Under the Glacier (2 page)

In
Under the Glacier
, when the generic Naive Young Man receives his charge from the bishop of Iceland to investigate the goings-on at Snæfells, he protests that he is completely unqualified for the mission. In particular—“for the sake of appearances,” he adds slyly—he instances his youth and lack of authority to scrutinize a venerable old man’s discharge of his pastoral duties, when the words of the bishop himself have been ignored. Is the young man—the reader is told that he is twenty-five and a student—at least a theological student? Not even. Has he plans to be ordained? Not really. Is he married? No. (In fact, as we learn, he’s a virgin.) A problem then? No problem. To the worldly bishop, the lack of qualifications of this Candide-like young Icelander is what makes him the right person. If the young man were qualified, he might be tempted to judge what he sees.

All the young man has to do, the bishop explains, is keep his eyes open, listen, and take notes; that the bishop knows he can do, having observed the young man take notes in shorthand at a recent synod meeting, and also using the—what’s it called? a phonograph? It was a tape recorder, says the young man. And then, the bishop continues, write it all up. What you saw and heard. Don’t judge.

Laxness’s novel is both the narrative of the journey and the report.

A philosophical novel generally proceeds by setting up a quarrel with the very notion of novelistic invention. One common device is to present the fiction as a document, something found or recovered, often after its author’s death or disappearance: research or writings in manuscript, a diary, a cache of letters.

In
Under the Glacier
, the anti-fictional fiction is that what the reader has in hand is a document prepared or in preparation, submitted rather than found. Laxness’s ingenious design deploys two notions of “a report”: the report to the reader, sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the form of unadorned dialogue, which is cast as the material, culled from taped conversations and observations from shorthand notebooks, of a report that is yet to be written up and presented to the bishop. The status of Laxness’s narrative is something like a Moebius strip: report to the reader and report to the bishop continue to inflect each other. The first-person voice is actually a hybrid voice; the young man—whose name is never divulged—frequently refers to himself in the third person. “The undersigned” he calls himself at first. Then “Emissary of the Bishop,” abbreviated to “EmBi,” which quickly becomes “Embi.” And he remains the undersigned or Embi throughout the novel.

The arrival of the emissary of the bishop of Iceland is expected, Embi learns when he reaches the remote village by bus one spring day; it’s early May. From the beginning, Embi’s picturesque informants, secretive and garrulous in the usual rural ways, accept his right to interrogate them without either curiosity or antagonism. Indeed, one running gag in the novel is that the villagers tend to address him as “bishop.” When he protests that he is a mere emissary, they reply that his role makes him spiritually consubstantial with the bishop. Bishop’s emissary, bishop—same thing.

And so this earnest, self-effacing young man—who refers to himself in the third person, out of modesty, not for the usual reason—moves from conversation to conversation, for this is a novel of talk, debate, sparring, rumination. Everyone whom he interviews has pagan or post-Christian ideas about time and obligation and the energies of the universe: the little village at the foot of a glacier is in full spiritual molt. Present, in addition to elusive pastor Jón—who, when Embi finally catches up with him (he now earns a living as the jack-of-all-trades for the whole district), shocks the youth with his sly theological observations—is an international conclave of gurus, the most eminent of which is Dr. Godman Syngmann from Ojai, California. Embi does not aspire to be initiated into any of these heresies. He wishes to remain a guest, an observer, an amanuensis: his task is to be a mirror. But when eros enters in the form of the pastor’s mysterious wife, Úa, he becomes—first reluctantly, then surrendering eagerly—a participant. He wants something. Longing erupts. It becomes his journey, his initiation, after all. (“The report has not just become part of my own blood—the quick of my life has fused into one with the report.”) The journey ends when the revelatory presence proves to be a phantom, and vanishes. The utopia of erotic transformation was only a dream, after all. But it is hard to undo an initiation. The protagonist will have to labor to return to reality.

Dream novel.

Readers will recognize the distinctive dream world of Scandinavian folk mythology, in which the spiritual quest of a male is empowered and sustained by the generosity and elusiveness of the eternal feminine. A sister to Solveig in Ibsen’s
Peer Gynt
and to Indra in Strindberg’s
A Dream Play
, Úa is the irresistible woman who transforms: the witch, the whore, the mother, the sexual initiator, wisdom’s fount. Úa gives her age as fifty-two, which makes her twice as old as Embi—the same difference of age, she points out, as Saint Theresa and San Juan de la Cruz when
they
first met—but in fact she is a shape-shifter, immortal. Eternity in the form of a woman. Úa has been pastor Jón’s wife (although she is a Roman Catholic), the madam of a brothel in Buenos Aires, a nun, and countless other identities. She appears to speak all the principal languages. She knits incessantly: mittens, she explains, for the fishermen of Peru. Perhaps most peculiarly, she has been dead, conjured into a fish, and preserved up on the glacier until a few days earlier, and has now been resurrected by pastor Jón, and is about to become Embi’s lover.

This is perennial mythology, Nordic style, not just a spoof of the myth. As Strindberg put it in the preface to his forgotten masterpiece,
A Dream Play
: “Time and space do not exist.” Time and space are mutable in the dream novel, the dream play. Time can always be revoked. Space is multiple.

Strindberg’s timelessness and placelessness are not ironic, as they are for Laxness, who scatters a few impure details in
Under
the Glacier
—historical grit that reminds the reader this is not only the folk time of Nordic mythology but also that landmark year of self-loving apocalyptic yearning: 1968. The book’s author, who published his first novel when he was nineteen and wrote some sixty novels in the course of his long (he died at ninety-five) and far from provincial life, was already sixty-six years old. Born in rural Iceland, he lived in the United States in the late 1920s, mostly in Hollywood. He hung out with Brecht. He spent time in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. He had already accepted a Stalin Peace Prize (1952) and a Nobel Prize in Literature (1955). He was known for epic novels about poor Icelandic farmers. He was a writer with a conscience. He had been obtusely philo-Soviet (for decades) and was then interested in Taoism. He read Sartre’s
Saint Genet
and publicly decried the American bases in Iceland and the American war on Vietnam. But
Under the Glacier
does not reflect any of these literal concerns. It is a work of supreme derision and freedom and wit. It is like nothing else Laxness ever wrote.

Comic novel.

The comic novel also relies on the naive narrator: the person of incomplete understanding, and inappropriate, indefatigable cheerfulness or optimism. Pastor Jón, Úa, the villagers: everyone tells Embi he doesn’t understand. “Aren’t you just a tiny bit limited, my little one?” Úa observes tenderly. To be often wrong, but never disheartened, gamely acknowledging one’s mistakes, and soldiering on—this is an essentially comic situation. (The comedy of candor works best when the protagonist is young, as in Stendhal’s autobiographical
La Vie de Henr
y
Brulard
.) An earnest, innocent hero to whom preposterous things happen attempts, for the most part successfully, to take them in his stride. That the nameless narrator sometimes says “I” and sometimes speaks of himself in the third-person introduces a weird note of depersonalization, which also evokes laughter. The rollicking mixture of voices cuts through the pathos; it expresses the fragile false confidence of the comic hero.

What is comic is not being surprised at what is astonishing or absurd. The bishop’s mandate—to underreact to whatever his young emissary is to encounter—sets up an essentially comic scenario. Embi always underreacts to the preposterous situations in which he finds himself: for example, the food that he is offered every day by the pastor’s housekeeper during his stay—nothing but cakes.

Think of the films of Buster Keaton and Harry Langdon; think of the writings of Gertrude Stein. The basic elements of a comic situation: deadpan; repetition; defect of affectivity; deficit (apparent deficit, anyway) of understanding, of what one is doing (making the audience superior to the state of mind being represented); naively solemn behavior; inappropriate cheerfulness—all of which give the impression of childlikeness.

The comic is also cruel. This is a novel about humiliation— the humiliation of the hero. He endures frustration, sleep deprivation, food deprivation. (No, the church is not open now. No, you can’t eat now. No, I don’t know where the pastor is.) It is an encounter with a mysterious authority that will not reveal itself. Pastor Jón appears to have abdicated his authority by ceasing to perform the duties of a minister and choosing instead to be a mechanic, but he has actually sought access to a much larger authority—mystical, cosmic, galactic. Embi has stumbled into a community that is a coven of authority figures, whose provenance and powers he never manages to decipher. Of course they are rogues, charlatans—and they are not; or at any rate, their victims, the credulous, deserve them (as in a much darker, Hungarian novel about spiritual charlatans and rural dupes, Krasznahorkai’s
Satantango
). Wherever Embi turns, he does not understand, and he is not being helped to understand. The pastor is away; the church is closed. But unlike, say, K in Kafka’s
The Castle
, Embi does not suffer. For all his humiliations, he does not appear to feel anguish. The novel has always had a weird coldness. It is both cruel and merry.

Visionary novel.

The comic novel and the visionary novel also have something in common: non-explicitness. An aspect of the comic is meaninglessness and inanity, which is a great resource of comedy, and also of spirituality—at least in the Oriental (Taoist) version that attracted Laxness.

At the beginning of the novel, the young man continues for a bit to protest his inability to carry out the bishop’s mission. What am I to say? he asks. What am I to do?

The bishop replies: “One should simply say and do as little as possible. Keep your eyes peeled. Talk about the weather. Ask what sort of summer they had last year, and the year before that. Say that the bishop has rheumatism. If any others have rheumatism, ask where it affects them. Don’t try to put anything right. . . .”

More of the bishop’s wisdom:

“Don’t be personal—be dry! . . . Write in the third person as much as possible. . . . No verifying! . . . Don’t forget that few people are likely to tell more than a small part of the truth: no one tells much of the truth, let alone the whole truth. . . . When people talk they reveal themselves, whether they’re lying or telling the truth. . . . Remember, any lie you are told, even deliberately, is often a more significant fact than a truth told in all sincerity. Don’t correct them, and don’t try to interpret them either.”

What is this, if not a theory of spirituality and a theory of literature?

Obviously, the spiritual goings-on at Glacier have long since left Christianity behind. (Pastor Jón holds that all the gods people worship are equally good, that is, equally defective.) Clearly, there is much more than the order of nature. But is there any role for the gods—and religion? The impudent lightness with which the deep questions are raised in
Under the
Glacier
is remote from the gravitas with which they figure in Russian and in German literature. This is a novel of immense charm that flirts with being a spoof. It is a satire on religion, full of amusing New Age mumbo jumbo. It’s a book of ideas, like no other Laxness ever wrote.

Laxness did not believe in the supernatural. Surely he did believe in the cruelty of life—the laughter that is all that remains of the woman, Úa, to whom Embi had surrendered himself, and who has vanished. What transpired may seem like a dream, which is to say that the quest novel concludes with the obligatory return to reality. Embi is not to escape this morose destiny.

“Your emissary crept away with his duffel bag in the middle of the laughter,” Embi concludes his report to the bishop; so the novel ends. “I was a little frightened and I ran as hard as I could back the way I had come. I was hoping that I would find the main road again.”
Under the Glacier
is a marvelous novel about the most ambitious questions, but since it is a novel it is also a journey that must end, leaving the reader dazzled, provoked, and, if Laxness’s novel has done its job, perhaps not quite as eager as Embi to find the main road again.

Susan Sontag
New York City
December 2004

1

The Bishop
Wants an Emissary

The bishop summoned the undersigned to his presence yesterday evening. He offered me snuff. Thanks all the same, but it makes me sneeze, I said.

Bishop: Good gracious! Well I never! In the old days all young theologians took snuff.

Undersigned: Oh, I’m not much of a theologian. Hardly more than in name, really.

Bishop: I can’t offer you coffee, I’m afraid, because madam is not at home. Even bishops’ wives don’t stay home in the evenings any more: society’s going to pieces nowadays. Well now, my boy, you seem to be a nice young fellow. I’ve had my eye on you since last year, when you wrote up the minutes of the synod for us. It was a masterpiece, the way you got all their drivel down, word for word. We’ve never had a theologian who knew shorthand before. And you also know how to handle that phonograph or whatever it’s called.