Not Just a Detective Novel: Trauma, Memory and Narrative Form in Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow

Abstract

Summary This article argues that Peter Høeg's “detective novel”, Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow, contains many elements relevant to postmodern and postcolonial experience. Smilla, the main character, who seeks answers to the death of a young Inuit boy in Denmark, encounters, in a profound way, the complexities of postmodern subjectivity, blended with postcolonial issues of identity formation and the power imbalances extant in any colonialist system. The journey of self-discovery Smilla undergoes in the narrative is the real “detective story”, and cannot be untangled from the wider political story of Danish colonialism of Greenland, and the encounter between the two cultures. There is no neat “answer” to the problems of colonialism and the hybrid identities formed out of it. At best the future belongs to a continued and traumatic “Middle Passage” where past and present interchange so thoroughly that any journey towards a teleological future or “closure” is one fraught with trauma and suffering.