Fall Books: On Tarjei Vesaas’s The Birds and The Ice Palace by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Vesaas’s home in Telemark, Norway. National Library of Norway, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

There are books that don’t leave you once you have finished reading them but remain with you, some for the rest of your life. To me Tarjei Vesaas’s two masterpieces, The Birds and The Ice Palace, are such books. This is not just because they are good—the world is full of good books—but also because they did something to me, changed something in me. I think of The Birds as a place, a place where something vital becomes visible, something that is always present but goes unnoticed, something that Vesaas’s novel, through its great attentiveness, allows to appear. The protagonist is named Mattis. He is mentally disabled and lives with his sister, unable to provide for himself. In social settings he is helpless, he senses other people’s wills and demands but is unable to satisfy them, he gets all tangled up inside. But when he is by himself, in the forest, for instance, or out on the lake below the house they live in, his being opens up, and the world he knows, the world of nature, flows through him; in his relation to it, he is free and unfettered. The linguistic sensibility that Vesaas evinces to accomplish this is unsurpassed. The same sensibility is found in The Ice Palace, which is about an encounter between two eleven-year-old girls, Siss and Unn. They are drawn to each other without knowing why, and their encounter—where everything that is at stake, everything that happens between them is wordless—takes place in an indefinite zone between sensations, emotions, and thoughts, a zone in the novel with its own animal alertness.

Seen from the outside, it is difficult to imagine a literature further from the center than these two books. The center of power, the center of money, the center of the entertainment industry. We are in the Norwegian countryside in the fifties, in the mind of a village idiot and in the mind of an eleven-year-old prepubescent girl. And the author himself, Tarjei Vesaas, came from a small, isolated inland village, surrounded by deep forests and high mountains, where he lived his entire life, and he wrote his books in Nynorsk, a language used by a mere half a million people. But when you open The Birds or The Ice Palace and begin to read, you are transported not to the periphery of the world but to its very midst. The circumstances of life in which the main characters, Mattis and Siss, find themselves, are far removed from the reader’s, but their being, their existential presence, is not. And this span of the reading experience is in a sense built into the books themselves, in their rhythm and overarching theme: the interplay between the familiar and the foreign, the near and the far, the graspable and the unfathomable. Vesaas himself called this the “Great Cycle.”

Throughout his entire body of work, so rich in life and the presence of all things, there flows an undercurrent of darkness, which when it surfaces can look like this, from the 1949 poem “The Serpent’s Way”:

And the snake glides across,
slowly polishes the rock
going about its tasks,
and the bird the void will swallow
sings

Tarjei Vesaas himself was a gentle, taciturn, modest, and mild-mannered man who rarely gave interviews, and when he did, he said practically nothing. He took up little space in public life, he turned down a lifelong honorary salary from the Norwegian state, he declined the offer to live in Norway’s honorary residence for artists (where the author Jon Fosse currently resides), and he refused to accept the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Saint Olav, on the grounds that “it is not in keeping with my nature.” He was the eldest of three brothers and by tradition should have taken over the family farm, as the eldest son had done for ten generations, but he relinquished his inheritance, he wanted to become a writer.

He made his literary debut in 1923 and thenceforth published roughly one book per year until 1968. All in all he wrote twenty-three novels, four short story collections, six volumes of poetry, and eleven plays.

The farm he renounced was called Vesås, and it is still there, six hundred meters above sea level, lying by itself with no other houses in sight, only a lake far below, and the majestic mountains on the other side. But although the farm buildings are still standing and the surroundings are much as they were in 1897, the world that Vesaas was born into was radically different from ours—all labor was manual, trees were felled by hand with axes, lumber was hauled out of the forest on sleds, the fields were ploughed with horses, the meadows mowed with scythes. All of the books Vesaas wrote take place in this landscape, wrought out of experiences that were made there. Not that the external world was absent, it seeped in; one of his earliest childhood memories was of hearing news from the Russo-Japanese war in 1905, and about the First World War, which broke out when he was seventeen, he was later to write: “It burned into you so that you could never again be rid of it. In those first months there seemed to be a tremor beneath your feet—no matter that it was happening far away.” In the twenties and thirties he made several long journeys in Europe, and among his experiences there he singled out the plays he had seen, in particular Artaud’s absurd drama, and the rise of Nazism in Germany, which he witnessed with dread. In literary terms it took a long time for these impulses to manifest in his writing. His early books were heavily traditional, neo-Romantic peasant novels. Not until 1940 was there a turning point in his work, with the utterly luminous novel The Seed, which plays out on an island over the course of a day and a night, filled with disturbing violence and mass hysteria, clearly an allegory of the events then unfolding in Europe. It was followed by several symbol-laden modernist novels, Tårnet (The tower), Brannen (The fire), and Signalet (The signal), in the last of which Beckett can be glimpsed in the background.

The Birds was published in 1957, when Vesaas was sixty, and The Ice Palace followed in 1963. These novels are the high point not merely of Tarjei Vesaas’s oeuvre, but also of twentieth-century Norwegian literature as a whole. Had they been written in English, there is no doubt in my mind that they would have been part of the Anglo-American canon, right up there next to the novels of Virginia Woolf, for example, with which they have much in common, in the sense that both represent an answer to the same question: how to wrest literary expression out of the grip of the narrative, how to make it pass beneath the arch of the epic, the arch of history, and get to where human beings really live, think and act, in other words, to the moment, where reality is not a given but something that comes into being? Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse are two of Woolf’s attempts to answer that question, while The Birds and The Ice Palace are two of Vesaas’s.

The Birds and The Ice Palace remained with me after I had read them, I wrote at the outset. They did something to me, I went on, they changed something in me.

What was it? What is it about these two novels that made me write that?

To recall one’s experience of a book is a bit like remembering pain—we are able to describe what happened and what it was like, but without the feeling that filled us then, and since the feeling is the pain, what we are talking about is merely the husk, what gets left behind in our memory. The sign for pain, not pain itself. From the moment I sit down, open The Birds, and read the first sentences again, it no longer matters what I already know about the novel. For when you get to a place, the essential thing is not what you know about it. The essential thing is that you are there. On a grassy hillside on a sunny day in May, who tries to understand the leaves of the birch rustling in the wind, the long grooves in the water traveling along the windblown blue fjord below? Now literature is not nature, of course, but when it is good literature, it has a presence of its own, its own atmosphere, its own timbre, and, I increasingly believe, this presence is what really matters. Not whatever meaning it may or may not produce.

To this one might object: What is the value of presence? It is a good question, but no better than the counterquestion: What is the value of a meaning?

To mean something is to take control of it. It is an active act. To be with something and allow oneself to be filled by it requires the opposite, it involves relinquishing control and is passive. The difference between meaning something and being with something is the difference between taking up space and giving space. There is no doubt that the former is given precedence in our culture, and that remaining passive, not acting, has low status.

This difference is essential in The Birds. The protagonist Mattis, ridiculed and dysfunctional in the company of others, is in a whole other space when he is out in the forest, it is as if his thoughts take one step back in his mind, the thoughts that otherwise shut other things out. Here they are given room, and he is so finely tuned to his surroundings that he is afraid to take up space, merely being there might be enough to frighten the bird he is watching and cause something to break, he thinks. Something vital. What might that be? The bond he has with the bird, perhaps, so fragile that the slightest thing is enough to break it. His very sense of belonging.

Powerful, conflicting forces come together in Mattis, in a fierce ambivalence, in particular in the relation between man and nature. While Mattis longs to be a part of the social world and its language, the novel yearns for nature and the wordless. While Mattis searches for an act that will gain him acceptance into the community, the novel seeks nonaction and the form of being that emerges from it.

All of this comes together in the novel’s key scene: one evening a woodcock flies over the house. Mattis sees it as a sign, brimming with meaning. And he thinks triumphantly that it will give him the status he lacks. But no one else sees any significance in it, no one understands what he is talking about. While Mattis identifies with the bird in the belief that it will help him be admitted into human society, the novel identifies Mattis with the birds as the nonhuman—his eyes are shy as birds, and when he calls his own name towards the end of the novel, his voice is that of a bird.

The Ice Palace is a very different novel, but there too, the relation between the human and the natural world is central, in a world where the boundary between the one seeing and that which is being seen is not fixed but in constant flux. This is how it begins:

A young, white forehead boring through the darkness. An eleven-year-old girl. Siss.

It was really only afternoon, but already dark. A hard frost in late autumn. Stars, but no moon, and no snow to give a glimmer of light—so the darkness was thick, in spite of the stars. On each side was the forest, deathly still, with everything that might be alive and shivering in there at that moment.

There is something out there. Siss is about to discover something within her, a sudden warmth, a sudden joy, a sudden fellowship, but the thing that is out there, cold and still and beautiful, does not vanish, it remains there throughout the novel. When I read it, it is difficult not to think of the image in the poem from 1949: “and the bird the void will swallow / sings.” For there is a consuming hunger in this novel, on the one hand for warmth and life, on the other for darkness and death. The central image, the ice palace, is just a frozen waterfall, but in the minds of those who see it, it becomes something other and more. “They bring out what sorrows they may have and transfer them to this midnight play of light and suspicion of death,” it says in one passage. And in another: “They recognize it so well that they tremble. It is unsafe, but they wish to do it, they have to take part in it.”

The danger that threatens in both of these novels is a life outside the community. Loneliness is a dangerous emotion, because it doesn’t come alone but is always accompanied by another, namely meaninglessness, since all meaning derives from others, never from yourself. Why meaninglessness is dangerous is obvious to everyone. If life has no meaning one may as well end it, and if the pain is great enough, that unimposing “may as well” can be replaced by “must” and “shall.”

Vesaas knew loneliness well, the years of his youth were painful, and both Mattis and Siss have much of him within them. He wrote one final masterpiece after The Ice Palace, the autobiographical, genre-fluid The Boat in the Evening, which came out in 1968. And then a poetry collection penned by him was published only a few months after he died in 1970, titled Liv ved straumen (Life by the stream). In one of its poems he describes the approach of death, in a warm, serene and limpid image as far removed from the frozen waterfall in the ice-cold, dark forest as it is possible to get. We are on the stoop outside the house on a summer afternoon:

From the Stoop

The shadows drift down the meadow
like cool, calm friends
after a scorching day.

Our mind is a silent
realm of shadows.
And the shadows drift down
with their friendly riddles
and their dim blooming.

The first shadow-tips
reach our
feet.

We look up calmly:
Are you there already,
my dark flower.