Fear, Abuse, and Invisibility: Form and Metaphor in the Works of Tormod Haugen

Abstract

Fear, Abuse, and Invisibility:Form and Metaphor in the Works of Tormod Haugen Eva-Maria Metcalf (bio) In 1990, Tormod Haugen received the Hans Christian Andersen Medal as his fifteenth and most prestigious award. Born in 1945, he made his literary debut in 1973 with Ikke som i fjor (Not like last year) after studying art and literature at Oslo University and working for two years at the Edvard Munch Museum in Oslo. A free-lance artist and author of more than a dozen children's books, he is well-known and well-respected in his native Norway and throughout Europe. Although his books have been translated into fourteen languages, he is little known in the United States because only two of his books, The Night Birds (1975, translated 1982) and Zeppelin (1976, translated 1991) have appeared in English.1 Haugen has developed artistically since the seventies, and in the late eighties and nineties his novels have become increasingly experimental in nature. The underlying theme of his work has remained constant, however. His books display a deep concern for the powerless: for all who are oppressed, silenced, and buried by the process of acculturation. The dominant metaphor he uses to express this concern is the metaphor of invisibility; through its manipulation he makes visible that which has become invisible. His books appeal to children and adults alike to free themselves from social and cultural constraints, to surmount obstacles, and to embrace the ultimate courage of daring to be vulnerable. Invisibility as it is used in Haugen's books has little to do with the invisibility conferred upon heroes by magic cloaks, nor does it concern the countless invisible playmates who have been a staple of children's literature for a long time. Haugen's invisible children are more closely related to the invisible child in Tove Jansson's short story by the same name. In this story the young girl Ninni becomes invisible because of a loveless situation at home, where she is treated with icy irony. She is brought to the Moomin family and finds a warm and loving atmosphere in which she dares to be herself and gradually becomes visible again. Haugen's fictional characters suffer from the same emotional distress that Ninni does, but they rarely find the safe haven of a Moomin family. The coldness, indifference, insensibility, disregard, and mockery of the older generation are what cause Haugen's fictional characters to become invisible; for psychological injuries, although invisible, are as real and as painful as physical ones. He draws on a wide spectrum of mental and emotional abuse of children—and of adults—who are either struggling to gain a degree of independence, the precondition for the development of their own personalities, or to regain their individuality. Adverse circumstances or the negligence and blindness of parents and their partners are often the cause of this invisibility, and rarely is such abuse carried out consciously or with malicious intent. In The Night Birds, Jake's father, for instance, is too involved in his own fears and failures to notice the impact of his behavior on his son. And oftentimes the phrase, "We parents want only what's best for you," provides justification for many forms of well-intentioned abuse, as it does for Father King in Slottet (The White Castle) (174). Such a conception of abuse is often relative, for identical treatment by a parent may cause anguish and agony for one sibling but not another. Central to Haugen's work is a thorough and sobering inquiry into childhood. In one way or another, all of his books raise his readers' awareness of the repression of children in our society. As he explores what is hidden behind it, Haugen deconstructs the cultural myth of a happy, carefree, and innocent childhood and uncovers its dark side. As a result, he has come to the challenging, [End Page 14] if disputable, conclusion that childhood, while being the foundation of life and the source of hope and renewal, is also life's saddest, most troublesome, and most painful period. What makes children invisible in his books is their acute feeling of being misjudged, excluded, and not taken seriously, particularly...