Climate Change and Denial in Brit Bildøen’s Sju dagar i august

Abstract

This article investigates how Brit Bildøen’s novel Sju dagar i august (2014) explores climate change and denial. Although the novel, through temporal and spatial cues, portrays climate change as real and imminent, it also depicts characters in unacknowledged denial. By using Robert J. Lifton’s, Stanley Cohen’s, and Kari Marie Norgaard’s studies on denial as a theoretical tool, I illustrate how three levels of denial mirror each other: denial of climate change is closely related to denial of the loss of a daughter and denial of a tick bite. Furthermore, this article demonstrates that the structural and metaphorical features of the text—such as the reliance on the literary narratives of the flood and the pastoral, the widely anthropomorphized nature, and many biblical connotations—are aesthetic traits that support the thematic content and cement the nature-culture dichotomy. Hence, the novel appears to eradicate human agency and thereby any hope for change. The lack of distance between the characters and the narrative voice through the frequent use of free indirect discourse reinforces the pessimistic view.