Abstract
This paper advocates for a blue comparative literature that uses the view from the sea to provide new axes for comparison. Roy Jacobsen’s De usynlige (The Unseen, 2013) and Sarah Moss’s Night Waking (2011) explore subsistence lives on small islands in the northern Atlantic at different moments in the past, when inhabitants were dependent on the sea for food and transport. By looking at them together, as texts linked by their engagement with the physical world of the northern Atlantic, the two novels show how marginal populations on small islands can represent a space for the imagination of the human past and future in the Anthropocene.
Highlights
The first view of the island of Barrøy, the fictional setting of Roy Jacobsen’s novel De usynlige (TheUnseen, 2013) is from the sea
The terrified priest from the main island has allowed himself to be rowed for two hours across the water in summer to make his first visit to this far-flung corner of his parish
He sees his own parish with new eyes. When he scrambles out of the faering and teeters a few steps along the mole he catches sight of something he has never seen before, his home on the main island the way it looks from Barrøy, along with the Trading Post and the buildings, the farmsteads, the strips of woodland and the fleet of small boats
Summary
The first view of the island of Barrøy, the fictional setting of Roy Jacobsen’s novel De usynlige Sarah Moss and Roy Jacobsen have both created fictional islands for their novels Their fictional islands draw heavily on real places, embodying McMahon and André’s claim that it is the simultaneous reality and fictionality of the literary island in modern literature that make it so potent as a site of imagination This kind of literarisation of islands can be problematic, as the authors of this article go on to point out, as it draws on and feeds the imagination of island spaces as bounded and other, and has underpinned and continues to underpin colonial projects and modes of thought These two novels, in their different ways, reflect on their own fictionality and on the colonial gaze, and engage discursively with the history of the literary island. The inhabitants of Barrøy in the 1930s and Colsay in the 1860s are poor subsistence communities whose existence appears in all senses marginal
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