a blog by Peter Leonard
A picture from Wednesday night's panel at ABF-huset in Stockholm, with psychiatry professor Johan Cullberg, critic Annina Rabe, author Aris Fioretos, editor Stephen Farran-Lee, and DN culture editor Stephen Farran-Lee. Entitled Den sanna litteraturen (The True Literature), the panel considered recent trends towards autobiography and personal narrative in Swedish literature.
Much ink has been spilled recently over Maja Lundgren's 2007 Myggor och tigrar, a depiction of Stockholm literary circles that pulls few punches and ruthlessly "outs" certain (male) critics and cultural figures as sexist. Fioretos noted that taboo-breaking of this kind is to a degree part and parcel of modern literature, and that in a way trying to out-do each other in shock value was a trait peculiarly conservative of contemporary authors. He mentioned as well that literature has begun to colonize territories "beyond the alphabetic," extending to areas such as the author as key actor in his or her own marketing. How the author is photographed, how his or her biography is written, how he or she travels around the country and vouches for the truth or artifice of his or her own narrative, have all become part of the phenomenon of literature.
Johan Cullberg, the psychiatrist, spent some time talking about the reasons why people feel themselves compelled to narrate their own lives, whether on the printed page to or to a friend or acquaintance. Often times such desires are concurrent with a life crisis, such as August Strindberg's singular chronicle of mental breakdown, alchemy and life in France, Inferno.