During the last few decades, Icelandic fiction has seen significant transformation
and exciting renewal. It was particularly in the 1980s and 1990s that a fresh wind
made itself felt in this area of Icelandic litetarure. Building on modernist experiments
initiated during the 1960s, the obsessive post-war preoccupation with a gloomy urban
realism gave way to a decidedly anti-realist fiction which celebrates the wonders
of everyday life in the city, rather than pitting an urban malaise against the rural
idyll. In discussions of these works, it became increasingly common to find the term
magical realism, and indeed, there can be little doubt that Guðbergur Bergsson’s translation of Gabriel
García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude into Icelandic, published in 1978, constituted an important influence in this respect.
The advent of these recent changes in Icelandic fiction has generally become associated
with the so-called “68 generation,” a group of young writers who, in their works,
turned Reykjavík into an exciting area
of wonder and magic. Looking back to their childhood days, writers like Pétur Gunnarsson
(b. 1947), Einar Kárason (b. 1955), and Einar Már Guðmundsson (b. 1954) portrayed
wondrous journeys of exploration from the perspective of young boys growing up in
the city. These works quickly reached a large and enthusiastic readership and soon
became the new face of Icelandic literature. Their impact was such that, in an interview
in 1986, a little less than ten years after the publication of the first of these
novels, Helga Kress began to question the influence of this “boys’ literature,” as
she called it, on the development of women’s writing: where were the women in
these little boys’ sagas? (Borhammar 1986 [page ref required])
A decade earlier, when women were producing more literature than ever before in Icelandic
literary history, the male establishment had begun to deride this wave of novels as
“kellingabækur,” old wives’ books, which flooded the market at the expense of “real,” innovative
literature. To a large extent, this debate was in fact really about the
need for literary change, and certainly there is no denying that the few experimental
modernist writers of the time were finding it very hard to gain recognition, indeed
an audience, while the storytellers were enjoying great popularity. Many of these
were women, some of whom had indeed only started writing at a riper age, when they
no longer had the care of young families taking up most of their time. However, with
this highly derisive dismissal of all writing it perceived as traditional old wives’
tales, the male establishment dealt a devastating blow to women’s writing. Now, it
seemed that “the boys,” as they have since come to be known (much to their annoyance),
were back with a vengeance,
having found their own, innovative ways of storytelling, and once again usurping the
literary arena. Where did this leave women writers, and the expression of female experience?
In this article I will investigate some of the ways in which Icelandic women writers
have gone about inscribing their own experiences and views in Icelandic literature
by looking to their own storytelling tradition and using innovative narrative techniques
to give this tradition new meaning in a contemporary Icelandic urban context. Due
to the inevitably rather limited scope of an article, I will focus my discussion primarily
on Vigdís Grímsdóttir’s (b. 1953) fiction prior to 2000. My reasons for choosing this
particular author as my main focus are the following: she is of the same generation
as “the boys,” and her writing career roughly spans the same time-period; she is one
of Iceland’s
most continuously innovative writers of the last three decades; and she has been among
the best known contemporary women writers outside Iceland today, who has had many
of her works translated into a number of languages. And last but not least, she is
one of the authors whose work critics have frequently labelled magical realist.
The attraction of magical realism for Icelandic writers is perhaps not all that surprising
when one considers Iceland’s history and situation: on the margins of European geography
and culture, an ex-colony of Denmark only since full independence was achieved in
1944, and still reeling from the sudden, dramatic leap from rurality to modernity
in the course of the twentieth century, Icelanders are continuing the process of negotiating
and articulating a cultural identity to match its current position as a small, peripheral,
modern and independent nation that is also an active participant in a global culture.
Writers and critics have long recognized that magical realism offers particularly
attractive fictional strategies to marginal and post-colonial cultures, mainly because
it “facilitates the fusion or co-existence of different worlds, spaces, systems, that
would be irreconcilable in other modes of fiction,” as Lois Parkinson Zomara and Wendy
Faris put it in their introduction to Magical
Realism (6). Thus it allows a renewed valuation of a local (national) cultural tradition
alongside,
or within, a modernity suddenly and traumatically imposed rather than developed locally.
In an Icelandic context, it makes it possible for authors to engage in a dialogue
with their own rich literary past, born of a rural culture and impressive geography,
thereby reaffirming a localised cultural imagination within a modern, globalized urban
context.
Of course, magical realism is not an unproblematic and undisputed term. Considering
the present purpose and scope, it seems hardly relevant, however, to enter into a
discussion whether magical realism is even to be considered a separate movement or
a part of late modernism or post-modernism, or whether it relies in part or in its
entirety on fantastic and/or surrealist modes of fiction. Each of these questions
alone could easily form the basis for a separate study. For the purpose of this article,
suffice it to say that I base my own understanding of the term largely on its use
here in Canada in a post-colonial context, where it is viewed as a fictional strategy
that relies on local pre- or anti-modern discourses to interrupt, question, contaminate
an imposed colonial discourse of modernity that has its basis in European cultural
centres. In addition, I rely on Sigríður Albertsdóttir’s discussion on magical realism
in contemporary Icelandic fiction, and, like her, I base myself on the five characteristics
identified by Wendy Faris (167-74) that make magical realist fiction:
- the text contains an irreducible element of magic, which cannot be explained according
to the laws of the universe as we know them; i.e. magical things “really” happen,
thereby disrupting the ordinary logic of cause and effect;
- there is a “renewal” of the realistic tradition through extensive attention to sensory
detail and events
grounded firmly in historical realities, but these realistic histories are often alternate
versions of these realities and exist side-by-side with mythical components, implying
that eternal mythical truths and historical events are both essential components of
our collective memory;
- Tzvetan Todorov’s formulation of the fantastic as hesitation between two contradictory
understandings of events inscribed in the text, between the uncanny (explainable according
to the laws of the universe) and the marvellous (the laws as we know them would require
some alteration), also occurs in magical realist texts;
- an experience of the closeness or near-merging of two spaces, two realms: the magical
realist vision exists at the intersection of two worlds, where boundaries are fluid
and/or blurred;
- magical realist fiction questions received ideas about time, space and identity,
and reorient them.
Finally, to clarify my understanding of the difference between fantasy and magical
realism, I consider magical realism to be a form of narrative that is polyphonic and
achieves its effects through contamination, combination, and the symbiosis of different
worlds, whereas I regard fantasy as primarily oppositional, a mode where reality and
the uncanny are distinct and work against each other, or rely on a perceived opposition
for the intended effect. In other words, whereas fantasy is very much a literary artifice,
“cerebral” magical realism relies on faith and effects a combination of reality with
fantastical
elements out of which marvellous elements grow organically.
Iceland’s literary heritage is based on a long-standing popular storytelling tradition
enriched by folklore and fantasy antedating modernity in Iceland, some of it with
pre-Christian roots. Obviously, this source forms a fruitful and potentially powerful
counter-discourse to respond to and engage with the overwhelming incoming tide of
a mass global culture threatening to obliterate the tiny speck on the European cultural
map that is Iceland, and find ways instead of creating a modus that will allow both
discourses, both cultural systems, to exist simultaneously; in other words, to be
both Icelandic and international. In recent Icelandic fiction, references to or elements
from the sagas are incorporated as part of contemporary life in Reykjavík, together
with the Beatles, rap, clubbing and grunge (see also Allard). Characters effortlessly
spice up their English-based street-Icelandic with quotes
from Sturla Þórðarson and Egill Skallagrímsson. The narratives delight in storytelling
and storytellers, as leaps of wild and boundless imagination propel the characters
forward, with a ghost lurking just around the next street corner. Iceland is full
of ghosts. They are part of a traditional Icelandic perception of what constitutes
reality, another important reason for the attraction of magical realism in Iceland.
As the author Svava Jakobsdóttir (1930-2004) has explained, the realism of the bourgeois
nineteenth-century novel is very different from the saga-realism which has influenced
Icelandic literature to this day, which is a realism that allows for a deeper, wider
understanding and perception of what is “real,” and a willingness on the part of Icelandic
audiences across the centuries to allow
fiction and poetry to determine the limits of reality (Dagný Kristjánsdóttir 1990:
12-13). Speaking at a conference in Edinburgh in 2002, Einar Már Guðmundsson discussed
the
influence of magical realism on literature and said: “what exactly is this term supposed
to imply? That there is a realism without magic?
The sagas, outstanding for their ‘realism,’ are full of magic. That there is a magic
without realism? As if there were no realism
in the stories of Borges or H.C. Andersen!” And when I recently mentioned my interest
in magical realism and Icelandic fiction
to an Icelandic colleague, she laughed and said: “but ALL Icelandic fiction is magical
realist!”
In Iceland, women writers, even more than the men, appear to be the natural inheritors
of these magical realist fictional strategies. Helga Kress’ history of women’s literature
in Iceland shows how women’s writing has developed from seiðr, or magical incantations, spár, or visions, and dreams, in pre-Christian times, through oral tradition: folk- and
fairy-tales and ballads, thus managing to survive alongside and on the margins of
a learned literary tradition written and dominated by men. These stories and songs
relate female experiences and desires, portraying life as a woman in a patriarchal
world, hiding or escaping to ideal worlds of the imagination. When women finally begin
to write and their works to be published, around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth
century, they use this tradition to express and give form to their own experiences,
using the inside point of view. Poets like Hulda (1881-1946) revive the oral tradition
of women’s folk poetry, using simple language and a free-flowing form, a significant
departure from the strict poetic rules that had governed the dominant male tradition.
They express the clash between society’s norms and women’s longings for freedom and
education, and look to nature as a refuge.
During the 1950s and 1960s, the first attempts at fictional experimentation came from
women, although the innovations they introduced initially went largely unrecognized.
Ásta Sigurðardóttir (1930-72), Halldóra B. Björnsdóttir (1907-68) and Ragnheiður Jónsdóttir
(1895-1967) were among the pioneers of a modernist short fiction that attempted to
expose the deceptive surfaces of daily life and portrayed women in a no-man’s land,
outcasts in the new urban middle-class society of post-war Iceland, on the boundaries
of life and death. Lost in fantasies and alcoholic hallucinations in an attempt to
escape their alienation, their narratives began to crack the boundaries of objective
realism.
Svava Jakobsdóttir built on this tradition when, in the 1960s, she began publishing
her stories, which constituted the most conscious break with the constraints of mimetic
realism. In an article from 1980 entitled “Reynsla og raunveruleiki” [Experience and
Reality] (1974), she describes the problems she faced as a woman writing in a male
tradition, wishing
to remain faithful to her own experience in her writing:
Kvenleg reynsla er að mestu falin undir yfirborðinu í menningarlífi okkar. Hver sú
kona sem byrjar að skrifa ... uppgötvar skjótt að breitt bil er milli reynsluheims
hennar sem er dulinn og umfram allt lokaður og ríkjandi, opinberrar menningar. Ætli
hún að leita að sjálfri sér og reynslu sinni í ríkjandi bókmenntahefð kemst hún fljótt
að því að aðeins 1/10 hluti hennar er sýnilegar. Hinir 9/10 hlutar eru duldir. (226-27)
[Female experience is, for the most part, concealed beneath the surface of our culture.
Any woman who begins to write, …, quickly discovers a wide gap between her world of experience – which is hidden and,
above all, closed – and the dominant, official culture. If she searches for herself
and her experience in the prevailing literary tradition, she soon realizes that only
one-tenth of this experience is visible; the other nine-tenths are hidden.] (trans.
Alison Tartt, in Helga Kress 503)
She decided to challenge the dominant way of perceiving reality, calling it into question,
by breaking it up from within: turning the inside out, and letting hidden inner experiences
determine what is “real,” what is “normal.” She employed the mode of fantasy, but
describing it as if it were completely real,
an everyday occurrence. Thus, ordinary reality for women becomes, in Svava’s fiction,
grotesque and horrific. This atmosphere is enhanced by images of enclosures, which
create a feeling of claustrophobia and imprisonment (women locked up in their houses,
between concrete walls), and images of reflection and outer appearance, mirrors, photographs,
clothes, which are unable to hold the actual selves hiding within (see also Ástráður
Eysteinsson 2000).
Women’s writing in Iceland has, in other words, continued to rely on folklore and
fantasy to express a reality for which there were no modes available in the dominant
male literary tradition. As the title to the first anthology of Icelandic women’s
writing, Draumur um veruleika [A Dream about Reality] (1977) appropriately indicates, women authors have had to
dream up a reality that expresses
their own experiences and perceptions rather than someone else’s. And it is this history,
this tradition that has continued to nourish much of women’s writing in Iceland, and
accounts at least partly for the attraction that magical realism holds for women authors
as well as for men, although there seems to be a difference in the use of magical
realism as a fictional strategy. While the magical realism of authors like Einar
Már Guðmundsson is retrospective, recreating the child that sees the magic in a daily
environment, women writers seem much more interested in the here and now, in the exploration
of connections, human relations and community, the cyclical perspective, liminalities
and inner realities: realities of the mind where anything can and does happen.
Vigdís Grímsdóttir published her first book, a collection of short stories entitled
Tíu myndir úr lífi þínu. Sögur um þykjustuleiki og alvörudrauma [Ten Pictures from your Life: Stories of Make-Believe Games and Factual Dreams] in
1983, hailed immediately as one of the most innovative pieces of writing to appear
in a long time. Each story is introduced by a poem instead of a title, so that poetry
and prose become closely intertwined, blurring the boundaries between the genres.
Each story is told by a different woman, but all are connected by the tug-of-war between
dream and reality in their lives. In each case, the woman’s dreams expose the illusion
of her daily life, making the dreams more “real” than reality, because, as Vigdís
puts it, dreams give a voice to one’s inner world,
the subconscious, that allows “the other woman” to come out and speak, the one behind
the public mask that women have tended to wear
in order to survive in a man’s world (H.H.S. 64). The ten stories are framed by an
address by the author to the reader, which attempts
to establish a direct, physical connection between the two. As Jon Thiem (240-41)
has demonstrated, such textualization of the reader is a feature common to many magical
realist texts: the reader is magically transported into the world of the text, losing
her detachment and becoming an agent in the fictional world. However, whereas in male
fictions the author and reader tend to become rivals or contestants for the production
of the text, and most readers end up as victims, here, the relationship becomes erotic,
a physical encounter driven by desire.
Vigdís’s second work was another short story collection entitled Eldur og Regn [Fire and Rain] (1985), characterised by a similar blending of poetry and prose,
but this time the
stories rely heavily on folkloric and mythic motifs, creating contemporary folk tales.
The collection rather baffled many readers and critics. When asked what she meant
by writing these modern folk tales, she replied that she had always been fascinated
by the enduring attraction and relevance of these age-old motifs, which, in her view,
represent the creativity of the human imagination, the human spirit, and symbolise
inner life, or, in Vigdís’ own words, the elves and “draugar og djöflar í mér og öðrum” [devils
and ghosts within you and me] (Jóhanna Steinsdóttir 25). Vigdís herself grew up in
an area in Reykjavík that was being built up at the time
and, as she says, “ævintýrið og þjóðsagan voru lifandi þáttur í hversdagsleikanum.
Draugar og heilagur
andi jafnraunverulegir og pabbi og mamma” [folk- and fairy tales were a living part
of the everyday. Ghosts and the holy spirit
as real as mum and dad] (Friðrika Benónýs 74): “raunveruleikinn er ekki aðeins ytra
borð heldur líka innra líf ... raunsæi er allt, líka það sem ekki er og það sem getur hvergi gerst nema innra með
manneskjunni” [reality is not just what’s on the outside but also inner life ... it’s everything, also that which is not and what cannot happen except in one’s mind]
(Elín Bára Magnúsdóttir 13), and “raunveruleikinn er mystískur, hvert augnablik er
leyndardómsfullt” [reality is mystical, each moment mysterious] (Árni Óskarsson 12).
Folk tales are of course an integral part of community culture, expressing the ways
in which people have survived in a particular place over time, and connecting the
community’s present with its past and future. One of the tales in Eldur og regn became the basis for Vigdís’s first novel, Kaldaljós [Cold Light] (1987), which is the story of a young boy, Grímur, who is an artist
with special, or second,
sight: he has prophetic visions which he translates into drawings. The novel is set
in a time and place that are hard to locate specifically: the little fishing village
under the mountain, Fjörður [Fjord], could be anywhere in Iceland at any time. Like
Bjartur in Laxness’ famous novel
Sjálfstætt fólk (1934-35) [Independent People] (1945/1997) which, by the way, also has many magical realist elements, Grímur is
in a way an
Icelandic archetype, as are his family, and Icelandic history is collapsed into this
one generation, with family members being magically transformed into other individuals
in a different place and time. In this way, the novel emphasises the timelessness
underlying its cyclical, repetitional structure. Like Márquez’ Macondo, Fjörður’s
cultural specificity spills over into the universal, it’s one place yet all places.
It is unusual in Icelandic fiction though, where there is a deep-rooted connectedness
to time and place, and their specific location is a traditional method of grounding
even the most marvellous of tales. In fact, and rather tellingly I think, this feature
of the novel was commented upon much more in Iceland than the fact that the novel
is about a boy with second sight whose muse is a witch and who disappears into a painting
at the end.
The main event in the novel that determines the course of Grímur’s life is the avalanche
that kills his entire family, a tragedy that reflects the inevitable risk of living
with nature and is repeated many times over across the generations in Iceland, its
memory preserved in shared community history. Grímur, a child of nature, has to come
to terms with the fact that the mountain that inspires him and that he regarded as
the protector of the village is at the same time the destroyer of his family and his
home. The mimetic constraints of a realism that developed in European industrial cities
have never been able to express effectively the experiences of living in and with
an awe-inspiring and “unconsumed” geography such as Iceland’s (Delbaere-Garant 253),
something which, according to Alejo Carpentier, needed the literary marvelous, the freedom of the imaginary, for its expression.
Grímur overcomes his ten years of grief and “darkness” with the help of his muse,
the witch Álfrún, who has been his guide, the keeper of
his art, and who finally introduces him to a vision of “the light.” She suddenly disappears
but leaves him enough money to go to art school in the city.
In this setting, people and events keep re-occurring, until Grímur finally manages
to paint his fjord and his people, and becomes one with the painting. This kind of
metamorphosis, the blurring of the boundary between the artist and his art, as well
as between life and death (Grímur stays in touch with his family after their death
and eventually joins them), and past and present (time is cyclical, people and events
are self-replicating), characteristises most of Vigdís’s fiction. The eternal return,
a holistic vision, mythic truth, is as much a component of collective memory as historical
events: in this manner, as Zomara and Faris (6) put it, “historical narrative is
no longer chronicle but clairvoyance”, and an alternate history of Iceland is created
alongside the officially sanctioned
one. And clearly many people were able to relate to it, for the novel was a bestseller
and was turned into an equally successful film scripted and directed by Hilmar Oddsson
(2004).
The novel Stúlkan í skóginum [The Girl in the Grove] from 1992 is, on one level, a fairy tale, but one grounded
in specific locations
in Reykjavík on one particular day in August 1991. The two main characters are modern
versions of the ugly witch and the beautiful princess, except that here, as in most
of Vigdís’s fiction, appearances are dangerously deceptive. Guðrún is a severely crippled
and deformed middle-aged woman, an outcast of society, which judges her by her looks.
She flees from her outer reality to an inner world of the imagination, a green, lush
grove, where her alter-ego lives. This is a natural haven of peace for Guðrún and
an outlet for her feelings and creativity. Her “outer” life consists of a routine
of rescuing books from the city’s rubbish bins; Guðrún
takes them home and has made a vow to memoriZe six lines from each book she finds
to enrich her life. Guðrún thus represents the riches and beauty of an inner life,
where imagination and creativity reside.
One day, she is unexpextedly invited home by Hildur, a complete stranger, for coffee.
This fair young maiden, however, disguises a sorceress of great cruelty and dark purpose.
She is a dollmaker whose creations have been found to be life-“like,” but lacking
in “life.” Since Hildur does not have an inner life, the true source of creativity
and imagination,
she has devised a way of taking it from Guðrún. Gradually, she invades Guðrún’s forest
and shatters the walls of her inner world by exposing her to her outer reality in
the form of the doll she has made in Guðrún’s likeness. Finally, in an erotic encounter,
Hildur and Guðrún merge and swap bodies, so that Hildur can experience what it is
like to be Guðrún. Yet Hildur fails to recognize the essence of what she desires most
from Guðrún when she neglects to memorize the lines from the books she finds and make
them her own.
This novel is, again, located in liminal territory, at the conjunction of inner and
outer life, art and reality. It is difficult not to see Hildur, on one level, as a
representation of mimetic art, imitating life but lacking the real “life,” the wonders
of Guðrún’s imagination. Guðrún, meanwhile, acts not only as the preserver
of Icelandic literature but also as the keeper of its true spirit, its riches, by
memorizing part of its contents rather than focusing on the outer shell, the title,
or the author, as Hildur does, something which some critics have read as a critique
of the contemporary, commercial approach to literature as consumer object marketed
by way of fancy cover designs and turning authors into celebrities. Guðrún reclaims
literary works for a popular, oral tradition. Taking this view a little further, one
could then even read Guðrún’s deformity as “felt literary history,” the “magical bodily
echoes” of the external state of Icelandic literature (Zomara and Faris 9).
Once again, we have as main characters women whose lives are incomplete and who only
really live in or through their dreams as a way of satisfying their longings, but
in this case Hildur’s obsession and literal execution of her dream becomes truly sinister
and raises serious questions about the responsibility of the artist towards her creation.
And Vigdís is not content to hide behind her own authorial inviolacy, because she
herself appears in the story as the writer who followed Guðrún as a possible subject
for a novel, but who eventually decided that Guðrún did not suit her purposes so she
recommended her to Hildur instead. At the same time, we, the readers, share Guðrún’s
thoughts and, like her, are invited over by the author into her world, where we experience
joy, excitement, fear and suffering, and are, for the duration of the reading experience,
completely in the author’s power. In this way, the assumed boundaries between the
fictional world and the reader’s are, again, magically transgressed. We do not know
what happens to Guðrún in the end; her fate closely resembles Grímur’s as she seems
to disappear forever into her grove, becoming one with her creation, which would give
the novel a circular structure. But the ending is ambiguous: the final lines, italicized
as are all the lines Guðrún memorizes, are also the first six lines of the novel,
so it could also be that the story was in fact nothing but Guðrún’s dream, where she
becomes a character in a book she finds. Or does Hildur indeed kill her to animate
her doll?
In Grandavegur 7 [7 Grandi Road] (1994), we return to the perspective and experiences of a clairvoyant
child, this time that
of a fourteen-year-old girl, Fríða (Einfríður). Fríða does not just have occasional
visions; she actually communicates with the dead: family members and inhabitants of
her house. Their talk never gives her a moment’s peace, so that, unlike most of Vigdís’s
protagonists, she actually tries to find refuge in the “real” world. The experiences
the dead share with her make Fríða’s perspective an intriguing
blend of childlike naiveté and age-old wisdom. Like Stúlkan í skóginum, the novel is, on one level, specifically located in time and place: one day in May
1990 in one clearly-defined area in Reykjavík. At the same time, however, time collapses,
for Fríða becomes a time-traveller through her memories and visions, as she experiences
events from different times and generations and can read other people’s thoughts.
Fríða’s is, then, a polyphonic narrative. Her interactions with the house ghosts emphasize
that the past is an inalienable part of the present, and we are never isolated individuals
who live only in the here and now, but are part of a larger whole. This underlines
Fríða’s movement in the book from being an outsider, “different” from others, towards
integration into community and wholeness.
At the beginning of the novel, Fríða’s dog Fúsíus, her only friend, is killed by a
car and his remains eaten by gulls. This loss of a loved one echoes the larger losses
in her life and that of her mother: their emotionally unstable father, who used to
leave the house during his drinking bouts, has permanently left them after the death
of Fríða’s brother Haukur, who died in a nightly attempt to conjure their father back
home. Fríða’s world is thus a lonely and shattered one, as loss has alienated mother
and daughter from each other, each trying to find solace in her own world. Fríða embarks
on a trip through town to find her father to request his presence at the funeral of
her dog that same evening, carrying Fúsíus’s bones around in bag, in an echo of Rebeka
in One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Her journey through town is also a journey into womanhood, as she falls in love and
has her first sexual encounter that day, which in turn helps her to feel affinity
with her mother and establish a connection with her mother’s friend Þóra, another
woman who has withdrawn into solitude after suffering a loss. At the end of the day,
also the end of the novel, Fríða has thus not only gained a friend, her lover Hörður,
but has also entered a community of women, and learned from her own and her ghost
friends that loss is a part of love. At the same time, however, Fríða breaks with
the tradition of the passive, all-suffering woman who time and again, in the desire
for love, allows an all too fallible man to become the centre of her life and depend
on him to give it meaning. When she makes love with Hörður, it is she who takes control,
and at that moment also abandons her dead brother’s obsessive urgings to find their
father at all costs. By letting go of this obsession and moving away from this centrifugal
patriarchal force, she creates room in her life for a relationship with her mother,
and thus she completes her journey of female individuation. On a metafictional level,
this movement is echoed in Þóra’s exhortation when she reads the notes of the poet
towards a novel he intends to write about the people of 7 Grandi Road, that she is
so tired of all the Úa’s in novels, a reference to the main woman protagonist in Laxness’s
novel Kristnihald undir jökli (1968) [Under the Glacier] (1972/2005) and a symbol of the eternal mystical female, thereby firmly denouncing
the objectification
of women characters in the male-dominated literary tradition.
In the novella Nætursöngvar [Nocturnal Songs] (1998), Vigdís returns to the themes of folklore, the illusion
that is daily life, and the
tug-of-war between dream and reality. The narrator, a wife and mother, receives seven
nightly visits from a man with a raven’s head who takes her on seven different journeys.
Gradually, the narrator’s dream world completely takes over from reality, and her
nocturnal experiences become more real than her waking ones. On her journeys she runs
the gamut of her own emotions, as she is made to face, indeed live in, an inner world
that has not received any expression. When the man with the raven’s head takes his
leave after his final visit, the narrator is a transformed woman. Her waking reality
and her dream world have fused, and her voice now speaks for the inner, dreaming woman
as well as the outer, waking one. Her story, an act of creativity, is her tribute
to the man and to her transformation. When the novella came out in 1998, Vigdís was
of course asked by every single interviewer who or what the man with the raven’s head
was, and what he signified. Her answer was consistently the same: he is who he is,
he simply is. In the world of magical realist fiction, it is belief that counts: the
magic is not a consciously created symbol, it is part of a world view, organically
growing out of the world that the storyteller creates, and is an essential part of
it.
All of Vigdís’s protagonists are artists in one sense or another, women (and one boy)
who trust, or learn to trust, the world of their imagination and emotion, sometimes
taking refuge in it, sometimes rediscovering it, sometimes hiding in it, but it is
always there, and in the end, it serves as a source of creativity. The creative act
empowers the protagonists, gives them a voice, and allows them to come to terms with
reality, to re-possess and redefine it. These inner worlds of the imagination are
as real as the outer world, and represent alternate realities that allow the protagonists
to interrupt established ways of viewing conventional reality, culture and tradition.
Through acts of magic, artistic creation and/or storytelling, they rename and reaffirm
the local, the communal, the non-rational, as positive forces in a technocratic, global
age of angst, fragmentation and isolation, as a force of survival and affirmation
of life.
Ultimately, it is this focus on fusion and connection that, in my view, both draws
women writers to magical realism and distinguishes the ways they write it from the
way male authors use it. Magical realist strategies allow women to write in a female
storytelling tradition that has survived in Iceland across the centuries. They also
create a variety of ways to re-tell, and re-affirm, Icelandic life, history and tradition
from a shared, community perspective, to repossess historical experience through storytelling
and art. Vigdís’s protagonists all seek to make their worlds whole again in one way
or another, whether they are trying to come to terms with loss, alienation or exclusion.
Often, this means “correcting” the official, accepted ways of perceiving cultural
legacy, and writing/righting the
wrongs on which our established views of what constitutes “reality” depend, offering
alternatives to relate to each other as humans, and making the world
whole again, while giving woman back her rightful place in the centre of it, making
her the site of the magical and historical, “a history that survives and nurtures
the present,” and by creating fiction that, in Gabrielle Foreman’s words, “reintegrates
the modern, disintegrated self back into the vanishing cultural community” (286).