Þórdís Björnsdóttir

From Þórdís Björnsdóttir

I have written stories and poetry since I was a child, and at that time I thought it the most natural thing to grab a pencil and paper and write. This was just an integral part of being and I didn’t wonder about it that much. Soon however, the question “what are you going to become when you grow up” came to the surface, without generating many answers. A poet or writer did not occur to me for I felt that the dream-job must involve something connected to the distant future of my adulthood, rather than things I was already doing as a child. In the end I came up with some answers that changed from month to month in my classmates’ memory books; a painter, a weaver, graphic designer or a cartoonist. But in my teenage years I finally saw beyond the nonsense and realized that the most important thing for me was to write, wherever that would end up leading me.

Recently, I met a young woman who said that she had for a long time dreamt about becoming a writer. “Really. So you write?” I asked excitedly as this came as a surprise to me. “No”, she replied, “I changed my mind when I realized I had no stories to tell.” This sad answer made my heart sink. How can you be alive, having lived for years and years, without having any stories to tell?

My grandmother loved talking about the past. She didn’t tell me much about her life during my childhood, then we mostly played card games without end. But when I became older, she started telling me various things from her past over a warm cup of coffee. One however needed to know how to approach the subject. She always started by asking me how school was going and if I had any friends, and when I had given her some idea about my daily life, I snug in a question or two about the past and then she usually brighened up. She added another cube of sugar to her coffee with a joyful glimpse in her eye, then started her story.

After I met the woman who wanted to become a writer I have contemplated whether young people today will in general have fewer stories to tell in their old age, since life for the majority will possibly have been rather effortless with all of our modern conveniences. Or, if the stories will be as many, but less rich and more impersonal, where old television programs and outdated events of social life will be in the lead. I hope not.

Yet, I don’t want to be pessimistic or sound like I am preaching about the importance of struggle in life. In order to tell a good story, the most important thing is of course to know how to use your imagination, being able to disconnect yourself to a degree from reality and create a new world in which the story can live. But no matter what the future may bring, I at least hope to become an old lady with all kinds of  stories to tell.

Þórdís Björnsdóttir, December 2006 

Translated by Kristín Viðarsdóttir

“A feeling arose within me, one which I have known before when something comes over me and makes me want to take great risks, humiliate myself or sacrifice something precious. Usually, it was simply a matter of wanting to turn the everyday on its head.”

(Story of a Blue Summer)

COMFORTing HORROR: The poetry and prose of Þórdís Björnsdóttir

The history of the gothic novel is usually thought to be rather definite. Its origin is accredited to Horace Walpole’s novel The Castle of Otranto, which was published in 1764. Walpole was influenced by the so-called Graveyard Poets—whose name derives from the major theme of their poetry—as well as by the general gothic aesthetic that was in vogue at the time and was characterised by an effect of carefully orchestrated deterioration. At the time, this could be seen in fields such as landscape design, where gardens tended to look rather wild and outgrown and preferably contained at least one ruin that looked as if it might date back to the Middle Ages. High society of the time idolised the world of the Middle Ages, the time of the wild and barbaric Goths, who were given a rather romantic spin during these early days of Romanticism. Seen through the rose-coloured glasses of these “New Goths”, the Middle Ages appeared as a time of adventure; a time of knights, heroes and beautiful (if rather fragile) ladies; a fertile ground for the fantastical and the grotesque. Walpole himself redesigned his Strawberry Hill mansion into a gothic castle. He recruited a group of fellow aristocrats, who much like himself were the self-declared intellectuals and influencers of the times, and together they redesigned the house inside out. They gathered books filled with gothic patterns that they used to decorate the walls and ceilings, but due to limited funds these decorations were usually made of papier-mâché and cheap wood rather than plaster, which was generally thought to be the preferred building material. In cases where papier-mâché would not suffice, they painted deteriorating gothic stone patterns onto wallpaper and used it to cover the walls. Each room contained at its centre a magnificent fireplace. The designs of these fireplaces were based on the tombs and headstones of renowned personages, which was naturally very fitting to the atmosphere of horror that Walpole considered an integral part of the Gothic Middle Ages. It probably added somewhat to this gloomy atmosphere that only one of the fire places was actually intended for fire, as the rest were mere decorations, so a gothic chill must have enveloped the castle on Strawberry Hill.

Since then, the gothic has blossomed in literature and culture, and can be found in a variety of forms today. Even though the gothic novel is considered to have had its heyday at the turn of the 19th century, one of its most infamous examples, Dracula by one Abraham Stoker, was not published until 1897. Furthermore, the gothic influence is evident in the works of early twentieth century ghost story writers such as M.R. James. The gothic has continued to influence British horror to this day, as can be seen in the writings of Peter Ackroyd, Ramsay Campbell and Patrick McGrath—to name a few. On the other side of the Atlantic, the gothic became entrenched in North-American literature through the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, but a gothic influence is also evident in some of the writings of Henry James. These authors passed the torch to modern horror writers such as Stephen King and Anne Rice.

The United States is also where you will find the breeding grounds for the new face of horror, the aesthetic of which is sometimes defined as “gothic-cute”. This concept is at the crux of Ragna Þorbjörg Úlfarsdóttir BA thesis, which bears the title “Beautiful Disgust”. There, she discussed the two major harbingers of this aesthetic: director Tim Burton (b. 1958) and artist and comic book writer Edward Gorey (1925-2000). Both of their oeuvres present the combining of sweet innocence and “cute” elements with other darker and more grotesque themes. This is particularly evident in Burton’s use of colour in his movies. As Ragna points out, Burton habitually makes use of vivid colours when depicting ghosts and deaths, whereas he applies a greyish hue when portraying reality. Gorey’s drawings tend to depict innocent or childlike characters—often children—who are subjected to horrific tragedies. The result is a particular brand of gothic; a kind of innocent horror which usually carries comic undertones—Gorey and Burton both use humour extensively in their work.

This kind of gothic innocence is very apparent in Þórdís Björnsdóttir and Jesse Ball’s story The Disastrous Tale of Vera & Linus (2006), and similar elements can be found in Þórdís’s collections of poetry, Love and Oranges (2004), And Then Came The Night (2006) and Hiding Behind the Curtains (2007). Actually, the title of the second to last book is not entirely clear, as neither its cover nor title page offers any clues to its title. In fact, the same can be said about The Disastrous Tale of Vera & Linus, as it is commonly referred to as “Storie S: Schemes”, or simply: “Vera & Linus”.

However, there is no doubt about the title of Þórdís’s first collection, Love and Oranges. When she self-published it in 2004, its publication was heralded by the author distributing marketing material and sample copies far and wide, so that no one following Icelandic literature at the time should have been able to overlook it. This in itself served to capture peoples’ attention. A young poetess determined to make her mark on the current literary scene is a joyous occasion, and the poetry itself certainly showed some strength. Horror acts as an underlying theme throughout the collection, with the poems offering up a kind of bloody romanticism—or perhaps bloody eroticism. This can be seen in the poem which graces the book’s back cover:

I asked you to bite my neck

fairly hard

and you did

and said I tasted good

tasted a little bit

like a blood orange

and I felt the juice

running between my breasts

my underwear got wet

and the table cloth turned red.

The imagery being applied here might not be entirely original, but it still comes alive through the combination of eroticism and dining. The poem also serves as a good example of the elements of flesh and physicality that are found throughout the book. Despite the alternating quality of the poems, Þórdís manages to bring forth an overall sensation of the physical in the collection as a whole. This can be seen in the poetry itself in its themes of organs and bodies, as in the poem “Together”, where the speaker plucks the eyes from her lover’s head and rolls them “down the torso / like two little eggs”. In the next poem, “Ball”, the speaker wants to open her lover’s stomach and fill it with objects:

I put a toothbrush inside you

a tampon and a tea spoon

crumbled notes

covered in doodles and scribbles

A harmonica in the key of D

and plastic pearls

pins and needles

and a gleaming comb

a gold-coloured bracelet

and one small ball

that resembles a head.

As most of the poems refer to the speaker’s interactions with her lover, the poetry might be referred to as love poetry—as indicated by the collection’s title. In this way, the poems describe scenes where the lovers inflict violence and lovemaking upon one another, which are rendered very visual through the beautiful and lively imagery—as can clearly be seen in “Ball”. Another memorable instance is when the speaker observes her lover dressing up as a woman and expresses her wish that he’ll always be her woman. There is also a rather haunting image in the final poem, where the lovers’ grotesque physicality—how they continually invade one another’s bodies—is intertwined with their lovemaking as well as with death. The poem begins with the speaker describing how she used to talk about attacking her lover all the time, but only in jest. However, she eventually ends up throwing him off a balcony. In between, she talks about him admiringly and describes how she used to swim inside him like a fish while he slept: “swam past your organs / all the way up to the brain / and observed from there / all your dreams / about the two of us / and other things / that no one knew”.

This overall theme of the grotesque and the physical has only gotten stronger in Þórdís’s second collection, And Then Came the Night, which is actually a cycle of poems—or a poetic narrative—about a man-bird in a forest. There are two speakers, a girl and a boy, but at times they seem to converge with the man-bird, which can make for a rather complicated perspective. This diminishes the poems’ power somewhat. However, it’s obvious that the young poetess has grown immensely in terms of how she applies her imagery. The feeling of rawness and humour that first became apparent in Love and Oranges is stronger here, and it’s evident that she is learning to master her poetic language. The collection’s first poem immediately sets the scene:

1.

The woods are filled

with beings that sing

in aged voices

and drift

like the warm breeze

over the dome

it filled me with joy

so that I knelt down

felt myself amicably dissolving

and slowly trickling away

like water

The speakers call out to one another. As before, there is an undertone of horror, although it has somewhat diminished. The poem’s speakers alternate between climbing the trees and seemingly taking flight and being buried underground, where they also move from place to place. This can be seen in stanza no. 15, where the male speaker seems to be sitting in a tree:

Wanting to hunt birds and men

He gets comfortable

covered in green like the leaves of a tree

waiting with arrows drawn

But the night is full

of tightly woven nets

that capture the wind

Here, it might very well be the man-bird itself which is speaking, as throughout the poems the man-birds arrival is generally heralded with a sensation of danger. The line “covered in green like the leaves of a tree” is also a good example of how Þórdís plays with imagery. As I said before, at first the speaker seems to be in a tree, but upon further examinations turns out to be merely covered in a green colour that resembles the leaves of a tree. Therefore, he might just as well be below the ground, as the line about the night’s nets—presumably referring to tree branches—indicates. In this way, the perspective coalesces and looks down from above and yet also up from the ground, without ever making it clear which is the case.

Throughout, there is a constant merging with nature which the reader might interpret as the fusion that begins taking place through rot at the time death. This can be seen in stanza no. 30, when the speaker notices a knoll on the ground and sees that “there lies / a dead man with his face / buried in the dirt.”

The man-bird itself is a mysterious creature. It is featured in many of Jesse Ball’s illustrations, which feature heavily in the collection and give the poems a strong sense of gothic-cute. In stanza no. 22, the man-bird appears in the moonlight:

The moon tinged everything with a strange hue

The man-bird walked along the narrow path

leaving behind salty footprints

that gradually dissolved

evaporated into nothingness

but the eyes were distant and cold

like eggs enveloped in blue

Here the imagery is covered in blue; from the moonlight to the bird’s eyes, which must be some variation of blueish-white or whiteish-blue—according to the description “eggs enveloped in blue”, which I take to mean a whiteness that absorbs enough of the blue colour to pass beyond white but without actually turning blue.

As can clearly be seen in this particular poem about the man-bird, the surreal is present throughout the book and is at times intertwined with more coherent imagery—such as in stanza no. 20, when the speaker abandons a beautiful land to: “return into / the dark night / and lock the door behind me”.

In Þórdís’s third book, a variation of surrealism (or perhaps absurdism) can be seen in the comforting horror of her gothic-cute themes. The Disastrous Tale of Vera & Linus is written in English, as the book is a collaboration between Þórdís and her husband Jesse Ball, who is an American author. Even though the world of the book is most likely created by both parties, the author of each text is disclosed, so that in each case the reader knows which author is being read. The book is a sort of novel-in-fragments or a collection of flash fictions. It tells the story of two people, Vera and Linus, who are a couple. They spend most of their time together, usually in nefarious ways, and their major pastime involves the killing of children. It is this child killing theme that more than anything else brings to my mind the works of Edward Gorey, as one of his most well-known work, The Gashlycrumb Tinies, contains an alphabetised series of descriptions of child deaths.

Still, Vera and Linus don’t actually kill their victims in alphabetical order, and their story is far more concise than Gorey’s eccentric comics. At the beginning of the book, the two of them are actually burying a book, after which the child killings begin. The action takes place in a forest, which brings to mind the woods that appeared in And Then Came The Night. Vera and Linus move through these woods in a similarly chaotic way—as is apparent in the opening passage, where they bury the book and then descend down into a dried-out lake and follow a subterranean river passage until they emerge in a clearing in a dense forest. In the next passage, which is also attributed to Jesse Ball, Linus opens a trunk and removes from it three little girls. The girls struggle and blink as their eyes adjust to the sudden light. Inside the trunk is also a lake and a sail boat. To make sure that the girls don’t get away while the two of them go sailing, each girl has one of their feet cut off at the ankle by Vera. The following passage is attributed to Þórdís. It relates an incident where Linus has made a dark green dress for Vera. There are five silent children in one pocket of the dress, but the other pocket is carefully sewn shut. The other pocket contains a single child which loudly exclaims that it wants to go home. Never, says Vera and pushes its head down into the pocket. Then they carefully sew the pocket shut. The child cries more and more but eventually stops struggling. The final line of the text ends with: „No sound came from it any more, neither wailing nor sobbing. No sound anymore.” Still, Vera and Linus do not only attack children. They also pull pranks on one other and are actually both rather childish. In this way, their strange, rambling tale continues. The reader gets to know them through a series of small images that sometimes border on realism but seem extremely fantastical in other instances.

The killing of children is generally considered the height of horror, as well as being the ultimate taboo. This does not mean that children are not commonly found among the cast of characters in works of horror. Traditionally, these children are the cause of the horror, either through supernatural talent, as with Carrie and Firestarter (Stephen King, 1974 and 1980), or they are the progeny of evil, as in Rosemary’s Baby (Ira Levin, 1967) and the film franchise The Omen (1976-2006). Other instances pit a child’s innocence against the horror, as with The Shining (Stephen King, 1977) and the film franchise The Poltergeist (1982-1988), but you might also draw the films of Guillermo del Toro into this category (e.g. Pan’s Labyrinth, 2006). In these narratives, children serve as crossover creatures, straddling not just the boundaries between the innocence of childhood and the fall from grace of adulthood, but also the boundaries between two worlds; the real world and the hidden world. This tendency can perhaps be accounted for by the concept of the child’s imaginary world; the idea that the child lives in a world that tends to be to some extent unreal or even fantastical. In this way, horror narratives that concern children are a great example of the gothic-cute in that the sacrosanct and sweet innocence of a child (which may at times take on a disturbing aura that is completely bereft of anything “cute”) is played against the threats of childhood in the form of imaginary worlds which, as is commonly seen in fairy tales, are more often than not extremely disturbing. In these narratives, some kind of fairy tale and/or mythology is usually close at hand—as in Pan’s Labyrinth. This is indeed the case with The Disastrous Tale of Vera & Linus, which has a fantastical atmosphere that fits well alongside the book’s overall gothic spirit.

With the publication of Þórdís’s first book, it immediately became apparent that here was a poetess that had already found her voice. By her third book of poetry, Hiding Behind the Curtains, that voice has grown stronger, and it’s obvious that Þórdís is very comfortable within the world of her own fantastical and gothic imagery. Yet again, we are confronted with dying children (“On the Beach”), knives (“Room”) and blood (“Any Moment”), but now the imagery follows through and the effect is rather like stepping into a haunted house—if I may stick to my gothic metaphors. The dreamlike atmosphere is as prevalent as before, at times so much so that the readers don’t know where they stand when confronted with such dreams. That is: the dream seems almost like a house that the reader wanders into, looks around and then suddenly doesn’t know how to get out of. A good example might be the poem “Photograph”, which at first seems like a rather simplistic approach to the theme of photography:

After he killed his sister with a hammer

for not wanting to open the trunk for him

he struck everything that he came across

looking for other mysteries

until he finally discovered a hollow space behind the wall

where the marbles were hidden

Beneath them lay a photograph of a little girl

wearing the bronzed key around her neck.

The first thing we notice is that there is clearly a lot of backstory here, as is common with poems about photographs. But then we come to the description of the key, which has a definite article. At this point the story begins to waver: where was it again that it all started? This sensation of moving in a kind of circle, although not a closed one but one that opens onto somewhere else, can be found throughout the book and can be seen in poems such as “Bees”, where we are in a book, “April”, where we are in a picture (or at least where there was a picture on the wall at some point), and “Crows”, where we are in a kind of haunted house and the speaker of the poem is cutting the leaves of the potted plants because they “serve no purpose here any longer.” She looks around “to see what time it is” but there is no clock in sight. She “wants to get away” and let the crows sing her to sleep; they live on the roof of the house where she used to live “and predict the death / of he who sits at the table / with a cup of tea next to him / fixing the clock mechanics”.

In between, there are a few images that are more placid; as in “Before”, where the speaker claims to have been an old woman who “pretended to be a ghost”. But she was also a little girl, “hiding behind a bush”. Finally, the speaker claims to have swam in the sea until she “disappeared beneath the waves / dead among the fishes.” The poem ends with the line: “Those were good times.” Here, the mood is briefly lifted when a little bit of humour mixed in with all of this dreamlike ghost-drama.

The book’s opening quotes a poem by Gyrðir Elíasson, which describes a photograph of “beautiful seals” with “friendly smiles” and the eyes “of drowned / children.” On the next page there is a blurry photograph of something that could easily be some kind of creature or monster rising out the water. It’s interesting to look at Gyrðir’s poem in this context as his speciality is exactly this kind of dreamlike atmosphere, one which at times is tinged with ghostly horror. Even so, his work tends to skew towards folklore, while Þórdís’s work falls more within the realms of fantasy. The poem “Insomnia” brings to mind both Alice in Wonderland and the fairy tales of H.C. Andersen. In the poem, the world grows larger at the same time as a girl grows smaller “until she almost couldn’t be seen anymore.” The speaker nearly steps on her, but a man appears who “puts you inside / an empty box of matches when evening came / to make sure you wouldn’t get lost, / and there you lay awake all night long. // In a night place that from the outside / looked like nothing more than a small box / filled with dust.”

Here, we move between sizes and end up in a box of matches, staying awake with the girl. Then we are again shown the scene from the outside; just a small box that maybe actually contains nothing but dust.

As when presented with the trunk in the first poem (the one that perhaps never opened), we are filled with a strange curiosity when standing before the various living quarters that are hidden behind the window curtains. The same can be said about Þórdís’s previous two collections of poetry, which also contain this fantastical atmosphere. It is through this mixture of joy and the grotesque that Þórdís cooks up her comforting horrors.

 

© Úlfhildur Dagsdóttir, 2007

Richard Davenport-Hines, Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil and Ruin, New York, North Point Press 2000.

Ragna Þorbjörg Úlfarsdóttir, Beautiful Disgust (“Fallegt ógeð”), B.A. thesis in graphic design, tutored by Úlfhildur Dagsdóttir, The Icelandic Academy of the Arts, 2007. The author has given her consent for the use of her thesis.

On individual works

Ást og appelsínur (Love and oranges)

Dagur Gunnarsson: “Killing, Shooting, Maiming and Falling in Love. A Poetry Book of Course.” An interview with Þórdís about Ást og appelsínur.
The Reykjavík Grapevine, issue 9 2004, p. 34. Read here.

Vera & Linus

Haukur Magnússon: “A deep, strong hope in its core.” An interview about Vera & Linus.
The Reykjavík Grapevine, issue 15 2006, p. 30. Read here.