Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.2008, Page 132

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PAPER BOAT IN ROUCH WATERS
ln the article "Barbara and the Dano-Faroese
Moment", Leyvoy Joensen connects
Bakhtin's chronotope to Jacobsen's novel
(Joensen 2000:78). Where Joensen primarily
attaches the hybridity of the novel to liter-
ary and cultural history, my analysis demon-
strates how the novel celebrates the het-
erogenous experience with reference to the
problematic of representation in general and
to literature in particular. In other words the
figure of heterotopia in Barbara can also be
read as a convergence between meaning and
contingency.4
From Foucault’s perspective, the ship is
the heterotopia par excellence (Foucault
1986: 27). In Barbara as well, the most cru-
cial heterotopia is the ship, named Fortuna.
The Fortuna sails between the Faroes and
Denmark, and when it arrives in the Faroese
capital of Tórshavn, it sets the entire town in
motion.5 In accordance with Foucault’s idea
of heterotopia, the Fortuna is represented as
a counter-site that challenges the place and
causes daily life to cease. Beginning with the
message that the Fortuna is a about to arrive
vibrations are sent through the little com-
munity. These vibrations manifest them-
selves as external movements in the form of
people being on the lookout, windows that
open and people hastening down toward
the beach. The otherwise slow rhythm of
daily life in Tórshavn is abruptly interrupted
by a more rapid rhythm and a festive mood.
The ship arrives from another, larger world, a
cause for both concern and excitement.
Through the movements of the Fortuna
the novel reveals a discord between the tem-
poral and the spatial dimension. The hetero-
topia of the novel is an answer to this divi-
sion of modern times in terms of a
condensed communication between mean-
ing and contingency. I read the novel's reac-
tion to the process of modernity as an ex-
pression of an identity which is conflicting in
a communicating way.
Throughout the novel the returning For-
tuna is an image of an ambiguous modernity.
The entry of the outside world in the small
community creates a contact zone between
two very different worlds: a local peasant
culture and a modern European culture. In
this way, the isolated world in the middle of
the ocean becomes controlled by an un-
known power, which is the modern Fortuna,
i.e., the goddess of happiness and fate in the
guise of modernity. The ship Fortuna shows
the path forward toward a more easily mov-
ing, fluid world.
Mr. Poul arrives to the Faroes with the
Fortuna at the beginning of the novel. FHis ar-
rival demonstrates the anxiety and tension
that the Fortuna creates in the little town. In
the same way as the Fortuna gets life going in
Tórshavn, the locality obtains its dynamic by
virtue of the way it acts on the stranger. The
turbulence which the Fortuna creates in the
urban setting also continues in Mr. Poul as
an inneranxiety. The novel is a drama of des-
tiny, and the plot points inevitably forward
toward instability. Mr. Poul is depicted as a
young, promising theologian who is re-
garded as being well suited to 'restore peace
and tranquillity and good habits' to the
Faroe Islands (Jacobsen 1939: 35). Flowever,
the promising theologian becomes a victim
of the anxiety generated by his relationship
to Barbara. In the end, he stands to be
'judged to bedefrocked fordereliction of of-
fice and desperate behaviour' (ibid: 211).
Mr. Poul's anxiety has its roots in the