There is an illicit pleasure in reading Jenny Hval’s Girls Against God. The main character is charged with hate and sees hate as a true creative force; the titillating cynicism and adolescent rage of the book couldn’t help but bring smiles to my face.
The main character of Hval’s novel is a young girl in conservative Norway that is looking for any kind of alternative to the quotidian existence she sees around her. To that end, she has an obsession with black metal and witchcraft and what she refers to as the “cosmic internet.” The novel follows these fascinations as it jumps around in time; we see her early roots as a member of a black metal band that (maybe) never actually plays concerts—instead she engages in performances so subterranean as to be undetectable and not even music related. The lines between music, visual art, witchcraft, and language collapse. So too does the idea of an independent producer become incomprehensible as subversive art becomes by necessity a collective, collaborative work. The other component of the book follows the main character’s filmic ambitions, including a full account of her film in the back third of the film. If you’re looking for a conventional story, Girls Against God is largely lacking, but if you’re looking for some vibes and philosophical reflection, Hval’s work is an absolute treat.
If you’re a true devotee of my reviews, you might remember my commentary on The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan. I find that premise extraordinarily unlikely. One of my critiques of The Hearing Test is its referentiality to other art works and it really relies heavily on readers’ knowledge. Girls Against God does something similar, but Hval is much more generous in elaborating on its touchstones. There are extended summaries and analyses of the works, often replete with imagery. In that way, the text is more accessible even in its offputtingness. Or, maybe it’s just that the touchstones are more part of my cultural lexicon.
Hval expounds in particular on the aesthetic of early black metal—an interesting angle, given the author’s own musical style. She describes music videos found as extra features on early black metal CDs and the way she describes its grittiness and content and wild cuts and sweeping shots of high-contrast nature is just perfect. In the aesthetic, she sees a primitivism that restores sincerity to art. When planning for her film, she notes, “I don’t know what the film is going to be about yet, but I like the early black metal aesthetic, so near to my own childhood. Strangely, it gives me hope, hope that it’s possible to make art primitively, in a way that isn’t steeped in professionalism and compromise. Art that still hates. I remember how much hope there is in hatred” (8). That manifesto sets the direction for all of the main character’s efforts. I adore this notion that hatred is hope—indeed, there has to be hope for there to be hatred, or else we would simply have indifference and apathy.
Throughout the book, she seeks connection with others through various means. One way that manifests is in the Satanism associated with black metal: “I can establish a connection or a pact, demonstrated through the connect-the-dots drawing between myself and the world of the gods, the underworld, or between myself in the past tense and myself in the present. Or all of it simultaneously. Maybe I could even draw up a map between me and you” (26). She’s trying to be part of something bigger than just herself. The connect-the-dots metaphor works in that way; she’s looking to be the lines between points. To that end, when she plans her film, she thinks, “Maybe this film has created a place to meet” (26). She makes a direct address to the audience—which is in itself odd, given that there is not a frame narrative that establishes she’s writing for others. Nonetheless, she presents the audience with a series of questions: “Do you also recognize the desire for secret and impossible connections? Do you recognise the loneliness, could we share in it? Could we get closer to each other? Could you and I and the film be the start of a we? A we which takes the form of an expanding community of girls who hate?” (26).
Hval’s narrator’s gesture is twofold. On the one hand, she’s aiming to escape the prison of subjectivity and on the other she’s trying to build a subterranean network of connection. Reflecting about her relationship with religion, she notes, “Sin is still inside me; everything is my fault and my responsibility, because I’m doomed to be alone, locked inside this subjectivity” (37). There is an exhaustion to the process of creating oneself: “I am so tired of chasing after it, this subjectivity, looking for something that’s all mine, that doesn’t have any context, surroundings or background. It’s so lonely. It’s so limited. It’s so heavy” (37). I appreciate this angle to exploring the posthumanist principle that we are not individuals but rather we exist in a context that has formulated us. She continues, “The subject is reflected negatively, the subject is so alone, so threatened, so scared, so dying, so guilty” (37). She considers how she wants to swap some of these negatives for “something else, something shared” (37). The passage ends with a delightful crescendo and what some might deem an anticlimax but which nonetheless has a ring of truth for those in the know. She concludes the passage, “I want to take part in a chaos of collective energy. I want to be in a band” (37). The fact that a band is what embodies that collective energy and chaos is just so humorous but also it imbues me with a sense of nostalgia and the optimism of such a project. The other side of Hval’s project is the desire for community, specifically through her witchy communities: “In blasphemy, there’s a secret pact, a desire for a community that isn’t rooted in the Christian, Southern spirit” (43). She elaborates on how the subversiveness allows for these connections:
Blasphemy protects us against the moral fables we grew up with; blasphemy renounces anything that requires our submission. It shows us a crack in this reality, through which we can pass into another, more open meeting place. Blasphemy has not forgotten where it came from; it maintains that defiance and energy. Blasphemy looks for new ways of saying we. And the band is a we, a community that happens without anyone asking. It’s an unknown communal place, an impossible place. In a place like that, we can make art magic. (43)
I love that spirit of togetherness and spontaneity. I feel like it elevates the idea of being in a band to a metaphysical tour de force.
I’ll return to that in a moment, but I also want to bring up the idea of time. Bands shape sound in time, so there’s a bit of a connection already. There’s also a stunning series of pages—too long to quote here—where the narrator describes her experiences with the early days of the internet. She describes its cosmic power, its ability to connect people across time. It brought me back in time, completely. The way that she describes the experience of finding communities, largely anonymously, and sharing files, connecting over subterranean media—it’s a perfect blast from the past. Then, towards the end of the book, the narrator gives an account of a photograph. Just before the photograph, she blasphemes and she delights in the moment where it is impossible to tell her apart from her well-behaved classmates. She notes that it is “impossible for an unknowing eye to spot the difference in our smiles, but at the moment this picture was taken, I’ve just said fucking hell, in the middle of the photo shoot” (214). The moment is imbued with a power because, even though it’s such a mundane kind of rebellion, it is elevated as symbolic of the collapse between herself and others—yet one that is distilled in time. In aspic? She continues on to say that “Half the class are about to stop smiling; they are about to look around for the sinner as they cautiously cross themselves and touch their hands to their hearts” (214). It’s a moment where the offense has not yet been detected and “a moment later, everything will be defined, crossed, damned, forgiven and blessed” (214). The moment that lacks definition has its subversive power: “right now, in this image, there is chaos; the students aren’t sure what happened yet, who said the word” (214). She continues, “Sound is faster than comprehension, faster than what they call heart and soul and sin. Right now my voice could have come from any of my Christian classmates, a slip of the tongue, a Tourette’s tic; that’s why they react and why they are about to cross themselves” (214). Hval seems to present the idea that a sin has its power when it has not yet been defined or remedied; sin exists as potential and “everyone in the class is a potential sinner” (214). The narrator notes, “the uncertainty is shapeless, even in the middle of this conformity; they themselves aren’t exempt; the guilt includes everyone in the room and leaks from one thing to another. No one remains dry, everyone is defined” (214). It’s a great parallel to the idea of everyone existing in connection with one another. Everyone gets joined by sin and guilt into one mass and “just as the most evangelical of them feel defiled when we’re taught by the lesbian teacher; they fear that she’ll lure them over to her side, that they will say what she says, that they’ll become, or realise that they already are, like her” (214). The notion of the subversiveness awakening something in its audience gives it a compelling power—and there’s a kind of optimism in that.
Towards the end of the book, there is dedicated focus to the symbolism of aspic. Aspic is a kind of jelly in which other things float. It’s a great symbol for the lack of distinction between individual entities. A passage that identifies the sense of connection in aspic reads as follows:
Aspic is made from the collagen in the bone marrow of pigs, and I dream it’s also made from our own bones and our own marrow, because marrow is the very best we have to give of ourselves. In the marrow is found the collagen, the creative power, the coherence. The same sounds ring in marrow as in margin. In my language it’s even the same word. In the margins are the experiments, the bonus material, the unwritten scenes, the unused leftovers, a suggestion for a new world, a suggestion for impossible connections. In the margins are the comments, the hope and hate, suspended in the thick, translucent marrow broth. (229).
For all its sprawling nature, Girls Against God has a knack for recreating this kind of connective aspic. There are a number of strange false starts to the book that float around. The focus on the margins and experiments is critical to what Girls Against God is up to. It is itself “bonus material”---auxilliary content about other works. It is the unused leftovers; consider, for example, we get the fragment of her film as an additional chapter that takes up a reasonable portion of the book.
Girls Against God asks a question that I find perpetually troubling whether it’s phrased as “can the subaltern speak?” as it is in the work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, or as it appears in Mark Fisher’s question about capitalism: “is there no alternative?”, or indeed, as it is asked by Terese in Girls Against God, “Why does resistance always end up just polishing the traditions?” (69). Hval is exploring the idea of how we might preserve a space of genuine resistance to tradition, a genuine alternative that does not get subsumed into the aspic like everything else. She notes this paradoxical position—wanting to have connection as a form of subversion and yet preserving a special space for the truly radical. Hval offers an extended meditation on the topic: “Think about that word, EXCLUDED. To exclude something, to explain something. THe nature of the subversive isn’t actually to be directly visible but to roam the shadows, to give texture to the seemingly shiny and clean, to scrawl public walls with inexplicable nonsigns that refuse to materialize into language” (96). She’s looking for that shadow space: “the subversive desires to be seen and not seen simultaneously, it desires both to be excluded and to be explained” (96). I think that’s a critical observation for the counterculture; we are riding the line between legibility and rewriting. The trouble, as Hval notes, is that “it’s so easily muted, left behind, forgotten, excluded without being explained. Or it gets picked up and transformed into a language we all understand, that is, explained, but for some reason that always seems to mean commercialised” (96). This succinct passage puts to words the trouble I feel with my own subversive subcultures—how much are we preaching to the choir? When we are preaching to the masses, how does the meaning get hidden behind dollar signs?
I really appreciated the way Hval characterized the grotesque resistance in black metal music videos. I’m not sure I recorded the quotation, but there’s a part where she describes the sound of the music like flies and worms wiggling out of the tape. As she navigates the “cosmic internet” she finds additional videos and details to supplement her research into primitivism in art. She finds a clip of “a black metal gig that looks as if it took place in an assembly hall in an early nineties secondary school” (8). In her note, “wholesome Norwegian youths talk amongst themselves and walk in and out of the room while the band plays on, completely unaffected. Black metal crawls unnoticed through adolescence, mine too” (8). There’s a real love of the genre and the music scene that shines in Hval’s work. There’s a sincerity and authenticity to the depiction of shows like this—I can vividly picture videos of grainy punk shows in a rented church. She thinks about how “it doesn’t burrow down completely. But for as long as it’s there it lives and crawls” (8). She reflects on how one one of the youths in the video could have been her “if [she]’d been a few years older, or if the clip had been from 1997 and not 1991. If [she] hadn’t been a girl and excluded from the black screen” (8). She concludes, “It could have been me: we could have hated, all of us, together. Instead I had to hate alone. Provincial hatred” (8). In the description of black metal music videos, the graininess of the image, the rapid cuts, the high contrast colour palettes, and so on, brought me back to a special moment where the internet made all kinds of possibilities real. Essentially, it was a modern day dada movement. I think in particular of the revolution it caused in my brain when I saw the video for Some Girls’ “...Warm Milk” or the freneticism of The Locusts’ album Plague Soundscapes. Sure, it’s not quite the genre Hval described, but it’s adjacent enough to feel the same.
Hval’s book is, in many ways, about representation and connection. She philosophizes that “to describe is also to construct form and perspective; it’s the reflex of mortal dread” (206). She wonders, “could language be used for something else? Aren’t there other reasons to write? If we let go of the descriptions, will we discover that we’re no longer moving at all, since we already exist within everything in here?” (206). Girls Against God is a quest to renegotiate with language and art: “we’re given up shapes, our own shells and components and we’re back in a flow, that gelatinous substance that ruled the earth before the harder minerals, rock types, skeletons and shells came into existence. This could be the beginning, the white egg, the original place, the original life” (206). Girls Against God is a quest to find that area of potential, the origins, the not-yet before everything gets established and codified.
Hval meanders in all the right directions. It felt to me to be a deeply intimate and resonant novel that was also accompanied by humour and thoughtfulness. Hval’s other novel, Paradise Rot, had a bit more in terms of story, but she clearly has a gift for introspection and ambitious projects to revolutionize both literature and the world.
Hope we can appreciate the margins without taking out their teeth. Happy hating!
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