Arbeiderklassen, Édouard Louis og Kjartan Fløgstad. Et kritisk tilbakeblikk på debattene rundt Farvel til Eddy Bellegueule i Frankrike og Norge

Abstract

In 2016 the author Kjartan Fløgstad criticized the Norwegian reception to the novel The End of Eddy by the French author Édouard Louis, sparking a debate that would culminatein a stand-off between Louis and Fløgstad in the weekly newspaper Morgenbladet. Thedebate brought both esthetical and political questions pertaining to the depiction of theworking class to the surface. In this article, we argue that the politically charged question ofchoosing either class solidarity or identity politics over the other lay at the core of thedebate, and we show that Fløgstad’s criticism in many regards coincided with critical view-points raised by French journalists and academics two years earlier. By comparing the crit-ical French voices with Fløgstad’s criticism, and by examining not only the rhetorical and political conflict between the two debaters but also their meeting points, we cast a new lighton both the French pendant to the Norwegian debate, and on the political dimensions andlarger context of the debate.