SAGA-BOOK - Viking Society Web Publications

130 Saga-Book of the Viking Society
metaphor and fragmentation of the skaldic lines. A still
more violent eruption of the subconscious was called for
by the French surrealists in the twenties of the present
century - in Andre Breton's Manifeste surrealiste (1924),
which became H. K. Laxness' gospel when he was writing
his debut book, The great weaver from Cashmere (1927), and
gave it its stylistic furioso, The French surrealists had
two nineteenth-century prophets whom they liked to
quote and imitate: Lautreamont (Isidore Ducasse,
r846-r870) and Rimbaud (r854-1891). Of these two
Lautreamont died at the age of twenty-four in the year
of the great French debacle at the hands of the Germans,
while Rimbaud was then only sixteen years old. This to
me, as it would have to Taine and Brandes, goes a long
way to explain their pitchblack pessimism and the
violence of their literary revolt. Rimbaud's poetry was
quite volcanic in character while Lautreamont is credited
with having foreshadowed all the gloomy themes of modern
poets and the fascination that ugliness has on them. This
also goes far to explain their favour with the French
surrealists and literary rebels, who during World War I
lived through the same terrifying experience, although this
time the French were victorious. The surrealist tenets
resulted in "the stream of consciousness" literary style
than which nothing could be more unlike the hard
composition of skaldic poetry. But joyce's Ulysses,
though ostensibly written in this style, reveals almost as
tough a composition as any skaldic poetry underneath the
flood of words. Laxness' first book, written with a
stylistic furioso, had the surrealist abandon but not
Joyce's hard composition.
Surrealism also resulted in a preference for the world
of dreams. The surrealists chose dream at any time in
preference to waking reality, which, to most of these
artists, was the most despicable of all things. Enemies,
too, were common sense and reason.