Pär Lagerkvist

Start Free Trial

Pär Lagerkvist: 'The Dwarf' and Dogma

Download PDF PDF Page Citation Cite Share Link Share

Lagerkvist has apparently called himself a "religious sceptic." His novels have a curious unfinality about them, for their characters never come to their proper reward, never gain the solace suffering is supposed to bring. In manifestly Christian fiction, the main characters seem completed by their faith, whether that faith has temporal reward or not. In explicit existential fiction, generally the protagonist achieves some sort of pride, even happiness, in his incompleteness. But for the religious sceptic, like Lagerkvist, there is neither fulfillment nor pride. Humility, very human love, tenuous community, striving—these are the "rewards" of such a world. They are universal conditions, but they are not rigidly defined. In other words, they do not congeal into dogma. In the Lagerkvist scheme of things there are no conclusions, no party lines, no givens. As near to Christian as the basic tenets are, they are not locked into doctrine. In Barabbas, the Christian enclave ignores and then purges Barabbas, the truer seeker. Christ himself is said to have cursed Ahasuerus in The Death of Ahasuerus. And the Christians in The Dwarf are generally materialistic and vicious beings, even sadistic in their faith. Lagerkvist consistently attacks those who are so meager of spirit that they accept the narrow word and in consequence reject the spirit of religious law. (p. 98)

As a brief against the acceptance of dogma, The Dwarf holds no truth as self-evident. The misapprehension of events by the dwarf serves the important literary purpose of portraying insubstantial knowledge directly; no other technique could as well have evoked the reader's dissatisfaction with answers and judgments. We cannot trust the dwarf, just as we cannot trust the evidence of this world or the "evidence" of an otherworld…. Like Henry James and Vladimir Nabokov in some of their fictions, Lagerkvist has created a narrator whose conclusions leave the reader ill at ease. The brilliant use of the memoir format in The Dwarf accomplishes the sceptical attitude in the most immediate, almost visceral way by encouraging doubt in the reader himself. In effect, the unreliable narrator is the meaning of the novel.

Even though the dwarf's narration veils some of the actuality in the novel, there will be agreement on a number of his characteristics: his ugliness, his misanthropy, cynicism, pride, shallowness, his love of war and of killing. The common denominator of these is not, however, undifferentiated evil, as Alrik Gustafson avers in A History of Swedish Literature. He states that "in many ways" the dwarf is "the very incarnation of evil," and thus far the commentators have agreed. But the dwarf is too closely drawn, too specifically malicious to represent all evil. Furthermore, to designate the dwarf as evil incarnate is to imply metaphysical manicheism, a rather simplistic duality which certainly would not appeal to a modern sceptical mind. The Dwarf is full of realistic detail unusual for Lagerkvist's novels, and the first-person narrator is also unique; the consequence of these techniques is that we may be confident of determining the dwarf's precise nature. The "evil" is really an overwhelming egoism, a selfishness raised to the highest power, an I-ness such as that touted by the existential philosopher. The dwarf denies any values outside himself; he retreats within, where fickleness, vacillation, and ephemerality have reign. His judgments begin and end in himself, referring at every instance to his own self-serving. So extreme is his egoism that he convinces himself of his authority in the court, though he obviously has none, and of the continuing reliance of the Prince on him, though he is chained in a dungeon. Since his character emanates from the vicissitudes of the "I" he is arbitrary and changeable in his opinions. He adores his Prince but turns against him bitterly; he taunts the Princess and brings about her death although he confesses his love for her; he has unlimited admiration for the leader of the mercenaries and then denounces him. The dwarf's only consistency lies in the inconstant and incontinent ego. His resources located only within himself, and those proving to be insubstantial, the dwarf's career exposses the insipid egoism of the self-ish, in effect a parody of the existential. The "evil" of the dwarf is his inversion of values. (pp. 99-100)

The dwarf's "freedom" throughout the novel is a parody of existential freedom. For Sartre, as he describes it in the famous essay, "Existentialism and Humanism," the final stage of recognition is the knowledge that each man is condemned to freedom, condemned to utter freedom of choice. This is literally true of the dwarf. But Lagerkvist asks further, who condemns man to this lonely freedom? And the answer is, man does, when and if he choses to do so. As criticism, by means of parody, of the existential position, The Dwarf presents the alienated hero limited in vision (the dwarf cannot see the stars which others guide by), shrunken in stature and self-serving. He is, of course, also sterile. (p. 101)

Any bridging of the existential abyss which separates people evokes his malice, for the dwarf's view of life disallows communion, sharing, being together, communication. Ironic in the portrait of the dwarf himself, The Dwarf here partakes of olympian irony: as a deliberate writer of his own memoirs, the dwarf is in the very process of communication. In thus sharing his experience, in the very intent of offering his life and views to others, he ridicules his own attitude and parodies every "existential" view he holds.

This is the purpose of the form of The Dwarf, unique in the Lagerkvist canon. It turns on itself, just as the dwarf's egoistical pretense to freedom of action in the palace and to authority is ironically subverted by his actual status. He is living a lie which he has made dogma. The existential conception of life is just as dogmatic and blind, Lagerkvist suggests, as the most canonical law of any religion, for it invents absolute premises and erects a superstructure of demands onto them. The idea of "existence before essence," first premise of existentialism, is only a possibility; "But perhaps it is not thus." But a dogmatist rushes to aver or argue. The dwarf is quick to accept the idea that "life itself can have no meaning. Otherwise it would not be." He exposes both his basic existentialism and his egoism: "Such is my belief" (italics his). Of course, The Dwarf is fiction, not a disquisitory refutation of a system of ideas. As Richard Vowles, the first appreciator of Lagerkvist in English, has said, "Lagerkvist is always the artist, seldom the philosopher." In the character of the dwarf is embodied the perversion of truth which dogmatic adherence to existential premises can cause; the novel is a warning from the north of Europe that humanistic scepticism and breadth of vision are endangered by this new dogma.

Neither is The Dwarf Christian apologetics. It is frustrating to hear critics and students speak of existential elements in Lagerkvist, although his early pessimism and constant subject, the isolated man, might account for this. No less erroneous is it to ascribe to Lagerkvist doctrinaire Christian principles, although the settings and spiritual questings in his novel might again lead easily to such a conclusion. It is likely that the popularity of the fiction among the general public in America has something to do with this misapprehension…. But a more acute perception of the settings shows that they suggest an atmosphere of turbulence, of conflicting loyalties and insecure commitments…. [All] of the characters are pilgrims, seekers, in the chaos of the sea.

Except the dwarf, Renaissance Italy is a superb selection of setting to invoke the spirits of feudal authority structures and of the rise of liberating humanism. The dwarf calls himself a Christian, and in a sense he is. We have seen that his misanthropic alienation is anti-Christian, in the larger sense, but his dogmatism corresponds to that of a Church at the zenith of its power…. Like the existential dogma, religious dogma is here parodied as untrue even to itself, toadying and arbitrary. In the Lagerkvist world, rigorous execution of Church law is no less binding to the human spirit than militant egoism, and no less false at its very source. (pp. 102-03)

For a religious sceptic like Lagerkvist, even the misguided and dogmatic Church will not deter the proper religious spirit from expressing itself in the people. As always, in literature at least, this truth is discovered only after intense suffering, after war and siege and plague. Man's proud and pretentious character must bow before the ultimate mystery, wherein is located the true spirit of religion. (p. 103)

Even in The Dwarf, perverse and unreliable as the point of view is, we may find the positive values that inform all of Lagerkvist's fiction. Dogmatism is antithetical to the human spirit, evidenced in the cruel and severe oppressiveness of the Renaissance Church, machiavellian deviousness, and existential egoism…. In The Dwarf, Lagerkvist isolated a particular kind of evil, one that paralleled the groundswell of totalitarianism in politics; existentialism was as dogmatic as legalistic Christianity and power politics. All of them blind and blinker man's capacity for thought and investigation, a capacity which has as its only reward the pleasures of incompleteness, tentativeness, pursuit. This is man's lot; like Keats' lovers on the Grecian urn, Lagerkvist's heroes are forever searching, never to find, "forever panting" after truth. And this is the beauty man can achieve. Only a dwarf can convince himself that he is happy and whole. His negative example reminds us of the consequences of immediate commitment, the kind that the Pope, the Macchiavel, and the Sartre demand. No commitment is vital or vitalizing in a world ungraced by truth, and so in recognizing the evil of dogmatism, incarnated in the dwarf, we may recoil from it and take refuge in scepticism, affirmative scepticism. We may, with Bernardo, question the meaning of existence and be humble before its silence. (pp. 105-06)

Roger Ramsey, "Pär Lagerkvist: 'The Dwarf' and Dogma," in MOSAIC: A Journal for the Study of Literature and Ideas (copyright © 1972 by The University of Manitoba Press; acknowledgement of previous publication is herewith made), Vol. V, No. 3 (Spring, 1972), pp. 97-106.

Get Ahead with eNotes

Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.

Get 48 Hours Free Access
Previous

Introduction

Next

An Interpretation of Lagerkvist's 'Mariamne'