Studia Islandica - 01.06.1986, Blaðsíða 293

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the exile, who lives in a wasteland or on the most distant shore - the sad,
lone wanderer whose enemy is life itself rather than society. In the realistic
fiction, man is little but the environment personified: name, appearance,
occupation, social status - a face with a past, someone capable of action.
Literature of the modern period has abandoned the historical / social defini-
tion of man, in favour of psychological probing; its interpretation of life is
existential and mythic - not social.
3) The psychological break: Man thought that he knew himself, that he
could chime in with Descartes: Cogito, ergo sum. But the new psychology
overturned the harmonic self-understanding, changing the confident asser-
tion into a question: Who am I? What am I? Which changed man from an
integrated whole of will, intellect and emotions into a fragmented creature,
stranger to himself. Many works from the turn of the century focus on char-
acters who are losing their sense of direction; they can seldom find any an-
swer to their overwhelming question, for the inner reality has shattered in
a peculiar way. All man knows is that he suffers, that his soul is separated
from something nameless and unknown - that his soul, divorced from rea-
son, has lost the mastery of its own house - that the darkness is not only
outside, but also within.
Icelandic fiction from 1900 to 1920 is strongly characterized by the senti-
ment of the isolated person; the core of modern thinking, it is both the
cause and the effect of the triple eultural break with the past. In numerous
works, it is linked with an illusion: the protagonist believes, for a time, that
an escape from the prison of loneliness is possible - only to find out that
what seemed to be a revelation was an illusion, that man’s fate is just un-
certainty, separation and pain. More often than not, this disillusionment is
connected with the fall of the myth of love. Most works written by the new
authors exhibit a preoccupation with human isolation and problems caused
by it. Who am I? man asks, without getting any answer. How can someone
who is a stranger to himself know another person, achieve a harmonious
union with another human being? Lovers search for a shared moment but
manage only to give and receive by turns, at best, and seldom equally. The
trouble stems not least from basic fickleness of the human personality: We
remain the same only for a brief moment; we are constantly changing; the
emotion that was aroused yesterday died this morning, when the world
changed colour, like ourselves. With such rootlessness, it seems futile to
hope for a permanent emotional state; man cannot guarantee his love for
long to another person if the fundamental truth is change. In short, roman-
tic and harmonic eroticism is rejected entirely in Icelandic fiction from the
beginning of the 20th century.
The changed definition of man gave the tragic again access to Icelandic
literature. Both Gunnar Gunnarsson and Jóhann Sigurjónsson, for in-
stance, probe deeper into the psychology of love than is done in any works