Today it became clear to me that the whole idea of suicide is absurd.
There is absolutely no way out. We are immersed totally and completely in reality, in history, in our own biology. The possibility of imagining one’s own death amounts to a linguistic misconception. Similar to the possibility of calling oneself “you.” Or like the possibility of calling oneself by a name.
The blackness of the pupil is identical with the blackness between the galaxies.
(The Damaged Book III:2)
1–8: cleaned, the queens in good condition.
9–11: frozen, not cleaned.
12–14: in good condition, the queens possibly too old, the frames have to be attended to, new combs.
15–16: standing empty since fall 1971. Not attended to.
(The Damaged Book IV:1)
Spring, early summer winds, the scent of lilacs. The pounding of short, restless waves on the beach, the swarm of whitefish. The yellowed little stems of the dried reed.
A swarm of whitefish stands very still, as if it were one single body. How can a single whitefish know that the others are standing just as still?
Then a shadow falls there, the shadow of somebody who is bending over the water, and the swarm scatters in an explosion of lightning-quick reflexes, every one in a different direction, just as quickly as the light reflects in the water above them.
Nothing is left to reveal that they were there.
After they are gone, it’s hard to believe that they just were there.
(The Damaged Book V:1)
What’s happening to me now is disgusting, horrible, and degrading, and nobody will bring me to accept it or to persuade myself that it is somehow good for me.
It is disgusting to be at the mercy of an idiotic blind pain, fits of vomiting, and this entire secret inner dissolution, which is stupid and offensive, no matter what kind of an explanation there may be for it.
The usual heresy consists in denying the existence of a god who has created us. It is a much more interesting heresy to imagine that possibly a god has created us and then to say that there isn’t the least reason for us to be impressed by that fact. And certainly not to be thankful for it.
If there is a god it is our duty to say no.
If there is a god then it is the task of the human being to be his negation.
We begin again. We never give up.
My duty in these days, weeks or, at the worst, months which are still left, consists in saying a great, clear NO.
(The Damaged Book VI:1–3)
I, I, I, I, . . . after only four times already a senseless word.
(The Damaged Book VI:4)
Although it is the second week in May, it’s snowing today in all of Västmanland. The ambulance is coming to get me at four o’clock. I hope that the streets will not be too slippery.
One can always hope that there won’t be an accident. One can still hope.
(The Damaged Book VII:0)
*“lnformation Bureau”: the Swedish Secret Service (translator’s note).
Afterword
Lars Gustafsson is an engaging personality. He has the capacity for including his audience in his thinking and creating a sense of give and take, an exchange of ideas, enthusiasms, and perceptions. If Guntram Weber and I had not met Lars, attended his classes, watched him revel in his idiosyncratic standards of excellence, witnessed his undaunted capacity for doing, been struck by his “otherness,” his seeming bravado, his almost rude self-confidence, we probably never would have undertaken to find and read his novels—works inaccessible to English-speaking readers. But knowing him, we were drawn to his writing. We asked ourselves, “Is this captivation glitter, an illusion, a clever deception, or is there substance?” What are the dynamics of Lars Gustafsson’s joie de vivre? Would it be as contagious in his writing as in the flesh?
The last question must be answered by the individual reader. The questions of deception and dynamics, however, are dealt with in depth in the novel The Death of a Beekeeper as elsewhere in Lars Gustafsson’s work. They are at the heart of his philosophy, his poetry, and his prose. For Lars Gustafsson consciously extends his philosophical convictions into his life and his creativity, believing that the precondition for freedom is our individual capacity to define ourselves. “More and more people,” he says, “are realizing that the meaning or sense of their lives is the one they have to give to themselves.”* But this self-definition functions as a mirror or a wall which redirects one’s reality construct back toward oneself. Only in confronting a barrier does an image of self become precise. Lars sees this defining barrier as one’s “limits.” “The limits are the points where you discover reality, where you meet resistance. You say to yourself, ‘I cannot go further in this direction; here I am ignorant.’ A religious leader might say, ‘Here my convictions stop.’”
Modern man, says Lars Gustafsson, has succeeded in demonstrating to himself that there is no absolute certainty anywhere in his universe, be it in theology, philosophy, or even physics and mathematics. Rather than viewing uncertainty as cause for despair, Lars affirms the denial of absolutes as an opportunity for self-discovery. By discovering what you are not, you discover what you are. “God,” says Lars, “comes into Descartes’ philosophy only as a sort of geometrical question. That is to say, Descartes asks, ‘What would be the case if God is systematically deceiving us; what would remain of solid truth?’ He answers this question by saying that the one thing that remains solid, remains certain, is the fact that we doubt: Cogito ergo sum.”
Doubting reality, then, becomes an exercise, a creation of reality. It is in this sense that Lars Gustafsson proposes that writing be an overt act of deception or, as he expresses it: “Writers have to pose to themselves the question, ‘Are we counterfeiters?’ When I speak about counterfeit, I mean giving value to things that are valueless, giving context to things which have no context. This is exactly the way to make literature.”
Such a counterfeit reality is the raw material for the series of five novels of which Beekeeper is the last. All of the novels deal with a possible Lars Gustafsson, one of them even entitled Mr. Gustafsson, Himself.* The author explains the process: “I took one personality, mainly my own childhood, my own youth up to the age of eighteen and then varied it into five different lives, strengthening one property of my personality here, weakening it in another by giving myself a little more of a certain talent, subtracting a talent there. That resulted in alternative lives, what I call the cracks in the wall. These five novels are an experiment with the possible lives of a certain organism. They are a set of premises.”
By experimenting with such a set of premises, Lars is seeking to create the unique rather than the representative. Delineating the unique in The Death of a Beekeeper involved a precision which, to its author, is comparable to viewing a subject through increasingly stronger lenses of a microscope. His micro-lenses are a series of superficially redundant notebooks, each serving a different objective, each possessing a different optical power, presenting the reader with stylistic variations of the same theme. Not Doris Lessing, Lars maintains, but his own working notebooks motivated the decision to use this narrative ploy. “As I came into my office [in Austin], I saw my own notebooks lying on the table. You know, the yellow notebook for my lectures and the blue notebook containing sketches for one book and a red notebook containing sketches for a third book, and it occurred to me that they all had their own language, their own style of writing.”
The beekeeper’s notebooks also function as variant inventories of the protagonist’s life. The Blue Notebook purports to inventory his imagination. The Yellow Notebook contains an admixture of notations about household finances and personal comments about such events as the arrival of the diagnostic results from the District Hospital, the letter assumed to contain the news that the beekeeper has terminal cancer. This juxtaposition of economic pressures and death is not accidental, because Lars wants to imply that the lifeless exteriority of household finan
ces contains death. The narrative fiction is that the Yellow Notebook is not reproduced except in terms of a “few indicative samples.”
In contrast with the discursive Yellow and Blue notebooks, the Damaged Notebook conveys the tension and imminence of a memo pad and is ostensibly reproduced in full. It consists of local telephone numbers, terse observations, and notes about the course of the beekeeper’s disease. It most clearly reflects the protagonist’s physical state, demonstrating in its fragments the beekeeper’s need to break off, his inability to finish. The terse notations register and catalogue intense experiences of pain and perception and, in so doing, locate and diffuse their otherwise overwhelming impact.
All the notebooks concentrate the focus of Beekeeper on a man who is discovering life in the process of dying. Yet it is not a book about dying. “People talk so much about fearing death,” says Lars, “but very often they mean pain. If you ask the first person you meet what he is fearing, he will answer ‘death,’ but he will obviously mean pain. Death is something so tremendously empty and abstract.”
Death is the remote limit in the beekeeper’s life. More palpable by far in these pages is the experience of pain, portrayed with a particular poignancy: for it is through pain that the protagonist, an unabashedly egocentric man, meets his limits and thereby extends the meaning of his life.
This extension process is not morbid. From the outset the hero, nicknamed Weasel, is never unattractive, despite his selfcenteredness. He has humor—“Proletarians of pain, unite!” he thinks in a doctor’s waiting room—and imagination. All the notebooks testify to his capacity to engage the reader: even his capacity for rationalizing his behavior becomes a charming foible. The reader comes to admire the Weasel’s facility for fabricating idiosyncratic conclusions, for reminiscing about a girl he cannot remember or about an argument whose substance is forgotten.
Gradually, however, the pain of the cancer refocuses his attention as it alternates with respites from pain. His perception of nature and of people changes. When he dreams of his bees, which he has viewed as a mindless collective organism, they are transformed into a totally different, highly differentiated species—as some very intelligent, technically “advanced beings from the farthest reaches of the universe.” He views past events for the first time with something other than complete self-satisfaction, or at least with the dislocation essential to begin a reassessment of the potentials within himself: “Perhaps I should have used the time better.”
He begins to reflect about the fact that he has never wanted to have anything to do with people before because he does not want to give them control. He concludes that this was a vain aspiration, since he finds one can deny others but not the innate human desire for intellectual and physical companionship. He is struck by the fact that: “That word ‘I’ is the most meaningless word in the language. The dead point in the language. Just as the center must always be empty.” And what he learns is, “there is no real escape from life.”
His pain has created an absolute other within his own body. He denies his pain much as Descartes denied God—as an affirmation of self. With this opposition of pain he has the means to discover a nascent self and escape the vacuum of his own egocentrism.
The Death of a Beekeeper, then, is a novel with a philosophical program, an undertaking which, in the popular mind, could easily cast it in the role of a dubious entertainment. And for this reason no one is more surprised and suspicious than Lars Gustafsson about the novel’s popular success in Sweden and in Germany. He finds popularity a trifle suspect, maintaining that there is a “well-known media distinction between effect on the surface and affect which goes under the surface and becomes a profound effect. I mean, you can titillate millions of people for a few minutes and you can affect a few people to such an extent that they won’t forget your ideas the rest of their lives. In the long run, the deep, profound impression can lead to literature’s affecting many more people than a popular novel does.”
In an era in which titillation and mass manipulation dominate the media marketplace, Lars Gustafsson’s The Death of a Beekeeper may prove an anomaly: a book which epitomizes a profound individualism.
Janet King Swaffar
*All author comments are drawn from two taped interviews conducted by Janet Swaffar with Lars Gustafsson on February 6 and April 25, 1979.
*Mr. Gustafsson, Himself (1971), Woe (1973), The Family Reunion (1975), Sigismund (1977), The Death of a Beekeeper (1979).
A Note on the Author
Lars Gustafsson was born on May 17, 1936, in Västerås, Sweden. He earned the equivalent of an American doctorate at the University of Uppsala in 1962, and his dissertation, Language and Lies, on Friedrich Nietzsche, Fritz Mauthner, and the American philosopher Alexander Bryan Johnson (under whom the author studied), has been published in several languages.
Through his writings on mathematics, sociology, history, philosophy, and literature, Gustafsson’s influence has been strong in all quarters of the European academic community, but his essays and comments, notably the collection on Utopia (1969), have reached an even broader audience. He has published in virtually every area of belles lettres: novels, stories, poems, drama, literary criticism, and journalism, and from 1962 to 1972, he was the editor of Bonniers Litterära Magasin, the leading literary periodical of Sweden.
He is best known in his native land and, through an excellent translation, in Germany as well, for his related series of novels, Mr. Gustafsson, Himself (1971), Woe (1973), Family Reunion (1975), Sigismund (1977), and The Death of a Beekeeper (1979). Although each of these can be enjoyed alone, they are five variations on a common theme: “We begin again. We never give up.”
Copyright © 1978 by Lars Gustafsson
Copyright © 1981 by Janet K. Swaffar and Guntram H. Weber
Copyright © 1981 by Janet K. Swaffar
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, or television review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
Originally published as En biodlares dod by P. A. Norstedt and Söners Förlag, Stockholm, in 1978. This English translation is published by arrangement with Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich.
Assistance for the translation of this volume was given by The Swedish Institute, Stockholm, whose support is gratefully acknowledged.
The epigraph in this book is from Lars Gustafsson’s poetry collection Varma rum och kalla, Copyright © 1972 by Lars Gustafsson, published by Bonnier, Stockholm. The English translation is from Warm Rooms and Cold, Translation Copyright © 1975 by Yvonne Sandstroem, published by Copper Beach Press, Providence, R.I.
First published clothbound and as New Directions Paperbook 523 in 1981
Published simultaneously in Canada by George J. McLeod, Ltd., Toronto
eISBN 978-0-8112-2649-9
New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin
by New Directions Publishing Corporation,
80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011
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