Between Nation and World: Semi-Peripheral Nationalism and Global Capitalism in Halldór Laxness’s The Atom Station and William Heinesen’s The Black Cauldron

Chapter two progresses the arguments about national allegory and form advanced in chapter one, by exploring the relationship between nationalism, independence, and global capitalism in Laxness’s satirical post-war novel The Atom Station and Heinesen’s kollektivroman (collective novel) The Black Cauldron. Drawing on Benita Parry’s notion of ‘peripheral modernism’, the first part of the chapter argues that the shift from historical realism in Iceland’s Bell and The Good Hope to modernist formal modes in The Atom Station and The Black Cauldron attests to the rapid transformation of Iceland and the Faroe Islands from peripheral colonies to semi-peripheral nation-states in the mid-twentieth century. I then explore the representation of nationalism in the novels through two instances of nationalist spectacle: Jónas Hallgrímsson’s repatriation and funeral in The Atom Station and the funeral of Ivar Berghammer in The Black Cauldron, which together illustrate the appropriation of the emancipatory and progressive nationalism of the independence movements by the local elite to serve their own interests. The analysis is rooted jointly in the Gramscian notion of the ‘national-popular’ and Frantz Fanon’s discussion of national consciousness in The Wretched of the Earth and argues that despite the critique of bourgeois nationalism in both novels, cultural nationalism remains a point of resistance against the threat of ‘cultural obliteration’ (Fanon 2001, p. 190) posed by colonialism and capitalist imperialism. It argues that both novels express a dialectical national consciousness which is registered both at the level of form and content and attests to the rapid and uneven development of both countries during and shortly after the Second World War. Set at a moment of hegemonic transition, these novels invite discussion of nationalism in world-systemic terms, and although focusing on the national might seem incompatible with the notion of world-literature, this chapter shows that the nation is in fact integral to the global perspectives of Laxness and Heinesen’s semi-peripheral novels.