Nordlit

Cover and colofon

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Introduction

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«Suicide and suicidal survival», this special issue of Nordlit, examines the presentation of the extremities of the human existence, primarily in literature, but also in popular music, a TV-series, and a graphic novel. Why do some people commit suicide while the vast majority continue their life? What is suicide? And suicidality? Why do literature and art present unique possibilities to reflect upon and to interpret suicide and survival, and an alternative to sociological, philosophical, and psychological approaches to this grave topic? How do we define suicide literature? This introduction and the twelve articles meditate upon such questions, and how these existential inquiries can be apprehended through imaginative sensibility and aesthetic awareness.

Absurd Life Simulated Upon the Blank Canvas of the World

2024-12-17T14:58:22+01:00

Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road (2006) and Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), grapple with the choice of suicide versus struggle when meaning is exposed as socially fabricated. McCarthy declares, “there is no god and we are his prophets”, a dismal idea if one is searching for external meaning but conversely an empowering permission to create. McCarthy juxtaposes a father who chooses to produce absurd meaning with a mother who rationally commits suicide. Using Jean Baudrillard’s philosophical lens to read The Road, forces the reader to walk through a world of simulacra where floating signifiers are detached from meaning. Combining The Road, Simulacra and Simulation, and The Myth of Sisyphus, exposes that living is irrational because the simulation we have incarcerated ourselves within is absurd; however, McCarthy shows that in embracing the artistic struggle of creating a personal construct we feel most alive.

Ah, Come Here, Oh Satan!

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In this article, I analyze Karl Ove Knausgaard’s novel The Night School (2023) with particular focus on the novel’s connection between a motif of suicide and a motif of a pact with the devil. In the novel, Knausgaard reuses the story of his own path to becoming an artist from My Struggle. However, the story is told in a more negative light by being coupled with the Faust myth. In a close analysis of The Night School’s web of references to both pacts with the devil and My Struggle, I will show how the novel can be read as a reflection on the price of creating art. In this article, entering into a pact with the devil is interpreted as a form of suicide, as the artist is ready to sell his soul and identity to serve art.

"I find comfort in others with great sorrows"

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This article analyses Tiril Broch Aakre’s autobiographical documentary Mødre og døtre (Mothers and Daughters, 2019) as a next of kin narrative and a fictional double portrait. The book depicts a suicidal mother and shows how grief affects the daughter’s perception of herself and her role as daughter and mother. The text creates a polyphony through quotes from the mother’s letters, books she has read, and the inclusion of the mother’s notes from hospitalisation. These texts provide some solution to the narrative and ethical dilemma of how it is possible to talk about the mother and her suicide without compromising her dignity. At the same time, the book promotes a different view of suicidality and suicide than the prevailing view in society today.

"It was a powerful little creature"

2024-12-17T14:58:18+01:00

In Laila Stien’s short story «Markblomster», the narrator recounts the story of her brother and his relationship to Alice, a city girl who ends up taking her own life by driving their car into the ocean. This article analyses the short story with particular focus on how the narrator uses strategies to take control over the suicide narrative, and actively suppresses the perspective of the deceased. This control method is examined within the broader tendency to frame suicide narratives in metaphors of silence. Furthermore, this is interpreted as an expression of what Peter Wessel Zapffe, in On the Tragic (1941), calls suppression, i.e. maintaining decorum to preserve what he terms the autotelic hope. Via Zapffe’s theory of tragedy, I argue that the tragic potential of the short story cannot be limited to the individual suicide but also, through the narrator’s narrative strategies, reveals a human need to suppress the tragic aspects of existence as such.

They, you, I

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In this article, I analyse Niviaq Korneliussen’s treatment of the current Greenlandic suicide situation in the novel Flower Valley (Blomsterdalen, 2020). The novel is – according to the author – «political», which raises several questions: Why write a novel instead of an opinion piece? What possibilities does fiction open? In what ways can a novel contribute to discussing and nuancing political, cultural, and human issues? Drawing on rhetorical fictionality theory, I focus on Korneliussen’s use of local fictionality, particularly in the form of death representations, composition, and pronominal shifts, demonstrating how she, trough the novel’s countdown structure, for instance, presents perspectives that seem inaccessible outside literature.

Creativity and destruction in Bjarte Breiteig's «They don't mourn down there»

2024-12-17T14:58:14+01:00

How can we interpret Bjarte Breiteig's short story «Der nede sørger de ikke» (They Don't Mourn Down There)? The short story depicts two teenage boys who, seemingly without reason, vandalize the arts and crafts rooms at their school. However, on a symbolic level, their destructive actions are connected to themes of suicide, creativity, and individuality.

A burning knife: Suicide, sublimation and slapstick in Arne Østring's "Out of the Silence"

2024-12-17T14:58:20+01:00

Arne Østring’s flash fiction «Out of the Silence» could certainly be read as a slightly comical text about a Japanese kamikaze pilot’s – a suicide bomber’s – impossible raid against a militarily superior enemy, but more interestingly the text balances a war-logic and a rational psychology, it unpacks the premise and backstory of kamikaze war, and it situates a suicide bomber as what sociologist Norbert Elias called homo clausus: the isolated, enclosed individual who is all alone in the world. And finally, the text demonstrates that a reading of literary suicides must always be a reading of the text.

Youth, suicide and suicidal survival in Heine T. Bakkeid's Uten puls (2006), Oliver Lovrenski's da vi var yngre (2023) and Simon Stranger's 304 dager (2021)

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Why do young people commit suicide? How does young adult fiction present teenage suicide? Suicide fiction can be simplistically defined as a literary work in which suicide constitutes the life-altering event for the character(s)’ death or survival, and for the next of kin’s challenges. This article meditates upon how the young adult novels Uten puls (2006) by Heine T. Bakkeid, da vi var yngre (2023) by Oliver Lovrenski and 304 dager (2021) by Simon Stranger present suicide, survival, and the next of kin’s experience and importance. The explorations of these young adult suicide novels are predominantly literary, although they also draw upon Durkheim’s sociology in Suicide (1897), on Freud’s psychoanalytical theory, and on Camus’ philosophical classic, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942).

Horror literature and suicide

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The first part of this article discusses suicide as motif and theme in horror literature and the mythologizing of real suicides by horror authors from the medieval era onwards. The second part analyses suicides by gentlemen in «The Great God Pan» by Arthur Machen, with a particular focus on how these suicides by hanging (with noose) have an antique (Greek) connection and are femininely coded. Finally, part three presents a reading of a probable intertext on mysticism and (horror) literature from «The Poetic Principle» by E A Poe over H P Lovecraft and «The Night Ocean», written by Lovecraft's literary executor R H Barlow.

Ghost in the mirror

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The musical career of David Bowie displays a longstanding fascination with suicide, as both a theme that recurs in his lyrics and as a visually enacted motif in his stage and media performances. This essay focuses on how the artist responded to the death of Bowie’s half-brother Terry Burns by suicide in 1985. Close attention is given to the lyrics of, and music video for, “Jump They Say” (1993), both of which are interpreted as acts of mourning. The essay engages with theories of mourning and trauma to suggest that Bowie’s response to Burns’s suicide is a complex one. Bowie is shown to try to rationalise his reaction, via psychoanalysis, as an ordered working through that leads to the freeing of the ego. With the help of Derrida, it is here argued that the process is, in fact, a protracted and open-ended one. The analysis connects Bowie’s mourning with important earlier songs such as “Rock’n Roll Suicide”, “All the Madmen” and “The Bewlay Brothers”, and also demonstrates how “I Can’t Read” and “Goodbye Mr. Ed” can be interpreted as predecessors for “Jump They Say”. It is argued that Bowie’s mourning process later becomes more occluded, but persists to the very end of his career, including the ending of his musical Lazarus (2016).

The writing on the wall

2024-12-17T14:58:12+01:00

This article analyzes the theme of suicide in NRK's successful youth drama Rod Knock (Rådebank). Departing from a genre perspective on youth drama conventions within Norwegian and Nordic public service broadcasting drama, the article analyzes how the series constructs a compassionate gaze that seeks both to recognize the impossibility of understanding the act of suicide and to show conditions for actions that may contribute to survival.

Iconic solidarity with death

2024-12-17T14:58:07+01:00

In A voluntary death (2018), comics writer Steffen Kverneland thematizes the suicide of his father. This contribution examines the interaction between the verbal text and the visual design. It turns out that the compound expression creates complex and partly contradictory interpretation possibilities of the father's suicide. In this context, Thierry Groensteens concept of '"iconic solidarity" is of particular importance.

Postscript

2024-12-17T14:57:59+01:00

This postscript focuses on the connection betweeen literature, society, and psychology regarding suicide .

Contributors

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Info on the contributors