these purely inner, or purely eternal realities. Nothing is more meaningless than to require of literature that it should keep to "pure poesy." In general it's insane and meaningless to demand anything at all of literature, other than that one should become wiser from it. But then that is also an absolute requirement. I require that something must happen to me when I read a book. It must change me. But nonfiction must do that too.

The change can happen in a thousand different ways. When I learn an important thing which I didn't already know, then my whole inner landscape becomes different from what it was before. A new light falls over it; I see it against a different background. In short: a renewal occurs in the relation between myself and the reality which surrounds me.

To take an example, this time from nonfiction: it involves one certain book, and it confirms the old rule that no poetry can surpass reality, no fantasy can compare with what has happened daily, happens daily, and will continue to happen around us.

It concerns the first comprehensive history of colonialism—under the title Die weissen kommen (The Whites are Coming). The author is Gert von Paczensky, a journalist and former TV reporter and TV editor—today a freelance journalist and writer. The publisher is Hoffman & Campe. It's the first comprehensive colonial history to be written. Gert von Paczensky is not a historian, he's a journalist, and as he says himself: When the historians fail us, the journalists must take over. That is: he's a journalist in the full and great sense of the word, and the work he has done has no scientific imbalance; it is documented from the first page to the last, and contains thousands of footnotes and references.

We generally think that we know quite a lot about the whites' advance into other parts of the world, against people of other colors and cultures. We know that the whole thing was one big plundering expedition, one continuous assault and robbery; we know that it involved massacres and mass murders, gold and bloodbaths, rapes, slave trading and genocide. We know, in short, that it was really, really bad.

And yet we know nothing. What we picture to ourselves about colonialism isn't even the palest shadow of what colonialism was, or what it to some extent still is. Colonial history is in reality a hundred times worse than what we have been able to imagine. This same history of colonialism is so terrible that you blanch with shame once you've delved into it. All this has been systematically suppressed, concealed and falsified. But the "colonial peoples", those who were "colonized", they know the truth. Those who today lead the "rebellious" peoples, they know that white supremacy has cost Africa at least 200 million dead, they know that the white rule consisted of robbery and murder. There are details which are worse than the worst things from the horrors of the Hitler epoch—and if one is willing to look at the total picture, ten one can only say that what Hitlerism did in Europe is (aside from Hitler's technical perfection in murder techniques) no different from what the Colonial powers have done in Asia, Africa and America, and in some cases on a much larger scale than what Hitler had time for. The only difference between Hitlerism and colonialism is that Hitler did the same thing in Europe as the French, Dutch, Belgians, Spanish, Portuguese, English, Italians and Imperial Germany had practiced in Asia, Africa, and America. Had Hitler perpetrated his genocide, his plundering, his torture, his child-murder and his oppression in other parts of the world nobody would have cared, either in the US or in Europe.

This is not a lecture on colonial history. The book The Whites are Coming is only mentioned here as an example of a history which completely bursts the bounds of the concept "nonfiction" [faglitteratur]. After reading it one is quite simply another person than one was before, and this because it conveys reality with such an intensity that one can never again be completely the same as one was before reading it.

It's this, then, which one must also require of belles-lettres.

We have touched on literature, or belles-lettres, as a medium for describing things which can't be presented by other means; love, death, eternity, endlessness and empty outer space. But can't literature also concern itself with other things? Shall literature be obliged, dogmatically, to concern itself only with "inner," "subjective" reality? Shall poetry be obliged to keep its hands clean, not to dirty them with the "outer," the "objective," brutal and appalling reality which surrounds us? Must the belletristic writers, the poets, be too fine to describe the reality in all its baseness, filth and vulgarity?

Here we're face to face with the literary program of classical naturalism: to speak the truth, to write without lying.

Obviously literature has a double task: namely, to describe both the "inner" and the "outer" reality. It is this which makes literature an independent genre. For me a book's content of truth becomes steadily more decisive—and a part of the truth which is accessible to us today is that 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. With its reality-content 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.

But literature is surrounded by a world, and in some cases by a whole group of critics, who want answers, and who even want prescriptions. And this comes, we may note, from two completely different, two opposite quarters. But both parties want a "positive" literature. These wishes—or better, demands—come, politically defined, from the right as well as the left. We can pinpoint it more closely by saying that the demand arises from the conservative, or perhaps rather: the reactionary forces of both right and left.

The reactionaries of the right demand that you write positively in the sense of accepting a bourgeois-capitalist world as it is, with colonialism and all, with violence and oppression, with falsehood and deception. That is to be "positive" in those circles.

The reactionaries of the left demand that you write positively about Marxism-Leninism, accept it with the violence and oppression it has entailed, with its special form of colonialism, with falsehood and deception. That is to be "posi- tive" in those circles.

The reactionaries of the right demand that you write "unpolitically" in the sense of concealing our terrible political problems, and thereby coming to serve the reactionaries of the right, whether you actually want to or not.

The reactionaries of the left demand that you write "politically" in the sense of concealing the appalling problems which Marxism-Leninism has created in practice. Above all you mustn't proclaim that what is called "Leninism" in theory is called "Stalinism" in practice.

Certainly there are writer who with good conscience and in the greatest subjective honesty can meet these demands—either by being "unpolitical" to such a degree that they serve the status quo, or by being "political" to such a degree that they renounce both freedom and literature. But it isn't these writers who move the world, or who advance it. They don't advance literature either, but bind it to dogmas and to creeds, they abolish literature as a cognitive instrument and as empirical science. They castrate it and make it harmless. In reality it's just as idiotic to demand that literature shall be "unpolitical" as that it shall be "political." Inasmuch as the whole concept "politics" can be defined as an attempt to find a way of living together on earth, everything we write will willy-nilly be political, but at the same time the word "political" ceases to mean anything at all. All genuine philosophy is occupied with the same problem: living together on earth, "making the earth habitable," as Brecht says. One could say: "politics" means finding a way in which one can stand to live with other people, or reaching an agreement about sharing the earth's riches in a reasonable way, in brotherhood, in freedom and equality.

In a sense all philosophy of significance is an attempt to find a humane and usable form of communism. But that is by no means to say that this true communism is the same as Marxist-Leninist centralism, with its elitist theory, its worship of the party and its unfreedom, oppression and police terrorism. Quite the contrary: it looks as if the Leninist version has led to the art of making the earth even more uninhabitable than it was before Marx. I don't believe that one improves the world by building more concentration camps. And neither do I believe that one improves the world by dropping napalm bombs on the poor peasant population in Asia or Africa.

If we now return to belles-lettres, then I will say that today it's impossible for an aware person—which a writer ought to be—to live in this world without taking a stand with regard to the forces which are trying to rule it. As an adult and responsible person one can't avoid confronting them. And as a responsible person one can hardly avoid taking a stand in defense of that part of the world which is being plundered, raped and massacred. It's apparent that nearly all literature which today is really alive and which means something, is also—to a greater or lesser degree—"leftist-oriented". It has taken a stand on the side of the poor, of the abused, the maltreated and the exploited. However, all good literature has almost always done that. It is just more obvious today than before. Now how does this come about?

Why is it so?

The relationship is most striking with respect to the dramatic literature of the past hundred years—especially, of course, since the last world war. Not a few theater critics have been enormously vexed at incessantly being forced to see so-called "political theater", and still they don't escape—for the simple reason that today there is almost no living and serious drama being written which isn't "political", and leftist-political at that.

The explanation why no "unpolitical" or conservative drama is being written stares us in the face—and it lies in the nature of the drama; it has, so to speak, a technical basis. Along with the epic side of the drama—the telling of a story—there's also something which is specific for dramatic writing: that the story which is told is the story of a fight, of a struggle between two opposed interest groups. And since drama likewise always has a moral-philosophical content, the one side must represent interests which the spectators can sympathize with—to say it simply: some must be "bad" and some must be "good," one must "side with" one of the parties. (Which naturally doesn't mean that the "bad" side should be painted black exclusively, but only that its interests and methods do not serve the true advantage of the community, and this must be made clear on the stage.)

If a dramatist today looks around him in the world—as all writers ought to do, as thoroughly as possible—then he can't avoid noticing that a global struggle for power is going on—a life-and-death struggle between a rich and powerful minority and a poor, oppressed and exploited majority. Today all the world's power and wealth is gathered in an astonishingly small number of hands. These rulers sit for the most part in the Kremlin or in the Pentagon. From their point of view the struggle revolves around keeping wealth and power. It's very difficult for this viewpoint to create sympathy among those who have become aware of the situation. And when a contemporary dramatist writes, he will have this as a background for all he does—first and foremost as an ethical necessity, and then as a technical necessity. Today we're forced to sympathize with the rebels, with the oppressed, the exploited—if we are to be able to write a passably rational play. (I am now completely ignoring pure entertainment—drama, comedy, farce and ordinary musicals, which are after all purely capitalistic and thus in their essence right-wing political enterprises.) Practically all serious drama being written today takes the part of the wretched, in one way or another. I believe that it would be completely impossible today to write a good play which defended the recent American presidents' foreign policy and their activities in the developing countries or their war in Vietnam. I believe it would be impossible to write an honest drama defending the policies of the Russian police and the Russian leaders toward the libertarian writers who have been imprisoned in the Soviet Union. I believe it would be impossible to write a good play in defense of racial oppression in the US or South Africa, or anywhere for that matter. I believe that it would be impossible to write a rational drama in defense of the colonels in Athens or of the Russian intervention in Czechoslovakia.

The drama requires defense of truth and justice; that lies in the character of the drama: it must take a stand on reality and it must serve justice. It must convey reality and not illusion. The drama is a critical and unmasking kind of art. It should hardly be necessary to say this in Ibsen's homeland. And this is why conservative theater criticism will always feel itself cheated out of its wish to see genuine conservative drama on the stage: it is quite simply impossible. A good drama which in all seriousness defends the slave traders or describes colonialism's "good sides" and "positive contributions" is something we'll never see. Because it would be a lie. Not only the drama, but literature in general has its own kind of ethical mandate, a certain moral philosophy will always characterize it. And this moral philosophy will very often be in conflict with prevailing establishment or conservative moral concepts. It will often be in conflict with the prevailing "sexual morality," if one can imagine that sexual morals can be different from morals in other areas of life. Here we have the reason for all of the curses and imprecations which have been poured out over belletristic writers through the years.

It's difficult to refrain from recalling Morgenbladet's earlier characterization of Sigurd Hoel: that by his writings he did more harm to society than a drunken pervert does to a little child. This in reference to the thoroughly proper and very moral Sigurd Hoel. What the Scandinavian newspapers of the time wrote about the more radical moralists Strindberg and Ibsen—or about the moralistic painter Edvard Munch—we won't quote here, but I hope to write a book about it someday.

Now, one should by no mans overlook the corresponding demands from the opposite side; from a Stalinistic or so-called "Marxist-Leninist" viewpoint. It's still a question of demands on literature, and of course directly opposite demands. In common they have only the "demand" for "positivism"—there the bourgeois and the Leninist critics are agreed, albeit on very dissimilar premises.

This Marxist-Leninist demand aims at "optimism": literature shall serve the revolution alone, and serving the revolution consists in at every moment describing the world as seen from the viewpoint which just now is the ruling Marxist line. Literature thus stands between two "demands":

A) It shall be pure literature and not concern itself with anything so vulgar as politics, it shall not soil itself with the class struggle or social criticism.

B) Literature shall be purely political, and not serve capitalism by diverting attention from the class struggle.

Naturally within both camps it is only mediocre critics who share these viewpoints, and for that matter also only mediocre writers who accommodate them. But we live under a dictatorship of the mediocre, and it doesn't pay to quarrel with them.

One can characterize both positions a bit differently: The one is that literature should concern itself only with the human interior, not with the external reality. The other is that literature should concern itself with the world around us, not with the inner reality.

The fact is, however, that internal reality alone is just as abstract and unreal as external reality alone. The human situation lies between both extremes; even the most ethereal devotee of the interior is surrounded by an external reality, and even the most devout Leninist has his own inner reality within him.

I myself would put it this way: The province of literature is neither the interior nor the exterior; its task is to explore the meeting between the two.

Literary activity lies in describing the meeting between external reality and a human mind.

The world around us mirrored in a human consciousness.

Let us say: The objective, appalling reality around us plus the warmth of the sub- jective experience. Only this gives the whole and full truth which only literature can capture. Every human activity has its raison d'être in that it comprehends something which only it can comprehend. And it looks as if so long as humanity has had the use of language, literature has been a part of its essential need, and as long as humanity has been familiar with written symbols, it has tried to capture literature in writing. The social and interpersonal function of literature was obvious and indispensable.

All most all the way down to our century it was so: literature was an inevitable, integral part of society; it could be controversial, annoying, unpleasant—or "harmful", "sick" and "destructive" as they usually say—but there was no serious question mark set by literature's justification for existence. There is one today, however.

On the conservative side, people don't want just lilies and roses and soul from literature—they also expect it to pay its way, to be salable as merchandise—and if it doesn't always bring a profit, it should at least sell to a certain degree. Otherwise the question mark comes of itself: isn't literature actually a passé, obsolete phenomenon? In the opposite camp, on the extreme "socialist" or more accurately the Leninist side, it looks as if they take literature much more seriously. But still it only appears that way, for the next moment comes the evaluation of literature's political effect—and if it isn't politically profitable, then one produces the same question mark: isn't it an obsolete, an outmoded phenomenon?

The characteristic thing about the present-day attitude is that people judge literature by its economic or political usefulness.

And it's time for this viewpoint to be stated with full force: Mustn't literature pay for itself, either politically or economically?

Do the belletristic writers really believe that those with power should support them out of pure charity, without getting anything in return?

The one group wants economic profit, the other group wants political profit.

This is likewise often accompanied by a sentimental glance in the direction of the poor readers, the consumers. The capitalist group of rulers maintains that after a hard working day the poor exhausted reader or theatergoer needs relaxation and recreation. It would be a pity for the people not to get the entertainment they're willing to pay for, but instead to be confronted with the problems they want to escape from.

The socialist group of Leninist rulers maintain that it's a pity for the people not to be provided, through their leisure reading and theatergoing, with an opportunity for further political (read: Leninist) education.

What it all adds up to is: A work of literature which contributes neither to economic flowering nor to political education—this work is totally useless and shouldn't even exist.

I think that in both extreme cases the error lies in the fact that the thinking is too myopic—economically, socially and politically these people are thinking in much too short-sighted terms. To take the simplest thing first: Even slow-selling authors, such as Kinck or Olaf Bull, have still eventually paid their publishing debts through their posthumous rights. Even Kafka eventually paid for himself. Rainer Maria Rilke was finally printed in millions of copies. Even James Joyce balanced his accounts. But not within the same fiscal year, not as this fall's best sellers. Strindberg died a poor man, in spite of his international renown. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that over the years Albert Bonnier's Forlag has recovered what it invested in Strindberg back then when it paid his laundry bills and his rent.

Now it should also be said for the sake of fairness that within this scale from absolute capitalism to absolute Leninism there are many degrees, many nuances; a striking number of capitalist publishers and conservative critics, probably a clear majority, stand far closer to the center of the scale in practice than one would expect. And something similar also applies to many of the theoretically hard-boiled Leninists (it even applied to Lenin himself). They're often much more tolerant in practice than in theory. In both cases, no doubt, the old formulation applies that "nature overcomes training"—reason wins out over theory.

Only within the closed Leninistic areas does the climate become intolerable: total ideological obedience is required of the writer. Here too there's an error involved which has its origin in the fact that the thinking is too myopic; just as many capitalist publishers expect instant economic profit, the political commissars expect instant political profit.

But this is in total opposition to literature's true nature: namely, for its effect to be a long-range one. Since it has a much greater dimension of depth than a bestseller or a political pamphlet, it is predestined to take effect more slowly, but all the more powerfully. In contrast to the pamphlet and to journalism, literature works from below and from within. But we are all inclined to calculate superficially and shortsightedly.

Books—certain books—have a strange ability to go underground, to disappear, become invisible, and to grow during the interval in which they're wholly or partially forgotten. Their effect will come slowly, their force grows as during a long and secret process of fermentation. A book which disappeared in silence and oblivion the day after it was published can return—make its comeback—twenty, fifty or a hundred years later, with a power and a youthfulness, a freshness and a vitality which is overwhelming, and which can set its mark on the thought of decades.

The reason for this resides in the fact that true literature has a far greater degree of reality-content than the current pamphlet or reportage can have. Such works are born with difficultly and grow slowly. A leopard has a longer gestation period and slower growth than a domestic cat. And a lion needs more time than a leopard. In literary history there are countless examples of this. Moby Dick became a world concept long after the author's death. Brand and Peer Gynt were regarded by the author himself as plays to be read, and only long, long after their publication did it become apparent that both of them belong to Ibsen's most dramatically effective work. The Great Highway was long regarded as unplayable; only many years after Strindberg's death did it turn out that it worked splendidly on the stage. It was a long, long time before Shakespeare's significance was really understood. For two hundred years the Marquis de Sade was regarded as an eternal shame and a scandal, and only today has the man's enormous importance for literature, psychology and intellectual history been discovered. His political and revolutionary significance was indeed recognized for a very short time, while he was out of prison during the revolution, but it quickly disappeared from the politicians' consciousness, and the dogmatic Leninist critics to this very day regard him as the exponent of a decadent bourgeoisie, not to say of a decadent nobility. The problem of describing decadence is not the same as being decadent, to portray cruelty is not the same as to be cruel.

What follows from this is the idiocy of demanding of literature that it "must be" or "ought to be" this or that. What distinguishes all new and living literature is precisely the opposite: it is something one hadn't expected. And thereby all so-called "criteria" become wholly outmoded and useless as standards. One can almost say that the characteristic of a living and modern literature is that it can't be judged with the help of old labels. If it is new, then it is new, and that means that one must alter one's whole way of looking at it.

Personally I believe in a kind of dialectic in literary history; the further the pendulum swings over to one side, the more violently it will subsequently swing to the opposite side. I believe that all development in literature is due to a new return to naturalism, but in a new way, and with new eyes.

One of the things which is typical for the literary situation today is the trend to what is called "documentary literature"—as a very typical representative one can mention Peter Weiss. First in connection with is entirely free interpretation of our good old Marquis de Sade, and later Peter Weiss's Africa-play about he Portuguese colonial terror.

In principle I see documentary literature as a sign of health in European-American literature, even if it has—now and then—its ridiculous undersides. One of the comical sides, for instance, is the tendency to misuse fashionable words. In the literature one of these words is at present "report". People write a "report" from an East German City, a "report" from a West German city—a report from here and a report from there. Most impressive of all is when a book is simply called Report—which I guess means a report from the world in general.

But in spite of modish phrases of this sort I think that the trend is healthy—and hence we are back at the starting point of these observations; namely that the traditional distinction between nonfiction and belles-lettres is in the process of disappearing. Today there's a general tendency to erase the dividing lines between the different genres—poetry assumes clear traits from prose, painting from sculpture, sculpture from paining and music—and the drama takes on characteristics which traditionally belong to epic literature.

Strictly speaking one no longer writes a novel; one writes a book. And I think that today readers have the same attitude—they want to read a book which has something in it.

The sum of my personal aesthetics then becomes that a book, in order to be "well-written," must be so saturated with reality—no matter what kind of reality—that the reader forgets to ask himself whether the book is "well-written", but dwells entirely on the reality which the book conveys.

In other words, a reality which is of such intensity and significance that the reader forgets the author, and that he forgets the "criteria" he has brought with him.

If a writer manages this, then he has managed to write what I call "modern" literature.

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