Prefiguring the Rift

Alexander Kielland’s first novel, Garman & Worse (1880), is considered today part of the Norwegian literary canon. Although the role of the ocean in this novel has already been analysed, most discussions limit themselves to its metaphorical dimension. This paper proposes a Marxist ecological reading of the novel. Considering the depiction of the ocean and two storylines – the unfulfilled romantic relation between Madelaine and Per, as well as the building of a sailboat – I argue that the novel shows a complex negotiation with real social and metabolic changes that were occurring in Stavanger. At the time the novel was written, capitalism and the fossil economy were expanding and exerting pressure on Norwegian coastal communities, which in turn were affecting the way the ocean was being imagined and experienced. Kielland, however, is still able to establish a harmonic metabolic relation with the ocean in the figure of Per, as well as a way for a benevolent capitalism embodied first by Christian Fredrik Garman and later by his younger son, Gabriel.