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Paper short abstract

Applying US southern gothic forms to two novels set in Iceland in 1918—Sjón’s Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was (2013) and Gunnar Gunnarsson’s Seven Days of Darkness (1920)—brings repressed societal aspects, such as the suppression of queerness in Icelandic nationalist discourses, to the surface.

Paper long abstract

Although Icelanders were not directly involved in World War I and did not witness its horrors, they were reminded of their mortality in 1918 with the outbreak of the Spanish flu and the eruption of the volcano Katla, which turned day into night. Both Sjón’s Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was (2013) and Gunnar Gunnarsson’s Seven Days of Darkness (1920) capture this historic year through distinctly gothic approaches. The intertextuality between the two novels deepens some of the darker threads in Sjón’s novel, such as the suppression of queerness in Icelandic nationalist discourses. Applying US southern gothic forms to these novels bring suppressed societal aspects to the surface, resonating with the gothic’s engagement with the repressed histories of slavery and patriarchy in the US South.

In this talk, drawn from a co-written book chapter, I’ll elucidate queer themes present in both novels. For instance, according to Jean-Ulrick Désert, “queer space is in large part the function of wishful thinking or desires that become solidified” (21), which relates to the concretization of imaginings that occur through cinema, in this case international films that transport Máni outside of the time and place of 1918 Iceland—even if only within the space of the cinema and his own mind. Thus, through the queer space of the cinema, Máni can exist beyond the culture that surrounds him. Sjón’s novel, then, challenges ideas of nationalism and normative expectations, attempting to come to terms with that which has not been directly addressed in Icelandic culture.