Iceland and Images of the North

Foreign Fictions of Iceland

Daisy Neijmann, “Foreign Fictions of Iceland,” in Iceland and Images of the North, ed. Sumarliði R. Ísleifsson with the collaboration of Daniel Chartier, Québec: Presses de l’Université du Québec, “Droit au Pôle” series, and Reykjavík: ReykjavíkurAkademían, 2011. Foreign Fictions of Iceland Daisy Neijmann University College London (United Kingdom) Abstract – This article will examine ways in which Iceland has been fictionally recreated by the foreign imagination and assess to what extent stereotypical images of Iceland are perpetuated, challenged, and/or reconstructed in contemporary foreign fiction. The role of Iceland in fiction from different countries will be discussed and compared, as well as the way Iceland is “contained” in the language of the novel/story. Perspective, form, and national literary context will be also be explored, as well as the “Iceland novel’s” relationship to other writing on Iceland. Keywords – Literature, fiction, cultural representation, cultural difference, image, the Other Introduction Medieval Iceland has spoken to the European literary imagination for centuries. Not only were the Icelandic sagas translated into many languages, they inspired foreign writers to create their own tales about Iceland’s medieval past.1 Contemporary Iceland has never really been able to compete with the romantic allure of its history. During the last few decades, however, there has been a noticeable change from an almost exclusive interest in the Iceland of the past to the “cool” and trend-setting Iceland of the present, which has raised the profile of modern-day Iceland in European culture and even, to a modest extent, in literature. This article will examine a selection of foreign fictions of Iceland that have appeared in the wake of this shift in focus in order to analyze the image of post-medieval Iceland that emerges in these works and its relation to the general discourse, images, and stereotypes of Iceland as part of the North. 1 See for instance Wawn 2000; Helgason 1999. ICELAND AND IMAGES OF THE NORTH [ 482 ] Representations of Iceland and the Iceland Novel As Sumarliði Ísleifsson points out in his article “Islands on the Edge” in this volume, foreign descriptions of Iceland go back as far as the 11th century, and there is a sizeable corpus of European writing on Iceland. From the Enlightenment onwards, Iceland became an increasingly popular subject of travel accounts and scientific literature, and scholars have turned their attention to the ways in which Iceland has been represented in these works.2 Foreign fiction inspired by post-medieval Iceland, on the other hand, is still quite rare and, with some notable exceptions, quite recent. This raises the question whether there are any significant differences in the way Iceland is portrayed in these two genres. Do the requirements of fictional conventions produce a different textual representation? There is no doubt that travel literature and fiction are closely related, and often the lines between the two genres are blurred.3 But to what extent and to what purpose do fiction writers rely on this existing corpus of travelogues for their representations of Iceland? And, given the fact that belles lettres are inevitably part of, and in dialogue with, a larger literary context, do national literary traditions influence the image of Iceland in fiction—are there, in other words, noticeable differences between countries? For the purpose of this article, I have selected five works of fiction, each from a different country, in order to analyze and compare the image of Iceland that emerges and the role Iceland is made to play in each work. In addition, I will discuss the relationship of these Iceland novels to travel literature on Iceland. The works to be discussed are the following: the novel Skimmer (Shimmer, 1996) by the Swedish author Göran Tunström; the Dutch novel De Knoop van IJsland (Iceland’s Knot, 1996) by Gerrit Jan Zwier; “Kaltblau” (“Cold Blue,” 2003), a German short story by Judith Hermann; Smukke biler efter krigen (Smart Cars after the War, 2004), a Danish novel by Lars Frost; and The Killer’s Guide to Iceland (2005), a novel by the Northern Irish writer Zane Radcliffe. The fact that I wanted to do a crossnational comparison, and examine the representation of Iceland in the language in which it was originally cast, determined the countries I looked to for my selection of texts. Within these countries it soon 2 Notably Ísleifsson 1996; also Aho 1993. 3 Adams 1983. FOREIGN...