A stereotype that deconstructs itself. Representations of Danes and Denmark in Joanna Chmielewska’s crime novels

Abstract

The research question this article tries to answer is: how was Scandinavia “invented” in Polish prose written when the Iron Curtain still physically divided Europe? The text discusses three novels written by Joanna Chmielewska (1932–2013) and published in 1969 (Krokodyl z Kraju Karoliny [The Crocodile from Caroline’s Country]), 1973 (Lesio) and 1974 (Wszystko czerwone [All in Red]). Chmielewska, a vastly popular Polish crime novelist, especially known for the creation of the so-called “ironic crime” sub-genre, often introduced depictions of Denmark and the country’s inhabitants in her novels and used them to demonstrate amusing contrasts between them and her Polish protagonists and their reality in Poland. My goal is to show that while Westerners constructed and exoticized the East, Easterners did the very same thing to the West, only using different values and criteria in order to distinguish between “us” and “them”. We should therefore perhaps start talking about “inventing Europe” or “inventing Europes” – where the West invents the East and the East invents the West, and xenostereotypes introduce and reinforce autostereotypes. Those stereotypes can sometimes become so extreme that they are no longer sustainable and “collapse” under their own weight.