THE DEEP ONES: "Rebecka" by Karin Tidbeck

"Rebecka" by Karin Tidbeck

Discussion begins on September 22, 2021.

First published in Jagannath: Stories (2012).



BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?1556051

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

Jagannath: Stories

ONLINE VERSIONS

http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/rebecka/

ONLINE AUDIO VERSIONS

No online audio versions found to date.

MISCELLANY

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karin_Tidbeck
https://www.tor.com/2018/01/31/book-reviews-karin-tidbeck-jagannath/
https://www.karintidbeck.com/
https://bombmagazine.org/articles/karin-tidbeck-interviewed/
https://tinyurl.com/cywpdv5x
https://tinyurl.com/nhn7vsvb

Online for me, and I'm thankful there's that option.

The Swedish original was first published 2002. The English translation is by Tidbeck herself.

Somewhat unusually, I've got this one in two different collections, Jagannath and Vem är Arvid Pekon?.

The opening paragraph is fabulous. With a closing sentence like that, I anticipated the story would come back to that moment, with the narrator strapped to the bed, and continue the action. Presumably, the narrator's captor would return to the room, and I dreaded the implied violence. How mistaken I was.

The worldbuilding in this one was subtle and well done. There is an early reveal of the way the Lord manifests in this world, but as the story proceeds I almost forgot this major difference between that world and ours. I wondered if this was our world after a change, or was this world always that way. Tidbeck suggests it's the former: “After all, we had to take care of ourselves before He came back.”

It's a bit of a black comedy, actually. Extra points for identifying the logical implications of a manifest deity. The Lord works in mysterious ways, to be sure.

I went and both re-read the English and read for the first time the Swedish, and realize the former isn't so much a translation of the latter as a reworking or retelling. There's no Karl in the later, frex, and almost none of the local colour.

It's interesting that His return has (supposedly) obviated the need for psychiatrists, but not for hospitals.

Tidbeck is quite good at worldbuilding with minimal means.

No Karl! I can see that the central idea can remain (getting His attention), but the logic and premise would be radically changed without the backstory and moral rationale. The local colour seems more a matter of style than substance, and I wonder if it reflected the recent market trend in criminal novels with strong sense of place.

Would be interesting to hear Tidbeck's discussion of what changed for her when translating the Swedish original into English: was it a "correction" of the first story to better realise her original intent, a problem of translation, simply an opportunity to write a different story?

In the Swedish version, Rebecka has apparently been abused by someone called Emmy, but what their relationship was is not stated, and just what happened is a lot more vague.

This story rather reminded me of one of my favorite movies, The Rapture, which also takes a version of Christian theology to a logical and horrible ending.

So Sara, at the end, got to know Rebecka reciprocated her friendship. Interesting that Tidbeck gives no clue how much, if any, torture Sara endured. It seems both Sara and Rebecka are being tested.

It occurred to me that the biblical Sarah had a test of faith too though decidedly less trying. I'm not sure if there's any significance to Rebecka being another biblical name.

I wonder what Karl's motives for the torture were in the first place. Was it also, so to speak, suicide by God? It's also interesting that Sara, who seems devout to Him, isn't too upset about the idea of Rebecka succeeding in her suicide. On the other hand, perhaps, in this story's theology, suicide is still a very serious sin and God was somehow saving Rebecka from actually going through with it.

>8 RandyStafford: On the other hand, perhaps ... God was somehow saving Rebecka from actually going through with it.

At first I didn't follow that. Wouldn't God incincerating Rebecka in fact instantiate the act of "suicide by God"? I suppose it comes down to whether the "suicide" act is considered begun or fully implemented, if Rebecka never reached the point of applying any specific techniques of torture. So akin to someone with suicide ideation getting pills out at bedside and opening the bottle of whisky, but falling down the stairs before swallowing anything?

I see that logic, it's not persuasive to me but it's also unclear where the story sits on that point.

I interpreted the situation as God's mercy (and more to the point, Tidbeck's mercy for the reader) that Rebecka needn't proceed to actual torture for God to intervene. A theological question is whether God knows what lies in Rebecka's heart, that she will proceed if not stopped, and there's no need for Sara to suffer to establish that. In this scenario, suicide was instantiated, and whatever sin or moral culpability that comes along with such an act is fully owned by Rebecka.

It appears Tidbeck packed a deal of theological content in this quite brief story.

If God knows Rebecka’s heart like that, wouldn’t He also know beforehand that she’ll hit on the suicide-by-god solution, and could have smote her before the whole sorry mess?

It’s also notable that Rebecka seems to have no concern about going to Hell.

I haven't managed to get to grips with this one. The best I can come up with is that God would forgive anything Rebecka did (and, as an interventionist God, prevent her suicide attempts) until she took the step of setting about torturing to death somebody who loved her. I've no idea if it's rooted in any "real" (real world, I guess) theology, or all out of Karin Tidbeck's imagination.

>10 AndreasJ: If God knows Rebecka’s heart like that, wouldn’t He also ...

This invokes some classic mediaeval Christian theological debates, I believe. I was never expert in this and have forgotten much of what I once knew, but I'd summarise a major Christian response to such questions as postulating that the relevant constraints are not a deity's foreknowledge so much as what we frail humans do with our free will in these circumstances.

I tend to assume that Tidbeck might be pleased that these questions surface, but the priority in storytelling was the ironic twist for the reader in witnessing Rebecka's "outsmarting" of her deity, and the interesting place this puts our narrator along the way.

>12 elenchus:

But Rebecka presumably retains her free will right up until she's actually done something. So on that interpretation, we probably have to assume that she did at least start torturing Sara.

Tidbeck is not, I believe, a believer, and is likely only too happy to raise troubling theological questions.