Smilla's Sense of Snow, Part II

I lost my copy of Smilla’s Sense of Snow several years ago, in some move or other. I remember it was a paperback with the same diagonal black and white color scheme as Josephine Hart’s Damage; the two used to be next to each other on my shelf, for that reason. This time around I’m reading my local library’s copy:

You will note that there is a quotation from the NYT on the front, about how the book is in the form of a suspense novel, but it is really something else: “an exploration of the heart.” I mentioned in Part I that on a second reading, it struck me how loose and frankly bizarre the structure of it is, as mysteries go. To the point where I would say, inverting the quote, that it is something else posing as a mystery. I would call it a novel of ideas rather than an exploration of the heart. Although it is in some ways emotional, even deeply so, you get to know Smilla’s mind much more readily than her heart.

I read a fair amount of literary theory in college, and I read this book two years after I graduated, but as I recall I approached it more or less as a straightforward mystery novel—just one that happened to give me a picture of Greenland. I wanted to know who killed little Isaiah, Smilla’s six year old neighbor. The conceit of the mystery, and its window into the Danish relationship with Greenland, is that although the death takes place in Copenhagen and Danish authorities treat the death as an accident, Smilla, who grew up on the ice in Greenland, can read the patterns Isaiah left in the snow and tell that he was scared and running away from something or someone. I plowed through it frantically to find out what or who.

Unfortunately for twenty-four year old me, the basic mystery is never resolved. I don’t remember feeling cheated, however, since I got distracted by all the information about Greenland and the current of feeling that went with it. The afterimage or impression the book left, decades later, was all about the lost homeland. The lost Greenlandic mother. Smilla ends up alone and bitter in Denmark with her estranged father, after her mother dies.

Reading it again, it occurred to me that this lost icy paradise—this lost mother—fits seamlessly into the psychoanalytic or literary theory of the world of the mother as a world beyond language, a world of pure connection, which is changed or threatened by the world of the father, where the child communicates through words rather than by touch or staring into the mother’s eyes at the breast. Particularly what came up for me was the feminist theorist Julia Kristeva’s conception of pre-lingual maternal bond as the semiotic chora, which you can attempt to reconnect to via poetry and certain other artistic forms. This pre-lingual stage is suggested even by the title of the book, in that it’s Smilla’s “sense” of snow—or, in the original Danish, fornemmelse which can also be translated as “feeling.” Høeg brings out the difference between the thinking and feeling worlds explicitly. At one point Smilla articulates it:

Since Høeg got a degree in comparative literature a few years before writing the book, I’m sure he read far more Kristeva or Lacan than I did. Following this line of inquiry, I noticed a professor at the University of Copenhagen offered a Lacanian reading of the book.

Since the mystery is left unresolved, the book can also be read as postmodern. And given the centrality of the Denmark-Greenland relationship in the narrative, and the attempt at a sympathetic Greenlandic point of view—critical of the impulses of almost every Danish character—it is also self-consciously tapping into postcolonial theory. Mirroring the way the father’s world and the destructive world of thinking encroaches on the joyful world of feeling, there are many, many references in the text to the colonizer’s attempt to map and therefore control the wilderness of Greenland. At the same time, Høeg makes a conscious effort not to infantilize Greenlanders, or present them as too noble or pure, clearly trying to avoid something akin to an Orientalist trap for the narrative.

I admit I was worried in returning to the book that I would find its approach to Greenland off-putting—especially since that had survived as the most memorable part of it. As I say, though, Høeg addresses most of the themes and controversies of the colonial relationship directly through Smilla’s critical lens. One obvious difference between the early 1990s and now is that both writers and readers are more conscious of allowing colonized or indigenous people to speak in their own voice, and the attempt to capture that voice by an outsider is more fraught.

On this score, I’m not sure if it’s better or worse that Smilla’s story is not terribly realistic. She’s ultimately not convincing as a regular character, let alone a half-Greenlandic one. Too often, her narration reads like a textbook. For example:

Perhaps this compilation of facts simply conveys a scientific turn of mind, but for my own sake it would add verisimilitude if there weren’t so very many of them. The piling on takes you out of the story and away from its emotional center—just as Smilla herself suggests when discussing the sensitivity of experience.

I have noticed that a lot of the critical analysis of her tends to view her as a symbol of some kind, possibly of the Denmark-Greenland relationship itself, rather than a sketch of a figure one might be likely to meet.

As I was turning over this question of Own Voices and appropriation in the past few weeks, I happened to attend a reading by Rebecca Makkai. Since her own recent book touches on the experience of a black man in prison, an audience member asked her about writing from different backgrounds or points of view. I was attracted to her idea that of course writers are going to write about people different than themselves. Art is not merely about telling your own story but capturing different slices of the world around you. But the point is to try to do it well. This involves research, and it involves talking to people from the background or culture you are trying to represent. At length, if necessary. In order to succeed in capturing a voice different than your own, getting feedback on that representation is going to be critical. If you treat it as optional, you will no doubt fail. Even if you do strive to nail down everything you can about the experience of others, you have to accept that it is still perfectly possible to fail.

No one can fault Høeg for not doing his research. Not only does the reader learn a ton about Greenland in the course of the book, but Høeg convincingly portrays life at sea, and captures something ineffable about the edges of known experience. I just doubt that he was even trying to make a realistic half-Greenlandic/half-Danish character, who would be recognizable to others caught between the two cultures. It made me wonder how people from Greenland received the book.