The report of the death of shortfiction was anexaggeration

Something stirs beneath the surface

BY MAGNUS ERIKSSON

Ten years ago, the short story was a dead genre in Sweden, in terms of both artistic and commercial activity. Some years later, it made a comeback. Work by first-time writers was dominated by short stories and a form of short fiction where short texts (though rarely of the intensity of prose poetry) formed an epic progression. Many of these works mainly resembled unfinished novels. The short story has also experienced a backlash phenomenon, a debate where criticism has been levelled particularly at the strong influence of Raymond Carver. This debate has focused on the wrong problem, as it were. It is not in Carver’s influence that the danger lies, it is in the loss of standards of craftsmanship. Jerker Virdborg, for instance, allowed his short stories to inflate into unfinished novellas, while others produced strangely listless text; on the whole it looked as if no-one was aware of the abyss that Carver’s minimalist aesthetics had opened.
However, this last year we have also seen movement in the opposite direction. Many of the new writers in 2002 write episodic (Anna Jörgensdotter, Oscar Danielsson, Henric Kullander) or eruptive prose (Malte Persson, Frans Daniel Nessle). It would be easy to extract a chapter or an idea from their novels and obtain a short story or a fragment of short fiction. Even so, Malte Persson waxes ironical over the trend toward short fiction in Life on this Planet (Bonniers):
»Hi, my name is Lola, and here I am at a creative writing course at the Sacred Lamb community college in the most beautiful surroundings. Here, we are learning to consider different genres and the ratio of trees to houses in our texts. We are writing short fiction; short fiction is trendy, and above all it is short and convenient to write and to read — we are, after all, living in a stressed-out society and it is best if every smallest bit of prose is the length of an advertising break on telly and can be easily fitted in between the perforations on your average toilet roll«.
This said, it should be noted that not all short fiction deserves to be ridiculed. In 2000, Mara Lee made her writing debut with Come (Vertigo). This is a series of erotically charged impressions, most of them shorter than ten lines. A sexual encounter on a beach provides the frame story. Within it, a transformation takes place, with dream and reality merging in a synthetic time. Mara Lee writes clear, visual prose which tangibly pins down all the different vague and nebulous layers of the experience, yet allows the text to retain its tension and mystery.
All contemporary short stories by young writers cannot be criticised either. Cecilia Davidsson connects both with the American ‘dirty realism’ tradition and the Swedish short story tradition of the 1940s (Stig Dagerman, Lars Ahlin, Tage Aurell). Her first work was published in 1994 and in 2002, her third book Wait for Wind (Bonniers) was published. There is a powerful and enigmatic core in her stories, an existential predicament that all other things circle around. Her stories become like satellites orbiting this core. They throw things into sharp relief with sudden bolts of lightning, they signal changing orbits, but they keep returning to that unresolved core.
Because ultimately, Cecilia Davidsson’s characters cannot reach each other. They live isolated lives. Their conversations turn on everyday things, but there are sudden, unexpected flashes of something else. A few words can suddenly reveal or imply an unexpected connection. Something stirs beneath the surface, something tries to emerge, but it has no language. In the title short story of the new volume, we hear the inner monologue of a woman during an outing in a boat. She is puzzled that the owner of the boat does not make any advances. She imagines having sex with him in the sauna which may exist on the island where they are about to moor. And she is upset when the man says after the boat trip is over that it was less than successful. She spent most of the time just moping around.
All that would have been needed was one word, or perhaps the fleeting caress that the woman considers. But nothing happens. An absence of affirmation of mutual understanding shapes the characters’ experiences in Cecilia Davidsson’s short stories. This social ineptitude also reflects an existential dilemma. The text opens a chasm. More profound insight is not even possible. All that is left is an ominous threat of imminent doom.
Cecilia Davidsson’s characters have a claustrophobic existence, they are strangers to themselves and life itself. This is an experience which has hallmarked Swedish prose over the last twenty years, both the realist and anti-realist types. This experience has been given varying interpretations: social, philosophical and psychological. In Karl Johan Nilsson’s book Korsakov’s Syndrome (Bonniers) — his second novel — it is given a clinical interpretation. The book consists of three longer stories in which Nilsson describes the lives of people suffering from the pathological loss of memory, an inability to form either memories or contexts, that gives the book its name. He enters their experience, lending language to something beyond linguistic codes and generalizations. Nilsson writes extreme realism, anti-psychology in the spirit of Virginia Woolf, capturing consciousness before it petrifies into psychological specimens.
However, one of the Swedish novels in 2002 which attracted by far the most attention was Ciona – an Auto-biology, published under the pseudonym Tamara T. This is a novel about sexuality and role-playing. The focus is on two women: the first-person narrator and the elusive Gabriella, always referred to in the third person. The narrator is watching Gabriella, the woman who always comes between her and her lover whenever she falls in love.
The narrator is a researcher specializing in Ascidiacea or sea squirts. The novel’s name comes from the species Ciona intestinalis, a solitary species of sea squirt. Sea squirts are surrounded by a protective mantle, and they absorb nutrients by filtering water through the organism. The sea squirt lives a stationary life attached to a rock or cliff. The narrator is also a solitary being. She is frozen in denial of her own sexuality, as if enveloped in a protective mantle. Her consciousness becomes an impassive filter that impressions filter through. The detailed descriptions of the life of the sea squirt in the novel turn out to be emotional projections. In fact, Gabriella, too, could be a projection, a carrier of the narrator’s baser instincts. She often tempts the narrator into a quick seduction, an act of gratuitous sex, only to take over when the narrator expresses doubts. But we cannot know for sure. The text is at once both open and guarded: open to interpretation, yet guarding its secret. And relentless in its expression of the experience of a split life and personality.
There was a great deal of speculation about who was behind the pseudonym Tamara T. Names of authors such as Carina Rydberg, Gabriella Håkansson and Mara Lee were mentioned. All the guesses focused on women. When the novel was nominated for the August Prize, writer and pilot Torsten Wächter stepped forward. He had been concerned that the novel would not be taken seriously if it were known that the writer was a man. This may indicate that estrangement (whether existential, gender-based or social) is not merely a characteristic of literature, but of the literary scene as well.

Magnus Eriksson is a literary critic

Translated by The English Centre/Monica Sonck and Nicholas Mayow