Intercultural Dialogue In Nordic Literatures

v.1.3. SUBMITTED: 31 JULY 2008 Intercultural Dialogue in Nordic Literatures (a critical study) Silke Reeploeg Student ID: 05020268 Dissertation submitted as part of the final examination for the degree of MA Highlands and Islands Literature of the Highlands and Islands | UHI Millennium Institute ABSTRACT "Is a Nordic literary community emerging?" - this question was asked in the year 2000 edition of Nordisk Literature, a literary yearbook published by the Nordic Literature and Library Committee (Nordbok, 1997-2006) under the Nordic Council of Ministers. The editors reflected on the fact that 100 years previously, this “Nordic literary community” had existed, noting that when Knut Hamsun wrote Sult (Hunger) at Nørrebro in Copenhagen (...) the book was read on the day of publication all over Scandinavia. Henrik Ibsen’s plays often had their premieres in other countries than Norway. Since then, Nordic countries seem to have developed in separate directions, establishing separate, national literatures – The question is whether a return to a collective Nordic forum is a possibility? Perhaps already on the way? (Nordbok, 2000) This thesis seeks to answer this question with a resounding "yes, but not as you know it" via case studies from contemporary, 20/21st century Nordic literature, the cultural dialogue they have with each other, as well as with their changing cultural-historical and critical-literary context. The study will situate Nordic literature both as a discourse and cultural space, and seek to locate the “Nordic forum”. In the process, it will investigate the possibility of a cultural space where an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson, B.) finds a voice that is neither based on geopolitical ideas of ‘nationhood’, nor on the ‘determined subjectivity’, fragmented or transcendent ‘meta-identities’ suggested by some variants of post-modern thought 2|Page (Foucault/Derrida/Althusser). Instead, evidence will be sought for a much more dynamic, complex and dialogic (Bakhtin) interaction between culture(s) and society. Motivated by the current “European Year of Intercultural Dialogue”, the research agenda includes a focus on the ways in which cultural and literary practices have become marked as national or global (‘world’ literatures), but how, in fact, literature mediates between different communities of cultural practice and national/regional or cultural ‘territories’ in a way that crosses and interrogates these established boundaries/categories. Nordic literature will be defined as a site of interplay between plural, converging, but also contradictory regions of identity, a site of continuous change but, most importantly, of human agency, intercultural dialogue and “our ability to go beyond the limits set by our existing beliefs and practices” (Callinicos, 2006) KEYWORDS: Nordic identity, Intercultural dialogue, Nordic literature, Culture and Discourse 3|Page CONTENTS CHAPTER 1 – INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................5 Background ....................................................................................................................8 Methodology................................................................................................................14 CHAPTER 2 – DISCUSSION Postmodernism, Globalisation and the Meta‐narrative ..........................................15 Identity, Culture and Intercultural Dialogue ............................................................17 Multicultural & intercultural – what’s the difference, does it matter? ...................19 CHAPTER 2.1 ‐ Where were we? … Historical and political contexts: from ‘Kalmar Nordic’ to ‘European Nordic’ Nordic region‐building & cultural co‐operation within the European Union ..........23 Nordic Cooperation beyond 1995............................................................................28 Nordic Regions and Small Nations ‐ Faroe ...............................................................29 CHAPTER 2.2 ‐ So, tell me about yourself … Nordic narratives and change National Narratives and Intertextuality across Nordic literatures...........................32 Opening or closing doors? – Global and Intercultural dialogue in Contemporary Nordic literatures .....................................................................................................36 Chapter 2.3 ‐ Contemporary Case Studies Global intercultural dialogue and Nordic national/regional voices.........................40 The Global Nation ‐ Contemporary Danish and Norwegian fiction .........................41 Intercultural dialogue in postcolonial settings – Faroe and Iceland........................46 Down and Out in Reykjavik ......................................................................................55 CHAPTER 3 – ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE NORDIC THRESHOLD Nordic voices in Scottish literature ‐ Shetland/Orkney ...........................................57 CHAPTER 4 – SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION ...............................................................66 BIBLIOGRAPHY .............................................................................................................71 APPENDIX A..................................................................................................................74 4|Page CHAPTER 1 – INTRODUCTION Europe is becoming more culturally diverse. The enlargement of the European Union, deregulation of employment laws and globalisation have increased the multicultural character of many countries, adding to the number of languages, religions, ethnic and cultural backgrounds found on the continent. As a result, intercultural dialogue has an increasingly important role to play in fostering European identity and citizenship. (http://www.interculturaldialogue2008.eu) One of the main objectives of this study is to consider the role intercultural dialogue plays within literary texts, as well as recognising the significance literature plays in defining social realities. It will take advantage of the Nordic ‘cultural space’ and its literatures as an example of the network of continuous interaction between cultures and societies, and to show literary representations as embedded in both their regional and global economies, political structures and power relations. However, by critically exploring the discourse of intercultural dialogue, this study will also connect it to “Nordic” and “European” discourses and narratives 1 , and analyse the relationship between historical and economic realities and cultural phenomena, between 1 Narrative is central to historical explanation as the vehicle for the creation and representation of historical knowledge and explanation. (Munslow, 2000:169) 5|Page Nordic literatures and the construction of identities within this, and other, “imagined communities” (Anderson, 1991). Whereas the current Year of Intercultural Dialogue could be merely seen as a ‘management activity’ by a corporate Europe aiming to defuse internal conflict by “fostering European identity and citizenship” 2 , intercultural dialogue also points to phenomena that effectively connects literary works and their interpretations across national or regional boundaries. As such it serves as a useful analytical tool to conceptualise the dynamics of cultural production – as a negotiation between the socio-economic reality of a historical period and the dominant discourses about it, or (in post-structuralist terms) narratively constituting it. Anthony Smith, in Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity states that the rise of transnational cultures is a logical conclusion to the Second World War: Before 1945, it was still possible to believe that the medium-sized nation-state was the norm of human organisation in the modern era and that national culture was humanity’s highest aspiration (...) The Second World War destroyed that vision and aspiration. (Featherstone, M. (ed.), 1990:172) Within the post-war world of “power blocs and ideological camps, humanity was re-divided” according to a “truly global politics and culture” (ibid). In place 2 http://www.interculturaldialogue2008.eu 6|Page of the now obsolete nation state “arose the new cultural imperialism of Soviet communism, American capitalism, and struggling to find a place between them, a new Europeanism” (ibid). It is interesting to note that in its insistence on being this ‘new age’ of transnational communication, this type of Globalist discourse nevertheless still implicitly accepts the existence of cultural boundaries along national or ethnic limits. On the one hand, it asserts that globalisation, migration, decolonisation, and the post-war process of European integration have led to a questioning of traditional collective identities based on the idea of a unitary nation-state and confidence in Western supremacy. On the other hand, and as a result of these globalising/post-modern developments, it supports an increasing preoccupation in public/civic life with such issues as cultural diversity, religious and social allegiances, (inter)national canons and the internal and external borders of Europe (which are based on the very national borders that it claims no longer exist). This is because, on the contrary, nations have neither disappeared, nor are obsolete. Post-1945, and, most importantly, post-1989, there seem to have been ever smaller nation-states emerging by the year – and with them, the civic institutions and discourses (including literary narratives) that are associated with the rise of nations: Nations, then, are imaginary constructs that depend for their existence on an apparatus of cultural fictions in which imaginative literature plays a decisive role. (Bhabha, 1990:49) 7|Page Background As a consequence of the “so-called linguistic turn that has moved historical explanation to a discussion about the part played by language in producing and shaping historical meaning or 'making true’” (Munslow, 2000:8) - the postmodern “re-orientation" of literary and historical studies (Rorty, White, Foucault, Althusser, Barthes) - literature (and cultural activity as such) has emerged as a meaning-making, hegemonic activity that generates narratives, identities and cultures (Pearson-Evans, 2007). Literary works no longer provide a mere 'reflection' of a unified, underlying socio-cultural reality or history, but play an important part in the construction of ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson, 1991), and the way societies imagine themselves as historical entities through narration (Bhabha, 1990). So, on the one hand, we can speak about ‘cultural reproduction’ (Bourdieu) or the replication of existing, underlying structures (structuralism), on the other hand it might be more appropriate to refer to generative and vibrant (post-structuralist) process “that reveals as it structures and contains” (Jenks, 1993:118). Similarly, whereas the field of intercultural communication (Pearson-Evans, 2007) has tended to consider individual cultures as more or less well defined, static and homogeneous entities (usually centred around national states or language groups) that can be easily understood and 'managed' - this thesis will take a different approach, one that sees culture as a complex, dynamic 8|Page and changeable activity. It will take as its starting point the fact that literature and society are in dialogue with internal social and cultural complexities, as well as external cultural difference, including political and historical change. (Blasco, 2004) Craig Cairns, in The Modern Scottish Novel, discusses Hobsbawn and Ranger’s The Invention of Tradition, noting Trevor-Ropers view of the ‘invention’ of ‘imaginary communities’ as leading to a “fictionalising of the past which leaves the present trapped in a fog of illusion, one that can only make the novelist’s engagement with that ‘imagined community’ double false to the real history of the nation” (Trevor-Roper in Cairns, 1999:14). Instead, he suggests literature as being the “necessary reconstruction through the imagination of a compensatory sense of shared forms of meaning to replace the lost customs of ‘traditional’ societies” (Cairns, 1999:14). This study fundamentally disagrees with both the above perspectives. The view of literature/culture as providing ‘false consciousness’ 3 (correctly criticised by Cairns) does not take into account how cultural reality/memory is in fact constituted by narratives and intertextual dialogue, rather than reflecting some underlying truth or essence that is then ‘fictionalised’. However, neither is Cairn’s inherent assumption of the existence of a related underlying-but-fragmented national consciousness very convincing. He defines a ‘Scottish imagination’ as one that (a) must be “reconstructed” to 3 As argued by cultural theorists such as Stuart Hall, this is part of an essentially elitist view of culture that implies that a) there is a ‘truth’/perspective available that is somehow outside ideology and that this perspective is b) only available to the educated intellectual (see Althusser and the Frankfurt School for further background). 9|Page replace “the lost customs of ‘traditional’ societies”, and (b) is (in any case) completely pluralistic, fragmented, ‘schizophrenic’, with any unity being equally illusory and fake: ‘unisonance’ of the nation is an illusion – it is the nation’s inner and outer dialogues, its dialects with their all-too-forceful (as opposed to ‘imagined’) sounds which forms its real identity. The nation, like the self, is a space of dialogue, a place of dissonant voices, a dialectic of relationships (...) it is constituted not by the autonomous unity of its language or its culture but by its inner debates and by the dialectic of its dialects. (Cairns, 1999:116) Although Cairns correctly identifies the constitutive nature of literature as a cultural discourse, and the heterogenous nature of ‘the nation’, he seems to misunderstand Anderson’s ‘imagined community’ as a form of Althusser’s ‘imaginary transposition’ (Morley, D. & Chen, K.-H. (ed.), 1996:48) that presents us with a (illusory) unified cultural whole where there are, in reality, a plurality of ‘dissonant voices’. However, and as Anderson repeatedly states in his discussions about old and new imagined communities around the world, not all ‘dissonant voices’ have the same power. It is the (equally ‘all-too-forceful’) hegmonic ideas and institutions that constitute these ‘dialectic of relationships’ – with the ‘inner debate’ always influenced by forceful political and economic ‘arguments’ outside it. 10 | P a g e Discursive and textual processes are, from this perspective, ‘considered to be, not reflective but constitutive in the formation of the modern world: as constitutive as economic, political or social processes’ which themselves (...) ‘do not operate outside of cultural and ideological conditions’ (...) (Hall in Morley, D. & Chen, K.-H. (ed.), 1996:16) Anderson’s discussion of the origin of ‘national print-languages’ illustrates this point further: (...) the convergance of capitalism and print technology on the fatal diversity of human language created the possibility of a new form of imagined community, which in its basic morphology set the stage for the modern nation. (...) while today almost all self-conceived nations – and also nation-states – have ‘national print-languages’, many of them have these languages in common, and in others only a tiny fraction of the population ‘uses’ the national language in conversations or on paper. (Anderson, 1991:46) Yet Cairns’ cultural pluralism provides an interesting link to both ‘national literature’ and multi-culturalism, which will be discussed in the next chapter, that will explore where this view might stem from, as well as suggest an alternative perspective in terms of trans-regional/global Scottish/Nordic narratives and cultural reality/memory. The space of Scotland is that ‘other side’ to history: where history’s grand narratives are reflected in absurd miniature. (Cairns, 1999:240) 11 | P a g e Is it really that simple? Do we not get a say in this? Dominant ideologies are indeed inscribed ‘in miniature’ in the discourse used, in which control, as well as the power of exclusion and silencing (the ‘otherside’) rests. Ideology, and its cultural discourses such as literature, therefore form an important part of social experience, as both a real and imaginary relation to the world – real in that it is the way in which people really live their relationship to the social relations which govern their conditions of existence, but imaginary in that it discourages a full understanding of these conditions of existence within them. (Belsey on Althusser, 1980:57) According to Althusser, literature can be said to (both in form and content) have an inherently complicity function within the ‘ideological state apparatus’, and in particular within the idea of the nation and nation-state, as he notes when discussing the role of the novel in Nation and Narration: It was the novel that historically accompanied the rise of nations by objectifying the ‘one, yet many’ of national life, and by mimicking the structure of the nation, a clearly bordered jumble of languages and styles. Socially, the novel joined the newspaper as the major vehicle of the national print media, helping to standardize language, encourage literacy, and remove mutual incomprehensibility. (...) Its manner of presentation allowed people to imagine the special community that was the nation. (Bhabha, 1990:49) 12 | P a g e Having defined Nordic literature as a narrative space, that is constantly under construction, in dialogue with socio-historical as well as cultural discourses, "a discourse subject to other discourses" (Munslow, 2000), one could now also be tempted to conclude that ideology is therefore somehow in control of people and 'subjects' them to the hegemonic forces of cultural production (or literary fake realities). This thesis will oppose this ‘negative conception’ of ideology (Morley, D. & Chen, K.-H. (ed.), 1996:48) by focusing on literature as a productive and dynamic dialogue between narratives, discourses and cultures, a shared meaning-making that is always in progress and constantly open to human agency and change. Particularly within the post-colonial/global context that Bhaba describes when contrasting the modern and post-colonial history of the novel, the ‘imagined community’ takes on a different reading. By its very nature of being a sociocultural phenomena, literature also contains elements (be it narrative or stylistic) that resist complete complicity/hegemony (Gramsci) and its purely functional internalisation of ideology by ‘the masses’ (Adorno). In the postcolonial text; messages are sent from (perceived) peripheries to the centre. They move across the globe; picturing their societies so as to connect them to the world. (Bhaba, 1990:49) 13 | P a g e Methodology A variety of approaches are engaged in the study of narratives, from historical/historiographical studies or that of postcolonial contexts (and a related interest in the construction of memories), to more philosophical, sociological or psychological concepts of narration and the way in which the cultural memory of particular groups or regions shapes their present-day sense of belonging and place. However, key concepts such as identity, narrative and culture are not simply static tools which can simply be applied to certain objects of research (i.e. literary texts). It is important to recognise the significance of knowledge about the historical and ideological context and implications of particular discourses (i.e. Globalisation, post-modernism, romanticism, post-colonialism) surrounding the texts (Williams, Foucault, Gramsci, White, and Bhaba), recognising the role literature plays within society. This study will therefore combine a definition of the historical and contemporary conceptual framework of both Nordic literature and intercultural dialogue, with a focus on the critical analysis of institutional and cultural discourses. The discussion will then be followed by a literary analysis of iconic 4 source texts from contemporary Nordic literature (from Faroe, Iceland and Norway, and their former ‘colonial centre’ of Denmark). Whilst situating the works themselves within their contemporary historical context, the study 4 Iconic in a sense that they have achieved ‘bestseller’ status in translation or become canonised as ‘Nordic literature’ within the English-speaking readership, as well as in a sense that the work has been awarded a literary prize (Nordic or otherwise). 14 | P a g e will thus also explore the theoretical and critical literary approaches inherent in secondary literature and literary criticism about the works. In terms of the research agenda, rather than separating economic, historical and cultural spheres, the discussion will analyse Nordic literatures within their changing cultural and historical contexts, with particular focus on the ongoing intercultural dialogue within narrative. By focusing on literary narratives, economic realities or detailed political contexts in relation to the Nordic cultural space will be touched upon, but not be examined in great detail (although they clearly form important parts of the socio-historical background). The discussion will utilise the ‘Nordic’ concept to interrogate other categories such as ‘European’ or ‘Transnational’, although, clearly, a continuous flow of cultural exchange and dialogue takes place way beyond these Eurocentric cultural/geographical/political boundaries. CHAPTER 2 – DISCUSSION Postmodernism, Globalisation and the Meta‐narrative It is useful, at this point, to examine the theoretical and discursive background of both globalisation and cultural identities, and how literary narrative may or may not be able to supply a true picture of the intercultural reality mentioned above. 15 | P a g e As noted by Callinicos in Postmodernism as Normal Science (1995) 5 , postmodernism, after gaining increasing academic support during the 1980’s, has since become more or less ‘entrenched’ as an intellectual paradigm. It provides a sort of intellectual backdrop for other discourses such as globalisation - especially when considering that what is generally referred to as postmodernism is not actually a concrete position as such, but a combination of complex and sometimes self-contradictory interpretations of what ‘modernism’ is perceived to be (or have been). Rather than accepting the existence of ‘objective reality’ that is then represented and reproduced in cultural production, postmodernists give up on language’s representational function and follow post structuralism in the idea that language constitutes, rather than reflects, the world, and that knowledge is therefore always distorted by language (by the historical circumstances and the specific environment in which it arises). (Bertens, 1995:6) Therefore, there is no such thing as an objective reality in terms of concrete social conditions – reality and identity are constructed by language or ideology. As noted in the introduction to this study, this places literature as being part of what Althusser refers to as the institutionalised ‘state apparatus’ that replicates dominant ideologies through cultural artefacts, maintaining the socio-political terrain most useful to the elite. By emphasising notions of entrapment and manipulation, narratives are seen as determining factors of the ‘culture industry’ (Adorno) that only operate ‘one-way’, or, worse, ‘pure 5 Postmodern Culture, V.3, No.2 [3], Jan 1993, Issue 193. 16 | P a g e imaginary surface’ (Baudrillard) - modernist notions of reality and truth having been replaced by mere reproductions or ‘fakes’ (Cairns, 1999:14). Ignoring the fact that narratives and ideas are social phenomena and as such are ceaselessly changing and in dialogue with the rest of society and history, this post-modern perspective also often proposes a view of cultural reality as being purely in the imagination or aesthetic, rather than related to concrete socio-historical events. It is easy to see a connection between the discourses of post-modern fatalism, cultural imperialism, and that of EUprescribed cultural diversity. Implicit in these particular discourses is the assumption of the possibility of generating a type of institutionalised consensus that will replicate and maintain hegemonic domination (i.e. somehow produce a plural and equal cultural Eurotopia from above). Identity, Culture and Intercultural Dialogue With cultural identities having to relativise themselves against this changing context and rise in the number of smaller or newer nations (be they based on language or ethnic categories), it is not surprising that debates about national culture have, in fact, dominated recent elections, not just in Scotland, but everywhere in Europe. One of the recent changes in both the social sciences and, as we can see, within EEC policy, is the acceptance that the world is much more complex than nation states, ethnic groups, language groups or other wider categories that have been used to group people into ‘cultures’ and so predict ‘typical’ behaviour. Intercultural communication has often assumed 17 | P a g e a multi-cultural stance, which assumed the existence of defined cultural boundaries; across which ‘cross-cultural’ communication has to take place. In terms of utilising intercultural dialogue as a tool to analyse literature, it is important, then, to identify the implicit assumptions that makes it so different from cross-cultural communication. In his essay on Cosmopolitans and locals in World Culture, Ulf Hannerz defines globalisation as a way in which “All the variously distributed structures of meaning somewhere.” and expression are becoming interrelated, somehow, (Hannerz, U. in Featherstone, M. (ed.), 1990:240) In this surprisingly elitist (and visibly dated) definition of ‘cosmopolitanism’, he then suggests that the only way this intercultural mess can be disentangled is via ‘People like the cosmopolitans’, who have “a special part in bringing about a degree of coherence”. (ibid) This is partly, because The cosmopolitan may embrace the alien culture, but he does not become committed to it. All the time he knows where the exit is. (...) This view contrasts the intellectually able and self-conscious ‘cosmopolitan’, with the ‘local’ (or ‘native’), with the real appreciation of intercultural contact only really open to the former, also providing the necessary intercultural connections between ‘them’ and ‘one world culture’. If there were only locals in the world, world culture would be no more than the sum of its separate parts. (Hannerz in Featherstone, 1990:240, 249) 18 | P a g e Equally, intercultural competence is noted as “simulating local knowledge” rather than “becoming a local” (ibid:247) - a management method, rather than ‘real’ engagement within intercultural dialogue. ‘necessary reconstruction’ (Cairns)? Another ‘fake reality’ or Or an ‘ideoscape’ generated by “intellectuals who continuously inject new meaning-streams into the discourse of democracy in different parts of the world”? (Appadurai in Featherstone, 1990:301) Either way, all of the above views are connected in the way they support a discourse of multi-cultural/cross-cultural communication within globalist ideology that implies pre-existing structures or ‘culture-as-essence’. Multicultural & intercultural – what’s the difference, does it matter? The UK National Report by EIW (European Intercultural Workplace Project Partnership, 2007) defines ‘multiculturalism’ or ‘cultural pluralism’ as a policy, ideal, or reality that emphasizes the unique characteristics of different cultures in the world, especially as they relate to one another in immigrant receiving nations. (my emphasis) The term ‘multicultural’ generally acknowledges cultural difference (placing priority on learning/teaching about difference). Equally, the terms ‘cross- cultural’, as well as ‘acculturation’ (the modification of the culture of a group or of a single individual as a result of contact with a different culture) depend on 19 | P a g e the way in which these unique and different cultures come into contact with each others “distinct systems of norms, beliefs, practices, and values.” (ibid) Intercultural communication (communication between persons who have different cultural backgrounds) continues this emphasis on difference, with inter/multi-cultural competence taught to management teams across the world in order to prevent misunderstandings and to ‘manage’ perceived conflicts across well-defined boundaries. This context is also still implicit in the EEC ‘version’ of intercultural dialogue, with intercultural dialogue placing an emphasis on what is common to various cultures (i.e. Geographical region, history), but priority given to the process of common learning and, respectively, understanding and reception of the values of pupils originating in different cultures. (Katunarić, V., 2002, my italics) It is important to note that the concept of separate cultures and essentialist ‘origin’ is usually used in conjunction with the existence of nation states and national/ethnic cultures – an idea that emerged during modernity. Multiculturalism can thus be seen as a modernist desire for separateness and (national) boundaries. National literatures, equally, work within this paradigm of cultural or language borders, from which narratives emerge, that somehow ‘reflect’ this underlying ‘nativeness’, ‘national consciousness’ or ‘indigenous culture’. 20 | P a g e Where does that leave the Nordic forum? Fragmented into individual national cultures/literatures, never to meet again? Again, we have to look at how solid those boundaries actually are, and whether intercultural dialogue might provide an alternative way of interpreting narratives and cultures alike. Krams and Widdowson note that “Early phases of cross- and intercultural communication studies were marked by a tendency to see cultural and linguistic boundaries as more well-defined than they actually are, emphasising the need to communicate to another, different culture, or across imaginary cultural borders (from one homogenous culture to another).” This view is directly connected to “a structuralist heritage that favoured categories, dichotomies and 'dualist confrontations'” (Kramsch, 1998). A poststructuralist stance, in contrast, “inspired by the American philosopher Peirce, the Russian literary theorist Bakhtin and the Indian British cultural critic Bhabha, instead sees identities as constructs through categories set by others, but also defines this as a process that refers to the outside world, and the dialogue in which the speaker constitutes himself as a subject.” (Kramsch, 1998) Communication is seen as an activity, a “responsive construction of self, and the interdependence of opposites”, with the intrinsically contradictory nature of meaning and identity constituting the position that we call inter- or cross-cultural. There always is “an-Other perspective to dualistic confrontations”, a fact overlooked in a notion like intercultural competence, with Kramsch therefore preferring to talk of an 'intercultural stance’. (Kramsch, 1998) An ‘intercultural stance’ has important 21 | P a g e advantages in terms of understanding literature as a complex mediation or dialogue, rather than simple one-way communication or reflections of national or ethnic cultures. It is also an important first step in understanding the complex operations of culture and history itself. Léonce Bekemans, in a paper on Globalisation and Solidarity (2002) defines intercultural dialogue as “a policy answer to the globalisation process” that has “automatically incorporate the ideological presuppositions of neo-liberal economics”, concluding that we're not moving into a unified and harmonious world culture, nor into an age in which cultures are in perpetual war with each other. The likely scenario might be a global culture, primarily western and commercialised, which interacts with indigenous cultural forces in a number of different ways. (Bekemans, 2002) Again, this perspective relies on the contrast between the ‘indigenous’ and the ‘other’, with globalisation meaning a wave of “western” and “commercialised” forces interacting counterparts. (mechanically) with their regional or “indigenous” Yet, as we have seen, literature engages societies in a dialogue with their local cultural past and present, as well as past and present socio-economic power structures across the world. As a form of social activity, it not only ‘reflects’ social and economic changes, but constructs the way in which reality, community and social change are perceived. Rather than located in the binary opposites of ‘indigenous’/’global’, Nordic literature is therefore situated within the interdependence of opposites, meaning a complex network of intercultural contexts that include both perspectives. So 22 | P a g e where does this leave the Nordic narratives – as global ‘hybrids’ that have no cultural ‘roots’? CHAPTER 2.1 ‐ Where were we? … Historical and political contexts: from ‘Kalmar Nordic’ to ‘European Nordic’ When defining Nordic identity, Baldersheim and Stahlberg refer to Pertti Joenniemie and his perspective on Nordic networks of sub-national/crossborder co-operation, based on the long history of Nordic networks at the level of civic society. Many Nordic citizens feel they have a Nordic identity supplementing their national one. This Nordic identity is often stronger than a European identity. (Baldersheim, 1999:173) This chapter explores the historical and geo-political context of the ‘Nordic’ identity within Europe today, the co-operative unions it was and is based on, as well as the challenges large and smaller Nordic regions have encountered when situating themselves within the European context. Nordic region‐building & cultural co‐operation within the European Union Historically, the closest we get to a politically defined ‘Nordic Society’ is probably the Kalmarunionen (Kalmar Union), a series of personal unions 23 | P a g e (1397-1524) that united the three kingdoms Denmark, Norway (with Iceland, Greenland, Faroe Islands, Shetland and Orkney) and Sweden (including some of Finland) under a single monarch.” 6 Although of a very intermittent nature, this symbolic and historically significant unification established Danish dominance over the countries concerned 7 , resulting in a culture-historical ‘moment’ that has resonated throughout Nordic culture and society ever since. (This) common Nordic identity has grown through inter-Nordic trade and migration, through substantial efforts to harmonise domestic legislature across a broad range of sectors, and though extensive interNordic cooperation and interchange of scientific, academic and cultural activity. (...) (Thomas, quoted in Miles, 1996:16) Nowadays, the Nordic Council (www.norden.org) defines ‘Nordic countries’ as consisting of “Denmark, the Faroe Islands, Greenland, Finland, Åland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. The Faroe Islands and Greenland are both part of the kingdom of Denmark, and Åland is part of the republic of Finland.” This excludes Shetland and Orkney, which became part of Scotland/Britain in 1469. So, if the category that defines where the Nordic region has changed over time, how has affected Nordic literatures? Can the Nordic society/community/forum be located at all, in a historical reality that has, according to Thomas, “been marked more by disintegration than by cooperation” (Miles, 1996:16)? 6 7 www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalmar_Union. The Norwegian monarch actually resided in Denmark. 24 | P a g e In his introduction to Post-war Period - Nordic Countries and the EU, Miles notes the existence of a perceived ‘Nordic bloc of nation states’ that share a large (if at times rather superficial) consensus on many domestic and international issues. The Nordic countries have historically been confronted with a common set of problems when defining their relationships with the European Community (EC) and later European Union (EU). In particular, these countries have all faced the challenge of securing preferential trading relations with continental Europe, while simultaneously maintaining close contact with their own region through Nordic cooperation. (Miles, 1996) In The Concept of the Nordic region (Miles, 1996:16-18), Baldersheim and Stahlberg differentiate between “the Nordic region” (as encompassing “the monarchies of Denmark, Norway and Sweden and the republics of Finland and Iceland, as well as the Faero Islands and Greenland.”) and Scandinavia (“a collective term for Denmark, Norway and Sweden.”) This is an interesting differentiation when dealing with traditional ‘Scandinavian’ literature/identity, and it’s wider, and in some sense, more recent, ‘Nordic’ partners, meaning a division between young and old: Denmark and Sweden are old-established powers, while the independent states of Norway, Finland and Iceland in their present forms are new nations of the twentieth century. (Thomas, quoted in Miles, 1996:16) 25 | P a g e This change and ex-/inclusion of certain areas within the Scandinavian/Nordic ‘concept’ is thus an ongoing project, that relates the current geopolitical/historical climate back to not just historical texts and contemporary literature, but also to literary criticism and thus the literary canon itself. Literature is therefore not the repository of culture or tradition, but part of a system of discriminations and evaluations ... it also means that culture is a system of exclusions. (Said quoted in Bhaba, 1990:100) So, for example, C. G. Laird’s comparative study of The World Through Literature (1951) orders Scandinavian literature according to a historical reality (at the time of writing the study): The Scandinavian countries, in northernmost Europe, comprising Denmark, the Swedish-speaking part of Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, have all distinct national individualities of their own, but form historically, geographically, and racially, a cultural unit. (Laird, 1951:371) In terms of twentieth-century history and politics, and as mentioned previously, the concept of a Nordic community as a forum or cultural unit, has thus been a complex and changing one, with “formalised Nordic co-operation as an inter-governmental process (being) largely a post-war phenomenon” (Baldersheim, 1999:7). The notion of a common Nordic state emerged again in scholarly pamphlets during the 18th century. However, during the 19th century 26 | P a g e the idea of Nordic ‘togetherness’ had to compete with nationalism and separatism in the countries that today make up the area. Of the five countries that presently constitute the Nordic family the last one emerged as a sovereign state only in 1944 (Iceland declaring its independence from Denmark). (...) (Baldersheim, 1999:7) Significantly, Baldersheim sees the “Nordic family” both as a precursor of the EEC 8 , but also, importantly, as a response to increasing economic integration to that same European Economic Community. Appadurai identifies these trans-national ‘community of interests’ as part of a global infrastructure, a transglobal ‘scape’ formed by five different dimensions of global cultural flow. With ‘ethno-/techno- and finanscapes’ forming the infrastructure, ‘media-/ideoscapes’ are then “built upon” it, with global cultural flows occuring “in and through the growing disjunctures between ethnoscapes, technoscapes, finanscapes, mediascapes and ideoscapes.” (ibid:301) Similarly, Baldersheim concentrates on the ‘disjunctures’ and potential conflict between the local and the global, with Nordic countries united against the perceived threat of this ‘third culture’ of European/Global business and economic relations (Gessner and Schade in Featherstone, 1990:259). 8 (…) co-operation in the Nordic area took off earlier than that of the six original EEC countries and achieved results more quickly than the EEC did. The level of integration reached by the Nordic countries in many respects already in the 1960s (e.g. free flow of people or harmonization of social legislation) was not matched by the EEC until the late 1980s or early 1990s. (…) (Baldersheim, 1999:7) 27 | P a g e ... all the Nordic countries felt equally affected by the EC’s resolve from the mid-1980’s to increase the speed of European economic integration. (...) Consequently, local authorities have increasingly tried to position themselves in relation to this new scenario, among other things through cross-border regional co-operation and learning. (Baldersheim, 1999:122) Nordic Cooperation beyond 1995 Following the accession of Finland and Sweden to the EU, the March 1995 Reykjavik Nordic Council resolved that Nordic cooperation could be used as a platform for pursuing Nordic advantage (nytte), particularly in order to influence the European agenda. With this in mind, Nordic cooperation changed somewhat, in that, rather than merely concentrate on intra-Nordic cooperation, it now sought cooperation with Europe/EU/EEA, as well as cooperation with the areas adjacent to the Nordic region. (Miles, 1996:28) In terms of Nordic literatures this would mean that, as part of an ‘ideoscape’, they are generated from within both a European and Nordic economic and cultural structure, in which disparate cultural identities are in conflict. Historical, political and economic factors thus determine any further development of cultural identities and their consequent representation in Nordic literatures. What then happens to smaller, less economically powerful nations? 28 | P a g e Nordic Regions and Small Nations ‐ Faroe Almost every year the United Nations admits new members. And many ‘old nations’, once thought fully consolidated, find themselves challenged by ‘sub’-nationalisms within their borders – nationalisms which, naturally, dream of shedding this ‘sub’-ness one happy day. (Anderson, 1991:3) As we have seen in the previous discussion, neither globalization/‘transnational’ or European activities have, to date, resulted in the total demise of the nation state, nor the end of national literatures. Global influences merely work as part of a network of trans- and sub-national elements and institutions that include a “‘third culture’ of international business and economic relations” (Gessner and Schade in Featherstone, 1990:269). However, they also include also regional and inter-regional cultural and political alliances such as the Nordic Council of Ministers. All the above are integrated within complex, interdependent, ideological ‘landscapes’: ‘Ideoscapes’, which are “often directly political and frequently have to do with the ideologies of states and the counter-ideologies of movements explicitly oriented to capturing state power or a piece of it. (Featherstone, 1990:299) These ideoscapes are composed of elements of the Enlightenment worldview, which consists of a combination of ideas, terms and images, including ‘freedom’, ‘welfare’, ‘rights’ (…) and the master-term ‘democracy’”. This 29 | P a g e “Euro-American” master-narrative of the Enlightenment has been internationalised, with different nation-states, “as part of their evolution”, organising their political cultures around it. (Featherstone, 1990:300) However, this complexity (and the relationship between economic and cultural processes and institutions) also means that not all regions aim to achieve national status “one happy day” (Anderson, 1991:3), with the Faroe Islands, instead, having to accept a a home-rule status as a “self-governing community within the Danish state” (Thagil, 1995:63) Nevertheless, the Faroe Islands serve as a good case study in connecting literature, power and discourse in the rise of Nordic nationalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In terms of its literary discourse, neither forms nor subjects of Faroese literature can be separated from the ‘nationalist movement’, as the establishment of the first news periodical in the Faroe Islands shows. With the epoch-making “Christmas Meeting” on 26 December 1888 “lead by several of the most respected and enlightened men in the country, all with connections to the nationalist movement in Copenhagen” concluding “with a resolution which demanded greater rights for the Faroese language in the schools, in the churches and in the courts.” - but also resulting in the establishment of “The News of the Faroese (Foringatidindi), the first periodical written in the Faroese language.” (Debes in Thagil, 1995:75/76) 30 | P a g e Heinesen’s work, although writing in Danish, can be seen as both a further development and direct result of the preceding interaction between political discourses and literary history of Faroese writing, with Hoydal (whose work will be discussed in the next chapter) and other contemporary Faroese writers providing another step along this changing ‘national narrative’. So what connects Faroese narratives to other narratives within the Nordic area and beyond? The next chapter will explore how cultural reality is in fact constituted by narratives and intertextual dialogue, and what this means for the trans-regional/global ‘Nordic narrative’. CHAPTER 2.2 ‐ So, tell me about yourself … Nordic narratives and change The aim of this chapter is to connect the preceding discussion of the discourse of intercultural dialogue and the Nordic socio-historical context with representations of these cultural realities in literary narration. In order to provide a critical analysis of intercultural dialogue within Nordic literatures, the connections between narratives will be examined, as well as those between narratives and dominant discourses (i.e. nationalism, globalization) – taking particular issue with the following statement and the negative implications it has for contemporary literature and its readers: 31 | P a g e the consumer has been transformed, through commodity flows (and the mediascapes, especially of advertising, that accompany them) into a sign, both in Baudrillard’s sense of a simulacrum which only asymptotically approaches the form of a real social agent; and in the sense of a mask for the real seat of agency, which is not the consumer but the producer and the many forces that constitute production. (Appadurai in Featherstone, 1990:307) National Narratives and Intertextuality across Nordic literatures When discussing the Finnish National epic Kalevala in Nordic Frontiers: Recent Issues in the Study of Modern Traditional Culture in the Nordic Countries, Lotte Tarke argues that “the cultural reality is not ‘around’ or ‘behind’ texts, cultural reality comes into being through and in the texts it produces.” This “dialogical view” sees the literary text as “neither self- contained, nor identified with the written or printed ‘work’: text is the product of interpretation, more a process of meaning than an object.” (Anttonen, 1993:170) Having situated the rise of national literatures within the context of both structuralism and a particular European and Nordic socio-historical framework, it becomes apparent that ... context is in itself not a homogenic and unproblematic background, a given reality: it too consists of different cultural processes, different 32 | P a g e discourses, a multitude of things happening simultaneously or sequentially. (Anttonen, 1993:178) Cultural analysis and intertextual interpretation of narratives attempt to avoid reductionist assumptions phenomena and context. about causal relationship between cultural Therefore, although we have considered both historical and discursive contexts in the previous chapters, they will not ‘explain’ literature, rather the focus lies in the interplay of different discourses or levels of cultural reality: the context does not explain the text, nor the other way round. (Anttonen, 1993:179) So, for example, the absence of an independent Faroese nation-state is no obstacle to their being Faroese national literature – as the existence of institutions such as the Faroese writers association 9 , the Faroese National Library 10 and the Faroese Literature Prize demonstrate. Yet, at the same time, membership in various cultural partnerships ensures the links to not just Nordic, but also European trans-regional partnerships – recognising “a common cultural heritage that has played such an important role in northern Europe’s economic and political history.” (Baldersheim, 1999:111) Both cultural and political-institutional discourses are thus interwoven in economic and cultural communities that cross the North Sea, 9 http://www.rit.fo/ http://www.flb.fo/ 10 33 | P a g e re-incorporating the Scottish islands, a region that had disappeared from the ‘Nordic map’ in 1469 11 : One significant initiative, particularly for the North Atlantic area (including the Scottish Islands), has been the Nordatlantiska samarbetet/North Atlantic Co-operation (previously West Nordic Cooperation), which initially covered Greenland, the Faroe Islands and Iceland, extending in 1995 to include Norwegian coastal regions and Scottish islands. (...) it builds on historical antecedents such as the Hanseatic League (a trading alliance in northern Europe in existence between the 13th and 17th centuries in several Northern European and Baltic cities), which was based primarily on efficident trading, but also on peaceful and prosperous co-operation. (Baldersheim, 1999:111) Post-war history, particularly the post-1995 emphasis on Nordic co-operation beyond its ‘traditional’ (Scandinavian) regions, has thus resulted in a resurgence of the idea of the ‘Nordic forum’, but one that now follows this change in Zeitgeist in terms of opening the doors to literatures and cultures from “areas adjacent to the Nordic region” (Miles, 1996:28). As we will see in the case studies in the next chapter, intercultural dialogue provides an ideal vehicle for the interpretation of these communities of interest’. It locates the Nordic community as not an ‘awakening of a self-consciousness’, but the construction of a cultural community from a constant dialogue with other contexts (National, Regional, European, Global). 11 The Scottish islands, formerly ruled from Norway/Denmark were ‘loaned’ to Scotland and subsequently incorporated into Great Britain. 34 | P a g e Anderson quotes Gellner as an example of what happens when nationalism is seen as “not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist.” (Anderson, 1991:6) Gellner emphasises ‘fabrication’ and ‘falsity’ rather than ‘imagining’ and ‘creation’ – implying that “‘true’ communities exists which can be advantageously juxtaposed to nations”. (ibid) It is this perspective that Craig Cairns adopts when he laments the history of the Scottish nation and “the ‘predicament’ of the imagination in Scotland” which is neither a real imagination – having been maimed by Calvinisim – nor is it effectively national – since Scotland has failed to maintain a continuous identity as a nation of the modern kind. (Cairns, 1999:21) Equally, the above ‘re-invention’ of the Nordic forum could be seen as a fake reality, an artificial combination of fragmented nation states or ethnic groups that have long since lost any real communal ‘essence’. Yet, as we have seen above, the Nordic cultural community is both the basis and itself based on a tension between European economic integration and the resistance to full integration by national and regional interests. It is an ‘imagined community’ that has an ongoing and complex dialogue with economic and financial realities that change over time. 35 | P a g e Opening or closing doors? – Global and Intercultural dialogue in Contemporary Nordic literatures Similar to Bakhtin’s idea of the dialogue of voices within a text, intercultural dialogue stands opposed to the idea of ‘genetic’ links between Nordic cultures. Intertextuality refers to the links that bind texts together in a different sense: relationships of meaning, allusion, connotation (...). Texts are clusters or processes of meaning that presuppose each other and exist only in relation to each other. (Anttonen:171) Instead, an ‘intercultural stance’ opens the door to a socio-cultural (and literary) heteroglossia that questions static cultural boundaries, opening them to change; a Nordic cultural space that is both international and interrogates national cultures, recognising the importance literature plays in the construction of both. So, for example, although both Heinesen and Laxness are seen as ‘national writers’, they can also be seen as playing their part in what Loefgren refers to as the “import of an international ideology for national ends”: The interesting paradox in the emergence of modern nationalism from the end of the eighteenth century onward is that it is an international ideology which is imported for national ends. (Anttonen, 1993:217) 36 | P a g e In The Cultural Grammar of Nation-Building Loefgren explores the “international cultural grammar of nationhood” that emerged during the nineteenth century, which produced “a kind of cultural checklist” that included “a symbolic estate (flag, anthem, sacred texts, etc.), ideas about a national heritage (a common history and folk culture, a pantheon of national heroes and villains, etc.), and notions of national character, values and tastes.” (Anttonen, 1993:218) Similarly, when comparing Sweden and America during the 1930’s and again the 1960’s, Loefgren pays particular attention to the different interpretations or “national appropriations of twentieth-century international ideas of modernity”, and how the “mentalizing of the nation” was accompanied both by visible political, civil and physical national infrastructure.”(223) He notes that various media such as radio and television “created new and intensified forms of national sharing” (227), one of which being the existence of a national body of literature or canon – a list of authorised narratives within and about the nation. This is allied to “the idea that the status as a modern citizen calls for the sacrifice of old (pre-national) loyalties and traditions” often lamented in the nostaligia for “the loss of community” (Anttonen, 1993:229/230, my insert). However, by extension, and as Arnason notes in Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity states: National identities and nationalistic perspectives can become the starting point for different interpretations of the global situation; (...) (Featherstone, 1990:225) The Danish writer Johannes Jensen’s Den Lange Rejse is a good example of how both a structural and narrative form can create Anttonen’s “new and 37 | P a g e intensified form of national sharing” (Anttonen, 1993:227), as well as becoming part of an international canon and literary history (Jensen received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1944). In his essay Beginning as a Structural Element in Johannes V. Jensen’s Den Lange Rejse, Korovin notes that it represents a “new type of novel, the ‘novel-myth’, which became very popular in the twentieth century.” (Garton, 2002:232-236) The novel-myth, by differing from both the romance and the novel of character and adventure, presents a model of the universe. (...) Den Lange Rejse can be viewed as a single literary work, a novel-myth in the form of a cycle instead of as separate novels. Den Lange Rejse consists of six self-contained parts that were not written immediately after one another. (...) All parts share a central idea: the author attempts to present the triumphant march of the Nordic race on the planet. (...) Every new novel relates new steps, new victories on the journey of the Nordic race: the finding of fire, the Cymbric invasion of Europe, or the discovery of America. (ibid) In terms of literary history, Jensen’s narrative thus stands alongside other epic novels or fictional annals 12 such as Laxness’Fish Can Sing, Heinesen’s The Lost Musicians or Hamsun’s Growth of the Soil – in their depiction of Icelandic/Norwegian/Faroese microcosms and (Nordic) man’s triumph over both nature and history. All create a mythical regional identity through narrative, a cultural reality that deals with what is perceived to have existed before “the arrival of the modern world.” (Leithausen in Hamsun, 2007:xiv) 12 The original title Brekkukots Annall referring to ‘the Annals’ or memory of past events. 38 | P a g e The narratives take part in an intercultural conversation that not only depicts internal struggle (i.e. against provincial sectarianism in Heinesen), but, through the medium of the novel-myth, construct a fictional cultural memory (Laxness/Heinesen/Jansen), and look forward “to a saner future” (Leithausen in Hamsun, 2007:xiv) with individuals becoming part of something greater and whole – the ‘national narrative’. Changing cultural and historical circumstances however also mean constant change within national literatures, with contemporary Nordic literature interacting not just with the above (national) literary history, but also with the wider world and change. The “lange rejse” through literary history continues, and the interplay between society and culture, modern and post-modern discourses, can be traced to the literature of the 1990s. This includes a preoccupation with the construction of an international canon of post-modern fragmentation and romanticism (rather than national communities and Nordic microcosms represented in earlier literature). As noted by G. Mose in a study of Danish Short Short Fiction. “One entire issue of a Copenhagen-based literary journal Den Bla Port was devoted to articles on the literary fragment, translations of selected fragments by Schlegel and Novalis, and an article on the punktroman as genre (…).” (Garton, 2002:31-51) As in the case of the novel-myth of the early twentieth century, different fragments relate to each other intertextually, providing a context for something different from the novel-myth or poetry, thus establishing a ‘new’ genre or intellectual paradigm. This generative quality of intertextual dialogue is also 39 | P a g e present in the way Nordic national and regional literary texts represent global intercultural dialogue, showing the tensions both in symbolic and institutional cultural spaces that characterise the cultural climate of the time. So, for example, Katya Sander and Simon Sheikh (2001) comment in On Nordicness and Normality: An Introduction, that Nordic countries are neither isolated nor overrun by global forces, they are ‘normal’, in that they are part of the world, interacting with shifts in cultural practices and discourses as part of the wider, global cultural discourse and artistic/critical practices. In recent years, there has been a major change in Nordic art practices and discourses. (...) Artists that, on the one hand, broke away from the local, Nordic tradition and entered international discourses and art scenes. (Sander, 2001:14) So have Nordic narratives been subsumed into the international/global discourse, away from “regionalistic tendencies and qualities” (ibid)? Has the Nordic forum dissolved into global “art scenes”? Chapter 2.3 ‐ Contemporary Case Studies Global intercultural dialogue and Nordic national/regional voices Focusing on examples from Nordic contemporary fiction, this chapter will situate regional narratives and identities within the changing global cultural landscape. It will analyse specific examples of intercultural dialogue in the 40 | P a g e literatures of Norway, Denmark and the North Atlantic Islands - Iceland, the Faroe Islands, and Orkney/Shetland - in order to demonstrate the way in which global and regional identities are created through narrative (Bhaba, Burke), but also how the dynamics of intercultural dialogue define a cultural space that has no specific national, geographic or even language boundaries. The Global Nation ‐ Contemporary Danish and Norwegian fiction As we have seen in the second chapter, both Norway and Denmark are nowadays not only part of a Nordic/European cultural space, but of a much wider social experience that includes ‘global brands’ such as McDonalds and Volvos, as much as familiar European realities such as holidays at the Costa del Sol. Suzanne Brogger’s and Frode Grytten’s narratives thus represent a dialogue with current Global/European realities, featuring narratives that connect personal or family histories and memories with world events. Both Brogger’s The Jade Cat and Grytten’s The Shadow in the River also deal with transient identities, although each one from the perspective of a narrator located within their particular region. Brogger’s semi-fictional family history of post-war Denmark, as experienced by three generations of women from a part-Jewish Danish family, explores their search for roots, new identities and their mourning for lost certainties. Representing Denmark’s history during the second half of the twentieth century, the narrative charts the transition of a prosperous and educated 41 | P a g e family with imperial aspirations – as symbolised by the main protagonist Katze (the Cat) Katze had never been like that. She came from a good family and she had been christened Katarina after the Russian empress. (Brogger, 2004:5) We witness the transition from being “as assimilated as one could imagine” (ibid: 4) to their dislocation (both physically and mentally) by the arrival of the Nazis in 1942/43 – “Above the sideboard hung a painting of a Jew fleeing with a bag on his back.” (ibid:13). Although the Lovins family clearly enacts all the cultural traditions of Denmark, including Christmas, “At no house in Copenhagen was the Christian Yuletide celebrated with more splendour or devotion than in this Jewish home.” (ibid:7) - their cultural assimilation turns out to be only temporary, with Katze’s husband Tobias (along with Katze herself) subject to an enforced change of identity, when it becomes clear in 1943 that “the Jews could not remain in Denmark” (Brogger, 2004:83) How strange that seemed! For Tobias had never regarded himself as a Jew. It is true he had not been baptised, but neither had many Danes. (...) He had allowed his children to be christened without discussion. What more could you expect? Nonetheless, he was a Jew. (Brogger, 2004:83-84) Although the deprivations of war eventually, by the end of the novel, give way to 1990’s affluence and a return to “home” in Orm’s Book (the novel is divided into separate ‘sagas’), this is combined with a pessimism about both the past 42 | P a g e and the future, with Katze’s granddaughter Zeste ending her days living on the streets of Copenhagen. The change that takes place on a international level thus finds its counterpart in the personal experience of an individual, whose identity is constituted not just by the narrative that surrounds him, but how s/he then negotiates this discourse of difference and ‘dissimilation’, of ‘becoming other’ in a changing Nordic narrative. Both national and personal identities are also under threat in Frode Grytten’s novel The Shadow in the River, with the main narrative following the investigation of a murder under the newspaper headline “KILLED BECAUSE HE WAS NORWEGIAN?” (Grytten, 2006:46) During his journalistic investigation, Robert Bell 13 meets “the Serbs”, Bobby Scott – employee of the American Cohen Brothers company - the nine-year old boy Ronaldo of indeterminate origin - all part of a multi-cultural Norway. However, against the backdrop of the small Norwegian town of Odda, familiar twenty-first century narratives of post-industrial unemployment and simmering racial tensions are played out. So, beyond the unifying presence of McDonalds, MTV and mobile phones, equally unifying global fears of ‘the other’ crystallise into racial and religious stereotyping, in what can only be described as a typical post-9/11 climate of terror and fear. The narrator draws attention to the irrationality of this process, which becomes particularly evident during a ‘phone-in’ at the local radio station: The next caller had an Odda accent. He said we had to start speaking out. The Muslims were heading north. They’d already advanced deep 13 Note how few Norwegian names populate the narrative. 43 | P a g e into Europe. This was about values. (....) Europe will end up Islamic if the fundamentalists get what they want, he said. And what do the fundamentalists want? I asked. Well, just look right here in Odda. They killed a white man in cold blood. Who are they? The Serbs. (...) And they’re Muslims too? There was silence. I said: Well, it is my great pleasure to inform you that the Serbs are not Muslims. They are Christians. Still silence. (...) It makes no difference what they are, said the guy. They are a danger to democracy and to Christian values. The Christians, you mean? No, these asylum seekers. We are all Serbs, I said, and hung up. (Grytten, 2006:111,12) Misinformed but full of conviction and indignation, the Norwegian/European or, broadly speaking, ’Western native’ is represented as defending his/her ‘nation’ in this symbolic exchange, which reveals as much about Nordic society as it constructs. Gone are the Norse sagas, the concern with social continuity and nostalgic memories of rural Nordic landscapes - this is an ironic look at a socio-cultural context dominated by terrorism and, as in Brogger, loss of certainty; 44 | P a g e He gave me a lecture on how we were becoming a major importer of terrorist scum. We featherbedded killers and rapists. He asked: And what will be left of Norway? And he gave the answer himself: Nothing. (ibid:112) The way in which reality, community and social change are perceived and then transmitted within the narratives is significant, in that it shapes narratives and themes, echoing and narratively re-constructing versions of reality, histories and identities. Nordic literatures operate within a changing cultural landscape that includes changing discourses about ‘the other’, as well as what constitutes regional identity. As we have seen during the above analysis, the narratives have not simply reflected social or historical changes, but, as a form of social activity, engage societies in a dialogue with their cultural past and present, as well as past and present (global) cultural discourses. Fear of difference, and more, from “foreign” invasion, together with fear of loss of identity seem convergent themes that can be detected within these two examples of contemporary literatures of the Nordic regions, showing the tension and change that both Norwegian and Danish societies are experiencing as established boundaries and borders are (literally) on the move in the twenty-first century. However, literature both narrates and questions these discourses of fear, asking the reader to engage critically with a changing Nordic reality. 45 | P a g e Intercultural dialogue in postcolonial settings – Faroe and Iceland Everything’s changed. Everything’s different. This isn’t the same country any more. (...) We can hear the sound of flutes and strings coming from the houses and cottages. It’s no longer an indecipherable noise but music, the deep yearning of thousands of people. (Hoydal, 2003:212) This section will explore intercultural dialogue within Faroese and Icelandic contemporary fiction, focusing especially on the interaction between regional ‘island literature’ and twentieth- and twenty-first century global cultural landscape. Cultural discourses such as literature represent ‘versions’ of internal and external perceptions of reality or ‘the other’, supplying knowledge that either complies, opposes or subverts the culture ‘in power’. It is interesting to note the transition in Nordic literatures even from the early-tomid twentieth century, when both Icelandic and Faroese societies were asserting themselves culturally, in a bid to generate their own ‘national voice’. This contrasts with contemporary texts, which feature regional/postcolonial, yet globally influenced narratives. Ashcroft et al. in The Empire Writes Back (1989) describe the development of postcolonial literature as taking place in “several stages”. From the “imperial period” when literature is 46 | P a g e produced by a literate elite whose primary identification is with the colonizing power. (...) emphasizing the 'home' over the 'native', the 'metropolitan' over the 'provincial' or 'colonial’ via “literature produced 'under imperial licence” – usually in the coloniser’s national or state language - to a dynamic “postcolonial literature” that generates its own, distinctive narratives. Kim Simonsen, a Faroese cultural critic, suggests that “The tension in Faeroese cultural life today is created by continued nationalism, regionalism and modernity”, with Faroese art and literature constantly on the lookout for “aesthetic ideals that can reinforce ethnic concepts of a regional and national community.”, a search “occasionally been dominated by a neo-nationalist tone”. (Simonsen, 2006) Initially, cultural nationalism found expression in the works of ‘national poets/writers’ such as Heinesen and Laxness 14 , who wrote from particular Faroese or Icelandic perspectives, in their efforts to assert or maintain independence from the Danish colonial centres. Works such as Heinesen’s The Lost Musicians (1950) or Laxness’ Fish Can Sing, focused on representations of local narratives and characters, evoking a rural way of life from the early twentieth century, with cultural contacts to other European ‘colonial centres’. So, for example, one of the main characters in The Lost Musicians, which follows the lives of a group of Faroese amateur musicians in a small Faroese town, “The poet Sirius” is described as “well read (...) he also possessed Dante’s Divine Comedy in a Swedish translation” (Heinesen, 1971:43), with his library records featuring “Ahlberg: Victor Hugo and Modern 14 Originally born Halldór Guðjónsson, he changed his surname in honour of the rural area north of Reykjavik where he grew up. 47 | P a g e France; Nissen: W.A. Mozart” (ibid, footnote 1). Contemporary fiction from both Iceland and Faroe, on the other hand, has moved beyond Nordic or North European intertextual references, indicating an intercultural dialogue that has changed. Both islands thus represent what Ashcroft et.al. would refer to as postcolonial realities, meaning that they were once part of a greater nation (Denmark), but have since asserted themselves and become independent, smaller nations – culturally, if not economically, in the case of Faroe, which is still in receipt of substantial financial support from Denmark. The interplay between external and internal perceptions of place, identity and reality plays a significant part in the narrative expressions of this relationship between the Nordic regions/nations and their colonial centre(s) 15 . What each of these literatures has in common beyond their special and distinctive regional characteristics is that they emerged in their present form out of the experience of colonization and asserted themselves by foregrounding the tension with the imperial power, and by emphasizing their differences from the assumptions of the imperial centre. It is this which makes them distinctively post-colonial. (Ashcroft, et.al., 1989) 15 Centres that have also changed over time, as for example, in the case of the Scottish Highlands and Islands, who ceased to be ‘Nordic’ by becoming subsequently ‘attached’ to anglophone Scotland/Britain. 48 | P a g e Neo‐colonialism and Faroese literature Gunnar Hoydal’s novel Under Southern Stars (2003) is of particular interest in this respect, in that it engages Faroese identity as both the colonised and coloniser, but also (thematically) linking across to the comic-critical Colombian phantasy of Louis de Bernieres’ Senor Vivo and the Coca Lord (Vintage, 1998) and its critical examination of the role of Europeans in South America. The narrative both begins and ends in a Faroese Fjord, contemplating the symbolic encounter of a father with his son, and a grandfather with an old friend. Cultural and personal discovery combine in a narrative that follows the children of a former UN worker on their journey back (as adults) to revisit the places and people they remember from their time spent on “the other side of the world” (Hoydal, 2003:cover summary). Both non-linear chronology and indeterminate geography compliment a narrative of orientation and disorientation, merging the repressive politics of the twentieth century with the arrival of the conquistadores in South America; the stories told by villagers of the Andean Altiplano with the folk tales of the Faroes ... They are standing on a mound and they can see that it has been hollowed out and lined with bricks. There are ashes inside. Policarpio points to three more mounds, each of the four set at the cardinal points. He explains that these are ‘Achachila mounds’. Four men are chosen each year to go into these mounds when the rainy season is due. They have either to entice or to chase away Achachila, the spirit who governs the weather. (Hoydal, 2003:76) 49 | P a g e They are sitting on the magic mound now, just as if they are gathered round the hearth of a Faroese farmstead, carding and working the spinning wheel. The sister knows a lot about the fairies, because she remembers the time when grandfather was a small boy. There was a farmer’s lad in love with a huldu maiden and such was their passion below ground that smoke could be seen rising through the earth. (Hoydal, 2003:78) Transient identities and competing perspectives are also revealed and reconstructed during the meeting between the Andean farmers and their Faroese visitors The farmers of the plateau are fascinated by the sister. (...) They’d been told these people had been God-fearing Catholics for hundreds of years, ever since the Reformation, about the time the Spaniards first came to the Andes. But the trolls and the huldu people were living undisturbed among them and it was often the priests who could communicate with them the best. (Hoydal, 2003:79) The dynamics of the postcolonial experience can be traced on many levels, from the Danish influence on Faroese popular culture (their father humming “the Danish ballad about Irmelin Rose” (Hoydal, 2003:1)), to the family’s symbolic journey to their destination in South America - now as colonisers and represented, again, through a song sung by their father in the ‘coloniser’s language’ of Danish; 50 | P a g e The names resonate: Esmeraldas, Latacunga, Otavalo (...) They can hear, in their mind’s ear, their father singing a song in Danish: In Riobamba Kisses ring like shots from a gun In Riobamba Buy a girl and have some fun. (Hoydal, 2003:151) - and finally to the integration of these various cultures into something dynamic and positive, that “beats” below the “crust” of power relations: ‘Time has no conscience and they say history belongs to the victors,’ says Father. He has sat down on a stone halfway up the slope to have a rest. ‘But beneath it all is a great surge of all sorts or people. Behind recorded history lie myths and legends. Power is only the crust on the surface of a great big cauldron. It takes very little to reach the heat below. The fist that strikes is nothing compared to the heart that beats.’ (Hoydal, 2003:237) Hoydal’s fictional journey through time and (cultural) space interweaves personal and world histories and cultures, often resulting in tragic-comic dialogues between the new colonisers of economic development and progress, and the reality of the Andean villagers: ‘Ay, Senior Elic’, wailed Marta. He felt bad about it and tried to comfort her. He’d never imagined that World Development Aid would bring him to a roadside in Bolivia, fighting over a pig with the natives. (Hoydal, 2003:134) 51 | P a g e During a conversation between an Andean farmer, Don Clemente, and policarpio, a village representative, a more serious and critical note emerges, as they discuss the failed projects of the “Relief Mission”; The two men discuss the wind turbines which have been erected to provide electricity to run the water pumps. But at the high altitude the air is too thin, the sails do not turn and need to be twice the size. Now the turbines just stand there rusting and no one knows what to do with them (Hoydal, 2003:103) The story of this Faroese family thus serves as a vehicle for a wider narrative and critical commentary on the politics of international aid (a thinly disguised critique also of the neo-colonial relationship between Faroe and Denmark), and with it the impact of European economic and cultural interventions throughout history. The giving of thoughtless and inappropriate ‘aid’ to developing countries is further explored in the story of Marta, the former maid of the Faroese family, who is given a toilet bowl as a present. She carefully transports it back to her home in the south of Bolivia, only to discover that she cannot afford to get it connected to the sewer. It becomes a ‘throne’ to an superflous culture, as well as a symbol for her own changing/conflicting identities, represented through her neighbours perceptions of Marta when she returns to her native village to open a small shop; the stuck-up bitch who thought she was a cut above them, a gringolover with curls in her hair she’d had to buy in a shop, who had betrayed her own people by turning her back on them. (Hoydal, 2003:134) 52 | P a g e Similarly, when arriving in Ecuador, the narrator remembers the change in his parents, the transition from being rural Faroese islanders to being part of a cultural and economic elite in a developing country - from worrying about their cows and the farm to having to “represent an entire civilisation, a larger and more advanced civilisation” (Hoydal, 2003:142); When the head of the village, Policarpio Poma, gives a speech in their honour, he echoes not only the parralel concerns that connect the Latin American to North Atlantic regions, but the challenges every smaller region faces when dealing with the power relations of colonialism, or, nowadays, the global marketplace: The people of our country are not granted equality. Those of us who have tilled the soil and lived off the land for generations and know the land as if she were our mother have to tug our forelocks when we go into the big offices and not speak until we are spoken to. If any of us succeed in bettering ourselves then we immediately forget where we came from and ape the ways fo the people who now surround us. There are two languages spoken in this country. One is weak and one is strong. One is humble and the other is cunning. (Hoydal, 2003:86) This perspective follows what H. Hoydal refers to as a “cosy self-colonisation” that is characterised by Faroese Homerule as still being in the process of extricating itself from Denmarks cultural and financial colonial hold: When it comes to the relationship between the Faroe Islands and Denmark, we are in a period of neo-colonialism. (Hoydal H. , 2006) 53 | P a g e In his essay Neo-Colonialism with a Human Face – the Cosy Self-Colonization in Danish Home Rule, Hoydahl argues that far from living in a globalised world that has made “the concept of nation building (..) obsolete because it has been replaced by dynamism, globalisation and reflexivity” (Simonsen, 2006), Faroe is, in fact, still being colonised, be it from within: the Danish state is a state of mind of our own. In the Faroe Islands, this state of mind and this concept of our own identity and of our own history are simply based on myths. We are pictured through these myths and we want to see ourselves through these myths, which are mainly produced and reproduced by Danish media – on the rare occasion that we are mentioned in Denmark (Hoydahl H., 2006) Faroese literature is thus not only in dialogue with its own culture of dependence, but is able, from this standpoint, to interrogate other, equally dependant, nations around the world. It is important to remember that nationalism has different effects and meanings in a peripheral nation than in a world power. (...) the nationstate is, for better or worse, the political institution which has most efficacy and legitimacy in the world as it is. Modernity reproduces itself in nation-states; there are few signs of it happening otherwise. To reject nationalism absolutely or to refuse to discriminate between nationalisms is to accede to a way of thought by which intellectuals – especially postcolonial intellectuals – cut themselves off from effective political action. (During in Bhabha, 1990:138) 54 | P a g e Down and Out in Reykjavik First published in Iceland in 1996 (in the UK in 2002), 101 Reykjavik readily stands alongside Douglas Coupland’s Generation X (1991) or Richard Linklater’s Slacker (1991) in its depiction of the Icelandic version of the ‘MTV generation’ 16 . The main character Hlynur, although 30-something is unemployed, lives with his Mum, his time divided between sleeping, watching satellite TV, surfing the Net and, usually after dark, wandering the streets/bars of the microcosm that is the ‘old town’ of the 101 postcode district in Reykjavik. Following the format of Icelandic sagas, the main characters are introduced at the beginning of the book. Significantly, Helgason does not supply a sagastyle list of relationships, but merges ‘real’ characters with those appearing on Hlynur’s many TV cable channels (including the porn he downloads from the internet), leaving a virtual/reality list of “cab drivers, organ-delivery boys, barmen, guys, extras, girls, whores, clerks, anchormen, etc.” (Helgason, 2002:Introduction) As in Brogger and Grytten, throughout the text there are multiple references to American and British anglophone popular culture 17 – from McDonalds to Marks & Sparks, Woody Allen to Rod Stewart. 16 A twentieth/twenty-first century adaptation of what became known as The Beat Generation; (especially in the US in the 1950s) young people who did not follow accepted principles and customs but who valued personal experience instead. (http://dictionary.cambridge.org/) 17 Signposting the two major historical and cultural influences on Icelandic culture: Iceland was occupied by the British forces during the Second World War, and, due to its geographical position, still retains strong strategic links with America for defence purposes, due to the period of the Cold War (In 1949 the United States and Iceland signed an agreement on the permanent presence of American forces on the island, although throughout the 1990s forces in Iceland were reduced, with the Naval Air Station Keflavik closed in 2006). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Air_Station_Keflavik) 55 | P a g e Media and technology dominate the narrative, with large amounts of Hlynur’s time spent with “the Mac” on “the Net”, as well as the constant presence of TV and radio. Using his digital watch to symbolically fast-forward through history, Hlynur’s re-edited version of the past incorporates this dominant ‘global culture’ into the cultural narratives of Iceland in an amusing and ironic re-birth of history and literature as a mixture of historical bookmarks and TV soap opera: Each day is a history of mankind. Christ is born at midnight, the Roman Empire passes out in a wild all-night party, and then the Vikings meet at the crack of dawn, already gang-banging by nine. The lunchtime news is read from the Sagas – ‘A huge fire erupted at Njal’s place last night’ – and then a nap after lunch, slumber, the plague, Dark Ages, until we wake up to the blast of that Michelangelo guy’s chisel in 1504. (...) (Helgason, 2002:4) This re-imagining of a compacted and dramatised ‘MTV-history’ also occurs in Hoydal, who, at various intervals in Under Southern Stars interweaves the narrator’s version of the history of conquistadores (the ‘first’ colonisers of South America) with that of Faroe: All the castles in Cuzco are burning and the Temple of the Sun is ablaze. All the great buildings and places of worship in the land. Smoke hovers over the whole town. (...) The sister wakes up. The hens fly from their roosts and Svarta lows in the byre, lashing her tail against the stall, knocking over a pail. (...) Next the sickness comes. In Mexico, the Aztecs, the Olmecs and the Mayans are all but wiped out 56 | P a g e by the new diseases, which rage like fire along the mountain ridges. The sea boils and the rainforest to the south burns with yellow fever, measles and the pox. (Hoydal, 2003:65,66) The constant telling and retelling of histories thus becomes a central theme to which both Hoydal and Helgason return. Both writers critically (or cynically, depending on your point of view) explore their own intercultural histories and identities, as members of a former colony, but also of a powerful society of European ‘new masters’, that (in various incarnations throughout history) tell the ‘rest of the world’ what has cultural value. But in the Urubamba valley the city of Macchu Picchi still exists. The town remained empty and forgotten for generations until a rich man from a new world power to the north rediscovered it at the beginning of the twentieth century. (...) New masters arrive issuing instructions to value history and the old legends. (Hoydal, 2003:68)) CHAPTER 3 – ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE NORDIC THRESHOLD Nordic voices in Scottish literature ‐ Shetland/Orkney As previously mentioned, what is nowadays known as the Scottish Northern Islands, Shetland and Orkney, was historically a part of the ‘Nordic kingdom’ represented by the Kalmarunionen (1397-1524), uniting the three kingdoms Denmark, Norway (with Iceland, Greenland, Faroe Islands, Shetland and 57 | P a g e Orkney) and Sweden (including some of Finland). Although becoming part of Scotland in the fifteenth century, Nordic narratives and culture have nevertheless persisted, particularly during revivals of Scandinavian identity during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Writers such as Haldane Burgess and George Mackay Brown have generated intercultural texts, that represent the continuing dialogue that Scots/Shetland culture has with both the Nordic and European cultural spaces – aptly (if somewhat abruptly) summarized in the following Shetlopedia entry: Shetland’s Literature reflects its history: five hundred years of Norse rule, followed by five hundred years of Scottish and British - this, in very simple terms, is the political reality of the last millennium. (http://shetlopedia.com/Shetland%27s_Literature) Yet, although clearly linked to the ‘Nordic forum’ historically and culturally, the location of political and civil institutions in Scotland mean that both literary history and contemporary narratives share a cultural identity very much locked into an English/Scottish dualism, sometimes interpreted as provincial and ‘ambiguous’, or even ‘tormented’, as the following comment on the history of twentieth century Scottish literature illustrates: Scotland’s reckoning with itself was, at best, ambiguous. Poetry was confident of place and landscape (...) The novel was not. Among the characters invented to typify modern Scotland, (...) the notion of solipsism was pervasive. Whether in the cases of Inspectors Laidlaw or Rebus, or the tormented characters and encoded plots of Ian 58 | P a g e Rankin, Iain Banks, Ian MacEwen or even Allan Massie, a divided, fathomless and largely male society was on view (...) (Harvie, 1977:226) Yet, at the same time As in the Nordic countries, Scotland’s culture seemed to have moved into an era that was simultaneously Scots and international. (Harvie, 1977:218) Can Orkney and Shetland literature still be thought of as part of the Nordic voice, part of the developing ‘Nordic forum’? Or would this be another ‘fake’ identity, with an underlying ‘real’ Scottish predicament as its origin? Nineteenth and twentieth century writers from the region certainly did not think so, with Shetland writers Laurence Nicolson and J. J. Haldane Burgess both referred to as the bards “of Thule” (Rendboe, 1986:8), and featuring both in themes and language a “Nordic identity in transition”. Modern writers from the Northern isles are still in dialogue with this literary tradition today, especially with its frequent romantic look back to a pre-industrial “paradise lost” (ibid:31) populated by Nordic settlers and/or Viking heroes, a perspective connects their narratives with those of Hamsun, Laxness and Heinesen. In his 1994 novel Beside the Ocean of Time George Mackay Brown’s character Thorfinn Ragnarson becomes the focus of this communal Nordic memory. Significantly, and as the title suggests, the text considers time as 59 | P a g e not something purely linear, but as an ocean of narratives that constantly envelope Thorfinn and define his cultural identity: “Round Norday island, the great ocean music goes on and on, everlastingly.” (Brown, 1994:59) Both in the conversations Thorfinn witnesses when growing up on the Orcadian island of Norday 18 in the 1930’s (itself a memory constructed by the narrator), and the frequent dreams he has of travelling through history, Thorfinn/Norday island represent the particular intercultural historical narratives of the region: you must understand, this was long before the time of the Vikings and the Norse settlers, and Thorfinn would have had a different name then, an early Celtic name long forgotten, but it was the same boy – that much is certain. (Brown, 1994:81) Similarly, the exchange between islanders of differing political views that takes place at the local smithy articulates Orkney’s peculiar cultural and political situation as part of Scotland’s ‘periphery’: Ben Hoy objected that Orkney had never been a part of Scotland anyway till 1472 and then the Scots had fallen on the once powerful earldom of Orkney and battened on it like hoodie crows. Terrible it had been. MacTavish brushed that aside. ‘Well’, said he, ‘you’ve been Scottish now for a long time. That’s an old song you’re singing, my man.’ (Brown, 1994:25) 18 Nord = north, ay (ey or oy) = island http://sh.shetlanddictionary.com/ & http://www.freelang.net/online/ (FREELANG - Old Norse-English and English-Old Norse online dictionary) 60 | P a g e Whilst the narrative follows Thorfinn in his symbolic dream-journey south to Scotland as vassal to the Scottish Nationalist ‘knight’ MacTavish, in order to participate in Scottish history, the islands themselves remain a rural Nordic idyll (interrupted occasionally by the Press Gang attempting to remove islanders to various wars); The Dutch skipper – a smuggler – might as well have told them that the Faroese were at their whale-culling, or the Icelandic volcano was active again. Wars were in the nature of things, but happened otherwhere. (Brown, 1994:142) Yet the Ocean of Time finally enters Thorfinn’s (waking) reality, with the arrival of the Second World War and the physical and cultural changes it brings to Orkney in the form of an aerodrome – including the new (external) perspective it brings to Norday: Labourers from Scotland and Ireland were ferried ashore and began at once to erect a little village of Nissen huts in the open meadow between the village and the hill. (…) The workmen, whenever they paused from the work of unloading and carrying and building, looked at Norday and its soil and sea and sky as if they had been sentenced to Devil’s Island or Spitzbergen or Rockall. (Brown, 1994:179) Significantly, the Nordic imagination is primarily located in Thorfinn’s subconscious/dream world, which has Nordic-Thorfinn marry a “seal-girl” (176) and live out a “two-hundred-year-old dream” (177), whereas “the twentieth-century” Scottish-Thorfinn leaves the island to become “Private 61 | P a g e Ragnarsson” – prisoner of war in Germany. During his captivity, and in an ironic twist to the story, Thorfinn becomes a writer of historical novels, reconstructing heroic “fake epics”, finally returning to Norday to re-capture “what was left of ‘the glory and the dream’” (216). Although realizing that “the tide had turned” with the glory and the dream “lost beyond a recall”, the novel nevertheless expresses hope that Norday/Orkney will have its own ‘voice’ … eventually. Robert A. Jamieson’s poetry represents a particularly good example of how intercultural dialogue generates such an ‘authentic voice’, a cultural identity that is regional, yet distinctly part of both the Nordic and Scottish literary landscape. His collection of poetry entitled Nort Atlantic Drift very closely connects both form and language to locality (he uses his own form of Modern Shetlandic Scots or Shetland Dialect) and evokes, not just a specific “place” or landscape (the area around Sandness in the North West of the Shetland Mainland), but also a specific historical period (the time when the writer was growing up there, during the 1960’s. Jamieson does not invent a ‘fake’ language/identity/cultural place, he simply uses the existing one to explore old and new themes. He particularly focuses on representing the cosmopolitan nature of island life and identity, a constant intercultural dialogue between Shetland and the Nordic world, between an “act of retrieval” of a past way of life and the present reality here and “across the sea”. 62 | P a g e BOTTILT Hit wis a Hæie’s chinchir koardjil It was a Hay’s ginger cordial bottle he he baalt owir da fæs a’da wæjiev threw beyond the incoming wie his haandskrivin ’po da pæpir insyd. wave, with his handwriting on the paper Da Hæie’s korks snødit tyghtir, inside. wid kiep his ingkie messiech Hay’s corks twisted tighter, would keep dry fir da wirld t’fin. his inky message dry for the Fæ dis laandfaa, he myght rekk world to read. oot ta Riekjaviek ir Tromsø, From this shore, he might reach out to t’Heligolaand ir Tor’s Havn. Rekjavik or Tromsø, to He nivir dootit an ungkin haand Heligoland or Torshavn. wid lift Hæie’s bottil He never doubted a stranger’s hand fæ an ebbin grund sumwy. would pick Hay’s bottle from an Dan dir kam a lettir bakk. A man’d fun it, ebbing shoreline somewhere. ati’da shoormil, an wret, wie fotoos, Then a letter came. A man had found it, fæ dat ungkin laand akross da sie – in the shallows, and wrote, Æshnis. with photos, from that foreign land across the sea – Eshaness. (Jamieson, 2007:37) Atlaslaand Via the artifact of a ginger cordial bottle containing a message “fir da wirld t’fin”, the Nordic/North Atlantic world is represented as far, yet accessible, foreign, yet, surprisingly (and ironically) familiar - Eshaness still being part of the island that the sender inhabits. The sea is not seen as where the land ends, but where the rest of the world begins - “Da sie’s da wy da wirld kum’s 63 | P a g e ta wis.” (Jamieson, 2007:73) – this also evokes the way in which place is seen as here/central, rather than part of the Scottish/British ‘Northern Periphery’. In terms of an island identity, the poems interrogate stereotypical perceptions of a culturally peripheral or isolated place - remote, provincial and ignorant. SIEVÆGIN Ajunt da flat ært Beyond the flat earth of the a’da boondries a’sens, boundaries of sense, he knows – he kens – the world is just a round blue ball da wirld’s choost people circle in order to work and a roond bloo baa fokk sirkil live: t’wirk an liv: a global awareness. If you spit in the a globbil awaarnis. ocean, that drop might reach Du spits ati’da oshin, Eshaness. a drap myght rekk Æshnis. But hoist a sail, and you go where Bit hoiest du a sæl, you please, to new found land. du gjings quhaar du will, ta njoo-fun laand. (Jamieson, 2007:113) Instead, through the metaphor of the sea/sailor, the “global awareness” of the islander is drawn to the foreground, aware of the possibilities beyond “the boundaries of sense” and of “ethnic grouping”. 64 | P a g e He steps from the vessel to find that it is the land which is swaying and floating, and that ‘his people’ are not an ethnic grouping, but those who share a way of life. (Jamieson, 2007:91) With both his use of imagery and dual-language text Jamieson thus deliberately locates his poetic narratives in the “Nort Atlantik”, away from the traditional literary or geographic centres of London/Edinburgh or even dry land. Rather than attempting to move ‘the centre’ to a specific nation, language or race (Gaelic/Scottish/Shetland) he situates his work alongside that of other writers using ‘minority languages’ within the North Atlantic/Nordic region and beyond. This cosmopolitan Weltanschauung is reinforced by Jamieson’s commentary, when he explains the rich intercultural horizons of island communities: The knowledge, understanding and artefacts of the world that the merchant seamen brought home with them meant that although Shetland was a small isolated community in global terms, its folk had an awareness of the true size of the world. This demonstrates the misapprehension that such a ‘marginal’ community is less informed about the world at large than more ‘central’, metropolitan situations, where everything, it appears, is near at hand. (Jamieson, 2007:77) 65 | P a g e CHAPTER 4 – SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION As we have seen, both Brown’s prose and Jamieson’s poetry avoid an anglocentric/parochial view of Shetland/Orkney/Scottish culture and place, by situating it within its own intercultural space (the Nord Atlantik, or “beside the ocean of the end and the beginning” (Brown, 1994:217)). What emerges is as much a European or Nordic Islander, as the crofter from Eshaness; as much Dialect as standard English, with both existing alongside. Both Jamieson’s and Mackay Brown’s texts can be interpreted as resisting the “dominant note in much hand-wringing” in “Scottish criticism from 1919 to 1964”, which assumed that “Scottish literature and culture had too often suffered from a time lag, clinging to old modes of expression and dwelling on “native” identity long after these things had ceased to represent useful currency.” (Carruthers et.al., 2004, 167). Instead they integrate Scottish literature into an intercultural and contemporary discourse, producing “authentic” regional literature (Carruthers et al., 2004, 14), by removing the narrow, reductive and ultimately provincial dependency of Scottish culture as defining itself constantly against the past and the Scottish/ English duality. As Rendboe notes in his introduction to The Shetland Literary Tradition: This poetry, often mild, often forceful, as the need be, has never played the role of “art for art’s sake”. It has always been in integral part of Shetland life, being used to set forth warnings so as to rouse the people when needed, to commemorate worthy events, or to bestow praise where it belonged, just like the skaldic poetry of the old Norsemen. (Rendboe, 1986:35) 66 | P a g e Nordic literatures thus not only evoke ‘a sense of place’, in terms of locating their texts in their particuar intercultural space, but also reveal how cultural history is transmitted through intercultural dialogue, showing how cultural identities are informed by the interaction between literatures and societies, rather than an aesthetic artifact arising from the artist’s ‘roots’ or ‘native culture’. An intercultural understanding of Nordic/Scottish literature thus opens the doors to re-interpreting the ‘Nordic identity’ evoked by both past and present writers, as one that both accepts their place in literary and sociohistorical reality, but also questions the current ‘Scottish silences’ within the Nordic canon, and vice versa. To summarise, although there is still a strong need to acknowledge the past and its influence on present day cultural life, it is equally vital to emphasise the dynamic nature of culture and intercultural dialogue (see Figure 1), as notions of boundaries, belonging and the ‘othering’ processes are constantly drawn and redrawn. Having focussed on specific examples of intercultural dialogue within the literatures of the North Atlantic region, this thesis has demonstrated the way in which regions of identity are in fact created through narrative (Bhaba, Burke), rather than purely being a window or reflection of an underlying historical, geo-political or economic structure or institutions, what Thagil refers to as “a distinct territory of their own, a common spoken language, cultural awareness and an indigenous class of officials”. (Thagil, 1995) Our final case study of contemporary literature from the Scottish Northern Islands (Orkney/Shetland) demonstrated the cultural forces that both include 67 | P a g e and exclude literary output from the larger Nordic discourse or the ‘Nordic canon’, asking whether a alternative ‘regions of identity’ are possible (Althusser) or desirable (Callinicos). Nordic writing thus evokes place as being an intercultural community of people, a place that, although located and represented by the Scottish/Faroese islands or Norwegian/Danish urban realities, reaches beyond it and connects it with worldwide events and cultures. Yet, at the same time, the use of the regional languages/dialects and symbolism, places these texts in a particular region and culture, relating their own personal and regional history to international concerns. Through the literary context the construction, re-appropriation and reconstruction of identity may be achieved. The exploration of non-standard cultural spaces and the creation of meaning through the re-examination of literature and discourse about literature is thus, itself, a participation in intercultural dialogue and critical literary narrative. By critically exploring historical and contemporary intercultural dialogue with other regions, a dynamic and plural Nordic/European/Scottish literary community can be demonstrated that not only challenges cultural imperialism, but also the notion of ‘nativeness’. Intercultural dialogue can be defined as a dynamic force within what Heidegger would call 'being in time', a constant productive force that, although inherently contradictory and discursive/hegemonic, does not exclude the 'agent of change' (Callinicos). 68 | P a g e By explicitly including regional, island voices from Shetland, Orkney and Faroe, this study has aimed to interrogate the dominant discourses of Nordic and Scottish literary criticism and the global/national/intercultural boundaries it has set for itself. literature needs to incorporate transnational, postcolonial, hybrid experience ... so that we don’t reproduce the narratives of nationhood and thus silence or lose the voices which are excluded from those narratives.” (Klages, 2007:161) It is hoped that future studies in this area will take the provisionality of cultural spaces as an opportunity for inclusive, generative and critical literary activity against static or reductionist perceptions of literature and cultural production, rather than seeing heterogeneity and change as a paradoxical ‘predicament’ that has to be resolved via elitist cultural assertion, retreat to ahistorical concepts of tradition or other variants of post-modern pessimism. all these contradictory, competing cultural forces are not a sort of a free-floating liberal pluralism, nor do they exist merely at the postmodern level of fragmented signifiers, but they are deeply inscribed in the material conditions of existence in capitalist societies and in the power relations that structure those conditions. Meanings underpin or undermine any given social order, but they cannot exist independent of it. The people are neither cultural dupes nor silenced victims, but are vital, resilient, varied, contradictory, and, as a source of constant contestations of dominance, are a vital social resource, the only one that can fuel social change. 69 | P a g e (Morley, D. & Chen, K.-H. (ed.), 1996:220) (Word Count: 14,832) 70 | P a g e BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Literature Brogger, S. (2004). The Jade Cat. Trans. A. Born. London: The Harvill Press. Brown, G. M. (1994). Beside the Ocean of Time. London: Flamingo, 1995. Grytten, F. (2005). The Shadow in the River. Trans. R. Ferguson. London: Abacus, Little, Brown Book Group, 2007. Heinesen, W. (1950). The Lost Musicians. Trans. W. G. Jones. Ed. M. Mitchell. Cambs: Dedalus Ltd, 2006. Helgason, H. (1996). 101 Reykjavik. Trans. B. FitzGibbon. London: Faber and Faber, 2002. Hoydal, G. (1992). Under Southern Stars. Trans. M. Stewart and J. Burrows. 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