Gunnars' Night Train a mournful journey towards self-determination

Kristjana Gunnars

Toni Morrison once wrote that to be free is "to narrate the world," to tell one's own story instead of surrendering to a foreign script. Kristjana Gunnars' Night Train to Nykobing is about one kind of journey towards self-determination, specifically a woman's struggle to free herself from the false expectations of romance.

The fifth in a series of short books published by Red Deer College Press beginning in 1989, Gunnars once again combines a number of genres - fiction, poetry, essay, autobiography, memoir and travel writing - into a "deliberate fusion" of impressions conveying the pain of separation, loss, and waiting.

Gunnars says people often have difficulty reading her brand of fiction, feeling it's too sad, or doesn't turn out the way it should. But as far as she's concerned, that's precisely the point.

"I wanted to record my sense that we're somehow being cheated by our notion of what is good classical literature, and our sense that a good novel doesn't in fact distress us but comforts us and puts us to sleep ...we've got such a strong faction in Canadian literature that believes in literature as narcosis."

While Gunnars insists the book is fictionalized autobiography, stretched and exaggerated "all out of proportion" to explore a greater truth, there are numerous references to campus life that keep people guessing, she says. The narrator is, after all, a creative writing instructor in the English department (as is Gunnars). She mentions two of the highlighted guest lecturers of the past few years - Slovenian cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek and Native American writer Paula Gunn. And the narrator's colleagues is a strange composite of the infamous "merit-only" gang of male professors who nine years ago objected to the hiring of five women in the department.

At the heart of Night Train to Nykobing, however, is an intense if impossible love affair. The narrator and her lover have conspired to commit a crime somewhere in Denmark, and must separate for an unbearable length of time so as not to arouse suspicion (or so we are led to believe through an allusion to Emile Zola's Thérèse Raquin).

But that's all we're told of this particular plot. What drives Gunnars' narrative is what David Guterson (Snow Falling on Cedars) calls "the deliberately controlled hysteria" of waiting. It is the perverse and sometimes endless postponement of life that occurs when we are under the spell of a false reality.

"What I wanted to construct was an argument against romance, [which is] a false representation of what human beings are able to do or should be doing or can do," says Gunnars. "Inside relationships that are embroiled and impassioned there are these feelings of guilt, danger and threat that belong to the whole arena of romance - there is always a dark side and I just wanted to bring that out."

"I also wanted to record somehow what's called in the book 'the deliberate hysteria of waiting' because that's also a large part of a lot of people's lives. You're waiting if you're a student, even though you're working hard, for your life to begin. And if you're a professor or a worker, you're waiting for it to be over so you can retire."

Aside from the entrapment of romantic love, Gunnars also takes the modern university to task, if only in the subtext. The problem, as she sees it, is the erosion of the academy by corporate culture, a "total bureaucratic system where you can't really unfold as a person."

"We've become so corporatized lately, and that's what I'm reacting to. The university is a corporation, the corporations are also becoming mega-corporations - the government is itself becoming a kind of corporation, and I'm not sure any of this is good for us."

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