6 - Kinship and Narrative

Summary

As the drama of recognition demonstrates, kinship drama makes for good narrative, playing off expectations of familial solidarity against the ambivalences of kinship to structure narrative episodes in an arc that is opened by the introduction of tension between kin and ultimately resolved by the recognition of mutual, interdependent kinship between the parties involved. Relations between parents and their children are stretched almost to breaking point in Old Norse myth and legend in the knowledge that the foundation of solidarity among kinsmen remains secure. These narratives may provide the space in which to probe the frustrations and ambivalences inherent in kinship so long as the conception of mutual and transpersonal kinship also mediated through these literary depictions reassures their audience of the fundamental resilience of parent-child relationships in literature and, by extension, in life.

The literary depictions of parent-child relations, therefore, inform us about the anxieties and ambivalences provoked by kinship in the Old Norse society that told and retold these mythic-heroic narratives, articulating their hopes and fears about what kinship might look like in a variety of imagined situations. As Boose has pointed out, the family is a public as well as a private institution, the emotional ambivalences of which ‘get written not in its official documents but inside the masking devices of what we might call the archetypal histories of family – its literary and mythic texts.’ These ambivalences are no less authentic for having been expressed via imaginative literary means and suggest that while kinship was vitally important to Old Norse society it was also deeply problematic.

At the same time, it must be borne in mind that kinship and family relations in a literary setting operate under a different set of rules and strictures to those enacted in the outside world. Within the confines of the literary text, family relations are less constrained by certain cultural taboos, like incest or kin-slaying, but simultaneously more constrained by considerations of narrative composition, such as the demand for balance between tension and closure within a literary production. Any successful narrative requires both conflict and suspense in order to retain an audience's interest and attention.