Vigdís Grímsdóttir

From Vigdís Grímsdóttir

I’m not sure I want to know why I write.

Yet I know.

But I’m reticent to talk about it.

Yet I go for it because deep down inside I’m surely cool as all working people are.

Some things you just do, make the bed, do the dishes, do the laundry, read for kids, blow your old grandma’s nose, give the wrong change at the store, feel sick when you put clean teeth in your aunt’s mouth, stick an old worn-out note into your lover’s sandwich, sneak into the movies during break, cry at the funeral of a man you don’t know at all simply because the music is so beautiful, hit your finger when you’re driving nails into the walls, curse drollish people who swindle you, hate those who bite you, get a job at nights so you can travel abroad and see pyramids, love those who give you flowers ... and write books.

Yes, some things you just do and, fortunately enough, rarely have to explain why.

You do it automatically and yet are fully conscious and full of passion.

And without notes to follow. That’s how a decent human being does her job.

I think I’m a decent human being.

I could of course be hard on myself and take a look at some intellectual and philosophical theories about literature, measure myself against each of them, find some things that fit, knowing the whole time that I’m faking, because I’m sure my secret is stupid, unpopular and banal. The point is I write books because it’s what I know best, I can’t do anything better, have no stronger urge, cannot reach harmony with myself in anything else or make stronger connections with other people.

I also know I can never change the world because I’m so uncontrollably free of the immortality gene.

Nor do I want to change the world because I expect the world to grind me, polish, hit, beat, love, cuddle, rampage me and change me.

Maybe this goes hand in hand. Perhaps it isn’t so.

My secret—in time and space, the future, the present, and the past—is that I’m first and foremost a cuddling and uncontrollable human being with far too great a need for touching and I know nothing better than the word, the sentences, the paragraphs, the meaning, the baubles, and the letters to approach the universe and the universal consciousness I’m more or less a part of.

And I’m lucky to have found a path in the chaos.

I am also fortunate to see the chaos.

Because I am chaos.

My grandma told me when I was fifteen that I shouldn’t start having sex because I would be unable to quit. No matter how I tried. I told her I couldn’t promise that because more likely than not I would break my promise.

Then she talked about obsession; it was the first time I heard the word.

Then she talked about vices.

And I couldn’t help connecting the two in my mind.

But then I had sex and I couldn’t stop.

You have just gotten into the habit, she said.

Soon I saw it was the same with the stories, the poems and all of the things I was always writing.

I started and couldn’t stop.

And it didn’t matter what position I used, whether it was in today or out tomorrow, I wrote obsessively and couldn’t stop. Simply because it feels so good to write and is so much fun and also because without it my life would have little meaning.

Perhaps that’s a vice.

I encourage everyone to find his or her own vices and stick with them.

Vigdís Grímsdóttir, 2000.

Translated by Jóhann Thorarensen.

A Fictious Being. On Vigdís Grímsdóttir’s Work

Grímsdóttir writes for grown-ups in children and children in grown-ups and it is certain that most of her books deal more or less with children though only one of them has been called a children’s book.

With these words Vigdís Grímsdóttir describes her fiction in an introductory brochure following a Norwegian exhibition of Icelandic children’s books over the last ten years. (1) There she draws attention to the connections between childhood and adulthood or the blurred boundaries between and the combination of these stages in an individual’s life, where children live in grown-ups and grown-ups in children, but such a blurring is also very prominent in her work. Many of her characters are childlike even though they are supposed to be grown-up and similarly children often find themselves in roles that in no way fit their age and thus the point of view often becomes simultaneously childlike and adultlike, irrespective of the narrator’s age or the central consciousness of the text.

Beginning in Grímsdóttir’s first book, Tíu myndir úr lífi þínu (Ten Pictures from Your Life, 1983) which is a collection of short narratives and poems, childhood is a prominent thread but it becomes a dominating theme in the novels Kaldaljós (Cold Light,1987), Ég heiti Ísbjörg, ég er ljón (My Name is Ísbjörg, I am a Leo, 1990), and Grandavegur 7 (Grandi Road 7, 1994) as well as in the children’s book Gauti vinur minn (My Friend Gauti) (1996). Also to be noted is the collection of poetry Minningabók (Book of Memories, 1990) which Grímsdóttir wrote in memory of her father and dedicates to her mother. In this work memories of childhood are foregrounded. In Grímsdóttir’s other works children are not the main characters or do not even appear, and yet in some of them one can find a point of view similar to that of childhood. This is especially true of the picturesque world the main character of the novel Stúlkan í skóginum (The Girl in the Forest) creates for herself and dwells in, her inner forest, which actually has more in common with the lightheartedness, adventure, and innocence traditionally connected with the world of the child than the harsh world the children in most of the aforementioned stories live in.

In Grímsdóttir’s work the world of the child is not at all a world of innocence and adventure but much rather one of threat and even horror. Her stories often focus on children’s desperate attempts to keep their world and the world of their family together, or characters who cannot separate themselves from their childhood even though they have reached adulthood. Thus most of the stories are not Bildungsromans in the traditional sense, in many cases the characters have a hard time facing reality and rather turn inwards and close themselves off in a fictional world they think they have under their control. This has, however, changed somewhat in Grímsdóttir’s later work where the characters try to use their inner experience to connect with other people and the outside world, allthough the connection or even the fusion with others they long to have does not always become a reality. But whether the characters are heading away from reality for good as in Grimsdottirs earlier work (and thus perish in the search for themselves and for meaning) or use their inner experince to head outward as in the later ones, such a “takeover” of the person’s inner life, her thoughts and dreams, is one of the strongest characteristics of Grímsdóttir’s fiction. The boundary between reality and fantasy is often very vague and correspondingly all her texts are highly lyrical, be they poetry or prose, and it can even be said that Grímsdóttir combines these forms in one way or another in all her work.

In her first two books short prose and poems take turns. Since then she has mostly written novels, excluding the collections of poetry Minningabók and Lendar elskhugans (The Lover’s Loins), each of which can be read as one long poem; both tell a story or present images and fragments of images that can hardly be understood except as a whole. In the same way her novels have a poetic or lyrical characteristic where rhythm, repetitions and either a fast paced and concise or a flowing style is used in a very conscious manner. The style is also very picturesque and more often than not this is linked with the perspective of childhood mentioned earlier, words transform into images and characters transform things in their perception as when flickering flames remind Gudrún from Stúlkan í skóginum of “long-legged boys on a beach with their toes in the foam” (16).

Grímur from Kaldaljós, Grímsdóttir’s first novel, who is a child in the first part of the book but a grown-up in the second, perceives the world in this picturesque manner and so does Ísbjörg, the eponymous character of Ég heiti Ísbjörg, ég er ljón. She, however, lives even further in or through stories her father tells her when she is a child, stories that he uses to exercise his power over her, and she is never able to free herself from this enormous power,  not even after his suicide, which he commits when she is eight years old. He not only controlls her life but also that of her mother and abuses them both mentally and physically for years. Ísbjörg tells her story in a prison cell while awaiting trial for the murder of her client (as a prostitute) and in her narrative it is gradually revealed how she “fictionalises” herself into a text her father has written for her. She herself says she stopped aging when she was eight years old and is thus a child in the body of a grown-up without ever having had the chance of being a child in her own right. This contradiction is then perhaps revealed in her fantasy about the girl on the beach; Ísbjörg literally splits herself in two and creates another “clean” or “innocent” self with which she finally unites at the end of the story. Ísbjörg does not succeed rather than Grímur in Kaldaljós in working out her childhood, both eventually escape into a fictious, but safe, existence (some sort of death) where they stand at the end of the story waving to the reader.

Hildur the dollmaker in Grímsdóttir’s next novel, Stúlkan í skóginum, is related in spirit to Ísbjörg’s father. The description of her at the beginning of the text actually reminds one of a combination of a viper and a vampire that has started to thirst after new and envigorating blood. Her ears remind her victim and the narrator of the book, Gudrún, also of the story of an elf woman and thus are joined Biblical images, references to folklore and finally horror stories in literature and films. Accordingly she sucks the life out of her victim, throws herself on her and all but devours her when she changes shapes with her and thus takes over her body at the end of the story.

In Grímsdóttir’s work such imagery of sucking others or eating them is extremely common. People are eaten, swallowed, they are breathed on, lain over, others suck them or seduce them by some kind of witchcraft, pierce them with their eyes or slip into their eyes to name just a few. Linked with this figurative language are questions of power and the lack of it when people either try to control others or claim them both secretly and openly or when people become prey to others. This goes for Ísbjörg’s relationship with her father in her story, for Hildur and Gudrún in Stúlkan í skóginum, for Frída’s father and his family in Grandavegur 7, and in a way for the relationship between the lovers Anna and Z in Z: ástarsaga (Z: A Love Story). Another aspect of this imagery is the characters’ fear of allowing others to enter their lives, ot letting others into the “house” the sister in Minningabók says every person is:

And one whole day long she comes to me, the sister
and says that not only are some days houses,
people are also houses, and they decide who they let
in, who they offer to bed, who they
allow to stay.  And she is thoughtful when she says
that because of that people must also look out.
(Minningabók, 34)

Gudrún in Stúlkan í skóginum does not beware of this and it can be said that a person´s fear of someone invading her world and altering the moving of the stars, as Ísbjörg describes to her defendant in her story, becomes a reality in Gudrún’s story when Hildur walks into her “forest” and gradually destroys its unity. Hildur literally intends to use Gudrún as material for a work of art , and the story, which in my opinion is Grímsdóttir’s finest work, is a horrifying dissection of how far you can go in the name of art (which can then be transferred to any “higher purpose”) if moral questions are ignored. The answers are not unambiguous, however, since even though Gudrún is on the one hand an innocent victim, a small grown-up girl who walks unsuspecting into the mouth of the monster, she refuses to deal with anything in her life that can cause her pain and thus seems for example to stagnate in her growth around the time she reaches puberty.

Frída, the adolscent girl, the main character and narrator of Grandavegur 7, tries, on the other hand, to adapt to the world of grown-ups without fully separating from the world of childhood. She is in fact on the boundary of two worlds in another sense because she is psychic and constantly has to listen to the stories of the departed inhabitants of the house on Grandi Road even though she does not always want to. The ghosts constantly interrupt her thoughts and actions, interrupt her and lead her off the straight path of monophonic thinking, linear time and restricted space, so she travels between time levels and places, or is in many simultaneously.

Her psychic abilities may be called polyphonic, since Frída is the medium for different and often opposing voices that call on each other. Even though the voices all pass through Frída and she is in that respect the centre of the text, the first person narrative is broadened so that Frída’s voice is only one of the voices that appear in the text. It can therefore be said that her central position is underlined and dissolved at the same time: she has to grasp all these voices, but also to find her own and thus create herself, and she seems able to do so, unlike the characters that have most been discussed here. The ghosts or the voices that follow her can also point to the notion  that our being is always dependent on other voices, another time and another space. Thus we are never just here and now, each self whole and undivided and clearly defined from others.

Grímsdóttir also uses this expanded first- person narration in her next book, the children’s book Gauti vinur minn which appeared the same year as the novel Z: ástarsaga. In Gauti vinur minn  we get to know a five-year-old boy through a grown-up narrator, his friend Begga, but together they go on journeys that prove to be their mutual dreams. In the dreamtravels they learn various things about themselves and others and Gauti succeeds for example in overcoming his fear of losing his mother. Gauti is yet another child in Grímsdóttir’s stories who has lost a parent. He is lonely and insecure like most children in her work, and he, as they, does not get the security he needs at home. It has been said that Grímsdóttir wrote this children’s book as some sort of a “guarantee” while sending forth simultaneously a story about homosexual love, but I think the children’s book is not at all a sidestep or a “safety valve” in her work but much rather a logical continuation of the perspective of childhood that has always been visible in her work.

In Grímsdóttir’s latest book when this is written, the novel Nætursöngvar (Nocturnal Songs), the step inward is completed. The whole story takes place in the heroine’s dream and the reader gets to know almost nothing about her life and situations outside of the dreams. The story describes the heroine’s dreams who is here not a child like Gauti but a woman, a wife and the mother of a young daughter. The story is written in a form of report with an introduction and an afterword, and in it a woman without a name recollects her dreams for nine nights in the company of a man with the head of a raven, a few years after this strange man has abandoned her. The form of the report does not reach any further since the language and the gist of the narrative belong to the world of fiction and fantasy. The dreams are a sort of a serial story with a clear progress even though they seem inscrutable, but they are first and foremost about the woman’s search for herself and her need to find peace and balance in her life. The dreams are everything to the woman, they take over her life and to such an extent that the days become just an unavoidable delay before the next chapter of the dream. She “awakens into the dream” and thus it is implied that her “real” life takes place during sleep, like that of the princesses in the fairy tales which have an independent nocturnal existence which outweights their waking state.

The woman’s dreamworlds are strange worlds. However, they are also strangely familiar, because as in Grímsdóttir’s other work the reader recognises many things from the world of adventure, folklore and myth. The book’s subtitle, a novel, points perhaps in this direction, the lands of the dreams are in some ways the lands of fiction and in addition to that the woman has to transfer this inner experience to her waking world. The direction here is thus directly opposite to what happens in Ísbjörg’s and Grímur’s stories, because even though the text consists almost entirely of the woman’s dreams, they aim at teaching her something about life and at the same time make it possible for her to accept her limitations and expand them. The final part of that process is to tell the story nine years later, in order to understand “your own life better and simultaneously that of other people” (136). Such “recycling” is a strong factor in most of Grímsdóttir’s work: characters turn their experiences into stories and thus use the medicines of fiction to give meaning to their lives.

This is connected to another prominent theme in Grímsdóttir’s fiction, and that is a discussion about art and the creation of art. The attention is often aimed at the boundary between fiction and reality and most of her texts are characterised by a strong awareness of their own existence, they are self-reflective and in that sense postmodern. However, this applies least to the novel Z: ástarsaga (Z: a Love Story) (1996), which is the lovestory of two women and is in many ways different from the author’s other books. In Z the text is broken up in a different manner, the relationship between the main characters, Anna and Z, occurs mostly in texts where one writes poetry for the other who then expresses herself in the form of letters. Moreover the relationship between Anna’s sister and her husband forms some sort of a side story that both reflects and opposes Anna and Z’s story.

Grímsdóttir herself has said that when she decided to write a story about love she decided that “no veil must be over it” because that would not suit this delicate subject matter. She says she wants “to make the characters come forth unmasked and speak to the reader and they want him to deal with finding the answers. (2) This is, however, far from being Grímsdóttir’s first book about love, all her books deal with it more or less, but Z is nevertheless the first where lesbian love is foregrounded if the long poem Lendar Elskhugans (1991) is excluded. It is thus perhaps this specific form of love she thinks needs to be delivered “plainly” to the reader, but Z is among the very few Icelandic works of fiction that have homosexuality as its main subject, a subject that has up until now almost been considered a source of embarrassment in Icelandic literary discussion. (3)

Even though the long poem is much more fragmentet and inscrutable than Z it deals in some ways with the same subject. The voices of many women come together who all seem to be seeking something or someone they have lost or miss in their lives (or death), but the speaker in the poem wanders around in the tower of doubt, which is a kind of a leading theme in the text and marks both its beginning and its end. This poetic story can perhaps be seen as one more dream in Grímsdóttir’s work, the dream of the speaker of the poem who abandons her sleeping children and lover and goes on a travel where she meets passionate women who seem to have a lot more to offer than the sleeping lover.

In this article only a few of the main points of Vigdis Grimsdottir´s fiction have been highlighted but I have tried to point out some of the connecting links in her work: as different as her stories are the same themes and motifs can be seen repeatedly and the texts “speak” to each other and wrestle with each other in various ways. When Nætursöngvar was published Grímsdóttir said in a newspaper interview that she was now “through with the dreams,” that she had “used up most of the possibilities of the dreamlike narration,” but added that you never know. (4) Readers can thus wait in anticipation for her next work, but it is certainly difficult to imagine a text from her where strong emphasis is not placed on the inner world, a world that is at least as big a part of our every day reality as the outer one we are accustomed to connect with the real or realism.

1. Kristín Birgisdóttir (ed).  Niste på veien (Veganesti). Oslo: Den Kongelige Kulturdepartment, 1999.
2. Kristín Birgisdóttir and Kristín Vidarsdóttir.  “Saumað að sálinni.”  Vera, 15.6 (1996): 9
3. See Geir Svansson’s comprehensive discussion in “Ósegjanleg ást.  Hinsegin sögur og hinsegin fræði í íslensku samhengi.”  Skírnir, 172 (Fall 1998)
4. “Draumurinn afgreiddur.”  Dagur, 4. Dec. 1998

© Kristín Viðarsdóttir, 2000.

Translated by Jóhann Thorarensen.

Criticism

Dagný Kristjánsdóttir: “Den døde kvinde lever”, “Løve eller lam”, “Kærligheden og døden”
På jorden 1960-1990, Nordisk kvinndelitteraturhistorie, bind iv, ritstj. Elisabeth Møller Jensen og fl. København, Rosinante 1997, s. 455-460

See also: Neijmann, Daisy L., ed. A History of Icelandic Literature
University of Nebraska Press, 2007, pp.  446, 454, 541

Reviews

Ingunn Ásdísardóttir: “Askepot og stedmoderen/Cinderelle and the step-mother”
Vigdís Grímsdóttir: Stúlkan í skóginum/The Girl in the Forest
Nordic Literature Magazine 1993, p. 55

Úlfhildur Dagsdóttir: “Oranges, mussels and monstrous flowers”
Klima/Climate: Nordic Poetry 1984-1994, København : Transit Production, 1994, p. 44-51

Kristín Viðarsdóttir: “Flydende grænser/Floating boundaries”
Vigdís Grímsdóttir. Grandavegur 7
Nordic Literature Magazine 1996, p. 88-89

From Reviews

Ingunn Ásdísardóttir: Cinderelle and the step-mother
The Girl in the Forest

We could say that there are two people in the Girl in the Forest, the one who invites the other to coffee, and the one who is invited; the acting and the suffering; the one who lives in society, and the one outside; the sacrificer and the victim; Cinderella and the step-mother.

Both women live in two worlds. Guðrún lives in her forest, where red birds fly by a still pond, and in the world of her books; the forest is her inner world, her own creation, while books belong to the external world that inlfuences her life.

Hildur’s world is her parlor, where she is alone with her dolls, her creations, and the modern society in which she lives, and whose demands she feels she must meet as an artist.

Hildur’s personal interpretation of what these demands mean for her and for her art is fateful; it sets of a chain of events and upheavals from which neither of the women can return.
(55)

Úlfhildur Dagsdóttir: “Oranges, mussels and monstrous flowers”
The Lover’s Loins

[The] search for self and for poetry is nowhere as pronounced as in Vigdís Grímsdóttir’s two books of poetry dating from 1990 and 1991. Both of these books are linear in structure, telling a story in poetry. [.../...]

In Lendar elskhugans (The Lover’s Loins) the search for poetry is the central theme, intertwined with the search for the woman herself, her search for identity as a woman and a poet. Eventually she finds it all within herself, but the discovery is not all happiness since she is then necessarily fragmented, and still unable to see “herself”: looking into the mirror she exclaims, “I cannot be seen here/I was never seen here”. She can see all the others, the lily, the lover, the sister, the friend and the poem, but not herself. [...]
Thus multiplicity goes hand in hand with a new discussion of women’s identity – reflecting on identity in general – and women’s ways of expressing themselves. Instead of searching for identity in an illusory whole, it is built up of fragments, a kind of collage; very similar to postmodern art itself. Women are looking back into history and myths, re-evaluating both, and adapting them to their new images.
(46-49)

2017 – The Jónas Hallgrímsson Prize

2012 – The DV Cultural Prize for literature: Trúir þú á töfra? (Do You Believe in Magic?)

2007 – The Bookstores’ Staff Literature Prize: Bíbí: Sagan um Bíbí Ólafsdóttur

2001 – DV Cultural Prize for literature: Þögnin (The Silence)

1994 – The Icelandic Literature Prize: Grandavegur 7 (Grandi Rd. 7)

1993 – Davíðspenninn: Stúlkan í skóginum (The Girl in the Forest)

1992 – The Icelandic Broadcasting Service Writer’s Fund

1990 – DV Cultural Prize for literature: Ég heiti Ísbjörg, ég er ljón (My Name is Ísbjörg, I am a Leo)

Nominations

2013 – Fjöruverðlaunin, The Womens’ Literature Award: Dísusaga (Dísa´s Story)

2013 – The Icelandic Literature Prize: Dísusaga (Dísa´s Story)

2007 – The Icelandic Literature Prize (nonfiction): Bíbí: Sagan um Bíbí Ólafsdóttur

1997 – The Nordic Children’s Book Prize: Gauti vinur minn (My Friend Gauti)

1996 – The Icelandic Literature Prize: Z : ástarsaga (Z: A Love Story)

1996 – The Nordic Council’s Literature Prize: Grandavegur 7 (Grandi Rd. 7)

1994 – The Nordic Council’s Literature Prize: Stúlkan í skóginum (The Girl in the Forest)