BENEATH THE SURFACE OF INTERPRETATION. A GLIMPSE INTO NORWEGIAN PROSE
BENEATH THE SURFACE OF INTERPRETATION. A GLIMPSE INTO NORWEGIAN PROSE

Summary/Abstract: The essay takes up the short story Barndom (Childhood), written by the Norwegian author Bjørg Vik, and applies different interpretations using the instruments of psychoanalysis (Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva) and feminism (Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler). The premise of the article is that, despite the seemingly uncomplicated and undramatic narrative, the story conceals a maze of symbols which mirror the anxieties of the main character, a girl of about ten years old. The spatial coordinates of the story functions as a psychological mise en abîme: they reflect the girl’s unease, especially concerning her gender identity, but they also clearly separate the masculine space from the feminine. The girl relates to the outer world through her senses: the sense of smell reveals her desires of integrating the Other, while sight appears as a mechanism of creating distance between her and alterity. The girl’s feelings of insecurity and discomfort echo her longing after the original condition of the undifferentiated identity from the Semiotic Order. The need of gaining her own identity leads to perceiving the mother as the ‘abject’ and, consequently, of accepting the Law of the Father.

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