Two Icelandic meta-literary novels at the turn of the century

Settling the accounts

AV JÓN YNGVI JÓHANNSSON

In Iceland the cultural debate in recent year has, it seems, been marked by the turn of the century and the typical settling of accounts often associated with such turning points. The 'dawn-of-a-new-century poems', long-winded and sentimental, that abounded at the turn of the 19th century, are, though, absent this time around. After an age of extremes, the said reckoning finds expression in other genres and through other mediums. Instead of buoyant optimism and pride one finds, as the Zeitgeist dictates, regret, irony and doubt.

The settling of accounts has to a large extent been relegated to literature and literary history, and the focus of attention is Halldor Laxness and his impressive life and work. And further, the literary/political debate not only takes place in journals and newspapers; it extends into literature itself. Thus, during the last couple of years two novels by Icelandic authors dealing with specific writers and their part in cultural/political debates in the preceeding century have been published.

Halldor Laxness: The institution

It is not easy to explain to foreigners the extent of Halldór Laxness' importance in Icelandic society and culture in the last century. Almost as old as the century, born in 1902, he passed away in 1998. From the early thirties onwards he was one of the most revered artists in Iceland as well as the most controversial of his kind. He was one of the leading socialist voices in Iceland and a scourge of the bourgeoisie. However after Laxness received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1955, , the number of his enemies rapidly dwindled and in the last years of his life his towering status was hardly contested. Without a hint of irony he was generally referred to, whether by the public or literary scholars, as The Nobel Scald. One of his biographers, Halldór Guðmundsson, called him the last national poet in Europe. He became an institution in Icelandic culture, a standard by which literature was measured. In the last few years, however, Halldor Laxness, the man and institution, has apparently been undergoing a certain revision. Some scholars and amateurs, have taken the myth of Laxness to task, some in positive, fruitful ways, while others seem bent on judging and sentencing him for his political commitment, thus, totally disregarding his literary contribution.

Laxness' awe-inspiring status in the cultural history of Iceland is the starting point for Hallgrimur Helgason's novel The Author of Iceland (Höfundur Íslands). The novel begins as the writer Einar J. Grimsson awakes from death in a novel he has written himself. Einar bears a striking resemblance to Laxness and the novel in which he wakes up resembles to Independent People (Sjalfstætt folk) , Laxness' most famous novel. This set-up affords Helgason all sorts of intricate language twists and stylistic acrobatics concerning the relation of text and reality. Einar J. Grimsson gets to try on his own skin that "there is nothing outside the text". But he is also forced to settle the accounts of his own life as a writer and a radical socialist in the 20. century.

In this way, The Author of Iceland contains at least three books. Firstly, the novel is a study of the cultural history of Iceland; secondly, it is an account of the relation between author, work and "reality"; and thirdly, it is a first-class narrative of rural life, perhaps second only to Independent People . The characters in the story that the author gets stuck in are full-fledged and three-dimensional and not just two-dimensional parts of the setting. The reader is liable to get caught up in their destinies, until jarred by the text into a discussion about the relations between the author, text and tradition. The Author of Iceland is thus in part a cultural history of Iceland in the twentieth century, the source of lively discussions about the relations between literature and society and about the role of the author in that age of extremes that created such writers as Halldór Laxness and Einar J. Grimsson. The novel makes one think about Icelandic literature in the twentieth century, that at times seemed like a battle field of an acrimonious strife between left and right, between stagnant conservatism in national matters and modernisation.

Kristmann Guðmundsson the author - a casualty of the cold war?

The fate of the author Kristmann Guðmundsson is quite different from that of Halldór Laxness, but like Laxness he is the main character in a recent novel. Kristmann Guðmundsson moved to Norway as a young man and published several books there in the twenties and thirties. He was hugely popular in Norway and in the other Scandinavian countries. His works were translated into several languages, receiving critical and popular acclaim. He moved back to Iceland at the end of the thirties; his fame in Iceland, however, dwindled rapidly, especially in the post-war years. His new novels were not translated and his older works were not re-published. His writings, it seems, did not age well. What was considered daring in matters of romance in the thirties and forties, and which earned the author the epithet "DH. Lawrence of the North", in time appeared outdated and squeamish. Guðmundsson did not take his lessened status lightly; he became bitter and paranoid, seeing conspiracies against him everywhere. Perhaps his paranoia was not wholly unjustified; he took part in the cold war debates and received acrimonious criticism for his efforts; his ripostes were not any less acidulous. On top of that Gudmundson's private life - he married nine women in his time - became a source of endless gossip.

The novel Cities and Deserts (Borgir og eyðimerkur) by Sigurjon Magnusson does not resemble The Author of Iceland in the least. This is a short novel centered on a single event in the author's life; the reader does not get a chance to follow the protagonist beyond life and death as in Helgason's novel. Cities and Deserts recounts a few days in 1964 when Guðmundsson is waging a legal battle, a libel suit, with a young writer, Thor Vilhjálmsson, who declared in a magazine article that to award Guðmundsson the state's writer's grant was "like spitting in the face of one and all true artists in the country, and to piss on the whole nation." In the middle of the trial, Guðmundsson withdraws for two days and goes back to his old home in Hveragerdi, a small town 30 km east of Reykjavik. Once he is there, he meditates on his life and career, especially after his return to Iceland. Cities and Deserts is first and foremost a psychological as well a cultural saga. The focus is on the reception of Guðmundsson's writings and the cultural situation in which he found himself in the post-war years. The portrait that the reader is presented with is that of a bitter and opinionated man. This is a rather one-sided picture and the opinions of his adversaries are never presented except in Guðmundsson's own words. Guðmundsson's paranoia is almost Kafkaesque; everywhere he sees conspiracies and enemies lying in wait to trip him.

One of the characters in the story is Thor Vilhjálmsson, who is still alive and well. The critique the book received and Vilhjálmsson's own comments raised demands in the media that Vilhjálmsson himself participate in the reckoning of accounts inherent in Magnusson's novel.

The demise of the political author?

Icelandic novels in the 20th century often focused on the interpretation of the recent past and the development of society. At the dawn of a new century this realism has turned into literary history, as well as history. The authors who shaped the culture and politics in Iceland in the last century are the subject matter now. Perhaps this is a sign of death of the all-important role that writers had in Icelandic culture then. Ironically, the authors who still manage to ignite debates nowadays are the same that did so seventy years ago; they appear as literary-historical spectres, brought back to life by their colleagues in the present.