Jens Bjørneboe
The Fear of America Within Us
(Excerpts)
Translated by Esther Greenleaf
Mürer
Jens Bjørneboe, "Frykten for Amerika i Oss".
Originally published in Spektrum, 1952. Norge, mitt Norge (Oslo:
Pax, 1968); Samlede Essays: Politikk (Oslo, Pax, 1996), 12-21.
©1968, 1996 by Pax Forlag A/S. English translation ©1999
by Esther Greenleaf Mürer.
We live between two poles of dread. One of
them lies up in plain daylight; it is the fear of Russia and
of many things whose nature we know: hunger, bombs, mass transports
and concentration camps. That is an officially accepted, recognized
dread.
The other pole lies deep down in our unconscious
and in the dark. And its emanations are noticed only by those
who are sufficiently sensitive or young. It is the terror of
America and of something no one can rightly identify. It can
take the form of modernistic poetry or of an ordinary nervous
breakdown. Or it can be camouflaged and made operational by an
arsenal of communist slogans: warmongering, capitalism, imperialism,
etc. But there is no getting rid of it. For the dread of America
is the fear of an inner state, of America within us.
In Americanism's footsteps follows an attitude
which impoverishes life and makes death meaningless. Death is
an uninvited guest, whose arrival cannot be forestalled with
the help of refrigerators and illustrated magazines. Life, on
the other hand - oh, we know what life is: it is canned pineapple.
The media chosen by the U.S.A. to represent
it in Europe continually proclaim that the secret of life is
solved: the radio-refrigerator is what humanity was waiting for.
And furthermore the new Buick model will have 170 horsepower.
The theme runs like a red thread through everything we hear from
America: the great democracy is inhabited by humans of a new
kind, by splendid, half-mechanical giant babies who live on canned
tomato juice and synthetic vitamins. In America they add artificial
sweetener and vanilla flavoring to the chocolate. Those super-red
apples have long been a well-known product of American culture.
But last Christmas I came across some oranges of particularly
tempting, chrome-yellow splendor. When I pressed the first one,
the color came off on my fingers. And sure enough: on the rind
was stamped "Color added." The color was as false as
a technicolor film. For me that was a novelty at the time.
While Russia offers us vistas of hell on earth
here and now, the U.S.A. can treat us to paradise on earth. But
the thing about this paradise is that when you've lived there
for a while, the apples and the oranges need makeup in order
to be noticeable. Life must be colorized.
America's weakness for the artificial is something
quite different from a simple lack of culture. It is a sickness,
a kind of premature aging. The paradise of American civilization
has produced the Rockefeller physiognomy, and therewith a peculiar,
ambiguous symbol: the fetus and the old man in one. It is the
unborn and the dying, and, be it noted, something is dying which
does not want to die. The dread of death is companion to the
appetite for life.
The fear of death is the great night casting
its shadow over the American paradise. Thomas Wolfe has described
it unforgettably. And the future's first social task must then
be to produce a race of humans too dull to know about death.
Many feel instinctively that this is a very
high price to pay for colored oranges.
It may be appropriate here to recall a burial
custom which has long been on the rise in the United States.
It is a variation on lying in state which has a very strange
effect on unprepared Europeans.
Before cremation the corpse is taken under
treatment by skilled beauticians. He or she is made up and treated
with injections to restore a life-like roundness and color, the
hair is arranged to look as much as possible as it would after
a car trip or before a party, the eyes are opened and given a
sheen, and the deceased is dressed in party clothes or a sports
outfit, according to the person's taste and character. The corpse
is then set in its accustomed place in the family living room,
with a glass, an apple or a cigarette in its hand, its favorite
phonograph records are played, its picture taken. Then follows
the funeral.
This - and much else - has not come about
by itself. All such phenomena are unconscious reflections of
the American view of life. Whether one is putting makeup on corpses
or apples is immaterial. When a people wash themselves so much
outwardly, says Thomas Wolfe, inwardly they must be very slovenly
indeed. Washing promotes health and well-being, washing prolongs
life. The healthier you are and the longer you live, the more
pleasure you can squeeze out of the material paradise. Add artificial
pineapple flavor to the pineapple and smear pink plastic color
over it all; for under us, behind us, off the dance floor, outside
the neon light, the Meaningless One lies in wait! Death, the
only true snake in Eden!
Our participation in America's view of life
I call America within us. The heavenly, new America, independent
of time and space.
The earthly America is a place where thinking
and feeling human beings are worse off than anywhere else in
the world. You don't have to be a specialist in American literature
to arrive at that idea. But then are the ones over there who
are in fact the wretched, the ones who are not pictured on the
magazine covers? Since it is still true on earth that man is
man's joy, this will be the first and weightiest question we
pose to America:
Where are our American brothers?
Among my first impressions were meetings with
a steady stream of North Americans. That was in the late twenties
and early thirties. It was after the Wall Street crash, and long
before the days of hard currency. And people in Europe did not
yet regard the Americans as roaming wads of dollars. They were
still human beings in our eyes, people you could talk with without
ulterior motives and without being suspected of ulterior motives.
You could buy American cigarettes at all Norwegian tobacconists,
and we didn't yet have the poor-and-rich complexes which plague
us today ....
Back then too the U.S. was the land of wealth
and gold. We knew that very well. But we also knew that people
had to work for it over there, work so hard that at a young age
they needed both gold teeth and gold-rimmed glasses to be able
to see and chew. And it never occurred to anyone to begrudge
them their wealth. The poor fellows had slaved hard enough for
it, while we back home in the old country sat around reading
books and fishing whiting, and couldn't even be bothered to convert
our waterfalls into profitable power stations. It never occurred
to anyone that the Americans were there to get rich on. And if
they had inch-thick gold chains over their bellies, if they bragged
about their cars and their houses, they weren't trying to say
"Here you see a boy who has money!" They were showing
us that they were people who had worked more and harder than
we could conceive of. We really looked at them without envy -
they were brothers and fellow human beings, and if we laughed
at them, the laughter was without malice.
Today it is utterly different.
We have swallowed so much of America's view
of life that we can no longer see the people over there. There
are views of life which unite and views of life which divide.
One can never establish a relationship to a person one hopes
to get rich on.
The first foreign country I visited was the
U.S.A. When I went ashore on the pier in Brooklyn, I knew neither
Denmark nor Sweden.
On the voyage over I had become friends with
an American boy of my own age.... Since he was from the Midwest,
we parted in New York, and since then we haven't seen each other.
It didn't occur to us that he should finance me in any way.
Today the problem would have arisen. The awareness
of class difference would continually be lurking in the background.
For five of the years which have elapsed since that time, we
in Europe ate sardines with heads and intestines and tail fins.
We collected cigarette butts and did many other strange things.
And wegained the fundamental insight that this is not what it's
about.
Fellow feeling is what it's about: To be able
to be a human being among human beings.
Until further notice, a few bars of a communist
battle song have more allure for the soul than a whole Atlantic
ocean full of canned pineapple. Aren't there people on the other
side of the ocean too who are willing to leave shop and field
in order to devote themselves to the quest for the Holy Grail?
It looks as if America has begun to secrete
a new type of American, a new and un-American being.... The young
Americans who bum around Europe today are spare parts who don't
fit into the big U.S. machine. They are of a different make.
They are often poor, and have that strange homelessness in their
eyes which shows that here is a whole generation, a whole new
type of people on the move. They are no longer "innocents
abroad" - they are not abroad, because they have no homeland.
You find them especially in the old cultural centers, and they
voluntarily renounce all that America has to offer them if they
can just starve through another winter in Florence, Rome or Paris.
The more past a city has, the more certain it is to suck to itself
people who are starved by a lack of history. The tragic thing
is that these young Knights of the Grail from a new America are
looking back to Germany, Italy and France, to the lands of their
grandparents, at a time when the remains of European culture
are in the process of being forgotten. The historyless are looking
for their past in a continent which itself is on the verge of
becoming ahistoric.
American birds of passage of the last generation
likewise sought milder latitudes in Europe. They sought culture
and spiritual tradition, and met a generation of Europeans who
had grown tired of both. A tired, critical and revolutionary
intelligence met the pilgrims by recommending primitivism. And
this (in part) highly gifted generation from the time after the
First World War turned out to have a lower cultural potency than
any of its bourgeois predecessors. For all who have looked with
admiration on the great revolutionaries from the period between
the wars, it is a bitter fact to swallow: The rebellion against
the bourgeois tradition has resulted in a painful banalization
of the cultural life.
It is almost impossible to write about this
without resorting to facile formulas. But it is nonetheless certain
that the vast wave of longing for brotherhood, the wave which
socialism and radicalism swallowed up, was in reality the longing
for a new primitive Christianity. It is just as certain as the
fact that a Europe without two thousand years of Christianity
could never have invented anything like socialism. Had socialism
been mindful of its ancestry, it would have been able to work
against the churches - with regret, but without throwing Christianity
out with the bathwater. Clarity that Christianity is a religion
of brotherhood - and the direct opposite of the conservative
principle - could have given rise to something like a gigantic
Quaker movement, a movement oriented toward both earth and heaven.
A writer like Ignazio Silone can be mentioned as representing
such a socialism. The difficulty, of course, is that social compassion
demands a type of Christianity which can be taken seriously to
an unheard-of degree.
The Americans who looked to Europe in the
first half of this century did not achieve firm contact with
what they were seeking. The cultural generation which received
them was by no means convinced of the worth of the European heritage,
and completely abstained from transmitting it. The young America
resembles a younger brother who, returning home to the parental
homestead to claim his inheritance, is told that he shouldn't
have bothered; it's nothing but worthless old junk.
Today it may be possible for us to take another
look at that inheritance before we irrevocably burn it up. Perhaps
our spiritual storerooms will turn out to contain treasures which
we literally hadn't dreamed of. We have gained a distance which
may make possible a new and fresh evaluation of the whole European
idea.
Europe is the land of Christendom. European
culture is not a Christian culture; it is the Christian
culture. Every fruit which the last 1800 years have borne on
European soil was of Christian descent.
What we fear today from east and west is nothing
else than the extinction of brotherhood. And it lies in Europe's
nature that we must regard this as the worst of all evils: It
would mean Christianity's complete eradication from the earth.
A world without brotherhood, for the European, would mean a world
without aim or meaning. It gives a perspective of a boundless
sadness and emptiness.
The idea of brotherhood lies so deep in European
culture that we can find it in all shades. It is our picture
of the world. And if one cannot see the parallelism in such different
formulations as Francis of Assisi's "brother ass" /
"brother sparrow" / "brother wolf" and Darwin's
doctrine of the origin of species, then one is either a religious
or a scientific dogmatist.
Freedom and equality are thoughts which would
never have been thought had the idea of brotherhood not provided
fertile soil. But once they are there, they can forget their
origin and take on lives of their own. Europe embraced the holy,
threefold motto: liberty, equality, fraternity. The West chose
freedom. The East chose equality. But freedom without brotherhood
is the economic and social law of the jungle. Without brotherhood
freedom becomes divorced from equality.
And in the East: Equality without brotherhood
becomes equality without freedom. The three concepts are inextricably
interwoven.
It is strange - yes, more than strange - that
the "atheistic" French Revolution chose a slogan which
is a direct paraphrase of Christendom's concept of the Trinity
(Before the Father we are equal, before the Spirit we are free,
and before the Son we are brothers.)
The radical intelligentsia rejected Christianity
with unforgivable irresponsibility. But they did so with the
best intentions. They disassociated themselves from it without
investigating what it was; but it would be wrong to believe that
Christianity can be justified with the same ease. Perhaps the
radicals themselves have provided the best springboard for what
is required: They have removed conscious Christianity to such
a great distance that we will be able to regard it with new eyes.
They have broken the line of succession, and a Christianity which
is not handed down will have fulfilled the first precondition
for becoming a primitive Christianity. And when it is understood
that brotherhood is our essential plumbline for distinguishing
between good and evil, that everything which in European eyes
serves brotherhood partakes of the good, and whatever does not
in our eyes serve brotherhood is of evil, and that this is so
because we are imbued with Christianity to the bottom of our
souls, and because this Christianity has fully-realized brotherhood
as its inmost and deepest secret - then the day is not far away
when Europe can assume its appointed position as the Land of
Brotherhood - along with the Land of Freedom and the Land of
Equality.
Once it has become clear to us that we experience
unbrotherliness - exploiting and oppressing others, denouncing
others as heretics, greed, lust for power, racial hatred - as
the basest of all sins precisely because they are anti-Christian,
then we will be able to meet our American brothers in a common
quest for the Holy Grail. And we will be able to mediate Europe
to them, hand over their inheritance without casting doubt on
its worth. The days of cultural pessimism will be past, quite
simply because our Christian European culture is our highest
and most cherished possession - what we at the bottom of our
hearts have always loved above all else. One may think what one
will about Christianity, but it cannot be nullified; it is sown
in us and has been growing in our unconscious for two thousand
years, it has become blood and bones, sight and hearing, facial
expressions and body language. And if equality, liberty and fraternity
should ever be eradicated from the face of the earth, they will
still live on in our hearts - as the unquenchable longing for
brotherhood. We can mock Christianity, scoff at it, detest it;
the day we pull the veil off it, we will recognize the beloved
of our youth, our only love.
More Jens Bjørneboe
in English:
http://home.att.net/~emurer/
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