Jens Bjørneboe’s texts paved the way for young readers in the world of literature and thought

Will you keep making clues?

Chronicle
This is a chronicle. Opinions in the text are the responsibility of the writer.

“I think one of the biggest tasks a writer has is to make words mean something again.” This is how Jens Bjørneboe was able to formulate his vision of literature.

He concluded that he was a “supporter of ‘committed’ poetry”, but that he was not opposed to so-called “pure” poetry, as long as it did not stray from reality. But the value of the books, you could also say, had to be evaluated on the basis of whether they created change, whether they had a “provocative effect.”

We must be careful to simply say that authors and literature change history. Rather, they are part of it, history and literature are in a complicated interaction. But in Bjørneboe’s work as a public intellectual, there are clear examples of the effects of his texts, beyond the fact that several readers had strong encounters with his literature.

The prison debate

It began with a question: “Is illness a crime?”

Jens Bjørneboe’s first contribution to what was to be called the “prison debate”, or “Bjørneboe debate”, published on the cover of Dagbladet on Christmas Eve 1959, dealt with what he thought to be an outdated law. , forced labor for alcoholics.

Alcoholism is not a criminal problem, he noted. Alcoholism was a disease.

Timing wise, the opening shot of this debate might look like a Dickens or a Kielland, who used the good Christmas humor of people to cause a little extra upset.

For life, the author had to be in this fight, through novels, plays and articles. In prison and justice matters, he definitely gained influence, at least when it came to the idea of ​​the need for reform.

He created it as a writer-intellectual

Also the school novel Jonas, which made the author one of our main portraits of the child’s perspective, generated much debate.

Also, perhaps the most powerful of all, were Pax’s releases of their articles and essays, which Norway, my Norway, We who love America Y Police and anarchy. These were sold by the tens of thousands as cheap books and made him a mastermind, now and later.

As for the “provocative effect”, you should also The history of bestiality mentioned, the youth trilogy itself, an introduction to the darker parts of the adult world.

And if the effect is the criterion, more than the quality, the anonymous release of the scandal cannot be avoided. Without thread, a kind of final chapter in the history of Norwegian literary censorship.

In the middle of the radicals

With the prison debate, the once conservative intellectual — a critic of materialism, science, Norwegian bread, and social democracy — suddenly found himself in the middle of the radicals.

For many, the transformation was almost unbelievable, but from now on, Bjørneboe came to make an impression on an entire movement, the radical youth movement.

In 1968 full of symbols, it is as if it had reached its historic moment. After a long time in different peripheries, Jens Bjørneboe became almost mainstream.

He had been old and young, and he was young and old. When a selection of Norwegians from sixty-eight years ago looked back, they ranked Jens Bjørneboe among their greatest heroes, second only to Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi (they may have been injured to forget Marx and Mao).

In any case, he had found new communities, contexts that became crucial for his perception, such as the weekly Orientering, as publisher Pax, as Club 7.

He paved the way for young readers to literature

“I am primarily targeting young people,” he wrote. Eventually, he would experience “almost unbearable responsibility” for his young readers. It shaped the new generation’s self-understanding. And so it was for several generations of young people even after his death. It confirmed them and made them believe that the world could change.

Bjørneboe’s texts paved the way for young readers in the world of literature and thought. And no less important it was about children and young people, traditionally the least readers.

He became “the most important teacher of my life,” has written Jon Fosse. “My life? Yes, the most important teacher in my life and, I know, in the lives of many others.”

As a myth and a human being, through his various activities and his many commitments, Bjørneboe made his mark. In retrospect, he appears as an image, and no less as an inversion or counter-image, of his country and his time.

Many have caught him

Without Jens Bjørneboe, his life, his work and the myths that surround him, we would not have had these entries into 20th century history. His biography and texts can be read as part of our collective memory and as a form of countermemory, sources of what would be lost if our stories about ourselves were limited to stories about the great us.

Many have caught him. No Norwegian author of the 20th century could have had more ownership. The anarchist, the anthroposophist, the cultural conservative, the communist, the Christiansander, the nationalist, the school critic, the alcoholic, the radical, the Pax, the astrologer, the 7 Club, the pornographer, the intellectual, the bisexual, and many plus.

In fact, it was theirs, many have thought, and above all, it confirmed them. He left his mark not only in the lives of people, but also in movements and institutions.

The paradoxes and the contradictory

When I finished my great biography of Bjørneboe ten years ago, I was more fascinated by the fact that there had been so many, that her life was so rich, so multiple and unpredictable.

I tried to free him from property, from ambiguities, committing myself to the presentation of history, with the thousands of sources we have for his life and work. I suggested that one Bjørneboe was not necessarily more real than the other, that some of the most fruitful lay precisely in the paradoxes and the contradictory, in what does not rise.

A summary of the most valuable aspects of Jens Bjørneboe’s work quickly ends with the word “commitment.” Despite increasing personal problems, despite increasingly destructive psychic difficulties and substance abuse, he was extraordinarily productive, in various literary genres, as a lyricist, novelist, playwright and essayist, in front of countless current affairs.

What Bjørneboe called “freedom of reading”

Will you keep making clues? It depends, I think, on whether the readers use what Bjørneboe called “freedom of reading.” Perhaps it also depends on whether they are able to use the knowledge we have about their life and their texts, to find new and enriching ways of understanding it, to make their voice relevant in new contexts, in new personal situations.

Freedom was not something you gave yourself, he thought. You had to take it. In order for Jens Bjørneboe to make an impression on the human mind and culture, we must take the liberty of rejecting and caring, critically appraising and enthusiastically embracing, letting ourselves be rejected and touched.

He himself often referred to Friedrich Nietzsche’s well-known statement: “It is a bad pupil who always stays true to his teacher.” It can be as good an anniversary slogan as anything.

The article is a shortened version of the Chapter 2020 opening conference in Stavanger, where the topic is “Imprint.” October 9 marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Jens Bjørneboe.

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