Nordic Literature and the Oil Impasse: Contemporary Petrofiction from Denmark and Norway

The monograph Nordic Literature and the Oil Impasse: Contemporary Petrofiction from Denmark and Norway is the first substantial survey of petrofiction from the Nordics. The study rests on a theoretical foundation stipulating that oil is much more than a source of energy and by extension also a political and economic factor. Oil has been and still is an essential component in the development of our modern cultural ideations. As the school of critical theory called petroculture-studies argue, our understanding and valorization of mobility, individualism, ingenuity/frontierism, freedom, masculinity, conservation, consumption, and much more are heavily influenced by this cheap andvast energy form.

So far, this understanding of oil as culture has been a fairly understudied subject in the two Nordic oil nations, Denmark and Norway. As such, in an effort to transport the insights from the North American based petroculture-studies to the North Sea, my project analyses instances of Nordic contemporary petrofictions. In short, it is a preliminary study of the Nordic North Sea nations as away to introduce a cultural component to the discussion of a post-fossil way of life. Spanning the timeframe from 1992 to the present time, this study takes the intersection of continued Nordic oil extraction in the North Sea and the increased public awareness of climate change as its starting point. Thus, Nordic Literature and the Oil Impasse is an examination of Nordic petrofiction going back to the UN’s Earth Summit of 1992 where climate change definitively gained political headway. No singular event of course delineates a clear cut off point but the Earth Summit of ‘92 presents itself as a highpoint in the official political recognition of planetary emergency and the need to alleviate the emissions of greenhouse gasses. From here on, the discourse of flat-out climate change denial has slowly begun to disintegrate. Today the causality between anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissionsand climate change are generally acknowledged while substantial steps to alleviate the planetary emergency still are in their infancy. In line with the theoretical foundation, this monograph therefore argues that we are at an impasse. Hence the title of the survey. In other words, this emergence of a shift from denial to delay, from a lack of acknowledgment to an impasse within the fossil economy, is the guiding context for my study of Nordic petrofiction from 1992 onwards.

The monograph focuses on close readings of literary petrofiction in different genres and forms. With its detailed focus on language, meaning, and form, literature is an absorbent media when it comes to registering the implications of the fossil economy’s continuation in times of environmental distress. Essentially, I read fiction as seismographic entries that sense some material tectonic shifts and correspondently produce a response in form and content with potential performative dynamics of its own. This analysis of contemporary Nordic petrofiction exposes an instance of cultural creativity and reimagination in seemingly dark times by pinpointing a correspondence between the material reality of fossil fuels, the affective tenors brought about by climate change, and the present variations in literary genre and form. The literary responses to the contemporary situation of Nordic oil extraction raises two primary questions: How is oil portrayed in the Nordics today and what does it possibly entail? 

With the literary examples put forward in this analysis, I posit that petrofiction from the so called green frontier nations of Denmark and Norway employ impasse sentiments of obscurity, inertia, and nostalgia in their registration of ongoing oil extraction. We see this is Peter Høeg’s Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow (1992), where the obscure nature of offshore oil and shipping is weaved into the thriller plot. We see it in Aske Juul Christiansen’s Aftenstjerne (2019) and in Kristina Stoltz’s På ryggen af en tyr (2014), where oil-obscurity is equally registered through a vocabulary of gothic mystique and seafarer mythology thereby exposing the ‘realer, if darker’ existence and occurrence of oil and its capitalist relations. In what I term ‘roustabout narratives,’ the registration of oil work takes shape through the invocation of nostalgia for a strong social democratic welfare system of socialsecurity and worker rights in oppositional to the reality of fossil capitalism’s eternal search for cost cuts. A study of the concrete casting technic resulting in the production of condeeps in Norway as well as of the Norwegian Oil Fund, moreover, accentuate the material structures undergirding the affective connection to oil. Nordic road novels show a conscious registration of the pitfalls of oil infrastructure which leads to inertia and depression rather than active opposition. And, in the speculative after-oil imaginings of the Nordics, inertia sets in once again, as the texts eventually convey the bleak notion that there is no escape from the capitalist structure of oil.

To sum up, the monograph argues that the contemporary registration of oil in Nordic petrofictions has a particular tendency to represent the oil impasse by way of ‘inactive’ sentiments. They are thus examples of what I term impasse fiction. In the study, this tendency is connected to the specific development of the Nordic welfare state system as well as the nations’ internationalreputation as green frontier nations. These inactive affects mimic the uncomfortable Janus-face reality of having a green front of sincere climate change alleviation resting on a black foundation.