THE AFRICAN

Author: Jean Marie Gustave Le Clézio
Year: 2005 (2004)
Publisher: Elisabeth Grate Bokförlag

Language: Swedish (translator Ulla Bruncrona)

The father/son dichotomy is among the oldest tropes in literary history going back to pre-antiquity. Zeus dethroning Kronos, Sophocles’ drama Oedipus, which is probably a much older legend simply exploited by him, and much of the Old Testament revolve around the discord between the begetter and his offspring. Many prominent writers over the centuries have furthermore turned to writing as a form of therapy, diving deeply into their fathers’ roles in their lives. Sometimes, the purpose has been to understand. At other times, to forgive. At still others, to deliver vengeance. Peter Härtling’s “Nachgetragene Liebe”, Charles Dickens’ “David Copperfield”, and Ivan Turgenev’s “Pervaya Lyubov” may serve as a few of many examples from all over Europe of stories written by sons about their fathers. Similarly, Marguerite Duras seems to have written “The Lover” (see my review from 15 March 2020), in an attempt to process her memories of an overbearing mother and to finally, at a mature age, liberate herself from her.

French Nobel Prize-laureate J. M. G Le Clézio makes his mark on this territory with the autobiographical essay “Afrikanen” (“The African”). This is a story about his father, the physician serving in the British colonies in Africa while his wife and sons remain in France, and how the distance in geography, time, and culture laid the foundation to what turned out to be a virtually impenetrable curtain between them.

Curiously enough, the barrier between father and son did not become tangible until 8-years-old Le Clézio and his family were called for by his father to unite with him in Ogoja in south eastern Nigeria. This would be the first time the boy met his father. He had heard his mother and other family members speak about him, of course, and the father had been careful to write letters and remit funds to his wife on a regular basis, but to the young Le Clézio he was just an idea. A concept. Or more accurately; the idea of a concept. The physical encounter with the father, who would become the embodiment of the unknown environment into which the boy was thrust without any agency of his own, rattled the 8-year-old mind and heart. He became an alien in his new home. The curtain, that had previously been nebulous and logical suddenly became real and inexplicable.

The sensation of displacement was further exacerbated by his father´s stern regime, which was a contrast to the loose reins Le Clézio and his brother had enjoyed under the supervision of his aunts and uncles back in France. Discipline, routine, and order suddenly became mercilessly enforced on a level that the young boy was completely unaccustomed to. Not only did he suddenly have a father, but he had one that showed little love and plenty of acerbity.

A child of such a tender age does not have the language or the perspective to process this type of shock and Le Clézio can account merely for his memories of his juvenile self trying to sort out a new reality. It is a gripping endeavour to try to put into words the emotions of a child by the guidance of a grown man’s recollections of emotions that he himself is no longer qualified to reproduce.

“As a child, one doesn’t make use of words. And words are not exhausted. This is a time in which I live far from adjectives and nouns. I cannot say or even think: impressive, colossal, power. But I can experience what these words refer to.”*

Le Clézio’s solution is to approach the memory of his father by integrating him into his memory of the portion of his childhood spent in Africa. Africa made his father and consequently, his father, to Le Clézio, becomes Africa. The opalescent landscape, the pungent odours, the bright smiles on the dark faces of the people whose attitude to nudity and privacy differs vastly from that of the French, are all building blocks that make up the African. So are the squalor, disease, and colonial oppression that he encounters.

As the author digs deeper into memories and tries to navigate his impressions toward the essence of his father, he also reflects upon himself and what his own existence might have posed to his procreator. In Africa, his inevitable whiteness was the main factor connecting him to his family, but it also placed him in the category of the oppressors who instigated such animosity in his father. The aging doctor, by all accounts, seems to have revolted vehemently against the maltreatment of the local population by the British and French governments. He identified with the people among whom he lived, not with those for whom he worked. The son became an inescapable testimony to the African’s own whiteness and a reminder that despite his best efforts and his own choice of identity, he may never become Ogoja to the same degree that Ogoja had become him. He was African; his progeny was French.

And yet, “Afrikanen” turns out to be a love letter; an expression of affection and gratitude to the man who loved the author’s mother and who beyond just giving him life, gave him the opportunity to become the man that he is. It would certainly have been understandable had he resented his father due to his harshness and his lack of interest in his children. As Fyodor Dostoyevsky writes in “The Brothers Karamazov”.

“Why am I bound to love him simply for begetting me when he has cared nothing for me all life after? Oh, perhaps those questions strike you as coarse and cruel, but do not expect an impossible restraint from a young mind. /…/ Let the son stand before his father and ask him, ‘Father, tell me, why must I love you?’”**

Despite a thin veneer of bitterness and travail, the totality of Le Clézio’s book is a warm document of tolerance and gratitude. What makes this possible is in the end Africa. Father and son who never got to know each other across a kitchen table, seem to figuratively meet on the plains of Ogoja and connect on the grasslands on Ntumbo. Their minds touch on a dirt road in Kwaja and they unite in their shared experience of Babungo. In a photograph. In a memory. It is a love by proxy, but it is a love that transcends time and space and flows beyond the confined entities of mortals. A love as true as any other.

“While I write this, I realise that this is more than my own memory. This is also the memory of the years before I was born, when my mother and father trekked together along the footpaths of the Cameroonian highlands. The memory of my father’s angst and hope, of his loneliness and misery in Ogoja. The memory of moments of happiness where my father and mother are united in a love that they think will last forever.”*

In this way, the African becomes the father not in spite of, but thanks to, Africa.

 

*My own translation from the Swedish copy.
** Translation by Constance Garnett, The Lowell Press, New York, 2009

 

SOLDIER WITH A BROKEN GUN

Author: Vilhelm Moberg
Year: 1998 (1944)
Publisher: Albert Bonniers Förlag
Language: Swedish

Vilhelm Moberg without a doubt counts among the most important figures in Swedish literature. Few writers either before or after him have described the hardships of the regular rural Swede in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, and the dream of a better life in America as detailed as he has. His magnum opus, The Emigrants-tetralogy, has become an integral part of Swedish national identity and an urgent reminder that Swedes were also refugees from poverty and famine at one point in time not too long ago. To the Swedish population, this period is known as “Fattigsverige”; i.e. “Sweden, the impoverished”. His careful research, based to a large extent on the many years he spent in the US living among descendants of the Swedish diaspora, sets him apart from other writers concerning themselves with this era in Swedish-American history.

His interest in poverty and migration was surely triggered by the fate of his own family. Like so many other Scandinavians from the poorest segments of society, much of Moberg’s family also migrated to the New World at the turn of the century, including several of his siblings.

At the same time, a growing and increasingly assertive socialist movement was sweeping across Europe. Sweden was no exception and Moberg soon signed up as a party member for the Social Democrats. He spent a considerable portion of his adult years debating for the rights of the under-privileged classes, and from the 1920s and onwards against Nazism and Communism.

All these things; poverty, inequality, the dream about America, writing, socialism, and the fight for a better and fairer tomorrow, come together in what is possibly the closest Moberg ever came to an autobiography: “Soldat med brutet gevär” (not available in English but the title could be translated as “The Soldier With a Broken Gun”). Moberg himself said of it “this is not an autobiography, but this novel, more than any other, is based on material from my own experience.”

The protagonist and Moberg’s alter ego, Valter Sträng, is born as the youngest son to a soldier. Growing up in a society where militarism, alcoholism, want, and political abuse were ubiquitous, at an early age he recognises that the main framework of the Swedish community, based on Lutheranism, allegiance to the King, work ethics, and alcohol are all chains applied to the under-privileged classes by the ruling elite in order to keep the former docile and useful. This puts him at odds with his father (the soldier) and many of his friends, classmates, and colleagues. Much of the storyline is aligned with what we know about Moberg’s own life and even though Valter Sträng finds himself in some situations which may not have been precise representations of Moberg’s specific experiences, the truth is in the message Moberg tries to convey. The writer lets us know how he would have acted had he been faced with some of the challenges he puts before Valter Sträng. And on a whole it is credible.

In many respects, “Soldat med brutet gevär” is a Bildungsroman that captures the transition of a peasant boy from the childhood years in the soldier’s cabin to the threshold of literary fame and the ascension into the cultural and political elites. Bit by bit, Valter Sträng explores the complexity of a society in upheaval and tries to legitimise his path through life. Moberg links his political maturity to his biological aging as if to say that becoming an adult is tantamount to taking a stand. A young Valter Sträng repeatedly laments the fact that his family, friends, neighbours, and co-workers remain oblivious to the social injustice around them and the structural prison created for them by the affluent classes. And yet, a watershed moment for him is when one of his political adversaries calls out his own ignorance. Knowledge, honesty, equality, and activism define Valter Sträng in a way I do not doubt Vilhelm Moberg wanted to be defined himself.    

Besides the biographical virtues of this novel, as always with Moberg, his deep understanding of the class struggle in the 19^th and 20^th centuries as well as his proficient and precise way of putting it into words in a way that almost a century later we can still relate to, makes him the timeless novelist and essayist that he is. His use of the Swedish language, in particular when he twists it to capture the full flavour of various Smolandian dialects and sociolects, provides a peephole into how southern Swedish dialects may have sounded in the past and a study of what role language has as a social class indicator. Valter Sträng’s dialogue as a child and adolescent is written in the Smolandian dialect. As he grows up and discovers socialism, his language changes and Moberg gives him a voice that rivals that of the rich and educated. When he enrols at a formal education institution and begins to socialise with scholars, the transition of his speech is completed. The effect is exacerbated whenever Valter Sträng meets his mother or other characters from his past, whose language remains provincial, something which Valter Sträng never comments or ponders upon.

An element in the novel that I could do without is the superfluous accounts of Valter Sträng’s sex life. His love interests are usually of little consequence for his development and although explaining the main character’s rather detached and unemotional relationship to the opposite sex may serve an autobiographical purpose, the sequences dedicated to his endeavours and ensuing doubt are at times almost cringe-worthy.

The novel is at its best when it focuses on the political awakening of the young boy and his political maturation process. This is where Vilhelm Moberg rightly becomes a giant among giants.   

LES MISÉRABLES

Author: Victor Hugo
Year: 1976 (1862)
Publisher: Panstwowy Instytut Wydawniczy
Language: Polish (translator Krystyna Byczewska)

In 1862, renowned writer and French politician Victor Hugo was in exile on Guernsey. His furious attacks on the emperor Napoleon III, most notably in his novella “Napoleon le petit” ten years earlier, had made it impossible for him to stay in France and he had had to seek refuge first in Belgium and later the Channel Islands. During his exile, when he was not firing off bitter and offensive pamphlets in the general direction of the French autocrat, he had worked on his magnum opus, “Nedznicy” (known in English under its original French title “Les Misérables” but sometimes translated as “The Wretched”, “The Miserables” or “The Miserable Ones”). And this year, 1862, after 17 years in the making, he had crossed the last t and dotted the last i.

The epic novel was widely anticipated. Hugo had made no secret of his ambition to write the novel that would eclipse all novels. His publisher had made great efforts to build up the suspense long before the manuscript had been sent to the presses. When it was finally launched, France was in a fever. Hugo, stranded on his island and eager to know how sales were going, may have initiated the shortest telegram exchange in world history when he allegedly sent a message to his publisher with only one sign: “?”. The answer was equally short but unmistakeable: “!”.

While the commercial success was indisputable, the critics were less impressed. Some complained about the flat characters which were considered to be stereotypes rather than complex representations of true Frenchmen. Some even remarked upon the fact that they all speak in a similar voice using the same vocabulary and the same tone. Others criticised Hugo’s choice to idealise rebellion, prostitution, and robbery. Others still, were discontent with the sentimental storytelling and exaggerated drama. All in all, the contemporary literary elite seems to have been disappointed with “Les Misérables”.

Much has been written elsewhere about “Nedznicy” and I can hardly aspire to bring anything new to the table, but for my own amusement and hopefully someone else’s benefit, I have still taken the liberty of sharing some observations. The key points of this epic novel, which spans across 5 parts, 365 chapters, and over 1,400 pages, are brought to the fore by the repeated and carefully orchestrated dynamics between four male characters: Jean Valjean, Thernardier, Marius, and Javert.

Jean Valjean is an impoverished gardener who is sentenced to hard labour for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his sister’s starving children. After he is released, he wanders around France disillusioned and hapless with no way of supporting himself other than by theft and smuggling as his status as a former convict disqualifies him from any honest employment. He grows hardened, bitter, and vindictive. His encounter with Bishop Myriel changes all of that. The kindness and patience of the aging clergyman resuscitates the good nature of the long-suppressed gardener inside the body of the convict and Jean Valjean sets off to repay the debt of gratitude to the bishop by doing good for the rest of his life, although his past repeatedly stands in his way.

Thernardier, like Jean Valjean, is impoverished and defeated by society but chooses a different path through life. When he and his wife are first introduced to the reader, they run a small and unsuccessful inn where they try to trick their guests out of as much cash as they can while they can. Later, after the inn goes bankrupt, Thernardier re-appears as a con-man, thief, robber, and probably murderer in his hunt for a fortune. A path Jean Valjean may well have found himself upon, had it not been for the intervention of bishop Myriel in the first chapters of the novel.

Marius is the son of a military officer and Napoleonic war hero, and the maternal grandson of a wealthy royalist. He is raised by his grandfather and aunt to embrace the memory of the “ancien régime” but eventually finds out about his father’s exploits as a Bonapartist and is starstruck. This puts him at odds with his family and forces him to break with them to go live with the bohemian students in the poorest parts of Paris.  

Javert, finally, is the law-enforcer who, much like Jean Valjean and Thernardier, hails from the lowest echelons of the French society, but chooses to cling on to the law as his guiding star through life, putting aside all ambitions to develop a personal sense of morality. He is intelligent and fiercely loyal to the letter of the law and has little interest in investigating the underlying reasons for people’s actions. During the course of the novel, he rises in rank to become police inspector and his and Jean Valjean’s paths will cross several times.

In the course of this novel the fates of these four men become ever more tightly intertwined, as if in an involuntary death-grip spiralling together through the vicissitudes of life, and through the clamour of their tumbling existence, Victor Hugo addresses a variety of issues.

SPOILER ALERT

Three of the four men have their roots in the social class of the miserable; the poor, the uneducated, the outcasts. They represent three different ways to cope with their fate. These choices will place them at direct collision courses with each other. The fourth, Marius, gets a taste of poverty after he breaks with his wealthy grandfather and tries to fend for himself in Paris. He is not at direct conflict with any of the others and instead interacts with them in a more or less nonpartisan way.

Notably, there are two virtues distributed among the four men in various combinations. Jean Valjean, being a reformed ex-criminal, stands on the wrong side of the law but on the right side of morality. Javert, the ruthless lawman, caring little about the people around him and holding on to the letter of the law as his only precept, stands on the right side of the law but as he will find out, on the wrong side of morality. Thernardier stands on the wrong side of both being both a criminal and a cur. Marius, is the one standing on the right side of both law and morality, as symbolised by his choice to become an attorney as well as a devoted son, friend, and lover.

Each of these combinations are repeatedly tested. Jean Valjean is tempted to let someone else take the punishment for crimes that he had committed. Thernardier gets a chance to start anew. Marius is torn between his oath to his dead father and the love of his life. Javert’s faith in the indubitable righteousness of the law is time and time again challenged by his encounters with morally superior Jean Valjean.

A fifth character deserves some special attention: Fantine. Although her function in the book is to give Jean Valjean a suitable foundation against which to manifest his moral and physical strength, of all the miserable ones she is, by far, the most miserable, sacrificing everything for her daughter in a world where women have no rights and essentially no hope. I find it regrettable that Hugo chose to portray her as a little daft as I believe that the magnitude and power of her sacrifice would have exerted an even more crushing effect if the reader had got to know her as an emotionally balanced and intelligent young woman. On a more general note, it is noteworthy that the women who appear in the novel, despite some of them receiving a fair share of attention and space, like Fantine, Cosette and to a certain extent Eponine, none of them serve any other purpose but to function as a trigger for the choices and decisions of the male characters. Presumably, in 1862 this was considered acceptable writing and I cannot fault Hugo for it, although to a modern reader this seems inadequate.

Chronologically, Hugo cleverly places the events in the time of the Paris uprising in 1832. Being a well-known pacifist and defender of peaceful political activism, he does not allow the dauntless deeds of his characters to amount to a successful violent revolution. While the story requires an arena for the characters to heroically perish or valiantly prevail, the historical truth of the uprising in 1832 is that it was unsuccessful. Nothing in “Nedznicy” is ever solved by violence.   

Hugo uses the sheer size of the story to advertise a wide range of his opinions, sometimes in somewhat lengthy passages which abridged issues of the novel typically do away with. These passages typically appear from nowhere like in the final part where Hugo basically says ‘we’ll now take a break from the exhilarating events on the revolutionary battlefield to discuss plumbing.’ It is also to be expected that a novel of these proportions will have some minor inconsistencies like for instance when Hugo convinces the reader that it makes perfect sense for Jean Valjean to hide in Paris after having rescued Cosette from the Thernardiers because only a city like Paris can offer such a dense and diverse population that it is possible for a person to spend a lifetime there and never be spotted, and yet Jean Valjean keeps running into both Javert and Thernardier over and over again in the most unexpected situations throughout the rest of the tale.

Some of the criticism that Hugo received from contemporary literary figures was probably legitimate. The novel is highly sentimental and emotional, and some key scenes, including the ending, are so obviously designed to squeeze tears from the reader that they risk becoming corny. Having said that, I will readily concede that Eponine’s death in Marius’ arms put a lump in my throat.

It is not altogether surprising that “Nedznicy” became a massive and immediate success in France and much of Europe. Hugo was already a celebrated writer and his name alone was a sales pitch. But more importantly, his writing touches on issues that had just begun to interest the reading portion of society. The hardship of the poor had been taken as a matter of course for a long time but with the newly established liberalism and increased calls for equality, the poor masses were beginning to garner the attention from the middle-class. It has to be placed in the context of a growing social movement.  Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had published the Communist Manifesto in 1848 and John Stuart Mill On Liberty in 1859. The public interest in equality, individual freedom, distribution of wealth, and alleviation of poverty and despair had spread far enough to form an appreciative audience for Hugo’s work. Still today, when Les Misérables continues to reap success in movie theatres and musical stages, many of us continue to find inspiration from Jean Valjean’s indomitable resolve and rectitude.

 

LUCY

Author: Jamaica Kincaid
Year: 2017 (1990)
Publisher: Tranan
Language: Swedish (translator Lena Fagerström)

”The nice thing about identity is that everybody has one”, Dame Marilyn Strathern once told me during one of our few chats at Cambridge. My research at the time was in the onerous phase of deconstructing the concept of collective identity searching for the origins of its formation. I had come as far as realising that trying to establish the inception of a personal or group identity without understanding the mere concept of identity first was a bit like trying to find the source of the Nile without understanding the concept of water.

Another anthropologist, Thomas Hylland Eriksen, defines identity on the most basic level as “inward sameness, outward difference”. By this he seems to subscribe to a Platonian theory of forms where an idea, an item, a person, or indeed a group of people can be defined by some characteristics that apply particularly to them. We recognise and identify a chair by our consensus on a set of properties that all chairs have and only chairs have. That which is not a chair, must by necessity be something else.

For this definition to be useful we have to allow for a space where concepts meet to constitute a border, or an interface, where the inward/outward sameness/difference dichotomy is manifested. As articulated by Stuart Hall and later elaborated on by Lawrence Grossman among others, there are essentially two models for the production of identities: one offers that there is some intrinsic and constant feature to every identity that essentially immunises it from getting mixed up with other equally perpetual identities, the other proposes that identities are never translucent, never static, and never complete but instead subject to context, time, and often arbitrary choice.

On this backdrop and as someone who did his anthropological fieldwork in Haiti in the Caribbean: the Mecca, as it were, for those who take an interest in creolisation, identity studies, and flux, I had long wanted to read Jamaica Kincaid’s most famous novel “Lucy”. In this short book (my copy is less than 160 pages), Kincaid explores ideas of hard borders between cultural domains and proposes that they may be close to impenetrable so that even communication between them is prohibited or at the very least grotesquely disfigured.

Lucy is a young girl from a Caribbean island who is sent to work as a maid in a well-to-do family in Long Island, New York. She is warmly welcomed and promptly embraced by her host family who treat her with love and respect and who, from their standpoint, try their best to invite her into their midst. Especially Mariah, the mother, makes great efforts to connect with Lucy and share her world with her. Lucy on the other hand is reserved and grumpy and soon decides that integrating with her host family, as the lady of the house so desperately desires, is not an option.

As most of Kincaid’s writing, “Lucy” is largely autobiographical. Kincaid was also an island girl from Antigua sent away to work as a black maid in a white family in the US when she was just a teenager. She was also well-received and treated as part of the family and she also used it as an opportunity to make a future for herself in the new country. In fact, she made it better than most earning a professorship at Harvard and being repeatedly mentioned among the favourites to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Yet “Lucy” is written from the standpoint of resentment, anger, and even hatred and revenge. It is a study of resistance. This is what finally makes this book somewhat interesting. The trigger points are in Lucy’s relationships to people around her and how they shape her identity. The divide between her and Mariah. The rift between her and her mother. The unfinished business with her father. Her friendship with Peggy. Lucy is locked in a continuous struggle for personal space and the power to define her own existence and yet it is increasingly obvious that the more bitter her tussle, the more embedded it itself becomes in her identity. She slowly turns into the sum of her tug-o-war with the world.

In the end she realises that her only escape is isolation and denial. By removing herself from the universal social horseplay and by emotionally disconnecting from her past, present, and future personal relationships, she effectively tries to withdraw from the sameness/difference grating and in so doing obtain some form of liberty. Being something else, sometimes means being nothing. “I was all alone in the world, and this is no small accomplishment.”

I will be honest to admit that I did not altogether enjoy “Lucy” as much as I had hoped. Perhaps my expectations were too high. Maybe I was in the wrong mood. Maybe Lucy’s cantankerous character put me off. Although the topic is highly interesting, I found the story bland and the storytelling unappealing, unimaginative, and slow. I readily admit that while the author makes many powerful points and the underlying analysis and the understanding of the clash between several different worlds across generations, genders, geographies, ethnicities, and historical contexts are crisp and moreover from a perspective that is impossible for a white, European man to replicate or fully grasp, the presentation leaves a lot to be desired and, in my opinion, falls short of the masterpiece that this novel is frequently declared to be.

A MAN CALLED OVE

Author: Fredrik Backman
Year: 2012
Publisher: Månpocket
Language: Swedish

In 2012, Fredrik Backman entered the Swedish literary scene with a bang. His novel “En man som heter Ove” (“A Man Called Ove”) was an instant success and he soon followed up with titles such as “Mormor hälsar och säger förlåt” (“My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry”), “Britt-Marie var här” (“Britt-Marie was here”), and “Björnstad” (“Beartown”) just to mention a few.

Fredrik Backman had dabbled in writing before. Besides his daily job as a forklift operator, he had sold some freelance journalistic work to one or two newspapers and created a moderately successful blog in cooperation with the gentlemen’s gazette Café. The blog gave him the opportunity to experiment with observations and characters, take in the reactions from the readers to expand on what seemed to hit a nerve and remodel traits and characteristics that did not work. Little by little the protagonist of his debut novel come to life.

I early on decided that I was not going to bother with his books as I am not a great fan of up-lit and I figured that there must be more rewarding literature out there than maudlin Scandinavian kitchen-sink-realism. But as time went by and I could observe Backman’s success around the world, not the least through recurring stellar reviews in English- and German-language book groups on social media, it became increasingly clear to me that as a Swede, I needed to at least have a smattering of what the rage was all about. No sooner said than done, I read “En man som heter Ove”.

I am happy to say that I have no reason to regret it. The book is a highly entertaining and engaging read which both cracked me up and squeezed an occasional tear from the corner of my eye. It is narrated in the present tense by mixing scenes from the present with flashes from the past across 39 short chapters depicting a changing Swedish society on the back of the transition from an industrial wonder to a high-tech powerhouse as well as the continuous strife between the overbearing welfare state and the individual it steamrolls.  

Ove himself is the quintessential stubborn 60-something-year-old, Swedish working-class man stuck in a mindset that has long ceased to exist. Born of a different era for a different world. He has no sympathy for people who drive a different brand of car than he does or who have names that were unknown when he was young, who cannot bleed their own radiators. And certainly none for hospital clowns who borrow a coin for a magic trick and then fail to return it.

By Ove’s never-ending clashes with the relentlessly changing Swedish society, Backman puts his finger on the rift between old and new Sweden. Immigration, feminism, technology, and globalisation have changed the face of the nation to a point where individuals who are unable to keep up, will inevitably feel left out. The boomers and the millennials seem to live in different realities. Although Backman doesn’t say anything about Ove’s political views, it seems to me that this is precisely the kind of voter who might hesitate between his loyalty to a labour party like the Swedish Social Democrats and the delusive allure of the crypto-fascistic Sweden Democrats to bring back some unspecified iteration of a mythical Sweden of the past.

This could easily have become a story where the younger generation makes fun of the older but in a warm and reconciliatory tone, Backman gently brings them together and allows them to build bridges of mutual understanding, respect, and friendship. 

Objectively, “En man som heter Ove” is not a great work of art. The storyline is simple bordering on primitive and the characters are essentially caricatures or types, rather than complex representations of human beings, engaged in dialogues that feel a bit forced here and there. I also found the theme of Ove’s suicidal attempts overly melodramatic and even though it all sort of comes together in the end, I maintain that the book would have done just as well without that subplot. This notwithstanding, it most certainly deserves its audience and its success. It is sentimental, mushy, and corny but it works very, very well.

LEVIATHAN

Author: Thomas Hobbes
Year: 1968 (1651)
Publisher: Penguin Books
Language: English

In 1577, Etienne de la Boetie’s work “Discours de la servitude volontaire” (see review on this blog from July 2021) framed the question why people, villages, cities, and entire nations allow themselves to be subjugated and oppressed by a single ruler who without their consent would have no means of exercising control over them. His was a simple but wildly controversial question and the book gives one of the oldest comprehensive arguments in favour of civil disobedience in European philosophy.

I have found no evidence that Thomas Hobbes ever read de la Boetie. Indeed, as tantalising as the thought is, efforts by scholars much more accomplished than I to connect Hobbes with de la Boetie have also amounted to nothing (see e.g. Reiss, Timothy J., “Utopia Versus State of Power, or Pretext of the Political Discourse of Modernity:Hobbes, Reader of La Boétie?” in French Connections in the English Renaissance by Catherine Gimelli Martin & Hassan Melehy (eds), London, 2013). And yet, Hobbes’s most famous book “Leviathan” seems to address perfectly the concerns of his French precursor. If de la Boetie asks “why?”, then Hobbes answers “this is why!” and moreover explains why it cannot be in any other way.

“Leviathan” is written in four parts, the first two of which are the ones most commonly cited in modern public discourse.

1.      Of Man

2.      Of Common-Wealth

3.      Of A Christian Common-Wealth

4.      Of the Kingdome of Darknesse

In its most basic albeit no doubt most useful and essential interpretation, “Leviathan” is understood to demonstrate how mankind, being the egotistic, violent, and greedy creature that we are (Hobbes’s opinion of humans seems to be akin to Jonathan Swift’s of yahoos (see review on this blog of “Travels Into Several Remote Nations of the World, By Lemuel Gulliver” from March 2022), would be unable to function as a peaceful collective had there been no overarching power to pacify us. Hobbes calls this primordial unfettered anarchy the State of Nature and in the most famous part of the book concludes that in such a state, human life would be “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Hobbes’s argument is that if there were no laws, and more importantly still, no one to enforce them, there would be nothing stopping individuals from murdering one another and stealing from each other. The state of nature is by definition a state of war. Hobbes specifies that war does not necessarily mean a constant ongoing use of force. For a state of war to exist, it is enough that the threat of force, or the suspicion that someone may use force, prevails. Consequently, it would make sense for rational beings to come together and agree on a set of rules that would limit the liberties of each of them to harm others in exchange for a corresponding limitation of the risk of being harmed by others. We know this line of thought today as the “social contract”, but Hobbes did not use that term. Instead, he uses the terms “covenant” and “common-wealth” to cover different aspects of what we understand as the social contract.

Without a central authority that has the power to enforce the contract the agreement as such has no purpose as it can always be broken with impunity for, as Hobbes writes, “the Passions of man are commonly more potent than their Reason”. This is why Hobbes introduces the sovereign; the Leviathan, with unlimited power to make sure that people live in peace within the framework of the covenant.

The sovereign is not a party to the contract but rather a result of it. The contract is not between the people and the sovereign but between people and people. The sovereign as an entity is the ensuing result of this agreement as a third party. Consequently, the sovereign is not bound or constrained by the contract. The power of the sovereign is unlimited and unchecked and must remain so. I understand Hobbes’s argument to be that since the amount of violence that can be wrought upon others by all of us is constant and unlimited, when the authority to exercise violence is transferred from us to the sovereign it follows that it must remain unlimited. Furthermore, analogous to the inability of people to regulate themselves, which requires the creation of the sovereign in the first place, the sovereign also cannot be expected to regulate himself which is why there can be no basis for a limit to his power or accountability for his actions. For peace to be guaranteed, and for the social contract to remain intact, the sovereign may not in any way be challenged or disobeyed.

Hobbes certainly acknowledged that such a state of affairs would by necessity bring about a series of negative consequences for individuals and collectives alike but argued that any inconvenience would be preferable to the alternative which is the state of war. The only condition under which subjects are absolved from obedience is if their sovereign fails to uphold peace and security between them as per the covenant.

Lesser known is Hobbes’s analysis of Christianity with regard to the civil law and the division of power between God and the sovereign. Hobbes, who may or may not have been an atheist, goes to great pains to disconnect the power of God from our lives on Earth. He argues that obedience to God’s law is not obedience to God but to the sovereign who enforces it. In Hobbes’s view, God Himself is incapable of enforcing his own laws on Earth and needs to rely on kings and princes to do it for Him. In that dwells the difference between crime and sin. Both disrespect the legislator all the while the former is being enforced and the latter is not. Sometimes, but not always, they coincide.

In essence, Hobbes takes issue with the expectation that people are asked to obey a divine law professed by someone who claims to have received it through a revelation without being presented with any reason to believe that such a revelation has actually taken place. He refers to the Scripture (1 Kings 13) where a prophet sent by God to Jeroboam is deceived by a false prophet. If even a man of God can be fooled by a simple con artist, how are common people supposed to be able to tell true prophets apart from false ones? Therefore, it is rational for all humans not to rely on scuttlebutt about divine law, but instead to subordinate themselves under the fixed and unambiguous laws of the sovereign.

Hobbes’s second argument is that we are actually not living in the Kingdom of God in this era. He rejects the idea that the Kingdom of God is an ethereal existence but rather stresses that it refers to this world, though not this time. He identifies the Kingdom of God as beginning with the covenant between God and Moses and ending when the Israelites demand a king like other nations have, and the prophet Samuel anoints Saul to be their king. All of Samuel’s warnings about the consequences of having a king instead of being ruled by priests coalesce into Hobbes’s definition of the Leviathan but the words of the prophet fall on deaf ears and the people insist on a sovereign. God then speaks to Samuel “it is not you they have rejected, but they have rejected me as their king” and Hobbes sees here the end of the Kingdom of God on Earth, with God’s approval. The obligation to obey divine law has thus been transformed to the obligation to obey civil law.

Hobbes finds a decisive piece of evidence in the fifth book of the New Testament wherein Christ sends his disciples to all corners of the world to teach, persuade, counsel, and baptise. Not to rule. Therefore, there is no conflict between being a Christian and obeying a heathen prince. Nor is it a sin to disavow Christ if commanded to do so under the threat of punishment. It is simply an act of obedience to once earthly sovereign. Lip service, as it were. “The (Unum Necessarium) Onely Article of Faith which the Scripture maketh simply Necessary to Salvation, is this, that JESUS IS THE CHRIST.” All that is required of a Christian is that they believe.     

This is a decisive break from the traditional understanding of the king’s right to rule wherein the king used to be portrayed as being appointed by God to uphold his law. Hobbes throws that notion out and argues that the sovereign is appointed by the people and receives his authority from the people and not at all from God.

In the final section of “Leviathan”, Hobbes attacks the Church of his day and particularly its reliance on the teachings of Aristotle whom he calls absurd, repugnant, and ignorant. Aristotle’s teachings that the human being is a social and political creature naturally predisposed to thriving in a peaceful and well-organised community and does not fully bloom until they accept their role as a political participant in a large-scale society is the direct anti-thesis to Hobbes’s grim judgment of man as a savage beast.  

He goes on to call out four main sources of darkness in the church: ignorance of the Scripture, fascination with ghosts and demons, mixing in false philosophy (Aristotle), and confusing faith with tradition. The Roman Catholic Church in particular takes the brunt of Hobbes’s critique but the Anglican Church is not spared with all its rituals and ceremonies with regard to communion and baptism which the philosopher dismisses as “Incantation, rather than Consecration”.

The many important observations and well-founded conclusions notwithstanding, Hobbes, in my view, missed a crucial parameter in his analysis. It is commonly accepted that the docile and peace-loving philosopher was spurred to his work on government by the horrors of the English civil war which made him focus on peace within a common-wealth. This may also explain why he made no efforts to propose a solution to violence between common-wealths. Modern history has shown that the likelihood of two democratic countries going to war against each other is infinitely smaller than if any other type of government is involved. I imagine that this perspective might have inspired Hobbes to somewhat adjust his stalwart support for the absolute monarchy.

Needless to say, Hobbes’s work was hugely controversial in his days and decades to come. Hobbes was declared persona non grata in Paris for having attacked the Pope, the book was banned in England and even burned in public displays of outrage, and his follow-up, “Behemoth”, was graciously withheld from publication by King Charles II with the benevolent intention of preserving whatever was left of Hobbes’s good name until the philosopher had passed away. Among his contemporaries, John Locke, albeit critical of several of the propositions made by him, was one of few thinkers who recognised Hobbes’s work as an intellectual masterpiece that opened the door to a new way of thinking about government and power.

As time went by and the uproar subsided, “Leviathan” cemented its position as one of the most ground-breaking philosophical pieces of literature in history of Western thought, and went on to inspire such thinkers as Jean-Jacque Rousseau, Friedrich Nietzsche, and indirectly Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, and Louis Althusser.

 

TRAVELS INTO SEVERAL REMOTE NATIONS OF THE WORLD, BY LEMUEL GULLIVER

Author: Jonathan Swift
Year: 1980 (1726)
Publisher: Forum
Language: Swedish (Translator Anna Berg-Mortensen) 

Meaning is floating. It is well established in the study of semantics and semiotics that communication through words, symbols, gestures, rituals, artefacts, and actions vary with the place, context, and time. A word that means one thing in one situation may have a different meaning in another. A simple expression such as “thank you” can carry a meaning of such disparate sentiments as gratitude, command, distancing, and irony depending on the situation, interpersonal relationship, and tone of voice. Meaning is transitory and particular to the moment in which it is created.  

One of the most radical changers of meaning is time. Not the least in the realm of literature. Literary history is littered with examples of masterpieces that have been morphed over the centuries so that they are today read and enjoyed in a completely different way than they were intended and received at the time of their birth. Daniel Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe as a testament to the rational Christian man’s superiority over the elements (and other peoples) but is in our times considered an exotic and somewhat naïve adventure for teenage readers. Mark Twain’s intention with Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn was to highlight the social injustice in 19^th century America but has since then moved through a period of nostalgic literature only to end up in the same category as Robinson Crusoe. Moby Dick by Herman Melville seems to have moved in the opposite direction. I was written to impress the masses but has slowly been incorporated into the canon of American literature and is frequently mentioned in discussions on the essential Great American Novel.

Similarly, Jonathan Swift’s peculiar novel “Gullivers resor” (“Travels Into Several Remote Nations Of the World, by Lemuel Gulliver” or simply “Gulliver’s Travels”), has not been spared. The most recent movie adaptations as well as the cover art on most modern publications of the novel give no signs of it being directed at political scientists, pundits or policy-makers. Instead, they are in matinee-format and even musicals and the books are brightly coloured and often richly illustrated. This presentation is far removed from the original intention of the book.

Jonathan Swift was born in Ireland in 1667, less than 15 years after the end of the Confederate Wars. He soon moved to England where he tried to establish himself in the circles around Charles II. His ambition failed and after some years he was sent back to Ireland with the modestly prestigious seat as Deacon of St Patrick’s parish. This is where he began to write his most famous work of literary fiction intended and designed as a fierce assault on all things that the London elite pretended to: politics, power, money, knowledge, and honour.

Swift sends his protagonist, Dr Lemuel Gulliver, on four different voyages to imaginary lands, each of which allows him to dwell on particular features of English high society.

Gulliver’s first journey takes him to the land of the Lilliputians. Here he is faced with tiny people who make great problems out of tiny issues. They go to war over pointless matters, choose their senior government officials according to preposterous criteria, carry grudges, lie, and deceive. By Liliput, Swift ridicules the English political elite that dons ostentatious robes, use fancy vocabulary, and make all the pretentions of great men.  Through Gulliver’s eyes, the thick display of pomp and circumstance going on around his ankles can only appear as parodic and ludicrous.

The tables would soon be turned. In his next journey, takes him to Brobdingnag which turns out to be inhabited by giants. Having been left behind after a shore leave on an unknown coast he is captured and put in a cage. Although well taken care of and eventually settling into a reasonably comfortable lifestyle at the royal court, where he earns the friendship and attention of the king and queen, he remains a prisoner used for entertainment purposes. In his conversations with the king, Gulliver tries his best to impress him with accounts of the intricacies of English governance, judiciary system, and codes and morals. The deeper into his descriptions he ventures, the more absurd English customs appear to the king. He shrugs them off as unintelligible and without merit.

During his penultimate excursion, the ship on which Gulliver serves as a ship’s doctor is captured by pirates and Gulliver is put in a canoe to fend for himself on the open sea. By a stroke of luck, he reaches a previously unknown archipelago where he lands. Here he is soon surprised by an island floating in the air which turns out to be Laputa, the dwelling and communication vehicle of the ruler of Balnibarbi. In this episode, Swift goes after academia which he perceives to be aloof and disconnected from reality. Every senior citizen on Laputa is followed around by a servant, called “flapper”, whose main purpose is to nudge or strike their master with a cane or a bladder filled with pebbles from time to time to bring their attention back to the world around them, be it for the purpose of following a conversation or not to walk off a cliff. Gulliver seizes the opportunity to also visit the university town Lagado where various scientists have invested lots of thought and made absolutely no advancement in areas such as extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, turning human excrement back into food, or constructing a solar calendar based on the wind.     

Gulliver’s final and most decisive journey would also be the one that would ultimately change his life. After having been deposed as captain in a mutiny, he is marooned on an unknown shore. The first creature that he runs into makes an altogether adverse impression on him. He observes that they had no tail and most of the time walk on their hind limbs, their heads and parts of their torsos are covered with thick hair but the rest of their bodies are naked. Moreover, they are dirty, smelly, and loud. Surrounded by these beasts, he is rescued by two gallant horses which quickly disperse the screeching flock. Slowly it dawns on Gulliver, that the masters of this world are the highly intelligent, peaceful, and serene horse-people called Houyhnhm, and that the vermin he had first encountered, known locally as Yahoos, are in fact humans. Equally slowly, but infinitely more painfully, he must eventually reconcile with the fact that to the Houyhnhm, he is simply an unusually clean and communicative Yahoo. After his inevitable return to England, disgusted at himself and the Yahoos which we all at our essence are, he secludes himself from his family and society and spends the remainder of his days professing the glory of the horse-nation. Swift, finally, condemns forever mankind in its entirety.

As I read the novel, it seems to me that Swift grew increasingly bitter as he progressed. There is evidence that speaks against this proposal, most convincing of which is that he wrote the part about Houyhnhm before he had finished the visit to Laputa. Nevertheless, the leap from criticising the English elite, as he did by Lilliput and Brobdingnag, to dismissing humanity as a whole seems like a drastic escalation of Swift’s grievance. As the book was written over several years, such an emotional evolution is by no means unlikely. The publisher even had to delete some parts from the manuscript for fear of prosecution. This is political satire through and through.

But as we concluded at the beginning of this review, material changes with time. Even if we accept that “Gullivers resor” is satire and designed to visualise the absurdity of politics, I suspect that we read it differently than its contemporaries would. To us, the satire appears largely Menippean showcasing a broad criticism of general characteristics of our society, but to the contemporary reader, it would have constituted a vicious attack on specific institutions and even individuals more or less carefully veiled. After all, our time would to Jonathan Swift be as foreign as Lilliput or Brobdingnag ever were to Lemuel Gulliver.