Literary Realism and Vitalism in Faroese Literature

By Kim Simonsen

Lyric poetry predominates in literature from the Faroe Islands. Normally, less than one novel is published a year on average. From the patriotic romantic song tradition from the 1880s to the first experiments with modernistically inspired literature, and on to the Post Modernism of the 1980s and 1990s, lyric poets have always played an important role. This may be due to many different factors – not least of which may be the fact that the prose tradition on the Faroe Islands is very young. Another problem, which people from larger countries with more substantial literary traditions may find difficult to understand, is that it isn’t so easy to write in a small community where everybody knows each another and immediately identifies characters, dilemmas and themes in an author’s work with some real life counterparts.
In the context of the visual arts and the vigorously flourishing musical culture of the Faroe Islands it may indeed seem very relevant to question whether there is any contemporary Faroese prose of any quality. Contemporary literature from the Faroe Islands has not, for example, in any way dealt with the crisis of the 1990s, where ten percent of the population were forced to emigrate; or with the marked growth of political and cultural nationalism in the 90s; or with major issues in public debate on the Faroes, such as religious faith, identity, nationalism and globalisation.
The first Faroese Realists took the lives of the common people as their point of departure, collecting their material from the reality of everyday life. In a philosophical sense, their works are sober and materialistic. Literary Realism emerged contemporaneously with the first trends towards democracy, building on a kind of Peasant Realism, where the preferred subjects were nature, working conditions, and naturalistic descriptions of the material conditions of the time. In his literary research, Jógvan Isaksen has defined this style as a kind of Social Realism, exhibiting a superabundance of picturesque descriptions of the countryside and of specific localities. One might go even further, and say that these descriptions take up too much space at the expense of the expression of a more modern inner reflection and more lyrical language. The modern Faroese Realistic prose tradition was created in the 1930s by authors like Hedin Brú (1901-87), Martin Joensen (1902-66) and William Heinesen (1900-1991). William Heinesen, however, later chose to follow some other paths, so that his work became more freely imaginative and truly Modernist.

A journey into an unending story
Let us briefly take a look at a couple of contemporary Faroese realists – one a successful stylist, and one whom I find less successful. To deal with the latter first, Oddvør Johansen, (b.1941), won a novel competition in 2004 in connection with the annual Arts Festival held by the Nordic House on the Faroe Islands, with a novel called Sebastians Hús („Sebastian’s House“). In this novel, we trace the development of a character called Diddan. Her childhood and youth are delineated from the start of the previous century up to the 1950s. Sebastians Hús starts out as a Rahmenerzählung where Sebastian’s house itself provides the framework of the narrative. The main problem with this little novel is its thoroughgoing respectability, its Vitalistic view of life, and the fact that it soon deteriorates into mere anecdotal reminiscences of Thorshavn in the 1930s and 1940s. The literary craftmanship is inferior, the characters one-dimensional, and the narrative technique archaic.
By way of contrast, we might more profitably turn to a significant proportion of Jens Pauli Heinesen’s (b. 1932) substantial production, crowned by his seven-volume work entitled Journeying Into a Never Ending Story, which was modelled on Marcel Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Jens Pauli Heinesen made his debut as a novelist in 1958 with a novel called Yrkjarin úr Selvik („The Poet from Sælvig“). With the life of an artist as its subject, this novel was influenced by the Post-War French Nouveau Roman. Even though the main character in the novel is a cardboard character – a chronically tubercular, bohemian Romantic poet – the novel does have a touch of the introversion, and the mercilessly ironical reflection, which are typical of early Modernist novels.
The seven ambitiously conceived novels concerned with recollection and the life of an artist, subtitled Journeying Into a Never Ending Story, tell us about Hugin, who is seduced by a weird woman – a wood nymph, perhaps, or some mythical muse, who lures Hugin into a world of stories and folk-tales. In terms of narrative technique, Jens Pauli Heinesen’s major sequence of novels is of high literary quality, clearly inspired by international models. Heinesen both recreates and deconstructs the Realistic novel by bringing its form to bear on a new and more complicated reality, where existence is not something to be taken for granted as it was in the naïve realistic novels of the period between the wars. Heinesen manages to situate his native home, the little Faroese village, within the larger contexts of the 20th century, such as the Second World War, the Cold War and the drama which Existentialist atheism creates for the main character, Hugin.

Faroese or Danish Realism?
Faroese prose is directly inspired by Danish literature. Which makes it relevant to ask how „Faroese Literature“ really ought to be defined. Does it include Danish authors who write in Danish about how they grew up on the Faroe Islands? Here, one might mention Arthur Krasilnikoff, and his novel, Hvalens øje („The Eye of the Whale“), which is a beautiful recollection about a boy’s adolescence on the Faroes just after the Occupation. And, among others authors worth mentioning in this category, there is Lisbeth Nebelong, whose topically Realistic novel, Når engle spiller Mozart („When Angels Play Mozart“), is set on the Faroe Islands of today.
There are Faroese authors who write for a literary public about the Faroe Islands, and about Denmark, in Denmark (many Faroese authors live or have lived in Denmark, recording their encounters with Danish culture) and there are Danish authors who write about the Faroe Islands. This clearly illustrates the contemporary breakdown of nationally defined cultural borders.

Vitalism and Realism
The recurrent subject of 20th C. Faroese poetry and prose is an intimate relationship with nature – whence emerges a philosophy of typically healthy Vitalism and a struggle for the positive in life. Vitalism has a predilection for extreme situations which can bring us into touch with the „pure pulse of life“. Vitalism actually has its own ethic, describing men as speculative, suffering and dynamic, while women are described as part of nature. For Oddvør Johansen, amongst others, women are the source of life itself, sacred and endlessly self-sacrificing. While, for others writers, they are involuntarily destructive, like the character of Barbara in Jørgen-Frantz Jacobsen’s novel of the same name, who is a pure representation of some Vitalistic life force. Under the influence of Vitalism, even William Heinesen deploys stereotypical female characters. But this is one heritage from Heinesen which I think Faroese literature ought to liberate itself from. Vitalism has no place for anything new, founded, as it is, on its concept of a Vitalistic life force, on ancient myths, and on adulation of the qualities necessary for survival.
In relation to this tradition, Jens Pauli Heinesen’s characters and themes are exceedingly modern. In contrast to naïve Realism and Vitalism, his characters – and especially his female characters – are not Vitalistic caricatures: they are just as mean, beautiful, moody, sexy, treacherous, and modern, as they are in real life and in the prose of modern Nordic Realism elesewhere.
The limitation of Vitalism as a philosophy, and as an aesthetic for the Realistic novel, is that its biologically deterministic view of human life precludes the individual’s possible existential experience of freedom and autonomy in relation to what nature has determined – which makes vitalism a fundamentally conservative artistic project. Vitalism is still to be found as a frequently unconscious philosophy of life among Faroese prose-writers – especially among mediocre female authors! – as is often also the case among other Nordic Contemporary Realists, such as Herbjørg Wassmo, whose Dinas Bog („Dina’s Book“) presents us with a female character who is so superhuman, valkyrie-like, fertile, vital and unpredictable as to be aesthetically incredible, like some century-old Vitalistic statue by Rudolf Tegner.

Biedermeier Realism
The problem with Realistic Faroese literature today is that it all too frequently imitates the older forms of Realism which are to be found among the authors of the 1930s. This may be due to the fact that Faroese prose is, in terms of its sources of inspiration, at least one generation of authors behind, in relation to developments in Denmark and the rest of Scandinavia. Traditional features of this antiquated „Contemporary Realism“ – things like its strong epic tradition in contrast to dramatic structure; its folk universe with its roots in peasants’ language; its often rather antiquated omniscient narrative technique, such as we found in Oddvør Johansen’s novel – all too many of these have been infused into contemporary Faroese literature.
The most serious accusation one could raise against this far too inoffensive and old-fashioned literary Realism is that it does not dare go any further than what is prescribed by its roots in folklore – and that Faroese literature is still far too timorous, and prim and proper, whether it is influenced by indignant Social Realism or by Vitalism, by exaggerated Post Modernism or by a stylistically lightweight Realism which more often than not deteriorates into a kind of unsophisticated parochial literature.
After a reading of Oddvør Johansen’s prize-winning novel, it becomes very clear that realistic novels from the Faroe Islands often lack critical distance to their material: and that goes for the places, subjects, and historical conflicts, etc. which are dealt with. So these novels become reminiscent of biographical or semi-autobiographical works, over which, like Cold War CIA-documents, a veil should now be drawn. The most serious problem about the writing of Oddvør Johansen and others is its structural deficiency, which makes many of these writers fall back on some kind of „ultra-realism“, with its eternal enumeration of the colour of each and every boat- house – which seem to have be described like some naively realistic painting.
It might be a timely provocation to suggest that the Danes, Arthur Krasilnikoff and Lisbeth Nebelong, are actually the greatest Faroese Contemporary Realists, most truly concerned about the Faroe Islands and Faroese conditons today. Nebelong’s novel is, in fact, precisely that breath of fresh air which is lacking in contemporary Faroese literature, in that it is a very honest story about the quest for meaning and coherence in the modern world. About choices and lack of choices, love, music, and politics. It is also a story about being Nordic. About past and present relationships between Denmark and the Faroe Islands, and about the Faroese path to independence – about everything that the Faroese themselves should be writing about, but don’t dare to touch.
With few exceptions, it may be said that contemporary literature from the Faroe Islands is insufficiently aesthetically adventurous. Where the shoe really pinches is in the lack of detailed reflection about the weaknesses and potential of both Modernism and Realism.

Kim Simonsen is a cultural critic, at present doing a university degree thesis on Nordic Literature.

Translated by Philip Edmonds