Analysis of Independent People

(Adapted Google translation)

By Claudio Giunta


In northern Iceland at the beginning of the 20th century, Bjartur was a small peasant who sought to preserve his independence, all the more valuable because he had acquired it at the cost of long years of labor and sacrifice. The aim of this sheep farmer, heir of a centuries-old peasant tradition and imbued with medieval epic poetry transmitted from generation to generation, is to free himself from all tutelage. The story takes place in the style of a family saga, depicting the harsh daily life of a peasantry of another time, faced with the profound political and social upheavals that marked the era: the emergence of a modern economic system, Effects of the First World War, efforts to open up isolated areas of the island, large migratory movements to the United States.

Bjartur constantly fights to feed his flock, and only then his family, whose central figure is his daughter, Asta Sollilja, left by his first wife Rosa, who died in childbirth: this child, whom he suspects to be illegitimate, is its true treasure, its “little flower” that flourishes in the glacial immensity of the moor. Bjartur, facing the natural and even supernatural elements, confronts the difficulties without ever giving up, nor does he lower his eyes in front of anyone.

This novel, marked by a powerful epic breath inherited from the medieval sagas, but also by a dark and unusual humor, pays tribute to the Icelandic peasant spirit of the beginning of the century, proud and tenacious in the face of death and chaos Return inevitably claim their due.

“Romantic Europeans can also praise the wilderness of desert and wild places, but they know that they are at most a walk of a few hours to a comfortable inn: they can celebrate the joys of solitude, but they know that at any time They can go back to the family roof or in the city, and over there, cousins, grandchildren, uncles and aunts, clubs and lounges continue the usual life just as they left them. The true desert, the solitude that does not know lasting relationships to cultivate or to reject, can not even conceive it.” ~ (W.H. Auden, The Shield of Perseus)

1. Among the ingredients that make up human life, Michael Oakeshott distinguished the processes from practice. Processes governs nature: birth, aging, illness, death, earthquakes, rain, and gravity. Humans can try to influence them, defend themselves, but mostly suffer them, and no one is free of it. Practices are the decisions and actions of humans: love, friendship, hatred, envy, vengeance, forgiveness. This is a distinct distinction, it is clear that the novel is primarily a reflection on the practices, that is, of what is a particular human being or human group, distinguished from each other, and on the relationships that humans intertwine: the processes Natural backgrounds. In the death of Ivan Tolstoy's son, we pose, the background - the very death of Ivan Ilic, the same as all other deaths - is important, but more is the way in which Ivan Ilic lived His life with other men, and that way refers to a set of practices.

Independent People of Halldór Laxness (translation by Silvia Cosimini, Milan, Iperborea 2004) is an exception. In Independent People, in fact, the force of natural processes is predominant, incomparable to what it has in any other modern novel; And those practices that result from interaction between humans, and which usually form the scaffold of novels, have a secondary role. Independent People is not so much the story of the life of poor shepherd breeder Bjartur, as well as the history of his survival in cold, hunger, and disease. The story of a life presupposes change, growth. Mastro-don Gesualdo, a literary anti-hero who in his abnegation and morbid attachment to the stuff has more than one resemblance to Bjartur, is born poor but becomes rich: he evolves. The story of survival is static: in essence it is to keep it hard, and enough. The six hundred pages of Independent People talk above all about this, how Bjartur holds it hard. If one seeks a book that preserves in itself, according to Adorno's precept, “the memory of accumulated pain,” he may stop looking for.

The young Bjartur - neither father nor mother, nothing to connect it to something or someone, a man and that’s it - buy on credit an old farmhouse in a remote area of ​​the Icelandic countryside and settled there with his wife. Put children in the world, sheep sheep, cow. Under different conditions, at a different latitude, at a different time, these could have been the ingredients of an idyll. In the late nineteenth century no. The family ménage is that of tribal societies. Bjartur marries a woman she has never seen before, a woman who will learn to fear and hate her from the first night. Of the four children, two will abandon it, unless they come closer to the end of the story later years; One will go to America; The fourth, dead in the moor, will die. In a memorable scene, Bjartur finds the corpse after the thaw, following the flight of crows. At first he does not recognize him: “It was the skinny body of a boy who had rolled up here by the rocks who knew when in the winter.” Once he realizes that this is the body of his son, his response is this: “The bone was discovered nose and mouth without lips laughed at the sky, torn eyes, the rags around the body so rotten that the rot had penetrated In the bones. So that was what she was looking for, the raptor, it was not a beautiful scene - the man touched him once or twice with his stick, kicked the dog and murmured: Everyone makes the end deserved, and I will aspire to a generous grip.”

Lost children, lost his two wives, Bjartur finds himself master of the farm and freed by debt but, more alone than Linda Loman in Death of a Salesman, “So he lost his youngest son, as he sat down in the bottom of a chiassaiola, just when he arrived almost to win the struggle for independence that had cost him all his other sons, now that the well-being and the full sovereignty is outlined before.” Finally, Iceland is not Arcadia. The sheep die of scrapie and of worms, or have been killed by whim the demons who live in the heath; The cow is slaughtered by Bjartur himself, for pure stupidity. The cold does the rest. Despite all romantic idealization, and in spite of the Icelandic rhetoric about virtuous rural life (when the novel appeared in 1935, many were outraged by the brutal way in which this life was represented), the nature described by Laxness is always the enemy, and Who lives in the middle does not have eyes to see her beautiful. “Now I understand why the valley is so beautiful,Ú says a passer to Ásta Sólillja, the only female daughter of Bjartur. She is forbidden: “The beautiful valley? For a long time after that he bent on this sentence. What did he mean? She had often heard about beautiful wool and fine yarn, and especially beautiful sheep - but the valley?”

2. What was life five hundred years ago? And what? Two thousand? Answer: Literature tells us, they say Ariosto, Dante, Homer. But it is not entirely true. In their books, Ariosto, Dante and Homer do not talk about everyday life, the common life of their time, but about exceptional individuals in exceptional situations. Not the Miller or Farmer but the Hero; Not of the hero in rest, in the quiet of the house, but of the hero in action, in the forest or on the battlefield. It is rare that ordinary, experiential, is a matter of story. This is why we are so moved by the “domestic” comedian comparisons, in which Dante compares strange things like those seen in the afterlife with family things like a carved shelf, or the sheep coming out of the stab: they move us, because in the pre-modern literature these shots on the more minute, concrete aspects of life open seldom. By reading Philip Roth’s novels, the future historian will have a fairly reliable idea of ​​how he lived in the West at the end of the twentieth century; Reading the novels of Chrétien de Troyes, or Boccaccio himself, we can not see their age with the same clarity. For this reason, in general, the books on Daily Life in ancient Rome, or in the Middle Ages, seek elsewhere their sources, data for their guesswork.

Independent People takes place in the late nineteenth century and the years of World War I, but the lives of the characters that populate the novel are so simple, so poor of things, relationships, ideas, which is not exaggeration to say that Independent People allows us to take a look at any Icelandic life - perhaps on any Scandinavian life - before the age of automation. It is the year 1900, but with a few adjustments, a few subtractions, it could be the year 1700, or year 1500, or more back yet. A hundred kilometers east of Reykjavik, today the tourist can visit the Stöll farm, which was buried by the ashes of the Hekla volcano during the eruption of 1104. "Disinterred by archaeologists, the large XI century hut was rebuilt and placed in this valley protected, Visiting the interior you will have an idea of ​​how Iceland was born (Bradt’s Guide to Iceland). In fact, you can also get an idea of ​​the kind of life lived by Bjartur and his children in the farm imagined by Laxness. The peat and grass roof, the glass-less windows (“If it’s sunlight you need, there's just as much you want”), I was going to the animals next to the room where she sleeps and eats the family - are conditions, they are customary that in essence the centuries separating Bjartur from the early settlers of Iceland have not really changed.

Reading Independent People means entering the time machine and being catapulted into the world before civilization: the charm of this great novel also stems from its document strength. Not that it is a completely objective document. Mary Young, an au pair girl visiting the country in 1936, writes to her sister in England recommending reading Laxness, but points out that Laxness “only describes the worst side of life in Iceland” (Letters from Iceland 1936, University of Birmingham 1992 , P. 12). The description she gives of life on the island and work in the fields is in fact far more serene:

“It was supposed to be Tuesday yesterday. Now there is a beautiful light on that large, latent stream, and Snæfell is blue as blue ink (or paper), and white down to the south, and there is always and only the sound of current and wind. There was a shower today, so I read a saga about this area as long as it was dry enough to weed and pack hay.”

Here is the idyll that we were looking for, just change your gaze. While true: there is, at the bottom of Independent People, the intention of smiting, ridiculing the Icelandic ideal of the small independent owner, of the solitary colonizer of lands. In its place, Laxness would like socialism. For this reason, the representation of the spiritual and material misery of the characters is so raw: only the union of forces—suggests Laxness—can have the best of such an overwhelming nature. But the fact that the vision is partial does not mean that the things seen, the things told by Laxness are fantasy (the thirty years separating Mary Young from the characters of Laxness have made Iceland’s life much less fatigued and laborious) And one of the pleasures that you feel by reading Independent People is just the pleasure of disgrace, the kind of pleasure you experience when you look at one of those docu-fictions who survived an air disaster on the Andes, or in the desert of the Gobi: not be there not to be like to see them suffer, to wonder what else can happen to them, and how they will get away - it’s almost voyeurism.

And so, reading, the voyeur notes, puts together her little horror show. Houses like wooden boxes with sheet metal roofs, full of mold, mushrooms, brooms; Conversations about scrapie and worms even at baptisms and funerals, as if scrapie and worms were the only arguments worthy of discussion (and probably they were); Conversations about time, unsubstantiated opinions, absurdities about time, and more radical than absurd; Die of childbirth, bleeding; Dying at two years do not know what; To marry people who you have never seen; To have as toys, from children, only the bones of the sheep; Always be cold, even in the summer; Spend the winter with doors and windows barred, unhealthy air, perennial darkness; The ground in the ground, the mud in the house, the mud in the bed, the rain dripping from the beams; Sleeping on dry turtle mattresses; To sleep with the sheep (so “men and sheep in one sense are one thing”); The fear of the dark, the ghosts, the trolls, the Christian saints become demons, Satan, but most of all, always and in any case the terror of God; The obligation to remain virgin until marriage, the harassment of the fathers on the daughters, the bastards exposed in the snow; Kicks and fists to wives; already old at forty, forty-five to be dumb, move from youth to old age in the space of a few months:

“Just a year before was a girl with red cheeks that evening she washed and dressed in their best clothes. Suddenly he had become a woman dressed in old tattered burlap rags, limp and gray face, the sparkle had gone from his eyes, the color from his cheeks, the grace by the movements…”

Believing in dreams and dreaming of flesh, milk; eat fish scraps, coffee drinking watered down, make yourself last a lump of sugar for a week, make a meal a day, two in the religious holidays, a steak twice a year; Cod liver oil instead of milk for infants; The rich who spit on the earth in the house of the poor; Drown in the river, drown in the sea; Female daughters like a curse; Always lick me in all the rooms on all the clothes; Not to talk to anyone for days, for weeks; To see no more than fifty people in life; Living on an island and never having seen the sea; Die of typhus, die of cold lost in the heath; black  teeth from tobacco, a baby's blue face from scrofula, sleeping four on the same plank, have five sons and see three of them die, eat grass because there is nothing else to eat, have chronic hives, chronic cough, chronic toothache, chronic aerophagia, wash only at Christmas, stop washing when you become old…

The thing that moves most, in this chain of privations, is that it is a living condition that Bjartur and his people accept as normal. The only one who has dreams going beyond the farm in the moor is the last-born, who will leave for America. All the others endure in silence. This has the effect of highlighting the small, ephemeral joys that make life alive in this abyss. A passing fisherman with his tent is welcomed by the sons of Bjartur as the savior just landed on the deserted island; Ásta Sóllilja, now a teenager, sees the sea for the first time in her life; a book of poems of Ossian becomes for auction Sóllilja a confidant and comfort:

“What most touched the heart, the bottom of my heart, and filled with primal emotion, enough to feel that they can embrace everything, were the verses Pain that arises in the heart when dreams have not come true, and on the beauty of this pain. Poetry on the ship lying on the shore of the cold autumn sea, that was his poem; and the bird trying to crouch in some shelter, featherless, who was also in the autumn, which in bad weather is anxious and lost song and the way [...] - all this she understood it well.”

But they are moments. The fisherman starts off and will not come back again. Ossian speaks of loves of whom Ásta Sóllilja will not experience. The winter begins again.

3. Independent People is the epic of a single man, but the truth is we never know, because Bjartur never really appears to us like a man. Bjartur has no interest other than his sheep, because sheep are needed to survive; He does not love anyone, he has no friends, he does not, does not seem to have the slightest aptitude for reflection on himself without which, according to Socrates's statement, life is not worth living. Scheduled to endure, it does not seem to have desires and fears that can be defined as human. All of his spiritual life is summed up in a few lead maxims such as “Females are more compatible than human beings,” or “People are worth less than manure, when there are difficult years”, or “Nothing is as ruthless as life Human”, or “The strongest is the one who remains alone. One is born alone. One dies only. Why then should not you just live, alone?” Laxness makes us into the dull, dark mind of such a man: it is difficult to find another novel in which such a experiment is carried on for so long and with much rigor.

Now the praise of solitude is a common humanistic place, which is not difficult to experience the charm especially today, in our lives too lazy. You do not have to be misanthropic to let yourself be seduced, and perhaps persuade, of Thoreau's words: “I find it to be salutary to remain only for most of the time. Being in the company, even the best, causes trouble and dispersion. I love to stay alone [...]. For the most part, we are more alone when we leave among men than when we stay in our room… ” But the loneliness of intellectuals like Thoreau or Horace is praised is, in fact, the loneliness of intellectuals, is Arcadia of classical poets: and it is not a loneliness imposed, it is a lonely choice, and the choice is temporary and always revocable: Thoreau lives a couple of years in his hut on the lake but then returns to town and dies in his bed in his parents' home. Despite the hardships and deprivations, Walden is a book that inspires serenity, Independent People are worth reading. Thoreau is free, Bjaltur has a wife and children. Thoreau lives in a forest on the lake, Bjaltur in the lava desert of southern Iceland. But above all: Thoreau knows, thinks, studies; Bjaltur hardly feels, and reacts to life as it responds to a slap: shaking his teeth or hitting in turn - and the affected are the children, his wife, the animals. Bjartur is only by necessity, not by choice: "going out among men", for him, is not an option. And his solitude can not be relieved by reading, or writing, or meditation, or prayer. In Independent People, there is no room for religion: there are neither pagan gods nor Christianity; There is only that degraded variant of the religious consciousness that is superstition, and its agents are the “hidden people” of demons and trolls, and above all the treacherous Kolumkilli, that is, a Saint Colombanus past the filter of paganism. Bjartur believes in their existence as all; But he feels enemies: fights, and loses, even against them. Bjartur’s solitude is not the reflection of his distrust of civilization: it is the reflection of his being never civilized. Thoreau and Bjaltur live the same struggle against nature and loneliness, but Walden is a momentary reaction to civilization, Independent people is the account of what precedes civilization.

Is there any good in this wild state in this life out of the story? It is interesting to read Independent People holding in the background certain books that specifically support this view, that the path of virtue is the one that leads away from civilization, books such as Emilio or Werther. Werther regrets the naive goodness of the people, not contaminated with the false wisdom of the books: “This love, this devotion, this passion is not at all a poetic invention ... All this lives, is in its utmost purity among those people we call Ignorant, grumbling. We, educated people ... Deformed by education!” Likewise, Rousseau will recommend Emilio reading a single book, Robinson Crusoe, “… the only book that teaches all that books can teach.” Independent People illustrates the opposite deformity, produced not by education and agitation, but by poverty, ignorance and, above all, by the self-discipline self-discipline that poverty and ignorance impose on those who are victims. According to Werther, the lussi of education produce a corrosive relaxation. But the self-discipline of the poor and ignorant pays the price of cruelty to himself and to others. And the lack of education makes every human relationship impossible: Bjartur also treats poor people who would like to do good. No, there is absolutely nothing good, according to Laxness, in this wild state. “Crusoe”—wrote Ian Watt in The Origins of the Bourgeois Novel —transforms Its abandoned property into a triumph”:

“It is for this reason that its charm is so strong for all those who feel isolated (and who sometimes do not feel that way?) An inner voice continually suggests that the human isolation in which individualism has placed us is painful and, in the end, tends towards a life of animal apathy and mental upheaval. Defoe confidently answers that solitude can be the arduous prelude to the fullest realization of all our potentialities.”

Well, Independent People give strength precisely to that inner voice that warns us not in favor but against loneliness. Laxness takes the pedagogical dream of Rousseau and drops it into the concrete case of Icelandic moorland. The result is not the natural man, Emilio grew free in the harmony of nature; The result is Bjartur.

4. In the human desert described by Laxness, it is not strange that the most stubborn hates and loves revolve around the animals. To say that the most beautiful pages of independent people are those that describe the relationship between Bjartur and his sheep or between Bjartur’s second wife, Finna, and the cow Búkolla does not make the idea, because what comes to mind is still a Turn, is Arcadia. Instead, the relationship between man and animal falls into the circle of violence and blood, as it was natural in the rural world of a time, and as it is still natural where the world has remained intact. Independent people are a kind of anti-dump: animals are the protagonists of the story as humans, but they are in a tragic, uncomplicated, and exemplary way. They are cold and hungry like men, and they die before them because of them. The two most memorable chapters of Independent People contain precisely this kind of violence: man kills or tries to kill the animal. But in the account of these kills and of these Laxness hunts puts a perturbing element that seems to be alluding to a deeper layer of deeper meaning. In the eleventh chapter, Rósa, Bjartur's first wife, left alone in the house, enters a sheep to protect her from cold and rain, but the sheep, once inside, simply laughs and jumps in the room, crazy of terror. At dawn, Rósa seizes the animal and scans. The description of the act lasts a page, a very detailed butcher’s page. But the leftmost page is the previous one, in which Laxness describes the state of trance - generated by exhaustion, terror, hunger, desire for revenge against her husband, but also, it would be said by a dark sexual drive - that brings Rósa To grasp the sickle and preparations for slaughter:

He jumped out of bed. He did not even dare to put on his clothes, walked around the room with his arms outstretched, his chest half-naked, pale for insomnia, his eyes glittering, crazy. He advanced tensile under the arch in the indefinite light of the morning, and pulled out of a punch the Bjartur scythe wrapped in a linen sheath, carried it, brought it under the window, looked at the blade, tried it on the hair. Then he went downstairs. The sheep jumped terrified for the room from one wall to the next and the woman followed her, flailing in tools and ropes that had fallen to the ground during the night turmoil, but she was no longer afraid, no weird idea could hinder the decision Had taken, and after some pursuit he managed to grab the beast ...

In the fifteenth chapter, Bjartur, lost in the moor, chases a reindeer herd, grabs one for the horns, and mounts it on the rump, and drags him with him in the frozen water of the river. The centaur formed by the beast and the man running on the bottom of the icy river is such a powerful image to evoke the colors of wisdom or magical stories more than novel ones. Perhaps only Cormac McCarthy, among the contemporary writers, is capable of representing animals with as many truths and symbolic strengths as the passage over the border, horses.

But animals are also a subject of love. Bjartur loves his dog and his sheep; The kids love the calf that Bjartur will kill, then wiping his guts on the floor of the living room. And Finna loves the Búkolla cow, she finds a penitent in her, and dies deadly when Bjartur kills her too, for the absurd reason she threw grass, light and attention to the sheep. The second part of Independent People closes on this gorgeous and heartbreaking scene:

At that moment [after the killing of the cow] it was all over for Finna of Sumarhús, this woman of a few words, music lover, who had given birth to many children for the independence of the nation, but also for the death. It was good. He had friends among the elves. But her heart had long pulsed in fear. Human life? It was as if human life came back to look for its principle at that time. She bent her knees and turned to the old Hallbera in absolute silence, abandoning her as impalpable dust in her mother's womb.

5. In the last hundred pages, Independent People ceases to be a novel of processes and becomes a novel of practices. The time is clear and thick: the First World War broke out, and Laxness shows the consequences of this event on the Icelandic people who do not participate in the war, using a 'popular voice' that is not different from what is spoken in Verga's novels : "This so-called World War, perhaps the most generous blessing God has ever sent on our country since the Napoleonic wars saved the nation from the consequences of the Great Era [...]; Yes, this beautiful world war, that God assures us to have another like this sooner. " Space is also complicated: Bjartur and the two remaining children leave the farm and go to town, and come into contact with the harbor on strike. Contemporary history enters the novel, the novel becomes political. It's the weaker part of the book. The epic force of the battle that Bjartur fights alone against each other dilutes. And the final, with the reunion between Bjartur and her daughter, is melodramatic.

But up to that point, a hundred pages from the end, Independent People is really a unique novel that tells things and people that no other novel tells, things and people in a remote world (but in fact, and this adds charm to History, not too far away either in space or in time: Iceland is Europe, and only a hundred years passed), such a desolate world that "even a man with a stick is a phenomenal event" and in Whereby the heathen elves of the moon, at night, can plant nails in the head of the lambs, and that a man rides a reindeer into the waters of a stream, and passes the night to the frost while sleeping on a rock (“The shivers were part of the overnight stay In that place, it was not necessary to do so much if you knew the trick to get rid of it. The trick consisted of standing up, grasping the slab with his arms and flipping it up until one was warmed up again”); A world in which everyone cites the sages and the heroes of the sages as if they were stories the day before, and not older than eight hundred years, and in which no one has ever seen an apple, so it is not good reason for the sin of Eve: “… for them it was an absolute mystery why the woman had this irrepressible desire for an apple, in fact they had no idea of ​​the seductive abilities of an apple and thought it was a kind of potato”, and even the forty days Of the rain of the universal flood have the air of deception, since “there were years there in the moor where it could rain for two hundred days and two hundred nights, almost unclear; Yet no universal flood was coming.”

According to Henry James, one of the peculiarities of modern novelties is that there are “subtly conscious” characters in it that can be compared in the literature of the past only to the great tragic heroes such as Hamlet or King Lear: this is the conscience that “… does absolutely the intensity of their adventure [...] We, that is, our curiosity and our sympathy, we care relatively little about what happens to the stupid, the rudeness, the blind…” (preface to Princess Casamassima, in Prefats, Rome, Editors Joined 1986, pp. 110-11). Having known how to create problematic and contradictory characters: is this not the greatest praise for the novelist? It is by virtue of this representative talent, of this richness of nuances, which as readers we appreciate Musil, or Mann, or Roth. Their characters are as intelligent and morally as complex as we are.

The protagonists of Independent People—the sweet, timid, squinting Ásta Sóllilja and the brutal, stupid, but in a heroic way, Bjartur—do not resemble this description. On the contrary, they possess all those bad qualities which, according to James, make empathy impossible: they are stupid, rude and blind. Yet they are unforgettable. What makes them spectacular, and extraordinarily touching, is the fact that they are both, completely unaware of themselves and of the vast world that opens beyond the boundaries of the Sumarhús farm. Love and sex attack Ásta Sóllilja and stun her, because no one has ever told her what they are; And Bjartur, blinded by his madness of independence, ends up becoming the worst enemy of himself. Who reads today Independent People does not see around themselves, in everyday life, humans like these. But just look back, go back to fifty-one hundred years, to the generation of our grandparents or grandfathers, to realize, to remember that an infinite number of existences have followed this course, consuming themselves in this torpor. Independent People is, among many other things, a reading to recommend to anti-modern propaganda to idealize that past: it is more cautious.