Icelandic society underwent radical changes in almost every respect in the twentieth
century. In Iceland these changes were more profound and more rapid than changes of
a similar kind that occurred in most of the countries with which it would be natural
to compare it such as the Scandinavian ones. At the beginning of the last century
Iceland was extremely backward and in a short period it went through a development
that in many other countries stretched over centuries.
The most visible change was caused by the urbanization. Through the centuries Icelanders
lived on farms spread along the coasts and in the valleys, and there were no villages,
let alone towns. Officials of the Crown and Church lived on their own farms and traders
came and went, but had no permanent quarters in the country; only in late winter and
spring did numbers of people (mostly men) gather for seasonal fishing near the richest
fishing banks in the South and the West.
The nineteenth century saw the formation of villages in centres of trade and fishing
along the coast, but in the year 1900 the number of inhabitants in Reykjavík was only
around 6000 out of a population of c. 90,000. The overwhelming majority of people
lived on farms and did their farming without the help of modern technology. The twentieth
century brought new technology to fishing and the fishing industry. The gathering
of people in the towns and villages increased steadily, and modern technology reduced
the need for manual labour on the farms. World War II accelerated the development
greatly; the presence of foreign troops, British and American, brought capital to
the country that made possible a renewal of the technical means of production. By
the 1960s the country was mainly urban with no more than about 10% of the population
living on farms. The greatest concentration of people by far was in Reykjavík and
its environs. Of the ca. 320,000 people living in Iceland today, about three-quarters
live in the southwest corner of the country and most of the rest live in towns and
villages.
This sudden urbanization and the changes that brought it about obviously revolutionized
social structure and cultural life. New classes of people emerged and new differences
in life styles and culture arose, which were a mixture of the old and still officially
respected farmers’ culture and an, often superficial, imitation of foreign, especially
Danish, middle-class culture.
Communications with Europe had gradually improved in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, but World War II and the years following suddenly ended Iceland’s
isolation. The severing of the last political ties to Denmark as well as the growth
in air traffic to both Europe and North America opened the country to the influences
of contemporary culture elsewhere—mass culture no less than elite culture.
In spite of Iceland’s isolation and economic backwardness in the nineteenth century,
its people were relatively well educated. Literacy was general by the early nineteenth
century and a small but influential intelligentsia gained an academic education in
Copenhagen. The poetry of the nineteenth century reflects the ideas and forms of contemporary
European literature, adapted to the strong poetic traditions native to the country.
Nineteenth-century poetry was idealistic, praising the beauty of the country and the
national cultural heritage and encouraging Icelanders to take affairs into their own
hands.
A blend of nationalism and the idealization of rural life and culture was the strongest
ideological trend in Icelandic literature and in Icelandic culture in general up to
World War II and even beyond, but a renewed creativity in the field of narrative art
had already opened possibilities for a more diverse description of society and for
social criticism. Novels and short stories found a ready market with Icelandic readers
and although they did not oust the old and always popular saga literature, they presented
a welcome addition.
Although the first novels written in Iceland were sentimental love stories, the drawing
of characters and setting was usually more realistic than the ones found in traditional
narratives, and the appeal of the books no doubt owed much to the sense of recognition
they evoked, people recognized their own environment and the character types of their
community. A wave of naturalism was brought from Denmark in the 1880s and 90s which
coloured the works of Gestur Pálsson (1852-91), Einar H. Kvaran (1859-1938), Þorgils
gjallandi (the pen-name for Jón Stefánsson 1851-1915) and Jón Trausti (the pen-name
for Guðmundur Magnússon 1873-1918). With these authors the Icelandic novel came of
age reaching a scope and quality similar to that found in the rest of Scandinavia,
although Icelandic novelists were few in number and enjoyed limited professional and
commercial possibilities because their market was so small.
In the first three decades of the twentieth century Reykjavík gradually became more
of a capital in the modern sense of the word. A university was established in 1911
and publishing activity increased greatly: the first daily newspapers started to appear,
cultural magazines were created, and more and more books were published each year.
When the economy underwent serious setbacks in the 1930s, the social problems and
the new forms of class struggle were described and interpreted in a wave of novels
influenced by socialism and social realism. Foremost among the authors appearing in
this period was of course Halldór Laxness (1902-1998).
I am not going to discuss or describe the authorship of Halldór Laxness. His œuvre
is vast and varied and had a tremendous impact in Icelandic literature and culture
in general throughout most of the twentieth century. His international reputation
was well established by the end of World War II and culminated in the Nobel prize
for literature in 1955.
Young Icelandic authors starting their careers after World War II were in a paradoxical
situation: on the one hand the world lay open to them and their generation to a degree
unknown to any previous generation of Icelanders. The chains of isolation and poverty
seemed suddenly to have been broken. But while the authors of Laxness’s generation,
not to mention the nineteenth-century poets, had gone abroad to pick up such cultural
treasures as appealed to them and bring them back to the Icelandic people, the new
generation had competition from all directions, because of all the channels of communication
that had been opened. In order to get the attention of their countrymen and achieve
the cultural authority of previous generations of authors, new novelists had to get
out of the shadow of Halldór Laxness, out of the shadow of a great tradition of story
telling, at the same time as they had to define a modern Icelandic identity.
In spite of almost innumerable labels that have been attached to different kinds of
literature in the course of the twentieth century, it is probably safe to say that
the two dominant modes of narrative discourse, competing and blending in different
ways, are realism and modernism, two terms rather difficult to define. For my purpose
it is enough to say that realism is characterized by a will to describe important
and typical aspects of human life, as well as by a belief in the communicative potentialities
of language, its power to tell us some kind of truth about “the real world.” Modernism,
on the other hand, does not take literary form or the functions of language
as given and cultivates probability neither in characters nor in action.
It is safe to say that the dominant tendency in the Icelandic novel has been realistic.
The most important influences forming Icelandic novel writing from the 1880s into
the 1920s were, on the one hand, traditional Icelandic narrative: sagas, legends and
folktales, and on the other hand, the realistic European and, especially, Scandinavian
novel. Modernism is above all a child of the great cities of the world, and when it
first came into vogue in Europe it found no resonance in the simple rural setting
of Iceland. In the wake of World War I there were, however, a few works clearly influenced
by modernist attitudes, especially by the fierce individualism and spiritual quest
of a number of European authors among whom Strindberg was the foremost. Such influence
is apparent in Halldór Laxness’s brilliant novel Vefarinn mikli frá Kasmír [The Great Weaver from Kashmir], which appeared in 1927 and was the cause of much controversy among Icelandic readers.
But in the face of social conflicts Laxness and others turned to realism and in many
cases to radical socialism in the 1930s. World War II and the discussion of national
issues around the establishment of the republic made the forties a time in which realism
blended with idealism rather than with the despair of modernism, as exemplified above
all in Laxness’ Íslandsklukkan [Iceland’s Bell] and in the works of some of his younger contemporaries like Ólafur Jóhann Sigurðsson,
by then a prolific novelist and short story writer in the realistic mode. It is first
in the fifties and sixties that a modernist search for identity and the feeling that
realistic narrative is unable to deal with significant issues becomes a pressing problem
for a new generations of writers, and then modernism appears as a real option.
Modernist influences appeared sporadically in Icelandic poetry in the first half of
the twentieth century, but the breakthrough came with the suite of poems by Steinn
Steinarr (1908-1958), called Tíminn og vatnið [Time and the Water], and in poems published by a group of young poets soon acquiring
the nick-name “atóm-skáld” [atomic poets]. Modernist tendencies in poetry were soon explored in the writing of short stories
and prose sketches, but as far as the novel was concerned, it was still mainly realistic
in the fifties. The sudden social changes during the war years and after were matter
well suited to realistic treatment. By this time probably every second Icelander had
personal experience of tearing up roots in the countryside and moving from a farm,
where the family might have lived for centuries, into a town with new customs and
above all new and uncertain values. The years of military occupation during the war
had brought easy money to a number of people, and when the Americans did not leave
their base in Keflavík after the war many Icelanders continued to do business with
them. Novels from this period often expressed the common experience of the time, a feeling
of guilt for having betrayed old traditions and old values and a critical attitude
or rejection of an urban way of life seen as materialistic and characterized by loose
morals and a lack of values and ideals, a troubling state of affairs for which it
was, however, hard to see any alternatives.
For the new generation of writers, the realistic way of dealing with the chaos of
post-war society was too slow in its tempo to catch the rhythms of modern life; furthermore
this artistic approach tended to be nostalgic or naive in its implicit or explicit
idealization of rural life and/or the simple working people often contrasted in literature
with a caricature of a nouveau-riche middle class. These novels were received with lukewarm interest, and readers seemed
to be wondering whether the rumours from abroad that the novel was dying might have
some foundation.
By the mid-sixties the tide began to turn, and since then the production of new novels
has been high and the novelists themselves have had no reason to complain of lack
of interest. The realistic mode of narrative has survived, though faced with strong
competition from a number of modernists.
I shall now turn to a discussion of three novelists each of whom published their first
novels in the 1960s, and continued to do interesting work in the following decades,
thus maintaining their roles as leading Icelandic authors in this period. They are
so different from each other that it is hard to find any points of likeness, apart
from the fact that they can all be described as modernists rather than realists. These
authors are Thor Vilhjálmsson, born in Edinburgh in Scotland in 1925, Svava Jakobsdóttir,
born in Neskaupstaður in the East of Iceland in 1930 (but who lived with her parents
in Canada from 1935 to 1940) and died in 2004, and Guðbergur Bergsson, born in 1932
in Grindavík in the South-West of the country.
When Thor Vilhjálmsson made his debut as a novelist in 1968, he had already been a
well known literary figure for twenty years, as a poet and writer of short stories,
sketches, and travel books, and as translator and co-editor of a literary magazine.
He had studied in England and France for a number of years and was well-versed in
English, French and Italian literature and film.
In his previous prose works Thor had established himself as a brilliant and original
stylist and observer of human life and culture. His readers were therefore not surprised
that a novel by him would be different from the novels they had read before. But the
sustained brilliance of style and the acute cultural criticism of Fljótt fljótt sagði fuglinn [Quick Quick Said the Bird] (1968) was somehow more than anyone had expected, and many readers found the book
difficult and strikingly un-Icelandic in its cosmopolitan outlook.
Like T.S. Eliot, who is being echoed in the book’s title, Thor sees modern Western
culture as a waste land which has lost something irrevocable. In Fljótt fljótt sagði fuglinn the characters have no names. They are called “the man,” or “the woman,” or occasionally
their occupation is indicated, “the painter” etc. Although the narrative is in the
third person, almost everything is experienced
through the senses of “the man,” some sort of intellectual whose concrete experiences
and fantasies are interwoven
in the text. However, the narrator sometimes seems to merge with a person he has been
describing from the outside, and occasionally an event is described, at different
places in the book, from different angles, from without and within. The reader is
of course free to interpret this as a change between two or more narrators, but the
style and the dreamlike quality of the text, rather indicates that the narrator is
constantly inventing and arranging his material in different ways and from different
viewpoints.
The narrative starts in an Italian village, not far from Rome, where the narrator
arrives on his travels. There are extremely sharp and vivid images from the surroundings
given dimension through metaphors and unexpected but accurate similes. In his mind,
the traveller is a witness to an ancient ritual where a meeting between the goddess
Diana and the forest god Virbius is enacted by the goddess’s priest—a slave who keeps
his office only until a younger and stronger one kills and replaces him. The enactment
of the rite and the ritual killing of the priest while he is having intercourse with
the representative of the goddess is set in the time of emperor Caligula, who is watching
the event, and it is connected with a tale about how on a different occasion Caligula
watched a great number of his partying guests drowning in a lake, an event which the
emperor had arranged himself. The terrifying content of the two tales contrasts strikingly
with a tightly structured and beautiful text that weaves past and present smoothly
together. The narrator identifies with the death-marked slave/priest, and as the novel
proceeds, we see that Caligula’s madness is only a miniature image of the madness
of the modern world.
All this becomes clearer in the continued wanderings of “the man” which take him to
a metropolis (presumably Rome) and along the freeways of a modern
European landscape. There is a flow of conversation in the book, but it is superficial
and devoid of real content, real feeling. People talk and drink, and make love, but
they are isolated from each other, and never is the total isolation of the individual
and the presence of death more overwhelming than during the act of love.
As already said the borderlines around the individual are transgressed in this novel.
Most characters are experienced in brief flashes of clear vision, but at other times
appear as out of focus and with no clear demarcations between them; another borderline
that is frequently transgressed is the one between the inner and the outer world,
microcosmos and macrocosmos; a long, detailed and vivid description turns out to be
the fantasy of the narrator, or his fantasy may seem to turn into reality. Art and
life are also seen as interchangeable. The paintings and decorations in a renaissance
palace merge with life images of the people having a feast or an orgy in its halls.
For all the book’s dreamlike qualities, one thing portrayed in the novel is experienced
as ovewhelmingly real: the narrator is a fugitive, constantly on the run from something,
although it may be difficult to pin down exactly what it is he is running from. It
is sometimes experienced as an external, sometimes an internal threat. Just as the
slave/priest is constantly running away from the threat of extinction caused by the
drying out of the sources of life within him, the modern narrator is on the run from
the barrenness and madness of modern society, from the withering of the life nerve
that connects him with other people, and with nature.
It is a strange paradox that a book vividly portraying the barrenness of modern life
and the threat of extinction of real human emotions, staring this barrenness in the
eyes, as it were, should be a work of such verbal richness and stylistic variety that
there are hardly any parallels in the Icelandic language. In fact it reads like a
long poem, and it is therefore no wonder that many readers found it overpowering,
and, one has to admit, even boring. But it is worth the time it takes to really let
it sink in. There is at its core the despair of modern man, yet its poetry and verbal
magic is a sort of a chant or protective charm, a desperate clinging to life through
language, a creative act which in itself defies the forces of destruction that seem
to threaten life and emotion in western society.
Since Fljótt fljótt sagði fuglinn Thor Vilhjálmsson has published many works of fiction, mainly novels but also shorter
texts. In a number of these works he has continued along the lines staked out in his
first novel: they are wanderings of a perceptive mind through the jungle of modern
society and modern consciousness presented in a language rich in metaphors and images.
However, these later novels are no mere repetitions of Fljótt fljótt sagði fuglinn. The external world experienced and portrayed varies and so does the general message
of the books. Óp bjöllunnar [The Beetle’s Cry] appearing in 1970 shows a clear influence from the tumultuous
years around 1968-1970,
and it is obvious that the youthful enthusiasm and revolutionary fervour of these
years has awakened in the novelist a new hope. The world is indeed the same in most
respects as in Fljótt fljótt sagði fuglinn, and much of the flow of conversation going on between people is superficial and
cliché-ridden. There is, however, an earnestness about much of it, which is new, and
in the communications between individuals there seem to be new openings, new hopes.
Among the positive elements added in this book are brief but poignant experiences
of nature, which provide a contrast to the still mainly urban setting of the work.
New variations in a similar kind of discourse are found in Mánasigð [Moon-sickle] from 1976 and Turnleikhúsið [The Tower Theatre] from 1979.
In between these works Thor has written a different kind of fiction: satires and satirical
fantasies aimed at contemporary Icelandic society. There is of course much satire
and satirical fantasy in the novels already mentioned, but in books like Folda with three narrative reports, as they are called, from 1972, and Fuglaskottís [Bird-dance] from 1975, and others, there are found satirical descriptions with recognizable
Icelandic
character types and Icelandic themes. These tales are witty in their burlesque fantasies,
which frequently use elements from Icelandic legends and folk-beliefs.
Thus the European and the Icelander in Thor Vilhjálmsson seem to have been living
separate lives to some extent, although that is of course an illusion which disappears
when his books are carefully read. But they are undoubtedly united in Grámosinn glóir [Justice Undone] from 1986, his greatest success by far with the Icelandic reading public and a work
that won him the Nordic Council’s Prize for Literature, a recognition only awarded
to two Icelanders before him.
Grámosinn glóir is a historical novel set near the end of the nineteenth century. The protagonist
of the novel is a young poet and lawyer who after some years of study in Copenhagen
is temporarily appointed judge in a country district where his first assignment is
to investigate and judge a case of incest and infant-killing in an isolated area.
The defendants in the case are destitute orphans, a half-brother and sister who have
not been brought up together. The young judge (simultaneously an investigating, prosecuting
and judging authority as was customary in Iceland at the time) manages to get a confession
from the brother, but the sister who is older and a stronger character, commits suicide
before the sentence is passed.
The novel is based on real events: the poet and judge is modelled upon the well known
poet Einar Benediktsson (1864-1940) and the case, as well as the suicide and the final
sentence, is historical. But the book is far more than the reconstruction of a criminal
case. Its main focus of interest lies in the complex experiences and reactions of
the young poet/judge. Having spent years abroad, where he has become acquainted with
the refinements of urban culture, experienced erotic passion, and faced death from
a serious illness, he comes back to his country, absorbs its magic landscape and folk
traditions and is confronted by the brutal facts of the lives of common people, but
also by the reality of their passions. The work is far too complex to summarize satisfactorily
in a few words. Many of the themes of Thor’s modernistic works are here treated once
again in a discourse that seeks to absorb concrete Icelandic historical reality into
modern consciousness, at the same time as the modernist way of telling a story is
combined with a realistic mode of story-telling. Perhaps it could be described as
post-modernistic.
While Thor Vilhjálmsson was born into the new bourgeois upper class of Iceland (his
grandfather a Danish merchant and a founder of a dynasty which for decades wielded
great financial and political influence), Svava Jakobsdóttir was the daughter of a
clergyman. After studying English and English literature in the United States and
Oxford, and later in Uppsala in Sweden she published her first book, a collection
of short stories, 12 konur [Twelve Women] in 1965, and another collection of short stories in 1967, Veizla undir grjótvegg [Party by a Stone-wall]. Svava Jakobsdóttir’s short stories are written in a style
which is almost the diametrical
opposite to the style of Thor Vilhjálmsson. It is terse, matter-of-fact and seldom
reveals much emotion. And her stories, mainly about women, usually take as their point
of departure everyday situations in the lives of these women. The suburban tranquility
that they portray is, however, only superficial, and without raising her voice or
revealing any signs of distress the narrator tells the strangest stories, where laws
of nature or probability are disregarded: the absurd is treated as real, and the real
is seen to be absurd. One of the most immediately memorable stories, “A Tale for Children,”
in the beginning tells about a housewife, an absolutely normal person, preparing
a meal for her family. But this woman has a strange story. Her son, a boy interested
in experiments, once removed her brain with the help of her other children, and although
she felt a bit uncomfortable for a while she has got used to the fact that the brain
is kept in an urn on a shelf in her home. Later the husband dies and the children
leave home and she is alone. In an attempt to reawaken her children’s interest in
her and love for her, she cuts out her heart and carries it, bleeding, from one child
to another, but there is no response; they have no time for her. The message of this
story seems obvious, but when it appeared in a newspaper on Christmas Eve the readers
were shocked. In many of her stories Svava uses equally shocking but usually less
crude means to create an acute feeling for the absurdity and hidden pain or even desperation
in lives that have lost all sense in the race for the acquisition of material things
and in the routine of everyday life.
Although these stories, paraphrased thus, can sound as general allegories about life
in modern society, that is not the whole truth. Most of them are primarily concerned
with the lot of women in our society; the confinement and reduction of personality
that women’s relationships with men seem to occasion. And one can indeed see in these
stories that men also suffer in their role.
Svava Jakobsdóttir has only written two novels, but both have been much read and discussed
in Iceland. The first, Leigjandinn [The Lodger], appeared in 1969. It has many of the characteristics of her short stories: an apparently realistic
opening and a fantastic course of events. The story tells of a young couple of small
means living in Reykjavík. He goes to work and she takes care of the rented apartment
and his needs. She is unsatisfied and extremely insecure, feeling threatened all the
time. She blames this on the uncertainty that goes with being a tenant, and the pair
decide to start building their own house. The project is difficult economically and
they have to leave their rented apartment and move into the house before it is quite
finished. One day, when the woman is alone at home, a stranger, a man speaking with
an American accent, knocks at the door, and having come inside is reluctant to leave.
He subsequently settles down in the entrance with his things. The woman wants her
husband to throw this man out, but he hesitates to do so, and soon the guest, or the
tenant, starts to contribute money to the finishing of the house. They can finish
the house, but instead of leaving, as the woman had expected, the tenant moves into
the living room and becomes more and more a part of the household; gradually he and
the husband start to grow together into one person.
As Christmas approaches, the woman notices a man who is walking around in the vicinity
of the house. He seems poor and wretched. On Christmas Eve this man comes and knocks
at the door and asks to be let in, but the husband and the tenant, who by now have
become almost one person, forbid her to let him in.
When the novel appeared many readers were quick to point out that it could be read
as a political allegory about Icelandic history. The young couple living in a rented
apartment were supposed to represent the Icelandic people while the country was still
dependent on Denmark, the building of a new house as the establishment of a republic,
and the tenant who moved in without being asked, contributed with money to the building
of the house and did not leave when it was finished, represented the Americans in
their military base in Keflavík. The stranger appearing at the end of the book could
then be seen as representing the wretched of the earth, our smallest brothers whose
needs are neglected by the rich whose main concern is their own safety and the protection
of their privileges.
This is no doubt one of the legitimate ways of reading Leigjandinn, but it is a reductive reading. On another level it is a story about the domination
of women by men and its psychological effects; there are passages in the book that
can have no relevance for a political allegory, but exemplify the crippling effects
of an unsatisfactory relationship between men and women. But on a more general level
the novel deals with the question of human freedom. It demonstrates that there may
be conflicts between a need for security and possibilities of freedom. Security means
building walls, and there is always a danger of moving from one state of dependency
into another.
The incredible story told in Leigjandinn is accepted by the reader because of the narrative technique. The absurd and the
irrational is not presented suddenly but in small portions, so that each step in its
direction goes almost unnoticed, a process which is indeed seen in real life in many
military and environmental developments. Svava shows her readers the irrationalities
and absurdities of life with techniques that remind us of Kafka, but although she
offers no solutions, one cannot say that she portrays the absurdities of human life
as an essential aspect of the human condition, which one may feel that Kafka is doing.
Rather she sees them as man-made and therefore indicates the possibility that they
can be un-made. Perhaps this can be interpreted as evidence that she is basically
a realist who makes use of one of the literary techniques of modernism.
In the seventies Svava Jakobsdóttir more or less gave up writing while she was involved
in politics as a member of parliament, but she emerged again forcefully in 1987 with
Gunnlaðar saga [Gunnlöð’s saga]. Gunnlöð appears in Norse mythology as the daughter of a giant who takes care of the
mead of poetry, but is cheated by Óðinn who sleeps with her and gets away with the
mead. Once again Svava writes a narrative filled with symbols and events that seem
to be contrary to the laws of nature.
The central figure in Gunnlöð’s saga is a well educated and successful businesswoman
and a partner in her husband’s entrepreneurial firm in Reykjavík. She gets a message
that her daughter has been arrested in Copenhagen for stealing a precious object from
the National Museum. She visits the prison, and the daughter tells her a most fantastic
story. She was watching a golden bowl in the museum when she suddenly sees a face
of a woman in the bowl and is drawn into another time and place. What she experiences
there is a story within the story, an alternative version of the myth of Gunnlöð.
She is here a princess in a society where a female deity is the highest one. Gunnlöð
is her priestess, a king’s daughter guided by the elderly woman (völva, norn) Urður. Her cousin Óðinn is to become king, and in accordance with convention
he is to be consecrated as king by spending a night with Gunnlöð in a holy place and
having a drink of the holy mead, prepared and taken care of by the women. But Óðinn
is an adventurer who has been around and is filled with greed for power. He desecrates
the temple by bringing the new and evil metal, iron, into it, and he steals the mead.
We are given to understand that he steals all power and afterwards falsifies history
by making himself a god, and his relatives, Gunnlöð’s family, into evil giants. We
witness a transformation from a society where women guard the highest secrets and
where man strives to live in harmony with nature, to a society of male dominance,
deceit and war. The fiction of this invented mythology is very skilfully woven into
a warp formed of elements from real mythology, mainly Norse.
This “saga of Gunnlöð” within Gunnlaðar saga is in itself a beautiful and poetic pseudo-myth, and in style and texture it is more
sensuous and lyrical than anything Svava had written before. It is not the main story,
however, although it has an important function within the work as a whole. The main
story is the story of the mother. At first she is disbelieving and angry when she
hears her daughter’s story, but she grows more and more confused and the effect of
the story sends her on her own journey, not to another time but to places in Copenhagen
where ladies of her class are not supposed to go. The course of events gradually breaks
down her previous personality, breaks down the self-image and the defences she has
built up around her self, her life and her family. Gradually she comes to realize
the deep truth of her daughter’s story. How that truth is to be understood is more
or less left to the reader to decide. In the end the story of the mother becomes a
repetition of the story of the daughter in a most unexpected way, forcing upon the
reader the need to answer the disturbing existential questions that have been asked
in the novel.
How is one to classify such a novel? The frame-story can be read as totally realistic
and psychologically refined, if we dismiss the mythological tale as symbolic. And
what else can we do in our modern age? Nevertheless, the internal logic of the work
seems to demand that we accept the myth as true—just as all myth demands to be believed
if it is to stay alive. We know, of course, that both stories are fiction, and the
outcome is that we have to accept the text’s images of life and society with their
realistic and mythical elements as an indivisible whole, as equally valid statements.
In a way the attitude to reality in Gunnlaðar saga seems to be of the same kind as the one we find in the so called “magic realism”
of some Latin-American authors, although Svava with her typically protestant seriousness
about moral issues is hardly reminiscent of her Latin-American colleagues.
Latin-American influence is, on the other hand, obvious in the works of Guðbergur
Bergsson. He was born in the small fishing village Grindavík (ca. 20 km. from Keflavík
and 50 km. from Reykjavík). After graduating from the Teacher’s College in Reykjavík
he spent a number of years in Spain. He has translated classical Spanish works like
Don Quijote and Lazarillo de Tormes and modern authors like Jimenez, besides a great number of works by Latin-American
authors like Borges, Marquez, Alejo Carpentier, and others. He made his debut as a
novelist with Músin sem læðist [The Sneaking Mouse] in 1961. His breakthrough as a modernist and iconoclast came
with Tómas Jónsson metsölubók [Tómas Jónsson: a Bestseller] in 1966. No other novel had had such a shock-effect
on the Icelandic reading public
since Vefarinn mikli by Laxness some forty years earlier.
Tómas Jónsson is not an easy book to describe. At its centre is an old man, Tómas Jónsson, and
the book is a collage of texts he has created to tell the story of his life, or perhaps
to create this story, or perhaps to hide the truth about himself. Like many of Guðbergur’s
later persons he seems to be totally dominated by clichés in his understanding of
himself and his world, and through the several kinds of discourse, the various styles
he attempts, he actually lays bare and undermines the inherent ideologies of Icelandic
discourse in his times, both spoken and written. But Tómas has limited control over
his writing and all kinds of things get out that he does not really want to talk about.
This opening is symptomatic of the conflicts demonstrated in the text:
Ævisaga
Ég er afkomandi hraustra bláeygðra víkinga. Ég á ætt að telja til hirðskálda
og sigursælla konunga. Ég er Íslendingur. Nafn mitt er Tómas Jónsson. Ég er gamall
nei nei
(7)
Biography
I am the descendant of strong blue-eyed vikings. My genealogy goes back to
the skalds of princes and to victorious kings. I am an Icelander. My name is Tómas
Jónsson. I am old
no no
Here Tómas starts with the most empty clichés of the self-image of Icelanders,
narrows the definition down to his name, and then, inadvertently as it were, tells
the fact of overriding importance and a cause of anxiety: he is old. Here the subconcious
or the suppressed takes over the text, as frequently happens in the book, and he protests:
no no.
Tómas Jónsson is old and he has little control over his life or his thoughts, but
this situation is paradoxical: when he is doing what he consciously wants, and therefore
ought to be seen as in control, his writing is really being invaded by texts from
the outside. The official definition of an Icelander with which he starts is obviously
not of his own making; the several experiments with writing he performs in the book,
as for instance texts classified as “Úr Þjóðsögum Tómasar Jónssonar” [From the folktales
of Tómas Jónsson], reminiscent of Þjóðsögur Jóns Árnasonar (the standard collection of Icelandic folktales), are entirely unoriginal; such texts
are of course Guðbergur’s device to parody all kinds of Icelandic prose-styles and
reveal and make ridiculous the clichés of conventional Icelandic prose. He produces
texts in order to reveal their emptiness. It is only when Tómas loses control, when
his suppressed ego takes over, that he produces his own text, tells us something significant,
but here bodily functions and low desires dominate the text, and as a consequence
Tómas’s own uncontrolled text contributes to a fundamental doubt about personal, subjective
control over any kind of text. The text is a meeting place invaded from all directions.
But through the confrontation of different kinds of discourse where Tómas Jónsson’s
own outbursts of uncontrolled thoughts are at the centre, the text as a whole liberates
itself.
Tómas Jónsson lives in Reykjavík, but he has relatives in a small fishing village,
and this fishing village was the focus of a number of novels and short stories by
Guðbergur in the sixties and seventies. Many of the same persons appear in most of
these books, sometimes in small, sometimes in big roles. The books in question are
Ástir samlyndra hjóna [The Loves of a harmonious Couple] 1967, Anna 1969, Það sefur í djúpinu [It is sleeping in the Deep] 1973, Hermann og Dídí 1974, and Það rís úr djúpinu [It is rising from the Deep] 1976.
This group of works is sometimes talked of in Icelandic as the “Grindavík” novels,
the implication being that Guðbergur has modeled his village on his native
Grindavík. To some extent this is true, there are many points of likeness between
the two worlds, but there is also a fundamental difference, because Guðbergur’s world
is a textual one. It is typical of the nature of these works that none of them can
be picked out and taken as an example, none of them is what could be classified as
a finished masterpiece. Rather they are unfinished, open towards each other, towards
an infinite intertextuality, and above all open towards the reader who must find an
interpretation, a closure for himself or herself.
Realistic descriptions are intermingled with fantasy in Guðbergur’s fictional world.
People are seen in familiar situations, at work and at leisure, but then the camera
moves closer and we look through “unspeakable” regions of body and mind, i.e. the
stories talk of things previously unspoken even
unthought-of consciously. The people we meet are almost exclusively of the working
class, and there are no working class heroes among them, such as we might find in
the works of many Icelandic authors. Overburdened with labour that has no meaning
for them, they drift through life in a stupor, dominated by lazy desires and vague
dreams. In their more awake moments they give expression to greed and aggression.
These people are socially passive, and have a very limited understanding of the forces
that govern their lives, although they are constantly quarreling about their own confused
ideas.
My description of these works may sound quite depressing, and it is indeed a depressing
picture of the world we meet with in these novels. But it it is equally true that
the world of the novels is described with great humour, Guðbergur’s early novels are
indeed hilariously funny most of the time. They recreate and caricature daily speech
and the general debate that is constantly going on in the media and among ordinary
people. While retaining a recognizable tone, the dialogue glides smoothly into the
area of the absurd and back again, revealing the prejudices, illusions and delusions
of the speakers.
Guðbergur portrays a general emptiness of human relationships, and he gives no hints
of a golden age of human relations in the rural past. He exposes the hollowness of
such modern ideological concepts as the nation, the family, rural culture, the working
class, and so on. Many of his readers have found him nihilistic and even misanthropic,
and perhaps such interpretations are justified. But it should not be forgotten that
he is emphatically not pretending to give a true picture of life. His negative image
of the world compels more positively inclined readers to create their positive worlds
for themselves. As in Tómas Jónsson the dialogues and external descriptions of these
village stories are constantly punctuated or even punctured by intrusions from the
Deep, from the even more chaotic inner world of the suppressed and the subconscious.
The chaotic world of Guðbergur’s village is not unified by any references to classical
myths or master-narratives, in the way Joyce’s Ulysses is organized on the basis of Homer’s Odyssey, or, for that matter, Thor Vilhjálmsson’s Fljótt fljótt sagði fuglinn on the myth about Diana and Virbius, but strange and unnatural happenings as well
as a dreamlike treatment of time give the fictional universe a legendary or even mythical
character. One of the devices producing this effect is the narrative technique. The
reader is systematically confused about who is telling the story. A small group of
central figures with unclear identities appear both as characters in the narrative
and its creators. Thus there is a fundamental uncertainty about who speaks the text,
an uncertainty that finally makes the reader the one who determines its significance,
demanding of him or her a creative effort.
In the 1980s Guðbergur Bergsson published several novels and a collection of short
stories, apart from being very active as translator. These novels are not as tightly
linked to each other as the novels from the village, but their setting is either Reykjavík—and
then especially the world of intellectuals and professional people—or a locale more
general and less strictly located. If the intellectuals of Reykjavík by any chance
should have felt a secret Schadenfreude when studying the portrait of the working class in Guðbergur’s novels from the sixties
and seventies, they have little cause for pride faced with their own image in the
novels of the eighties. However, if they have any sense of humour, it is difficult
to resist laughing. In Hjartað býr enn í helli sínum [The Heart Is Still Living in its Cave] from 1982, the protagonist is a psychologist.
He is recently divorced from his wife,
a social worker and a feminist, and wants nothing more than to get back to her and
their two daughters. There are no heroes in this story about people who like to call
themselves the generation of 1968. It is typical that the psychologist and the social
worker, both professionally trained to solve other people’s problems, have no control
over their own lives and their actions are seen to be as selfish, short-sighted, and
dominated by clichés as those of the workers in the village in the earlier novels.
The novel is tragi-comic, and although the clichés that are supposed to express the
noble ideals of leftist intellectuals and feminists alike are ridiculed and treated
with sarcasm, there is real desperation beneath the surface. The name of the novel
is an allusion to Plato’s myth of the cave, the action takes place during one weekend
in December, when darkness reigns, and the persons are seen as shadows moving about
in twilight, each of them the prisoner of his or her boundless egotism and inability
to love without claiming anything from the loved ones.
The picture of the world drawn in the novels of the three writers described above
may be a dark one. Why should we cause ourselves pain by reading such books and how
can they be of interest to people living elsewhere in the world? Jónas Hallgrímsson,
the nineteenth-century poet, says in one of his poems that he would rather feel pain
and live, than live a numb life without feeling (Ringler 300-03). People of the modern
world must face many terrible facts if they are to have real
feelings and live a real life, but getting acquainted with the darker aspects of life
through art is not only painful. There is also pleasure and joy to be found in works
of art that face reality and transform it, and at the same time demand a creative
effort from the recipients—from us.
The three novelist I have tried to describe here are in my opinion all first-class
writers and masters in the use of the Icelandic language, but they are quite different
from each other. They all demand much from their readers, each in their own way: Thor
Vilhjálmsson and Svava Jakobsdóttir can perhaps in most of their work be classified
as mainstream modernists of two different types. Thor is lyrical and exuberant, trying
to express the feelings and reactions of a cultivated European to the post-war world.
Svava Jakobsdóttir is more economical in her means and more directly concerned with
concrete social problems, such as the effects of conventional sex roles in our society,
while always seeing such problems in the light of a quest for individual freedom and
development and the threats with which it is faced. In their later works both these
authors seem to be attempting some sort of fusion between modernism and realism. Guðbergur
Bergsson is in my opinion the most radically modern, the most disturbing of these
three authors. He is constantly deconstructing the speech and writing of predecessors
and contemporaries, attempting, as I see it, to shock us into awareness of our language,
both of the constant death-threat hanging over it, of its seductive and stupefying
effects and its creative possibilities.
Icelandic literature has always been surprisingly quick to pick up and make use of
foreign influences at the same time as it has retained its specially Icelandic flavour.
I see the sudden flowering of the modernist novel in the 1960s as a natural development
considering the sudden urbanization and internationalization of this society, but
the great differences we find between the individual authors should remind us that
there is nothing mechanistic about such a development. It is the result of a complex
interplay between culture and society, history and present, and in the end totally
dependent on the individual writers and their creative fantasy.