Girls Against God

Jenny Hval

Verso

Otago Daily Times, March 20th 2021

Film script? Memoir? Manifesto?  Norwegian writer and musician Jenny Hval’s third novel is almost impossible to describe, let alone classify. Which is entirely appropriate for a work that rails against the misogynistic constraints of language, art, culture and religion. In Girls Against God, an Artist reflects upon her attempts to escape the Christian conformity of southern Norway’s white Scandinavian paradise with its “white walls, white fresh snow, white painted laminate and white chipboard…milk, fish pudding..swastikas and purity rings.” A child of the 90’s she decides that the ultimate rebellion is to hate God, and spends her time trying to find ways to ”brainstorm with the colours reversed, to write with white hope on black hatred.” Dying her hair and dressing in the darkest colours possible, she joins a black-metal band only to find it as regularised and hierarchical as everything else in her life – male-dominated and co-opted into popular culture.  

Overseas study provides a temporary escape, but returning to Oslo reignites the Artist’s anger against a capitalism that defines women’s work as worthless, art that commodifies their bodies (epitomised by Edvard Munch’s Puberty), and religion that idealises their purity. Re-energised, she utilises hate’s transformative potential as a means of resistance by combining art, craft and witchcraft to blaspheme the beloved icons of art institutions. With two other women, she forms a heavy metal band/coven whose music oozes through the city, suffusing it with the stench of rotten milk and wet dog, facilitates Puberty’s revenge on her creator, and imagines art films inspired by the experimentalism of the 1960s and 70s and early death-metal videos: bacchanalian horrors rich in sweat, blood, shit and other bodily effluvia.

This crusade is further embodied in the novel itself, with the Artist/author seeking to turn writing not into art but magic. What, she asks, is hidden in the h in white? What happens when you introduce a third counterpoint to a binary pair: Reality, fiction and? Man, woman, and?

The ‘and’ in Girls Against God takes many forms. Descriptions of the Author’s childhood are interleaved with discourses on feminist theory, the socio-politics of witchcraft, linguistic analysis, and scenes from her own works-in-progress, visceral, macabre visions of eating, sex, death and rebirth reminiscent of David Lynch as his most surreal. Angry, confrontational, triumphal, beautiful, it is a book not so much to be read as experienced.