Pär Lagerkvist

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A Blackened Sea: Religion and Crisis in the Work of Pär Lagerkvist

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SOURCE: Polet, Jeff. “A Blackened Sea: Religion and Crisis in the Work of Pär Lagerkvist.” Renascence 54, no. 1 (fall 2001): 47-63.

[In the following essay, Polet discusses how Lagerkvist's characters mirror his own search for eternal peace and the Kingdom of God, by exploring the connection between social order and freedom and the deepest questions of what he called “human destiny.”]

A variety of literary figures have been highly regarded as critics of totalitarianism: Camus, Kundera, Orwell and Solzhenitsyn among them. Generally absent from this list is Swedish Nobel laureate Pär Lagerkvist. This is an unfortunate omission, and in the English speaking world his work has become all but neglected. Quickly after his death in 1974, two books were published giving American readers an overview of Lagerkvist's work, though neither was an in-depth study. Since then, no books and only two articles, both of them comparing him with other contemporary writers, have been published about Lagerkvist. As a result, a generation of Americans is largely unfamiliar with his work.

One can only speculate as to why his voice has become silent. Certainly the end of the cold war made his statements against totalitarianism seem less relevant. The fact that he worked in a minor language and a culture that was not a world-center probably consigned him more to the margins. His sparse prose, strange characterizations, unusual style, and dark themes are not well-suited to the tastes of Americans. His work is in many ways too religious for people of a secular bent, and too atheistic and disturbing for people of religious orientation. Yet, because of the ubiquity of violence and evil in our world, his work remains worthy of serious consideration, and his penetrating analysis of our culture forms the crux of this study, reinforcing the words of the Nobel Prize committee, which praised Lagerkvist “for the artistic vigor and true independence of mind with which he endeavor[ed] … to find answers to the eternal questions confronting mankind.”

Lagerkvist produced a broad literary and critical output in multiple genres. Early in his career he concentrated on criticism and poetry. By the early 1930s he began to concentrate his energies more on theater and short stories. After the war, he produced the occasional short story, but wrote mainly novels, which generally became shorter and more concentrated in form. The themes of these novels are mostly present in his earlier works, but they become clearer and stronger toward the end of his career. His first novel, The Dwarf, was an examination of human depravity and licentiousness. His second work, for which he was honored with the Nobel Prize in 1951, was Barabbas, set in Rome at the time of Christ, exploring the tortured soul of an individual about whom it may more rightly be said than anyone else, that Christ died for him. The Crucifixion remains the important background in the four works associated with Barabbas: The Sibyl, The Death of Ahasuerus, Pilgrim at Sea, and The Holy Land. The trajectory of this pentalogy is to trace the movement from the guilt associated with the murder of an innocent Man at Golgotha, to finding peace and forgiveness in the kingdom of heaven.

The arc Lagerkvist draws suggests a great deal about how such a search is structured. There is the acknowledgement of guilt over the rejection of divine love and forgiveness, which stands at the heart of Barabbas. In The Sibyl, Lagerkvist shows how the rejection of Christ empties life of its meaning, creating resentment and alienation in the heart of the person who rejects. Such rejection leads to a life of aimless and angry wandering, where the only hope can be found in mysterious and inscrutable traces of divine presence. Such eternal wandering can only be ended by death, by confronting one's mortality, which forces a person to face issues or moral responsibility. This death is found in The Death of Ahasuerus, but it is a troubled and complicated one, as the main character finds rest, but not peace. The character of Tobias is introduced in that novel, and he is the central figure of the next two. There, Lagerkvist explores with great care the relationship between violence and rejection of God, the need for divine grace and forgiveness as the only solution to the problem of evil, the unwillingness of human beings to accept such grace, and the transfiguration of the self that occurs when grace is finally accepted.

Lagerkvist's characters mirror his own search for eternal peace and the Kingdom of God. This search, it is argued, is paradigmatic for modern people who must confront the horror of the age not with their secularism, but rather see in it the result of their secularism. The dissolution of western culture at its spiritual core engendered the political crises of the modern age. Lagerkvist explores the connection between social order and freedom and the deepest questions of what he called human destiny: divine transcendence, the reality of evil, the regenerative power of love. He saw the depth of the “decline of the West,” the degenerative self-understanding of our civilization, but linked this analysis to the possibility of spiritual and cultural renewal.

Lagerkvist may rightly be thought a spiritual heir of Nietzsche, for he shared the German's foreboding of a world unchained from its sun, a world where the murder of God is followed by the extermination of God's creatures. Unlike Nietzsche, however, he refused to resort to dionysiac release, a circular celebration of life, succumbing to the desire for self-apotheosis,1 or an acceptance of the will-to-power as the one ineluctable reality. Rather, Lagerkvist's vision deepened into the sense that God may not, after all, be dead, but only silenced by our Promethean cries; and God may yet again speak, if we become silent.

Lagerkvist self-consciously dwelled in the Platonic metaxy, that awful tension of reality, refusing to resolve it in religious speculation, critical atheism, or revolutionary activity. Against the crisis and chaos his characters face, he constantly draws our attention back to the reality of the soul in movement toward the source of its existence. In so doing, Lagerkvist analyzes the existential source of the contemporary crisis, and provides a mechanism not to resolve it, but to battle against it.

Born in 1891, Lagerkvist embodied fin de siècle values. Dissatisfied with a world whose façade masked an underlying crisis, whose outward form distorted its inward reality, he saw in much contemporary art a synecdoche of this crisis: pleasing to look at, but hollow and decadent in essence. The young man made this discovery after spending some time in Paris prior to the outbreak of the First World War. There, he became impressed with the vigor or expressionist and cubist art, which seemed to him so vital when compared to the cold classicism of his homeland. His early essay Literary Art and Pictorial Art sought to apply the radicalism of cubist style both to the theater and to literary work.

The influence of cubism manifests itself throughout his work (Ellestad 41), including the employment of simple lines and clear forms. By flattening out artistic space, he was able to present a variety of perspectives simultaneously, without letting any one dominate. Art no longer represented reality, in his view, but revealed the artist's freedom, dislocating and relocating reality so that what was hidden might be revealed. The cubist element can be seen in his literary style by the collapsing of literary horizons and the flattening out of climaxes within the narrative structure. Like the cubists, Lagerkvist emphasized structure over surface details, believing that shape and form were more important than color or feeling. Art must shake up the viewer's notion of reality and draw the audience into the artistic process (Modern Theatre 8).

Lagerkvist's writings bear the stamp of cubism in a number of other ways as well. First, the narrative is not constructed teleologically, in classic Aristotelian form, but aims to penetrate deeper into the existential issue. It intends to burrow in on a complex of problems without moving us toward a clear resolution. The conviction that problems cannot and should not be resolved rests at the heart of Lagerkvist's work. Second, his characters have no interior space. He does not use characters in a classic psychologizing manner, but instead uses them as representations of human tendencies; in other words, he is less interested in their internal states of mind and development than he is in how they manifest certain characteristics. As such, his characters have a tendency to seem lifeless or without complexity. This form, however, enables Lagerkvist to present a variety of viewpoints without privileging any one. His characters are not encumbered by the pathologies we see in most novels. Instead, they attempt to reveal what is solid and abiding in humanity; they are the shape and structure of human nature. Third, he makes the audience participate in the artistic process. Lagerkvist's characteristics suffer from a lack of lucidity derived from living lives which do not embrace the essence of being human.2 Likewise, Lagerkvist's meaning remains opaque to those who lead their own truncated lives. It possesses an esoteric quality whose meaning opens up in conjunction with the soul of the interpreter; that is, when the reader has become existentially more aware, so does his or her understanding of Lagerkvist's texts. As Plato argues in his Seventh Letter, philosophy is only intelligible to those whose souls are already predisposed to its truth.

Another aspect of his cubism is that he places multiple meanings, experiences, and positions side by side without allowing any to dominate. Animated by belief in the inexhaustibility of life, Lagerkvist eschewed any ideological or dogmatic explanation which reduced the complexity to systems, formulas, or easy clichés. “I shall fight against everything that distorts and limits human life,” he wrote in an uncharacteristically personal passage (Five Early Works 229). In the ideologies of the age, he found the greatest threat. Finally, the form of his works becomes more and more concentrated. Most commentators see little development in Lagerkvist's work; that is, they believe his central concerns remain constant. In contrast, I argue that Lagerkvist's artistic vision becomes more and more concentrated in style, goes through shifts in its understanding, and what is implicit becomes explicit. The celebration of life in the early works changes qualitatively: the trajectory of his work is a movement toward searching for the transcendent ground of reality. Lagerkvist himself wrote:

This greatest wonder of life—that everything becomes more circumscribed, shrinks about us until there is finally only one way. No longer a choice or an external chance. But the compulsion from within.

(Five Early Works 50)

It was this inchoate spirituality, constantly explored, unfettered by any orthodoxy, which made him so sensitive to the problems of totalitarianism. Indeed, he thus became “the most eloquent and rigidly uncompromising Swedish critic of totalitarianism” (Gustafson 51) and “one of the first major writers” to oppose Nazism (Spector 29).

Nietzsche first characterized the history of the West as the advent of nihilism. In his analysis, Western consciousness is one long error, a descent into ideas which have no referent. Although “God is dead” we have yet to feel consequences of this belief. Once the hollowness of Western morality is brought to light, Nietzsche argues, the civilization which rests upon that morality will soon collapse, for the lack of faith characterizing Europe really means “a long plenitude and sequence of breakdown, destruction, ruin and cataclysm,” a “monstrous logic of terror” (Gay Science 279). The murder of God is followed by the murder of God's children. Nietzsche saw that the modern constructions of domination and power arose from institutions or movements determined to occupy the vacant space left by the death of God.3

Nietzsche's influence resonates throughout Lagerkvist's work. But while the former saw Christianity as a path neither possible nor prudent to take, Lagerkvist, although rejecting the rigorous orthodoxy of his youth, never broke free of the powerful essence of Christianity: the movement of God towards humanity, and the reciprocal movement of the soul toward God in faith.

Even though Lagerkvist cannot by any means be said to have attained a firm faith in God, it is the two transcending forces in human life, the longing for spiritual reality and the longing for love, that always constitute the meaningful and controlling factors in his attempted solutions to the problems of life's significance. … He belongs among those whose struggle against the dehumanization of mankind has led them to seek the hidden God.

(Malmström 57)

The recurring use and restructuring of Christian figures and themes in his work testifies to this. Both Nietzsche and Lagerkvist share the conviction, however, that because of the spiritual nihilism, some new barbarism loomed on the horizon. Where Nietzsche sought solace, Lagerkvist sought redemption. The former told us to love our fate, the latter announced our fate must be love. Nietzsche sought comfort for God's murderers; Lagerkvist sought justice and forgiveness. Lagerkvist well understood the desire for self-apotheosis in nihilistic culture, and that is this aggrandizing attempt was a result of the rebellion driven by despair over the world's evil. When, in The Sibyl, Ahasuerus considers the vanity of life and a world covered in ashes, he realizes that it is because God “cares nothing for mankind” and resolves “to hate him as he hates me.” “I will not bow,” he swears, and notes that “I am as immortal as he is!” (Sibyl 147)

In the absence of a mandate of love, social existence rests on the will-to-power alone. For Lagerkvist the story of the twentieth century is the story of power over love, a choice modern humanity makes in part because the reality of love is too perplexing, and the demands of love too great. The title character in Barabbas (set in the Biblical story of Christ's passion) is both fascinated and repelled by what he takes to be the central teaching of the early Christians: to love one another. In the end, it remains incomprehensible to him. At the same time, the prevalence of evil as a universal and “necessary” aspect of human nature is clearly present in Lagerkvist's work, and has received much commentary. Many critics suggest that Lagerkvist believes we cannot live without evil, that it serves a comparative/balancing function (Spector 185). In this reading Lagerkvist sees evil as a necessary complement to goodness. In contrast, in the totalitarian movements of the day, he saw not something new, but an example of ancient human traits, as the ever-present reality of evil, against which our actions and thoughts ought to be directed. Instead of seeing evil as something necessary, he saw it as something to be fought.

Lagerkvist makes this diagnosis of the constancy of human evil most forcefully in his remarkable play from 1933, The Hangman. At a time when the western democracies were placating and appeasing Hitler, when many thinkers and writers of the first rank were coddling up to Nazism, Lagerkvist exposed the movement for the barbarism it was. The Hangman is a satire worthy of Swift (an author Lagerkvist admired greatly). The play is divided into two acts, the first taking place in a medieval tavern, the second in a German Cabaret, thus emphasizing the historical continuity of human nature which engages evil as its constant companion. Because of the constancy of human nature, both evil and good are present in every age, with the tendency toward evil always enjoying prominence. Recognizing the historical transcendence of evil, Lagerkvist turns his attention to its practitioners’ use of an economy of violence, the Machiavellian belief that politics could not be directed without the application of force and the threat of violence.

As noted above, The Hangman is composed of two scenes, the first set in a medieval tavern and the second in a German nightclub. In both instances Lagerkvist populates the stage with a variety of common characters, and places in their midst the hangman, who remains largely silent, his nature emerging from the consciousness of the others, all of whom celebrate different acts of violence. All the characters are fascinated with execution, death, and terror, and the hangman's presence among them suggests they regard him as their lord. Many of the characters appear eager to meet and gain the respect of the hangman, one even going so far as to say that she could not wait to tell her son she had met him. The contrast between the two scenes is important also, for while scene one suggests that the attitude of the medieval world toward violence was one of awe, and that violence should be a last resort, the second scene suggests that the modern attitude is embracing, and regards violence as salvific. In fact, their passion for violence becomes his guilt, and in the final scene we witness the hangman asking for a genuine salvation, one that will cleanse him of the blood of his victims. Only by finding such a ritual could he, or any human, become capable of enjoying the manifold beauty of life.

The hangman, an ideological descendant of Machiavelli's Prince, guarantees order in the chaos. At the same time, Lagerkvist presents him as a sympathetic character, for he has seen too much blood to share the lust for it otherwise on display in the nightclub. This lust infects the political actors in a world where power alone matters, reducing life to a rational calculus, indulging eugenic impulses. In one scene, two Nazi soldiers walk into a pub, and the following conversation takes place:

VOICE at a table:
Anything special tomorrow?
ANOTHER Voice:
I don't know, but I hear they have plenty of people to liquidate. Okay by me.
THE First (Soldier):
No, no harm in that. After all, there are lots of people in the world, decent and proper people. It's always the best ones that are left, they're careful about that.
THE Second:
Quite Right.

(Modern Theatre 182)

Lagerkvist identifies two sources of motivation for the executioners: first, a spiritual laziness which seeks resolution and answers in collective existence, in submerging the self, in the development of an ideological system; second, the creation of the Volk as an ersatz god, performing the functions of the one now dead, including that of separating the sheep from the goats. “You see before you the glorious, incomparable view of a collected and united people! And those in doubt will soon be a part of us, no doubt of that. And we'll manage the stubborn ones” (Modern Theatre 185). The system of thought becomes a second reality, a nightmarish world of human invention and twisted imagination counterpoised to the real world. To draw others into their nightmare, the ideologues indulge a missionary zeal for proclamation. In the classic ideological vein, dating back at least to Socrates, those who do not acquiesce must be exterminated. The ideology establishes itself by force, not reason.

Obviously we must spread our teachings throughout the world! It would be outrageous to keep this only for ourselves, and if any people fail to accept it, we'll exterminate them. Naturally, for their own sake. It would be happier for them to be exterminated than to live without experiencing this!

(Modern Theatre 188)4

Even within the murderous clique, terror is used to maintain ranks. When one of the soldiers shows a moment of hesitation, a brief flicker of doubt, his comrades instantly kill him.

Lagerkvist sees racism as another example of murderous ideology. When an all-black band takes a break, a riot ensues as the patrons remind the band members of their natural inferiority. The rebellion against racism is unusual in a writer of the thirties. Lagerkvist brings this theme, and the close relation between racism and murder, to even greater clarity in his striking story, “A Strange Country.” This story, about a remote country named “Liberania,” whose customs and habits are out of step with the rest of the world, demonstrates the totalitarian threat to freedom. Liberania was, he writes, “outside the mighty stream of current events.” Presenting Liberania as a type of utopia, he suggests that one of its defining features is the absence of racial distinctions and prejudices. Thus, in the story, visitors to Liberania were amazed when they found that the Liberanians

formed no definite race, at least not in a real, modern sense but only quite generally or purely biologically, that is to say they formed what one might call a natural race. And this was what was so extremely interesting. Here, apparently, was the only place on earth where such a natural race still existed, while all other races had long ago been refined and become purebred, had been submitted to rational culture.

(The Marriage Feast 215)

Again, with Swiftian irony, Lagerkvist skewers the Nazi race idea while relating it to the aims of a civilization which was itself crumbling. As he shows in the story, this deformation results from a spiritual slovenliness, an unwillingness to think and act in accordance with a reality not of our own making, but to immerse oneself in a shadow world. By cutting themselves off from a transcendent source of order (pursuing a thorough secularism), humans have created a horrifying simulacrum of order based on power alone. In so doing, humans have “deprived themselves of something that belongs to mankind” (Five Early Works 207). Ideological deformation springs from a truncated spirituality.

Likewise, in The Hangman, the patrons all toast the hangman as their lord while the hangman sees himself as sacrificed on the cross of the libido dominandi. He embodies the great contradiction of Lagerkvistian man: his existence is stunted by his thirst for blood, but he is fascinated and troubled by the power of the blood of his victims. As it turns out, this blood holds the potential for redemptive cleansing, but the hangman has difficulty seeing it, though he catches an occasional glimpse. As a result, he proclaims that while he will “save” humanity everyday by drawing blood, he yet longs for “a death of sacrifice,”—to be “nailed to my cross and to give up the ghost in the great merciful darkness.” In death, then, Lagerkvist presents an intimation of a world where violence is rejected, where the light of grace overwhelms the darkness of evil.5 Here we see two of the great themes in Lagerkvist: first, social evil results from spiritual exhaustion, or from a thorough secularism; and, second, the cure for disease is not recapturing past orthodoxy, but a hard fought effort, never to be consummated, to learn the regenerating power of love, and learning to accept divine love.

Accepting the proposition that human history is a stage whereon unfolds the drama of the encounter between human beings and God, at this point in Lagerkvist's career the divine aspect or place in this drama remains opaque and undeveloped. He cannot yet break though to the realm of faith, remaining—in his words—a “religious atheist.” In the poem, “My God,” he can at one moment capture the dynamic of divine presence/absence:

My god I curse you and stand in fear
—my god, I beg you, be near—be near!
My god is what life has given me
to mold into worship and belief.—
My god is a plank on a blackened sea
—when will he offer a port and relief?—
—I cling to it tightly in hope and doubt
—I sink in the wave and am lifted out.—

Yet he subverts this dynamic in anguished doubt, borne of disaffection with rigid orthodoxy, and turns it into a tortured identification, collapsing the godhead into the consciousness of the suffering poet.

My god breaks his night into morning sky;
my god—my god—: he is I!—he is I!—

This undifferentiated poetic consciousness later deepens and differentiates into a search for a transcendent God. In this, Lagerkvist's search proves paradigmatic for all who reject belief in God or engage in the century's atheistic forgetfulness. As much as he tried, Lagerkvist could never escape the shadows of divine presence.

The works which established his international reputation, The Dwarf and Barabbas, demonstrate this dynamic further. In both works, Lagerkvist presents us with portraits of mankind separated from the sources of goodness and virtuous action. The first of these two novels, The Dwarf, takes place during the Renaissance in a city clearly modeled after Florence during the reign of the Medicis. The main characters in the novel are the Prince, his wife (Teodora) and daughter (Angelica), Bernardo (clearly modeled after Leonardo da Vinci), the warrior Don Ricardo and the mercenary Boccarossa, the Prince's cold-hearted mistress Fiametta, and the Montanzas, with whom the Prince is at war. The most important character, of course, is the Dwarf. The behavior of the characters suggests the Borgias, and one feels in the book the ever-present teachings of Machiavelli, which regard evil as a necessary means to a desirable end. The drama within the court is presented in relief against the external conflict between the two kingdoms. The drama in the court is structured by the licentiousness, crass materialism, deceptiveness, and depravity of the characters. Their private vice spills over into their public functions, for after the war has been fought to the point of mutual exhaustion, the Prince decides to hold a feast for his enemies. At this feast the Dwarf poisons the wine, leading to the destruction of the leaders of their opposing kingdom. The narrative presents the response of the Prince ambiguously: while the Dwarf insists he was acting under orders, the Prince reacts with horror and responds by throwing the Dwarf in a dungeon. The novel concludes with the Dwarf chained to the wall, but of good cheer, secure in the knowledge that the Prince will one day call on him again. Throughout the book we are exposed to incidents of acute violence, grotesque excess, total depravity, and complete deception.

The Dwarf is a malevolent little cretin, the embodiment of evil, who resides always at his Prince's side, always ready to perform a service of violence. All the dark contours of the Prince's subconscious have been concentrated in the Dwarf. The Dwarf, because of his deep destructive psychology, thus representing truncated humanity, cannot fathom or enjoy the most profound experiences. As a consequence of his being, like all humanity, “misshapen,” significant experiences such as the glories of beauty, the joy of play, the wonders of love, and intimations of perfection, prove to be inaccessible. The dwarf's will-to-power leaves him filled with bitterness toward those who have something more. As the condition of cutting himself off from the ground of being, however, the Dwarf must reconstitute himself as that ground. An important contrast in the novel is between the dwarf and the princess. Gradually she comes to realize there is more to life than simply material goods, a realization by which Lagerkvist criticizes the excess and crass materialism of Western culture. Instead, she comes to realize that happiness can only be found once a person loves God more than life itself. In a key scene, the princess confesses her sins to the dwarf, who acts as a surrogate god, lashing out at her with vengeance. The dwarf shouts:

“I have suffered for you, but you have never cared about that! Now you shall know what it feels like to suffer!” I was beside myself, I scarcely knew what I was doing. Knew? Of course I knew! I was taking revenge, retribution for everything! I was dispensing justice! I was exercising my terrible power over mankind!

(Dwarf 208)

By worshipping the God of violence, mankind destroys all that is pure, innocent, and uplifting to the spirit.6 The aptly named Angelica, daughter of the Prince, loses her “innocence” late in the novel and brings about the destruction of both her and her lover. At this point, Lagerkvist's search remains troubled and incomplete: he is unable to separate the problem of evil from the general purpose of social existence. Operating still within a Machiavellian world, Lagerkvist has a hard time imagining social life without its violent necessities. At the same time, while he bemoans that “the most exalted element of the human spirit is shattered, perhaps inevitably so,” he can affirm that “it is still the most exalted” (Five Early Works 199). Likewise, the dwarf at the end of the novel, after being thrown in the dungeon (thus allowing the light of culture to shine for a time in the city), grimly reminds the reader: “I await other times and they will surely come … If I know anything of my lord, he cannot spare his dwarf for long. I muse on this in my dungeon and am of good cheer. I reflect on the day when they will come again and loosen my chains, because he has sent for me again” (Dwarf 228).

Here, Lagerkvist's acute sensitivity to the problem of human suffering and violence leads him to rebel against the political movements of his day. But while he carefully identifies the problem, he lacks the resources to provide a response. If spiritual deformation is the problem, some sort of spiritual restoration would have to be the solution. But Lagerkvist at this point in his career has no idea what the content of this restoration might be. Instead, he suggests the key might be recapturing some vague notion of “culture.” Journeying in Greece convinced him there was much that was noble and worth preserving: but what made culture something worth preserving, what made it ennobling and elevating to the human spirit, remained unexplored. His response is to suggest that we show respect for tradition: “Out of roots which none can trace, of which we know only that they strive downward, down into the secret pits of life and nature, the tree of man sucks nourishment for its crown.” In the deformity of the age he could only hope that “a new cultural epoch will be born of the phantom mist and the symptoms of poisoning.” Culture remained for him “a precious gift which can be taken from us at any time … a great and mysterious miracle” (Five Early Works 221-24). But he gave us little guidance as to what made it miraculous, or how we might sustain it.

But if at this point Lagerkvist gives us little sense of the sources of spiritual order which would enable us to fight evil and violence, he did give us the important insight that people often do not trace the roots and draw upon and preserve traditions, simply because it is easier to take the path of narrow barbarism (Five Early Works 192-93). We are a culture which “takes pleasure in spiritually castrating itself amidst wild howling.” This point is also taken up by him in the short story “God's Little Traveling Salesman,” about whom Lagerkvist writes: “With him, as with so many others, it was just that he had a slovenly soul” (The Marriage Feast 114).

It is not until in the great pentalogy Barabbas, The Sibyl, The Death of Ahasuerus, Pilgrim at Sea, and The Holy Land that Lagerkvist deepens his understanding of what makes culture something worthy of our respect, and makes it the experiential core of history. Throughout these books, he employs the symbols of Apollo and Christ to explore the nature of light over darkness, life over death, and civilization over barbarism. Barabbas represented for Lagerkvist modern, secular humanity and the deficiencies of its existence. The character Barabbas is contrasted to Christ. In the novel Christ stands not as a resolution to the problem of human suffering, but represents human striving to attain divinity. “Christ is man, in the process of becoming divine, achieving transcendence out of his carnate adventure to the secular darkness” (Weathers, Critical Essay 24). Barabbas shows man cut off from divinity, wedded to the things of this earth and investing them with hedonistic impulses. In this respect, he has an analogue in the novel in Lazarus, who has undergone physical resurrection without spiritual transfiguration. In the characters of Barabbas and Ahasuerus (in The Sibyl) we see people whose inability to open themselves to the drama of divine presence renders them hollow. Death and resurrection, figuratively, must create a transformation of the soul accommodating itself to the divine if life is to become anything more than simple duration (Weathers, “Transfiguration” 174).7

Lagerkvist consistently employs the metaphors of sight and eyes to explore the problem of spirituality acuity. The eyes of his characters reveal not only the death of their souls, but also reveal a failure of apperception. Lagerkvist lets us know that only those who have eyes to see can do so, that life opens up its meaning when the soul has opened itself. Thus the key moment in The Sibyl occurs when Ahasuerus, when talking with the pythia, looks at:

… her dark face, which seemed ravaged by fire, and at her inscrutable old eyes which had seen god. His eyes too had seen god. But because of that they were empty, like dried-up wells, like depths with nothing in them. They were not like hers. Why was that? Why was he poor and she so rich?

(Sibyl 151)

Although he symbolically “dies” three times and emerges from death twice in the novel, Barabbas receives no intimation of what life really means. In the end, Lagerkvist leaves the state of his soul ambiguous. Crucified not for his faith, but by actions of violence spurred by his desire to make it look as if he had faith, Barabbas surrenders his soul by looking up into the darkness as if he were addressing it (Barabbas 144). The “as if” leaves us wondering whether he had found faith or not. But if Barabbas is the ambiguous “No” to faith, the Tobias novels trace the path to a hopeful “Yes.”

The Sibyl, the first in the series, poses the question of the inscrutability of God and the difficulty of reciprocating movement; the Tobias trilogy marks the gradual opening of the soul. Pilgrim at Sea, the first in the series, demarcates three stages of this process: first, a blindness caused by secularization; second, an interiorization of the pilgrimage, the awareness that human life is organized around a deep longing of the soul; and third, a final transfiguring experience. Worse than doubt and uncertainty about God is the uncertainty of life without God. Lagerkvist poses the choice between the certainty of an arid rationalism, which ends in terror, and the uncertainty of a living faith, which demands humility. He places this in the conflict between seeking God and being human—for, as the experience of the Sibyl shows, nearness to God constantly threatens to obliterate the human. Symbolically, God is located in the inscrutability of the eternal smile, the violence of possession, the bubbling spring, and within God's own absence. God, Lagerkvist tells us, is never where or how we expect God to be. Life poses great mysteries and contradictions which cannot be resolved, and the greatest of these is God who is “incomprehensible, inscrutable,” embodying all the contradictions of life, and standing as “a riddle which is intended not to be solved but to exist. To exist for us always. To trouble us always” (Sibyl 149).

Thus, although Tobias and Ahasuerus strive to remain independent of God, they experience an ineluctable pull upon their souls. Their deaths provide an important contrast. Ahasuerus remains to the end “troubled, pursued by whatever it was that he did not understand; it gave him no peace.” He is pursued by a god who demands sacrifice, who causes people to suffer. The God of his experience is a terrifying, judging, jealous god. Ahasuerus in this resembles Nietzsche, who can feel only the back of God's hand and not the gentle caress of an open palm. The only grace he can experience is that which he extends himself (Ahasuerus 113).

Lagerkvist attempts here to break beyond dogmatic formulations of the divine-human encounter for a simple reason: he does not want to pursue the route of Christianity. First, he finds Christianity tends toward the ideological, complete with exclusivist claims and closed, hostile communities (for example, the early church in Barabbas, the priests and the temple workers in The Sibyl, the High Priest in The King); second, he believes orthodox Christianity to be a naïve fideism unable to deal with the complexities of the modern world.8 He was always suspicious of anything which claimed to have solved the mystery of existence, but at the same time realized life was structured by the search for the ground of that existence. Thus he has Ahasuerus proclaim the desire of someone who cannot deny the reality of the transcendent ground, but cannot find the language to talk about it:

Beyond the gods, beyond all that falsifies and coarsens the world of holiness, beyond all lies and distortions, all twisted divinities and all the abortions of human imagination, there must be something stupendous which is inaccessible to us. Our very failure to capture it demonstrates how inaccessible it is. Beyond all the sacred clutter the holy thing itself must exist.

(Ahasuerus 114)

Our conception of God keeps us “from drinking at the spring itself.” Plato saw that language concerning the gods had corrupted our sense of what the divine really was. The reason Plato wanted to kick the poets out of Athens was precisely because their undifferentiated conception of “the gods” could only create moral confusion in the youth of the city. Instead, Plato described the constant pull of the indefinite “Beyond”—the unnamed divinity which was the ground of existence, and as the ground structures is what divides us from the divine” (Ahasuerus 115), demonstrating how hypostasized theological language disrupts the structure of the human quest.

One predominant reason we prefer to avoid the quest is out of fear that we may have to change our lives. It is in facing mortality, when theology has lost its voice, that we become most aware of the structure of reality and what is required of us. This realization dawns only in part to Ahasuerus as he faces death: “I don't know what it [death] hides in its dark depths. If I did I might well be terrified. But I desire to drink from it. It may be those very depths that can assuage my burning thirst.” In coming to this realization, Ahasuerus finally finds real death, and thereby finds peace. In his dying, he can now live. At the end of the book, light finally descends upon him.

Like Ahasuerus, Tobias has isolated himself from the human community. This isolation is both a cause and an effect of the isolation from the divine. This theme of estrangement is a prominent one in much Swedish art. One can find similar characters in the films of Ingmar Bergman. Antonios Block in The Seventh Seal and Isak Borg in Wild Strawberries are both representatives of the isolation from the human community that results from the inability to accept divine grace. The comparison between Lagerkvist and Bergman is apt, for they deal with nearly identical themes. Like Lagerkvist, Bergman was troubled by the silence of God, but also thought God was silent by necessity, in order to preserve the space within which human freedom could retain its integrity. For those who could not recognize the strength in God's silence and see it as a way of relating to God, the response could be despair (Block in The Seventh Seal), lonely disconnectedness (Isak Borg), hostile rejection (Pastor Tomas in Winter Light), an attempt to play with the dark forces of reality in an attempt to make oneself an ersatz God (in The Magician, though Bergman shows the devastating consequences of such attempts in Through a Glass Darkly), or a return to a comfortable though dull middle-class existence (in the brilliant Persona which takes the issue of God's silence and our commerce with God to its limits). The key for both Bergman and Lagerkvist is that the disruption of commerce with God, either through arrogance or protest or fear, necessarily leads to the disruption of commerce with one another.

As his writing career progressed, so did the concentration of Lagerkvist's themes. His works became shorter, more compact, and more focused in their emphasis. In his last work Herod and Mariamne, Lagerkvist takes the theme of how isolation from God creates profound social alienation to its limits. Here, he writes that Herod, “had no link with the divine. Inwardly he was a wilderness …” (Herod 54). Because of their isolation, the characters become cruel and vindictive. In Herod as well as other characters in his novels we see that separation from God exacerbates the tendency to indulge murderous impulses. An unwillingness to accept divine suffering leads to a need to create human suffering. Herod sets himself as a surrogate God, and in order to maintain his pneumopathological state, he must slaughter the innocents. When love has no place, when the search for the divine ground has closed, there remains only the thirst for power (Bergson 38). The great revelation of Tobias is that divine love and human love must coexist, and that they depend on one another. When Ahasuerus dies, he is grateful for the presence of the “little brother,” a monk who has come to minister to him. He finds a kind of human love in the care that the monk provides for him, a stranger, and is amazed by it. The light that bathes him is a light “so familiar to earth,” but different yet than that at the death of Tobias, who experiences a light not of this earth. Ahasuerus finds death and peace, but in all Lagerkvist's work, only Tobias finds holiness as well (Swanson 312).

The Holy Land marks the end of Lagerkvist's pilgrimage. It is the third novel in the Tobias trilogy, wherein Lagerkvist constantly searches for absolute answers in a reality which has only questions. The novels move from his meeting with Ahasuerus, to his pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and finally to his death in a land which is so non-descript and unreal as to suggest it is a product of the religious imagination. It is in this final novel where Tobias finds the elusive key: love forgives all and does not judge the worthiness of its recipients. At the end, he has a vision of the Madonna and discusses with her whether holiness can be achieved. For him this question is particularly vexing since he had lived a life of cruelty. The Madonna assures him, ambiguously, without specifying its nature, that transfiguration can take place, that it does take place, through the power of divine and human love (Spector 111). It is not enough just to long for the holy land, he realizes; one must have direct experiences of it and must try to concretize it into reality. This marks a distinct development in Lagerkvist, who moves from seeing human life as determined by a vague longing, to seeing God as the object of that longing, to seeing God as a direct participant in our experience and us as players in the divine drama of history. The inaccessibility of God, emphasized in his earlier works, necessitates that God come to us.

Tobias realizes that it is not enough just to long for holiness, but one must become holy. This revelation occurs in a confrontation with a woman in whose murder he had been complicit. The confrontation occurs in a vision he has after the murder has been committed, and as he faces his own mortality. Tobias had to confront the reality of his own guilt, his own culpability in murder. To see her again is something “I have dreaded and have longed for all my life. I could win no peace until I met you again.” By coming to grips with his hollow existence, by emptying himself of selfishness and cruelty, he becomes open to the reality of love. He finds the death he seeks. As he dies, an empty locket he had been carrying around his neck, which throughout the book symbolizes his atheism, undergoes a transformation and “began to shine like the most beautiful jewel” (Holy Land 85). Tobias’ atheism has undergone transfiguration into an object of beauty. For Lagerkvist, this moment is symbolic of his own artistic striving. While his life had been structured by an inchoate longing, he comes to realize that what he had been longing for was divine love and forgiveness.

Lagerkvist responds to the disorder of the age by moving, in a representative fashion, toward the reality of redemptive love. In this, he reminds us of another great twentieth century religious atheist, Albert Camus. Like Lagerkvist, Camus had little patience with the orthodoxies of the day, and little appreciation for Christianity's emphasis on the redemptive value of suffering. At the same time, after passing through the century's absurdity, Camus was driven by the question of terror and murder to investigate why our century was so horrible, and what ways we might find out of it. In the arc of his career we see a similar movement: from protest, to analysis, to a vague longing, to a recognition of what that longing means: the power of divine forgiveness and the cleansing power of sacrificial love. Camus’ most unforgettable character, Jean-Baptiste Clamence in The Fall, who has gone through the process of self-apotheosis, realizes at the end of the novel that the only way out of hell he has created for himself is to pursue a new baptism, a baptism in the waters of sacrificial love. His anguished cry at the end, “O young woman, throw yourself into the water again so that I may a second time have the chance of saving both of us!” is the cry of modern humanity cut off from the ground of its being, desperately pleading for divine grace. Clamence's resigned, “It's too late now. It will always be too late. Fortunately!” (Camus 147), demonstrates the truth Lagerkvist also discovered: the journey of faith is rarely pursued because it is too difficult for most to bear.

Once the free movement of the soul in faith is identified as a central reality, though a burden too great for most humans to endure (as Dostoevsky notes in his legend of the Grand Inquisitor), it stands as a new truth, making atheistic forgetfulness no longer a possibility (at least, not as long as one wants to be intellectually honest). Lagerkvist calls us to a realization of the significance of human freedom, which finds its reality in the space created between the silence and the voice of God. The value of human life has a source outside of social existence (The Marriage Feast 219), but must relate itself positively to that existence. He calls us to find in life those intimations of perfection which alone render life meaningful, and to clear the space where all people can pursue in freedom the call of divine love. He calls us to measure our complicity in the violence and cruelty of the world in which we live. Like Camus, he sees the purpose of art not to serve those who make history, but to help those who suffer it, to be a voice for those who have been silenced. Lagerkvist's art aims at moving beyond the disorder of the age toward the source of order itself. In so doing one can make the final description of Tobias one's own: “Was he really a pilgrim? Was he even a Christian? No one knew. But his peace was great. That one could see.”

Notes

  1. In his parable “The Madman” where he proclaims the death of God, Nietzsche notes that we are God's murderers, and asks: “Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?” (Gay Science 181). Like Macbeth, the only way to be King is to kill the current one, and then murder everyone who tries to prevent your ascension to the throne. Also, like Macbeth, Nietzsche wonders if there is water sufficient to cleanse us of the guilt of our actions. Coyly he has Zarathustra articulate this grasp at divinity: “But let me reveal my heart to you entirely, my friends: if there were gods, how could I endure not to be a god! Hence there are no gods.” (“Zarathustra” 198).

  2. One is reminded of Zarathustra's claim that when addressing hunchbacks it is best to speak in a hunchbacked way.

  3. A theme developed by Heidegger (65). It could be argued persuasively that Heidegger leaves that space vacant but for the exception of another parousia of Being.

  4. In Let Man Live, from 1949, Lagerkvist assembles various martyrs—Socrates, Christ, Paolo and Francesca, the victim of a South Carolina lynching, a man toiling behind an iron curtain—as examples about how human beings are more interested in judging and exercising power over one another than they are in loving one another. Judgment is the ultimate power wielded by any system, and is a movement directed against individual existence. The title itself suggests a plea.

  5. Another contrast with Nietzsche. “I do not understand how anybody could love fate, unless within the details of our fates there could appear, however rarely, intimations that they are illumined; intimations, that is, of perfection (call it if you will God) in which our desires for good find their rest and their fulfillment” (Grant 46). This could stand as a Lagerkvistian credo.

  6. Also the theme of the wickedly satirical “The Children's Campaign” in The Marriage Feast. The particular point of attack here is the Nazi Youth Corps.

  7. This corresponds, interestingly, to Nietzsche's analysis of nihilism: “Duration ‘in vain,’ without end or aim, is the most paralyzing idea, particularly when one understands that one is being fooled and yet lacks the power not to be fooled.” (Will to Power 35). This sums up perfectly the walking corpse of Barabbas. He knows he needs faith, but lacks the power to attain it.

  8. There are many examples of this, the semi-autobiographical Guest of Reality deals largely with this theme, but perhaps none are finer than his short story “Father and I.” The railroad (his real father's occupation) becomes a metaphor for how those of orthodox belief approached the world, believing everything to be well-ordered and problem free. When walking along the tracks one night, the son and the father are suddenly surprised by a train with a pale driver hurtling through the darkness:

    I sensed what it meant: it was the anguish that was to come, the unknown, all that father knew nothing about, that he wouldn't be able to protect me against. That was how this world, this life, would be for me; not like Father's where everything was secure and certain. It wasn't a real world, a real life. It just hurtled, blazing, into the darkness that had no end.

    (The Marriage Feast 34)

I would like to thank Richard Plantinga, Gregory Miller and the anonymous reviewers for their editorial assistance and comments.

Works Cited

Bergson, Henri. The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. Trans. R. Ashley Audra and Cloudesley Brereton. Garden City: Doubleday, 1935.

Camus, Albert. The Fall. Trans. Justin O'Brien. New York: Vintage, 1984.

Ellestad, Everett. “Pär Lagerkvist and Cubism: A Study of His Theory and Practice.” Scandinavian Studies 45 (1973): 38-53.

Grant, George. “Times as History,” CBC Massey Lectures, 1969.

Gustafson, Arlik. A History of Swedish Literature. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1961.

Heidegger, Martin. “The Word of Nietzsche: ‘God is Dead.’” The Question Concerning Technology and other Essays. Trans. William Lovitt. New York: Harper. 1977.

Lagerkvist, Pär. Barabbas. Trans. Alan Blair. Reprint. New York: Vintage, 1989.

———. The Death of Ahaseurus. Trans. Naomi Walford. New York: Random House, 1958.

———. The Dwarf. Trans. Alexandra Dick. New York: Hill and Wang, 1945.

———. The Eternal Smile and Other Stories. Trans. Alan Blair, et. al. New York: Random House, 1954.

———. Five Early Works. Trans. Roy Arthur Swanson. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1989.

———. Guest of Reality. Trans. Robin Fulton. London: Quartet, 1989.

———. Herod and Mariamne. Trans. Naomi Walford. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1968.

———. The Holy Land. Trans. Naomi Walford. New York: Random House, 1967.

———. “Let Man Live.” Scandinavian Plays of the Twentieth Century. Trans. Henry Alexander and Llewellyn Jones. Princeton UP, 1951.

———. Literary Art and Pictorial Art: On the Decadence of Modern Literature—On The Vitality of Modern Art. Trans. Everett Ellestad and Roy A. Swanson. Wauwatosa, WI: Rainbow Press, 1991.

———. The Marriage Feast. New York: Hill and Wang, 1954.

———. Modern Theatre: Seven Plays and an Essay. Trans. Thomas Buckman. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1966.

———. Pilgrim at Sea. Trans. Naomi Walford. New York: Random House, 1964.

Malmström, Gunnel. “The Hidden God.” Scandinavica 10 (May, 1971): 58-67.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science, with a Prelude in Rhymes. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1974.

———. “Thus Spoke Zarathustra.” The Portable Nietzsche. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Penguin, 1982.

———. Will to Power. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage, 1967.

Spector, Robert. Pär Lagerkvist. New York: Twayne, 1973.

Swanson, Roy Arthur. “Evil and Love in Lagerkvist's Crucifixion Cycle.” Scandinavian Studies 38 (1966): 302-17.

Weathers, Winston. “Death and Transfiguration in The Lagerkvist Pentalogy.” The Shapeless God: Essays on Modern Fiction. Ed. Harry Mooney and Thomas Staley. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1968.

———. Pär Lagerkvist: A Critical Essay. Grand Rapids: Eerdman's, 1968.

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Poetic Naivism: Czeslaw Milosz and Pär Lagerkvist