(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
"Norway is a pink sleeping tablet," the protagonist says This life or the next by Demian Vitanza. The book was published this winter and it constantly catches me off, like terrorist threats and immigration debates. Vitanza's documentary novel, which has some points of contact with Åsne Seierstad's Two Sisters, is about a returned Norwegian Syrians.
This text is not about Vitanza's work, but about the annual critics seminar at Lillehammer Literature Festival, which this year took place 1. and 2. June. I start with Vitanza because This life or the nexts uncomfortable news was dormant in the back of the head during the seminar called “Our Houses and Hotels are Burning. Criticism and publicity in an insane time ».
Seansen was initiated by the Swedish newspaper editor and author Åsa Linderborg, who mainly talked about topics we know from countless debates in recent years, mixed with a dose of self-criticism on behalf of "the Swedish PK elite". It was about a polarized and increasingly profit-driven and mediated public, the pitfalls of identity politics and the necessity of freedom of expression. The post was not so much an affirmation that yes, our houses and hotels are burning (a title which, by the way, feels too literal in light of recent weeks in England); it left me with exactly the same questions I had at the beginning: Why don't the fire extinguishers work? Has anyone wondered about a substance that gives the flames more life? And not least: How did I, through Vitanza's book, sympathize with a man who voluntarily resigns from the Norwegian welfare state and goes to Syria to fight on the part of jihadists? Maybe the next speaker could give me some answers.
How can I sympathize with a person withdrawing from the Norwegian welfare state and going to Syria as a jihadist?
Microsociologies. Danish literary critic Tue Andersen Nexø would talk about his latest book, Testimony from the welfare state. His method is to read the contemporary Danish literature politically – and not just the literature that directly invites such a reading. Among other things, he is based on the style minimalist Helle Helle and looks at how her protagonists are actively standing far down on the welfare state's career paths. Nexø investigates what he calls microsociologies, and sees the Danish welfare state as a kind of role-play in which everyone must fulfill what their role requires in order for it not to break down. He quoted Pablo Llambias' Town hall, where a man in the face of a so-called social technocrat tries to force some visions of the good society from the man's role as a community builder. The problem is that the man does not know what he is building, but only does what he is told. This is where Vitanza's jihadist (regretful, noteworthy) comes back into the picture. He experiences a society where everyone plays their roles to the best of their ability to achieve a materially optimal life, and that politics is about keeping the threats to the optimum away. There are no big visions to aspire to, other than a musty nationalism that he will never be a part of, no matter how many brown cheese slices he eats.
Nexø mentions several who, like the Syrians, have turned away from the welfare state, such as the Danish poets Yahya Hassan and Asta Olivia Nordenhof. The latter begins the collection of poems The easy and the lonely with these lines:
a wet lawn and me
it will be great to step out
the material moisture meter shows you the
here smells of maple
the easy and the lonely
do not die on your own do not own
even completely
the statutory and the duties
Provide tea and oranges
to the sick that life comes from without
the earliest water of the morning
the nerves are madder than I am
The lines "I die on my own / I do not own myself completely / the legal and the duties" can be read as a universal longing for the sublime and idealized. And there may not be room for this longing in the welfare state's social-democratic utopia, which unites capitalism's extraction of resources with healthy, healthy and laborable bodies.
The story as a tool. If the welfare state can only offer us small stories, while we long for the big and transcendent – what can we do? This leads me to the event's big draw, a conversation between the said Åsne Seierstad, the Swedish writer Steve Sem-Sandberg and critic Bernhard Ellefsen. The three talked about how the use of literary instruments in their documentary narratives opens up room for both empathy and depth, a method that is not without ethical complications. However, we need literary approaches to understand phenomena such as ideology and longing because they are linked to a non-everyday, non-technocratic language – a language the bureaucrat does not possess in the novel, but who, to take a non-arbitrary example, a book of which the Qur'an has great mouths.
Researcher Kasper Green Munk's contribution was also the contrast between the micro-narratives in the comfortable welfare state against the Great Narrative in Norway: World War II. Monk's lectures centered around the Scandinavian fascination for fascism, which he finds among others at Karl Ove Knausgård. Munk defines fascination which something an interest cannot exhaust, and contrasts fascism with what he calls "the unreality of the welfare state" and its posthistoric apathy. We long for the great story that a world war can offer.
But do we really? War is terrorist action every single day. And Vitanza's Syrians return home, though he knows that a long prison sentence, condemnation and racism in both everyday life and partying will probably follow him for the rest of his life.
There is no room for the yearning for the sublime and idealized social welfare utopia of the welfare state.
So why do young people continue to opt out of the welfare state, even if it cannot fill every nook and cranny of their lives with sublime meaning? Perhaps because, to paraphrase the Danish poet Olga Ravn, we know that the welfare state exists, but its benefits no longer come to us. Free student life no longer exists, unemployment among young people is increasing, almost every job is temporary, the dream of home ownership remains a dream, freelance life is anything but free and NAV closes its doors. Maybe it is better to reject the welfare state as a pink sleeping pill than to realize that it is a pill that you cannot afford anyway? Choosing away is better than not having a choice to make?
