lønningspils

By Gregory Conway

Per Esben Svelstad is a Professor at NTNU, Norway. In 2017 he completed a queer theory focused Ph.D. on the Norwegian writer Åsmund Sveen. He works around the topics of ecocriticism, queer reading, literary education and more. Same-Sex Desire and the Environment in Norwegian Literature, 1908–1979, came out in 2024.

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Earlier this year I was incredibly moved by The Ice Palace, a 1963 novel by Tarjei Vesaas. There is an undefined queer eroticism / romance / friendship between the characters Siss and Unn. The book stuck with me for a long time after closing the pages and I felt curious to see what others thought of the novel; I ended up finding Per Esben’s book as there is a subsection on “An Ecofeminist Approach to Tarjei Vesaas’s Is-slottet” and immediately knew I had to tap in. Reading the entire work was incredibly enlightening and I knew quickly I wanted to tap in with Per Esben and chat about his beautiful book.

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LP: Good morning from Peterborough, thank you for joining the Lønningspils Google Chat for a conversation about Norwegian Literature and your 2024 book Same-Sex Desire and the Environment in Norwegian Literature, 1908–1979, How is Trondheim treating you today?

PE: Good morning — or afternoon as it is here. Thanks for having me! This is quite a foggy day in Trondheim, and our dreams of a white Christmas seem to be fruitless. It’s a very Anthropocene moment!

LP: I believe Alf Martin Jæger does have a character, Leif, in Strengen Brast, who views Trondheim as some sort of paradise. So there is still time for miracles to happen and a white Christmas to emerge.

To get right into your work – I found your book after reading The Ice Palace by Tarjei Vesaas; I had finished the book and was thinking about the relationship between Siss and Unn; two 11 year old girls who have an intimate moment in an iconic scene in Norwegian Literature. I wanted to read more about how people interpreted the text/scene and quickly came across your book.

I think reading this book for the first time in 2025 in contemporary North America, it feels quick and easy to identify it as a queer romantic relationship, but this hasn’t always been the case. From your book I also learned they were originally set to be 16 years old, but was switched to 11 – the age of “wordless secrets” – what are your feelings / relationship to the novel and has it changed with more research into its history?

PE: That is true! There’s much to be said about Trondheim as a queer literary location.

When it comes to The Ice Palace, it’s obviously a classic that I had read and cherished before I started working on the book. I knew there had been a debate about how to interpret the relationship between Siss and Unn, but I wasn’t aware of how much blatant homophobia that was voiced in some of the reception.

Part of the beauty of Vesaas’ book, and of fiction in general, is that it allows us to explore different types of relationships without having to pin them down. What unfolds between Siss and Unn is more fluid and undefinable, and the real value of the novel, to me, is how Vesaas probes into the wordless attachment between the girls. It is interesting to see how many scholars and critics immediately resort to the categories at hand — such as Freudian ideas of psychosexual development or ideas of “perversion” — in order to close down the interpretation of the novel.

What really stood out to me when I used the posthumanist/ecofeminist lens, is how the novel can almost be read as being in opposition to the very act of naming, categorizing, and reducing the world to manageable bits.

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LP: Touching on your posthumanist/ecofeminist lens, this is what made me read the rest of the book (despite not knowing many of the novelists mentioned), this way of using an ecofeminist and non-human environmental view of literature. I try, to the best of my ability, to have these views in day-to-day life, so it really felt like home to find them in a book on literature.

I wanted to share a couple of quotes from the book to touch on that overall theme of your work, which seems to be connecting feminist and ecocritical theory. As a non-academic, these ideas feel incredibly naturally intertwined, but in academia, they had been historically opposed (!?)

P. 3-4. [you share the following quote by Timothy Morton] “Putting something called Nature on a pedestal and admiring it from afar does for the environment what patriarchy does for the figure of Woman”

P. 51. In her seminal article “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” (1972), anthropologist Sherry Ortner answers with a resounding “yes,” arguing that the subjugation of women is a parallel to human, i.e. primarily male, ravaging of the nonhuman world.

P. 51. For feminists and queer theorists alike, the problem with ecological thinking arguably resides in how these theorists imagine the concept of “nature” as an essentialist prison.

How did viewing literature from both a queer and environmental lens become integral to your work?

PE: That is a really interesting and difficult question! I could start with my own academic trajectory. I did my Ph.D. on Åsmund Sveen (1910-1963), a poet, novelist, and literary critic who is also briefly mentioned in my book. My focus was queer theoretical and discourse oriented, and I was interested in how he negotiated psychoanalytic, legal, and aesthetic discourses on sexuality in his lifetime. But there’s also a strong vitalist tendency in his work, and I grew increasingly aware of ecocriticism towards the end of my dissertation work.

I didn’t have the opportunity to pursue this before I got a position teaching and researching literature and literary education in teacher education. Sustainable development is a part of the Norwegian curricula, also for literacy instruction, so I had an excuse to explore more in-depth how imaginative literature and environmental and ecological ideas interact.

Likely primed by my dissertation work, whenever I studied how a work of fiction represented nature, I couldn’t help becoming aware of how closely connected the nature/culture dichotomy is to that of female/male and homosexual/heterosexual. Ortner, of course, is the first to really map out how these dichotomies are coded in parallel.

As I explored ecocriticism further, I discovered that there has historically been a conflict between the social constructivist approach characteristic of gender and queer studies and the insistence on the material reality of nature in ecocriticism and the environmental humanities. What I try to show is 1) acknowledging the social constructivist aspect of the concept of nature does not mean that nature disappears or is disregarded — it might make us consider it in a new light and 2) acknowledging the material existence of nature can be a path to forging new links between queer lives and a nature that is also subject to heteropatriarchal suppression.

It is interesting that you think of these fields as intertwined, whereas academics have had trouble with it. I think that speaks to how sometimes academics — especially scholars of literature — overtheorize certain issues and create polarizations where there need be none. I think this is also due to the rhetorical need to present your research as new and innovative. Ecocriticism probably wouldn’t have had as much success if scholars hadn’t initially presented their approach as a break with what came before. And I think the way ecocritics have challenged the more vulgar versions of the linguistic turn has been very healthy. Now, however, I think it is high time to find common ground [!]. Because, as I hopefully manage to show in my book, there is a lot of interesting negotiation and ambiguity going on in terms of how gender and nature are coded. And both as a scholar and a teacher I believe we need to think about and affirm, but also critically assess ambiguity — now more than ever.

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LP: I remember reading Cheryll Glotfelty’s Ecocriticism Reader and yes! it really felt like that book was burning the house down and rebuilding something new.

I listened to your appearance on the German podcast Nordlitt, which happened in 2023. In that appearance you reference this dissonance between the image of Progressive Norway and what the country is actually doing, (in the context of oil extraction). I feel like Canada has a similar national image dissonance, and also shares this distinct urban vs. pastoral literary history (with urban / pastoral being a very interesting theme throughout your book).

At the time of recording that podcast, the book seemed focused on the interwar years, how did it expand and eventually settle on 1908:1979?

PE: Well, I specialized in the interwar years and during my PhD, so I felt knowledgeable about that period. This has increasingly been a period of interest for literary scholars lately, but little has been written about it from a gender/queer perspective. I realize that much of my motivation for doing research comes from a desire to highlight these stories and do my part in order to make previous queer life and experience visible.

During my work, I realized that much happens on the level of society and ideology in the 1950s and -60s: the revival of the nuclear family as part of the project of national rebuilding, in parallel with the rise of the LGBT rights movement. Some of the literary works from that period I knew about and wanted to devote academic attention to, such as Is-slottet and Villskudd. Others, like Haslund’s Det hendte ingenting I discovered was an almost subcultural lesbian classic that provided interesting nuance to the rest of the works.

So although there is an interwar emphasis, I argue that exploring those works from the 1950s up to 1980 uncovers a crucial blind spot in existing scholarship. And as I argue in the book, the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, followed by the partnership law and the rapid legal and social recognition of LGBTQ rights represents something so different it is worthy of a separate study.

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LP: It truly is a fascinating time in literature – I find that era where we find the mix of the rise of queer visibility in Norwegian literature, alongside Norway during the wars produced some of the best works in the history of literature. Yet they are sadly under-read and under-translated. It is really special to read about more of these texts and I am quite happy that this book is published in English for selfish reasons. I really appreciate the work you are doing.

While reading your book, as an English reader, there are quite a few books which have little distribution in North America, or even available translations. I quickly felt drawn to wanting to read certain books (I have a note at the end of a chapter that just says JENNY – UNDSET, NOTHING HAPPENED – EBBA HASLUND – BUY IMMEDIATELY), but felt something like Borghild Krane was historically important and enjoyed reading about it in your book, but I am doubtful I would pursue it further.

I also felt very inspired to dive into Sigrid Undset, the description of the novel Jenny felt like something I really wanted to read, where Kristin Lavransdatter had never really caught my eye in the same way. Learning of Undset’s late in life Catholicism conversion also brings to mind the contemporary writer Jon Fosse and would be fun to read both looking to see if there was any influence.

If someone wanted to explore one or two of these early queer Norwegian novels, which would you first recommend to a reader?

PE: Thank you for that! One never knows if publications actually reach out to someone, so I’m very happy to know that at least one person read it with this much interest and enthusiasm! That means a lot.

I sometimes jokingly call myself the Sigrid Undset prophet because I am absolutely enamored with her work. She’s figured in my life a long time; I’m born and raised in the same village as Kristin Lavransdatter, and Liv Ullmann’s movie adaptation was shot on location while I was in school. I do enjoy her historical novels, but I realize they’re not everyone’s cup of tea. (One research project that I really want to do is a more sociological analysis of what they’ve meant to female readers, but that’s long-term.)

In terms of quality, Undset’s Jenny and Vesaas’ Is-slottet are the absolutely best novels I treat in the book. So I would start there. They are very different stylistically, but both are beautiful explorations of what it means to be attached to others and how desires and affects push and pull us in various directions.

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LP: It is gearing up to be a holiday season of Undset for me!

Thank you so much for taking the time to do this chat with me, the book is really special and inspiring. It feels like a jumping off point, a great book should make you want to go out and read 10 different books and that’s exactly what this did; I would not have found non-fiction books by Ellen Rees and Jenny Björklund and so many other novels without it.

I want to mention how beautiful and of aesthetic quality your book can be, the ending of the chapter on Ebba Haslund (Intellectual Isolation) is particularly beautiful and moving. If you (the reader of this interview) don’t read “theory” or “academic texts”, this is accessible and even a “fun” read! I kept texting friends about little tidbits of information on Bjorneboe, Vesaas, Sveen… it is special.

To end off, what are you working on these days and how is your work / teaching going? & any books you are excited to dive into over the holidays? I hope to get together for a coffee and chat books in Trondheim one day.

PE: I am very happy to hear that! Obviously, writing in my second language I do feel anxious about hitting the right “note” so to speak — so that feedback is very encouraging.

I just finished the novel The Wanting Seed by Anthony Burgess. A strange, Malthusian, dystopian novel about a future in which heterosexuality, and especially having children, is considered shameful because of resource depletion and food scarcity. Naturally, a lot of straight men “act queer” in order to move up in society. I used it as an example of a book that invites both paranoid and reparative readings for my students recently — quite an interesting read. Right now, I’m reading Du Eneste by Hilde Hagerup, a young adult novel based on the historical, romantic relationship between the poet Gunvor Hofmo and the Jewish, Austrian refugee Ruth Maier in the 1940s. It won the Brage award and is a touching fictionalization of another story that should be more well-known. I’m also looking forward to relaxing with a biography of Virginia Woolf I discovered in a used book store in Copenhagen recently.

Research-wise, I’m getting to the last stage of a new book, focusing on sustainability education in the literary classroom. I’m also doing some work as part of a network on cultures of reading, where I’ll be interviewing young queer readers on what fiction means to them — kind of an empirical/sociological take on topics that I’ve touched upon in previous research.

I’m very happy you invited me to this interview, and would love to continue the conversation in the “real world” sometime!

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Same-Sex Desire and the Environment in Norwegian Literature, 1908–1979 is available here.