Things are not always as they appear. ‘Your individual mission.’ Even among the rich and the diplomats' sons in the West End of Oslo, there are people in cellars pursuing their solitary dreams, storing things in secrecy and surrounding themselves with layer upon layer of cover stories, like spiders in dusty bomb shelters.
The anonymous regular customer at the bar was in reality two people. In his compendium, at the same time as denouncing his former self, he described his transformation from a ‘career cynic’ to a knight equipped with a monumental mission. To signal the metamorphosis that was taking place, he signed the compendium not as Anders Behring Breivik, but as Andrew Berwick. Maybe he was not totally uninfluenced by the Sex and the City lifestyle after all, or at least by the desire to be seen and appreciated when he went out on the town.
The Consumer Zombie
Even though he might cling to celebrities, it was not easy to uncover any dark sides to the polite bar customer, but, one time he was at the Palace Grill, he cracked. One Thursday evening in October 2010, he arrived at the bar early. Apart from a woman in her late thirties, Breivik was alone. Breivik was a social guy, in his own way, so he treated the woman to a beer and started talking with her.
‘Knights,’ he said, explaining what his book was about. The woman's friends came in and sat down. She was a literary researcher and began conversing with Breivik, who readily told her that he was inspired by chivalric literature.9 He had never heard of The Song of Roland, but he knew that Ivanhoe was a novel about knights.
‘My book's going to be big,’ he said.
‘What kind of genre is it’, she asked, ‘if it's not a novel?’
‘It's a masterpiece,’ Breivik explained.
The literary scholar tried to help him out and asked if it was fiction or non-fiction. Breivik answered with a reply that explained nothing at all. Either he did not understand the question and was not able to answer it, or he did not want to answer – mysterious. She did not understand what kind of book the strange guy's masterpiece was. When he said that he did not have a publisher, she stopped asking. Hardly an undiscovered genius, more of a slightly simple young man, she concluded, a show-off who had maybe done a few interrupted semesters at the Oslo School of Management.
The evening was young, and more of her friends were on their way. Breivik had not displayed his whole register yet. ‘Novels about knights,’ she thought, ‘whatever next?’ Without knowing it, she was on to something about the slippery salesman character at the other side of the table, but she had already forgotten his name.
History's most famous knight was never knighted by a monarch or a pope; he was self-appointed. Four hundred years ago, a man by the name of Alonso Quijano from La Mancha put a basin on his head and rode out into the world on an old nag he named Rocinante. The poor and childless man had read so many chivalric novels that he had begun to believe them. He took the name Don Quixote and was ready to fight bandits and save damsels in distress.
The conflict between the protagonist's fantasies about himself and other people's more level-headed opinions about the old man is the main theme of Cervantes’ novel about the great narcissist of world literature, the Knight of the Ill-Favoured Face. With his lance lowered, Don Quixote charged at what he thought was a giant, only to be thrown to the ground by the sails of a windmill. To use an image from the psychiatrist Finn Skårderud, the narcissistic mind alternates between floating over the waters like an inflated Zeppelin and lying on the ground like the smoking wreckage of the Hindenburg.
Don Quixote's knightly character was constructed in a library in the early 1600s, while Breivik's knight, Andrew Berwick, was formed, dressed and armed on the Internet between 2006 and 2011. In spite of a difference in age of four hundred years, there are similarities between the two knights. Andrew Berwick also has a host of modern relatives. The Breivik/Berwick duo resemble characters described by many contemporary authors on both sides of the Atlantic, possibly because Anders Behring Breivik was even more a child of his time than many others. In a way, he had no real parents.
In his compendium – the ‘masterpiece’ – Breivik emerges as the consumer society's prodigal son, a loser in the capitalist battleground, a gamer who cannot distinguish reality from fantasies born online. The compendium describes two different people: a wakeful, political and active Justiciar Knight and a dormant, passive and unconscious consumer, almost like the plot of The Matrix, a film to which he frequently refers.
One of the pictures he has included in the compendium shows a face with its eyelids sewn shut and a scalpel approaching to cut the threads. This picture is related to his frequent use of opposed concepts such as sleeping vs. waking and living vs. dead. Both the sleeping and the waking Breivik could have walked right out of novels by Michel Houellebecq, Bret Easton Ellis or Chuck Palahniuk – a ‘Norwegian Psycho’, a person who is almost totally superficial and empty, whose best friends are not people, but brands. Breitling Crosswind, Chanel Platinum Égoïste and Château Kirwan ’79 were respectively Breivik's favourite possession (a watch), his favourite eau de toilette and the wine he had put aside for a final party with two luxury prostitutes.10 If a genre were to be suggested for the compendium, a notion of consumerist prose would come close.
Breivik writes about his miserable imprisonment as a cog in an enormous capitalist machine, in which people are seemingly free but in reality enslaved; in which people are seemingly part of a society but in reality are not bound to other people, not even to those who are enduring the same glossy hell as them, in the soft but deadly embrace of money. It is a self-portrait of homo consumens. Breivik, the dopamine wreck, is alive on the outside but dead inside. The smiling bar customer behind his glass, chatty and seeking contact, is empty, cold and dead beneath the surface. In his compendium, Breivik condemned the spirit of the age, in what at the same time emerged as a dark self-portrait. In the following paragraphs he writes ‘you’, but in all probability means ‘I’. Breivik describes his former self as:
a zombie where the highlight of your day is purchasing a 1,000 euro garment or a 100 euro sushi meal, or getting a blowjob from someone you met outside the toilet at a club that Saturday. On your way home you see a girl getting gang-raped by 4 Somalis. You don't offer it much thought as the slag probably had it coming anyway … Why should you risk your health for someone you don't know? And the poor Somalis are probably only acting out [sic] as a result of centuries of European colonialism. Poor fellas. Society should take responsibility and offer these underprivileged individuals better accommodations [sic] and more rights, perhaps affirmative action would ensure that they feel at home, that they finally would like us? How can we be so cruel and treat them this way?
You work 9–10 hours a day, come home, eat, work out a couple of hours to keep fit, take your regular tanning, spa and Botox session and don't really have time for much else. Your concerns are not for the well-being of your family – close or extended – your neighbours, your kinsmen or countrymen, about the outlook for your country or your compassion for others, but rather the frightening scenario of being alone in this world. You don't want children because in essence you are a child yourself without responsibility or concern for anyone but yourself. Your only concern is how you can get your next dopamine fix, through and [sic] endless spiral of feeding your own ego.11