Selma Lagerlöf’s "giant bees of the imagination"

Favorite single line from The Saga of Gösta Berling:

Then he set up this organ, which had such strange tones, whose dreadful bassoon stop intermittently bursts forth in the middle of a peaceful hymn – no one knows why or how – and causes the children to cry in church on Christmas morning.  (Ch. 13, 193)

This organ builder was once loved by Mamsell Marie, whose name gives the chapter its title.  Mamsell Marie now sews quilts and curtains, and is adopted by Countess Märta, one of the novel’s villains – I have finally reached a character who matters for the plot.  The monstrous Countess cruelly mimics and mocks Marie.  Countess Elisabet, her daughter-in-law and the most important female character in the book, takes pity on Marie.

I am just saying that the organ that makes children cry, an invention worthy of Hoffmann, is pretty distant from the story as such, as is much of the text of The Saga of Gösta Berling.  This chapter begins:

Silence, by all means, silence!

There is a buzzing over my head.  It must be a bumblebee flying around.  No, just be quiet!  Such an aroma!  As sure as I’m alive, if it isn’t southernwood and lavender and birdcherry and lilac and narcissus.  It is a glory to sense this on a gray autumn evening in the heart of the city. (190)

And this goes on for a while, just the narrator thinking about plants and an old story, which she then tells, as she has been doing all along.  A narrator like this is designed to test the patience of many readers.  I found her to be full of surprises.

A few chapters later, that wicked mother-in-law is cursed by a witch so that the magpies – I guess I can skip the horrible details.

No one had a more bitter life.  Can anyone keep from pitying her? (Ch. 19, 248)

In a later chapter, one of the cavaliers is given a gift by a wood nymph – “’hereafter shall you with your two hands be able to execute whatever work of art you wish, but only one of each type’” (Ch. 33, 353), for example “a wagon that moved by itself” and wings that allow him to fly.  This gift also turns out to be a curse, more due to the temperament of the cavalier than the ill will of the nymph.

The book ends with the return of that bumblebee, an expansion of Selma Lagerlöf’s meaning.  “[T]he legends swarm around you like the bees of summer,” she writes, which leads her to one more little story, or joke, really, about the “giant bees of the imagination” and their difficulty in entering “the beehive of reality.”  Her strange novel is meant to help.

Selma Lagerlöf’s The Saga of Gösta Berling - some Swedish renunciation

Selma Lagerlöf’s first novel, The Saga of Gösta Berling (1891), turned out to be, to my surprise, a Don Juan story transplanted into western Sweden in the 1820s.  The title character’s horse is actually named Don Juan – that was a subtle clue – but more importantly Berling shares two characteristics with Don Juan, first, that he is a chaos seed, an impulsive prankster who delights in disorder and has trouble seeing the damage he does, and second, that he is irresistibly attractive to women.

Berling does not actually seduce any of the women, though, because Lagerlöf is writing under something like Victorian moral standards – so no sex outside of marriage – and also because both Berling and the various women practice the Goethean art of renunciation.  She loves Berling but must renounce him for some higher purpose, or perhaps Berling renounces the woman.   Lagerlöf’s novel is a mix of Don Juan and Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship.  Except there is more sex in Wilhelm Meister.

Scandinavians read German writers and Germans read Scandinavian writers.  I am not sure what else I have learned from my little project this year, but now I know that.  The Saga of Gösta Berling has more in common with German novellas (Theodor Storm, E. T. A. Hoffmann) or Gottfried Keller’s Green Henry than with anything going on in French or English literature at the time.

The story as such barely makes sense.  Gösta Berling is an alcoholic priest who finds himself leader of a group of “cavaliers,” washed up remnants of the recent wars who have been taken in as retainers by a woman who owns a large ironworks.  It is a bit like a Western about a tough female rancher and her bunkhouse of grizzled cowboys.   The book covers a year of their adventures.  Each of the eleven cavaliers gets his own chapter and adventure.  I think they each get a chapter.  I didn’t count them.

Chapter 8, for example, “The Great Bear in Gurlita Bluff,” is about “Anders Fuchs, the bear killer,” and his ongoing attempt to kill a magical bear.  “A bullet of silver and bell metal, cast on a Thursday evening at the new moon in the church tower, without the minister or organist or any person knowing of it, would quite certainly kill him, but such a bullet is perhaps not so easy to secure.”  Much of the chapter is about Fuchs acquiring the bullet.  By the end of the story, he does a good deed by letting someone else kill the bear.  More renunciation, for which he is duly rewarded (“’Lord God, how good you are!’ he says, clasping his hands together”).  It’s a good story, and though some bits of it are brought in later in the novel, it could easily have been omitted or published separately.

The rest of the chapters belong to Berling or one of the women with whom he becomes entangled.  Often, Berling’s pranks cause trouble far beyond his control, yet with an ultimate result that is good.  A man is accidentally driven from his wife (bad prank, Berling) but in the process becomes a saint.  That sort of thing.

Why do I keep writing these posts with no quotations?  Tomorrow, some quotations.  And the devil, the wood nymph – I already covered the werebear.  Some strange stuff in this novel.

I read the terrific 2009 Paul Norlen translation, the Penguin Classic.