"As It Used To Be": Children's Relationships in Vesaas

In Tarjei Vesaas’s The Ice Palace, the narrated interaction between eleven-year-olds Siss and Unn reveals the complex depths of the relationships that adolescents create. Through this innocent complexity, the Norwegian Vesaas illuminates an important dimension of what Arnold Weinstein calls the fiction of relationship.  Vesaas does so, both in his fictional story about the friendship of two young girls and in the relationship that they actively construct.

Most basically, the connection between Siss and Unn reminds readers that children’s relationships are far from simple or rudimentary merely because the participants are not adults.  Children, too, both long for relational intimacy and fashion their individual and social identity through their personal connections. It may be tempting for adults to look condescendingly on these early forays into friendship.  Vesaas challenges us not to do so.

For instance, the friendship between Siss and Unn raises questions about who one is -- identity -- relative to another. Personal identity is pressured. Unn changes Siss’s life forever.  Life in the town is not the same.  Reversals occur.  Insiders become outsiders.  Moral codes thrive.  In brief compass, Vesaas narrates the layers of social change that result from Unn’s death and Siss’s vow not to forget Unn.

Tarjei Vesaas (1897-1970; photo 1967)

Siss interprets her vow as requiring her to take Unn’s place as outsider in the school yard, precisely because of the unifying experience that the two had together when they looked into the mirror, a magical connection: “Siss stood by the wall, keeping her promise. A new girl had taken over as leader of the group. … They all looked at Siss:  Siss who of late had become a different person; Siss whom they longed to get back again” (113; see 143).

Moreover, the unadorned adolescent perspective on sociality reveals the profound dynamism of relationships in general:  how we construct them and they in turn construct us in our world.  Siss’s friends realize that something fundamental has changed not just with Siss, who seemed “a different person,” but also with them. People and their world are both altered, and this not merely because of Unn’s death.  It is also because of Siss’s relationship with Unn prior to it.  Siss's schoolmates want the old world back, as they communicate one afternoon as they walk Siss home from school:

    “So you don’t want to walk with us anymore today?”

    No, I’d rather not. You don’t understand, I know.  It’s something I’ve promised,” she said, startling them.

    When she said it like that, they dimly realized that it was a promise made to Unn... It put an end to all discussion. …

     Since she spoke so normally they regained their voices and were able to reply, and even argue.

    “Yes, of course,” they said, “but it’s not that.”

    “You’ve been standing by the wall the whole winter,” one of them dared to say.

    “And we thought everything was going to be as it used to be.”  (122)

Siss’s parents say something similar when she arrives home after walking with those schoolmates: “‘We thought you’d got over it at last,’ said her mother. ‘We thought things were going to be as they used to be’” (127; see also 143, 153). But things are never the same. What the adults in the story and what the other youths, who may represent onlookers in general, do not recognize, Siss in fact does see. Things are never the same, never just exactly “as they used to be.”

The fiction of relationship -- stories about relationships, which (relationships) themselves are products of humanly interactions -- is enduring.  The effects of relationships abide, even when a participant in a relationship dies and the relationship necessarily changes. Something in us dies, too.  It is to be lamented.  Grieving is appropriate, even healthy.  And we must move on, enriched, even enlarged, by the former experience, as Unn may eventually become.  But things are never just as they used to be.