Reykjavík Grapevine - 01.03.2013, Blaðsíða 14

14The Reykjavík Grapevine Issue 3 — 2013
THE NUMBER 1 MUSIC STORE
IN EUROPE ACCORDING TO
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SKÓLAVÖRÐUSTÍG 15, 101 REYKJAVÍK AND HARPA CONCERT HALL
I'm not sure if
calling people
idiots is the best
way to deal with
xenophobia
“
„
Iceland | Literature
Raised in Iceland by Lithuanian parents,
Agnes is a history student writing her the-
sis on today's right wing populism and its
resemblance to the Nazi's Third Reich.
Her boyfriend Ómar carries with him all
of his problems from youth, unsolved and
silenced, and is incapable of finding him-
self a fixed existential position. Arnór is an
educated Neo-Nazi who gets to know Ag-
nes through her thesis work and winds up
having an affair with her. Finally, Snorri is
the newborn son of Agnes and Ómar—or of
Agnes and Arnór—who slowly but system-
atically gets to know the complex nature of
human existence.
These four are the main protagonists of
Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl's most recent novel,
‘Illska’ (“Evil”), which was awarded the
2012 Icelandic Literary Prize last month.
Eiríkur simultaneously tells a number of
different stories from the past and present
through the above-mentioned characters,
who are often faced with the complicated,
paradoxical conflict between who we be-
lieve we are and who others believe we are.
We contacted Eiríkur to congratulate him
on his work and ask him a few questions
about it.
My first impression of ‘Illska’ is that
of the complexity of human society—
the seemingly essential state of con-
flicts implied in human coexistence.
Is this something you intended to
highlight?
When I had written about half of the book,
I realised that at its core it dealt with the
phenomena of seeing and being seen. We
often think that we alone decide “who we
are”—that we are the masters of our exis-
tence, capable of being or becoming what
we like, and this is true to a certain extent,
but we also need others to recognise our
ideas about ourselves.
This “fundamental truth,” if we can call
it that, is the basis of almost everything in
the book—the roles we are given, the roles
we choose, and the conflicts between them.
In the world's eyes, Arnór is unrighteous but
he experiences himself as righteous. Ómar,
meanwhile, appears just to the world, but he
experiences himself as unjust. Agnes feels
like the world incorrectly associates her
with “foreign” mischief and Snorri is dis-
covering all these structures. All of this is
then mirrored in the historical dimension—
abstractly in the Lithuanian town of Jurba-
rkas and more generally in the Holocaust,
WWII, nationalism, right wing populism
and possibly left wing populism as well.
In the foreground is polarisation—this
dialogue centred on stigmatising the inter-
locutors. I push you into one corner and you
push me into the other. This doesn't only
change the way we see each other, but it
also changes where we stand in the world
and what thoughts we are capable of—it
changes the way we see ourselves.
Can the communication between
Agnes and Arnór then be inter-
preted as a call for a new method of
discussion, one that is different from
the predominant political trench
warfare?
I want to say yes, as I want to call for discus-
sion, but I didn't think of it that way. Their
interest in each other is for me somewhat of
a fetish for the past and possibly an indica-
tion of Iceland's smallness. Agnes can trace
her ancestors only a few generations back
to WWII. Arnór is a doctoral student who
subscribes to a European school of thought
regarding nationality and nationalism on
quite a “high level.” Agnes has never met
a “real” Neo-Nazi and Arnór has never
known Jews—they are sort of an archaeo-
logical discovery for each other.
And Arnór is quite far from the ste-
reotypical all-stupid-racist-idiot that
many would assume him to be…
I'm not sure if calling people idiots is the
best way to deal with xenophobia. Quite
the contrary, I think there's good reason to
take this fear seriously and discuss it with
composure even though one sticks to some
fundamental principles and the demand for
human dignity, which is not something we
just “take ourselves”—we only enjoy it if
society is ready to acknowledge that we are
worth it.
I realised early on that the book would
be in contradiction to itself. And it has been
interesting to see how people take out of it
what suits them best. Most simply, someone
would say that theme A is better than theme
B—but then there are more complicated
interpretations, for instance that the Holo-
caust is completely incomparable to any-
thing else or that the book's main thesis is
a comparison of the Holocaust and Iceland's
immigration policies. Both points are far
from my thought, although they are brought
up in the book. The book also contradicts it-
self, putting forth different ideas, trying one
out before moving to another one, which is
often a complete paradox.
Many of the highly political issues
‘Illska’ takes on—refugee and im-
migration policies, for instance—are
mostly absent from Iceland's political
discourse and are instead executed
as they follow a certain form of logic.
That's quite dangerous, isn't it?
It's very dangerous. It's remarkable how po-
litical issues—those regarding the nation's
participation in real and harsh miseries—
are almost never discussed, at least not be-
fore elections. This has been the case since
I started voting. NATO and the presence of
the US army in Iceland were for instance
never discussed.
Well, there was a party called ‘Fr-
jálsyndi flokkurinn’ which was infa-
mous for its loud xenophobic rheto-
ric, but it sort of vanished after the
post-collapse 2009 parliamentary
elections. In your book, this is indeed
a turning point for Agnes, who feels
like the xenophobic rhetoric she is
studying is eclipsed by the new rhet-
oric of the collapse.
It's even possible to interpret the death of
‘Frjálsyndi flokkurinn’ as a lost opportuni-
ty for discussion. Although the party’s rhet-
oric was built on quite shaky ground, there
were some parliamentarians and others
who were ready to jump into the fray. But
they were met with force—I myself almost
called for the beating of one of their MPs in
a radio column—so the opportunity for dis-
cussion was lost. I'm not sure what a proper
discussion would have resulted in, and it's
impossible to say because we flinched from
taking part in it. But I think this indignation
wasn't the right tactic. We are no better off
by silencing unpopular and ethically unjus-
tifiable ideas.
Is the book supposed to change the
way we talk? Do you hope that it does
anything like that?
It's important to note that the book is not
a political manifesto and was never meant
to be one. Its ideas are only the ideas of
the book, wherein everything is permitted
and the text is allowed to contradict itself.
It's political in the sense that everything is
political, but its only agenda is that of the
fiction—the hypothesis.
But, of course I hope that it affects read-
ers somehow—that they allow themselves
to try the ideas on and discuss them out-loud
without taking them too seriously. At the
same time, we need to be capable of listen-
ing open-mindedly to other people's ideas,
giving them a chance before we talk them
down—so that we won’t have a knee-jerk
reaction based on who the speaker “is” or
who we think he or she is.
Turn to the next spread to read a chapter
of ‘Illska’.
Not The Knee-Jerk Reaction
Recent Icelandic Literary Prize winner Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl on seeing and being seen
by Snorri Páll Jónsson Úlfhildarson
Dagur Gunnarsson
Eiríkur used to be a regular columnist and feature writer at Grapevine before he went on sabbatical
for a couple of years. Go to www.grapevine.is to read articles by Eiríkur!