Neo-Realism
[In the following excerpt, Jorgenson presents a thematic overview of Bojer's works.]
A Procession is the first of a group of [Bojer's] early works, which may be given the common designation of political satires and includes broadly the productions of hal a dozen years between 1896 and 1902. They are more realistic than neo-romantic. The central emphasis is on the accusation that political parties and overheated agitation tend to warp the characters of men and to draw them away from the pursuits of useful labor. Work is Bojer's gospel. The bitter campaigns which accompanied the fall of the Sverdrup ministry are in the mind of the author so many scorching desert winds leaving the country arid and desolate. He continued the satire in The Eternal Strife (Den evigekrig) and in Mother Lea. Meanwhile he turned aside to another genre. After writing the rather weak play Saint Olaf; he published in 1897 and again in 1898 collections of short stories, symbolic fables and fairy tales. The lyric strain in him, which had made him experiment in the writing of verse during the spare hours in Borthen's office, now found expression in these imaginative lyric narratives. Throughout his life his fondness for such literature has been apparent, and novels on the order of The Prisoner Who Sang are hardly more than elaborate fairy tales.
Throughout the year 1897 Bojer lived in Oslo. He was ill part of the time. A chest disorder troubled him; it was necessary to rest at one of the near-by sanitariums. Nothing serious developed. Early in 1898 he was again in Paris where he renewed the acquaintance with Obstfelder and in addition met Thomas Krag and Christian Krohg. He continued to Nice, visited Corsica and Italy before he returned to Oslo in May, 1899. Late that same year he married Ellen Lange, a student at the University of Oslo and the daughter of colonel Lange of Stavanger. Almost immediately after the publication of The Eternal Strife, the newlyweds left for Rome where they remained during 1900 and 1901 and where the next novel, Mother Lea, was written. In the fall of the latter year we find the young couple back in Norway. They visited Rissa on their way to Stenkjer where the Langes then resided. Bestun became for a short time Bojer's home, and there the oldest of his three children was born in January, 1902.
The year 1902 marks the beginning of a new period in Bojer's literary production. It covers the time between the beginning of the twentieth century and the publication of Treacherous Ground in 1908 and includes, beside the book here mentioned, the drama Theodors and the novels A Pilgrimage and The Power of a Lie. These works may be called psychological morality studies. They exemplify the author's use of an idea in the service of art. In A Pilgrimage, for instance, the thing given at the beginning is the deterioration of a woman's character when the racial function is thwarted. Every scene in the novel is but another step in the unfolding of the one characteristic until the woman chases hither and thither in a feverish and insane desire to recover the lost child. Some of the effects used are almost mathematical in their regularity, as when in quick succession Regina Aas tells her husband, first that she has born a child out of wedlock, then that she has killed this child, and finally that since marriage she has been unfaithful—all in order to satisfy her morbid...
(This entire section contains 2161 words.)
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desire to rid herself of him, since he cannot help her recover the illegitimate offspring she had turned over to unknown fosterparents. Similarly inThe Power of a Lie. The given idea is that a man may deceive his own conscience to the extent that white innocence rises out of a dark and corrupt deed. Every scene is a step in the proof. Erik Evje in Tracerous Ground is an example of how a certain type of idealism is essentially based on a selfish desire to have life present a fixed meaning. There must be a moral ruler of the universe or the bottom drops from under the feet of the believers and they face chaos. Here the problem is the same as that which Kinck sets forth in the characters Machiavelli and Aretino, the one strong enough to be a transvaluator, the other too weak. Bojer's method is the direct opposite of that of the old Norwegian sagas, in which certain deeds and appearances are given, certain actions are known. From these we must feel our way inward into the hearts of the characters. Consider as an instance Skarphedin in the story of Burnt Njal. The twentieth century favors the latter practice. It desires to feel the uncertainties of life, the possibility of different outcomes, and the likelihood that the future is unsettled, being made. Hence the discrediting of the rigid plot novel and the uniform praise given to psychological and social description. We may favor philosophical ideas, but we insist at any rate that the artist shall be able to sink these ideas so deeply into the stream of life that they are sensed in the manner in which the spirit of a personality is sensed from the face of the man. Bojer is not consistently able to achieve that result. His books are clear and impressive but not always richly human.…
Beginning with the year 1909 [Bojer] entered a third period of creative activity characterized by vibrant joy in a new fullness of life. A number of his characters experience an Indian summer during the forties of their lives, a circumstance which may no doubt be traced back into the mind of their maker. With the exception of the publication of The Eyes of Love, an adaptation of a story originally found in White Birds, and the similar dramatization of The Power of a Lie, the first book representing the new mood is the novel Life finished in 1911. There are portions of captivating beauty in the work, yet it is hard to disagree with the Oslo critics that the emphasis on the new interest in sports such as skiing, boating, and tennis does not make for depth, and the attempt to show a rhythmic recurrence of life from parents to children is not altogether convincing.
To this period of vibrant joy in a new fullness of life belong also the novels The Prisoner Who Sang and The Great Hunger. The story of Andreas Berget is the account of a man who possesses no strong inner continuity, no determining self. He is a supreme actor but the stage affords no lasting satisfaction. He must play in real life, in such a manner that people are fooled and mistake the show for reality. Happy and carefree, entirely void of the sense of moral rights, he passes through life alias this and alias that until one of his personalities is accused and brought to trial for killing another. It is a Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde affair on a much larger scale but without the actual transformation of the English account. In conclusion Andreas finds that after all there is a force which integrates the various moods and personalities of man and makes of him a responsible soul. It is the love of a woman. Again we discern Ibsen's idea that the soul is not a unity as such at the beginning. It comes into being when mind-elements are coordinated and given point under the guidance of a strong life purpose rooted in the principle of growth. The Scripture says, Where there is no law, there is no sin. Likewise we may say, Where there is no spiritual purpose based on a life function, there is no creative soul, no real continuity, only successive states. Here too we have the basis of Bojer's amoral conception of the physical world. The landslide in reacherous Ground has no regard for the teleology of Erik Evje. It is only when we enter the realm of mind that moral principles have any meaning. The same idea underlies the story of Peer Holm in The Great Hunger. We are swept along and fascinated by the dash and the genius of the leading character only to find him in the end overtaken by the fortuitous amoral elements of existence. He stands like a badly shaken mountain pine. But as the people of this world of ours crawl back to their habitations after cities have been destroyed by earthquakes and storms, and at once begin to repair the losses, so man in his very nature is characterized by an inner persistency which drives him to continue, and by a surplus quality of soul which in the final analysis compels him to be a creator of good, one who insists that the kingdom of God shall not perish from upon the earth.…
Two books not hitherto discussed belong to Bojer's so-called "idea" novels. They are The Face of the World and The New Temple, the former published in 1917 and the latter, a sequel to The Great Hunger, in 1927. Neither is particularly satisfying. The author himself has passed unfavorable judgment upon the story of Doctor Mark by omitting it from his collected works. It is an account of a social idealist whose altruism brings ruin. The New Temple is an attempt to show how the religion of modern humanism may be harmonized with the worship of the existing church simply by, in a somewhat ingenious manner, filling the old bottles with a new wine. The meaning of the sacraments is to be reinterpreted and mental reservations made in cases where the intellectually inclined finds difficulties in the path of reason. The novel is pale. One must again agree with the critics that there is a heaven-wide difference between the soul agony expressed by Garborg in Tired Men and the rather insignificant pangs suffered by the priest of the new temple.
We have now reached the fourth and perhaps the most significant group of Bojer's works, his descriptive novels of folk life. They include God and the Woman, The Last of the Vikings, The Emigrants, and The Everlasting Struggle. In these works we find a satisfying nearness to life and a richness of artistic expression not consistently present in his other works, though who shall say that a book with the strong lift in it that The Great Hunger possesses will not outlive them all? In God and the Woman some of the "idea" novel persists. Underlying the fortunes of the master and the mistress of Dyrendal is distinctly the doctrine that woman must function racially or die. The failure of Martha Ersland to perpetuate her life in offspring and of Hans Lia to secure a natural heir to his estate are the mainsprings of their undoing. In spite of their magnificent achievement they have not found and established deep contact with the things which grow. The Last of the Vikings is a paean to the old Lofoten fishermen. It was customary for the small farmers in Bojer's native district Rissa to make the northward journey every year; hence the names we meet are locally determined: Lindegaard, Myran, Skaret, Raben, and others. The splendid thing about the book is its epic grandeur. In spite of the hard circumstances under which the people labor, they are men and women of energy and action, of courage and stubborn persistence, first cousins of Rölvaag's giants. And these two authors draw nearer to each other in their emigrant sagas. Though The Emigrants indicates in its very title that the point of view is that of a European, while the Minnesota novelist is concerned with the making of a new nation, their two works are complementary. Not an emigrant himself, Bojer had lived, nevertheless, for years in foreign countries. He was not a stranger to the emotions of longing nor to the feelings of those who return to childhood haunts. In its central elements the book is true and genuine, a worthy companion to the story of Kristaver Myran and his Lofoten fishermen. Personally, I do not find the English title of the last book of the group suitable. Literally translated from the Norwegian it is People by the Sea. To be sure their life is an everlasting struggle, but the author's effort is descriptive, an attempt to create a picture of folk life without any descriptive, an attempt to create a picture of folk life without any social or moral implications. It does not appear from the work itself that the life of the poor farmers and fishermen is necessarily less happy than that of people in other circumstances. The book is a piece of descriptive narration and as such magnificent.…
[Bojer's] natural ability to tell a story is very great. The lucidity of his intellect is admirable. And it seems that his fine persistence, his untiring self-discipline in the artistic pursuit, has made him a creator of lasting significance.
