Arnfinn Åslund
The Smorgasbord of Scandinavian Philology, 4 (2020), 2020, pp. 115-134
The essay presents an interpretation of the novel Thunder Road (2009) by the Norwegian author Erlend Kaasa (b. 1976). The novel is about growing up in rural Norway in the early 1990s. At the narrative center is the love story between two teenagers. They engage in matters typical of their age, and there is quite some drama in their relationship. The male protagonist goes through a variety of feelings related to love and deceit. The novel shows how young people think about themselves in a way that is influenced both by older generations and by contemporary popular culture. In a conversation about Bruce Springsteen, his brother, who has become a fan, introduces the concept of the “big things”. He has borrowed this expression from an interview by the director David Lynch. These “big things” are of the greatest importance in both life and art. How can one talk about them without making them smaller? The problem seems to be related to that ancient discourse on the sublime or the great in literature, which is commonly attributed to Longinos. This essay investigates the concept of the big things in relation to the novel itself. I make use of Gadamer’s hermeneutic ideas of play, symbol and feast, and I emphasize the various kinds of aesthetic experience and the intertextual and the metafictional play throughout the novel.