Jonas Lie mellem det maritime og det hjemlige

The Norwegian author Jonas Lie is best known as a writer of domestic fiction depicting the Norwegian society through the perspective of marriage and the family. Through readings of Lodsen og hans hustru, Rutland and Gaa Paa!, this article challenges this view by emphasizing the maritime dimension of Lie’s work. A place-phenomenological method based on the writings of Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger and Robert Pogue Harrison allows for a focus on specific place relations in the novels such as the shore, the house, and the ship. Consequently, Lie’s novels establish a convergence between two opposite, yet mutually dependent movements – an “oceanization of the domestic” and a “domestication of the maritime” – as they portray compromises between ocean and land, man and woman. As a result, Lie is not only revealed to be a modern writer, more so in some ways than Ibsen, but also a writer who takes more radical (perhaps even specific Nordic) steps in the relationship between land, ocean, and the sexes than more internationally renowned authors of the sea such as Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad.