Memory and Identity Building Strategies: The Role of Clothing in Lars Saabye Christensen’s Beatles
Memory and Identity Building Strategies: The Role of Clothing in Lars Saabye Christensen’s Beatles

Summary/Abstract: This paper aims at analysing how memory and identity are forged in the novel Beatles, written by the Norwegian author Lars Saabye Christensen in 1984. Special attention will be given to the role of clothing for the act of walking and the use of music, two main strategies at work in this novel. Beatles is a text deeply engaged with remembering and mapping the city while also being an initiation story narrated on the background of Oslo and the Beatlemania that spread through the 60s. Clothing becomes important in two ways. Firstly, in connection to the spatial practice of walking the city as shoes become symbolic for this act. Secondly, the cultural revolution that manifested itself during these years was very much concerned with breaking away from established norms, a direction visible also in clothing style and hair length, for example. These two aspects will be examined throughout this paper and set against other themes in the novel.

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