Guðbergur Bergsson

From Guðbergur Bergsson

Guðbergur Bergsson was born in the year 1932 in Grindavík, which was at that time a godforsaken village with a human existence that was good for the mind against the open sea. Today it is much bigger and has acquired municipal rights. Grindavík is still very much alive, even more than ever, on the rough south coast of Iceland. Earthquakes are frequent, even an everyday affair, but not of much use. To the south there is nothing to see but the endless ocean, to the east there are stretches of mountains, as there are to the north, but to the west a grey lava-field stretches out and in some places fumes from hot springs can be seen. Apart from that there is lava all around, also to the south where it cannot be seen under the sea where the fish hides itself to spawn in narrow lava holes far from the jaws of greedy sharks and whales. Because of this particularly clever instinct of the cod and the harmony between it and nature the people of Grindavík could make a living and still can, exactly as they have always done and will continue to do until the end of time.

Guðbergur’s father was a fisherman during the winter and a carpenter during the summer and his mother a maid-servant until she became a wife and worked at home. Since he was born during the Great Depression, everything around him, the houses, the people, and the way of life was as simple and as deprived or empty as the sky, the lava, and the weather. On the other hand, what was seldom seen or not plainly obvious on land – man’s disposition and emotions – was as rich or even richer than in more populated places. The connection between people is closer and different in smaller places than in more populated areas where you can find special kinds of entertainment that has no other purpose than to provide oblivion for a moment; what is called a pastime. In those days everyone in Grindavík was his or her own dark cinema but also, in their own way, a secret silver screen for others. People were their own novels, poems, operas, and danced a ballet of the emotions. It is similar with artists. They are characterized by the unconscious but they train themselves to unify all the arts in the same work, each after his or her own liking, first in the workings of the mind which they then change into a piece of art, for example a novel.

Like everyone else in Grindavík Guðbergur first worked at sea. Then others wanted him to learn shipmaking. He did not want that. Then he began studying, not what he wanted but something of which he could make a living. He could then use his spare time to do what was impossible to make a living of at that time, namely writing fiction. Others hindered him from teaching children so he took to cooking for foreigners. He then wove rugs for a few years after which he worked as a nurse at a mental hospital. Then he decided to leave the country and study literature and art history in Barcelona during the reign of Franco. Slowly he started to weave the world he has mostly lived in ever since, the world of his art. He has not lived anywhere but in his work, which is more prose than poetry. All this is naturally linked with and a logical result of having been born and raised in as isolated a place as Grindavík, a place where people were their own theatre but also a theatre for others; their own novel, poem, opera, philosophy, and piano concert. Most things in an artist’s mental makeup are the result of himself but also his parents and his surroundings. It is not necessary to live in a so called intellectually rich environment in order to be able to braid or weave the cloth that is rich art. But he who is born into a poor environment, amongst poor people, needs to be endowed with a will and an inner fullness which he carefully nurtures. Above anything else he needs to be self-sufficient. He cannot depend on anyone but himself. Few people understand him. He needs to be strong in his solitude, unafraid to go into the world to reach maturity, not into what is known but that which is unknown. The one who only associates with himself and others like himself dies into emptiness and harmony with others, yes-men and women who never disagree. Disagreement is the root of growth.

Guðbergur has tried to compose a life’s work based on his own aesthetics and he knew it would not be well received. In all things he has remembered the lava where he grew up. Lava is like this: A burning mass of rock running from a volcano. It stops, cools down, and dies, but only up to a point. In this rough state it slowly becomes covered with moss which crumbles and turns into soil from which even high trees can grow under the right conditions.

Guðbergur knew that this would probably be the destiny of what he worked at for years, in his theatre, in the opera, in the cinema of his self.

Few things are harder on the mind than the endless ocean, the barren lava, the earthquakes, and villages on the edges of the world where strong ocean storms hit the coast. At the same time, this can be stimulating if external conditions are looked at in a certain way: “This is how nature intended it to be.”

This attitude which stems from Guðbergur’s childhood surroundings is most likely one of the reasons why the most distinct feature of his fiction is not the will to evoke sympathy but contemplation, wonder, rebellion against situations, and the question: “How can you withstand the complex trial nature puts before your life and your nature and that of others?”

Guðbergur Bergsson, 2000.

Translated by Jóhann Thorarensen.        

Life as an Experiment in Guðbergur Bergsson’s Fiction

A man does not exist who would not want to return to the place he came from, to unite with it forever, because we are not born free and happy even though we think so. We are born into a lifelong forsakenness.

Guðbergur Bergsson: Faðir og móðir og dulmagn bernskunnar (Father and Mother and the Mystery of Childhood).

The author of The Confessions, Augustine (354-430), wrote so much that according to a fifth century pettiness only God can browse through the whole thing. Guðbergur Bergsson is similar to Augustine in terms of output and if anyone wants to approach the coherence of his work, the story from the fifth century might repeat itself. Amongst a multitude of novels, biographical novels, poems, short stories, articles and translations the reader feels inadequate and thinks: “In a project like this I have to be equipped with the angle of eternity. This author cannot therefore be writing for me and my kind but for God. May eternity keep him!” Having said that, the reader is not only tangled up in Bergsson’s creation, which covers the field of fiction, aesthetics, criticism and translations, but in a creative repetition of cultural history. A history whose main focus has been, for a long time, man, his circumstances and the means of his existence. The coherence in Bergsson’s work is, in other words, not prevalent and he himself says the following about his stories in the book of interviews called Guðbergur Bergsson metsölubók (Gudbergur Bergsson: a Bestseller): “The stories are like the man - never only themselves but refer to a larger field and remind us that no one is begotten of himself; everything is repeated words. Therefore, they are ’pranks’ in their own way.” (200).

It is not my intention to map out Guðbergur Bergssson’s fiction and the deep-rooted dialogue concerning the reality of Icelandic culture and society on the one hand, and Western cultural history and narrative tradition on the other. But in order to approach the coherence in Guðbergur’s fiction; in order to touch for a moment the “space” of his creation and the creative repetition already mentioned, the reader can join the man in Faðir og móðir og dulmagn bernskunnar (1997). The man has entered the house of his youth; the house that stands in the village of Grindavík, on the seaside of the south-west corner of Iceland. The wind is blowing outside and the man says that he finds security in hearing the wind wrestle with the wood of the house. Here he wants to seek his origin and enter of his own free will any part of the past.

But is it possible? Who is this man? And what is the connection between his search and the stories that are never only themselves but refer to a wider space and remind us that no one is begotten of himself; everything is repeated words.

The man is “Guðbergur Bergsson” and he has decided to make his origin the subject in a work about a father, a mother and the mystique of childhood. The work is not a traditional autobiography, as can be seen in Guðbergur’s definition of origin: “Man’s origin is everywhere and nowhere, but it can always be found in the thought and the words.” (27). The reader is also repeatedly reminded of the recreation of form and content discussed. In the introduction of the work we find the following words: “This work is historically wrong. Its sole role is to be somewhat correct emotionally, from the author’s point of view. Thus, this is autobiographical fiction.” These words are in harmony with other words, those that can be found in the beginning of the first part of the work and also concern the author’s will and intention. He says he wants to create an analogy with the past in the memory of his parents in words. Biographies, he also says in the introduction, do not, strictly speaking, exist because “few things are as completely lost as a man’s life so you can only write down his desire to preserve its atmosphere in words.”

But what is the athmosphere of a man’s life? the reader asks dumbfounded. What is an autobiographical fiction? Is this work perhaps closer to art than life? How is this boundary perceived?

In all of Guðbergur’s work we can find tireless reflection on the boundary between life and art. Faðir og móðir og dulmagn bernskunnar is not a unique work then in terms of how the content is dealt with. Rather, it is possible to find many of the main questions of his fiction as well as the aesthetical position they originate from. The words about origin mentioned above, how it is everywhere and nowhere and how it can always be found in words and thought, are closely linked with Bergsson’s first publications, the collection of poetry called Endurtekin orð (Repeated Words, 1961) and the novel Músin sem læðist (The Prowling Mouse, 1961). In the former we see a poet introduce himself on a stage of a world that is the scene of repeated words, words which simultaneously are devoted to the idea of God - the idea that God is the author of existence - and demand freedom from it, for the sake of man’s creative image. In the latter we see a novelist wrestle with a boy’s surroundings and inner life which seems to become the prey of existence after his mother’s enormous power over him is brought to an end. Born and raised in a bleak landscape, a ruggard group of people, and the reality of culture only fiction can express, the boy perceives in turns -living dead - his own limits and will before the dizzying project: to live.

Such is the perception in Bergsson’s works, as if copulation with existence takes place, an experimental perception which takes the form of creative thought in the repetition of words on the edge of Europe. In Faðir og móðir og dulmagn bernskunnar this perception is the novelist’s subject in a search for the origin of life and art. Along with the serious questions evoked by the work – such as what is the connection between imagination and death? What is it about life that makes man die within? How do you hold on to your faith in life against all that is constantly dying, on the outside as well as within? – the reader not only participates in the novelist’s search for his origin, beyond the historical doctrine about what is right and what is wrong, and beyond the dogma of accepted ideas about what should be true in a man’s life, but also in a modern author’s thoughts about art, from the point of view of life:

I know that thought can travel far in the air, perch on the gravel, and grow multi-coloured wherever it shoots roots. It is not a prayer to life, life does not need one, it goes about its own business having no sympathy with those who are alive and life has no laws, only we who make them. (232)

It may be that what is here called the angle of life gives birth to tragedy. In Bergsson’s autobiographical fiction the reader also gets a chance to come face to face with the poor existencial circumstances related to his father and mother’s childhood and their struggle in life. But instead of arousing a temporal and spatial sympathy with the reader and get him to think something like; “What injustice the common people in Iceland had to suffer in the beginning of the 20th century!” Bergsson evokes much greater fear by having the same reader think, in a large context, about human nature and the echo of life that can be found in its senselessness. Following this kind of thoughts people’s need for man-made laws becomes not just tangible but is replaced by the problem of human existence without any solution in sight. The man in the house - the one who has not only created completely different conditions of life for himself and lived for long stretches of time far from the layer of lava and the village of his childhood, but also made the point of view of life repeatetly the subject of his fiction - he has this to say about man’s hopes in life: “You can only hope to be able to handle your work, almost anything else is unmanageable.” (93).

In the unfinished house Gudbergur, as a child, finds what later shapes his aesthetic approach to life and art: How that which is unfinished evokes a special kind of magic, how existence is not made up of that which is completed and emptied but of potential possibilities. When he was a child he felt that it was a lot more mysterious and enjoyable to sit by a wall and feel how dry sand in a closed fist flows tickling over the palm and between the fingers, constantly increasing as it is emptied and the flow is faster at the edge of the palm and seems at the same time to fill the fist with emptiness. I gained in this simple game knowledge of the equal existence of fullness and emptiness, that the emptiness is also fulfilment but of course only in its own special way. There is balance in this and an analogy between matter and the lack of it, the palpable and that which cannot be touched except with thought and perception. This is the fusion of form and its content. I could lie for hours, sometimes all day, doing this, to feel the delight in perceiving both the matter and the lack of it in my hands and in life and perhaps in art as well, the fusion of form and meaning in the world. (31-32)

In search of conceivable possibilities in the house of youth the man thinks about the sorrow life awakens and how man’s own grief has no other purpose than to water the emotions to keep them from drying up. The same man says in a different place in a different book:

The same goes for my fiction as life: if human beings could choose some other scene for their perceptions or unity than the life they lead, they would choose it and reject life. Life is only a bad necessity for those who are born. I could say the same about my practice or my fiction.... to know how to categorise emotions and give them names is of no concern for the head or the body that brings them forth. Thus I say, that fortunately for my feelings I feel like I’m living dead at the same time. (Guðbergur Bergsson metsölubók 70)

But what is this boundary between life and art? The man in the house remembers his mother’s deathbed and how he felt profound disgrace there: The mother’s struggle with death brought forth the memory of a story by Borges, a story about a woman who was about to die when the blush of youth was suddenly in her face. He remembers how he felt spellbound by fiction, just as if his reality was the reality of fiction. “Did then nothing in life exist except fiction?” he asked himself. “Is that which brings forth stories always a kind of a death-struggle?” In this he remembers the mystery of childhood, how ideas about fiction and its nature were born, and how a poet dies in his work in order for it to have its own independent existence.

I will not attempt here to answer the question, “does then nothing in life exist but fiction?” Another man in another story by Guðbergur Bergsson may however shed some light on the matter, on this incessant reflection about the boundary between life and art and this boundary is both linked to the creation and to death within. In the novel Sú kvalda ást sem hugarfylgsnin geyma (Tormented Love, 1993, published in English in 2000), the reader meets a person who decides to live the potentials of human nature, both in life and in writing. After having lived a spotless life as a husband, father and teacher in contemporary Reykjavík, he inherits his lifelong friend’s flat and lover. What happens then is a passionate experimentation of the emotions every person is offered; the man voluntarily enters the carousel of emotional relationships driven by cultural history. Just as Augustine in his Confessions the man records in his diary the incessant search of his body and spirit for a possible channel for his love of life, love for himself, and others. But unlike Augustine - who, in the end, chooses the love of God rather than an existence in the bitter world of man - the man in Bergsson’s novel is faithful to the tormented love. Because of this the reader cannot only sense the threat which is in life, a threat which the man in Faðir og móðir og dulmagn bernskunnar decides to meet and “come into the possession of something as lasting as the torment of having been born” (169), but also the artistic value of the expression of life in the literary culture we in the Western world are born into and die out of after fumbling attempts in what the poet calls a lifelong forsakenness:

Perhaps the expression of life, a man’s love of life, the love for oneself and others, is a constant death within us, the death of something we would least like to lose but desire to be everlasting because the same goes for the thought and the matter: after it has been formed it must also become extinguished.

Therefore things have turned out differently than I thought at the beginning: that if I made the diary my confidant I would give eternal life in words to my feelings. Experience has taught me otherwise. The expression of life and love have died a certain death. I don’t think I have been able to give anything in my life a permanent artistic form or an immortal content and that I, in fact, only love the subject I record in my diary in order to destroy it there. (173)

I would like to thank Ástráður Eysteinsson for reviewing this article.

Birna Bjarnadóttir, 2000.

Translated by Jóhann Thorarensen.

Articles

Jerábková-Bartoskova, Marta : “Guðbergur Bergsson (1932-)”
Icelandic Writers. Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 293, ed. Partick J. Stevens, Detroit, Gale 2004, pp. 70-76

See also: Neijmann, Daisy L., ed. A History of Icelandic Literature.
University of Nebraska Press, 2007, pp. 421, 423-426, 430, 435, 439, 448, 454, 448

Excerpts from articles on Guðbergur’s work

Dagný Kristjánsdóttir: “Fra andeunge til svane/ From duckling to swan”
Nordic Literature Magazine 1993

The Swan (1991), which was nominated for the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize, is a curious book. Superficially it deals with a nine-year old girl who is sent away from home over the summer to learn manners in proximity with nature and simple people in the country. Few dramatic events take place except for the magical conclusion. If one sticks to the concrete action in the novel,it is not so different from that in many Icelandic books for children and young people that show how city children are sent from the pernicious urban environment to be reeducated in “innocent” surroundings. But Guðbergur’s novel is no children’s book, and it concerns not the girl’s real experiences, but how she deals with them psychologically.

The girl in the novel develops from a child into a woman during this summer, from a pupa into a butterfly, from an ugly duckling into a swan. She is in the borderland between youth and adulthood, and this summer she learns that borders are unreal. Everything contains its opposite: life carries death inside it; beauty embraces ugliness; love has cruelty in it.

The book’s depictions of nature hardly have a parallel in Icelandic literature, and the beauty of the language spreads a veil over the text’s calm or sorrow.

(16-17)

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Ármann Jakobsson: Faðir og móðir og dulmagn bernskunnar (Father and Mother and the Mystery of Childhood)
DV December 12th 1997

It goes without saying that Guðbergur Bergsson is one of the major geniuses of Icelandic literature in this century, and seldom has he been better than in this unique autobiographical novel. [...]

The reader is drawn into the mythical world of Bergsson’s youth in Grindavík. There, both the boy Guðbergur and the writer parttake in the narrative, for in this story of childhood the past, the present and the future stand side by side. In his youth Guðbergur was meant to be a carpenter but he was too dexterous for that. The structure of this work could, however, well be compared to the work of a skillful craftsman, and Bergsson’s craftsmanship has enriched Icelandic literature. [...]

The book is called volume I and that gives one a reason to celebrate. This promises that with this work Guðbergur Bergsson has started to put together his powerful autobiographical novel. We would like to hear more.

2013 - An honorary doctorate with the Department of Languages, Literature and Linguistics in the School of Humanities of the University of Iceland

2004 - The Swedish Academy’s Nordic Literature Prize

1997 - The Icelandic Literature Prize: Faðir og móðir og dulmagn bernskunnar (Father and Mother and the Mystery of Childhood)

1994 - The Knight‘s Cross of the Icelandic Order of the Falcon

1991 - The Icelandic Literature Prize: Svanurinn (The Swan)

1988 - The Cross of the Spanish Order of Civil Merit (Cruz de la Orden del mérito Civil) for his contribution to spanish literature as translator

1983 - DV Cultural Prize: Hjartað býr enn í helli sínum (The Heart Still Lives in its Cave)

1978 - The Icelandic Broadcasting Service Writer’s Prize

1967 - The Icelandic Newpaper’s Literary Award

Orden de Merito civil. The Spanish Royal Cross

Nominations

2016 - The Nordic Council’s Literature Prize: Þrír sneru aftur (Tree Came Back)

2014 - The Icelandic Literature Prize: Þrír sneru aftur (Three Came Back)

2010 - The Icelandic Translators’ Awards: Öll dagsins glóð. Safn portúgalskra ljóða 1900-2008  (A selection of Portuguise poetry)

2006 - The NONINO Award (in Italy): Il Cigno (Svanurinn), translated to Italian by Silvia Cosimini

2000 - The Nordic Council’s Literature Prize: Faðir og móðir og dulmagn bernskunnar and Eins og steinn sem hafið fágar (Father and Mother and the Mystery of Childhood and Like a Stone Smoothed by the Sea)

1999 - The Icelandic Literature Prize: Eins og steinn sem hafið fágar (Like a Stone Smoothed by the Sea)

1999 - The Aristeion Prize: Faðir og móðir og dulmagn bernskunnar (Father and Mother and the Mystery of Childhood)

1998 - DV Cultural Prize: Faðir og móðir og dulmagn bernskunnar (Father and Mother and the Mystery of Childhood)

1993 - The Icelandic Literature Prize: Sú kvalda ást sem hugarfylgsnin geyma (Tormented Love)

1993 - The Nordic Council’s Literature Prize: Svanurinn (The Swan)

1982 - The Nordic Council’s Literature Prize: Sagan af Ara Fróðasyni og Hugborgu konu hans (The Story of Ari Frodason and his Wife Hugborg)

1975 - The Nordic Council’s Literature Prize: Það sefur í djúpinu and Hermann og Dídí (It Sleeps in the Depths and Hermann and Dídí)