Pär Lagerkvist

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Pär Lagerkvist World Literature Analysis

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The one artistic movement to which Pär Lagerkvist publicly lent his support was cubism. This support took the form of his praise, in his criticism, of cubist art and his relation of cubism to literature. His approval is detailed initially in two works that he published in 1913. The first is his monograph, Ordkonst och bildkonst: Om modärn skönlitteraturs dekadens, om den modärna konstens vitalitet (Literary Art and Pictorial Art: On the Decadence of Modern Literature, on the Vitality of Modern Art, 1982). The second is his review of Guillaume Apollinaire’s Peintres cubistes (1913; The Cubist Painters, 1944). Two movements to which he never gave his blessing or commitment—expressionism and existentialism—are nonetheless reflected in his work and are entirely consistent with his artistic aims. Expressionism was in vogue when Lagerkvist entered the literary scene. Like cubism, it emphasizes individuation and a reorientation of artistic perspective. This emphasis is consistent with the existentialist emphasis on authentic individualism and personal responsibility. A chronological reading of Lagerkvist’s works discloses his passage from expressionism to cubism and existentialism.

The socialist fervor of his earliest poems and sketches finds a receptacle in the rebelliousness of expressionism. His first novel is expressionistic in its abruptness of transitions and its interjectional style. His first play, Sista mänskan (1917; The Last Man, 1989) is as expressionistically somber as Människor and shares its concern with the inner evil of human beings, but it is more conventional in plot and dialogue than the German expressionist drama of the time. Den svåra stunden (1918; The Difficult Hour I-III, 1966) is closer to German expressionist drama. The three one-act plays that constitute The Difficult Hour I-III produce a multiple perspective on the human experience of the moment of death, and the setting of each act is cubist in its disregard of spatial logic.

Structurally, cubism informs much of Lagerkvist’s drama, poetry, and fiction of the five decades of his mature work. He provided literature with an equivalent of the cubist translation of four-dimensional reality into a two-dimensional plane. In The Dwarf, for instance, he translates the complexities of the human world into the dimensions of evil and love, represented by, respectively, an evil dwarf and the model for Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. The characters, like the segmented and rearranged units of a cubist canvas, display the fragmentation of human intentions and emotions. The dwarf, who cannot love, murders the only man whom the Mona Lisa can love; he also engineers the deaths of a pair of teenage lovers who are reminiscent of Romeo and Juliet. The varieties of love and the subjectivity of evil are placed within the context of a simple narrative, much as different points of view are integrated on one visual plane in a cubist painting.

Da Vinci appears in The Dwarf as Messer Bernardo, an artist and scientist committed to the studious observation of those who love or do evil, or both, without any predisposition in himself to do either. In this regard, Messer Bernardo is an existential hero; he maintains his integrity by accepting that he is without an innate destiny. All of Lagerkvist’s later fiction exhibits his affinity for existentialist thought.

Barabbas is the first novel in what became a cycle of five, the narrative of each of which focuses on the event of Christ’s crucifixion. The cycle of novels presents, through the characters of Barabbas, Ahasuerus, and Tobias, the human quest for a spiritual satisfaction that is tenable only to the extent that the individual releases the inner self to the object of the quest. The release,...

(This entire section contains 2745 words.)

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achieved by Tobias, corresponds to Martin Heidegger’sGelassenheit (1959; Discourse on Thinking, 1966), which, as contact of the inner self with the realm of conceptualization, is the highest degree of thought, the spiritual level at which the thinker is at one with being. Tobias finds the Holy Land to be the Gelassenheit of his pilgrimage.

The Eternal Smile

First published: Det eviga leendet, 1920 (English translation, 1934)

Type of work: Novella

A group of the dead in eternity learn in the course of their pilgrimage to God that the value of life is its conceptual uniqueness.

The eternal smile is the smile of the skull, or the grin of the death’s head, as well as the expression of deity in its indifference to the living humankind from which it always distances itself. It is, in other words, something that in divinely preceding or physically surviving human life has nothing to do with actual human life. Life is its own unsmiling conception of itself. It encompasses human beings within its conceivability; the intensity of an individual human life is directly proportional to the individual’s experience of this conceivability.

As the dead in the story compare their previous existences, twenty-six brief biographies unfold. One of the dead who had been quite satisfied with earthly life is an old man, who took a menial job, handing out paper in a subterranean restroom, as a stopgap until he could find his real vocation. He discovered with the passage of years that the menial job was in fact his real vocation, so he determined to perform his task with perfection, and this resulted in his finding happiness in life. Collectively, the biographies invite the inference that life is its own, and the only, value.

The twenty-first tale is the most significant. A man relates his love for a woman who learned that her destiny was to die after she had borne a child. After she gave birth to his child and died, the man held the newborn infant to his breast, and as he did so he gained a sense of meaning—the realization that life means but has itself no meaning: “Life has no love for you, tree; life has no love for you, human; for you, flower; for you, swaying grass, except when it means precisely you. When it no longer means you, it loves you no more and annihilates you.” Life has no abstract or absolute meaning that can be apprehended by inquiry; instead, life means each existing individual. To live is to be meant by life.

The residents of eternity are perplexed. They contemplate the peace of all-becoming-one and find it empty. They take no pleasure either in the prospect that life’s purpose may be only the perpetuation of life. They seek out God, who turns out to be an old man sawing wood by lantern light. Identifying themselves as the living, they ask God to account for the vagaries and disappointments of life. He tells them that he had not meant life to be anything extraordinary, adding: “I have done the best I could,” and, later: “I meant only that you should never need to content yourselves with nothing.”

The Dwarf

First published: Dvärgen, 1944 (English translation, 1945)

Type of work: Novel

A malevolent dwarf is the personification of the evil inherent in every human being.

Like the Freudian id or the stunted troll, Lagerkvist’s dwarf, Piccolino, represents the dark side of human life—“a person’s dwarf is really the person’s self,” and one “cannot do without one’s dwarf for long.” This is to say that human life is basically evil: Instead of attempting to deny or to eradicate one’s evil, which is, in fact, one’s instinct to survive, one should be constantly aware of it. The antithesis of evil, in this context, is not good but love, which directs the energy of one’s self toward the betterment of another. To be evil and to love is to become good—that is, good at being human. Evil and love are moral integers; goodness is a functional integer.

Piccolino serves a prince, clearly patterned after Niccolò Macchiavelli’s exemplar, Cesare Borgia. The prince dallies sensually with the courtesan Fiammetta; his wife, Princess Teodora, is in love with Don Ricardo (suggestive of the historical Francesco Orsini, an admirer of Petrarch’s poetry). Angelica, daughter of the prince and Teodora, is in love with Giovanni, the son of the prince’s enemy, Lodovico Montanza il Toro (historically, Ludovico Sforza il Moro). Messer Bernardo (Leonardo da Vinci), who has painted The Last Supper for Montanza in the refectory of Santa Croce (Santa Maria delle Grazie), is now painting a portrait of Princess Teodora (the Mona Lisa). The time of the events is probably 1502 to 1503, when Macchiavelli and Leonardo da Vinci were both in Cesare Borgia’s employ. Boccarossa, a ferocious mercenary soldier in the hire of the prince, may be based upon the historical Ramiro d’Orco.

The prince poisons Montanza and his retinue at a banquet falsely given over to a peace settlement. Piccolino, complicit in the poisonings, arranges on his own for Don Ricardo to be among the victims. Earlier, the dwarf had beheaded Angelica’s pet kitten. Subsequent to the treachery of the banquet, Piccolino leads the prince to the bed in which Angelica and Giovanni are engaged in premarital love. The prince beheads Giovanni. Angelica awakens to discover the horror and later drowns herself. Princess Teodora, unable to abide the deaths of her beloved Don Ricardo and her precious daughter Angelica, languishes in the company of the dwarf and dies during a period of plague. Fiammetta also succumbs during the plague. The prince has Piccolino incarcerated and chained in a dungeon, and the dwarf appears to be ignorant of the reason for his prince’s disfavor. He is confident, however, that his prince will not be able to do without him for long.

Throughout the novel, love is repressed or destroyed before it can check the evil that is both the spark of life and, untended or without attenuation by love, the fatal conflagration of human existence.

Barabbas

First published: 1950 (English translation, 1951)

Type of work: Novel

Barabbas, haunted by the mystery of the man who died in place of himself, strives to achieve belief in the man’s divinity.

Barabbas is the criminal whose release was contingent upon the death sentence of Jesus. In Lagerkvist’s novel Barabbas witnesses the Crucifixion and senses that his life and newly gained freedom are defined by a world of darkness and an impulse toward death. He is puzzled by the faith of Jesus’ followers and disturbed by their certainty that Jesus is the son of God. He tries to embrace and experience their faith but he cannot.

He detects a curious distance in three persons who were close to Jesus. Jesus’ mother does not weep at her son’s execution and seems to reproach him for dying in innocence. Peter, a big, red-haired, blue-eyed disciple, has denied Christ and needs reassurance. Lazarus, whom Jesus resurrected, is not happy in his resumed life; his gaze is empty, and in answer to Barabbas’s question about what death is like he replies: “The kingdom of death is nothing. But for those who have been there, everything else is also nothing.” Many years later, Barabbas envisages Lazarus dead for the second time, his skull grinning in the eternal darkness.

Two persons who are close to Barabbas, a harelipped young woman and a man named Sahak, have faith that Christ is their savior, and both die as martyrs. The harelipped woman was the mistress of Barabbas. Sahak was his fellow prisoner and slave in the Cyprian copper mines. Both loved Barabbas, and both appear to fulfill their lives, not so much in the secure anticipation of eternal life as in realizing Jesus’ doctrine of mutual love. Peter also seems to find his great peace more in his love of Christ and of his fellow Christians than in the prospect of eternal life.

Lagerkvist established his preference of love to eternity in “The Eternal Smile” and in his essay “Stridsland, Evighetsland” (1934; “Land of Conflict, Land of Eternity,” 1988). In the essay he says this explicitly. Like his Barabbas, he does not believe in the divinity of Jesus; like his Barabbas, he looks at the kingdom of the dead and finds that “there is nothing there” for him: “My inner being rises up in pain, because I am alive; my spirit tries to break its shackles, my thought to find an answer to something about which it can only ask questions, something which it is given the power to agonize and brood over.”

The brooding Lagerkvist has his Barabbas brood over the kingdom of death, first as Lazarus describes it and then as it appears to him in the copper mines of Cyprus and in the catacombs of Rome. On the point of entering death’s realm—Barabbas is crucified, along with Peter and other Christians—he makes his death his own, existentially, by making the only choice left to him. He identifies himself with his death. He exemplifies as well the authentic refusal to blame anyone but oneself for what befalls one, including one’s death.

Lagerkvist’s Barabbas is a recipient of love. That he himself has the capacity to love is shown in his respectful care for the corpse of the harelipped woman and in his vigil at the death of his crucified friend, Sahak. That he does not realize this capacity is clear in his failure to close the distance between himself and those who love him, until it is too late, and in his inability to understand the commandment, “Love one another.” It remains for Lagerkvist’s pilgrim, Tobias, to realize that love is the foundation of being human.

Lagerkvist followed Barabbas with his novel Sibyllan (1956; The Sibyl, 1958), in which the wandering Jew leaves the Crucifixion scene and seeks the meaning of life and death. The wandering Jew finds his great peace in Lagerkvist’s novel Ahasverus död (1960; The Death of Ahasuerus, 1962), the first novel in the Pilgrim Trilogy, also known as the Tobias Trilogy. The other novels in the trilogy are Pilgrim på havet (1962; Pilgrim at Sea, 1964) and Det heliga landet (1964; The Holy Land, 1966).

Herod and Mariamne

First published: Mariamne, 1967 (English translation, 1968)

Type of work: Novel

The incompatibility of King Herod and his wife Mariamne is aggravated by her inability to love him and his inability to love anyone but her.

In Herod and Mariamne, the last of Lagerkvist’s fictional works published in his lifetime, the concept of love is examined in a lyrical prose narrative of austere simplicity. The novel tells of the relationship of Herod the Great and his second wife, Mariamne. Their tempestuous marriage ends with Herod’s murder of Mariamne. Lagerkvist pares the biblical account down to a short, melancholy song of contrasts.

In the story, the huge, coarse, brutal soldier and reigning tyrant, Herod, is subdued by his love for Mariamne, who is beautiful, gentle, and self-contained. After their marriage, Mariamne requites his sexuality but never his love. She is his bedmate, never his soul mate. His is a desert soul, in need of a temple; she is her own force of life, her own temple. Frustrated by his inability to possess her completely, Herod predisposes himself to his ultimate act against her, ordering her to be executed for conspiracy with her people, the Hasmoneans, whose resurgence he has been quelling. The last years of his life are punctuated by his repeated calling out of her name, by his slaughter of the innocents after the birth of Jesus, and by his slowly succumbing to a painful and horrible disease.

Lagerkvist appears to have wanted Herod and Mariamne to serve as both prelude and postlude to his cycle of five Crucifixion novels. It is historically a prelude, leading up to the birth of Jesus. It is thematically a postlude, qualifying the love that Tobias experiences as he finds the Holy Land within his heart. Love is not a simple thing: It embraces all human life, and it is directed to another individual, with whom one identifies one’s self. General love, without particularity, becomes the love of humanity in the abstract; and the abstraction becomes God, who is not humanity. Particular love, without generality, becomes possessiveness and, ultimately, the love of an object, not a person. Human love, as the foundation of being human, is manifest in both the general and the particular, not merely in one unchecked by the other.

Herod’s love of Mariamne is particular; Mariamne’s love of people is general. Herod softens a little toward his subjects, and Mariamne becomes moderately sensitized to Herod’s sexuality, but there is no full coalescence of the two manifestations of love; they remain at odds.

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Pär Lagerkvist Long Fiction Analysis