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Tuesday, January 6, 2009 |
Kristin Lavransdatter
3 volumes, The Bridal Wreath, The Mistress of Husaby and The Cross
Originally in Norwegian, first published in English 1923-1927 (New York:Knopf)
Later (recommended) translations, The Wreath, The Bride and The Cross by Tiina Nunnally 1997-2000 (New York:Penguin), 1137 pp.
This was the book that prompted Sigrid Undset's 1928 Nobel Prize in Literature, "principially for her powerful descriptions of Northern life during the Middle Ages." When the prize was presented, Undset had only just written the four volumes (as they were translated into English) of The Master of Hestviken (a.k.a. Olav Audunssøn) and in my view the later multi-book novel is the better work.
Don't let the slow start of these novels put you off, with their opening paragraphs of flat-footed exposition outlining lineages, marriages and property inheritances. You will discover that as often as these delineations occur, you will still occasionally be lost in these knots of relationship, complicated by the fact that actual family or lineage names are rarely mentioned and the individual characters are known in the text only by their first name and as the "datter" or "son" of their father's first name). Undset's explication of the relationships, properties and inheritances serves as an illustration of the great emphasis that the people of Norway's medieval period laid on these matters, a thread of concern that runs heavily through both novels.
One of the fascinations of these novels is the way they evoke the essential ethos of the so-called "Dark Ages." Unlike the rootless individualism that Undset saw as the tragedy of modern life in her earlier novels (set in and around the Norwegian city of Christiana in the 1920s), in her medieval novels the characters are, for better and for worse, inextricably bound to their lands, their families, their religion and what our Founding Fathers called their "sacred honor." It is so sacred to Undset's characters, in fact, that sometimes it is as if this austere sense of honor is just another part of their Christian faith.
And, like their faith, honor is deeply tested in both novels. A woman's virginity before marriage is a particularly important element in the behavioral code which intersects so strongly with their religious laws, but curiously, the most consequential early actions in both novels involve a young woman succumbing to her desires with an "unsuitable man," before the arranged marriage her family desires. The ideal of sexual continence, for both sexes, seems almost more honored in the breach than in conformance in both novels, as numerous characters, major and minor, demonstrate the consequences of this particular human weakness. Religious exhortation to virginity and marital fidelity didn't work in those days, either, even when reinforced, as it isn't so much today, by the prospect of overwhelming public shame.
Although all scenes touching directly on the sexual act are elided and euphemized and the physical particulars are never addressed as they are in modern novels, the Nobel presentation speech noted that "[t]he erotic life, the problem common to the two sexes ... constitutes the centre of Sigrid Undset's psychological interest." I would say that Undset's focus is more upon the conflicts between the inner physical demands, the received duty ("what honor requires"), and the spiritual longings of her characters. Although the many earnest discussions of Christian doctrine and the ways in which Kristin has fallen short, both in her own mind and in the consideration of her priests, are sometimes heavy going for a modern reader, they are crucial to our understanding of the inner life of a "woman of excellent lineage" in that pious age.
Even though it may seem to us that Kristin's serious commitment to Christianity imposes too many strictures and impossible demands on human nature, to Kristin it is one of the most important parts of her life. She swings passionately between accepting and rejoicing in the comforts it can bring, defying its expectations, and despairing in her bouts of disconnection from God. Ultimately it is the combination of her halting, hard-won understanding of what her faith demands -- and the sense of personal honor so inextricably tied to it -- that sets up the heroic challenge she undertakes at the end of her life.
A lot of lives end in these books, and it is Undset's treatment of death which stands out for me as much as the gorgeous descriptions of the physical world of Norway's mountains, meadows, fields, and fjords (for which the Nobel presentation also rightly commended her). Death in Undset's novels often occurs just as it does in life, unforeshadowed and shocking, "out of the blue." This causes the impact on the "unprepared" reader to be similar to that of the unprepared characters.
Undset depicts all too clearly the vulnerability of children in that age and works to demolish the idea that people didn't mind their children's deaths as much then, when they died more often. Even when Kristin manages to become numbly resigned to the losses she must suffer, Undset convincingly demonstrates the emotional and spiritual devastation that comes in their wake.
She also shows how little could actually be done for the sick or injured in that era. People essentially got better on their own or they died. All Kristin can do, even after she develops her medical skills over the course of her lifetime, is attempt to keep her patients comfortable. What is particularly affecting is the way she must face her medical helplessness when one of her own loved ones is dying.
In most cases of adult death Undset carefully follows the inner life of the doomed as much as she does the thoughts and actions of the people around the deathbed, and the effect is poignant and profound, to the extent that we are drawn into the same acceptance of death experienced by the dying.
It is significant to Undset's illumination of the mindset of the era that the firm and active religious faith enjoyed by almost everyone is not only a comfort to the survivors but mercifully eases the passing of the declining characters themselves. I hadn't fully appreciated before how psychologically useful the refuge of religion could be to people who lost children so often and so commonly died in the prime of life. (At the same time, the Church's assiduous cultivation of the sense of sin -- which lays so heavily on Olav in The Master of Hestviken -- can also deeply damage a man's life.)
Death is everywhere in these Middle Ages, in childbirth, from accident, from infection, disease, suicide, and most extraordinarily to our era's sensibilities, from interpersonal violence. Swordfights, axe killings, daggers, spears to the groin...Undset demonstrates all the ways that men (and occasionally women) of that era killed one another, in what seems to have been almost routine violence. The incidents often arise because of offenses to "honor," such as verbal insults or active affronts like the seduction of a man's daughter. In Undset's view, both the initial outrages and the impetuous reactions, at least among men, are usually fueled by an accepted and nearly universal habit of prodigious alcohol consumption.
Many of these violent deaths are justified within the community (there are no trials, per se) by the "severe provocation" defense and the punishment for them (agreed by the aggrieved survivors or decreed by ecclesiastical judges) is often just some material loss, in money, land or expensive goods. It is the loss of lands and estates which is considered the most grave punishment, because the children of the gentry maintain their status largely by being able to live on land that they inherit from their parents. Having to "hire out" and work on another's estate or depend upon the forbearance of indirect relatives is a great humiliation -- a major loss of honor. Given the extent of out-of-wedlock sexual activity in Undset's novels, the disinherited fate of illegitimate children becomes an important worry for many characters.
In fact, the parents' concern for the fate of all their children, legitimate and not, forms a crucial spine of both books. In The Master of Hestviken Olav must reconcile his tender feelings for an illegitimate child and his stormy relationship with his legitimate, but difficult and "unlovable" son.
Kristin Lavransdatter's emphasis is, understandably, more upon the experiences of motherhood. Undset's portrayal of the crippling guilt Kristin feels when she discovers she will destroy her beloved father's honor by turning up pregnant before her long-delayed marriage is harrowing enough, but her depiction of Kristin's agonies in the delivery of the child "conceived in sin" is frankly horrifying.
Pregnancy and childbirth, even within marriage, are fraught with grim consequences for medieval women, not least of which is the way in which the lack of contraception renders them helpless in the face of their own fecundity. Every delivery embodies a real threat of death, and pregnancies which occur at the wrong place and wrong time (even if they are only perceived as such by the neighbors), give rise to ugly rumors and even outright accusations spoken in church sanctuaries and before bishops. Kristin must endure an assault of undeserved shame in relation to one of her unavoidable pregnancies, and an attempt to defend her against the charge leads to one of the saddest incidents of her life.
But not a whisper of rebellion against any of the oppressive circumstances of her life and the gossipy local community's often ugly role in it, or any breath of "feminist" thought crosses Kristin's mind. Kristin accepts her endless duties, health burdens, disappointments with her irresponsible husband, and her inescapable position in her household and community as the immutable "way things are" and "the way things must be."
Undset literally never even approaches any idea of structural or institutional injustice. Such destabilizing, community-threatening ideas are not even wrongly considered or defended against by her characters in these novels; no hint of them even arises. I think she was right in this. One of the major divisions between medieval thought and the ethos of the Renaissance is in the bubbling up of ideas that challenged structural orthodoxy, whether it was questions about the positions of women in relation to men or serfs' relation to their masters. Although these dangerous ideas are more-or-less successfully controlled, suppressed or co-opted for centuries, the turning point is the very fact that they do begin to arise and be seriously considered, even among the "common folk," and therefore must be overtly dealt with by various forms of appeal to authority.
Undset goes on to show how a mother's intent everyday concentration on her children and her determination to preserve their inheritance can ultimately become more important to her than her relationship with her husband. Many women will also identify with Kristin's struggle to finally "let go" of her children.
A continual sense of realistic surprise is what makes the reading of this huge, sometimes challenging tome so compelling. As the Nobel presentation put it,
Her narrative is vigorous, sweeping, and at times heavy. It rolls on like a river, ceaselessly receiving new tributaries whose course the author also describes, at the risk of overtaxing the reader's memory. This stems in part from the very nature of the subject. ... However, this heaviness is also a result of the author's ardent and instant imagination, forming a scene and a dialogue of each incident in the narrative without taking the necessary backward look at the general perspective. And the vast river, whose course is difficult to embrace comprehensively, rolls its powerful waves which carry along the reader, plunged into a sort of torpor. But the roaring of its waters has the eternal freshness of nature. ... Then, when the river reaches the sea, when Kristin Lavransdatter has fought to the end the battle of her life, no one complains of the length of the course which accumulated so overwhelming a depth and profundity in her destiny. In the poetry of all times, there are few scenes of comparable excellence.
Another way to put it is that Kristin's life story has all the rich, unexpected depth and detail of a real life, lived as we all live, incident by incident, crisis by crisis, and with no discernable "story arc" or "theme" that would allow us to guess what is coming next. And yet, in the end, because this is a novel, we are finally allowed to see how all of the years and experiences, as random as they seemed in the progress of the narrative, have produced a woman whose heroism, spent as it is on something we in this age might consider unnecessary, comes as no surprise.
Undset's lengthy, sometimes lyrical, sometimes matter-of-fact treatment of "life as it is lived," depicting a woman at once so ordinary and so brave, would be fascinating even if it was set in the present day, in familiar physical surroundings and within our current world view. That it also beautifully and intimately evokes the experience of Norwegian landscapes and weather, and presents a 14th-century culture so far removed from ours today, only makes the reading experience more satisfying.
The ending of Kristin Lavransdatter is quintessential Undset: she somehow creates a deeply affecting lyricism from straightforward prose, a view of the Norwegian landscape, a brief discussion of the weather, and a quiet, unpretentious description of two people stepping out from under their shelter onto a new fall of snow. It's one of those conclusions you know you'll always be able to see in your mind's eye, even after you may have forgotten all that went before.
1:28:20 PM 
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