Human–Bird Relations and Ethics of Care in Contemporary Norwegian Fiction

Abstract

In literature as in life, the significance of birds for humans is contextual, subjective, and culturally constructed. Their role may be interpreted as ecological, spiritual, aesthetic, or symbolic, depending on one’s preconceptions and capacity to be affected (Sax 15, 65, 149). Where birds figure as prominent motifs in twenty-first century Norwegian literary fiction, they tend to be associated with practices of care. More precisely, birds are often linked to relations between parents and children: mostly mothers, daughters, and grandmothers, women of different generations. Some texts deal with involuntary childlessness or the loss of a child, misfortunes that challenge the characters’ capacity for care and, in turn, lead to care being directed at or projected onto birds. This article will focus on three novels in which these associations are particularly evident: Gøhril Gabrielsen’s Ankomst (Arrival, 2017), Brit Bildøen’s Tre vegar til havet (Three Roads to the Sea, 2018), and Merethe Lindstrøm’s Fuglenes anatomi (The Anatomy of Birds, 2019). While contemporary Norwegian fiction is remarkably rich in examples of birds functioning as a motif linked to care, these three novels offer divergent approaches that, taken together, provide a representative overview.1 Can the association of birds with care contribute toward fostering sustainable relations with nonhumans? How does it align with environmentalist aims?