The Tobias Trilogy by Pär Lagerkvist

First published:Pilgrimen, 1966: Ahasverus dod, 1960 (The Death of Ahasuerus, 1962); Pilgrim pa havet, 1962 (Pilgrim at Sea, 1964); Det heliga landet, 1964 (The Holy Land, 1966)

Type of work: Allegory

Time of work: The Middle Ages

Locale: Mediterranean Europe and the Near East

Principal Characters:

• Tobias, the pilgrim
• Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew
• Diana, Tobias’ consort
• Giovanni, a defrocked priest who becomes Tobias’ companion

The Novels

The Tobias trilogy, to which Pär Lagerkvist gave the title Pilgrimen (the pilgrim), is a continuation of two earlier novels, Barabbas (1950; English translation, 1951) and Sibyllan (1956; The Sibyl, 1958). In those two novels, Barabbas and Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew in The Sibyl, both wander away from the scene of Jesus’ crucifixion in quest of spiritual peace. Each, in his own way, is seeking death; more precisely, each is seeking to have truly lived, so that he can truly die. Their quest is continued in the persons of Giovanni and Tobias in the Tobias trilogy. Variously and at different personal levels, Barabbas, Ahasuerus, and Giovanni succeed in the quest. Tobias alone succeeds transcendently and seemingly in full. Together, the five novels constitute a pentalogy or, since the pentalogy begins and ends in the context of the three crosses on Calvary, a crucifixion cycle.

Ahasuerus in both The Sibyl and The Death of Ahasuerus is, apart from the second title, not named; he is called simply “the stranger” or is referred to only as a man. Like Barabbas, he has been caught in an association with Christ, which has propelled him into a lifeless existence of wandering. For each man, the wandering ends in a death implicit with having lived, a death that proves to have been the object of a troubled quest.

In The Sibyl, Ahasuerus moves westward from Palestine to Greece. At Delphi, he meets the Sibyl, a priestess whose parents committed her life to the service of the temple god, a composite of Dionysus, whose spirit is manifest in goats, and Apollo, whose spirit is manifest in snakes. She relates to Ahasuerus her infidelity to the god in her attempt to love a mortal man. The man was consequently destroyed after the Sibyl was impregnated not by her human lover, as she had at first thought, but by the god. The child to which she gave birth, in isolation and attended only by goats, is an idiot (in the original Greek sense, a private person), a solipsistic son of God. This son, changelessly smiling and still having the face of a child, although now gray-haired, sits in the presence of his mother and Ahasuerus but disappears unnoticed by them while his mother tells her story and, like the Palestinian Son of God, ascends to his Father. Ahasuerus then continues his wandering.

The Tobias trilogy begins with Ahasuerus’ meeting Tobias in an inn that accommodates pilgrims who travel to the Holy Land. Ahasuerus appears to have moved physically farther west from Greece to, presumably, Italy and temporally further from the age of primitive Christianity to the era of cathedrals and conventional pilgrimages to the Holy Land (that is, from the latter half of the first century to no earlier than the fourth century).

Tobias is an unusual and very individualistic pilgrim. His individualism is stressed in Pilgrim at Sea, the second novel of the trilogy, as Giovanni tells him, “You are making a pilgrimage to suit yourself and in your own way” and as he himself decides that it is best “to choose oneself, just as one is, to dare to be just as one is without disapproving of oneself.” Tobias was once a scholar, soldier, and criminal. His determination to become a pilgrim was forged by his chancing upon a recently deceased pilgrim, an old woman who bore the stigmata. When Ahasuerus meets him, Tobias is accompanied by the old woman’s dog. Also in Tobias’ company is a young woman whom he has raped and made his consort and to whom he has given the name “Diana” because of her hunting prowess and her affinity with nature. Diana, herself proficient with a bow and arrow, steps in the path of an arrow that is aimed at Tobias and saves his life at the cost of her own. The arrow was shot by unseen hands, possibly those of bandits. Ahasuerus, a witness to Diana’s sacrifice, suggests to Tobias that the arrow was actually intended for Diana and was aimed at Tobias so that Diana could find a happy death in sacrifice.

Ahasuerus, having spent two days and two nights with Tobias and Diana (during which Tobias, in a moment of great anger, kicked his dog to death, and Diana later took the arrow into her heart) continues to accompany Tobias for an indefinite number of days until they reach the sea. At the port, Tobias learns that the pilgrim ship has already sailed, and he gives all of his criminally acquired money to the captain of a pirate ship, who falsely promises him passage to the Holy Land.

After the departure of Tobias and another indefinite period of time, Ahasuerus dies in the presence of an angelic lay brother. His last moments are marked by his realization that the crucified Jesus was his brother and not his god. He realizes this through an understanding that God is an obstacle to the divine truth for which every human being longs and by a symbolic blaze of radiant light. The Death of Ahasuerus begins with Ahasuerus’ entering the pilgrims’ inn in retreat from shafts of lightning and ends with his finding the peace of death in an embrace of sunlight. His thought toward the close of the second day with Tobias was: “How great a happiness it must be to be able to die. That is the land for which one must really long...the land of Death, the holy land....”

Tobias becomes the “pilgrim at sea” on board the pirate ship, whose Italian crew includes Giovanni. Pilgrim at Sea is chiefly the story of Giovanni, to whom Tobias listens as Ahasuerus listened to the Sibyl. Like the Sibyl, Giovanni was committed to God by his parents, or at least by his mother, who named him after the disciple whom Jesus loved and who directed him unalterably toward priesthood.

As a priest, Giovanni fell in love with a woman whose confession of her extramarital love inflamed him with desire for her. His efforts to consummate his love physically were successful, and during their adulterous liaison, he learned that she kept the image of her true beloved in a locket. Giovanni stole the locket shortly before the public exposure of their affair and his consequent defrocking and excommunication. The locket proved to be empty. Giovanni kept it and wore it about his neck as his most prized possession. He is still wearing it as he recounts his history to Tobias, and Tobias views it as a symbol of the human longing which can never be satisfied but without which humans cannot live. Tobias concludes that the highest and holiest in life is perhaps only a dream that cannot endure reality but that exists nevertheless: that “true love exists and the Holy Land exists, only we cannot get to it; that we are perhaps only on our way to it, only pilgrims at sea.”

The journeying in Pilgrim at Sea is generally eastward. At one point, the pirate ship docks alongside the pilgrim ship that Tobias missed and that is continuing en route from its western Mediterranean port to Palestine.Tobias, the individualist, rejects the opportunity to transfer to the pilgrim ship. He chooses not to part from Giovanni, not to reach the Holy Land “in their way.” He will continue his pilgrimage to the Holy Land not on the pilgrim ship, but on a pirate ship headed elsewhere.

In the last novel of the trilogy, The Holy Land, many years appear to have passed. Giovanni, now blind and useless aboard the pirate ship, has been marooned on a bleak coast and Tobias has chosen to stay with him. The two men make a habitation out of an ancient temple that has fallen into ruins. The coast land is probably a geographical abstraction. Lagerkvist makes no specific geographical references, apart from “the Holy Land,” in the entire trilogy, and “the Holy Land” is treated both literally and figuratively. Wherever or whatever it is, the coast lies below a range of hills and is inhabited only by ageless herders of sheep and goats. They are gentle and kind and help the castoffs. They know nothing about the Holy Land or about any former use of the ruined temple.

The episodes that constitute the novel are intimations of religious mystery. Tobias witnesses the herdsmen’s adoration of an infant in a hut. The baby boy, whose mother died shortly after giving birth, has been brought down from the mountains by his father. Tobias excavates the icon of an archaic god, presumably the god whose priestess the Sibyl was. Vultures swarm over the coast land as sheep and goats die off in a plague. A bald, bird-faced man takes augury from the opened breast of a young vulture while its heart still beats; later, he sacrifices a lamb on the altar of the archaic god. A woman carrying a poisonous snake in a willow basket visits Tobias and Giovanni. She removes Giovanni’s locket and, as he then finds peace in death, she places it about the neck of Tobias. The infant is discovered to have died, and Tobias recognizes the cause of death as a snakebite. The plague ends, and the vultures depart.

In the concluding episode, Tobias ascends the mountains and finds himself in an “eveningland” of perpetual twilight. He comes to the three crosses upon which Barabbas once gazed; they are now empty, and he ponders the inseparability of the two crosses for the evil men and the one for the good man. Later, he sees an old man staring into a dark river and, as he reaches the river, discovers that the old man is himself. Still later, he drinks from a pure wellspring and knows that he will never thirst again. Finally, he rests by a wooden image of the Virgin Mary, its carved garment painted blue. He has a visionary conversation with her, during which he revives the long-suppressed memory of his childhood sweetheart, whom he impregnated and who drowned herself, wearing the blue dress she had made. Her suicide followed the abortion imposed upon her by Tobias’ wealthy parents. The Virgin Mary is transformed into this blue-dressed sweetheart; she discloses her un-dying love for Tobias and removes the locket from his neck. As she places it on her own neck, she becomes radiant, and Tobias dies in great peace, having found in his own heart and in death the holy land for which he has longed and to which he has been a pilgrim.

The Characters

Each of Lagerkvist’s principal characters is given a symbolic dimension in the evocation of Judaeo-Christian tradition or Greco-Roman myth. Tobias evokes the son of Tobit and Anna in the Book of Tobit. The biblical Tobias is a pilgrim to Ecbatana who is accompanied by a dog and the angel Raphael. His father has become blind. The mission to Ecbatana is successful: The divine Raphael not only ensures the success but also provides the cure for Tobit’s blindness. Inversely, Lagerkvist’s Tobias kills his dog, is accompanied by Ahasuerus, who is cursed instead of blessed by God, and has an incurably blind father figure in Giovanni. Like certain existentialist writers, Lagerkvist takes God out of the picture and places the responsibility for human existence with humans themselves.

Ahasuerus evokes the myth of the Wandering Jew, which derives dualistically from the evil Malchus, who flouted Jesus, and the good John, Jesus’ beloved disciple, who was considered by many to be immune to death until the Second Coming of his Lord. Lagerkvist sustains this dualism from the perspectives of Ahasuerus (as Malchus) and Giovanni (as John).

Diana is the Italian equivalent of the Greek goddess Artemis, whose cult in Asia Minor, particularly at Ephesus, was overcome by early Christians. In The Death of Ahasuerus, Diana is victimized by a man who becomes part of the growing Christian world, and in an act evocative of Jesus, she sacrifices her life to save her victimizer, whom she loves.

Giovanni is both an extension of the Wandering Jew, as noted, and a humanistic inversion of the beloved disciple John. Jesus gave his mother to John in the Gospel of John, but Giovanni’s mother gave Giovanni to Jesus, from whose godhood the defrocked priest seeks to separate himself.

Critical Context

Lagerkvist was a part of the expressionist scene in Europe. He followed his compatriot August Strindberg in expressionistic drama, and he introduced the principles of cubist literature into his native Sweden. His earliest fiction and drama is expressionist. In his late work, including the Tobias trilogy, he fully developed his cubist stylistics of planar simplicity and simultaneity of multiple perspectives. His simple prose is the equivalent of the cubist painting which emphasizes its canvas as two-dimensional and makes it, as such, an instrument of linear abstraction rather than of counterfeit three-dimensional perspective. His cubist perspectives are discernible in, for ex-ample, his superimposition of the metaphysical upon the psychological and the timeless upon the temporal, his simultaneous presentations of conflicting modes of religious mystery, or his oxymora and endoxa. An example of his oxymora is Ahasuerus’ mortal immortality, the herdsmen’s ageless age, or Tobias’ religious atheism. Lagerkvist identified himself as a “religious atheist” in Den knutna naven (1934; The Clenched Fist, 1982). An example of his endoxa, or ambiguous probability, is his frequent use of som om (literally “as if,” the als ob of the philosopher Hans Vaihinger) and of questions that admit of no answer or of more than one answer, such as, “Why were there three [crosses]? Why not just one?”

The cubist simultaneity of perspectives is especially evident in Lagerkvist’s superimposition of Dionysus, the goat-god, upon Apollo, the snake-god, and his juxtaposition of Dionysus-Apollo with Christ, the lamb-god. This abstract complexity is presented on a simple prose canvas and is underscored by images of goats and snakes (in The Sibyl) and of goats, sheep, and the snake-woman in The Holy Land. In The Holy Land again, the vultures that descend upon the dead sheep and thereby cleanse the land, the bald man’s sacrifice of a lamb, and Tobias’ ascent into the hills emblematically constitute humanistic and inverse abstractions from the Descent of the Dove, the Agnus Dei, and the Ascension.

The Tobias Trilogy may also be viewed as existentialist in its reflection of authentic individualism, its recognition of human responsibility for the meaning or essence of human life, and its preoccupation with existence and non-existence as opposed to preoccupation with supraexistence and a heaven that is external to humankind and the human heart.

The crucifixion cycle, initiated by Barabbas and concluded by the Tobias trilogy, along with Lagerkvist’s last novel, Mariamne (1967; Herod and Mariamne, 1968), constitutes a crystallization of Lagerkvist’s literary principles and religious symbolism: The profoundly simple narratives based on classical and biblical traditions encapsulate and project an apotheosis of human longing.

Bibliography

Cienkowska-Schmidt, Agnieszka. Sehnsucht nach dem Heiligen Land: Eine Studie zu Pär Lagerkvists spater Prosa, 1985.

Sjoberg, Leif. Pär Lagerkvist, 1976.

Spector, Robert Donald. Pär Lagerkvist, 1973.

Swanson, Roy Arthur. “Evil and Love in Lagerkvist’s Crucifixion Cycle,” in Scandinavian Studies. XXXVIII, no. 4 (November, 1966), pp. 302-317.

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