Jenny Hval is a Norwegian musician, singer-songwriter, producer, and novelist whose work is multidisciplinary and transgressive. She made her writing debut with the critically acclaimed novel Perlebryggeriet in 2009 (published in English as Paradise Rot in 2018). Her latest novel, Girls Against God was published in Norwegian in 2018, and has just been published in English by Verso (translated by Marjam Idriss). Girls Against God is a meditation on magic, art and writing, via the lenses of black metal, heresy, technology and the occult. I spoke with Jenny over Zoom shortly before the book’s release.
Photograph © Baard Henriksen
Maria Blyth The novel really resonates with me, Jenny, in part because like the protagonist I too was a provincial goth growing up in the far North. Though I’m from the Shetland Islands, I feel like I’m almost Norwegian—I’m familiar with the landscape, the Shetland dialect is very Nordic, and there are so many cultural similarities. The book really made me think about those provincial subcultures—goth, black metal, and so on. This made me wonder whether, growing up, were you a provincial goth too?
Jenny Hval I’ve never been to the Shetland Islands, but I’ve always wanted to go! I was really into horses in my youth, and that connection with Norway was really intriguing—this sort of in-between place. This book is very Norwegian. I think I tried to be a goth for a while, though not as much as the character in the book. I was in a goth band and I was trying out this goth thing. What connected with me was the opposition to a lot of things, but then I was also disappointed by how apolitical a lot of it was, or at least not political in the way I was leaning. So I think I ended up being in the goth group but also being more of a misfit. But that’s also okay; the clothes don’t fit, the corset doesn’t fit, my taste in literature didn’t fit with the ideal at the time. I never got into Lovecraft, for example. I think I was a bit snobbish. I wanted to go for more modernist-type literature; I was quite set on what I wanted to read and enjoy. One of the major traits of deciding what kind of identity you’d like to reach for, and how to get there—mine was literature and maybe music. So I was part of the goth group, but I didn’t feel at home there. And maybe others didn’t either. Maybe that’s a major part of being young—not fitting in, feeling like you fit in nowhere, that no-one understands you.
MB That’s so true—even when you find your people, your subculture, that feeling of being an isolated individual doesn’t really go away.
JH Yeah. Subculture is often not as cultish as it seems—most societies and subcultures and congregations have more variation than you think when you’re young. You think that everyone’s part of the same flock of sheep, but as soon as you get to know people, it’s not the case because people are so different. So, I felt out of place, but quite at home. I didn’t enjoy the dresses but luckily there were fake leather trousers!
MB So, you were kind of into the goth scene—was this when you became interested in magic and the occult, or with this novel are you coming at it anew? I can see occult threads and themes throughout your writing and music.
JH Well I think I discovered it after doing it. I wasn’t very into these things beyond reading about Wicca and Pagan rituals on the early internet in the 90s. I was fascinated by it but not really studying it—it was pure fascination for me, but there was no such thing in my region, and perhaps not in Norway at all, at least that I could see. So it felt very far away from me. When I started doing my own music in my mid-20s, I guess that after a while I realised how interested I was in the ritual of performing. I think for many years I was more interested in the performing arts—performance art in particular—because of this closer connection with ritual than I could find, even in subcultural pop music. I realised I can do elements of this on stage, I can use the space visually, I can look at the space of the stage differently, even if I’m performing music. I can look at music as an incantation, as a spell, as something that is brought to life with its own kind of magic. That’s become more and more important in my work. I think that it’s been the motivation all along, but I hadn’t been able to see that until I started working towards creating this book. So, over the last six or seven years I’ve realised more and more that music does have something to do with magic and ritual. Even if my work is not coming purely from that subcultural longing any more.
MB I really love this idea of the band as a coven casting spells together. One thing I like about the spells in the novel is how many bodily fluids are involved. This is something I find really interesting about all of your work—there’s something really tied up around physicality, the body, nature, “filth”, in a certain meaning of the word. Of course, bodily fluids feature throughout the history of magic and spellcasting—they are such an integral part of magical practice. Why do you think this is?
JH My entry points to magic are art and music. Music, because that’s my stage, it’s my ritual output, which is much more visceral a process than writing is. And I write a lot about this in the book—about how you write the spell and it can be performed, but it’s sort of in an in-between place of not existing yet, not being put into words yet, or not being in the body yet—like you’re creating future bodily fluids. To me, experiencing singing is what makes me write a lot about fluids and the body. I’m not necessarily the kind of artist you’d call a visceral artist—I don’t spit on stage or come across as an extrovert. I’m not a confrontational body-oriented artist. I’m really much more of a shy person. But I find that bodily fluids and singing come out of the same process—they both come out of your body and are not of your body at the same time. So they’re kind of in-between life and death. They’re in between the temporal and infinity—they don’t belong to you. Which is problematic because as soon as you’ve said something it doesn’t belong to you anymore. Which is beautiful, but it’s also abject. I remember back in my early band days, when I’d hear my voice in a tape recording, I’d have this very abject reaction; kind of like seeing your own pee, or getting your period. This experience, for me, was a very extreme experience. I think about this when I record because my intentional sound is always different to what I listen back to. It’s this strange opportunity to have this interaction with yourself that’s both inside and outside. So it’s partly this connection with singing, but also having studied a tonne of feminist literature, and the history of performance art since the 60s. To me, when I discovered all that, I discovered “oh, art is real”. There is something there that belongs to me, belongs to everyone. And it’s not coming from a place I can’t access or understand—it’s lived.
MB On the topic of things outside the body, sometimes inside it, technology comes up in Girls Against God a lot. What do you think the role of technology is in magic, and vice versa?
JH I’m really curious about what your thoughts are! I felt like when I was writing about the visceral internet, or connective technological tissue, I was finally writing science fiction, which has been a dream for me to do. I felt like I got to this point where I could finally go off in that direction. For me, I write myself to starting points for going out of a more realistic type of narrative voice, then onto what I am the most interested in, which is getting to those places where I can write that film script, write the apocalypse, write about this intersection between magic and technology. For a while I thought I actually want to write an entire book that is about a parallel society in which everything is the same as the real world except the internet is visceral. That would be crazy! Now, because of the virus, I’m like “don’t go there, don’t do that”. I guess the internet is philosophically very fascinating, and there was a time when it was full of opportunity. I remember in the 90s when it was a hidden, subcultural place that felt like being underground. Not to be super nostalgic—that’s not a very productive story—but the book goes to this place where there’s a place for a different type of body, and a different type of experience of the body, and the connection with other people. I guess for me that’s the magical part—feelings of belonging and community, things that we’re really longing for at this time. Closeness, the feeling of affinity, the feeling of an unspeakable or inexplicable intimacy. Maybe beyond words, but maybe not beyond code.
MB And maybe not beyond magic. If you could define magic, in a few sentences, without really thinking about it, how would you do it?
JH I’ve already thought about it! Transformation. One word, but many syllables.
MB And what does transformation mean to you?
JH It’s the combination of space and time.
MB Talking of words, and the meaning of words—swearing, blasphemy, and profanity come up in the novel a lot. Why is blasphemy so thrilling to us—why does it have this real allure, this magical quality?
JH Well maybe I could’ve said blasphemy is magic. It feels like a strong experience because it’s an opposition, and being in opposition makes you realise that you exist in opposition to something. Blasphemy to me is also being part of the huge opposition to institutions, which might be stupid, as we’re also part of institutions—this book is published through institutions, and I perform because of institutions. I went to university, I learned about magic, all because of institutions. The feeling of being in opposition is also the feeling of being part of forces that are almost in opposition to humanity, or to its structures and hierarchies, and being part of nature. For me, swearing is like being the wind in the trees.
MB That’s such a graceful way of framing it. In the same vein, it would be good to talk about hate—for the protagonist hate is such a fuel. Is hate a fuel for your work?
JH For this work in particular, definitely. For this book, obviously it’s a huge motivation, for the protagonist it’s the reason to write, and because of that, perhaps for me as a writer. And I do think that I’ve needed to feel rage to begin to write, many times. I do think that sometimes I’ve needed this type of energy, oppositional energy, in order to say anything at all. But it’s not always my motivation. I think that it appears a lot, sometimes more humorous, sometimes more sarcastic or energetic, but also sometimes I feel very different energies—I think it comes in waves. Sometimes the need to hate, and sometimes the need to pick apart the emotional and go into an approach that is much more meditative. I’m able to get there also by using the hate energy. I don’t get to wellness by wellness. It’s never that easy. I kind of felt, after I finished this book, that I was more at peace with Christianity, which came as a surprise.
MB Well that’s transformation, and as you said, magic is transformation.
JH And writing is magic.