Under the Glacier Read Free

often wrong, but never disheartened, gamely acknowledging one’s mistakes, and soldiering on—this is an essentially comic situation. (The comedy of candor works best when the protagonist is young, as in Stendhal’s autobiographical La Vie de Henr y Brulard .) An earnest, innocent hero to whom preposterous things happen attempts, for the most part successfully, to take them in his stride. That the nameless narrator sometimes says “I” and sometimes speaks of himself in the third-person introduces a weird note of depersonalization, which also evokes laughter. The rollicking mixture of voices cuts through the pathos; it expresses the fragile false confidence of the comic hero.
    What is comic is not being surprised at what is astonishing or absurd. The bishop’s mandate—to underreact to whatever his young emissary is to encounter—sets up an essentially comic scenario. Embi always underreacts to the preposterous situations in which he finds himself: for example, the food that he is offered every day by the pastor’s housekeeper during his stay—nothing but cakes.
    Think of the films of Buster Keaton and Harry Langdon; think of the writings of Gertrude Stein. The basic elements of a comic situation: deadpan; repetition; defect of affectivity; deficit (apparent deficit, anyway) of understanding, of what one is doing (making the audience superior to the state of mind being represented); naively solemn behavior; inappropriate cheerfulness—all of which give the impression of childlikeness.
    The comic is also cruel. This is a novel about humiliation— the humiliation of the hero. He endures frustration, sleep deprivation, food deprivation. (No, the church is not open now. No, you can’t eat now. No, I don’t know where the pastor is.) It is an encounter with a mysterious authority that will not reveal itself. Pastor Jón appears to have abdicated his authority by ceasing to perform the duties of a minister and choosing instead to be a mechanic, but he has actually sought access to a much larger authority—mystical, cosmic, galactic. Embi has stumbled into a community that is a coven of authority figures, whose provenance and powers he never manages to decipher. Of course they are rogues, charlatans—and they are not; or at any rate, their victims, the credulous, deserve them (as in a much darker, Hungarian novel about spiritual charlatans and rural dupes, Krasznahorkai’s Satantango ). Wherever Embi turns, he does not understand, and he is not being helped to understand. The pastor is away; the church is closed. But unlike, say, K in Kafka’s The Castle , Embi does not suffer. For all his humiliations, he does not appear to feel anguish. The novel has always had a weird coldness. It is both cruel and merry.
    Visionary novel.
    The comic novel and the visionary novel also have something in common: non-explicitness. An aspect of the comic is meaninglessness and inanity, which is a great resource of comedy, and also of spirituality—at least in the Oriental (Taoist) version that attracted Laxness.
    At the beginning of the novel, the young man continues for a bit to protest his inability to carry out the bishop’s mission. What am I to say? he asks. What am I to do?
    The bishop replies: “One should simply say and do as little as possible. Keep your eyes peeled. Talk about the weather. Ask what sort of summer they had last year, and the year before that. Say that the bishop has rheumatism. If any others have rheumatism, ask where it affects them. Don’t try to put anything right. . . .”
    More of the bishop’s wisdom:
    “Don’t be personal—be dry! . . . Write in the third person as much as possible. . . . No verifying! . . . Don’t forget that few people are likely to tell more than a small part of the truth: no one tells much of the truth, let alone the whole truth. . . . When people talk they reveal themselves, whether they’re lying or telling the truth. . . . Remember, any lie you are told, even