KALLOCAIN

Author: Karin Boye
Year: 2018 (1940)
Publisher: Modernista
Language: Swedish 

There is something tantalising about dystopias. The same way horror novels, thrillers, and ghost stories bring out our fear of other people or the supernatural, dystopias centre on our fear of society and mankind at large. Their point of departure is almost always some sort of failed state or government overreach, some variation of fundamentalism and anti-liberalism. Quite often, the dystopian world is where the collective power oppresses the individual where the individual by his or her obedience and complacency constitutes a part of the oppressing regime.

Some of these dystopias have become part of the global literary canon. “The Time Machine”, “Nineteen Eighty Four”, “Brave New World”, and even “The Handmaid’s Tale” (see my review from November 2020) have risen to shape the general public’s idea of a repugnant social order. For Swedish readers, Karin Boye’s novel “Kallocain” can easily be added to this category.

This story is told by the chemist Leo Kall who is writing his memoirs in a penal colony where he continues to work in his profession. His testimony is of a world in which every action of every citizen has been closely monitored by the authorities for a long time. However, the rulers were not satisfied. They were adamant about trying to control people’s thoughts, too, and they made substantial efforts to reach their goal. Everybody in Kall’s world is an informer. All important citizens, including scientists such as Kall, have a mandatory housekeeper whose job it is to report any anomalies in the household to the secret service (not unlike the housekeepers in undergraduate accommodation at Cambridge). Every sign is suspicious and is supposed to be reported, be it a facial tick, a microscopic delay in response or confirmation, the slightest change of voice, returning home from work a few minutes later than usual. Yet despite this comprehensive enterprise, people’s minds and thoughts have long remained a secret to the regime.

All shifted when Leo Kall unveiled his invention Kallocain; a drug that compels whoever is injected with it to instantly reveal all their thoughts and secrets. As it turns out, it would have radical consequences.

“Kallocain” is an incredibly well-written, nay, sensational novel. The language flows swimmingly like a mountain brook and is a joy in itself to behold. The pace, the development of the characters, the dialogue and the descriptive passages are consistently powerful and engaging, the plot is intense, and the message crystal clear. Kallocain is by far the best piece of literature I have consumed so far this year.

SPOILER ALERT

I am particularly impressed by the way Boye develops the protagonist while at every stage challenging the reader to reflection and introspection. We first meet Leo Kall at the penal colony from where he is telling his story directly to us in the first person. We know that he was captured and imprisoned but we are not told about the circumstances until the very end of the novel. Instead, Kall spends some time assuring us that he is doing well and that his life in prison isn’t actually much different from his life as a free man. From the very beginning, we are faced with the prisoner/free dialectic and the dispute about whether it is at all meaningful in a totalitarian state.

For a large part of the story, Kall appears to be completely down with the dictatorship and its policies. He comes across as a deeply unpleasant and single-minded man who unabashedly promotes and defends the current state of affairs. As the events unfold we begin to understand that what he is actually doing is suppressing his own thoughts. He consistently over-compensates his insecurities, fears, and hesitations by an overly vocal commitment to the system. Lip service to the state can never get you into trouble. You do not have to make any choices. Not thinking is as simple as it is safe.

Boye juxtaposes Kall’s obstinate allegiance to official doctrine with Edo Rissen's, his supervisor’s, hesitancy. Kall deeply dislikes Rissen and talks himself into suspecting that his wife, Linda, who was previously engaged to Rissen, is still in love with him. When Kall picks up signals from Rissen which he interprets to be rebellious, he decides to report him. It eventually dawns on him that it is not the man’s political views that provoke him, but his own jealousy about Linda. He begins to realise that his political zeal is merely a manifestation of his innate insecurities.

In the meantime, Kall has begun to administer the drug, first to “volunteers” and subsequently to suspected dissidents. They all begin to speak. Thoughts that Kall has never before been exposed to now overwhelm him. Under the influence of the Kallocain, citizens open their hearts and speak freely about their most forbidden ideas. Every new encounter chips away at Kall’s facade until his manufactured indoctrination which he realises he never actually believed in or supported is ultimately razed. In the paranoid world created by the dictatorship, everything that he used to think was convictions was in effect defence mechanisms designed to give him the illusion of choice. The choice to be loyal. A shield from disappointment.

The latter was particularly pronounced in relation to Linda. In a society where everybody is an informer, you can naturally not trust anyone. On top of that, his jealousy drove him to the suspicion that Linda was still in love with her ex-fiancé and that they were conspiring behind his back. What Kall was essentially doing was to emotionally distance himself from the woman he loved before she had the chance to deceive him.

My final observation relates to the nature of resistance. We typically think of an organised guerrilla, underground press, secret meetings, planned sabotage actions and so on when we think about resistance, but Karin Boye allows for none of that in her novel. In Leo Kall’s world, the resistance is inside the heads of the citizens. The more suspects he injects with his drug, the more he realises that all there is, are fragments of a collective myth. The myth of a city in the desert where the state has no reach. The myth of a leader from long ago who had liberated his people. The dream of a dream, as it were. And this is Leo Kall’s final lesson. His drug reveals that everybody is part of the resistance. Everybody criticises the system. It is an inseparable trait of humanity to disprove of an oppressive regime. The moment where the head of the police department realises this is one of the key turning points in the novel (in my own translation):
“-Anyone can be condemned with this, he snapped.
Suddenly he stopped in his tracks, seemingly overpowered by the meaning of his own words.
-Anyone can be condemned with this, he repeated but this time in an excruciatingly slow, silent, and velvety voice. Perhaps you are not wrong after all.”  

An ingenious touch by Boye is to describe how peaceful and serene the drug makes the subjects feel. I imagine the question that Boye hints at is whether it is really the drug that makes them feel relaxed or is it the very freedom of finally being able to tell the truth and speak frankly. It is subtle, elegant, and supremely potent.

“Kallocain” was published in 1940. The Second World War was raging and the horrors of both Hitler’s and Stalin’s regimes had become known to most readers of the press. It is easy to imagine how the events in continental Europe in the 1930s leading up to the war had inspired Boye’s imagination. Her letters from this period give evidence of the hardship she went through to pen the book. To one of her friends she wrote “Amidst sweat and internal vomit, I have just finished a rather comprehensive novel.”  To her surprise and satisfaction, “Kallocain” received a warm reception from the critics and also sold well, which Boye, who primarily considered herself a poet, was not used to.

For what it’s worth, I hereby protest that the critics of her time were right. This is in every sense a remarkable book. It has been translated to some ten languages which is far too few. Boye deserves a global audience similar to Wells, Orwell, Huxley, and even Atwood.