Separation
Posted: Tue Oct 26, 2010 8:28 pm
Parting is all we know of heaven
And all we need of hell
Emily Dickenson
This may not explain all of the novel, but I thought I would give it a shot.
So what is Harbour all about? After reading Harbour, I feel that this story is about the pain that comes from separation. Harbour is a story about the ways that people who love each other become separated from each other. The break up of a marriage is the most common use of the term separation. The most complete separation from a loved one comes with death.
At the very beginning Maja is taken from her parents and is kept separate from them by the supernatural. What follows are the more realistic forms of separation that we are all familiar with. Anders falls into depression and alcoholism and separates from Celia, his childhood sweet heart. That they are separated is only underlined by Anders’ drunken phone calls to Celia at 3 AM. Anders is very much lost in the hopelessness that comes with separation. Like a sailor lost in the sea, he clings desperately to the emotional wreckage of his past life. The world-down-the-stairs at the end is really a nightmare vision of separation. The people in this world are lost in their dreams. Anders speaks to people, but he is not heard. He approaches people and they turn away from him. He is a ghost in this ghost-world and even Maja can’t see or hear him.
If this story is about separation, it is also about the opposite of separation. This is not the “communication” taught by marriage counselors. In Harbour different characters experience an actual communion between two people. Think about when Eli kisses Oskar in Let the Right One In and you have the right idea. You do not simply “know” the other person, you become that other person. The medium for this communion is the same thing that has caused so much separation in Harbour: the sea. Through the sea, the spirits of those lost in the sea return to the living and become part of them. So Anders becomes Maja’s människohamn, and actually becomes Maja. As Anders tells Celia near the end, “It doesn’t end. Everything is still here.”
The sea in Harbour is this mystical force, both separating and uniting the past and the present, reality and dreams and the living and the dead.
And all we need of hell
Emily Dickenson
This may not explain all of the novel, but I thought I would give it a shot.
So what is Harbour all about? After reading Harbour, I feel that this story is about the pain that comes from separation. Harbour is a story about the ways that people who love each other become separated from each other. The break up of a marriage is the most common use of the term separation. The most complete separation from a loved one comes with death.
At the very beginning Maja is taken from her parents and is kept separate from them by the supernatural. What follows are the more realistic forms of separation that we are all familiar with. Anders falls into depression and alcoholism and separates from Celia, his childhood sweet heart. That they are separated is only underlined by Anders’ drunken phone calls to Celia at 3 AM. Anders is very much lost in the hopelessness that comes with separation. Like a sailor lost in the sea, he clings desperately to the emotional wreckage of his past life. The world-down-the-stairs at the end is really a nightmare vision of separation. The people in this world are lost in their dreams. Anders speaks to people, but he is not heard. He approaches people and they turn away from him. He is a ghost in this ghost-world and even Maja can’t see or hear him.
If this story is about separation, it is also about the opposite of separation. This is not the “communication” taught by marriage counselors. In Harbour different characters experience an actual communion between two people. Think about when Eli kisses Oskar in Let the Right One In and you have the right idea. You do not simply “know” the other person, you become that other person. The medium for this communion is the same thing that has caused so much separation in Harbour: the sea. Through the sea, the spirits of those lost in the sea return to the living and become part of them. So Anders becomes Maja’s människohamn, and actually becomes Maja. As Anders tells Celia near the end, “It doesn’t end. Everything is still here.”
The sea in Harbour is this mystical force, both separating and uniting the past and the present, reality and dreams and the living and the dead.