Afew weeks before I began writing this paper I was sitting in front of my television
set in Reykjavik, as I do too often, mindlessly flipping channels, when I came upon
a program on the Discovery Channel about the astronaut Bjarni Tryggvason. Bjarni was
born in Iceland but brought up in Canada. He is a Canadian citizen and as such he
has participated in one of the space shuttle missions in order to perform scientific
experiments. On the program, they showed some of the photos Bjarni had taken of the
Earth from space. NASA actually encourages the personnel aboard the space shuttle
to take pictures whenever they have some spare time, which of course is not very often.
Why? Aren’t there plenty of automatic cameras attached to the shuttle, taking pictures
regularly as it circles the globe? Not to mention all the satellites photographing
our planet probably every minute of the day? However, as NASA has learned, pictures
taken by machines do not appeal to the public and therefore cannot be used for promotional
purposes in the same way as pictures taken by astronauts. Beauty is in the eye of
the beholder, and that also means that for us to respond to such pictures, they need
to have been taken by other human beings, who themselves have responded to the reality
before them with their interests, their tastes, their fears and desires, conscious
or subconscious.
The photos that were shown were truly beautiful. Bjarni’s attention had been caught
by voluptuous cloud-masses rising from the atmosphere, and terrifying vortexes making
you feel giddy, even in the security of your TV chair, also delicate shadings of blue,
green, brown, reminiscent of a cool stream in a forest clearing on a hot summer’s
day, or of the subtle colouring of someone’s eyes. Finally, the rim of the earth becoming
incandescent as it slowly reveals the glory of the fiery sun.
I couldn’t help thinking that this would be an excellent introduction to what I wanted
to say about how the sagas have continued to shape Icelandic literature in our century.
It has little to do with the fact that Bjarni happens to be of Icelandic origin. That
is only the reason I paid attention to this particular television program. It is much
rather connected to the problem of realism in art in general and in literature in
particular. Ever since the early nineteenth century, when Stendhal developed his famous
simile of the novel as a mirror carried along a road reflecting whatever it comes
upon, novelists, critics and readers have recognized the problematic nature of the
relationship between reality and its representation. Though it is true that the novel,
like the mirror, reflects the part of reality it is turned to, it is also true that
what and how it reflects also depends on who is holding it and, equally important,
who is looking at the reflection in the mirror. This problem can be formulated in
the same way as the one NASA faces: even though cameras reflect on film whatever they’re
pointed at, the important thing is that a human being is pointing the camera, communicating
thereby his subjective experience of reality to other human beings.
Transposed to the realist novel, this tells us that though its ambition is to convey
something about reality it must humanize it, in order to make this reality interesting
to us—make it subjective. What I would like to show here is how one Icelandic author,
Halldór Laxness, solved this problem for himself by using some of the same techniques
the saga authors had developed several hundred years earlier. He thereby achieved
two things. He created a link between the saga tradition and the more recent development
of the realist novel in the Western world. He also made an important contribution
to the art of the novel in general, a contribution that was to prove very potent in
years to follow.
The novel I will be looking at is Sjálfstætt fólk [Independent People], but first I want to make a few points about the sagas, using as an example Grettis saga. Though it is without much doubt the youngest of the great sagas of Icelanders, it
has many of the same characteristics that define the genre. The action takes place
in a society in which social relations and the power structure are similar to those
of the period in which the sagas were written. For the most part, it also takes place
in a physical environment familiar to the authors and public of the sagas. The characters,
especially the main ones, are to a great extent submitted to the same limitations
as we are: they are mortals, with the strengths and weaknesses we all share. All of
this contributes to the reality effect the sagas of Icelanders manage to create, i.e.
the illusion that they mirror the world of the first centuries of Iceland’s history.
I now come to the supernatural, which is in my title, and its relationship to realism
in the sagas. The supernatural is present in very many, if not all, of the sagas of
Icelanders. This is not sufficient to deem them unrealistic. As Carl Bayerschmidt
argued quite a long time ago, the supernatural events they relate do not go against
their author’s perception of what could happen in the real world. After all, these
were people living in the Middle Ages, long before the Enlightenment and later scientific
revolutions. Things we perceive as outside the boundaries of the real would have seemed
entirely plausible to them.
It could be said that Grettis saga is different from earlier and more classical sagas, such as Egils saga or Laxdæla saga, because of the greater role played by the supernatural in Grettis saga. This is true, but I think that the difference is one of degree rather than kind.
In Grettla, as in earlier sagas, the supernatural has a specific role to play which, paradoxical
as it may seem, is very important in creating the reality effect of the saga. It has
to do with the inner lives of the characters.
The sagas are notoriously quiet about what goes on inside their protagonists’ heads.
I don’t know why this is, because they obviously take an interest in the inner lives
of at least their main characters. I suspect that the silence is in part due to the
fact that when vernacular literature appeared in Iceland in the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries, there did not exist the same poetic tradition as for example in France,
where troubadours had for quite a while been singing of the suffering of the soul
burning with desire for its true love. The embryonic inner monologues which can for
instance be found in Chrétien’s narrative poems and already hint at the psychological
analysis which the French novel tradition will later develop, use the language of
the troubadours and trouvères to express the inner life of the characters. This language does not exist in the
Icelandic tradition, and I propose that this might be one of the reasons for the sagas’
silence about their protagonists’ inner life. Their authors simply didn’t have the
discursive tools to be very eloquent about what goes on in the soul.
What they had instead was skaldic poetry. Skaldic poetry has two characteristics that
I believe are of relevance for understanding the relationship between the supernatural
and the inner lives of saga characters. The first is that a skaldic strophe is an
enigma that has to be decoded and interpreted. A parallel can be drawn between this
and famous episodes of the sagas, such as Guðrún Ósvífursdóttir’s mysterious reply
to her son: “Þeim var eg verst er eg unni mest.” [I treated him worst, whom I loved
the most.] Another example is Egill Skalla-Grímsson sitting across the fire from King
Athelstan
with his eyebrows askew and fiddling with his sword. In both cases we are being invited
to wonder about what the characters are feeling, but it is left to us to make an educated
guess. In the case of Grettir, the enigma lies in his destiny: why did a man who had
all it takes to be a hero make such a mess of his life, ending it as an outlaw?
The other characteristic of skaldic poetry which is helpful when we try to understand
the saga’s particular brand of “psychological realism” is the way they call upon the
supernatural to create meaning. I am referring of course
to the kennings, circumlocutions which do not for example call poetry poetry but Odin’s
mead or ship of the dwarves, building thus on the myth of the origin of poetry. Practitioners
of skaldic poetry, as it seems safe to assume that very many of the saga writers were,
would have been accustomed to making constant reference to supernatural worlds, to
that of Old Norse myth, of course, but also to Christian religion.
The episode I just mentioned from Egils saga is rich with such intertextual allusions, one of them being to the prologue of the
eddic poem Grímnismál, where Odin comes to take revenge on Geirröðr, a king he has helped to take the throne
away from his elder brother but who hasn’t been faithful to him. Important traits
are common to the two scenes: the king and the guest sit opposite each other with
a fire between them and one of the protagonists holds a sword half drawn from its
scabbard. Egill has one eye closed and this can be seen as a reference to the one-eyed
Odin who, in the eddic narrative, has the king stumble on his sword impaling himself.
Thus the parallel with the myth suggested by the saga hints at what might be going
on in Egill’s head as he faces Athelstan after the death of his brother: he might
be contemplating whether to kill the English king.
I now come to Grettis saga and how it uses the supernatural to address the enigma of Grettir’s inner life. The
saga as a whole is remarkable for the fact that it makes Grettir’s character flaws
largely responsible for his destiny. As a boy he is wilful and unruly and his long-standing
conflict with his father is never completely resolved. The unruliness lingers on in
early adulthood, though he also shows another facet of his personality when he heroically
saves the women of Þorfinnur’s farm from the berserks who intend to rape them. The
enigmatic aspect of Grettir is nowhere more apparent than in this episode, since no
one knows, neither the women at the farm nor the reader, whether Grettir is going
to save them or help the berserks as he pretends he will do.
After the episode, however, the reader is convinced of Grettir’s intrinsic heroic
nature. Despite it, his destiny will be that of an outlaw, finishing his life miserably.
This is also an enigma, which the saga author solves by resorting to the supernatural.
I am referring here to Grettir’s fight with the ghost Glámr. This famous episode has
been studied by many scholars, among whom I will only mention Hermann Pálsson who
has elucidated its links to Christian views of the supernatural. What interests me
is how the author uses this ghost story to give us insight into Grettir’s psyche.
He does this in several ways. The most obvious one is when Glámr, before expiring
a second time, lays a curse on Grettir, telling him that what he has seen in his ghostly
eyes will stay with him for the rest of his life, making him unable to be alone at
night but also turning most of his actions against him (1010–11). This is not only
the tangible—if that word can be used for a curse made by a ghost—explanation
for Grettir’s subsequent outlawry and misfortunes. It also bears witness to remarkable
insight into the effects of trauma on the psyche. What Grettir saw in Glámr’s eyes
was so devastating in its effect on him, that only a few days later, he tells a friend
that since he was exposed to the demon’s stare, he has become even less able to control
his temper (1011).
It therefore becomes even more interesting to consider how this experience of the
fight with Glámr can be interpreted from a psychoanalytic perspective. This is made
possible by the saga’s use of intertextuality. Indeed, the closest model for the Glámr
episode in the saga literature is to be found in Eyrbyggja saga. Here the man who dies mysteriously and comes back to haunt his surroundings is not
a foreigner like Glámr but the father of an important protagonist of the saga. In
Egils saga a very similar account, that of the death of Skalla-Grímr also suggests that a father
might be coming back from death to haunt the living (Tulinius).
Obviously, Glámr is not Grettir’s father. However, some of the Glámr’s characteristics,
such as size and hair colouring, resemble those of Ásmundr. If this is linked to other
aspects of Grettir’s life, for example the close relationship to his mother and the
difficult one with his father, it becomes tempting to use Freud’s theory of the Oedipus
complex to explain Grettir’s problem. Of course, this is quite an anachronistic thing
to do to a text from the fourteenth century, but the fact that it can be done (Tulinius),
proves the point I am trying to make: In the absence of a poetic tradition of emotional
effusion, staging their characters as enigmas and confronting them with the supernatural
are what the saga-writers could use to give their audience an idea of the inner life
of their characters.
After having first considered a Canadian with an Icelandic name photographing Earth
while orbiting the planet, and then an Icelander whose name is lost, steering his
feather pen over the parchment somewhere in medieval Iceland, let us now take a look
at one more Icelander, whose nom de plume has gone around the world. In 1931, Halldór Laxness is not yet thirty. He is already
recognized as a talented author, bringing a new understanding and mastery of the art
of the novel to a somewhat backwards Iceland. His first breakthrough as a writer had
been the Great Weaver from Kashmír, a novel about promising young people whose souls are torn between the pressures
of the flesh and aspiration towards higher ideals. This novel was heavily influenced
by Laxness’s Catholic period but was also a resolutely modern piece of writing. Shunning
whatever had been written in Iceland before him, his aim was to create a truly contemporary
European novel in the Icelandic language using the conventions and techniques of the
novel tradition, among them the representation of the inner life through endless dialogues
and monologues. By the time he had finished the Great Weaver, however, he was becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the psychological novel,
recognizing all the same how much he has learned from it. As he says in a letter to
a friend, nothing is “as limited and positivistic. It does not permit strong poetic
flight” [eins takmarkað og rammpósívistiskt eins og hún; hún bannar öll sterk vængjatök]
(Hallberg 1970 256).
The twenties and thirties are exciting times for novelists: Proust, Gide, Joyce, Faulkner,
Hemingway, Gorky, Musil are just a few of the great authors whose work is making an
impact on other writers during this period. They are experimenting with new techniques
of narration, of point of view, of composition, of style. The novel is the major literary
genre of the time and, like his contemporaries, Halldór Laxness is very conscious
of the fact that what he is doing is art.
It would be a worthwhile task to undertake a careful study of the evolution of Laxness’s
art, especially during this crucial fourth decade of our century. Such a study would
evidently benefit from Peter Hallberg’s excellent work from the fifties, sixties and
seventies, to which I am indebted, as is anyone who takes an interest in Laxness as
a writer. What I will say here is only a minor contribution to a picture Hallberg
has already done more than outline, but is still not complete.
Between the Great Weaver, which he finished writing in 1925, and Independent People, of which he completed the first volume in 1933, Laxness subjects himself to many
kinds of influences and experiments with different forms. He abandons Catholicism
for socialism, tries writing for the movies, and publishes a collection of essays
on politics and a volume of poems while continuing to absorb everything that is going
on around him in the world, artistically, intellectually, politically.
Originally intended as a movie script, his next novel, Salka Valka, bears witness to this intense and fertile activity. True to his socialist beliefs,
he focuses in this political novel on the poor people of a fishing village instead
of the soul-searching of the middle class. In order to portray these people, especially
their inner life, he resorts to techniques that are different from those in the Great Weaver. They are not city people but people of the land, and as such they have a kinship
with the nature which surrounds them. This is especially true of the most memorable
characters, Salka and Steinþór. There is an underlying energy in the two of them,
which reminds one of forces of nature. The energy stems from the story itself, of
course, the sexual tension between Salka and her former stepfather, but also from
an almost poetic prose of which Laxness has acquired a new mastery, combining similes
and metaphors from the sea with a musician’s ear for the sounds and rhythms of the
language.
Despite its undeniable qualities, Salka Valka is not wholly satisfying. Laxness still relies heavily on dialogue and monologue
and too much authorial commentary, at least for my taste. However, he has achieved
something new, fusing poetry and politics within his own personal art of the novel.
While still writing Salka Valka, Laxness took a new look at a manuscript he had been working on a few years earlier.
It was about a poor mountain farmer living in a mud house with his half-starved and
overworked family. It was a story close to his heart, but he had nearly thrown away
the manuscript because he wasn’t satisfied. Now he started working on it again and
it would become Independent People, his first and maybe greatest masterpiece. The two years that elapsed had probably
been beneficial to the work. Laxness had sharpened his perception of rural Iceland
with a Marxist analysis of how the ideology of the small independent farmer was in
fact an instrument subjecting them to the rich landowners. More importantly, Laxness
displays an extraordinary inventiveness in this novel, experimenting as never before
with style and composition. He was aware of this and in a letter to his wife tells
how proud he is of what he has just written, the opening chapter of the second book:
Vetrarmorgunn or [Winter morning] (157-172; 139-153). “No one has ever written such prose in Icelandic,”
he says and he is probably right (Hallberg 1970 203). It shows Bjartur’s farm as
it is perceived by the awakening consciousness of a young
child, Bjartur’s third son, Nonni. The way he achieves this suggestion of a child’s
mind is by narrowing the point of view to that of a small boy, by infusing this world
with his fears and fantasies and by humanizing it, turning the objects that inhabit
it into people the way a child would.
One of the problems Laxness had been battling with when he abandoned the book temporarily
was how to get his readers to sympathize with these people who were so poor and miserable
it could seem doubtful that they even had any inner lives. In Independent People he had found the solution. To make them human, he would suggest their fears and their
longings through precisely what Icelanders had expressed their humanity with, even
in the darkest periods of their history: their folklore.
Space does not allow me to go into this in any sort of detail. Those who know the
novel will remember for example how Bjartur’s second wife Finna and her children are
comforted by stories of elves, telling them that in the stones they inhabit there
is a better world, where people are kind and life is beautiful. In his grief after
Finna’s death, Helgi, Bjartur’s eldest son, will try to enter this world, but the
stones are hard and cold and won’t open up to let him in. His grief turns into despair
and with despair comes madness. Here again it is through the staging of an event from
folklore, the ghostly sheep murders, that the inner anguish of the character is expressed.
Many other examples could be named, such as the way Ásta Sóllilja’s nascent sexuality
is suggested through the rhymed romances she learns, or the way the whole episode
of the cow which is given to the family is suffused with the Icelandic tale of Búkolla,
a cow which disappears one day from the farm, the unloved son of the farmers being
sent to look for it. Búkolla has been taken away by trolls and when the boy and the
cow are fleeing them together the magic that saves them comes from the cow’s tail.
Of course, the Gunnvör story with its ominous forebodings tells us, right at the very
beginning of the novel, that we are in a world where the old folk-beliefs are very
potent, and all through the novel a wealth of allusions to the treasures of Icelandic
folklore are used to make the lonely inhabitants of the desolate Summerhouses come
alive to us. One could say that the folk-tales are to them what the camera is to Bjarni
Tryggvason. They are the instrument of their subjectivity making their world accessible
to us. Through them we acquire a strong sense of what’s going on in the hearts and
souls of these people, except maybe that of Bjartur.
This is because, alongside his use of folklore, Laxness has now made his peace with
the saga tradition. Indeed, after shunning it for so long, he creates the extraordinary
Bjartur who, as many have remarked, has so many characteristics of a saga hero, with
the strong sense of individuality he shares with figures such as Egill and Grettir
(Hallberg 1970 239). Like Egill the skald, he expresses himself through elaborately
wrought poetry, and
like Grettir the outlaw, he lives on the border between nature and culture. More important,
Bjartur’s inner life is an enigma and it becomes more and more enigmatic as the novel
unfolds and he is perceived through the eyes of his children.
Indeed, for them he is above all a tyrant, imposing on them the hardships the economic
system is subjecting him to. There is, however, one thing that makes him human, the
tenderness he cannot suppress for the eldest of his children, Ásta Sóllilja, the baby
he found barely breathing beside the dead body of his first wife, Rósa, when he came
back from his eventful search for the lost sheep. She is not his child, but the bastard
of the land-owner’s son, the proof that his so-called independence is only an illusion,
serving the interests of those who exploit not only the labour of his limbs but also
his very soul, making him believe that he could ever be an independent man, that he
could ever marry a woman who loved him.
Herein resides the enigma of Bjartur: why does he adopt the little girl? Is it charity
for a newborn waif, an orphan abandoned by her real blood relations? Pride over being
morally superior to them? The fascination of a coarse, ugly working man for the beauty
he does not have and which he sees in Ásta, the grace of the upper classes?
Here, as the sagas do, Laxness hides and shows the answer to the mystery of Bjartur’s
behaviour in an adventurous encounter with the supernatural. I am referring to one
of the most memorable episodes of the novel, Bjartur’s trip to the mountains to search
for the lost sheep (98-114; 85-101). I believe that Laxness has finely wrought this
whole account not only to deepen
the psychology of Bjartur but also to give the story its meaning, already preparing,
in the first book, how the fourth and final one will end, when like King Lear taking
Cordelia in his arms, Bjartur goes and finds the dying Ásta after having scorned her
love and sent her away (Hallberg 1970 251).
To understand this, we can begin by looking at “what’s in a name,” Ásta Sóllilja’s
one. I had always thought that Laxness had invented it, but then
I came across it in the diaries of Magnús Hjaltason, the model for his next novel,
Heimsljós
(Magnús H. Magnússon 1998). This doesn’t mean however that the choice is a gratuitous
one. On the contrary, it is Bjartur who gives her the name when he decides to adopt
her. He chooses it with care, though he doesn’t explain it.
Let me. Ásta is the love he is giving to the little girl, the unrequited love he had
for Rósa, the girl’s mother. Sól is the sun, making Bjartur, the bright one, a recipient
of her light. Lilja, the lily, is a flower name, like Rósa, but this flower has no
thorns. Ásta won’t hurt Bjartur, he will harm her, in her tender innocence, when he
is on the verge of committing what is and is not incest, and again when he sends the
poor girl away, when she is pregnant with the child of a drunk that Bjartur had sent
to teach his children while he was away working as a fisherman. The flower metaphor
is omnipresent in the novel, especially in Bjartur’s poetry, when he compares himself
to a cold and lonely mountain cliff sheltering a tiny blossom, also in the last words
he says to her at the very end of the novel: “Haltu þér fast um hálsinn á mér, blómið
mitt” [Keep a good hold round my neck, my flower] (525; 482).
As far as I know, no one has noticed yet how the whole episode of Bjartur’s search
for the missing sheep is built on a folk-tale, the one I have already mentioned about
the cow Búkolla. It is a typical adventure tale: the cow has been stolen by evil troll-women;
the unloved son is sent out to find it and does so with the help of Búkolla herself,
thwarting the troll-women’s attempts to capture it and bringing back the cow to the
joy of his parents. Laxness uses the Búkolla tale as the basic pattern for this chapter
but transforms and displaces its elements in order to adapt it to the underlying metaphorical
structure of the novel. The boy’s quest for the lost cow, basically what could be
called his quest for his parents’ recognition, becomes symbolically Bjartur’s existential
quest, a sort of mise en abyme of the plight which is his. Here it is a sheep which is missing and not a cow, but
the links with folklore are suggested by the name which is given to it: Gullbrá. In
place of the evil troll-woman, it is Rósa herself who has taken the sheep. Obviously,
Bjartur won’t find it. Instead he comes across a flock of reindeer.
It is here that the author starts playing with the folklore elements in order to
serve his more general purpose. Bjartur decides to try and capture one of the animals
and bring it to his farm as a compensation for the loss of his sheep. He chooses the
biggest and strongest one, the male. When he makes his attempt, however, the reindeer
nearly impales him with his horns. The reindeer carries Bjartur into a glacier river,
in which he barely escapes drowning and as he climbs out of the river, he finds himself
on the opposite bank. It is a whole day’s walk to the nearest bridge. He is at least
two days away from home and a violent storm is breaking loose. While he fights through
the storm, he goes through all the poetry he knows, first metrical romances of heroes
fighting terrible foes, then, when he is assailed by the need for rest, other romances
about evil queens trying to lure their stepsons to sleep with them. More dead than
alive, covered by ice, he finally stumbles into the first farm on his way. A peasant
woman leads him into the farm, taking his clothes off and massaging the life back
into him. The only thing he can say is: [I’ll walk by myself … I’ll follow the woman with the lamp] (111; 98).
This is no small ordeal and many things suggest that it verges on being a supernatural
one, for example the strange birds that Bjartur sees just before his encounter with
the reindeer. More importantly, his adventure, like Grettir’s, plays out what is going
on in his soul. When he sets out he is entangled in a thorny marriage, when he comes
back, the Rose is dead. It has been replaced by the graceful Lily who has no thorns
and will love him as he loves her, even though it will take him the rest of the novel
to realize it. Also, the gender shifts in the objects of his quest, first a female
sheep then a male reindeer, and then in the imaginary foes he conjures up in the poetry
he recites during his long walk, first Vikings, then evil queens, mirror the conflict
in which he finds himself. In the social logic of the novel, his foes are the male
representatives of the dominant class. They keep him from attaining the real object
of his quest, the right to be an independent man who can take a wife and build a home
for his family. However, he is also confronted with female foes, who deceive him:
the wife of the landowner and Rósa herself. Her replacement by Ásta Sóllilja can be
seen as a symbol of the possibility for him to know true love and build himself a
home outside the system of oppression and exploitation the novel portrays.
In his introduction to the recent English language edition of the novel, Brad Leithauser
says that with Independent People Laxness invents magical realism a few decades before the Latin American writers
(xii). He’s right in the sense that the Icelandic novelist resorts to the treasures
of
the folklore of his people in order to portray the inner lives of his characters.
In 1955, when they gave him the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Swedish Academy said
something along the lines that it was for reincorporating the saga tradition into
the more recent art of the novel. As we have seen, they were doubly right. Confronted
with a crisis, not only in his own career, but in the development of the novel as
an art form, which had to integrate new views on society and new insights into the
workings of the human soul, Laxness found a solution by going back to the saga tradition
and its unique way of using the unreal to throw light on the real. By doing this he
shaped Icelandic culture in a manner which is still quite present in the works of
today’s artists and writers.