Girls Against God by Jenny Hval

The girl slurps up more and more spaghetti. It turns out the body and head of this demon are made entirely of spaghetti, and it slowly begins to unravel. In the end, the cloak is the only thing left on the chair. The girl devours the last strand of pasta, and happily continues to eat what's left on her plate. As if the demonic spaghetti isn't real food, but satisfies some other need.

"I hate God," begins the narrator of experimental musician Jenny Hval's novel Girls Against God. What is the God that she hates? It's the stifling atmosphere (we are told) of southern Norway, its churches, its conformities, its cherished authors and artists, its whiteness--racial, yes, but also an aesthetic and essential whiteness that obliterates subversiveness. Hval's narrator hates God because to hate God is to hate hierarchy and paternalism. She describes, as a young girl, searching for a mode to express her hatred in the form of black metal music, but she's born too late; the metal scene has already come and gone, exhausted of its subversive potential, emptied out, already antiquated.

What can be done to subvert whiteness and God when black metal is no longer possible? The narrator forms a coven with two other witches, Therese and Venke, a pair of women she seems also to have invented on the page. The coven is also a band, and the band seems to sometimes play music, but it explores other kinds of subversion, too: the introduction, for example, of a horrible stench that no one in Oslo can identify or trace. A stench that is a hex and is also, somehow, a kind of music: this is the kind of surrealism that Girls Against God is made of.

One thing that interested me about Girls Against God is its embrace of the possibilities of modern technology. In one image, a group of high school girls fight each other for possession of the USB cords around their necks, which contain the whole of their identities. The language of the novel is both extremely physical and ethereal, as the internet is, as light is: vaginas shine with the otherworldly lights of laptops and tanning beds. The coven creates what they call the cosmic internet, a second internet that is summoned in the same way as a spell and which binds its users in both bodied and unbodied space: "We agree in the most extreme instances, you should be able to log on to the cosmic internet and exchange small pieces of flesh with other bodies out there in the hereafter, an then feel a leg or an arm snatched at, as your body comes into contact with the half-composted dimensions." For Hval, the internet is--metaphorically, at least--a subversive space, one in which the hierarchies represented by God are flattened, boundaries melted.

But the machine that interests Girls Against God most is the film camera. Hval's narrator frames everything in terms of a film being written--as when Terese and Venke are invented, as characters in a script. The final section of the book is titled "A Film," and follows the coven as they move through the woods, encountering a member of a metal band filming a music video. Eventually he melts into black goo and produces a mystical egg. Much of Girls Against God seems like an attempt to transfer the modes of surrealist and experimental film onto the page. At times it invites the question, why write a book at all? Why not just make a film? Perhaps because what Girls Against God captures is the creative process of writing the film, which is one of the many things that a film like the one Hval imagines cannot capture. It captures not just the idea of subversion but the generative process of thinking through what subversion is, what it looks like on the screen, on the page. Not just the hatred of God but the contemplation of the hatred of God.