When the name of Icelandic Nobel Laureate Halldór Laxness (1902-1998) is brought up in the English-speaking world, those who have heard of him are most likely to connect his name to left wing politics and the novel Independent People, first published in the US in 1946 and circulated widely in the Book of Month Club. A lesser-known fact is that Laxness tried his luck as a scriptwriter in Hollywood in 1927-1928 and pitched his idea for Woman in Pants to studio moguls and film directors. The treatment for the film would evolve into the novel Salka Valka which allowed Laxness to enter the world literary system through translations into Danish, French and Swedish. An English translation was also published on both sides of the Atlantic but went mostly unnoticed. In contrast, this panel celebrates Philip Roughton’s new translation into English of this key work in Laxness’s career. The novel is as current as ever, exploring the development of heroine Salka Valka, considered a feminist icon by generations of Icelandic women. Salka is a survivor of sexual violence, and her gender expression is fluid and provocative in her small fishing village. Laxness chose the subtitle “Political Love Story” for the second volume of Salka Valka, a dialectic composition which highlights the novel’s competing narratives of romance and class struggle and at the same time challenges the formulas of social realism and traditional love stories. Little scholarship exists on his work in English and what does concentrates primarily on political and biographical perspectives. The panelists draw on existing scholarship in both Icelandic and English to fill these gaps. Each will speak for about fifteen minutes, and the rest of the session will open to unstructured discussion.

In his paper Haukur Ingvarsson will give an account of how Salka Valka grew out of Laxness's fascination with a movement in US literature referred to as the Revolt from the Village. During his stay in California Laxness read key works by others connected to the movement such as Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson but he also became personally acquainted with the socially engaged writer Upton Sinclair. One of the indicators of Salka Valka’s ties to the Revolt from the Village is the fact that Laxness considered calling the novel “Plássið” which can be translated as small town or simply the place. The paper will explore thematic and formal resemblance between Salka Valka and the US authors mentioned but also trace how Laxness and William Faulkner followed a parallel path into the system of world literature.

Jenna Grace Sciuto explores connections between Salka Valka and her American counterparts, Mick Kelly a protagonist of US southern writer Carson McCullers’s The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940) and Frankie Addams in McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding (1946), who each reject what they consider to be feminine roles and behaviors, from having sex to wearing skirts. These gender nonconforming protagonists refuse to be caught within the confines of approved womanly behavior sanctioned by their societies. Sciuto examines how Salka, Mick, and Frankie perform female masculinity to reject the rigid gender expectations and confinements common to US southern and Icelandic societies in the 1930s and 1940s. An analysis of the different though comparable ways that gender nonconformity in the form of tomboyism manifests in literature from each space also elucidates the patterns resulting from their various histories and experiences of colonization.

Finally, Xinyu H. Zhang revisits Halldór Laxness’s engagement in the genre of social(ist) realism concomitant with his stay in the U.S. Zhang considers the ways in which envy structures and mobilizes the representation of the coming-into-consciousness of sexuality and class within the novel as well as the reception of that representation by contemporary literary and social critics. Here, envy is understood first and foremost to be a temporal structuration (rather than an essentializing characterological trait), which, through a gesture of (quasi-)dialectically differentiating and valorizing between forms of possession and dispossession, yields a structure of non-synchronicity and gives rise to an affective and kinetic exigency, or desire, towards an act-to-synchronize that is not to be reductively captured by the binary of action/reaction. Zhang proposes a way to address and formulate the socio-literary task implicit in the social realism of Salka Valka –– that of closing up the temporal gap between knowing and writing, writing and acting; or, of bringing out a sense of synchronicity or contemporaneity, which expresses a necessarily Utopian desire –– through the figuration of envy within and without the novel.