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

Abstract

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.

1. Introduction

The historical novel has long served as a crucial medium for negotiating collective understandings of the past. Since Georg Lukács’s ([1937] 1962) foundational theorization of the genre in The Historical Novel, critics have emphasized how historical fiction mediates between individual experience and broader social processes, transforming distant events into narrative form and thereby shaping cultural memory. Though often sidelined in memory studies, the historical novel plays a vital role in how societies remember. As Astrid Erll (2008), Aleida Assmann (2011), and Marianne Hirsch (2012) remind us, cultural memory is not confined to archives or monuments—it is mediated through narratives, images, and affective structures.

Just as importantly, cultural memory operates through sensory forms: the sounds, textures, and atmospheres by which historical experience becomes palpable. The historical novel, with its attention to detail and embodied perception, stages not only the remembrance of events but also the struggle over how the past is felt. This sensory dimension, which I later describe as a ‘battle of the senses,’ will be central to understanding how Solstad’s realism engages both ideology and affect.

In this light, the historical novel is more than a vehicle of representation; it is a medium through which the past is constructed, reimagined, and circulated. From Lukács to Fredric Jameson, theorists have underscored this double function: fiction both renders the past and actively shapes its cultural remembrance. For Jameson, works of literature even lets “History appear” (Jameson 2013, p. 264) through narrative form. However, the past is never a monolithic entity—History with a capital H, as Jameson insists—but a layered field of narratives, documents, and artifacts. Fictional texts, therefore, do not merely reflect the past; they intervene in it, balancing historical credibility with aesthetic framing. This is also why literature often functions as a site of what Rigney (2008) calls “oppositional memory”: a counter-memorial practice that unsettles dominant narratives and reintroduces marginalized perspectives.

Such dynamics are particularly evident in literary representations of World War II, which occupies a central place in modern European cultural memory. As both a historical catastrophe and matrix of political meaning, this war has produced a vast corpus of novels, memoirs, and testimonies, mediating between personal recollection and collective identity. In Norway, the occupation years remain a key axis of national self-understanding and political legitimacy, as well as a recurrent theme in postwar literature. With the eyewitness generation fading, the historical novel assumes new mnemonic responsibilities, offering frameworks through which later readers engage with a past they never directly experienced. Far from a static or secondary form, the novel plays an active role in this process, reinterpreting earlier representations, interrogating dominant myths, and staging tensions between history, memory, fiction and testimony.

Though written in the late 1970s, Solstad’s War Trilogy anticipates these concerns. Blending archival knowledge about Norwegian society of the time with literary experimentation, it uses realist form—multi-perspectival narration, socially representative characters, careful rendering of sociolects and class environments, and meticulous attention to everyday detail—to interrogate both the events of the war and the conditions of their narration. However, the trilogy must also be read historically. When Svik. Førkrigsår (Betrayal. Prewar Years) appeared in 1977, only three decades had passed since the occupation—closer to Solstad than his novels are to us today.

This temporal constellation produces what we might call the trilogy’s dual historicity: the novels operate within two distinct yet overlapping historical frames. They reimagine the 1930s and 1940s from the vantage point of the 1970s, when the war still belonged to living memory and political discourse, while now reaching us as artifacts of that very decade, shaped by its ideological debates and aesthetic forms. In other words, dual historicity names the way Solstad’s text both represents history and becomes history itself, mediating between remembered past and historical present.

This layered temporality resonates with Reinhart Koselleck’s notion of Zeitschichten (Koselleck 2000), or “layers of historical time.” For Koselleck, every historical moment is sedimented with multiple temporal registers: long-term continuities, short-term events, and the horizons of expectation through which the present reads the past. Yet these temporal strata are not only conceptual or narrative—they are also sensory. Each historical layer carries its own perceptual regime, its distinct ways of seeing, hearing, and inhabiting the world. When Solstad’s novels reimagine the 1930s and 1940s through the idioms of 1970s Marxist realism, they also stage an encounter between these sensory orders: between the visual and emotional textures of wartime modernity and the ideological atmosphere of the late twentieth century.

Solstad’s trilogy thus operates across several temporal and sensory planes at once: It represents the war years, it refracts the political conflicts of the 1970s, and it reaches us today through the lens of our own contemporary concerns about memory and representation. To read Solstad now is therefore to traverse overlapping strata of time: the narrated past of the occupation, the author’s present of Marxist commitment, and our own present of retrospective engagement. In this sense, the War Trilogy not only participates in the cultural memory of the war but exemplifies how memory itself is layered, refracted, and rehistoricized across successive presents.

Across its three volumes—Svik. Førkrigsår, Krig 1940 (War 1940), and Brød og våpen (Bread and Weapons)—the trilogy traces the decomposition and reorganization of Norwegian society under the pressure of war. Animated by Solstad’s Marxist commitments, it exposes the hierarchies and contradictions structuring Norwegian society before, during, and after the occupation. The novels are not, however, reducible to ideological instruction. Their multi-perspectival form and sensitivity to sensory detail—hygiene, light, cinema, atmosphere—reveal a more complex project: one that exceeds doctrine and dramatizes how history is both lived and remembered.

In what follows, I examine how the War Trilogy operates on two overlapping registers—historical and aesthetic, didactic and sensory—and how their interplay complicates our understanding of realism and cultural memory. While the trilogy aligns with the traditions of politically engaged literature, its form also exemplifies what Jameson calls the “antinomies of realism”: the tension between the narrative impulse to situate events in historical time and the affective force of a perpetual present. In this article, I refer to this tension as a battle of the senses—a struggle within realist form between ideological abstraction and sensory immediacy, between the impulse to interpret history and the urge to feel it. What emerges is not a seamless account of the past, but a layered narrative that dramatizes the contradictions of memory, perception, and history itself.

2. Realism, Memory, and Dual Historicity

A few chapters into Svik. Førkrigsår, the first novel of the trilogy, the young protagonist Fredrik Lindgren returns to Oslo from the Spanish Civil War, where he has volunteered with the International Brigades in their fight against General Franco’s fascist troops. Cornered by a group of curious young workers, he is asked about his experiences as a soldier. What has he learned during his wartime service? Hesitant to provide a clear answer, he tells his interrogators that he has encountered beauty—not just any beauty, but the beauty of young women believing in a bigger cause (Solstad [1977] 2000, p. 132). Baffled by his romantic remarks about the young Spanish communists fighting for their freedom, the group nonetheless accepts Fredrik’s answer as genuine and profound. More than just a banal comment, his words lend a poetic flair to his story, as witnessed by the narrator:

It was a strange thing to say, and had it not been Fredrik who said it, it might have come across as a bit affected. But now the strangeness sounded uplifting, and several of the young workers who heard it later found themselves thinking about those words—there was something poetic about them1.

(Solstad [1977] 2000, p. 133)

This brief but resonant scene encapsulates many of the broader thematic concerns of Solstad’s War Trilogy. Having returned from battle, Fredrik struggles to reintegrate into the grim realities of prewar Oslo, a city marked by unemployment, economic depression, political fragmentation, and the looming threat of an imminent global conflict. The heroism and clarity that once seemed possible in the context of internationalist struggle are now met with a kind of paralysis and petty concerns. Fredrik finds himself out of sync with the political rhythms and emotional registers of civilian life. The dissonance is not just social but temporal: he carries with him the intensity of a recent historical struggle, only to encounter a society already oriented toward a different future.

As such, his experiences stand in stark contrast to the young couple, Stein and Jorunn Johansen, who in many ways represent the ideological and sociological antithesis of Fredrik. As the trilogy opens, we encounter them in the process of moving from an aging tenement in Rathkes gate, in Oslo’s East End, to a newly built apartment complex in Sinsen—a modern district to the north associated with new infrastructure, planning, and upward mobility. The relocation is not merely spatial, but symbolic: a transition from a world shaped by working-class struggle and historical contingency to one organized around progress, predictability, and technocratic order.

Stein and Jorunn are early exemplars of the new petty bourgeoisie emerging under Norwegian social democracy—modern, educated, articulate, and confident in their role as the future ruling class. Stein is already on the path to becoming an influential union representative at Standard Telefon- og Kabelfabrikk, while Jorunn takes an active role in organizing welfare initiatives for working-class families. These efforts are grounded in her conviction that social progress can be achieved through education, hygiene, and everyday discipline. Jorunn, in particular, is portrayed as deeply concerned with health and nutrition, and is repeatedly referred to as “strict” by the narrator. She believes that poor diet among the working class stems not from poverty or moral failure, but from ignorance—something that can be corrected through education:

She was concerned with questions of nutrition. She believed that poor diet was the scourge of the working class. That poor diet stemmed from ignorance, and it could be changed through education. Cleanliness, orderliness, and knowledge of what was healthy for the body—that was what was needed to raise the standard of the working class2.

(Solstad [1977] 2000, pp. 19–20)

Cleanliness, order, and bodily knowledge become uplifting instruments—a way to civilize and improve the working class from within. This future orientation is visible not only in the couple’s political and social aspirations, but also in their domestic and bodily routines. The narrator’s detailed description of Jorunn’s insisting on the daily use of toothpaste offers the most telling expression of this logic. Presented as entirely natural and self-evident, this hygienic ritual condenses the broader political ideal: to bring light, order, and control into the body’s most private spaces. Yet the insistence on discipline at the level of the mouth also points to a deeper aesthetic and symbolic struggle. Toothpaste here becomes a sensual technology of purification, transforming the intimate materiality of the body into a site of civic virtue. As such, this everyday practice resonates with what the Norwegian historian of ideas Rune Slagstad, in his seminal work De nasjonale strateger (The National Strategists 1998), has called the logic of the “Labour Party state” (Arbeiderpartistaten): a technocratic rationality in which hygiene, planning, and rational control of social life became instruments of political hegemony. Jorunn’s bathroom regimen fuses two logics: the aesthetic taming of the body and the rationalization of hygiene as social virtue. It is not merely about cleanliness, but about the making of a new subject—modern, self-aware, and aligned with the rational promises of the welfare state.

Against this backdrop, Fredrik Lindgren embodies an alternative political stance—formed through internationalist struggle and sustained by radical conviction. Yet within the world of the War Trilogy, such radicalism becomes a liability. As the narrative progresses, Lindgren and his political comrades are increasingly marginalized—not only by the bourgeois ruling class, but also by the very social–democratic actors like Jorunn and Stein who claim to represent the interests of labor. Even within the ranks of the armed forces, communists are viewed with suspicion. They are rarely granted positions of authority, and their experience and commitment are systematically undervalued.

In this way, the social and political tensions that dominate the prewar years in the first volume are carried over into the military sphere and extended into the war and occupation in the later volumes. Here, we clearly see the contours of Solstad’s political critique—one he was eager to articulate in interviews and essays around the time of the trilogy’s publication. In bringing the unresolved class antagonisms of the 1930s into the sphere of postwar experience, Solstad not only exposes the structural continuities between peace and war but also sets the stage for a more contemporary resonance3. His critique of bourgeois authority, military hierarchy, and social-democratic compromise reverberates beyond the historical setting, speaking directly to the political debates of his own moment.

It is against this backdrop that the War Trilogy should be read—not only as a historical indictment of Norway’s compromised war leadership, but also as a pointed commentary on the political climate of the 1970s. At that time, individuals affiliated with the Maoist Workers’ Communist Party (AKP-ml)—a small but culturally influential organization at the center of Norway’s radical left—were subjected to state surveillance and political isolation, and Marxist cultural production was often dismissed as tendentious or doctrinaire4. This is precisely where the novel’s dual historicity becomes most visible: the text remembers a war already invested with powerful symbolic meanings, but it also encodes the anxieties of a later moment in which communist politics faced systematic delegitimization.

This tension was mirrored in the trilogy’s public reception. While Solstad was often praised for his nuanced social-realist portrayal of working-class communities, the overtly political dimension of the work—its critique of the military, the state, and the labor movement’s opportunism and compromises—was frequently dismissed as dogmatic or tendentious and viewed by many critics as out of step with the literary norms of the time. The literary scholar and critic Harald Bache-Wiig, for instance, commended the first novel for its detailed realist depiction of the social milieu but rejected what he saw as Solstad’s apologetic stance toward the Soviet Union. In his review, Bache-Wiig described this position as a “distortion of perspective” (perspektivforvrengning) and a fatal misreading of the Norwegian working class’s willingness to side with the ruling elite in its hostility toward the USSR (Bache-Wiig 1978, p. 88). Such critiques illustrate how the trilogy’s ideological commitments were perceived by contemporaries as exceeding the bounds of acceptable realism.

In a more retrospective and dismissive tone, the critic Øystein Rottem later claimed in Norges litteraturhistorie (Rottem 1997, vol. 2, p. 118) that Solstad’s War Trilogy was written and conceived according to “a literary party programme” dictated by the Maoist Workers’ Communist Party (AKP-ml). Other commentators—most notably Atle Kittang (2024) and Espen Hammer (2011)—have re-evaluated the trilogy’s aesthetic and historical significance, arguing that its political contradictions constitute a central source of its literary power and enduring relevance within Solstad’s oeuvre. In Anstendighet og revolt (Decency and Revolt), Hammer praises the War Trilogy as a major achievement both for its literary qualities and for its documentation of the social and ideological tensions of its time. He portrays Solstad and other contemporary writers as striving to establish a necessary distance and aesthetic autonomy from party doctrine, thereby challenging the instrumentalist conception of art they themselves had once advocated in speeches and essays. As Hammer observes:

If the Maoists believed that literature and politics could become one, reality showed that the two often collided, creating a dynamic that was both unpredictable and dogma-dissolving. Simply writing a novel is, in itself, such an experimental and open undertaking that many factors inevitably point in other directions than those dictated by ideology.

(Hammer 2011, pp. 85–86)5

Where Rottem saw political dogmatism, Hammer identifies a productive friction between ideology and form—a friction that energizes Solstad’s aesthetic project. And where Hammer emphasizes the trilogy’s aesthetic dimension, historian Torgeir E. Sæveraas (2023) foregrounds its ideological bias and factual deviations. In a recent article, he examines the historical accuracy of Solstad’s War Trilogy in relation to official wartime accounts such as Rapport fra den militære undersøkelseskommisjon (Report from the Military Commission of Inquiry), which Solstad’s publisher, Oktober, reissued in the same year as Krig 1940 (1978). Approaching the trilogy from a historian’s perspective, Sæveraas highlights discrepancies between documented fact and fictional representation. Yet he also acknowledges Solstad’s engagement with a Lukácsian poetics of the “historical type”—characters who embody broader social and ideological tendencies. From this standpoint, Sæveraas concedes that the novels capture dimensions of lived experience inaccessible to strictly factual historiography, particularly in their portrayal of fear and anxiety. Nevertheless, he concludes that Solstad’s depiction is marked by evident ideological bias, asserting that “the picture Solstad creates […] is, at times, grossly distorted” (Sæveraas 2023, p. 150).

Rather than viewing the trilogy as either an autonomous aesthetic construct or a flawed historical document, it is more productive to read it as a mediating form of cultural memory, negotiating between historical record and lived experience. These tensions reveal why the War Trilogy cannot be reduced to either a documentary reconstruction of the occupation years or a partisan intervention in the political debates of the 1970s. Its significance lies precisely in how it holds these positions in tension. On one hand, the trilogy draws on the realist conventions of the historical novel to anchor its narrative in recognizable social worlds and historical events. On the other, it unsettles those very conventions by foregrounding the affective residues, perceptual shifts, and ideological fractures through which history is remembered.

From this foundation, Solstad’s practice also intersects with Ann Rigney’s reflections on fiction and cultural memory. Rigney argues that the difference between factual accounts and fictional narratives is less absolute than once assumed, since both depend on narrative structuring to make the past intelligible. However, fiction retains a distinctive flexibility: through condensation, invention, and aesthetic form, it transforms historical material into memorable narrative experience (Rigney 2001). In this sense, Solstad’s “materialist” realism is not opposed to fictionality but depends on it—using the resources of narrative form to render historical contradiction perceptible and thus memorable.

3. Structures of Conflict

The War Trilogy is, in both form and ambition, a collective historical novel, and one that seeks to portray representatives of Norwegian society prior to and during the German occupation. These representatives span multiple social strata, and the trilogy’s narrative structure avoids the coherence of a single protagonist or linear plot. Instead, Solstad constructs a panoramic, multi-perspectival form that follows a wide cast of characters across the years leading up to World War II and through the occupation.

This aesthetic and structural ambition is intimately tied to Solstad’s own convictions at the time of writing. In several key essays, interviews and speeches from the 1970s, he insists that literature must proceed from a deliberate class standpoint—that the writer must choose to adopt the perspective of the working class, even if they are not themselves a part of it. As he puts it in one of the most important essays of the period—originally delivered as a lecture at the Dramatiska Institutet in Stockholm in 1978 and later reworked for publication under the long and ironically descriptive title “Et langt foredrag om materialismen, polemikk mot dogmatismen, særlig da formalismen—og et forsøk på å beskrive min egen arbeidsmetode i forsettet på å være en materialistisk forfatter”6:

It is the class standpoint—the consciously chosen one, not the natural, spontaneous one—that is the alpha and omega when it comes to literary methods for capturing contradictory reality. It is the best tool for not getting lost in the web of contradictions in reality, but for enabling us to unravel the main contradictions in the reality we are exploring. […] To explore reality is to be a materialist.

(Solstad 2001, p. 321)7

Here, Solstad defines materialism not merely as an ideological position but as a literary method: a way of navigating complexity, mapping contradiction, and representing social totality through a particular lens. This approach informs the trilogy’s realism—not a realism of documentary flatness, but one grounded in historical structures, embedded perspectives, and the lived textures of social life. In this sense, Solstad’s conception of materialism unites two distinct yet interdependent strands: historical materialism, which seeks to map the structural antagonisms and ideological formations that shape society, and sensual materialism, which attends to the embodied, perceptual, and affective dimensions through which those structures are lived. To be a “materialist writer,” as Solstad puts it, is therefore to hold these registers together—to show how social contradictions are not only historically produced but sensorially experienced. This fusion underpins the trilogy’s aesthetic project and its distinctive form of realism.

The trilogy also resonates with Georg Lukács’s theory of the historical novel, which he describes as a genre capable of mediating between the individual and the social totality8. Rather than focusing on psychologically idiosyncratic characters, the historical novel presents types—socially determined figures whose fates are shaped by the structural contradictions of their historical moment. For Lukács, these types are not abstract symbols but concrete embodiments of class position and ideological conflict. Their personal stories reveal deeper societal tensions, and the narrative as a whole dramatizes the movement of history through lived experience (Lukács [1937] 1962).

This Lukácsian scaffolding underpins Fredric Jameson’s discussion of the collective war novel—a more specific variant within the realist tradition that nevertheless carries forward many of the same structural commitments found in benchmark works of the historical novel, such as War and Peace and Father Goriot. Like Lukács, Jameson is concerned with the mediation between individual fate and social totality, and with how character types register historical contradictions. However, where Lukács emphasizes the revelation of structural conflict, Jameson draws attention to a different dynamic: the emergence of collective affect under total war conditions. In The Antinomies of Realism (Jameson 2013), he explores how the war novel stages a momentary suspension of class divisions, producing not only a representational totality but a fleeting experience of national unity. As he writes,

The collective war story runs on the interaction of various character types apparently gathered at random. The experience is the national one of universal conscription as the first occasion in which men from different social classes are thrown together.

(Jameson 2013, p. 234)

Jameson would later deepen his analysis in American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army (Jameson 2016), where he radicalizes the notion of universal conscription. Here, Jameson argues that the national army—because it drafts across classes and temporarily suspends the usual logic of market exchange—possesses a unique utopian potential. For Jameson, only the universal conscription of national armies, what he calls the re-nationalization of the military, can produce a form of ‘dual power’ capable of challenging capitalism’s hegemony from within. By conscripting every citizen, the army becomes the one modern institution that traverses class boundaries and gestures toward a collective structure outside the privatized, commodified logic of late capitalism.

From this perspective, Solstad’s War Trilogy reads as an inverted case study. Instead of realizing the utopian potential Jameson associates with universal conscription, Solstad’s Norway turns the army into a space where bourgeois authority is simply reproduced in new uniforms. What Jameson imagines as a force for radical change appears, in Solstad’s narrative, as an instrument of continuity—carrying the hierarchies of the factory and the state into the military without real transformation. If Jameson’s universal army gestures toward collective empowerment, Solstad’s novel reveals the historical reality that made such empowerment impossible.

Here too, the realist logic of social types remains central, but the stakes differ. Whereas Lukács conceives of types as embodiments of historical contradiction, Jameson finds in the war novel a fleeting utopian promise: the battlefield as a space where alienation might momentarily dissolve and disparate lives converge within a shared historical frame. For him, the war novel gestures toward a representational totality that briefly illuminates the possibility of collective being beyond class stratification.

Solstad’s trilogy, by contrast, resists such universalizing impulses. Written from a distinctly materialist position—here understood not in the sense of contemporary “new materialisms,” but in the Marxist–Lukácsian sense of a historical and representational method that links aesthetic form to material social conditions—and with explicit allegiance to the working class, the novels foreground the persistence and intensification of class antagonism under conditions of war. Where Jameson locates in the military the potential for utopian collectivity, Solstad uncovers the reproduction of social division. His war is not a crucible of unity but a theater of fracture: between historical regimes, competing modes of authority, and incompatible visions of the political future.

In this reversal, Solstad’s realism reveals what Jameson’s utopian model leaves implicit—the historical limits of collective imagination under capitalism. In this sense, the trilogy may also be read through the lens of what Mark Fisher, building on Jameson, has termed “capitalist realism” (Fisher 2009). The War Trilogy transforms the military from a site of potential solidarity into a laboratory of ideological endurance, where the contradictions of modernity are not resolved but made visible in their sensory, affective, and structural dimensions. Solstad’s refusal of wartime universalism is thus not only thematic but formal. Where Jameson identifies the battlefield as a utopian space of convergence, Solstad maps it as a terrain of persistence—where inherited hierarchies are reasserted rather than dissolved. Rather than gathering disparate types into a fleeting national unity, the trilogy shows how those types endure across domains, carrying their class inscriptions with them.

This is realism not as reconciliation, but as demystification—a project that echoes Lukács’s insistence that the historical novel must expose the ‘internal contradictions’ of society from within. The demystifying impulse comes into sharp focus in Solstad’s portrayal of the bourgeois order. Represented by state officials, factory owners, upper-level clerks, and military commanders, this class appears increasingly anachronistic, held together less by legitimacy than by tradition. These figures cling to a hierarchical social structure rooted in property and inherited authority, even as its ideological coherence begins to unravel. Nowhere is this more sharply staged than in the recurring presence of Standard Telefon- og Kabelfabrikk—a key site of production and discipline, and arguably the central locus of the trilogy as a whole. The factory does not merely provide material context or employment; it anchors a web of social relations that span generations, institutions, and political registers. Many of the trilogy’s characters are directly or indirectly connected to the factory, including Jan Johansen, a young volunteer in the Norwegian defense forces and the younger brother of the union representative Stein Johansen.

This continuity becomes acutely visible when Jan observes the eerie parallelism between civilian and military command structures. After having joined the armed forces as a communication officer, he notes how the logic of the workplace seamlessly transfers to the battlefield, with commanding authority simply putting on a new uniform. Far from dismantling the class structure in favor of a collective national body, the war merely redistributes existing hierarchies across new institutional terrain. As Jan reflects,

Had chief engineer Baumann from Standard been standing here as a lieutenant, it wouldn’t really have made a difference. It’s no different in the army than it is in society otherwise. It’s hardly surprising that the same people giving orders in the factories are the ones giving orders in the army, and that those who are commanded in the factories are also commanded in the army. That’s how it’s always been, and there’s no point in kicking up a fuss about it now, when we’re at war.

(Solstad [1978] 2001, p. 9)9

Here, we reach the heart of Solstad’s political intervention. As the author stated in interviews at the time, the trilogy should be read as a critique of the political and military personnel responsible for Norway’s passive and defeatist war effort. When Germany invaded Norway on 9 April 1940, the government and military command were largely unprepared, leading to a rapid capitulation and the exile of the legitimate government to London. Domestically, the occupation (1940–1945) exposed deep fractures within Norwegian society—between collaboration and resistance, class and ideology, urban elites and rural workers. These divisions would later shape postwar political alignments and the consolidation of social democracy. Their authority—like that of the bourgeois class more broadly—derives not from competence or rational legitimacy, but from background, tradition, and systemic privilege. In this sense, the military becomes a distilled model of the wider social order: rigid, stratified, and fundamentally unreformed by the crisis of war. Within this schema, social roles are starkly differentiated. The bourgeois elite maintain their commanding positions; the social–democratic worker is cast as the conciliator, willing to adjust and preserve the system; and the communists are structurally marginalized, excluded from decision-making and relegated to positions of little or no authority.

Solstad’s ideological mapping reflects not only the class dynamics of prewar Norway but also anticipates the political compromises of the postwar consensus. The war does not reorder society along democratic or egalitarian lines, but merely entrenches existing asymmetries, and this is precisely where form and memory intersect. The War Trilogy does not simply depict social structures; it shows how those structures persist across layers of historical time. In doing so, it both dramatizes and enacts the principle of dual historicity: the novels remember the occupation while simultaneously refracting the political conflicts of the 1970s. The War Trilogy does not merely represent history as a fixed set of facts—it reflects on how history is organized, remembered, and transmitted. In this sense, it stands as both a product of its political moment and a work of cultural memory that continues to shape how Norway’s wartime past is imagined.

Through its insistence on social types, historical structure, and unresolved contradiction, Solstad’s realism aligns with what Ann Rigney describes as the “counter-memorial” function of narrative: a critical force that unsettles hegemonic views of the past and reframes the conditions under which it can be imagined (Rigney 2008, p. 348). In this light, the historical novel becomes not a vessel of ideology or a neutral document, but a critical form of remembrance—one that resists the flattening of national myth, insists on structural antagonism, and dramatizes the enduring entanglement of class, ideology, and feeling. The War Trilogy, then, participates simultaneously in the Marxist tradition of critical realism and in the field of memory studies, showing that literature not only reflects the past but actively intervenes in its meaning.

4. Aesthetics of the Present: Affect, Cinematic Sensations, and Cultural Memory

As we have seen, Solstad’s War Trilogy may be read as a historical novel in the strongest, most politically analytical sense: an attempt to map class antagonisms, institutional power, and ideological inertia within a society under siege. The continuity between civil and military hierarchies, the marginalization of the communist left, and the weary pragmatism of figures like Stein and Jorunn Johansen all point to a narrative shaped by Marxist commitments.

However, Solstad’s realism does not end with structural critique. As Fredric Jameson argues in The Antinomies of Realism, the realist novel is defined by an internal contradiction between the narrative impulse to clarify historical process and the affective drive to register sensation, mood, and discontinuity, expanding into what Jameson (2013, pp. 27–44) calls a “perpetual present.” These two forces often operate in tension, pulling the novel in different directions. Rather than resolving this tension, great works of realism turn it into a source of energy, a dynamic that Solstad’s trilogy exemplifies. While committed to a Marxist mapping of social reality, it also opens space for a different kind of transformation—less ideological and more sensory.

Yet Jameson’s reflections on affect remain relatively schematic compared to the more elaborated accounts in affect theory. As Lauren Berlant (2011) and Sara Ahmed (2014) have shown, affect is not merely an interruption of narrative but a central medium through which historical experience is lived and shared. For Berlant, affective attachments sustain people in the face of structural impasse; for Ahmed, feelings circulate across bodies and objects, shaping the contours of social life. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003) adds another dimension, describing affect as a matter of texture—a felt quality that clings to perception, shaping how worlds are sensed and navigated. To place Solstad alongside such perspectives is to see that his realism does not simply document political contradiction; it also stages what we might call the affective infrastructures of history—the ways in which moods, atmospheres, and bodily rhythms give form to collective life.

The novels are therefore not only about political conflict; they are also about how history is lived and sensed. Running parallel to the analysis of class and ideology is the emergence of a new aesthetic regime: a reorganization of perception, habit, and affect. The narrative does not just track the shifting balance of power; it registers the textures of a changing world—its colors, surfaces, sounds, and rhythms. In this sense, the War Trilogy dramatizes a battle of the senses as much as a battle of classes: a struggle over the very forms of perception through which history becomes thinkable and memorable.

This mediated sensibility is perhaps most vividly dramatized in a striking scene from Svik. Førkrigsår, where two young working-class characters, Jan and Sidsel, take a paid airplane ride over Oslo on 17 May 1938, Norway’s Constitution Day, alongside youth from the bourgeoisie. Technical innovation and the intensification of the consumerist economy have made private aviation newly accessible, even to them: “Jan and Sidsel flew. Two working-class youths from Grünerløkka suddenly found themselves high up in the air, up between the sky—the blue, blue sky—over Oslo, and could look down on the city they had grown up in” (Solstad [1977] 2000, p. 94). From the sky, their familiar world becomes newly visible—distant, composed, almost unreal: “Sidsel was struck by how beautiful everything was when you saw it from the air!” (Solstad [1977] 2000, p. 95). The flight grants them not political clarity, but aesthetic distance. It reframes the city not as a terrain of struggle, but as something seen—a perceptual object, available for reimagination.

This dimension can be taken as part of Solstad’s method as a materialist writer, which exceeds doctrinal boundaries, pointing to a more general transformation in how life is lived and experienced. In this sense, the trilogy registers a broader reordering of the sensible: a historically specific shift in what can be seen, said, and felt. These shifts in perception do not simply accompany ideology, but constitute its aesthetic infrastructure. What the War Trilogy traces, then, is not only a transformation of political alignments or social institutions, but one of the sensorium itself. The central drama is not only political or historical, but fundamentally perceptual: a transformation in how life is sensed, imagined, and lived.

Alongside the textures of everyday life—hygiene, electric light, running water—another aesthetic layer emerges: the influence of cinema, revue, and theater. These forms of popular entertainment become part of the characters’ imaginative universe, shaping how they see themselves and the world around them. For several of the young protagonists, going to the cinema is not just a leisure activity, but a formative aesthetic and emotional event. It mediates their understanding of modernity, love, and ideology. The emotional and ideological charge of cinema is powerfully staged in different scenes across the trilogy.

In Svik. Førkrigsår, Sidsel goes to Scala Kino to see the romantic movie Camille, and is captivated by Greta Garbo’s performance. The film stirs what the narrator calls filmfølelser—cinematic sensations—that open up a deep emotional resonance for her. Jan, her date, is unsettled: “What kind of girl was this? Who saw herself in the mysterious Greta Garbo? What kind of feelings did she carry within her?” His confusion soon turns to resentment: “He didn’t like it. It made him helpless. Could he kiss a girl who said she had such feelings?” (Solstad [1977] 2000, p. 45).

Cinema here becomes a threshold for interiority and for a form of female subjectivity that disrupts familiar gender and class codes. Solstad’s treatment of gender in this scene is telling. Sidsel’s capacity to identify with Garbo dramatizes how mass culture provides young women with affective and imaginative resources that exceed the expectations of their immediate social environment. Jan’s discomfort—his inability to reconcile Sidsel’s cinematic feelings with the norms of heterosexual intimacy—exposes the fragility of masculine authority when confronted with a female subjectivity mediated by modern culture.

Sidsel’s filmfølelser echo this dynamic: through Garbo, she accesses a register of feeling and selfhood that unsettles the categories available to her as a young working-class woman in 1930s Oslo. More broadly, the trilogy often situates women at points of transition between tradition and modernity: as carriers of hygienic and educational discipline (as with Jorunn Johansen), but also as figures of aesthetic receptivity and imaginative openness (as with Sidsel). These roles are deeply ambivalent. On the one hand, they reinforce the social-democratic project of order, health, and technocratic rationality; on the other, they hint at disruptive potential, where women’s affective investments and aesthetic encounters destabilize gender and class hierarchies. In this sense, Solstad’s realism not only maps traditional class contradictions but also registers how gendered subjectivities are reconfigured in the cultural modernity of the 1930s and 1940s.

Nowhere is this tension more sharply staged than in Brød og våpen, where Sidsel’s younger sister, Rigmor, enters a forbidden relationship with the German soldier Karl Otto. What captivates her is not his position of authority as an occupier but the sensory and aesthetic dimensions of his presence. “That’s how life should be, Sidsel,” she tells her sister. “Completely different from what we’re used to. Almost like a ball. We’ve never been to a ball, have we? He says so many beautiful things, in German—it’s quite a similar language, actually” (Solstad [1980] 2001, p. 43)10. Rigmor frames her affair not as betrayal but as an experience of vitality, beauty, and linguistic enchantment. Like Sidsel’s cinematic identification with Garbo, Rigmor’s desire foregrounds how sensory life generates subjectivities that cut across ideology and social expectation. In both cases, female affect is rendered as a force that cannot be fully contained by political or social categories. For Solstad, gendered affect thus becomes a site where realism stretches its boundaries, seeking to register how history is not only lived collectively but also felt intimately.

In postwar Norway, young women who engaged with German occupiers were condemned as tyskertøser (literally “German girls”) and subjected to severe stigmatization, social exclusion, and even public shaming after the liberation (Langås 2025). The novel’s narrator, however, refrains from such retrospective judgment. Instead, the focus remains close to Rigmor’s affective drives—the exhilaration of vitality, the allure of language, the sense of living otherwise. This perspective underscores Solstad’s commitment to a form of realism that resists the temptation to impose moral closure. Rather than rehearsing the nation’s disciplinary narrative of betrayal and punishment, the trilogy attends to the intimate textures of beauty and desire, showing how historical experience is lived through affect as much as through ideology. In this way, Solstad’s historical novel extends the “battle of the senses” into the moral domain of collective memory itself, unsettling its most entrenched binaries of purity and transgression.

By suspending judgment in this way, Solstad not only complicates the gendered politics of war memory but also underscores the novel’s broader aesthetic strategy: to trace how collective history intersects with private sensation. Rigmor’s story, like Sidsel’s cinematic reveries, exemplifies how realism in the War Trilogy is stretched between structural critique and sensory immediacy. It is precisely in these moments of affective intensity—neither fully subsumed into ideology nor reducible to private escapism—that Solstad’s realism points us toward a layered experience of history that is both analytical and experiential.

What emerges, then, is a realism animated by two impulses: a Marxist mapping of structural antagonisms and an affective attunement to the textures of lived experience. The War Trilogy narrates the war years as a history of conflict, but it also preserves the sensory immediacy of life in transition—cinematic sensations, hygienic rituals, aerial perspectives, and fleeting moods. This doubleness is not incidental: it is precisely what allows the novels to function as works of cultural memory. They articulate history both as a set of social contradictions and as a field of sensations that refuse to settle into narrative closure.

5. Conclusions: The Battle of the Senses

Dag Solstad’s War Trilogy occupies a distinctive position in the Norwegian cultural memory of World War II. Published more than three decades after the occupation, yet now itself more than forty years old, the trilogy exemplifies what I have called dual historicity: it remembers the 1930s and 1940s from the vantage point of the 1970s, while also reaching us today as a historical artifact in its own right. This layered temporality aligns with Koselleck’s Zeitschichten (Koselleck 2000) and underscores Astrid Erll’s (2008) point that cultural memory is always mediated—remade through narrative, affect, and form across successive presents.

This dual focus on historical critique and the affective textures of modernity brings us to the threshold of realism’s internal antinomies. As Fredric Jameson argues, the realist novel is always caught between two imperatives: the narrative drive to structure historical meaning, and the affective pull to register lived experience in all its contingency and sensuality. In the War Trilogy, Solstad does not resolve this tension but inhabits it. On the one hand, the trilogy retains a distinctly didactic ambition, consistent with the author’s communist commitments and the Lukácsian impulse to depict society as a totality structured by class conflict, institutional power, and ideological realignment. Its characters are socially situated types whose trajectories expose structural tensions—between capital and labor, tradition and modernization, and bourgeois authority and revolutionary critique. On the other hand, the trilogy is acutely attentive to the small intensities of experience: the scent of toothpaste, the sensation of flight above Oslo, or the affective charge of cinema. These details resist incorporation into narrative causality. They are what Jameson calls the breach of affect into narrative—interruptions that do not weaken realism but deepen it.

Rather than choosing between these tendencies, Solstad lets them rub against one another. Like the society it depicts, the trilogy is riven by unresolved tensions—between intention and effect, ideology and feeling, and structure and appearance. In this way, it enacts what Jameson describes as a “contradiction made visible”: a literary form that dramatizes the uneven inscription of history in both institutions and interiorities.

In a broader European context, Solstad’s War Trilogy stands apart from other major postwar narratives. Whereas works such as Günter Grass’s Danzig Trilogy (1959–1963) or Väinö Linna’s The Unknown Soldier (1954) approach World War II through questions of moral guilt, national trauma, and reconciliation, Solstad’s focus lies elsewhere: on the ideological formations and class dynamics that structure both wartime experience and its remembrance. Solstad’s realism remains distinct in its insistence that memory is inseparable from the material and sensory conditions of modern life. In this sense, the War Trilogy expands the field of European war literature by reimagining the historical novel not as testimony or catharsis, but as an arena where ideology, perception, and history contend.

This friction is ultimately what gives the War Trilogy its distinctive force. It is not realism as transparency, nor as nostalgia for a lost totality. It is realism as a political and aesthetic experiment—one that seeks not only to represent a world in crisis, but to register how that crisis was lived and sensed and later re-imagined. If the trilogy begins with the radiant promise of revolutionary commitment and ends in the diffuse disillusionment of the welfare state’s consolidation, it is not because Solstad abandoned critique, but because he expanded its terrain. The battle of the senses, then, is not peripheral to the political drama, but its condition. The aesthetic order shapes what can be perceived, how lives are formed, and which futures remain imaginable. Solstad’s realism does not merely document this transformation; it stages it.

This perspective also allows us to return to the question of memory. If the historical novel has long been overshadowed in memory studies by trauma testimony, autobiography, or visual media, Solstad’s War Trilogy makes a powerful case for its continued relevance. The trilogy does not simply preserve a historical period; it actively mediates it, transforming archival material, political analysis, and sensory detail into a complex form of narrative remembrance. It shows that what we remember of war and occupation is not only political conflict but also how that conflict was lived: in gestures, atmospheres, moods, and images. In this sense, Solstad’s trilogy contributes to shaping Norway’s memory culture—not through unifying myth or heroic narrative, but through contradiction, fragmentation, and aesthetic reconfiguration.

At the outset, I suggested that the War Trilogy is not only a political novel or a historical reckoning but a novel that treats form as a mode of thought—a structure capable of grasping the contradictions of a society in motion. What has emerged, however, is something more layered still. Solstad’s trilogy does not merely represent the war nor simply critique its mismanagement by a compromised ruling class. It stages a deeper conflict: a battle of the senses, in which ideological structures and aesthetic regimes vie over the very conditions of perception. In doing so, it positions itself within both the Marxist tradition of critical realism and the evolving field of cultural memory, reminding us that to remember history is also to rehearse its tensions—to dwell, as Solstad does, in the uncertain space where memory, ideology, and perception converge.