Sailing from Illness to Health: Spaces in Gaute Heivoll’s Kongens hjerte

Abstract

This article reflects on the issue of spatiality in Gaute Heivoll’s novel Kongens hjerte [The King’s Heart] from 2011, and analyzes how different descriptions of space interplay with illness metaphors in the text, contributing to a literary imaging of illness as “a road to health.” Kongens hjerte is a historical novel set in the second half of the eighteenth century, telling the story of a father and his ill daughter traveling from Norway to Copenhagen in order to seek treatment. The girl suffers from radesyke, a mysterious and lethal disease whose etiology remains unclear up to this day. After a theoretical introduction and outlining the context, the paper suggests possible lines of analysis of the spatiality aspects in the novel and moves on to a detailed reflection upon two categories: the presence/absence of the father and daughter in the same space, and the horizontal/ vertical orientation of the protagonists’ bodies. The conclusion of the study is that constructions of space and spatiality are a coherent and immanent component of the illness images in Heivoll’s novel, enabling a wide range of reading alternatives and supplying additional contexts for possible interpretations of the text.