by Karl Emil Rosenbæk Reetz
Norway – a nation where oil production was born at sea – is by far the largest producer of fossil fuels in Europe. The second largest, the UK, is distanced by a factor of 2.3 according to the EIA (disregarding the Eurasian fossil mastodon of Russia).[1] To zoom in on Norway is therefore an obvious way to grab the question of the so-called green transition championed by Western and especially European nations by its horns and scrutinize the black, extractivist foundation on which it often stands. In this sense, the political discourse of sustainability can be boiled down to an unrealisable fantasy of a green transition without real transformation of any sorts. Here, I will show how ‘roustabout narratives’ from Norway – stories depicting the absurdly profitable offshore oil enterprise of this nation – display how the green paradox is closely related to a long socialist history of class struggle and worker rights.
Focussing on two recent novels, I urent farvann (2020; In Muddy Waters) by Sidsel Mørck and Puslingar (2019; Mannikins) by Atle Berge, I showcase how they register aspects of offshore austerity related to a corporate trend of cutting expenses in a globalised economy. Cutbacks, untrained personnel working at a lower salary, postponements of regular safety reviews, and use of expired equipment as well as other sorts of measures to ‘trim the fat’ and push the limit, constitute what I term a North Sea peripheralisation of safety. In that sense, these Norwegian offshore petrofictions are best understood as additions to a long tradition of fossil fuel working-class literature from the Global North where issues of safety have surfaced repeatedly as a signifier of class struggle.
“WE RUN A BUSINESS, NOT POLITICS”
First, let us look at Sidsel Mørck’s novel I urent farvann. In this bildungsroman about social mobility and national oil development, we follow the protagonist Ole Viktor. Ole Viktor is the only child of a working-class family with firm connections to the labour union. In the beginning of the novel, his father works at a steel nail factory and often goes to after-hour meetings in the local trade union. Later, the father works as a roustabout on a drilling rig at the Ekofisk field in the North Sea, and the father’s background as a factory worker hired under collective agreement comes forth again. When he is onshore, he often talks about the ‘wild west’ security issues offshore and about how he and his fellow roustabout Lars are working on unionising the workforce. But before this ambition of oil labour organisation is ever materialised, he is involved in an accident that crushes his right shoulder. Following the accident, he receives some insurance money and then lives the rest of his life on cash benefits provided by the Norwegian state.
The timespan of the novel – from the late-1960s onwards – corresponds to the development of Norwegian oil, and further, Ole Viktor’s adulthood, growing up to be an oil engineer, is organised as a tour de force through real Norwegian oil developments, incidents, and scandals both domestic and international. Following Ole Victor’s white-collar employments, I urent farvann, however, focusses on the management level rather than that of roustabouts employed on oil platforms. In this way, the novel registers a socioeconomic and cultural move away from a locally oriented working-class perspective to a globalist middle-class stance. In the novel, this shift is furthermore connected to a decreased social-democratic collectivist position replaced by a liberalistic individualised concern about career and self-fulfillment. “We [run] a business, not politics,” Ole Viktor says, whenever there are problems. Societal concerns and moral conundrums are simply outside the scope of multinational oil enterprises in the neoliberal zeitgeist, the novel asserts.
Furthermore, as Ole Viktor grows up and gets involved in the oil industry as an engineer, his father functions as an idealistic figure calling him up whenever there is an oil-related accident urging Ole Viktor to do something. Invalidated, the father cannot live out his own ambition of unionising the offshore workforce and consequently the burden is put on his son to reform the oil business. Yet, Ole Viktor quickly begins to pivot towards another stance altogether. The father’s class struggle orthodoxy begins to feel burdensome to Ole Viktor and an instance of cultural patricide can be observed in his life choices. Slowly he turns away from the collectivist ideal and towards becoming what he himself terms “a company man” with a conservative, unapologetic slogan of capitalist reality: “That’s how the world is, take it or leave it.”
The novel is driven forward by exactly this blue-collar/white-collar dichotomy. Central to the plot is the clash within the family constellation of two distinctive perspectives. On the one side; collectivism and social politics, and on the other side; individualism and capitalist necessity. As such, the novel takes shape as a small chamber play between father and son reflecting larger societal alterations in both the labour market and the national debate over the Norwegian offshore oil enterprise.
I urent farvann is saturated by a defeatist ethos when it comes to believing in changing the oil enterprise substantially. However, this overall tone of capitalist surrender is suddenly upended on the very last pages of the novel. Throughout the novel, Ole Viktor’s daughter Vera has disarmingly been called “Vesla” (meaning ‘the little one’) by both father and grandfather. But now, instigating her own much more outspoken generational rebellion, Vera tells Ole Viktor that she will study “green economics.” With this rebellious choice and some harsh words against her father’s complicity in the emission of greenhouse gasses, Vera seems to personify the environmentalist aura of Greta Thunberg and the green youth movements more generally as she argues for an alternative study of economy. The ideology that has guided Ole Viktor’s life is confronted and his ‘apolitical’ self-image is being revealed as a highly political stance. Still very much in its infancy, then, the novel ends up suggesting that a new world order could be on the rise driven by the next generation. Just as Ole Viktor himself was part of a massive social, economic, cultural, and political transformation in his time.
RURAL OIL
Puslingar by Atle Berge is also structured as a bildungsroman following the child Marita from 1980 till 1991. Marita lives with her parents in a rural neighborhood adjacent to the port city of Bergen where the area’s oil-industry is centred. Throughout the novel an identity-conflict between the urban city and the rural surroundings emerges, but the main story of the book concerns the real Norwegian event of the offshore capsizing of the oil platform Alexander L. Kielland (March 27, 1980) and its traumatic influence on Marita’s teenage life. Her father, Jonny, is one of the victims of the accident leaving Marita alone with her mother Astrid. Some years after the accident she is suddenly approached by one of Jonny’s old friends, Trygve, who was with Jonny at Kielland. And with the help of Trygve as well as her bookish classmate called Settembrini, Marita slowly becomes more and more interested in the accident.
As Marita and Trygve begins to dig deeper into the possible causes of the accident, the novel makes use of the still-existing distrust towards the official inquiries and reports that were made after the accident. The novel is filled with gestures towards these reports’ explanations as well as references to other mysterious circumstances omitted from the inquiries.
With this general tone of distrust in the activities of the government, the novel registers a dialectic between rural workers and a seemingly clandestine ruling class. There is a visible animosity towards urbanity and all the connotations that go along with it – power, influence, higher education, capital. This dialectic is one of the defining features of fossil fuel working-class literature. Us, the authentic, down-to-earth working-class, versus them, the capitalist vultures who live withdrawn in their mansions and club houses. Consequently, the general tone of the novel is that the ‘strong forces in the society’ are less occupied with figuring out exactly what happened at Kielland then they are with ensuring that the North Sea region’s contribution to the world-systemic business of oil production carries on.
As Marita continues to question the reports, we also see how she is finally reproached by her mother and her stepfather Einar in this somewhat timid fashion: “Sometimes you just have to let things go. People who don’t manage to forget and move on eventually becomes unbearable to be around” (223). It is okay, it seems, – even expected – to be critical and almost conspiratorial against the urbanites in the abstract, but it is best not to become too concrete in one’s criticism and skepticism. The emphatic conviction of elitist malpractice must not turn into real political agency. The very last page of the novel describes how Marita also draws this conclusion herself as she thinks: “People who can’t manage to forget are unbearable. People want to forget, need to forget, just as the nation needs to forget in order to live with itself” (247). Subtle, Atle Berge is not. The reader is firmly guided to draw a particular conclusion about the sincerity of the official inquiries on Kielland.
And yet, it is rarely the oil and therefore also the oil-work itself that is being criticised in these roustabout narratives. An affinity towards the oil enterprise seems to linger on in the cultural unconscious as the energy workers can be said to forego their body to keep the nation both powered and proud: Ole Viktor’s father literally sacrifices his arm in the nation’s service. So, while the author of Puslingar has some critical comments on oil production as well as the comprehensive oil culture, it is interesting to note how adamantly the protagonist Marita defends the wonders of oil. Fittingly, the novel ends with her lifelong dream of enrolling as an oil engineer student being realised. For Marita, the problem is not the extraction of oil from the seabed, but the loose regulations and the corporate inclination to cut costs on behalf of the safety protocols.
Marita is obviously haunted by the tragic loss of her father, yet, growing up in the rural outskirts of Bergen oil still constitutes the best and often only way to realise a prosperous (and aspiring) future. For these rural working-class families, the oil rig is tragic in a double sense then. It is the haunting accident of the past and still the only possible future.
CONCLUSION
To conclude, a clear tension is registered in these recent Norwegian roustabout narratives. On the one hand, they expose a neoliberal ideal about cost-efficient fossil fuel enterprises driven without organisationally imposed measures or governmental restrictions. On the other hand, they argue for worker-oriented oversight based on a moral sense of righteousness. Another way to frame this is to say that these working-class oil fictions illustrate an imperfect match between world-systemic fossil capitalism and the Nordic welfare state model.
When thinking of the historical legacy of Norwegian oil revenue, this internal conflict is perhaps not that surprising. In Norway, a discussion of ownership and control has always been in the foreground. At the beginning of the Norwegian North Sea endeavour, environmental and industrial concerns went hand in hand at the governmental level. In 1971, the Government of Norway decided on ‘ten oil commands’ revolving around the management and control of this burgeoning industrial sector. In the mid-1970s, to avoid what is called the ‘Dutch Disease’ where rapid growth in one sector of the economy causes decline in other sectors and to prevent ecological depletion, the Government furthermore decreed a principle of ‘moderate extraction tempo.’ However, this principle was eventually overhauled by grand expansions to the Norwegian North Sea territory in the late 1980s. And then, the culminating success of developing the oil sector while preventing a sudden decline in other parts of the economy came in 1990 with the construction of a sovereign wealth fund – Statens pensjonsfond utland – internationally known as the Norwegian Oil Fund.
The unique construction of the Oil Fund works to ensure that the revenue from offshore oil and gas extraction benefits the Norwegian public, but it has not entirely eliminated the tension between oil workers and managers. Thus, core class related questions of who benefits from who, how to secure right and proper distribution of wealth, and how the local and national history of offshore oil is to be told still saturates Norway.
These contemporary Norwegian roustabout narratives, I argue, invoke a nostalgic longing for a strong welfare system of social security and worker rights – a thus another world possible – while showcasing how the reality of fossil capitalism’s neoliberal search for cost-cuts has played out in recent decades. As such, they extend to the waterscape the tradition of working-class fiction as they register and critically comment upon the offshore perspective of the continuing, deregulated fossil world economy in an era of havocking climate changes.
Reworked paper presented at the EASCLE Symposium: Sea More Blue: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Blue Ecopoetics, June 17-20, 2024.
About the author:
Karl Emil Rosenbæk Reetz, PhD, is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Culture and Language at the University of Southern Denmark.
[1] Visit https://www.eia.gov/international/rankings/world?pa=288&u=2&f=A&v=none&y=01%2F01%2F2022
