In the Land of the Cyclops

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  See her rise up,

  once again,

  earth from sea,

  forever green-clad;

  waterfalls tumble,

  eagles soar,

  the one on the cliff

  hunting for fish.

  Nothing described here is anything human beings can control, change, or even influence. It all takes place independent of human beings; these are the conditions under which human beings exist. From this perspective – that of the gods, the higher powers, or the life force – the single human being is insignificant and his or her fate unimportant. Still, the human being has its place, not as an individual but as a notch in a Norn’s stick:

  Maids come,

  knowing much,

  three maids together

  from sea under ash trees;

  one is named Wyrd,

  the second Verdande,

  – notch the tally stick –

  the third is Skuld;

  the law made, the life shaped,

  human kind,

  eternal destiny.

  The names Verdande and Skuld come from verbs meaning “is about to happen” and “should/must be” – these women are about the future. Like everything in the poem, they are a concrete visual representation of the conditions of reality, and it is of course impossible for us to say how those who heard it believed it: primarily as metaphor or primarily as literal fact.

  When we read the Icelandic sagas, though, which describe the outer life of human beings and the literal physical reality in which they act, it is striking how little we find there of what “Völuspá” contains. Myths and religion are almost entirely missing, except indirectly through the ways people’s ideas about the world shape how they act. The sagas are about not the nature of the higher powers but rather the effects these powers have on the human sphere.

  The longest, greatest, and richest of the Icelandic sagas is Njal’s Saga. Written down in Iceland probably sometime around the end of the thirteenth century, it speaks of events that took place there near the turn of the millennium. It is unlike any other literature from the Middle Ages and so realistic in its descriptions of reality that some passages can touch us very closely, freed from the veil of the past that so often covers not bygone events but bygone language and the bygone ideas that color it. This applies especially to the violence.

  He thrust at Gunnar with a great spear that he held in both hands. Gunnar threw his shield before the blow, but Hallbjorn pierced the shield through. Gunnar thrust the shield down into the earth so hard that it stood fast, and he drew his sword, so fast that no eye could follow it, and he struck with the sword; it fell on Hallbjorn’s arm, above the wrist, and took off his hand.

  Njal’s Saga has no main characters, but some characters are more central than others. The most important ones are Njal, his friend Gunnar, and Gunnar’s wife, Hallgerd. Sometimes they enter the story and take over the action, other times they stay in the background, and in the end they leave the saga because they die, while the story continues without them. This is the structure: people come on the scene and then fall away, fill a few pages with their life before others take over. In this way, Njal’s Saga resembles a kind of collective novel, the story of a society where everyone, from the highest to the lowest, has a voice. Over a third of the text is dialogue, and all 177 of its characters speak, Peter Hallberg writes in the afterword to the Swedish edition, comparing it to Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, which is three times as long, which gave rise to the concepts of the polyphonic and dialogic novel, and in which forty-five people have speaking parts.

  The major difference between a modern novel like The Idiot and an archaic saga like Njal’s Saga is that there is no inner life in the saga, neither as thoughts nor as feelings: everything is portrayed externally, through what is said and done. It thus takes place in the interactions between people – that is where the interest lies. This is one of the things that seem alien about the saga, despite its realism. In the saga, a person is nothing outside his or her family relationships; these constitute the essential part of his or her identity, and the strongest punishment this society knew was therefore not the death penalty but condemning a person to live as an outlaw, without contact with others. Being exiled must have been like being nothing, a kind of living death. It is hard to imagine that any of Dostoevsky’s characters would feel this way – they have a much more autonomous identity and an entirely different self-sufficiency.

  Perhaps the clearest way the Norse self differs from the modern self is in relation to the concept of guilt. In Dostoevsky’s Christian universe, the concept of guilt is ever present, an inner quantity, potentially self-annihilating, always ready to overwhelm the mind with these violent struggles of the soul that his books are so full of. In Icelandic sagas, guilt does not exist. At least not as some inner factor. Since the relationships between people are always of primary importance, guilt, too, is externalized: if someone kills a man, it creates an imbalance – in society, not in the mind – and the imbalance has to be repaired not by seeking forgiveness from God but by giving restitution to the victim’s family in the form of goods. The higher the victim’s status, the higher the value of the goods required. It was a culture of honor, where the formal aspect – outward forms – took precedence over any individual variations, and if guilt was a question of imbalance that could be repaired with material things, shame was the factor that always threatened the society’s stability. An insult or offense that caused shame could not be tolerated, it had to be avenged. And since the individual never represented simply himself, but always his family, this gave rise to blood feuds in which whole families could be wiped out. It is striking what extremes people went to in order to avoid bloodshed and murder, how dangerous they considered shame to be, how far they were willing to go to avoid it, and that death was always preferable to shame, whether another person’s death or one’s own.

  Perhaps the most characteristic thing about the events in Njal’s Saga is that they are bigger than the characters, who seem somehow caught in them, as though what happens to them happens for reasons they themselves can neither control nor escape. But not in any supernatural way: there is no idea of any divine will or divine intervention in the sagas, as there is in other archaic stories such as the Iliad or the Five Books of Moses. In the sagas, everything that controls or rules over the characters is earthly, in the human realm. The first determining factor, perhaps the most important, is character. In Njal’s Saga, that is what sets in motion the whole tremendous, fateful series of actions.

  The book opens with the description of two brothers, Hauskuld and Hrut. Some children are playing on the floor in front of them, including Hauskuld’s daughter Hallgerd. Hauskuld calls her over to him.

  She went straight up to him. He took her by the chin and kissed her; and after that she went away.

  Then Hauskuld said to Hrut, “How do you like this maiden? Do you not think she is beautiful?”

  Hrut held his peace, and Hauskuld said the same thing to him a second time, and then Hrut answered, “She is beautiful enough, this maid, and there are many who will suffer for it. But there is one thing I do not know, and that is, whence come the thief’s eyes that have entered our line.”

  Then Hauskuld was angry, and there was little friendship between the brothers for some time.

  Later it turns out that Hrut had judged rightly: Hallgerd is a person who inflicts harm on other people, who manipulates, schemes, and consistently chooses what will bring destruction. Even when she finds herself in circumstances that seem good from the outside, good for her as well, she chooses what will lead to discord, strife, murder, and war. There is no explanation for this, except for what Hrut notices right at the beginning: that she has thief’s eyes. Nor are there any consequences for her, no criticism or accusations or punishments – after she has had a man murdered during h
er first marriage, Hauskuld takes her back into his home, where she lives without anything happening to her. Hallgerd is like that, she puts her thoughts into action and there’s nothing we can do about it. And by extension: she can’t help it. Or, to put it another way, it is her fate.

  Hallgerd is a terrific character. I remember from studying literature that characters are divided into two main categories: “flat” characters, who do not develop, do not change, but are the same from start to finish – typical in epics and other older texts – and “round” characters, who not only possess an entirely different complexity but also develop, change, and are changed by and draw conclusions from what happens to them. The distinction between these two types of character, one archaic and one modern, touches on the distinction between characters portrayed entirely through their outward lives and characters who have their own inner lives. These differences are essential, and mysterious, and can really mean only two things: Either people in earlier eras were radically different from modern people, in other words they did not actually have an inner life in our understanding of the term, an autonomous self reflecting on itself. Or else only the depictions are different, and thus the conceptions of what is essential and inessential to a person. The question is whether these two possibilities aren’t, in the final analysis, the same.

  For Harold Bloom, it was in Shakespeare that modern man came into being, through monologues where a character listened to his self and reflected on it, learned from it, acted on it. Another key aspect of Shakespeare, for Bloom, is that Shakespeare lays out a psychology of instability – in contrast to Dante, for instance, who emphasizes what is unchangeable in a person. Njal’s Saga has unchanging characters. (Dante was born around the same time the saga was written down.) Insofar as we can speak of a psychology at all in connection with the depictions of these characters, it is a psychology of stable constants.

  We will naturally never know how they thought and felt, the extent to which their selves were different from ours, because they are long gone, remaining only in monuments like the one near Kåseberga and in the texts they wrote, which have the further complication that they were written two hundred years after the events described. The only thing we can truly say is that they were portrayed differently from how we portray people, out of a different sense of what a person is or can be, and this also means that they saw other things than what we see. No one I know would ever tell his brother that his child had the eyes of a thief. And I don’t think anyone I know would think it, either. That is not one of the things we look for when a child is born. We look to see whether it is healthy, whether it is functioning normally.

  When our own daughter was born, she was a month premature, and during the first couple of weeks of her life she tended not to make eye contact; she always looked down, or away, or in, and when I shifted my gaze to try to meet hers directly, she would shift hers again, and I thought, Maybe it’s autism. Then her behavior completely changed and the worries disappeared, everything was fine. Hrut seeing the eyes of a thief in his brother’s daughter’s face says something about what these people are looking for, what matters to them. A person with a bad character can have great consequences in a small society, like the one in Iceland around the turn of the millennium.

  We find this approach alien. We believe in the power of society when it comes to behavior; for us, the causes of behavior are to be found in relationships, in experiences; we live deep in the unstable reality of psychology, where character is not a fixed quantity but relative, and we believe that change is possible. Some people even believe that you can choose your identity, the way you choose what to buy in the supermarket, and that you do so by listening to a certain kind of music, reading a certain kind of book, studying for a certain kind of job, wearing a certain kind of clothes, driving a certain kind of car. Since music, books, jobs, clothes, and cars can be exchanged for other ones, identities can too. If this is so, if character – I am speaking now of our image of character, the way we make sense of ourselves to ourselves – is potentially changeable and improvable, and we always seek the greatest possible complexity in our portrayal of the inner life, then the insight of the Greeks, which is also in the Icelandic sagas, that character is fate, loses all meaning. In Njal’s Saga, which portrays only what happens between people, it is a self-evident truth that Hallgerd is how she is, she has to do what she has to do, and what she does has very specific consequences that come back to her in the form of unavoidable events. We can see this. The one way Hallgerd’s behavior and actions can be corrected is through external measures, through rules and sanctioned prohibitions, because on the inside she will always be the same.

  Something is being shown here: the relationship between who we are and what happens to us. When our attention shifts from the external to the inner and from everyone to just one, we lose sight of this, and the idea that character is fate loses all meaning. This doesn’t mean that the implications of the idea disappear, only that we no longer see the implications or understand them the same way. My life is full of patterns and repetitions; often the same thing keeps happening to me, even unexpected contingent events with no direct connection to me. More and more, I think that we are unalterable, that the essential parts of our character are fixed from the day we’re born until the day we die, and that anything we think of as change or improvement is merely a small adjustment we make out of consideration for others, so that we can function in society, a more or less significant adjustment depending on the kind of person we fundamentally are. Instability, change, the inner storms of the soul, our inner monologues, the diaries we write, the therapists we see, don’t change anything about our fixed character, except that our constant attention to our motivations and rationales, our psychology and our childhood, our guilt and shame makes us lose sight of the very simplest thing: what we actually are for other people and what we actually do to them. And that there really are good people and bad people.

  When we are children, we confront the world with what we are, and who we are, creating a certain way for it to meet us, which reinforces some things in us and weakens others, and that profile is what other people react to in turn. This is socialization: the “I” adapting to the “you” or the “we”; character entering the social world; the encounter between what is essential in a person and what is relative.

  The strongest mechanism for regulating this exchange is shame. We feel shame when we fail to meet an expectation, but not when we are alone by ourselves, only when the failure is seen by someone else. Shame is about who we are in the eyes of others. This gaze is something most people internalize, and which is then active to a greater or lesser degree. In an honor culture like the Norse one, almost everything is about what a person is in the eyes of others, how a person is seen. The most famous lines in “Hávamál,” another of the Edda poems, run:

  Cattle die,

  kinsmen die,

  a soul dies the same way;

  I know one thing

  that never dies,

  the judgment passed on every one of the dead.

  In Njal’s Saga, it is as if shame must be wiped out, must disappear; it cannot logically exist because the transgressions it indicates cannot occur – for a man not to fight, but instead to flee the battlefield when he needs to fight, simply cannot be tolerated. Courage was an exceptionally important quality, therefore nothing was as shameful as cowardice. And when such a large part of your identity is bound up with other people and their image of you, a violation of that image destroys your identity and has to be annihilated.

  Almost everything any character does in Njal’s Saga is about mastering the impulsive, neutralizing the unpredictable, suppressing the emotions, and keeping shame under control – and once the first impulsive, unpredictable, emotion-ruled thing happens, for instance a murder or act of giving offense, they then try for a long time to nullify it, and only if that fails do they escalate the violence. Because the thing a
bout violence is that it is constructive and useful in relation to external enemies, but extremely destructive and dangerous when it comes to one’s own community. It also very easily gets out of control. It, too, is a form of thinking in terms of fate: as soon as it is established that Hallgerd has thief’s eyes, it is inevitable and inescapable that Gunnar will eventually be killed in his own house and that by the end of the saga Njal and almost his whole family will be burned alive.

  There is a mechanism of action, whose necessities lie in the society’s rules, customs, and culture. It was a collective mechanism that no single individual could either manage or control, and it was probably not known to, or was in any case hidden from, those who lived within it, simply because they lived in it, they were it, it was inseparable from who they were. It is something we can see because we understand the world differently, and a pattern emerges from that life precisely because it is not ours and thus can be seen from the outside. But such escalating disintegrations of collective life are not unknown to us: there is also a mechanism of action that led, for example, from the European peace in spring 1914 to the European war in autumn of that same year, and that made young men meet their fate in the trenches in Flanders, and that actually continued all the way to the fall of the Third Reich in spring 1945 and into the society we live in, which is set in direct opposition to Nazism. For the soldier who fell with a bullet in his head, death was the consequence of relationships neither he nor any other single individual could guide, control, or stop; it was out of everyone’s hands, it was part of the collectivity, or the higher powers in the collectivity, and the violence that was suddenly unleashed escalated with tremendous speed and horrific power. The complexity was dizzyingly greater, the number of people involved almost infinite in comparison, but the mechanism, the powers at work in the collectivity’s annihilation of the individual, were the same.