the labyrinth of the Cryolite Corporation of Denmark and finally leads her out to the open ocean and back to her homeland of Greenland. Like a quest hero, Smilla has helpers on her journey. Peter Føjl, the mechanic, provides her with care, information, and love. Jean Pierre Lagermann gives her information about Isaiah’s autopsy and about the parasite. Lukas, the captain of theKronos, also reluctantly helps her by allowing her to come on board the ship in the guise of a stewardess.

Smilla nearly dies when she goes to the Arctic Museum and a bomb explodes. She escapes by swimming underwater, a symbolic rebirth. When she emerges from the water, her resolve is firm: she will find the answers she seeks.

Tricksters also abound in the book. Moritz’s wife, Benja, fills the role by calling the police on Smilla when she is at their house, causing Smilla to flee. Jakkelsen on the Kronos is also a trickster, someone who is not what he seems. After their initial encounter, however, Smilla and he reach an uneasy truce and a strange alliance.

For Smilla, the purpose of the quest is to understand why Isaiah was killed. This information is bound up in the quest for the strange meteorite that gives off heat in the Arctic north. Isaiah’s death is inextricably connected to the meteorite that seems to be alive and to the parasite that kills its host. Indeed, the quest for information and the quest for the meteorite merge in the final pages of the book.

Finally, Smilla fights against forces of evil. Tørk, the grand villain, is bent on recovering the meteorite for fame and fortune, regardless of the havoc the accompanying parasite wreaks on the rest of the world. In the final climactic scene, Smilla confronts Tørk, as any good epic hero would do.

However, while it is possible to find the archetypal epic structures in the novel, closer inspection reveals that Høeg has played with these archetypes, just as he has played with generic conventions, to such an extent that he undermines the entire epic project, the triumph of the hero over evil.

In the first place, Høeg plays with conventions of gender. As noted earlier, the classic epic hero is always male, and often a male in search of his father. Although Smilla is a woman, she does not even fit easily into that role. Her area of expertise is a male-dominated field. She is aggressive and bold in sex and causes trouble everywhere she goes. Throughout the book, it seems clear that Smilla is in search not of her father but of her mother. Again, Høeg plays with notions of gender by creating Smilla’s mother as an androgynous Inuit hunter, a woman who nurses her child at her breast while demonstrating that her arms are as thick as a man’s. It is her mother’s knowledge and strength that Smilla emulates.

Høeg also creates a false helper for Smilla. Readers of epic literature expect a helper who will fight to the death for the hero. Føjl, Smilla’s helper and lover, is not the helper of epic lore, but rather is a betrayer. He has collaborated with the forces of evil in order to help Tørk in his quest. Even here, however, the distinction is not clear. Føjl does not rest easily in the villain’s camp; he was devoted to Isaiah and to Smilla, in spite of his duplicitousness. Moreover, Smilla does not seem to be able to reject the mechanic out of hand, even when she sees his betrayal.

Tørk, as the villain, also seems to blur in and out of focus. Smilla finds him breathtakingly hand- some and finds herself attracted to him in spite of his murderous intentions. Høeg goes so far as to almost create Smilla’s doppelganger, or double, in Tørk: a lonely, precocious child, looking for love, fame, and attention, just like Smilla, who runs away more times than she can count before she is twelve years old. In the final scene, the pair are both running across the ice, each on his or her path to salvation or destruction.

There are other, less obvious details as well. A common motif in the epic quest is the arming of the hero. Gawain and the Green Knight provides a well-known example as Gawain puts on his armor as he is about to leave on his search for the Green Knight. In Smilla’s Sense of Snow, however, Høeg provides an ironic reversal. In Denmark, Smilla is always dressed extravagantly; indeed, her expensive, high-class clothing often allows her to do battle with the Danish establishment. On board the ship, however, as she prepares for what will be her final battle with Tørk, rather than going through an elaborate arming ritual, she takes off her clothing and examines her wounds:

Anyone interested in death would benefit from looking at me. I’ve taken off my bandages. There’s no skin on my kneecaps. Between my hips there is a wide yellowish-blue patch of blood that has coagulated under the skin where Jakkelsen’s marlinspike struck me. The palms of both hands have suppurating lesions that refuse to close. At the base of my skull I have a bruise like a gull’s egg. . . . I’ve been modest enough to keep on my white socks so you can’t see my swollen ankle.

It is the ending of the novel, however, that most undermines epic conventions. Most quest stories are of the out and back type. That is, the hero leaves on his quest, defeats evil, retrieves the item of value, and returns to tell his tale, a wiser and stronger man. Høeg both manipulates and subverts this form. The book closes with Smilla tracking Tørk across the snow, herding him onto thinner and thinner ice. Although Smilla knows some of the details of Isaiah’s death, she still does not know the truth of it nor the truth of the mysterious meteorite, which will remain where it is, nor the truth of her lover, the mechanic. “Behind us the stone is still there, with its mystery and the questions it has raised. And the mechanic.” She considers the story she will tell on her return. Unlike the triumphant tale of the returning hero, however, her tale is one that signifies nothing:

Tell us, they’ll say to me. So we will understand and be able to resolve things. They’ll be mistaken. It’s only the things you don’t understand that you can resolve. There will be no resolution.

By choosing to end his book but not resolve it, Høeg demonstrates the postmodern condition, a condition that allows only pastiche, not epic, only ambiguity, not certainty. Although Smilla can read the ice, she cannot read the truth. As such, she is the postmodern hero, still struggling to find meaning in a darkening world of ice and snow.

Source: Diane Henningfeld, Critical Essay on Smilla’s Sense of Snow, in Novels for Students, The Gale Group, 2003.

As Frøken Smillas fornemmelse for sne (Smilla’s Sense of Snow) begins to end, if never to resolve itself, Smilla Qaavigaaq Jaspersen sets sail for an arctic sea far, far away. In that sea lies as island; on that island there is a glacial cathedral; in that cathedral there is a lake; in that lake there is a black stone; in that stone there is a worm. “Mennesker venter på denne sten. Deres tro og forventning vil gøre den virkelig. Vil gøre den levende, uanset hvordan det ellers forholder sig med den” (“People are waiting for this stone. Their belief and anticipation will make it real. They will make it alive regardless of the true nature of the stone.” Tørk, the fictional, murderous plot maker is speaking to Smilla, near the finale, about the public he fully intends to exploit. Is the voice of his creator, Peter Høeg, an equally murderous plot maker, to be heard under Tørk’s, albeit with a potentially different public in mind? Inevitably, it would seem, in a novel as self-consciously wrought as this one. Tørk speaks with utter cynicism about our need to believe in the sensational power of the stone. Does Høeg, a most sophisticated, cosmopolitan writer, speak with equal conviction about the need of his late twentieth-century reading public still to believe in the sensational power of the fiction? Does he taunt us, even as he entertains us, with the emptiness of the post-modern novel? Or does he strive to fill it up again? And if so, at what price? Does it become, like Tørk’s stone, the commodity in which, in Walter Benjamin’s words, “hell rages”? And again, if so, what is that “hell”?

A stone in a lake in an ice cave on an island in an arctic sea far, far away mimics an ancient riddle in Scandinavian folklore.

“Langt, langt borte i et vann ligger en øy,” sa han; “på den øya står en kirke; i den kirken er en brønn, i den brønnen svømmer en and; i den anda er et egg og i det egget—der er hjertet mitt, du.”

(“Far, far away in a lake lies an island,” he said; “on that island there’s a church; in that church there’s a well, in that well swims a duck; in that duck there’s an egg, and in that egg—that’s where my heart is”).

This is the riddle at the heart of the Norwegian folk tale, “Risen som ikke hadde noe hjertet på seg” (The Giant Who Had No Heart in Him). Askeladd must find the Giant’s heart in order to bring his brothers and their brides, turned into stone by the Giant, back to life. What takes Smilla five hundred pages takes Askeladd two paragraphs in the Asbjørnsen and Moe tale. Finally holding the egg enveloping the Giant’s heart in his hand, Askeladd squeezes. The Giant cries out in pain. “Klem én gang til” (Squeeze again), says Askeladd’s helpful sidekick, the Wolf. The Giant begs for his life, agreeing to do whatever Askeladd wants. “Si at dersom han skaper om igjen de seks brødrene dine som han har gjort til stein, og brudene deres, skal han berge livet” (Say that if he brings back your six brothers that he has turned into stone, and their wives, he’ll save his life), says the Wolf. The Giant immediately turns stone back into flesh. “Klem nå sund egget” (Now crush the egg), says the Wolf. Without hesitation, Askeladd breaks the egg, and the Giant’s heart bursts.

Is there a heart in this novel, and if there is, does Høeg break it? Without much ado, we can certainly say that he breaks the heart of any notion of “traditional” closure, quite literally and quite figuratively putting the worm in the stone of the ending, in keeping with post modernism’s aesthetic of failure and fragmentation. And, indeed, the critic in us may thrill to Smilla’s theoretical correctness. But the reader in us experiences, along with many others, a dismay as the novel disintegrates, as the philosophical, European detective fiction spins seemingly out of control into a Hollywood actionadventure script. Or as one reviewer wrote:.

Something peculiar happens to Smilla’s Sense of Snow as it sails toward its denouement . . . (It) takes on the trappings of movies like The Blob (whose extraterrestrial predator, one recalls, was shipped to the Arctic), The Thing (whose monster preyed on the inhabitants of an Arctic station) and Them (which evoked a world threatened by genetic mutation).

The amorphic movie titles do, indeed, capture exponentially the “appearance,” if not the “essence” of the second and third parts of Smilla, “Havet” (“The Sea”) and “Isen” (“The Ice”). Typically, Høeg gives us warning of the direction his narrative will take once he and Smilla have left the landscape of “Byen” or “The City.” Only a few hours after Smilla has gone on board the ship, less than a minute in fictional time, s/he muses:

Jeg har altid vaeret bange for havet . . . På det åbne hav findes der ingen landkending, der findes kun en amorf, kaotisk forskydning af retningsløse vandmasser, der tårner sig op og bryder og ruller, og hvis overflade igen brydes af subsystemer der interferer og danner hvirvler og forsvinder og opstår og tilsidst forgår sporløst . . . Jeg frygter (havet) fordi det vil fratage mig orienteringen, mit livs indre gyroskop, min vished om, hvad der er op og ned, min forbindelse med absolute space . . . Fra jeg for nogle timer siden er gået om bord, er nedbrydningen sat ind.

I’ve always been afraid of the sea . . . On the open sea there are no landmarks, there is only an amorphous, chaotic shifting of directionless masses of water that loom up and break and roll, and their surface is, in turn, broken by subsystems that interfere and form whirlpools and appear and disappear and finally vanish without a trace . . . I’m afraid of (the sea) because it will rob me of my orientation, the inner gyroscope of my life, my awareness of what is up and down, my connection to Absolute Space . . . The process of disintegration started the moment I came on board several hours ago.

Smilla’s loss of connection is reflected everywhere in the fiction henceforward. Characters and events become increasingly anarchic, narrative rhythm grows fitful, suspense ebbs and flows, and the images of the fictional landscape lose both color and contour, until in the final scene a white fog of frost is descending, the heroine is losing sight of the villain, the villain is losing his bearings, the ice is thinning, the temperature is dropping, and an obliterating snow storm is coming, returning all, we might say, to the blank page. As if we have entered into some other, inchoate dimension, philosophically as well as imagistically, we are left to ponder, after all this time, whether Smilla’s words are pretentious or profound, empty or full of meaning.

Man kan ikke vinde over isen.

Bag os er stadig stenen, dens gåde, de spørgsmål den bar rejst. Og mekanikeren.

Et sted foran mig bliver den løbende skikkelse langsomt mørkere.

Fortael os, vil de komme og sige til mig. Så vi forstår og kan afslutte. De tager fejl. Det er kun det man ikke forstår, man kan afslutte. Det kommer ikke til nogen afgørelse.

You can’t win against the ice.

Behind us the stone is still there, with its mystery and the questions it has raised. And the mechanic.

Somewhere ahead of me the running figure slowly grows darker.

Tell us, they’ll say to me. So we will understand and be able to resolve things. They’ll be mistaken. It’s only the things you don’t understand that you can resolve. There will be no resolution.

Does Høeg in the end, like some post-modern Askeladd, break our collective, bourgeois heart? Or has he hidden a heart elsewhere, as the Giant did twice before he was outwitted by the intrepid hero? It would certainly be in keeping with Høeg’s fascination with the paradoxical that he play both roles. The folk tale that informs the final phase of the novel is, at least from one point of view, a tale of rebirth. Askeladd tricks the Giant into bringing his family of brothers back to life. Upon my first reading of Smilla the existential thriller, even the extraordinary heroine, even at times the devastating social critique, seemed like masks, Trojan horses, Askeladdian tricks that allowed Høeg to write what he indicated he was writing from the very beginning, a narrative of mourning, a tale of death, loss, and depression, and equally of those flashes of clarity, of white-hot purpose, of the keen sense of being on some right track, as one attempts to trick the Giant, to restore what has been lost, the one who has been lost, if only in another form.

Høeg concludes Smilla with his own riddle. “Det er kun det man ikke forstår, man kan afslutte. Det kommer ikke til nogen afgørelse” (“It is only the things you don’t understand that you can resolve. There will be no resolution”). In other words, contrary to what we think we have just read, we have understood it all. I would suggest that the novel is, at heart, about the most common, and the most devastating, of human experiences, those sorrows of loss that potentially wean us too soon from this earth. At the risk of being Tørk’s fool—and there could be worse fates—the one who would find meaning where there is none, I offer a reading of this novel as a tale of mourning and renewal.

The Corpse
One could say that Frøken Smillas fornemmelse for sne is held in the embrace of a child. In the first narrative moments, barely acquainted with our guide, Smilla, we watch her catch sight of a small, dark shadow in the snow early on a December evening in Copenhagen. She runs toward it. The shadow is the corpse of the boy, Isaiah.

Esajas ligger med benene trukket op under sig, og med ansigtet ned i sneen og haenderne omkring hovedet, som skaermer han for den lille projektør der lyser på ham, som er sneen en rude gennem hvilken han har fået øje på noget dybt nede under jorden.

Isaiah is lying with his legs tucked up under him, with his face in the snow and his hands around his head, as if he were shielding himself from the little spotlight shining on him, as if the snow were a window through which he has caught sight of something deep inside the earth.

Nearly five hundred pages later, now all but a double of Smilla, we watch with her as Tørk, the murderer of Isaiah, runs out onto the thinner and thinner ice of the Greenlandic seas. She chases him, running parallel to him.

Han har mistet orienteringen. Han føres ud mod det åbne vand. Mod dér, hvor strømmen har udhulet isen, så den bliver tynd som en hinde, en fosterhinde, og under den er havet mørkt og salt som blod, og et ansigt presser sig nedefra op mod ishinden, det er Esajas’ ansigt, den endnu Ufødte Esajas.

He’s lost his bearings. He’s being led out toward open water. Toward the spot where the current has hollowed out the ice so it’s as thin as a membrane, a fetal membrane. Underneath, the sea is dark and salty like blood, and a face is pressing up against the icy membrane from below; it’s Isaiah’s face, the as-yetunborn Isaiah.

As if the text were the earth, Isaiah peers back at himself lying lifeless in the snow. How are we to read this fetal embrace? Is it a hole or a whole in a text that ends with the proclamation, “There will be no resolution”? Perhaps it is both, the everrepeated cycle of meaninglessness and meaning, the failed and the possible, loss and recovery, Isaiah’s sooting vision, the vision of newborns and of the extremely old, the gaze of our common humanity, connecting the beginning to the end like a beam of light, providing, one might say, the Ab- solute Space of the story, the thing for which we long, to which we cling, even as we search for it.

In a review of Smilla for The New Statesman John Williams began by saying that “It’s the corpse that defines a thriller.” Isaiah as corpse is particularly poignant. The dead boy bears the name of the greatest of the prophets, who foretold of the coming of the Messiah. His was a prophecy of a paradoxical redemption, made manifest in both a suffering and a reigning Messiah. Does such a namesake have any meaning in a text as profane as this one? Smilla possibly casts doubt. Upon first meeting Elsa Lübing, the novel’s elegant, oldfashioned, religious recluse, Smilla remarks, “Jeg har mistet fornemmelsen for, hvordan man tackler troende europaeere” (“I have lost the sense of how to tackle a believing European”). But Miss Lübing, a former “bookkeeping” genius from another era, a woman of conscience, even if she has withdrawn to her windowed penthouse of white and cream, lends credence to the Bible as text. It is the wisdom by which she lives, providing her not only with the language through which she speaks in her daily life, but the secret code through which she and Smilla communicate. Miss Lübing, with her Bible, gives Smilla one of the first keys to unlocking the mystery of Isaiah’s death. Her ancient text may also provide a key to the meaning of Høeg’s text as well.

Høeg’s Isaiah might be said to be both prophet and prophecy. He is a Christ child of sorts, at the center of an albeit highly corrupted nativity myth. Smilla, the quintessential, 1990s vierge moderne,2 in spirit if not in body, thinks of Isaiah as her child. The mechanic, Peter Føjl, plays the carpenter to her Virgin Mary. They are this novel’s unholy family. Isaiah dies in December and is fictionally about to be reborn about three months later, roughly corresponding to the Christian feast of the Resurrection. Oddly for a story set in Copenhagen, the boy is often placed by Smilla in an environment of shimmering heat, as if he were in a desert, and he is usually described as being naked, save for the underpants he wears like a loin cloth. His body is pierced by a modern sword, a biopsy needle. And, like Christ, Isaiah turns the other cheek. When lashed out at, abused, hurt, he digs into what Smilla calls “sin naturs ubegraensede reserver” (“the unlimited reserves of his character”). “Tålmodig, tavs, agtpågivende vred han sig bort under de udstrakte haender, og gik sin vej. For, om muligt, at finde en anden løsning” (“Patient, silent, and watchful he would wrench himself away from the outstretched hands and go on his way. In order to find, if possible, some other solution”).

Smilla herself sees Isaiah as a potential savior of her cultures, as a Greenlander who could in essence incorporate Denmark, change it to his own, take it backward or forward to something more integrated and whole. Using imagery as eclectic as her boy-hero, she describes his response to her gift of a luxurious, white jacket. The resulting composite is of a hybrid phoenix.

Esajas var ved at lykkes. Han ville kunne vaere nået frem. Han ville kunne have optaget Danmark i sig, og transformeret det, og vaereblevet både-og.

Jeg fik syet en anorak til ham af hvid silke. Selve mønsteret havde passeret europaeerne. Min far havde engang fået det foraerende af maleren Gitz-Johansen. Han havde fået det i Nordgrønland, da han illustrerede det store standardvaerk om Grønlands fugle. Jeg gav Esajas den på, jeg friserede ham, og så løftede jeg ham op på toiletsaedet. Da han så sig selv i spejlet, skete det. Det tropiske tekstil, den grønlandske andagt ved festdragten, den danske glaede ved luksus, alt. smeltede sammen. Måske betød det også noget, at jeg havde givet ham den.

Isaiah was on the verge of success. He could have gotten ahead. He would have been able to absorb Denmark and transform it and become both a Dane and a Greenlander.

I had an anorak made for him out of white silk. Even the pattern had been passed down by Europeans. The painter Gitz-Johansen once gave it to my father. He had gotten it in North Greenland, when he was illustrating his great reference work on the birds of Greenland. I put the anorak on Isaiah, combed his hair, and then I lifted him up onto the toilet seat. When he saw himself in the mirror, that’s when it happened. The tropical fabric, the Greenlandic respect for fine clothes, the Danish joy in luxury all merged together. Maybe it also meant something that I had given it to him.

The notion of Isaiah being on the verge of success seems blasphemous in a narrative in which he is the ultimate victim of late twentieth century, western culture, a culture of greed, power, and disregard for life. The child of the System’s pawns, he is witness to his father’s death by explosives and his mother’s by alcohol. His body is infected with parasites and his hearing damaged by modern drugs. But as the Biblical Isaiah’s Messiah was both sufferer and redeemer, so too is Smilla’s young Isaiah both victim and savior, both hollowed out and whole.

One might, in fact, say that Isaiah is the emblematic child sufferer in a sea of suffering. In reviewing Høeg’s recently published The History of Danish Dreams (1995) for Nation John Leonard writes:

How H(ø)eg hates this middle class, whose own children are a Third World, to be colonized, “civilized” and serfed. In his suspicion of science, technology and the very idea of progress, he belongs to a long tradition of those antirationalists who’ve gone swimming Against the Current . . . But H(ø)eg’s distinctive contribution to this literature of disenchantment, of subversive subjectivity, is his brilliant focus on the lost child—coveted, abused, eroticized, missing, homeless, inner, emblematic, mode of production, consumer and commodity, Little Mermaid and Ugly Duckling—the orphan in the burning world. No wonder he needed Smilla . . . Smilla on her sleigh, who has fled us through dreaming ice to a Winter Palace.

Smilla may have fled. Nevertheless, these lost children lie like an endless chain of corpses on the landscape of Frøken Smillas fornemmelse for sne. Like Isaiah they fall from the structures, through the fissures, not only through the corrupted world reflected through the narrative but through the narrative itself, through those expert discourses—economic, scientific, medical, philosophical, aesthetic—that are the building blocks of the fiction.

The novel is really a novel of nothing but children, their adult masks bleeding off like actor’s paint, crooks, criminals, and good citizens alike, bleeding into children before Smilla’s and our very eyes. Of the dead, to name just a few: Closest to Smilla is her younger brother, who committed suicide when he was forced to transform himself from hunter to dock sweeper, this younger brother, mentioned in an aside here and an aside there, more important in the narrative than he seems, connected somehow to Isaiah through the memory of the shimmering heat of a hot, arctic summer. And there is the investigative detective Ravn’s daughter, pushed from another roof, also by Tørk, symbolic of all the children of any class who are forced by violence from the structures of power. Smilla’s last communication to the “outside” world is to Ravn about his daughter, and the revenge she takes in the end is certainly in her name as well as Isaiah’s. Of the living-dead: There is Benja, the lithe, emotionally stunted, thumbsucking darling of the Royal Ballet and Smilla’s abusive doctor/father. There is Landers, the perpetually drunk casino owner whom Smilla calls “En affaldsbarn, en der altid har haft svaert ved at begå sig, og egentlig heller ikke har haft lyst til at laere det” (“A throwaway child, someone who has always had a hard time dealing with the world and hasn’t actually wanted to learn how”). No one is exempt, not even the artists, perhaps most particularly not the artists. The murderer, Tørk Hviid, is himself a crucified child, the son of a “great” composer. As a mutual acquaintance condemningly writes to Smilla’s father:

Drengen gik for lud og koldt vand. Huller i tøjet, rødøjet, fik aldrig en cykel, blev pryglet i den lokale proletarskole fordi han var for svag af sult til at forsvare sig. Fordi hans far skulle vaere stor kunstner. I har alle svigtet jeres børn. Og der skal en gammel svans som mig til at fortaelle jer det.

The boy was totally neglected. Holes in his clothes, red-eyed, never had a bicycle, was beaten at the local proletarian school because he was too weak from hunger to defend himself. Because (his father) was supposed to be a great artist. You’ve all betrayed your children. And it takes an old queen like me to tell you.

There is also Jakkelsen, the Kronos Captain’s drug-addicted younger brother, whom Smilla calls the “sick child.” He literally becomes the corpse in the cargo of the ship that takes Smilla to that (w)hole in the ice where she potentially wrecks her revenge on Tørk. Backing Smilla up like some farcical, glacial warrior, Jakkelsen’s protective, yet impotent brother, the Captain, steps up behind her, harpoon gun in hand, pointed at Tørk. “Du skal blive gjort ansvarlig” (“You must be held responsible”), he says, just before his arm is shot off. And, of course, there is Smilla, the protagonist, the Greenlandic/Danish hybrid child, whose desires to sink back into her own childhood from the iceencrusted present continually wash over her like waters, sometimes troubled, sometimes calm, from a sea of memories, even as she pursues the murderer of her beloved child, Isaiah.

Wounded children killing wounded children, wounded children avenging wounded children is the underlying modus operandi of Frøken Smillas fornemmelse for sne. In a novel more nakedly about the abused child in contemporary society, De måske egnede (1993), the novel that followed Smilla, Høeg quotes the god of modern physics who publicly mourned the death of his own childhood, at the same time as he consigned his infant daughter to a similar fate.

Da Einstein er blevet verdensberømt, og journalister spørger til hans opvaekst, refererer han flere gange selv til den som “liget af min barndom,” “The corpse of my childhood”.

Han siger at han sigter til den hårde, indskraenkende borgerlighed der omgav ham.

Det fremgår tydeligt af hans breve til Mileva Maric, at hans videnskabelige teorier udvikles i protest mod denne borgerlighed . . . Den indskraenkning han protesterede mod i sit arbejde, bornertheden, er samtidig den der får ham og Mileva Maric til at sende deres otte måneder gamle datter bort.

“The corpse of my childhood.”

When Einstein has become world famous, and journalists ask about his youth, he himself refers to it several times as “the corpse of my childhood.”

He says he is referring to the strict, inhibiting bourgeois mentality that surrounded him.

It is clear from his letters to Mileva Maric that his scientific theories are developed in protest against this bourgeois mentality . . . At the same time, the inhibition he protested against in his work, the narrowmindedness, is what causes him and Mileva Maric to give away their eight-month-old daughter.

“The corpse of my childhood.”

How do we reverse the unending spiral of child corpses? At the heart of much of what Høeg writes is the question, “Can we do it differently?” Those who try, like the boy-murderer, August, in De måske egnede, who ends his own life rather than perpetuate the murderous cycle in which he is caught, are Høeg’s twentieth-century, martyred heroes, his messiahs. In the end, as Smilla confronts Tørk on the ice, she recasts herself in the image of Isaiah.

Det er is der er under mig, jeg er på vej hen over isen, imod ham, som Esajas var på vej vaek fra ham. Det er som om jeg er Esajas. Men nu på vej tilbage. For at gøre noget om. For at prøve, om der skulle findes en anden mulighed.

There is ice under my feet. I’m on my way across the ice toward him, just as Isaiah was heading away from him. It’s as if I am Isaiah. But on his way back now. To do something differently. To see whether there might be an alternative.

The recast Isaiah, the Smilla/Isaiah, would save the child. But which child?

The Character
Preliminarily it must be said that it is the dead child who saves the living, for to bring Isaiah back seems to mean bringing Smilla back, Smilla whose dark love affair with melancholy is far more seductive than her love affair with the mechanic. Death often startles us into living. Isaiah’s death sharpens Smilla’s senses, like a cup of the mechanic’s scalding, tropical tea. She says herself that she has been set free.

Esajas’ død er en uregelmaessighed, en spraengning der har fremkaldt en spalte. Den spalte har sluppet mig fri. For en kort tid, uden at jeg kan forklare hvordan, er jeg kommet i bevaegelse, er jeg blevet et skøjtende fremmedlegeme oven på isen.

Isaiah’s death is an irregularity, an eruption that produced a fissure. That fissure has set me free. For a brief time, and I can’t explain how, I have been set in motion, I have become a foreign body skating on top of the ice.

The death of one child becomes the lifeline of the other.

One can speak of Smilla in this way only, of course, if one can assume that a traditional notion of character has gone into the making of Smilla. Instinctively as readers we seem to believe in her as “real.” Brad Leithauser wrote in his review in The New Republic:

At the outset of her tale I was aware that Smilla—as a European, an Eskimo and a woman—stood at three removes from a reader such as myself. All the more striking, then, was the speed with which the sense of distance from her vanished—the speed of arriving on intimate terms with her. And she accomplishes this without being at all forthcoming. She is a taciturn soul. We read nearly 100 pages before we discover that her passion for snow and ice derives not merely from experience but from scholarship. She is a glaciologist, with articles to her credit like “Statistics on Glacial Graphology” and “Mathematical Models for Brine Drainage from Seawater Ice.” We believe in this heroine partly because her reticence in no way feels coy. It seems, rather, like the wariness of somebody who, having grown up surrounded by dangers, instinctively seeks to keep predators at bay.

Leithauser’s observation touches only the tip of the iceberg. Reticence is Smilla’s emotional veneer. Underneath she is a chronically lonely soul, subject to bouts of depression which she records, as only the true melancholic can, with irresistible allure, provoking our desire to follow her into her dark spaces. Depression, I would suggest, is the crack in the personality of this uncommon heroine that allows us, most likely so different from her in most ways, to identify so intuitively with her. Melancholy is, in a sense, our common bond.

For Smilla it seems tantamount to a lost love. Rather than fend it off, she courts it and embraces it with a determined abandon. Momentarily defeated in her search for Isaiah’s murderer, she gives herself up to depression with these fighting words:.

Man kan forsøge at daekke over en depression på forskellige måder. Man kan høre Bachs orgelvaerker i Frelserkirken. Man kan laegge en bane højt humør i pulverform ud på et lommespejl med et barberblad, og tage den ind med et sugerør. Man kan råbe om hjaelp. For eksempel i telefonen, så man har sikret sig, hvem der hører det.

Det er den europaeiske vej. At håbe på, at man kan handle sig ud af problemerne.

Jeg tager den grønlandske vej. Den består i at gå ind i det sorte humør. At laegge sit nederlag under mikroskopet og dvaele ved synet.

Når det er rigtig galt—som nu—så ser jeg en sort tunnel foran mig. Den går jeg hen til. Jeg laegger mit paene tøj fra mig, mit undertøj, min sikkerhedshjelm og mit danske pas, og så går jeg ind i mørket.

Jeg véd der kommer et tog. Et blyforet damplokomotiv, der transporterer Strontium 90. Jeg går det i møde.

Det kan jeg gøre, fordi jeg er 37 år gammel. Jeg véd, at inde i tunnelen, inde under hjulene, nede mellem svellerne er der et lille punkt af lys.

You can try to cover up depression in various ways. You can listen to Bach’s compositions for the organ in Our Saviour’s Church. You can arrange a line of good cheer in powder form on a pocket mirror with a razor blade and ingest it with a straw. You can call for help. For instance, by telephone, so that you know who’s listening.

That’s the European method. Hoping to work your way out of problems through action.

I take the Greenlandic way. It consists of submerging yourself in the dark mood. Putting your defeat under a microscope and dwelling on the sight.

When things are really bad—like now—I picture a black tunnel in front of me. I go up to it. I strip off my nice clothes, my underwear, my hard hat, my Danish passport, and then I walk into the dark.

I know that a train is coming. A lead-lined steam locomotive transporting strontium 90. I go to meet it.

It’s possible for me to do this because I’m thirtyseven years old. I know that inside the tunnel, underneath the wheels, down between the ties, there is a little spot of light.

Høeg has taken great pains to give his Smilla a psychologically provocative past, both in the broad sweeps of ancestry and family history and the smaller, more secretive movements of the “soul.” During this particular dark mood, literally locked up in her Copenhagen apartment, she consciously evokes a memory that makes her black tunnel even blacker. It is the memory of her second attempt, at the age of twelve, to return to Greenland from Denmark, where her father had forcibly brought her after her mother’s death six years prior. She remembers a frantic, winter flight northward, trying to reach Frederikshavn, and from there Oslo, and then Nuuk. First she hitchhikes, then she steals a motorcycle, skids, crashes on lake ice, tears her jacket, breaks her wrist bones, and lands in the hospital, where her father comes to retrieve her. Walking to the car she breaks away, he chases after her and catches her, and she turns on him, her right hand in a cast, her left hand hiding a scalpel that she had stolen from the emergency room. She gashes the palm of his hand. They circle around each other, both ready to strike, when Moritz suddenly straightens up and says, “Du ligner din mor . . . ” (“You’re just like your mother . . . ”). And he starts to cry.

This scene, which begins Part Two of “The City,” is key to the novel, an allegory of the greater narrative in which present and past play to and against each other in a drama that stays the same the more it changes. The paradigm of the wandering, violent journey northward, leaving Smilla bloodied but unbowed, is unmistakable. Embedded in it are the complex of forces that compel her to flee, be it to the expanse of the Arctic or to a small, dark room in Copenhagen. Her depression of the present, brought on by her momentary failure to uncover Isaiah’s murderer and hence to recover Isaiah, is deeply anchored in the past, in her attempts to return to Greenland, both in body and in spirit, to the home of her mother.

John Bowlby, in his introduction to Loss: Sadness and Depression (1980), the third and final volume of his classic study on mourning, Attachment and Loss, noted that “bereave” stems from the same root as “rob.” Building on earlier studies by Darwin and Strand, he assumed that the attempt of the bereft one to recover what has been lost is instinctive. “ . . . a mourner is repeatedly seized, whether he knows it or not, by an urge to call for, to search for and to recover the lost person and . . . not infrequently he acts in accordance with that urge.” In Loss he developed his theories of successful versus thwarted mourning, concentrating, in particular, on children who have lost a parent, either through death or separation. The mourning of children would, he contended, reveal the paradigm for adult mourning, which, he further contended, was often founded in childhood. If a child is allowed to/is able to suffer through grief in all its stages, s/he will recover from the loss, will recover what Darwin called “elasticity of mind,” but if grieving is thwarted, s/he will be doomed to a repetitive, if disguised search for the dead beloved. Bowlby established an intimate connection between a recent and an earlier loss.

A probable explanation of the tendency for a recent loss to activate or reactivate grieving for a loss sustained earlier is that, when a person loses the figure to whom he is currently attached, it is natural for him to turn for comfort to an earlier attachment figure. If, however, the latter, for example a parent, is dead the pain of the earlier loss will be felt afresh (or possibly for the first time). Mourning the earlier loss therefore follows.

I would suggest that Smilla’s search for Isaiah can be interpreted as a repetition of a “life-long,” if disguised search for her lost mother. Smilla herself is keenly aware of the need in others to try to hold on to the dead beloved, even if that other is the father she so scorns. In ruminating about her flight toward Greenland, away from Denmark, she recognizes, as both a past and present truth, her father’s need to keep her close in order to keep her mother, if only in memory, alive.

Til Danmark havde han hentet mig, fordi jeg var det eneste der kunne minde ham om, hvad han havde mistet. Mennesker der er forelskede, de tilbeder et fotografi. De ligger på knae for et tørklaede. De foretager en rejse for at se på en husmur. Hvad som helst der kan puste til de gløder, der både varmer og forbraender dem.

Med Mortiz var det vaerre. Han var håbløst forelsket i en, hvis molekyler var suget ud i den store tomhed. Hans kaerlighed havde opgivet håbet. Men den havde klamret sig til erindringen. Jeg var den erindring.

He had brought me to Denmark because I was the only thing that could remind him of what he had lost. People in love worship a photograph. They fall on their knees before a scarf. They make a journey to look at the wall of a building. Whatever can ignite the coals that both warm and sear them.

With Moritz it was much worse. He was hopelessly in love with someone whose molecules had been sucked out into the vast emptiness. His love had given up hope. But it had latched on to memory. I was that memory.

The thing that Smilla understands so well about her father, in fact the thing that allows her to understand her father at all, is the thing that drives her with equal ferocity, the need to recover someone who also for Smilla, with even more insidious consequences, was “suget ud i den store tomhed” (“sucked out into the vast emptiness”). What Moritz tries to do through his daughter, Smilla tries to do through her chosen son, Isaiah. After her failed flight at the age of twelve, she never again tried to escape, that is, until Isaiah was murdered. Her return to Greenland may be far more compulsive than the detective novel alone would allow. Smilla as the avenger of the dead child on one level of the narrative, is herself the thwarted child mourner on another.

Smilla was seven years old when her mother disappeared in the Greenlandic seas. The only trace of her was her kayak, which, according to Smilla, led her Inuit kin to conclude that “det havde vaeret en hvalros” (“it must have been a walrus”). There were no further details. Now in her thirty-seventh year, Smilla seems to have made peace with her mother’s unknown demise as yet another hard, but natural fact of a hard life. But as so often with Smilla, things are not what they seem. In the context of telling of her mother’s disappearance, Smilla detachedly cites two fascinating facts from her seemingly endless list of fascinating facts. First, in Danish waters, compared to Greenlandic waters, due to the warmer temperature, the processes of decomposition cause fermentation of the stomach, giving “selvmordere fornyet opdrift” (“suicides renewed buoyancy”), and causing them to wash up on shore. Second, walruses are unpredictable. They can be transformed from the most sensitive of fish to the most ferocious killers.

Med de to kindtaender kan de slå en skibsside af faergecement ind. Jeg har engang set fangerne holde en torsk hen til en hvalros de havde fanget levende. Den smalede laeberne til en lille kyssemund, og så sugede den fiskens kød direkte af knoglerne.

With their two tusks they can stave in the side of a ship made of ferrocement. I once saw hunters holding a cod up to a walrus that they had captured alive. The walrus puckered up his lips as for a kiss and then sucked the meat right off the bones of the fish.

These bits of knowledge are potentially interesting in and of themselves, as are so many of Smilla’s multifarious observations. But we should not be folled. For surely they have a more provocative function in this story of Ane Qaavigaaq’s demise. They devilize the unknown waters of her grave. They suggest that Smilla has entertained fantasies of a most violent death, or perhaps even worse for Smilla, a death by her mother’s own hand, fantasies that Smilla can only allow herself to express through the detached formula of scientific facts. For the mourning child, Bowlby stressed, it is essential that the child be made aware of two things, “first that the dead parent will never return and secondly that his body is buried in the ground or burned to ashes.” Smilla, denied certainty, even of this elementary kind, has lived for thirty years with disembodied ruminations of suicide, dead animals, and lethal walruses, a symptom of what Bowlby called “disordered mourning.” Her image of the walrus’s kiss of death reveals a truth she cannot see, a fear she cannot feel. It explains her rage with her beloved Isaiah, when she finds him running across the disintegrating ice in Copenhagen harbor. “ . . . (jeg) slog . . . ham. Slaget var vel— som vold nu kan vaere det—et destillat af mine føleser for ham. Han holdt sig lige akkurat oprejst.” (“ . . . I hit him. The blow was probably a distillation of my feelings for him, the way violence sometimes is. He barely managed to stay on his feet”). A love more powerful even than her love for Isaiah was distilled in that single blow. For hove could Smilla tolerate even the thought of another loss to the sea?

Smilla does not disguise the centrality of her mother in her life. To the contrary, through memory and fantasy she has created an icon, an androgenous, Inuit god, earth mother and hunter, an almighty presence between whose legs she once lay, at whose breast she once nursed. The image is of a divinity in whose body the fluids of life, milk and blood, flow eternally.

Hun kysser mig aldrig, og hun rører sjaeldent ved mig. Men i øjeblikke af stor fortrolighed lader hun mig drikke den maelk, der bliver ved med at vaere der, bag huden, som blodet altid er der. Hun spreder sine ben, så jeg kan gå ind imellem dem. Sore de andre fangere går hun i bukser af bjørneskind, som kun garves nødtørftigt. Hun elsker asker, spiser den undertiden direkte ud af bålet, og hun har smurt sig under øjnene meed den. I denne duft af braendt kul og bjørneskind går jeg ind til brystet, der er lysende hvidt, med en stor, sart rosa areola. Der drikker jeg så immuk, min mors maelk.

She never kisses me, and she seldom touches me. But at moments of great intimacy, she lets me drink from the milk that is always there, beneath her skin, just as her blood is. She spreads her legs so I can come between them. Like the other hunters she wears pants made of bearskin, given only a rudimentary tanning. She loves ashes, sometimes eating them straight from the fire, and she has smeared some underneath her eyes. In this aroma of burned coal and bearskin, I go to her breast, which is brilliantly white, with a big, delicate rose aureole. There I drink immuk, my mother’s milk.

But does the all-powerful maternal image conceal a treachery? Smilla’s tale of intimate attachment to her mother is contained within a tale of destruction and death. As with the memory of her mother’s disappearance, Smilla diverts attention from the actual love object in her mind’s eye, not this time through smart, scientific facts, but through her mother’s own anecdotal wisdom about the ebb and flow of life in the Arctic. Two years before Ane Qaavigaaq died, Smilla was hunting with her for narwhals and white-breasted auk. Among her mother’s kill was a female narwhal and her angelwhite pup, not yet born. Smilla herself caught three auk in a flock of black, white-breasted females on their way to their young with worms in a pouch in their beaks. She had them in her net, and she knew how to kill them by pressing on their hearts. She had done it before, but this time she balked.

Og så ser jeg nu alligevel pludselig deres øjne som tunneler, for enden af hvilke ungerne venter, og disse ungers øjne er igen tunneler, og for enden af dem er narhvalungen, hvis blik igen fører ind og bort. Lige så langsomt vender jeg ketcheren, og med en kort eksplosion af støj stiger fuglene til vejrs.

And yet I suddenly see their eyes as tunnels, at the end of which their young are waiting, and the babies’ eyes are in turn tunnels, at the end of which is the narwhal pup, whose gaze in turn leads inward and away. Ever so slowly I turn over the net, and with a great explosion of sound, the birds rise into the air.

Seeing her daughter’s distress, as if, Smilla recounts, she were seeing her for the first time, Ane, in essence, introduced Smilla to the notion of paradox. Sitting beside her, she said simply, “ . . . jeg har båret dig i amaat . . . Alligevel . . . er jeg staerk som en mand” (“I have carried you in amaat . . . And yet, . . . I am as strong as a man”). And then she drew Smilla into her legs and to her breast, comforting her in her generous, fleshy, androgenous way. Later she spoke of the greater paradox of life and death, trying to explain, Smilla says, why one month 3,000 narwhals are gathered in the fjord and the next month they are dead, trapped in the ice. Smilla understood what her mother was trying to tell her, she recounts, “Men det aendrede intet” (“(T)hat didn’t change a thing”). The year before her mother’s death—Smilla would have been six—she began to feel nauseated when she went fishing.

Clearly, Smilla interprets the memory as her initiation into modern consciousness, the moment forever after which she would harbor “en fremmedhed over for naturen” (“a feeling of alienation toward nature”) because it was no longer accessible to her “på den selvfølgelige måde den havde vaeret tidligere” (“in the natural way that it had been before”). “Måske er jeg allered dér begyndt at ønske at forstå isen. At ville forstå er at prøve at generobre noget vi har mistet” (“Perhaps I had even then begun to want to understand the ice. To want to understand is an attempt to recapture something we have lost”). But as Smilla has reconstructed the memory, its real heart is about maternal loss. As that small child Smilla saw herself in the baby birds, whose mothers would never return. She was the narwhal pup, robbed of its own mother, even as it too was robbed of its life. Smilla’s image of the dark tunnel of depression, which she enters, stripped of illusion, as an adult, she already saw as a little girl in the eyes of the baby birds, at the tunnel’s end an abandoned child.

Bowlby believed that disordered mourning revealed itself primarily in two variants of behavior, in the one extreme, chronic mourning, and in the other, Smilla’s way, a prolonged absence of conscious grieving. “Adults who show prolonged absence of conscious grieving are commonly selfsufficient people, proud of their independence and self-control, scornful of sentiment; tears they regard as a weakness.” Smilla is nothing if not in control. Even when she is not, she is looking like she is. She is a character endowed with encyclopedic knowledge, which she imparts with authority and seductive charm. As readers we must become as adept as she is at reading between the lines, decoding the messages, ferreting out the truth in the fissures that suddenly crack open. She is also a character defined by radical self-sufficiency. The very trait that makes her a contemporary, fictional wonder, the perfect heroine for the actionadventure film, is for Smilla as a character in a narrative of mourning, the mask that reveals the true face. Most critically effected, Bowlby maintained, is the mourner’s “capacity to make and maintain love relationships (which becomes) more or less seriously impaired or, if already impaired, (is) left more impaired than it was before.” By this measure Smilla makes a profound leap toward love when at the end she emotionally embraces the mechanic as part of her future and at the same as part of her return. He is, significantly, waiting “behind” her.

Høeg, in creating Smilla’s past, has destined her for grieving. For she has been drubbed by the shattering, sudden, unresolved disappearances of all of her most beloved, her mother by drowning, her brother by suicide, compounded by Isaiah by murder. But Isaiah has left tracks, and for Smilla this seems to make all the difference as the mourning process is compulsively set in motion.

The Search
It would seem that Høeg has been compelled to create not only a character but also a narrative that is, at the very least, illuminated by a theory of mourning, possibly even driven by it. The child Isaiah, Greenlandic, gynandrous, mysteriously gone, is the perfect spark to ignite Smilla’s memories both of her mother and of herself as a child, her memories of attachment and, in the same breath, loss, and thus to initiate the search, never completed, to find the mother never truly mourned. At the same time, the very structure of the narrative loosely resembles the four phases of mourning isolated by Bowlby: “numbing,” “yearning and searching,” “disorganization and despair,” and “a greater or lesser degree of reorganization.” Smilla seems to be in a phase of numbness as the novel begins, manifest in her rabid self-reliance, her fear of attachment (with, of course, the exception of Isaiah, who may have fooled her because he was “only” a child), and her embrace of the scientific guise, at the same time as she fears it, like the walrus’s puckered kiss. The second phase, “yearning and searching,” could be the subtitle for “The City,” as Smilla begins a series of multi-layered, interconnected, volatile investigations into the murder of the boy, the reluctant love affair with the mechanic, and the memories of the past.

Intermittent hope, repeated disappointment, weeping, anger, accusation, and ingratitude are all features of the second phase of mourning, and are to be understood as expressions of the strong urge to find and recover the lost person. Nevertheless, underlying these strong emotions, which erupt episodically and seem so perplexing, there is likely to coexist deep and pervasive sadness, a response to a recognition that reunion is at best improbable.

Once Smilla leaves land and sets out to sea, both she and the narrative begin to lose their bearings. Smilla’s feeling for Absolute Space fails her. Isaiah seems almost forgotten. The mechanic disappears. The target of the investigation seems to shift from a murdered boy to a secret cargo. Bowlby’s formulation of the third phase of mourning, “disorganization and despair,” may shed critical light on this (often criticized) section of the novel, in which Smilla finds herself quite literally walking and crawling through every inch of the ship, including the dumb waiter, trying, at astounding physical risk, as it turns out, to open locked doors to discover what might be on the other side. “For mourning to have a favourable outcome,” Bowlby observed:.

It appears to be necessary for a bereaved person to endure (a) buffeting of emotion. Only if he can tolerate the pining, the more or less conscious searching, the seemingly endless examination of how and why the loss occurred, and anger at anyone who might have been responsible . . . can he come gradually to recognize and accept that the loss is in truth permanent and that his life must be shaped anew.

He cited the English writer C. S. Lewis who wrote of his own, overwhelming grief in terms that, when applied to Høeg’s narrative, capture the confusion of the section called “The Sea.”

C. S. Lewis (1961) has described the frustrations not only of feeling but of thought and action that grieving entails. In a diary entry after the loss of his wife, H, he writes: “I think I am beginning to understand why grief feels like suspense. It comes from the frustration of so many impulses that had become habitual. Thought after thought, feeling after feeling, action after action, had H for their object. Now their target is gone. I keep on, through habit, fitting an arrow to the string; then I remember and I have to lay the bow down. So many roads lead through to H. I set out on one of them. But now there’s an impassable frontier-post across it. So many roads once; now so many culs-de-sac”

Smilla wears her bruised emotions on her body like contemporary body art. As Brad Leithauser described her in her near final phase:

. . . near the close of the book, we glimpse her with her clothes off as she steps into a shower: “There’s no skin on my kneecaps. Between my hips there is a wide yellowish-blue patch that has coagulated under the skin where Jakkelsen’s marlin spike struck me. The palms of both my hands have suppurating lesions that refuse to close. At the base of my skull I have a bruise like a gull’s egg . . . .”

This is a partial list of wounds. Still to come is the breaking of her nose. The mysterious struggle she is engaged in, against an amorphous circle of thugs and aristocrats, is savage. She might as well be battling one of the bears that she used to come upon in the far north . . . Actually, she might be better off with the polar bear. At least she would know who her enemy was and why it wanted her dead.

Leithauser drew no conclusion about the enemy. I speculate that it is the despair of loss, that her wounds and bruises are comic (actionadventure) representations of emotional lacerations she must endure in order to return, if you will, to the house of her mother to enter the final phase of mourning, “a greater or lesser degree of reorganization,” as apt, if bland, a description as there could be of the conclusion of Frøken Smillas fornemmelse for sne. Smilla herself, toward the end of “The Sea,” tells us, as Høeg so often (and, at times, so pedantically) has her do, precisely what is going to happen. She has fled the ship and stumbled into the body of another dead boy, when she suddenly recognizes the mechanic as the fourth passenger.

Da jeg genkender ham forstår jeg, at jeg bliver nødt til at gå tilbage til Kronos.

Det er ikke fordi det pludselig er blevet lige meget om jeg lever eller dør. Det er snarere fordi problemet er blevet taget ud af haenderne på mig. Det er ikke noget med Esajas alene. Eller med mig selv. Eller med mekanikeren. Ikke engang alene noget med det der er mellem os. Det er noget større. Måske er det kaerligheden.

When I recognize him, I realize that I’ll have to return to the Kronos.

“Not because it suddenly doesn’t matter whether I live or die, but because the problem has been taken out of my hands. It no longer has to do with Isaiah alone. Or with me. Or with the mechanic. Or even with what there is between us. It’s something much bigger. Maybe it’s love.

Smilla returns to her passage through time, at the end, at the edge of the waters that took her mother, embracing for the future both the fetal image of Isaiah and the waiting mechanic, allowing her nemesis, Tørk Hviid, to flee onto the treacherous ice, off the page, and into oblivion.

In elaborating on the phase of “yearning and searching,” Bowlby quoted Colin Murray Parks as saying:.

Although we tend to think of searching in terms of the motor act of restless movement towards possible locations of the lost object, (searching) also has perceptual and ideational components . . . Signs of the object can be identified only by reference to memories of the object as it was. Searching the external world for signs of the object therefore includes the establishment of an internal perceptual “set” derived from previous experiences of the object.

In terms of motor action, Høeg has Smilla quite literally get on board a ship that will carry her back to the place of her birth and her deepest loss, and he is not shy with his symbolism. The ship is named Kronos, the classical god of time, associated with change, with melancholy, and with death. In his fine introduction to Melancholy Dialectics (1993), his book on the play of mourning in the works of Walter Benjamin, Max Pensky traced the transition of what he calls “the role of melancholia in Western culture” from medical to theological and ethical discourses. The eventual kinship to Kronos is striking.

The original medical texts of late antiquity . . . become associated with astrological bodies and properties. Melancholia becomes connected with Saturn, the cold, dark, and slow planet, and thence the correspondence, Saturn-melancholia, with Chronos, the classical god of time, who is now transfigured into the god of sadness and morbidity, of delay . . . thus the association of melancholy with Saturn, and Saturn with the god Chronos, Chronos with time and universal death . . . ”

But Høeg seems to love nothing more than the dialectical, and thus, at the same time as Smilla sails in a ship marked by time, birth imagery abounds: an enclosed vessel, a blind passage through maternal waters, the waiting fetal image. None of this is subtle.

More nuanced, however, is what Bowlby/ Parks called the “perceptual and ideational components,” or, the external “signs” of the internalized object “as it was.” Isaiah is, of course, the most conspicuous sign, but then there is the mechanic. Is Føjl to be read as the English “foil” or the Danish “feel”? Both have connotations. For is he not the perfect, maternal surrogate? (He even shares his own creator’s Christian name.) Like Smilla’s mother, he is large of body and androgynous of spirit, strong and protective. Like her, too, he is primarily non-verbal, a stutterer, who, nevertheless, is the only one who can cajole Smilla out of her depression. He gives her nourishment, like mother’s milk in adult guise, tropical tea and thick espresso, and he takes her between his legs. Time and again, as if she cannot help herself, Smilla connects the mechanic to her childhood. He cooks for her, and she is “mindet om måltidets rituelle betydning. At jeg husker barndommens forening af samvaerets højtidelighed og de store smagsoplevelser . . . Fornemmelsen af, at stort set all i livet er til for at blive delt” (“reminded of the ritual significance of meals. In my childhood I remember associating the solemnity of companionship with great gustatory experiences . . . The feeling that practically everything in life is meant to be shared”). He sleeps with her and she is reminded of a parental kiss. “Munden og naesen vibrerer blødt, som om han dufter til en blomst. Eller skal til at kysse et barn” (“His mouth and nose vibrate gently, as if he were sniffing at a flower. Or were about to kiss a child”). But the mechanic, like Smilla’s mother, is also potentially treacherous, a man of secrets who is not necessarily what he seems to be. Most dangerously, he is a man who can mysteriously disappear, as he does, just as Smilla is about to set sail for Greenland. As a “sign” he must be nearly irresistible to her. At the same time he seems to signal a change in her fortune in the narrative of mourning. For when, in the penultimate section, he returns to the Kronos as the fourth passenger, he in effect reverses the series of (three) shattering, mysterious disappearances Smilla has suffered by mysteriously reappearing, significantly in a shower of warm water.

But the most seductive “sign” of all for Smilla is her beloved snow. Smilla authoritatively announces early on, “Jeg synes bedre om sne og is end om kaerligheden” (“I think more highly of snow and ice than love”). Equally authoritatively Høeg cautioned readers not to trust her. “She should not be relied on, because she’s hidding her sensitivity and feelings under a rough surface” (Lyall). Both statements are misleading, for it is not so much a matter of snow versus love, but of snow as Smilla’s disguised obsession with the loss of love. Smilla herself makes the connection, if she disguises the nature of the loss, when, at the end of her reminiscence about her mother’s intimate embrace, she muses, “Måske er jeg allerede dér begyndt at ønske at forstå isen. At ville forstå er at prøve at generobre noget vi har mistet” (“Perhaps I had even then begun to want to understand the ice. To want to understand is an attempt to recapture something we have lost”).

Smilla is, she says, “panisk” (“panic-stricken”) at the prospect of loving the mechanic, for fear it won’t last.

Dér på hans gulv, ved siden af hans seng, kan jeg høre noget. Det kommer inde fra mig selv, og det er en klynken. Det er frygten for, at det der er givet mig, ikke skal vare ved. Det er lyden af alle de ulykkelige kaerlighedshistorier jeg aldrig har villet lytte til. Nu lyder det, som om jeg selv rummer dem alle.

Standing there on his floor, next to his bed, I can hear something. It’s coming from inside me, and it’s a whimper. It’s the fear that what has been given to me won’t last. It’s the sound of all the unhappy love stories I’ve never wanted to listen to. Now it sounds as if they’re all contained within me.

In her study on melancholy, Soleil Noris: Depression et melancholie (1987) (Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (1989)), Julia Kristeva wrote early on:

Le désenchantement, fût-il cruel, que je subis ici et maintenant semble entrer en résonance, à l’examen, avec des traumas anciens dont je m’aperçois que je n’ai jamais su faire le deuil. Je peux trouver ainsi des antécédents de mon effondrement actuel dans une perte, une mort ou un deuil, de quelqu’un on de quelque chose, que j’ai jadis aimés. La disparition de cet être indispensable continue de me priver de la part la plus valable de moi-même: je la vis comme une blessure ou une privation, pour découvrir, toutefois, que ma peine n’est que l’ajournement de la haine ou du désir d’emprise que je nourris pour celui ou pour celle qui m’ont trahie ou abandonnée. Ma dépression me signale que je ne sais pas perdre; peut-être ai-je pas su trouver un contrepartie valable à la perte. Il s’ensuit que toute perte entraine la perte de mon être—et de l’Être lui-même.

The disenchantment that I experience here and now, cruel as it may be, appears, under scrutiny, to awaken echoes of old traumas, to which I realize I have never been able to resign myself. I can thus discover antecedents to my current breakdown in a loss, death, or grief over someone or something that I once loved. The disappearance of that essential being continues to deprive me of what is most worthwhile in me; I live it as a wound or deprivation, discovering just the same that my grief is but the deferment of the hatred or desire for ascendency that I nurture with respect to the one who betrayed or abandoned me. My depression points to my not knowing how to lose—I have perhaps been unable to find a valid compensation for the loss? It follows that any loss entails the loss of my being—and of Being itself.

Smilla, afraid to lose, has practiced, she says, the art of renouncing, “det eneste i denne verden der er vaerd at laere” (“the only thing in the world that is worth learning”). Her passion, her yearning for love and for beauty, she has channeled into the study of snow and ice, for in her mind they are the substance of permanence. Ice is the opponent of the sea. “(D)en daekker vandet og gør det fast, sikkert, farbart, overskueligt” (“(I)t covers the water and makes it solid, safe, negotiable, manageable”). The sea robs Smilla, as we know, of her sense of Absolute Space. She experiences the loss as actual physical disintegration.

Langsomt vil denne forvirring arbejde sig ind i mit balancesystems vaeskekar og opløse min stedsans, den vil kaempe sig ud i mine celler og forskyde deres saltkoncentration og dermed nervesystemets ledningsevne, og efterlade mig døv, blind og hjaelpeløs . . . Fra jeg for nogle timer siden er gâet ombord, er nedbrydningen sat ind. Det koger allerede i mine ører, i mine slimhinder sker der underlige, umotiverede vaeskeskred.

. . . this confusion will work its way into the chambers of my inner ear and destroy my sense of orientation; it will fight its way into my cells and displace their salt concentrations and the conductivity of my nervous system as well, leaving me deaf, blind, and helpless . . . The process of disintegration started the moment I came on board several hours ago. There’s a boiling in my ears, a strange, internal displacement of fluids.

This is the experience of dissolving, of dying, and it is brought on by the very sea that took her mother.

For Smilla snow is the substance that preserves form, like Isaiah’s tracks. It is the substance of connection, associated in her mind with winter, her mother’s favorite season, and the visiting of others. “Vinteren var en tid til samvaer, ikke til jordens undergang” (“Winter was a time for community, not for the end of the world”). Snow is the substance of certainty. It is the substance of perfection. Like all who mourn, Smilla longs for something that can contain the essence of what is lost, Keats’s Grecian urn, Dinesen’s blue vase. Smilla has found it in her ability to imagine snow. “I den ydre verden vil der aldrig eksistere en fuldendt dannet snekrystal. Men i vores bevidsthed ligger den glitrende og lydefri viden om den perfekte is” (“In the external world a perfectly formed snow crystal would never exist. But in our consciousness lies the glittering and flawless knowledge of perfect ice”). Smilla seems to find in the ice all that she longs for, life, wildness, beauty, change, and eternal permanence. Nearing Greenland, she describes in the most sensuous terms the creation of the ice cover:

Det er skabt i skønhed. En oktoberdag er temperaturen faldet 30 grader celcius på fire timer, og havet er blevet stille som et spejl. Det venter på at gengive et skabelsesunder. Skyerne og havet glider nu samme i et forhaeng af grå, fed silke. Vandet bliver tyktflydende og ganske let rødligt, som en likør på vilde baer. En blå tåge af frostrøg gøar sig fri af vandoverfladen, og driver hen over vandspejlet. Så størkner vandet. Op af det mørke hav traekker kulden nu en rosenhave, et hvidt taeppe af lsblomster, dannet af salte og frosne vanddråber. De vil måske leve fire timer, måske to dage.

It was created in beauty. One October day the temperature drops 50 degrees in four hours, and the sea is as motionless as a mirror. It’s waiting to reflect a wonder of creation. The clouds and the sea glide together in a curtain of heavy gray silk. The water grows viscous and tinged with pink, like a liqueur of wild berries. A blue fog of frost smoke detaches itself from the surface of the water and drifts across the mirror. Then the water solidifies. Up out of the dark sea the cold now pulls a rose garden, a white blanket of ice blossoms formed from the salt and frozen drops of water. That may last for four hours or two days.

The ice is endlessly transformed, even as it remains, always, what it is: hexagonal crystals dissolve into new hexagons, to become frazil ice and grease ice and pancake ice and then hiku (permanent ice) and ice floes, blue and black floes, and white glacier ice, ad infinitum.

But, of course, snow is as impermanent as life, the quintessence of impermanence. Touched by the human hand it disappears, as suddenly and completely as Smilla’s mother. Only in Smilla’s mind is it a constant. Even in its physical construction it is made up of wholes and holes, as illusive a substance as Smilla could have found for her passion, and thus, in essence, the perfect “sign” for her mother, both in her presence and her absence. It is the substance in which she is both to be lost and to be found. Yet, as long as Smilla continues to romanticize snow, she can avoid facing the loss that it hides. She need never lose again.

Kristeva, in her work on mourning, has said that it is the escalating number of signs that is the mourner’s true “sign.” In summarizing Kristeva’s contribution to the literature of mourning, Max Pensky wrote:

It is this very proliferation of signs that draws the melancholic’s attention, both as the exact schematic representation of the sites of the melancholic’s loss and as the only possible medium in which the Thing could be glimpsed. The chaotic mass of symbolic signification— of names—“means” the loss of meaning. It therefore signifies in a double motion. For the melancholic who is able to