Under the Glacier
Page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
INTRODUCTION - Outlandish
1 - The Bishop Wants an Emissary
2 - Emissary of the Bishop: EmBi for Short
3 - Journey from the Capital to Glacier
4 - Evening at Glacier
5 - The Story of Hnallþóra and the Fairy Ram
6 - Morning at Glacier
7 - Two Buildings
8 - Interrogation of the Parish Clerk
9 - Women Bring Soap
10 - Doughty Women at Glacier
11 - The Story of Úrsalei
12 - Farriers
13 - A Highly Responsible Office
14 - Inventory of the Parish Church at Glacier
15 - Le Cimetière Délirant, i.e., the Best Churchyard in the Land
16 - Marital Status of Pastor J. Prímus
17 - Philosophy at Glacier
18 - About the Creation of the World, God’s Name among the Teutons, etc., at Glacier (Summary)
19 - Twelve Tons
20 - Provisional Summary
21 - De Pisteria
22 - Strange Moment of Time
23 - Winter-Pasture Shepherds
24 - The Red One Found, the Grey One Bolted Again
25 - Banquet of Dried Halibut
26 - Intergalactic Communication
27 - Dandelion and Honeybee
28 - The Glacier
29 - Miracle Postponed
30 - Four Widows or a Fourfold Madam
31 - Your New Instructions, and a Work-Report
32 - Night Vigil
33 - The Mourners and Their Solace
34 - Extra Day at Glacier
35 - Yet Another Disputation about the Same Thing
36 - A Geophysical Drop, and So On
37 - The Veranda, Continued: Night
38 - The Woman Guðrún Sæmundsdóttir from Neðratraðkot
39 - An Account of G. Sýngmannsdóttir
40 - Reality as the Head-Bone of a Fish
41 - Repairing the Quick-Freezing Plants
42 - The Poetry of Saint John of the Cross and So On
43 - Uncertain Balance, Etc.
44 - Away
45 - Home
About the Author
Also by HALLDÓR LAXNESS
Copyright Page
HALLDÓR LAXNESS
UNDER THE GLAClER
Halldór Laxness was born near Reykjavík, Iceland, in 1902. His first novel was published when he was seventeen. The undisputed master of contemporary Icelandic fiction, and one of the outstanding novelists of the century, he wrote more than sixty books, including novels, short stories, essays, poems, plays, and memoirs. In 1955 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Laxness died in 1998.
INTERNATIONAL
Also by HALLDÓR LAXNESS
Independent People
Paradise Reclaimed
World Light
Iceland’s Bell
INTRODUCTION
Outlandish
The long prose fiction called the novel, for want of a better name, has yet to shake off the mandate of its own normality as promulgated in the nineteenth century: to tell a story peopled by characters whose options and destinies are those of ordinary, so-called real life. Narratives that deviate from this artificial norm and tell other kinds of stories, or appear not to tell much of a story at all, draw on traditions that are more venerable than those of the nineteenth century, but still, to this day, seem innovative or ultra-literary or bizarre. I am thinking of novels that proceed largely through dialogue; novels that are relentlessly jocular (and therefore seem exaggerated) or didactic; novels whose characters spend most of their time musing to themselves or debating with a captive interlocutor about spiritual and intellectual issues; novels that tell of the initiation of an ingenuous young person into mystifying wisdom or revelatory abjection; novels with characters who have supernatural options, like shape-shifting and resurrection; novels that evoke imaginary geography. It seems odd to describe Gulliver’s Travels or Candide or Tristram Shandy or Jacques the Fatalist and His Master or Alice in Wonderland or Gershenzon and Ivanov’s Correspondence from Two Corners or Kafka’s The Castle or Hesse’s Steppenwolf or Woolf’s The Waves or Olaf Stapledon’s Odd John or Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke or Calvino’s Invisible Cities or, for that matter, porno narratives simply as novels. To make the point that these occupy the outlying precincts of the novel’s main tradition, special labels are invoked.
Science fiction.
Tale, fable, allegory.
Philosophical novel.
Dream novel.
Visionary novel.
Literature of fantasy.
Wisdom lit.
Spoof.
Sexual turn-on.
Convention dictates that we slot many of the last centuries’ perdurable literary achievements into one or another of these categories.
The only novel I know that fits into all of them is Halldór Laxness’s wildly original, morose, uproarious Under the Glacier.
Science fiction first.
In 1864 Jules Verne published Journey to the Center of the Earth, the charming narrative of the adventures of a party of three, led by a German professor of mineralogy—the irascible mad-scientist type—who have lowered themselves into an extinct volcanic crater on a glacier in Iceland, Snæfells, and eventually exit upward through the mouth of an active volcano on another island, Stromboli, off the coast of Sicily. Just over a hundred years later, in 1968, Snæfells is again the designated portal of another unlikely fictional mission in a novel by Iceland’s own Halldór Laxness, written with full mocking awareness of how the French father of science fiction had colonized the Icelandic site. This time, instead of a journey into the earth, mere proximity to the glacier opens up access to unexpected, cosmic mysteries.
Imagining the exceptional, often understood as the miraculous, the magical, or the supernatural, is a perennial job of storytelling. One tradition proposes a physical place of entry—a cave or a tunnel or a hole—which leads to a freakish or enchanted kingdom with an alternative normality. In Laxness’s story, a sojourn near Snæfells does not call for the derring-do of a descent, a penetration, since, as Icelanders who inhabit the region know, the glacier itself is the center of the universe. The supernatural—the center—is present on the surface, in the costume of everyday life in a village whose errant pastor has ceased to conduct services or baptize children or bury the dead. Christianity— Iceland’s confession is Evangelical Lutheran—is the name of what is normal, historical, local.1 (The agricultural Viking island converted to Christianity on a single day at the Althing, the world’s oldest national parliament, in 999.) But what is happening in remote Snæfells is abnormal, cosmic, global.
Science fiction proposes two essential challenges to conventional ideas of time and place. One is that time may be abridged, or become “unreal.” The other is that there are special places in the universe where familiar laws that govern identity and morality are violated. In more strenuous forms of science fiction, these are places where good and evil contend. In benign versions of this geographical exceptionalism, these are places where wisdom accumulates. Snæfells is such a place—or so it is stipulated. People lead their mundane, peculiar lives, seemingly unfazed by the knowledge of the uniqueness of where they live: “No one in these parts doubts that the glacier is the centre of the universe.” Snæfells has become a laboratory of the new, the unsettling: a place of secret pilgrimage.
As a species of storytelling, science fiction is a modern variant of the literature of allegorical quest. It often takes the form of a perilous or mysterious journey, recounted by a venturesome but ignorant traveler who braves the obstacles to confront another reality that is cha
rged with revelations. He—for it is always a he—stands for humanity as apprenticeship, since women are not thought to be representative of human beings in general but only of women. A woman can represent Women. Only a man can stand for Man or Mankind—everybody. Of course, a female protagonist can represent The Child—as in Alice in Wonderland—but not The Adult.
Thus, both Journey to the Center of the Earth and Under the Glacier have as their protagonists and narrators a good-natured, naive young man who submits his will to that of an older authority figure. Verne’s narrator is the eminent Professor Lidenbrock’s orphaned nephew and assistant, Axel, who cannot refuse the invitation to accompany his uncle and an Icelandic guide on this adventure, though he is sure that it will cost them their lives. In Laxness’s novel, which opens on a note of parody, the narrator is a nameless youth whom the bishop of Iceland in Reykjavík wants to send to the village at the foot of Snæfells Glacier “to conduct the most important investigation at that world-famous mountain since the days of Jules Verne.” He is to find out what has happened to the parish there, whose minister—pastor Jón Jónsson, known as Prímus—has not drawn his salary for twenty years. Is Christianity still being practiced? There are rumors that the church is boarded up and no services held, that the pastor lives with someone who is not his wife, that he has allowed a corpse to be lodged in the glacier.
The bishop tells the young man he has sent countless letters to Prímus. No answer. He wants the young man to make a brief trip to the village, talk to the pastor, and take the true measure of his spiritual dereliction.
And beyond science fiction:
Under the Glacier is at least as much a philosophical novel and a dream novel. It is also one of the funniest books ever written. But these genres—science fiction, philosophical novel, dream novel, comic novel—are not as distinct as one might suppose.
For instance, both science fictions and philosophical novels need principal characters who are skeptical, recalcitrant, astonished, ready to marvel. The science fiction novel usually begins with the proposal of a journey. The philosophical novel may dispense with the journey—thinking is a sedentary occupation—but not with the classical male pair: the master who asks and the servant who is certain, the one who is puzzled and the one who thinks he has the answers.
In the science fiction novel, the protagonist must first contend with his terrors. Axel’s dread at being enrolled by his uncle in this daft venture of descending into the bowels of the earth is more than understandable. The question is not what he will learn but whether he will survive the physical shocks to which he will be subjected. In the philosophical novel, the element of fear—and true danger—is minimal, if it exists at all. The question is not survival but what one can know, and if one can know anything at all. Indeed, the very conditions of knowing become the subject of rumination.
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 t
o 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 Henry 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.