Jose Therattil

Why are you fascinated of Barabbas of Pär Lagerkvist?

Barabbas is an attempt to look at Christian faith from the perspective of the emotionally disturbed and religiously challenged modern man. I think Lagerkvist wanted to present such a man to the world and found that the image of Barabbas in the Gospels can be evocative medium to convey his message. Choosing Barabbas enabled him to set the story in a period immediately after the death of Jesus when the Christian dogma had not yet crystallized. It had closeness to the gospel story, avenues to couch all the doubts and convey all the yearnings as well as the hurdles on the path of surrender to faith. It provokes the readers, believer and non-believer alike, to examine their respective beliefs, which one otherwise takes for granted.
The character of Barabbas is contrasted to Christ the symbol. Christ is presented not as a resolution to the problem of evil, but as a representation of human striving to attain divinity. Barabbas is a man cut off from divinity, wedded to the things of this earth. In this respect, the character of Lazarus in the novel is also his analogue. While Barabbas had an escape from mouth of death, Lazarus had a physical resurrection, both without spiritual transformation required for the quest of the divine.

 “I have no god”, “name of Jesus is engraved on his slave’s disk, not as a sign that he belongs to Him, but because he wants to believe.”

The progress of the narrative is all the more fascinating as it presents diverse perspectives and contrasting beliefs, all empathetically. The story is brief, narration nonpartisan and restrained, style sparse and antiseptic and underlying philosophy balanced. The final emerging picture of a man who wants to believe but is incapable of it is true to the tragedy of the modern man.

As I understand Lagerkvist is Swedish Christian, why do you think he is presenting Barabbas as an outsider?
Barabbas is an outsider in the biblical story. By trying to present Christ and other insiders through the eyes of an outsider, the author has created for himself more than adequate space to raise questions and draw the contours of the modern man in search of meaning. One of the recurring themes of Lagerkvist’s writings is the ancient and mythological origins of our concept of god and foundations of our faith and its inadequacy in coping with the questions and concerns of the modern man, “liberated”, so to say by modern science and the knowledge explosion. This theme is examined threadbare in Barabbas against the symbol of Christ.

“When he felt death approaching, that which he had always been so afraid of, he said out into the darkness, as though he were speaking to it: – To thee I deliver up my soul.’ “Are the last words of the Novel, what do these words tell the reader of the story?
Andre Gide has written the following on this last sentence: “That ‘as though’ leaves me wondering whether, without realizing it, he was, in fact addressing Christ, whether the Galilean did not “get him” at the end. Vicisti Galileus, as Julian the Apostate said.”
Beyond the craft of leaving the imagination of the reader to all possibilities, it stands testimony to the firm thinking of Lagerkvist that it is not the mandate of literature to find or suggest answers. Therefore, he refused to be didactic and dogmatic, but continued to be insistent on expressing human yearnings and despair in not finding easy and direct answers to his various questions.

Is Barabbas the narrator of the Christian world an objective spectator and records only what can be perceived from the outside? And what is he saying? Or is he simply a man who got freedom without God and does not know the meaning of it, living in solitude and despair?
The yearning to believe and surrender oneself to a faith is present in every human soul, but in varying degrees of intensity. But what one does with it and what circumstantial forces work on it is what distinguishes one from the other. From here, what predisposes one to a surrender of faith and ultimate discovery of God is a question that Lagerkvist throws before the reader through the apparently unsuccessful pursuits of Barabbas.
Barabbas seems to be saying, “Here I am, a sheer naked man, who has been apparently blinded by the sight of god (or an encounter of faith) and doesn’t know what to make of it”. He is witness to many stellar testimonies to surrender of faith in the story (of the hare-lipped woman, St. Peter, Sahak and others ), but it leaves him confused. He yearns to leap into a surrender of faith, but is held back by several things like the incongruity of this Christ to the prophesies about the Messiah as was apparent in the ‘weaknesses’ of Jesus. He was baffled by the paradox and the surrender of many to this ‘weak god’. He just could not comprehend the state where the spiritual world could conquer the real physical world.
Yet, on another level, the fact remains that but for his various “encounters with faith”, beginning from his sight of Jesus on the courtyard of Pilate’s palace, he might have remained and died a brute robber.

What is The Dwarf of Lagerkvist who says “I have noticed that sometimes I frighten people; what they really fear is themselves. They think it is I who scare them, but it is the dwarf within them”?
The Dwarf is metaphor for the evil that hides in everyone. It is natural that men are frightened by the might of evil, the evil that resides within each man and that resides in others and in the society at large.
The following is what the Dwarf says about him and his master, the prince: “I know what he wants, but I also know that he is a knight. I am no knight, but only the dwarf of a knight. I can guess his desires before they have been uttered, perhaps before he has formulated them to himself, and thus I perform his most inaudible commands, as though I were a part of himself.”
Everyone carries his own dwarf within.

Dwarfs do not beget their young, “we are sterile by virtue of our own nature.” “We have no need to be fertile, for the human race itself produces its own dwarfs, of that one may be sure. We let ourselves be born of these haughty creatures, with the same pangs as they. Our race is perpetuated through them, and thus and thus only can we enter this world.” What does it tell the world and you?
The author is referring to the origin of evil in man. That it has its origins not from some evil from outside or from a Satan existing ‘somewhere’, but from the very nature of man, which is an embedment of both evil and good. As long as man lives, evil will be by his side like the dwarf in the story.
It is curious to note the traits of the dwarf. He does not understand the finer elements of man: love, faith, yearning for god, search for the stars, even the pleasure of physical intimacy. At the same time, he is an embodiment of all baser elements in man: dark humor, sarcasm, indifference, razor-sharp intelligence and analytical skills, inflexibility, love of violence and treachery, ruthlessness, absence of emotions, sense of self importance in spite of one’s limitations, contempt of men etc. He appears like an alien, from another planet. Therefore he offers a critique of mankind from an unattached, independent and clinical perspective.

Is not Lagerkvist with his artistic vigor and true independence of mind endeavoring to find answers to the eternal questions confronting mankind?
Yes. That was his life. He was a seeker through and through. Literally, every word of his literary pursuit was a record of his search for the purpose of life and answers to the problem of evil and death. No answers seems to have satisfied him. His characters also seem to have remained seekers like him. But depending on the predilections of the reader, they can be said to have found their answers or not. In his search for answers to the eternal questions, he has not attached himself to any dogma, across the entire spectrum of faith and pure reason.
A recurring theme in his writings is his anguish at God leaving man an unfinished work. That is his interpretation of the original sin. In one of his poems he speaks of the tragedy of being man:
I am man, to me the dreadful thing happened
Namely, that he breathed his own soul into me
Yet another verse laments:
We are blind like the earth we have come from
He did not grant us the power
To see ourselves in our splendor
Yet another poem makes this cry more pathetic, like that of a child. One that     reminds us of Tagore in the descriptions of the Absolute, yet so different from him in the reeking despair:
Everywhere, in all the heavens
You will find his footprints
All regions are filled with his mysterious letters
All heights, all depths with his handwriting
That one he can decipher
All powerful one, why do you not
Teach us to read your book ?
Why do you not move your fingers
Along the letters
And teach us to piece them together
And understand like children ?
But no, that you do not do
You are no school master
You let things be as they are
Incomprehensible as they are
Then one day in the evening of time
Will you delete them all again
Let everything become darkness
As it was before you arose from your thoughts
And wandered off to set them down
While on your way
With the burning coal in your hand.

Tobias, a character in “Pilgrim at Sea” says “Yet the sea is not everything it cannot be. There must be something beyond it, there must be a land beyond the great desolate expanses and the great deeps which are indifferent to all things: a land we cannot reach but to which we are on cur way.” What do you think?
For Lagerkvist, “Sea” is a metaphor for reality, or life in its primitive and raw state. At one extreme end, it is the ocean of sin and bestiality, and on the other end it is the arena where the most evolved of our species have achieved their sublime heights. In the middle, it is the medium in which we all find ourselves. To our anguish we also find out that “the sea”, though inviting, cannot satisfy our yearning. This is similar to the Indian concept of life as a river to be crossed and the soul as raft that enables the crossing. Many sink themselves in the “sea”, by surrendering to the pleasures of life while many others embark on journey to a higher purpose, which is indicated as the pilgrimage to a “holy land’. Awareness about the inadequacy of the “sea” to satisfy the yearning of the soul and posing the emerging questions and embarking on a pilgrimage (meaning a higher state of the soul) is the essence of the human of the endeavor.
Tobias too discovers that we are “on our way” and may not reach our destination. But that is the essence of life, being on the way. He also realizes that ‘holy land” “ can be an empty dream which mankind clings to as a refuge against the “sea?” like the inside of the locket that Giovanni’s (the key co-traveler for Tobias in the pilgrimage) mistress carried on her breast, which was finally found to be empty:
“He thought about the highest and holiest in life and of what its nature might be: that perhaps it exists only as a dream and cannot survive reality, the awakening. But that it nevertheless does exist”. (Pilgrim at the Sea, p. 116).
Lagerkvist’s presentation of the quest and the reality of the “holy land” seems to suggest an answer to the question left unanswered by Camus and Sartre. If man is condemned to meaninglessness, why does he demand a meaning? Lagerkvist’s portrait of Giovanni and Tobias suggests that the demand itself, if manifested in action, contradicts the supposed meaninglessness of the universe. Life cannot finally be meaningless, he implies, as long as there exists a demand for meaning which is acted upon, consciously or not, and the act of demanding itself, can make one a “man of god.”
Lagerkvist has expressed this line of thought in one of his poems:
If you believe in god and no god exists
Then your belief is an even greater wonder
Then it is really something inconceivably great.
Why should a being lie down there in the darkness crying to someone who does not exist?
Why should that be?
There is no one who hears when someone cries in the darkness.
But why does that cry exist?