National Imagination and Novel in Late Twentieth-Century Denmark

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by UCL Discovery Danmarkshistorier : National Imagination and Novel in Late Twentieth-Century Denmark Catherine Claire Thomson PhD The University of Edinburgh 2003 I hereby declare that this thesis has been composed by me, that the work is my own, and that it has not been submitted for any other degree or professional qualification. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Abstract Danmarkshistorier : National Imagination and Novel in Late Twentieth-Century Denmark This thesis centres on the contemporary Danish novel as a conduit for national imagining. Chapter one begins with a discussion of Benedict Anderson's account of the ability of novels to facilitate an imagining of the national community in time and space. Critical responses to Anderson's hypothesis are then situated in the context of late twentieth-century debates on the 'postnational' and 'posthistorical'. Recent Danish historiography attempts to negotiate national histories that recognise not only the contingency of established historical accounts but also their narrative nature, employing textual strategies such as resisting linear chronology and causality, historicising space and place, and fusing (individual) memory and (collective) history. Such texts, hybrid narratives between histories and stories of Denmark (or Danmarkshistorier ), implicate a Danish national model reader who is alive both to the homogenising contemporary discourse of danskhed (Danishness) and to its self-ironising subversion. Contemporary Danish literature, it is argued, shares this concern with what Bhabha identifies as the symbiosis of nationalist historical pedagogy and narrative performance. Chapters two to four focus on three novels which map out the Danish experience of the twentieth century and sit at the intersection of the genres which have marked Danish literature in the 1990s: the punktroman and the encyclopedic novel. Thus all three texts explore temporalities alternative to Anderson's interpretation of Benjamin's 'homogenous empty time', and they construct shifting textual communities of national subjects predicated on the liminalities of cultural identities, on the boundaries between historical fact and fiction, and on the tension between privileged and marginal forms of narrative. In chapter two, Peter Høeg's Forestilling om det tyvende århundrede (1988) is discussed as an anthropological novel which pastiches postcolonial and magical realist writing to critique the longing for order inherent in national historiography and fiction. Peer Hultberg's Byen og verden (1992) is read, in chapter three, as a spatial history of a community in which local, national and global places and times of belonging can coalesce. Chapter four examines the configurations of individual and collective memory, trauma and event, the epochal and the everyday in Vibeke Grønfeldt's I dag (1998). The thesis concludes with a discussion of the novels in question as sites of textual memory, in which 'postnational' spacetimes, including the term of the millennium and the glocal, can be negotiated. For Mum, Dad, and Elizabeth Anne, with love, and in memory of Ben Voysey Acknowledgements It has taken five years to produce this dissertation, and life has moved on. I complete it in a different century and a different nation to those in which I began it. The first change was expected, the second one not. My East Anglian exile from my country has given me a new and acute perspective on national identity and its cultural expressions which I would not have gained from staying at home. A first vote of thanks must go to Bjarne Thorup Thomsen, my supervisor for this project and my teacher for the last ten years, whose heroic reserves of patience, good humour, flexibility and sparky insights have maintained my enthusiasm for the PhD and for Danish culture in general. Tusind tak! Scandinavian Studies at the University of Edinburgh has been a home- from-home for almost a decade, and, thanks to the efforts of Peter Graves, Arne Kruse, Martine Pugh and Gunilla Blom Thomsen, and others, a warm and stimulating environment in which to learn and to work. Since my move, in 2000, to the School of Language, Linguistics and Translation Studies at the University of East Anglia, this project has been prompted to develop in various directions by teaching and by opportunities to attend conferences and symposia in the UK and Denmark. Remission from teaching, when appropriate, gave me some space to breathe. I am very grateful to my colleagues at UEA, especially Drs Jean Boase-Beier and Janet Garton for effective and friendly mentoring. Special mention must go to my colleagues and friends Carol O’Sullivan, Neil Smith and Scott MacKenzie, who have been most generous with their time, insights, practical help and pertinent questions, and have borne the brunt of my recent PhD-related crises. Pernille Langkjær Chapman and family have kept me grounded and supplied with Danish books and saltlakrids over the years. Stephanie Millar and Catriona Murray have ensured that Edinburgh remains home, and have been endlessly supportive, interested and interesting, as have my inspiring sister Lizzi Thomson, Javier Castillo, Juana Espasa, the late Ben Voysey, and others whose kind contributions go unrecorded here, but are no less appreciated for that. I would also like to thank David and Maureen Miller, whose idea it was to start studying part-time in the first place, for their support in the early years. Søren Ulrik Thomsen, Daisy Neijmann, Britta Timm Knudsen, Peter Holm-Jensen, Allan Juhl Kristensen, Henk van der Liet and many others have been generous in sharing ideas and references. I am grateful to the Faculty of Arts of the University of Edinburgh for two Small Studentships awarded in 1998 and 1999, and to the Research Committee of the School of Language, Linguistics and Translation Studies at UEA for support towards the costs of submission of the thesis. By far the greatest debt of thanks I owe is, of course, to my parents, Catherine and Robert Thomson, whose moral, practical and financial support (and open-minded acceptance of my esoteric career choices) has reached far, far beyond the call of duty over the years. I don’t tell them often enough how much I appreciate it, and I have too often neglected them in favour of work; I hope this end result will stand as partial recompense. Contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1 The Textual Life of Danes Fiction, Historiography and the National Imagination 7 1. Imagined Communities 7 1.1. Becoming (post)national 10 1.2. Imaginary and imagined nations 11 1.3. Post-Anderson?: Smith and Ethno-symbolism 15 1.4. The situatedness of theory 18 1.5. Beyond the national? The politics of identity and difference 21 2. The spatio-temporal dimension(s) of the national imagination 26 2.1. Thinking time 28 2.1.1.From Messianic time to homogeneous empty time 29 2.1.2. Bhabha and the double-time of the nation 32 2.1.3. The ‘meanwhile’ 34 2.1.4. Material participation in the ‘meanwhile’ 37 2.2. National space 40 2.2.1. Symbolic boundaries and topographies 41 2.2.2. Heterogeneous spaces 45 2.2.3. Textual space 47 3. National history, postnational hi/stories 49 3.1. Order from chaos: history and the nation 49 3.2. Cultural and historical materialism 50 3.3. ‘Jarring Witnesses’ 52 3.3.1. The triumphal procession…and the ‘others’ 52 3.3.2. The historian as jarring witness 55 3.3.3. Bakhtín and heteroglossia 57 3.4. Fact and fiction in postmodern historiography and literature 58 3.5. The end(s) of history 62 3.6. Den sidste Danmarkshistorie 64 4. Nationness and fiction 69 4.1 The question of content and form 70 4.2. The (post)national model reader 73 4.3. (Post)national literary histories 78 Chapter 2 A Longing for Order Peter Høeg: Forestilling om det tyvende århundrede (1988) 84 1. The postcolonial context 84 1.1. The Latin American genesis: One Hundred Years of Solitude and the postnational novel 85 1.2. Anthropology and the novel 89 2. Disjunctive hi/stories: archival spacetime 93 2.1. Myth versus History: the archival novel 93 2.2. The myth of origins: beginnings (and endings) 100 2.3. Archival time in Forestilling om det tyvende århundrede 106 2.3.1. The magical metaphorics of time 106 2.3.2. The everyday and the epochal 110 2.3.3. Koncentrat as chronotope 113 2.3.4. Pre-figuring and fulfilment 115 2.3.5. Mirrors and dreams: another time of writing 118 2.4. The location of knowledge 119 2.4.1. The archive as motif 119 2.4.2. Jarring witnesses 124 2.4.3. The narrator as jarring witness: official and unofficial hi/stories 126 3. The longing for order 132 3.1. Genesis and genealogy 133 3.2. Textual perversities 137 3.3. Scatology and eschatology 140 3.4. The longing for ordet : or, the myth of writing 144 After/word: Ordering the archive: the longing for space 150 Chapter 3 Living space Peer Hultberg: Byen og verden (1992) 152 Prologue: An ethnographic account of Viborg 152 1. Byen og verden as spatial hi/story 153 1.1. Reconfiguring narrative : or, From Work to Text 154 1.2. The spatial turn: space and text in the late twentieth century 156 1.2.1. Space in/and history 158 1.2.2. The body and society in space 159 1.2.3. Space in text 161 1.3. Space, place and memory: the novel and the nation 162 1.3.1. Anthropological place 163 1.3.1.1. Places and non-places 163 1.3.1.2. Imagining local and national place 165 1.3.1.3. Heterotopias 169 1.4. The textual space(s) of the novel 170 2.

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