Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.2008, Page 133

PAPER BOAT IN ROUGH WATERS
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Dano-Faroese zone of contact created by the
Fortuna. But the anxiety is more than that of
a new priest’s alienation in the outlying
Faroese wasteland. Through Mr. Poul, the
Fortuna transforms the place into an emo-
tional battlefield. The occasion is Barbara.
With her spontaneity and lust for life, Bar-
bara challenges all the established conven-
tions and rules of Faroese society. She shocks
her future husband, Mr. Poul, by misspelling
the name 'Jesus’, while he disappoints her by
wanting God more than he does her. Barbara
is the focal point of the entire novel, and es-
pecially the axis for Mr. Poul's romantic tor-
ments. Everyone gathers around Barbara,
and she herself wants to be loved by every-
one. Where Barbara loves too much, her
men love her too little.
Barbara is described as nature, which can
be fooled, but not disciplined. In order to
characterize her, the narrator uses meta-
phors of nature, especially of the maritime
kind. Mr. Poul constantly finds himself on
rocky ground and he is compared with a
paper boat in rough waters (ibid.: 143). The
continually challenged Mr. Poul is an easily
movable boat in Barbara's element, which is
that of passion. It is a clash between two dif-
ferent worlds: Poul's Christian guilt feelings
versus Barbara's Eros and spontaneity.
The clash between the notion of a mod-
ern and a pre-modern world also reveals it-
self in the language of the novel, which con-
tains innumerable Faroese expressions. In
linguistic terms, the novel is a decisive break
between Faroese vernacular and a European
language level in the form of learned discus-
sions and Francophile terms. In this way, lan-
guage also becomes a zone of contact be-
tween incompatible worlds. The result of the
encounter between the two widely different
domains of experience is a place outside all
places, which only can be represented in art.
The many Faroese expressions represent the
familiar distance in Barbara to the Faroese
life-world. Heterotopic literature in general
is a genuine part of a locality, but only by
virtue of distance. In such cases, literature is
local through its language, extrovert through
its reflexion following a fertile challenge to
every local self-understanding. Barbara re-
flects a heterotopia being more than a de-
scription of a certain, unconfusing place. On
the one hand the notion of heterotopia as a
site with no site dams up for the referential
fallacy in reading the heterotopic site prima-
rily as a reference to a concrete place. One
the other hand there is no absolute bound-
ary between art and non-art, between art
and common human creation.
The novel demonstrates a precise de-
scription of the convergence between op-
posing worlds. Hence, the descriptions of the
old and the new worlds reach far beyond the
traditional realistic description. The novel’s
entire expression celebrates the encounter
between two worlds. It is a special perspec-
tive on things, where Barbara becomes a
symbol of the Atlantic periphery, simultane-
ously representing that which is incorpo-
rated into the project of modernity and that
which evades it. The representational energy
of the novel develops from the narrator's
sharp reflection on the gap between moder-
nity and the surplus of meaning: "The het-
erotopia of the ship produces a language
that gravitates toward nether world of the
nonrepresentational and that operates at
the edge of its own dissolution" (Casarino
2002:15f).