Shining a Light on Eyvind Johnson’s Sidelined Novel, Nittonhundrasjutton

Towards multilocational modernism

In February 1930, right at the beginning of the new decade, Swedish author Eyvind Johnson relocated to Scandinavia after having spent most of the previous decade in Germany and France, primarily in Berlin and Paris. During the 1920s, Johnson had established himself from a distance as a new literary voice in his home country. With a string of novels published in quick succession – Timans och rättfärdigheten (1925), Stad i mörker (1927), Stad i ljus (1928), Minnas (1928) and Kommentar till ett stjärnfall (1929) – Johnson had showcased what we may term his multilocational modernism. Multilocational insofar as Johnson’s early body of work testifies to the emergence of an innovative literary sensibility to a variety of modern urban environments. These range from the European metropolis to the “marginal” northern town and the smaller-nation capital city, including mobility and interconnection between the places in question. If we separate Johnson’s early novelistic output into segments, Stad i ljus (first published in translation into French as Lettre recommandée, 1928) centres on Paris and resembles a “classic” articulation of the modernist city whilst, however, continually gesturing towards a Nordic hinterland. Conversely, Timans och rättfärdigheten, Stad i mörker and Minnas concentrate on capturing “peripheral” northern Swedish geo-modernity: the new structures and landscapes of industry, the transformation of transportation and communication, with the railway of particular importance to the opening-up of the north, the mechanisation of everyday life, as well as new municipal, commercial and entertainment cultures. These narratives break new ground through their use of off-centre urban spheres as sites for the probing of emerging modern societies and states of mind. At the same time, however, commitment to the northern locality typically competes or alternates with spatial expansiveness and continental European, even cosmic, outreach, resulting in plurality or “polyphony” of place. Kommentar till ett stjärnfall, finally, introduces Stockholm, a capital city but outside modernism’s metropolitan “canon”, as a further arena in which Johnson’s pioneering novel writing is played out. In sum, Johnson’s body of novelistic work from the 1920s reads as a sustained challenge to a centrist and spatially confining understanding of the map of modernism and modernity.^[1]

This renders Johnson’s work highly relevant in relation to various widening and “softening” tendencies in current modernism studies and the growing recognition of the role of the margins of modernity in renewing literary articulation. In a discussion of modernism’s global turn, Mark Wollaeger identifies three axes along which the transformation of modernist studies has taken place: a spatial, a temporal and a vertical axis (Wollaeger 2012, 9). The three axes signify the widening and decentring of the gaze of criticism to accommodate, respectively, further places (beyond the most famous metropolitan centres and major western countries), further times (beyond the “core” modernist period of about 1890 to 1945), and further forms of cultural production (beyond “high” culture). This disciplinary perspective is supported by Paul K. Saint-Amour in an illuminating study focused on interwar modernism, Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form. Saint-Amour contends that there is a causal connection between, on the one hand, the weakening of the definitional dimension of modernist studies and, on the other hand, the vitalisation and diversification of the field:

Modernist studies has become a strong field – populous, varied, generative, self-reflective – in proportion as its immanent theory of modernism has weakened and become less axiomatic, more conjectural, more conjunctural. In fact, we could say that modernist studies underwent a delay in emerging as a field partly because its immanent theory of modernism remained for several decades too strong to permit the kind of horizontal frictions and attachments necessary for field-formation. A major index of the field’s current strength is the enormous range of foreground terms we find moored to the field’s weak central term. […] Work in modernist studies can now be preoccupied with questions other than the old transcendental one: “But is it really modernist?”

(Saint-Amour 2015, 41–42)

Concerning the Scandinavian modernist domain, Anna Westerståhl Stenport applies in a chapter entitled “Scandinavian Modernism: Stories of the Transnational and the Discontinuous” a related analytical lens. Scrutinising both the temporal and the spatial axis of the field, she observes that “[m]odernism in Scandinavia emerges both early and late, through starts and stops, in intermittent and localized forms, as well as in tension with ideologies of margin and center, import and export, and nation and cosmopolitanism” (Westerståhl Stenport 2012, 479). Scandinavian modernism is shown to be informed by a radical rethinking of the nation, of national parameters as such, and of perceived marginality, as it develops through a variety of transnational relationships. These approaches are emphasised as valid, moreover, to Eyvind Johnson specifically, whom Westerståhl Stenport characterises as “one of Swedish literature’s foremost innovators in prose modernism” (2012, 492) and positions within a generation of proletarian writers who contributed “one of the most prominent and unique strands of Swedish modernism” (2012, 492), as they sought to let new forms of literature capture and contribute to social change.

Johnson’s output during the 1920s documents the wide reach of modernist writing in two ways. Firstly, the extensive horizontal axis of modernist literature, including the challenge to national parameters and notions of centrality, is demonstrated by the aforementioned novels and the creative interface between “core” and “marginal” environments they reflect. Their strong sense of off-centre domestic modernity was typically crafted during and seem to have been stimulated by Johnson’s prolonged encounter with canonical European modernities. Furthermore, Johnson’s prose modernism of the 1920s did not consist purely of novels. Prior to and alongside the book publications, Johnson used his continental European experiences more directly as material for a high volume of short-form factual and fictional writing for a growing variety of newspapers and periodicals in the home market. This two-pronged publication activity combined prolific “foreign-correspondence” reporting with a range of short fictions, frequently mediating the same modern subject matters. The activity and the sporadic income it generated formed part of the aspiring modernist writer’s survival strategy; but it also constituted a literary laboratory of sorts, in which a considerable cross-fertilisation of themes, techniques and ideological emphasis took place between the factual and the fictional writing mode. Shared modernist features can be found in Johnson’s journalism and in his short prose fictions. Björn Gustavsson argues that Johnson’s journalistic texts “blev till övningar i berättarkonst – med efterhand allt starkare inslag av skönlitterär gestaltning” (Gustavsson 2006, XI). So, secondly, this shows how Johnson’s writerly and publication practises of the 1920s operate along an expanded vertical axis of modernism. Johnson’s modernism emerged and evolved in an interplay between forms of cultural production that, conventionally viewed, occupy different levels on the vertical axis leading from “low” to “high” culture, which Wollaeger and others scutinise, as discussed above. Johnson’s modernism is multilocational not only in respect of the variety and fluidity of environments in which the narratives are played out, but also in respect of the plurality of publication outlets and forms of writing in which it appears.

The afterlife of war

Prominent among the topics which Johnson’s journalistic reporting conveys to the home audience, and also reflected in the short fictions, is the European metropolitan environment, particularly Berlin, in its post-First-World-War configuration. Johnson’s writing offers socio-political analysis of as well as subjective response to an overwhelming urban reality in which the traces of war remain visible and readable everywhere, from economies to transnational communities to human bodies. Johnson’s Berlin reportage from the early 1920s works to dispute the notions of a punctual end to war and of a future peace time in any settled sense. In a piece dated 23 November 1921 and published in Morgonbris (1922, issue 1), the magazine of Sweden’s Socialdemocratic Women’s Association, Johnson captures the emotional impact of witnessing the ubiquity of the war-disabled in the streetscape: “Det är en gripande syn att se dessa fordom friska och hela människor nu stå i gathörn och tigga, en del blinda, en del med gripklor i stället för händer, andra utan ben” (Johnson 2006, 44). If harrowing sights such as these represent the afterlife of war, Johnson in another early piece, dated Christmas Eve 1921 and published in Norrländska Socialdemokraten 31 December 1921, displays a considerable degree of historical foreknowledge. Here, he turns to the topic of macroeconomics and identifies the imposition of the colossal German First-World-War reparation payments as creating the nucleus of a new collapse and conflict: it is essentially a “krigsförklaring” and “embryot till att nytt sammanbrott, ett ‘sammanbrottets sammanbrott’” (Johnson 2006, 39).

In his above-mentioned exploration of war, critical futurities and modernism, Paul K. Saint-Amour discusses the role of interwar modernism in registering, exactly as Johnson does in his journalism, “the ostensibly peacetime vibrations of war in the metropolis” (2015, 12) as well as in conveying, but also critiquing and resisting, an apparent war-dominated foreclosure of the future. In terms of understanding the interwar period as such, Saint-Amour disputes the view that the notion of interwar is a predominantly retrospective formation: the period was equally, he contends, “understood by many from its midst, even from its inception, as an interval between the First World War and its likely sequel” (2015, 34). The condition of living during the 1920s and 1930s could thus for many mean that their memory of one war was joined to the spectre of a future war.

These perspectives on war and interwar are of considerable relevance to the first major literary work which Eyvind Johnson published after his relocation to Scandinavia in early 1930, and to which we shall now turn our attention. The work in question is a little-known novel entitled Nittonhundrasjutton. This novel can fruitfully be discussed in relation to both the horizontal and the vertical expansion of the axes of modernism. The novel shares features with Johnson’s early foreign journalism, in terms of publication mode and aspects of subject matter, as well as with his early novels set in “marginal” domestic environments. Published in the middle of the interwar period, Nittonhundrasjutton takes a memory-linked approach to the experience of the condition of the First World War, not in the metropolis, however, but in a northern Swedish town. The novel deserves recognition for the unique ways in which it explores the topic of economic, social and ideological ripple effects of war on a “neutral” country – effects that are palpable despite the fact that the country is far removed from the core conflict zone. The strong impressions of economic collapse and bodily harm conveyed in the post-war journalistic reportage may have been factors, years later, in influencing the novel, but transposed to a marginal setting. Nittonhundrasjutton is noteworthy, furthermore, for its modernist display of innovative spatialities and temporalities as well as narrative experimentation. Sharing the attribute of its setting, the novel occupies a marginal position in Johnson’s oeuvre, sidelined from his canonical work. It has been largely overlooked in the reception of Johnson’s writing, having hitherto been afforded very limited critical attention. The sidelining of the novel may, finally, also be connected to its publication mode, as it (uniquely among Johnson’s novels) was published solely in periodical form. It thereby shares the dissemination form of Johnson’s post-war short-form factual and fictional prose and thus contributes to our awareness of the multiple outlets and modes of modernist writing. Let us begin our consideration of Nittonhundrasjutton by offering some observations on the circumstances under which the novel was conceived, followed by some insights into its unusual form of publication.

The making of an unassuming novel

In the wake of his return to Scandinavia, Eyvind Johnson expresses a sense of dislocation, but also of new potential. In a letter sent from Alingsås in south-west Sweden and dated 18 February 1930, Johnson describes to his friend and fellow writer Rudolf Värnlund his “homecoming” as an emigration of sorts that necessitates a profound re-start: “Jag känner mig som en emigrant. […] jag måste ‘börja om’ på allvar” (Munkhammar/Bergh 2018, 1278). The notion of being a migrant in Scandinavia was reinforced when Johnson and his newly established family, after having spent some weeks in Stockholm, set up a temporary home for the summer and early autumn in rural Norway. They rented a cottage in the coastal countryside at Viggja (Viggen) by the Orkdal Fjord south-west of Trondheim, which was the hometown of Johnson’s wife Åse Christoffersen. In a following letter to Värnlund, dated 15 July 1930, Johnson provides a detailed and diverse mapping of his new Norwegian environment; his conspectus combines closeness to nature, spartan economy, spectacular scenery, modern transport, nearby urbanity, deep history, and rich literary echoes:

Här bor jag i en stuga som vi hyrt av en bonde. […] Jag fiskar en smula i fjorden – ror lite i lånt båt och skriver, som sagt, om nätterna. Egentligen har vi det bra här. Man lever billigt, vilket just nu är ett viktigt faktum för mig. […] Landskapet är så kuperat att man nästan går på knäna när man skördar. Åkrarna stå rätt upp och ner, tycker man. […] Snöfjäll i fjärran, ljust om nätterna, ebb och flod och salt vatten, där man badar. Trondhjems Båten går förbi en gång om dagen, reguljär busstrafik med Trondhjem annars. Fiskarby, vikingavik förr. Landskapet en blanding av Sigrid Undset och Johan Bojer och människorna förfärdigade dels av Strindberg och dels av Hamsun. Se där en karta.

(Munkhammar/Bergh 2018, 1300)

In these hybrid surroundings Johnson wrote Nittonhundrasjutton. Broadly speaking, the contents of the novel could be said to share with Johnson’s outline of the environment in which it was conceived features such as a nature-sustained local economy, a scarcity of means, a collective of inhabitants, and a modern interface with a wider world. Through the novel’s retrospective and period-specific lens, such topics are transported to wartime Sweden. Thus, in specific terms, the subject matter of the narrative is rather removed from the time and place of writing, although the wider concerns of the novel resonate with the interwar period, too. The novel displays a keen interest in wartime economy and social psychology. It scrutinises and satirises a dubious domestic economic system and its black-market entrepreneurs who feed off the obtaining shortage of produce and goods. The relative failure and consequent price hike, rationing and illegal trading of the local potato crop constitute a leitmotif in the narrative, to the extent that Johnson, in keeping with the hyperbolic tendency of the text itself, comments in a note to fellow writer Erik Asklund in August 1930: “Hösten 1917 kom stora regnskurar, mycket regn, potatisen ruttnade i jorden. Jag vet det, ty jag har skrivit närapå en hel bok om denna potatis” (cited in Lindberger 1986, 266). Alongside its analysis of the ways in which also an ostensibly peripheral and “sheltered” country has its communal reality and its behaviour changed by the reach of war, the novel reads as a coming-of-age narrative. It gestures generationally towards those who, like the author, were contemporaries of the twentieth century while, on the level of individual psychology, the novel illuminates the theme of approaching adulthood during troubled and disorienting times.

The novel was published during the course of exactly one year, from 8 November 1930 to 7 November 1931. It was released in weekly instalments, amounting to 221 small pages in total, in the magazine Brand, the outlet of the anarchistic Sweden’s Socialist Youth Alliance (Sveriges Ungsocialistiska Förbund).^[2] Intentionally or not, the publication cycle of the novel thus contains an echo of the use of one year as a structuring and thematic device in the narrative, as signalled by the novel’s title. Similarly, the ideological role – rather than the specific anarchistic leanings – of the novel’s medium of publication would seem to offer an appropriate habitat for the novel’s politicised subject matter and radical analysis.

The limited critical opinion that exists on the novel differs as to whether its publication mode was a deliberate choice by Johnson or necessitated by a lack of other channels willing to take this profoundly socially satirical text on. In a rare fuller treatment of the novel, Jöran Mjöberg’s article “Nittonhundrasjutton – en okänd roman av Eyvind Johnson”, it is argued that the author never intended to have the novel published in the form of a book: “Till romanens historia hör också att dess författare aldrig önskade att få den utgiven i bokform” (Mjöberg 1977, 21). This seems to conflict with the assessment of Örjan Lindberger, who observes that Johnson tried unsuccessfully to have the novel published elsewhere: “Efter resultatlösa försök att få ut den på annat håll placerades den som följetong i Brand” (Lindberger 1986, 266). The possible clues to the question of preferred publication mode provided by the author’s correspondence with Värnlund, which is punctuated by references to the (lack of) progress on the novel, prove somewhat inconclusive. On the completion of the novel, and on the last day at Viggja before departure for Sweden – the realisation of the creative project and the timing of the stay in Norway thus seemingly connected – Johnson foresees in a letter dated 19 September 1930 that his book is likely to struggle to convince the publishing house (which must mean Bonniers) of its merits, in light of recent rejections by the publisher of manuscripts by Värnlund and the pioneering “proletarian” author Gustav Hedenvind-Eriksson: “Boken är klar, men efter den behandling du och Hedenvind fått av förlaget har jag inte stort hopp” (Munkhammar/Bergh 2018, 1327). This passage would appear to go against Mjöberg’s position that Johnson favoured the periodical form and substantiate Lindberger’s version that Johnson would have preferred a different outlet, and implicitly a book publication, although the statement does not in itself prove that Johnson proactively sought alternatives. Rather, the possibility of not immediately submitting the manuscript (through Johnson’s usual publishing channels, one would presume) is indeed raised in a passage in an earlier letter dated 15 August 1930 (but thus notably written before the full result of Johnson’s creative efforts were known):

På boken har jag inte skrivit på över en vecka. Jag har gjort en slags renskrivning av manuskriptets första hälvt, men är ganska missnöjd med alltihop. I den kommande veckan skall jag försöka göra slut på historien och sedan renskriva alltsammans; men blir det inte bra låter jag bli att sända in manuskriptet. Då får det hellre ligga någon tid, något år, kanske, om jag kan klara den ekonomiska biffen på annat sätt.

(Munkhammar/Bergh 2018, 1314)

Irrespective of whether this reflects Johnson’s final assessment of the quality and publishing prospects of his book, the pessimistic tone of the passage is characteristic of a general tendency of his correspondence with Värnlund to diminish the stature of the novel and to emphasise the struggles experienced in the process of shaping it. It is possible that this was to an extent dictated by an avoidance of sounding overly confident vis-à-vis Värnlund, whose career as a writer was stalling at the time. But the devaluing pattern as such is beyond dispute: Johnson’s letters conceptualise the book as slow in emerging and of slender build, with overtones of malnourishment (cf. its subject of shortage of food): “Boken går det sakta med, den blir liten och mager” (2018, 1324). Other passages suggest a cumbersome and labyrinthine creative process and a difficulty in achieving imaginative “lift-off”: “Jag sitter fast i min bok”, “hittar inte vägen ut”, “och om jag hade djärvheten att likna mig vid en fågel, skulle jag säga, att jag flaxar förtvivlat med vingarna utan att komma så högt upp, att jag ser sju kyrktorn” (2018, 1306, 1310, 1306).

Ultimately, however, such assessments by Johnson are hard to reconcile with the obvious literary qualities and originality of the end product, whose sidelining in the author’s oeuvre may primarily be explainable by, precisely, the novel’s “peripheral” and less prestigious publication mode. It is difficult to disagree with Jöran Mjöberg when he concludes his discussion of the novel by declaring that “Nittonhundrasjutton är ingen dålig roman, […] den har en mognad, personlig stil, och den ger en klarsynt, bitter vidräkning med kriget och krigets svenska samhälle” (1977, 28). In the following sections, we shall document the temporal, spatial and narrative sophistication as well as the unique subject matter and the biting style that are on display in Johnson’s “overlooked” novel. The first section will consider the relationship between periodisation and characterisation in the narrative. The next section will discuss the novel’s discursive design and use of different types of narratorial voice as devices for satire and commentary, especially in relation to topics of body politic, economy and ideology. And the final section will explore the novel’s creative interplay between different geographical scales and spheres: local, national and cosmic; furthermore, it will illuminate the novel’s innovative approach to the depiction and critique of modern public institutions in a marginal locality and beyond. Together, the sections will substantiate the workings of Johnson’s “marginal” modernism.

The generation of 1900

Nittonhundrasjutton is a novel preoccupied with periodisation, zeitgeist, temporal ruptures and continuities, and with the interplay between retrospective and prospective time. Conceived from an implied vantage point in the future that is not developed but creates a degree of critical distance, the main narrative revisits how global war is reflected and refracted in its local urban community in the Swedish North. Concentrating on the year of 1917, the novel captures the manifest changes to everyday societal life, from rationing to mobilisation, in a so-called neutral country, as well as presenting a panoply of mental, behavioural and ideological responses to war. In a few noteworthy instances the narrative offers, moreover, insights from its wartime situation into the future by employing character focalisation to voice a foreseeing of the possible afterlife of war-related damage in a “post-war” period.

In his brief treatment of the novel in Norrbottningen som blev europé, Örjan Lindberger observes that Johnson, born in 1900, could be inclined to regard himself as representative of the new century and of a new generation that came of age during the destructive and disruptive times of the First World War (1986, 304). A similar sense of period and generational representativeness is identifiable in Nittonhundrasjutton. The novel foregrounds the notion that the outbreak of war constitutes a rupture point determining the real dividing line between a traditional and a modern epoch: “Den gamla goda tiden flyttade under dessa år en bra bit in på nittonhundratalet; gränsen hette -14” (Johnson 1930–31, 3).^[3] This would imply that the century, like the generation of 1900, underwent a defining change caused by war. The generation of 1900 is represented in the novel by a constellation of three male characters who display variant relations to the centre/periphery problematics of war and to the question of the significance of its afterlife. Ultimately, however, the characters in question are bound together by the fate or threat of death, designated by Mjöberg as a “grundmotiv” (1977, 23) in the narrative. The three figures are linked, furthermore, by degrees of connection with motifs of writing and reading, lending the character constellation a symbolic relevance in regard to signalling the importance of confronting war in writing.

Of these characters, one is objectively identifiable as being of the same age as the century, and his youth is explicitly associated with the beginning of war: “när kriget bröt ut var sonen, som hette Mattias, fjorton år” (4). The narrative aligns phases of macro historical time with the micro periodisation of a protagonist’s life. Mattias’ parentage points to his early proximity to the figure of the writer: “Om nätterna satt han [Mattias’ father] vid sitt skrivbord och försökte få till dikter” (3–4). Furthermore, the young Mattias’ own employment as an advertising copywriter in one of the war-profiting, illicitly operating companies invites recurring attention to his specialisation in “creative” coded communication, resembling elliptical modernist poetry of sorts: “Hans arbete bestod till en stor del i att sätta samman tvetydiga annonser, som kunde vara så här: Finfin affär, s–a bytes mot s–r. Eller: 100 kg. OVI, dgsprs, diskr” (37). The motif of the typewriter works in several scenes as a modern marker of Mattias pictured at work: “han satt och skrev på maskin” (101).

Concerning the perception of war from within a marginal environment, Mattias represents a conflicted position. On the one hand, he shares a widespread sense of the World War as an elusive and slippery phenomenon, bound up with an evocative but fluid range of exotic place and personal names largely empty of specific significance – war as a concept devoid of any sense of horror, instead imbued with faraway excitement:

En gång mindes han att kriget hette Somme; en annan gång hette det Marne eller de Masuriska träsken. Det hette Joffre, Hindenburg, Beatty, Foch, Dreadnought och U-båtar, Lusitania och Emden och en gång mitt i alltsammans hette det Ford och Wilson. Det bytte namn och var ett fjärran äventyr och man blev aldrig riktigt klar över det – men det var inte hemskt på något sätt.

(8)

This type of attitude is given a generational significance in the narrative: “Ungefär så betraktade hans generation kriget” (5). On the other hand, some of the most poignant articulations in the narrative of the gruesome consequences of war, and of an embodied affective response to this, are attributable to Mattias’ perspective or eye-witness status. A strong case in point is a sequence that uses the topic of a temporary stop in the Northern town of a train transporting war-disabled through the country to symbolise the penetration of the horror of war into the apparently most removed of environments and mindsets:

En gång hade han sett ett invalidtåg gå förbi; man bytte offer. Det stannade vid stationen och han var där nere och tittade på dessa stympade människor ungefär som han varit ner och tittat på när kungen for förbi. En man bars i en låda: han saknade armar och ben och var blind. Det var ohyggligt fult att se honom. Det sög i magen, som när man står på en brant och tittar ner i en avgrund. Detta var kriget; men den sugande känslan i underlivet försvinner i den mån man avlägsnar sig från avgrunden.

(83)

While demonstrating the sway and radical mobility of the reality of war, its striking capability to make porous the boundaries even of a “neutral” country, the passage additionally exposes the problematic position of the both fascinated and appalled bystander and the risk of renewed distancing. The spatial imagery of approaching and then retreating from an abyss captures well Mattias’ ambivalent and fluctuating attitude to war.

In comparison, Mattias’ generational peer, Sigurd, one year his senior, feels and lives in a more profound and lasting manner the mental effects of war and of the “tense future” it threatens. Sigurd carries similarities with the ostracised figure of Yngve Björk from the story “Snickarprofessor Tantalus” in Johnson’s first book publication De fyra främlingarna.^[4] Sigurd, too, walks the streets of the town alone, with the controversial emblem of the book – or rather a whole assemblage of them – and the signs of inner turmoil setting him apart from his sourroundings: “Sigurd Bredlund […] var ute och vandrade med en packe böcker från biblioteket under armen och sugenhet och oro i blicken” (37–38). Sigurd may read as a representative of an intelligentsia deeply troubled by war. Although inhabiting the same peripheral environment, he is different from the large majority of townspeople, and from Mattias, by not subscribing to the view that their community is not involved in war, instead insisting on the transnational position that all of Europe shares the destiny of war: “Vi är med, varenda människa i Europa är med” (53). Having followed closely the development of the World War since its beginnings and discovered the scale of untruth war begets, Sigurd is a mouthpiece in the narrative for critical alternative analysis. This extends to challenging, while war is still ongoing, the myth of a punctual end to war. In contrast to Mattias, whose character is regularly employed to articulate a more conventional understanding – such as the belief that war is simply followed by peace – Sigurd’s gaze is already directed towards the destroyed world that will present a particular post-war difficulty for their generation: “– Tror du inte det blir svårare för – oss nu efter det här? sade Sigurd plötsligt och såg upp. […] Medan man håller på att lappa ihop världen igen? mumlade Sigurd” (52).

Sigurd’s concerns for the future and his troubled and hesitant speech resemble indicators of what Paul K. Saint-Amour terms pretraumatic stress in his aforementioned study. Sigurd’s astute analysis may, moreover, be aligned with the insights of scholars of history who, according to Saint-Amour, “insist that modern war and war powers have historically proven to be not punctual but durable, not exceptional but perpetual in their drift” (2015, 305). Sigurd’s anticipation of the future, damaged, condition of the European sphere may be illuminated further by Bertrand Westphal’s explication in Geocriticism that time impacts on the perception of space and that space is located at “the intersection of the moment and duration” ([2007], 137). While Westphal’s discussion of space and duration addresses the past strata of time on which a present surface of space rests, rendering it polychronic, it can be argued that Sigurd’s foreknowledge, especially when seen through the lens of Saint-Amour’s examination of modernism and time, suggests that space-related experience of duration may be future-orientated as well. Although Sigurd thus senses the future situation of the European world his generation will inhabit, his own future is cut short in the narrative. Sigurd is a significant figure in the novel in his role as a critic whose destiny it is to be “sidelined”. The exceptional insight and foresight he represents mean that there does not seem to be a lasting place for him in the local community. When he is killed in a traffic accident in which Mattias is implicated, Sigurd’s death seems on a symbolic level more than accidental. He is hit at nighttime on the outskirts of the town by an automobile driven by one of the profiteers, with Mattias in the passenger seat. Throughout the narrative, the motif of the automobile manoeuvring in local streetscapes is emblematic of the scheming presence and power of the men who profit from the illicit war-time economy. The profiteers embody a mentality that fails to empathise with the suffering and destruction caused by war. Thus, Sigurd’s critical voice seems to be silenced by the forces it opposes.

The third and final representative of the generation of 1900 in the novel, an unnamed student, could be regarded as a parallel figure to Sigurd in terms of the tenets of his assessment of the war and its afterlife and in terms of his association with death. The portrayal of him differs, however, with regard to narrative technique and tone. It is contained within one of three semi-freestanding segments of the novel that, under distinct headings and in more abstracted voices than are used elsewhere in the story, disrupt narrative continuity in a modernist way. The three segments are entitled “Om döden 1917”, “Karrikatyr av Gud Fader” and, fittingly, “Röster”. These segments are characterised by Jöran Mjöberg as “insprängda partier” (1977, 25) and considered as first instances of a fragmentising technique that flourishes in Johnson’s mature production and reflects the author’s modernist dislike of uniform narrative progression. Taken as a whole, Nittonhundrasjutton is informed by a pronounced pluralism of voice: in addition to the elaborate observations by its satirical external narrator (see next section), the novel features a range of declamatory passages in a variety of character voices, lending a dramatic quality to aspects of the novel. A case in point is the section in which the aforementioned student features, “Om döden 1917”. This juxtaposes the suicidal thought soliloquies of a working-class woman and a well-off male student, drawn towards death for social and ideological reasons respectively. While the woman, given national significance as “[e]n kvinna i Sverge” (90), considers life as valueless due to the starvation and bodily destruction that the condition of war causes in her own family and on a wider scale, the student has arrived at a similar conclusion – “O liv, […] du har inget värde” (93) – because he has lost faith in historical progress and the ability of mankind to create a successful society. Age indicators provide a strong signal that the character of the student is intended to be placed in a tight generational sequence with Mattias and Sigurd: we noted earlier that Mattias and Sigurd are identified as being 17 and 18 years old respectively in 1917, and we now learn that the student “föddes för nitton år sedan” (94). Like Sigurd, the student is sceptical of the dominant conception of Swedish peripherality as an immunity of sorts against the impact of war; and, like Sigurd, he foresees the scars that the war will leave on the century and on the post-war minds: “Jag undrar om man sluppit så billigt undan, som man tror. Vem vet vad århundradet får för märken av 1914, 1915, 1916 och 1917 års klor? Vem vet hur det ser ut i själarna när allt är överståndet?” (95). Again, we observe how a peripherally positioned character feels a critical futurity resulting from the long-term effects of war. Although the student’s suicide attempt, a gunshot to his head, does not kill him, it blinds him, perhaps indicating the disappearance in society of critical insight, paralleling Sigurd’s demise.

As the novel closes, even Mattias has become the target of a war-associated death threat and the object of a critical futurity, albeit of a personal nature, when his diagnosis with tuberculosis leads to a highly conflicted concentration on prospective time (also explored in an extended scene in which his aunt Hanna seeks out a female fortuneteller to find clues to her nephew’s fate): “Så är kriget: man får lungsot av det. [/] Vänta, bara jag blir frisk en gång! tänker han. Då är kanske kriget också slut. [/] Men om jag aldrig blir frisk? tänker han sedan” (221). Thus, Johnson’s novel utilises its trio of young males to destabilise notions of peripheral protection against war and death and to project ambiguity and damage into the interwar period.

Mixing the voices of satire

We shall now move on to discuss in more depth and detail the novel’s discursive design and fluid use of different types of narratorial voice as devices for satire and commentary on topics of community, economy and ideology. Such devices represent a formally experimental, de-familiarising dimension of Nittonhundrasjutton that contributes to the novel’s modernism. The role of polyphony, relativity and distance as aesthetical means of challenging fixed or false positions will be demonstrated.

We shall contend that three types of narratorial voice interact in the novel. The first voice belongs to an overarching, character-independent narrator who provides an intermittent critical commentary, informed by rich use of figurative language, on the wartime zeitgeist locally and nationally. This lends the novel a reflective and inquiring tone, making it at times border on what could be termed a novelistic essay. The discursive style used in the novel is also observed by Jöran Mjöberg, although his association of the reflective tone with a loss of tempo requires some qualification: “Tempot är påfallande långsamt, bestämt som det är av den reflekterande stilen” (1977, 26). If Mjöberg’s argument is that the reflective narrator’s voice serves to delay or disrupt conventional plot development, this seems valid; but the multifaceted contents and the inventive, at times burlesque delivery of the discursive passages should at the same time be recognised as an important source of energy in the novel. The second type of narratorial voice is of a collective nature. It is characterised by its role as a form of mouthpiece for a (frequently debatable) majority view belonging to the local town inhabitants. This function is regularly signified by use of the pronoun “man” (or occasionally “vi”). The third type of narratorial voice can be termed kaleidoscopic. Its role is to capture a pluralistic range of conflicting, often clichéd and self-serving, ideological or political positions. This represents a technique of multifocalisation and parody that works critically in a way that is different from the function of the overarching commentary of the narrator. The kaleidoscopic method critiques through relativising and subverting specific, strongly held singular viewpoints and through irreverently combining these mutually exclusive opinions into a chatter or whirlpool of voices.

It should be emphasised that the distinctions and transitions between the three narratorial modes proposed here are characterised by degrees of fluidity and slippage. Additionally, as shown in the previous section, the novel makes use of direct character oratory constituted by declamations of thought and feeling, at times grouping such declamations together. In the following, we shall exemplify, relatively briefly, the three types of narratorial voice we posit. In doing so, we shall also examine the treatment of topics of body politic, economy and ideology in the novel. And we shall conclude this section by comparing our own understanding of the role of satire in Nittonhundrasjutton with that of Jöran Mjöberg.

First we can observe that the overarching narrator’s commentary in the novel evidently contests conceptions of war as insignificant at the level of the local community and the “neutral” nation, instead lending further credence to the positions taken by outsider characters such as Sigurd and the student. War metaphors are made to work on the periphery, as in the following passage which uses tropes of military destruction of the natural environment and collapse of ecological consciousness to posit a transformation of mentality and economic behaviour that the condition of the World War brings about in the town and the nation: “Under denna tid glömde många människor bort hur blommor och träd egentligen sågo ut och lukten av sill, fläsk och pengar var för dem många gånger ljuvligare än doften av vildrosor och granskog. Det var som om en granat exploderat i en välorganiserad myrstack av själar” (19).

The leitmotif of the failing potato crop in the year of 1917 serves to symbolise a profound war-related change in the national and local body politic. The troubled state of the national economy of potato production is writ large upon the map of Sweden as in this statement that seems balanced between the elevated viewpoint of the narrator and the perspective of the population for which the narrator can act as a mouthpiece: “i stället för potatis ser [man] ett tomrum, stort som hela landet: brist” (2). In comparison, the following registration of bodily effects of war as experienced in a marginal country is unquestionably attributable to the voice of a national populace, recognisable by the use of the pronouns “vi” and “man” and also by elements of linguistic register: “Och vi voro neutrala. Det tråkiga i detta var att man fick kålrötter i stället för potatis. Man fick dålig mage. Man åt krig” (8). The food shortage identified in these passages means that physical and psychosomatic symptoms such as eczema and weight loss are prevalent in a proportion of the population. This is counterpointed in the novel by an emphasis on the dominant body mass of some of the profiteers such as Bredlund, Sigurd’s tellingly named uncle.

The kaleidoscopic method is equally in evidence throughout the narrative. A particular case in point is a prolonged separated text segment positioned centrally in the novel that presents and parodies conflicting political positions and expectations. These reflect a divided society that struggles to second-guess and agree on the future course that international and domestic politics should take. The segment is prefaced by a reflective observation that reads as a mission statement for the novel’s polyphonic and kaleidoscopic method: “En våg av mörker. [/] Ett brus av röster – och lyssnar man noga urskiljer man de särskilda stämmorna” (129). The segment proper works to suggest parallels between ideological beliefs that are in principle at contrasting poles of the political spectrum: pro-German and capitalist on the one hand, revolutionary on the other. Although the role of the transitional statement at the end of the first paragraph in the following citation is to suggest that the proponents of the latter ideology constitute the “inner enemy” of the former (and vice versa, one may suppose), the opposing ideologies share a range of attributes such as self-glorification, latent threat, underlying uncertainty, and overblown rhetoric, to which distance is shown by citation marks and capitalisation respectively:

Ännu hade inte “den modiga uppslutningen vid våra germanska bröders sida” kommit, men det transporterades mycket gott och närande och värmande och militärt användbart på alla möjliga sätt ur landet, och detta var en tröst för många, en källa till glädje och inkomster […]. Men snart kom kanske uppslutningen – och så hade man ju att tänka på den inre fienden, som enligt säkra uppgifter rustade till kamp.

Och den hade ännu inte kommit, Revolutionen, men den skulle komma, den var på väg. Den var Morgonen. Den var Den nya dagen, Den nya tiden. Och den var Det Eviga Vita Livet I Vitt. Den var också maskingevär och handgranater. Och den var milda tal, den var palmer i händerna på goda, leende människor, som förläto sina fiender. Och den var Stormen Som Befriar, Kvasten, som sopar rent med en enda gång. (129–130)^[5]

Through recurring application of the type of adaptable and chameleonic satirical voice we see at work in this passage, Johnson’s novel communicates a general scepticism about ideological thought as informed by simplistic ideals, rigid them-and-us oppositions and by fabrication of “truth”: “Tillverkningen av sanningar blev en livskraftig industri” (19). The novel demonstrates that fake ideologies and fake news proliferate when the engagement with international conflict zones is nourished by long distance.

Positioning Johnson as one of the foremost satirists of twentieth-century Swedish literature, Jöran Mjöberg reads the role of satire in Nittonhundrasjutton in ways that partly support and partly diverge from our own understanding. Insofar as the identification of satirical multidirectionality is concerned, there is agreement: Mjöberg observes that the satire in Nittonhundrasjutton “slår åt alla håll”, adding that “den är så mångsidig att man ibland får en känsla av en total relativism” (1977, 24). However, insofar as the assessment of the drivers and the effect of satirical relativism in the novel is concerned, Mjöberg’s understanding, of which the formulation of “total” relativism may already be suggestive, and our own analysis seem to differ somewhat. Mjöberg proposes a distinction between two types of satire in the narrative: he contrasts the satirical representation of a range of political ideologies as discussed above with a morally more absolute satire directed against the economic exploitation embodied by the black-market profiteers and against God’s nonchalant attitude to the suffering of mankind. Mjöberg interprets the latter form of satire as an expression of “en ung diktares renhjärtade förtrytelse” (1977, 25), whereas he considers the former, ideological, form an expression of Johnson’s relativistic outlook and “misantropiska hållning” (1977, 25). This would seem to imply that Johnson’s ideological critique in Nittonhundrasjutton is pessimistic in nature and offers the reader little hope. Instead, we would suggest approaching the kaleidoscopic ideological satire in the novel as a method (rather than an expression of a mindset) that indirectly offers up an alternative, positive, vision of political and social understanding as less blinkered, less antagonistic, less self-serving and more knowledge-based. This, in turn, would challenge Mjöberg’s binary typology of satire in the novel.

Our understanding of the role of satire in Nittonhundrasjutton allows us to align Johnson’s narrative with Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the polyphonic novel, whose cultural function is to give voices to conflicting ideological positions and thereby critique monologic thought. In his study entitled After Bakhtin, David Lodge sums up the workings of the polyphonic novel in the following way:

It was the destiny of the novel as a literary form to do justice to the inherent dialogism of language and culture by means of its discursive polyphony, its subtle and complex interweaving of various types of speech – direct, indirect and doubly-oriented (e. g. parody) – and its carnivalesque irreverence towards all kinds of authoritarian, repressive, monologic ideologies.

(Lodge 1990, 21)

Nittonhundrasjutton is indeed informed by an ideological irreverence that can border on the carnivalesque, and Johnson’s novel thereby offers hope.

Scale, space and social critique

In this final section, we shall explore the creative interplay in Nittonhundrasjutton between different geographical scales and zones. We shall exemplify, moreover, the novel’s inventive depiction of modern public institutions in a marginal locality and beyond. It is noteworthy that the application of spatial satire and critique moves freely between local, national and, occasionally, Scandinavian levels of representation, while a satirised heavenly sphere makes a cameo appearance. This causes a proliferation of focal centres in the narrative and contributes to creating a degree of what Betrand Westphal terms deterritorialisation, which is manifested when “the representation of a space lies at the crossroads of diverse views” ([2007], 137).

The relation between the local and the national focus in Johnson’s novel is regularly one of expressing similar phenomena on different scales and in varying degrees of abstraction. What is fleshed out in the particularity of a place in the local townscape acquires a more pluralised, stylised and symbolic articulation on the national level. This, in return, bestows typicality back upon the local phenomenon. A prominent case in point is the local town hotel, which is at the centre of the novel’s spatial satire. A highly recurring setting, it is bound up with the war period’s underground capitalism. It is a social bastion, but also an illicit trading house, for the men of the black-market economy: “De sutto där” (186). The hotel’s official policy in relation to the war and to the conflicting loyalties (towards Germany or France in particular) of its customers is to be strictly neutral and above board, “stället var strängt neutralt” (28), thus mirroring the status of the nation. However, the hotel façade is a cover for the discreetly expressed activities of the profiteers, described as “vissa personer som sålde vissa varor” (34). In a poignant instance of elevation of perspective from the singularity of the local to the seriality of the national, it is made clear that efforts to gain economically from the condition of war, in spite of alleged neutrality, are not confined to a particular place but constitute a feature of the state of the nation. Within a critical national cartography that reveals centres of dubious commerce and secret pockets of power spread across the country, the town hotel is multiplied into a satirical graphics of national “beacons”:

Här på Stadt flockade sig jobbarna samman. På Stadten över hela riket, där fanns en smula av makten och en god del av härligheten under dessa år, de voro fyrar, ljuspunkter, och om man överblickade dessa små stadshotell kunde man på ett ungefär se hur landet låg. På Stadt åts, söps och gjordes affärer.

(21)

A similar summarising function of the national level of depiction is in evidence when the majority of the population’s experience of shortage of food supply (contrasting with the extravagant and provocative life style of the profiteers) is condensed into “Och hela svenska folket stod i kö” (85), or when the peripheral reach of war is figured as the shadow that the potato shortage casts across the land: “Potatisbristen var en skugga av kriget i fjärran” (8).

The closer scrutiny of the unjust distribution of food is conducted on the local level, where the bureaucracy and malfunctioning of municipal food management agencies such as the “livsmedelskommission” and the “kortbyrå”, in charge of rationing, are laid bare. Two significant female figures in the novel, Mattias’ religiously leaning mother, referred to as Mamma throughout the narrative, and particularly her assertive, and atheist, cohabiting sister Hanna are instrumental in confronting the agencies. While not fully escaping the novel’s satirical force, Hanna is an important mouthpiece for war critique and for the exposure of double standards in the administration of the town. She manoeuvres confidently within the institutional landscape of the locality, penetrating in variant scenes the barriers of the rationing office in order to claim that food supplies are being haemorrhaged both to the profiteers and to Germany and to encourage fellow town inhabitants to participate in food rebellions like those taking place elsewhere in the country: “På andra ställen har man åtminstone hungerkravaller” (126). The food agencies form part of an assemblage of public places employed in the novel to capture the diversity of a modern urban environment in the North: the grammar school, the Social Democratic “Folkets Hus”, the Salvation Army building, the “Missionshus” of the free church and, of course, the town hotel.

As shown, the relationship between local and national focus in the novel is frequently one of similarity in subject matter but difference in mode and particularity of depiction. Occasionally, however, the relationship between local and national environment is one of difference and distance, of critical national mass left un-impacted by “minor” and marginal local events. When the local community of profiteers begins to self-destruct towards the end of the novel, three men among their ranks are lost, through suicide, homicide and imprisonment respectively. However, the vacuum they leave behind is barely registered on the national level: “Efter dem uppstod onekligen ett litet tomrum, men Sverges land blev dock inte fattigare; det märktes knappast i den stora massan” (201). This statement displays a technique used to disappoint and satirise ideas of wider local significance – and to pass a moral judgement through the juxtaposition of spatial frames.

However, notions of national, even Scandinavian significance are challenged, too. The Scandinavian sphere can serve in the narrative as a macro articulation of peripherality into which the nation is subsumed. In the following, the wintry metaphor of being drifted over suggests an atmosphere of dormancy and detachment and of going unnoticed on a greater scale: “Möjligheternas värld: så liten. Ett land, som Sverge, en bit av Skandinavien, som vintern snart skall driva över. Tänker man på det därute?” (207). A similar sense of disappearance from the European map is evoked in the fragmentary “headline” register that Johnson favours as an intermittent stylistic device: “Mörker över Skandinavien” (86). The association of the Scandinavian domain with confinement, despite its size, and with limited opportunity finds a full-blown formulation when the longing away that seizes Mattias towards the end of the narrative stipulates a dividing line between, on the one hand, the Scandinavian countries combined and, on the other hand, a wider field of perceived real freedom that the war has rendered out of reach: “Möjligheternas lilla värld, som inte var mer än Sverge, Norge och Danmark; utanför de murarna var det svårare att komma” (180). This may also read as containing an underlying prospect of the post-war relaxation of barriers of travel and exchange that would inform the period in which the novel was conceived.

The divine sphere, finally, offers little comfort either. It is parodied in one of the aforementioned divergent segments of the narrative. The segment in question, “Karrikatyr av Gud Fader”, may be viewed as allowing Johnson to showcase in short form the cosmic counter-perspective that was intended as a fundamental experimental feature of the novel known in manuscript form as Herr Clerk vår mästare but which had to be sacrificed in the novel’s published form entitled Minnas (1928).^[6] The cosmic segment presents a caricature of a disengaged deity captured asleep during the wartime: “Nittonhundrasjutton, i slutet av juli månad, satt han på ett moln och sov” (147). The key function of the cosmic sphere is to provide a “receiver” in space for a growing polyphony of complaints and requests emanating from the novel’s core localities, the nation and the northern town. The effect of this technique is to both centre on and defamiliarize the novel’s marginal setting. Ultimately, however, the requests leave little impact on the drowsy divine figure whose deep temporal knowledge of mankind’s misery seems to render him insensitive to specific suffering.

As the novel closes, escalating hostilities and fatalities are evident on the peripheral “battle field”, with the town itself becoming a scene of war of sorts between the profiteers. The collapse of their power and their mindsets is symbolised by the motif of the infesting rats they delusionally fear and even believe to observe in their environments. The collapse may be a pointer to positive change. And there are other small signs of repair, although still rather cautiously or slightly satirically expressed. The contrastive and combative character constellation of Mamma and Hanna thus begins to acquire features of what may be the future shape of a solidary pairing: the sisters abandon their mutually exclusive fixed and circumscribed positions and approach each other more truthfully in their weariness of war. In a similar challenge to antagonistic and binary thinking, two minor characters, who have belonged to opposing Germany- and France-supporting camps in the town, begin to socialise. Remaining faithful to its leitmotif to the end, the novel uses its final, poetical and ambiguous, scene to combine a melancholic sense of supplies running out with a soothing vertical axis: “En fin dag i dag. Så hög himmel, hög och sval. Ute på åkrarna går folk böjda över den klibbiga jorden, hackar och rotar och tar upp sista potatisen” (221).

Through its unique techniques and rare subject matter, Eyvind Johnson’s little-known novel offers an original depiction of the difficult and fractious reality of wartime as it is lived and felt hundreds of kilometres from the core war zone. The novel stands out in Swedish literature,^[7] while also pointing forward to the author’s major breakthrough work, Romanen om Olof (1934–37), similarly set in the north of Sweden during the First World War.