Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.2008, Page 131

PAPER BOATIN ROUGH WATERS
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Barbara (1939) written by the author-histo-
rian Jørgen-Frantz Jacobsen (1900-38) is one
of the most well-known Dano-Faeroese
novels. Barbara was published in 1939, a year
after Jacobsen's untimely death at age 37. It is
his only work of fiction. Jørgen-Frantz Jacob-
sen grew up within a Dano-Faroese com-
munity in Tórshavn on the Faroe Islands. The
language of the Faroes first become a living
literate language around the year 1900, and
Jørgen-Frantz Jacobsen has therefore been
more comfortable writing in Danish than
Faroese. For the same reason, one-third of all
Faroese novels, including Barbara, are writ-
ten in Danish.1 As is the case with Indian and
African literature, the greatest works of
Faroese literature have been written in the
language of the colonizers. The other great
Dano-Faroese author is William Heinesen,
and he and Jacobsen comprise the twin pil-
lars of Faroese literature. The nerve in their
writing is a heterogeneous strand of expe-
rience which communicates Faroese culture
through an especially familiar distance.
Barbara takes place around the year
1760. The plot is a rather banal romantic in-
trigue written into a historical cultural
framework. The framework is primarily an
acute analysis of the differences between the
old and the new society. This is the epic
starting point for the encounter - and clash
- between a pre-modern peasant culture
and the beginning of modernity. The focal
Pointofthe novel isthe Faroese woman Bar-
bara and her relationship with the Danish
priest Mr. Poul. Reflecting the etymology of
her name, Barbara represents the 'barbaric',
untameable desire that is unleashed in con-
tact with the outside world.
The goal of this article2 is to analyze the
novel's description of the conflicting realities
of place using Michel Foucault's conception
of heterotopia. Foucault's notion of hetero-
topia is inspired by Mikhail Bakhtin’s term
"chronotope", which literally means time-
space. Chronotopes are Bakhtin's name for
the most crucial mutual connection be-
tween time- and space-relations. Bakhtin dis-
tinguishes between real and literary chrono-
topes. In the latter the spatial and temporal
characteristics melt together to a meaningful
and concrete whole. The notion of hetero-
topia expresses the same tense integration
of space and time as the chronotope.
The concept of heterotopia was first de-
veloped by Foucault in a 1967 lecture enti-
tled "OfOtherSpaces". Heterotopia emerges
as an answer and as an alternative to utopia.
In Foucault’s lecture, we read that utopias -
unlike heterotopias - are forever condem-
ned to remain 'sites with no real place' (Fou-
cault 1986: 24). A heterotopia is a kind of
counter-site, in which the real sites, those
that can be found in the culture, are simul-
taneously represented, contested, and in-
verted. Places of this kind are outside of all
places, even though it may be possible to in-
dicate their location in reality. In other
words, they are absolutely different from all
the sites that they reflect (ibid.: 24).3
Heterotopia is not only a spatial concept
but a linguistic one as well. It comes into
being as the interference between represen-
tational and non-representational practices.
This immanent interference occurs when a
practice falls back upon itself and questions
both itself and all other practices. It is pre-
cisely this movement toward itself that en-
ables heterotopias to question and contest
all other spaces.