World Light
Table of Contents
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: PRONUNCIATION
INTRODUCTION TO HALLDÓR LAXNESS’S - World Light
BOOK ONE - THE REVELATION OF THE DEITY
BOOK TWO - THE PALACE OF THE SUMMERLAND
BOOK THREE - THE HOUSE OF THE POET
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: PRONUNCIATION
The modern Icelandic alphabet has thirty-two letters, compared with twenty-six in modern English. There are two extra consonants (ð and þ), and an additional diphthong (æ). Readers may find a note on the pronounciations of specifically Icelandic letters helpful:
ð
(Ð), known as “eth” or “crossed d,” is pronounced like the (voiced)
th
in
breathe
. þ (
), known as “thorn,” is pronounced like the (unvoiced)
th
in
breaths
. æ is pronounced like the
i
in
life
.
The pronunciation of the vowels is conditioned by the accents:
á like the
ow
in
owl
é like the
ye
in
yet
í like the
ee
in
seen
ó like
o
in
note
ö like the
eu
in French
fleur
ú like the
oo
in
soon
ý like the
ee
in
seen
au like the
œi
in French
œil
ei, ey, like the
ay
in
tray
Please note asterisks (*) within the text indicate an explanatory note to be found
on pages 599–606.
INTRODUCTION TO HALLDÓR LAXNESS’S
World Light
BY SVEN BIRKERTS
The first, and possibly main, thing to be said about Halldór Laxness’s
World Light
is that it is a surpassingly strange novel. Strange as in exalting, eye-opening, and sense-refreshing. But certainly strange. The book fits on none of the usual grids. It cannot be assimilated to the categories of psychological novel, or social, or historical, or philosophical, or, quite, spiritual; certainly it has elements of all. Neither is it an old style
Bildungsroman,
though in its presentation of a life in fairly distinct “stages,” it owes some debt to that form. It does not create a strong dramatic arc, avoiding most strategies whereby tensions are gathered toward resolution, creating instead its own unique terms and procedures. Nor does it have as its core preoccupation the exploration of human relationships. And though it features as its protagonist an individual with a strong visionary aptitude, it does not ascend, except in isolated—wonderful—bursts, into the realms of higher seeing; it remains quite closely tethered to the inhospitable ground surface of its Icelandic setting.
World Light,
more than almost any novel I can think of, declares itself
sui generis,
summoning readers with its call to independence.
Moving in on the novel from a distance, we can first try to place it in the context of the author’s career. Halldór Laxness, the undisputed giant of Icelandic letters, was born Halldór Kiljan Guthdjónsson in Reykjavík in 1902, and began to publish early—a privately printed love story,
Child of Nature,
appearing when he was just seventeen, followed in short order by stories, a novel, a treatise on Catholicism, a collection of essays, and poems, all before his thirtieth year. In the decade of his thirties, Laxness would produce his monumental saga,
Independent People
(1934–35), various stories and essays, a play, and then, in 1937, first issued in four separate volumes,
World Light.
Dozens of works of all descriptions followed decade after decade, including
The Fish Can Sing,
representing the more directly lyrical turn of his late career, which was published in 1957, two years after the author was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Many of these works have not been translated into English and remain inaccessible to this reader. But the point is obvious:
World Light,
like any of Laxness’s works we may wish to single out, is but a boulder in a rockslide, one small part of what might be seen as a compulsive lifelong quest to fix a world to the page.
Yet for all that, there is nothing that feels rushed or
ad hoc
or partial about the novel. It possesses an almost glacial mass and solidity, and unfolds in an atmosphere of such pre-electronic stasis that the present-day reader may feel she has been removed to a counterworld, a place of the imagination where everything happens differently, where scarcely any news of modernity has reached. How odd it feels when we encounter, as we do, once or twice, references to the telephone or to airplanes, reminders that the world of the novel might be more or less contemporaneous with novels by Virginia Woolf or D.H. Lawrence.
Laxness’s narrative of the hardscrabble and ultimately (at least from the outside) tragic life of Ólafur Kárason is based, at least in part, on events and episodes from the life of one Magnus Hjaltason Magnússon, an Icelandic folk poet (1873–1916), including Magnússon’s abandonment by his mother, his long childhood illness as well as the extreme deprivations he endured, his tormented marriage to a grasping, manipulative epileptic woman, and his prison sentence for the sexual violation of a fourteen-year-old girl. But if the Magnússon story activated Laxness’s imagination and gave him a scaffold of sorts, his mission was less to re-create the life than to use the solitudes and encounters of that life to help him body forth a whole culture, the world of tough-luck villages and remote farmsteads, and to play variations upon some of his favored themes, like the isolation of the creative imagination, the deep-rooted struggles between the forces of labor and capital, and the all-transforming power of the spiritual encounter.
The four books of
World Light
can be seen to represent the four essential stages, or passages, in the life of Ólafur Kárason, taking him from the damaging indignities of his boyhood in the rural isolation of the oddly named Fótur-undir-Fótarfæti, into the isolation and romantic and poetic questing of his young manhood in the village of Sviðinsvík; through the demoralizing entrapment of marriage and the abrasions of political and moral struggle in the conflict between union-activists and owners that transforms village life for a long period; bringing us finally to his public disgrace, trial, and imprisonment, all of which destroy the frail structures of his life and pave the way for his tragic romantic transfiguration. But while movement from our first introduction to our last sighting—the poet walking out to his certain death on the vast glacier—can hardly be called happy or fulfilling, the paradoxical triumph of the novel is that the reader nevertheless feels throughout the ennobling and redeeming force of the spirit.
This redemption is manifest for Ólafur—and the reader—both as a sense of mystical union, experienced over and over through the poet’s encounters with the beauty of the physical world
and
in his periodic seizures of creative inspiration. And this last points to what is probably the greatest liberty Laxness has taken with his source material. For folk poet Magnússon was by all accounts regarded as a second-rate versifier, hardly a vessel for the Northern Muse. But whatever the objective quality of Ólafur’s verses—the cited examples don’t make the case for greatness—the visitations he experiences have a Rilkean intensity and integrity. The author, so fond of mocking his characters, protagonist included, is dead earnest in depicting the shuddering inrush of inspiration. It renders all of Ólafur’s real-life travails temporarily moot.
World Light
opens with great vividness and compression. The boy Ólafur, who will come to seem to us as solitary as any character in literature, the works of Beckett included, is seen standing by himself on the shore of the bay of Ljósavík. Within a few pages we have grasped both his situation and his character. A dreamer, drawn to the distant promise of books as well as to the immediate solace of his natural surrounding, Ólafur is ridiculed and ritually abused by the rudely unreflective members of his adoptive family. His mother, who is still alive, had him sent away from her in a sack while he was still a baby. He has been taken in less out of kindness than in the vain hope that he will grow up to be a useful worker on the homestead. Life at Fótur-undir-Fótarfæti is bitter, at near-subsistence level—“sometimes the evening meal was only pickled tripe and milk”(5)—and Ólafur, frail as he is, can do little to pull his weight. He lives in corners and crannies, hiding from the blows of his two thuggish “brothers,” his inconspicuousness belying the fierce intensity of his inwardness, which battens onto whatever scraps it can—cautionary stories told by his stepmother, the few books and pamphlets he comes across. From these paltry influences arises his ambition: “Often the boy was overwhelmed by an uncontrollable yearning to write down in a hundred books everything he saw, despite what anyone said—two hundred books as thick as the
Book of Sermons,
whole Bibles, whole chests of books”(7).
Then there is the matter of his spiritual susceptibility. Not yet nine, he is described as having mystical encounters worthy of one of the Desert Fathers: “He would be standing down by the bay, perhaps, in the early days of spring, or up on the headland to the west of the bay where there was a mound with a rich green tussock on top. . . . Then suddenly he felt he saw God’s image open before him. He felt the deity reveal itself in Nature in an inexpressible music, the sonic revelation of the deity; and before he knew it he himself had become a trembling voice in a celestial chorus of glory”(10). At times Ólafur seems to be a splinter of the extraordinary wedged into a world driven forward by the most limiting natural exigencies.
Humiliated by his family, divided within himself by their conflicting claims on him, brought to the breaking point by the tension between his inward sense of things and the unyielding crudity of his circumstance, Ólafur collapses into his long infirmity—the nature of his illness is never clear, not to the family or the reader—taking to his little bed under the eaves. Here, mostly ignored, reviled from a distance, he retreats into a kind of waking coma, a condition of extreme life deprivation interrupted only by the arrival, for a time, of an old man named Jósep, with whom he discusses the glories of poetry and the Icelandic sagas before the old man dies, and the sporadic visits from Magnína, the poignantly obese daughter of the house, who surreptitiously reads to Ólafur from the one precious book in the house,
The Felsenburg Stories.
Laxness, so generously lyrical in scenes of spiritual encounter, can also render the near-absolute stasis of Ólafur’s confinement: “This boy had counted the floorboards and the joints and the planks in the clinker-built ceiling more than a thousand times . . . He knew every single knot in the ceiling and the floor, and every single nail, and how the rust from the nails had stained the wood” (71). We can scarcely believe that anything will ever change. But always, when the limits of the tolerable have been reached and exceeded, comes rescue: “Then suddenly Magnína came up the stairs, brought out a worn book from under her apron, and sat down on the edge of his bed” (71).
The subtle art of the first section is to persuade us of Ólafur’s absolute estrangement and to prepare the ground for the various strange transformations that will follow in succeeding sections. Soon enough the family will give up on the useless invalid, whose illness is regarded as sheer laziness by the vicious brothers, and he will be sent away to burden others.
The first book closes with several fateful encounters, a phrase which is to be taken quite literally, for Ólafur’s life, like the lives of characters in myth and legend, is in a sense nothing
but
a sequence of fateful encounters.
At one point, not long before his departure, the family celebrates the wedding of Jónas, one of the brothers. The house is full of guests. Ólafur, abed as ever, listening to the noises downstairs, suddenly discovers that there is a young woman in the room with him. This is Jarþrúður from Gil, who for some reason—poor health, it appears—is avoiding the festivities. Her exhausted indistinctness is vivid. Ólafur “had to examine her carefully to make sure she had any appearance at all. Youth had faded from her cheeks and her eyes were brownish and moist like seaweed . . .” (90–91) But Jarþrúður seems to be a young woman of some sensibility, and as they converse, she somehow manages to extract from Ólafur the promise that he will one day marry her, a promise that will become one of the terrible manacles of his later life.
Then, one day soon after, the mysterious “escort” Reimar comes to take the young man away. The destination is unclear. Indeed, departure is thrust upon Ólafur like some arbitrary stroke of fate. The boy is so weak that he has to be carted away over the mountains and through the rocky valleys on a stretcher. But Reimar, who will play a crucial messenger role at novel’s end, has a plan. He brings him toórunn of Kambar, a beautiful, provocative priestess figure who lives with her sisters at an isolated farmstead. There, with incantations and the laying on of hands,órunn miraculously restores Ólafur to health, gives him back to the world, though that world will prove for long years to be but the shambles of an isolated fishing village.
The second book begins with Ólafur’s arrival in Sviðinsvík, where his visionary inwardness will suffer the complex assaults of new circumstance. The young poet, destitute, necessarily reliant on the proverbial kindness of strangers, is pulled inexorably into the intensities of village life, first through his contact with Vegmey, yet another of the mysterious young women who appear in the pages of the novel as if by spontaneous generation, then with the various rivalrous town officials—the partish officer, the Privy-Councillor, and Péturríhross, manager of the Regeneration Company, a peculiar mercantile operation that seems to have the whole village clutched in its economic tentacles.