Knowledge on the Nordics
Knowledge on the Nordics
Iceland: Uncovering the past in Nordic Literature with Gunnþórunn Guðmundsdóttir
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Listen to this podcast if you are interested in finding out more about:
- Contemporary Icelandic literature to read in English translation;
- Currents in Icelandic and Nordic literature on rewriting the past;
- The exoticising of Iceland and the North; and,
- Nordic noir as a category in literature and film.
Join the editor of nordics.info, Nicola Witcombe on her fourth virtual visit around the Nordic countries in the podcast series The Nordics Uncovered: Critical Voices from the Region. Gunnþórunn and Nicola spoke on 24th February 2021 when they were frequently interrupted by earthquakes.
The 5th in the series is with Lill-Ann Körber, Professor at the School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University in Denmark about Nordic postcolonialism, amongst other things.
Find out more on nordics.info.
Sound credits : freesound.org.
We are finding narratives that lie on the edges of Europe that are not part of the main narrative, what is emphasized and what is left alone what is silenced and what is deliberately or sort of carelessly forgotten? What kind of histories are left behind? Literature has means to interrogate this.
Nicola Witcombe:Literature can tell us a lot about society. Gunnþórunn Guðmundsdóttir, Professor in the Department of comparative literature at the University of Iceland, whose voice you just heard, specializes in literature's and cultures to do with memory; remembering and forgetting the past. She not only looks at Icelandic and Nordic literature, but also in comparison with writing and film from other countries like Spain, Ireland, France and the UK. She is my fourth guest in the nordics.info podcast series, the Nordics
Uncovered:Critical Voices from the Region. My name is Nicola Witcombe, and I'm editor of nordics.info. A normal part of my job is to travel to universities and conferences, to meet researchers and to encourage them to spread the word about their research to a wider audience. In these COVID times, I'm virtually visiting 12 researchers based in six different countries, to try to find out the answer to questions like, what is the state of the Nordics today? And how do researchers investigate Nordic society and concepts? This interview was recorded in February 2021 over Zoom. So welcome to this nordics.info podcast.
Gunnþórunn Guðmundsdóttir:And thanks so much for having me.
Nicola Witcombe:So we could start with you giving an idea of you know, what areas you have focused on within your research?
Gunnþórunn Guðmundsdóttir:In my PhD, I focused on contemporary literature and in particular life writing on autobiographical writing. And so, this has been my main field of study since life writing and memory studies. The link between memory and writing is really what I was interested in. How can you write the past? Is it possible and what kind of past is it that you're writing. And you know, all the all the tricks memory plays in you and so on. And where I am looking at the combination, or the integration and the negotiation between private memory and public and collective memory,
Nicola Witcombe:Perhaps you can give a concrete example?
Gunnþórunn Guðmundsdóttir:And the literatures of the Spanish Civil War. And here I am talking about the generation that came in 2000's, that was sometimes called the grandchildren of the war. They wrote, there was there was a lot of interest in this field. And many novels and autobiographies and biographies were published, they were trying to understand it, from a new perspective. We're trying to dig up the past because it happened sort of agreed that politically, the past shouldn't be used and Spanish political life. So it's not to hinder the democratization of the country and so on. So not to, not to sort of fuel another kind of civil war. But this sort of feeling of forgetting the past or, or hiding it, or just leaving it there left many people dissatisfied, because they wanted to know what happened to their grandparents, they wanted to know where they were buried even. And so, around 2000, there was sort of the founding of historical societies, the Society for Historical Memory, for instance, new memory laws were passed in Spain. So giving the people the right to, to find out what happened. And there was this huge boom in writing in this era. And there was a lot of ways in which they wanted to move past the usual way of looking at, oh, these were the bad guys, and these were the good guys and so on, and looking at it much more complicated picture. And of course, that could be very difficult to do and of course, a very sensitive issue for many, but literature has this ability to do that. Because you can imagine an alternative past, you can reimagine the past without making any great claims that this is the truth. This is the final truth. This is the final version.
Nicola Witcombe:I understand you're part of a research group that looks at Irish and Icelandic literature and compares the two. Can you tell me something about that?
Gunnþórunn Guðmundsdóttir:What we're interested in are sort of similarities and parallels in the histories of these two countries, these islands on the western margin of Europe, which have sort of a particular relationship to other nations, to the larger nations, to the Empire, and so on. We find sort of commonalities and parallels and even influences. Of course, direct influences in the medieval times, but then more of a parallels, for instance, during the world wars of the 20th century, and sort of literatures of landscape and nature. And also, with literatures of the 2008 banking crisis, and the recession.
Nicola Witcombe:Maybe tease out some of the similarities or differences?
Gunnþórunn Guðmundsdóttir:With a banking crisis, there were lots of similarities, these two nations were particularly badly hit. Their economies had grown far beyond the size of the national economy. The banks in Iceland had accumulated debts that were at least 10, of the, of the national TPT. So there was, there was a lot of similarities, especially in sort of, in the run up to the recession, the Irish tiger, the Celtic Tiger, the huge expanse of the of the economy, with this rapid growth within this huge bubble dispersed completely, very quickly, and with grave consequences for both nations. The aftermath is different between the two countries, there are different ways of dealing with it, and so on, but what we found is that, in literature, authors were dealing with similar themes, they were dealing with, sort of sense of loss, of course, but also a sense of looking further back, of looking towards an age which somehow had been more real. Where the core values had been clearer, etc. And that's how that the pre crash era had created this sense of false wealth, which wasn't real, which was only imagined, only accessible to the few, and then left everybody in the lurch. So there was that kind of feeling of having to reimagine the past and reimagine how it happens, and what it means to individuals, but also to the community. In both countries, there was a huge building boom, in the run up to the crash. And so the crash left, these coastal states, which you perhaps familiar with, where the builders left, there was no money anymore. And so they were just left there to to disintegrate, rot, really, and sort of became symbols of this imagined wealth that wasn't based on any kind of real wealth. And so we found that many, both Irish and Icelandic authors have been grappling with this. I think also the interest is that we are finding parallels and sort of narratives that lie on the edges of Europe that are not part of the main narrative. For instance, as regards the Second World War, where Ireland remained neutral and was hugely contested, and it's still even part of a contested past, and then in Iceland, of course, was occupied by the by the British unlike Denmark, which was occupied by by Germany. So these different kinds of narratives that have not really been told, and that have not really been part of the overall narrative of the Second World War, for instance.
Nicola Witcombe:I don't know whether you know, but I interviewed Stephen Olafsson a few weeks ago. I found it very interesting that there was this sort of buy-in to neoliberalism. And then it's rather inevitable that following the crash, there's some sort of backlash? And are you able to give some examples of whether that happened in Ireland or Icelandic literature as well?
Gunnþórunn Guðmundsdóttir:Yes, I mean, it absolutely did, it happens before the crash, there was already a kind of a strand and Icelandic literature that was pointing to these bankers and to the very high status of these bankers, and in a very small community. And how they infiltrated really every aspect of the community, and of cultural institutions and of everything, so there was also already a criticism in Icelandic literature, you could see that in some works. And then, of course, after the crash, there was absolutely the need to return to different values to turn away from the from the Viking bankers from these kinds of ideals of constantly accumulated wealth, and so on. So there was definitely a sense of that in works. Some of these works, we're just using it as a background, of course, for instance, the crime writer, Yrsa Sigurðardóttir, we use the scope states as one of the themes and ghosts works of one of the things that got caught people's attention. So as a revenant, from the past, who are coming as a warning or something like that, so so you can see this in crime fiction and also in Irish crime fiction.*earthquake*
Nicola Witcombe:Oh what was that?
Gunnþórunn Guðmundsdóttir:That was an earthquake
Nicola Witcombe:Oh, my goodness. Are you okay? You better go.
Gunnþórunn Guðmundsdóttir:If there's another one now, I'll go to the doorway again.
Nicola Witcombe:Does it happen often?
Gunnþórunn Guðmundsdóttir:Yeah. Every once in a while. There was one just in November, October that was quite big. I think we're fine to go on.
Nicola Witcombe:Okay. Yeah. So if you're able to concentrate after that, you were explaining really this very new academic area of memory studies?
Gunnþórunn Guðmundsdóttir:I think what memory studies is interested in and what I'm interested in, is how things are remembered. We, of course, know that the Second World War happened and we know what happened to two different nations, and how the fact that so many people and what happened to the Jews, etc. We know this, but what is interesting is how is it remembered? How is it recalled? For instance, for a long while, it wasn't really a discussion. When discussing the Holocaust, the fate of the Roma people, for instance, or what happened to gay people of the time? So what memory statuses is interrogating? How is this remembered? And what is what is it that influences these kinds of narratives and memories? We can see, for instance, in Poland now, when there are more and more restrictions put upon academics in regards to narrating the past, or telling the past. So that's what is very interesting to me is how is it remembered? How does it influence our presence? And of course, because the present always is rewriting the past, for instance, why we look at certain epochs or eras as a golden age for different nations. But then suddenly something happens and we sort of review and so I think that is very interesting and think literature has the means to interrogate this.
Nicola Witcombe:I guess what you're saying is, you know, like a time like now, it's sort of quite exciting in a way because people are sort of digging up those simplistic national narratives and sort of writing alternative ones. So it must be quite exciting to be in your field.
Gunnþórunn Guðmundsdóttir:Yes, I mean, there's quite a lot sort of going on in that field. And also just for the pandemic times, there's a lot of interest from memory scholars and how people are recording and how they are documenting this period in time, and what kind of memory will it leave? So there's quite a lot of discussion of how we can make sure that it is somehow documented that that we encourage people to write diaries and, or, you know, somehow record the experiences of lockdowns and pandemics and so on,
Nicola Witcombe:It would be really nice to have some specific examples of Icelandic literature that illustrate maybe what what you're talking about within memory studies.
Gunnþórunn Guðmundsdóttir:Maybe we could mention an author who has been widely translated, so it's available in many languages for people if they want to look them up. A contemporary author, Sjon, you can say that his work is, on the one hand, very contemporary, often very experimental, and almost futuristic in its outlook on sort of contemporary culture and contemporary life. But another strand in his work is looking backwards and looking at at the past. There's a wonderful book by him called Moonstone, which takes place in 1918, or you could call it a pandemic novel. So highly relevant now, then you have this young boy who was completely fascinated by cinema. And at the time you could go to the cinema many times a day, just to see all kinds of films. And at the same time, there is a ship in the harbor with Danish soldiers. So he also has a touch of sort of other cultures and other influences in a variety of ways, which is an unusual way to see Reykjavik in 1918. So it gives you a completely different picture than the ones that you are used to. And the boy is gay. So it's also about gay life in Reykjavik at the time. So that is one of the ways in which he is looking at the past. And he also has novels on the Second World War, which take place in the run up to the Second World War and just after, which also offers interesting insights. They're not documentary novels, they are they are fiction, and he's using a lot of literary influences and, and mythologies even, and so on. But he also also giving sort of quite a new feel for Iceland, during these periods. And you can see that in Moonstone and then in CoDex 1962.
Nicola Witcombe:You wrote a book called Representations of Forgetting in Life Writing and Fiction. Could you tell us a bit about this?
Gunnþórunn Guðmundsdóttir:It was focused on not on memory, but on forgetting, which is, of course, the other side of memory that is always present in memory texts, because you're always choosing one event and discarding another and so on. So forgetting is always there, it's always present. And in that work, I wanted to examine the way in which we can see representations of forgetting. And I was looking both at autobiographical texts, but then also on these memory texts. And I included a chapter on Knut Hamsun and his autobiographical narrative on overgrown parts. Because, of course, history is one of the contested histories of the Second World War in Norway, and of the highly traumatic and devastating German occupation in Norway. So that was one of the ways in which I wanted to view what is forgetting in literature? And how does it manifest itself and how can we sort of see instances of it? and so on. And this sort of led me later on to explore crime writing, and to explore also memory in crime writing because crime writing is very often preoccupations of the past. It takes any length from the past that needs to solve for some reason. And the Icelandic crime writer, probably most well known, Arnaldur Indriðason, is particularly focused on the past. And very often goes back. For instance, in his some of his recent books, he is looking at the Second World War, and sort of reimagining the stories that were told, and so on. This is something buried in the past that we need to investigate. So that's one of the ways in which crime fiction sort of deals with that, and maybe, in particular, this kind of Scandinavian or Nordic crime fiction, this is very often preoccupied with some kind of trauma in the past. Be it personal one, abuse or something like that, which is a very common theme, or a more sort of political social one, something that that is caused, for instance, by the deterioration of the welfare system or something like that. So that sort of led me to what has been called Nordic Noir.
Nicola Witcombe:It would be really useful, just to get your overriding perspective on what it is? What is the concept of Nordic Noir generally?
Gunnþórunn Guðmundsdóttir:It's just an overarching term for Scandinavian crime fiction, television series and films. And of course, it has an ease of use. You know what we mean. We are we are talking about Scandinavian crimefiction. The term Nordic Noir is, of course, more a term of convenience and marketing, rather than a particularly literary theoretical term. It was really coined. Just when, at the at the height of the popularity of for insistency, the Danish and Swedish TV series that were being shown, for instance, in the UK, this was where the Nordic Noir term was coined. And it's not a term that has you know, that it has been contested, really.
Nicola Witcombe:Could we just tease that out a little bit? So this term Nordic Noir was sort of a rose like 10-15 years ago. Could you just let me know more precisely why some academics have disagreed with the "noir" term?
Gunnþórunn Guðmundsdóttir:Yes. Noir, of course, refers to in sort of film studies, for instance, it refers to a much more particular type of narrative. A narrative that is sort of much more concerned with the sort of the dark underbelly of life. And that doesn't really have any kind of positive outcome or any kind of solution.
Nicola Witcombe:You've looked at Nordic Noir in a recent book
called "Noir in the North:Genre, Politics and Place" which you edited along with Stacy Gillis. Are some of these criticisms of the term Nordic Noir taken up there?
Gunnþórunn Guðmundsdóttir:What we are investigating there is what do we mean by this term? And if it's a valid term, is it helpful and analyzing this crime fiction in the Nordic countries? One of the contributors to our volume Björn Nordfjörd argues that this isn't really "Noir"; it has maybe one or two links, for instance, in the visuals of the TV series and films, you know, the use of cityscapes of a dark and so on, of the of the grayscale, but that Noir is a much more historically particular thing. And that doesn't really apply to Scandinavian crime fiction, not least because in the traditional American noir, the heroes are often the criminal villain themselves, and the police is often very corrupt. There is nobody good, nobody that will bring a solution to it. But I think it can also be argued that the term has simply evolved and is now used differently than it was in these historical genres. So I think in that way, it can be a useful tool and sort of identifying commonalities within Scandinavian crime fiction. But it should also be said that crime fiction written in the Nordic countries is a much wider fields. And with very different types of authors and works.
Nicola Witcombe:I guess, it must be a risk being a Scandinavian or Nordic writer that you might get sort of put into a box that you don't actually belong in. But there's a positive side and a negative side, because I think often the publishers and the advertisers and so on, use the term Nordic noir because it is trendy or even Nordic per se, because it so obviously sells. So if you're outside that box, you can't sort of also enjoy the benefits of being within it, as it were.
Gunnþórunn Guðmundsdóttir:Yeah, absolutely. I mean, as I say, it is a marketing tool. And of course, it has been very useful for many authors and getting translated and getting published elsewhere. Because of course, for instance, for Icelandic authors, the market is tiny, and this can be very, very hard to get translated into other languages. So, of course, this does open up a new market, new readerships. And what follows is more translation of all types of Nordic fiction. So the interest doesn't stop with the crime novels. And what we are talking about in this in this book is how the term has been expanded, and how it has now a much more sort of transnational and even transcontinental use. And for instance, we have targeted more in Scotland, Celtic Noir in Ireland and so on. And then in the UK and in the US, these kinds of transnational television series that are either adaptations and reworkings of Scandinavian series, such as the Bridge in the US and so on. And then the UK, we have the series that have sort of taken on some of these aspects of Noir often the Scandinavian types of crime fiction and used it in their own sort of TV series and so on. I think it's a value on its own in that there are strands that you can see as commonalities in Scandinavian crime fiction. You can see this emphasis on society, and emphasis on a critique of politics, and society and the welfare state and so on. So there's a definite strand and Scandinavian crime fiction started with Sjöwall and Wahlöö and then got popularized later with Henning Mankell and many, many others. And somehow this spoke to the larger European community and then has traveled much more widely.
Nicola Witcombe:Could you perhaps give some specific examples of the Icelandic writers or film or TV that illustrate some of the things that you've been saying?
Gunnþórunn Guðmundsdóttir:So as I said before, there's an essay on Arnaldur Indriðason, probably the most successful Icelandic crime writer at the moment who has been widely translated into many languages for a number of years now. And this we have a foreword by Yrsa Sigurðardóttir who is the other prominent Icelandic crime writer. And we have the TV series Ófærð(Trapped).
Nicola Witcombe:Iceland and the North are often considered attractive locations due to their exoticness. And when you live in a place, it probably doesn't feel that exotic. But how do people from Iceland feel genuinely when they are placed in this position of being exotic?
Gunnþórunn Guðmundsdóttir:It has sort of a contradictory responses. On the one hand, you are always defined by others. So you always take on some of the destinations that others give you. And of course, with tourism, which was at its height just before COVID hit, it was of course used constantly in marketing. You know that there are, of course, lots of people who revel in it, sort of make use of it, who will be self exoticising. Historically, it's very interesting to look at because Iceland offers an interesting example of being a Danish colony for a very long time, but at the same time, it kept distancing itself from other colonies of Denmark, because we were not Greenland, there was no indigenous culture here. So there was also this sort of need to show that we are not exotic, that we are like, sort of the mainstream that we are like everybody else, and that we are really much more sophisticated and civilized, and all these terms that we used to have in this kind of racialized way of sort of speaking about nations. So there was an interesting feature to it. And I think, historically, the discourse in Iceland has often emphasized this, how different we are nobody else. How we survived natural disasters.
Nicola Witcombe:*laughs* How you keep on doing a podcast, even though there's like repeated earthquakes! Some of what you were saying there kind of, in my mind, links a bit back to what you were saying about memory studies, and the importance of having a consistent history that is told, which espouses the correct image to the world, if you see what I mean. And perhaps because Iceland is a young nation, is a small nation, is geographically isolated, that it was perhaps even more important to have this consistent, and only one narrative that everyone sort of signed up to.
Gunnþórunn Guðmundsdóttir:Yeah I think there's definitely that sense, I think, in many young nations, and in many nations that someone had to fight for independence. Because then the independence becomes the overarching, all encompassing goal that everybody needs to espouse, and therefore needs to agree to the national narrative. There's no time to question the national narrative and sort of fight for independence. So I think that really colors past nations narratives. So I think it is very important, and it is also very strong in nations that were occupied. So the need to get rid of the occupying forces, is what really runs the narrative. Just like, you know, in France, where the collaborators were not talked about, it was not, you know, it sounded like after the wall, everybody had been in the resistance. The sort of thrust of narrative becomes very strong, and any kind of protest against status, and there's just no space for it.
Nicola Witcombe:Are you able to say something about Icelandic literature within colonialism, post-colonial? Because you've got a foot on both sides, it's quite an interesting perspective.
Gunnþórunn Guðmundsdóttir:Yeah, and it hasn't really been given the attention that deserves. And I think one of the reasons why it is under researched, is this sense of a national narrative - that it's not a defining feature of Icelandic culture. That it was always somehow independent from it, and so on, which is sort of a simplification and a little bit nationalistic way of thinking about things, but it is gaining attraction now. And young scholars are looking at this and they're looking at using post colonial theory and looking at Icelandic literature. So there's plenty of things to be done there. And there's definitely all kinds of instances where this trope of being a dependency, rather than a colony, but a dependency that was so tightly knit to another country that really didn't know much about.. The Danish people were not very preoccupied with Iceland and are still not very preoccupied with Iceland. So that kind of negotiation and kind of, well, anxiety, there's this sort of postcolonial anxiety that you can detect in many texts. And, as always, as I say, I think this is a really rich area that deserves more research.
Nicola Witcombe:I mean, we've talked about politics, we've talked about war, we've talked about economy, we talked about identity, perhaps can you explain why it's important for you to teach and study in your subject area?
Gunnþórunn Guðmundsdóttir:We need to understand what people are doing, we need to understand sort of the culture, we need to understand what lies behind cultural and artistic endeavors. We need to be able to have a certain sense of the past of literature, the history of literature, and we need to understand what it is that matters in writing, in fiction, and poetry, and so on, we need to we need to understand it. The importance of reading and visioning other worlds and seeing other points of views, and seeing different ways of lives. How we can open up worlds rather than close them. And such sorts of possibilities that literature offers. And for us to understand the world.
Nicola Witcombe:The last person I interviewed was Elisabeth Straksrud from Oslo University, who's a professor in media and communications department. And she's particularly interested in young people and children and their freedom of expression, particularly online, and their online rights in their own upbringing. And so she asked you could you say something about how children have been portrayed in literature, and perhaps how this has changed over time? Or maybe how this has been different in the Nordic countries, as opposed to elsewhere?
Gunnþórunn Guðmundsdóttir:It's not something I have studied in any detail. But of course, there is research into this on how the depictions of the child and literature and how it has changed. And the main changes to it occurred in the 20th century, when the child was somehow not just a small grown up, but became a being, an individual, its own rights that was treated as such. And this, especially perhaps after the Second World War were changed and changed, of course, in children's literature as well. And of course, the Scandinavian writers were very much at the forefront, I would say, and some of these sort of movements towards giving the child its autonomy and its individuality and its role in society and looking at how society treats the child and so on. And interestingly, there is an essay in our collection on Nordic Noir, that is addressing the child in Scandinavian Nordic crime crime fiction. An essay by Andrew Nestingen called Kid Stuff: Nordic Noir, Politics, and Quality, and where he is sort of explaining how the child is a figure which is affected by the crime in one way or another, has become sort of a symbol of like quality TV, and so on. So it's an interesting connection between crime fiction and more generally, the child in literature and TV, and the depiction of it and how this Scandinavian influence has also be seen elsewhere.
Nicola Witcombe:And the next person I'm going to interview is Lill-Ann Körber, who's a professor at the Institute of Communication and Culture at Aarhus University, or one of my colleagues.
Gunnþórunn Guðmundsdóttir:I would just like to ask her, if she could sort of think a little bit about what are the difficulties in talking about Nordic culture, or Nordic literature. Are we including all national languages? Historically, Finland and Iceland have very often been left out of this kind of discussion. And so what are the challenges with approaching culture as Nordic rather than from particular nations and languages?
Nicola Witcombe:Well, we've had a really interesting, wide ranging discussion and covered many topics. And thanks so much for persevering through.
Gunnþórunn Guðmundsdóttir:Now, it seems finally to be over.
Nicola Witcombe:Reading can help us make sense of the world. It can take us out of ourselves and try on new perspectives. Gunnþórunn suggests that it can help rewrite the past or at least see it from a different perspective or from a new angle. And this is necessary in the Nordics. And perhaps particularly in Iceland, where there can be a tendency to focus on dominant narratives of one size fits all, when it clearly doesn't. You have been listening to nordics.info podcast. Thanks go to Gunnþórunn and to our very own research hub, Reimagining Norden in Evolving World and our funders. Nordforsk. If you would like to find out more, please visit nordics.info