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Philosophy and Literature, Volume 27, Number 1, April 2003, pp. 21-39
(Article)

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DOI: 10.1353/phl.2003.0034

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 Catherine Wilson 21

Catherine Wilson

CAPABILITY AND LANGUAGE IN

THE NOVELS OF TARJEI VESAAS

T hough relatively unknown to English-speaking readers, Tarjei

Vesaas (1897–1970) is recognized as one of the great Scandinavian
novelists and literary innovators of the last century. His oeuvre is
substantial, extending to thirty-four volumes published between 1923
and 1966, many of them translated into English and European lan-
guages. He was one of four nominees for the 1964 Nobel Prize in
literature, and he received a number of other awards and citations in
the course of his life. At the same time, his work has failed almost
entirely to generate a secondary literature going beyond plot summary,
stylistics, and moral approval, and even that literature remains strongly
regionalized.1 Vesaas wrote in nynorsk or “New Norwegian,” the minority
language of the country created from south-central dialects and distinct
from the official, bureaucratic bokmal. He settled permanently on a
farm in the remote Telemark district of Norway and assumed no role in
European culture as critic or essayist, refusing to discuss his own work
in literary or philosophical terms. As a result, analytic and comparative
studies have proved difficult to launch.
The present essay is intended to provide one such analytical study,
addressed specifically to the philosophical themes of ethical resigna-
tion, the precariousness of communication, and inwardness. These are
familiar themes in twentieth-century literature. In his study of the
“literary conquest of the void,” R. M. Adams shows how Moravia, Musil,
and Beckett amongst others make use of devices of paralysis, immobil-
ity, exhaustion, and incomprehension that have their origins in the
romantic literature of the nineteenth century, notably in Baudelaire

Philosophy and Literature, © 2003, 27: 21–39

22 Philosophy and Literature

and Gogol.2 Literary modernism rejected certain nineteenth-century

conventions of plot and character, but did not abandon the fascination
of the preceding century with nihilistic themes. Vesaas’s work demands
to be read in this literary context. The novels, at once semirealistic and
highly stylized, deal almost exclusively with rural people and their
struggles against the elemental forces of nature. The main characters
are often children and adolescents who suffer some degree of helpless-
ness. Simple contrasts are posed: warmth and cold; loss and retrieval,
childbirth and death. Agricultural cycle motifs abound. The choice of
protagonists and the dominance of vitalistic and biological themes pose
the threat of sentimentality and preciousness, but it is avoided by the
ubiquity of devastation and destruction in the moral landscape. Accord-
ing to Randi Brox’s note in the Dictionary of Scandinavian Literature, the
early novels in particular “advocate as the highest goal in life an
accepting, contented attitude toward the human condition.”3
This judgment reflects what might be termed a judicial-theological
picture of fiction. On this view, a novel constitutes a testing ground for
discovering what sort of world we live in and what pursuits are possible
and worthwhile. Various alternatives are set up as hypotheses, and
novels prove and disprove them through narrative demonstrations of
the causal effects of adopting them. False theories of the human world
and untenable values are subject to refutation. This template is surpris-
ingly useful, not only with respect to the nineteenth-century novel, with
its apparent tendency to confident judgment, but even to modern
fiction. Moravia, for example, can be seen to be awarding divergent
roles to characters and allowing the qualities they represent to struggle
for supremacy.4
Yet poststructuralist and postmodernist criticism have cast doubt on
the notion that, to the extent that they are important, such contests can
ever be decided, and it is increasingly clear that the greatest nineteenth-
century novelists, Hardy and Eliot, did not regard the hierarchy of
values as settled and demonstrable. Persons, we are coming to under-
stand, are more plausibly seen as sites of conflict; thus fictional
representations of persons are repositories of opposing values. Vesaas’s
novels reflect such an understanding of persons and values, and so the
judicial-theological template is inapplicable.
The critical view that Vesaas’s novels are essentially instructions in
adaptation is untenable, because the goal of adaptation to inevitabilities
cannot be found in any credible moral philosophy or in any important
work of literature without its complement; the possibility of boundless-
 Catherine Wilson 23

ness, freedom, and capability. The injunction to resign oneself to

inevitabilities, to comprehend one’s limited control over events, and to
accept one’s enmeshment in a nexus of natural and social laws,
combined with the promise that one will be better off if this advice is
followed, is familiar from certain branches of moral philosophy, notably
stoicism. But it is far from clear that stoicism expresses a coherent
moral attitude or that its historical representatives were in fact advocat-
ing the position described. Stoicism can only be hypocritical or
unbearable because, in its fixation on banishing anxiety, it cannot fail
to preclude hope. If one kind of human aspiration—that represented,
for example, by emotional investment in finite things—is declared
worthless and shown to be inevitably disappointing, another compel-
ling aspiration must be brought in to replace it. For Plato, the love of
virtue alone was not an adequate substitute—that can only turn the
poor deprived creature back on itself—but only the love of knowledge
or of higher things; the redirection of desire has to be outward from the
realm of other living human beings and oneself to the boundlessness of
the intellectual and spiritual.
Furthermore, the expression of a familiar but basically incoherent
moral attitude can hardly constitute a sufficient condition for greatness
in literature. Alone among critics, Walter Baumgartner has abandoned
traditional text-immanent methods in his critical study of Vesaas.
Baumgartner’s refusal to look for a superficial “message,” his dedicated
search to uncover the political, social, and economic circumstances of
Vesaas’s literary production, and his insistence on Vesaas as a reflective
participant in debates about poetic language and literary style (rather
than a daemonically inspired poet) is creditable. Baumgartner argues
that the lyric-archaic aura of the novels, the thematization of ineffabil-
ity, and the myth of the author as a being preserved from the social and
moral consequences of industrialization and urbanization, are in need
of demystification.5 But his approach has its own pitfalls: externalist
criticism can have the effect of draining a work of aesthetic meaning,
reducing the author to a machine that produces a predictable output
from a given input and destroying the illusion of an autonomous found
object on which our aesthetic experience seems in part to depend.
Vesaas is, accordingly, a “problem author.” Neither Brox’s internalistic
moralism nor Baumgartner’s externalistic demystification seem entirely
adequate to the text, and the aim of this essay is to supply a framework
that compensates for the deficiencies of both approaches.
24 Philosophy and Literature

II

Vesaas’s mode of writing might accurately be described as a rural

modernism. This description might seem puzzling in view of the associa-
tion between modern literature and urban sophistication. The discov-
ery of multiplicity in solitude and solitude in the experience of the
crowd is often said to be a discovery of the cosmopolitan flaneur.6 The
stimulus of commercial activity, the inhuman scale of city architecture,
the bombardment with messages, the juxtaposition of luxury goods and
poverty, the invisibility of industrial labor are said to produce a sense of
dislocation, while the escape from the grip of familial expectations and
hereditary roles enhances the sense of the arbitrary and contingent,
and proves the inadequacy of all partial representations. The confusion
of tongues and the meretricious nature of city life are tied to modernism’s
alleged mistrust of language. Rural modernism would thus seem a
contradiction in terms; yet Vesaas’s novels, whatever they owe to
cosmopolitan experience, transplant modern dislocation into the coun-
tryside, and close consideration reveals that there is more conflict in
them than initially meets the eye.
Vesaas’s fondness for oppositions does not come into play at this
point. There is no attempted validation of the country relative to the
city; no reactivity, but all the same the city and its manifestations are
systematically excluded from his work. Money, whose role in the life of
rural people is hardly negligible, is rarely mentioned in a Vesaas novel,
but work goes on incessantly inside and outside the household. The
rare images of leisure, two workmen sitting in the middle of the road
drinking bottles of beer in The Seed, are entirely stylized. Noise,
specialization, and class differentiation are absent. There are tele-
phones and automobiles, which have a sort of brute facticity in the
stories, but there are no direct references to fashions, political events,
extratextual personalities; no place-names or dates or other
temporalizing or localizing devices. Nature is evoked absentmindedly,
without the lengthy accounts of the pastoral tradition. There is a
pronounced lack of authorial concern for how people look, carry
themselves, dress, or speak, an indifference to the color of people’s eyes
or hair, to their qualities or accessories. Nor is there any psychologizing
in the usual sense; there are reports of their thoughts, but rarely of
their deliberations.
Such techniques of underdescription attempt to shift the balance of
responsibility from author to reader or observer, forcing the latter to
 Catherine Wilson 25

pay attention by depriving him of the structures which would otherwise

permit automatic processing. As James McFarlane observes, Vesaas’s
task “was to fine everything down in the greatest possible degree, to
increase the efficiency of his communication in a kind of engineering
sense, by improving the power-to-weight ratio, by giving it a super-
charged power of intimation and cutting away everything superfluous;
the result was to combine strength and lightness in a way reminiscent of
some of the best modern architecture. . . .”7 Settings—the two uncan-
nily identical houses, each with its set of cardboard parents reading in
the living-room, in which Aud and Torvil live in The Bridges—are
established with the wave of a hand; personalities are handed over
abruptly, as in the opening lines of Ice-Palace: “A young, white forehead
boring through the darkness. An eleven-year-old girl, Siss,” or by brief
repetitive strategies of indirection, as in The Bridges: “Everything about
her showed that she was normally a different person. This was not her
natural walk—she was built to walk with a light, elegant step. The whole
of her was like this.” Edvard Beyer points to the use, in such passages, of
the syntactic devices of spoken language—parataxis, asyndeton, and
ellipsis—devices of artificial incompetence by means of which the
didacticism of the nineteenth-century descriptive novel is eliminated.8
At the same time, Vesaas’s stories depart from the main lines of
literary modernism in their strict dramatic construction, which consis-
tently emerges in some ritual of revelation or purgation, and in their
fixation on erotic attraction and murder. Judged in absolute and
comparative terms, Vesaas’s novels are lacking in subtlety. We are
returned to an Atridean world in which people go mad in various ways
and, with surprising frequency, kill or cause the death of their near
relatives.9 Tragedy, as Aristotle said, has to be a family affair: there has to
be harm between people who know each other well,10 and this lesson is
well observed. There is, even in the most pastoral and hopeful of the
novels, a death with grotesque aspects to it; often the death of a child.
In The Tower, which remains untranslated, a baby has died after cutting
its hand on a piece of jagged metal in a scrapyard where the father
works tearing up old automobiles; the baby’s death unleashes grief and
irrational action—the brother’s and father’s obsessive construction of a
tower of scrap metal over the place where the baby was injured. In The
Seed, a stranger arrives on a remote and sheltered island seeking to
forget a gruesome explosion in a factory in which he was employed. He
accidentally observes a disturbed sow in a barn eating her offspring and
becomes deranged: “Something snapped, and blazed up, and it was
26 Philosophy and Literature

over. A shock ran through him as his reason burned up.” The visitor
murders a girl before being hounded and lynched by an angry mob led
by the girl’s brother. In The Bridges, two teenagers, Torvil and Aud, find
a dead newborn baby in the woods and shortly thereafter meet the
young mother who, in her pathos and self-possession, exerts a fascina-
tion over them both.11
Yet the novels are more than updated re-creations of classical tragedy.
Vesaas’s treatments lead both in the direction of the analytical detach-
ment of Robbe-Grillet, with its characteristic underinvolvement in its
subject matter, and to the Kafkaesque literature of anxiety, with its
characteristic overinvolvement. The approach to emotional content in
Vesaas is both oblique and magnified. We see again a rejection of the
conventions of the nineteenth-century bourgeois novel, in which the
authors, through various delaying and obscuring strategies, succeed in
coercing and cajoling the reader into assigning a high degree of
importance to events which are of no significance by the standards of
classical tragedy, such as the choice of a marriage partner by a middle-
class person.
The boundary between the truly shocking and the everyday horror of
the second page is no longer easy to fix. Our ways of reading and
writing about these things force us to vacillate uneasily between natural
and supernatural explanations. Our sociological acceptance of statis-
tics—so-and-so many murders per year between close family mem-
bers—sits in uneasy tension with our psychology, which looks for
extraordinary provocations, and our literary history, which assigns them
archetypal significance. Classical tragedy, even when it concerns itself
with the psychology of crime (that is, with reconstructing the first-
person experience of someone responding to an extraordinary provo-
cation), does not take into account the facts of statistical distribution
and inevitability. As Aristotle says gravely, “Tragedies are about a very
few families.”12 Valborg, who fails to keep her newborn infant alive in
The Bridges betrays the modern sensibility in that she not only adopts
the first-person stance but points to the sociological banality of her
story: “I didn’t want this to happen. I would have given anything in the
world for it not to happen. It was done before I was aware of it. These
things have been said a thousand times, beside the river, beside the
stones, beside deserted houses. A thousand times they have been just as
true and just as bitter.”
 Catherine Wilson 27

III
A similar pattern informs a number of the stories. Vesaas’s characters
find themselves at the limit of their ability to cope with some novelty,
and when they cannot escape from it—having nowhere to go—they
either withdraw into fantasy and self-destruction or else into an interim
state of suspended existence from which they eventually find their way
back. The optimistic novels deal with young people whose innate
resiliency seems to preserve them from collapse; the pessimistic novels
deal with adults in whom some fixed structure of need has taken hold,
and these end badly for all concerned. These works echo the theologi-
cal contrast between purity and corruption, but bring on none of the
usual engines of salvation: with Vesaas, we are always in the pagan world
in which character, rather than willing and election, is decisive.
Stuck fast in their village communities, Vesaas’s characters are
typically pushed beyond their ordinary limits by the arrival of a
newcomer into their small society. In the Bleaching Yard, John Tander’s
fate is decided when, against the background of his wife’s quietly
repressed sorrow at their inability to produce a living child, a fresh
young girl comes to work in their laundry and becomes a focus of
jealousy and desire. In The Birds, the outcome is determined by an
interloper who appears only in the last third of the book: the simple-
minded, inarticulate Mattis is unable to perform a normal job and lives
with his lonely and irritable middle-aged sister, who supports him. One
day he brings home a woodcutter, who becomes first a boarder and
then his sister’s lover. Mattis’s jealousy is aroused despite friendly
attempts by the woodcutter to help him attain self-sufficiency and, after
an impulsive suicide attempt in which he tries frantically to stuff
poisonous red mushrooms into his mouth, he formulates and carries
out, without fully meaning to do so, a clever and successful plan to
drown himself by sabotaging his own boat. In The Ice-Palace, an eleven-
year-old child new to the village school who shelters an inexpressible
secret wanders off, is walled up in a frozen cavern, and dies; the girl who
first befriended her makes an impassioned vow to keep her memory
alive forever and to resist secretly the efforts of the community to
resume its normal life.
Success and failure in the cyclical as well as the linear novels are
posited as adjustment or failure to adjust to the terms of reality as
dictated by public consensus: this means either giving up on or being
crushed by aggrandizing fantasies of possession and revenge. But in
28 Philosophy and Literature

general terms, the novel of adaptation can function only as the novel of
restitution. Adaptation is shown to be possible to the extent that it is
invested with transcendent possibilities, that it is recreated as a higher
object of devotion, even if that object is only the life of denial and
compromise. The novel of resignation and reconciliation with necessity
not only lives from its portrayal of antisocial passions and the continu-
ous possibility of flight from the values it portrays as triumphant, it
seeks always some synthesis in which the inevitable is able to take on the
promise of enchantment.
This pattern is apparent not only in The Ice-Palace and The Bridges, in
which a new love is promised in exchange for giving up the old one, but
in The Great Cycle, considered by some to be Vesaas’s most successful
novel. Following Per Bufast from early childhood through youth, the
novel depicts his upbringing on the farm, where he experiences the
rhythms of agricultural and biological existence—haying, calving, suck-
ling, slaughtering, weeding, plowing, and planting. One day, the six-
year-old Per is watching his father straining to dig a stone out of the
field. He is vaguely troubled by his father’s silence and intensity
throughout this process and by the frightening expression on his
father’s face. Per asks abruptly, “Are you going to dig until you’re
crazy?” His father drops the spade and grabs him:

He screamed in terror, “Let me go!”

But no, he had it coming to him; he knew it would come. Father’s grip,
and his face, told him that something important was coming. Father said
slowly without letting him go:
“You too will love the earth, Per. It’s all that matters.”13

“‘You will stay at Bufast to the end of your days,’” he tells him, a
prophecy which terrifies him then, and again when it is repeated a few
days later by a bureaucrat who has come around to interview farmers:
“He felt as if a wall were being lowered around him. No it was as if an
enormous mouth had opened and said crushing words and then
snapped shut, and would never open again. No, it wasn’t like that
either, but there were those big grownups standing there. . . . They
floored him with mysterious threats that burned into him so that he
seemed forced to become what they said.” The years pass, and Per’s
sickly younger brother dies in bed with him; he becomes estranged
from his second, stronger brother. There are more experiences, at once
ordinary and grave. He loses the girl he loves to his best friend. His
 Catherine Wilson 29

father dies, his mother becomes, in widowhood, a disturbing and

unfamiliar person, and he discovers at the end that he can love
someone else—not his first choice, but “something certain to hold
onto,” that he can marry Signe and remain on the farm. “Pressed to the
earth by the weight of a woman,” Per has mixed feelings: “She radiated
calm and peace. But she could not blind him; he had gone through a
hard apprenticeship in what work really is. He saw shadows in front of
him: hard work, debt, anxieties.” Even in the most constrained situa-
tion, doors and windows appear; and conversely, every action taken
towards escape produces a situation with its own inevitable limitations.
The farm means, in the literary code, what you want to get away from.
In Vesaas’s pessimistic novels, the physical confinement of the charac-
ters magnifies the effects of their slight initial instabilities. A newcomer
can destroy them because, faced with novelty and conflict, there is no
place for them to go except deeper into their own wrecked imagina-
tions: there is not sufficient buffering in the environment to absorb the
forces emanating from them. In that sense, the novels are about what
happens to people who live in the country, as opposed to the city. But
the farm, in the literary code, is not simply one place as opposed to
another, but the finitude of every place.
In their pessimism, the novels show the effects of real constraint. But
in their optimism, they suggest that there is nothing, in terms of the
intensity of the experiences involved, that can happen to anyone that
cannot happen to him on a farm or in a laundry-yard. Passion, jealousy,
and grief will visit there as anywhere else. No wide exposure, no urban
multiplicity is necessary, only ordinary proximity to others and chance
occurrences. The fear of the young Per is not that he will miss out on
life—he is only six years old—but that his life will be marked by
exhaustion, anger, and futility, as his father’s is. And, at the end of the
novel, he faces this inevitability gravely but not unhappily. The move-
ment from rebellion to acceptance of that life involves a change of
perception in which the limitations are converted into possibilities. A
persistent theme in moral philosophy, here repeated, is the idea that
freedom is to be found not in escaping the causal nexus but in
consciousness of it and in the attitude of acceptance. But moral
philosophy is silent about how this is to be accomplished, leading us to
suspect that this ratcheting down of expectations, if it is not to be
identical with despair, can only be achieved in the framework of erotic
promise, through boundlessness.
Within the novels, desire is bivalent: a form of bondage which
30 Philosophy and Literature

narrows and constricts the field of action and a form of liberation that
initiates new modes of thinking and seeing. For Jan in The Bleaching
Yard, the arrival of the young laundress is such a double-faced event: “As
soon as she arrived it was as if a new space opened up in him,
unimaginable and powerful as a revelation. Vera with piles of linen
around her. Vera in the midst of those shining heaps, forever! And no
one shall share this. That’s how it is. Just to look at and be near.”14 In The
Bridges, Valborg’s magnetism projects both an attraction and a repul-
sion which deforms every spatial and emotional constant existing
between the three participants, as Torvil’s bond to his old girlfriend
Aud is destroyed and replaced:

First stand and simply be aware of being together. But it was not possible.
There was something about Valborg that prevented it; she was stiff and
distant. On the other hand, the radiance over which she had no control
was alive and active.
. . . Light and darkness alternated, he saw nothing but Val who seemed
about to pitch forward—she who was so different from anything which he
had experienced before.
A number of thoughts flashed through his mind about Aud, about
himself and Aud, a series of pictures so long that there was no room for
them all . . .
His face brushed her hair. He stood, unsteady and uncertain . . .

The threat of radical exogamy in the form of marriage to someone of

unknown provenance—Valborg arrived by bus from a place she refuses
to name—who is either a child-murderess or close to it, and the betrayal
of local expectations is lifted by a moral action, Val’s withdrawing in
recognition of a prior claim. Yet the result is that the neutral-but-uneasy
brother-sister relation of Torvil and Aud is reconstituted; having been
driven apart, they are now able to come together. The same pattern
appears in Per’s changed relation to Signe, who now appears to him not
as one more familiar fixture of the closed society from which he cannot
escape, but as an object of possibility.

IV
Vesaas’s responsibility for the cultivation of his own myth—a myth of
spontaneous poetic creation unmediated by experience, reflection or
conversation—was considerable. On the basis of his early works, he
received travel grants and stipends that enabled him to visit other
 Catherine Wilson 31

European countries in the period of literary ferment between 1925 and

1934 when the works of Proust, Joyce, Kafka, Hesse, Brecht, and
Pirandello were coming to critical attention. Nevertheless, he remained
an observer, and, later in his life, interviews intended to explore the
origins of his work and his literary affiliations brought forth monosyl-
labic responses. His speech on the occasion of the award of the Venice
Trienniale prize for Vindane (The Winds) reinforces the picture he made
no attempt to correct of the grammatophobic naïf whose genuineness
and honesty are expressed in a few clumsy repetitive phrases: “I want to
say something about poetry. That is, we have not words in any language
to use. No tongue on earth can tell you exactly the truth about poetry—
and it is good so.”15
Confessing a lack of confidence in one’s own or anyone else’s use of
language is one of the better-known devices of modernism. But the
temptation to imagine that the novels make a statement about the
futility or inadequacy of language, that they are straightforward expres-
sions of the author’s own grammatophobia, or that they attempt to
induce a grammatophobic response in the audience should be re-
sisted.16 The literary context presupposes an author and an audience
who, whatever else is true of them, want to hear, write, listen, and read.
The apparent validation of renunciation and restriction is achieved
only by locating a means of escape and transcendence within the
framework of renunciation. A parallel situation obtains with respect to
silence and communication. A text-immanent valorization of silence
and ineffability can proceed only through the compensatory gift of the
possibilities of language, a showy display of its most emotionally invasive
poetic power.
On one level, then, Vesaas’s work gives us those statements of limits
familiar from modernist discourse: “One says far too many stupid
awkward things. Most often they are awkward. The things one says
usually seem to be left lying about on the floor like a pair of lopsided
shoes—while the things one wanted to say feel like birds in flight. To
keep silent about matters of importance is not just modesty. One’s
wretched tongue is wooden. Small matters are chatted about, blurted
out. One keeps silent about the rest until it is perhaps forgotten and
lying in various graves.” Mattis’s muteness and linguistic ineptitude in
the presence of “the clever ones” encourage the notion that a general
thesis about the inefficacy of language or the human use of it are being
presented: Vesaas claimed to identify himself with Mattis above all his
other characters. But these statements are contradicted by the strong
32 Philosophy and Literature

auditory character of the writing. Vesaas’s characters often seem to

perceive indistinctly; certainly we see them indistinctly; but they hear
clearly, and the attention of author and character to exactly what
people say and their timing in the delivery of their messages produces
the impression of hieratic weight and formality. For at the same time as
he appears to problematize ordinary spoken language, Vesaas evokes a
world of ambient meanings where one does not normally expect to find
them. After the discovery of the dead baby in the woods, Torvil waits for
his complicity in this secret to be found out:

Something is waiting. The air is charged with messages that never arrive.
You know they are here.
You turn towards an approaching, unknown sign, and feel what might
be a faint, muffled threat from it, although it does not seem to be going
to reveal itself. Even if you are with the others indoors, you are at the
same time in an empty room, with the message waiting outside. . . .
In any case, something precarious is waiting. It may step in through the
door as a person. A letter may quite easily come in the post. The
telephone may ring with a call from another part of the country.
It’s most likely to be the telephone, and that’s the worst. Harsh. Right
through your head. You stand nailed to the floor.17

In The Birds, a woodcock appears one day and flies over Mattis’s
house three times. He immediately recognizes this as the sign he has
been waiting for. Things are going to be different. That night he
dreams that a beautiful girl appears to him in a grove of trees and
Mattis, to whose efforts at self-expression people have hitherto reacted
with irritation or amusement, finds—astonishingly—that anything at all
that he says and does seems to have the right effect. It is he for a change
who is able to render another speechless and compliant.

She waved her arm and all around the air was filled with the song of
birds.
“Yes, and you were born in the flight of the woodcock,” Mattis began,
“and you’ve long been in my thoughts. If there’s something you want to
say, you must say it now.”
“Say?” she said.
“Yes.”
“No there’s nothing more I want to say now. . . .”
. . . All his wishes were coming true. And what was more he was able to
say things in the right way.
 Catherine Wilson 33

“Now you do just what you want,” he said to her. “You’re wonderful.”
She came nearer at once.18

That communication of a most urgent and personal nature comes in

dreams or through winged messengers is a familiar theme of romanti-
cism; in Vesaas’s hands, the motif is stripped of its pretensions. The
message, the certainty of its reception, and the mode of its transmission
undergo a sort of reduction to absurdity.

“You are you,” a voice inside him seemed to be saying, at least that was
what it sounded like to him.
It was spoken in the language of birds. Written in their writing.
He was standing in a dried up patch of bog right under the woodcock’s
path, standing looking spellbound, reading a message or whatever it was
that had been left there for him.
In the smooth brown surface of the marshy soil were the pointed
imprints of a bird’s feet. A number of tiny deep round holes had been
dug as well.19

In The Seed, the mystical acquires an opposite valence in the seduction

of the girl Inge by the murderer who has picked up on her knowledge
of botany. Communication is diabolical: “She thought: we have the
same interests. . . . His burnt out brain was working rapidly and
precisely. He had grasped his chance. Knew just what to do. Did it
quickly and surely. ‘Well I can’t resist that,’ he said, and let his face
shine at her so that she stood there blind and happy.” In Spring Night,
silence is the final move of self-defense and aggression of someone who
is about to be annihilated; when someone has ceased to talk, his
grievances against the world are such that they can never be set right. In
the final move in their long war of nerves, Kristine, one of a carload of
unexpected visitors, has become mute and paralyzed in the presence of
her husband, a fluttering, chattering, ineffectual man. She can both
move and speak, but only in the presence of fourteen-year-old Olaf,
who is baffled and fascinated by her. When she dies of shock after her
husband clumsily crashes their car into the side of the house, there is
general relief. But Olaf, who has found a companion, or so he thinks, in
the arrival of thirteen-year-old Gudrun at the end of this long verklaerte
Nacht of opening and closing doors, is brought up against the arbitrary
and immovable silence of the living. Gudrun is only passing through:
34 Philosophy and Literature

“You could write to me!” he said impulsively, desperately.

“Write?”
It was difficult for her to make her voice sound.
“What’ll I write about?”
Another shock.
“Isn’t there anything?” he asked in despair. He could find no other
words to express it—but though only thirteen years old, she understood
it immediately.
“No—” she said, and blushed.20

Is the moral that happiness is to be found only in the imagination and

that reality is a series of crashes and departures? This conclusion is
unwarranted. As Baumgartner points out, the high point of Mattis’s
brief and unsatisfactory life is his conversation with two real girls who
go for a ride in his boat, not with the girl of his dreams; Olaf’s brush
with happiness involves the substitution of a real Gudrun for a fantasy-
girl who used to appear to hold long conversations with him at his attic
window. Still, the apparent text-immanent decision in favor of actual as
opposed to imaginary connection is less definite than it seems, a brief
stopping in a world which is moving on. The Other always has things to
do. The Gudrun-Olaf encounter reduces to a parody or metonymy of
an embrace when they measure their arms against each other’s to see
whose arm is longer, but it gives rise to one of the most beautiful lines
in literature: “Their eyes rested in one another’s for a moment.”
Absorption can only be prolonged in art, that is to say in imagination,
where one is permitted to look and rest as long as one likes. In The Ice-
Palace, the love affair between the girl Siss and the dead Unn, the
disciplined perfection of the life of inwardness and devotion to the
craft of memory, is the analogue of aesthetic absorption: “So Unn could
not be blotted out. This was something that came about in Siss’s
bedroom. There the dearly-bought promise took shape. After a week
she was able to get up. A week of driving snow against the window panes
and many wakeful hours at night, with the knowledge that it was
snowing harder than ever—because everything about Unn had to be
blotted out. It was to be emphasized that she had gone for good, that it
was useless to search. Then resistance rose up strong and shining.”21
Involvement in fictional representations is a measure of the resistance
we make to the evanescence of the moment. This resistance, when it
takes root too strongly, presents the danger of imprisonment and
immobilization, of becoming frozen. Siss is saved from this fate by two
real people, Unn’s aunt—“Everything collected there, all lines of
 Catherine Wilson 35

communication met in this lonely woman, Unn’s sole anchor. The

blind lanes met at a clear, tearless point of intersection”—and a boy her
own age who first digs her out of a snowdrift with the tip of his boot,
and then recognizes and approaches her again in the spring when the
ice palace on the river melts and collapses. The decision for outward-
ness is almost a requirement of the novel; no other literary resolution,
except the drastic Wertherian one of self-annihilation, is really intelli-
gible. All the same, the competition between the real and the imaginary
is itself enacted in the imaginary realm, in the realm in which the
author maintains control over the sequence of events, where all unfolds
as it should. So fiction lets us perform, inwardly, the drama of our
outward encounter with the recalcitrance of the world.

V
Vesaas’s novels do not value or otherwise recommend submission to
a life of rural confinement, nor do they promote acceptance of our
inability to talk in ways that are not merely chatter. Vesaas does not, as
is sometimes said, advocate community over aesthetic isolation, or
adaptation to actuality over imagination or, as other, somewhat op-
posed, critical judgments would have it, silence over discursiveness.22
The processes at work are comparable rather to the Proustian process
by which the problematic social existence of the aging subject is set
right by the emergence of two related persons, an introspecting subject
who finds in involuntary memory the enchanted world of his youth,
and an author who, in writing down the contents of those memories
and thus fixing the impermanent, consciously confers a value on them
which, as mere experiences, they did not have. Proust does not try to
adjudicate between society—with its beauties, pleasures, and cruelties—
and solitude; the life of the text resides in the interdependency of two
superficially opposed modes.
Modernist literature’s emphasis on the individual and the limitations
of his situation raises the problem of the political disengagement. How
is it possible to avoid a properly political treatment of political events,
events in which individuals lose life, identity, or freedom of action
through the unrestrained and unrestrainable actions of others? Written
five years after The Seed in 1945, The House in Darkness is a study of
occupation, resistance, betrayal, and execution set in the rooms and
corridors of a large mansion. Although Vesaas’s moral stance con-
trasted with the notorious willingness of Knut Hamsen to write and
36 Philosophy and Literature

lecture as an apologist for fascism during the same period, this indirect,
metaphorical method of dealing with the subject of the war raises
questions about the moral evasiveness or damaging aestheticism of
subjective literature, particularly literature with a primitivistic stamp.
The fascist valorization of Blut und Boden—the Heideggerian celebra-
tion of rootedness and agriculturalism against wanderers and city
people—seems to place an entire genre under accusation.
The problem of political art is created by two intuitions: first, that
artistic expression, even if it does not have an influence on the course
of the world, is always about the state of the world at the time it occurs;
second, that it is escapist to be concerned with the nuances of
experience when the survival of millions is threatened. Following
Lukács and the Marxian tradition in criticism, Baumgartner argues that
the writer cannot choose whether his work is to have a social and
political context, nor can he choose whether to be influenced or not by
that context. The adoption of a subjective perspective, the cultivation of
primitivistic techniques and rural-archetypal themes embodies, he said,
a recognition of antithetical realities, which the author seeks to evade
or resist.23 But the requirement that literature in terrible times should
be politically engaged can be impossible to fulfill decently. In this
connection, it is well to remember Adorno’s celebrated doctrine that,
in the aftermath of the second World War, resistance to terror and
oppression is possible through subversion of established forms alone,
and not through the explicit handling of political content. Certainly,
the feeling has been widespread until recently that it would be wrong to
treat the rise of fascism and its genocidal episodes in any classical
aesthetic framework. For such treatments must, as Aristotle says, make
the sequence of actions seem plausible and even necessary. They imply
a certain degree of rationalization (“Given the circumstances it was
inevitable”) and relativization (“Such things have happened before and
will doubtless happen again”). Between inappropriate attempts at
mastery and irresponsible avoidance, there would seem to be little
room for an appropriate politically informed art that speaks to its
contemporaries about its own times.
As Baumgartner repeatedly insists, it is essential for the critic not to
be taken in, not to lose his bearings, not to accept the author’s system
at face value. Yet many readers do resist the notion that their principle
task is to unmask the author and expose his stratagems and magic
tricks. The reader’s notion that the writer moves him by angelic means,
not by virtue of poetic mechanisms and psychological predispositions,
 Catherine Wilson 37

but only as a voice which begins to talk and to which he finds himself
compelled to listen, is illusion only, for any art that speaks to more than
one person must work by a subtle but lawful craft. And Vesaas’s works
ironize this reader; those in the novels who hear these special voices
speaking only to them, such as Mattis with his woodcock, have been
caught up in foolish or even dangerous delusions. Yet they do not only
ironize him; they are meant for this reader, too.
“The threat of catastrophe,” Beyer says, “the dangerous forces in the
mind, delusions, isolation, crippling guilt,” have furnished Vesaas with
his subjects, “but also life’s primary healthiness as it is revealed in plants
and animals, in children and in young love. . . .” But such structuralist
criticism does not fit its subject. Vesaas’s habit of furnishing us with such
contrasts, it is true, encourages it, but only so far. Everyone can be said
to know that health is better than sickness, sociability than isolation,
flexibility than rigidity, and resignation than futile resistance, and we do
not have to read novels and stories in order to find this out. But we do
read in order to understand how sickness and health can alternate and
perhaps be mistaken for one another in a single life, how isolation can
occur in the midst of sociability, how difficult it can be to judge whether
to give way or resist. The voice of the narrator tells us about our trials,
and it gives us the language of resolution. “There is a grave for such
things,” Valborg says. “You put your burden into it and are freed.” But
it does not resolve them, and we should be no more taken in by the
literary surface in this than by other superficialities. The novel of
finitude and renunciation depends on glimpses into the possibility of
transcendence; the novel of muteness and linguistic incompetence not
only employs the most artful and direct language but reveals its subjects
to be sensitively registering instruments of ambient information; and
the novel of interiority and isolation represents capability and connec-
tion as possibilities that can be realized even in the most constrained
external conditions.

University of British Columbia

1. The following, together with his autobiography and a volume of poems, have
appeared in English: The Seed (1965), Spring Night (1965), The Birds (1968), The Bridges
(1970), The Bleaching Yard (1981), The Ice-Palace (1966), The Great Cycle (1967), The
Floodtide of Fate (1960). In 1952, Vindane (The Winds) won the Venice Trienniale prize for
38 Philosophy and Literature
the best collection of stories of its year, and in 1964, the Nordic Council Prize went to
The Ice-Palace by unanimous vote. James W. McFarlane in his survey of Norwegian
literature describes The Bleaching Yard as one of the most remarkable novels of the age.
Apart from a number of memoirs and appreciations in Norwegian, there exist only two
monographs: in English, see Kenneth G. Chapman, Tarjei Vesaas (New York: Twayne,
1971); in German, see note 5 below. See however the appreciative article by Edvard
Beyer, “Tarjei Vesaas,” Scandinavica 3 (1964): 97–109; also Heiko Uecker’s entry in Die
Klassiker der skandinavischen Literatur (Dusseldorf: Econ, 1990).
2. Robert M. Adams, Nil: Episodes in the Literary Conquest of the Void during the Nineteenth
Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966).
3. Dictionary of Scandinavian Literature, ed. Virpi Zuck (New York: Greenwood Press,
1990), p. 640.
4. In Moravia’s A Woman of Rome, Adriana is awarded a surplus of resources—
emotional and practical—that enable her to cope with the spectacular incompetence of
the hapless student she adores who cannot talk, love, or succeed in effective political
action; and in Conjugal Love, the enervated aristocrat and failed author Silvio Baldeschi
faces off against the competence of his own skilled barber to whose libertine capability
his wife succumbs.
5. W. Baumgartner, Tarjei Vesaas: Eine aesthetische Biographie (Neumuenster, 1976).
6. G. M. Hyde, “The Poetry of the City,” in Modernism: 1890–1930, ed. Malcolm
Bradbury and James McFarlane (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), p. 337; see also the
articles collected under the section-heading A Geography of Modernism, pp. 95–172.
7. James Walter McFarlane, Ibsen and the Temper of Norwegian Literature (London:
Oxford University Press, 1960), p. 184.
8. Beyer, “Tarjei Vesaas,” pp. 100–105.
9. Examples of intrafamilial lethality abound: in The Great Cycle, Asmund’s scream kills
his sick brother; Hjalmar’s crashing the car into the house kills his wife in Spring Night;
the death of the baby in The Tower is felt to be its father’s fault; Elise inadvertently
contributes to her husband’s harrowing death in The Bleaching Yard.
10. Aristotle, Poetics 13.
11. Chapman, Tarjei Vesaas, p. 82. The Seed, trans. Kenneth G. Chapman (London:
Peter Owen, 1966), p. 34. The Bridges, trans. Elizabeth Rokkan (New York: William
Morrow, 1970), pp. 154–55.
12. Aristotle, Poetics 14.
13. The Great Cycle, trans. Elizabeth Rokkan (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1967),
p. 18.
14. The Bleaching Yard, trans. Elizabeth Rokkan (London: Peter Owen, 1981), p. 7.
15. Baumgartner, Tarjei Vesaas, pp. 305ff., 372.
16. See the discussion of Samuel Beckett in D. Z. Phillips, “Meaning, Memory, and
Longing,” in Through a Darkening Glass: Philosophy, Literature and Cultural Change (Notre
Dame: University of Indiana, 1982).
 Catherine Wilson 39
17. The Bridges, p. 61.
18. The Birds, trans. Torbjorn Stoverud and Michael Barnes (London: Peter Owen,
1968), p. 30.
19. Ibid., p. 75.
20. Spring Night, trans. Kenneth G. Chapman (London: Peter Owen, 1972), p. 164.
21. The Ice-Palace, trans. Elizabeth Rokkan (London: Peter Owen, 1966), p. 98.
22. Sven A. Rossel, A History of Scandinavian Literature 1870–1980, trans. A. C. Ulmer
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1982).
23. Baumgartner, Tarjei Vesaas, preface, ix.