Escaping the Urban Middle-class Scene of Adulthood

Abstract

Contemporary Danish literature has seen many autobiographical texts about growing up in the precariat. Some take place in what we term Udkantsdanmark (peripheral Denmark), others in what is termed the ghettos. Often these narratives are about climbing the social ladder and breaking out of the ghetto. This article deals with protagonists moving the other way, or who use class mobility as a marker of superior identity linked to the urban middle class. Many texts fetishise precarity and the ghetto, as well as the people living there. This can entail the sexualisation of the exotic other that we know so well from postcolonial studies, but sometimes becoming the precarious other is depicted as an attractive goal. In these texts the narrative of leaving the ghetto is reversed, producing a strange kind of Bildungsroman. This kind of narrative, too, deals with social mobility, but down the social ladder. This is not always a self-destructive move; in some novels of disillusion, taking the ladder downwards is an attempt to grow (emotionally) and create solidarity with the precarious other. It may seem paradoxical to claim that a text that fetishises the other at the same time tries to create solidarity with the other. This fetishisation works as a caricature of the urban middle class, a class which fears growing up and which therefore refuses to acknowledge its privileges and responsibilities.