Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.2008, Page 134

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PAPER BOATIN ROUGH WATERS
ln the final analysis, it is not only about
progress, but also about destiny and identity.
Barbara’s essence gives birth to a cascade of
questions about the insecure foundation of
identification. For example, it is asked, 'Who
is Barbara?' (Jacobsen 1939: 133). The novel
answers this question without answering by
saying that she lights up with her dress of
many colours and high spirit, and that this
game finally ends at a point (ibid.: 134). Bar-
bara is the force of life and a grand illusion in
a world of salt and darkness.
But as a character, Barbara is also chal-
lenged by the movements caused by the For-
tuna. She would not have been who she is if
the priests had not come to the Faroes. And
at the end of the novel, she makes a failed at-
tempt to reach the Fortuna, which is heading
toward Copenhagen with her lover Andreas
on board. Barbara thus fails in her attempt
to satisfy the demands for change imposed
on her by modernity. Just like Mr. Poul she is
a victim of the oncoming modernity, which
as an anonymous power moves things and
people around. In the meantime, however,
the narrator has idealized her so strongly
that it is primarily the uncaptured nature of
her essence which is left behind. The point,
however, is the breach between the modern
and that which cannot be modernized. The
connotations of the wildness contained in
the name Barbara reflect an oncoming mod-
ern gaze upon her as Other. But this gaze
should be seen as a reference to a world
which cannot be modernised and repre-
sented, rather as than an objectivising, colo-
nizing gaze on the Atlantic world. The novel
underlines this through Mr. Poul as an un-
finished subjectivity, who in advance is not
stabile enough to create the Other as a
counter image. I therefore see the colonial
contact zone of the novel as a part of a gen-
eral modern context rather than as a relation
of power between colonialists and the colo-
nized.6
As a symbol of inexpressible experience
the Barbara-figure is not only challenged, but
also challenges the modern gaze on itself.
The world of Barbara in other words does
not allow itself to be demystified. It is the pe-
riphery that writes back to the Europe of me-
tropoles in order to give an account of the
encounter with another world which cannot
be contained in words. But before the novel
in this way challenges the center, it is itself
challenged as representative for the periph-
ery by a modern European consciousness.
The novel's self-consciousness accords with
Foucault’s view of the ship in European liter-
ature. Foucault represents the ship as a het-
erotopia, from which the entire Western civ-
ilization is seen from outside. The sea
narrative questions not only its own founda-
tion but also reaches beyond itself to ques-
tion the foundation of a world that for sev-
eral centuries had been run in all sorts of
ways by ships (Casarino 2002:13). From the
sixteenth century until the present, Foucault
says, the ship has been not only the great in-
strument of economic development, but
also the greatest reserve of the imagination.
This is why Foucault characterises the ship as
the heterotopia par excellence.
The district recorder Johan Hendrik
Heyde is the character who most clearly rep-
resents the ship as symbol of development,
fantasy and reflexion. Heyde is part of the
Danish officialdom in Tórshavn and comes
from an old family with lots of foreign blood
in it, but well-rooted in the Faroes (Jacobsen