The Dwarf by Pär Lagerkvist

First published:Dvargen, 1944 (English translation, 1945)

Type of work: Parable

Time of work: The Renaissance

Locale: Unnamed Italian city-states

Principal Characters:

• The Dwarf (Piccoline), the narrator, a misshapen, misanthropic factotum of the Prince’s court
• The Prince, the cultured ruler of an Italian city-state
• Bernardo, a brilliant scientist and artist
• Angelica, the Prince’s naive young daughter
• Giovanni, Angelica’s lover and the son of the Prince’s enemy, Lodovico
• Don Riccardo, the Prince’s swaggering courtier
• Teodora, the Prince’s wife and Don Riccardo’s lover
• Boccarossa, a condottiere and leader of mercenary troops

The Novel

The Dwarf is the acrid journal of a court freak, a twenty-six-inch-tall misanthrope whose name, Piccoline, is mentioned only once, in passing, by another character. Thereafter called the Dwarf, he offers a distorted perspective on the fortunes of the Italian city-state whose prince he serves. Though generally slighted by them as an insignificant retainer, the Dwarf is able to observe important public figures and bear witness to actions that have dramatic consequences.

After strangling Jehosophat, the Dwarf has become the only dwarf at court and the reluctant pet of Angelica. The Dwarf is discomfited by the arrival in the city of the inquisitive genius Bernardo and gratified by that of the mercenary leader Boccarossa. With Bernardo’s war machinery and Boccarossa’s soldiers, the Prince attacks the enemy Montanzas led by Lodovico. Reveling in battle, the Dwarf reports his disappointment over delays caused by rain and over the retreat necessitated by insufficient funds to pay Boccarossa. He is nauseated when he witnesses the sexual adventures of the Prince and Don Riccardo with prostitutes. He regrets that Don Riccardo, whose illicit love letters he has been forced to convey to Teodora, has not been killed in battle.

During a truce, Lodovico and his followers are entertained at the Prince’s court. The Dwarf follows what he assumes to be his master’s orders and serves poisoned wine to the enemy, but he intentionally kills the vainglorious Don Riccardo as well. Lodovico’s followers regroup and, with the support of Boccarossa’s mercenaries, lay siege to the Prince’s city. When the Dwarf discovers that Giovanni, Lodovico’s son, has been surreptitiously spending the night in the bed and arms of Angelica, the Prince’s daughter, he informs on them. After the Prince beheads Giovanni, Angelica, lovelorn, drowns herself.

Meanwhile, an epidemic of plague devastates the city, ending the war but resulting in the deaths of many at the court. Before expiring in agony, Teodora comes under the diabolical domination of the Dwarf, whom she accepts as a scourge for her sinful past. When she dies, Bernardo paints a beatific portrait of her, and she becomes an object of veneration throughout the city. For his part in her painful death and in the suicide of Angelica and the poisoning of Lodovico, the Dwarf is imprisoned. While chained in the fastness of a somber dungeon, he writes his final lines, certain that they will be followed by others.

The Characters

Although his position permits him access to privileged information, the Dwarf is about as unreliable as a narrator can be. Stunted emotionally as well as physically, he imagines himself central to the life of the court, when in fact, if the Prince notices him at all, he considers the Dwarf a disposable lackey. “Reality is the only thing that matters,” declares the Dwarf, who admits that he cannot perceive the stars or value dreams. He also concedes that he cannot understand love, yet love, whether that of Angelica for Giovanni or that of Teodora for God, is crucial to the events he narrates. The Dwarf’s version of reality is so circumscribed as to be almost solipsistic, like Pä Lagerkvist’s final image of him, chained in the darkness of a solitary cell. Some of the Dwarf’s most confident assertions are immediately refuted by events, as when, seeing them during the military truce, he proclaims that Angelica and Giovanni, clandestine lovers, are obviously bored with each other. “It is difficult to understand those whom one does not hate,” says the Dwarf, who succeeds in hating everyone but the Prince and understanding no one, including himself.

Bernardo, a brilliant scientist, artist, and inventor, is a fictional version of Leonardo da Vinci and, more generally, the archetypal Renaissance man. Animated by boundless curiosity, he might have adopted the Humanist motto “humani nihil a me alienum puto” (nothing that is human is alien to me). By contrast, the Dwarf, considering himself to be a member of an alien race, despises human beings. While the Dwarf has a pathological dread of the body and of being touched, Bernardo exemplifies another Renaissance ideal, the sound mind in the sound body, and he is intent on studying anatomy. Bernardo’s moments of exuberance alternate with moments of severe depression when, aspiring to accomplish everything, he realizes the futility of attempting anything. Many of his projects remain incomplete.

Like a Borgia or a Medici, the Prince is an amoral leader motivated by vanity and personal pleasure. No one is a hero to his dwarf, and, though the narrator expresses admiration for the Prince, the endorsement comes for all the wrong reasons and from the wrong source.

Each of the characters in this short novel is a victim of the insufficiency of the human self. The only ones to suggest the possibility of transcending the inadequacies of the merely human are the two main female characters: Angelica with her doomed love for another human and Teodora with her confused gropings toward God.

Critical Context

Lagerkvist’s first published novel, The Dwarf was both a commercial and a critical success. It remains, along with Barabbas (1950; English translation, 1951), published a year before he received the Nobel Prize for Literature, the best-known work of the best-known Swedish novelist. In its recognition of the power of evil, The Dwarf is as much a product of the continuing preoccupations of its author as it is of the somber Zeitgeist of World War II.

Lagerkvist has been discussed as an heir to Fyodor Dostoevski and Franz Kafka and within the context of European existentialism, though he remained aloof from organized Continental movements. His was a religious sensibility, not merely in novels such as Barabbas, Sibyllan (1956; The Sybyl, 1958), Ahasverus dod (1960; The Death of Ahasuerus, 1962), and Det heliga landet (1964; The Holy Land, 1966) that recycle biblical texts. The Dwarf explores the frailties of individual consciousness in a world bereft of the consolations of the absolute. A powerful narrative of skeptical spirituality, The Dwarf is no small achievement.

Bibliography

Ramsey, Roger. “Pä Lagerkvist: The Dwarf and Dogma,” in Mosaic. V (1972), pp. 97-106.

Scandinavica. X, no. 1 (1971). Special Lagerkvist issue.

Spector, Robert Donald. Pä Lagerkvist, 1973.

Vowles, Richard P. “The Fiction of Pä Lagerkvist,” in Western Humanities Review. VIII (Spring, 1954), pp. 111-119.

Weathers, Winston. Pä Lagerkvist: A Critical Essay, 1968.