Jacket of original editon of The Silence
Illustration: "La Roule"
from Les Misères de la
Guerre by Jacques Callot
Jacket of original editon of The Silence
Illustration: "La Roule"
from Les Misères de la
Guerre by Jacques Callot
Powderhouse: Scientific Postscript and Last
Protocol
PUBLISHED
(Kruttårnet, 1969)
The Silence: an Anti-novel and Absolutely the Very Last
Protocol PUBLISHED
(Stillheten, 1973)
Jens Bjørneboe's trilogy Moment of Freedom (1966), Powderhouse (1969) and The Silence (1973) marked the high point of a controversial literary career. Since the early 1950s this Norwegian iconoclast had been making life difficult for the establishment by attacking its sacred cows: a repressive school system, a hypocritical Christianity, an inhumane prison system, power-seeking politicians, corrupt police and depraved moral guardians—all concentrated n his particular bête noire: the authoritarian personality.
With this trilogy, Bjørneboe turned his attention to a more general problem: the evil inherent in the human race itself. Why, his narrator asks despairingly, does man behave so inhumanely to his fellow creatures?
Generally regarded as one of the most important literary works written in Norway, this groundbreaking trilogy—which has parallels with the works of Michel Foucault and René Girard—is a powerful and unsettling indictment of western civilization.
With the Moment of Freedom trilogy, Bjørneboe gave Norwegian
literature a new form, which he variously titled manuscript, protocol, and anti-novel;
amixture of fiction, essay, and memoir. . . .
What Bjørneboe was attempting to do was to look steadily at the human
condition, to examine the options open to mankind in the second half of the twentieth
century, to ask whether there was anything left worth saving.
-- Janet Garton, Jens
Bjørneboe: Prophet Without Honor
