Fate in Harbour and Little Star. Spoilers? yes sir!

For discussion of John Ajvide Lindqvist's novel Lilla Stjärna
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gattoparde59
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Fate in Harbour and Little Star. Spoilers? yes sir!

Post by gattoparde59 » Sat Sep 01, 2012 10:40 am

While re-reading Harbour, I suddenly found myself in the grip of a “senior moment.” I read this passage:
It just didn’t turn out that way.
That expression contained the essence of an attitude to life that was embraced by many people on Domarö, and that Simon also shared. A kind of fatalism. The meeting in the mission house had shown him where the roots of the fatalism lay. Things happened and that was just the way it all turned out. Or they didn’t happen, and things just didn’t turn out. Nothing to be done about it.
I read about fate and I said to myself, “this is important” but I could not remember why. Fate is very important in Harbour for sure. From early on we get comments like “That’s just how it was.” In Harbour, the sea is the ultimate source of this fate. I like this description of the sea:
If we are taken so far out in a small boat that no land is visible in any direction, we may catch sight of the sea. It is not a pleasant experience. The sea is a god, and unseeing, unhearing deity that surrounds us and has all imaginable power over us, yet does not even know we exist. We mean less than a grain of sand on an elephant’s back, and if the sea wants us, it will take us. That’s just the way it is. The sea knows no limits, makes no concessions. It has given everything and it can take everything away from us.
To other gods we send a prayer: Protect us from the sea.
With the sea the individual confronts a massive indifference. This is certainly a fatalistic vision of the world where the powerless individual counts for nothing, nothing at all. This vision of a world governed by massive indifference also has social implications. The inhabitants of Domarö submit to their legacy, something like the villagers in Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.”

Fate is very important to Harbour, but that is not the real source of my senior moment. What I really needed to remember is Teresa in Little Star. Like the Islanders in Harbour, Teresa’s makes herself into a faithful reflection of the indifference she finds in the world around her. She does this by assuming the identity of a wolf, but she also does this in a more pointed way by assuming the identity of the goddess Urd, who is literally fate:
But was she actually Teresa any more? Was that her name?
Those were her thoughts as she stood in front of the mirror, studying her face and searching for a clue. She thought her eyes had hardened, literally. As if the eyeball was no longer a jelly-like lump filled with fluid, but was made of glass, hard and impenetrable.
“You are weird,” she said to herself. “You are hard. You are weird. And hard.”
She liked the words. She wanted to be those words, wanted them to fit her like her boots, to wrap themselves tightly around her like her boots and become her.
“My words. Weird. Hard. Words. Hard. Weird.
Urd. Urd.
Her body said yes, in spite of the fact that she didn’t remember. Where had she heard the word before? Was it a name? She went to the computer and opened Wikipedia.
Urd. The original and possibly the only goddess of fate in Norse mythology. One of the three Norns. With her sisters she would spin and cut the threads of life, and her name came from the Icelandic word for unlucky fate.
Everyone is actually called something else. I am called Urd.
The play on words works perfectly in English. I am curious how this was done in Swedish. In particular, the English word “weird” has the same Old English origins as Urd, wyrd. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wyrd

What does this mean exactly, other than Teresa is going insane? It is easy to see that Teresa’s identification with a goddess gives her a sense of omnipotence, but I feel that this is something more ominous at work here. Teresa is literally embraced by, and possessed by Urd later on in her ritual burial.

What role does blind faith play in this story, and as I have implied already, in Harbour, or in any one of the four novels? Urd casts her pall over the story, but I cannot come up with an easy, or at least satisfactory explanation.

If only Lennart had not found the baby in the woods, if only Jerry had been allowed to play "Starman" for his class, if only Teresa had not found Theres, if only . . .

I'll break open the story and tell you what is there. Then, like the others that have fallen out onto the sand, I will finish with it, and the wind will take it away.

Nisa

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