Jens Bjørneboe, "Diktning og kritikk—middel til kamp eller flukt?" Vi som elsket Amerika (Oslo: Pax, 1970). © 1970 by PAX Forlag A/S. Used by permission. English translation ©1999 by Esther Greenleaf Mürer.
The world marches forward. Since the invention of Nobel's dynamite, other high explosives, and not least of our beloved nuclear weapons, child-execution has become superfluous. In the course of the last three decades mass extermination of the civilian population has become internationally recognized as a means of pres- sure in war, and the Second World War accomplished the extermination of children on a hitherto unheard-of scale. How many children were executed by the bombings of London, Dresden, Leningrad, Hamburg—and above all of two well-known Japanese cities—in the course of the years from 1939 to the present, is something for which there are no figures.
It is also self-evident that execution by phosphorus or napalm means not only that one can kill a lot more children, but also that one can kill them in a more painful manner than by old-fashioned, fast-acting hanging. It is therefore obvious that we no longer need child executions.
"'Tis the times' plague, when madmen lead the blind," said Shakespeare. 'Tis a plague of all times, and is more evident today than ever before: it's the chief characteristic of our time. We—the blind—follow dumbly and happily after the day's leading statesmen. We don't want to know what they're doing—and we're not supposed to know what they're doing. To study them, keep a watch on them, criticize them—in short, to meddle in what they're up to, to want to have a say in what happens in the world —that is downright vulgar. In fact it's worse: it's criminal, it's destructive, it's pacifistic, negative, etc.
It's especially malicious and destructive to take a stand vis-à-vis the world if one is a writer. If what one writes has anything to do with contemporary reality, then it isn't only an attack on democracy and American family life, but it isn't delicate—no, it's even worse: it isn't art.
Everywhere sits a guard of literary critics keeping watch over this. That writers don't write wrong, i.e. about reality and the world. For then it isn't poetry.
Proper writers should write about how dull it is in marriage, how painful and hard it is to be young, how sad it is to be frustrated, how lonely it is to be lonely, how terribly boring it is not to have any interests, and above all how cruelly difficult, lonely and alienating it is to live in a welfare state. One should further write about nights of love, or the reverse, that one can't make it. That is pure writing, that is central poesy, that's...yes, that is art.
Nearly all critics of this type distinguish themselves by knowing even less than other critics about artistic technique, about the lowly, the complicated and difficult craftsmanship in, for example, a novel or a play. Instead of knowing something about the technical and artistic sides of the art they make their living writing about, they have something called "aesthetic criteria." These "criteria" consist of external, mechanical viewpoints for dividing writing into categories.
The intellectual primitivism which lies in the desire to judge art according to thematic or formal schemes can be masked behind a few foreign words.
Naturally it's much easier to have aesthetic categories than to know anything concrete about the technique of an art form, its inner laws, its possibilities, its limitations, or above all something about that which is a critic's real task: to judge a work by the standard which lies within the work, that is, by its own premises: by what the work wants and is aiming at.
What is the purpose of a book? What is its innermost intent?
When a critic has managed to forget his "criteria," his sympathies, and his own opinions; when he has dissected and analyzed the book's insides, its material worth; and when he has the result of the analysis before him, then he can read the book over again, but now he has a point of view—not his own, but the book's. Now maybe he can begin a critique. Now he can evaluate it as a sequence of images, of actions, of situations. He can criticize the order of the chapters or scenes. And he has one—only one single—standard to judge it by, only one question to ask himself, namely: does every detail, every part, every chapter serve the whole? Does each thing, alone or in conjunction with other elements in the book, serve this book's own main idea? Single words, single expressions—do they serve the whole? The whole composition, does it serve the whole. The breaks, the pauses, the digressions—even the longueurs—do they in the long run serve—the whole. Do the style and the tone serve the one single basic idea which is involved?
Further: does the work's "form", its genre, serve this idea?
What is the idea? —Well, this or this or this.
To what genre does the work belong?
Is it a "modernistic" poem? A novel of social criticism? Is it a realistic description of war? Is it an abstract philosophical novel (e.g. Hesse's Glass Bead Game)? Is it a revolutionary political drama? Etc., etc.; there are many genres. Terribly many.
Sometimes the author has chosen the right genre, then it serves the idea. Sometimes the wrong one, then it spoils it.
The (usual) critic suffers first and foremost from a lack of the craftsman's insight and the intellectual faculties which are a prerequisite for being able to analyze his way forward to the book's real idea. For this reason he is incapable of judging how the idea is served by the book's execution and genre. He usually can't see the difference between genres either.
The result can be divided in two:
A) He can't write a concrete word about what merits or weaknesses the book has, but only about what he himself likes. The book then becomes, in the critic's helpless language of formulas, "good", "bad", "promising", "masterful", "ruthlessly honest", etc., etc.
B) He doesn't keep the categories distinct, but falls into mortal sin: he judges a modernist poem as if it were a realistic novel, or he judges a pamphlet as if it were an abstract novel of the Kafka school, he judges an "absurd" drama by the standards of socialist realism, or he judges a classical sonnet as if it ought to be a modernist poem, a political drama as if it ought to be a slight, descriptive psycho- logical novel—etc., etc.
This type of critic is the rule.
Even worse, often, is the man who "knows" something, who has a university education in literature behind him—true enough, neither does he know anything about novelistic or dramatic technique or other vulgar things from the tailor and carpenter branches, but in return he arrives on the scene with "aesthetic criteria" from the universities or from literary magazines written by people of his own sort, who got their "criteria" from approximately the same milieu as he did, namely in the lecture hall, only at a different place—and perhaps at another time.
It is characteristic of "criteria" that they follow the fashions of the moment, and never concern themselves with the real criteria of craftsmanship, which are eternal and immutable.
This type of critic is dangerous, because he usually sticks to "criteria" which he has learned by heart, he keeps to the teachings of his childhood, and he likes the "criteria" which were fashionable back then. If he is today in his fifties, he will love "modernism" from Kafka's time. And so on. Or he may belong to the very nimblest regiment of literary guards: then he tries to adapt to "criteria" which change from day to day. The basic problem is that in this group there are so many initiates into authoritarian and dogmatic beliefs. They like what they have been taught to like.
For the most part the result is this:
The critic likes modernist poetry, and thinks everything else is bad.
Or: He likes another kind of poetry, and therefore thinks that modernist poetry is bad. Or: He likes Kafka modernism in novels, and therefore thinks that realistic novels are bad. Or: He only likes French literature, therefore other books are bad.
It was this type Alexander Kielland called literary eunuchs. They are now—since everything is so much better today—naturally extinct?
Today they are more widespread than ever before: The castrati exercise an extensive dictatorship, most often in the big establishment newspapers or in the mass magazines, and they guard the harem faithfully. Their first requirement is this: literature shall be written in free verse, without punctuation and with lower-case letters:
be modern
istic about eroti
clife and and and and and
about feelings of lonel
iness and seek con con
tact
withthewelfarest
ates probl
ems not
involved in anything b
ut how ba
d w
e
have it
with ourselves and the sexdr
ive and etc etc
Another group of eunuchs exercises the same dictatorship, but with the opposite sign. They command:
"You shall write for the masses. You shall be positive and edifying, and not criticize us who have power. Don't meddle in politics."
Common to both 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).
Today there are two adjectives relating to literature which are so worn out that they ought to be retired from usage: "modernist" and "engaged". It is the critics who have spoiled these words, as they have spoiled other words before, and made them meaningless. In addition they've managed to work up a dichotomy between the two concepts which has no necessary basis in reality. "Engaged" can well be "modernist", and realistic literature can be completely "disengaged". That isn't the point at issue.
They've managed to spoil a few more words, that's all.
I believe that one of the greatest tasks a writer has is to make those words mean something again.
The spoiled, abused, dishonored, ravished, inflated, murdered and humiliated words must be awakened from the dead. I could imagine someone writing a great novel, a great drama, many, many poems—to make one or two words have a meaning again. In getting words to mean something lies the writer's whole art, aesthetics, technique: to get words to bear witness.
Before me on the table I have some printed matter, text and pictures: from the new West Germany. It is the new German NATO people, the new German generals who once more have power over us in Europe. They are people like Cord von Hobe and von Kielmansegg. And people who are worse.
War-romantics, Jew haters, power politicians, old Nazis, people who bellowed "Heil Hitler" from the time he came to the time he went: now we have them back! A few years ago the lesser minions were tried and punished, politically unsuspecting soldiers and people who acted in good faith were judged severely. They hanged the little ones and let the big ones g—
No, they didn't let them go, they restored them to their old power, sometimes in even higher positions! They send people to prison for several years for having snitched a few bottles of beer or twenty kroner. The war criminals they make into cabinet ministers and generals.
I confess that I feel myself very "engaged" when I think about this and a few other things, about the recklessness of the superpowers, the frivolity of statesmen, about—oh, never mind....
Because I am a writer I shouldn't be allowed to say what I think about this? I should stick to "pure" writing?
I'm sorry.
I am bound to disobedience, among other things because the Western parlia- mentary system and the Eastern one-party state have developed in such a way that the individual can no longer get a hearing. There are no longer enough dissenting opinions being heard in the newspapers, far fewer yet on radio and television. One is cut off from having any individual influence on the foreign policy pursued by the country one lives in. Only the stupidest, laziest, most indifferent and ignorant majority opinion finds expression. This I should accept, on aesthetic grounds?
I'm sorry.
To get back to the good old child-executions from the 1830's: In poetry it was a sublime and seraphic, lyrical time. Just think, for example, of Byron, Lord Byron....
While we're thinking about Lord Byron: In the year 1812 he delivered a speech in Parliament about child-execution, one of the most burning and passionate pleas which had ever been made there, and one can naturally ask oneself whether he became less sublime and seraphic, less lyrical because of it....
The politicians and the jurists rejected Byron's proposal to stop the execution of children. They found him unrealistic and fanciful—they doubtless also thought it un-seraphic and un-lyrical of him to worry about that sort of thing, instead of sticking to his poetical last.
If this article will bear a conclusion, then it would have to be this:
That I declare myself an adherent of "engaged" writing.
But, to bring the matter into balance: that doesn't mean that I'm opposed to "pure" writing.
So long as it doesn't divert us from reality.