The Eternal Smile by Pär Lagerkvist
"The Eternal Smile" by Pär Lagerkvist is a philosophical exploration of life and its intrinsic value, conveyed through the reflections of deceased individuals on their past experiences. The narrative presents a series of twenty-six brief biographies of the dead, each contrasting their earthly lives with their current existence. One poignant story involves an old man who initially sees his menial job as a temporary measure but ultimately finds fulfillment and happiness in it, emphasizing the theme that the essence of life lies in the experience of living rather than in the pursuit of external definitions of success.
Central to the text is the idea that life lacks an absolute meaning; instead, its significance is individualized, suggesting that each person’s experience gives life its value. The story's climax involves a man's realization of this concept as he embraces his newborn child, illustrating that life’s meaning is tied to personal connections and existence itself. The dead confront a perplexing eternity, seeking understanding from a deity who reveals a mundane perspective on life, stating that it was never intended to be extraordinary. This revelation further underlines the notion that life is simply about being, without grand expectations, and invites readers to reflect on their own understanding of existence and meaning.
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The Eternal Smile by Pär Lagerkvist
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of World Literature, Revised Edition
First published:Det eviga leendet, 1920 (English translation, 1934)
Type of work: Novella
The Work
The eternal smile is the smile of the skull, or the grin of the death’s head, as well as the expression of deity in its indifference to the living humankind from which it always distances itself. It is, in other words, something that in divinely preceding or physically surviving human life has nothing to do with actual human life. Life is its own unsmiling conception of itself. It encompasses human beings within its conceivability; the intensity of an individual human life is directly proportional to the individual’s experience of this conceivability.
As the dead in the story compare their previous existences, twenty-six brief biographies unfold. One of the dead who had been quite satisfied with earthly life is an old man, who took a menial job, handing out paper in a subterranean restroom, as a stopgap until he could find his real vocation. He discovered with the passage of years that the menial job was in fact his real vocation, so he determined to perform his task with perfection, and this resulted in his finding happiness in life. Collectively, the biographies invite the inference that life is its own, and the only, value.
The twenty-first tale is the most significant. A man relates his love for a woman who learned that her destiny was to die after she had borne a child. After she gave birth to his child and died, the man held the newborn infant to his breast, and as he did so he gained a sense of meaning—the realization that life means but has itself no meaning: “Life has no love for you, tree; life has no love for you, human; for you, flower; for you, swaying grass, except when it means precisely you. When it no longer means you, it loves you no more and annihilates you.” Life has no abstract or absolute meaning that can be apprehended by inquiry; instead, life means each existing individual. To live is to be meant by life.
The residents of eternity are perplexed. They contemplate the peace of all-becoming-one and find it empty. They take no pleasure either in the prospect that life’s purpose may be only the perpetuation of life. They seek out God, who turns out to be an old man sawing wood by lantern light. Identifying themselves as the living, they ask God to account for the vagaries and disappointments of life. He tells them that he had not meant life to be anything extraordinary, adding: “I have done the best I could,” and, later: “I meant only that you should never need to content yourselves with nothing.”
Bibliography
Linnér, Sven. “Pär Lagerkvist’s The Eternal Smile and The Sibyl.” Scandinavian Studies 37 (May, 1965): 160-167.
Polet, Jeff. “A Blackened Sea: Religion and Crisis in the Work of Pär Lagerkvist.” Renascence 54, no. 1 (Fall, 2001): 47-65.
Scobbie, Irene. Pär Lagerkvist: An Introduction. Rev. ed. Stockholm: Swedish Institute, 1963.
Sjöberg, Leif. Pär Lagerkvist. New York: Columbia University Press, 1976.
Spector, Robert Donald. “Lagerkvist and Existentialism.” Scandinavian Studies 32 (November, 1960): 203-211.
Spector, Robert Donald. Pär Lagerkvist. New York: Twayne, 1973.
Swanson, Roy Arthur. “Lagerkvist’s Dwarf and the Redemption of Evil.”Discourse 13, no. 2 (Spring, 1970): 192-211.