STIG DAGERMAN

 

 

The snakes are loose.

Robert Mitchum in Crossfire (1947), directed by Edward Dmytryk

THE SNAKE IS A NOVEL of hallucinatory urgency written by a person barely out of his adolescence.1 Stig Dagerman was twenty-two years old when the book was published in 1945, and this fact alone makes it a rare work in the history of the novel. Poets, musicians, mathematicians, and visual artists often bloom young, but great novels have usually been produced by somewhat older people. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald, who published This Side of Paradise when he was twenty-four, Dagerman hit it big fast, and his early genius has become part of his identity as a writer.*

But this is received knowledge. What is the power of The Snake? When I opened the book for the first time and began reading, I confess I felt hammered by the metaphors and similes that came down on me hard and fast, one after the other. I asked myself if I had run into a hopped-up European version of Raymond Chandler and his tough-guy prose, but as I read on, it became clear that something altogether different was happening. This is a text in which the metaphorical and the literal mingle to such a degree that by its end, the two have merged entirely. The process begins in the introductory paragraph of the novel. Dagerman’s narrator views the train station of a “sleepy hamlet” on a burning-hot day, a town which is personified when it gets a “dig in its flank,” a dig that presumably wakes it up. The theme of sleep, dreams, and stupors is under way from this sentence on and will return again and again before the novel ends.

In the paragraphs that immediately follow, the reader is introduced to further tropes that will dominate the book and from time to time metamorphose into actual creatures and objects: the old woman at the station “with her quick rat-like eyes” who becomes “Rat-Eyes”; her grotesque companion (later identified as Irene’s mother), has a tongue that sways in her mouth “like the head of a snake”; and the train that cuts the silence “like a razor blade.” Rodents, snakes, and cutting instruments will reappear relentlessly in multiple guises and incarnations, as will images of mouths and throats, of suffocation and strangulation, of biting and the fear of being bitten, of suppressed or actual screams, of silence and speech.

The novel is structured as a concatenation of stories told from varying perspectives. It begins with its longest section, “Irene,” a third-person account, closely identified with the heroine but which also enters the mind of the sadistic soldier Bill and, briefly, Sergeant Bowman, who is terrified of the snake Bill shows him. The following section, “We Can’t Sleep,” about half the length of the first, is a collective narrative, told in the first person plural, but which incorporates the stories of individual men, as the soldiers lie awake on their bunks in a state of shared insomnia and dread, after which come five additional third-person tales, all titled, and none of which is more than half the length of the novel’s second section. The five stories revisit individual conscripts whom we have met earlier and do not follow a chronological timetable. In this way, the structure of the novel’s second half can reasonably be called snakelike; it moves, not straight ahead, but slithers in and out and around the characters’ narratives.

The two halves of the novel are bound by place and by a literal snake that appears and disappears in the camp, terrifying the men who feel it is lurking somewhere near, ready to strike. And even after it is found dead, one of the soldiers, Gideon, is startled to realize that his fear is not extinguished; it lives on. The snake’s metaphorical aptness for Sweden’s precarious neutrality during the Second World War is clear, but what interests me is Dagerman’s evocation of embodied dread, a human state that is notoriously difficult to pin down because, as Gideon notices, it needn’t have an object. Anxiety’s object can be nameless.

In Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety (Hemmung, Symptom, und Angst) (1926), Sigmund Freud writes about the ambiguity of angst: “What we clearly want is something to tell us what anxiety really is, some criterion that will enable us to distinguish true statements from false. Anxiety is not so simple a matter.”2 Freud changed his theory of angst in this book, but the central thought that applies here is that the person suffering from anxiety has been blocked from releasing a necessary discharge of energy, without which he can’t find satisfaction. The feeling of anxiety is a signal of danger, a danger, Freud argues, we save ourselves from through repression.

The characters in The Snake are bellyful of seething anxiety. Both their emotions and their words are smothered by all manner of restraints. Eventually, however, the internal pressure mounts, becomes unbearable, and the characters give in to volcanic outbursts. Besieged by jealous thoughts that Bill is with her rival Vera, Irene “holds a [figurative] knife to her throat to prevent her from saying anything…” Later, after she had pushed her mother off the train, she fears “being suffocated, of not getting enough air to her voice…” After being raped or nearly raped by the butcher boy, she breaks out in hysterical laughter. The fear and guilt she suppresses are compared to a little rodent inside her, gnawing away at her insides, but finally it must be let out. “Her terror is the little animal that nothing can keep shut in any longer. All of a sudden, she screams, in fact it’s the little animal that screams.” Bill presses down on his opponent during a fight “in order to loosen the scream” that will clinch his victory, but instead he sees the man’s strangled tongue, one that resembles the earlier snakelike tongue of Irene’s mother and is unmistakably phallic: “He could see his tongue being sort of pressed out of his mouth, stretching out like a neck.” The soft-spoken, well-mannered girl in “The Mirror” reaches her limit and howls at the dense Lucky, “Don’t you see, you idiot, I’m blind! Blind! Blind!” In “The Rag Doll,” the boy Sorensen could have saved from sexual molestation by a predator returns home and, in a scene of genuine horror, vomits his guts out on the man who should have acted to help him. Gideon, the outsider, tormented by his fellow conscripts, suppresses the scream of his mounting anxiety. After he is brutally attacked by them, he lies paralyzed on the floor long after his cohorts have done with him. “Then he screams.”

The sexual danger that runs through the stories turns on a need for and terror of orgasmic release. Irene’s vacillations between inhibition and freedom, between soporific boredom and arousal, between her dread of and masochistic attraction to Bill are subtly evoked in a kind of Dagermanian phenomenology of embodied emotion and sensation that tracks her shifting internal realities in an ongoing present. These fluctuations in the characters between lassitude and longing, silence and speech, are continually explored through the lens of their immediate experience. And for many of them this dialectical tug of feeling crescendos in an act of sudden violence. When the reader first encounters Irene, she is lying naked in bed in a state of sensual torpor and moral ambivalence, which continues as she talks to Bill through the window. Her lax mood ends abruptly when Bill hurls his bayonet into the wall that separates them, bites her mouth when they kiss, and then she cuts her wrist on the bayonet’s blade. He also nips his other conquest, “quickly as a razor blade, he bites Vera’s ear.” The sexual violence of “The Rag Doll” is never seen, but it is ominously portended when the pederast bribes his victim with a knife in a sheath. The myriad associations prompted by the knives in the novel, both metaphorical and real, of cutting, butchery, wounds, sexual sadism, and running blood, permeate the text. At one moment the earth itself appears to have been gored: “Then he comes into the dense, suffocating spruce forest, where clusters of berries have been ripped out of the ground, which seems to be bleeding with deep black wounds.”

The novel’s insistent tropes move seamlessly from the subjectivity of a single character to personifications of a town or a landscape as asleep or bleeding. Accompanying this metaphorical motion is a contagion of feeling that moves from one character into another and blurs the boundaries between them. The fear is individual and collective: it bleeds. Without Dagerman’s psychological acumen, however, I don’t think the roiling metaphors and linked stories would have the power they do. He is a master of the momentary, of the fleeting emotional and ethical muddles we all find ourselves in, and then wonder what on earth has happened. He is also sensitive to the ongoing delusions between self and other and how often we confound the two. In “The Mirror,” Lucky’s attraction to the girl is a projection and so, ironically, a form of blindness:

Lucky suddenly felt sorry for her, because she was so alone. It was his own self-pity that spread to her. He’d worked himself into one of those moods now—everyone around him seemed to have a companion they could exchange ideas with; he was the only one who was so wretchedly lonely.

Lucky’s painful isolation infects his perception, and his identification with the pitiable position of the blind girl culminates in a vicious blast of self-hatred, and he smashes a mirror in the apartment, after which he is summarily beaten by his cohorts.

In The Snake the furious repression of confused and confusing sexual desire and its sadistic aspects epitomized in the narrative of Irene, Bill, and Vera merges with the more overt political messages delivered in the book’s second half and the collective failure to speak out and act, perhaps best articulated by Edmund through another image of restraint: “I feel pressurized … I feel there’s an iron band pressing into my skull when I find there are laws nobody’s asked me to accept that make me practically defenseless.” This message is further complicated by an additional statement. “You’re not wearing it because you deserve it, but because of so many people’s cowardice and your own inadequacy.” In the “Iron Band” chapter, it is words that go “to sleep in their sleeping bags” and must be shaken and woken up. Edmund finds his voice and his words; he speaks loudly, too loudly, addressing the angst he feels directly, claiming that no one’s is greater than his. As Joker listens to his comrade, he feels a sudden desire to speak, to achieve “clarity,” but the words are “strangled” and instead of coherent sentences, he emits gibberish, which is followed by a hallucinatory dream of two adjacent rooms, which are contained in Joker himself—a hiccoughing, chortling, jiggling living room and a second threatening angst-room with chairs that speak and fear that hovers near the ceiling. The double rooms clearly address the political present: one is full of drunks, furniture, a radio; the other is an impoverished place rife with paralyzing dread, but the fantasy is too bizarre to be agitprop or to be read only in terms of the war.

In The Concept of Anxiety, that paradoxical, ironic, parodic, difficult text by Søren Kierkegaard, the pseudonymous Vigilius Haufniensis famously yokes anxiety and dizziness.

He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much his own eye as in the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down. Hence anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks down into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself. Freedom succumbs in this dizziness. Further than this psychology cannot and will not go. In that very moment everything is changed, and freedom when it again rises sees that it is guilty. Between these two moments lies the leap, which no science has explained and which no science can explain.3

The Concept of Anxiety is a maddeningly complex examination of original sin and effect of the fall: the alienation from nature fundamental to human beings—guilt, innocence, and freedom. The spirit is that which is linked with God and the infinite, the body and the psyche are tied to the finite. As for Freud, for Kierkegaard anxiety serves as an inward subjective signal and needs no object. There is something ambiguous about dread itself, something that can’t be pinned down. Science has no access to this reality because it posits only a third-person objective view, and the “leap” made is not rationally explicable.

Dagerman’s snake necessarily evokes the story of the fall with its serpent, Eve, Adam, the original loss of innocence, and the insistent question of free will. In fact, the book may be read as a meditation on what it means to act freely. Joker’s hallucination of anxiety is the dizziness of freedom. The two rooms do not remain separate but merge in a terrifying image of collapsing walls, wild laughter, and blurring borders, in the monstrous confusion of unbearable dread. When Joker wakes from his horror dream, in which he feels he will burst apart, he again longs to speak his mind but doesn’t. He does not embrace his freedom or address his guilt. He does not act but remains silent in the world of his fantasy, only imagining that he has spoken, and his comrades have answered him by assuaging his sense of culpability with the words “You don’t need to have a guilty conscience.” The ethical dilemma, the parsing of innocence and guilt, is not simple and, as a reader, I have immense sympathy for Joker and his confused wish to be aided by his companions, somehow to articulate the complexity of his feelings, and for his inability to get the words out. Guilt spreads, too. It seeps into the whole culture and stains everyone.

It does not matter whether Dagerman read Kierkegaard or not, because in the early forties when he wrote The Snake, Kierkegaard was in the air, reread through the lens of Existentialism, a name mostly rejected by those who were labeled with it, but which nevertheless serves a useful purpose here because I am talking about ideas that seem to circulate like winds and blow into people’s ears as if no reading were necessary. When I was at Columbia University in the late seventies and early eighties, I sometimes felt that French theory had so permeated the humanities departments that one could simply stand on campus and inhale it. Such was existentialism in the early forties.

Although Sartre remained in denial about his debt to Kierkegaard, the Dane is all over Being and Nothingness (1943) in Sartre’s references to “vertigo” and “anguish” and in his insistence on freedom as an unavoidable human fate.4 But it is not only existentialism that infected the author of The Snake. Eras have moods, too, and in light of the monstrosities of Nazism, it is hardly strange that a fateful pessimism hung over the ideas and the art of the day and in the years that followed in American film noir, for example, which borrowed from European cinema to create its own dark stories of human brutality. Dagerman’s interest in American prose writers is well known, but their influence is reinvention in The Snake. Hard-boiled metaphors become a philosophical device, one that emphasizes, rather than limits, ambiguity.

Dagerman’s novel is a cry for individual responsibility and freedom, as well as a spirited work of resistance to the conventions of bourgeois life, which restrain and stupefy people. And it is a call for free thought and speech to clarify what should be done. It is acutely aware of the unspeakable horrors of the war, the sadism, the blood, and destruction, but none of these explains the book’s power. The allegory, the symbolism, the bleeding metaphors work because they are embodied in characters and scenes of genuine psychological force and nuance, because the visual world of the novel is astutely observed and refuses banal conventions, and because the narration has an intensity and drive that is irresistible. Also, the book is shot through with ironies and humor. The author even makes fun of his own metaphorical indulgences through his alter ego in the novel, Scriber, the scribe, the author character. In the second chapter, we are told that Edmund has poked fun of Scriber as a guy who compares a fire extinguisher to a bottle of India ink and a bottle of India ink to a fire extinguisher. “But just think if he needs both the India ink bottle and the fire extinguisher in the same sentence. How’s he going to manage it without mixing them up, without the firemen starting to spray ink on a fire and the artist drawing his sketches with carbon dioxide?” A welcome moment of self-referential levity.

In the last chapter of The Snake, “The Flight That Didn’t Come Off,” Scriber falls. After an unknown quantity of beer and an extended argument with two interlocutors, a cultural critic and a poet, during which Scriber has insisted that “the tragedy of modern man is that he no longer dares to be afraid,” he acts on an impulse to prove a point. He wants to “carry his reasoning to its logical conclusion.” Scriber climbs out the window and moves along the parapet. When the poet calls for him to come back because he might fall, Scriber says, “No bloody fear.” Surely this is a moment of hubris, not the dizziness of freedom for the one who looks into the abyss. There is something wrong with his fearlessness. Has he not been arguing for the merits of fear and dread? He loses his footing, and the last thing he hears is not his own scream but the cry of the prostitute who is standing in the doorway below.

The snake in the garden does not cause the Fall. He is only the tempter. But I don’t believe that Scriber’s fall can be read in any single way, nor do I think that the end evokes despair. It is, above all, ambiguous. Scriber’s fall is also a stupid accident. An energetic, argumentative, tipsy young man finds himself out on a ledge and falls to his death for no good reason. That is life, too—the sudden slip into the abyss. And there is irony in Scriber’s fickle fearlessness at the end of a novel that treats anxiety as its theme. Only a few pages before, Scriber has insisted that his own fear “is the greatest in the world.” We are not rational creatures. In the best art something always escapes us and bewilders us. If it didn’t, we would never return to it.

2010