Letters

The Editors

Don’t Mute the Post Horn

The Post Horn Always Blows Twice

Dear Editors,

I was delighted to read Gemma Sack’s thoughtful essay on five novels by Vigdis Hjorth (“Officially Good People”) in Issue 50 of n+1. Sack is right to focus on Hjorth as, among other things, a writer of Scandinavian social democracy, a perspective that works particularly well for A House in Norway. I also like the way she brings out the psychoanalytic preoccupations in Hjorth’s texts.

However, Sack misses a crucial dimension of Hjorth’s 2012 novel Long Live the Post Horn!,namely the way the novel responds to the most horrific event in Norwegian history after World War II. This is not a criticism of Sack, for most foreign readers wouldn’t necessarily see the connections. (I didn’t immediately see it myself when I first read the novel in North Carolina. It took a trip to Norway to enlighten me.) Yet the aftermath of that historical moment permeates the novel.

On July 22, 2011, a Norwegian right-wing terrorist detonated a car bomb outside the government buildings in Oslo, murdering eight people and seriously injuring ten more. (Dozens suffered minor injuries.) Then he drove toward Utøya, the tiny island where the Norwegian Labour Party’s youth organization was hosting its annual summer camp. Disguised as a policeman, he took a ferry to the island, where he shot and killed sixty-nine young people at close range and injured another sixty-six. Many of the injured will be maimed for life. The youngest children killed were 14 years old. Thirty-three victims were under 18. Most of the others were in their early twenties.

The trauma inflicted on the usually peaceful Norwegian society by Utøya defies description. What words could express the shock, the horror, the feeling that this was simply unthinkable in boring and tranquil Norway? How could art respond to something like this?

Hjorth began work on Long Live the Post Horn! shortly after Utøya. Set in the year preceding the terror action, the novel tells the story of Ellinor, a communications consultant who, numb with depression, struggles with language. Words have become meaningless; “communication” increasingly impossible, not just at work, but in her private life too. Death enters the novel when a colleague and friend commits suicide. This isn’t just another case of Scandinavian gloom. There are strong reasons to read Ellinor’s depression as a figure for the state of mind of Norwegians after Utøya.

Ellinor gets hired by Postkom, the trade union of the postal workers in Norway. Her task is to help them oppose the third European postal directive, which will introduce neoliberal notions of market-driven competition into the egalitarian Norwegian postal system. As a result, full-time postal workers will lose their jobs, and mail between large cities will get priority over mail to far-flung fjord and mountain communities. Postkom’s goal is to persuade the delegates to the ruling Labour Party’s annual congress, scheduled to meet in April 2011, to vote against the party line and reject the European postal directive. Trade unions and the Labour Party: the bastions of Scandinavian social democracy, and, absolutely not coincidentally, also the terrorist’s targets.