World Light (2 page)

Through the offices of the energetically self-involved
ríhross, Ólafur comes to squat in a dilapidated abandoned manor house called the Palace of the Summerlands, to which he repairs when he is not foraging for food, composing poems for village occasions, or wandering about the countryside, often as not thinking of Vegmey. The soul of the poet is compelled by beauty and the fierce longing for love. Looking at Vegmey, he has seen “that hot, wordless dreamland which is sometimes in a girl’s eyes when she looks at a man” (142).

The second book, drawing a broad and often satirical portrait of village life, is episodically constructed around Ólafur’s various encounters and involvements. If his interactions with Pétur
ríhross expose him to the machinating intelligence of the merchant entrepreneur, then his later friendship with Örn Úlfar exposes him to the most extreme political idealism. Örn may be a socialist dreamer, but he is also an activist bent upon breaking the monopolistic hold that the Regeneration Company has over the village. He wants to help his fellow villagers establish a union that will guarantee them equitable wages. While Örn is Ólafur’s opposite—a man of action and engagement—the two men share an emotional zealousness in the service of a larger vision of life.

More kindred in obvious ways is the poetess, a laborer’s wife who takes Ólafur in and feeds him when he needs care, and who, far more importantly, encourages him in his poetic pursuits: “The poetess gave him paper and exercise books, and then he would sit up late, sometimes all night, writing with all his might as if the end of the world could overwhelm them at any moment and everything depended on getting enough words down on paper before the sun, the moon and the stars were wiped out” (192).

Events in this second book take an overtly comic turn when
órunn of Kambor, who had been the one to restore Ólafur to health, is brought in by the manager to conduct a séance, one radical consequence of which is the decision of the town’s Psychic Research Society to disinter the bones of Satan and Musa, a long-dead murderer and adultress, to have them reburied, an initiative meant to mark a symbolic new beginning for the village. The intensity of debate among the locals inscribes as nothing else could the credulous insularity of village life.

That this new beginning should coincide with the arrival of one Júel J. Júel, a scheming confederate of the manager’s—the man with the marvelous broad-brimmed hat—is, we suspect, a slyly effective commentary by Laxness on what Marx characterized as the witchcraft of economics.
ríhross, who would bring the marvels of modern capitalism to the village, is also the guiding spirit of the Psychic Research Society. To raise money for their plan to capitalize the Regeneration Company, Júel and
ríhross, like any good mafiosi, insure the Palace at Summerlands for a huge sum of money and then arrange to have it burned to the ground, leaving Ólafur once again homeless. Very shortly thereafter—such is the pattern of “coincidence” in the poet’s life—he receives a letter from Jarþrúður, who he has not seen since the long-ago night of Jónas’s wedding, and who now insists that he honor the promise he made to one day marry her. Ólafur, as ever, capitulates before the power of the word. With this paired turn of events Laxness has everything in place for the third book.

The title of this third book, “The House of the Poet,” can be interpreted both literally and figuratively. Literally it designates the next phase of Ólafur’s tormented pilgrimage. Some time after the destruction of the Palace of the Summerlands—insurance money from which has now rejuvenated the Regeneration Company, boosting Pétur
ríhross in his monopolistic ambitions—we find Ólafur and Jarþrúður living in their own little shack, called “The Heights.” Things have changed. While Jarþrúður is still his “intended,” they have a child, Margrét, a sickly little girl much beloved by Ólafur. The passing of five years has brought the poet responsibilities, and with these a much more complicated relation to his soul’s vocation. Writes Laxness, modulating as he does so effectively from the idiom of daily life to a rich prophetic cadence: “If it ever happened that the poet felt a little obstinate and complacent, perhaps even touched with a certain arrogance at being a poet, such feelings vanished the moment his intended started to cry—not to mention if the little girl started crying as well. It was hard to say which was strongest in the poet’s soul—the desire to please or the fear of hurting. When happiness came to this poet in his solitary moments, he was free and did not have a house. When he saw before him their tear-stained faces, he suddenly had a house. To be alone, that is to be a poet. To be involved in the unhappiness of others, that is to have a house” (326–327).

But the pull of poetry, the spirit, what Ólafur calls “the Voice,” remains powerful, declaring its own imperatives: “Every time he was allowed to go out, and not on some routine errand connected with his livelihood or his home, it was as if he were being given the world for a little while. However small a digression it was from his everyday routine, the Voice began to echo at once. It was the same Voice as of old. The difference was that when he was a child he thought he knew what it was, and that he understood it, and he gave it a name; but the older and wiser he became, the more difficult he found it to say what it was, or to understand it, except that he felt it called him away from other people and the responsibilities of life to the place where it alone reigned” (336–337).

Again, Laxness sets into stark opposition the claims of the world and the claims of the spirit. The world, for Ólafur, is both the domestic—his suffocating, sorrowful bond to Jarþrúður and his genuine love for Margrét, who will soon be taken by illness—and the public, the societal. In these next pages the conflict between union forces and property—socialism and capitalism, if you will—will come to a head, first with the stand-off between the
ríhross’s organization, the so-called Society of True Iceland (its nationalist chauvinism obviously, but not exclusively, a phenomenon of the Thirties) and the Laborers, who are cast by their adversaries as nonpatriotic agitators. Though Ólafur struggles to stay uninvolved, he is pressured from both sides— by his friend Örn as well as by Jarþrúður, who has thrown in her lot with the Society.

While there are escalating protests and threats of work stoppage, the full-out battle never quite materializes—scandal at a distance destroys the financial structure of the Society and the workers ultimately get their most basic demands met. Orchestrating the conflict in its local terms, moving between straight-on and satirical scenes of agitation and encounter, Laxness has given the forces at large in Europe and America their particular Icelandic refraction.

Laxness had himself turned to socialism during a two-year stay in America in the late 1920s, which not surprisingly put him at odds with many sectors of his society, and this third book puts on display the two very different strains of his writing sensibility. The passionate rhetoric of Örn carries no sarcastic undertones: “He who doesn’t choose justice isn’t human. I have little fondness for that pity which the coward calls love . . . What is love? If a loving person sees someone’s eye being gouged out, he howls as if his own eye were being gouged out. On the other hand he isn’t moved at all if he sees powerful liars utterly rob a whole people of their sight and thereby their good sense as well” (408).