Creation Technology: Writing as Philosophical Problem in Lars Gustafsson’s Novels 1962-1986

1 In Search of a New Context: Följeslagarna

The first time we are presented with someone lacking inspiration in their writing, it is on the part of an Uppsala doctoral student in philosophy. The 1962 novel Följeslagarna starts with its protagonist, Per Grille, having ceased believing in his discipline’s dominant methodology: “att försöka avlägsna alla filosofiska problem genom att visa att de byggde på konstigheter, misstag”.^[4] Now a problem emerges which cannot seemingly be thus dismissed: where does the I end and the world begin? In which of the two categories do traces left in a person by memories, perceptions, and thoughts belong?^[5] These prove insurmountable difficulties for a dissertation on free will. Grille’s writing grinds to a halt.

In Följeslagarna, the question of writing is broached together with that of context. This is the case for Grille’s philosophical project. Besides the issue on which his dissertation strands – how to contextualise an acting subject – his (very unorthodox) philosophical forte consisted in uncovering hidden links, that is, seeing “samband där ingen annan såg dem” (13). It is also the case with reference to his life. All of a sudden, Grille finds himself dispossessed of his academic and professional contexts. For at the same time as his doctoral project founders, he loses his day-job as a church organist. In a short space of time, he is deprived of his two communities. With the State Church he loses his pay cheque, and with academic philosophy his worldview: “Därmed kände Per Grille det som om själva grundvalarna för allt det som han hade varit de senaste åren ryckts undan under honom” (19). He is now on his own: “Jag har upptäckt att jag på något sätt står utanför världen” (45).

The adventure can begin. Följeslagarna plays with different genre conventions, mixing the coming-of-age story with mystery and adventure fiction (Agrell 1993, 62, 72, 84). Lured on to the continent, Grille embarks on a trip to an unknown destination. By a stranger on a boat, he is given a document with an unknown content that seemingly sets obscure forces in motion. At one point he is (maybe) nearly killed! But the document – both the protagonist and reader learn on the last pages – turns out to be blank. The mystery does not exist here. It takes place elsewhere, namely in the search for a definition of context.

The continental adventure offers him and the reader takes on contexts drawn from traditions at odds with local, philosophical orthodoxy. One’s context can, the narrator tells us, transcend the historical moment to comprise all past and future events. It can, for this reason, be invisible and impossible to grasp let alone survey. To entertain such a possibility is, needless to say, more often done in theological discourses on a divine perspective than in Uppsala’s analytic language philosophy (165).^[6] And as such it chimes with what Grille had been promised to experience during his journey – creation (78). At first this term evokes mostly culture, past and present (109–110); the trip is described as a “bildningsresa” (194) and its protagonist, with his anti-metaphysical worldview, cast as atheist. But eventually the term starts suggesting something more expansive, something which includes the natural world and a sense of the cosmos. His most influential experience of creation, for instance, takes place at a zoo. That experience leads him to an idiosyncratic appreciation of the Fall (239) and to a sense of there being a larger whole in which he is inserted, a context which goes beyond appearances and chatter to the hidden depths of creation (227).

Here the discovery of a context in Creation is a self-reflexive part of the narrative. As we have seen, it is upon the loss of his original Uppsala context that Grille grows curious about creation. It is an interest which not only sets him on a journey but sets in motion the narration itself. For once the protagonist chooses the adventure, the narrator tells us that “långsamt tar vår berättelse [nu därmed] sin början” (24). Within the frame of the novel, the creation of the narrative is linked to the interest in the creation of the cosmos. As the narrator lets Grille tell us, “skapelsen […] finns mig förutan – och ändå kan jag spegla hela den” (226). Instead of delimiting the I from the world, as in Grille’s dissertation, the novel entangles the I in cosmic creation.^[7] Instead of, like its protagonist initially, dismissing the applicability and validity of intellectual history, it mobilises that history’s most holistic categories.

Before moving on to works in which the question of context is posed with a direct reference to the narrator’s own writing (and not merely as here indirectly to the protagonist’s), I’ll pause here to consider Grille’s choices – his repudiation of local philosophy, indifference to State-Church religiosity, and interest in creation. This will set up my later discussion of the way in which the uses of technology in Gustafsson’s subsequent novels depart from the dominant mode in the Swedish secularisation thesis. For, as I aim to show below, with Grille’s choices Följselagarna addressed key features of its time-period’s social imaginary, in particular the conceptualisations of technology co-constitutive of the postwar social order.^[8]

2 The Disenchantment Consensus

Born a few hours west of Stockholm, Följeslagarna’s Per Grille went – like Gustafsson himself – to read philosophy at Uppsala university in the 1950s. The Uppsala philosophy department was the crucible of ‘värdenihilism’, a local version of logical positivism, which, together with the imported ordinary language philosophy, came to dominate Swedish philosophy (Strang 2021). At the time of Grille’s arrival to the department, its most famous professor was Ingmar Hedenius.

Prominent in the public sphere, Hedenius had a few years prior instigated a divisive debate about the difference between belief and knowledge. It started with Hedenius, a famous atheist, frontally attacking the truth claims in theology. In the name of enlightened rationality, he assessed the logical viability of the work by contemporary Swedish theologians. These theologians responded, but to little avail; Hedenius established the lasting definitions (Thurfjell 2019, 97–8). While the Church remained part of the State, theologians and clergy saw their discursive position enduringly marginalised (Jansson 2020) – a situation well encapsulated by Grille who, though atheist, saw no contradiction in his working for the Church.

Besides thus questioning the credibility of ontological lines of inquiry, Hedenius rebuked metaphysical speculation also through other means. He was, for instance, among the most prominent proponents of ‘kulturradikalism’. Often remembered for its principled, if ultimately vain, opposition to the monarchy and the state church, the current broadly shaped postwar society by defining the vision and aims for the rapidly expanding state apparatus. Guided by a utilitarian ethos, the cultural radicals advocated for the importance of technical expertise (Runeby 1985, 298–300). Social and political developments should, they believed, be driven by what was called “ett kalkylerande förnuft” (Wiklund 2006, 156). As a result, it became, as Följeslagarna scornfully notes, “en på yttre nyttigheter hårt koncentrerad tidsålder” (18).

While the term itself was of Scandinavian provenance and the network ensuring its postwar prominence Swedish, ‘kulturradikalism’ was inspired by trends abroad. As the belief in a calculating rationality betrays, a crucial source of such inspiration was the so-called ‘secularisation thesis’. Becoming an all but common-sense position among postwar western European architects of social policy, the ‘secularisation thesis’ is often seen to originate in the dying days of the First World War, namely in Max Weber’s article “Science as Vocation” (1917) (Gordon 2013, 173; Saler 2006, 692–716; Saler 2013).^[9]

Examining the work and social role of university faculty, Weber here paid particular attention to the inspiration for and impact of research. Routinely grinding away at the same problem does not, he believed, precipitate scholarly breakthroughs. Novel ideas rather “occur to us when they please, not when it pleases us” (Weber 1958, 113).^[10] The work of a scientist in that sense resembles that of an artist, for it too depends upon fleeting moments of inspiration, upon unaccountable sources. But it also differs. For, unlike art, it is “chained to the course of progress” (115). “Every scientific ‘fulfilment’ […] asks to be ‘surpassed’ ” (116). This raises the question why anyone would engage “in doing something that in reality never comes, and never can come, to an end” (116). To suggest why, Weber homes in on its impact. “Scientific progress is”, he asserts, “a fraction, the most important fraction, of the process of intellectualization [and rationalisation], which we [in the West] have been undergoing for thousands of years” (116).

This process is often misunderstood. It does not mean that his Western contemporaries had “a greater knowledge of the conditions of life under which [they] exist than has an American Indian or a Hottentot [sic] [:] […] The savage [sic] knows incomparably more about his tools” (116–7). The average Europeans did not know how, say, a tram worked. Nor did they need to: they could rest content with counting on the tram’s functionality and reliability. “The increasing intellectualisation and rationalisation do not,” Weber concludes, “[…] indicate an increased and general knowledge of the conditions under which one lives” (117, my emphasis). What it does suggest is rather:

The knowledge or belief that if one but wished one could learn it any time. Hence, it means that principally there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation […] One need no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master or implore the spirits, as did the savage [sic], for whom such mysterious powers existed. Technical means and calculations perform the service. (117, my italicisations, original underlining)

This process of rationalisation leads to what Weber famously called “the disenchantment of the world” (133). What is especially important for this article is that the latter concept opposes a mastery of the world to mysteries within it and that it gives techno-scientific progress a crucial role in ensuring such mastery. Calculating rationality, it suggests, drives out the lingering mysteries of enchanted, that is animistic, worldviews.

When thus contrasting the cosmologies of Indigenous peoples to the worldview of the modern West, Weber was not original. Behind his opposition we can glimpse the kind of global, social–evolutionary schema pervading early anthropology. With his term disenchantment – originally Entzauberung, which literally suggest a de-magification (Karlberg 1980, 1146) – he followed the likes of Edward Tylor, James George Frazer, and even his French counterpart Emile Durkheim. These founders of British and French anthropology cast ‘enchanted’ worldviews as historically inferior and overcome in the West. For, while Tylor, Frazer, and Durkheim and others may have differed on whether there were lines of continuity stretching to contemporary Europe, and if so whether these led to the latter’s science or religion, they all defined magic and animism as atavistic remnants (Tambiah 1990, 45–53, 70; Hanegraaff 2016, 393–9).

As a concept, ‘disenchantment’, nonetheless, had an enormous impact. Subsuming a philosophical (onto-epistemological) question – can we know the conditions under which we live? – under a (Whig) historically informed, political assertion – techno-scientific advancements can control such conditions – it conceptualised the increasing tendency to collapse the distinction between what had previously been considered the means (technical innovations) and the end (intellectual enlightenment) of historical progress (Marx 1997, 977–8). As such it came to form the basis not only of the so-called ‘secularisation thesis’. By the post-war era, it also bolstered the social scientific paradigm of modernisation theory (Gordon 2013, 173–4). Symbolically in Sweden the two may have most famously met in the figure of Hedenius, with his mixture of ‘värdenihilism’ and ‘kulturradikalism’ (Ljunggren 2009, 40–3). But in reality their reach went way beyond both philosophy and positivist architects of social policy. They drove the expansion of – what Georg Henrik von Wright, in a rare early Swedish-language critique, called – “en teknologisk livsform” (von Wright [1963] 1978, 68). Their core ideas were even propounded by theologians.

If protestant theologians had long dismissed magic (Hanegraaff 2012) and curtailed miracles (Tambiah 1990, 16–7), come the postwar period some now did so within a Weberian horizon. In Sweden certain theologians even interpreted ‘creation’ as a kind of secularising rationalisation. In the late 1940s and early 1950s debate about faith and knowledge, Hedenius attacked the most significant theologians (Jansson 2018, 3–4). The rising star on the Swedish theological firmament, the Lund professor Gustaf Wingren, went under the radar. In fact, Wingren did not address the question of secularisation until the mid-1960s; and when he finally did, at which point he had become a public figure whose books reached a wide audience, it was with reference to the West-German debate, not the Swedish. It was especially Friedrich Gogarten, and his intra-theological definition of secularisation, which caught Wingren’s attention (Wingren [1967], 1970, 79–89). In Wingren’s rendition, Gogarten noted that the Latin West is alone in placing ‘man’ as master of nature. But for him, unlike for Weber, who traced its origins to Greek philosophy, this starts in the belief in creation in the Genesis, that is, in that God created the world, which Adam then is set to rule. The assumption that the world is “nur Welt”, that is, mere matter, is, according to Gogarten, the start of secularisation (Wingren 1970, 82).

Wingren integrates this line of reasoning into his own current, creation theology. To him, the meaning of creation was not confined to a biblical event; it was an on-going process, a process with cosmic and civilisational import (Anderson 2006, 82; Wingren [1967] 1970, 66). Wingren often framed this process with the help of the Lutheran imperative to work in a calling. The latter requires everyone to work in the service of one’s neighbour. As such it, according to Wingren, ensures the means of existence; its structure of care makes society possible (Wingren [1942] 1993, 169–170). This is especially so, he believed, for a society, such as the Swedish, set in an austere, even hostile natural environment (Kristensson Uggla 2011, 54, 63).

With his definition of work in a calling, Wingren’s stresses are at odds with Weber’s in his take on research-work in a calling. Like artistic creation, scientific breakthroughs are, according to Weber, made possible by moments of inspiration which fleetingly comes to us from the outside, from unaccountable sources. As such they differ from the internalised duty of serving one’s neighbour: where the former arrives as a gift, the latter is imposed as a task (Wingren 1944, 288–292).

And yet the assumed impact is similar. Wingren’s creation theology maps the emergence of what, Mircea Eliade around this time called, homo faber (Eliade [1956], 2018, 249–254): the internalised sense of a calling has, Wingren claims, in Sweden enabled economic prosperity, industrial prowess and efficient state bureaucracy (Berggren and Trägårdh 2015, 379–380). As such creation theology gives little credit to beliefs in the living, animated cosmos of what Eliade cast as an ideal-typical homo religiousus (Eliade [1957], 2023). Following Gogarten, Wingren explicitly denied nature any mysterious forces; he writes off such beliefs as non-Western (Wingren [1967] 1970, 82). There is also no mention of the sacred encounters which Eliade named hierophanies (Eliade [1957] 2023, 25–8). A sacred dimension is rather to be found in that mastery of nature and creation of society to which the calling has led. For in creating within a vocation, and doing so daily, humans are also that through which God works; human actions are God’s media (Wingren [1942], 1993, 13, 156, 173). Wingren has thus by some been seen to propose a gospel of work (Stolt 2004, 39, 51); if read in light of his later statements on the calling’s social importance, some passages of his could even be said to proselytise productivism. He surely played his part in establishing the “economic theology” (Nelson 2017, 189) which trained the time-period’s gaze on utility and reduced the space for critical reflections on the larger role of technology.^[11]

Symbolically, by granting the industrial economy a role in his take on creation, Wingren pushed Grille’s search abroad. Conceivably, he may also have contributed to more enduringly diverting Gustafsson’s attention away from the possibilities found in local archives. For instance, when wishing to rethink time and space in a non-fictional essay half a decade later, Gustafsson turned to an ancient Catholic tradition and its categories of eternity and verticality.^[12] A sense of intellectual alienation also persisted in his subsequent novels, informing their focus, and take, on their narrators’ writing.

As we will see in the next three sections, Gustafsson’s 1970s novels ‘stage’ the peripheral nature of their concerns. They not only employ narrators who explicitly compose their narratives from foreign vantage points – Italy in Herr Gustafsson själv, Berlin in Sigismund, Texas in Tennisspelarna – and who again look for conceptual inspiration abroad (if this time predominantly to contemporary technology scholars). If set in Sweden, these novels also make their tortuous emergence central to the story. Indeed, once the narratives of Gustafsson’s novels move home and stress work (i.e. writing), an obstacle to their very inception seems to be posed by the similarities across the a-theist divide due to the ‘disenchantment consensus’. To find crevices in the anti-metaphysical, ‘rational’ armour of the local consensus turned out, in other words, not only to be hard; within the frame of the first studied novel, it would even need a miracle.

3 The Miracle of Inspiration: Herr Gustafsson själv

As the 1960s drew to a close Gustafsson moved the position of his narrators from third- to first-person. But the critical edge, autobiographical themes and grand designs remained. As a new decade dawned, he embarked on his largest project: writing five novels, which, as the series’ name suggests, explored Sprickorna i muren through narrators who, while always called Lars and sharing birth dates and childhoods with the author himself, experienced diverging life trajectories. In the first chapter of the first novel, Herr Gustafsson själv (1971), the narrator conceptualises the project as a “sorgearbete”, which the novel eventually lets a character explain thus: “Heideggers ‘Sorge’ […är] ett sätt på vilket man kan förhålla sig, ett sätt att existera. Och i ordet ligger på en gång både ‘omsorg’ och ‘sorg’. Att stå i ett aktivt, ett intresserat förhållande till yttervärlden innebär samtidigt en smärta, en sorg över att finnas till” (Gustafsson 1973, 119).^[13]

Unsurprisingly, putting that to paper proved taxing. Herr Gustafsson själv ends with the narrator starting to write the narrative we have just finished reading – and it is a narrative whose arc traces the narrator’s attempt to articulate what his ‘sorg’ consists of, his attempts to work out how to correctly define how he cares for and grieves the world. The main thrust of the narrative and the crucial obstacle for its articulation, the narrator notes, is that:

Jag tyckte mig urskilja två samhällen i ett och samma. Ett glansfullt, maktfullkomligt [samhälle …] instängt rörde sig dess administratörer och finjusterare av dess balanser och kugghjul i sitt språk som var maktens språk och som samtidigt uttryckte dess harmoni, dess förnuftighet, dess ändamålsenlighet. Och ett annat samhälle [….] Jag tyckte mig se ett bortträngt, ett undre samhälle, befolkat av människor vilkas värden var hotade på samma oklara, på samma paralyserande och oåtkomliga sätt som mina egna värden kändes hotades (152–3).

On one side, we find splendour, glory and instrumental rationality, that is, the society, built by the Swedish adherents of a modernisation theory, whose state’s means had become its own end. On the other we have something suppressed and somehow threatened, something which for that reason was hard to grasp, something which, due to its elusive nature, the narrator does not quite manage to capture in words, something on the cusp of being inaccessible.

As readers we get to partake in the narrator’s repeated attempts to fix the line of social division. More anecdotal passages are interspersed with high theoretical reflection, lending the text a collage-like quality. Not seldom are the philosophical passages contradicting each other. So he restarts. A refrain throughout (repeated five times) is “Jag börjar om igen. Vi ger oss inte” (94, 131, 142 and in slightly modified form 86, 133). What he is trying to get to is his sense that the division runs not only in society but also within us. “Vi äger inte oss själva och därför lever vi våra maskers liv” (144), he believes. ”Denna maktens yttre ordning […] ockuperar våra inre, våra levande liv” (146). The narrator paints a picture of a close to all-encompassing alienation. At once occupied by foreign forces and ideologically interpellated by them, we are confronted by ourselves as someone or something foreign.

As part of a first-person narrative, such a claim is not just about the general situation; it also describes the narrator’s personal predicament. From 1969 onwards, he confesses to no longer recognising himself in his public persona, as the author and journalist Lars Gustafsson; he does not recognise himself in his mask: “I varje tidning såg emot mig någon som påstods vara jag, men som inget annat var än […] ett slags inbegrepp av all slags kyla, abstraktion och fanskap” (42). He felt as were he a pawn in a larger game.

But when describing this (metaphorical) game, his take differs from much contemporary social criticism. His main aim was not to denounce an overreaching welfare state bureaucracy.^[14] It was rather to bring out the inner logic of a technocratic worldview: “de känsliga ur som mitt i staternas inre utmäter tiden” (35), “de fina ur […]”, which, while “obönhörligt ticka[n]de […] vidare i sin säkra, newtonska tid” (37), set the parameters for “världens lagbundna ordning” (35), the predictable, reliable on-going process of rationalisation. This logic, the narrator seems to suggest, was not made to the measure of humans. For in that order, technical devices set the rhythm: “Jag upplevde mig själv som en mekanisk varelse [… som någon] som följer sitt fastställda program” (13). His masks had machinal attributes.

The narrator casts himself as confined by an ideology, which, to put it in the words of his near contemporary, Jacques Ellul, had created “the kind of world the machines need” (Ellul 1967, 5). Indeed, as for Ellul, technical developments are not here only understood with reference to actual devices. They are seen to have engendered a social organisation where the question of means has usurped one of ends (Ellul 1967, 12). That transposition was “maktens grammatik” (144); mastery was its way of being.

So what, we may wonder, had nonetheless empowered the narrator to write down his impressions? “Det har i mitt liv vid två eller tre tillfällen inträffat underverk”, the narrator at one point notes, and “[…] ett av dessa underverk inträffar nu” (24–5). In this case it takes the form of a chance meeting (in an aeroplane bound for Berlin) as a consequence of which he understands that “världen är inte död och förstenad” (96). With its help he (once safely arrived in Italy and thus even further away from Sweden) dares to take on the task of writing this novel; that meeting jolts him out of his ideologically-induced dogmatic slumber.

But while it enables him to write, the narrator does not elaborate on the implications of such impetuous for his worldview. In fact, he wants to keep such questions at arm’s length. When the miracle of inspiration arrives, he does his best to shield himself:

Jag har [alltid] vägrat tro på [underverk], därför att de medför konsekvenser i alla ens andra trosföreställningar, antaganden om gudomligheter, makter, undre och övre storheter som mitt förnuft inte behärskar. Att tro på underverk leder snabbt i en okontrollerbar irrationalism, ett system av ordningar bortom människan som är mig skrämmande och förbjudet (24–5).

The narrator resists the impulse to rely on such perspectives to think through his predicament; however undesirable a machinal logic may be, a Newtonian, linear time and an instrumentally domesticated environment formed the unassailable horizon. When working on the same theme in a non-fictional essay a decade later, Gustafsson gives a clue as to why:

‘Att låta något fall sig in’, är ett uttrycksätt som på ett väldigt fint sätt fångar det element av nåd, lycklig tillfällighet, gåva, nästan utifrån, som är förknippad med de verkligt goda idéerna. Det kommer till oss, men vi måste tillåta det att komma. Det finns något djupt oroande i att öppna portarna för den egna ingivelsen … därför att det alltid hotar världens fasthet och sammanhang att för sig själv medge att man kan se samma värld på många sätt.

Such dread to open “ingivelsens portar”, he insists, is not psychological but philosophical, indeed metaphysical (Gustafsson 1985, 149, his emphasis).

This suggests that, while depicting the adverse effects of a development driven by a technocratic modernisation theory, in Herr Gustafsson själv the narrator is not quite ready to abandon its twin, the secularisation thesis: the unaccountable forces beyond the disenchantment paradigm are still to be kept conceptually at bay. And yet he has opened the door to their possible effect; he has, meanwhile, linked them to literary creation. In Sigismund (1976), Gustafsson’s next novel with a narrator struggling to write, that link will come further into focus. And with it fractures the solidity of the world order of calculating rationality. What Weber had cast as a constitutive feature, the reliability of its tools and procedures, gives way. Instead of turning the narrator into a mechanical being, that feature, once destabilised, emancipates his imagination.

4 The Animation of the Metaphor: Sigismund

Like in Herr Gustafsson själv, Sigismund’s narrator feels alienated. This thwarts his creativity. He suffers from a writer’s block. As readers, we get to experience, in what comes off as in real time, how he unblocks his writing. Like in Herr Gustafsson själv, the now of Sigismund is the narrator (based in West-Berlin) composing the text. It is an extended present moment. When the narrator looks up from his writing, he notices that: “Jag måste ha varit här i månader utan att lagt märke till det”;^[15] “sedan ett par månader var det eftermiddag” (138). Writing is, “kort sagt, en egendomlig konst” (19, my emphasis). With its help “när världen blir för tröttsam, för ansträngande eller i största allmänhet för djävlig lämnar jag den” (19).

Sigismund comes with an aesthetic programme. In a sort of preface, its narrator renounces mimetic literature’s aim to give the reader a sneak peek of an otherwise hidden nook in society. As illustration of his own, in lieu of the keyhole (36), he suggests the mirror (13). That is slightly misleading insofar as a mirror seems tied to a representational discourse. What we find here is rather a kind of poiesis.^[16] For what his textual ‘mirror’ reflects is the narrator at work. The novel invites the reader to witness his egendomliga konst through a practice which, rather than depicting the cracks in the wall, performs them in what comes off as a kind of freely associative day-dreaming made possible by an oddly autonomous typewriter. This novel therefore features no miracle. The narrator is not in need of any to get to areas of life escaping secular mastery. That happens on its own. For what constitutes the curious aspect of his art practice is that every haphazard whim, every analogy, every metaphor, which the narrator happens to express, eventually comes to life.

One such case concerns the narrator himself. Like in Herr Gustafsson själv, the narrator in Sigismund (here too called Lars Gustafsson) describes how he does not recognise himself in his public persona. It is, he notes “som om någon annan hade hållit reda på mitt liv i mitt ställe, medan jag själv var någon annanstans” (17). As if someone else represented him, a “ställföreträdare[ ]” (18). For, when writing on his typewriter, he feels “ungefär lika verklig som det förtorkade skellettet av Kung Sigismund [III Wasa] […] i Domkyrkan under Kungaborgen i Krakow”(18). It even makes him wonder “vem som [egentligen] har hand om min själ” (20).

What starts as a figure of speech – “som om” – soon takes on a life of its own. The narrator has entered what play scholars describe as the magic circle of the game (Huizinga 1968, 12–8). Something which he soon regrets: “JAG SKULLE ALDRIG HA INFÖRT DEN DÄR OLYCKSALIGA METAFOREN MED SIGISMUND; den förföljer mig” (39). He now feels obliged to “berätta hur jag försvann och hur jag hamnade i en marmorsarkofag i Krakows domkyrka” (23). There seems only to be one solution: “Vi släpper ut [Sigismund]!” (212) Once resurrected, it does not take long until Sigismund finds his way to the narrator’s apartment. So on the last pages of the novel, Sigismund rings on his door. “Unge man”, he tells him, “det är på tiden att rycka upp sig! Unge man, tidens orm ömsar skin, förstår han det, unge man?” (284).

What happens here with the arrival of the double in many ways conform to what Freud called the uncanny. It marks a momentary loss of the certainties underpinning the disenchanted worldview in that it blurs the distinctions between dead and alive, animate and inanimate, human and machine (Freud [1919] 1971, 235–249). But this passage is not affectively uncanny: it blurs these distinctions in the way a fairy tale – or indeed a game – does. The narrator is astonished, expressing a sense of wonder, but not terror or fright. Expressed through a conscious daydream, not a subconscious (night) dream, this is not a traumatic return of a repressed possibility.

The novel does not shut down the attempt at bridging the gap which separates the narrator from the narrative, the writer from what is written. If anything, it, by asking the reader to joyfully suspend disbelief, welcomes the narrator’s loss of control of his typewriter; the loss marks the end to his sense of alienation and to his suffering a writer’s block! Once immersed in the ludic logic of his literary construction, where the text participates in its own creation, his writing rather starts working too well. His typewriter has finally become what it has always been in many European languages: a writing machine.

Sigismund’s animation is not merely a ‘metaphor’ for this situation; it is its matrix metaphor. The narrator thus entertains the possibility that tools can functions as, what Latour would call, mediators and not only as intermediaries of messages, that they inform, rather than merely transport, meaning, indeed that they even may possess agency, may be ‘actants’.^[17] Such mediations put in doubt the belief in that techno-scientific advancements really imply a mastery of the spiritual and physical environment (Latour 1993, 76–9, Davis 2004, 15–6). By subverting an instrumental definition of technology, they bring the focus back on the question, which the disenchantment paradigm had bracketed, about knowing the conditions under which we live.

With reference to the re-emergence of this previously subordinate onto-epistemological question, it should be acknowledged that what the narrator calls his egendomliga konst also can denote a kind of knowledge practice: besides art, konst can in this context equally mean ability.^[18] For the author (not narrator) Gustafsson, the two were inseparable. His novels formed part of what he in an interview called a tradition of “cognitive modernism”. His literary experimentations were, he claimed, “epistemological” (Endres and Gustafsson 1991, 122). As “experiments of thought”, they try articulating “that which is not there” (Endres and Gustafsson 1991, 130). As Herrmann has argued, in Gustafsson’s works the ambition is not to faithfully reproduce a reality but to explore its possibilities, not to produce closed mimetic spaces but to open up space for alterity (2001, 149–150). We could maybe add, with specific reference to Sigismund, that the experiments point to that which the dominant means of perception are blind. Continuing a tendency identified by Agrell already in Gustafsson’s 1960s novels (1993, 50–62), they ask the reader to consider new ways of seeing and – as emphasised by the double – of being seen.

In its way of employing tools to do so here, Sigismund introduced a line of thinking which would continue in Gustafsson’s oeuvre: in an essay a decade later Gustafsson, when addressing the affordances of modern technology, notes that no device can be fully controlled, no tool is entirely predictable. There is always an element of insecurity. There is always “spel”. What has changed with modernity is its “fallhöjd” (Gustafsson 1984, 54). And that is what he explored in his next novel Tennisspelarna (1977).

5 Technological Framing, Cosmic Writing: Tennisspelarna

Though written around the same time and published before the series’ last novel, Tennisspelarna does not form part of Sprickorna i muren. It is not a “sorgearbete” about postwar Sweden with whose depiction a narrator struggles. Recounting the year of a Swedish visiting professor at a US university, it rather evokes, as the opening and (close to) concluding sentences of the novel state, “en lycklig tid”.^[19] As the title suggests, the narrator seems to spend more energy on his tennis than on his teaching, let alone any research.

But one day a student presents him with a scholarly question demanding attention. The student claims to have found what actually caused August Strindberg’s so-called Inferno-crisis. Strindberg changed tack at the end of the 19th century. He started pursuing alchemy. He abandoned the realist mode in which he had previously been writing for something more disjointed and fragmentary. He also became increasingly convinced that he was haunted by what he called ‘the powers’. This was some sort of metaphysical agency, which, he believed, was out to get him. In Strindberg’s diary-like autobiographical novel Inferno, the narrator reads everything happening around him as confirming that suspicion; behind it all there was, seemingly, a kind of cosmological conspiracy transmitted through electric currents (Weinstein 1987, 67–8).

This Strindberg phase had by the 1970s already engendered lots of interpretations. But the student’s discovery questioned them all: he had found a forgotten memoir, written by an anarchist contemporary with Strindberg, who claimed to have gotten wind of Strindberg’s quite promising alchemical experiments and tried to poison him in order to steal his gold – hence Strindberg’s supposed delirium. There would, in other words, be an exoteric reason for Strindberg’s esoteric line of reasoning.

To establish that the rediscovered memoir was not a fake and indeed held the answer to Strindberg’s so-called Inferno-crisis, the student wants them to make use of a new technological device – a computer. He suggests for them to feed both books into a computer and then programme it “att dag för dag kolla sammanhanget mellan de båda berättelserna. Finns det ett verkligt sammanhang mellan dem kommer computorn [sic] att kunna kartlägga det” (52). On the tennis court, the novel’s narrator soon gets to know a cybernetician, who, thanks to his work for the US army, has access to a computer meant to monitor the air space above southern US and therefore equipped with powerful coding capacities. Nicknamed the monster, this computer is located in a fenced off and underground facility. But helped by his friend, the narrator nonetheless manages to steal access to it. Together the two task the computer to turn the two books, Strindberg’s and the anarchist’s, into numbers, which can then be used to calculate the exact overlap and get to the realities they describe.

That calculation turns out not only to be insoluble but also to give the computer a life of its own. Infinitely mapping out how the texts overlap and their authors crossed path, it becomes a being in its own right: at the end of the novel, the cybernetician friend guesses that the computer’s algorithm will soon have produced a book on its own!

As in Sigismund, the question of writing is in this novel approached through machinal ‘play’. Through a loss of control, writing here likewise starts working too well. Bringing back the bracketed question of the conditions under which we live, it too questions the environmental mastery assumed by the disenchantment consensus. But, due to the new kind of technology employed – one so new it has yet to find a Swedish name, here still being called by the English ‘computer’ – its impact seems far greater. Where the technological device at hand in Sigismund (a typewriter) remains a tool, the device in Tennisspelarna (a computer terminal) forms part of a system. This demonstrates the absurdity of clinging to a definition of technology which focuses on devices and their material components. Cybernetics, as Gustafsson noted in an essay (1969, 39–40), should rather be likened to a kind of animism.

Here everything is implicated. When taking on a life of its own, the computer does not explain what was behind Strindberg’s supposed delirium. It, the narrator alleges, rather proves Strindberg’s hunches about obscure currents of power right. “Det enda bra argument jag vet för Strindbergs Makter, de där märkvärdiga straffande och uppmuntrande gudarna ur maskinen, som ögonblickligen sätter igång att varna och förmana oss så fort vi ger dem ett lillfinger”, he contends, is what a local newspaper tells him that his experiment led to: “TWO HOURS BLACKOUT IN NATIONAL DEFENSE SYSTEM” (114). His experiment awoke the dormant forces in cybernetic and computational technology which may trigger nuclear war.

The novel’s experiment reveals the conditions of our life to be framed, rather than mastered, by technology. While the gods were “coming from machines” in Strindberg’s time, they now, Weinstein suggests, “have instead become the very machines themselves” (Weinstein 1987, 80). Their writing is cosmic by definition. As such it does not always only lead to creation but may also, as evoked here, result in destruction. Machinal playing brings an existential infrastructure out of concealment.^[20] In spite of its preceding whimsical tone and Nietzschean mantra of affirming life, Tennisspelarna ends on a note of the computer-technological sublime.

But, as we will see when now return to where we started, that is not the only technological prospect which the question of writing can evoke.^[21] In Bernard Foys tredje rockad, where writing has less to do with machinal play than with mediation, technology can also change what is accessible within its frame. For when working too well, writing here gives voice to a realm from which we, according to the secularisation thesis, had allegedly been cut off.

More clearly than the other novels, Bernard Foys tredje rockad calls its implicit (contemporaneous Swedish) readers to reconfigure their vision of the world. If the question of writing in the preceding works addressed the Swedish context negatively – that is, by what it lacked (Följeslagarna) or prevented (Herr Gustafsson själv, Sigismund, Tennisspelarna) –the question is here posed in a way that asks us not to enclose the novel’s meaning in its settings. This does not have to imply that ‘writing’ here exclusively functions as what Herrmann has called a hyperspace (2001, 155) or what Dübois by way of Derrida conceptualised as an orphaned voice without origin (1995, 175–6). Nor does it only lead to what Sander has seen as a projection which adds meaning to an ultimately inexplicable world (1998, 333) and makes us aware of our own essentially enigmatic essence (1998, 328). As I will suggest below, it can also be seen to cast ‘writing’ as a liminal practice. As such it constitutes Gustafsson’s most thorough exploration of the intellectual, indeed ideological, consequences of literary creation. With it culminates the adventure that started with Per Grille’s loss of his local context.

6 Technological Mediation, Liminal Practice: Bernard Foys tredje rockad

For the last Bernard Foy, the experience of writing resembles that of Sigismund’s narrator. He feels as if his tool – in this case a computer – “hade frigjort en diktare i honom”.^[22] On its screen, he perceives ‘his’ language to be living independently of him (316). The activity of writing re-arranged his sense of normality, starting with the division of time: “Han har suttit rätt länge vid tangentbordet nu, längre än han ursprungligen hade tänkt sig.” Writing “fascinerar honom till den grad att han glömmer hur dagar och veckor går” (388). It provides Foy a sense of having “tillgång till en annan värld, i varje fall en annan galax, som det är så lätt att stiga in i och därmed verkligen slippa den gamla vanliga världen” (388).

That was not the only alternative realm to which Foy gained access. In his spare time, he illicitly explored the tunnel systems under the ground of his suburb. Inside of their seemingly ordered disorder, he pursued his other ambition – one which he shared with Följeslagarna’s Per Grille: “finna hemliga förbindelser”. If that for Grille was about linking philosophical perspectives, for Foy it was about connecting various kinds of underground infrastructures (321): “som alla verkliga speleologer var han besatt av tanken på att upprätta förbindelser mellan grottsystem som skenbart inte hängde ihop” (407). In their labyrinths, he found his “hemland” (408).

Bernard Foys tredje rockad situates writing as a practice perched on the threshold between different realms. Foy composed his stories in these labyrinthine, subterranean tunnels. Like the ‘monster’ in Texas, his Atari was placed below ground. And like in Tennisspelarna, his use of it had been stolen. His writing was, in other words, enabled by two transgressions: illegal entry and theft. This seems to suggest that, if the promethean fire of computer technology granted the writer access to an alternative realm, that was somehow illegitimate. To thus gain access to this realm was not only proscribed legally. It was also sanctioned intellectually; it employed technology to work against the grain of the secularisation thesis.

This upended the social-evolutionary schema underpinning the disenchantment consensus. With its three parts, in which the protagonist of every subsequent story has written its preceding one, Bernard Foys tredje rockad unfolds as a genealogy structured around the question of its originator’s identity. As such this novel is, like the others, thematically concerned with artistic creation. But it is also concerned with creation in the larger, Wingrenian sense. For while written on Foy’s computer, the two initial parts’ real author, Foy insisted, was to be found in nature. That would make the spiritual and physical environment something other than ‘only nature’, than a passive matter to be formed. That would rather suggest it to speak. Irrespective of whether its voices are considered sacred or not, such a claim casts it – pace Wingren – as an enchanted environment imbued with more-than-human agency.

Crucially, such agency would have been enabled by the very force meant to subdue it. In this scenario nature writes through technology, its prose becomes legible once mediated. Indeed, writing is here a kind of mediation, the question of creativity one of (dark) media: what writing as mediation makes present is that which, by a Weberian legacy, has been cast as inaccessible, something whose mode of accessibility for that reason can only be as ‘myth’.^[23] And yet this was a mythology, as mentioned in this article’s introduction, whose insights the authorial voice could not bring itself to disregard.^[24] However ironic and irreverent claims about a ‘suburban mythology’ may be, it is still the case that the novel associates computers with mythologies, new devices with supposedly obsolete cosmologies, natural environments with digital media.^[25] It presents us with the possibility of a techno-scientifically powered animism.^[26]

As its title suggest, Bernard Foys tredje rockad could thus be said to be an attempt at castling the understanding of the conditions under which we live. For like the move in chess whereby the king or queen change place with a rook and thus, by engaging two pieces at once, transfigures the board, this novel rearranges the place of techno-scientific developments in the dominant worldview. It asks whether such developments are less means of ensuring the mastery of our environment, as per the disenchantment thesis, than media furthering its mysteries.

Posed here through the discovery of the novel’s non-human author, such questions lead to an eerie realisation. If humans have tended to narrate their surrounding flora and fauna, the roles are here reversed. And unlike the supposedly haunting metaphor in Sigismund, this intuition is uncanny. To change the order in which Derrida proposes an ontology haunted by a spectre “qui nous regarde” (Derrida 1994, 5), we could say that flora and fauna not only concern us; they are looking at us. What the technological mediations in Bernard Foys tredje rockad suggests is that we are the ones observed and described.