By Jonathan Thornton
Jenny Hval is an artist whose work refuses to be contained in one medium. Across her writing and her music, the Norwegian artist has relentlessly pursued her unique vision, one in which experiments with form are used to create a powerful sense of estrangement. Hval’s novels Paradise Rot (2009, translated by Marjam Idriss 2018) and Girls Against God (2018, translated by Marjam Idriss 2020) are remarkable works of feminist fiction that blur the boundaries between the Weird and the mundane.
These novels celebrate the abject, the queer and the arcane as a way of operating outside our capitalist realist present. Her music engages with complementary experimentations with narrative and form to achieve similar ends. It is Hval’s ability to disconcert through these unexpected juxtapositions that makes her music and her writing so powerful. However, to gain a true understanding of her oeuvre as a contiguous trans-medial experiment, let’s explore both of Hval’s novels Paradise Rot and Girls Against God, and two of her most narratively successful and well-received albums, Apocalypse, girl (2015) and Blood Bitch (2016).
Hval’s Novels and Albums
Across her novels and albums, Hval reveals some of her favourite techniques and themes. She favors fractured narratives, larger wholes built up out of telling little vignettes. A focus on interiority. Celebrations of transgressions and, as we’ll discuss in detail later, the abject. And music informs her novels, just as literature informs her albums. Paradise Rot tells the story of Jo, a young woman who has left Norway to go to university in the small town of Aybourne. She moves into a converted warehouse with no walls which she shares with Carral, a woman with no personal boundaries. As the warehouse they live in descends into fungal rot, Jo undergoes an erotic awakening with Carral. Girls Against God is about girls growing up in conservative Christian small town Norway in the 1990s, and finding release in the transgressions of black metal, witchcraft and female friendship.
Hval’s albums tend to be conceptual, drawing literary ideas from modernist authors, B-movies and folklore to create generically unstable but compelling texts. Likewise, Hval’s approach to music is equally catholic, with touchstones as varied as Kate Bush and Laurie Anderson through to modern electronics and classical jazz. Apocalypse, girl is a stream of consciousness narrative somewhere between dream and reverie that sees Hval’s identity drift between states of waking and sleep, male and female, just as the two women in Ingmar Berman’s Persona (1966), whose characters appear in the album’s liner note credits, lose track of their own identities in each other. And Blood Bitch is a concept album about a time-travelling vampire named Orlando, after the eponymous gender-shifting character in Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel, that centres blood and menstruation. Together, these works show different aspects of Hval’s unique artistic vision.
The Abject
The abject is central to all of these books and albums – Hval sees the abject as an embodied alternative to capitalism, conformity and Christianity. She celebrates rot and corruption for their transformative properties. Much as Hval’s characters frequently spend their time somewhere in between dream and reality, so their bodies find themselves in constant states of flux. In Paradise Rot, Jo and Carral’s warehouse flat becomes a kind of rotting Eden, a sanctuary in which the women can explore their creative impulses and their increasingly complicated feelings for each other. The rotting fruit, fungal growths and maggots serve to accentuate rather than contradict this – in their decomposing of the flat and everything in it, they create new matter out of death, even as they reflect how the physical and emotional boundaries between Jo and Carral are being washed away in a tide of bodily fluids. Jo experiences dreams and visions in which her body and the rotting warehouse merge into one, both sprouting surprising and beautiful new forms of life as their old forms dissolve:
But my dreams are full of apples, and in the dark my body slowly transforms into fruit: tonsils shrinking to seeds and lungs to cores. I dream of white flowers blossoming under my nails, as if under ice. Then my nails break, opening up like clams and in the finger flesh there are sticky little fruit pearls. (46)
The unnamed protagonist of Girls Against God and her friends/band members Venke and Terese harbor a similar obsession with the abject. The women are attracted to black metal as a howl of abjection, an aggressive negation of everything that white suburban conservative Christian Norway stands for, even as they find themselves excluded from its masculine immaturity by virtue of being girls. Through the transformative rituals they enact and the art they create, they imagine their own forms of abject expression. The protagonist imagines her hatred as a black poisonous corrupting fluid leaking from her body:
Perhaps the black fluid is coming straight from the body itself: the gall oozes from people. The insides take over, destroying the outside, our subversive components give us a texture that we didn’t know we had, but not with something we produce, just something that’s always there, something like blood, because we can’t stab our blood and feel pain. This blackness should disintegrate us. In the end we’ll look like little foetuses, and then we’re gone. (106)
Their bodies, in defiance of the conservative Christian doctrine that delineates their roles as baby producers, become sites for rot and destruction, a subversive negation of the life-giving process that allows the women to reclaim their bodies as their own through the process of putrefaction.
This fascination with the abject manifests in Hval’s albums just as strongly. Apocalypse, girl opens by drawing parallels between Hval’s body and rotting fruit in the first track ‘Kingsize’:
The bananas rot slowly in my lap, silently, wildly, girly. The rash is an opportunity, a common disease, something in common, a community, the definition must be: something attacking itself.
This confluence of rot and sexuality recurs throughout the album. In ‘Take Care of Yourself’, Hval sings about “grab[ing] my cunt with my hand that isn’t clean” as she meditates on the different meanings of self-care. This intermingling of desire with the abject, taking place as it does on the album’s prettiest song, all cooing vocals over delicate electronic beats, allows Hval to reclaim the messiness of her own body and sexuality from the clean, commercialized and idealized image of female pop star sexuality in a way that is both visceral and challenging. It reaches its apotheosis on ‘Sabbath’, in which Hval imagines transforming into a boy:
I’m six or seven and dreaming that I’m a boy. I emerged out of the water and went into the garden with a small silver hand between my thighs
Later, in the shower, I see a boy naked. He is contagious, and I can feel mine.
Pop stars have frequently played with gender ambiguity, but Hval takes this further by imagining gender as “contagious”, like an infection that reshapes the body. This taps into the performative nature of gender, that Hval’s ambiguous portrayal of gender begins as something absorbed almost unconsciously from the people around her, before she learns to control and manipulate it for herself. It can also be read as Hval’s response to the ‘social contagion’ trope so beloved of conservatives discussing gender – the abject allows Hval to reclaim the imagery as a celebration of gender ambiguity rather than a denial of it.
Blood Bitch is Hval’s work that most explicitly centres the abject, with its focus on blood, vampirism and periods. The album directly connects the abject with desire. In final track ‘Lorna’, Hval asks,
What is this desire
This biting
Eating into another person
What is this that can’t be contained in you
I feel full of holes
Separate
And when I wake up, I see red flowers on the bed
This directly echoes earlier track ‘Untamed Region’:
I’m in a big house, having big dreams
The next time I wake up there’s blood on the bed
Didn’t know it was time yet
Or is it not mine?
In both cases, consuming, vampiric desire is likened to being on one’s period – both are a loss of control, a surrender to the abject tides of the body’s blood. This thread follows Orlando’s loose narrative, as the character travels through time and contexts, engaging in transgressive sexual practices. Lead single ‘Female Vampire’ rages against subjectivity and the tyranny of being perceived, and ‘The Great Undressing’ likens capitalist consumption to the passionate objectification of unrequited love. The album reaches a climax with ‘Period Piece’, in which Hval, through Orlando, demands “some kind of artform … where I can call my blood”. Here Hval clamors for a form of self-expression that acts through the abject, allowing her to embrace the messiness and complexity of embodied desire.
Metatextuality
Hval’s art demands an equally radical form to reflect her transgressive subject matter. In her novels, this manifests through a rejection of linear narrative in favour of a fragmented style that blurs distinctions between dream and waking, reverie and plot. Paradise Rot sees Hval experimenting with this approach, incorporating sections in which characters retell fairy tales to each other or read their novels and poetry aloud. However it is Girls Against God that most fully embraces this approach. Throughout the novel, linear narrative is eschewed in favour of an approach that draws from, absorbs and plays with other modes of artistic expression. The novel’s unnamed protagonist’s primary mode of artistic expression is through film, so much of the novel describes hypothetical film scripts, drawing in particular from experimental film and low-budget found footage horror to create a language beyond the novelistic. In keeping with Hval’s fascination with artistic expression and the extremes to which she might go to achieve them, Hval’s protagonist imagines and reimagines different ways in which she might approach her filmic vision, writing and overwriting her own text with a palimpsest of alternate interpretations and approaches.
Appropriately enough for a book so much about music, Girls Against God also draws on Norwegian black metal. Not only is the history of the movement baked into the novel’s timeline, with characters arguing about when the movement started and what constitutes the genre’s truest forms of expression, but Hval evokes the lo-fi, self-recorded cassette aesthetic of black metal by celebrating her characters’ intentionally primitive approach to making their own art. The novel draws explicitly on Darkthrone’s ‘Unholy Trinity’ of black metal albums A Blaze in the Northern Sky (1992), Under a Funeral Moon (1993) and Transylvanian Hunger (1994), whose music, lyrics and artwork are frequently evoked. But typically for Hval, her references extend beyond this – Norwegian artist Edvard Munch is another of the novel’s touchstones, particularly his painting Puberty (1895). Hval imagines the subject of the painting rebelling against its creator and taking revenge on Munch, who hides by traveling through time to join a metal band. These allusions are both playful, allowing Hval to have fun with historical and fictional characters, and subversive, allowing a feminist response to a work of art that portrays its female subject as a passive victim.
This instability and metatextual playfulness extends to Hval’s music as well. Blood Bitch features recordings of studio chatter that poke through the constructed façade of the music, reminding the listener that the record is a carefully constructed artefact whilst providing meta commentary. We see this particularly on the track ‘The Great Undressing’, which starts with a snippet of Hval discussing the concept behind the album with artists friends, who laughingly dismiss vampires as “so basic”. It manifests in the experimental nature of the music, in which Hval mixes spoken word sections with singing, lush pop arrangements and electronic beats with experimental improvised droning. Hval co-produced both Apocalypse, girl and Blood Bitch with Norwegian noise musician Lasse Marhaug, chosen specifically by Hval to bring his experimental, underground approach to the context of avant-pop. Both albums also demonstrate Hval’s affinity for drawing on other artforms to enrich her work, with Apocalypse, girl modelled on Bergman’s Persona and Blood Bitch drawing on both Virginia Woolf and 70s horror films. Thus, like her novels, Hval’s albums play off and comment on existing works of art as part of their magpie approach to both sonics and narrative themes.
Hval’s work, both in written and musical form, shows an artist willing to explore the limits of genres. Her music and her books use a playful approach to metatextuality and form to more effectively convey their radical ideas about desire, queerness and the abject. She has now released nine studio albums, the most recent being Iris Silver Mist released this May, and two more novels which have sadly not yet been translated into English. She is a rare artist whose radical approach serves her well across multiple media. Works like Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018) have created a climate in which Hval’s embrace of the abject in her literature and her music can be more widely appreciated, and speculative works like Aliya Whiteley’s The Beauty (2014) have expanded on Hval’s recontextualization of the fungal as liberatory. But Hval remains a pioneer, and one whose artistic curiosity and intensity shows no sign of slowing.
Jonathan Thornton is a PhD student at the University of Liverpool studying the portrayal of insects in speculative fiction and fantastika. He is the book reviews editor for Foundation magazine. He also writes criticism and reviews and conducts interviews for internet publications Tor dot com, The Fantasy Hive and Gingernuts of Horror, and has written music criticism for The Quietus, Louder Than War and OUTSIDELEFT.
Photo by Hreinn Gudlaugsson via Wikimedia Commons.
Typebar Magazine is an independent media outlet funded entirely by readers like you. We put every cent we make back into the operation and our primary goal is paying our writers more money. This year we were able to increase pay rates from $50 to $75 but we’d love to offer our writers $100 per essay. Please consider supporting us as we try to make that a reality.
