‘A History-with-Holes?’: Magic Realism and National Allegory in Halldór Laxness’s Iceland’s Bell and William Heinesen’s The Good Hope

This chapter compares the representation of national history in Laxness’s Iceland’s Bell (1943-1946) and Heinesen’s The Good Hope and argues that in each novel the traditional realism associated with the historical novel is reconfigured in order to interrogate established historical narratives about colonialism in the Nordic region and to represent the national histories of Iceland and the Faroe Islands as resistive to colonial domination and systematic marginalisation by the Danish state. The novels are set at the height of the Royal Danish Trade Monopolies, an era of economic and cultural stagnation in Iceland and the Faroe Islands, and Laxness and Heinesen each make use of this historical moment to illustrate the historical violence of Danish colonial domination. However, in both Iceland’s Bell and The Good Hope the realist representation of colonial violence and exploitation is punctuated with magical, supernatural, and surreal events, as Laxness and Heinesen blend elements of the picaresque, parable, epic and saga traditions, with social realism resulting in a formal irrealism and generic uneveness which might more adequately be described as magic realist. The reading of Laxness’s Iceland’s Bell and Heinesen’s The Good Hope is initially grounded in a discussion of two key texts by Fredric Jameson, both published in 1986, which discuss the form and aesthetics of peripheral and semi-peripheral cultural production: “On Magic Realism in Film” and the controversial essay “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capital”. The second part of the chapter explores the systematic marginalisation of Iceland and the Faroe Islands by the Danish state by focusing on two examples that illustrate the violence of colonialism with particular potency: the representation of crime, criminality and the legal system, and the representation of the spoken and written word. It shows that by drawing on the history of colonial oppression, Laxness and Heinesen not only uncover the structures and forms of domination that would come to determine the future place of Iceland and the Faroe Islands in the capitalist world-system, but also give insight into the social conditions from which Icelandic and Faroese nationalism would subsequently develop. It concludes by arguing that the allegorisation of national history in Iceland’s Bell and The Good Hope allows the visible subjective violence portrayed in the novels to be directly related to the invisible systemic violence of colonialism and capitalism.