Samlaren
Tidskrift för forskning om
svensk och annan nordisk litteratur
Årgång 140 2019
I distribution:
Eddy.se
Berkeley: Linda Rugg Göteborg: Lisbeth Larsson Köpenhamn: Johnny Kondrup
Lund: Erik Hedling, Eva Hættner Aurelius München: Annegret Heitmann
Oslo: Elisabeth Oxfeldt
Stockholm: Anders Cullhed, Anders Olsson, Boel Westin Tartu: Daniel Sävborg
Uppsala: Torsten Pettersson, Johan Svedjedal Zürich: Klaus Müller-Wille
Åbo: Claes Ahlund
Redaktörer: Jon Viklund (uppsatser) och Sigrid Schottenius Cullhed (recensioner) Biträdande redaktör: Karl Berglund, Niclas Johansson, Camilla Wallin Lämsä Inlagans typografi: Anders Svedin
Utgiven med stöd av Vetenskapsrådet
Bidrag till Samlaren insändes digitalt i ordbehandlingsprogrammet Word till info@svelitt.se. Konsultera skribentinstruktionerna på sällskapets hemsida innan du skickar in. Sista inläm-ningsdatum för uppsatser till nästa årgång av Samlaren är 15 juni 2020 och för recensioner 1 september 2020. Samlaren publiceras även digitalt, varför den som sänder in material till Samlaren därmed anses medge digital publicering. Den digitala utgåvan nås på: http://www. svelitt.se/samlaren/index.html. Sällskapet avser att kontinuerligt tillgängliggöra även äldre årgångar av tidskriften.
Svenska Litteratursällskapet tackar de personer som under det senaste året ställt sig till för-fogande som bedömare av inkomna manuskript.
Svenska Litteratursällskapet PG: 5367–8.
Svenska Litteratursällskapets hemsida kan nås via adressen www.svelitt.se. isbn 978–91–87666–39–1
issn 0348–6133 Printed in Lithuania by Balto print, Vilnius 2019
Övriga recensioner · 431
nan, Astrid Lindgrens Pippi Långstrump. I
arti-keln ”Exploring” diskuterar samme forskare Per Kalms En Resa til Norra Amerika, Anders
Fred-rik Skjöldebrands Voyage pittoresque au Cap Nord
och Fredrika Bremers Hemmen i den nya världen.
I ”Northern bound: Exploring and colonizing the Nordic Far North” behandlar DuBois bilden av samer hos Olaus Magnus, Johannes Schefferus och Carl von Linné.
Kjerstin Moody från Gustavus Adolphus Col-lege, USA, reflekterar i ”By land, by sea, by air, by mind: Traversing externally internally via the trope of the bird in Finnish and Swedish poetry” över få-geln som symbol i dikter av Esaias Tegnér, Erik Jo-han Stagnelius, JoJo-han Ludvig Runeberg – i samtliga fall dikter med titeln Flyttfåglarna – samt Johannes
Anyurus dikt Tid. Dessa verk diskuteras i relation
till några samiska och finska dikter.
Det stora intresset hos forskare utomlands för svensk litteratur är glädjande. Överlag är de-ras kunskaper stora, oväntat stora när det gäller många av idag betydligt mindre kända verk som Mellins, Bergroths och Nordströms romaner ovan. Samtidigt är det tråkigt att motsvarande intresse för grannländernas litteratur synes vara betydligt mindre framträdande hos dagens svenska litteratur-vetare. Det märks redan i den aktuella volymen, där de svenska forskare som deltar ägnar sig uteslutande eller huvudsakligen åt svenska eller svenskspråkiga verk. Anders Olsson skriver om Gunnar Björling (”The limits of the unlimited: Gunnar Björling’s wordscape”), Henrik Johnsson om Strindberg, Emelie Flygare-Carlén och John Ajvide Lindqvist (”Archipelago”), Anna Smedberg Bondesson om C.J.L Almqvist, Kerstin Ekman, Hjalmar Bergman och Birger Sjöberg (”Through the land of lagom in
literature: Passing small towns in middle Sweden”) och Arne Melberg skriver huvudsakligen om Axel Munthe (”South of the South: Literary Capri”). Det förefaller finnas ett behov av ett större intresse hos svenska forskare för även annan litteratur än den svenska. I synnerhet kan man hoppas på att svenska forskare inser hur fruktbart ett allnordiskt perspektiv ofta är även i studiet av svenska verk; detta visar den aktuella volymen tydligt.
Hur glädjande det än är att ickesvenska fors-kare undersöker svensk litteratur finns ändå ibland praktiska problem med detta, kopplade till språket. Man kan väl leva med uppgiften att Creutz skulle ha skrivit ”Sommer-Kväde” (35) och att Stagnelius skulle ha talat om ”frammande land” (507) – och en hel del liknande – men att ”dova fågelflockar”
i en dikt av Johannes Anyuru översätts med ”deaf flocks of birds” (516) är mer allvarligt, eftersom det påverkar forskarens tolkning av dikten. Det är inte för mycket begärt att en person med svenska som modersmål hade fått möjlighet att se över en vo-lym med så många arbeten om litteratur på svenska. Sammantaget skall sägas att de femtioen spridda essäerna är kvalificerade och ofta erbjuder intres-sant läsning. Det är sällan författarna kommer med direkt nya rön, och de kartlägger aldrig outfors-kade områden. Med ett tema som ”spatial nodes” ger volymen upphov till teoretiska läsningar, i re-gel ganska korta (10–15 sidor), som ofta inspirerar och skänker nya perspektiv. Det största värdet lig-ger i att volymen så tydligt visar hur fruktbart ett komparativt nordiskt perspektiv är och hur mycket de olika nordiska ländernas litteratur verkligen be-lyser varandra.
Daniel Sävborg
Anna Sofia Rossholm, Ingmar Bergman och den lekfulla skriften. Studier av anteckningar, utkast och filmidéer i arkivets samlingar. Makadam. Göteborg
och Stockholm 2017.
The centennial of Ingmar Bergman’s birth in 2018 offered the occasion for renewed consideration of his life and work, and in particular, his writing drew fresh attention. In 2002 Bergman donated his archives to the newly formed Ingmar Bergman Foundation, and that year saw the publication of Maaret Koskinen’s I begynnelsen var ordet (“In the
Beginning was the Word”). Koskinen was the first
scholar to be allowed access to his writings, and her analyses soon made clear the richness of this unexplored material. Her study opened a new
di-rection in Bergman scholarship: a close analysis of his writing. By 2018, Bergman archivist Jan Holm-berg, in his Författaren Ingmar Bergman (“The
Au-thor Ingmar Bergman”), goes so far as to propose that Bergman might have been a more important author than he was a filmmaker, at least in the con-text of Swedish culture. Oddly, as both Holmberg and now Anna Sofia Rossholm (in the study un-der review here) point out, Bergman himself de-clared that he had no ambition to become an au-thor, but like many of his declarations about him-self and his work, one should be cautious about tak-ing him at his word.
In her book Ingmar Bergman och den lekfulla skriften (“Ingmar Bergman’s Playful Writing”),
Anna Sofia Rossholm does not concern herself with the question of whether Bergman was a “real” literary or textual author. For whether Bergman was an authentic author in that literary sense or not, he most certainly was a writer. Rossholm explores the central role of writing in Bergman’s cinematic work, moving from his workbooks to his film-scripts to his films. She investigates what his writ-ing and sketches reveal about his creative process in general, which she defines as “play as aesthetic act” (lek som estestisk handling, 14). In Swedish she
uses the word “leka” for “play” that one associates with children’s play: unstructured, light-hearted, creative. Swedish uses a different word, spela, to
refer to what actors or musicians do. In her read-ing of how Bergman engages with his writread-ing, both words might be appropriate: Bergman is “playful” (lekfull) as he doodles in his notebooks, engages
in wordplay, free associates, and allows himself to be distracted when his pen falls out the window. But Bergman “plays” (spelar) with his material, or
rather, makes his writing into a play (spel) when
he creates characters in dialogue with their author and with each other, when he makes those charac-ters antagonists, and pits them against each other in sometimes harrowing games (also spel in Swedish).
Rossholm’s close reading of Bergman’s writing re-veals both the lek and the spel of his creative process.
In her introduction Rossholm sets the stage for how she plans to trace Bergman’s playful method through a close comparison of different versions of his texts: workbooks, scripts, and finished films. It becomes clear that Bergman crafts an authorial self in his writing, a self at play with the other charac-ters he creates: “at the moment the authorial ‘I’ en-ters into dialogue with a fictional character […] he transforms himself […] into fiction” [“i det ögon-blick författarjaget går i dialog med en fiktiv karak-tär … förvandlar han … sig själv till fiktion”, 23]. Rather than focusing on autobiographical traces of Bergman in his writing and films, Rossholm pro-vides a nuanced reading of his narrative strategy: “When the author puts pen to paper and writes the word ‘I’, a split occurs. The writing subject becomes an Other, a textual construct” [“När författaren sät-ter pennan mot pappret och skriver ordet ‘jag’ upp-står en klyvning. Det skrivande subjektet blir en an-nan, en konstruktion I texten”, 197]. In Rossholm’s analysis, it becomes clear that Bergman transforms the diary-like, personal form of his notebooks into the dramatic form of his film scripts and the novel-istic form of his prose publications through
experi-mental play. This is a somewhat different image of the filmmaker than the one that focuses on the bi-ographical details of his life — his father the priest, his formidable mother, his series of wives and lov-ers — and tries to find the key for undlov-erstanding his films through that lens. Instead Rossholm unpacks the methodology of Bergman’s work and shows us the “how” of his creative process, which she defines as “play” [lek], “materialized in the movement of
writing” [“materialiserad i skriftens rörelse”] (25). Rossholm’s first chapter, “Perspective,” demon-strates what she means by this odd notion of “mov-ing writ“mov-ing.” The phrase alludes to the way in which a text is transformed in revisions and new versions, and she refers back to French theorists Roland Bar-thes and Jacques Derrida as sources for her charac-terization of this movement as play. As she notes, the writing that forms the basis for a film is per defi-nition writing that moves from one medium to an-other. But even between texts, or even within a text, Bergman’s writing moves in the sense that he shifts pronouns, divides his “I” into different figures, as-signs names to nameless characters as they develop, and so on. One of the sections in this chapter is entitled “Writing as Transformation” [“Skrift som förvandling”], which is a brief characterization of the kind of play and magic she traces through her close reading of Bergman’s texts.
The next chapter, which focuses on Bergman’s workbooks, features a penetrating close reading of some of Bergman’s notebooks in relation to the films they eventually became. One of Rossholm’s points, however, is that the path from workbook to film is a highly transformative one, where many el-ements of the original workbook version fall away. Nevertheless, she maintains, one finds the “kernel of his creative process” (“kärnan i den kreativa pro-cessen”) in these notes (49). There are forty-six of these books in the archive, beginning in the 1930s. Rossholm observes that a shift takes place in the 1950s, when the notes begin to function as a foun-dation for formulating new narratives. It is during that period, when his films evolve a style that is more recognizably “Bergmanesque,” that the work-books, according to Rossholm, become more per-sonal, more searching, and more creative (55). She explores the way in which this highly private form evolves from self-inspection to self-fashioning, evaluating the notebooks as diaries that allow Berg-man to create his artistic persona (62).
Among the details Rossholm attends to are “mis-takes,” excluded passages, cross-outs, doodles, and
Övriga recensioner · 433 pasted-in pictures. A wonderful feature of
Ross-holm’s book is in fact the interpolation of many beautifully reproduced images: Bergman’s note-book pages and covers, with the various shades of ink and doodles and notebook types offered up for the reader’s inspection. Thanks to the outstanding graphic design of the people at Makadam Press, the reader can almost reconstruct Rossholm’s experi-ence as she plumbed the archive (Fredrika Siwe is credited with the design). Given that one of the points Rossholm makes is how important writing materials (type of pen, paper, and notebook) were to Bergman, it seems particularly important that Rossholm’s book is able to give readers a sense of what she describes.
In the third chapter Rossholm turns to Berg-man’s scripts, which have often posed problems for scholars, in part, as she shows, because they are rather unusual in comparison with other screen-writing. Sparse in visual detail, Bergman’s film-scripts are characterized by a strongly literary style, which is revealed in Rossholm’s close reading of them. She notes, for instance, that the script for
Vargtimmen (Hour of the Wolf) opens in medias res, with not even a rudimentary description of the
first figure the viewer encounters. Instead the script, like those of Persona and Viskningar och rop (Cries and Whispers), is narrated by a subject with a
dis-tinctive voice. Particularly these later texts, Ross-holm argues, “can be considered hybrids between filmscripts and novels, more than scripts that func-tion simply as the basis for films” (“[de kan] betrak-tas som hybrider mellan filmmanus och romaner mer än manus som fungerar som enkla förlagor till filmer”, 100). It is this slippage between genres that makes Bergman’s film scripts difficult to read as scripts. As with Rossholm’s analysis of Bergman’s notebooks, reproductions of the pages of Berg-man’s scripts, replete with his marginal notes and sketches, allow the reader to follow the detail of her argument and see with vivid clarity Bergman’s crea-tive play. Here, however, rather than simply expos-ing a mind at play, the notes and sketches are de-vised to work as instructions for those who make the film with Bergman.
The interior, personal work of the notebooks has here become communicative and public. Still, there is a clear link between the “moving writing” Rossholm identifies in the notebooks and the way in which the writing in the scripts pushes toward the medium of moving pictures. Some of Bergman’s marginal notes (Rossholm cites a series of them
from Cries and Whispers) describe visual sequences
that will be mapped onto the language of the script. Rossholm pays close attention once more to the material aspect of the writing. The script was typed on the right-hand page, while the left facing page was left blank to accommodate Bergman’s hand-written notes and sketches in various colors. It is as if we are moving from the writer’s hand to the ma-chinery of typography, which will take us on to the cinematic apparatus that is only hinted at (unlike standard filmscripts, which refer to camera angles and the like). The move from the writer’s hand to the communal typescript finds a reflection in the movement, as Rossholm notes, from an “I” nar-rator, the diarist of the workbooks, to the many voices of the filmscript. And once again, there is interplay between various versions of scripts. Ross-holm makes a case study of a script entitled “The Cannibals” [“Människoätarna”], which was never produced as a film, but which served as a kind of basis for both Hour of the Wolf and, to a lesser
de-gree, Persona. Through a detailed comparison of
the scripts and the finished films, Rossholm ex-poses hidden elements of each work.
Rossholm’s next chapter, “Rewritings of Inti-macy and Violence” [“Omskrivningar av det in-tima och det våldsamma”] attempts to come to grips with one of the more difficult aspects of Berg-man’s work: the way in which intimacy and vio-lence are linked, and the awkward interface that ex-ists in his work between “real-world violence” (the Vietnam war, the Holocaust) and the psycho-ter-ror of dysfunctional human relationships. Though Rossholm treats this subject with careful nuance, she does not entirely rescue Bergman from this awkwardness. She does not, for instance, address his 1968 war film, Skammen (Shame), or the
rep-resentation of Cold War militarism that provides an odd counterpoint to the intimate drama of Ty-stnaden (The Silence). It would have been
interest-ing to hear her take on these two films, and their absence points to a more general question about her theoretically sophisticated and beautifully ex-ecuted book: how did she choose her texts? She spends a great deal of time on En passion (A Pas-sion), for instance, a film that ordinarily receives
lit-tle critical attention, but she has very litlit-tle or noth-ing to say about films of Bergman’s earlier periods. It would have been valuable to hear more about her thoughts regarding the shift that takes place in Bergman’s work from, say Det sjunde inseglet (The Seventh Seal) to Såsom i en spegel (Through a
Mir-ror Darkly). One wonders: are the workbooks for
some of the earlier films simply uninteresting? The other angle that could have provided a rich field for exploration would be the use of actors as tools in Bergman’s work; since Rossholm devotes a good deal of thought to the pens, ink, and notebooks as aspects of Bergman’s fascination with material pro-duction, it would have been intriguing to think of his cadre of actors in a similar light. But this topic could easily make up material for a complete book on its own.
Rossholm ends her book on a promising and in-ventive note: a look at new translations and works based on Bergman’s oeuvre. She reads these works
by an international collection of artists within the larger framework of her argument, namely as re-writings, as part of the moving writing that Berg-man himself practiced. In this way the “BergBerg-man works” that have been created after the filmmak-er’s death can be seen as part of the arc Rossholm describes in her analysis: we move from the inte-rior “I” that becomes a creator-persona in the note-books, to the persona who splits into a cast of char-acters in the script, to the voices that take on flesh and bone (albeit ultimately celluloid or digital) in the films, to a broad array of voices around the world, continuing the work of transforming Berg-man’s writing. Rossholm’s book is both physically beautiful and the product of careful and clear-eyed reading and analysis. In delving into the archive, she is able to cast new light on films that have been studied so thoroughly that one imagined there was no more to discover; she makes it apparent here that there is indeed more to learn, and this book offers an invitation to other scholars to enter the archive for their own discoveries.
Linda Haverty Rugg
Birthe Sjöberg, Dialog eller dynamit. Viktor Ryd-berg och August StrindRyd-berg – förtryckets fiender.
Gidlunds förlag. Möklinta 2018.
Ibland kan humanistisk forskning te sig som flask-post avskickad från en isolerad ö, långt ute i havet Ingenstans. Och hur länge flaskan plaskat i havet vet man inte, men många fartyg, lastade med olika teoretiska perspektiv och metodologiska reflektio-ner, passerar den isolerade ön utan att stanna och undsätta den nödställda. Bilden kommer för mig medan jag läser Birthe Sjöbergs Dialog eller
dyna-mit. Viktor Rydberg och August Strindberg – för-tryckets fiender. Den tycks härröra från en tid och
en värld då litteraturvetenskap förstods i termer av påverkan och inflytande, då litterära texter hade ”budskap”, och då dessa texters huvudpersoner kunde vara ”representanter” för författarens ”upp-fattning”. Det känns som länge sedan.
Ändå är Sjöbergs projekt inte ointressant i sig. Hon vill beskriva ”två motsatta uppfattningar om hur politisk kamp ska bedrivas” (9), en undersök-ning som motiveras också av att ”[l]ikheterna mel-lan vår tid och 1880-talet är skrämmande många” (11). Det temat utvecklar Sjöberg knappast, och förmodligen kan motsvarande påståenden fällas om snart sagt alla sådana tidskonstellationer. Sjö-bergs fokus ligger istället på skiftet ”från revolu-tionär, idealistisk liberalism till revolutionär soci-alism och politisk nihilism” (11). Det kunde och borde ha blivit spännande, men Sjöberg fastnar i friläggandet av respektive författares ”uppfattning”, samtiden och samhället läggs i skuggan av giganter-nas texter, de villkor texterna skrivs och läses under försvinner.
Men är jag nu inte väldigt orättvis mot Birthe Sjöbergs studie? Kanske. Förmodligen. Men hon hamrar in att de behandlade texterna har entydiga ”budskap”, hennes tes gäller Rydbergs påverkan på Strindberg – om ”Strindberg tagit intryck av Ryd-berg” (10) – och i någon mån Strindbergs påverkan på Rydberg. Denna ytterst basala utgångspunkt – är den alls viktig? varför? – försöker Sjöberg sedan bestämma som inspirerad av New Historicism, men
ingenting tyder tyvärr på att hon förstått implika-tionerna av den traditionstillhörigheten – den bå-ten seglade förbi hennes ö utan att stanna. Sjöberg definierar New Historicism som en ”metod som
an-vänds vid studiet av äldre texter”, men citerar också (17) en grundläggande definition av Donald E. Hall där han påpekar att nyhistorikern undersöker hur tidens maktordningar speglas men också arbe-tar och verkar i den litterära texten. Men sedan talar Sjöberg om något helt annat, nämligen om författa-rens ”politiska samhällssyn, människosyn, religiösa tro” och så vidare – och hennes studie innehåller mycket riktigt inte ens en antydan om en maktana-lytik. En författares eventuella ”politiska samhälls-syn” är inte samma sak som den av maktens prakti-ker genomkorsade diskursordningen.
Dialog eller dynamit lider tyvärr svårt av ett
de-finitionsmässigt underskott. Begrepp tas för givna: ”liberalism” är ett sådant, uppenbarligen oomkull-runkeligt, begrepp som inte ges någon tillräcklig
