“Independent People,” by
Halldor Laxness, 1946
This book won the Nobel
Prize for Literature back when and is probably unknown to most. It is a social-realist Icelandic tale set in the
period before, during and after WWI. It
is reminiscent of the Scandinavian-U.S. writers like Knut Hamsun or O.E.
Rolvaag, or in the tradition of Zola, Gogol and Hardy – high bourgeois fiction
prior to modernism. The graphic and
detailed descriptions of peasant life in remote parts of Iceland are
thorough and populist.
 |
| Icelandic Sheep are Better than People. |
The odd part is that this
book ostensibly tells the story of a flinty ‘crofter’ who worships his sheep
over everything else and you can’t tell if Laxness is making fun of this farmer
or celebrating him. Bjartur of
Summerhouses first survives as hired labor for his Bailiff, a local
gentry. Then he buys a sheep-farm on marginal
land in a mountain valley, christening it "Summerhouses," which has to be a joke. After a long period of struggle and a short period of sudden prosperity his property is foreclosed on after he builds a too-expensive
house. In the process he loses his
virtual daughter Asta Sollilja, several sons, two wives and some babies, and
mostly cares about his sheep as an ‘independent’ man.
The refrain ‘independent
man’ reoccurs constantly, as Bjartur never accepts help nor evidently gives
it. He loves his sheep, which are the economic
foundation of his life. In one episode,
Bjartur goes looking for a lost sheep while his wife is in labor, and she is
dead upon his return. His oldest son
leaves the turf-covered cottage in the middle of a winter-storm in distress and
Bjartur finds his body in the spring, and thinks no more of it. He throws his pregnant daughter Asta out of
the croft-house and she stumbles away almost shoeless. A competent housekeeper who comes to live in
his house is also told to leave after bringing home too many fine things from a
shopping trip to town. He will be the
recipient of no ones charity.
Bjartur is almost a
caricature of the backward farmer. He loves
old sagas and lives in the cultural past, dislikes women, never spends a dime
he doesn’t have to, works like a dog, puts up with every physical discomfort as
if it was nothing, and has no emotional attachment to his children or wives –
at least that he lets on about. His take
on the world is intentionally obtuse and bad-tempered. He initially refuses to join the collective
society, preferring to owe his debt to a rich merchant instead. Other farmers are smart enough to be kind to
their wives and children, who grow up to help on the farmsteads, but not
Bjartur. The only son still living with
him failed to sail to America
due to an absurd romantic attachment with a rich man’s daughter, and got stuck
in Iceland. Otherwise he too would be gone.
In the very end, after being
foreclosed upon, Bjartur changes. He allows
his last son to join a bunch of Bolshevik workers who are on strike in the port city
of Fjord, as
they wait for an attack by police. He
accepts bread stolen by a striker from a rich landlord’s wife – something no
‘independent’ man would have ever done before.
And he finally but accidentally visits his lost daughter and her two
children in their poverty-stricken hut in Fjord and decides to help them out. Ultimately he realizes complete
‘independence’ is impossible.
Laxness carefully describes
the cycles of disease, debt, boredom, really bad weather, death, ignorance, superstition,
prudery, politics, loans, fake social-democracy and the one period of prosperity during
WWI that the crofters lived through. Laxness
makes constant fun of the Christian religion, which Bjartur also has no truck
with. Laxness implies that an evil
spirit named ‘Kolumkilli’ supposedly living in Bjartur’s hills to haunt the poor farmers is really the ghost of Icelandic society, not magic. Kolumkilli is not the reason Bjartur is
doomed – it is because of the functioning of Icelandic capitalism at this time.
For all those Leninists
who never read fiction, please see the recent article in the Guardian
about Lenin’s close reading of Russian fiction.
Lenin sometimes characterized his enemies as characters in some of the novels
he carefully read. Fiction is many times
more factual than ‘fact,’ as even Lenin knew, and this book certainly proves
that. Take heed. Don't be a Bjartur!
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/25/lenin-love-literature-russian-revolution-soviet-union-goethe
Red Frog
April 3, 2017
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