Studia Islandica - 01.06.1986, Síða 290

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guaranteeing an active two-way contact with the extemal world. Actually,
total unity is as negative for the individual as total separation; without the
positive qualities of loneliness, the tension between the antithetical polari-
ties would disappear, and the person would be either sucked into the
isolated self or sent adrift into the external environment. Isolation and
community must go hand in hand.
4
Discussed in the monograph are the rise and decline of the myth of love
- or the transition from a romantic world-view to a modern one. The chief
features of the two visions may be outlined as follows:
A sense of separation is the centre of gravity in modern and existential Iit-
erature; it does not simply deal with the struggle against loneliness but is a
struggle and loneliness. While a keen sense of isolation also characterizes
the romantics’ works, it is extremely different as it implies an ideal of some
sort; the emotions of the isolated person are central there, too, but ac-
companied by a vision akin to revelation; the romantic looks outward from
life which is separate and demonic, to an ecstatic condition where perfect
harmony reigns. Guideposts mark the road travelled by him, and his jour-
ney is purposeful; to him, the union of outer and inner reality is no uncerta-
in possibility. By contrast, the modern author is headed into the unknown;
his directions are no compass points with names; to him, life is an endless
struggle promising no solution. Harmony, the core element of the roman-
tic ideal, on the other hand, manifests itself variously in the older genre: as
man’s communion with God, nature or another human being. Whichever
the case, the individual breaks out of the prison of loneliness and is united
with the environment. The romantics rejected the notion of man-against-
the-world, embracing instead the notion of man-in-the-world; they be-
lieved, in fact, that there was just a single polarity; as they saw it, love was
a virtually solid reality - and total: Another person walks by, and the whole
of existence assumes a fresh guise, objects become transparent, you enter a
different sphere of consciousness where what you feel is not your loneliness,
but the other person’s.
The Icelandic romantics employed the utopian narrative structure. In
their fiction, man triumphs over his circumstances, life is full of opportuni-
ties, and there is an open exit from the prison of the present. Romantic
transformation is frequently in evidence; the authors make their prota-
gonists larger than life and conjure up a world where everything is feasible,
where man lives in inner harmony at peace with other people and society.
Few of these writers saw any fundamental conflict between the individual’s
need for happiness and the requisites of the social order; their world-view
was static - their understanding of society, conservative. Nonetheless, their
works evince a submerged opposition to the accepted value system of the