Realism, Affect, and the Battle of the Senses: Historicity and Cultural Memory in Dag Solstad’s War Trilogy

This article examines Dag Solstad’s War Trilogy (1977–81) as a key work of realism and cultural memory in postwar Norwegian literature. Long dismissed as doctrinaire Marxist fiction, the trilogy is, in fact, one of the most ambitious literary engagements with World War II in Scandinavia. Drawing on Georg Lukács’s theory of the historical novel and Fredric Jameson’s account of realism’s “antinomies,” this article argues that Solstad’s realism is defined by contradiction: it is both a didactic mapping of social conflict and an aesthetic registration of lived sensation. The trilogy insists on the persistence of class antagonisms across civilian and military spheres; however, it also dwells on affective residues—hygiene, beauty, emotions, atmosphere—that resist narrative closure. This duality is framed through the concept of dual historicity: Solstad’s novels remember the 1930s and 1940s from the vantage point of the 1970s, while today they reach us as artifacts of that political and aesthetic moment. In light of this, the War Trilogy operates not only as historical fiction but as a medium of cultural memory, dramatizing the contradictions of remembrance itself. Realism here becomes neither transparency nor nostalgia, but a “battle of the senses” in which ideology and perception vie over the conditions of historical experience.